logic and poetry
Is philosophy the most or the least abstract of the academic disciplines? On the one hand, one can see it as dealing precisely with those topics which hit closest to home for us human beings... phenomena, interpretation, knowledge, the emotions, foundations of our language, etc, etc. Yet on the other hand, what, really, is further from the actual lives of men than most of these things? and about those things, such as the emotions, which are quite close to home, can philosophy say anything about them which poetry cannot? ah yes, and this brings up a similar question, one which is perhaps more what I was going for: is it the philosophers or the poets who reign as king in the world of abstraction? and what is poetry but the heart of the philosopher expressing itself through music? Is music the most abstract or the least abstract of the arts? On the one hand...
...and we could go on with this game forever. Here again I point you all to the nature of interpretation - to the gestalt shift taking place so many countless times throughout this discussion. Whether music, for instance, is the most or the least abstract of all the arts - that is a matter of context. For the dancer amidst her meditative, bodily trance, it is the least, and for the querulous number-miser on the other extreme of the scale - it is the most. In other words, from the standpoint of the body, music is one's most intimate language, but this is something that the logos can never understand. Of course, it often tries, and in the process creates for itself its own language through which it may interpret music. It uses such terms as C# minor, fortissimo and andante, hoping to connote the nuances of music's unspeakably cronal ecstasies. And through learning this language, the composer can then turn back toward music proper and, with his newfound skeletal system, excite the senses in completely unprecedented ways. That's the useful thing about our abstractions: they function as roads to new perspectives and positions through which to interpret and act within the world. Of course, they also function as means of communication, yet in the process, exactly because they are abstractions, must leave out certain aspects of what was initially meant to be said, and thus almost always leave us wanting, staring with those question marks in our eyes at the absence always present in the context of communication, of abstract expression.
This is where poetic language comes in. There is something so very strange about this aspect of human life, yet without it, we would be so utterly lost. Is poetry not the greatest manifestation of the synthesis between the logos and the heart? The use of words to communicate the unspeakable? It is the art of pure connotation, the realization of our frustrations with everyday language, and we must learn to speak as poets do day and night if we wish to ever be one with anything but ourselves. The logos, on its own, cannot grasp the textures of poetry, so to the dry minded masters of desert prose, poetry is among the most abstract of the arts. But to the poet, because he realizes that the poem is not merely the sum of words on the page, but rather in fact the space between them, he sees his art as the closest, along with music and dance, that we can get to reflecting through our finite means of communication the infinite being of the Moment. It is only in connotation, in the admittance of the existence of the absence present in all communication and the jump into that absence, that we may truly begin to make love with the Other. Poetry, as with music, dance, and any other medium of purest connotation, is really sex for us overflowing hearts, and therefore the most concrete of all mediums. What makes it abstract at all is nothing but the fact that it is a medium. Expression is necessarily abstract, precisely because it is always an imitation. But language is not merely a means of communication, is it? Is it not also the means by which we may experience pure philosophical meditation?
This activity, which we refer to as thinking - is this, too, subject to the woes of abstraction? In some sense, yes, for its medium is still primarily language, and language is always in some sense an abstraction. But when we find ourselves deep within that thick texture of the philosophical meditation, isn't there something which we cannot help but notice about it... that what we are doing is not at all along the same lines as communication with an Other, that it is ever so very far from expression? The absence inherent to communication fails to make itself present, because the activity is contained solely within that realm where words and their objects never cease to make contact. That is, words are used, but never on their own, never to be interpreted, but rather, merely sowed like lily pads in the pond of the thinker's thinking; the fundamental difference between thinking and communication is that, in thought, this particular step of interpretation is never requisite. One need not reinterpret his own words when he sets them down as mere placeholders on his own path, as long as he can always return to their original wellspring. Philosophical meditation, then, is not nearly as abstract as its discourse, despite its requirement of language.
This is where the problem with logic begins to make itself clear. Wittgenstein called logic a mirror of the world, but this is not entirely accurate. In a sense, he is onto something, but necessarily leaving out the texture. Yes, logic underscores our language, and our language creates for us the abstract skeleton through which we go about interpreting Being, and since this skeleton of our way through Being forms the basic structure of our World, we can say that logic is always in some sense there to underscore the world. But to underscore is not to reflect, for a pure reflection leaves nothing out. Words may consecrate our concepts and our objects, but this consecration, the carving out and clothing of our concepts, does not exhaust them. A man is more than the clothes he wears; the animal is more than its skin. Logic is like a black and white photograph, and such a photograph can tell us something about its depicted situation, but it can never tell us of the colors, much less of the fragrance. This is why there is more truth in poetry than in logic, and why Kierkegaard is in some sense right in his infamous proclamation that "truth is subjectivity".
When it comes down to it, where does logical truth find its base but within an intuition? A statement about the situation before me is irrefutably true, but what is this truth except the sublime, unrelinquishing light cast before me by the statement? When this light is so bright that we cannot even imagine its nonexistence, we might call its source, which here is a statement, unconditionally true. Sometimes these statements refer to matters-of-fact, sometimes they are a priori, but among any one of them, what is the determining factor of its truth except our inability to rid our view of the statement's particular light? "The lamp is on the table." "Two times three is six." I am drawn so strongly toward affirmation of these statements that I cannot authentically cast doubt; I therefore assert truth. Truth is therefore not simply a property of the statements, but of my relation to the statements. To assert, "it is true," is to proclaim, "I cannot see it otherwise." At least, that is the case of authentic assertions of truth. The physicist looking at his data might say quite authentically, out of complete conviction, that "dark matter exists;" for me, however, to make the same proclamation would be basically meaningless. I can regurgitate it, but a regurgitation is all it would really be, and far from authentic. This is, I think, what Kierkegaard was trying to get across in his assertion, and I think he's right. When it comes down to it, truth is a property of the individual's relationship with the concept at hand; what could it mean for it to be of the concept itself? "Conformity with the actual"? Please, don't take us back all those many steps. Conformity with which actuality? The rabbit, or the duck?
Logic has its place, but the crown that it wears at the head of the monopoly on truth has never been more than short-sighted and artificial. Fundamentally, its problem is its insistence on the "literal". But what is the literal except the most generally used figurative? What is denotation but an overly buffed connotation? It just loves to pretend that it has the sober view, but what is the sober except the most general inebriation? What is a logician but an archaeologist of World? As though through dry bones we may come to fully understand the meat...
The richest truths, then, are those of poetry. Yet, what really is the difference between the thoughts of the poet and the meditation of the philosopher who is himself aware of the flexibility of the chains of logic? Fluidity, rhythm, sensual textures, but fundamentally, these are only aesthetic differences. In the depths of their thinking, poets and spirited philosophers are essentially similar, and the greatest writers are the syntheses of the two.
...and we could go on with this game forever. Here again I point you all to the nature of interpretation - to the gestalt shift taking place so many countless times throughout this discussion. Whether music, for instance, is the most or the least abstract of all the arts - that is a matter of context. For the dancer amidst her meditative, bodily trance, it is the least, and for the querulous number-miser on the other extreme of the scale - it is the most. In other words, from the standpoint of the body, music is one's most intimate language, but this is something that the logos can never understand. Of course, it often tries, and in the process creates for itself its own language through which it may interpret music. It uses such terms as C# minor, fortissimo and andante, hoping to connote the nuances of music's unspeakably cronal ecstasies. And through learning this language, the composer can then turn back toward music proper and, with his newfound skeletal system, excite the senses in completely unprecedented ways. That's the useful thing about our abstractions: they function as roads to new perspectives and positions through which to interpret and act within the world. Of course, they also function as means of communication, yet in the process, exactly because they are abstractions, must leave out certain aspects of what was initially meant to be said, and thus almost always leave us wanting, staring with those question marks in our eyes at the absence always present in the context of communication, of abstract expression.
This is where poetic language comes in. There is something so very strange about this aspect of human life, yet without it, we would be so utterly lost. Is poetry not the greatest manifestation of the synthesis between the logos and the heart? The use of words to communicate the unspeakable? It is the art of pure connotation, the realization of our frustrations with everyday language, and we must learn to speak as poets do day and night if we wish to ever be one with anything but ourselves. The logos, on its own, cannot grasp the textures of poetry, so to the dry minded masters of desert prose, poetry is among the most abstract of the arts. But to the poet, because he realizes that the poem is not merely the sum of words on the page, but rather in fact the space between them, he sees his art as the closest, along with music and dance, that we can get to reflecting through our finite means of communication the infinite being of the Moment. It is only in connotation, in the admittance of the existence of the absence present in all communication and the jump into that absence, that we may truly begin to make love with the Other. Poetry, as with music, dance, and any other medium of purest connotation, is really sex for us overflowing hearts, and therefore the most concrete of all mediums. What makes it abstract at all is nothing but the fact that it is a medium. Expression is necessarily abstract, precisely because it is always an imitation. But language is not merely a means of communication, is it? Is it not also the means by which we may experience pure philosophical meditation?
This activity, which we refer to as thinking - is this, too, subject to the woes of abstraction? In some sense, yes, for its medium is still primarily language, and language is always in some sense an abstraction. But when we find ourselves deep within that thick texture of the philosophical meditation, isn't there something which we cannot help but notice about it... that what we are doing is not at all along the same lines as communication with an Other, that it is ever so very far from expression? The absence inherent to communication fails to make itself present, because the activity is contained solely within that realm where words and their objects never cease to make contact. That is, words are used, but never on their own, never to be interpreted, but rather, merely sowed like lily pads in the pond of the thinker's thinking; the fundamental difference between thinking and communication is that, in thought, this particular step of interpretation is never requisite. One need not reinterpret his own words when he sets them down as mere placeholders on his own path, as long as he can always return to their original wellspring. Philosophical meditation, then, is not nearly as abstract as its discourse, despite its requirement of language.
This is where the problem with logic begins to make itself clear. Wittgenstein called logic a mirror of the world, but this is not entirely accurate. In a sense, he is onto something, but necessarily leaving out the texture. Yes, logic underscores our language, and our language creates for us the abstract skeleton through which we go about interpreting Being, and since this skeleton of our way through Being forms the basic structure of our World, we can say that logic is always in some sense there to underscore the world. But to underscore is not to reflect, for a pure reflection leaves nothing out. Words may consecrate our concepts and our objects, but this consecration, the carving out and clothing of our concepts, does not exhaust them. A man is more than the clothes he wears; the animal is more than its skin. Logic is like a black and white photograph, and such a photograph can tell us something about its depicted situation, but it can never tell us of the colors, much less of the fragrance. This is why there is more truth in poetry than in logic, and why Kierkegaard is in some sense right in his infamous proclamation that "truth is subjectivity".
When it comes down to it, where does logical truth find its base but within an intuition? A statement about the situation before me is irrefutably true, but what is this truth except the sublime, unrelinquishing light cast before me by the statement? When this light is so bright that we cannot even imagine its nonexistence, we might call its source, which here is a statement, unconditionally true. Sometimes these statements refer to matters-of-fact, sometimes they are a priori, but among any one of them, what is the determining factor of its truth except our inability to rid our view of the statement's particular light? "The lamp is on the table." "Two times three is six." I am drawn so strongly toward affirmation of these statements that I cannot authentically cast doubt; I therefore assert truth. Truth is therefore not simply a property of the statements, but of my relation to the statements. To assert, "it is true," is to proclaim, "I cannot see it otherwise." At least, that is the case of authentic assertions of truth. The physicist looking at his data might say quite authentically, out of complete conviction, that "dark matter exists;" for me, however, to make the same proclamation would be basically meaningless. I can regurgitate it, but a regurgitation is all it would really be, and far from authentic. This is, I think, what Kierkegaard was trying to get across in his assertion, and I think he's right. When it comes down to it, truth is a property of the individual's relationship with the concept at hand; what could it mean for it to be of the concept itself? "Conformity with the actual"? Please, don't take us back all those many steps. Conformity with which actuality? The rabbit, or the duck?
Logic has its place, but the crown that it wears at the head of the monopoly on truth has never been more than short-sighted and artificial. Fundamentally, its problem is its insistence on the "literal". But what is the literal except the most generally used figurative? What is denotation but an overly buffed connotation? It just loves to pretend that it has the sober view, but what is the sober except the most general inebriation? What is a logician but an archaeologist of World? As though through dry bones we may come to fully understand the meat...
The richest truths, then, are those of poetry. Yet, what really is the difference between the thoughts of the poet and the meditation of the philosopher who is himself aware of the flexibility of the chains of logic? Fluidity, rhythm, sensual textures, but fundamentally, these are only aesthetic differences. In the depths of their thinking, poets and spirited philosophers are essentially similar, and the greatest writers are the syntheses of the two.