Philosophical Poet or Poetic Philosopher: Lucretius and the Ongoing Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry

In the early part of the twentieth century the renowned philosopher and Harvard professor, George Santayana, published a wonderful little book entitled Three Philosophical Poets. It is aptly, though perhaps not too inventively, named, as it treats in chronological order three of the more overtly philosophical poets whose magna opera belong to the Western canon: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Santayana’s principal contention in the book is that each one of the three gives voice to a distinct philosophical position or worldview; the work of each poet, that is to say, illustrates his own position’s highest expression. More particularly, he says of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura that it is the Western world’s loftiest vehicle for NATURALISM, Dante’s Divine Comedy is this same for SUPERNATURALISM, and Goethe’s Faust for ROMANTICISM. These three are, he maintains, the chief phases of European philosophy.

It is an interesting argument, to be sure, and also compelling. But as I read this book and continued to consider its title, I could not help but waver over its implicit argument. These three authors, it seemed to me, exhibited a greater degree of disparity than of kinship. I sensed chiefly that Lucretius and the De Rerum Natura resisted inclusion in this group. Dante and Goethe, I thought, were indeed philosophical poets, but Lucretius would more suitably be classed among the poetic philosophers, in whose company one would find the likes of Empedocles, Parmenides, Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida and others. After all, Lucretius himself claimed that his verse was merely ancillary to his larger purpose – namely, to introduce the salvific doctrines of his master, Epicurus, to the Romans, an audience so clearly and so desperately in need of them. Toward the end of Book I, Lucretius remarks, in a passage that has very justly become famous:

Nunc age, quod super est, cognosce et clarius audi.
nec me animi fallit quam sint obscura; sed acri
percussit thyrso laudis spes magna meum cor
et simul incussit suavem mi in pectus amorem
Musarum, quo nunc instinctus mente vigenti 925
avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
trita solo. iuvat integros accedere fontis
atque haurire iuvatque novos decerpere flores
insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam,
unde prius nulli velarint tempora Musae; 930
primum quod magnis doceo de rebus et artis
religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo,
deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango
carmina musaeo contingens cuncta lepore.
id quoque enim non ab nulla ratione videtur; 935
sed vel uti pueris absinthia taetra medentes
cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circum
contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore,
ut puerorum aetas inprovida ludificetur
labrorum tenus, interea perpotet amarum 940
absinthi laticem deceptaque non capiatur,
sed potius tali facto recreata valescat,
sic ego nunc, quoniam haec ratio plerumque videtur
tristior esse quibus non est tractata, retroque
volgus abhorret ab hac, volui tibi suaviloquenti 945
carmine Pierio rationem exponere nostram
et quasi musaeo dulci contingere melle,
si tibi forte animum tali ratione tenere
versibus in nostris possem, dum perspicis omnem
naturam rerum, qua constet compta figura. 950

                           De Rerum Natura I.921-950

which I translate as follows:

“Now come, learn and listen more clearly to what remains. It does not escape me how dark these matters are; but the hope of praise has struck my heart with the sharp thyrsus, and at the same time it has struck into my chest the sweet love of the Muses, impelled by which I now wander with vigorous mind through places pathless to the daughters of Pieros, worn away by the foot of none before. It pleases me to approach untouched fountains and drink, and it pleases me to pluck off new flowers and thereupon to seek for my head the illustrious crown, whence the Muses have covered the temples of none before; first, because I teach about great things and proceed to free the soul from the tight bonds of religion, next because I compose verses so clear about an obscure topic, touching all with musical charm. For this too has a function: as with children, when doctors attempt to administer foul wormwood, they first touch the rims around the cups with the sweet, yellow fluidity of honey, so that their unwitting age might be deluded as far as the lips, so that they might drink off the bitter liquid of wormwood and, though deceived, would not be cheated, but rather, restored by such a deed, grow strong. Thus do I now, since this account commonly seems to be rather gloomy to those by whom it has not been considered, and the crowd shrinks back from this doctrine, I have chosen to set forth for you in sweet-speaking Pierian song my account and, as it were, to touch it with the sweet honey of the Muses, if by chance I might be able in my verses to hold your attention with such an account, while you see clearly the nature of things.”

And so it would certainly appear that Lucretius himself conceived the poetic form of the De Rerum Natura as purely incidental. To modernize his simile, the roughly seven thousand and two hundred hexameters were little or no more than the cherry flavoring in Children’s Tylenol. Moreover the motivation behind the passage seems one of justification, as if he were fully expecting some or all of his readers to question or even challenge his chosen medium.

And this brings us to a more profound problem. Indeed, were we to doubt the significance of this passage, this simile, or perhaps miss it the first time round, we could not fail to recognize that it appears again, almost verbatim, as the opening lines of Book IV. Clearly, Lucretius wanted his readers to take note of this simile. But why? Did he have good reason to expect some raised eyebrows over his decision to convey the Epicurean philosophy through the medium of poetry? I believe he in fact had two reasons to believe this, pertaining respectively to Plato on the one hand and to Epicurus himself on the other.

Turning initially to Epicurus, Lucretius’s conception of this philosopher, hailing from what is today commonly referred to as the ‘silver age’ of Greek philosophy, was absolutely unambiguous: he quite literally worshiped him. Not only do the first, third, fifth and sixth books of the De Rerum Natura contain, either at or very near their beginnings, eulogies to him, but also within these eulogies he names him either “divus homo” or, more bluntly, “deus ille.” One would guess that for Lucretius Epicurus was the closest thing to those almost hopelessly contrived, Martian-like deities, who were said to dwell within the intermundia or ‘spaces between the worlds’ and who served for Epicurus and his followers as models of excellence and exemplars of the highest good: perfect tranquility. The trouble was that this ‘god-like’ man, it would seem, did not dig poetry. In his indispensable text, The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius wrote in reference to the Epicurean sage that “he would not compose poems assiduously.” (10.117-21b) Now, the degree of importance we would attach to the adverb ‘assiduously’ is beside the point; the fact remains that Epicurus evidently urged his disciples to approach the composition of poetry tentatively or, even better, not at all. So, one might well wonder why Lucretius should choose to lay out the central doctrines of Epicureanism in seven-plus thousand lines of beautifully crafted and hard-won lines of dactylic hexameter.

But what was the rationale behind Epicurus’s patent, albeit slightly qualified, prohibition of the poet’s artistry? It appears to have been twofold: first of all, most poetry, and certainly the poetry that is most universally loved and admired, like that, say, of Homer, Hesiod, and company, is positively riddled with lies; indeed, Hesiod’s own Muses admit as much when they inform him that while they surely have the capacity to deliver unto him the truth, they also know how, when they are of a mind, to tell him lies so persuasive that he would have no means of adjudicating the difference between the two. Secondly, poetry, both reading that of others and composing one’s own, is an enterprise so resplendent with passion, with love – also a big no-no in the eyes of the master – that it presents too great a risk of disturbing one’s ataraxia or, to use Lucretius’s term, ‘tranquillitas’. And this brings us to Plato.

In the midst of their theoretical construction of the ideal polis in the Republic, Socrates and his interlocutors eventually confront the problem of education. In the end, they decide, though it pains them all, and not least of all Socrates, to do so, that poetry, replete with lies as it is, would ultimately cause greater harm than good, and so must be banished from the perfectly balanced and therefore perfectly just state.

And yet we cannot help but feel that Socrates, himself Plato’s own artistic rendering of the man, kept his fingers crossed while uttering this pronouncement. For not only must Plato have had some cognizance of the generally poetic character of his dialogues, we also find him, when faced with an especially intractable concept, resorting to metaphor, a tool of the poet, not the philosopher. Thus has he given us his twin-horsed chariot, his ladder of love, his myth of Er, and his allegory of the cave, to name just a few of the more noteworthy examples. Plato’s condemnation of poetry is undermined by the very form in which it is pronounce.

And do we not feel that the same might well be true of Lucretius, that is to say, that his work as a whole, and the simile of the honey-rimmed cup in particular, possesses the same self-refuting character? That simile, as well as the haunting beauty one encounters at almost every turn in the De Rerum Natura, is not reducible to mere supplement. Memos and shopping lists are supplemental; the De Rerum Natura is high art, and as an achievement, it simply would not have been possible without an enormous share of passion, or love.

So it seems Santayana has been vindicated: Lucretius was indeed, and perhaps even despite himself, more the philosophical poet than the poetic philosopher. And we thank our lucky stars.

“When Am I Ever Going to Use This?” And The Problem of Cognitive Diarrhea

As perhaps stands to reason, I’m asked this question more often than most. After all, I teach two subjects here at WRA, the one a reputedly “dead” language, the other a discipline some wit once referred to as “the most interesting path to poverty.” Indeed, a few years ago one of the students in my philosophy class remarked, “So, Mr. Namiotka, it would appear you teach not one but two entirely useless subjects.”  Ouch!  By virtue of my status as “purveyor of the useless,” therefore, I’m uniquely suited to (or at least I have a most vested interest in) answering this classic rhetorical question, a question that stands, for good or ill, as an increasingly compelling objection to the value of liberal arts education in general.

Back in my undergraduate days, I took a course in Ethics. On the very first day, the professor entered the room, put his books down on the desk, and said, “This is the most useless class you will ever take.”  How’s that for a hook? He certainly had our attention. After giving us a moment to take in what he had just said, he continued, “It’s also the most important class you will ever take.”  I don’t recall exactly what I thought upon hearing this, although I imagine I found it appropriately paradoxical, coming as it did from a philosophy professor.  What I do know is that it took me some time to sort out the distinction he was evidently making between what is useful on the one hand, and what is important on the other. Aren’t the two concepts more or less synonymous?

Maybe not. Perhaps the reason that the question – When am I ever going to use this? – is such a familiar one is simply that there is little or nothing that one learns in high school for which one will find a direct application – or use. I like to tell my Latin students that they’ll be very grateful of my services one day when they are confronted in some dark alley by a crazed gunman giving them the choice between death and declining puella. All joking aside, however, the fact is that no matter how beneficial a background in Latin might be for those pursuing careers in medicine or law, no matter how well students of Latin traditionally perform on the verbal section of the SAT, the reason to study Latin – or philosophy or just about any subject one might encounter at the high school level – is not its practical or utilitarian yield.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me: I am certainly not suggesting that no benefits accrue from the study of Latin, or philosophy, or calculus, history, literature, biology, etc. What I am suggesting is that the discovery of such benefits would require one to dig beneath the surface a bit. This sounds easy enough, not to mention quite logical; indeed, as Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion. It is indecent to display all one’s goods.”

And now we come to what I would contend is the true source of the problem: ours is a fast food culture.  Consider for a moment the tremendous success of books like The Idiot’s Guide to the Iliad or The Bible for Dummies or (my personal favorite) Heidegger in 90 Minutes. Consider the tremendous success of Wikipedia.  Indeed, why should we spend years of our lives laboring over works like the Iliad, the Bible, and Being and Time, when the fast-food versions of these highly sophisticated and highly difficult texts are readily available to us?  (I’m reminded as well of an infomercial I saw years ago during one of my many bouts with insomnia. The company that produced it was trying to sell a secret speed-reading technique, and the fellow flipping through various books in the manner of Good Will Hunting was held up as proof positive of the efficacy of this dazzling new technique. After all, he was quite capable of answering any and all questions raised by his trusty interlocutor. He swore that he hadn’t prepared answer to these questions in advance, so...

But that’s beside the point. My first thought upon seeing this was how much fun it would be to hand this speed-reader a copy of Heidegger’s Being and Time or Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, assuming that he himself actually believed in the product he was selling, and either watch him get stuck on the first page or wait until he had finished and then pose a question like “To what extent does Heidegger’s analysis of mood in Dasein inform and/or enhance his phenomenological hermeneutics of the question of the meaning of being?” 

My second thought was, why on earth would anyone want to read a book that quickly? Isn’t it precisely the process of reading that we voracious readers find so gratifying? Well, I suppose that if one reads books to impress potential love-interests at cocktail parties, or potential employers at job interviews, then speed-reading might be the way to go. Such contexts demand little more – indeed, allow for little more – than surface details. Believe you me, the fellow who wishes to delve into the ramifications of the antinomies in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is seldom (and by seldom I mean never) the life of the party. So why not invest in such manuals of popularity as The Iliad for Idiots or The Bible for Boneheads? Why not take that speed-reading course?

Well, one good reason, to return to the fast food metaphor, is that should we partake of such fare, we would thereby run the risk of bringing upon ourselves what one might call ‘intellectual indigestion,’ or, if you like, on the other end, ‘cognitive diarrhea.’

Now, I’m not trying to be slick or clever; I am in deadly earnest. The situation is dire. At stake are our very souls.

Yes, our souls. The fact that many if not most doubt the existence of souls is itself symptomatic of the problem I’m addressing. Though it should be noted that when I use the word ‘soul’ I do not intend it in the sense of a Christian immortal soul; I mean it more in the sense of the ancient Greek notion of that star stuff imbuing our bodies with life. But I digress… Well, I do and I don’t…

But what am I saying, in more concrete terms? A liberal arts education, as I understand it, is one that puts us in touch with the works of truly great human beings. And the driving force behind such an education is an endeavor to set the student free. I know how hokey and trite that sounds, but bear with me a moment. It used to be the case that one might pursue a liberal arts education – a true liberal arts education – at the college level, and this may even still be the case in certain isolated pockets of the country.  But those days are numbered.  hese days one goes to college to learn a trade, and the rare individual who does have aspirations of studying the “liberal arts” is more often than not halted before she’s started, halted by the omnipresent voice of our culture assuring her that utility is the be-all end-all, not just of education but of life itself. That voice doesn’t tell her to what end such utility is directed, but it speaks so vociferously and so interminably that it hardly matters. And the reason it refuses to speak of ends, this ubiquitous voice of our culture, is that it believes the whole notion of “ends” is obsolete and outmoded. There is no end save utility itself, which I scarcely need to tell you is, as an end, utterly and completely vacuous.  One might just as well assert that the end of life is living.

But that’s ok, because we educators still have an opportunity to reach them in secondary school. Right?  Well…  What I find truly frightening – and this not just as it pertains to my own job security – is the fact that this mad drive toward utility for utility’s sake has already begun infecting high schools. It used to be quite common for a student to arrive at college with very little notion of what major she wished to declare. Now, whenever such a student is bold enough to admit that she really doesn’t know what major she will declare, she is usually met with that knowing stare, the one that says, “Do you really think it’s alright to waste so much money on something so flighty as ‘finding yourself’?” And so that same student is frightened into a proper career, like engineering, or medicine, or law, and quite possibly looks back upon her life at the age of forty-five or fifty and wonders what the hell it’s all been for.

We need the liberal arts, in all their glorious uselessness, because they provide the only means of freeing ourselves from the ever-present banality of our culture, a banality that signals the very real threat that one day – perhaps sooner, perhaps later – convention will swallow every last one of us. And that will be the day when the light of our souls is extinguished once and for all.

I’d like to end with one of my favorite quotations. At the beginning of his book called An Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger speaks precisely of the questionable utility of philosophy, but I would suggest that what he says of philosophy applies equally well to Latin, and history, and art; in short, all those useless subjects with which we engage in high school.  He writes:

“It is absolutely correct and proper to say that ‘You can’t do anything with philosophy’. It is only wrong to suppose that this is the last word on philosophy. For the rejoinder imposes itself: Granted that we cannot do anything with philosophy, might not philosophy, if we concern ourselves with it, do something with us?”

Salvete, Omnes!

This is the very first of what I hope will become an indefinite series of weekly posts.  The aim is to share with all interested parties any and all news pertaining specifically to the study of Latin at WRA.  This will hopefully include updates on all of the good work the Latin Club has done.  If I have forgotten to mention something that you believe to be relevant and/or significant, please don't hesitate to let me know.  Although I am myself quite new to the world of blogging, I suspect that the best blogs are dynamic and open to change.

I'm very happy to report that as of this first post Latin is alive and well at Western Reserve Academy.  We have two sizable sections of Latin I, two sections of Latin II, a section of Latin III, and a section of Latin III Honors.  This latter is a new course, which was designed as a more rigorous version of Latin II Honors and ultimately better suited for preparing students for AP Latin the following year.  Since this is the course's pilot year, as it were, its stands to reason that we put AP Latin on hold until next year.  (And, after teaching Vergil consecutively for the past eleven years, I miss him even more that I thought I would!)

The Latin Club is currently in the initial stages of putting together a presentation for WRA's "Culture Night," which will take place this year on February 12th.  In addition, they will work with me to whip up some genuine ancient Roman cuisine for the gustatory delectation of all attendees.  (I should perhaps make the following qualification: while all of the recipes derive from the ancient Roman cookbook of Alpicius, there are certain items for which we really do not have the stomachs, e.g., fried dormice, garum, i.e., liquified fish guts, etc.  With all such items, creative substitutions are utilized.)  The larger, year-long project for the Latin Club is the development of a "Classics Day" right here at WRA.  We envision setting aside a day for the celebration of all things Greco-Roman, with certamina (intellectual combat), a costume contest, a brief lecture from a guest lecturer, a chariot race, a "toga-run," and more.  We'd like to invite students and teachers from many of the local schools, including Hudson High School, University School, etc.  Stay tuned for further updates on this truly exciting project as the year progresses.

Finally, we're just fifty-four days away from departure for Italy and Greece.  Over Spring Break I'll be supervising a tour to Italy and Greece through a company called EF Tours.  The name of the tour is "From Rome to Athens," and as you might well imagine, we'll visit many places in between.  My personal favorites are Rome, Pompeii, Mycenae, Athens, & Delphi, but we'll see a number of other places as well, including the Greek Isles!  For reasons that are perhaps obvious, I'm especially eager for the latter.

Well, thanks for reading, and I hope you'll return regularly!

Si valetis, valeo!

Mr. Namiotka