The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

At present, philosophy appears to be consigned to the role of critic: its skeptical task is to cast doubt on any apparent truism by exposing its vulnerable underbelly. Whether we clarify concepts to excise a purer kernel of truth or deconstruct texts to expose a chasm of complexities, we are experts in the skill of intellectual dissection. While this critical stance is of undoubted value, both in exposing our hidden prejudices and in opening our minds to alternative possibilities, the question remains whether this is all that our field has to offer. Certainly metaphysics and logic have proven to be troublesome bedfellows, but in our efforts to be precise, have we too narrowly drawn the parameters of our discourse? Philosophy is, or should be, the love of wisdom, an ongoing consideration of life's most profound mysteries; and yet we have reason to suspect our ability to address these broader questions. By what methods, then, can we affirm truths about the meaning of life in the wake of our skepticism of the possibility of such truths?

It is my claim that philosophy has become trapped by the belief that precision is our surest path to knowledge. In our despair of knowing things in themselves, we confine our discourse to subjects that lie within empirical confines. We hope that where we failed to capture the bigger picture we can still master objects closer to hand, or at least be precise about why we cannot master them. I aim to challenge this limitative assumption and to affirm in its place a variety of means by which we may "speak" philosophically on a wider variety of topics. In doing so, I will reconsider the purported disjunction between poetry and literature, ¹ on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other, as when Plato aligned poetry with the passions and philosophy with reason (Plato 1992, 522 a–b), or when Carnap distinguished meaningful analysis of philosophical fact from the "merely expressive"—read meaningless—poetics of metaphysics. ² In both cases, philosophy's method of securing knowledge depends on distinguishing rational arguments from expressive utterances without a meaningful referent, and poetry is decidedly placed into the latter camp, its role being to arouse our emotions, not to illuminate our intellect. However, we need to turn from Plato's condemnation of the poets and instead investigate poetry's potential for veridical philosophical communication. [End Page 77] Rather than posit philosophy and poetry as different in kind—one truth-seeking, the other "merely" emotive—I prefer to argue that each of the varieties of human expression can, in its own way, be descriptive of the truth. Drawing on George Santayana's ontological realm of truth and his concept of literary psychology, I will show that philosophy and the literary arts are not fundamentally opposed. I hypothesize that the various styles of human discourse (which would include, for example, science, philosophy, and poetry) may be placed on a continuum ranging from those that aim closest to the material facts to those that seek to explain the human relationship to those facts. When we investigate what it would mean for some kinds of assertions to be nothing but expressive and others to be literally true, we find that, to varying degrees, all are expressive and none literally true. The imprecise nature of all knowledge need not cause us to despair of truth's possibility; in actuality, it offers us a much needed opportunity to broaden our understanding of what counts as philosophy.

In order to investigate what sorts of articulation can count as true ones, it would seem beneficial to briefly consider the ontological status of truth, and I find that Santayana can offer useful insight in this regard. In his philosophical system, truth signifies a distinct realm of being from the other categories—spirit (consciousness), matter, and essence (ideal forms)—and it is important to consider why this is so. Santayana notes that truth is not internal to consciousness (it is not dependent on what human beings happen to think is true), nor is it identical to material existence, for its role is to describe that existence. The truth...