I can't make any sense of the idea of a musical metaphysic. For me music evokes feelings; among them feelings of the sublime, feelings of awe, feelings of reverence but none of those feelings are inextricably linked to any particular metaphysical conjecture or belief as far as I can tell. The same goes for poetry and the visual arts, but then they, being more capable of representation, can present metaphysical ideas in ways that music cannot, except more vaguely by association with the church or whatnot. — Janus

This matches the thoughts I had when I read the OP. Not to get into an infinite loop, but is the claim that metaphysics is not applicable to music and other art a metaphysical statement.

Good poem. I really love it when my old threads are kept alive.

I won't argue with your personal experience with the Tao Te Ching. — Noble Dust

For what it's worth, when the "My Favorite Verses from the Tao Te Ching" discussion was active, some people made the same sorts of comments as you are about whether it is possible to really get what Lao Tzu was saying.

What are the benefits and the problems with patriarchy and with matriarchy? — Athena

I agree with @Apollodorus, it is difficult to have a fruitful discussion if you don't give us definitions to work with. "Patriarchy" and "matriarchy" mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Are our senses the only things that make the world real to us? — TiredThinker

I would guess the most important thing is memory.

This is a really good post about something I've been thinking about for a while. I need to put some thought into my response. I'll be back.

I only seek to publicly expose nonsense — 180 Proof

Yes. You are a bit less forgiving than I am. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Poetry is fated against it's own time because it's language. It will always fade because of it's stuff. — Noble Dust

My only real experience with poetry from a significantly foreign time and place is the Tao Te Ching. I've received much more from that than I ever have from all but a very few modern poets who write in English. The minute I first read it it grabbed me. Since then, I've read parts of at least 15 translations. Each helps me build up a more complete experience.

But it does mean that there's no "metaphysic" of poetry as such. — Noble Dust

I'll ask you the same question I asked @Gus Lamarch, do music and visual art have a metaphysics? If so, please explain.

I'm familiar with Machu Picchu, btw. — Noble Dust

I assumed you would be, but then you indicated you didn't. [joke]I thought maybe you were joking, but then I remembered you are from Ohio. [/joke]

Poetry uses words, which is really problematic because it uses the same vehicles we use in our every day conversations, like the one we're having here. So it's not correct to compare poetry to music, cave paintings, or whatever the fuck Machu Picchu is. If you can speak in music or painting right now, do so; and I'll concede the point. — Noble Dust

Disagree strongly. Poetry uses words, but is not like our other uses. I know that because I feel it. Poetry feels like music. It feels like visual art. It goes to the same place inside. Poetry doesn't mean anything the same way art and music don't mean anything. This is Machu Picchu:

All we can do is appropriate it to our way of reading what we think of as poetry. — Noble Dust

Can we receive the message sent to us by Mozart? By the cave painters in Lascaux? By the guys who built fucking Machu Picchu? By the guys who built this 5,000 years ago?

There are just so many factors, even just within the interpretation of current English poetry, for instance. — Noble Dust

The messages of art, including poetry, are not received by interpreting it. They are received by experiencing it.

When it comes to the population interested in politics, I do believe it's almost entirely hopeless. There's no longer anything rational about it, and no one is acting on good faith. There's no consistency, no principles -- it's pure tribalism. — Xtrix

I don't agree. I think the values of most Americans are pretty mainstream. Discord has been intentionally engineered to keep people with common needs and goals separated.

The division and discord you have in the US is between one set of working class plebs pitched against another set of working class plebs. What you don't have is a righteous division between those with power and those without. The fact that you under the absurd impression that this works along party lines - blaming 'Republicans', as though democrats are note complicit and in fact part of the same machine - makes you exactly one of the said working class plebs. — StreetlightX

Serious question - are things different in Australia?

This is not a scientifically accurate depiction.

this means everything that constitutes poetry (and any art form) is always in flux, which prevents any grandiose attempts by philosophy to pin the caterpillar under the glass. — Noble Dust

But I think pinning the caterpillar is the whole point of art. By which I mean that, when I read Lao Tzu, I am trying to receive the message he sent 2,500 years ago. A message intended to transmit an experience from his mind into mine.

Even when we read the Sufis, we're reading an interpretation (to say the least); we're not reading the poetry as it was written. We're looking at JPEG's of Mona Lisa.

None of this is to say that some metaphysic of Poetry doesn't exist, but if it does, it's at best apprehended by the poet at the time of writing and possibly at no other time, but probably not by readers, and certainly not by dilettante philosophers hundreds of years later. — Noble Dust

Sounds like you're saying art is impossible or useless. Given your history, I know that's not what you mean.

The liberal idea that we're all in this together tra-la-la happy-happy hold-hands simply does not hold. When some corporation is poisoning your water supply for profit, the idea that one must hold equal in discourse what is unequal in reality is to side with said poisoners. — StreetlightX

In the US at least, environmental protection enforced by government is part of the liberal agenda, resisted by business, often conservatives. The air and water in the US is dramatically cleaner than it was before 1970, when the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed. To be fair, they were passed with the support of Richard Nixon, a Republican.

Division and incivility is a public good. — StreetlightX

Perhaps in Australia, but not in general and not in the United States. The division and discord we see here, with the Trump presidency the most recent example, has been building for decades. It was engineered implemented by the Republican Party to advance their particular agenda. Governing takes a certain minimum level of civil discourse. There are a lot of people in the US not interested in governing.

TClark,

In the portion of my work that you cite, I make the Popper argument. Karl Popper rejected the notion of consensus in matters of science, insisting that a scientific postulate can only be based upon experimentation and is formulated with such particularity that it is subject to falsification. Like psychology, he would rank climatology as pseudoscience. — Neri

To start with, it would be really helpful if you would quote the text you're trying to discuss so we can all figure out what post and specific text you are referring to. You can do this by highlighting the text and pushing on the "quote" button that pops up. That will open a new response with the quoted text and a tag that links to the quoted post. That's what I've done with your text.

Here's what I wrote - "If you have to make a decision about a scientific issue where there is uncertainty, decide on the basis of the scientific consensus if there is one." Consensus is not about validating the truth, it's about picking our best understanding so we can answer the question "What do I do next." Sometimes you can't wait around for certainty. That's the goal - picking our best understanding so we can act. Climate change is a good example of a situation where that is the best approach.

Also - it's hard to take the idea that you, or I for that matter, know what Karl Popper might say about this situation seriously.

Personally, I believe that every essence that constitutes "aesthetic perception" and "art", is nothing more than the method that we - beings in a conscious existence - find to project unto this existence, something that is still not comprehended - emotions.

What is "beautiful" is only "beautiful" because such an object of worship projects into existence, the substance of the concept of aesthetics - like music, poetry and visual art, for example -. — Gus Lamarch

I think you and I are talking about something similar, but the language we use is too different for us to make a connection. And I don't think art - poetry, music, visual art - are about emotions in particular. At least not just emotions. I think they're about something that can't be explained or understood, only expressed and experienced.

Usually I retort 'Yeah well, a thing has structure and the vacuum does not have any structure, therefore the vacuum is not any thing (which is why the vacuum fluctuates, or "is unstable" as Frank Wilczek says.)' — 180 Proof

Anyway, I wasn't disagreeing with you. It's just that I've never found that the quantum vacuum ends any arguments or leads to any resolution in these types of questions.

"In the beginning" was (is?) vacuum fluctuations. — 180 Proof

Sure. Ok. I've used that answer when people ask how something can be created from nothing. They just say the quantum vacuum isn't nothing.

Perhaps the poem examples you provided would read as more poetic in Persian, but in English they're pretty prosy. So I'm not sure they're very good examples.

Poetry is not generally somewhere I go for metaphysics. It kind of misses the point. There are some philosophical poets I love, in particular Robert Frost. It feels like poetry uses a different part of my mind than prose does. It goes down different pathways. I think it's more like music or visual art than it is like prose.

Serious question - Do music and visual art "support an independent metaphysics?"

However, its "projections" - understand "projection" as what one wants to make explicit in an implicit way through poetic writing - do not allow the "substance" - understand "substance" as what even implicitly, does not become projectable because it is the fundamental basis of thought transformed into writing - of the concept itself to be perceived - external to individual interpretation — Gus Lamarch

I'm not sure exactly what this means, but I think you are getting at something basic about poetry (and music and visual art). It seems similar to how I describe them - I say they don't mean anything beyond the experience of reading, listening to, or looking at them. Does that ring a bell?

I think that poetry, or poesis, is a different way of viewing the world and, in many ways, is more about intuition than logic. It also is about language to capture images and it could be seen like painting In words. It does involve subjective expression more than reason, but it can touch and grasp higher, 'truths' as well. I think that some of the poets, including William Blake, and W B Yeats, stand out as such important thinkers in their own right. But, seeing their ideas as objective is questionable, but they did create worldviews, like many novelists and romantic philosophers. — Jack Cummins

Good post. Well expressed and I agree with you thoughts.

But pointedly, you didn't. — Banno

As I said, I'll keep any additional thoughts between Bitter Crank and myself.

Hey, I liked him. He just could not control himself. — Banno

As I said, I'll keep my thoughts between @Bitter Crank and myself.

banned for low quality posts. — Hanover

@Prishon could have been a really good part of this community. I've said it before. I'll say it again. You guys should be ashamed of yourselves.

I include you in that @Banno and @Gregory

I'll send a PM to @Bitter Crank and tell him what I really think of you all.

and any lack of quality is made up for in quantity.. — Banno

Often, a large number of posts and threads means low quality. Generally, that hasn't been the case with @Prishon. You, who's primary contribution has generally been off-hand, smart-ass snipes at other people's posts, probably shouldn't be the one to complain.

You wanna talk physics? Have a GOOD discussion, dialectical discourse? You seem to know about it. — Prishon

Gregory is trying to piss you off. Seems like he's trying to get you banned by harassing you. You should stop responding.

There is no Newtonian spacetime. Newton kept space and time separate — Gregory

Why are you harassing @pirshon. Generally, his posts are higher quality than yours.

Send me the link to this past discussion so that I can get up to speed. — Hanover

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1560/deathmatch-objective-reality-vs-the-tao/p1

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10427/my-favorite-verses-in-the-tao-te-ching/p1

And many others.

millions of years prior to the evolution of language existed in some non-existent state — Hanover

By George, he's got it!

This is something I've discussed many times on the forum. If you haven't seen those posts, now is not the time to go into it.

The fact that they both attempt to answer the same questions doesn't make them the same fields. — Hanover

I think this just points out the arbitrariness of your philosophy/religion distinction.

Reliance upon sacred texts, deities, and the supernatural are well within the purview of religion, but not of philosophy. — Hanover

One definition of "philosophy" from the web - "The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline." About half the people in the world are followers of Abrahamic religions. For most of those people, you can't discuss those subjects without also talking about God.

To be clear, I'm not saying that all philosophies are religious or are religions. Would I say that all religions are philosophies?... My answer is a tentative yes. I need to think about that some more.

...no one suggests that the world did not exist prior to language. — Hanover

Well...you know...I kind of do. I acknowledge that that way of seeing things is a metaphysical proposition, but then, everything in this thread so far has been metaphysics. As usual, when I say "metaphysics," I mean neither true nor false.

Prishon say: pain in the aaaaass. Auw! — Prishon

I assumed you would take that as a compliment.

Don't be a troll, Prishon. If there is any substance in your answers, it is not in your answers. Implied? But on this topic, nothing that can be substantively implied. — tim wood

@Prishon is a pain in the ass, but he's not a troll. Calling someone a troll is just another example of the malady I was referring to - delegitimizing an argument without good reason because you don't like it.

Partially. It does indeed deal with creation. — Prishon

I meant what I said and I said what I meant.

Not true. — Prishon

Is too.

Religion doesn't "deal with," at least in any respectable sense, it instead imposes upon. So let's set religion out apart and away from this discussion, until and unless it earn its way in. — tim wood

No further questions. I rest my case.

I don't agree that "religion is a philosophical matter." — tim wood

Religion generally deals with issues of the origins and nature of reality, ontology, so, of course it's philosophy. You have a history of kicking areas of study you don't have any respect for out of their appropriate place. Religion is not philosophy, psychology is not science, [joke]ice dancing is not a sport, Mitt Romney is not a Republican, bleach is not an appropriate treatment for the Covid 19 virus, Velveeta is not really food.[/joke]

Here is the terminal point of "beginnings" where religion finds its existential reality: the impossibility of conceiving beyond the boundaries of the thought that makes beginnings possible by conceiving of them, for what is possible that cannot be thought? — Constance

philosophy, in the minds of many or most, has no place in the dark places where language cannot go, but this is a Kantian/Wittgensteinian (Heidegger, too, of course; though he takes steps....) legacy that rules out impossible thinking, and it is here where philosophy has gone so very wrong: Philosophy is an empty vessel unless it takes on the the original encounter with the world, which is prior to language, and yet, IN language, for language is in the world. — Constance

The idea that reality inhabits "the dark places where language cannot go," is pretty common. Kant's noumena, Lao Tzu's Tao, Schopenhauer's will are all grappling with what comes during "the original encounter with the world."

Because climatologists make no claim that is so categorical and clear that their whole theory rests upon it, they can endlessly pile excuse upon excuse with their central claim remaining untouched. This is not science. — Neri

The principle I generally endorse - If you have to make a decision about a scientific issue where there is uncertainty, decide on the basis of the scientific consensus if there is one. Since more than 95% of scientists with relevant expertise agree that there is climate change related to man-made global warming which will have a significant negative impact on millions or billions of people, the consensus is clear.

Also - a quibble. You have made claims that climate science is wrong and perhaps that some climate scientists are not objective in their work, but you've provided no valid argument that climate science is not science.