Philosophy as Poetry

James and Dewey asked us to give up the goal of achieving correspondence with the way things intrinsically are, and to settle for that of leading richer human lives.

So in a post-Platonic culture, the love of wisdom would revert to its older sense of “intellectual culture.”

Perhaps the best way to wrap up what I have been saying in these lectures is to turn to the question, What would intellectual life be like if the Platonic search for ahistorical criteria came to seem as quaint as the worship of the Olympian deities? If retail ideals were the only ones thought worthy of discussion? If human finitude, and the priority of the imagination to reason, were taken for granted? If romanticism and pragmatism had both come to seem simple common sense? If the jigsaw puzzle view of things had come to seem as implausible as the notion of divine providence?
In the past I have sometimes described such a culture as one in which literature and the arts have replaced science and philosophy as sources of wisdom. But that description now seems to me misguided. I think it would be better to say that it would be a culture in which the meaning of the word “wisdom” had reverted to its pre-Platonic sense. Before the Greek word sophia acquired the special sense that Socrates and Plato gave it, it meant something like “skill,” something that could be gained only through the accumulation of experience. In that older sense, wisdom can be gained only by living a long time, seeing many men and cities, and keeping one’s eyes open. But after Socrates and Plato it was thought of differently; sophia came to mean getting in touch with something that was not the product of experience at all. The Greek word for “love of wisdom,” philosophia, which had once meant something like “intellectual culture,” came to denote the attempt to escape from finitude, to get in touch with the eternal, to achieve some sort of transcendence of the merely human.