Auden: “I feel about Pascal as Pascal felt about Montaigne. Of all the dualists he is incomparably the noblest and most seductive. Like most of us he exalted the faculty he lacked over the faculty he possessed, the heart over the reason, and fashioned an image out of his opposite. The neurotic who as a child was thrown into fits by the sight of his two parents together was truly a split being with a corrupt heart and an uncorrupt intelligence.

Moving progressively through the dream argument to the idea of a deceiving God and finally an evil demon, Descartes harnesses the power of doubt to explore the conditions that might distort our apprehension of the world. In doing so, he measures the problem of conceiving the whole through its parts, of knowing the universe through the partial lens of the thinking self. The question he confronts is this: if we must only rely on partial information, how can we capture the underlying unity of the whole?

Wenn kommt dieser Moment, in dem man der eigenen Stimme nicht mehr folgen sollte? Wie stellt man fest, dass es an der Zeit ist, einem Gedanken einfach zu vertrauen? In meinem heutigen Eintrag geht es darum, ob die aktive Teilhabe an der Gesellschaft und an der Kultur manchmal die Aufgabe der eigenen Stimme erfordert. Ich komme in den vergangenen Tagen immer wieder auf dieser Frage hin, indem ich versucht habe, die auditiven Dimensionen der Dichtung mit dem Erbe der akademischen Lyriktheorien zu einigen.