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PARTISAN REVIEW
but I should not call the piece of dead tissue "the thought itself."
Eliot's notion of thinking is altogether inadequate: "In truth
neither Shakespeare nor Dante did any real thinking-that was not
their job." Whatever "real" thinking may be, it certainly is no job.
Shakespeare did not really think because there is no evidence "that
he thought to any purpose; that he had any coherent view of life,
or that he recommended any procedure to follow." These are very
strange criteria of thinking, at variance not only with our ordinary
use of the term but also with the practice of many outstanding phil–
osophers. When Eliot denies that Shakespeare thought, but then
speaks of "whatever his time happened to think," he comes close to
implying that there are really only two kinds of thinking: the "good"
thinking accepted by Dante, and the "bad" thinking of the times in
which poets less fortunate than Dante are condemned to live and
write.
The separation of thought from experience, however, which
Eliot makes the criterion of "real" thinking, has its dark side. Re–
ligious beliefs, for example, though originally prompted by some ex–
perience, often become an acceptable substitute for religious exper–
ience or prevent the believer from savoring the full range of his own
inimitable experience. The thought that "you must change your life"
is a relatively common thought, present not only in Rilke's time but
in all ages. What distinguishes the poet is not that he found a striking
emotional equivalent for it, but that he did not let the thought get
in the way of the experience; and what Rilke has in common with
Nietzsche is not beliefs as much as experiences-and the determina–
tion to let no belief dehydrate them.
The dichotomy of thought and emotion on which Eliot depends
is quite modern and particularly characteristic,
pace
Eliot, of logical
positivism, especially in its first and crudest phase. It was largely
alien to Greek philosophy. Plato juxtaposed reason and the senses
without confining emotion to either realm: he knew the passion of
thinking too well. Among the earliest pre-Socratics there is no evi–
dence of any division of man into disjointed faculties; and this is
one main reason why Heidegger rejects the whole Western tradition
that begins with Plato, why he goes back to the pre-Socratics, and
why he has occupied himself so largely with H6lderlin and Rilke,
saying that his own philosophy is really an explication of Rilke. He
