Philosophy as Poetry

LISTEN. Thinking this morning about philosophy and poetry, Emerson and James and Shelley and Rorty. (And a bit about baseball and the beach, each of which figure prominently in the poetry of life as I've experienced it.)

"Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitations by the rest of us—these are the sole factors active in human progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow. The rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world." In that passage, James is echoing Emerson, whose essay "Circles" is perhaps the best expression of the romantic view of the nature of progress. "The life of man," Emerson writes there, is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. . . . Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. . . .There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes his story—how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man, and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. . . . In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the nations. . . . Men walk as prophecies of the next age. The most important claim Emerson makes in this essay is that there is no "inclosing wall" called "the Real." There is nothing outside language to which language attempts to become adequate. Every human achievement is simply a launching pad for a greater achievement. We shall never find descriptions so perfect that imaginative redescription will become pointless. There is no destined terminus to inquiry. There are only larger human lives to be lived. As James echoed Emerson, so Emerson was echoing the romantic poets. They too urged that men should walk as prophecies of the next age rather than in the fear of God or in the light of Reason. Shelley, in his 'Defence of Poetry,' deliberately and explicitly enlarged the meaning of the term 'poetry' [as] 'the expression of the Imagination'..." — Philosophy as Poetry (Page-Barbour Lectures) by Richard Rorty

Well, I have to admit that while my Purist instincts recoil at the artificial "ballet" the Savannah Bananas have imposed on our beautiful (former) national pastime, which always already embodied the real ballet of athleticism combined with collaboration and commitment to a shared cause, they nonetheless represent an impressive display of expressive Imagination. Philosophy could do that too; not all philosophy, perhaps, but surely that part of the wisdom quest concerned with ameliorating our condition and "prophesying the next age" of human achievement.

I'm still resisting the Rortian "nothing outside language" locution, though. I imagine there's much outside language, and that great poets are doing their best to imagine it. Maybe the big point, however, is that poetry and imagination are adequately expressive whether they mirror what's "outside" or not. We'd never know if they did. But we can know if they gratify our prophetic wills, and our collective will to truth and reality as we can hope to know it. Truth and reality are different but mutually implicated aspects of a singular referent: facts are real, truth is what we say about the facts and reality when our talk succeeds in moving us forward towards something better.

Wisdom, then, is to recognize and promote what gratifies that impulse. Thus will we live larger lives. That, James reminds us, was always the point. Life, more life. Richer experience. Not mere verbal abstraction.