ABSTRACT
Carnap resisted the Tractarian dogma about how philosophy, and language – philosophically reflected – must look. He rejected the old representational model of language as a passive, deadly script, and of philosophy as ‘repeating’ aeternae veritates. He thus opened new possibilities by replacing the silence predicament with action, both extra-philosophical, artistic action, and philosophical, formal action. But as we have seen, what Carnap failed to see is that the actor on this new stage is nonetheless doing metaphysics. He should then aim at a new, radical and creative metaphysics, rather than ignoring its implicit presence. His metaphysics must be aware of its active essence. It cannot be conceived, any more, along Plato’s metaphors of ‘discovery’ and ‘light’. These metaphors convey a sort of passivity which should now be subverted, and the metaphysician working after Nietzsche and Frege should hence be seen rather as ‘a metaphysician in the dark’. But this cannot be done within the limits of modernism. It remains to Artaud, our last modernist writer, to uncover this result and thus to mark the downfall of modernism. Perhaps under Artaud’s influence, Wallace Stevens formulated this same insight in his very exact words, published in 1942:
Of modern poetry
The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script.
