This is the draft of a talk I gave in Dhaka a few years ago, giving the gist of a set of preoccupations
A
Mirror up to Nature: Is philosophy really a form of poetry?
‘Thou shouldst not have been old before thou
hadst been wise’
1.
In the
midst of philosophical activity we can lose our sense of philosophy. In this
loss of perspective we can come to think that because we are philosophers,
philosophy must be just what we do—what we were apt for and trained to do. But
there is a creative as well as critical aspect of philosophy, and there is a
transmission between generations in the philosophical community which can nevertheless
favour one set of aptitudes and interests at the expense of others.
It may
not seem so to sceptical outsiders—and it is ironic that the philosophers have
for so long been a fitting topic for satire—but there is a diversity of
interest, aptitude and sensibility within the philosophical community and a
corresponding diversity of perspectives which taken alone and excluding
integration with others become narrow tunnels of vision.
When
they are put on the defensive by these same sceptical outsiders philosophers
will re-iterate the Platonic thought that the unexamined life is not worth
living, and assert when required that philosophy is the discipline by which
that examination is conducted. But this is often a smokescreen, behind which
philosophy remains absorbed in a conversation with itself, in a competitive,
not to say neurotic refinement of the terms of the elenchus, with little regard
for the life that waits patiently to be examined. The criticism has been, in
other words, that philosophy has lost its way.
This caricature has as they say the advantage of throwing prominent
features into relief even as they exaggerate them.
Philosophy
is supposed to (re-)examine itself from time to time, and is prompted to do
this when a sense emerges that something is lacking or amiss. This cannot
happen, though, if the terms of reflection on its own activity—and this is the
danger of reflection—pleasingly reduplicate the terms of the activity and allow
us comfortably to re-endorse them.
But
that there is something unsatisfactory about the state of philosophy is almost
a commonplace now among those who stand outside the mainstream. So, what is it
to be a philosopher at all? I shall try here to advance a claim that is by no
means original: a conception of philosophy as a moral endeavour with an
emancipatory intent.
2.
There
are two aspects to this intent, just as there are two aspects to emancipation,
what one is liberated from and what
one is liberated for, and this
distinction corresponds to that between the critical and the creative aspects
of the philosophical dialectic. It is unfortunate, however, that the critical
aspect—the elenchus—has in practice almost eclipsed the other, and that the role of the elenchus has been almost
lost sight of by those caught up in a self-proliferating analysis of its terms.
For
most of us the process of asking questions, of analysis and argument for and
against a position, almost defines philosophy, it is what we do. Its role is
essential, but it is one of negative critique, which is not to condemn it as
destructive, though I have heard people express bitterness about the casual
destruction of their beliefs by someone cleverer or more experienced than
themselves. The point of the elenchus lies in the uncovering and dismantling of
the confusions and errors that prevent us from seeing the truth, and it is
destructive only when it is cut off from the other, creative aspect of
philosophy—a good teacher can, after all use the creative tension of aporia to
liberating effect.
But now,
the elenchus does not deal well with inattention, with ungrounded,
undisciplined, distracted forms of attention—which demand a training which
would be available only in an ideal philosophical community. It is of course,
something we neglect—we see ourselves as engaged in an analytical and forensic task
and that doesn’t include a strategy for distracted and absorbed attention.
Consider
the prisoners in the Cave, for instance, who have no reason to believe that
they are prisoners, and there is
nothing in their experience, apparently, that tells for or against such a claim—we
know they are looking in the wrong direction and are too absorbed in what they
are doing to turn around. There is
nothing in their experience that tells for or against the claim that they are
prisoners but, on the other hand, though most of them are ignorant of their
position, we can imagine that some of them are also deluded: they have a view about their experience, viz that it
encompasses reality.
The
prisoners, though, are an image of ourselves and, although it may seem that we
have no reason to believe that they reflect our own condition, the
possibilities of its application are evident—we can at least think that we once
were or that others are.
What
interests me about the liberated prisoner is not their onward and upward path
to the noonday sun—it is their discovery of a perspective which allows them to
see the whole scene, to see for the first time the mechanisms which had
previously determined the form of their experience, the scope of their vision,
the focus of their attention. Their release allows them, in other words, to
stand in a place from which they can see the limits and the conditions of an
earlier perspective.
The
dialectic in its elenchic aspect seeks to dispel illusion and mere appearance,
and it is destructive or even wanton if it fails to fulfil its role of clearing
the way to wisdom and virtue—but it does not, as I said, include a strategy for
inattention, except of course that in its other, creative aspect philosophical
dialectic does have a strategy, as we
have just seen. It holds a mirror up to nature, offers images that show us our
condition from a point of view we are uneasily half aware of. It holds a mirror
up to nature, but a particular
mirror, it offers images that reproach and challenge consoling or pleasing
self-images that simply reflect the terms of our absorption. The significance
of the philosophical or genuinely creative metaphor is that it embodies an idea
or estimate of what it represents. The consoling or flattering self-image is a
form of self-authentication, reflecting back not the form of our desire but its
object as perceived under the sway of that desire, whereas the philosophical
metaphor is creative just to the extent that it implicitly queries what it
represents, carries a perspective on it, an idea of it—it is not a replication
of the terms of the perspective it represents, but sees it as a conditioned
whole from a position beyond it. In the third Critique Kant makes the distinction between talent and genius
reside in the latter’s power to awaken ideas and, as it were, to see (human)
nature as phenomenon in the light of those ideas. In Kantian terms the
philosophical metaphor awakens an idea—not, to use one of his examples, an
enticing image of fame or celebrity, say, that reflects its glamour as an
object of desire, but leads us to see it clearly and see it whole.
3.
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is
All mere complexities
The fury and the mire of human veins[1]
Our
attention is distracted from the fury and the mire of human veins when it is
caught by the beauty of the moonlit dome—an aesthetic moment in which our
immersion is suspended—a dome which, in its contrasting magnificence, casts a
critical light, or allows us to cast a critical eye on what we were immersed in,
from a point beyond it. Attention to this reflected light upon the cathedral
dome leads us towards its source, which is itself a form of reflected light,
and so on, in a graduated progress, not unlike that of the liberated prisoner,
in which a perspective emerges upon human nature that waits to be incorporated
into a larger conception that depends upon an embodiment through the ordeal of
purification.
The
elenchus is only a part of the dialectic, a necessary set of tasks which can be
destructive if it fails to fulfil its role of clearing the way to wisdom and
virtue. The terms ‘confusion’, ‘error’, ‘appearance’, ‘illusion’, are forensic
terms that refer us to states of the
human subject—from whom the truth is concealed. And the traditional, critical
function of the elenchus then makes
way for a second, creative function—disclosure, revelation, unconcealment of
what is unacknowledged by or hidden from the subject thus compromised.
Diagnosis
and cure are both parts of the philosophical enterprise, but they express a
human concern that explains the freed
prisoner’s return to the cave. The disquieting thought is that the freed
prisoner is an image of homo
philosophicus—one whose passion for wisdom is a passion to become wise but
also a passion for wisdom to prevail.
In
Plato's Symposium (Plato, 1951) the
philosopher is symbolised by Eros but
part of the discussion of eros is juxtaposed with a discussion of poiesis and
we need, I think, to look at both of these notions to draw some conclusions
about what it is to be a philosopher at all.
However,
that eros and poiesis work together will start to become evident if we look at
a third aspect of the discipline, viz the creative act by which the community
of philosophers is brought into and then sustained in being in the first
place—viz the foundation of the Academy. The creative necessity for this
foundation is expressed obliquely in the dialogue essay, and it comes in the
description of the ascent of eros:
The
next stage is for him to reckon beauty of soul more valuable than beauty of
body; the result will be that, when he encounters a virtuous soul in a body
which has little of the bloom of beauty, he will be content to love and cherish
it and to bring forth such notions as may serve to make young people better; in
this way he will be compelled to contemplate beauty as it exists in activities
and institutions, and to recognise that here too all beauty is akin … (210c)
Why will he be ‘compelled’? Because
the forms of activity and of what we institute as a practice provide the
conditions under which beauty of soul may flourish.
4.
In
his Notebooks (Winch, 1977, p 24)) Wittgenstein wrote:
Philosophie
dϋrfte man eigentlich nur dichten[2]
And the young John Stuart Mill wrote
in a letter to Thomas Carlyle that
…
one thing not useless to do would be to … make those who are not poets
understand that poetry is higher than logic, and that the union of the two is
philosophy[3]
Mill’s
suggestion that philosophy is a union
of logic and poetry might be compared with Descartes’ remark to Princess
Elizabeth, that the human being is a union
of soul and body, une seule personne,
as he puts it, not a soul within a body. Philosophy, on this view, would have
its own integrity as an art-form, and the ‘poetry’ would be integrated into the
form of interrogative and discursive dialogue. Nevertheless, to think of
philosophy as a distinctive art form we shall need to think of it as at least
sharing some of the characteristics of poetry, see it in other words as a related
form of poiesis, a form of
creativity.
If these
remarks and those preceding it put pressure on our conception of philosophy—and
our view in consequence of the current condition of the discipline—they also
put pressure on our conception of poetry—in either case the pressure takes the
form of the charge that we have allowed a dichotomy to arise where there ought
to be a union, and if we need to reassess our conception of philosophy we also
need to reassess our conception of poetry, or at least reflect on what it might
be to think of philosophy as in some significant sense ‘poetic’. We have a
dichotomy, an intellectual distortion that nevertheless determines in advance
the direction of conscious reflection, when two elements that belong together
within an integrated whole, are cut in two and treated independently and out of
all connection with one another. Overcoming the dichotomy is a matter of
restoring the connections and finding a way back to the sense of an integrated
whole. If in Mill’s terms philosophy without poetry is reduced to logic it is
tempting to identify logic with the critical, elenchic function and poetry with
the creative and revelatory. But what essential characteristic of poetry is
being invoked, and what is the nature of the convergence? To explore this
further we shall need to look at Diotima’s remarks about the nature of poiesis as the creative activity of
bringing into existence something that did not previously exist—and in the case
of philosophy I should want to say that it takes the form of bringing into
existence a form of self-understanding that was not previously there, one that
constitutes a transformation of subjectivity, so that something new is brought
into being.
In any
event poetry must be more than ‘the merely decorative word’, as Pound once
said,—not ‘what oft was thought’ but rather what we are by its means only now
able to bring to thought at all, showing us what we had previously been unaware
of, making new sense—in the spirit of Shelley’s ’marking the before unapprehended
relations of things’—which poetry does, he says, just because it is ‘vitally
metaphorical’. This is the function that
poetry shares with philosophy, or, rather, contributes to the properly
integrated discipline of philosophy. But we need an account of its revelatory
function that comes within the scope of the emancipatory intent. The form of
the philosophical metaphor is as we have already seen one that reveals the
possibility of inhabiting a perspective upon the world as a limited whole—to
give us the sense of a universe as Paul Valery put it, but to see it from a
position beyond it—to form an estimate of (human) nature as phenomenon that
informs and enhances that nature. This philosophical intent is available widely
in literature of course, as when Dennis Potter, for instance, seduces us into a
state of desire as we gaze at some scene, only to confront us with its vicious
nature, in a way and with a force that depend upon the success of the
seduction.
We
should understand metaphor here, not as an ornamental way of expressing what we
already know, but as an access to understanding,
a means of disclosing, not an item of knowledge, but a world. It might be helpful here to reassert the
point that we should not think in terms of a category of ‘metaphorical meaning’
but think of metaphor rather as a function of language that depends upon
literal meaning to bring about what has been called a burgeoning of meaning.
Thus, to use the example famously discussed by Stanley Cavell, ‘Juliet is the
sun’ does not, bizarrely, describe the
girl, making a ‘wildly false’ statement about her, but rather reveals to
Romeo a source of possible
descriptions, not, again, of the girl, but of the form of his relationship to
her, which can then be unfolded in a series of comparisons. In fact this
free-standing metaphor has the form of an identity statement. The identity
statement is the metaphor, and it
depends for its effect upon the literal use of the terms that compose it, and just
because of that it produces a degree of conceptual shock: we are forced by our
own recoil to ask ourselves how it could possibly be true.
Gerard
Manley Hopkins does something similar when he tells us that ‘the mind has
mountains’, etc., where the metaphor is unfolded in the poem itself. The series
of illuminating comparisons are not, however, between the mind and mountains, but
the mentality of grief and despair is compared to the weariness and the danger,
the terror and vertigo confronted by a climber. And you need to have hung
there. Here again, the form of the
experience of mental life coalesces and is seen, brought into focus, where
before it was simply endured, in a way that may remind us of Spinoza’s
discussion of the conditions under which an affect that is experienced as passio comes to be experienced as actio as we form a clear and distinct
idea of it.
But the
pressure towards metaphor comes from the painful inarticulacy that precedes
insight, where there is no clarity about what is to be articulated. The creator of the metaphor, who seeks to
communicate the form of an experience with which they are coming to grips, is
not in any great degree different from the recipient. The appropriateness of
the comparisons is registered unconsciously and in advance, we see ahead of
conscious recognition. The interesting metaphors are precisely those in which
there is unconscious recognition that one thing, whose nature has been unclear
to us, is like another whose nature is
clear to us. The recipient of the metaphor is also brought under the same
conceptual pressure. But how remarkable, that features of the natural world,
the sun shining, for example, should be available for comparisons that
illuminate the form of our own human life, and that our attention can be
focused on things external because we have already started to see in them an
isomorphism with things internal.
5.
In the Symposium Plato famously presents us with a metaphor which succeeds
at once in representing the form of life of the philosopher and at the same
time makes that life the figure of a human subjectivity whose character is
illuminated by that metaphor. So Eros is the figure of the philosopher who is
the figure of the human being in process of becoming. Both Socrates and
Alcibiades count as philosophers, in the sense that they both desire wisdom,
though of course Alcibiades is presented as someone who thinks of wisdom as
something that he can have as a possession, and is thus shown not to understand
the nature of what he desires.
Now Diotima declares, somewhat
disingenuously, that:
The
truth is that we isolate a particular kind of eros and appropriate for it the
name of eros which really belongs to a wider whole, while we employ a different
name for the other kinds of eros.
She makes similar remark a few
moments later about poiesis: we
assign exclusively to verse the name of ‘poiesis’
or poetry, even though there are other activities that are equally ‘poetic’ in
their creatively bringing into existence what did not previously exist.
I say ‘disingenuous’ because the
cases are somewhat different—poiesis is a generic term for creative activity
and it is clear enough that the various arts can be assembled under that
heading—anything that brings something into being that was not there before is
a form of poiesis, though the kind that interests Diotima is that which brings
into being wisdom and virtue—which would make the poetry she cites as exemplars
of this—Homer and Hesiod—philosophical poets. As philosophers we have been
trained to make distinctions and to look for difference under the appearance of
identity, but sometimes it is important to see identity under the appearance of
difference and whereas that is straightforward in the case of poiesis, it
requires creative and imaginative thought to follow Diotima in her account of eros—which is just what metaphor
demands. What is striking, indeed, is that it is by reference to the language
of desire and procreation that we have to understand philosophy as a form of
poiesis—since the bringing into existence that constitutes it a form of
poiesis, indeed the bringing into existence in terms of which we have
established a conception of creative life at all, is through the metaphorics of
conception, gestation and bringing forth, not to mention Socratic midwifery.
And then of course there is begetting, which tends to be prioritised by the
male Platonic psyche.
If a metaphor begins with what is
familiar to us—in this case, the experience of sexual life and desire, of being
an erastes and an eromenos—it does so because what is familiar
provides a transferable structure that sheds light on an area of experience
that is less familiar. That would be mysterious, were it not that our attention
is already drawn to something familiar because we have started to discern,
although dimly, its isomorphism with what we are struggling to understand, our
attraction to the image is the beginning of coming to grasp what remains
unfamiliar—we make progress in understanding through metaphor, it is the medium
of unconscious discernment—we already know that it carries across. The essence
of Diotima’s claim is that eros provides us with a philosophical metaphor for
what it is to be a human being at all, as represented by the philosopher—it
gives us a perspective on a form of life.
There is plenty of irony here— a
form of experience can be familiar without being well understood, and what
Plato offers us is a metaphor from sexual life whose applications allow us then
to turn round as it were and locate and shed light on the experience of sexual
life itself. But the metaphor is about the process of self-understanding, and
it serves to bring that process into focus. Eros or Love is not a beautiful god
but is exemplified in the figure of one who is ‘weather-beaten, shoeless and
homeless’. This is generally taken to be a figure of Socrates himself, the
philosopher/erastes, but it works in part because it is recognisable as a
figure of sexual desire seeking its unattained eromenos whom, as Diotima
insists, it does not properly seek to possess but with whom rather it seeks to
procreate, so that what issues from the union is wisdom and virtue
.
The salient feature of desire is the
suffered lack or absence of its object. I find it hard to understand the idea
of a desire for wisdom, though, except
as a response to or as an aspect of a distressed, negative experience of its
absence—whether one thinks of those who wish that they themselves were or had been
wiser or less foolish, or those who see the ghastly consequences of human folly
more generally and wish that wisdom might prevail. The distressed state is one
which forces the question, how then should
we live, if not like this? If this is
the essential condition of philosophy then the philosopher is someone who
confesses to an unsatisfactory condition of subjectivity and conduct:
6.
.
I have already echoed Kant in seeing
the philosophical metaphor as one by which we gain a perspective upon a world,
upon a totality or limited whole, and I mention this again now because in
talking about wisdom and its contrast, therefore, with folly, we enter a crucial
and contested area. If we contrast wisdom with folly or foolishness we must
contend with a contrast between ‘worldly’ wisdom and what ‘the world’ counts as
folly as well as a notion of wisdom for which worldly wisdom is a form of
folly. If I express myself here in terms that derive from the Christian New
Testament they also reflect the contrast between the cynicism of Glaucon and
Adeimantus and the Socratic diagnosis of their attitudes as reflecting a
sickness within the soul. This takes us back to the liberated prisoner and the
claim I made at the beginning that philosophy is a moral endeavour with an
emancipatory intent since the world of the prisoners is precisely ‘the world’
in this sense and the freed prisoner regards it from a position that transcends
it.
Diotima tells us that the gods and the ignorant
have something in common—neither desire wisdom, the gods because they are
already wise and the ignorant because they do not know they lack it. Those who do
desire wisdom, on the other hand, are in between these conditions: they fall
between wisdom and ignorance, not entirely ignorant because they know they lack
wisdom—because, as I have suggested, they suffer from its absence. It is this
existential plight that gives the idea of a passion for wisdom its force, a
force analogous and related to the passion for justice.
Diotima says
Wisdom is one of the most beautiful things and
Eros is the love of beauty, so it follows that Eros must be the love of wisdom
and consequently in a state half way between wisdom and ignorance.
But really we need a better objective
correlative than this to render intelligible the unkempt figure of Socrates as
the representation of that desire. ‘Wisdom is one of the most beautiful things’
does not give us what we need to capture the ordeal of the erastes, does not
give us a clear sense of the spur that impels the philosopher forward suffering
from the failure to attain it
If we need a distinction between knowledge and
wisdom we need to specify a difference. The difference lies in the fact that wisdom
is a condition in which one not only knows how things are as opposed, for
instance, to how they had seemed to be, but in which we comport ourselves and
order our desires in the light of that knowledge: this is the condition of sōphrosunē
and the intermediate state between ignorance and wisdom, the uneasy space
between bad faith and acknowledgment, is the crossing line between akrasia and
enkrateia, and one main way of lacking wisdom and feeling and thus suffering
the lack is in this experience of dissonance between what one knows and how one
acts, where the desired unity between them defines the unity of being found in
the sophron.
7.
I said at the beginning that the released
prisoner sees the mechanisms that had determined the form of his earlier
experience, sees them from a position beyond them, and this of course is the
crux of the problem of communication, as we shall see. But one should also recall the moment in the
narrative when it is suggested that the other prisoners would surely think that
the freed prisoner was mad, and would want to kill him, wouldn’t they?—a
suggestion which Glaucon incautiously endorses, taking on the role of Plato’s
ideal audience. His response is significant as a form of recognition. He endorses a violence of reaction that makes
psychological sense only as an expression of mauvaise foi. It isn’t in fact the prisoners who declare that they would indeed want to kill him:
surely they are too engulfed in their ignorance to be capable of such a
response. But Glaucon’s agreement shows how an audience already and uneasily applies the image to themselves,
expressing the resentful half-acknowledgement that it tells a truth about them.
But the image also helps us to track the
distinction between being genuinely wise and ‘the wisdom of this world’ since
this fits the picture of a perspectivally-challenged judgment on the part of
the prisoners. They also represent a picture of absorption or self-enclosure
which cannot see beyond the horizon of self-regarding desires. To talk about
‘the world’ in this sense, or to talk about ‘worldly wisdom’ not only marks its
epistemological scope as narrower than, as an enclosure within, a larger
‘reality’ but implies an ethical criticism of the nature of that enclosure. ‘This
world’ is precisely a function of reality mediated by self-regarding concerns,
which is one way of making sense of the ideas that the prisoners see shadows
and not substance.
Now the main difficulty with talking of ‘the
world’ in this way is that there is no shortage of traditions that populate and
offer precise delineations of what lies beyond it. Plato’s liberated prisoner
is set up to leave the cave and then return, stumbling back in to announce his
discoveries. But any proffered description of the world beyond the cave will
suffer systematic distortion by his audience, who will interpret it in the
light of their own experience and desires, whereas of course it is partly
intended as an implicit critique of the form of that experience.
But the liberated prisoner should not be
offering such descriptions at all, should not be offering descriptions of the
landscape that lies beyond the confines of the prisoners’ position. He should
rather be offering descriptions of the prisoners.
It is only when they are able to free themselves from their bonds that they can
start to look around and make their own journey onwards and upwards. This is
the point of holding a mirror up to nature and the need for satire, since folly
is highly recognisable even if wisdom is not. The liberated prisoner can comment on the prisoners and their
conduct—or rather, the philosopher can
comment on the human beings whose condition is represented by the story and
very regularly shared by themself. Their more ample and encompassing
perspective is shown in their attitude to the other prisoners and, if we revert
to the early books of the Republic, what Socrates casts his gaze upon and sees
as a sickness of the soul is rampant injustice. What is manifest but not necessarily apparent
in the demeanour of the liberated prisoner is the compassion that derives from
a perspective that cannot otherwise be shared.
If we start talking about what ‘lies beyond’
the world, it looks as though we are talking about a supersensible and noumenal
realm. It is true that I instinctively shrink from such notions and probably
need to defend that instinct, but in the meantime we can think it as an ethical
distinction. In certain contexts, to
talk about ‘the world’ or ‘this world’ or ‘worldly’ is just to refer to the
absorbed condition of the prisoners, and the position beyond it is an ethical
position. The expression ‘the world’ is a term of moral critique as well as a
term of epistemology, and refers to an enclosure within reality that is mediated
by absorption in shadows. Nevertheless we can still think the idea of a
transformation or conversion in which the world is ‘redeemed’ or purified of
the egocentric self-enclosure and acquisitive tendencies whose disastrous
consequences are now endangering future generations. But in that case we shall
still need to mark a distinction between the world and what lies beyond the
world. But again it would be a mistake to think that what lies beyond the
world, whether purged or unpurged, is reality.
It is rather that what lies beyond the world is such reality as we have not so
far encompassed and it lies open before us if we had a mind to look. Perhaps
this is what Guenther meant when he referred to ‘the open dimension of being’.
However, in order to look we need aesthetic or meditative experience, where
thought, in whatever terms, is suspended, allowing us look at things for the
first time and see further relations of things not yet apprehended.
There is something about this in Rilke’s
eighth Duino Elegy (Rilke, Rainer, Maria, 1963) which bears a striking
resemblance to the image of the cave. Animals provide for him an image of those
who are aware of what he calls das Offene.
It is only our eyes that are turned away—the animals seem to look through us to
something beyond that we cannot see. The child is constantly pulled back and
made to look at what is already established. There are six references in the
short elegy to our being turned in the wrong direction:
Always
world
And
never Nowhere without not
He thinks we see das Offene only as we approach death, which is when we start to
look beyond it:
We are
always turned towards creation, and so
See
there only a reflection of freedom
Obscured
by ourselves
8.
Finally, I want to return to something I
mentioned near the beginning. I had made the remark that there is a creative as
well as a critical aspect to philosophy, but also that the formation of the
Academy was a creative act that sought to protect the conditions for the
possibility of the philosophical relationship.
It is tempting here, is it not, to burst into
satirical song about how the instrumentalism and the managerial ethos of our
Higher Education Institutions, the demand to demonstrate research excellence,
to deliver demonstrable benefits to the economy, society, public policy,
culture and quality of life, all tend to undermine the telos of the academy as
a place in which the philosophical relationship can be embodied in practice and
in which its members can flourish. The dissonance is harsh and grating.
However, I have it in mind to end with a well-known remark of Alasdair
MacIntyre (the last sentence of After
Virtue):
What matters at this stage is the construction
of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and
moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us
It may be that Plato’s academy rather than his
republic provides the exemplar for such associations because it is dedicated to
the release of prisoners.
References
MacIntyre, A. (2007). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth
Plato. (1951). The Symposium (trans. Hamilton, W.). Harmondsworth: Penguin
Reeves, R. (2007). John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand. London: Atlantic Books
Rilke, R.M. (1939). Duino Elegies (trans. Leishman, J.B. & Spender, S.). London:
Chatto & Windus
Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Culture and Value (trans. Winch, P.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell
