By Moristotle
From her opening pages, Professor Meeks, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Perimeter College of Georgia State University, manifests writing mastery and loving expertise on the technicalities and history of her subject. I recognized a book I wanted to savor; anyone interested in the roots of philosophy in Homeric and Hesiodic myths would.
Beginning with the first section of the first chapter, “A Concise History of Allegory,” who would have thought that the history of how allegory was understood and used over the last 3,000 years could be so interesting? And how wonderful that scholars like the author to have studied so thoughtfully its use in composition and interpretation?
The book’s back cover provides a concise, accurate summary of Allegory in Early Greek Philosophy. I don’t think I could improve it:
A sentence in the middle of p. 38 elaborates: “The chapters which follow explore three principal themes: that myth becomes self-conscious through allegory, that this sense of allegory entails a connecting of reason with the imagination, and that this connection makes possible the form of thought required by speculative philosophy.”
| A book at all important should be reread immediately. –Arthur Schopenhauer |
This thoughtful and carefully articulated book about the beginnings of philosophy grabbed me more for what it suggested about poetry than for what it explicated about philosophy. That, for me, is a virtue of the book – I was an undergraduate student of philosophy sixty years ago, but I’m now more a poet than a philosopher. Professor Meeks is a scholar of philosophy, and I suspect she was writing mainly for other scholars and students of philosophy rather than for either poets or philosophers.
The book’s central concept for me, I think, is allegoresis, defined by Merriam-Webster as “the interpretation of written, oral, or artistic expression as allegory,” but also with the aspect discussed by Professor Meeks: that the artist who created the allegory intended it as “saying something else” – allegoresis as either composition or interpretation, or as both.
Having finished my first reading, I tried to remember instances of allegory in the readings in modern philosophy that I did in college and later. A prominent example popped out: Albert Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” which made a great impression on me when I read it decades ago and when I returned to it years later while I was wrestling with Soren Kierkegaard’s allegory of a person hanging from two ledges – one hand from the ledge of belief in God and the other from the ledge of disbelief. Does he continue to hang from both in desperate doubt, or risk falling into the abyss by letting one ledge go and switching its hand to the other? The Sisyphean myth helped me let go the ledge of belief by suggesting that I could yet experience the passion of daily life. From Wikipedia’s article on Camus’ essay:
In both Kierkegaard’s and Camus’ allegories I found truths about my own experience. Both writers’ meanings were clear, and in both cases I “got them.”He...characterizes several philosophies that describe and attempt to deal with this feeling of the absurd, by Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Lev Shestov, Søren Kierkegaard, and Edmund Husserl. All of these, he claims, commit “philosophical suicide” by reaching conclusions that contradict the original absurd position, either by abandoning reason and turning to God, as in the case of Kierkegaard and Shestov, or by elevating reason and ultimately arriving at ubiquitous Platonic forms and an abstract god, as in the case of Husserl.
For Camus, who sets out to take the absurd seriously and follow it to its final conclusions, these “leaps” cannot convince. Taking the absurd seriously means acknowledging the contradiction between the desire of human reason and the unreasonable world. Suicide, then, also must be rejected: without man, the absurd cannot exist. The contradiction must be lived; reason and its limits must be acknowledged, without false hope. However, the absurd can never be permanently accepted: it requires constant confrontation, constant revolt.
While the question of human freedom in the metaphysical sense loses interest to the absurd man, he gains freedom in a very concrete sense: no longer bound by hope for a better future or eternity, without a need to pursue life’s purpose or to create meaning, “he enjoys a freedom with regard to common rules.”
To embrace the absurd implies embracing all that the unreasonable world has to offer. Without meaning in life, there is no scale of values. “What counts is not the best living but the most living.”
Thus, Camus arrives at three consequences from fully acknowledging the absurd: revolt, freedom, and passion.
What we take away from reading a book (or an allegory) depends a great deal on how much we bring to the reading.
But more than that, I love that reading Professor Meeks’ book has aroused in me a greater awareness of allegory and instances of allegorizing. One morning, for example, when characterizing to a few relatives the equanimity of our Uncle Vernon on his deathbed, I wrote: “I didn’t myself visit Vernon in the hospital in his final days, but I listened to the awe-filled report of my oldest sister’s husband, who spoke as though he had been present when Socrates drank the hemlock,” a comparison I’m sure arose because I was then reading the book’s final chapter, “Plato on Poetry, Myth, and Allegory.”
The 2020 film Penguin Bloom, which my wife and I watched last month, seems to incorporate the Bloom family’s rescued pet magpie as a perhaps initially unconscious allegory for the paralyzed mother in learning to change her attitude and recover from her accident. And I, very conscious of it, in turn attempted to see applications of her experience (which was itself an allegory to me) in my own life. I understand a film-viewer’s response as being empathetic; through empathy, or identification, a viewer experiences fictional characters as real.
Do any scholars attempting to understand allegory’s contribution to philosophy identify anything empathetic about the process? Do they even consider the psychological dynamic of “logos”? I don’t recall Professor Meeks’ employing the word “empathy” anywhere in the book. A failure to talk about empathy seems to me a serious omission.
And only this week, we watched a 3-part British TV ghost story titled “Remember Me,” about two ghosts’ refusal to let each other die, with dreadful consequences for living characters whom the female ghost perceives as coming between her and the male ghost (played by Michael Palin, of Monty Python fame). The “meaning” of this allegory is succinctly stated by the investigating police detective in a remark near the end: “You don’t die so long as someone remembers you.”
And Paul Clark recently submitted an allegorical poem to me for publication: “Murmuration.” Not only is its first half allegorical, but its second half provides an interpretation – allegoresis both as composition and as interpretation. Here are two approximately corresponding sections, the second alluding to the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol:
A few things a reader might complain about in Professor Meeks’ book:But more than that, I love that reading Professor Meeks’ book has aroused in me a greater awareness of allegory and instances of allegorizing. One morning, for example, when characterizing to a few relatives the equanimity of our Uncle Vernon on his deathbed, I wrote: “I didn’t myself visit Vernon in the hospital in his final days, but I listened to the awe-filled report of my oldest sister’s husband, who spoke as though he had been present when Socrates drank the hemlock,” a comparison I’m sure arose because I was then reading the book’s final chapter, “Plato on Poetry, Myth, and Allegory.”
Do any scholars attempting to understand allegory’s contribution to philosophy identify anything empathetic about the process? Do they even consider the psychological dynamic of “logos”? I don’t recall Professor Meeks’ employing the word “empathy” anywhere in the book. A failure to talk about empathy seems to me a serious omission.
[Allegoresis as composition]They descend, tens then hundreds then thousands,Their mass of tiny wingbeats flattening the bamboo canopy into sparse strands,Like a helicopter gunship, searching a jungle for prey.Aggressive and raucous, choosing bullying over tact,They force the others to the edges of what was their home tract:“This is our thicket now.”
[Allegoresis as interpretation]
They ascend, tens, thousands, millions,Their mass of loud voices and absurd conjuration,Reinforcing their collective hallucination.
Choosing the power of loud and fat,Over science and fact,Shouting down those they consider overly educated and too high-brow,“This is our country now.”
The index includes none of the technical topics discussed at length in the book, only proper names. I think I understand why: those topics are tackled again and again, so to include them would require either long lists of page numbers or two or more levels of subentries. (And the book is so short, why bother?) But I myself would have appreciated something like a glossary of terms, and in fact I did a fair amount of googling (usually settling on Wikipedia entries) during my reading. Some of the terms in question: allegoresis, muthos, logos, heroic simile, archaic belief, mythical thinking, mythico-religious.
And I wonder how many of the 123 works cited in the “Selected Bibliography” (on p. 113) don’t much address the main period covered (but mainly serve the 2,000 years following it)? Not that this is a problem in itself, but let’s remember what the book’s title is.
I wish that Professor Meeks had disclosed her own, personal views on the mystery surrounding how archaic belief and mythical thinking survived into the 21st Century in various faith-based religions. Why have philosophy and science not led to faith-based religions’ demise?
Less a complaint than an encouragement and a challenge to other readers, I found zero reviews of Professor Meeks’ book anywhere, including on Amazon and other vendor websites. So maybe you can “Be the first....” to review it on one of those sites? Feel free to quote anything I say in this review, either in agreement or disagreement.
| Copyright © 2021 by Moristotle |
This conjoining of reason and imagination seems totally intuitive to me, and not only in stimulating philosophical thought, but how is it really different from any type of creativity? It must certainly happen when one imagines building a bridge, a car, writing a book, or any of the endeavors at which humans are so gifted, that involve imagining something new, using thinking and technology that currently exist. As much as a Dali, a Kahlo, a Piccasso might start or carry on an artistic tradition, the people who invented microchips were right there with them at the cusp of reason and imagination. Edison as much as Plato; Ford as much as Kepler. I shall endeavor tofind and savor this little morsel like Marcel with a Madeleine.
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