Philosophy and poetry. Essential tensions and confluences

Abstract

Since its birth in ancient Greece, philosophy has been compelled to clarify its connection with poetry, at least as fundamentally as with rhetoric and its sophistic drift. In this essay, we consider these complex relationships through paradigmatic examples taken from the history of philosophy and the history of poetry. We begin by showing the ambivalence of Plato's position to indicate, precisely, how the question gravitated from the very beginnings of philosophy. We then focus on a pair of contrasting contemporary examples: Schopenhauer and Frege. Regarding the latter, we show that some aspects of his semantic arguments depend on the metaphorical use of language, in a sense that, according to his own conceptualization of the difference between representation and thought, leads to questioning the established distinction, showing that, contrary to his orientation, it must be accepted that there is poetic thought. Along the same lines, we illustrate poetic thought through arguments and poems from some paradigmatic works, such as those of Antonio Machado, Fernando Pessoa, and Paul Valéry, among others. From all these sources, we believe it has been sufficiently demonstrated that philosophical and poetic thought maintain points of convergence, both in the impulse from which they originate and in their final expressions. This confluence does not eliminate the tensions between image and idea, so to speak, but even less does it deny their essential links.