Dawn Lacks Rosy Fingers, Astronomers Announce

Oh, no, David Brooks! Um, Homer wasn't a philosopher. Homer was a poet. Homer was an oral poet. All those rosy-fingered dawns and wine-dark seas and cunning Ulysseseseses . . . those were to help him remember the words. You're out of your element.

Seriously. What the hell philosopher is Brooks talking about? "The philosopher’s view is shaped like a funnel. At the bottom, there is a narrow thing called character. And at the top, the wide ways it expresses itself." Ah yes, I recall in the Tractatus, when Wittgenstein elucidates his oft-quoted seventh proposition: Where, or of what, one cannot speak, one pours into a funnel.

David Brooks, if nothing else, proves Pope's adage about a little learning. When he abandons his milquetoast ramblings on coastal Republicans who shop at Williams Sonoma and Appalachian Democrats who prefer Dunkin Donuts, or, you know, whatever, and sallies forth into the Great Books curriculum like a punch-drunk Quixote clutching an extra-large bottle of Tussin in his lance-hand, the Western canon, whatever it may be, better duck and cover. He has read widely, but seems to lack context entirely, and so, for example, he has confused the epic for the philosophical, synechdoche for proposition, metonym for definition.

UPDATE: Looks like Prof Crispy and I were reading the same papers ce matin.