ABSTRACT
I Philosophy seeks the truth, while literature is content with mere invention and pleasing fables. Such was Plato’s view of the matter, and so it has remained-with minor local adjustments-down through the history of western thought. Sometimes the distinction gets blurred and philosophers find themselves compelled to insist on a proper demarcation of interests. At present they are coping with one such problem, in the form of a deconstructionist literary theory which denies the very grounds of that distinction. Philosophy, it is argued, stakes its claim to rationality and truth only by forgetting or constantly repressing its own rhetorical character. A whole tradition of philosophic thinking-Derrida’s ‘logocentric’ epoch-rests on this unconscious refusal to acknowledge the kinship of philosophy and literature. Hence, as Nietzsche was first to proclaim, the root dissimulation of philosophic reason: the pretence that its truths have an absolute validity independent of the metaphoric ruses and devices that bring them into being. The salient fact of its textual constitution is what philosophy has to ignore in the interests of preserving its pure conceptual regime. That truth should be indeed, as Nietzsche maintained, a product of sublimated textual figuration is a threatening possibility scarcely to be dreamed of in ‘serious’ philosophic discourse.
