He brings to all the topics he writes about a depth, an urge to create profundity. He brings his profundity to bear on events which call for protest, opposition, a struggle against. He creates genuine profundity but far more often deluded profundity, just as the subconscious of the artist for some reason brings to the surface so often dross as well as artistically important material, which requires the conscious mind to sift and distinguish. Rilke failed to sift and distinguish sufficiently. In practice, he ignored and was ignorant of many things, matters of vital importance (I write in the hope that here, I can restore to the word 'vital' some of the force of 'vita,' 'life.')
He obviously knew that the First World War was recalcitrant and discordant (although he lacked the awareness of suffering to know just how discordant) and couldn't be brought into his world of acceptance, so although he lived through the conflict, he ignored it.
Rilke has surface profundity and very often not much more than that. Now, more than ever, denial of {restriction} is the source of endless illusion and disillusionment. Very many people are unable to acknowledge harshness, unable to recognize {restriction} on their freedom of action, expect no {restriction} on their happiness. They have 'extravagant expectations' (the title of the book by Paul Hollander.) Rilke's denial of checks, frustrations, obstacles, harshness, undermines so much of his poetic work. His sustained exploration of inwardness is undeniably impressive, but is insufficient compensation for the emphasis on the disembodied life, his neglect of the embodied life. His emphasis on inwardness has a linkage with his neglect of the embodied life. In his case, the {restriction} he denied was not on anything so commonplace and important as happiness, but on something much rarer. It's expressed in one of his statements of 'surface profundity:' “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches ...' (Letters to a Young Poet.) This may have been good advice in the case of this poet and his plight, but it would be hideous advice for many others - for millions of others.
The daily life of the Jews starving in the Warsaw ghetto or in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp must have seemed poor, but they had no reason to blame themselves for not being poets enough to call forth its riches. At Treblinka extermination camp, the unspeakable sadist Gustav Wagner decided to shoot a woman and her baby. He shot her baby first and after the mother had witnessed the act, he shot her.
Rilke was writing before such events as these, but the horrors of the Second World War, like the horrors of the First World War, would surely have left him unmoved. When he was writing, acute poverty and destitution were commonplace. Many, many writers have ignored acute poverty and destitution, whilst retaining an ability to recognize the harshness in reality, but Rilke's ignorance of harshness, his inability to recognize {restriction}, makes any claim for him to be a serious writer impossible to take seriously. Rilke is very widely regarded as a serious writer but I think that this misconception will be undermined by the evidence I provide, at some length, even if the misconception is an understandable one.
{restriction} is central to Kafka. In 'The Trial,' Joseph K.'s freedom of action is progressively restricted, in 'The Castle,' K. faces insuperable difficulties in reaching the castle. Although Kafka lived before the Nazi horrors (during which his three sisters were gassed at Auschwitz), his writing anticipated a world in which people faced insuperable difficulties in avoiding gassing in an extermination camp. Kafka's employment at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute surely helped to form his clear-sighted view of the world. It involved the investigation of accidents to industrial workers, such as falls from a height and loss of limbs.
I think that Nietzsche often remained in what I call the word-sphere. Of course, the word-sphere is the natural home of imaginative writers. This isn't a pejorative use of the phrase. 'Word-sphere' in the pejorative sense reflects a sense of reality which is surely defective. Often, reality is difficult, intractable, sometimes impossible to deal with. It's far easier to arrange words so that an aspiration is put forward as reality. 'Declaring' a thing to be so is mistakenly thought to be the same as the reality. Sometimes, words become a substitute for action - this is an instance of {substitution}. The word-sphere is amongst other things the world of facile claims, ringing declarations, hollow confidence-building assertions, wildly optimistic projections for future success.
The sermon preached on the Third Sunday of Lent (28 February 2016 ) by Revd Canon Mark Oakley, Chancellor
is a hagiographical account of an outstanding man, Desmand Tutu, who is surely right about so many things and surely mistaken, very badly mistaken, about a few others. In the sermon Mark Oakley says 'He is outspoken about Israel/Palestine.' Desmond Tutu's view of the Palestinians as the oppressed and the Israelis as the oppressors is mistaken, his view of Israeli-Palestinian relations is grotesquely mistaken. Mark Oakley claims, correctly, that Desmond Tutu 'has taken a lead for LGBT people.' What Desmond Tutu hasn't done is take into account the fact that homosexual/gay relations are fully legal in Israel, that LGBT issues are freely discussed and freely promoted in Israel. In Gaza, homosexual/gay relations are illegal. I discuss the issues at length in my page Israel, Islamism and Palestinian ideology. An extract from the page:
Archbishop Desmond Tutu & other leading members of the Episcopal Church tell the Church's General Convention that investment in companies supporting Israel's military occupation "make the Church complicit in the injustices suffered by Palestinians." They urge the Church to adopt human rights-based investment decisions that ensure it "does not profit from the suffering of others."
https://bdsmovement.net/tags/desmond-tutu
I am especially urging the Assembly to adopt the overture naming Israel as an apartheid state through its domestic policies and maintenance of the occupation