Of Poets And Thinkers Beginning

The European Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 5, pp. 519–534, 2009

Of Poets and Thinkers: A Conversation on Philosophy, Literature and the Rebuilding of the World

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COSTICA BRADATAN, SIMON CRITCHLEY, GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA AND ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

Sometimes there can be something supremely seductive about the unclear and the indistinct. On one occasion the ancient Chinese sage Chuang Chou made this disturbing confession, which must have left his disciples utterly perplexed: ‘‘Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou’’ (trans. Burton Watson). The distinct philosophical charm of the situation Chuang Chou found himself in seems to come precisely out of the structural indistinctness on which it is based. Any attempt to pin it down would certainly spoil it; this charm exists only insofar as it remains related to the corresponding ambiguity. The only appropriate way to deal with such a situation consists precisely in ‘‘letting it be’’ and taking its indistinction as a given. In many respects, the relationship between philosophy and literature is not unlike that between Chuang Chou and the butterfly he was dreaming he was: its intense attractiveness comes precisely from the indistinctness on which it relies, and which, needless to say, is in itself a philosophical problem worthy of the most serious consideration. To discuss the charmingly ambiguous relationships between philosophy and literature I have invited three distinguished scholars of philosophy and literature: Simon Critchley, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor in the Humanities for Italian at Yale University, and Alexander Nehamas, Carpenter Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. (C. B.) *** Costica Bradatan: First of all, I would like to thank the three of you for kindly agreeing to take part in this conversation. I know how busy you all are and I am certainly grateful to you for finding the time to participate.

Costica Bradatan, The Honors College, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79401, USA. Email: Costica. [email protected] Simon Critchley, 321 1/2 State St., Brooklyn, NY 11217, USA. Email: [email protected] Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University, Department of Italian, New Haven, CT 06520, USA. Email: giuseppe. [email protected] Alexander Nehamas, 692 Pretty Brook Road, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA. Email: [email protected] ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/09/050519–16 ! 2009 International Society for the Study of European Ideas DOI: 10.1080/10848770903128414

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I would like to start with a certain observation that has puzzled me for some time. It is about a rather widespread presumption in today’s mainstream philosophy (especially in the English-speaking world) that the literary aspects of a philosophical text do not in general mean anything, that they do not—and should not—play any significant role in the production, interpretation and appreciation of that text. It is as though a philosophical text is (or can be easily considered) something perfectly transparent, as if you can ‘‘see right through it,’’ without having to take into account its literariness. The literariness of a philosophical text is, according to this prevalent view, perfectly negligible, something you can easily leave aside, and still the significance of that text will remain intact. There was a time, not long ago, when philosophers (a Bergson, for example) could get the Nobel Prize for Literature. Today, in some circles, if you praise philosophers for the literary qualities of their writings, they might well take that as a disguised criticism. How do you comment on this state of affairs? Where does it come from? What do you make of this trend? Simon Critchley: Let me answer about the relation of philosophy to literature by telling a story. I remember having given a paper at the philosophy department of a prestigious English university that modesty forbids naming. I was in my late 20s and pretty inexperienced at giving papers. The question period was pretty lively and slightly hostile, I recall. At dinner afterwards, a philosopher of a rather different persuasion to mine said, in response to some remarks I’d made during questions, ‘‘I don’t see why reading a philosopher isn’t just like sitting down to dinner with him.’’ The example we both had in mind was Descartes. I pointed out the fact that Descartes would probably not been fluent in English, lived 400 years ago in a very different and indeed explosive cultural and historical context, defined by the Thirty Years War in which was a participant, that he wrote in different styles in his Latin and vernacular texts and experimented constantly with literary form, using the Jesuitical meditation, Montaigne’s autobiographical essay, and even allegedly finishing his career writing the verses to a ballet at the request of Queen Christina of Sweden. After I’d finished pleading, my interlocutor made the obvious move and said, ‘‘That’s all very well from a historical and literary perspective, but what matters is the truth or falsity of Descartes’ arguments.’’ The prejudice here is, as you say in your question, that we can read through the surface of a philosophical text and judge its arguments as either valid or invalid. The book series that epitomizes this approach is Routledge’s ‘‘Arguments of the Philosophers,’’ that I believe was first edited by Freddie Ayer, though I might be wrong. The presupposition of this approach is that it is only the arguments that are important and that we can ignore the historical, rhetorical, linguistic, cultural and literary features of a text as irrelevant surface details that are best ignored. I disagree very strongly with this approach. Arguments are obviously hugely important, but we ignore those other features at our peril and, when we do ignore them, we risk falling into a rather flat-footed philistine approach to philosophical texts. If philosophy is exclusively about arguments, then how do we explain the fact that there are so many poor arguments in so many philosophical texts, beginning with Plato’s dialogues? Was Plato stupid? I think we have reached a very peculiar state of affairs when philosophers are approached with suspicion because they write too well.