Ah! Freedom is a noble thing Freedom makes a man to have liking.
This paper searches for unity. The Vygotskian principle maintained that the function in cognitive development appears twice, first on the social plane and then on the psychological plane. The move from social plane to the psychological plane is mediated through certain signs . The Vygotskian principle states nothing new but the form of “Know Thyself.” Here, the verb ‘know’ for the subject we wish to know is not the individual consciousness but the universal subject as a man is to be studied not in his individual life but in his political and social life.
Similarly any mode of expression-whether fact or fiction linguistics now seeks to achieve a condensation and centralization through working toward a common end- a universal character(as we find in Inuit communities), in which every aspects of human life- the variety of mythical images, the work of aesthetics, the cult dogma etc. agree and harmonize. The freedom beyond the Romantic Age seeks a logical synthesis.
A logical synthesis is a different thing because in spite of knowing the fact that scientific inventions oppose and suppress mythical behavior. Religion in its nature is under the necessity of defending the purity of its own ideal against the extravagant fancies of mythical signs and aesthetics. The paper investigates a unity of action, and unity of creative process instead of effects and products. In this progress, the freedom of man can be understood as a functional idea where the domain is SIGN.
This includes any creative process or work that is free from time and space. What we do in this process is to observe an object from the collective knowledge, and then try to add individual aspects of assimilation in order to formulate a unity . While doing humanly related work whenever the moments of pure, and positive happiness come into our mind we leave ourselves from all doubts, fears, inhibitions, weaknesses; and to quote Maslow ‘Self-consciousness was lost’. The unity makes all distance disappeared, and we come out with expression like “the world is so beautiful”, “I love to be here”, “I want to hear the silence”, etc.
As to quote one of my poems named ‘Interior Monologues’ in this context:
In many ways- I see you near me
Harvesting your smile inside my mind
My interior monologues, and The unending thoughts of yours
Knock at my cerebral door
In a moment open and in a second closed The gates of my eyes
That placed you in between somewhere
Where… … …
There is nothing to forget but
The ways of remembering you
This poem is an example of my beyondness-my romance in post-modernity , or my extension of romanticism. I call this poem ‘my romance’ because after that things happened to occur in a way that makes them seem more important than they really were; and not to forget pointing out that this romance was totally different from Hemingway’s type romance with his nurse that inspired him to write “A Farewell to Arms.” Succinctly speaking here we discover two denotations for the term ‘romance’. The first one develops a way of thinking, and the second one is an affair.
As I have mentioned earlier that logical synthesis does not seek unity of effects but a unity of actions. Thus Hemingway’s “A farewell to Arms” and my “Interior Monologues” romanticizing an acted unity. We came out with our creative work but the unity of effect was completely different. Any creative process seeks freedom from time and space that’s why there remains no unity in products but in the processes.
Now to define “romance” of action the definition can be understood as a functional one, not as a substantial one. We cannot define the romance of action by any inherent principle which constitutes its metaphysical essence-nor can we define the romance of action by any inborn faculty that may be ascertained by empirical observation. In this way the denotative meaning of the word “romance” changes, and takes flight to different zones of freedom. The modifier “romance” before the preposition “beyond” changes the meaning of this preposition. The denotative meaning states that whatever comes after a particular time, and date; but here our modifier “romance” gives us freedom to move freely from time and space, and in this context only the functional elements remain, and the substantial elements evaporates. Then “the romance beyond the romantic age” can never be the Victorian age because substantial elements lack unity.
The clear version now comes into existence that any work which represents creativity and liberated imagination is romantic with small “r”. Now the Chomskian question comes into existence “How do we manage to think (romantically) freely? Linguistically it covers the field mind and cognition. Historically speaking literature finds creativity in history. Whenever we talk about the Romantic Period we say it is a period of beginning with French revolution, and simultaneously we talk about creativity, imagination, and perception that is far away from the Neo-Classical Period.
Now considering historical period in our mind we start talking about the substantial elements, but one thing is general whether we are dealing with creativity, or we are dealing with imagination we are in a unity of actions. To put forward the two Vygotskian concepts we would be able to give an appropriate solution to our riddle “How do we think?” The concepts are ‘zone of proximal development ‘and ‘inner speech’. Any person when comes out with any innovative work or imagination the action mediates between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving activity, and the level of potential development as determined by problem solving under guidance. Inner speech tries to find relation of the invisible act of thought to language as a phenomenon of culture. Inner Speech, a kind of silent talking to oneself, is a central issue in the problem of the relation between thought and language. Inner Speech cannot exist without social interaction.
Similarly, no imagination is entirely new and novel, and it is an imitation of the collective actions. The imagination is only a more refined and complicated play of the same associate mechanism and automatism which we find in imitation. It is a play of words e.g. Crashaw’s description, in “Saint Mary Magdalene” as …two faithful fountains Two walking baths, two weeping motions, Portable and compendious ocean
Finally we come out with one finding that imitation is also a part of imagination. Our action of imitation is not an instinct (not a substantial element but it is a functional one). It is a function of language, and now to answer this question how far romantic writers were different from the other periods is not simple. People all around the world, since their time of origin, have been experiencing the great moments of emotions. All these personal or collective moments have been inspiring them from time to time.
As a matter of fact they truly romanticized their sphere. But the point to notice is how come the hidden creativity bursts in a certain age? I elucidate my previous point that literature finds its creativity in History. The French Revolution with its cry of ‘liberty, fraternity, and equality’ began in 1789. The revolution inspired poets, thinkers, artists, and politicians. But it is not the whole truth. We cannot go for DNA genes as a creative marker. The supposedly scientific basic of such assumption is Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on linguistic determinism, stating that people’s thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language and its weaker version that is known as linguistic relativity (stating that the differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers).
Curiously enough an error is often committed by historians and anthologists, and its criticism is contained in John Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct. “It is unscientific”, writes Dewey, to try to restrict original (functional) activities to a definite number of sharply demarcated classes of instincts…But when we assume that our lists and bunches represent fixed separation and collections. We obstruct rather than aid our transactions with things. A person’s imagination may go beyond normal happiness while reading Pope’s “Happy the man, whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound.” in his poem Solitude rather than reading Wordswothian “Behold her single in the field Yon solitary Highland Lass!” in The Solitary Reaper. The critical point at this juncture is that we write in language but we don’t think in language though when we are in “Inner Speech” we do use language. But sometimes it is not easy to find any word that properly conveys a thought.
The title “Romance beyond the Romantic Age” is thus pointed out that everything is transitional, and it is hard to answer when an imitative work of art starts showing the sign of real romance, and vice-versa. For us as an individual it is intellectual self-preservation demands that we should classify the infinity of events with reference to functional elements. References
1. Aristotle. 1983[1935]. “On Interpretation.” In Aristotle in Twenty Three Volume, Vol. l. Trans. H.P. Cooke and H. Tredennick. London: Heinemann.
2. Edelman, Murry J.(1988). The Politics of Misunderstanding. Chicago:University of Chicago.
3. Hjelmslav, L. (1954). “La Stratification du language”.Word 10, Nos. 1-2: 163-80
. 4. Langacker, R.(1987). “Foundations of Cognitive Grammar.” Vol.l. Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press
5. Moll, L.(Ed.) (1990). “Vygotsky and Education: Instructional implications and applications of sociohistorical psychology.” Cambridge, MA:Cambridge University Press.
6. Smolensky, P. (1986 a.) “Neural and conceptual interpretations of PDP models.” In Mcclelland, James L., Rumelhart, David E., et al, 372-43
. 7. Vygotsky, L.(1962). ”Thought and Language.” Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.
iThe premise of Vygotskian psychology is often referred to as cultural mediation. Children learn specific knowledge through social interaction, also known as internalization; this can be understood in one respect as ‘knowing how’, or ‘knowing thyself’.
iiHjelmslev emphasizes on focusing linguist’s work to research human culture and try to accumulate collective preserved knowledge through language-signs. Neurologist Walter Freeman borrowed St. Aquinas’s thought that human existence goals union with the universal (Aquinas’s term was God). Freeman says that the primary function of human brain is to filter meaning from information. The intentionality remains dominant.
iii Husserl’s precisely says that what we observe is not the object as it in itself, but how and in as much it is given in the intentional acts. Knowledge of essences would only be possible by “bracketing” all assumptions about the existence of an external world.
iv Gidden’s work Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971) explicitly explains that the primary task of social analysis is the following: the hermeneutic explication and mediation of divergent forms of life within descriptive meta-language of social science, and explication of the production and reproduction of society as the accomplished outcome of human agency.
vAccording to Chomsky we recognize a new item as a sentence not because it matches a familiar item in any simple way, but because it matches the grammar that each individual has somehow and in some form internalized. The hypothesis postulates that a particular language’s nature influences the habitual thought of its speakers.
Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi
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