Liminal Agencies: Literature as Moral Philosophy

Abstract

The ‘quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry over truth was already an ‘ancient enmity’ in Plato’s time (Plato, Republic, line 607b). In considering the idea of Justice, Plato’s Socrates insists that literature has no power to ‘teach the truth adequately to others’, nor ‘to educate men and make them better’ (Plato, Republic, line 599d). Literature is inimical to justice because it is an ‘illusionism’, ‘an imitation of a phantasm … far removed from the truth’ (Plato, Republic, line 598b).¹ Instead of evoking, even to the degree that perceptual objects do, the one true world of the Forms, the images of art and literature capture only the distorting illusion of the artist’s own way of seeing or style, by which the unity of reality seems to be fractured into a multiplicity of perspectives and worlds. It thus undermines the central philosophical idea of the universality, the univocity, of truth. Moreover, literature is dangerously open to interpretation. It cannot choose its interlocutor. It cannot ‘defend itself’, nor determine ‘when to speak and when to be silent’. It is ‘parentless’ and ‘not lawfully begotten’ (Plato, Phaedrus, line 275d). It is at best the bastard, orphaned remainder of living speech.² Thus, the philosopher ‘will not seriously incline to “write” his thoughts “in water” with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others’ (Plato, Phaedrus, line 276c).