Rosen - The quarrel between poetry and philosophyh : studies in ancient thought /Stanley Rosen

The Quarrel Between
Philosophy and Poetry

The Quarrel Between
Philosophy and Poetry

Studies in Ancient Thought

Stanley Rosen

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosen, Stanley, 1929
The quarrel between philosophy and poetry.

Includes index.
1. Philosophy. 2. Philosophy, Ancient.
3. Poetics. I. Title.
B73.R67 1988 101 87-28628
ISBN 0-415-00184-6 ISBN 0-415-90745-4 (pb)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Rosen, Stanley
The quarrel between philosophy and poetry:
studies in ancient thought.
1. Poetics 2. Imagination 3. Creation
(Literary, artistic, etc.).
I. Title
808.1 PN1041

ISBN: 978-0-415-90745-3 (Pbk)

Permission to reprint the following is gratefully acknowledged:

Platos Myth of the Reversed Cosmos, Review of Metaphysics, Vol.XXXIII, No.1, September, 1979.

The Nonlover in Platos Phaedrus, Man and World, Vol.2, No.3, 1969, pp. 423-37. Copyright 1969 by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht, Holland.

The Role of Eros in Platos Republic, Review of Metaphysics, March 1965.

Thought and Touch: A Note on Aristotles De Anima, Phronesis, Vol. VI, No.2, 1961.

The studies collected in this volume have been written at various times during the past thirty years. They were produced as expressions of a continuous effort to understand whether philosophy is possible. Their author came to the academic practice of philosophy from poetry. He had been convinced as an adolescent of the truth of T. S. Eliots observation that philosophy and poetry are two different languages about the same world. Leo Strauss helped him to understand that there is an irreconcilable tension between these two languages as they are commonly conceived. Unfortunately, Strausss own conception of philosophy was incapable of defending itself against the poetry of Nietzsche and Heidegger.

This is not the place to describe the itinerary to which the present author was led by dissatisfaction with Strausss Farabian concealment of the dilemma of decadence. The extraordinary achievements of Leo Strauss must not be minimized. But on Strausss own account, they exhibit an impasse between reason and revelation, which by the nature of the claims of each, gives the edge to revelation. Stated with the brevity appropriate to a preface, this awards the victory to poetry.

With all honor to the welfare of the multitude, a poetic concealment of the triumph of poetry over philosophy is a deeply disappointing fulfillment of a teaching that exalted philosophy above all other human activities. But so too is the public repudiation of poetry, in the name of the thesis that philosophy is the technical resolution of puzzles. Analytical philosophy, for all its charms, provided no alternative to Strauss on the one hand or to Nietzsche and Heidegger on the other. On the contrary, it suffered from a fatal lack of self-understanding: it did not see that techn is a species of poetry. When this self-knowledge arrived at last, it was in the form of decadence, the prelude to postmodernism.

If we attempt to refresh ourselves from the weariness induced by the inferior poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, and return to the Greeks, we find the origin of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry in the ambiguous senses of mythos and logos. There is no doubt that philosophy has something to do with logos. Let us go so far as to assert that a logos is a reasoned account. But what does this mean? Are there no circumstances in which mythoi are reasonable, to say nothing of the fact that the distinction between the two words is relatively late?

An account is reasonable if it is appropriate. Thus the best mathematicians understand when it is inappropriate to offer an equation as an account of phenomena. At least initial light is shed upon the quarrel between philosophy and poetry when we take our bearings by Platos distinction between the two kinds of measure: the arithmetical and the appropriate or fitting. This distinction is essentially the same as Pascals distinction between the esprit gomtrique and the esprit de finesse.

Is it not, however, the esprit de finesse that distinguishes between itself and the esprit gomtrique? In other words, does not the return to the presumably superior poetry of the ancients simply confirm the triumph of poetry over philosophy? We can take at least one more step by raising the following question. How can the esprit de finesse be the root of itself and of the esprit gomtrique? Is there not a deeper root of which these two attunements of the soul are branches?

The point can be illustrated by an introductory contrast between Plato and Aristotle. In Plato, the whole (to holon) is exhibited within the dialogues by myth, and more comprehensively by the dramatic or poetic form of the dialogues themselves. Aristotle advocates the replacement of myth by logos, and he gives up the dialogue form for what may most simply be called monologue. The result seems to be that there is no account of the whole as whole, but only separate accounts of distinct families of phenomena. Not even the science of first principles provides us with an account, or for that matter with a phenomenological description, of the unity articulated as the tripartition of theory, practice, and production.

This tripartition is anticipated in Platos Republic by the Socratic tripartition of citizens in the city laid up in speeches (IX, 592all: a good example of the use of logos as blended together with mythos). The principle of political unity, one could almost say, is for Socrates the division of labor. It is assumed that each person has one characteristic work that he or she does best, and that justice, or the unity of the city, requires each person to mind his or her own business or to do his or her own work.

From our present standpoint, the most interesting feature of the city laid up in speeches is in the order of the stages of education. The citizens are first habituated to virtue by music, or the cultivation of the esprit de finesse. Mathematics, or the cultivation of the esprit gomtrique, comes later, and in serious form, it is restricted to a small class of citizens: to the guardians or potential philosophers. The Socratic vision of the order of human life suggests that poetry, which is ostensibly to be banished from the city, must in fact rule over philosophy. This suggestion seems to be confirmed by the noble lie: the root of the division of labor is the myth of the earthborn gold, silver, and bronze souls.

One could object to this that the prudential or tactical employment of music and myth is a secondary consequence of Socrates geometrical analysis of human existence. But the term geometrical functions here in a metaphorical or