The ancient quarrel unsettled. Plato and the erotics of tragic poetry
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE ANCIENT QUARREL UNSETTLED:
PLATO AND THE EROTICS OF TRAGIC POETRY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY JOHN U. NEF COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL THOUGHT BY THOMAS LUKE BARTSCHERER CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
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Table of Contents
2.1 Thinking twice: formal considerations ................................................................................. 62
2.3.1 Was will das Logistikon? ................................................................................................ 76
2.3 Two premises, two problems ................................................................................................ 75
2.2.3 Pharmakon ...................................................................................................................... 71
2.2.2 Epôidê ............................................................................................................................. 67
2.2.1 Erôs ................................................................................................................................. 65
2.2 Thinking twice: erôs, epôidê, pharmakon ............................................................................ 65
2 The critique of tragedy in Republic X: limitations and reformulation ...................................... 61
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... v Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
1.3 The power of images—the greatest accusation .................................................................... 54
1.2 The power of images—the psychology of belief and the spectacle of suffering ................. 46
1.1.2 Poetry .............................................................................................................................. 41
1.1.1 Painting ........................................................................................................................... 22
1.1 Mimêsis and the ontology of images .................................................................................... 22
1 The nature and power of images ............................................................................................... 20
2.3.2 That obscure object ......................................................................................................... 86
2.4.1 Elusive originals ............................................................................................................ 102 2.4.2 "The god must be described as he is…" ........................................................................ 111 3 "All those beautiful tragic things" ........................................................................................... 118
3.1 Tragedy and erôs: an overview ........................................................................................... 119
3.2 Poetics of tragedy and philosophy of the tragic: Plato and Aristotle ................................. 128
3.3 Philosophy of the tragic: Halliwell and Rosen ................................................................... 132
3.4 Erôs for the beautiful and tragedy ...................................................................................... 145
3.4.1 The beautiful [to kalon] ................................................................................................. 145
3.4.2 To kalon, poetry, tragedy .............................................................................................. 148
3.4.3 Tragic beauty: irony and enigma .................................................................................. 155
3.5 Conclusion: A frenzied and savage master? ....................................................................... 161
4 Erôs: tyrannical and philosophical .......................................................................................... 164
4.1 The puzzle .......................................................................................................................... 164
4.2 Duo erôte ............................................................................................................................ 166
4.2.1 Argument of the imagery .............................................................................................. 168
4.2.2 Tyrannical desire: unnecessary, insatiable, lawless ...................................................... 170
4.2.3 Philosophical desire: unnecessary, insatiable, lawless? ................................................ 175
4.3 One love: different objects ................................................................................................. 180
5 Tragedy, transgression, and psuchagôgia ................................................................................ 189
5.1 Was will der Mensch? ........................................................................................................ 191
5.2 The good, the beautiful, and the tragic ............................................................................... 195
5.3 Love minus zero/no limit .................................................................................................... 201 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 207
Acknowledgements
First thanks goes to the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, and especially to the chair of the Committee and my advisor, Robert B. Pippin, for sustained and unwavering support. What there is of value in the following work derives in large measure from the unique intellectual environment of the Committee, which Mr. Pippin has done so much to foster. For his guidance, support, and example, I am enormously grateful. I also thank the other members of my dissertation committee—John M. Coetzee, Jonathan Lear, and Glenn W. Most—who over many years have been generous with their time and attention, their criticism and encouragement. Many other individuals and institutions have aided and abetted my work on this project. Chief among them, David N. McNeill, cherished interlocutor since 1994, and Ewa Atanassow, helpmeet of a dozen years. Both have read many drafts and virtually every page of this work. I cannot overstate my gratitude. With apologies to any whom I omit inadvertently, I would like also to thank the following individuals and institutions: Danielle Allen, Shadi Bartsch, Rita Bartscherer, Manuel Baumbach, Jonathan Beere, Paolo d’Iorio, Anne Wescott Eaton, Christiane Frey, Paul Friedrich, Anne Gamboa, the late David Grene, H. U. Gumbrecht, John T. Hamilton, Martin Holtermann, Brett Keyser, Martin Korjenac, Brad Krumholz, Justine Malle, Katia Mitova, Sandra Moog, James I. Porter, James Redfield, Joan Retallack, Daniel Richter, Jarrell Robinson, Naomi Rood, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, Nicholas Rudall, Lauriana Sapienza, Eric Schliesser, Roger Scruton, Mark Strand, Claudia Strobel, William Stull, Chenxi Tang, Nathan Tarcov, Jonny Thakkar, David Tracy, Martin Vöhler, James Wengler, Antja Wessels, my siblings and their spouses, the Bradley Foundation, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Earhart Foundation, the École Normale Supérieure, the European College of the Liberal Arts, the
Modernes—CNRS, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the North American Cultural Laboratory, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. In accordance with custom, I emphasize that I alone bear responsibility for the shortcomings of this work.
Introduction
“There is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” This remark and the argument to which it belongs, attributed by Socrates to himself in Book X of Plato’s Republic, has not suffered from neglect in the history of Western letters. Rejoinders come early. For Aristotle, the notion of a “quarrel” between philosophy and poetry simply makes no sense.
Poetry is, like rhetoric or ethics or politics or weather, something about which philosophy can provide a reasoned account; it is not the sort of thing that might be regarded as an alternative to
1
or opponent of philosophy. In Plutarch, the antagonism is replaced with complementarity: poetry is informed by philosophical argument and philosophy is sweetened with an admixture of
2
poetic myth. Subsequent responses, varying greatly in content, form, and tone, continue to appear from the time of the neoplatonists through to the twenty-first century. The list would rival
3 1 Leporello’s catalogo for its magnitude and diversity. What I provide in this introduction is a
I agree with the many commentators who regard Aristotle’s Poetics as a response to the critique of poetry we find
in Plato, and especially in Republic X. Halliwell (1998) offers a particularly detailed account of the relationship between the Poetics and the Republic. See also Fuhrmann (1973), Gould (1964), and Kannicht (1980). 2 As Hunter and Russell observe, Plutarch’s De Audiendis Poetis 15d likely contains a direct allusion to Plato’s 3 formulation of the ancient quarrel (Plutarch (2011)).
To get a sense of the sheer range of periods in which and authors for whom the quarrel is of pressing concern (in
some cases, the concern being to reject the idea that there is such a quarrel), consider just a few prominent examples.
Neoplatonists, and Proclus in particular, inherit Plato’s interest in investigating the relationship between philosophy and poetry and they typically share with Plutarch a more harmonious conception of this relationship. For the th th Romantic writers of the 18 and 19 centuries, Plato’s formulation of the quarrel had profound resonance, as seen for example in Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry” and in much of Coleridge’s work (see James Vigus’s chapter, “The
Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy,” in Vigus (2009), 63-92). For a revisiting of this tension from the th perspective of a 20 century novelist, see Italo Calvino’s “Philosophy and Literature,” in Calvino (1986), 39-49. Paul de Man, commenting on Plato, remarks that “philosophy and literature” are “the two activities of the human
intellect that are both closest and the most impenetrable to each other,” in De Man (1979), 103. One may also recall
how Stanley Cavell concludes The Claim of Reason: “But can philosophy become literature and still know itself?” in
Cavell (1979), 496. Finally, in a recent study of the work of J. M. Coetzee, Stephen Mulhall argues that through the
character of Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee re-visits questions about the relationship between philosophy and literature
first formulated by Plato, but that Costello does so “in ways that can only be properly understood if we understand highly selective survey of recent publications to identify the field within which the present study moves, and then a summary of my central concerns to reveal the absence of field at which it aims.
In brief and broad terms, I will be arguing that for Plato, the quarrel contrasts two fundamentally different conceptions of the nature and purpose of discursive activity and the ethical implications of each. The distinction Plato proposes between philosophy and poetry is not, at root, a matter of formal criteria, such as meter or diction. Nor is it simply the difference between myth-making and account-giving, or between muthos and logos. Moreover, I do not believe we are to understand the quarrel to have been resolved within the confines of the
Republic, nor the arguments Socrates makes to constitute philosophy’s victory over poetry (or,
for that matter, philosophy’s incapacity to defeat its opponent). As I shall indicate in this introduction and elaborate in detail in the study that follows, on my reading the quarrel turns on the nature of what Plato calls erôs. As modes of discourse, philosophy and poetry manifest different understandings of the character and fate of erotic striving and constitute two different responses to the human condition.
Three monographs dedicated to the ancient quarrel in various manifestations, published in the last three decades, appeared at about ten year intervals beginning in 1990. They provide a convenient framework for this survey. I begin with Thomas Gould’s The Ancient Quarrel
Between Poetry and Philosophy (1990), then take up Susan Levin’s The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited (2001), and turn finally to Raymond Barfield’s The
4 4 Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry (2011). For Gould, the quarrel to which
Stanley Rosen’s The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought (1988) was published
Socrates refers is “a permanent state of affairs,” a fundamental disagreement about the nature of moral responsibility in relation to fate and the divine (Gould 1990, xxvi). Philosophy, on Gould’s understanding, is essentially a worldview based on the premise that human beings, not the gods, are entirely responsible for their own happiness or misery. “In 'philosophy,'” he writes, “are included not only the systematic thinkers like Heraclitus … but anyone who complained that the gods ought not to be envisaged as the authors of all human misery, deserved and undeserved alike” (214). Poetry, by contrast, represents the view that “divine injustice” is responsible for human misery and, as a corollary, that human beings are not responsible for their own lot and so are relieved of guilt for their own suffering. Poetry in this sense is aligned, Gould argues, with those religious traditions that ascribe human misfortune to divine will or plan.
Gould’s argument turns on his account of pathos. He defines pathos as “the operative event in stories essential to popular religion and tragedy: catastrophic suffering, undergone by some
5
great figure, man or god, far in excess of the sufferer's deserts” (ix). “Poetry” in the Republic’s formulation of the ancient quarrel can be regarded, according to Gould, as "the enterprise of those who wish to move hearers with accounts of a pathe”; philosophy, by contrast, is the "mission of those who are hostile to this enterprise” (x). Gould further argues that poets and philosophers, so understood, are responding to fundamental and ineradicable features of human psychology that are irreconcilable. We are in part driven by a desire, elevated to the highest principle in Socratic ethics, to lead our lives, to be alone responsible for the state of our souls. 5 Yet part of us also longs to believe that we are not responsible and therefore not guilty of the ills
I discuss the term pathos in some detail in Chapter One. Gould, for his part, argues that the revelation of the hero’s underserved suffering—his pathos—was at the center of the religion of hero worship and initiation into the
mysteries and was central to the epic tradition as well. From these sources, according to Gould, the celebration and exploitation of pathos became the central feature of Attic tragedy. See his chapter, “Pathos in Greek Religion,” that befall us. According to Gould, the great contribution of Plato’s poetics is to recognize how the difference between philosophy and poetry corresponds to this fundamental split in the human soul. It is the discovery that there has always been and must always be an irreconcilable difference between two drives within the human psyche: the rage to believe in justice, fed by philosophy, morality, theology, criticism, and other rational endeavor; and a rage to believe in injustice, fed by poetry, myth, religion, and other expressions of our dreamer selves (85). Plato’s insight, as Gould sees it, is inherited and his explanatory project advanced by modern psychoanalysis, and in particular, by Freud’s discovery that the superego, which Gould takes to be a rough equivalent of the middle part, the spirited part, of Socrates’ tripartite division, can itself be a source of misery through the experience of guilt (xix-xx). Plato recognizes that “tragedy and rationality” cannot be reconciled, but offers an insufficient account of the “counterrational pleasure we get from tragedy,” which for Gould is supplied by modern psychoanalysis (xxvi). From the point of view of practical moral philosophy, moreover, this insufficient understanding leads Plato to embrace absolutely the dictates of Socratic rationalism and to regard the pathos of tragic drama as an immoral satisfaction of the desire to have done with self-responsibility. From Gould’s perspective, one should recognize that the “rage to believe in injustice” cannot be ignored or extirpated. It must, to a certain extent, be gratified. But at the same time, it should not be allowed to predominate. Gould’s study makes the case that the representation of pathos, as for example in tragic drama, is necessary for psychic and societal health, but also aims to moderate its influence by clarifying the source and workings of it power.
The rest of Gould’s sprawling account examines the manifestations and ramifications of
th
these central claims over a vast expanse of time, from Homeric epic to 20 century political
6
overarching claims and in the details. For present purposes, we need only make a few additional remarks. At the root of Gould’s argument is the claim that a part of the soul naturally and ineluctably desires evidence of what the author calls “divine injustice.” Something there is in everyone that wishes to be a victim, and it is this part of the soul that responds to, and takes vicarious pleasure in, the pathos of tragedy. On Gould’s reading of Plato, the pity felt by the spectator of tragedy turns out to be a kind of projected self-pity: the spectator suffers because he recognizes his own plight in that of the suffering hero, and then again in reflecting on his (the spectator’s) own suffering. The pleasure arises from the satisfaction of the desire to be a passive victim rather than to be actively responsible for one’s own suffering.
7 It is an interesting idea, which some scholars have explored further. Yet we can note some
immediate difficulties. When Socrates explicitly identifies the desires and pleasures of each part of the soul in the Republic (580d-581e), at least on the face of it nothing like a desire for victimhood is indicated. He speaks of the desire for wisdom, the desire for honor, and the desire for gain: where among these is the desire to be off the hook, ethically speaking? This question leads to another difficulty with Gould’s argument. He blends together the fairly clear tripartite psychology of the earlier books of the Republic with the considerably murkier, seemingly 6 bipartite psychology of Book X without accounting for the differences between the two. Socrates
See, for example, the reviews by Halliwell (1992) and Salkever (1991). Central problems include scanty evidence
for his claims about the role of pathos in Greek religion; an assumed, rather than argued for, unity in the conception
of pathos, despite what appears to be a great deal of variety; a simplified account of the complex relationship between Platonic and Freudian psychology; and, in the context of a book that covers an impressively vast range ofperiods and issues, an unwillingness to engage in a sustained way with thinkers other than Plato and Freud who have
7 tackled similar issues and come to quite different conclusions from those proposed by Gould.See, for example, Halliwell (2002), 117, whom I discuss at length in Chapter Three, and Johnson and Clapp
(2005), 148-49. David McNeill accepts the self-reflexive character of Socrates’ account of tragedy, but argues that
the pity it elicits “need not express itself in self-pity” but may rather lead to “philosophic contemplation of our own does in Book X speak of “the pitying part” [to eleinon] of the soul, which he says is strengthened by attending to tragic poetry and, as a result, is more difficult to restrain from feeling self-pity.
This picture of the soul, with its pitying part, fits Gould’s argument somewhat better than the earlier account, although it is still a step to go from self-pity to self-exculpation. On the other hand, the tripartite soul is critical for Gould because on his reading it anticipates Freud’s superego.
Perhaps the main virtue of Gould’s study is to recognize that the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, as it appears in the Republic, should be understood as a fundamental opposition, one that is deeply rooted in the dialogue and is a defining feature of Plato’s thought. I share Gould’s conviction that the critique of poetry in Book X is not, as some have argued, a
8
mere digression, appendix, or afterthought. I also agree that the significance of the quarrel, for
9 Plato, is best understood in terms of moral psychology. Finally, I think Gould is right to place
tragic poetry, in particular, at the center of Plato’s concerns. I shall, however, offer a substantially different interpretation of Plato’s account of tragedy and why it is the primary focus of the critique of poetry in Book X.
Ten years after the publication of Gould’s study, Susan Levin returns to the topic with The 8 Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary
Shorey refers to all of Book X as "in a sense an appendix" and calls the discussion of poetry "an intervening digression" that serves chiefly to "rest the emotions between two culminating points" (Plato (1935), 1:lxi, 2:xxii);
Nettleship (1901) holds that the discussion of poetry in Book X "is disconnected from the rest of the Republic" and
"breaks the continuity" (304); Cross and Woozley (1964) write that Book X "must be regarded as an appendix" (263); Annas (1981) calls it an “excrescence” (335); and even the judicious Adam says the discussion of poetry in Book X is "of the nature of an episode, and might have been omitted without injury to the artistic unity of thedialogue" Plato (1963), II:384. Nehamas (1999), in opposing this view, cites additional proponents of the "appendix"
idea (256), including Else (1972). Those joining Nehamas in explicitly dismissing the dismissers of the critique of 9 poetry in Book X include Halliwell (1988), Ferrari (1989), 129 and Levin (2001), 152.
As will become clear in what follows, I do not agree with Gould that the ontological dimensions of the critique of
Tradition. Levin’s declared purpose is to demonstrate that Plato’s thought is informed by, and in
conversation with, the literary tradition that preceded him in ways and to an extent that had not been acknowledged. Levin is particularly concerned to document this influence in the realm of what she calls the “philosophy of language.” Much of the book is dedicated to this task, focusing particularly on etymology, eponymy, and the use of “functional terms,” (e.g., terms used to denote kinship). Levin’s overarching contention is that the literary authors of the Greek tradition—in which she includes the epic, lyric, and dramatic poets as well as Herodotus—were at least as significant for the development of Plato’s thought as the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers. It is only in the final chapter that she comes to a direct consideration of the ancient quarrel as it appears in the Republic.
On Levin’s reading, Socrates’ formulation of the quarrel is a straightforward presentation of two different views regarding the roles of poetry and philosophy, respectively, within the city in speech discussed in the Republic and, she seems to think, within Greek society more
10
generally. Plato is, according to Levin, firmly on the side of philosophy, which is presented as the “preeminent technê” (Levin 2001, 12). “Plato,” she maintains, “‘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” (129). Yet this does not mean, on her interpretation, that for Plato there is no role for poetry in the best 10 regime. Rather, Plato “reserves an important role for … poetry both in the project of attitude
For the most part, Levin limits her discussion to what she refers to as “the ideal polis.” She does however extend the claim, indicating that the arguments for the superiority of poetry within the ideal city apply equally in the real
cities that constitute “Greece” (129, 166). Levin does not indicate why what holds in the hypothetical city should be
thought to hold also in real cities. On this issue, I agree with Gadamer: "The state is a state in thought, not any state
on earth. Its purpose is to bring something to light and not to provide an actual design for an improved order in real formation that is the focus of early education and in the broader communal context, where poetic compositions will be integral to a range of civic occasions” (12).
Levin rightly recognizes and persuasively documents the “tremendous influence of traditional literary education” in classical Athens. Not only Homer, but “over time, Hesiod, Pindar, and the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were also recognized as influential educators” (8). Levin also makes the important point that, through the dramatic festivals, this literary tradition was formative not only for a small elite but for a large portion of the Athenian public. While neither of these is in itself a novel observation, both are important to bear in mind when thinking about what is at stake in Socrates’ critique of poetry, culminating in
11
the ancient quarrel. Levin furthermore reminds us of how contemporary conceptions of the boundaries between academic disciplines—philosophy, classical studies, literature—can distort
12
our view of Plato’s authorial project. Her work shows how, in Plato’s own authorship, we see evidence that in the cultural tradition to which he is responding there was in effect no firm distinction between poetry and philosophy. To understand the genesis and significance of the stark difference proposed by Socrates, it is necessary to abandon, or at least bracket, contemporary assumptions about what constitutes academic disciplines and discourses.
Although Levin indicates her interest in what she refers to as the “‘literary’” or “‘poetic’” aspects of the dialogues (the quotation marks are hers), she is not much concerned in this study to consider the hermeneutical implications of such things as irony, character, or dramatic action. 11 Even the fundamental distinction between imitated speech [mimêsis] and narration [diêgêsis],
On the influence of the literary tradition on Plato, with a particular emphasis on the significance of the transition
from oral to written culture, see Havelock (1963). For a general account of classical education, see Marrou (1965). Regarding the dramatic festivals, Levin mainly follows Pickard-Cambridge (1988). which is made by Socrates himself within the Republic, does not come into play in her interpretation. She ascribes the arguments that Socrates proposes regarding poetry directly to Plato without comment and further takes these arguments to amount to philosophy’s side of the quarrel, which, as Levin puts it, “wins” over poetry. While I think—and argue in Chapter One— that the account of poetry Socrates outlines in Book X is considerably more sophisticated and interesting than has often been recognized, I also think—and argue in Chapter Two—that this surface argument has decisive limitations, which the dialogue itself, to a significant degree through literary devices, brings to attention. A more comprehensive account of the significance of the quarrel for Plato’s thought requires that we move beyond those limitations, while still remaining within the text of Plato’s dialogues, as I aim to do in Chapters Three, Four, and Five.
It should also be mentioned that Levin, unlike Gould, takes little notice of the particular emphasis on tragedy, an aspect of Plato’s thinking on poetry that will be prominent in my interpretation. Levin does provide, as she indicates, “a powerful reminder of how central the quarrel with poetry is for Plato” (167). Yet to think that Plato regards the quarrel as settled in favor of philosophy—as philosophy is represented by Socrates’ argument in Republic X—is on my reading to neglect the underlying questions Plato aims to raise, which pertain in part to the very possibility of philosophy as so represented.
Raymond Barfield, in his recently published monograph, The Ancient Quarrel Between
Philosophy and Poetry (2011), does to a certain extent address these underlying questions. The
book is an expansive study of the ancient quarrel in its original formulation in Plato and in its subsequent reception, loosely conceived, presented in eleven episodes, each of which focuses on one or more key figures from Aristotle through to Mikhail Bahktin. Barfield would agree with literary tradition on Plato’s thought, a tradition that includes figures like Homer and Hesiod no less than Parmenides and Heraclitus. It is, Barfield argues, “precisely the similarities between poetry and philosophy that lend energy to the quarrelsome relationship between the two” (2). Barfield, with Levin and others I shall discuss presently, regards the quarrel as something “created before our eyes” in the Republic (17). Through much of his discussion, Barfield also seems to agree with Levin on a number of points about which I have raised concerns. He assumes, without argument, that Socrates speaks on behalf of Plato, that Plato is to be understood as an unambiguous advocate of philosophy, and that the philosophy Plato is advocating in opposition to poetry is represented by the kinds of arguments presented by Socrates in Book X. Barfield does, however, bring to the fore what I regard to be some of the key issues in Plato’s formulation of the ancient quarrel.
Weaving together the discussions of poetry in the Republic and the Ion, Barfield maintains that for Plato, while poetry may provide “starting points for philosophical inquiry,” the inquiry
13
itself must take place within the realm of reasoned discourse. Because the wisdom of poetry, such as it is, is not achieved by dialectical inquiry but bestowed through inspiration, and because poetry depicts and plays upon emotion, it is not an integral part of, and can even be a distraction from, philosophical investigation. Barfield identifies and acknowledges this critique, but then raises an important question. He points out that there “is a motivating force in the act of philosophy that might properly be called a feeling” (20). He refers to this as “transcendental
13 Barfield does not comment directly on the differences between the Republic and the Ion in regard to how poetry is
portrayed and explained. Most prominently: imitation (mimêsis and related words) is central to the former, not mentioned in the latter, while inspiration (entheos and related words) is the key concept in the latter, but is not
14
feeling,” and later clarifies it as “the conviction that ‘life is good’” (20). While I ultimately disagree that the relevant “feeling” should be identified in this way, Barfield’s argument is illuminating. He writes:
If a poet does make a claim to induce any sense of “life as good,” the philosophical rejoinder Socrates offers is that such recognition requires some
concept of what goodness is. But the converse might be argued: to begin a
discussion about goodness, one must first experience something as good in order to question the nature of that experience. Philosophical thought must have some fundamental experience with which to begin, an experience that is in some sense necessarily unreasoned, prior to reason’s work, which occurs while the questioning mind is “absent” or at least precedes the activity of questioning and analysis (20).
Again, while I do not agree about the content of the “sense” induced by poetry, the salient point is that, for Plato, the quarrel turns ultimately on a question of non-discursive experience
15
that orients and directs a way of life. On my reading, this experience is encountered in, provided by, both poetry and philosophy. What Barfield calls the “motivating force” is, in
16 Plato’s language, properly referred to as erôs. Seen in this light, the ancient quarrel raises a
complex psychological question both about erôs (the desire itself, manifest in the attraction to philosophical or poetic discourse) and about that which inspires and sustains erotic desire (the 14 content of the discourses). For Plato, erôs is, in the first place (and possibly also in the last 15 Barfield indicates that he is borrowing language here from J. A. Stewart.
See the discussion in Lear (2006) of the “orienting” power of poetry, which through allegory [hyponoia] can
convey meanings that enter “the psyche beneath the radar of critical thought” (27). On Lear’s account of Socrates’
argument, the child’s incapacity to distinguish between the surface and the deeper meaning of an allegory (see Republic 378d-e) is analogous to the typical adult’s incapacity to recognize the “allegorical nature of ordinaryexperience” (35). Thus the mythical and allegorical aspects of Plato’s writing can have an orienting, or re-orienting
effect on his adult reader, different from but analogous to the effect that stories have on the developing psyche of a
16 child.
The “original experience” evoked here is akin to what Robert Pippin has called “original erotic attachment” in
Pippin (2010), 15-19. My own account is indebted to Pippin’s formulation of this problem as manifest in the17
place), a response to beauty [to kalon]. It is here, as the present study argues, that Plato’s particular emphasis on tragedy, which is addressed by neither Barfield nor Levin, comes into play.
Barfield recognizes the relevance of erôs to the questions he is addressing and concludes his chapter on Plato with a discussion of the Phaedrus and the Symposium. He argues that Plato styles himself as a “new poet” who “will sing about what lies beyond the heavens where true being resides in a manner touchable only by reason” (24). Yet Barfield also sees that any writing that contains an account of “true being” will be subject to the same kind of critiques Socrates levels against poetry. Plato’s writing, he suggests, is meant to replace traditional poetry, attracting and enthralling the reader, facilitating the kind of “fundamental experience” that will draw its readers into a life of inquiry. Such a project, however, encounters a problem brought out by Barfield as follows:
If we are to persist in the training of the soul, we must believe training is for some end. But until the soul has actually reached the final revelation, it cannot be certain that the goal toward which it is working is actually reachable. Indeed, it cannot be certain that the goal is real at all (26).
This dilemma is explicitly thematized at various points in the dialogues when Socrates encourages his interlocutors to persevere in their investigations. A particularly prominent example comes in the Meno, when Meno expresses doubt about the possibility of ever learning 17 anything new. Socrates responds by encouraging Meno not to give up. There are of course
As recounted in the Symposium, Diotima asks Socrates about the lover of beauty: if he were to get that which he loves, what would he have? Socrates responds that he is unable to answer the question, so Diotima replaces the beautiful [to kalon] with the good [to agathon]. Socrates responds that the lover of the good will be happy
[eudaimôn] and the conversation proceeds to the point at which Diotima defines erôs as the desire for the good to be
one’s own always (204d-206a). Beauty soon returns, however, and erôs is redefined as the desire to “engender and give birth in the beautiful” (206e). The final stage of Diotima’s speech, moreover, is all about erôs for beauty, culminating in the life-justifying vision of beauty itself with no mention of the good. This vacillation between the
good and the beautiful points up what I regard to be a central and unresolved question regarding the ultimate object multiple and familiar ironies in the fact that Socrates’ response is to recount what he says he has heard from priests and priestesses and divine poets about reincarnation and the doctrine of recollection. He proposes to rely on the kind of authority he at other times treats skeptically, and he invokes myth to inspire confidence in dialectical inquiry. My point is that, as Barfield recognizes, just this kind of irony is also at play in the relationship between Plato and his readers.
Barfield canvases several potential Platonic responses to this dilemma. At one point, he adduces the “perfect revelations” vouchsafed to Socrates by Diotima in the Symposium. One who beholds the form of the beautiful, writes Barfield, “experiences a vision without becoming ecstatic or possessed by a god, without losing reason … 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” (28). Now, while the Symposium may well offer a description of the kind of erotic attachment that could sustain a life, this does not mean that to read the Symposium is to have the relevant experience. Even in the context of the dialogue, we should note, the “revelation” is heavily qualified. All of what Diotima says is seen as through a glass darkly: it is what Apollodorus says Aristodemus says about what Socrates said quite along time ago about what Diotima said years before that. Moreover, Diotima explicitly warns Socrates, just prior to these final revelations, that he may not be able to able to follow her (210a).
Barfield suggests, alternatively, that Plato relies on the example of Socrates to combat the erotic power of traditional poetry. The dialogues may not themselves reveal “true being” in a way that can inspire attachment to a way of life, but they provide an example of a person dedicated to the search for “true being” and “this example prods us to persist along the way” (27). Here again, however, it is one thing to see Socrates engaged in dialectical reasoning, dialogues for the superiority of the examined life. But there is also, persistently, the suggestion— most saliently in the discussions of erôs—that rational discourse is not sufficient to account for the attachment to a way of life. Moreover, when Socrates is presented as exemplary, there is always the danger that one may come to love Socrates rather than that which Socrates loved.
This very danger seems to be on display in the Symposium, where we are presented one version after another of individuals (Apollodorus, Aristodemus, Alcibiades) who have fallen in love with Socrates but have not adopted his way of life in the deepest sense (though barefoot Aristodemus
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seems to have adopted his lifestyle). Barfield refers to Socrates, misunderstood in this way, as a “false image” and calls this consummation of desire as “false completion” (30). He suggests that Plato’s presentation of Socrates, and his writing in general, is designed to circumvent this by pointing beyond itself. “The task of the true poet,” he writes, “is to make an image that sparks love, without becoming itself the false object of that love” (31). In the end, Barfield’s version of the relationship between philosophy and poetry in Plato looks more like a happy marriage than a quarrel. “True poetry,” he concludes, “creates the starting point from which philosophy proceeds” (31).
This however, as I shall discuss in Chapter Three, is to decide the matter in favor of poetry. Plato is here presented as a “true poet” because his writing points beyond itself, but to what does it point, and how does one evaluate the truth or falsity of that toward which it points? Or, to put it in moral terms, the goodness or badness of that toward which it points? The question, again, is about that which is deemed worthy of love and devotion in the most profound 18 sense. How does one know, for that matter, that the writing points toward anything at all, rather
As McNeill observes, Apollodorus and Alcibaides do not understand “the implication of Socrates’ poetic
association of himself with daimonic Eros. The daimonic, on Socrates’ account, is nothing in itself; it is beautiful or than being a vague gesture toward the beyond, or simply toward nothing? If one acknowledges that “true being” cannot be revealed through discursive activity (“the limits of language” (Barfield 2011, 25)) it seems to be sheer will—what Nietzsche calls the will to power—or blind
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piety to claim this status for Plato and his writing. Moreover, as I discuss Chapters Three and Four, in the absence of any determinant account of the object of desire, it is difficult to see how this understanding of philosophical erôs is to be differentiated from the equally object-less desire that Plato characterizes in the Republic as tyrannical.
While Barfield was motivated to revisit the original site of the quarrel by reflecting on what he saw as its prodigious legacy, one might also be motivated by the question of its prehistory.
There has been a tacit assumption, and at times an explicit contention, among at least some scholars that the ancient quarrel really was “ancient” when Plato was writing—that is to say, that the antagonism suggested by Socrates’ formulation referred to a pre-existing tension between two different modes of discourse. Curtius, for example, writes that “Plato’s criticism of Homer is the culmination of the ‘quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry that was already ancient in