T. S. Eliot: Philosophy and Genre

There was in the early 20th century a now largely forgotten American-English philosopher named T. S. Eliot. He published some scholarly articles, notably one in The Monist of 1916 on "The Development of Leibniz's Monadism." In general however he preferred to return to an older form of philosophical writing, also preferred of Parmenides, Lucretius, and Henry More: namely poetry. 

I would like to cite at length the final segment of Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" of 1940. It sums up perfectly my own views of religious belief, of the limits of human knowledge, and of our prospects for salvation, but that's not why I am citing it. I am citing it because I would like to then go on to make a point about the relationship between disciplines or domains of inquiry on the one hand, and the genres in which they are written on the other. So read it now. But really read it.

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

In the 14th-century Kerala School of mathematics in Southern India, mathematical proofs were, like "The Dry Salvages," written in verse. This delayed for some time the West's ability to discern within these lines of verse many discoveries that the West would take several centuries more to happen upon on their own using a more or less Euclidean style (dare I say 'style' instead of 'method'?).

Here, in Eliot, we are dealing not with mathematics, but with speculative metaphysics of the sort that also interested Leibniz (alongside mathematics): the relationship between the eternal and the temporal, the nature of corporeality, the prospects of surviving the corruption of the body, and so on. As I often say, if this is not philosophy, I don't know what is, and one hopes that the future's historians of philosophy will, in their surveys of the early 20th century, not consider only Carnap, Heidegger, and the rest of the usual canon of authors writing in the prevailing genre of that (but by no means of every) historical period, but instead will enrich their picture of the era by reading at least a few select poets.  The ones who contributed in parallel to philosophy's prevailing genre might yield particular insight, like Henry More in his day, who described the promise and limitations of 17th-century corpuscularianism both in poems such as the Democritus Platonissans as well as in straightforward treatises such as The Immortality of the Soul. 

Read, philosopher, I mean to say, T. S. Eliot, not as a curious reader who has finished his or her work for the day, but as a philosopher.

Comments

[Eric Schliesser]

Great job, Justin!
It's about time we agreed again.:)

[Jeremiah]

To overstate things, I'd say that philosophers read everything as "philosophy." What would they miss if they were to read poetry as "poetry"? I think some readers are drawn to Eliot because they cannot read poetry ... his writing is reconstructed in their minds along with the grain of familiar philosophical and theological arguments. The thinker reads the argument. But what is the poem, to these readers, without their premasticated philosophy?