Yeats and Abstraction: From Berkeley to Zen

Yeats’s engaged in extended study of several major philosophers. Foremost of these was George Berkeley. In his recent book on Yeats and Berkeley, W. J. Mc Cormack wrote that “The advance by scholarship of Berkeley’s claims to the modern reader’s attention occurred in stated rejection of the Yeatsian exposition.” However, as this essay demonstrates, there is a strand of Berkeley scholarship, and a major strand at that, which is fully in accord with the thrust of Yeats’s interpretation. It was inaugurated by A. A. Luce, the person Mc Cormack credited with stating his rejection of Yeats’s interpretation. Yeats’s understanding of what “realism” entailed was not a simple matter, just as it was not a simple matter for Berkeley. In the letters to T. Sturge Moore, Yeats debated at length what the terms “realist” and “idealist” meant, adducing Alfred North Whitehead’s attack on abstraction in Science and the Modern World, a book which utilized Berkeley heavily. Yeats’s wish was to “see things as they are,” without abstraction, and this ambition, he realised, was only fitfully to be attained, and in order to articulate this he drew also from descriptions of Zen Buddhists who had attained enlightenment.