Illusion or Fusion? Poetry and Reality in Plato, Proclus, and Erich Neumann

Plato’s Socrates, even when banishing poets from the polis, declares that he would willingly let them come back, if they or anybody else could make a case for it (Rep. 607c6-d1). In so doing, Plato allowed the possibility of a philosophical justification of poetry, vaguely suggesting that its charms could offer something else than a distorted picture of reality. According to the Neoplatonist Proclus, there are three types of poetry (the inspired, the didactic, the imaginative): only the last type, the imaginative, is mimetic. What characterizes the effects of the first two types is fusion and non-mimetic means: absolute fusion of subject and object in the inspired poetry, and fusion of knower and known in the epistemic. For Jungian-oriented psychologist Erich Neumann the true reality is undivided and can be only experienced through experience of one’s own self. Such an experience is defined as a kind of fusion of subject and object. It is by no means limited to poetry, but some of the most refined examples Neumann offers are taken from lyric poetry.