Plurality and the Poetics of Self by Bruce Bond

Author:Bruce Bond
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030187187
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The notion “affirmation” of both self and nonbeing and how they function in poems remains potentially confusing. Tillich rejects the usage of “self-love ,” since it presupposes a distance and difference between lover and loved that the usage likewise would deny. No doubt, “self-affirmation” is plagued by a similar contradiction, but without the suggestion of self-sacrifice, eros, and devotion. So too the word “affirmation” suggests conscious assimilation uncompromised by a severity of judgment, evasion, or control. Thus to “affirm” a self is to become mindful of the mind. In talking of self-affirmation as a stage of emotional maturation, Tillich lays the groundwork for an existential psychology wherein anxiety as the emotional fallout of nonbeing is more fully acknowledged for what it has to reveal about the human condition and what it seeks to repress. Authenticity in such a system suggests an opening, a gaze into the mind’s frequently occluded workings, how the prospect of death—or more broadly, nothingness—is inseparable from our sense of being.

While a meditative mindfulness, as an example of assimilation, may well move through stages of increasing and then decreasing sense of nonbeing as a threat, so too can the sublimations of creative life, the processes that honor what is less passive in the metaphor of assimilation. When Keats speaks of “negative capability” in his 1818 letter to his brothers George and Tom, he points to that quality in human character that tolerates the common sources of anxiety aligned with Tillich’s categories of the ontic, the spiritual, and the ethical nonbeing:

[A]t once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. (492)

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