Roger Scruton's "Poetry and Truth," in The Philosophy of Poetry (Oxford, 2015) ed. John Gibson (149-161) is one of the more interesting discussions of the topic, especially given that Scruton begins with a discussion of Heidegger's concept of poetry as "the founding of truth" which Scruton takes to be true! Scruton rightly takes "truth" to refer here not to evaluation of sentences in terms of truth value, so loved by Frege and friends, but in the sense of revelation, or as Heidegger would put it, unconcealment. Poetry, according to Heidegger, is a bringing forth which is also a bestowing. Scruton says that Heidegger is "attempting to gives a secular version of [a religious idea of revelation]. And by attributing the process of revelation to poetry - in other words, to a human product, in which meaning is both created by human beings and also 'bestowed' by them he can be understood as advocating revelation without God." (150) In relation to my posts on aesthetic atheism, I like Scruton's idea, taken from Wagner's essay "Religion and Art," that "religions have all misunderstood their mission, wishing to propose as true stories what are in fact myths...that cannot be spelled out in literal language." (150) and that "the meanings of the myths must be grasped through art, which shows us the concealed deep truth of our conditions, in dramatized and symbolic form." He also mentions (as a more bleak view) Nietzsche's similar idea that we need art "so that we will not perish of the truth" i.e. that God is dead.
For Scruton, "the heart of poetry is the poetic use of language" i.e. as distinct from everyday and scientific uses, a use that involves figures of speech that do not describe connections but make them in the mind of the reader. He makes a strong distinction between the poetic and the prosaic use of language, the later being instrumental, having the property of aboutness, having an interest in truth as correspondence, and having substitutivity of equivalent terms.
Scruton says that Keats in his "Ode to the Nightingale" "does not describe the bird and its song only: he endows it with value. The nightingale shares in the beauty of its description, and is lifted out of the ordinary run of events, to appear as a small part of the meaning of the world." I have argued elsewhere that Scruton originated the idea of the aesthetics of everyday life back in the 1970s, although, of course, the true grandfather of the movement was John Dewey. Scruton has continued to make major contributions to the field, most notably in his book Beauty. I have also argued that everyday aesthetics happens when the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and that that often happens when everyday phenomena are seen with the eyes of the artist. Scruton shows, through the Keats example, how poetry can make this happen. As he puts it "poetry transfigures what it touches, so that it is revealed in another way" and the test is "truth" in something like Heidegger's sense. Scruton understands the idea of poetry bestowing truth partly in this way: Eliot in Four Quartets "is looking for the sincere expression of a new experience, one that will remain true to its inner dynamic, and how what it is to live that experience in the self-awareness of a modern person. He is looking for words that both capture the experience and lend themselves to sincere and committed use." (159) Yet Eliot's idea may seem overly subjective. By contrast, Heidegger insists on an objective dimension in the grounding that poetry bestows.
Scruton finds in Rilke's "Ninth Elegy" the source of Heidegger's thought, where the truth of the thing, e.g. the house, "is a truth bestowed in the experience." Further "Its measure is the depth with which these things can be taken into consciousness and made part of a life fully lived." (160) So Scruton concludes that there is an inner truth to things, one bestowed by poetry, and that this inwardness is of our experience: "the fusing of a thing with its associations and life-significances in the poetic moment" (161) i.e. achievements that are "fruit of a life lived in full awareness."
Over time, I have become a bigger and bigger fan of Scruton (don't like his politics): he has the broad vision one might call wisdom and stands far above the usual in the realm of analytic aesthetics. Here is one final quote: we question what is the meaning of a world that has come to this: "The right answer is that answer that enables us to incorporate the things of this world into a fulfilled life. For each individual object, each house, bridge, fountain, gate, or jug, there is such an answer. And the poet is the one who provides it....His answer is true when it shows how just such a thing might be part of a fulfilled human life..."
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Plato's Take on Inspiration: The Ion
Socrates claims that Ion does not have art, but merely inspiration. But what is inspiration? Plato's Ion is often read in conjunction with Book X of the Republic, particularly in aesthetics classes. There are some remarkable similarities and differences. In both writings, the poet (and also the inspired interpreters of the poet, including the rhapsode, the critic and the actor) does not really know anything, and certainly does not know what he claims that he knows. In both writings we have a series that starts from and moves away from God. In the Republic, God is the creator of the ideal bed, the carpenter is the maker of the bed in the world of appearances, and the painter is the maker the painted bed. The painter is the imitator. (The whole account of the three beds is there to define the true imitator. Once we know how the painter, as well as the actor who pretends on stage to be, for example, a general, is to be distinguished from the creator and the true maker, then we have the "imitator" defined. "Imitator" does not mean anyone who imitates but rather someone who merely captures the surface appearance of something. Someone who holds a mirror to the world is also at this level.)
In the Ion, the God (or the Muse) is the first magnet, which then gives its power to the poet, who is the second magnet, who, in turn, inspires the rhapsode (or the actor) as well as other artists (for example dancers and stage-designers) involved in performing his work. The audience is at the fourth remove from the Muse.
The remarkable difference between the Republic account of the three beds and this is that in the Ion the poet is only two removes from reality, i.e. is in direct communication with God, and therefore takes the same place as the craftsman in the Republic. I am not going to worry, here, about which work was written first by Plato, although I should mention that the Republic is generally considered a middle and the Ion an early dialogue, which would make any change of mind on Plato's part be something that takes place after the Ion and before the Republic.
There are some differences between the actions involved in the two sequences as well: in the Republic the carpenter's bed is a copy of the ideal bed, and it in turn is imitated by the painter's bed. In the Ion, there are not two processes, but just one: inspiration, which is passed down from one magnet to the next. It is more dynamic in this way. Also, inspiration is just different from imitation. One can imitate with skill, whereas no skill is involved in inspiration qua inspiration. Inspiration is more magical: the inspired person participates in the source of inspiration, they are as if one with the source. The experience of inspiration is closer to a religious experience, whereas the act of imitation could be secular, mechanical, and solely for entertainment purposes. Imitation can involve more detachment, where only the surface form of the original is captured. Inspiration, by contrast, seems to pass on its inner essence: the poet passing his inspiration from God on to the the rhapsode, and the rhapsode doing this for the audience.
Historically, artists have found more support in Plato's theory of inspiration than in his theory of imitation. It is also interesting (and possibly contradictory for Plato) that Socrates saw himself as inspired in some way. In the Apology he often refers to a personal daemon, and there is a passage in the Symposium that implies that he is occasionally possessed by this inner spirit. Also, he praises wisdom in the Apology and says that he has no real knowledge. So, perhaps he is like Ion in being inspired by a God and in having no knowledge. (Someone who finds the Ion attractive as providing a theory of artistic creation might combine it in some way with the account of the Socratic way of life in the Apology.) However, Socrates also asserts in the Ion that, although the poets and Ion may have wisdom, he himself does not have wisdom and is only interested in truth and knowledge! This would be inconsistent with his position in the Apology that he has no knowledge, although not inconsistent with his commitment there to truth. I cannot resolve this, although perhaps scholars who know the Greek already have.
Another interesting difference between the two series (of beds and magnets) is that possession by the gods in the Ion involves a highly imaginative experience. Ion, for example, is ecstatic in the sense that he almost believes he is in ancient Troy as he recites Homer's poetry. This personal out-of-body imaginative experience is not described in the Republic account of the imitator. Many, in reading these passages in the Ion, have felt that Socrates is, here, more sympathetic to the imitative artist than he shows himself to be in the Republic.
What I would like to do, here, however (and for those of you who have read so far, this is the meat of my comment), is note the very specific quality of being "out of one's mind" described in Ion. Bear in mind that there are many ways in which one can be "out of one's mind," ranging from the relatively innocent moment of being so engaged with an aesthetic object as to forget oneself, to the more scary experiences of being deluded, obsessed, crazy, mad, or, in contemporary terms, entering into a manic-depressive or schizophrenic state. So what does Socrates mean by "out of one's mind"? He speaks of it in terms of Bacchic possession, a very specific kind of religious experience associated with intoxication, death and rebirth: "like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind." (I am working here from the Jowett translation at it appears in Art and Its Significance ed. David Ross, 3rd. ed., 1994, 48-9)
So, what is it to "draw milk and honey from the rivers"? I take it that this involves a kind of positive ecstatic experience when water takes on a quality that is metaphorically intensified. This is similar to the description Edward Bullough famously offered, in explicating his concept of psychic distance, of the fog at sea which I discussed in my book (245-247). He speaks of the fog as "a veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outline of things and distorting their shapes.." (759). The Bacchic maidens, in short, are "out of their minds" in the sense that they engage in a radical form of imaginative seeing of the sort described by Bullough when he describes what he calls "psychical distance."
Socrates goes further: "the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower." (49). Socrates goes on to endorse this view of the poet, even referring to him (her) as "a light and winged and holy thing" like such a bee. Such a poet is active in the sense that he or she goes from one source of inspiration to the next (the sources here, notably, being natural and not explicitly divine) and yet holy in being able to find the divine in everyday life. So, the poet, positively understood by Socrates, is someone who is able to take a radical aesthetic approach to nature, being inspired by nature in an active way, i.e. in bringing songs from fountains and other natural phenomena which he experiences in an intensified imaginative/sensuous way (symbolized by the term "honeyed.")
Thus, contra Neitzsche, it turns out that Socrates has a Dionysian theory both of the creative process and quite possibly also of aesthetic experience. Nietzsche, of course, must have known this. He is inspired by one aspect of Socrates' theory when attacking the other. Don't forget that the surface logic of the Ion is simply that poets and rhapsodes are deceivers in pretending to have knowledge and self-knowledge, whereas they only have inspiration, a kind of second-best sort of wisdom (true wisdom would, of course, involve having true self-knowledge) that can only be held up if one seriously believes in God, something that Socrates makes rather unnecessary in some of his other arguments.
It is only at another level of reading (focusing on the milk and honey text) that Socrates becomes an advocate of Dionysian forms of experience, ones that also involve a form of active engagement that is highly imaginative, that e.g. involves encountering nature in an intoxicated or intoxicated-like way, seeing it with heightened significance, i.e. as having what, in my book, I called "aura." Moreover, this experience of water as milk and honey is a kind of entering into another world, as when Ion seems to enter into the world of Homer: a kind of magical transfer of the self. (A similar view of the creative process can be found in Lu Chi's the Wen Fu as I have argued in an unpublished paper posted on my web page.)
This, by the way, is not the same as another well-founded reading of Ion in which the inspired person simply becomes a spokesperson of the God, as like a medium in a seance. I think that this reading is intended by Plato, but is only on the surface level of the story.
For more on Ion see here
In the Ion, the God (or the Muse) is the first magnet, which then gives its power to the poet, who is the second magnet, who, in turn, inspires the rhapsode (or the actor) as well as other artists (for example dancers and stage-designers) involved in performing his work. The audience is at the fourth remove from the Muse.
The remarkable difference between the Republic account of the three beds and this is that in the Ion the poet is only two removes from reality, i.e. is in direct communication with God, and therefore takes the same place as the craftsman in the Republic. I am not going to worry, here, about which work was written first by Plato, although I should mention that the Republic is generally considered a middle and the Ion an early dialogue, which would make any change of mind on Plato's part be something that takes place after the Ion and before the Republic.
There are some differences between the actions involved in the two sequences as well: in the Republic the carpenter's bed is a copy of the ideal bed, and it in turn is imitated by the painter's bed. In the Ion, there are not two processes, but just one: inspiration, which is passed down from one magnet to the next. It is more dynamic in this way. Also, inspiration is just different from imitation. One can imitate with skill, whereas no skill is involved in inspiration qua inspiration. Inspiration is more magical: the inspired person participates in the source of inspiration, they are as if one with the source. The experience of inspiration is closer to a religious experience, whereas the act of imitation could be secular, mechanical, and solely for entertainment purposes. Imitation can involve more detachment, where only the surface form of the original is captured. Inspiration, by contrast, seems to pass on its inner essence: the poet passing his inspiration from God on to the the rhapsode, and the rhapsode doing this for the audience.
Historically, artists have found more support in Plato's theory of inspiration than in his theory of imitation. It is also interesting (and possibly contradictory for Plato) that Socrates saw himself as inspired in some way. In the Apology he often refers to a personal daemon, and there is a passage in the Symposium that implies that he is occasionally possessed by this inner spirit. Also, he praises wisdom in the Apology and says that he has no real knowledge. So, perhaps he is like Ion in being inspired by a God and in having no knowledge. (Someone who finds the Ion attractive as providing a theory of artistic creation might combine it in some way with the account of the Socratic way of life in the Apology.) However, Socrates also asserts in the Ion that, although the poets and Ion may have wisdom, he himself does not have wisdom and is only interested in truth and knowledge! This would be inconsistent with his position in the Apology that he has no knowledge, although not inconsistent with his commitment there to truth. I cannot resolve this, although perhaps scholars who know the Greek already have.
Another interesting difference between the two series (of beds and magnets) is that possession by the gods in the Ion involves a highly imaginative experience. Ion, for example, is ecstatic in the sense that he almost believes he is in ancient Troy as he recites Homer's poetry. This personal out-of-body imaginative experience is not described in the Republic account of the imitator. Many, in reading these passages in the Ion, have felt that Socrates is, here, more sympathetic to the imitative artist than he shows himself to be in the Republic.
What I would like to do, here, however (and for those of you who have read so far, this is the meat of my comment), is note the very specific quality of being "out of one's mind" described in Ion. Bear in mind that there are many ways in which one can be "out of one's mind," ranging from the relatively innocent moment of being so engaged with an aesthetic object as to forget oneself, to the more scary experiences of being deluded, obsessed, crazy, mad, or, in contemporary terms, entering into a manic-depressive or schizophrenic state. So what does Socrates mean by "out of one's mind"? He speaks of it in terms of Bacchic possession, a very specific kind of religious experience associated with intoxication, death and rebirth: "like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind." (I am working here from the Jowett translation at it appears in Art and Its Significance ed. David Ross, 3rd. ed., 1994, 48-9)
So, what is it to "draw milk and honey from the rivers"? I take it that this involves a kind of positive ecstatic experience when water takes on a quality that is metaphorically intensified. This is similar to the description Edward Bullough famously offered, in explicating his concept of psychic distance, of the fog at sea which I discussed in my book (245-247). He speaks of the fog as "a veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outline of things and distorting their shapes.." (759). The Bacchic maidens, in short, are "out of their minds" in the sense that they engage in a radical form of imaginative seeing of the sort described by Bullough when he describes what he calls "psychical distance."
Socrates goes further: "the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower." (49). Socrates goes on to endorse this view of the poet, even referring to him (her) as "a light and winged and holy thing" like such a bee. Such a poet is active in the sense that he or she goes from one source of inspiration to the next (the sources here, notably, being natural and not explicitly divine) and yet holy in being able to find the divine in everyday life. So, the poet, positively understood by Socrates, is someone who is able to take a radical aesthetic approach to nature, being inspired by nature in an active way, i.e. in bringing songs from fountains and other natural phenomena which he experiences in an intensified imaginative/sensuous way (symbolized by the term "honeyed.")
Thus, contra Neitzsche, it turns out that Socrates has a Dionysian theory both of the creative process and quite possibly also of aesthetic experience. Nietzsche, of course, must have known this. He is inspired by one aspect of Socrates' theory when attacking the other. Don't forget that the surface logic of the Ion is simply that poets and rhapsodes are deceivers in pretending to have knowledge and self-knowledge, whereas they only have inspiration, a kind of second-best sort of wisdom (true wisdom would, of course, involve having true self-knowledge) that can only be held up if one seriously believes in God, something that Socrates makes rather unnecessary in some of his other arguments.
It is only at another level of reading (focusing on the milk and honey text) that Socrates becomes an advocate of Dionysian forms of experience, ones that also involve a form of active engagement that is highly imaginative, that e.g. involves encountering nature in an intoxicated or intoxicated-like way, seeing it with heightened significance, i.e. as having what, in my book, I called "aura." Moreover, this experience of water as milk and honey is a kind of entering into another world, as when Ion seems to enter into the world of Homer: a kind of magical transfer of the self. (A similar view of the creative process can be found in Lu Chi's the Wen Fu as I have argued in an unpublished paper posted on my web page.)
This, by the way, is not the same as another well-founded reading of Ion in which the inspired person simply becomes a spokesperson of the God, as like a medium in a seance. I think that this reading is intended by Plato, but is only on the surface level of the story.
For more on Ion see here
Saturday, July 5, 2014
Can we Paraphrase a Poem or a piece of Philosophy?
I have posted on this matter previously and here, again, I am responding to something written by Peter Kivy, one of the leading contemporary philosophers of art. In "Paraphrasing Poetry (for Profit and Pleasure," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69: 4 (2011): 367-371, Kivy addresses the issue again. The article is polemical, mainly directed against points raised by Peter Lamarque who himself had criticized Kivy's previously stated theory. Despite this polemical nature, the article leads me to think once more about the issue of paraphrase. Kivy believes that poetry is paraphrasable, which for him, simply means that we can interpret its meaning. He further denies Lamarque's claim that the only proper way to read poetry is under the idea of form-content unity, where the content (meaning) cannot be separated from the form. Kivy thinks that reading under the idea of form/content unity is one way to read poetry but not the only way. He thinks that someone like Lamarque would deny that one could read Paradise Lost as a theological tract and be reading it as poetry, and he thinks this would be wrong. I tend to favor pluralism, and I would therefore agree with Kivy on this point. Kivy's reason for his pluralism is somewhat different, however, from one I would give. He is a realist about meaning and so his reason is simply that "A serious, complex poem like Paradise Lost has so much going on in it that a reader...cannot possibly 'get it all' " with one approach. (373) No being a realist I do not believe in the idea of "getting it all." I even think that many of the good readings of Paradise Lost will be seen as contradicting each other or at least as being in some sort of conflict: this is not a possibility for a realist like Kivy. I wonder, also, why various different kinds of readings of Paradise Lost cannot all be under the notion of form/content unity. Does form/content unity really deny giving a theological reading to Paradise Lost? Kivy thinks his opponents will say that his pluralism will allow a reading of the poem that just concentrates on how many times Milton uses "e" but, and I agree, although we have no theory of poetry to exclude this, we do not really need a theory to do so, and we do not want to a priori rule out the possibility that it might provide a viable reading under some theory.
Now, if it the paraphrase contains the content and it is possible to get the content without reading the poem then why bother reading the poem? Is reading the poem rather than reading a good critic's interpretation of it really necessary or even useful? This carries over to reading philosophy books in philosophy classes. Students might ask us why they should read the original work by, say, Hume, when we have provided perfectly good lecture notes, and surely our lecture notes are better than anything they could come up with in terms of explication of content. I am deliberately not using as an example a philosopher who is known for his or her poetic or literary style. The hard and interesting case is Hume. To what extent is philosophy, even of the most straightforward sort, paraphrasable? Of course it is paraphrasable, but the question is, what do we get with a paraphrase? This has an immense bearing on the philosophy of education since we give our students papers and exams in which we expect them to paraphrase philosophical views and we judge these paraphrases based on how well they "get it." Interestingly, we are (or at least, many of us are) willing to accept many different kinds of paraphrase of the same philosophical work as correct. Of course we also have a clear idea when the student gets it wrong. A correct paraphrase shows understanding, and understanding is what we want from the student.
Kivy himself raises the issue of paraphrasing philosophy and they have to do with the issue I just raised: why do we think it valuable for students to read Hume in the original? Kivy gives three reasons for this, two of which I think are of little importance: i.e. the text might have great literary merits independent of its content (this gets us back to the original issue of whether form can be separated from content, and so is not helpful as a reason) and the reader may be curious "as to what the original text is like." The interesting reason is that "the reader might be at a sufficient level of philosophical sophistication to want to make up his own mind about the meaning of the philosophical text by consulting it directly, particularly as the 'experts' will doubtless differ on points of interpretation." (375) This seems plausible at first. However, most students in Introduction to Philosophy are not at a very high level of philosophical sophistication and are unlikely to want to read texts in the original (or even be able to see why this would be a good idea). So why do we philosophy teachers want them to do it, and why do they often in the end get something out of it. One reason is that we want them to be autonomous thinkers. Another is that many of us think that these texts are rich in meaning and open to multiple interpretations. These two points are connected: autonomous readers do not just accept the interpretations of the past but come up with their own interpretations. To follow Hans Georg Gadamer, they ideally engage in a "fusion of horizons" with the text. Moreover, it is the possibility of rich new interpretations with new readings that keeps good old texts alive. Interpretation is a form of dialogue with the great writings of the past.
So back to the paraphrase problem. It is not that paraphrase is impossible: each student who reads a poem or a philosophical text paraphrases when describing its meaning. The problem is in believing that any paraphrase is final: that's the heresy of paraphrase. The heresy is to believe that the text of the paraphrase can substitute for the original text, whether it be poetry or philosophy, that reading the teacher's lecture notes is as good as reading the text. There is another reason. The teacher's lecture notes or the teacher's written out interpretation are only as good as the teacher's understanding of the text, and this is just one understanding. It probably a good understand, deserving even of the highest marks, but still only one of unlimited possible good interpretations. Reading only the teachers interpretation reduces the liveliness of the exchange since one is two removes from the real thing. You can't fuse horizons with Kant by reading Guyer's book on Kant, even though his is the best current interpretation. The experience of understanding is deadened or flattened if one seeks to replace understanding the paraphrase/interpretation with understanding the text itself. Reading Guyer's interpretation is helpful in not getting Kant totally wrong or in testing one's own interpretation or in knowing what the current state of play is in interpreting Kant, but it is not something that replaces Kant, and this is not just because the literary quality is lost. I don't think that losing the literary quality is a big deal: Kant is not know for his literary virtues, although he does have a few good sentences. An important point is that every paraphrase leaves out things that the paraphraser believes is not essential to the content. But it is always possible that someone else reading Milton or Kant will find what is left out to be essential.
I also like Michael Dummett's explanation for the unparaphrasability of philosophy which Kivy gives and partially endorses: philosophy "aims not to formulate theses detachable from their author's expression of them, but to provide insight into very complex conceptual tangles." (375) However, Kivy thinks that this idea only applies to non-mainstream styles of philosophical writing (in which he includes Plato, Spinoza, Augustine, Descartes and Nietzsche). Mainstream philosophy is in "straightforward expository form." According to Kivy, only when the type of writing departs from the mainstream is "the philosophical content...not detachable from its mode of expression." One oddity to all of this is that it is not clear what great philosopher or even what really good philosopher is excluded from this class of non-mainstream philosophers. The list of non-mainstream philosophers that Kivy offers is already stellar and I see no reason why it should exclude Hume, Kant, Quine or Kivy himself. That is, I think there would be a problem with having students read my paraphrase of Kivy as a substitute for reading Kivy himself. So why does Kivy think that the non-mainstream philosophers are different? He says "to get the full content of them and, in particular, to understand how these thinkers construed the very nature of the philosophical enterprise, one must experience the particular mode of expression and content. For the particular mode of expression reflects a philosophical method, and a philosophical method has implications for what the philosopher construes philosophy to be about." But isn't it interesting that Kivy can only come up with great philosophers in his list of non-mainstream philosophers and comes up with no great philosophers when he talks about mainstream philosophers. So wouldn't that imply that mainstream philosophers are more closely allied to interpreters of great philosophers than they are to great philosopher since both attempt to write in a style that is easily paraphrased? Kivy thinks that the strong thesis that great philosophical texts cannot be paraphrased would also imply that one cannot learn Newtonian mechanics without reading Newton's original texts. But, on my view, this is a reductio of Kivy's position on this point since this is precisely the place at which philosophy is much more like literature than like science.
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
Now, if it the paraphrase contains the content and it is possible to get the content without reading the poem then why bother reading the poem? Is reading the poem rather than reading a good critic's interpretation of it really necessary or even useful? This carries over to reading philosophy books in philosophy classes. Students might ask us why they should read the original work by, say, Hume, when we have provided perfectly good lecture notes, and surely our lecture notes are better than anything they could come up with in terms of explication of content. I am deliberately not using as an example a philosopher who is known for his or her poetic or literary style. The hard and interesting case is Hume. To what extent is philosophy, even of the most straightforward sort, paraphrasable? Of course it is paraphrasable, but the question is, what do we get with a paraphrase? This has an immense bearing on the philosophy of education since we give our students papers and exams in which we expect them to paraphrase philosophical views and we judge these paraphrases based on how well they "get it." Interestingly, we are (or at least, many of us are) willing to accept many different kinds of paraphrase of the same philosophical work as correct. Of course we also have a clear idea when the student gets it wrong. A correct paraphrase shows understanding, and understanding is what we want from the student.
Kivy himself raises the issue of paraphrasing philosophy and they have to do with the issue I just raised: why do we think it valuable for students to read Hume in the original? Kivy gives three reasons for this, two of which I think are of little importance: i.e. the text might have great literary merits independent of its content (this gets us back to the original issue of whether form can be separated from content, and so is not helpful as a reason) and the reader may be curious "as to what the original text is like." The interesting reason is that "the reader might be at a sufficient level of philosophical sophistication to want to make up his own mind about the meaning of the philosophical text by consulting it directly, particularly as the 'experts' will doubtless differ on points of interpretation." (375) This seems plausible at first. However, most students in Introduction to Philosophy are not at a very high level of philosophical sophistication and are unlikely to want to read texts in the original (or even be able to see why this would be a good idea). So why do we philosophy teachers want them to do it, and why do they often in the end get something out of it. One reason is that we want them to be autonomous thinkers. Another is that many of us think that these texts are rich in meaning and open to multiple interpretations. These two points are connected: autonomous readers do not just accept the interpretations of the past but come up with their own interpretations. To follow Hans Georg Gadamer, they ideally engage in a "fusion of horizons" with the text. Moreover, it is the possibility of rich new interpretations with new readings that keeps good old texts alive. Interpretation is a form of dialogue with the great writings of the past.
So back to the paraphrase problem. It is not that paraphrase is impossible: each student who reads a poem or a philosophical text paraphrases when describing its meaning. The problem is in believing that any paraphrase is final: that's the heresy of paraphrase. The heresy is to believe that the text of the paraphrase can substitute for the original text, whether it be poetry or philosophy, that reading the teacher's lecture notes is as good as reading the text. There is another reason. The teacher's lecture notes or the teacher's written out interpretation are only as good as the teacher's understanding of the text, and this is just one understanding. It probably a good understand, deserving even of the highest marks, but still only one of unlimited possible good interpretations. Reading only the teachers interpretation reduces the liveliness of the exchange since one is two removes from the real thing. You can't fuse horizons with Kant by reading Guyer's book on Kant, even though his is the best current interpretation. The experience of understanding is deadened or flattened if one seeks to replace understanding the paraphrase/interpretation with understanding the text itself. Reading Guyer's interpretation is helpful in not getting Kant totally wrong or in testing one's own interpretation or in knowing what the current state of play is in interpreting Kant, but it is not something that replaces Kant, and this is not just because the literary quality is lost. I don't think that losing the literary quality is a big deal: Kant is not know for his literary virtues, although he does have a few good sentences. An important point is that every paraphrase leaves out things that the paraphraser believes is not essential to the content. But it is always possible that someone else reading Milton or Kant will find what is left out to be essential.
I also like Michael Dummett's explanation for the unparaphrasability of philosophy which Kivy gives and partially endorses: philosophy "aims not to formulate theses detachable from their author's expression of them, but to provide insight into very complex conceptual tangles." (375) However, Kivy thinks that this idea only applies to non-mainstream styles of philosophical writing (in which he includes Plato, Spinoza, Augustine, Descartes and Nietzsche). Mainstream philosophy is in "straightforward expository form." According to Kivy, only when the type of writing departs from the mainstream is "the philosophical content...not detachable from its mode of expression." One oddity to all of this is that it is not clear what great philosopher or even what really good philosopher is excluded from this class of non-mainstream philosophers. The list of non-mainstream philosophers that Kivy offers is already stellar and I see no reason why it should exclude Hume, Kant, Quine or Kivy himself. That is, I think there would be a problem with having students read my paraphrase of Kivy as a substitute for reading Kivy himself. So why does Kivy think that the non-mainstream philosophers are different? He says "to get the full content of them and, in particular, to understand how these thinkers construed the very nature of the philosophical enterprise, one must experience the particular mode of expression and content. For the particular mode of expression reflects a philosophical method, and a philosophical method has implications for what the philosopher construes philosophy to be about." But isn't it interesting that Kivy can only come up with great philosophers in his list of non-mainstream philosophers and comes up with no great philosophers when he talks about mainstream philosophers. So wouldn't that imply that mainstream philosophers are more closely allied to interpreters of great philosophers than they are to great philosopher since both attempt to write in a style that is easily paraphrased? Kivy thinks that the strong thesis that great philosophical texts cannot be paraphrased would also imply that one cannot learn Newtonian mechanics without reading Newton's original texts. But, on my view, this is a reductio of Kivy's position on this point since this is precisely the place at which philosophy is much more like literature than like science.
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
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