ABSTRACT
The political deficiency of poetry is regularly identified as its service to and unlicensed encouragement of pleasure rather than political utility. The quarrel between philosophy and poetry is in the first instance political or moral. The poetry encourages desire, and hence the will. Philosophy advocates the restriction of the desires or the transformation of desire in accord with the definition of completeness as wisdom. Plato practices esotericism in the sense that he seeks to persuade us that philosophy has won, or can win, its quarrel with poetry. The contemporary defense of poetry, for example by Heidegger, attributes to the poetic art the manifestation or unveiling of that which Plato would call an 'Idea' or 'ousia'. But the Socratic critique does not say that the poet 'veils' the Ideas. There is an essential discontinuity between poetry and mathematics. As a direct consequence, if philosophy is represented by the paradigm of mathematics, then it can never win its quarrel with poetry.
