On the Contradictions of Reason: Brodsky, Pound, Propertius and Others

Abstract

This capstone article completes the series of manuscripts published in 2020–2022. This paper addresses contradictions of artistic and philosophical reason. Inthe midst of wars and geopolitical upheavals of the last century, European, American and Russian intellectuals were in active pursuit of history’s meaning and purpose. The quest was accompanied by mounting controversy and philo­sophical contradictions. These debates and contradictions were neither an artistic game, nor a climb up the ladder of a brighter future. Great thinkers and intellec­tuals of that time argued and disagreed on views ranging from cosmopolitanism to patriotism, aristocratic individualism and democratic collectivism, Exodus and ecstasy. In this pursuit, they traversed through texts and souls of their prede­cessors to find hidden incongruities, while their own texts and souls were simi­larly full of contradictions. Despite vast political and ideological disagreements, these thinkers shared the ideas of their intellectual opponents, past and present. For instance, Shestov, Spinoza, as well as Isaac Bashevis Singer inherited the ambiguities of Biblical and Talmudic reasoning, while Brodsky and Pound adopted the paradoxes of Sextus Propertius. Unable to find the meaning of his­tory and resolve the contradictions of their reasoning, plagued by skepticism, these intellectuals sought to reconcile incongruences of their own thinking out­side of history, in the world of Kantian autonomous morality or to transcendent and eschatological entities.