Plato, poetry and nostalgia
Dr Rachel Fraser, opp academic advisor
In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, four wartime evacuees are sent to a rambling, unfamiliar house. One rainy day, they play a game of hide and seek. The youngest child, Lucy Pevensie, hides in a huge wardrobe, full of fur coats. Wanting to conceal herself as well as possible, she pushes her way to the back of the wardrobe, rubbing her face on the furs. She never reaches the back of the wardrobe; instead, she stumbles into an enchanted, snowbound kingdom: Narnia. Lucy grows up to become one of Narnia’s queens, but eventually she returns to her own world -- our world -- to take up her normal life as a mid-century schoolgirl.
In a later book, The Last Battle, Lucy is an adult for the second time. She watches as her beloved Narnia is destroyed by fire, floods, and a giant who snatches the sun from the sky. But then something very mysterious happens. Although she has just seen Narnia destroyed, Lucy finds herself in a land that seems just like Narnia, or, indeed, seems even more like Narnia than Narnia itself ever had.
Luckily, Lucy has a philosopher to hand. Her old friend Professor Kirke explains that the land they have just seen destroyed was only a shadow, or copy of the real Narnia. The real Narnia, which differs from its copy as an object does from its image, or waking life from a dream, has always existed and always will. He adds, under his breath: "It's all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!" (1)
Plato, one might suspect, would not have been too happy with this ventriloquized cameo. Plato, after all, expelled the poets from the Republic -- his vision of the ideal state, or polis -- because he recognised that poetry sculpts the soul, and the pliable souls of children most of all. Here, he acts as one such sculptor, giving metaphysical heft to a heavy-handed Christian allegory.
But Plato’s quarrel with poetry is not quite what it seems. Plato purports, in his dialogues, to develop a new, intellectually hygienic genre of writing: dialectic. Where poetry acts as a pharmakon -- a kind of intellectual toxin, or drug, that makes us sleepy and forgetful, dialectic wakes us up. But the Socratic dialogue is an overtly theatrical form, blending comedic and tragic elements. In The Protagoras, Callias’ doorman takes one look at Socrates and exclaims “Ha! More sophists! Callias is busy!” and slams the door in Socrates’ face. In The Apology, Socrates sits in a cell awaiting execution; his plight, like any good Athenian tragedy, arouses both fear and pity. Thus, Plato develops his supposed antidote to the poet’s pharmakon by unabashedly robbing the pharmacy.
Most significant, perhaps, is Plato’s choice of mouthpiece, Socrates. Plato’s dialogues do not mark Socrates’ debut as a literary character. The philosopher was something of a stock figure in Athenian comedy, and Socrates appeared on the stage cast in this mould, most famously, as a fraudulent crank in Aristophanes’ satire, Clouds. Plato could have channeled his philosophy through a figure of his own making. But he didn’t; instead, he chose a figure with a literary hinterland.
The more one looks at the Athenian literary record, the more peculiar Plato’s reference to “an ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy appears. Poetry was an exalted form in Ancient Athens: it moulded citizens and scaffolded public life. Philosophy, on the other hand, seems to have been regarded as a bit of a joke. When Plato spoke of an ancient quarrel, then, he was not reporting a quarrel but initiating one. In the words of a tradition of which he ended up one distant ancestor, he produced a performative utterance, but one that masqueraded as a constative.
By making philosophy poetry’s opponent, Plato allowed philosophy to emerge, for the first time, as a unified social practice. Creating philosophy was not simply a matter of giving a name to an activity, but a matter of embedding that activity within certain forms of life and social institutions. To do this, philosophy had to present itself, and come to be, a rival of poetry. As the classicist Andrea Nightingale has argued, Plato wanted to radically reconfigure social and political life. Philosophy was both the name of, and the justification for, that reconfiguration, poetry, the dominant social form which he sought to displace (2).
But, just as Professor Kirke had warned, Plato was also haunted by the cunning of imitation. He worried that we might, somehow, be tricked into mixing up a real bed and a picture of it. This can sound comic -- it would, after all, have to be a very convincing picture! But the worry can be made to seem less comic. When you were a child, you perhaps played a game like the following. (I did.) Pick a word, and repeat it, over and over: `tree, tree, tree, tree, tree…’ or perhaps `duck, duck, duck, duck, duck…’ If you never played as a child, you can play the game now: just pick a word, and say it, again and again. The repetition, you’ll find, works a kind of caustic anti-magic. The word starts off as a kind of precious charm, capable, somehow, of calling real objects -- real trees! real ducks! -- to the mind. Repetition drains the word of meaning. Before, the word `tree’ had seemed engraved on the trees themselves, now there is a yawning gap between the trees themselves and the word we used to have for them. From our new, post-repetition vantage point, the word and the thing seem to have nothing to do with each other; the word slides off the object like water. It comes to seem quite bizarre that you were ever able to use one to talk or think about the other. Occupying this vantage point can be exhilarating. But it can be strange and upsetting, too. But, for better or worse, the semantic vertigo quickly subsides: word and object click back into place beside each other. Plato’s worry, I think, is that we glimpse the truth about words -- which are, after all, a special sort of picture -- only in those stolen, fleeting moments when repetition allows us to briefly resist their spell. The rest of the time, we are under an enchantment. The trouble is, it’s hard to articulate this sort of worry without sounding somewhat hypocritical. After all to say that words are bad, you have to use...words. And so we have something like a paradox.
Poets offer one way out of the paradox. In Annie Dillard’s, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the narrator greedily recites accounts given of and by patients who, having spent their lives blinded by cataracts, become suddenly sighted:
“I asked the patient what he could see; he answered that he saw an extensive field of light, in which everything appeared dull, confused, and in motion. He could not distinguish objects.” Another patient saw “nothing but a confusion of forms and colours.” When a newly sighted girl saw photographs and paintings, she asked ” ‘ Why do they put those dark marks all over them?’ ‘Those aren’t dark marks,’ her mother explained, ‘those are shadows.’ (3)
For the newly sighted, she writes, full of jealousy, “vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning.” (4) Not for her, not any longer: “the fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window—silver and green and shape-shifting blue—is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place” (5). Instead of a “dazzle of colour patches” (6) she sees peaches. The colour patches seem lost forever. She mourns. “I cannot unpeach the peaches”. (7)
This elegy is full of generous irony. The narrator appears to be telling us that she cannot do something -- that she cannot unpeach peaches. But the way she describes her failure is so gently lyrical that our own imagined peaches seem, for a moment, to become unpeached; they seem to swell and glow and shrug their labels off. How can this be? Dillard works her magic with metre. Read only for content, the crucial sentence “I cannot unpeach the peaches” might seem artless, even childish. Metre turns the simple confession into an incantation. Rhythm is expression without content; here, it serves as a vehicle for what must be shown instead of said.
Philosophy, alas, needs to say as well as show; the philosopher cannot, unlike Dillard’s narrator, be in the business of getting beyond meaning, back to “pure sensation”. Philosophy cannot, without collapsing into poetry or prayer, wholly untether the world from our names for it. (So much the worse for philosophy, you might think.) Perhaps the best that philosophy can do is say things in new and startling ways. It can give us new names to think with. By their very novelty, these names can serve to remind us of the strangeness of the word, of the gap between our minds and it, even as they seem to reach out and touch it.
Perhaps, then, part of what Plato disliked about Athenian poetry was its conventionalism. If it drugged the Athenians, perhaps it drugged them because they were used to it. It is when language hardens into familiar forms that we lose any sense of the gap between words and things. If Plato’s dialogues could act as an alexipharmakon at all, perhaps they could do so precisely because of their literary inventiveness.
Literary inventiveness, and inventiveness more generally, is hard to come by in contemporary philosophy. Like so much else, it has become a form of cultural production characterised by what the late cultural critic Mark Fisher called nostalgia. A nostalgic culture is one bogged down in its own history. It is a culture that cannot make anything fresh for itself, but only scavenge, repurpose, and cannibalise its own recent past. One of my favourite things about going to the cinema is watching the trailers, so I always make sure to arrive in time to watch them. It can make for a depressing experience, but one that illustrates Fisher’s claims perfectly: often, every single trailer is either for a sequel or a prequel in a franchise, or a remake of an old (or sometimes not-so-old) movie. There is often nothing really new on offer.
What drives a culture towards nostalgia? Fisher had two answers, one rooted in consumption, the other in production. Patterns of cultural consumption drive nostalgia when they become frenzied and relentless, and so require content that is easily legible and digestible. Patterns of cultural production, on the other hand, come to favour nostalgia when labour is precarious, all-consuming, and mandatory. If you want good and unexpected forms of art, you probably need to allow a lot of people to live on the dole: those frantically trying to seek and keep employment are unlikely to have the time and space required to write poems or make music.
Something like both of Fisher’s answers apply to contemporary philosophy. Not long ago, relatively few academics had doctorates; now, a doctorate is near mandatory for those seeking an academic career. Academia has become professionalised; those wanting to be academics need credentials. But credentialising institutions tend to be risk averse and conservative with a small ‘c’; aspiring academics seeking credentials need their work to be readily legible to examiners and peer reviewers. Meanwhile, intellectual labour becomes ever more precarious. Early career academics often spend more time applying for jobs than reading or thinking about philosophy. Unsurprisingly, then, philosophy has not been much in the business of invention: lots of work -- and I here include my own -- has the feeling of a sequel in a franchise.
But philosophy cannot be wholly captured by the conditions of its production and consumption. For one thing, philosophy remains difficult. It cannot be made so easy to digest. And its difficulty teaches us something important: that the world has not been made to fit our minds. The world outruns us, always.
This makes fairy tales hard to escape. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe opens with a dedication from C. S. Lewis to Lucy Barfield:
My Dear Lucy,
I wrote this story for you, but I had not realised that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still.
Plato’s most infamous conceit was that philosophers should be kings. Part of the job of these wise kings, as Plato conceived it, involved an origin myth, or “noble lie”. Citizens of the polis were to be told that they were:
fashioned and nurtured inside the earth, and that when the work was completed, the earth, who is their mother, delivered all of them up to the world. Therefore if anyone attacks the land on which they live, they must plan on its behalf and defend it as their mother and nurse and think of the other citizens as their earthborn brothers. (8)
It is left somewhat ambiguous whether the philosopher-kings will be in on the deceit, or whether they will believe the noble lie like the rest of the polis. But Book 3 of Republic hints that the rulers, as well as the people, will believe the autochthony myth (9). Even the wise, it seems, cannot do without stories.
It may have been true that by the time The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was published, Lucy Barfield was “too old for fairy tales”. But, the address continues: “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again”.
Footnotes
C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle. HarperCollins: London, 2009.
Andrea Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Canterbury Press, Norwich, 2011.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, ed. C. D. C. Reeve. Hackett Publishing: London, 1992.
Catherine Rowett, `Why The Philosopher Kings Will Believe The Noble Lie’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 50: 67-100, 2016.