The Ascent of Love: Plato, Spinoza, Proust

Abstract

EW LITERARY HISTORY has been a pioneer in exploring the boundaries between philosophy and literature. Because of Ralph Cohen's creativity and vision, thejournal has asked hard, illuminating questions about the connections between philosophical form and literary content, about the moral vision embodied in works of narrative literature, about the role of genre and convention in the two disciplines, about the question of realism and antirealism. I feel great personal gratitude to Ralph and to the journal for the encouragement I received at the very beginning of my work on some of these questions, when Ralph agreed to publish an exchange between Richard Wollheim and me about Henry James's The Golden Bowl, inviting a distinguished group of literary and philosophical critics to comment. Without that encouragement I might have been less confident about devoting so much of my time to those issues, and perhaps much of my subsequent work would have been delayed or perhaps would not have existed at all. The quite marvelous thing about Ralph is that very many people in many disciplines in the humanities can tell the same tale. It would not be very profitable, I think, to pronounce in an abstract and general way on the role the journal has played in arbitrating what Plato calls the quarrel of long standing between the poets and the philosophers. It therefore seemed to me best to get on with the concrete exploration of that quarrel. I want to argue here that there is a part of the Western tradition of thought about love and its reform or ascent that cannot be well understood unless we do cross the boundaries that