Reality And Verbs, Nouns And Adjectives Poem by gershon hepner

REALITY AND VERBS, NOUNS AND ADJECTIVES


Cioran said there is a radical disjunction
between reality and verbs.
The fact that verbs will often not perform the function
that we suppose they do disturbs,
and yet the great disjunction that exists between
the noun and what it represents
is just as great: before each one there stands a screen
between reality and sense.
The beauty of the adjective is that we know
it's imprecise and inexact,
too subjective for us to bestow
on it authority of fact.


Mairéad Hanrahan, Professor of French at University College London (m.hanrahan@ucl.ac.uk) reviews Oeuvre, by Emil Cioran, edited by Nicholas Cavaillès and Aurélien Demars ("To recover from being born, " TLS,5/25/12) :

It is because he claims no illusions about the value of any meaning that he brooks no constraint other than those of language itself on his attempts to craft words into new forms. His intuition of a "radical disjunction between reality and the Verb" explains the interest his work would hold for thinkers such as Jacques Derrida decades later. But he draws very different conclusions about that disjunction from those Derrida would draw:

That a reality is hidden behind appearances is, after all, possible; that language could render it would be a ridiculous thing to hope. Why then weigh oneself down with one opinion rather than another, why retreat before the banal or the inconceivable., before the duty to say or to write any old thing?

It does not follow from the fact that language fails to describe reality that all attempts to do so should fail equally.

After writing this poem it occurred to me that when Genesis 1 uses the word tov, good, seven times to denote the fact that God considered the world to be good implies that this adjective, in its description of the world, is as objective as all the actions that God performed and all that the objects and being He created.

Having made this observation, I read another article in the same May 25 issue of TLS by Anthony Kenny, former Master of Balliol ("Why Lambs need to worry about lions") , reviewing Brian Davies's book Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil. Considering the question asked from Epicurus to Hume, "Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent? is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? " Kenny mentions "the free will defence" argument of Alvin Platinga and Richard Swinburne to explain evil ("God created a world in which agents have the power of choice, which is a great good: it is the agents' misuse of that power which causes the evil") . He writes:

The problem of evil is a strange kind of problem. At a time when it was fashionable to make a sharp distinction between statements of fact and statements of value, it seemed anomalous to draw a conclusion of fact (there is no God) from an evaluative premises (there is a lot of evil about) . …Like most people, I soon ceased to believe in any sharp distinction between statements of fact and statements of value.



6/4/12 #10404