Recently I read a short polemical book by a political philosopher in which he claimed that the works of Shakespeare, while entertaining and emotionally engaging, lacked intellectual content by comparison with the works of the great philosophers. If it were wisdom and knowledge that one was after, it was to the latter that one would turn. Literature was for entertainment, intelligent or not as the case might be. What applied to Shakespeare must, a fortiori, apply to all other literature, for by general consent the works of Shakespeare contain the richest description of the human condition ever written. Nor do we seriously expect that body of work ever to be surpassed. This being the case, philosophy was for thinkers, literature for those in need of light relief from the hard work of genuine thought.

This view, with which I am not sympathetic, supposes that everything truly important can be said, or is best said, in straightforwardly propositional fashion. It is to suppose that the mind always works best and deepest in explicit rather than in implicit mode. The greatest chess player is the one who is capable of calculating the greatest number of the consequences of the greatest number of moves ahead, rather than the one who takes the situation in at a glance. I find this view almost Gradgrindian in spirit, even though it must be admitted that there are few facts in Plato or Kant.

The question of the relative strength of the illumination provided