Hi Chris
I take it then that you reject Cocteau's claim that art is attempting to get truth across (option 2) and that you also believe truth is ineffable (option 3)?
I interpret Plato differently from you. I don't think his objection is to "mortal" truths or knowledge, but rather to "opinion" -- where opinion is to be interpreted as the kind of "knowledge" given to us by common sense and sense perception. These beliefs, I think, participate in being and not being in the following fairly straightforward sense: each is true in some circumstances and not in others. (It is true that it's standardly just to return what you owe, but it is not always just in all circumstances -- if someone lent you weapons and asks for them back when he is in a psychotic episode, for instance.) Our common sense beliefs do (appear to) contradict each other because they are each adapted to particular purposes and particular conditions. We are in the position William James describes in the introduction to _Pragmatism_ -- ordinary people all have philosophical beliefs -- but most do not have a consistent set of such beliefs. Rather we switch from one position to another as we think about different situations and different topics. We keep our beliefs in different "compartments".
As I read Plato, he nevertheless regards these commonsense opinions as the starting point for an inquiry which could ultimately lead to genuine understanding and knowledge (e.g., knowledge of the correct definition of "justice"). The aim of the Socratic method is to find an account which unifies our apparently inconsistent commonsense beliefs.
In the current discussion, he would take Goldwyn and Cocteau as stating two such partial truths and the aim of the philosopher as trying to find an account on which both turn out to be partially perceiving aspects of the same overall truth about literature. (Plato's view of truth and its relation to our ordinary seemingly contradictory beliefs can be well represented by the story of the blindmen who touched different parts of the elephant and gave vastly different descriptions of its nature.) On this view, truth is stateable, but NOT in sensory concepts.
I would like to distance myself a bit from the connotations of the word "didactic", though I'll admit my view does give art a sort of educational function in a broad sense.
I think Socrates was right to be suspicious of people who think they can TEACH wisdom -- if we understand teaching as an active teacher implanting wisdom into a passive student. First of all, the student only really learns if he actively engages in the kind of pursuit I just described -- resolution of conflicts between HIS OWN beliefs. Second, the "teacher" himself is always being tested as much as his "student".
To apply this last point to literature, I'd say Goldwyn has a point against anyone who tries to merely translate some preexisting message into a story. The only chance the artist has of conveying wisdom is if he surrenders control, if he allows the practice of composition itself to teach him again the wisdom he's conveying. (Frost seems to make a similar point in
The figure a poem makes -- the essay where he says the poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom".)
If such a joint inquiry into truth by reader and writer together is "didactic" then I'll accept the term.
Susan, I agree with you -- that's the sort of thing I meant when I said that literature is trying to teach the heart something which the head may (or may not) know.
For example, in my view the central moral truth is what my mother used to tell me "you are not the center of the world." We all know this abstractly, but just by showing us others' lives or feelings "from the inside", literature helps our hearts understand this fact (or reminds them of it). If we are unmoved, then our hearts don't really "get it".
[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 29, 2004).]