have you read zizek on chesterton? there’s an interesting essay here: http://www.lacan.com/zizhegche.htm

i don’t know hegel (or zizek to be honest) very well, so a good bit of that essay goes over my head. but from what i can understand, zizek has some interesting takes on chesterton.

To be a critic (nevermind Critic) isn’t intrinsically as bad as he makes it sound — to switch sides for a moment — but he’s put his finger on the danger. To criticize is to feign yourself more sophisticated than what you criticize. I can describe the workings of a pendulum (elliptic integrals, if you make me) because I am more sophisticated than a pendulum. But a poem is more than a pendulum (or, more aptly, than a metronome). It’s amazing how soon Critics seem to forget they’re just people with opinions, and that poetry is a form of awareness on the level of other people with opinions, so to criticize it properly would seem to require being everyone and having all opinions. Whereas, more commonly, a Critic peeps through his or her keyhole, faulting the line of sight: “Too discursive” or “Not autobiographical enough” or “Too many abstractions.” So much for defending criticism! I’d like a world where critics did nothing but clear avenues and clarify intersections.

Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

It’s probably no coincidence, either, that Cantor and Godel made seminal contributions to mathematics and logic, then (swiftly and slowly, respectively) went mad. I think it was Chesterton who pointed out how the analytical mind goes wrong sooner than the poetic. A reason why, or just a phenomenon: whereas social and political systems constrict, in mathematics it can feel opposite; too wide open. Cantor again: “The essence of mathematics is freedom.” Procrustean but pretty accurate up in the theory seats. Godel is still a hero of mine. In making logic capable of describing itself (somewhat analogous to crafting a mirror fine enough to reflect both the world and its own reflection of it — an infinite mise en abyme he found a way to circle back on itself), Godel found the soft spots: the modesties and misgivings. The limitations (of consistency and completeness) self-confessed in that mirror. I wish literary camps and schools could find that sort of knack, to self-critique without a war having to be brought. I’m sure they have, and do. But the interfactional sniping — in the vituperative reviews and scab-biting that goes on in the republic of letters — is what shows more distinctly in the Comment section of Poetry, et al.

Sorry this ramble has been only marginally on-topic.

Claim: “There can be no errors in perception if all perception is misperception, only errors in methodology.”

It is consistent to say, “not by force of truth but by force of belief,” but not, “not by force of any truth but this,” unless we then take that latter statement as the sole exception to its own mandate. Many in positions of power do (force) exactly that.

Let me say it another way. The claim above comes out as a Wittgensteinian meta-truth: gesturable toward as placeheld in logical space, but not “perceivable” unless that word is allowed to shift its meaning. Suppose we perceive it to be true that all perception is misperception. Then we’ve misperceived it, which, plugging back into the statement, means we’ve perceived it. It’s a variant of the Liar paradox.

I’m not trying to be a gadfly here. But this is one of my favorite conundra, and there are rigorous ways around it.

To the larger point that power resists systems (logical systems, for example) in order to maintain itself: this idea is endlessly fruitful. Theological arguments address it. God can’t make a rock too heavy to lift because that would entail giving up his omnipotence, one party claims. Another says that’s the point exactly: a choice to self-limit is one of the most powerful a being can make. Logicians like the idea that logic is the softest force but the strongest, but even they allow various ways out of the Chinese finger cuffs.