UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Poetic Philosophy in Plato and Zhuangzi Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/10m115xg Author Harte, Ryan Publication Date 2020 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Poetic Philosophy in Plato and Zhuangzi A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Ryan J. Harte June 2020 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Lisa Raphals, Chairperson Dr. Perry Link Dr. Yang Ye Dr. Zina Giannopoulou Copyright by Ryan J. Harte 2020 The Dissertation of Ryan J. Harte is approved: ——————————————————————————— ——————————————————————————— ——————————————————————————— ——————————————————————————— Committee Chairperson ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’ve always liked this remark from Cornel West: “I am who I am because somebody loved me.” It would be impractical to list everyone whose love in one way or another sustained me throughout my academic trip thus far, but a few names deserve outstanding mention: Kathleen (“mom”) for everything, Aunt Julie for getting all “verklempt” when I got into college, Tim for actually choosing to be my brother, Carly for seeing me and being seen, Sean for the sustenance of true friendship and the scraping heart-to-hearts, Wing for lung-fulls of fresh air when I needed them early on, and Ariel for the love and the generosity and the desert—in other words, for making southern California not only bearable but sometimes beautiful. The first question my supervisor, Lisa Raphals, asked upon meeting me in-person was whether I had food in my fridge and an acceptable place to sleep. My endless thanks to her for recognizing that there is a whole person attached to the scholar. Graduate students talk, and so I am keenly aware of my good fortune in having an advisor with whom I can openly disagree, caustically joke, and enjoy a meal (usually generously cooked by her). I am so glad my expansive search years ago turned me on to her. I write a lot about form, and she has been formative. Perry Link asks the best questions I have ever received. He can seize on a single word in a way that forces me to reëvaluate my entire argument, and this puts me on thrillingly precarious ground whenever I speak with him. I deeply admire his integrity in speaking his mind across all contexts, and his thoughtfulness towards equity in the case of graduate students and non-tenured faculty. Finally, I am grateful for his sheer sense of fun when getting into the nitty gritty of an argument. I thank him for the all the dinner invitations. iv I am indebted to the generosity of Yang Ye, whose pure delight in the beauty of literature and language is something the academic humanities need more of. He has always been ready to share feedback on my half-baked essays and ideas, always willing to sit and comb through the details of a text, but also to just visit and get to know me. In particular, his willingness to guide me through Classical Chinese was indefatigable. Having been his TA for several years, I can say that his love of fine literature is infectious: undergraduates sense it, and I have learned much from him. His encouragement to flex my creative muscles in the dissertation was welcome—any disastrous results are my own fault. Zina Giannopoulou has my thanks for hopping aboard an untested vessel when she agreed to serve on my prospectus committee only on the basis of our getting along well at a lunch. As a student, I felt affectionately seen when she correctly observed that I am a person who thinks as I write. Her candor and enthusiasm have been appreciated not just as a student but as a person (driving to Riverside from LA for drinks with a relative stranger is a kindness I have yet to fully fathom, let alone repay). Alba Curry, who, in Tennyson’s words, has “toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,” deserves my undying thanks. We are very different thinkers, but we make each other better. I am always happy to be angry on her behalf, and I am very sorry for leaving her alone in Riverside. Thomas Sorensen has listened to this entire dissertation. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I love his generosity, among much else. v This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Herman Sinaiko. He taught me how to read. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Poetic Philosophy in Plato and Zhuangzi by Ryan J. Harte Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, June 2020 Dr. Lisa Raphals, Chairperson This dissertation argues that written form is essential, not accessory, to philosophical content, with particular focus on Plato and Zhuangzi. In the case of these two thinkers, the written forms they have left us are what I call poetic: full of metaphor, imagery, narrative, and so on—characterized in largely by a lack of systematic analysis. Attending to form thus entails (1) expanding our notion of what counts as philosophically meaningful and (2) radically different interpretations of what Plato and Zhuangzi are up to—i.e., reading their forms as inherently meaningful rather than as containers for preconceived notions of Platonism or Daoism. The dissertation speaks, hopefully, to audiences in comparative literature, philosophy (especially the history of philosophy), classics, and sinology. vii CONTENTS Preface…………………………………………………………………………………….ix Chapter I Introduction: Forms & Poetic Philosophy…………………………………………………1 Chapter II The Torqued Unity of the Phaedrus………………………………………………………69 Chapter III Plato & Gestalt Thinking……………………………………………………………….134 Chapter IV Murdoch & Metaphysical Metaphors…………………………………………….…….166 Chapter V Perceiving & Selfing in the Qi wu lun 齊物論……………………………………….......215 Chapter VI Skillful Seeing in the Zhuangzi 莊⼦…………………………………………………...258 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….……..294 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………313 viii PREFACE ⼦曰：「予欲無⾔。」⼦貢曰：「⼦如不⾔，則⼩⼦何述焉︖」⼦曰：「天何⾔哉︖四時 ⾏焉，百物⽣焉，天何⾔哉︖」 Confucius said, “I desire to be wordless.” Zi Gong said, “But, master—if you don’t talk, then what will we disciples transmit?” Confucius said, “Does Heaven talk? Hmm? The four seasons come and go, everything springs up, but does Heaven ever talk?” Analects of Confucius, 論語 17.19 This dissertation argues that written form is essential, not accessory, to philosophical content, with particular focus on Plato and Zhuangzi. My starting premise is that form is an instantiation of ideas or content, not a container for them. When we attend to Plato’s and Zhuangzi’s forms, we come away with a different Plato and Zhuangzi than we are used to. I propose what I call poetic philosophy in contrast to most modern professional philosophy. By “poetic” here I refer to Aristotle’s sense of “poetics”: an interest in how a text does what it does rather than in what a text means. “Stylistics” or “formalism” capture somewhat of what I mean. I have opted for “poetic philosophy” because I want the resonance of that word: poetic, poiēsis (“to make, fabricate”). I also want to challenge our distinctions between poetry and philosophy, and so any discomfort that “poetic philosophy” evokes is probably deliberate. I rely on a broad notion of “form,” including written style but extending to the large idea that seeing how some form hang together is the fundamental experience of meaning itself. Here I draw on the largely neglected field of gestalt theory, which has in recent years benefitted from much experimental research, and which helps me treat form itself as a comparative category. ix Chapter One will give an overview of my theoretical approach, my poetic philosophy, as well as briefly look at how this approach differs from typical approaches to Plato and Zhuangzi. Chapter Two is a poetic reading of Plato’s Phaedrus with special attention to (1) its torqued unity as a poetic text and (2) Plato’s intertextual use of lyric poets Stesichorus and Sappho. Chapter Three zooms out to discuss more general affinities between Platonic metaphysics and gestalt thought, including a poetic model of truth as a kind of coherence. Chapter Four builds on this model of truth and offers my theory of metaphor not as decoration but as a way of saying something true; I then apply that to argue for Plato’s Theory of the Forms as a poetic metaphor. Chapter Five turns to Zhuangzi and shows how many of the same themes from Plato (knowledge as perception rather than analysis, for example) show up in the Qi wu lun 齊物論. Chapter Six expands this discussion to several of the famous skill stories in the Zhuangzi, which not only show some of poetic philosophy’s basic tenants but also blur several dichotomies that commonly distort the text (e.g., theory versus practice, mind versus body). The Conclusion recaps the project and suggests a direction for future work. Finally, a brief note on the structure and division of the dissertation. By sheer happenstance, my suspicion that the form of a text should be primary in any interpretation arose in reading Plato long before I was ever exposed to early Chinese philosophy. I have had at least an extra decade’s worth of thinking about these issues in Plato than in Zhuangzi—which is not to say that I have just taken a problem in Plato and thrown it onto Zhuangzi. Indeed, one of my hopes is that this project as a whole makes an argument for form as a comparative category. My theories of metaphor and of truth x apply to both thinkers but get explained in the Plato half, which helps account for why there are more Plato chapters. That said, Plato was my philosophical first love, and there is not much use in trying to hide that fact here—even as I carry on a torrid love/hate affair with Zhuangzi.