Francis Raven
Etymology of ‘Poetry’ and
‘Philosophy’
Perhaps in order to get at the relationship between poetry and philosophy
we should look at the etymology of these two words.
Etymological analysis tends not to be a rigorous analysis but a way of
moving through words which hopefully leads to new insights into these words.
These insights are often poetic in nature because they lead you to view
words in ways in which they are not normally used.
Thus, etymological analysis often leads to what has been termed ‘the
poem in every word’.
‘Poetry’ is etymologically derived from the Greek word ‘poiein’
which means ‘to create’ or ‘to make’.
So, etymologically, a poet is a maker or a creator.
The Greek word ‘poiein’ is a general verb for creation or making
whereas our word ‘poetry’ is the specific creation of the poem.
One question which arises at this point is: how is the making of a poem
also like the general making of everything?
If the etymological analysis is taken even further, that is, further back
from the Greek into the Indo-European a slightly different insight is ventured
into. The Indo-European root of
‘poetry’ given by the 4th edition of The American Heritage Dictionary
is ‘kwei’ which meant “to
pile up, build, or make”. In this
analysis, poetry might be seen as a piling up, but a piling up of what?
One way of looking at poetry is to see that it is a piling up of
interpretations of the world, a building of meanings, an increase in the volume
of the body of the world through the act of folding.
‘Philosophy’ etymologically breaks down into two Greek words, namely
‘philo’ which means ‘love of’ and ‘sophia’ that means ‘wisdom’.
So, etymologically, a philosopher is a lover of wisdom.
Which means two things. Firstly,
it means that the philosopher goes wherever wisdom goes, as any good lover
would. And secondly, it foreordains
that philosophy and the philosopher are not equivalent to wisdom because, of
course, you cannot be the lover of something that is the same as or synonymous
with yourself.
The poet and the philosopher are bound together by Sophia, bound by
wisdom, bound by that woman and her continual begetting of the world. A radical and wrong interpretation of Dante’s Divine
Comedy might help us. Let us
say that Beatrice is Sophia (she’s not, of course, Sophia is also in the
poem). This would mean that Dante
was being led, indirectly through Virgil, by her and towards her. Let us then again say that ‘Dante the writer’ is the
philosopher and that ‘Dante the actor within the poem’ is the poet.
This, of course, is almost too convoluted.
For it would mean that the one who wrote his poem was not the poet but
the philosopher and that the one within the poem was not a man, but a poet qua
poet. Yes, this analysis that has been brought by etymology leads
us slightly in the right direction, but it contradicts here into a mystery that
must not be analyzed. Or is
it the other way around, is ‘Dante the writer’ the poet and ‘Dante the
actor within the poem’ the philosopher? This
too, would also be a plausible direction because it would mean that the
philosopher was the one led by Sophia and this would make sense because we have
already seen that philosophy etymologically means ‘lover of Sophia’.
The poet would then resume his normal role as the one who writes the
poem. Either of these indirecting
character searches aids us in going with the relationship between poetry and
philosophy.
And so the philosopher loves that woman, that Sophia, analogue of the
holy ghost who continually begets with God and who is later (always later)
manifested as the Virgin Mary. The
philosopher goes with the woman and loves her dearly but poetry is the
analogizing process that takes this woman from the holy ghost to Isis to Sophia
to the Virgin Mary. This is what
poetry piles up, proliferates, makes. This
is the manner in which the poet is a creator or maker.
Etymological analysis has led us through these wild insights which we are
now able to use as stones for our argument’s temple.
Philosophy and the Self-Referential Poem
Since writing poems is an act of creation, writing poems about the nature
of poetry and the nature of the poet is necessarily a dialogue about creation
with someone who is in the act of it. Since
we did not get to speak to God while he was creating the universe, this is the
closest that we will ever get to speaking with a creator while he is in the act
of creation. Heidegger uses two
terms which will illuminate my point here.
For Heidegger ‘Being’ is the ground or source of all being, including
mind and world, whereas ‘being’ is merely existence. So, when the poet writes about the nature of poetry he is
exhibiting and attending to the conversation between ‘Being’ (the nature of
poetry and the creation of it) and ‘being’ (the poet himself).
This is why the conversation inherent in the self-referential poem best
helps us to understand what it means to be.
