The New Laokoon (Part 11)

(Pictured: Plato.) I am happy to present the eleventh post of Irving Babbitt’s book The New Laokoon, an Essay on the Confusion of the Arts, published in 1910, in which Babbitt followed the model of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s treatise on aesthetics, Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766; Laokoon; or, On the Limits of Painting and Poetry). Lessing criticized what he saw as a confusion of painting and poetry in the poetry of the neo-classical school. In The New Laokoon Babbitt mainly addresses a different confusion of the arts, one that he sees in nineteenth-century romantic works, manifested in things like word-painting, program music, and color-audition. Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing is notable for its clarity and perspicacity. This eleventh post inaugurates Chapter V: “Platonists and Pseudo-Platonists.”

The New Laokoon
An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts

By Irving Babbitt

Part II 

The Romantic Confusion of the Arts

Chapter V 

Platonists and Pseudo-Platonists 

“Every man,” says Coleridge, “is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist.” In an important sense this saying is true, though actual human nature is of course not quite so simple. In the first place, there are the many persons whom it would be an extravagant compliment to call either Platonists or Aristotelians; who are, in Carlylean phrase, merely patent digesters. Then there are the pseudo-Aristotelians of whom we have already spoken, as well as the pseudo-Platonists of whom we shall speak presently, not to mention the mixed and intermediary types, or the ways in which the same man may shift from one point of view to the other according to the mood and the moment. Plato himself was not a Platonist in the meaning that is often given to the term, nor was Aristotle an Aristotelian; that is, Plato was not merely a sublime enthusiast, any more than Aristotle was content with a dry analysis. Plato and Aristotle were like other sensible people who, whatever they may have been born,” try to maintain some balance between the analytic and the synthetic elements in their thinking. 

Yet when Plato is most analytic and Aristotle most synthetic, we still feel the difference of temper; so that Aristotle and Plato may rightly be taken after all as the supreme examples respectively of the analytic and the synthetic minds. We have therefore been justified in calling certain confusions that arose from a false analysis during the neoclassical period pseudo-Aristotelian; we shall also be justified in calling pseudo-Platonic certain other confusions which have arisen from a false synthesis and which pervade not merely modern art and literature, but modern life. 

The taking in vain of the name of Plato is of course nothing new. For example, many of the petrarchists of the Renaissance were as fond of posing as Platonists as any modern romanticist,—and with about as much reason. We cannot attempt a complete study of so vast a subject as the difference between true and false Platonism. We must confine ourselves to the main distinctions that are necessary for the present subject, and these distinctions may perhaps best be reached by comparing Plato with Rousseau, the most representative figure in European romanticism. There is a certain superficial likeness between the two men: each lived in an intensely self-conscious age, when analysis was dissolving traditional standards and threatening as it seemed the very foundations of conduct. Rousseau attacked the philosophes about as Plato attacked the sophists. They both look with suspicion on literature and the theatre, and they both oppose to the corruption of their time a sort of ideal Sparta. But if there is some agreement in their diagnosis of the diseases of an advanced civilization, there is none at all in their remedies. Rousseau strolls off into the forest of Saint-Germain, and indulges in a dream of the golden age which he then asserts to be a true vision of the life of primitive man,—man still at one with himself and his fellows, before he had lost his ignorance, before the growth of intellect had weakened the bond of sympathy and converted the peaceful selfishness tempered by ‘‘natural pity,” that one finds at the origin, into a warring egoism. He therefore looks back with nostalgic longing on the “state of nature” from which man has fallen, and with corresponding distrust on the faculties of the mind that have destroyed this spontaneity of instinct, weakened the bond of communal sympathy, and brought man into conflict with himself and others. He even raises the question whether a certain tribe on the Orinoco has not been wise in binding up the heads of the children in planks, thus arresting their intellectual development and assuring them some portion of their primitive felicity. 

Plato on the contrary does not dream of any return to nature. He sees the luxury and egoism and self-indulgence that have come with the weakening of traditional standards, and sets out in search of inner standards to take the place of the outer standards that have been lost. Instead of getting rid of discipline, like Rousseau, and hoping to overcome selfishness by reverting to the pristine warmth of sympathy, Plato would press forward, using the intellectual faculties themselves as stepping-stones, to a higher discipline which leads in turn to a new sense of unity, a sense of unity that we may term, in opposition to Rousseau’s unity of instinct, the unity of insight. Rousseau’s view of life is above all emotional, that of Plato supremely disciplinary (indeed he may fairly be accused in a later work, like the “Laws,” of overdoing the discipline). The unity of Plato is associated with a concentration of the will, that of Rousseau with an expansion of the feelings. A recent historian of Greek philosophy (1) remarks that Plato would not have understood the role Schopenhauer assigns to pity (Schopenhauer being in this respect a Rousseauist), and would utterly have despised the charms of sensibility as depicted by Rousseau. These remarks go far in establishing the difference between Rousseauists and Platonists, between those whose chief interest is in the things that are below the reason and those who are chiefly interested in the things that are above it. 

The radical divergence of the two classes always appears in their attitude toward the intellectual faculties. Socrates, according to Rousseau, praises ignorance. Rousseau does not often indulge in such an unblushing sophism. What Socrates actually asserted, of course, was, that though men imagine they know something they are in reality ignorant. The American scientist who complained only the other day that nobody knows more than seven billionths of one per cent about anything, was merely echoing what Socrates said many centuries ago at Athens. But Socrates would have men cherish preciously this fraction of knowledge, however infinitesimal, and the faculties by which they have attained it, in the hope that they may ultimately add to it a few more billionths of a per cent. We can imagine with what irony he would have greeted any Wordsworthian or Rousseauistic talk about “the false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.” On the contrary he spent his whole life in multiplying distinctions, and may indeed be regarded as the founder of formal logic. 

We have here a touchstone for separating not merely Platonists from pseudo-Platonists but also true from false mystics. For if some of our Rousseauists have posed as Platonists, others, as I have said, have looked on themselves as mystics. But the true mystic is not much given to mere revery; it is a historic fact that he has often shown himself remarkably shrewd and practical; and in any case he lives on good terms with his intellect. He is ready to follow it until it brings him to the point where he must intrust himself to a still higher power,—a moment Dante has symbolized in the passage of the “Purgatorio” where Virgil ceases to be his guide and gives way to Beatrice. If we find that a man attains his vision only by a denial of rationality, we may at once suspect that we are dealing with a pseudo-mystic. Professor Santayana writes: ‘‘In casting off with self-assurance and a sense of fresh vitality the distinctions of tradition and reason a man may feel, as he sinks back comfortably to a lower level of sense and instinct, that he is returning to Nature or escaping into the infinite. Mysticism makes us proud and happy to renounce the work of intelligence both in thought and in life, and persuades us that we become divine by remaining imperfectly human.” (2) But this passage is not a description of the genuine mystic at all, but merely of the Rousseauist, and as such it is excellent. [George Santayana, American (Spanish born) philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist; 1863-1952]

Of course, things are not so clear-cut in concrete human nature as they are in our formulae. The sense of what is above the reason sometimes merges bewilderingly into the sense of what is below the reason. There are, for example, touches of true mystical insight in Wordsworth, along with other passages almost equally admirable as poetry, if not equally wise, but passages at any rate that are more Rousseauistic than Platonic. Thus the famous Ode [“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807)] is a curious blend of Plato and Rousseau,—of the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence of previous existence and the Rousseauistic reminiscence of childhood as the age of freshness and spontaneity. To the belief that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting” Plato would of course have assented; but the assertion that children of six are “mighty prophets, seers blessed,” would, we may fear, have seemed to him portentous nonsense; and there are doubtless still a few persons left who would agree with Plato. Wordsworth indeed has so mingled the things that are above with the things that are below the reason as not merely to idealize but to supernaturalize the child, and this probably would have dissatisfied Rousseau as well as Plato. 

(1) See T. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, III. 

(2) Poetry and Religion.