Zukofsky feature: Return to the Contents list 

Paul Stephens

Zukofsky, Aristotle, Objectivism, Biology

This piece is 3,000 words or about 5 printed pages long.

When we think of Zukofsky’s philosophical influences, we tend predominantly to associate the early Zukofsky with Marx and the later Zukofsky with Spinoza. I want to suggest here that Aristotle may be nearly as important to Zukofsky’s poetics, especially to his late poetics. In sheer numerical terms, references to Aristotle outnumber those to any other philosopher throughout Zukofsky’s works. Bottom contains 108 references to Aristotle compared to a mere 47 to Spinoza. “A” contains 9 references to Aristotle compared to 8 for Spinoza.

Undoubtedly Spinoza was a more central influence than Aristotle in the formation of Objectivist doctrines — particularly on the visual components of Objectivism. Generally speaking, however, Aristotle is just as congenial to Objectivism as is Spinoza. Perhaps most centrally, Aristotle inspired a kind of biological organicism in Zukofsky’s later poetics. Aristotle was well suited to an anti-idealist, anti-romantic platform for Zukofsky’s poetics both early and late. Just as crucially, Aristotle helped Zukofsky to move from a Marxist ethics centered on the state to a virtue ethics centered on the household.

Not far from where we are now, Zukofsky was almost certainly required to read Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics in his Contemporary Civilization course taught by John Erskine. [I myself have taught this class, a great books class in moral and political philosophy begun in 1919, and I can confirm that all Columbia College sophomores are still required to read the Politics and Ethics.] In the first few pages of Aristotle’s Politics is a discussion of oikonomia, or household management. Thinking of economics in terms of household management offers us a very different take on A-9, for instance. A-9 is often taken to mark Zukofsky’s 1940s shift in allegiances from a Marxist politics to a Spinozan ethics, but perhaps, as a feminist reading might suggest, the politics of household management are never entirely removed from national and international political developments.

Zukofsky was greatly influenced in particular by his professor Frederick Woodbridge, a leading figure in the early twentieth-century Aristotelian revival. Woodbridge also taught Richard McKeon and Mortimer Adler, who would go on to be influential neo-Aristotelians at the University of Chicago. In the 1920s, Woodbridge seemed to have had as much prestige among his students as did his more famous colleague John Dewey. Barry Ahearn has noted that the conclusion to Woodbridge’s Purpose of History could pass as a general explication of “A.” Woodbridge believed that there was no single unifying purpose to history, believing instead in a multiplicitous vision of human progress. But it was not so much Aristotle’s view of history or Aristotle’s grammar or Aristotle’s categories or even Aristotle’s understanding of technē (which was of central importance for Pound) that interested Zukofsky. Aristotle the literary critic also seems to have held only peripheral concern for Zukofsky. It was Aristotle’s anti-idealist ethics and his insistence on the organic importance of specifics that most captivated Zukofsky, although Aristotle’s metaphysics, epistemology and poetics were also of some concern. In part, Aristotle permits the “poem including history” to cohere, or at least Aristotle provides a thematic underpinning for Bottom and for the later books of “A.” In particular, the passing along of poetic wisdom from father to son represents an important Aristotelian analogue within “A” and Bottom — giving a biological purposiveness to the seemingly unrelated events of daily life.

The emphasis on organic familial purposiveness is particularly evident in Zukofsky’s essay on Wallace Stevens. Zukofsky takes Stevens to task for his Platonism, but he also argues that Stevens’ writing, like his own, transcends Platonic conceptions of epistemology. Zukofsky responds particularly strongly to Stevens’ poem “The Lack of Repose.” In the poem, a vaguely aristocratic character sits down to read a book. The reader figure meditates on mortality as he recollects his grandfather. The poem ends

        What a thing it is to believe that
One understands, in the intense disclosures
Of a parent in the French sense.

And not yet to have written a book in which
One is already a grandfather and to have put there
A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end
To the complication, is good, is a good.

                            (Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays 26)

Zukofsky explains his attraction to the poem, in part, through Aristotle. “In quoting [the poem],” Zukofsky writes, “I intend what I believe Wallace Stevens intended, an instant certainty of the words of a poem bringing at least two persons and then maybe many persons, even peoples together” (27). In other words, the figure in the poem and his grandfather are communicating not through reference to the transcendent, but through a purposive instant where one is aware of biological connectedness. There is the Platonic Good and there are Aristotelian goods [plural] — and Zukofsky is more interested in how a plurality of goods can be understood within the family. The biological instant of certainty is “a little part of created or ever creating nature” (27). This

In creating a Stevens that understands Aristotle instinctively, Zukofsky is fashioning a Stevens more palatable to his own late aesthetics. Zukofsky goes so far as to describe Stevens the man as a kind of body, which, for all practical purposes has gone beyond the need for epistemology:

Zukofsky admits that it was not possible for him to read Stevens much after 1936 because of the concern with epistemology and with the nature of reading. What makes it possible for Zukofsky to reconnect with Stevens is his reading of Stevens’ poems as skeptical of skepticism — in other words, Zukofsky reads Stevens’ poems as analogues of his “philosophy of suspecting philosophy.” What fascinates Zukofsky about Stevens’ poems are not their concern with Ideas and Forms, but their concern with particulars, especially natural particulars, and especially the particularities of family, as in “A”-12 where Zukofsky associates Aristotle with his own family:

There is no excuse for such a bad pun [son-sun]. As Mark Scroggins notes, Zukofsky is allegorically associating himself with Aristotle: “That Aristotle’s own father was named Nichomachus, as well as his son, for whom the Nichomachean Ethics is named, is a clear parallel to the Pinchos/Louis/Paul relationship, for Paul was named after his grandfather” (218). As in the Stevens’ poem, intergenerational relations are indirectly associated with Aristotle.

In his 1951 essay “The Effacement of Philosophy,” Zukofsky reads Aristotle as something of a super-Platonist. In Zukofsky’s reading, Aristotle did not get rid of the world of the forms, he simply expanded the number of forms:

In a sense, Zukofsky is reconciling a Poundian poetics with a Stevensian poetics. He reads Stevens’ skepticism about philosophical abstraction as pointing to a kind of paideuma-like program of finding the right details for the right time. What the age is calling for, Zukofsky seems to be suggesting, is a recognition of the innate meaningfulness of “the words of a poem bringing at least two persons and then maybe many persons, even peoples together.” This may be a humanist message, but it is also a biological, perhaps even an ecological, message. There is purpose in “the feathers in a bird’s wing.” Zukofsky takes the time to chastise materialist historians because their histories are reductive, lacking the full richness of “the whorl of the spindle of Necessity.” The main agent of that “spindle of Necessity,” I want to suggest, is biology.

Intergenerational biological association is most explicitly foregrounded in Bottom. Zukofsky’s first extended discussion of Aristotle in Bottom deals with the issue of biology at length. Zukofsky quotes Aristotle’s definition of philosophy in De Anima as “the biological end of human life” (Bottom: On Shakespeare 41). Zukofsky refutes Plato’s “unbiological Good” (42) in favor of an inherent complete purposiveness in every individual being’s origin (43). “To Aristotle the soul meant life” (41), Zukofsky writes. The soul, in other words, fulfils a biological design. Zukofsky quotes Aristotle’s Metaphysics at length in order to show the purposiveness of heredity:

Supreme beauty and goodness are thus living, changing qualities — beauty and goodness are the empirical results of sense-experience rather than independent disembodied ideals. Eternity is figured as the passing on of life; the only thing that can thwart biological design is “lovelessness” (45). Existence is “continuously active” (54) and there are as many forms as there are beings. Thinking must be embodied (58) in the form of something like a “thinking heart” (60). Where Zukofsky differs from Aristotle is in his insistence on the evolutionary nature of life. Even so, Zukofsky approves of Aristotle’s claim that “Art does not deliberate” (62). Poetry lives in the world of objects and of living mortal beings, not of unchanging ideals:

This can be read as a deeply intuitive object-oriented poetics that is not dependent on reference to an external transcendent realm. As Zukofsky writes:

Zukofsky’s vision of Aristotle is deeply empiricist. For Zukofsky as for Aristotle, metaphysics is less a plausible field of knowledge than it is a discursive category. There is no beyond-thought and to invoke a realm beyond-thought is to drift mentally. There can be transcedence as a process but there can be no transcendental end of all things. There may in fact be one transcendental end of all life — and that is our unconditional love for those around us, particularly for those to whom we are biologically related. Zukofsky quotes the Metaphysics, implying that the only possible final cause is love:

In Zukofsky’s gloss of this passage, God is not necessarily loving — but in order to be purposeful, human beings must be loving. This is the only possible human universality. As Zukofsky writes “only as it completes this biological account of this love is the actuality of the ‘universal’ animal real. And only as the actuality of the ‘universal’ animal completes the biological account of this love is the love real” (53). In Zukofsky’s rejection of epistemology and metaphysics, love gives not just meaning, but reality itself, to all human action. Zukofsky’s preference in Bottom is always for the visible world, for a rehabilitation of the sensuous world in all its complexity. This, I want to suggest, is an important manifestation of Objectivism in a late form that would go on to inspire 80 Flowers and much of Zukofsky’s later work.

The ending of “A”-18, for instance, reads like a virtual Aristotelian introduction to 80 Flowers.

The act of poetic creation is like gardening because it fashions the living potential that already exists in nature. Aristotle is not a divinely gifted thinker, rather he is a scriblerus who has cultivated himself to the fullest degree. The messiness of the living process inherently gives meaning to art — wit should not be too well dressed, but somewhat rustic. (Scriblerus is a hack-writer character created by Alexander Pope and celebrated in The Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus.) Zukofsky is gently poking fun at Aristotle at the same time he is poking fun at the seriousness with which he himself takes his vocation as poet. Much cultivation, and by extension love, has been exerted in order to reach the creative ends aimed at by Zukofsky and his allegorical antecedent, Aristotle.

For both Aristotle and Zukofsky, there is no need for a monotheistic Spinozan deity to anchor the philosophical system — biological processes do not necessarily need to be linked to a divine origin, rather they are inherently meaningful in fulfilling a biological teleonomy. For Aristotle, the primary defining human characteristic is our capacity for rational thought. The late Zukofsky, perhaps more so than many of his contemporaries, has a strong confidence in the power of reason — but reason for Zukofsky is only important insofar as it is embodied in, and subordinated to, a process of loving. Zukofsky pokes fun at the simplicity of Aristotle’s biology in his 1948 essay on Williams:

And in fact, Aristotle, who wrote more on biology than on any other subject, is “an herb peddler” of sorts. As dismissive as Williams and Zukofsky sound at first, being an herb peddler is not in fact such a bad thing in the larger schema of Objectivist poetics. An herb peddler has his or her mind on things and on people and not on abstract ideas. The herb peddler is pragmatic in outlook and embedded within a system of social exchange.

The author of 80 Flowers could very well himself be a flower peddler. It is hard to imagine a more resolutely anti-philosophical work. No ideas but in plants. No ideas but in life. This is an embodied pragmatism and humanism based on familial love. The material world is not abstracted; rather it is presented with a respect toward the infinitude of its forms. No two persons and no two organisms are ever exactly alike. In the end, it is living beings “for whose existence we are more zealous than the existence of ideas.” For Zukofsky both early and late, living beings are always more important than ideas.