Webmaster: Why do you paint in addition to write philosophy?
Quentin Smith: The process began when I was 16. I had an experience of feeling shocked at what seemed to me to be the level of superficiality at which people seemed to live. I had the feeling that the people around me had no real knowledge of, or even interest in, the fundamental issues about reality and meaning (such as, why the universe was silent when one questioned about the purpose of life, or why is there not just pure nothingness). As a consequence, I became alienated from human society. I decided to devote my life to a solitary search for some ultimate meaning, if there was any ultimate meaning at all. Philosophy is my attempt to put into concepts what I believe is the meaning of human life and the universe. I attempted to do this with my first book, The Felt Meanings of the World: A Metaphysics of Feeling, which I first began thinking about at this time. But at 17 I began to get the sense that I felt or sensed something about reality that I could not describe using only words. I came to believe that I could express this through art. My paintings are about the inconceivable, about what cannot be expressed in any words. There is something about reality that I experience everyday but can only express in painting.
Webmaster: What sort of thing do you express in your painting that you can?t express in your philosophy?
Quentin: I cannot put it into words. When I paint, I keep painting until I can no longer conceptualize or verbalize what the painting meaning, but I know on some intuitive visual and emotive level what it means.
Webmaster: People usually comment that your paintings, as well as your poems, are nihilistic and express despair, isolation and suffering of one sort of another. Is that what you are expressing?
Quentin: Perhaps in part. But that is not what I sense I am expressing when I paint and write poetry. In my paintings, I try to capture an emotional reflection of the strangeness of reality, a reality that is beyond our verbal description. It is as if I am imagining there is a species of conscious beings, beings who are just as more intelligent than humans as humans are to rabbits. I am trying to express what sort of emotions these more intelligent beings would experience if they perceived the nature of reality that is inaccessible to us. I try to convey an intimation of this nature of reality by portraying its reflection in emotions that are too deep for humans to experience. But to reach a level where I sense such an intimation, I have to let myself slide into the deepest sort of despair, anxiety, or joy that is possible, for only at these extreme levels can one sense what might be a deeper reality than the one we normally experience itself as living in. But since this is a deliberate choice, it is not a psychological despair, anxiety or joy I experience, but a metaphysical one, a metaphysical feeling that is underpinned by a psychological will and desire to understand all of experience and reality. What I want to feel is not pleasant or happy feelings?I really couldn?t less if I am happy or unhappy?but deep feelings. I would much rather feel an infinitely profound sadness than the conventional, everyday cheerfulness that people are ?supposed to? feel as a matter of social convention. Nonetheless, I am cheerful when with others; it is just that I am usually alone. So, in a sense, I choose to be unhappy rather than happy in order to live a deepest life as possible.
Webmaster: How would this relate to your painting in the November 2003 issue of Art in America, with the title ?The Last Human, Broken?. Most people would respond: ?The painter is a nihilist or has had a very unhappy life?.
Quentin: It may appear from looking at the painting that I am expressing the view that the entirety of human life has proven to be unsatisfactory, and that it has broken a hypothetical human who has lived through it, or lived through all of history. But that is not a negative experience, as I see it. Rather, it is a way of becoming released from, or transcendent to, or infinitely detached from, human life, so that one can look at it as if from outside, from a non-human realm. If this hypothetical last human is ?broken?, then this raises the questions: what is it that would make the person broken? After all, it is a commonplace that there are both positive and negative experiences of life, that some lives are happy and others unhappy. But this painting is not about the relatively superficial fact that some person has lived an unhappy life or has had some negative experiences. Rather, it is that the entire gamut of human experience and life, including all that we find good and that we find bad, is for some reason so unsatisfactory that it has broken ?the last human?. But what could that possibly be? What sort of beliefs would this last human be having while feeling he or she is ?broken?? How would one go about rethinking the nature and meaning of human life so that what ?broke? the last human would not be there? If the last human is ?broken? by both the ?good? and ?bad? aspects of human life, one cannot say the answer is ?merely remove the bad aspects of human life, eliminate wars, famines, diseases, failed relationships, suffering, injustice and ignorance?. For that still leaves what we call ?the good parts? of human life. So there is something else altogether. Maybe it when we look at the life of a worm or moth, we can see what is lacking in its life. But suppose there is a hypothetical being who is as more intelligent than humans as we are too worms and moths. What would that being see as lacking to human life?
Webmaster: Would this hypothetical being see a meaning to life that humans cannot see? Are you suggesting that there is a meaning to human life, and life merely appears to be meaningless because of our limited experiences and intellect?
Quentin: I think Darwin discovered the meaning of life in 1859: the meaning of life is to survive and reproduce. The real question is: why does there exist this meaning of life? Does this meaning of life have itself any meaning, or is it just a brute fact that has no further point or significance? And if it has some meaning, what is it?
Other paintings may express the emotion of a hypothetical being who knows and experiences something we apparently cannot, the answer to the question ?Why is there anything at all, rather than just nothingness? Why are there things, space, time, rather than nothing at all?no things, no time, no space, no minds, not even an empty spatial void?? The answer may be incomprehensible and hence the emotional response to the answer would be an emotion that is too profound and strange for humans to have the capacity to feel.
Webmaster: I notice that you painted in 1971, when you were 18, and then stopped until 2002, when you were 49. The same with your poetry. You wrote poetry from age 16 (1969) to age 22 (first half of 1974) and then stopped mostly until 2002. It seems that there was some significant internal change going on in your life.
Quentin: Yes, there was in 2002. I suppose it was the fact that my increasing age (I turned 50 in August, 2002) has led me closer to the total oblivion of all my projects. I used to think, say at age 30, that my life and major works were ahead of me. But I was waking up to the fact that that may longer be true. It is possible, especially if I die unexpectedly and prematurely in my 50s or 60s, that my major works are behind me and that the significance or importance of my life lies in the past, and now I am just waiting around for death, distracting myself with long-term projects in philosophy and physics. These would just be distractions if I were suddenly struck down by death, and the projects left unfinished, and nothing worthwhile attained. But with poetry and paintings, one can express quickly a summary sense of meaning, and by this means one can outwit death, at least in a metaphorical sense. Although I spend most of my time on theoretical work, I do spend several hours each week on painting and poetry.
Webmaster: Why 2002? Do you no longer feel this way?
Quentin: In 2003 I began developing some philosophical ideas more original and fundamental than I had before, and now I see a 30-year project of developing these ideas stretching out before me. In 2002, I was seeing the future in terms of developing the ideas I had already worked out in previous years, and any sense that I was on the path to discovering something astonishingly new was missing. It seemed then that the sense of finding something new in an unknown theoretical landscape would be something that I would no longer experience. But now that experience is back again, so I feel as if I am just beginning to really think and find some signposts to the truth.
This change came along with the idea that I am not just waiting for death, and my focus on my impending death receded. I realized there was no more reason now to think that I might die soon than there was when I was 20, since the relevant evidence, regular physical examinations and the like, have shown, according to my physician, that I have no reason to think I will die for several more decades, perhaps in my 90s, given the longevity of my family history.
Webmaster: It seems that you were unhappiest in the earlier part of your life, when you first became a philosopher and first started writing poetry and painting. Reading your poems from around 1970, it is hard to avoid the impression that you found life rather bleak and hopeless.
Quentin: I preferred the early stage of my life when I was unknown, unrecognized, alienated and held in disrespect by society for not being a ?successful, normal person?. But you are right that I found despair and isolation to be a natural state. From age 17 to 26, I had no human contact. I thought the human race lived in illusion, that there was no obviously apparent purpose to life, and that only by working in isolation could there be any hope for discovering some ultimate sense to the world and human existence. I chose to avoid human beings, and usually left my apartment only once a week at night to buy food.
But this is only part of the story. There was also something else back then. At the same time I had intense, positive, almost mystical experiences of the whole universe, which appeared as sort of an indeterminate One. The One is not a ?new reality?, like Plotinus? One, but just the universe appearing in a certain way, appearing without any boundaries or discriminations between its different parts. This blurring of all the differences between the parts of the universe can only appear in a kind of ecstasy. Most of the time I felt it when listening to Bruckner?s symphonies, especially his symphony No. 4. I wasn?t just listening; rather the music carried me away into an ecstatic state. It was as if Bruckner?s music carried me on a tidal wave that spread endlessly throughout the universe. But I found that this was only the case in the way Daniel Barenboim conducted this symphony, in his version with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (not his version with the Berlin Philharmonic). So, with the help of this music, I varied between ecstasy and despair.
But there is a paradox here about poems of despair, since I spent my time writing poetry or philosophy, and I felt happy if I wrote a poem of despair that I thought was a good poem. I excluded the positive fulfillment and the meaning of my personal life, writing, from these poems. Why? Poetry is a matter of complete self-expression, and I felt a need to express myself when I felt bleak and despairing, and I find a need to express that despair at other times when I was not despairing. But I have noticed that the older I have gotten, the more positive my poems have been. For example, my 1974 poems, such as "Night" and "Mysterium Tremendum" express a very deep, positive attitude of awe and wonder at the universe. And most of the poems I write now are not despairing, but about attempts to experience meaning. I think in the early 1970s, I did think life was in large part meaningless and hopeless, but by 1974 my despair was changing to an awe and wonder at the universe. But here again there is a caveat. I also recorded the ecstasies I felt about the universe in the early 1970s, e.g. in the poems "At One with the Night", "The Last Hour", "Enchanted Night", "Reconfirmation", "Awestruck", "Transfigured in my Backyard", "There In Nowhere" and most especially, "Walking Home From a Movie", which best captures what Bruckner?s 4th symphony evoked in me, although in this poem I had the experience without listening to anything. I was walking home from a showing of the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman movie ?Persona? and was so overwhelmed by the film that I couldn?t move for two hours; I just sat on the sidewalk outside the movie theatre. And then I walked home and felt a sort of ecstasy. ?Persona?, I still think, is the best and most profound film ever made. It is pure nihilism, and this evoked the response in me, after the movie, that this is not the whole truth, and that brought about the ecstasy, described in "Walking Home From a Movie", written as soon as I got home.
Webmaster: How about your childhood? What of significance happened
in your childhood?
Quentin: Nothing really. But some incidents may be of interest.
My father, who was a psychology professor at Bennington College, wrote a
book-length manuscript consisting of his descriptions and psychoanalytic theory
of my personality from the time I was born until I was 10 or so. He used this
manuscript as a textbook in his psychology courses, and the students were
required to develop their own analyses of me based on the manuscript.
One of his predictions was that I would become a philosopher. This was based on his observation of me at two years old, sitting motionlessly in from of a window for 3 days in a row, looking at our neighbor's house. He asked me what I was doing, and I replied: "I am waiting for Harry's [our neighbor's] house to fall down." Upon further questioning, he figured out that I had this rather remarkable expectation since 3 days earlier I had seen a shingle fall off our neighbor's roof.
Webmaster: Is there anything else you want to relate about your
childhood?
Quentin: Let me see. Some people find interesting the fact that I
got whipped every day for a year, when I was 7 years old. But not by my parents;
by my school. When I was 7 years old, I got whipped on my left hand every
morning, since (not being a Christian) I refused to say the Lord's Prayer at the
beginning of the school day. The whip was called the leather ?strap?, and one?s
left hand was strapped because the strap paralyzed one?s hand and one needed
one?s right hand to do the schoolwork during the day. I got used to my left hand
being paralyzed every day for about 5 hours from the strapping.
Webmaster: That sounds like it was traumatic.
Quentin: No, it wasn't. It seemed normal to me and I didn?t think
it anything special or noteworthy. It seemed normal since my parents expected me
to live by my individual ideals rather than by the criterion of unreflective
conformity to whatever culture one happens to be born into. They didn't really
say much about me being strapped; they had the same attitude I did. It was as if
it I was just living by the truism that the world is not a perfect place and
thus one should not expect society to be completely just and rational at every
time and place.
Mental Q-space:
Photo copyright
Qsmithwum Webmaster, February 23, 2003.
Webmaster: You have discussed your painting and poetry. When did you become a philosopher? And how did your decision to become a philosopher come about?
Webmaster: This occurred when I was 16. I had
already started writing poetry, but not through any contact with higher culture,
to which I had no exposure. Rather my poetry writing was inspired by the poetic
lyrics of rock songs! This was in the late 1960s and all I knew was that I
thought something was wrong with human society. It seemed the alternative was to
become a hippie, which I did. I lived on a hippie commune in Vermont for a
summer. But I awoke from that delusion soon enough. It happened when I read
Herman Hesse?s Steppenwolf at somebody?s suggestion. That book changed my
life. Steppenwolf, especially as he is described in the early parts of the
book, seemed to be like myself (Hesse meant him to be Nietzsche). My
self-identity suddenly changed from that of a hippie to a member of the class of
historical creators, artists, philosophers and scientists. This was already in
place when I read the next major influence on my thinking, Nietzsche?s The
Will to Power. I started off as Nietzsche?s disciple in a sense, for I
remember my first book-script (I started writing a philosophy book as soon as I
finished Steppenwolf) took the line that the meaning of life was the
increase in power, and I identified power with different degrees of happiness.
One can already discern here the concern with feelings or felt meanings.
Webmaster: Tell me about your career as a professor.
Quentin: I don?t think philosophers have careers. Business executives or bankers can properly be said to have careers, but devoting one?s life to pursuing the basic truths cannot be considered a career. I experience philosophizing to be the same thing as being alive. For example, I do not understand the distinction between ?work? and ?relaxation?, or the concept of a ?vacation?. How can one take a vacation from thinking about what the point of human existence is, or whether it has any point at all? And how can philosophizing be classified as one?s ?working hours?? As far as I can see, philosophizing hours are not ?working hours? but instead should be viewed as the hours at which one is awake rather than asleep. Others may call it ?work?, but I would call it ?doing what it is natural for any conscious being to do?, trying to figure everything out.
However, it seemed to me when I first began teaching as an assistant professor in 1978 that many philosophy professors saw philosophy as merely a career, similar to any other career. The built-in conventional meaning of the career was defined in terms of pursuit of social status, climbing higher on the level of the ladder of status in the community, as if going from one university to another supposedly more prestigious university is like being promoted from being a junior vice president of a bank to a senior vice president, getting a bigger office on a higher floor in the building, a bigger house and more luxurious car and living in a more upscale neighborhood. One ?advances one?s career? by doing what pleases those who have the power to advance one?s career. Philosophizing seemed to be understood tacitly by many as a means to getting the approval of one?s peers and the most prestigious ?authorities? in the field and this attitude seemed to largely influence what professors philosophized about. But it seemed to me that the ?careerist? values of many professors was not an ?all or nothing? affair, but tended to vary in degree and to be mixed in varying degrees with the desire for knowledge for its own sake.
Webmaster: Did this influence your decision to resign your tenure-track position as assistant professor when you were only 27?
Quentin: No. It was already apparent to me by my late teens that there was a clear cut distinction between being a philosophy professor and being a philosopher, so this fact was not relevant. I already knew this before I became a professor. I resigned from my tenure track job as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Kentucky in 1980 for a different reason. I resigned, as my letter of resignation said, ?in order to do philosophy?. I had what I considered a heavy teaching load, 2 courses one semester and 3 courses the next semester, and that left only the 3 summer months as time to write. But with no idea of how I was to support myself financially, I resigned and began writing full time.
Webmaster: What was your plan to find shelter and food?
Quentin: I was planning to move to Florida, write philosophy in a library, while it was open, sleep outside in the warm weather at night, and hopefully find some soup kitchen or something.
Webmaster: How did you survive until now?
Quentin: I was fortunate enough receive some Rockefeller Awards, National Endowment of the Humanities stipends, and a stipend from the American Council of Learned Societies. For awhile I lived in the poorest parts of some cities. Living in the city slums wasn?t that enjoyable a feeling, especially since being robbed and shot at tended to disrupt my concentration on the theory I was working on. I recall that when living in Louisville, I was used for target practice by the neighborhood kids every time they saw me in my apartment window. Consequently, I had to crawl on the floor to move about my tiny domicile. I remember that one time I mistakenly stood up for too long, and I felt a bullet passing through my hair and saw it lodged in the opposite wall. I temporarily lost my train of thought, but was able to pick it up 5 minutes later.
Webmaster: How and why did you return to academia?
Quentin: In 1991 I received an endowed chair from Antioch College, the Lillian Pierson Lovelace Visiting Professor (a 3 year endowed chair position) which was ideal since I negotiated time for research and had to teach only two courses a year. But I so used to being poor for the past 10 years that I gave them back all my salary except for $7,000. It didn?t seem to me anything peculiar at the time, but I was told later that it had become the gossip of the campus. People thought I was eccentric, but as far as I could tell, it was other people who lived eccentrically, and only I lived a normal life.
Webmaster: How did you come to Western Michigan University?
Quentin: My three year endowed chairship at Antioch College expired, and since I didn?t want to expire as well, I needed a job.
Surprisingly, I received several job offers from the so-called ?top ranked universities?, probably because by that time I had published things, in quantity and quality, that had interested philosophers. But I also received what I, and also the rest of professional philosophers, consider to be an ideal, research-oriented position at Western Michigan University. I was supposed to teach one course a semester (two courses a year) and spend the rest of my time on research. But the leading research universities had teaching loads of 2 courses per semester and this intractable fact made the decision to go to Western Michigan University an easy one. I also like the philosophy faculty and administrators here, so I felt lucky in this respect as well. In fact, I immediately sensed that the faculty here did not have the distinction between ?being a philosopher? and ?being a careerist motivated philosophy professor? that I generally sense 15 years earlier when I first began teaching. The faculty were philosophy professors who were genuine philosophers. This fundamental respect for them, as well as for their evident abilities as a philosophers, enabled me to ?feel at home? in the department rather than alienated from it. I also discerned from the very beginning a moral maturity and harmony among the faculty that is not always present at some other philosophy departments.
Another factor that influenced my appreciation of the philosophy department here is the individual philosophical talents and accomplishments of the other faculty. Some of the faculty here are less well-known that those at the ?more prestigious? research universities, but the faculty are as least as intelligent and erudite. When I visit the more prestigious research universities to give talks, I have found that the top philosophers do not surpass in intelligence or erudition the faculty at Western Michigan University. Perhaps that is why Western Michigan University is ranked among the top 10 philosophy MA programs in the country; most of our MA graduate students go on to the top ranked PhD programs, so working with them is like working with the best pre-dissertation students at the top PhD programs at research universities. When I teach class, I feel basically like an equal with the graduate students, and not as some kind of authority; I learn just as much from them as they do from me. And more than once, they have refuted some of my arguments and theories. These are the sorts of students I like to teach.
Webmaster: This sense of ?being at home? at Western Michigan University seems to be a fundamental change in your attitude to the philosophical profession and, indeed, society in general.
Quentin: I had changed myself, probably during my 30s. I began to see the irrationality of alienation. I began with the basic thought, ?I don?t feel alienated from other animals, who are more different than me than other humans, so why should I feel alienated from the human species??. But this change was more at a basic psychological level rather than as an outcome of a chain of reasoning. Now, instead of feeling alienation from other people, I felt a sort of instinctive liking of people. I don?t know how unusual this may be, but I cannot help but like everyone I come in contact with or know about in some way or another. The phenomenological experience is that each person has the trait of ?being likeable?. This is true for even my so-called philosophical ?opponents?. Three of my main theoretical opponents in the philosophical literature are L. Nathan Oaklander. William Lane Craig and William F. Vallicella. Other philosophers, reading the ?critical? style of the articles we wrote about each other, assumed we ?hated? each other. In fact, these three people are three of my closet friends. It never crossed our minds that we should not like and respect each other merely because we have very divergent views about certain philosophical topics. Our attitude was that our mutual criticisms were helpful to each other in stimulating each other?s further thought on a topic that interested us both. Some philosophers I criticize take it personally and, apparently (so I have heard) don?t particularly like me as a consequence. The Princeton philosophers Scott Soames and (retired) Saul Kripke have publicly expressed their personal, negative feelings to me. But this never prevented me from liking them and respecting them, despite the ?critical tone? that is involved in debating or negatively evaluating their philosophical views or their place in the history of philosophy. Philosophy, unlike science, is not a team-work enterprise where there is agreement on the fundamentals; rather, philosophy is the field of thought where the fundamentals are in dispute, and so debate and mutual criticism is the natural way to try and figure out which views are the most justified ones. I could never understand why a philosopher would like only those who agreed with him or her and dislike the philosophers who disagreed. Why should a philosopher take something ?personally? something that is not in fact ?personal?, but an attempt to advance philosophical knowledge?
Webmaster: Could you elaborate some more on this change in your general attitude?
Quentin: I don?t know anybody whom I don?t like. The attitude of universal alienation I felt in my teens and twenties has now changed into its opposite. This change is more of an instinctive or psychological nature than a result of any change in philosophical theory. But it does seem to me absurd that there could be a reason not to like somebody. There is a clear distinction between liking a person and agreeing or disagree with what they believe or do.
The same applies to everything else. I find animals, plants and inanimate things to be likeable, even though I may not be in ?agreement? with a rattlesnake who wants to bite me. Whether this attitude can be philosophically justified or not, I do not know. I am just reporting how I experience things now.
This also involves re-evaluating my earlier attitude to people with careers, such as business executives and bankers. If one talks to some of them, one finds that a sense of larger purpose is the main motivating factor in their lives. For example, I once talked with the vice-president of Citibank (it wasn?t too difficult to make an appointment with him, since he happened to be my older brother!) and it was obvious that he saw the purpose of his life to be improving the human condition through improving its economic condition. One finds this way of experiencing life present in just about everybody, although it varies in degree from one person to another.
It may seem paradoxical that I spent most of my time alone, if I have this positive attitude to others. But it is not really paradoxical. It is simply that I have a stronger desire to do something else than socialize, namely, develop new philosophical theories and works of art.
Webmaster: Do you still have the same motive for writing philosophy
that you did in your twenties?
Quentin: No. I realize now that one?s philosophy cannot ?change the world?, which I set out to do at age 16 when I began writing The Felt Meanings of the World. Rather, it only stimulates people to think who already have a developed philosophical world-view. And since I admire original thinking, and discourage people from becoming my ?disciples?, so to speak, I don?t want anyone to adopt my philosophical world-view as their own. Rather, they should adopt their own world-view, perhaps with the stimulus of my publications being useful in this process.
Webmaster: I notice that you now are an editor as well as a writer.
Quentin: Yes. My two main editorial positions are being the editor of Philo: A Journal of Philosophy, and a philosophy editor at Prometheus Books. I accepted the positions as editors in part because I agree with the general sort of world-view Philo and Prometheus Books represents. And I also thought: everybody is always complaining that most of the articles published in journals are not very good. I felt, well, then, you have an obligation to do something about it. Become an editor if you can, and stop turning down requests to referee papers. The same goes for books. People complain that many philosophy books that are published are not very good. I ask them: how many requests to referee and evaluate a book-manuscript have you turned down? The major problem, I think, is that the most able and accomplished philosophers believe they don?t have time to evaluate others? works, and so this task by default falls upon the less accomplished or able philosophers. So the poor quality, I would say, is mainly the fault of the group of more accomplished and able philosophers who turn down requests to evaluate articles and book-manuscripts,
Webmaster: There is a widespread view about your philosophical work that you began as a phenomenological philosopher and then changed to being an analytic philosopher and philosopher of physics. Is that correct?
Quentin: I don?t accept the fact that there is a difference between phenomenological (or Continental philosophy in general) and analytic philosophy. And my philosophy is neither phenomenological nor analytic, although I can see why (using the categories of contemporary philosophy) philosophers would call some of my work ?phenomenological? and other of my work ?analytic?.
My main influences in my late teens and early twenties were the phenomenologists and existentialists. I studied Heidegger?s Being and Time, Sartre?s Being and Nothingness, Jasper?s Philosophy, Max Scheler?s various books, and Husserl?s Logical Investigations. I was influenced by Heidegger the most, although I preferred the more exact methodology and understanding of consciousness put forth by Husserl, Sartre and Max Scheler. Heidegger remained the main influence on my thought until I was in my early 30s, when I also became influenced by analytic philosophers. The change occurred when I first read Russell?s The Principles of Mathematics, and there I found the sort of precision of thought that I was looking for at that point in my philosophical development. My first book that was categorized as ?analytic? is Language and Time (finished in 1990 and but not published, due to the usual delays, until 1993). I first began writing it in 1983, as soon as I finished The Felt Meanings of the World. The two main influences were Richard Gale?s The Language of Time and Alvin Plantinga?s The Nature of Necessity.
But when I first read William Craig?s The Kalam Cosmological Argument, I was so excited by it (before Craig, no philosopher had written a book on the implications of the Big Bang that began our universe) that I read it nonstop from beginning to end, staying up all night. I thought I could spend the rest of my life writing about that book, and that turned out to be partially true; some of my responses to Craig, and his responses to me, were published in a book in 1993, Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology. Despite the fact that my mathematics made the book unintelligible to philosophers, and the dense technicality of the philosophizing made it unintelligible to physicists, that became my best selling book.
I had become interested in physics, particularly in big bang cosmology and quantum cosmology, in the early 1980s, due to accidentally finding a newspaper clipping saying ?physicists discovered the universe was created out of thin air?. I was bemused by the title, but upon reading the original articles in the physics journals, I realized the physicists were developing theories about why our universe began to exist. This motivated me to learn the mathematics and physics necessary to understand the new theories, and I began publishing in this area in 1985.
Webmaster: How would you characterize the meaning and influences upon your poetry?
Quentin: I?d have to write a poem in order to verbalize it to you. But it would be consistent to call my poetry part of what is usually called ?Contemporary American Poetry?. I wasn?t influenced by it; I don?t think I started reading it until I had wrote most of my early 1970s poems (I liked Kinnell and Roethke the best). But my poems differed from most other Contemporary American Poetry of the early 1970s in two ways. First, I try and write about the ultimate meaning or meaninglessness of life in each poem, whereas the other poets write poems about more surface, conventional life. After meeting several of these poets in the early 1970s, I felt that the reason for this difference was that they were ordinary, conventional, surface level people. Naturally, this further increased my disillusionment with humanity. My attitude back then was that they couldn?t understand my poems since the poems were at a level of depth they had never experienced. I will have to wait to see the reaction to the publication of a collection of my more recent poems to see if I still have the same attitude.
I remember when I was 17 and 18 that poetry professors unsuccessfully attempted to get me to write more surface level poems. Perhaps this corresponds to my real influences, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Rainer Rilke, Fredric Holderlin and Georg Trakl, all of him wrote basically about one topic: Is life meaningful and, if so, what is its meaning, and how should we live? And if life does have a meaning, how do we reach it through the sort of experiences described in poems? I think only Roethke and Kinnell among American poets of that time have written at this level of depth of experience of life.
Webmaster: Which poem of yours do you like the most?
Quentin: Well, first let me say what I think the relation is between philosophy, poetry and painting. Poetry captures an aspect of reality that cannot be captured by philosophy. But painting captures an aspect of reality that cannot be captured by poetry, since it is a wordless aspect of reality that can be sensed but not verbally or even poetically described. I am not saying that there exists some supernatural reality that is not captured in the sciences and philosophy. Rather, I am saying that poetry and painting capture certain ways of appearing of the realities discovered by science and philosophy, ways of appearing that cannot be expressed in science or philosophy. So I am no mystic. Rather, I just appreciate reality from a multitude of perspectives (this theory is the basis of my book The Felt Meanings of the World).
Now, your question about which of my poems I like the best. I like best the poem that expresses with the greatest aesthetic beauty my deepest attitude to life. That is the poem "Night", written in 1974.
Webmaster: What is your favorite philosophical work?
Quentin: You mean of my own works? It would be The Felt Meanings of the World. I think now that most people do not live at a deep enough existential level to understand it or emotionally relate to it all. I think that shows, while I was writing it, that I had an overly optimistic view of humanity. Or at least I mistakenly assumed that their experience of life was more similar to mine than it actually was.
My attitude to death changed completely upon finishing this book. Before I finished it at age 30, in the early summer of 1983. I was afraid of dying before I could finish the book. I thought that book was the one crucial thing I could contribute to humanity. But as soon as I finished it, I stopped caring if I lived or died. It didn?t make any difference to me if I woke up the next morning or died during the night. I had completed what I had understood, even since I was 16, to be my life task. But eventually, as new ideas began forming in my mind, I felt I had something more I wanted to discover and communicate, and so it started becoming more important to me whether I lived or died the next day.
You asked what was my favorite philosophy book. I understood that to mean in addition which philosophical book by another philosopher was my favorite. In terms of historical figures, I would empathize most with some sort of combination of Democritus, Spinoza, Hume and Schopenhauer. What about a contemporary book? I would say that if I had no world-view of my own, and had to adopt someone else?s, I would adopt John Post?s in his book The Faces of Existence. Maybe this book is too conceptually sophisticated and profound for widespread understanding or empathy, which may explain why it is not discussed very much in the literature. But it may be the best philosophy book written in the 20th century.
Webmaster: What does your first sentence of the interview mean, on the first, home page?
Quentin: The fire is the mystery of the nature of reality and whether or not human existence has some ultimate meaning. The only way to live and study these questions is to crawl along a painful knowledge of not knowing the answer, and knowing that at any instant one may die by falling off the blade into the fire.
Click to go back to:
Home Philosophy & Physics Poetry Paintings