Philosophy and Poetry – Discourses on Minerva
Philosophy has always had a contentious relationship with poetry. In part because of the misunderstanding the non-philosophical public has with philosophy and poetry. Even though virtually all scholars of Plato, for instance, have written that Plato was very much indebted to poetry, that his philosophy is poetic, and that Plato was a known lover of poetry, most people believe Plato was an opponent of poetry because of one section in The Republic when Socrates says he would ban the poets from the ideal city. Yet Plato’s many other statements about poetry throughout his writings, his constant use of poetic myth and structure, reveals a much different story: how philosophy utilized poetry, rationalized it, universalized it, allegorized it, and rebirthed it for a new purpose.
Plato famously makes use of many myths in his writings, none more famous than his reinterpretation of Kronos from Hesiod’s Theogony. In the Theogony, the myth of Kronos is one of violence, war, and bloodshed. Hesiod’s account of the birth of the gods and the origins of the universe is in chaos and violence: Uranus rapes Gaia, consumes their children, Gaia forges a sickle for her surviving son, Kronos, to overthrow Uranus, Kronos castrates his father, takes over as lead god, before being overthrown by Zeus and the Olympians.
What Plato didn’t like about the old poetry was the moral message communicated. Reading the poets, what did Plato conclude? Chaotic violence, not self-mastery and rationality, was the governing principle of the world. Hesiod’s world is one of chaotic violence. Homer’s world is one of chaotic violence. Aeschylus’s world is one of chaotic violence. So on and so forth all the way down to Plato’s own lifetime. Chaos and violence seem to reign supreme in the works of the poets and other dramatists. This is no way to teach the next generation. This is also no way for a society to organize itself. So Plato rejects the moral message of the old poets but then reinterprets them, using their own stories, to present a new story: the birth of the cosmos and human life through rational order and love of the truth.
Plato’s use of the myth of Kronos, especially in The Statesman, serves as the best example of this. We also have Plato’s use of creation myths in the Timaeus as another example where he reevaluates and reinterprets the classic schema of Hesiod. Here, Plato argues against the prevailing poetic notion of a chaotic and violent cosmos. Instead of chaos and violence as governing and creating the world, Plato asserts that Kronos was a rational demiurge, a creator god of rationality and mathematics, order and love, who ordered the cosmos through rational and mathematical principles. This rational and ordered cosmos is what produces the beauty of the universe and the earth we inhabit. We can also know this truth by rational contemplation of what we observe. This rational contemplation of the order and beauty of the universe teaches us that we too are rational and beautiful creatures, capable of self-mastery and beautification in imitation of the reality of the demiurge. What Plato does is deconstruct the old poetry then repurpose it for his philosophical agenda: rationalism, intellect, and beauty. Rather than teach the chaos and violence of the world (which is incorrect anyway) to the next generation, we should teach the next generation the order, rationality, and beauty of the world. The purpose of poetry is mimesis, imitation. Plato’s insight, here, leads to an inevitable conclusion: if poetry teaches chaos and violence, we will imitate chaos and violence; if poetry (or, philosophy) teaches order, rationality, and beauty, we will imitate order, rationality, and beauty.
This allegorization and philosophizing of poetry continues with Aristotle, the Stoics, and reaches another stage of metamorphosis in the greatest of the Neoplatonists, Plotinus. Plotinus, learning from Plato’s reinterpretation of poetry, sets out in the Enneads his own ambitious allegorization of poetry—mainly through his reinterpretation of Hercules and Odysseus as archetypes of human life and existence.
Before we examine this, a few things about Plotinus’s philosophy are necessary to know. Plotinus believed that all existence was interconnected as part of a whole. The problem of knowledge is not that knowledge is impossible but that our worldview is too narrow. We often look at existence from a self-perspective and not a holistic perspective. Once we do so, however, we learn that we live in an interconnected reality. Humans have relationships with other humans. Humans have relationships with earthly nature. Earthly nature has a relationship with the cosmos and the other moons and stars of the universe. This also means humans have a relationship with those other moons and stars because they shape the earthly life and climate that we exist on. So on and so forth. Humans occupy a middle place in the hierarchy of existence, between divinity and mere materialism through the soul – the rational and intellectual part of the human mind.
Plotinus reinterprets the Hercules myth as an archetype of this interconnected and intermediate existence: Hercules is a demi-god, part man and part god. His proper home is with the gods, but he labors on earth like a human. Plotinus sees this as reflecting the reality of human existence: our true nature is divine: rational, intellectual, blessed; our daily existence, however, is earthly. We must labor on earth before we return to the blessed realm of divinity.
Plotinus also articulated the view that existence is a journey: life is a journey. Drawing on Odysseus, Plotinus reinterpreted Homer’s famous story of Odysseus’s journey home to Ithaca as an archetype of human existence: the struggle to overcome the trials, tribulations, and temptations of earthly life to reach a divine homeland (Ithaca) and achieve the blessed happiness that that home portends. Plotinus bequeathed to the world the positive image of Odysseus, since, as those educated in the classics know, Odysseus in the Greek poetic tradition is far less noble and less heroic than those of us living in the 21st century often think. Odysseus was often depicted as a trickster, a liar, a conning self-centered deceiver. Plotinus’s reinterpretation of Odysseus as an archetype of universal humanity, man on a journey home to eternal happiness through the cultivation of virtue during earthly life, has had a major impact on our culture’s reevaluation of Odysseus.
The Platonic reinterpretation of poetry continued in Christianity through Saint Augustine. Augustine, as we know, learned the poetic myths—mostly Virgil—as a schoolboy. After Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, that love of Virgil never subsided. In fact, Augustine cites Virgil more than he does Plato even though we are often taught, somewhat inaccurately and misleadingly, that Augustine baptized Plato. In reality, Augustine baptized Virgil through his baptism of Neoplatonic allegory. Augustine, in having adopted the Neoplatonic allegorical school of interpretation, sets out on his own ambitious reinterpretation of Roman poetry to prove the inner truths of Christianity.
Like Plotinus, Augustine reassesses Virgil’s Aeneid as an archetypal allegory of the soul’s pilgrimage on earth: Troy is the doomed city of man and the promised “eternal Rome” of the Aeneid is an allegory of heavenly paradise. Aeneas is reinterpreted as the earthly Christian pilgrim, surviving war, strife, and temptation to reach the heavenly homeland. Rather than read the Aeneid as a work of history of poetic propaganda, Augustine repackages the Aeneid as a story communicating the inner truth of man’s spiritual destiny: the universal pilgrimage from destruction to eternal life. This gift from Augustine is then passed on through the Middle Ages with all the poets who reinterpret the stories of the pagan past as pointing to the Christian future, this reaches its great climax, of course, with Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Moving forward into modernity, Nietzsche, though he loathed Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine (Christianity), also stood in their footsteps. Nietzsche, too, engages with the Greek classics, the poetic and dramatic tradition of Athens, and reinterprets the poetry and plays at a philosophical and psychological level. The Birth of Tragedy is his great magnum opus on this account; furthermore, Nietzsche’s writing is poetic and dramatic in form and style, much like Plato, even though he is supposedly writing philosophy.
The point, here, is that philosophy has always had a relationship with poetry. In fact, we can agree with Giambattista Vico that poetry gives birth to philosophy. Without poetry, no philosophy. I would go one step further. Philosophy without poetry is not philosophy at all. Philosophy and poetry are meant to be one. Philosophy without poetry is dead. It’s no surprise then that so much of modern philosophy, especially that crude, utilitarian, and analytic form that dominates Britain, is going nowhere. Philosophy is best when it is also poetic and dealing with poetry. From Plato and Plotinus and Augustine, to Nietzsche, to Roger Scruton more recently, what we find among the best philosophers is a poetic mind and poetic soul, one that saw immense truth in poetry, and it was the task of philosophy to unlock that inner meaning of poetry for the rest of us.
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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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