What is the name of the rose? Does the essence of the rose exist? pink Or is its concept merely a linguistic representation? The question of universals, which, with the world of ideas of Plato marks the beginning of Western philosophy, twenty-five centuries later it continues to throb through the work of George Steiner y Roger Scrutonboth recently deceased.
Despite their shared profile as celebrated academics, their origins could not be more different: George, the son of a cultured and well-off Viennese Jewish family, raised between Paris and New York after his parents fled Nazi barbarism; and Roger, the boy who came into the world after the Second World War in a modest, Labour-friendly home in a small village in the Midlands English. And yet, through art, literature and music, neither of them ever ceased to question the meaning of the word: is language a creation of the cultural environment in which we live or is it a symbol of a wider reality that precedes us?
Attempts to evade the mystery of language through positivist or deconstructivist explanations provoked, for their argumentative inadequacy, not a few misgivings in the sharp and ironic Steiner. The phlegmatic Scruton, for his part, arched his eyebrows sceptically at those who saw only structures of domination in any cultural manifestation.
Indeed, in reading a poem, listening to a cantata, seeing a painting, a sculpture or a film, one and the other coincide; our two authors believe that the aesthetic experience goes beyond the mere physical and biological dimension, for from matter - be it phoneme, stone, pixel, sound or pigment - emerges the communication of a meaning that is as beautiful as it is disturbing.
Moreover, the spectator then abandons his or her condition as an autonomous, rational-discursive individual to become a youwhich establishes a relationship not with somethingbut with another; with a person that challenges us; with a voice that from its freedom dialogues with ours. These are the "Real Presences" of which Steiner speaks in his most famous essay.
The greater the vibration of the original in the work of art - of that irreducible otherness, impossible to define and stabilise - the greater the force of its meaning. Thus, language, the word, especially through poetry, becomes - the influence of the original, of the otherness that is irreducible, impossible to define and stabilise - the greater the force of its meaning. Heidegger is notable in both authors - in that house of Being, capable of revealing the identity that things have in themselves, outside their everyday technical instrumentalisation.
But Scruton and Steiner, both born polemicists, go further. They have no qualms about understanding artistic creation as a reflection of the divine act of creation. The spark of transcendence flares up when the Anotherthrough its Person profound and mysterious, existent but ungraspable, it gives meaning and beauty - a beauty that goes beyond the merely formal or sensible - to the great and small other who are gradually entering the scene.
It all ties in with the best humanistic tradition, but none of it is provable from the scientific method. In the face of the apparent paradox, Roger Scruton provided a perfect answer: music. Its notes can be described in a score, but from a technical-rational point of view an instrumental piece is completely meaningless.
Now - and here comes the surprise - a musical theme, while it takes place in space and time - think, for example, of The art of escape or the Adagio BWV 974 from J.S. BachIt challenges the listener and provokes a non-transferable experience which, at the same time, is fully real; an encounter with an intentionality - with a person - which, through the beauty it contains in its own presence, transports the spectator to a different and higher world, where life finds glimpses of fullness, depth and purpose.
Both Steiner and Scruton understood first-hand that these approaches went against the tide of the dominant literary theories of the last half-century. In fact, both detected in the various currents that converge in Postmodernism a series of blowing up of the bridges that link words to their essential signifiers.
One and the other, faced with the present tendency towards ephemerality and self-referentiality, denounced that I The authorialist who, erected as the pretended centre, does not want to see in language a channel that links the subject with the world that precedes him and with other people. And so, with the contract with the primordial word broken, the intellectual landscape of our time became, in Steiner's opinion in his aforementioned 1989 essay, that "secondary city" that radiates paraphrase or diversion.
The two protagonists of this article, snipers of high culture, did not always walk alone. A few years later, in 1993, another European intellectual of Jewish origin and emigrated to the USA, Zbigniew BrzezinskiThe book was based on a different academic background and came to similar conclusions. In his book on geopolitics Out of controlThe former White House National Security Advisor framed many of the cultural creations of his contemporaries in the ephemeral productions of the "permissive cornucopia", a metaphor that Brzezinski created to describe Western consumer society after the defeat of Marx at the hands of Comte.
Is there a way out of the deconstructivist labyrinth? No one accused George, who entitled his memoirs Errataor Roger, author of a self-help manual entitled Uses of pessimismThey were both aware that culture did not stop the fanatics who devastated much of the twentieth century. Moreover, both warned that idolatry towards the abstractions contained in books gave rise to the virus of political hallucination; a fictitious rhetoric that swept away concrete reality and, with it, so many millions of innocent people.
Yet they believed that reasonable hope for the future remained rooted in the vigour of the Western canon - the very opposite of what is promoted by current educational curricula which, in Steiner's words, "increasingly resemble an institutionalised amnesia".
The rigorous study of the classics involves an exercise, Scruton argued, of what Plato called anamnesisThe bringing to consciousness of forgotten things. Only in this way will we stop living nostalgically and alienated, we will find home and, with it, the name of the rose.
José Barros
Journalist and communications consultant.