A letter on meaning and methodology.
S.R.,
Forgive me if I’ve told you this story before.
I recall, once, sitting in on a philosophy lecture while in college — something on Plato, I can’t recall what— and that a particular professor was also in attendance, of whom I was quite fond, and himself a friend of the lecturer.
And I recall him yawning quite loudly in the middle of the lecture and exclaiming, loud enough to be heard in that spacious hall, something to the effect of,
“Where’s the Rilke? I want to read Rilke!”
Plato does not exile poets from his Republic because of their impiety, or their aggrandizement of vice, but rather because poetry and philosophy are perhaps fundamentally at odds:
“[T]here is an old disagreement between philosophy and poetry…”
Plato, Republic X 607b4 (my translation)
We might understand poetry in Plato’s day as consisting of the works of Homer, the works of Hesiod, possibly the novel genre of epigrams which was at that time coming into existence, of which purportedly Plato wrote a few, or the tragedies of Aeschylus, or Euripides, or the comedies of Aristophanes.
It was an ecosystem that could host and maintain such disparate genres as epic and comedy, though perhaps these are disparate in form only. Plato is right, I think, in exiling the poets, because poetry and philosophy have different ends and different methods, and I do not think it a simple matter of taste, but of truth.
Poetry is concerned with experience, the truth of lived experience, whether at the individual level, or the societal level, either in describing it, or ascribing it, or exhorting it — in this respect we might label it as concerned with the subjective. Poetry does not, in this sense, create, but merely describes what is and as it appears (poetry does not invent truths).
Philosophy is concerned with truths that are not dependent on the individual or the societal, truths that are not contextual, and particularly in that philosophy is the uncovering or discovering of truth — truth being some fact outside of any particular person, though it may be concerned with individual persons or situations. In this respect philosophy does create, in that it creates an explanation of a phenomenon, or a postulate with respect to why a phenomenon is, or what a phenomenon might be.
But let me explain.
For example, the philosopher uncovers the sorts of things that are, e.g., what love is. We in common discourse already have an intuitive notion of what the word love means, what the idea or symbol means to express, but this is not always sufficient in philosophy, though at times we might appeal to common discourse in order to support a point. The method of the philosopher when doing philosophy is something like this:
the philosopher constructs a theory, or a set of hypotheses, and by the process of argument, and with recourse to what he or she already knows to be true, some prior or assumed web of beliefs, tests the truth of his or her postulates — whether these are true by accuracy, or by necessity.
By accuracy I understand something like:
I know that love, at least in the conventional sense of being an emotion, fundamentally, is the desire for what one lacks, and to possess that thing, and is a dizzying, or somewhat soporific, feeling (phenomenologically). When the lover loves the beloved, it is because they lack them, because they are separate from them and wish to possess them, and are in the grips of this attractive force, whence derives the states and actions we associate with love — longing, care, worry, well-wishing, the desire to provide and protect the beloved, and their associated actions. This is consistent both from experience in so far as I catalog what I feel, what people generally feel, and from my implicit assumptions — e.g., that desire is the willing to possess a thing, that to desire is to lack something, as you can’t want strictly what you have, because you have it some sense that precludes the desire.
I think that this is consistent with what we conventionally think of love as being, and is accurate.
Necessity, on the other hand, is simply the entailed truth of an argument, as by syllogism (a “reckoning”), where the truth of a conclusion is entailed by the truth of the premises and validity of its logical form. Here is a classic syllogism:
(P1) All men are mortal.
(P2) Socrates is a man.
Therefore,
(C) Socrates is mortal.
We can simply arrive at our conclusion via modus ponens from P1 and P2 (i.e., if X is true, then Y is true. X is true, so Y is true).
But of course we can have a syllogism which is logically valid, and yet the reasoning of the premises might be fallacious, and the conclusion false yet formed well.
Seneca has somewhere in his Letters an argument that runs something like:
(P1) What you have not lost, you have. (If you have not lost something, then you have it. E.g., if I have not lost my car keys, then I have them.)
(P2) You have not lost horns.
Therefore,
(C) you have horns.
And we arrive at the conclusion by inference using modus ponens. And yet the reasoning of P1 is obviously fallacious, and the conclusion false, as I haven’t ever had horns (supposedly).
Poetry, by contrast, is pictorially, descriptively concerned with a protagonist, even if he or she is excluded — it is always concerned with someone, even if that someone is absent, and does not deal with universal truths, only truths as they pertain to any individual. Poetry does not create truths as such, but merely makes what is already true apparent, and does this through a kind of gesticulation, rather than through argument. Consider the effect that love has on our perception of time. We become ignorant of its passing when in the company of the beloved.
“Last year changed its seasons
Subtly, stripped its sultry winds
For the reds of dying leaves,
Gelid drips of winter ice melt onto a
Warming earth and urged the dormant
Bulbs to brave the
Pain of spring
We, loving, above the whim of
Time, did not notice.
Alone. I remember now.”
Maya Angelou, In Retrospect
The primary theme is the preoccupation of the lover with the beloved.
But something that is clear but not explicit is that love has an almost exclusive quality with respect to the attention of the lover, such that even the passing of time is ousted in the company of the beloved. And this is a truth that, even if it were individual, and no one else had ever had this experience, is true because it is felt by the author, if by no one else. The power, of course, lies in the fact that this is probably a universal truth in the experiential sense — most people have had some such experience. The seconds turn to hours and in a minute a day has elapsed in this way. Time becomes a fictitious narrative and only exists outside of a lover’s presence.
“And I remember how many times we sank the sun
in talking.”
Callimachus, Epigram 2 (my translation)
‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.”W.H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening
But the truth is true because we feel it as true.
And perhaps not all love is like this — but doubtless some loves are. The mechanism for truth here, the method by which it is indicated, rather than revealed, is simply this — it is displayed. The poet does not say why but rather what, and does this in a how, painting a portrait, as it were, in words.
And the moment we probe the question of why is the moment we embark on something that is no longer poetry, but more akin to philosophy.
“And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love — then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”
John Keats, When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be
An ancillary distinction between poetry and philosophy, I suppose, is that philosophy is concerned with thought and poetry with feeling, though admittedly, this is needs explication, and I wouldn’t be confident in asserting it.
The central tension between poetry and philosophy, we have seen, is that the former is indicative and the latter is demonstrative. The truths of poetry are not argued, they are shown, whereas the truths of philosophy are argued, and in so far as we are doing philosophy we are working under the assumption that we must have good reasons for believing what we believe, and so arises disagreement, whereas in poetry the truths are true by the fact that they are true,
“Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.”W.H. Auden, O Tell Me The Truth About Love
that they are revealed through inspiration, as by some god,
“But a third kind of madness and possession comes from the Muses, taking hold of a gentle and inexperienced soul, rousing it and causing it to frenzy and express itself in lyric and the other forms of poetry…”
Plato, Phaedrus 244e5-245a2 (my translation)
or through the authority of the poet
“I intend to speak about the city in the midst of the Athenians,
making a comedy.
For, even comedy knows what is right.
And what I say will be terrible — but right.”
Aristophanes, Acharnians 497–501 (my translation)
— and so the tension arises between contention and revelation, and so much is evident from our individual dispositions.
I am left wondering whether one can be both a poet and a philosopher.
But I will leave you with this — that Plato himself was, as I alluded to earlier, a poet converted to philosophy:
“[H]e took to painting and to poetry. Firstly dithyrambs, and then lyric, and tragedy… And when he, intending to compete in a contest with a tragedy, heard Socrates speaking in front of the theatre of Dionysus, burned his poems, saying,
‘Come forth, Hephaestus — Plato has need of you.’”
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers III.5 (my translation)
And with respect to that lecture — I never liked Rilke much, anyway.
I always found him excessive, and pedantic.
Farewell.
Sincerely,
George