Abstract
This article offers an overview of the numerous theories about knowledge—the semantic core of the concept of cognition—and of their traces in Joyce’s works. Examining how Joyce’s writing constantly addresses questions, such as permanence and change, which date back to classical philosophy, O’Rourke problematizes both the possibility of attaining stable knowledge about realities in constant flux and the subject’s very status as knower. He shows that Stephen grounds the reliability of knowledge in Aristotle’s theory of sensation and develops it through the theory of the soul as “form of forms,” a phrase which conveys the soul’s powerful cognitive role as receptive of all reality.
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Notes
- 1.
Common to the idealist and empiricist views of knowledge is the recognition—itself a truism—that what is known must somehow be “in” the mind or consciousness . Descartes , Locke , and Hume failed, however, to recognize the analogical use of the preposition in the context of cognition: whereas a physical object can only be in a single location, the object of knowledge—while enjoying an independent autonomous existence—is also, as known, somehow mysteriously present within the mind . In this sense Joyce could remark to his brother Stanislaus : “What can a man know but what passes inside his own head?” (JJII 265).
- 2.
For a comprehensive account, see De Anima II, 4, 415a14–415b28.
- 3.
The Paris notebook can be read online from the National Library of Ireland website (catalogue.nli.ie): MS 36,639/2/A (“The Joyce Papers 2002”).
- 4.
Locke and Boyle studied together at Oxford in the late 1650s and early 1660s, and corresponded on scientific matters.
- 5.
See SH 186: “The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the most modern process one can conceive.”
- 6.
Joyce explained to Frank Budgen in a letter: “Much more is intended in the colloquy between Berkeley the archdruid and his pidgin speech and Patrick in answer and his Nippon English. It is also the defence and indictment of the book itself, B’s theory of colour and Patrick’s practical solution of the problem. Hence the phrase in the preceding Mutt and Jeff banter ‘Dies is Dorminus master,’ = Deus et Dominus noster plus the day is lord over sleep , i.e. when it days” (Letters I, 406). Anthony Burgess refers to “St. Patrick refuting the philosophical gibberish of the archdruid Berkeley-Bulkily-Buckley” (Burgess 1973, 259). See Burgess : “‘Bilkilly-Belkelly ’ spouts sesquipedalian idealism which makes as much sense as blackfellow’s gibberish” (Burgess 1965, 260).
- 7.
Joyce almost certainly borrowed this phrase from the conclusion to Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (which has as its slogan Heraclitus ’ declaration of universal flux): “It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves” (Pater 236).
- 8.
The word “manshape” echoes Hopkins’s poem “That Nature is a Herclitean Fire”:
Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indignation! Manshape, that shone.
- 9.
Stephen stands for the Hellenic, intellectual, and artistic, as against Bloom , the Hebraist, sensualist, and scientific. See Wagner 178.
- 10.
See U 8.110: “Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball’s . Parallax.” Also U 15.1010–12: “I was just chatting this afternoon at the viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir Robert and lady Ball, astronomer royal at the levee. Sir Bob, I said…”
- 11.
Anatole France expresses a similar phenomenon, perceived by Riquet, M. Bergeret’s dog: “Men, animals, and stones grow larger as they approach me, and become enormous when they are quite close. It is not so with me. I remain the same size wherever I am” (“Les hommes, les animaux, les pierres grandissent en s’approchant et deviennent énormes quand ils sont sur moi. Moi non. Je demeure toujours aussi grand partout où je suis” [France 87]).
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O’Rourke, F. (2018). Knowledge and Identity in Joyce. In: Belluc, S., Bénéjam, V. (eds) Cognitive Joyce. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71994-8_2
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