Section: Teaching philosophy to other disciplines
Paideia and an ancient quarrel
Martin Warner
I
Any consideration of the teaching of philosophy to other disciplines has at least
three variables with which to contend. As a preliminary orientation I shall focus on
teaching at university level in English-speaking universities towards the end of the
twentieth century, and treat as ‘philosophy’ what is there predominantly taught as
such. Even with this narrow focus the notion of what counts as ‘another discipline’ is
not wholly straightforward. Partly this arises from the obscurity of the notion of a
‘discipline’, and partly from the fact that philosophy’s boundaries are not always
clear-cut; some work in mathematics and in physics is also philosophy, and some
work in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language is difficult to
disentangle, respectively, from psychology and from linguistics; further, there are a
number of disciplines on the borders of philosophy such as political theory,
jurisprudence and critical theory.
Further, in those cases where a discipline clearly lies outside the boundaries of
philosophy what counts as teaching philosophy to its practitioners or students may
itself vary, depending on whether the focus is primarily on the content or on the
methods of philosophy. Attention to content may be in place either when a distinct
area of philosophy has a direct bearing on some aspect of the discipline (as in the
teaching of medical or business ethics) or when philosophy’s general concern with
fundamental categories may provide relevant insight into the foundations of a
discipline - whether sociology, cosmology or theology. Attention to method may be
of more general application, but can also be double-edged. It is usual, at least in the
analytic tradition, to stress philosophy’s argumentative rigour, its use of logic and
techniques of analysis, its inculcation of the values of clarity and precision - what
might be called its Aristotelian heritage. But there is also the Socratic, subversive,
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heritage - gestured to by Yeats’s haunting refrain: ‘“What then?” sang Plato’s ghost,
“What then?”’1- which encourages us to examine and question our assumptions, and
which may disrupt clear and orderly results. Content and method can, of course, come
together when attention to a discipline’s fundamental categories, analytic rigour and
unsettling questioning can disrupt that discipline, as theology knows both to its cost
and to its benefit; but they can also be unfortunately separated, as in some versions of
applied ethics where an ethical model seems so apt to some preferred versions of a
discipline or practice that it is analytically refined, absorbed into that practice’s
protocols, and taught to students and practitioners without due attention to its
limitations and problems.
In the pursuit and teaching of philosophy, of course, content and method are
intimately related. Certain types of issue have traditionally been regarded as the preeminent concern of philosophy, narrowly conceived; ontology, epistemology, theories
of meaning and truth, theories of rational inference and proof, and theories of value
would be included in most scholars’ designations of the philosophical heartlands. The
types of procedure found apt for serious engagement with these issues constitute
philosophical methodology. Some of these methods are as ancient as the discipline
itself: the Socratic elenchus is a form of reductio ad absurdum which as late as the
mid-twentieth-century was seen by Gilbert Ryle as exemplifying, in one of its forms,
distinctively philosophical rigour; the Platonic diairesis (division) and synagoge
(collection) prefigure both the analysis and synthesis championed by Descartes (who
notes the geometric antecedents) and the underpinnings for twentieth-century notions
of ‘analysis’ as characteristic of philosophy; while Aristotle’s conception of logic as a
propaedeutic study for philosophy remains entrenched in much philosophical teaching
across the world. Other procedures are more controversial, being associated with
different contemporary paradigms of philosophy - analytical, phenomenological,
hermeneutic, deconstructive and so on - though all have roots in a common
philosophical tradition and engagement with the core philosophical issues. Forms of
engagement with other issues may be regarded prima facie as having philosophical
credentials where they employ such procedures, most obviously when the issues in
question connect the philosophical heartlands with other areas of human concern -
2
hence, in part, the appeal of ‘applied ethics’ and, more generally, ‘applied
philosophy’.
Not only, then, are the boundaries of philosophy to some extent contestable, but
what on any given account of philosophy lies outside its boundaries may be judged to
be more or less remote from it both in terms of content and in terms of method. The
relevance of philosophy to any such discipline or practice may therefore differ
accordingly. Further, philosophy’s relevance, in one mode or another, may be much
more immediate with respect to some specialised aspect than to the fundamentals of
some specific discipline or practice, and where it is relevant to the fundamentals this
may either be directly or because of some apparent conflict between the
presuppositions of different disciplines giving rise to dilemmas which connect with
the philosophical heartlands - such, for example, as may arise between the criminal
law and psychology with respect to the notion of responsibility, or between cosmology
and theology with respect to the concepts of creation and causality. It is therefore
doubtful whether a great deal can be usefully said in any detail about the teaching of
philosophy in relation to other disciplines in general; circumstances alter cases. There
is, however, a fund of experience and reflection on the teaching of philosophy to those
concerned with specific other disciplines and practices, and it may be worth
considering particular instances of these in the light of the general considerations
sketched above.
II
The example I shall take relates to what, right from philosophy’s emergence, has
been seen at least as ‘other’, and often as inimical, to philosophy: poetry or, more
generally, imaginative literature. Neither term, of course, designates a discipline, but
the composition, reception and, where appropriate, performance of poetry, plays,
prose fictions and related genres constitute an overlapping set of practices. Out of
these practices have arisen a variety of second-order practices of discourse about
literature: literary criticism, poetics and, more generally, literary study - the latter at
least having come to be seen as a discipline in its own right to which the relevance of
philosophy is a contested matter.
3
‘There is from of old’ remarks Plato’s Socrates, ‘a quarrel between philosophy and
poetry’. In the Republic he argues for the banishment of the ‘honeyed Muse in lyric
and epic’ from his ideal city; he expresses some unease but regretfully holds to his
conclusion, ‘for reason constrains us’ (607a-c). Despite Aristotle’s attempt to provide
a modus vivendi, the ancient enmity has continued through the centuries; David Hume
remarked that poets are ‘liars by profession’ (A Treatise of Human Nature I. 3. x), and
the logical positivists went one better: poets do not lie because they characteristically
talk literal nonsense. Further, the principles underlying a good deal of the Platonic
critique can be extended to much imaginative literature.
As so often with quarrels, the enmity has been focussed over rival claims to the
same territory, for both philosophy and literature have traditionally been held to share
a concern with both the great and the small truths of the human condition. It was
Plato’s conviction that only philosophy had access to at least the greater of such truths
which led to his banishment of the rival claimant; reason and imagination were in
genuine tension - only reason held out credible promise of enabling us to see the
world clearly and see it whole, and the imagination’s claims to do this as well or better
were counterfeit. (Overlap of content, one might say, he saw as being subverted by
incompatible methods.) There have, of course, been various attempts to end the
quarrel but the most recent is perhaps the most radical: while literature has no access
to the truths of the human condition, neither has philosophy - for philosophy is itself a
kind of writing inescapably enmeshed in the procedures of imaginative literature; the
very notions of such ‘truths’, particularly if conceived of as relating to ‘the ultimate
nature of reality’, itself represents a kind of mirage brought about by failure to grasp
the essentially rhetorical character of all dialectic.
In the English-speaking world this latter ‘deconstructive’ manoeuvre is most
frequently encountered as a leading element of literary theory, part of the discipline of
literary study, although its Derridean origins are firmly in a Germano-French
philosophical tradition reaching from phenomenology to post-structuralism; it is
therefore susceptible to both literary and philosophical critique, as is that earlier
attempt to overcome the ancient enmity pioneered by Aristotle. With certain
reservations, one might interpret the treaty terms proposed by Aristotle as favouring
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philosophy (that poetry is ‘more philosophical’ than history is seen as an important
feature in the positive valuation of poetry [Poetics 1451b]), whereas those proposed
by Derrida do not; to some degree they favour the poetic camp but more
fundamentally that of rhetoric.2 Philosophy’s quarrel with rhetoric is at least as old as
Plato’s disputes with the sophists (his proposed modus vivendi in the Phaedrus
making philosophy very much the senior partner), and the rise of deconstruction can
with some plausibility be seen as a major element in a new, late twentieth-century,
‘sophistic’. Institutionally, the study of rhetoric is greatly decayed, but significant
elements of it - most obviously of the figures and tropes - have been absorbed by
departments of literature complementing their engagement with poetics.
Philosophy’s relationship to literature is thus many layered. At the primary level of
the literary texts themselves, their production, performance and reception, literature is
autonomous - no more intrinsically dependent on philosophy or needing to be taught
by it than with respect to any other element of culture. This is the level of the ancient
quarrel; Plato’s Socrates was concerned to argue that there are extrinsic reasons - to do
with reason, truth, psychological health, and morality - why it should be so dependent,
which its own internal dynamic is prone to resist; and much of this applies also to
rhetoric. Next there is the level of discourse about particular texts, interpreting,
comparing and appraising, which we call literary criticism; to the extent that this
discourse is characteristically designed to persuade it may be classified as a form of
rhetoric, and philosophical analysis of rhetoric has an impressive pedigree; even in its
most austerely analytical mode there remains scope for philosophy to submit the
arguments of literary critics to logical and linguistic analysis. Then there is the level
of theorisation about literature; the great philosophical landmarks here are Aristotle’s
Poetics with its development of the notion of mimesis, and Kant’s Critique of
Judgement where such theorisation becomes subsumed under general aesthetics, but
there are a number of other elements.
From the philosophical side there is the tradition of hermeneutics, with its bearing
on the principles of interpretation of literary texts, and the perennial debate between
dialectic and rhetoric with its recent deconstructive twist running in sometimes strange
channels as it becomes incorporated into literary practice and theorising 5
deconstruction as encountered in literary departments is often several stages removed
from Derrida. On the literary side there is the recurrent resistance to appraisal by
philosophic protocols and procedures, from those noted by Plato - not only in the
Republic but also in the Ion and, more sympathetically, in the Phaedrus - through (to
take just English examples) Keats’s Lamia and Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, to F.R.
Leavis’s insistence that literary criticism’s engagement with the concrete experience
of poetry is wholly distinct from and independent of the abstractions of philosophy3.
However it should be noted that there is at least a case for maintaining that any such
claims to the autonomy, including independence from philosophy, of a discipline or
practice are themselves philosophical in character.
So far as the teaching of philosophy in this context is concerned, much depends on
the level of interconnection with literature in question - and much also of course on
the literary experience, scholarly background and overall sophistication of the students
to be taught. With respect to the latter aspect Aristotle’s well-known concern that
ethics should not be taught to those without sufficient experience to grasp what is at
stake and judge accordingly can be extended to poetics and, more generally, to
philosophical engagements with literature and literary criticism. Barren logicchopping or empty theorising without serious engagement with literature, and lacking
a personal background of honest attempts to interpret, appraise and share one’s
responses to it, are not merely unprofitable but also capable of impoverishing one’s
capacity to be enriched by literature and develop an educationally invaluable capacity
- recently characterised by Frank Kermode as ‘an appetite for poetry’4.
It is in part for this reason that I have chosen to focus on teaching at university
level, both undergraduate and graduate, for university students of literature may
reasonably be expected to have significant literary experience and some appetite for
literature on which philosophical probing can work and which what I have called
philosophy’s ‘Socratic’, subversive, heritage can unsettle to the students’ benefit
rather than lasting loss. As Aristotle remarked in the case of ethics, however, this is
not a matter of age but of experience (Nicomachean Ethics 1095a); some are ready for
philosophical exploration of their literary experience and discourse about it well
before university studies, and it is unfortunately the case that some university students
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of literature are not; the ease with which a significant number of students are seduced
by quasi-philosophical literary theory into transforming what appetite for poetry they
may have had into a delight in theoretical abstractions concerning - and often
deflationary towards - literature is a testimony to the dangers here, analogous to too
early an exposure to the more subversive elements of moral philosophy leading
students to lose what unsteady grip they may have had on the difference between right
and wrong.
With this caveat, I shall turn now to consideration of ways in which philosophy
may be brought to bear on the study of literature, primarily at first degree level but
with some reference to how this might be built on in Master’s programmes. To do
this it will be necessary to take account of the differential layering of philosophy’s
relation to literature, and experience suggests that it makes educational sense to mark
some separation between philosophical consideration of discourse about literature
(roughly, literary criticism, historical contextualisation, and poetics or ‘theory’) and
consideration of literature at the primary level of literary texts (and where appropriate
their performance) themselves. Since the latter type of consideration necessarily
involves the former, it is wise to start by considering the status and variety of
discourse about literature before moving on - self-reflexively - to engaging in it. This
is the order that will be observed here.
III
Philosophy, remarked Aristotle, begins in puzzlement (Metaphysics 982b), and
unless there is something problematic in a student’s engagement with literature which
is already a matter of concern, or which he or she can be readily brought to see as
such, it may be well for that student to steer clear of philosophy in this context.
However in most students’ experience the status of their discourse with others about
literature, and their reading of the critics, throws up questions about objectivity. On
the one hand attempts are made to share responses and perceptions, often with some
degree of success, while on the other full agreement seems always a mirage.
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Students are inducted into a ‘canon’ of literature which appears to incorporate
some degree of settled stability of comparative valuation, yet exposure to historical
scholarship shows that canon shifting while most are aware of strong contemporary
cultural currents (concerning gender, race and more traditional political concerns)
seeking to reshape or downgrade established canons. Again, attempts to understand
complex works of literature lead to apparently competing interpretations, often
seeming equally plausible, together with a sense that all are somehow inadequate.
Such considerations may lead students to doubt the value of discourses concerning
literary appraisal and interpretation, or to see them simply as elements in a form of
cultural politics where norms are partly determined by persuasive success; correctness
of evaluation or interpretation, from this perspective, is relative to a given group of the
like-minded, and canonicity (of value or interpretation) determined by the most
powerful group; which group, if any should have such power is not a literary matter.
But for many such devaluing of the integrity of their literary responses and discourse
is at best unwelcome and at worst rings false; the analogy with ethics is obvious
enough.
Once one’s questioning has reached this level it has touched on philosophy, and the
teaching of philosophy to students thus puzzled is not an impertinence. There are at
least three levels, of apparently decreasing generality, at which philosophy can
usefully operate here. The first is to set such concerns in the context of general
sceptical considerations of which that sketched above is a species. The analogy with
ethics has already been remarked but of course the issue is a more general
epistemological one, relating to the types of agreement and warrant it is appropriate to
seek for conclusions in different contexts. The Aristotelian perception that ‘it is the
mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the
nature of the subject admits’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1094b) has an obvious bearing on
the problems about interpretation and, as for canonicity, the shifts brought about in
literary canons (for example from ‘classic’, though ‘romantic’ to ‘modern’ literature)
may be instructively paralleled by interpretations of the history of the physical
sciences in terms of ‘paradigm shifts’; the extent to which the phenomena pointed to
by the latter term can - or cannot - be accommodated within non-relativist models of
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the philosophy of science may point students to seek analogies in the history and their
experience of literature.
The second level is that of aesthetics, and here an introduction to the Kantian
notion of judgements coming within the category of the ‘taste of reflection’ whose
topic is, ultimately, the beautiful (see Part I of Kant’s Critique of Judgement) can be
instructive. His account of the aspiration to the assent of everyone or ‘universal
voice’ which we nevertheless cannot postulate, as we could in the case of an ordinary
empirical judgement, picks up that sense of claiming something beyond our own
perceptions - that the response which is the ground of our judgement is somehow
appropriate, that that which we perceive should also be perceptible by others - which
is part of the experience of the students in their articulation of their perceptions and
rereading of literary texts in the light of what they hear and read about them. A
consideration of the status of such judgements, of the aesthetic as a category between
pure subjectivity or relativity on the one hand and hard empirical verification or
refutation on the other, is plainly relevant to such students’ condition.
And this can properly lead to consideration of the particular norms, characteristic
moves and even ‘paradigms’ employed in literary criticism; of the varying roles of
mimesis and expression in different types of literature and its associated criticism; of
the Aristotelian criteria of necessity and probability, Keatsean ‘negative capability’,
the aspirations of symbolist poetry and so on. More generally, one may seek to
untangle the different strands of what William Righter has pointed to as the enduring
end of criticism: ‘opening up as much of the work as one can, and relating as much as
seems relevant to both literary and personal situation’.5 While the orientation of
teaching at the first two levels is primarily towards content, at this third level both
content and method are involved, the latter in both the ‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Socratic’
modes. And here what at first seemed to involve decreasing generality, as we focus
down on specifically literary discourse, by a counter-movement opens up as its
different strands connect with other ranges of discourse.
Thus Leavis’s insistence upon literary criticism’s concrete particularity (as
contrasted with the theoretical abstractions of philosophy) connects with that ancient
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philosophical problem of the One and the Many. The evaluative inferences made in
the best criticism have sometimes been argued to be criteriological rather than
deductive or inductive,6 such that where A is a criterion for B it is necessarily the case
that A is evidence for B - that necessity arising from the relation of the concepts in
question; such suggestions clearly bring in their train a whole host of issues not simply
in general value theory but in the philosophy of logic and - indeed - epistemology and
the philosophy of mind. The problems about interpretation raise, on the one hand,
issues about their status (are they descriptive - and if so probabilistic or otherwise - or
evaluative or performative?) and, on the other, issues in the philosophy of language
concerning their connections with questions about meaning more generally: What are
the relations between questions concerning the meaning of a poem and those
concerning the meaning of the words making it up? In either case what role, if any,
does author’s or utterer’s meaning play - or, indeed, matters concerning illocutionary
force? Do any such considerations sponsor a principled distinction between objective
meaning and subjective significance? How does the meaning of ‘poetic’ language such as metaphor - relate to ‘literal’ language? And of course behind all such matters
of interpretation loom the more general issues traditionally the concern of
hermeneutics.
Even with an agenda thus developed, major contemporary currents in poetics
remain unaddressed. Some - such as certain forms of feminism or marxism - are
associated with forms of criticism that may usefully be addressed in the terms already
given; but other forms of these, together with distinct intellectual movements such as
deconstruction, propose their own categories of rationality which need to be explored
and engaged at a broader philosophical level. So at this stage it is worth stepping back
and considering how one might structure the teaching of a programme that thus
ramifies.
One is faced here with the problem of the relation between scope and the time
available. If one takes seriously the requirement that one is teaching philosophy to
literature students no more than half their study time should be taken up with
philosophical input; on the other hand, much less than this is likely to involve serious
oversimplification or shallowness. This provides a case for an undergraduate degree
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where the literary and philosophical elements are fairly evenly balanced - either a joint
(dual) programme or a major/minor structure with the ‘minor’ element maximised.
One such structure, with which I have been involved, that has worked well is a
three-year joint programme where the philosophical components in the first year
include logic and the philosophy of language, an introduction to general problems of
scepticism, and some value theory including aesthetics. Scholarly background in the
history and contemporary context of literature, literary criticism and its concepts is
properly furnished as part of the literary component - as well, of course, as the study
and discussion of literary texts - and towards the end of that year an enquiry is
launched into reflection, in the light of the other studies, on the procedures and status
of literary criticism. This enquiry can be profitably pursued through dialectical
interchange - not infrequently subversive of the orthodoxies - between literary and
philosophical instructors into which the students are drawn in discussion seminars,
ranging over the issues sketched above, so that neither the literary nor the
philosophical voice is marginalised. I have sometimes found it pedagogically
effective, as an aid to self-reflection, to observe earlier in the year practical criticism
classes in which the students are participating, analyse what is said in sequence, and
then ask them to reflect on the nature of the moves made and the status of the claims
proposed, as part of this enquiry.
Courses in later years can engage more fully with aesthetics - perhaps the most
obvious point at which philosophical ‘content’ bears directly on the study of literature
-developing for example the Kantian framework in its wider ramifications, as well as
wider study of the classic philosophers and the standard discussions of scepticism,
truth and value theory. Here or at Master’s level there is scope for serious engagement
with such contemporary intellectual currents as deconstruction - which requires
preparatory background at least in terms of Nietzsche, Husserl, Saussure and
Heidegger. Especially, though not only, in literary contexts deconstruction also draws
on the long tradition of rhetorical scholarship and has serious engagement with
traditions of hermeneutics, but undergraduate degrees should not be overloaded. I
have found it convenient to teach not only hermeneutic theory but also the theory and
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practice (including literary practice) of rhetoric - the latter in dialogue with a scholar
of literature - as part of Master’s programmes.
IV
Thus far the primary level of direct philosophical consideration of literary texts,
where philosophy and literature’s ancient quarrel takes its rise, has only been touched
on by implication. In the programme I have been sketching the issue is adumbrated
towards the end of the first year by including literary texts with their own rhetorical
and philosophico-theological agendas among those with which the literary criticism
discussed deals (such texts as Rochester’s ‘Satire Against Mankind’, Johnson’s
‘Vanity of Human Wishes’, Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ and
Stevens’s ‘Sunday Morning’). But full engagement is delayed until the final year
when the students have experience in reading and discussing in a wide variety of
literary genres, as well as a grounding in the history of philosophy and contemporary
philosophical discussions and techniques, together with experience of reading
philosophical texts. And here, to avoid taking sides in that quarrel, the investigation is
carried on using the technique of dialectical exchange mentioned above, with both
literary and philosophical instructors involved and the students themselves
participating in the light of their own responses to the texts in question; the
discussions have been most fruitful when we have kept closest to the texts.
Also, in order not to skew the agenda to one side or the other, we have not only
considered literary texts concerned with issues that also come within the province of
philosophy, but philosophical texts with an eye to their literary (most obviously
rhetorical) elements, and also texts - from Plato to Nietzsche and beyond - which have
a foot in each camp. Despite its evident inadequacies one may use as an expository
device in the classification of texts the analogy of a spectrum. The philosophical end
may be defined in terms of overlapping issues and methods, where the truth or falsity
of propositions about issues traditionally regarded as ‘philosophical’ is argued for by
standard patterns of logical inference, and all non-logical elements are placed in
subordinate position. It is rare, one notes, for this ideal to be fully realised in major
texts and even apparently paradigm cases (such as Spinoza’s Ethics or Kant’s
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Critiques) gain much of their power from their ‘non-logical’ elements: capacity to
illuminate experience remains significant even in the face of ‘geometric’ austerity, and
where this is so one is dealing with issues important to literary critics.
As one moves toward the centre of the spectrum different elements of the
philosophical end’s defining features drop away. Perhaps most often we have texts
where the truth or falsity of ‘philosophical’ issues is the centre of concern, but the
standard logical models are downgraded or abandoned. Other more ‘literary’ devices
are employed in a persuasive role so that matters may be placed, for example, ‘in a
fresh light’. There is room here for wide variety; Plato’s Phaedrus comes to mind, as
do (with reservations) Pascal’s Pensées, Dickens’s Hard Times, Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra and Sartre’s La Nausée; we have also experimented with different genres
- dialogue, aphorism, philosophical fiction, philosophical poetry and even the
philosophical autobiography. In all such cases the concern to persuade about the truth
or falsity of the issues involved challenges the philosopher to rational assessment, but
such an assessment can only be carried through by means of a thorough understanding
of the nature of the rhetoric involved, which traditionally comes within the purview of
the literary critic.
The literary end of the spectrum is characterised in terms of distinctive forms of
language use, expressive, emotive, indirect, imagistic. euphonic, fictive, generic,
depending on the level of analysis. Only the last category applies intrinsically to the
philosophical end, and that in a subordinate position as the genre that is specified by
the appropriate concerns and procedures. At the generic level poems, plays and
novels are the classic literary forms. Other genres are regarded as ‘literary’ in so far as
either they are closely analogous to the traditional forms or if they exhibit certain
merits that are customarily associated with them, and a crucial role of literary criticism
is the discrimination of such merits. Since literary criticism is centrally concerned
with the relation between how a thing is said and what is said, it may be employed
wherever form/content relations are at issue; thus it may explore and even claim in the
name of literary merit philosophical works (for example, Hobbes’s Leviathan) far
removed from the traditional genres. And just as literary criticism may be appropriate
in the case of clearly philosophical works, so philosophical probing - laying bare and
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assessing the framework of assumptions which render a text intelligible - may
sometimes be in point even with regard to texts far towards the literary end of the
spectrum, belonging to one of the traditional genres and without overt philosophical
pretensions.
It has been our experience that, over wide ranges of material, discussion of texts
incorporating the approaches of both philosophy and literary criticism have been
mutually reinforcing and organically related. It is notorious that philosophical debates
do not wholly fit the standard logical models (if they did, they would soon be
satisfactorily resolved) and detailed attention to the manner in which they are carried
on is an essential element in the philosopher’s attempts at rational assessment. On the
other hand, it has been a recurrent complaint that literary criticism tends either to
ignore its own assumptions or else to read models constructed a priori into the texts it
considers; thus the practice of examining and criticising assumptions which are either
embedded in, or integrally related to, the close reading of particular texts provides one
way of coming to terms with a perennial critical difficulty: how to retain the integrity
of one’s sensibility and freshness of one’s response without pleading theoretical
innocence.
Such teaching requires intense and extended discussion, with detailed attention to
texts, scholarly contextualisation, critical perception and philosophical sophistication,
in all aspects of which the students should be invited to participate. Here the seminar
discussion must take priority over the lecture. In such contexts we should be less
concerned to teach philosophy to another discipline than to incorporate it in the
educational process - less with instruction than with paideia; further, the separation
between the pursuit and the teaching of philosophy is here particularly problematic.
The instructional work elsewhere in the programme is essential, but the aim of the
process should be to help the students to think clearly, read discriminatingly, respond
with integrity and judge wisely for themselves - to find their own balance between
‘Aristotelian’ order and ‘Socratic’ disruption.
But what of the quarrel? Recognition of rhetoric, and indeed metaphor, in the text
of philosophy should only lead us to collapse or deconstruct the difference between
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philosophy and literature, or declare victory to the poets, if the picture of philosophy
as a ‘rigorous’ discipline, with ‘rigour’ defined in terms of deduction more geometrico
holds us captive. Study of the sort I have outlined helps students to see that this is too
simple and schematic. The geometric model for philosophy is but partial; important
philosophical argument is inevitably to be assessed in part by such criteria as capacity
to ‘illuminate experience’ and so on; thus part of philosophical education should be to
help students explore these criteria and integrate them into their overall accounts of
rationality. Such considerations lay behind a remark that impeccably analytic
philosopher, John Wisdom, put into the mouth of an exuberant character in one of his
philosophical dialogues: ‘Logic is rhetoric, proof persuasion, and philosophy logic
played with especially elastic equations’;7 neither he nor his character saw this as
justifying a retreat from the ideal of proof to that of conversation with the
abandonment of truth as a regulative ideal in the manner recently popularised by
Richard Rorty.8 Rather, rhetoric is reconceived as a suitable tool for philosophical
self-analysis, and for this to be possible on Wisdom’s terms it is necessary to
discriminate rational from non-rational forms of persuasion without simply falling
back on the well known procedures of deduction and induction. Here ancient
traditions of rhetorical analysis and more modern procedures of hermeneutics and
literary criticism may all, inter alia, have their part to play.
The point is reinforced if we consider what I described as texts towards the centre
of the spectrum. Here the obvious question arises of whether, and if so how, the
rhetorical strategy of such a text is apt for its particular concern with truth. Such
questions can only be adequately answered if we explore the nature of the text’s
rhetoric, together with the relations between its form and what it is seeking to say and for these explorations we need to employ procedures conventionally associated
with literary criticism. Here we have urgently forced upon us meta-questions about
how far the rationality of an argument may be separated from the manner of its
presentation, together with questions about the canons appropriate to assessing its
rationality; but if the difficulty of distinguishing between rigorous argument and
rhetorical persuasion is as all-pervasive as I have suggested, then these mid-spectrum
questions apply to all texts which are concerned with philosophical issues, and one of
the leading criteria for distinguishing between mid-spectrum and properly
15
philosophical texts collapses. So, too, does any bar to philosophical probing of the
rhetorical power of literary texts with their own persuasive designs upon us, and
exploration of the relations between rational and poetic force. Reason and
imagination, it may begin to appear, are interdependent both in imaginative literature
and in philosophy.
And this is increasingly being recognised. A number of contemporary philosophers
have brought to philosophical prominence the capacity of literature rationally to
illuminate experience in such ways as to properly modify our ways of seeing the world.
Bernard Harrison argues for the capacity of literature ‘to unhinge and destabilise ...
Great Truths’9 , Tristram Shandy being a notable example. Stanley Cavell takes
seriously the categories developed by literary criticism to help us grasp and assess the
capacities of imaginative literature to transform our understanding and sensibility,
playing (for example) Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ off Kant’s account of
the noumenal, and Shakespeare against scepticism.10 Martha Nussbaum argues more
specifically for an interdependence between literature and moral philosophy,
maintaining that each needs the other, from concerns with the fragility of goodness
engaged by the great Greek philosophers and tragedians to the twentieth-century
explorations of the texture of human relationships found in the novels of Henry James.11
Exposure to such philosophers’ sensitive and attentive handling of literary and
philosophical texts, together with consideration of the conceptions of philosophising
such handling presupposes, endorses and serves to develop, may help students to
grasp the variety of modes of seeking clarity and precision, and also of subversion,
that may be legitimate within philosophy, and to see the point of Bernard Williams’s
claim that serious philosophical works are themselves imaginative achievements, that
failure to achieve what is required may well show itself in failings which attract the
kinds of criticism applicable to imaginative literature, not only those familiar from the
standard range of philosophical criticisms: ‘Philosophy needs virtues of literature and
should fear failing in ways that literature can fail.’12
Behind the Republic’s exclusion of the poets lies a certain model of philosophy as
dialectic which alone can yield knowledge, conveyed in language which contains only
16
terms that are perfect images of realities; and the relations between these terms,
relations embedded in the logic of this form of discourse, must precisely mirror those
that hold between the elements of reality itself. The analogies with the linguistic
model of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus are not accidental, and the philosophical pull of
such an idealisation seems to be perennial, often associated with the concern for
clarity, precision and rigour. Given it, the poets in their pretensions to understand and
teach about the most important things in life are indeed ‘liars by profession’ or - as the
logical positivists would have it - purveyors of nonsense.
But Plato himself recognised some of the problems with this ideal; if no image is
identical with that whose image it is, perhaps the notion of a perfect image is
ultimately devoid of sense; and since dialectic is dependent on language the dialectical
ideal is itself problematic. One notes that he himself wrote in dialogue form,
incorporating the ‘Socratic’, subversive, element as well as the ‘Aristotelian’ quest for
rational ordering. In the Phaedrus we are presented by Plato’s Socrates with a vision
that unites the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, with the lover of beauty under the
sign of devotion to the Muses - though that devotion, we find, still involves engaging
in a form of dialectic as well as an idealised rhetoric. Whether that represents his final
vision is controversial, as is whether it should be ours. Ancient enmities still run
deep. But the sorts of philosophical pedagogic engagement with literature that I have
sketched may so help in the formation of our students’ paideia that if, ultimately, they
decide that rapprochement is not possible, that aspiration to common content remains
subverted by irreducible differences of method, their judgement will be informed,
understanding and respect will reach across the battle-lines, and we may be spared the
melancholy spectacle that characteristically ensues when ‘ignorant armies clash by
night’.13
17
Notes
W.B. Yeats, ‘What Then?’, from Last Poems (1936-39), in his Collected Poems, London:
Macmillan, 1961.
1
See for example, Jacques Derrida, ‘La mythologie blanche’, Poétique 5, 1971; English
translation as ‘White mythology’ in his Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Brighton: Harvester
Press, 1982.
2
F.R. Leavis, ‘Literary criticism and philosophy’, Scrutiny 6, 1937; reprinted in his The
Common Pursuit, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin 1962. See also his ‘“Thought” and emotional
quality’, Scrutiny 13, 1945; reprinted in his A Selection from Scrutiny, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1968.
3
4
Frank Kermode, An Appetite for Poetry: Essays in Literary Interpretation, London: Collins
1989; see especially the prologue and first chapter.
5
William Righter, Logic and Criticism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963, p. 84.
6
See, for example, John Casey, The Language of Criticism, London: Methuen, 1966, chap. 8,
especially sect. 2.
John Wisdom, ‘Other minds IV’, Mind 50, 1941, p 215; reprinted in his Other Minds, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1952, p. 86.
7
8
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton
University Press & Blackwell, 1980.
9
Bernard Harrison, Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory, New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1991, p. 11.
10
Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988, chaps. 2-4; Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; see also The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein,
Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979, especially part 4.
11
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy
and Literature, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Bernard Williams, ‘Philosophy and the imagination’; paper presented to the conference After
the Revolution: The Future of Analytic Philosophy at the University of Warwick, March 1996.
12
13
Closing words of ‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold, first published 1867.
18