Philosophy and the Art of Writing

Richard Shusterman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000563696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Philosophy and literature enjoy a close, complex relationship. Elucidating the connections between these two fields, this book examines the ways philosophy deploys literary means to advance its practice, particularly as a way of life that extends beyond literary forms and words into physical deeds, nonlinguistic expression, and subjective moods and feelings.

Exploring thinkers from Socrates and Confucius to Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir, Richard Shusterman probes the question of what roles literature could play in a vision of philosophy as something essentially lived rather than merely written. To develop this vision of philosophy that incorporates literature but seeks to go beyond the verbal to realize the embodied fullness of life and capture its inexpressible dimensions, Shusterman gives particular attention to authors who straddle the literature/philosophical divide: from Augustine and Montaigne through Wordsworth and Kierkegaard to T.S. Eliot, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Bertrand Russell. The book concludes with a chapter on the Chinese art of writing with its mixture of poetry, calligraphy, and painting.

Philosophy and the Art of Writing should interest students and researchers in literary theory and philosophy. It also opens the practice of philosophy to people who are not professionals in the writing of philosophy or literary theory.

1 Philosophy and Literature: The Quarrels of Intimacy

DOI: 10.4324/9780429331770-1

Ancient Roots of a Struggle for Distinction and Dominance

Philosophy and literature enjoy an extremely old, richly intimate but also problematic relationship. Already Plato could speak of an ancient “quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Plato Republic Book X, 607b 1969). ¹ In literary theory, the connection is especially intimate and complex as the borders with philosophy are very hard to demarcate. Plato’s critique of poetry in the Republic is the foundational text of literary theory, yet given its dialogue form, its storytelling, and its imaginative and stylistic qualities, the Republic is also a literary work itself, just as it is undeniably philosophy.

Philosophy is often conceived primarily in terms of definitional “what is?” questions, such as what is knowledge, what is justice, what is beauty? From that perspective, philosophy of literature should take as its initial task the definition of literature; and this implies that it should examine the nature of literature with objective, critical distance. But if philosophy is itself a form of literature, is this external perspective really possible? And how can we convincingly deny that philosophy is, in some sense, literature, given the enormous breadth of the concept of literature? We cannot exclude philosophy from literature by reducing literature to fictional discourse since much literature is nonfictional and aims at truth. Philosophy, moreover, displays a variety of recognized literary genres: essays, dialogues, poems, meditations, treatises, speeches, confessions, memoirs, letters, discourses, journals, commentaries, investigations, sermons, notes, lectures, fragments, aphorisms, inquiries, outlines, and sketches. We could easily extend this list, which will continue to grow with new literary forms like the blog, which has already found wide philosophical use.

We cannot argue that philosophy is not literature by claiming that some ancient philosophers (including Socrates) never wrote any philosophical texts but only communicated their views in oral dialogue. Even if the term “literature” derives from the Latin root for “letter” and thus suggests writing, the concept of literature clearly includes oral literature. Indeed, ancient Greek poetry was essentially intended for oral transmission and was preserved through oral tradition before being committed to textual form. To award philosophy the privilege of defining literature while recognizing that literature is the subsuming genus that includes philosophical discourse as one of its species would suggest a logically disconcerting circularity. Even if we dismiss concerns of circularity, philosophy seems compelled to cede literature the status of generic primacy. Philosophers, however, have rarely been willing to concede this, perhaps because of philosophy’s traditional proud rivalry and embarrassed sense of belatedness. Philosophy first emerged as a major force in ancient Greece by asserting its superiority to poetry and rhetoric as a better source not only of truth for the conduct of life but also for the highest kind of beauty and happiness.

With Socrates and Plato, philosophy was born of a struggle for intellectual supremacy fought against the rhetoricians or sophists on the one hand and the artists on the other. Poetry was the prime artistic enemy, since it best captured the sacred wisdom of tradition and lacked the banausic character of plastic art. As philosophy adapted many of rhetoric’s strategies of argumentation, so it took key epistemological and metaphysical orientations from art. The ideal of knowledge as theoria (which means detached contemplation of reality rather than reconstructive interaction with it) reflects the attitude of a spectator at a drama or an appreciative observer of a finely finished work of plastic art or poetry. Similarly, the idea that reality ultimately consists of well-defined and stable forms that are rationally and harmoniously ordered and whose contemplation affords sublime pleasure suggests a preoccupation with fine works of art, an envious fixation on their clear, purposive, well-wrought forms and distinct contours, their enduring and intelligible harmonies that set them above the confusing flux of ordinary experience. This makes art seem more vivid, permanent, compelling – in a sense more real – than ordinary empirical reality. Since the poets were highly esteemed not only as creators of beauty but also as purveyors of wisdom, philosophy had to establish its autonomy and privilege by defining poetry, drama, and other fine arts in more negative terms. With keen dialectical ingenuity, it transformed its imitations of art into a depreciative definition of art as imitation, or mimesis (Plato Republic 595a–607b).

For Plato, not only was art (as imitation of mere appearance) twice removed from the true forms of reality, not only did it deceive and appeal to the lowest part of the soul, but it also could not compete with philosophy in terms of beauty and the pleasures of desire. While art might provide a view of beautiful objects, philosophy could offer the rapt contemplation of the more perfect transcendental forms that make art’s imitative objects (and indeed all objects) beautiful, providing a program of visionary delectation culminating in the ultimate beauty and object of desiring love, the very form of Beauty itself. Plato therefore describes the philosopher as not only the expert on wisdom but also “the master of the art of love” (Plato Symposium 198d 1997: 481). In short, Plato defined art not to promote its practice or enhance its appreciative understanding, but rather to deprecate, confine, and control it – even to the extent of censorship and banishment.

The critique of poetry as inferior to philosophy pervades Plato’s dialogues. In the Apology, Socrates relates that after he found the politicians wanting in wisdom because they thought they knew things they did not really know, he “went to the poets” and found that they could not properly explain the meaning of “the poems they themselves had composed” (Plato Apology 22b 1966a). He concluded that “they composed [their works] not by wisdom, but by nature and because they were inspired, like the prophets and givers of oracles; for these also say many fine things, but know none of the things they say” (22c). Yet, “on account of their poetry, [they] thought that they were the wisest of men in other things as well, in which they were not” (22c). The dialogue Ion extends this critique of literature as radically remote from knowledge by explaining both poetic composition and reception as irrational, albeit divinely inspired, madness (or mania). Ion’s prize-winning talent as an interpretive reciter of Homer’s poetry derives not from real knowledge or “mastery” but from “a divine power” from the Muses, which first inspires Homer and then extends from him through Ion and all the way to the appreciative listeners that thrill to Ion’s recitations (Plato Ion 532c–534b 1997: 942). Socrates likens this to a magnetic chain of inspiration, where the “poets utter all those fine poems not from art [techne or skilled knowledge] but as inspired and possessed” and thus essentially out of their minds (Plato Ion 533e 1925a). No poet can properly compose “until he has been inspired and put out of his senses, and his mind is no longer in him” (Plato Ion 534b 1925a). In the Phaedrus, Plato reaffirms this theory of poetic creation and experience as a “kind of possession and madness [that] comes from the Muses”: “he who without the divine madness comes to the doors of the Muses, confident that he will be a good poet by art, meets with no success, and the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madmen” (Plato Phaedrus 245a 1925b).

In this critique of poetry’s irrational frenzy, the worry is not simply lack of knowledge, but the loss of a strong, autonomous, rationally moderate self who exemplifies the ideals of excellent character, sound mind, and self-control that belong to the ancient Greek virtue of sophrosyne, deemed essential to wisdom. If Socrates defined philosophy’s quest through the Delphic injunction “Know Thyself” and understood this as knowing one’s mind, then what could be worse than losing your mind and self-control through possession by a foreign force, even if divine? The ancient Greeks prized the manly values of autonomy and independence that found expression in their political structure of independent city-states and in their ideals of heroism, athleticism, and virile dominance. Sexually, it was admirable for a man to penetrate but shameful to be penetrated, because the latter implied a passive, subordinate, feminized role of being possessed by another. Even within the Greek culture of male pederasty, penetration by one’s lover carried a hint of disgrace, of being weak and womanly; even if permitted, it should not be enjoyed, but instead only tolerated as an expression of the beloved’s affectionate submission to the older lover’s desire. ² If sexual penetration of one’s body by another was a shameful thing for any noble male (no matter how worthy the penetrator), then one could easily understand how penetration and possession of one’s psyche would appear extremely threatening, even if that other was divine. Plato’s word for poetic “inspiration” in Ion is ἔνθεοι whose etymology suggests being penetrated, full of, or possessed by a god (Plato Ion 533e 1925a). Defining the poet as a being irrationally possessed or penetrated by another served to gender poetry as an essentially feminized practice, characterized by weakness and lack of control, and thus removed from the masculine ideals of Greek virtue.

This worry concerning effeminate weakness pervades Plato’s critique of literature in his Republic. It complements the other, perhaps more famous charges this dialogue makes against poetry, drama, and the arts in general: that they are inferior and deceptive imitations of appearances rather than presenting true knowledge of the ultimate forms of reality, and thus they are not worthy of serious attention. As “poetry, and in general the mimetic art … is far removed from truth” and is at best “a form of play, not to be taken seriously,” so it also presents contents that “are both impious and false” (Plato Republic Book III 391e; Book X 602b–603a 1969). But this, Plato claims, is not the “chief accusation against [poetry],” which instead is “its power to corrupt” by stimulating and fostering “the inferior part of the soul” that enjoys emotions and irrational, self-indulgent, unserious, and unmanly behavior, whether of tragic “lamentations” or comic “buffooneries” (Book X 605a, 605c, 606c; Book III 387d). Even Homer’s poetic passages are dangerous because “the more poetic they are the less are they suited to the ears of boys and men” who should be strong, brave, and self-controlled (Book III 387b). Literature’s emotional depictions of the terrors of war and the pleasures of love and “bodily appetites” tend to “make [men] more sensitive and soft than we would have them” (Book III 387c, 389e). Such scenes “certainly are not suitable for youth to hear for the inculcation of self-control” and the proper “conduct of a man [instead of] … that of a woman” (Book III 390a; Book X 605e). ³

Plato attacks literature from another angle in the Phaedrus by radically arguing that writing itself (whether or not poetic or fictional) is simply inadequate for doing the serious business of philosophy. Writing involves multiple problems. It weakens the minds of those who use it “because they will not practice their memory” (Plato Phaedrus 275a 1925b). Moreover, it makes readers and writers conceitedly “hard to get along with,” thinking they really know and have in active memory the things they have read and written, when in fact “they are not wise” (275b). Third, because writing is detached from the thinker who thought what was written, it cannot speak up to explain itself; it can therefore be taken out of context, misunderstood, or misrepresented without the ability to defend itself against misinterpretation. Like paintings, writing is mute:

written words … [seem to speak] as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about … when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.

(275d–275e)

A written text has only “words which cannot defend themselves by argument and cannot teach the truth effectually” (276c). Fourth, just as literature’s representations are only imitations of appearances of things that are but imperfect copies of the true realities of the perfect forms, so writing is similarly but a copy of live oral speech which is but a copy of the real “word” of thought [logos] “which is written with intelligence in the mind” of the thinker (276a). Writing is a “bastard” imitation of “the living and breathing word of him who knows, of which the written word may justly be called the image” (276a).

Plato recognizes the value of literature “only for amusement” but not for the serious matters of philosophical inquiry and truth (276c). Writing’s “gardens of letters [the serious thinker] … will … plant for amusement, and will write, when he writes, to treasure up reminders for himself, when he comes to the forgetfulness of old age,” about admirable discourses on noble topics such as justice (276d). But “serious discourse about them is far nobler, when one employs the dialectic method” of living dialogue, which can make men wiser and bring men “to the farthest possible limit of human happiness” (276e–277a).

Can literature escape this critique of writing by the fact that it exists in oral forms as well? Many indeed claim that ancient Greek literature was primarily oral, more often recited and listened to than written or read. ⁴ Nonetheless, for an oral work to maintain its identity (through its different performances over time), it must have a reasonably defined and stable form, which could not provide the type of fully open-ended, multi-directional, dialectical give and take that Plato prizes in philosophical dialogue. A better way to resist Plato’s argument against writing is to expose its performative contradiction, namely, that his rejection of doing philosophy through writing is performed through the very process of writing he rejects. Moreover, because his dialogues often involve the artistry of dramatic form, storytelling, and myth, we often appreciate his work as literature as well as philosophy.

If we understand literature broadly to include all forms of coherent, sustained, purposive, and well-wrought verbal expression, then it is hard to claim that philosophical discourse is something other than and beyond literature. It rather seems, from this perspective, that philosophy is only a distinct form of literature, one that philosophers privilege as superior to other forms. For Plato, part of that privilege is its open-ended and live dialectical character in which present thoughts are directly exchanged in real time through face-to-face dialogue. Today’s new technologies enable such live dialogue in textual “chats” without face-to-face oral expression. If this means there is now less reason to privilege oral discourse over writing as being closer to thought, one could still argue that speech captures more (and more subtle) tonalities of expression than writing can. By the same logic, one could argue that remote face-to-face dialogue through internet connections such as Skype or Zoom can communicate, through facial gesture, more than a mere voice call can, while full-bodied presence allows still more forms of gestural meaning than mere oral or even face-to-face internet communication. Thus, orality itself is not the crucial, all-encompassing factor in conveying richness of meaning and truth.

Plato’s Phaedrus suggests that philosophy can go even deeper than oral language and penetrate the realm of pure thought, that is, “the word [i.e. thought] which is written with intelligence in the mind”; the Greek word “logos” means both “word” and “thought” (Plato Phaedrus 276a 1925b). Can philosophy ever penetrate into a realm of truth, thought, or meaning beyond words, a realm of experience prior to and outside language? Does such a realm of raw reality or unmediated nondiscursive experience even exist? And are theorists like Maurice Blanchot right to argue, paradoxically, that only through the words of literature can we experience this nondiscursive primary reality? We address this interesting line of inquiry in Chapter 3.

Key to philosophy’s claim of superiority is its commitment to truth and ennobling knowledge versus literature’s alleged shallower concerns with pleasure, amusing pretense, and corruptive falsehood. If Plato defined literature not to promote its practice and understanding, but rather to diminish its importance, then, given his formative influence, subsequent philosophers, even when they eschewed Plato’s condemnatory agenda, continued to define literature in inferior terms. We see this already in Aristotle’s defense of literature and his recognition of imitation as the fundamental means of learning. To rescue art from the Platonic charge of mimetic preoccupation with sensuous particularities of appearance, Aristotle asserted that poetry imitates the universal and thus “is something more philosophic and of graver import than history,” which treats only particular past events. This argument to defend literature only reinforces the hegemony of philosophy, because Aristotle limits poetry’s cognitive value to verisimilitude – “what is possible as being probable” – rather than what is really true (Aristotle Poetics 1451a38–1451b10 1968). ⁵ Moreover, he treats literature as a distinct realm of objects set apart from ordinary life and action, sharply distinguishing the arts as poiesis (the making of external objects) rather than praxis, i.e. real action, while insi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Preface
• 1 Philosophy and Literature: The Quarrels of Intimacy
• 2 Writing, Identity, and the Unity of Self
• 3 Expressing the Ineffable
• 4 The Art of Writing in Chinese Thought
• Works Cited
• Index