349.365: One of the frustrating things about philosophy is how little it knows about poets -- about what they do for us. And this has ecological consequences, to which I'll return in a moment. Almost without exception, Philosophy -- the discipline -- romanticizes poets and adopts one of two attitudes: either it adores poets mystically or it denies them categorically. The exceptions are mostly ornamental -- a poem as an illustration or an epigraph. The poet's mode of work isn't philosophy.
What is that mode of work; what is poetry? The adoring mystics make poetry into some form of salvation, soul-juice. Whether by Heideggerians or Deleuzians, the consequence is the same: poetry's the slippery dissolver of categorically restrictive things. Its lovely or violent meaning gets romanticized -- a form of freedom or transcendence.
On the other hand, the categorical deniers take poetry to be epistemologically flawed and conceptually confused -- basically, a form of rhetoric, importing the distinction between imitative rhetoric and accurate logic that Plato worked so hard to barricade against good sense.
This split between the mystics and the deniers reinforces itself through each side -- for the deniers are enemies of the mystical, and the mystics are enemies of the categorical. It is no surprise, then, that the split overlays the infamous "Analytic / Continental split" that was so prevalent throughout the 20th century.
One might think that nowadays the romanticization of poetry will fare better in the so-called "Pragmatic return" which is supposedly dissolving -- as water to sand castles -- the twin fortresses left over from Analytic and Continental philosophy. After all, pragmatists want to find what is useful; they value what works and what gets things done in life. They are vitalists -- logical enough to function well; mystical enough to appreciate meaning's wondrous blur in the daily midst of movement. Moreover, poetry is at root a making: as Aristotle said of poieisis -- creating -- its end is in a good separable from the act. "Poetry" was originally any making producing a good that stands alone, separate from the action. (The action being the means to the good; the action not terminating in the end; the end outliving the action and being judged as good apart from the action.) Poetry, then -- the act of making things that are good -- is useful by definition. Poetry's pragmatic through and through, the poet a worker.
But on what? All this is academic. What matters first is to look and see what poets do and how poetry works. Etymology is only as useful as convention. Look: poets draw attention to meaning's cluster. Sometimes they are useful, and sometimes they are useless.
Use to the side, mostly irrelevant. Poetry lodges before usefulness sets in. Sensitizing us to the lay of our land, here's the dis/order of our intimate time. Poetry works unfolding time and space as we experience them intimately in our meaning -- the space of our lives, our time (or others's times) -- here, we get a grip on what could be useful or useless at all. If anything, poetry works to disclose an existential condition of possibility on our ethics, understood most broadly as our pursuit of passionate, real, value-laden life. Poetry is then more than pragmatic, far from mystical; it is anti-romantic, categorically important. Hey, poetry's not fitting into School, at least Philosophy School (right now).
( Professionalization counts against it -- we are not supposed to be tattered in any respect (we are supposed to be only useful, even if we aren't quite human in so being). But that is another reflection. Professionalization has become anti-philosophical in many respects, this on both sides of the old, so-called "divide". And none of this parenthesis is supposed to mean that it's okay to be unethical when we work -- far from it. )
Now the anti-ecological consequence of romanticizing poetry -- or of reducing it to usefulness (which is the true antithesis of the romanticization shared by both the Analytic and Continental camps) -- is that we do philosophy outside our ecology, blind to our meaning's cluster. Meaning's as wild, nascent, ill-formed, tuned, hard-formed, ropey, cut and dry, ... as life in our biosphere actually is. You see, poetry's an ecological mode of making sense, the poet a kind of ecologist. Poetry lets us view (our) surging life and brittle decay as what it is. In us, or on Earth (and in the universe).
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