Adapted from a talk I gave on Sunday preceding a reading of my verse play, Sonnez Les Matines (check it out if you haven’t!).
__
Humans have used dialogue to work out philosophical problems since we started writing literature. See Job: one of the earliest literary works we have, the book is essentially a verse play (albeit with very long speeches punctuated by just a few dramatic interludes). Plato and Xenophon wrote their philosophy as dialogues (some of which, like Plato’s Apology of Socrates, have real dramatic force). During the Reformation, apologists on both sides couched their arguments in dialogues (of varying degrees of dramatic value—more on that in the next few weeks!). The interplay between drama, verse, and philosophy spiked in the 20th century, with existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre writing plays, poet T.S. Eliots writing philosophical dramas, and playwright Samuel Beckett writing poetic philosophical dialogues for his (sometimes almost entirely un-dramatic) plays.
What these works have in common is that they are all set against the backdrop of a mystery of some kind or another.
Job unfolds against the question of why evil befalls the righteous. Plato’s Socrates (and his Stranger, actually) are enamored of the mystery of Ultimate Reality; what really IS? Hans Sach’s pro-Luther dramas seek to equip often under-educated Protestants tools to use against Catholic theologians in discussion mysteries of authority and revelation. Sartre, Eliot, and Beckett, each in his own way, wrestles with the collapse of traditional ideas of human nature (post the World Wars).
But there is another shared characteristic of philosophical drama: it is almost always, no matter what mystery it confronts, a moral project. The central question is not usually how shall we solve this philosophical problem? but rather, how should we live in the presence of this philosophical mystery? The book of Job is not actually an attempt to answer the question why does evil happen to good people? It is an attempt to show what we ought to do—how we ought to live—in light of the reality of this mystery.
Even Plato, who sometimes seems to wield his Socrates as a hammer of philosophy, chose to write dialogues, not treatises, for a reason. His choice permitted him to introduce ambiguities that seem better suited for literature than for “pure” philosophy, as when he denounced poetry and myth in The Republic and then concluded the dialogue with a myth.
The dialogue form lends itself to this kind of moral-mystery exploration. The form creates what literary critics have taken to calling “ambiguity,” meaning simply that the dialogue form allows for paradox. In a treatise, the writer must take some kind of stand; that is the bargain he has made with the audience in choosing to write in the treatise form. In a dialogue, two speakers (or three, or four) exploring a philosophical (or theological) question can say two or three or four seemingly contradictory things (or, in the case of Plato’s Socrates in The Republic, one speaker can contradict himself) without destroying the audience’s trust. “God is good,” and “everywhere the innocent suffer.” Both of these statements are true. In a treatise, the philosopher has an obligation to try to work out how these statements relate to each other. In a dialogue, a drama, they can co-exist, both true, and the mystery that encompasses their relationship can be indicated or inferred imaginatively. This kind of imaginative inference can, in the right hands, lead to a clearer and more powerful than an straightforward argument.
Our task—the literary philosophers among us—is not to decipher the mystery, but to find a right way of living in relation to it.