John Koethe

In the collection

18

In the last book of The Republic Plato turns to poetry, implicitly contrasts it with philosophy, and argues that it shouldn’t even exist in the ideal city he’s meticulously constructed. His reasoning is liable to strike us now as quaint: poets traffic in appearances, not essences, and write of things they don’t know anything about, like military strategy and battles; they portray heroic figures in the grip of powerful, deranged emotions, to which their readers must inevitably succumb; and there’s a metaphysical complaint: all art, including poetry, is essentially mimetic, and representations are inherently inferior to what they represent. You need to make some changes if you want to know what’s going on. Poetry for Plato wasn’t what you’d probably think of if you’re reading this, a marginalized enactment of experience and subjectivity in which the medium itself is half the point. Nor was philosophy the systematic study of the possibility of meaning we’ve become accustomed to, but sought instead to penetrate the veil of appearances, arriving at a vision of the good that shows us how we ought to try to live. It’s been suggested that to understand him, think of movies and TV instead of poetry, for they’re what occupy the space that poetry occupied in Athens. I agree, but then the question ultimately becomes: Should how we try to live be based on fantasies and feelings, or known facts and reason? And the suspicion that the latter aren’t much fun shows just how troubling the question really is. …

John Koethe

The philosopher David Lewis spun a fantasy of two omniscient gods who know about one world, which might as well be ours. Each knows precisely all there is to know, the grand “totality of facts, not things.” Each knows the pattern of the light on each neglected leaf millennia ago. Each knows the number of the stars, their ages, all the distances between them, all the “things too tiny to be remembered in recorded history—the backfiring of a bus/In a Paris street in 1932,” as well as all the things that history distorts or just can’t see, like the thought that must have flashed across Patroklos’s mind (if he’d existed and had had a mind—the middle knowledge of the schoolmen) when Hektor split his stomach with a spear (if he’d existed too). Each one looks on, as though through ordinary eyes, as “Mme Swann’s enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist and as infantile as St George in the picture, endeavored to curb the ardour of the quivering steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered over the ground,” and sees “the gray ‘toppers’ of old” the gentlemen strolling with her wore, the little “woolen cap from which stuck out two blade-like partridge feathers” that she wore (or would have worn if they and she’d been real). Each monitors the photons through the slits, the slow decay of radium, and knows the ratio of vermouth to gin in someone’s first martini at Larre’s. Each knows what Darragh, Geoff and Willy knew before the bullet or the pavement killed their worlds, and where the shots came from in Dallas. Each knows precisely what the other knows, in all the senses of those words, and if a question has a factual answer, each can answer it. Yet there’s a question neither can resolve: which god am I? …

John Koethe