XANTHIPPE: Call it what you will –poetry, rhetoric, imitation –it is the art of appearances, of showing the world as it really seems. And since we too are appearances, it is poetry, and not philosophy, which gives the truth of our condition.
Xanthippic Dialogues by Roger Scruton
This quote comes from a wonderful work of philosophic fiction that I heartily recommend. Ancient Greece was a very patriarchal society as everyone knows. Xanthippe was the actual wife of Socrates, portrayed in Plato’s dialogues as something of a shrew. But one man’s shrew is another man’s intellectual equal and foil. The Xanthippic Dialogues are the fictional dialogues of Xanthippe who, being female, naturally puts Socrates (“Socks” to her) in his place by standing him on his head; truth is not discovered by reason, but by art.
In reality, she asserts that we do not know the world, we only perceive it, i.e., reality is mediated by our senses and intellectual software before we subjectively perceive it. But if this is true, and clearly it is, then what are we ourselves but an appearance, the interior perception of ourselves by… who exactly? Perhaps not who, but what: being, which exists outside time and place and is therefore nameless. No one knows.
Scruton’s Xanthippe is not arguing that there is no external, objective reality; rather, she asserts that our condition is such that we cannot know it directly and therefore in a certain sense cannot know it at all. She argues that since all we know is appearance, it is art, which reflects perception not reality, that gives us the truest picture of our condition in the world. Therefore, the first truth is that reason alone will not reveal truth; it is not philosophy, but art that shines the brightest and truest light. She is arguing for vigorous realism, prudence and humility, the virtues of women, not men.
Interestingly, however, Xanthippe came to this thought (which, ironically exists only in Plato’s world of forms) , through the use of her reason. As Plotinus notes in The Six Enneads:
Hence the Soul heightened to the Intellectual-Principle is beautiful to all its power. For Intellection and all that proceeds from Intellection are the Soul’s beauty, a graciousness native to it and not foreign, for only with these is it truly Soul. And it is just to say that in the Soul’s becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings.
God created man and woman in His image. Thank goodness!
Blog 86, We too are Appearances
XANTHIPPE: Call it what you will –poetry, rhetoric, imitation –it is the art of appearances, of showing the world as it really seems. And since we too are appearances, it is poetry, and not philosophy, which gives the truth of our condition.
Xanthippic Dialogues by Roger Scruton
This quote comes from a wonderful work of philosophic fiction that I heartily recommend. Ancient Greece was a very patriarchal society as everyone knows. Xanthippe was the actual wife of Socrates, portrayed in Plato’s dialogues as something of a shrew. But one man’s shrew is another man’s intellectual equal and foil. The Xanthippic Dialogues are the fictional dialogues of Xanthippe who, being female, naturally puts Socrates (“Socks” to her) in his place by standing him on his head; truth is not discovered by reason, but by art.
In reality, she asserts that we do not know the world, we only perceive it, i.e., reality is mediated by our senses and intellectual software before we subjectively perceive it. But if this is true, and clearly it is, then what are we ourselves but an appearance, the interior perception of ourselves by… who exactly? Perhaps not who, but what: being, which exists outside time and place and is therefore nameless. No one knows.
Scruton’s Xanthippe is not arguing that there is no external, objective reality; rather, she asserts that our condition is such that we cannot know it directly and therefore in a certain sense cannot know it at all. She argues that since all we know is appearance, it is art, which reflects perception not reality, that gives us the truest picture of our condition in the world. Therefore, the first truth is that reason alone will not reveal truth; it is not philosophy, but art that shines the brightest and truest light. She is arguing for vigorous realism, prudence and humility, the virtues of women, not men.
Interestingly, however, Xanthippe came to this thought (which, ironically exists only in Plato’s world of forms) , through the use of her reason. As Plotinus notes in The Six Enneads:
Hence the Soul heightened to the Intellectual-Principle is beautiful to all its power. For Intellection and all that proceeds from Intellection are the Soul’s beauty, a graciousness native to it and not foreign, for only with these is it truly Soul. And it is just to say that in the Soul’s becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings.
God created man and woman in His image. Thank goodness!