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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
There is an effort of the mind when it would describe what it cannot satisfy itself with the description of, to reconcile opposites and to leave a middle state of mind more strictly appropriate to the imagination than any other when it is hovering between two images: as soon as it is fixed on one it becomes understanding; and when it is waving between them attaching itself to neither, it is imagination.
Coleridge, Lectures of 1811–1812“The highest a man can attain,” said Goethe on this occasion, “is wonder, and when the primordial phenomenon [Urphänomen] makes him wonder he should be content; it can give him nothing higher, and he should not look for anything beyond it; here is the boundary. But the sight of a primordial phenomenon is not generally enough for men; they think there must be more in back of it, like children who, having looked into a mirror, turn it around to see what is on the other side.”
Eckermann, Conversations with GoetheI begin with Plato and Aristotle because in them, first of all, philosophy and poetry or drama find themselves intertwined. Even when Plato speaks harshly of poetry (and he does not always do so), his harshness is born of a deep sense of its appeal and strength as an alternative source of knowledge. Recognition of the cognitive claims of drama forms the principal ground of Aristotle's account of it in the Poetics. Though neither of them gives a full account of how poetry accomplishes its effects, both are deeply responsive to its power to work on our emotions, and both locate the emotion of wonder in particular at the juncture between what poetry does and what philosophy does.
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