What, if anything, is George Steiner trying to say to us in Real Presences and how can he say

it?

INTRODUCTION

As I begin to read this paper, please ask yourself, don't you make certain assumptions, simply by
listening to what it is that I am trying to say? Don't you assume that I am a really present subject
who is capable of having had these thoughts and now of expressing them to you in intelligible
speech, in such a way that the linguistic markers correspond to what I am trying to say? Don't I
assume that there are others here who are really present around this table to listen to me? And, if I
strive to make this paper something more than just a secondary commentary and at least even
attempt to inject some creativity of my own into it, then don't I exemplify these assumptions all the
more? This is the argument of George Steiner in Real Presences. In what follows I will try to give a
condensed summary of the text, and offer some critical remarks in the hope of prompting some
discussion. The three selected readings assigned for this seminar give us three snapshots of key
points in Steiner's argument, one from each of the three major sections into which he divides his
book. As well as summarising these snapshots I will also try briefly to fill in the gaps between them,
giving increasingly more attention to each subsequent section of Real Presences, just as Steiner
assigns to them an increasing size and depth.

A SECONDARY CITY

Steiner's first major section is entitled 'A Secondary City'. In the selection that we read, he is
kind enough to state his argument in precis on the very first page of the book (p3), telling us up
front that in this essay he will propose

'that any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any
coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the
final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence. [He] will put forward the
argument that the experience of aesthetic meaning in particular, that of literature, of the arts, of
musical form, infers the necessary possibility of this 'real presence.' (p3)

In the proceeding pages he then immediately sets about developing the image of what he calls a
'primary city'. (p16) This is a society in which no talk about or secondary commentary on aesthetic
creations is permitted. The only reviews of artworks that appear in this society are uncritical blurbs
that explain what the work is about, and the public interpretation of any artwork may only take
place via the production of new, primary artworks, which he argues are the best kind of art
criticism. We might well imagine that this city would be a wonderful, vibrant and exciting place to
live (only noting in passing that if we lived there then this seminar would not be happening).
Our first extract (pp3-15) stops here, but in the remainder of the section Steiner goes on to
show how we actually live in a parasitic counterpart of this aesthetic utopia, a secondary city. Ours,
he argues, is a journalistic age -in fact the dominant genre of the age has become the 'academic-
journalistic'- where our society is characterised by the seemingly endless proliferation of comment
upon comment upon comment ad nauseam. Correlatively, academic practice in the humanities has
become a predominantly secondary and even tertiary affair; humans no longer write books, but
books about books about books, and so on in an infinite digression from the free, primary acts of
aesthetic creation. We are all guilty of this, myself included as I read to you this secondary comment
about Steiner's comments on secondary comments on comments. But why introduce these images
of the primary and secondary cities at the start of an argument about God's presence? The point is
that the secondariness of our culture is symptomatic of a widespread disengagement from real
presence. Steiner diagnoses, 'we crave remission from direct encounter with the 'real presence' or
the 'real absence of that presence'...which an answerable experience of the aesthetic must enforce on
us'. (p39) So, since the ability to engage with real presences in art has to do with our unique
humanness and 'the eclipse of the humanities, in their primary sense and presentness, implicates that
of the humane.' (p49) At the close of the first major section he suggests that to make this highly
counter-cultural case properly he will need to examine seriously 'the relations between language and
the boundaries of language on the one hand, and the nature of aesthetic statement and experience on
the other.' (p50) This is what he will go on to do in the remaining two sections respectively.

THE BROKEN CONTRACT

Our second snapshot (pp53-69) is taken from the opening of Steiner's second major section,
which is given the title 'The Broken Contract', and begins with the idea on page 53 that anything can
be said about anything. After elaborating on this thought for a few pages he builds up to the
assertion on page 59 that we are ultimately free to interpret the infinite chain of signs which
constitute language in terms of a meaningful transcendence or a meaningless play, but that in doing
either we make a theological move. What he then goes on to say in the next sub-section (2) he, very
helpfully for my purposes, summarises in two points half way down page 68: Here we read that
'The ontologically linguistic, discursive substance of interpretations and value-judgments in
aesthetics makes verification and falsification logically as well as pragmatically impossible' and, a
bit further down, 'the attempt to attenuate or to evade altogether the abyss of freedom by invoking
consensus, institutional and social, across the ages, by pointing to the majority votes cast for certain
works and texts over the long centuries, carries neither formal nor evidential finality'. (p68 both) In
other words, there is no way of checking whether our boundless saying about the aesthetic is true or
false, and 'canons' that try to catalogue the 'best' of human artworks can never be definitive. Is
Tolstoy a better writer than Dostoevsky? There can be no final judgement.
All of this serves to set up Steiner's next point, now straying again beyond the boundaries of
our snapshot, that to talk about aesthetic theories of criticism as analogous to scientific theories is to
make a category error. (p72) Scientific theories need to fulfill two important criteria, experimemtal
verification or falsifaction and predictive application, and theories of criticism satisfy neither.
Semiotics and linguistics can formally study some aspects of speech, but they will always fail to
formalise meaning itself. (p81) This leads him to give his own definition of 'aesthetic creation' as
'the maximisation of semantic incommensurability in respect of the formal means of expression' (p
83) which we might translate as 'the maximisation of meaning transcendent of the raw material of
the artwork'. Off the back of this, Steiner now ironically defines the claim to theory in the
humanities as 'impatience systematised' (p86) because an attempt to form a theory of the aesthetic is
a refusal to patiently wrestle with its semantic incommensurability in respect of its formal
expression. After giving these definitions, Steiner is now in a position to explain what he means by
the 'Broken Contract'; having shown how we can never construct a scientifically justified theory of
the aesthetic or formalise meaning, he is now able to highlight the element of trust which inheres in
language:

'Often [unobserved] is the act, the tenor of trust which underlies, which literally underwrites the
linguistic-discursive substance of our Western, Hebraic-Attic experience. Often unregarded,
because so evidently resistant to formalisation, is the core of trust within logic itself, where
'logic' is a Logos-derivative and construct.' (p89)

What is the object of this trust which underwrites language and even logic? 'This
insaturation of trust,' he tells us, 'this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and
world.' (p89) The 'Contract' that our age has 'Broken', therefore, like no other age before it, he says,
is the Contract of trust between word and world. According to Steiner, this contract was broken for
the first time in Europe between the 1870s and the 1930s, and 'it is this break of the covenant
between word and world which constitutes one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in
Western history and which defines modernity itself.' (p93) Granted, through history there have been
skeptics who have questioned the correspondence between word and world, but until the crisis of
the meaning of meaning in the late nineteenth century, they all still assumed that language obtained.
They expressed their skepticism in language and skepticism still accepted the contract with
language. (p92-93) But now we find ourselves (or perhaps we don't find 'ourselves' anywhere at
all...) in the time of the 'epilogue' of the logos, says Steiner, where language is no longer thought to
straightforwardly obtain to transcendent meaning -word no longer straightforwardly represents
world. Two central culprits identified as initiating this breech of contract are Mallarme, who says
that that which endows the word 'rose' with its sole legitimacy is 'the absence of all rose' (p96), and
Rimbaud, who collapses the singular pronoun of first person discourse, signing 'I is an-other'. (p99)
Steiner examines the repercussions of this revolution for linguistic philosophy, linguistics,
psychoanlysis and what he calls sprachkritik. Then at the close of his second major section he offers
a summary and critique of deconstruction. 'For deconstruction,' he explains, 'there can be no
foundational speech-act, no saying immune from un-saying. This is the crux.' (p119) Deconstruction
knows that in each and every assumption of the correspondence between word and world there is a
conscious or unconscious illusion. Steiner thinks that it is the particular strength of Derrida that he
sees that this issue is not just aesthetic-linguistic but theological, and that 'A semantics, a poetics of
correspondence, of decipherability of truth-values arrived at across time and consensus, are strictly
inseparable from the postulate of theological-metaphysical transcendence. Thus the origin of the
axiom of meaning and of the God-concept is a shared one.' (p119) For Steiner, and he says for all
language that accepts the Contract, it is theological, ontological, metaphysical presence which
insures that we mean things when we say them. But the key category for deconstruction is not
presence but absence, deconstruction challenges the presumption of presence, of insured content,
and of any meaning that is not indeterminate. (p121)
Steiner is aware of the criticism that deconstruction fails on its own terms. The
deconstructive attack on logocentricism is worded in logocentric symbols, the denial of reference is
referred to in referential terms, the dogma that all readings are misreadings is arrived at by way of
readings, and so deconstructive propositions are self-falsifying. (p129) However he also concedes
that deconstruction can cope very well with these criticisms, because, from a deconstructive
standpoint, both deconstructive texts and criticisms of them are merely more sign-play, more
signifying signs that can never properly get behind themselves to their signifier. What
deconstruction does is simply press the fact that 'presentness' can never be demonstrated, and point
to the mechanism of infinite regress, of ultimate undecidability of meaning, to which all
constructive strategies succumb. (p130) It is for this reason that Steiner says 'On its own terms and
planes of argument...the challenge of deconstruction does seem to me irrefutable...Deconstruction
teaches us that where there is no “face of God” for the semantic marker to turn to, there can be no
transcendent or decidable intelligibility.' (p132) BUT he goes on to argue that this only means that
the deconstrutive challenge cannot be answered from within the realm of the literary or the
aesthetic, and that we nevertheless reserve the right to call on the theological. At the close of his
second major section, he informs us that he now wants to ask whether the encounter with meaning
in the valued form can be made answerable to the existential facts if it does not contain the
theological postulate of transcendence. (p134)

PRESENCES

We now arrive at the third and final major section, 'Presences', which starts with the sentence
'There is language, there is art, because there is 'the other''(p137) and an investigation into the moral
categories relevant to our meetings with works of art (pp145-150). Here Steiner introduces the term
cortesia (p147) to denote the courteous requirements that are made of us when we engage with
other presences in works of art. 'What we must focus,' he tells us, 'with uncompromising clarity, on
the text, on the work of art, on the music before us, is an ethic of common sense, a courtesy of the
most robust and refined sort'. (p149) The concept of cortesia is tested against the deconstructive
notion that an aesthetic creation is simply a pre-text for any secondary commentary upon it, and
Steiner concludes that the common-sense ethic would have it that, where deconstruction fudges the
primary and secondary together, the movement from one to the other really is a temporal and
ontological movement from autonomy to dependence: Works of art exhibit first-order autonomous
freedom, whereas commentaries exhibit second-order, dependent freedom. (p151) Artworks come
into being in complete freedom, their existence is gratuitous, and thus a reading of a work of art is a
courteous meeting of freedoms. (p153-155)
Again it is noted that this courteous movement of reception and apprehension implies an act
of fundamental trust (p156) and that 'Meaning is, in terms of proof, no more decidable, no more
subject to the arrest of experimental demonstration than is the purpose (if there is any such) or
'sense' of our lives in the unbounded script of time and the world.' (p164) But, while 'radical doubts,
such as those of deconstruction and of the aesthetic of misreadings, are justified when they deny the
possibility of a systematic, exhaustive heremeneutic, when they deny any arrival of interpretation at
a stable, demonstrable singleness of meaning...[all the same,] between this illusory absolute, this
finality which would, in fact, negate the vital essence of freedom, and the gratuitous play, itself
despotic by its very arbitrariness, of interprative non-sense, lies the rich, legitimate ground of the
philological' or we could say of the possibility of encounter with presence. (p165) Of course we can
never claim to penetrate right down to the pure intention and freedom of the author, but this fact
does not justify the denial of an intentional context. (p174) This makes the negations of post-
structuralism and certain kinds of deconstruction just as dogmatic as a naive historical positivism.
(p175) Our encounter with the freedom of presence in another human being and our attempts to
communicate with that freedom will always involve approximation. (p175) But in this age no-one
really tries to study the immediate effects of engaging with a work of art anyway, because to do so
is embarrassing and forces us to think in unfashionable terms of encounter between free,
metaphysical presences. (p177-178)
This brings us to our third and final snapshot. (pp179-217) Embarrassment notwithstanding,
here Steiner says that he wants to sketch as best as he can the kind of effects that artworks have on
us. (p179) He asks what it is that makes works of art bed down in our consciousnesses, and admits
that we don't really know, but that Western speculation has tended to think of this in terms of a
'recognition'. (p180) There are two ways of approaching this conjecture, he says. One, recognition
could be 'a slippage in our time-sense', a sense of deja-vu brought about by a temporary psychic
malfunction. (p180) Or, two, there may be in works of art traces of presence prior to consciousness
and rationality, like background radiation that points to the origins of the universe. He goes on to
explore the idea that each real presence has its own idiolectic signature which it imprints on its
works of art, and which governs its responses to other works of art. (p181-183) In thinking about
these responses, he distinguishes between the consensual, cultural syllabus and the personalised
canon of treasured artworks. (p184) He acknowledges that it is hard to situate the relations between
the two, but wants to assert that there is a general concordance between individual canons and
agreed syllabuses. We are all impacted by works of art in a profound way that cannot be
paraphrased, and those works of art transform our internal landscapes. (pp185-188) Since we are
most markedly and enduringly transformed via language, man being a language-animal, this means
that civilisation is textual. (p189) And although aesthetic creations are themselves discussed in
words (p190), as we have already seen, their creation and reception cannot be made the object of
systematic rationality. (p193) Quote: 'Because we are language and image animals, and because the
inception and transmission of the fictive is organic to language, much, perhaps the major portion, of
our personal and social existence is already bespoken. And those who speak us are the poets.'
(p195) We then find a short side note in which he talks about music as arational and ineffable, a
favourite theme of Steiner's. (pp195-198)
The bottom paragraph on page 198 affords us an important review of where we have now
got to:

'I have tried to say that the only account we can give of the ontological encounter between
freedoms, as it takes place in our meeting with the aesthetic, is an intuitive one. The summary
pointers I have given to the entrances into our consciousness and answering humanity of art,
music and literature are impressionistic and metaphoric. They postulate an irreducible
 subjectivity, the finality of a self whose freedom, whose cortesia, make possible the recognition
of the other. An axiom of dialogue underwrites the very concept of an encounter with intelligible
form.' (p198)

On the opposite page Steiner again reminds us that this does not amount to any logical or verifiable
refutation of nihilism. (p199) There is no way of proving the presumption of presences, but, he
suggests, perhaps the present liberal ease with the manifold discourse of uncertainties about
presence might reflect a certain reduced condition of the poetic and of artistic creation in our
culture. (p199-200) On page 200 the question of why there are works of art at all is proclaimed
analogous to Leibniz's question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' (p200) The answer,
page 201, can be put no more plainly than 'There is aesthetic creation because there is creation.'
(p201) The world might not have been, and art-acts imitate this. Art tries to create ex nihilo,
although it always comes after the created world. Traditionally, the philosophy and psychology of
art have described this coming-after in terms of mimesis. (p203) But mimesis is not enough. Steiner
wants to say that aesthetic work is a counter-creation (p203), it is not a mimetic copying but a
radically agonistic rival to the divine act of creation; the artist lovingly rages at having to come after
the original mystery of the forming of form, and makes a counter-world. (p204) The self-portrait is
the expression par excellence of the artist's compulsion to freedom, of his agonistic attempts to
reclaim, to achieve mastery over his own being. (p205)
In another side-note, pages 206-208, Steiner makes it clear that he is aware of his argument's
possible bias towards maleness and notes that he thinks it is extremely important to investigate the
poetics of gender. In any case, whatever their gender, the artist makes of himself or herself a god
and the aesthetic even aims to negate mortality, for in reading we try to resurrect the author, though
we can never get round his or her irreducible 'otherness', and this otherness is like the inaccessible
moment of cosmic creation. (pp208-210) We hear once more that our apprehension of this essence
'behind' presentness and representation is conditional upon trust. (p211) On pages 212-216 we now
reach the climax of the argument of Real Presences. We read here that without some supposed
continuity between the making of art and the re-enactment of the creation of being there cannot be
an intelligible view of the experience of the aesthetic. (p213) If created characters are only
notational 'characters' on a page then form is only a formality and meaning is a self-deception, but
this is manifestly false to the human experience of both the artist and the receiver. (p213) It is worth
quoting most of page 214 in full, as I think it represents the high-point of Steiner's argument:

'There is no construct, there is no intuitive imaging, of our identity in being, of our relations to
the world, which does not include at least one hiatus in the chain of definition and
 demonstration. There is no mind-set in respect of consciousness and of 'reality' which does not
make at least one leap into the dark (the a priori) of the unprovable. This essay argues a wager
on transcendence. It argues that there is in the art-act and its reception, that there is in the
experience of meaningful form, a presumption of presence [...] It is, I have argued, the
irreducible autonomy of presence, of 'otherness', in art and text which denies either adequate
paraphrase or unanimity of finding. These convictions are, as current linguistic philosophy puts it
-when it is being polite [note the courteous language]- 'verification transcendent'. They cannot be
logically, formally or evidentially proved. [...] But let there be no mistake: such 'verification
transcendence' marks every essential aspect of human existence.' (p214)

And, crucially, for the interests of this seminar, we see that this wager on meaning is, on
page 216, 'a metaphysical and, in the last analysis, a theological one [...] It is a theology, explicit or
suppressed, masked or avowed, which underwrites the presumption of creativity, of signification in
our encounters with text, with music, with art. The meaning of meaning is a transcendent postulate.'
(p216)
Our seminar snapshots end here. To summarise the remainder of the book extremely
quickly: Steiner now asks if this thesis makes all adult poeisis religious in some way, and answers
yes. (p216) He offers another meditation on music as rendered meaning and presence without
logical and verbal form (pp217-219), and then a meditation on myth and its relationship to the
transcendent (pp219-223). He asks if art can be demythologised and stripped of its gestures towards
the transcendent, and, predictably, concludes that it cannot (pp223-225). He argues that the 'gravity'
and 'constancy' of meaningful art, as well as the category of meaningfulness itself, are ultimately
religious in the senses that 1. Even atheistic art is still a reaction against God and 2. Serious art
enacts a basic impulse in the human spirit to explore possibilities of truth that lie outside scientific
proof. (p225) Poetry, art and music relate us most directly to that being which is not ours (p226) and
as such it is the privelege of the aesthetic to open us up to the metaphysical and theological. (p227)
God gives us the best proof of himself in the arts. (p227) In closing Steiner says he knows that the
readership of the present age will not be able to stomach his book, but that is symptomatic of the
time of epilogue. (pp228-229) He affirms that where God's presence is no longer a tenable
supposition then certain dimensions of thought and creativity will not be attained. (p229) The book
ends with a reflection on art as sabbatarian, as inhabiting the Holy Saturday between the loneliness
and suffering of Good Friday and the hope of Easter Sunday. The last sentences run 'The
apprehensions and figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music,
which tell of pain and hope of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which us said
to have the savour of fire, are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting
which is that of man. Without them, how could we be patient?' (p232)

STARTING POINTS -BOTH OPTIONS, TRUST

This concludes our whistle-stop tour of George Steiner's Real Presences. What can I suggest
by way of a few critical comments? First, I think it is important to bear in mind that Steiner is not
here trying to offer us a knock-down argument for the existence of God. Again and again
throughout the text he invokes the word 'trust'. A telling sentence on page 213 reads 'In
mathematics, an axiomatic system can prove its own consistency only by including at least one
postulate which cannot itself be proved from within that system.' (p213) It seems that what Steiner
is pointing out is that while we cannot prove the axiom of God's presence -or even of the presence
of other real persons and subjectivities- all systems of language and in a microcosmic way all acts
of aesthetic creation place their trust in this axiom. The breaking of the contract between word and
world and the radical doubt of deconstruction do serve to point out the unprovable nature of this
axiom, but we may still reserve the right to take a gamble on it, to 'wager on transcendence', and
Steiner is saying that indeed we must in order to voice our deconstructive doubts at all.
Furthermore, he hints that the deconstructive alternative is itself a system with its own unprovable
axiom, irrefutable on its own terms, and so also makes a theological wager, except on chaos as
opposed to transcendence.

A MEDITATION ON THE PROBLEM OF OTHER MINDS

Second and following on from this, I wonder if we can therefore read Real Presences as kind
of extended meditation on solipsism or the philosophical problem of Other Minds, which we can
express in Steiner's terms in the form a short tongue-twister: 'Possibly the presentness most present
to us is our own presence, but we cannot possibly presume to prove the pretension of the
presentness of other presences.' This is the solipsist problem, the only phenomena we have access to
are those of our own conscious experience. But, in spite of it, we all live as if other people really are
present when we speak in language and make artworks and so on. This seems to me to be what
Steiner is talking about when he makes appeal to the existential facts of the presumption of
presence; as he himself says, 'we must read as if.' (p229) But perhaps phrasing the discussion in
terms of the problem of solipsism exposes the that the default intellectual position should actually
be that of skepticism. If there is one foundational axiom we can all individually accept, isn't it the
Cartesian axiom that we are presently having an experience? This might mean that the
deconstructive mindset is less presumptuous than Steiner makes out. But perhaps this does not
matter for his argument all that much. After all, even to talk about the problem of Other Minds, I
need to assume that there are people present here for me to talk to about it and that you understand
something of what I mean when I talk about it.

IS IT REALLY THEOLOGICAL?

Thirdly and finally, I want to ask, the presumption of presence may be widespread, but is it
really theological? It is quite a leap to move from the metaphysical concept of the presences of
other people to the theological concept of the presence of God. Unless Steiner is simply using the
word 'God' as a placeholder for the nexus of being, then simply to show that we all presume
presence is not to show that we presume the presence of God. It may well be, as he credits Derrida
for observing, that the concept of meaning and of God have a common source, but this does not
mean that a subscription to one necessarily entails the other. HOWEVER, that said, I think at the
same time that Steiner's case provides a very helpful starting point for us to begin thinking
theologically, not just about aesthetics, but at all! The word 'trust', so often called upon in Real
Presences, bears a very close family resemblance to the word 'faith', and if we can be made aware
of how commonplace is the trust in other-ness that comes with language, we might find a faith in
the other-ness of God becomes demystified to us. Consider the following passage from 1
Corinthians, and ask yourself whether it might be talking about a courteous encounter between
presences and how the reception of a unprovable axiom transfigures the whole derivative system of
language:

'The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the
thoughts of a man except man's spirit within him? In the same way no-one knows the thoughts of
God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is
from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in
words taught to us by human wisdom but in words taught to us by the Spirit, expressing spiritual
truths in spiritual words.' (1 Corinthians 2:10-13)

CAN THERE BE A THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS?

The question we have been asking in this seminar is 'Can there be a theological aesthetics?'
In opening the discussion I would like to do a bit of mimesis and try to summarise the positions we
have studied this term. For Coleridge, the passionate poet thinks the thoughts of God and thus
invokes his presence. For Nietzsche, passionate poetry brings some bitter-sweet relief to a world in
which there is no present God. For Hopkins, the poet can encounter God by reading off his presence
in the natural world. For Eliot, the situation of the poet in a tradition and culture coordinates them
with orthodoxy and prevents them from careering off into absent a-theological space. For Jones, the
lifting up of the sign in art is sacramental and may mysteriously invite God's presence. For Derrida,
we can never break the mirror of representation and get behind it to the face or presence of God. For
Kristeva, Trinitarian dynamics of God's presence are a useful metaphor for our calling-out into
forgiveness by the pre-Oedipal parent, but they do not depict metaphysical reality. In the wake of all
of this, can there be a theological aesthetics? It seems to me that, yes, there surely can, no-one is
going to stop us trying to make one, but that Derrida presents the most significant (note the pun)
obstacle to our integrity in making one by calling our attention to the crisis of representation.
Steiner tries to make some reply to this. He is unique amongst the figures we have looked at in that
he does not try to investigate whether a theology can legitimately pertain to an aesthetic but instead
argues that any aesthetic necessarily entails a theology. The conclusion of this introduction is that he
is not wholly successful, but that he does reveal how a gamble on the representation of presences is
an aspect of everyday existence, and how this is not so dissimilar from the gamble of faith in God.

Suggested questions for discussion in this final seminar could be: 1. 'Is Steiner right?' 2. 'Does
Steiner successfully answer the challenge of deconstruction?' and 3. 'Can there be a theological
aesthetics?'

I would also like to suggest, in the spirit of Steiner, that we put a ban on the secondary-style
comments that postgraduates, myself included, are so prone to making, for the duration of this
discussion. This would involve a prohibition on our saying by way of comment 'This reminds me of
such-and-such a thinker' unless we are backing up a point which we ourselves are making. If the
participants' criticisms can be made in the primary form of poetry, music or art, then all the better.