| Eliot, Bradley and the Key Eliot explains the importance of 'Dayadhvam' by giving negative literary examples, demonstrating the pain of not sympathizing. (He has a different strategy for each of the Buddha's commands, very nicely done) - and hence the importance of sympathizing: the upshot of the Dayadhvam section is that symphatizing is the only way to prevent ourselves from being locked into our own being.
The lesson of the Dante reference is just that - for selfish reasons, Ugolino has betrayed his country; now he is forced to betray his own sons. This is the lesson of sympathy - he has been selfish, chosen to withdraw within the walls of egoism in free will, and his due is to be locked in there against is will, so he will be taught the pain of being dependent on others for food and then be betrayed by not getting any, and watching people he does care for and who were innocent suffer, for his betrayal also afflicts the innocent. Coriolanus too is a betrayer of his own people. The 'ethereal rumors of a broken Coriolanus' refer to guilt, the repentant phase of hearing the people outside your tower when its too late and you're already locked in.
Since the key, therefore, from the allegory is a mental key and the prison created by our own thought - if we thinking selfish, think only of ourselves we will have only ourselves and be alone - the key to unlock it is to unthink the lock. The lock being ourselves, our egoism, we have to move the mind to the others, call it ego decentralisation, and by moving our mind to the others, hence sympathising, the mental prison is refuted.
Eliot mentions Bradley and the idea for this section probably has at
least partly its origin in Eliot's discussion of this topic in his
thesis on Bradley, 'Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the
Philosophy of F. H. Bradley'. Akroyd discusses precisely this aspect of
the work in his biography:
| ... lived truths are 'partial
and fragmentary' and the experiences of the Bradleyan 'finite
centres' are 'mad and strange' but, paradoxically, they are
all that can be known to be real: 'All siginificant truths are
private truths.' But we are compelled to think and behave as
if this is not so and, in order to combat the extreme
relativity of such a position, Eliot postulates 'degrees of
truth' which help to create an objective world in which 'the
cruder and vaguer, or more limited, is somehow contained and
explained in the wider and more precise'. The purpose is to
reach beyond the miasma of private experience and construct a
world, or rather an interpretation of the world, 'as
comprehensive and coherent as possible'. And so it is that
throughout Eliot's work the idea of pattern or order becomes
the informing principle - he finds it everywhere, in literary
tradition, in ritual, in political myth and in English
history. (69-70) |
see also
| sources |
| Akroyd, Peter. T.S. Eliot. 1984. |
|