Poets as Philosophers and Philosophers as Poets

Language in India, 2017

Within the extant domain of humanities, both poetry and philosophy are accorded almost an equal amount of veneration. Since Socrates in Plato’s Republic expelled the imitative tragic poets from his ideal state laying grounds for reformed ethical poetry, there have been numerous debates in this regard. Poetry and philosophy have remained at loggerheads since then. However, there are various approaches to read the binary of poetry and philosophy. A comparative analysis of any two ideas must aspire to estimate the recognisable differences as well as similarities between the two of them. Are poetry and philosophy similar to each other? Is there a dichotomy between the two? This essay attempts to contrast and compare the two fields critically.

The quarrel between philosophy and poetry has implications for our lives as both citizens and ordinary human beings. By closely reading and interpreting Book X of Plato’s Republic, which judges poetry by the standard of truth, and Aristophanes’ Clouds, which provides a comic critique of philosophy, we may see that the philosopher and the poet seem to engage in conversation, addressing similar points from opposing views and outlining the terms of their disagreement. This thesis aims to point to questions raised and answered by the poet and the philosopher about the status of reason in governing the soul and the city, the best life for human beings according to their nature, and the role of laws and convention in our lives and relationships. It also applies the discussion of these topics to issues of free expression today, and explores moral authority as both the philosopher and the poet see it.

Aoristo))))) International Journal of Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Metaphysics , 2020

Considering the history of Philosophy, we can see that, before recognizing and stating the peculiarities of its practices, the philosophical discourse was born in intimate connection to poetry. By exploring moments of tension and proximity between poetic and philosophical discourses, the present essay is a reflection on this relationship over time. In order to do so, we focus on the works of authors such as Homer, Plato, Goethe, F. Schlegel, and Schelling as a strategy to show variations and emphasize some specific movements within this long dialogue.

The fact that the term " aesthetics " was only introduced into philosophic discourse by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 is regarded by some historians of the subject as a sign that the ancient Greeks were not much interested in questions about the nature of beauty and the arts. (For them, ta aisthêtika would have suggested sense perception in general.) Other historians treat this fact as a factoid, a historical curiosity that need not stand in the way of assuming that the ancients responded to works of art in ways much like ourselves and confronted the same problems as we do when we try to think about beauty and art. The problem with this reasonable assumption is that it is hard to amass many actual texts that deal directly with the subject: most ancient discussions of issues we would define as aesthetic are embedded in works devoted to quite other topics, especially politics, ethics, or metaphysics. Thus Kristeller's much‐quoted denial that the ancients had anything comparable to modern aesthetics remains a challenge: " ancient writers and thinkers, though confronted with excellent works of art and quite susceptible to their charm, were neither able nor eager to detach the aesthetic quality of these works of art. " 1 The present chapter hopes to throw light on this question by turning from the Greeks' philosophies of art to their literary criticism. The daily, practical business of commenting on poems, interpreting them, and evaluating them implied the existence of standards for evaluating literature. This was especially so in the " agonistic " musical culture of the Greeks, which regularly set one poem against another in a competition to see which was the " finest " (kallistos: Ford 2002, 272–293). Already in the Archaic period, the most prestigious performances of Homeric epic took the form of competitions among professional reciters (rhapsôidoi), and the Athenian contests in tragic, comic, and dithyrambic poetry are well known; amateurs exchanging songs at drinking parties often turned to singing games. All such events raised the question, whether explicitly or implicitly, of what criteria to use when declaring one poem " finest " of all. I propose to study closely two texts from Classical Athens in which the question of standards is discussed. The pair is notable for suggesting that works of verbal art ought to be judged on their own terms. Taken together and set in context, the texts suggest that, in practice if not always in theory, the ancients recognized an aesthetic dimension to literature to a far greater extent than is sometimes allowed. In criticism, the possibility of a literary aesthetics emerges most clearly in the question of whether poets have any autonomy in the sense of immunity to certain kinds of objections

Estetika 50 (1): 27-40, 2013

Poetry as a mode of philosophizing can reasonably be considered a failure when making the following moves: from the experientially particular to general content (by means of abstract thought); from ordinary pre-reflective thinking (a contingent thought someone happened to have) to philosophically rigorous thought (which is rationally grounded); from domestic conceptions (connections of thought made by individual readers) to public conceptions (why these connections are relevant to our general, collective understanding). These problems arise when trying to meet the three main requirements of philosophical inquiry: generality, rationality, and justification. In order to show that the thinking involved in reading a poem is akin to the thinking involved in philosophical inquiry, poetry must make the right kind of moves in thought and meet these fundamental philosophical demands. In this article, the author offers a defence of the view that poetry can make a significant and valuable contribution to philosophical inquiry when faced with these three problems.

A POETICS OF WORLD SAGES

Destrée/A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, 2015

The fact that the term "aesthetics" was only introduced into philosophic discourse by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 is regarded by some historians of the subject as a sign that the ancient Greeks were not much interested in questions about the nature of beauty and the arts. (For them, ta aisthêtika would have suggested sense perception in general.) Other historians treat this fact as a factoid, a historical curiosity that need not stand in the way of assuming that the ancients responded to works of art in ways much like ourselves and confronted the same problems as we do when we try to think about beauty and art. The problem with this reasonable assumption is that it is hard to amass many actual texts that deal directly with the subject: most ancient discussions of issues we would define as aesthetic are embedded in works devoted to quite other topics, especially politics, ethics, or metaphysics. Thus Kristeller's much-quoted denial that the ancients had anything comparable to modern aesthetics remains a challenge: "ancient writers and thinkers, though confronted with excellent works of art and quite susceptible to their charm, were neither able nor eager to detach the aesthetic quality of these works of art." 1 The present chapter hopes to throw light on this question by turning from the Greeks' philosophies of art to their literary criticism. The daily, practical business of commenting on poems, interpreting them, and evaluating them implied the existence of standards for evaluating literature. This was especially so in the "agonistic" musical culture of the Greeks, which regularly set one poem against another in a competition to see which was the "finest" ( kallistos: Ford 2002, 272-293). Already in the Archaic period, the most prestigious performances of Homeric epic took the form of competitions among professional reciters (rhapsôidoi), and the Athenian contests in tragic, comic, and dithyrambic poetry are well known; amateurs exchanging songs at drinking parties often turned to singing games. All such events raised the question, whether explicitly or implicitly, of what criteria to use when declaring one poem " finest" of all. I propose to study closely two texts from Classical Athens in which the question of standards is discussed. The pair is notable for suggesting that works of verbal art ought to be judged on their own terms. Taken together and set in context, the texts suggest that, in practice if not always in theory, the ancients recognized an aesthetic dimension to literature to a far greater extent than is sometimes allowed. In criticism, the possibility of a literary aesthetics emerges most clearly in the question of whether poets have any autonomy in the sense of immunity to certain kinds of objections

Ethics in Progress, 2016

The aim of the article is to show that the so-called “philosophia perennis” is valid for our modern times too. Four philosophical schools of the Hellenistic times remain influential for the following centuries: Plato and Neoplatonism, Aristotle and the Peripatetics, the Stoics and the Epicureans. We are interpreting two, only two, poems from Thomas More and Jacob Balde, and so we see the greatest possible influence of all these four ancient philosophical schools.