The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry [antikvár]

Preface The studies collected in this volume have been written at various times during the past thirty years. They were produced as expressions of a continuous effort to understand whether philosophy is possible. Their author came to the academic practice of philosophy from poetry. He had been convinced as an adolescent of the truth of T. S. Eliot's observation that philosophy and poetry are two different languages about the same world. Leo Strauss helped him to understand that there is an irreconcilable tension between these two languages as they are commonly conceived. Unfortunately, Strauss's own conception of philosophy was incapable of defending itself against the poetry of Nietzsche and Heidegger. This is not the place to describe the itinerary to which the present author was led by dissatisfaction with Strauss's Farabian concealment of the dilemma of decadence. The extraordinary achievements of Leo Strauss must not be minimized. But on Strauss's own account, they exhibit an impasse between reason and revelation, which by the nature of the claims of each, gives the edge to revelation. Stated with the brevity appropriate to a preface, this awards the victory to poetry. With all honor to the welfare of the multitude, a poetic concealment of the triumph of poetry over philosophy is a deeply disappointing fulfillment of a teaching that exalted philosophy above all other human activities. But so too is the public repudiation of poetry, in the name of the thesis that philosophy is the technical resolution of "puzzles." Analytical philosophy, for all its charms, provided no alternative to Strauss on the one hand or to Nietzsche and Heidegger on the other. On the contrary, it suffered from a fatal lack of self-understanding: it did not see that techne is a species of poetry. When this self-knowledge arrived at last, it was in the form of decadence, the prelude to postmodernism. If we attempt to refresh ourselves from the weariness induced by the inferior poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, and return to the Greeks, we find the origin of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry in the ambiguous senses of mythos and logos.