The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [41]
Dead Flowers and Concepts
One feature of philosophical tradition Derrida and Nietzsche sought to undo was Plato’s conception of art and poetry. According to Plato, poetry nourishes laughter, anger, love and joy, and sex and dreams, and all the human desires that just might leave you in tatters. So philosophers need to be on their guard against the damaging effects of poetry and music. Since they can corrupt the soul, and drive us to a state of emotional crisis, they need to be kept in check and controlled by our sun-seeking rationality.
Plato’s masterpiece The Republic includes a quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Plato argues in favor of censoring poets because they endanger our souls by stimulating our emotions at the expense of our reason. Plato takes the side of philosophy and non-poetic, non-metaphoric, literal truth (which is ironic, given that his allegory of the cave is itself a metaphor). Poetry can only provide us with illusions or appear-ances, he says, just as a painter can only present approximate representations. Just as the rational part of the soul corrects the errors of optical illusions, such as the unequal angles of a bed in a painting, reason must correct the emotional errors that are fostered by poetry. In other words, Plato prefers the dead flowers of philosophical abstraction to the living flowers of poetry.
Derrida and Nietzsche disagree and take the side of poetry. Abstract thinking, according to Derrida, distorts philosophy by leaving us with a conceptual graveyard of ideas that have been effaced of their original life and meaning. The process of abstracting metaphors into concepts strips them of their color, and causes them to wither like dead flowers. It is, in effect, a process of “abstraction without extraction,” of focusing on the dead flower and ignoring its life source derived from its metaphoric roots. Derrida claims that philosophers wish to escape the world of appearance expressed in poetry, and to concentrate their focus on what is real. But in doing so, they, in effect, become poets by creating a new world of appearances.26
For Nietzsche, Plato’s attempt to strip philosophy of its poetic content leaves us with empty, abstract concepts because in our attempts to “purify” reason we have forgotten its origins in metaphors and poetry. Poetry, the language of the emotions, is more immediate, less abstract, and closer to the source of what is signified. Consequently, metaphoric language is more real. Philosophy should embrace it, and not fade away into lifeless concepts.
Philosophy’s Bad Boys
Nietzsche and Derrida are misfits and outcasts within a long philosophical tradition. Western philosophers, they believed, elevated reason to new heights and worshipped it falsely in its purified state. But they remind us that while the heliotrope may seek the rays of the sun, it is nourished by the soil from which it originates. White mythology leaves us with concepts that are colorless, blanched and anemic, lacking in the life blood which gives them their richest meaning.
The Stones similarly took pop back to the soil and the roots from which it is nurtured and earned their image as outcasts, misfits. They helped integrate Black American blues in White America, which had stripped and effaced its music of its African and slave origins and had presented itself as a white mythology. White rock’n’roll, like philosophy, had attempted to purify itself, stripping itself of its roots and the pathos from which it originated. It had become, to use Derrida’s phrasing, an “abstraction without extraction.” It needed to find its roots in its emotional pathos and white musicians needed to learn to “let it bleed.” And it needed some color—it needed to be painted black. The heliotrope of rock’n’roll cannot always face the sun. White music, like white mythology,