Are Poets More Important Than Philosophers for Understanding Democracy?

I recently had a conversation with an undergraduate advisee who was contemplating what course of study to pursue. The student was interested in understanding American democratic life in greater depth, and while admittedly drawn more toward literature than political philosophy, she seemed to think the latter was the more practical, grounded option. “Literature,” she said, pausing to find the right word, “is more . . . creative.” Another way of putting this would have been to say that literature seems less connected to that hard, eminently tangible thing we call reality, making it, ultimately, a less serious endeavor.

Without realizing it, the student was touching on both a longstanding dilemma—the alleged “quarrel,” extending back to Plato, between dreamy poets and rational philosophers—and one that has recently been at the heart of curricular discussions at the nation’s growing list of university programs in civic thought. Scan a list of the faculty and courses at those programs and you will quickly see that the philosophers have clearly won the quarrel. “Beyond Homer, Greek tragedy, and Shakespeare,” William Deresiewicz writes, these programs’ “curricula lean largely to political philosophy—that is, to texts that seem more relevant to public questions.” Some within the fields of political philosophy and political science have called for more engagement with literature. But their rationales often rely on questionable—or at the very least incomplete—assumptions, such as the notion that literature complements philosophy by being more oriented toward the emotions (thus reproducing the logic that philosophy is the weightier, more intellectually serious endeavor) or that literature makes us more moral (something I’d love to believe, but highly doubt). Meanwhile, traditional English departments have for some time failed to make a compelling case for the purpose, civic or otherwise, of literary study. The reasons for this are complex, but among them is surely the narrow form of politicization that has dominated English departments for the last several decades, which has left many outside (and some inside) the discipline unclear about or even wary of literary studies’ value.

So let’s go back to the beginning: what did America’s founders think a proper study of the United States and the nature of democracy entailed? They, of course, were raised on a steady diet of moral and political philosophy along with history, classics, and rhetoric, and they certainly advocated for these. But further light is shed on the matter when we consider what must surely be one of the oddest moments in The Federalist Papers.

In Federalist 37, discussing the various challenges the Constitutional Convention faced, James Madison—exemplar of the American Enlightenment—launches into an extended digression on how difficult it is to understand the world. His reference to the tricky question of where “the proper line” resides separating the proposed national government from the state governments quickly spills over into doubts, spread across several pages, about our inability to grasp the “delicate shades and minute gradations” that separate the constitutive parts of the human mind, of “the great kingdom of nature,” and, especially, of “the institutions of man” (including, for instance, the precise extent of executive, legislative, and judicial powers), all of which have baffled “the most acute metaphysical philosophers” and “the greatest adepts in political science.”

Part of the issue, Madison notes, is our patently human limitations: we are not always reliable or even capable observers of the world (there’s more going on than we realize) or those who inhabit it (people are complicated). Exacerbating all of this, however, is the nature of language itself, or the “use of words to express ideas.” Words can be misleading and inaccurate, and “no language,” Madison observes, “is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many equivocally denoting different ideas.” All of this leads to a rather frightful conclusion: “When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language,” Madison proclaims, “his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated.” In a text designed to clarify and explain the new government, this is an unsettling account of the challenges involved in observing, understanding, and communicating about democratic life. Could any course of study remedy such problems?

While one reason for Madison’s epistemological digression is certainly rhetorical—he doesn’t want people to expect perfection in the new Constitution—it isn’t merely rhetorical. We see similar concerns and struggles several decades later in Alexis de Tocqueville’s magisterial Democracy in America. Tocqueville argues that to understand American democracy one must start at ground-level by studying daily life in the township. The only problem: though small, townships are extremely mysterious and difficult to understand! Their governing “spirit,” he argues, “develops almost secretly in the bosom” and is rooted in a tangle of instincts, feelings, ideas, and mores that can be challenging to observe or describe. The township, he notes, “is in a way born of itself” and “appears to issue directly from the hands of God” rather than from anything humans could understand and enact themselves. And these Madisonian struggles with perceptions and language are at issue throughout Democracy in America. We see it again, for instance, when Tocqueville, trying to articulate his notion of the “soft despotism” that hampers democratic societies, confesses, “I myself seek in vain for an expression, that exactly reproduces the idea that I form.”

What Madison and Tocqueville show us is that any program for educating democratic citizens must account for the capacities and the limitations of both the human mind and of language itself in our encounters with the world. For them, the “real world,” as we call it today, is far more difficult to perceive and understand than we typically acknowledge. We therefore need to cultivate an array of capacities and sensibilities both for engaging with that world and for communicating with each other about it.

As it turns out, these were the very objectives of modern literary study as it was originally conceived roughly a century ago—an inheritance that, if not outright lost to time, has at least been greatly diminished. I’m referring, in particular, to the ideas of Cambridge scholars I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, who, in their “practical criticism,” sought to demonstrate that literature, far from being a creative world unto itself, was intimately connected to daily life and “the whole scheme of human affairs.” Understanding those connections, however, required one to think about the nature of both mind and language. “Underestimation of the importance of the arts,” Richards claimed, “is nearly always due to ignorance of the workings of the mind.” His psychologically informed conception of literature and literary engagement was premised on the idea that our interactions with the world are always a complex blend of impulses, appetites, emotions, ideas, and attitudes. To make any sound conclusion or judgment about the world therefore requires a heightened awareness of and an ability to organize, work through, and communicate about these various dimensions of experience.

And this is what great poets and artists help us cultivate. They help us become, as Richards describes it, more adept at apprehending “minute particulars” (or, as Madison would say, “minute gradations”) that, for most individuals are either imperceivable or “incommunicable and indescribable.” And they help us avoid ideas and “generalizations” that “in actual practice are too crude to discriminate between what is valuable and the reverse.” Literary study helps us, in other words, become more attentive to the multitudinous “kinds of meaning that language handles” and, especially, to the great literary works that represent a culture’s best attempts to deploy that language toward apprehending what Herman Melville in Moby-Dick called “the ungraspable phantom of life.” And that endeavor, while certainly rooted in emotional sensibility, was also profoundly intellectual. “Nowhere but in poetry, unless in mathematics,” Richards wrote, “do we meet with ideas so closely packed together, so tightly woven.”

While Richards has been receiving some renewed attention of late, it was F. R. Leavis who went much further in declaring literary studies a “discipline of thought” that was markedly different from philosophy and which should reside at the core of the undergraduate curriculum. As he candidly declared, “any scheme that hasn’t a sound notion of literature at its center has gone wrong.” And while many find Leavis’s unabashed elitism and irascible temper disqualifying, his defense of the uniqueness and seriousness of literary study deserves renewed attention (as, I would argue, does his commitment to high educational standards). Boldly declaring himself an “anti-philosopher,” Leavis attacked philosophy’s “mathematico-logical” methods and “conceptual rigidity” for being unattuned to the kinds of worldly complexities that, as we saw, troubled Madison and Tocqueville. We need, Leavis argued, to “cultivate a more adequate notion of thought” that attends to the complex “reality underlying language” because “what is inexpressible in terms of logic and clarity, the unstatable, must not be excluded from thought.” He believed both thought and the language we use to convey it had to be more creative and “heuristic”—that is, experimental and exploratory—and that is why literature, both individual works and the tradition of texts in conversation with one another, was so vital.

“All major literature,” he argued, “is concerned with thought” because, in it, “we have the fullest use of language” grappling with an always-elusive reality. The “intelligent study of literature” is therefore a unique and necessary discipline oriented toward “acquiring a delicate readiness of apprehension and a quasi-instinctive flexibility of response” both to language and to the world itself.

Leavis could certainly be accused of caricaturing philosophy. Yet, in recent years, philosophers themselves have raised unsettlingly similar concerns with their discipline’s penchant for evading difficulty and complexity. In a now-famous 2003 essay titled “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” Cora Diamond sought to reorient her fellow philosophers toward “the experience of the mind’s not being able to encompass something which it encounters.” “Philosophy,” she boldly declares, “characteristically misrepresents both our own reality and that of others” by “deflecting” from stubborn difficulties toward other ideas “in the vicinity” that are easier to handle. To capture the “difficulty of reality”—a phrase she takes from novelist John Updike—Diamond engages with Ted Hughes’s poetry and J. M. Coetzee’s fiction in a Leavis-like attempt to steer her discipline back toward the murky and incommunicable depths of individual and collective life. And we find a similar attempt in moral and political philosopher Charles Larmore’s call for his fellow philosophers to embrace “the law of conservation of trouble” rather than the usual practice of “dissolving” philosophical problems by trying to show that there’s really no problem at all.