Archibald MacLeish: "The End of the World"

Archibald MacLeish
Wikipedia

I've long liked this poem by Archibald MacLeish, though only recently did I realize it's a sonnet:

"The End of the World"

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb --
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

In fact, I noticed its sonnet form only as I was typing it here, so "recently" was yesterday (now that I'm posting it). I've never read any literary criticism on this poem, though I'm sure that reading some would be enlightening, but I think I previously failed to recognize the sonnet form because I was so taken by the poem's subject matter: the encounter with "nothingness."

Nothingness is difficult to conceive properly because our natural tendency is to ontologize it, i.e., to attribute "being" to it, when "nothingness" is in fact the absence of any and all being.

To get to that radical absence intellectually, one must subtract one thing after another from the world until all has been subtracted, whereupon one also subtracts "being" and finally oneself, the thinker thinking these subtractions.

The mind revolts . . . and fails to notice the sonnet form . . .

Utterly Nothing

Empty Set

Next, subtract the set itself?

(Image from Wikipedia)

I want to pick up the thread of my thought on nothing and see where it leads me.

The philosopher Roy Sorenson, writing for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, discourses on "Nothingness" in an article first published on August 28, 2003 and substantively revised on August 30, 2006, and from my reading it on this 5th of July, I have gained not nothing . . . though I had hoped for something more.

Sorenson did provide a concept for use in thinking about nothing, but before getting to that, let's enjoy a couple of poems. The first is a riddle that Sorenson quotes from page 201 of Joseph Lemmings, Riddles, Riddles, Riddles (New York: Franklin Watts, Inc.: 1953):

What does a man love more than life?
Hate more than death or mortal strife?
That which contented men desire,
The poor have, the rich require,
The miser spends, the spendthrift saves,
And all men carry to their graves?

Sorenson holds that "[t]he answer, Nothing, can only be seen through a kaleidoscope of equivocations." I assume that he means that "nothing" in this riddling poem takes on a variety of meanings. I'm not sure that we encounter a "kaleidoscope of equivocations," for the correct answer, "nothing," seems each time to mean "not anything." The equivocation seems to me to occur between our expectation of a positive answer, such that "nothing" seems initially to be some thing, and our recognition that the answer is negative, i.e., no thing.

Sorenson links to another poem, a far more impressive one by the 17th-century libertine John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester:

Upon Nothing

Nothing, thou elder brother even to shade,
That hadst a being ere the world was made,
And (well fixed) art alone of ending not afraid.

Ere time and place were, time and place were not,
When primitive Nothing Something straight begot,
Then all proceeded from the great united -- What?

Something, the general attribute of all,
Severed from thee, its sole original,
Into thy boundless self must undistinguished fall.

Yet Something did thy mighty power command,
And from thy fruitful emptiness's hand,
Snatched men, beasts, birds, fire, air, and land.

Matter, the wickedest offspring of thy race,
By Form assisted, flew from thy embrace,
And rebel Light obscured thy reverend dusky face.

With Form and Matter, Time and Place did join,
Body, thy foe, with these did leagues combine
To spoil thy peaceful realm, and ruin all thy line.

But turncoat Time assists the foe in vain,
And, bribed by thee, assists thy short-lived reign,
And to thy hungry womb drives back thy slaves again.

Though mysteries are barred from laic eyes,
And the Divine alone with warrant pries
Into thy bosom, where thy truth in private lies,

Yet this of thee the wise may freely say,
Thou from the virtuous nothing takest away,
And to be part of thee the wicked wisely pray.

Great Negative, how vainly would the wise
Inquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise?
Didst thou not stand to point their dull philosophies.

Is, or is not, the two great ends of Fate,
And true or false, the subject of debate,
That perfects, or destroys, the vast designs of Fate,

When they have racked the politician's breast,
Within thy bosom most securely rest,
And, when reduced to thee, are least unsafe and best.

But Nothing, why does Something still permit
That sacred monarchs should at council sit
With persons highly thought at best for nothing fit?

Whilst weighty Something modestly abstains
From princes' coffers, and from statesmen's brains,
And Nothing there like stately Nothing reigns,

Nothing, who dwellest with fools in grave disguise,
For whom they reverend shapes and forms devise,
Lawn sleeves, and furs, and gowns, when they like thee look wise.

French truth, Dutch prowess, British policy,
Hibernian learning, Scotch civility,
Spaniard's dispatch, Dane's wit are mainly seen in thee.

The great man's gratitude to his best friend,
King's promises, whore's vows, towards thee they bend,
Flow swiftly to thee, and in thee never end.

Sorenson's link has a pop-up, so here's a better link provided by Wikipedia. Incidentally, both links contain the line "Whist weighty Something modestly abstains" twelve lines up from the poem's end, but it should read "Whilst weighty Something modestly abstains" (though without the italics).

The opening lines seem to assign ontology to nothing, as though it were a sort of nothingness, a substance:

Nothing, thou elder brother even to shade,
That hadst a being ere the world was made,
And (well fixed) art alone of ending not afraid.

Perhaps this was intended by Wilmot in irony, but the assertion is useful by contrast as a way of getting at what I mean by nothing. Let us return to Sorenson, who notes, in section 7 of his article, the "subtraction argument":

To many, the possibility of an empty world seems self-evident. Nevertheless, Thomas Baldwin (1996) reinforces the possibility of an empty world by refining the following argument: Imagine each object vanishing in sequence. Eventually you run down to three objects, two objects, one object and then Poof! There's your empty world.

Sorenson is citing Thomas Baldwin, "There might be nothing," Analysis 56 (1996), 231-38, but I've not read Baldwin's article. However, I'd like to use the subtraction method to get at what I mean by nothing. So far as I can see from Sorenson's deployment of Baldwin use of subtraction, one is still left with a remainder, a world that is empty, but nonetheless a world. So, let us subtract this world as well. In the absence of even an empty world, neither of either horn of paired opposites apply, e.g., neither nonpotential nor potential. This total absence lacks any property whatsoever.

What then?

At this point, I grow stumped. Initially, I intuited: "Anything follows." Commenter JK, however, intuits: "Nothing follows."

JK would therefore agree with the ancients, namely, that "ex nihilo nihil fit," first formulated by presocratic thinker Parmenides, or so I am informed, but presumably in Greek rather than Latin. I am not one to disagree with ancient wisdom, so I should point out that my intuition that "anything follows" leaves open the possibility that "nothing follows." I think, however, that I am playing word games at this point, so I will simply stop, for now, at being stumped.

For an entertaining essay on almost nothing at all, read Jim Holt's "Nothing Ventured" in Harper's Magazine (1994), which has come to my attention via Sorenson, in whose debt I once again find myself.

"Ontology, a branch of philosophy based on capitalism..."

René Descartes's Illustration of Ontological Dualism

(A Self-Image from Wikipedia)

I learn something new every day. Just yesterday, I happened upon an article, "One's true image is what others see," by Lee Se-jung, business news editor at the JoongAng Ilbo. Lee has been reading some writings by Sungkonghoe University Professor Shin Young-bok, a man who had the unfortunate experience of being arrested by the Park Chung-hee regime in 1968 and sentenced to life imprisonment for "being involved in a political party that a North Korean spy had formed to make South Korea communist."

The prison didn't take all of his life -- after all, he's been teaching at Sungkonghoe University -- but it took twenty years until his release on August 15, 1988. The very next year, he began teaching at Sungkonghoe, where he is "an expert on Marxist economics and ... Eastern classical literature as well."

Hmmm...

Well, what does Professor Shin have to teach us? I don't directly know. But here's what business news editor Lee summarizes:

Probably because he has gone through all manners of hardship, Professor Shin emphasizes relations with other people. He goes beyond ontology, whose goal is to maximize each individual's or each group's interests. He instead emphasizes relations and argues that relations with others and other creatures or objects are the core of human life.

Ontology, a branch of philosophy based on capitalism, always demands competition and winning. Mr. Shin maintains that an emphasis on relationships is a new alternative to build a more humane society. He also explains that a basic factor of European modern history is ontology, while Asian society is based on relationships.

Ontology is based on capitalism, demands competition and winning, and aims to maximize interests?

Sigh...

Professor Shin may be an admirable man, but if Lee's summary is accurate, then his students have some un-learning to do.

Ontology is not based on capitalism, does not demand competition and winning, and does not aim to maximize interests.

That would be rational actor theory.

Ontology, rather, is the study of being or existence.

If that sounds rather abstract, it should, for ontology is abstract, so abstract that any links between its abstract, etherial realm and the concrete, material realm of competing, winning, and maximizing interests will be rather tenuous.

As for the remark that "a basic factor of European modern history is ontology, while Asian society is based on relationships," this sounds like a variant on the claims asserting the superiority of group-based "Asian values" over individualistic Western values, which we heard a lot about back in the 1990s ... until the market crash of 1997. But Shin also seems to be taking a page from the volumes of criticism indigenous to the modern West itself that blame, for instance, Descartes's ontological dualism for everything from the mistreatment of animals to the evils of capitalism.

Korea's relationship-based society, of course, treats animals very well and is not at all competitive.