Philosophy and Poetry

Continental Perspectives

Ranjan Ghosh

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231547246
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This book explores the distinctive ways in which twentieth-century and contemporary continental thinkers have engaged with poetry and its contribution to philosophical meaning making, challenging us to rethink how philosophy has been changed through its encounters with poetry.

1

The Agonizing Agon

Meditations on a Conjugality

RANJAN GHOSH

If we divorced poetry and philosophy altogether, we should bring a serious impeachment.

—T. S. Eliot, “Dante”

Within philosophy resides the perennial temptation of the poetic, either to be made welcome or to be rejected.

—George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought

The quarrel begins …

Jacques Maritain observes that “Henri Bergson liked to quote a sentence he found in the letters of a French philosopher; the sentence was as follows: ‘I have suffered from this friend enough to know him.’ When I know a friend to the core—not through having submitted him to a complete series of psychological tests, but because I have suffered from him and have got in myself the habit of his nature—then we may say in philosophical language that I know this man by connaturality.”1 Poetry and philosophy have eavesdropped on each other ever since Xenophanes; they have known each other connaturally since their earliest days of togetherness through a “lover’s quarrel”—a quarrel that builds on unusually intense moments, however sustained and interminable. Texts, whether poetic or philosophic, are apparently evasive of each other committing to a sort of clarity and rigor. But such effort to maintain a distinctness of self-analytic monologics can seldom conceal, on a deeper investigation, a multivoiced conversation, mutually inflective and infective. George Santayana raises two questions at the beginning of his short essay “Poetry and Philosophy”: “Are poets at heart in search of a philosophy? Or is philosophy in the end nothing but poetry?”2 The integral dependence of poetry on philosophy owes to poetry being theoretically a worth and order of its own. Santayana sees a “life of theory” as “typically human” and “keenly emotional” so poetry being theoretical does not sunder it from life or forms of life. Philosophy in being a “more intense sort of experience than common life” is a different mode of experience, a separate vein of life. Philosophy is both intense and nuanced and like poetry builds its own aesthetic—a redoing of the crudeness of life. It enters into poetry because both converge on making a different sense of theory and life (θεωρία) that we thought we have long understood and lived, something that cannot be mere investigation and reasoning but insight, a contemplation that is imaginative.3 In fact, we can see both as events for a new kind of thinking, generating fresh ontological capacity. Santayana argues further that our mind is “not created for the sake of discovering the absolute truth” and it is a kind of weariness to think of philosophy ontologically and persistently committed to achieve this. Abstraction is as much a part of philosophical quest as investigations into our living realities, our finitudes, are. Our excursus must be directed to allowing the living spirit to prosper and poetic philosophy is a key to such accomplishment. Philosophy begins in perception and the profound features of reality can be located in our perceptual experiences. Perception combines conception that, again, cannot afford to be direct, narrow, or stodgy: articulation is competently achieved knowing the skills that express our perceptual knowings. Philosophy is “figuring forth,” manifestations brought about in relational understanding of being, self, substance, activity, time, values, and will. I would argue that philosophy’s inadequacies cannot be met through philosophy alone but in a poetic philosophy that enables greater possession of conceptual ways and firmer occupancy of analytic spaces of meaning. Poetry is key to philosophy’s ability to engage with the “truths of experience.”4 The lover’s quarrel then, as it opens unto the twentieth century in this book, is certainly more complicated and productive than what Socrates meant in the Republic.

Let us, however, begin with Plato, who inevitably is our first point of dialogue. His Apology arraigns the poet on the grounds of not “composing” out of sophia or philesis, which the philosophers possess. Creation effected merely out of the base nature (phusis) and enthousiasmos is not exactly the Socratic recipe—the Socratic dismissiveness of poetry5 as evident through Republic, books 2 and 3 (where morality and poetry come under suspicion), the Laws (where dramatic structure is the point of scrutiny), and Apology, Ion, Phaedrus, Protagoras, and Lysis is in dialogues where poetry is not allowed a decent establishment and the poet stands ascribed as mad or ignorant. The Socratic elenchus and focus on preventing the mutative progress of concepts make allowance for a strong counterposition against the rhapsodes, the poets, who, it is claimed (see Euthyphro and Ion), speak without knowing often what they are speaking—dianoia (thought) and episteme can get established only when nous (reason) has not deserted the creator (see Protagoras). The battle of wits involving Socrates and Protagoras is an interesting commentary on the language world of both, the notion of reality and moral thought, the challenge to elenchus, and the arche of instruction in poetry. Socrates in his characteristic loquacity scores over Protagoras by dismantling the merits of poetry, using poetry to dismiss poetry as a medium of moral instructions and pedagogy, developing a theoretical and philosophical intelligence. Simon Haines points out that “Plato wanted to show not just that philosophy does a better job of thinking than poetry does but that it does a better job of thinking about just what poetry is supposed to be better at thinking about: passions. He wanted to do this because he was a poet, deeply interested in the passions: but his interest was in ruling them, subordinating them, not using them, living with them.”6 So the soul of the “city” has the guardians who would know what “excellence” (see Meno) is and the poets for whom epithumos would lead to eros and not philia or episteme. The diet of poetry needs to endorse its passional and recognitive validity through tests of excellence, intellective reason, and conceptual clarity. If poetry chose character and the human, then philosophy chose the abstract and the concept.

Susan Levin’s observations are perceptive:

While Plato rejects the view that poets are authorities in the sphere of pedagogy, denying thereby that poetry could be a techne even under ideal conditions, he admits the possibility that gifted practitioners, if themselves properly educated, may benefit the state by generating creations that will be suitable for the young. Although the pedagogical function of poetry is limited to children, poetic compositions will, in addition, play a civic role on a range of public occasions. Plato thus “wins” for philosophy the quarrel (diaphora) between it and poetry by arguing, against tradition, that philosophy should be the teacher of adults and hence supplant poetry in this way as the educator of Greece. He establishes philosophy’s dominance, in addition, by contending that its practitioners should be the ultimate arbiters of the content and form of acceptable poetic compositions. The interpretation developed here foregrounds the complexity of Plato’s attitude by stressing that although much is at stake for him in the conduct and outcome of the diaphora between philosophy and poetry, he is nevertheless unwilling to bar poetry from the ideal polis if this exclusion would deprive it of a potential benefactor.7

Both Aristotle and Plato lived and grew up in a culture deeply grounded in poetry. Plato’s ambivalence can be traced to the decline of Greek poetry after the fourth century BC when poetry lost its moral and aesthetic power to a kind of crass materialization. The Socratic dialectic and its discriminating fineness look into poetry as speaking about a world and philosophy as interrogation into the workings of the world—the reason, the judgments, and sources. If the poet speaks about a moral world, the philosopher generally starts on morality. It was Socrates who drew Plato away from his initial vocation as a poet into the pathways of philosophy. But was Plato really spurning poetry or reorienting poetry into the service of philosophy? “My dear Socrates,” Diotima says in the Symposium, “if a man’s life is ever worth living it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty.… It is only when he discerns beauty itself through what makes it visible that a man will be quickened with the true, and not the seeming, virtue—for it is virtue’s self that quickens them, not virtue’s semblance.”8 Raymond Barfield explains that “the poet sees but does not retain reason. The unpoetic philosopher reasons but cannot move beyond the methods and truly see. Diotima tells us about a third option. When the eyes have been opened and the lover of wisdom gazes upon the transcendent, upon beauty or the good in true contemplation, such a vision remains one’s own forever. The beholder experiences a vision without becoming ecstatic or possessed by a god, without losing reason. Indeed, the vision is attained in part through reason properly used. This is the source of a new and better type of poetry, the sort of poetry Plato writes.”9 Plato has his own distinct mode of doing philosophy—in dialogues that have rigor, clarity, and insight, the fierceness of insight with some uncertainty over inferences justifying the necessity of a dialogic mode. But is Plato’s philosophy steeped in poetry, his style a mediatory point between prose and poetry? What made Aristotle imply that the “Socratic Conversations,” as much as the prose-mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus, can be categorized as poetry? In this context, Hartland-Swans observations are worthwhile:

The Dialogues are works of art; dramatic to a varying extent; compact of serious argument, scientific and mythical description, sustained pleading, high incantation; enlivened by humorous incidents, quotations from the poets, topical allusions, playful digressions—all these diverse elements combining to develop a series of philosophical themes. And conversely it is these philosophical themes which orient and control the variegated discussions in each Dialogue. The language itself fluctuates between extremes of fine-spun or even laboured prosaic argumentation, and colourful or metaphorical descriptions of high poetic quality. And it is, naturally enough, in the Myths, allegories and fables that this poetic quality is longest sustained, and that Plato’s imaginative genius most openly displays itself. Not only are we aware that “poetry” rather than “fine prose” is the more correct description, but we can feel the presence of emotional currents which seem, for the moment, to change the whole atmosphere of the Dialogue.10

In fact, the “poetic” Plato’s objection to “bad poetry” is legitimate. Poetry must come with perception for it is what connects and negotiates with philosophy. The poeticization of the dialogues comes about through the urgency of perception, the necessity to challenge the vulgarization of abstraction. In fact, even Aristotle wrote poetry much to the surprise of people who see him only as the foremost philosopher in the ancient world. He composed enough poetry “to fill two papyrus rolls in the ancient collections of his works, for it was not unusual that a well-educated gentleman of his day should be able to come up with a verse or song to grace special occasions. What is very surprising is the story told about one of his poems, for the sources that preserve the text also tell us that it came near to costing the philosopher his life.”11 Aristotle’s socioepistemic consternation about the poets is less intense than Plato’s, which, however, does not prevent him from putting forth the exhortations for the creation of epic and tragedy. Intertwining poetry with ethics—the overlaps between Politics and Poetics are hard to ignore—Aristotle sees poetry supervised by philosophy through judgment, choice, and values. For a man with a variety of interests in life-experiences and forms of reality, his philosophical aesthetics combined wonder and practicality, structure and good action. Not as suspecting of poet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. The Agonizing Agon: Meditations on a Conjugality
• 2. As the World Turns: Heidegger and the Origin of Poetry
• 3. Benjamin’s Baudelaire
• 4. Georges Bataille and the Hatred of Poetry
• 5. Voicing Thought: Arendt, Poetry, and Philosophy
• 6. Language and the Poetic Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics
• 7. “I Am a Poem, Not a Poet”: Jacques Lacan’s Philosophy of Poetry
• 8. Adorno: Poetry After Poetry
• 9. Sartre and Poetry: Je t’aime, moi non plus (I Love You—Me Neither)
• 10. Levinas and the Poetical Turn of Being
• 11. The Intoxicated Conversation: Maurice Blanchot and the Poetics of Critical Masks
• 12. Merleau-Ponty, Ponge, and Valéry on Speaking Things: Phenomenology and Poetry
• 13. Deleuze and Poetry
• 14. Irigaray’s Breath, or Poetry After Poetics
• 15. On the Persistence of Hedgehogs
• 16. What Are Philosophers For in the Age of the Poets? Badiou with and Against Heidegger
• 17. Jean-Luc Nancy: Poetry, Philosophy, Technicity
• 18. Rancière on Poetry
• 19. Desire Against Discipline: Kristeva’s Theory of Poetry
• 20. Agamben and Poetry
• List of Contributors
• Index