The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato’s Philebus

Benardete, Seth, The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato's Philebus, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Excerpt:

The criticism of poetry in the Philebus does not deny to poetry its truthfulness to life. It locates its falsity in poetry’s denial of the goodness of life. Poetry’s exposition of life does not redeem it; rather, it makes life worth living only to the degree to which poetry has not exposed it. Socrates, however, locates the ground of the impossibility of the life that poetry reveals in its neglect of the life of body and sou; he vindicates life by showing that the mixture of thought and experience is superior to any separation and that the speculative mode of poetry is too far removed from life to detect the life of philosophy.

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