THE THESIS

First approach to the thesis (383ab)

Our dialogue, like the Philebus, opens by bringing us in medias res:

The situation seems to be the following. Hermogenes and Cratylus are on their way to the countryside (440e) and have been discussing for some time without reaching an agreement. Then they meet Socrates. Hermogenes suggests that they should inform him of the content of their discussion; Cratylus agrees.

But what is the issue Hermogenes and Cratylus were debating just before meeting Socrates? Hermogenes does not explain this in so many words. Rather, he immediately sets forth Cratylus' own view:

This first part of Hermogenes' exposition is articulated into three coordinate clauses:

1. (C1) ‘There is a natural … beings’ (a4–5),

2. (C2) ‘What some … not a name’ (a5–7),

3. (C3) ‘There is … same for all’ (a7–b2).

As announced in §8.2.3, this Appendix is devoted to the textual issue of 437d10–438b8, the passage transmitted by the MSS in two different versions. To get a clearer view of the matter it will be helpful to start by translating a text that is roughly identical with the one reported by W and with the one printed by Stallbaum and Hirschig, with line spaces added to highlight some relevant joints and a couple of further changes (I also translate the first words of c1–4):

The time has come for me to make good on the promise I issued in the Introduction. As I understand these puzzles, their purpose is to cast doubt on the very existence of time and to problematize the status of the now, and I believe that Aristotle clearly takes them to be sophistical. There is in Physicsiv no explicit, systematic treatment of them (nor anywhere else in the corpus, for that matter). Indeed, immediately after rehearsing the puzzles, Aristotle forthrightly drops them and takes up the other principal question concerning time, namely its nature (218a30). This suggests to me that the puzzles are easily solved, or so Aristotle thinks, when one sees the mistaken conception of time on which they rest and replaces that mistaken conception with the proper concept. And this is in fact the case. Once we get the puzzles in view, it will not be difficult to understand why Aristotle didn't trouble himself to dismantle them, since they aren't really the obstacles they appear to be, but rather are for the most part mirages.

I recast the puzzles here in the form of three arguments, the second offered as a response to an implicit objection to the first:

Aristotle's non-temporal conception of motion saves his definition of time as “a number of motion with respect to the before and after” from circularity, at least insofar as “motion” appears in the definiens. But the definition will nonetheless fail unless “before” and “after” can also be explicated independently of temporal notions. And they can be.

It goes without saying that “before” and “after” do indeed denote familiar, reciprocal temporal relations: Armstrong's moon landing is (in some timeless sense of “is”) before Nixon's death – and the latter is after the former – because the landing occurred at a date earlier than the death. But as this illustration makes amply clear, every relation requires relata, and so I shall speak of the before and after in motion, as well as in time, in terms of the entities that function as the relata for each respective relation, whatever those relata might turn out to be. On the hylomorphic interpretation of Aristotle's theory of time, the temporal entities denoted by “before” and “after” as used in their temporal sense must have some variety of kinetic entities as their matter. Moreover, the existence of such kinetic entities provides a proper referent for “before” and “after” used in a distinctly kinetic sense. My contention is that Aristotle uses the terms in precisely this sense in his definition of time, and that the definition is therefore not circular in any respect.

Having distinguished the various aspects of our own concept of time, we should now examine what I take to be for Aristotle two very obvious though importantly different sources of thought on the subject of time: the common conception of time in fourth-century Athens, and his philosophical predecessors' views on time.

While Aristotle does not explicitly appeal to the first source of thought in the course of developing his theory, he was not immune to the sway of “common wisdom” in his day. Certain features of his account clearly engage some of the remarks on time made by antiquity's greatest historians, and as we shall see, there can be no doubt that his view is driven in part by considerations having to do with the two types of chronometers with which he would have been very familiar.

As the second source of thought, the views of Aristotle's predecessors are always given consideration in his own work, and Plato figures as a looming presence throughout all of Aristotle's treatises. It is my view that Aristotle's theory of time is profoundly influenced by Plato, and much insight into Aristotle's project can be gained when it is cast in the light of Plato's theory. Although there are a number of dialogues containing considerations relevant to a discussion of time, Plato's most developed thoughts on the subject are contained in the Timaeus. Consequently, I shall focus my attention on this work in particular.

More than two millennia after the start of the quarrel, Friedrich Nietzsche revisited the idea that the deity speaking to a poet – in this case, Euripides – might in fact be a demon, but a demon of a particular sort who was responsible for wrecking Greek tragedy, with catastrophic consequences for those who followed. “Dionysius had already been scared from the tragic stage by a demonic power speaking through Euripides,” he says in The Birth of Tragedy. “Even Euripides was, in a sense, only a mask: the deity that spoke to him was neither Dionysius nor Apollo, but an altogether newborn demon, called Socrates.”

Whenever something is apparently gained, it is fair to ask the cost, and this is what Nietzsche does. To achieve the gains made through dialectic, through the addition of the philosophical question to the tools available to the human mind, what was the loss? For Nietzsche what is lost is a kind of metaphysical comfort that tragedy reveals to us and reminds us of, the comfort that, whatever may happen with appearance, life finally remains a powerful presence that outlives all individuals, all nations (Birth, 59). Nietzsche is vehement in his criticism of the forces that resulted in this loss. When we assert that our temporary states of pleasure and pain and our own existences somehow rightly lay claim to eternal importance, we disfigure the very pleasure and pain experienced, twisting the experiences into a mangle of misplaced heights and valleys.

This history has concentrated on the quarrel as it is portrayed and expressed in writing. Throughout, poetry and the poets show up in philosophy as a source of language, a source of ideas, or source of inspiration, or else an obstacle to ideas, a foil, a source of lunacy, a punching bag. It is a persistent relationship, so far looked at from the perspective primarily of the philosophers, though the same quarrel might be addressed from the perspective of the poets with a very different tale resulting. In this history, despite the recurrent appearance of the poets, the importance of the idea of poetry, and the background and foundation provided by poetry for the work of philosophy, it is rare to see what it might look like for various poetic voices – singular voices singing, as did Homer and Hesiod, through the Greek rhapsodes – to be forced into the arena of consciousness created by the philosophical impulse to question and made to stay in the cauldron. All too often in the writings of the philosophers, the poets are made use of, their methods critiqued, some of their claims mocked, and their resources pillaged (often with respect, of course, as with Hegel, Dilthey, and Heidegger), while they are made to serve the singular narrative of the singular philosopher who has seen what is of value and found its place in the world – thus retaining for philosophy legislative authority.

When we step into the lecture hall with Aristotle, we quickly sense that we are in a different arena. There are a few echoes of Plato's judgment on poetry, as when Aristotle, discussing the education of children in the Politics, says, “The legislator should not allow youth to be spectators of iambi or of comedy until they are of an age to sit at public tables and to drink strong wine; by that time education will have armed them against the evil influences of such representations.” But Aristotle embraces the whole range of poetry as valuable in the right setting, and he spends most of his effort trying to understand the elements of great poetry in order to teach the poets.

Plato found a fair amount of overlap between poetry and metaphysics, motivating the quarrel as philosophy made its foray into domains dominated by the theological poets – the realm of truth, the good, the gods, being and access to the mysteries of the universe and the heavens. In all of this, poetry and philosophy occupied similar territory. In order for philosophy to do its work, the quarrel had to become trenchant indeed, Plato's three-part strategy being, as we have seen, to exile the poets; to create a new poetry that is capable of serving philosophy; and to tuck the real philosophy into the realm of silence, inaccessible to the best tools of the poet's trade.

In his New Science, Giambattista Vico offers a very different perspective on the quarrel between poetry and philosophy, in which he reconsiders who the poets are, what their role has been, and what philosophy is to do with them. He offers a view that exiles neither poetry nor philosophy from the domain of wisdom, and he resists artificial boundaries set up between disciplines. Vico was born in the same city as Aquinas, Naples, in 1668. He attained a professorship of rhetoric in 1699 at the University of Naples and held this position until his retirement. In his first inaugural oration ushering in the academic year, he insisted that all branches of knowledge, the entire “universe of learning,” should be the aim of the human mind, an aim that cultivates a kind of diversity in the mind. The key to all accumulated knowledge is that we rightly know ourselves: the truth of the whole and knowledge of the self are always related for Vico. In the range and type of idea that he is willing to entertain, he has a kind of daring that rests in a notion of providence that allows us not to worry too much about “getting it right,” for providence is robust enough to avoid being foiled by our own limitations: “Intensely ambitious as we are to attain truth, let us engage upon its quest. If we fail in the quest, our very longing will lead us as by the hand toward the Supreme Being, who alone is the Truth and the Path and Guide to it.”

The poet “out of his mind” is not trustworthy if our aim is wisdom. A philosopher cut off from the root and source of wisdom is no better. We want our souls to grow. We want our living consciousness of what is real and true to expand. Hegel is the philosopher of consciousness. Before he gave The Phenomenology of Spirit its final title, he had as his subtitle “Science of the Experience of Consciousness.” Though consciousness ranges across all things, from sense experience to the objects of art and religion, philosophy is ultimately and uniquely about our being in the world, a kind of living consciousness that is the fullness of self-knowledge. In The Philosophy of Right, Hegel warns, “When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then has a form of life grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in.” It is this “gray on gray” that is resisted by a philosophy that aims to grow the consciousness of seekers as they experience the world.

In much of the quarrel, the poets engage as prophetic figures used as the voice of the gods for better or worse, their words received and brought to fullness of understanding by the philosophers. At many points in this history, poetry has functioned as a means of gaining access to the “transcendent” in one form or another, moving past the mundane immanent world, however much such claims labor under suspicion.

“The poetic is glorious, the religious still more glorious, but what lies between is silly talk, no matter how much talent is wasted on it.” So says Frater Taciturnus, one important guide to thought about poetry and its relation to life, history, and philosophy. Taciturnus is one guide among many, for in the works of Kierkegaard the relationship of poetry to philosophy not only is a question examined and considered from many angles but is a quarrel and struggle enacted in the works themselves, written under pseudonyms by a writer who, on multiple occasions in his papers and journals claimed, “I'm a poet – alas, just a poet.” Kierkegaard did not write formal poems, but he wrote poetry understood in a certain sense: “The subject matter plays a very important role [in] … poetry, this word understood in its widest meaning to denote all artistic production that is based on language and the historical consciousness.” In relation to his characters, Kierkegaard explicitly requests his readers to remember, “My wish, my prayer, is that, if it might occur to anyone to quote a particular saying from the books, he would do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonymous author.”

Poetry does a tremendous amount of work in Kierkegaard's presentation of his thought. And yet poetry used as a means of presenting certain perspectives and of bringing us to certain thresholds, fails – and for Kierkegaard fails most miserably – if it becomes something more than a means for realizing that poetry is not sufficient.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius sat in prison at the age of roughly forty-four, condemned by Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths. He awaited execution, which came around the year a.d. 525 – he was tortured and bludgeoned to death in Pavia. In the time between his imprisonment and his death, he was able to write The Consolation of Philosophy, one of the central texts bridging the classical and medieval worlds. When Lady Philosophy visits Boethius in prison, the urgency of Boethius's struggle is rooted in his strange circumstance. Facing death by bludgeon in the not-too-distant future hones his ear as he listens to Philosophy's counsel and to her carefully crafted cure. The book follows in the tradition of Menippean satire. The poetry is not where consolation is found, though often the poems are used to refresh Boethius after a difficult course of treatment by Philosophy in her attempt to cure him. He goes through the curative rigors and is then allowed a draft at the fountain of poetry for relief. Other times poems do carry forward an idea presented in the prose argument or else sum up what she has said. No longer does poetry find itself struggling against philosophy. Poetry is very nearly subsumed by Philosophy, who speaks in poems at various junctures in the work of helping Boethius make the ascent from the earthbound grief he starts with in the first poem to contemplation of the mind of God, even approaching in the final chapter (which is all prose with no poem) the very ideas of the nature of God's knowledge, time, and eternity – a fitting place to end before exiting this life at the hands of a tyrant.

The quarrel between poetry and philosophy finds its first footing where most of Western philosophy originates, in the work of Plato, and it still reverberates from the assaults of Socrates on the poets when he exiled them from the Republic and claimed that the supreme music was no longer poetry but rather philosophy. There is a nearly journalistic thrill that comes from noting one further fact: the starting point of wisdom for that titanic human being, Socrates, instigator of the philosophical question, source of a new kind of human self-consciousness and critique, founder of true dialectical challenge to the status quo, and chief propagator of the assault on poetry, is accomplished at the temple of Apollo, god of poetry, when the oracle forgoes favoring of the poets and sophists and pronounces Socrates the wisest of men. Even more worthy of journalistic note is his own admission that the sum of his wisdom is that he knows that he does not know, that he is merely a seeker of wisdom. This admission is the very heart of what is most attractive about his engagement in the quarrel between poetry and philosophy, a quarrel and struggle that has a rich history and that constitutes one of the finest examples of humanity exploring the world through every means available to it, including attention to prophecy, oracular utterance, systematic questioning, and even truth uncovered through the instability of madness.

Before winning his final post in philosophy at the University of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant was offered the position of professor of poetry in Berlin in 1764, which he turned down. Throughout his work, from his early observations on social habits and stories of ghosts to his final unfinished work full of notions about a priori matter, etymology, and recipes for the day, Kant always appears as a mind sorely tempted to go beyond what he viewed as “the boundaries of reason.” He was unrelentingly disciplined in the face of this temptation, but the nature of his temptation was revealing. Regarding spirits, for example, he said, “I confess that I am much inclined to affirm the existence of immaterial natures in the world, and to place my own soul in the class of these beings.” But soon after this comment he tempered his inclination, saying clearly that “the appeal to immaterial principles is the refuge of a lazy philosophy” (Dreams, II, 331).

While he was establishing the firm boundaries of his island of truth, Kant knew the temptations and the dangers of sailing far from the shores and into the fog, and so he was at times scathing in his rejoinders. In his early book Dreams of a Spirit Seer, a book written to refute the spiritualist claims of Swedenborg, who said he could see action from a distance, in far away cities, for example, Kant said that “the realm of shades is the Paradise of visionaries” (Dreams, II, 317).

In Plato's Republic, it was clear that establishing the relationship of poetry and philosophy was important. William Dilthey agrees. But Dilthey's conclusions differ considerably, and he embraces a near inversion of the Platonic view. Whereas for Plato the transcendent was most real, for Dilthey the transcendent in principle can play no role in philosophy; and in Dilthey's work, unlike in the Republic, poetry takes a preeminent place among the arts and, along with the other arts, is of critical importance to the work of philosophy: “It is one of the most vital tasks of contemporary philosophy to reestablish, through the further development of aesthetics, the natural relationship among art, criticism, and an engaged public.”

The content of both poetry and philosophy ranges across all of human experience. When one asks about the relationship of the two, no answer that does not attend to this common content will finally be satisfying. This may be especially true for Dilthey, for whom, some have argued, the entire conception of the human sciences is rooted in the conception of aesthetics. The efforts of poetry and, more broadly, of art in general aim at the understanding of human life. Indeed, Dilthey goes so far as to say, “None of us would possess more than a meager part of our present understanding of human conditions, if we had not become used to seeing through the poet's eyes.”