The Reas'ning Engine: Poetry and Philosophy

LINES 29 AND 30 of the Earl of Rochester's Poem, sometimes called merely 'A Satyr', but more often cited as 'A Satire Against Reason and Mankind', run

Huddled in dirt, the reas'ning engine liesWho was so proud, so witty and so wise.

They give me my title, but before I take them any further, I propose an alternative couplet:

Muddled by praise, the rhyming engine liesWhose truth was this or that or otherwise

Notice I haven't interfered with the rhyme: rhymes are hard to find in our language, which is why we use them over and over again, and esteem creative inventors of new ones, and incidentally why we distrust too ingenious or far-fetched or inappropriate discoveries. I've plunged into this immediate diversion to justify the subtitle I rather recklessly gave when asked to amplify the brusque original. Clearly if I were to engage with so powerful an adversary as philosophy it behoved me to admit how shifty poetry can be. My real concern is with the resources and practice of poetry and how different they are from those of philosophy. But I don't want to surrender reason to any discipline more than to poetry. Poetry is based on thinking (and disinterested thinking at that) as much as philosophy is, but its method is radically different in its priorities. It relies on the skills of entertainment rather than on the operations of logic. Not merely on devices, mnemonic or rhythmic, as aids to memorability, but on the awakening of enlightenment by the pleasure afforded by what we have come to call 'language games'. Perhaps these have been discredited in recent times by too much emphasis on the 'ludic', but the pleasure principle has always been at the heart of making verses. As Freud supposed, truth may lie beyond that principle, but truth remains the murkiest of absolutes and the hardest flag to rally around. Poets have often favoured the accusatory tone of their critic when they've hastened to the confessional.

W. H. Auden prefaced his 1950 Collected Poems with these lines:

Whether conditioned by God or their neutral structure, stillAllmen have this common creed, account for it as you will –The Truth is one and incapable of contradiction;All knowledge that conflicts with itself is Poetic Fiction.

He didn't go on to say that what so many of us admired in his work was just this, his gift for poetic fiction. In 'New Year Letter', he offered a special apology: 'For I relapse into my crimes. / Time and again have slubbered through / With slip and slapdash what I do. / Adopted what I would disown, / The preacher's loose immodest tone'. This is a change of key. He seems to be worrying less about truth than repining a failure of technique or at least an impatience with it. But the last two lines could be construed as suggesting that his willingness to be a truth-telling preacher might be responsible for the slip and slapdash. Considering his lifetime's hectoring in oracle mode, we can understand why he worried about his tendency to tell us off. Confessor and Penitent are a Janus-faced image. We find him on another occasion pronouncing that 'the occupational disease of poets is frivolity'.

I don't raise these contradictions to rebuke him, but as a reminder to all of those – and I number myself among them – who are drawn to the aphoristic manner. All codes, dogmas, philosophies and Scriptures are not that far from aphorisms. Their only guarantee is an assumption that they spring from a truth which we subscribe to. I wake up sometimes with pertinent apophthegms on my lips, and I usually appreciate that I have emerged from the Wonderland of Utterance, but truly am no wiser than when I went to sleep. The real work of literature is still to be done – the conflict of ideas, the mustering of events and the dilemmas of expression. This is too humanly untidy to be fit for philosophy. When philosophy is at its most attractive it doesn't hesitate...