I won't argue with your personal experience with the Tao Te Ching. — Noble Dust
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. — T Clark
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. — T Clark
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. Just off the top of my head; I probably missed some things — Noble Dust
the OP is not restricting the term "metaphysics"/"metaphysical" to a school or period of English poetry, as Sam Johnson did. Rather, he appears to be using those terms to describe the commonalities of all poerty, the purpose and intent behind the "poetic enterprise". In this, Gus seems to be suggesting that the impulse behind the poetic undertaking is the elucidation of fundamental truths of the human experience of life. — Michael Zwingli
What is meant by an 'authentic metaphysics' ? — Amity
So, poetry itself is supposed to be able to deconstruct its meaning to enable an understanding of its 'metaphysical essence' ? Or a 'substance' such as 'Faith' or 'Heredity/Glory' ?
What is 'substantial', in 'metaphysical essence', about 'Faith' — Amity
What on earth does this mean ? — Amity
Isnt it the case that it is the particular CONTENT conveyed by any of the innumerable modes of cultural expression within an era ( including poetry) that manifests a mataphysics? For instance , if one were to delimit a cultural history of poetry in the West, would one not be able to correlate the changes in the way poets considered their craft over the centuries with changes in metaphysical outlook? Doesn’t classical Greek poetry reflect a different metaphysical thinking than the poetry of the Renaissance or the Modern or postmodern eras? — Joshs
And can "emotions" be understood and explained? In fact, if we are debating "instinctive and/or biological emotions", they can be objectively detailed so that in a basic research, all their causes and effects can have a rational and logical conclusion. — Gus Lamarch
However, if we are discussing a philosophical concept of "emotion", which, as it is already a "concept in itself", includes metaphysics in itself, something that can be "experienced and expressed" being pre-mediated by an idealizing conception must necessarily be plausible in terms of understanding and comprehension, whether this understandness is subjective or not. — Gus Lamarch
Throne of my lonely niche, my wealth, my love, my moonlight.
My most sincere friend, my confidant, my very existence, my Sultan, my one and only love.
The most beautiful among the beautiful ... — Gus Lamarch
Poetry is to thought as makeup is to a woman. A poet is a beautician - enhances beauty and conceals ugliness. The metaphysics of beauty is simply our dissatisfaction (dukkha) with reality and thus our obsession with illusion (maya). Turns Buddhism which believes maya is dukkha on its head. — TheMadFool
Such is the power of poetry. If you read the above mentioned poems, they still have that aspect of "beautifying the ugly" to them. The effort it takes to become enlightened is great, much hard work, and the poems afford a dignified distance toward it, or else one would be crushed by it.How is that a good peom can be written about the bad? — TheMadFool
The sonics and harmonics of a piano, the anatomy and physiology of the ear, and the neurology and cognitive processing of the nervous system can be explained. Is that the same as the experience of music? — T Clark
experience of music? — T Clark
We differ on the point where you take any and all "art" to be merely the "experiential moment" of such art - be it Poetry, Music, Images, etc... - which I - and many other philosophers and artists - disagree, because an existential process needs a metaphysical starting point - in terms of something artistic, "any real process, initially needs to be ideal" - which, if it does not exist, cannot be projected by nature. — Gus Lamarch
Isma'il lived, and died, and his features lived and died with him; what we have as a record - in the case of his portrait above - is an "idealization" of something that was once real, and which, through the reception to the painter's consciousness - Tiziano's -, goes through the process of being projected again to existence as something real, but totally different from its previous conception - what was once something real - a human being - became an idea, that then became real again - as a portrait - -. — Gus Lamarch
My understanding of metaphysical statements is that they are neither true nor false. If that's right, we don't have to resolve our differences, we just pick the meaning that works the best for each of us. — T Clark
In my experience with writing poems, which is limited, they usually start out with a feeling, an unspoken experience. Often the poem comes to me as a visual image. It's a neat feeling — T Clark
Our disagreement arises from the moment you assert that even in existence, which is a minor and more limiting field than that of metaphysics, concepts can still exist without the perception of "absoluteness", which is what makes up reality. — Gus Lamarch
The concept itself, without "idealization", cannot become "real"; you needed to capture it - idealization - so that you could project it to the "real" world. — Gus Lamarch
Article on the poem:
https://slowlander.com/2019/09/10/split-the-lark-and-youll-find-the-music/ — PoeticUniverse
In other words she wants the song to be enjoyed for what it is, and that to look too far into it misses the whole point. The song is supposed to be beautiful. Yes, the song has meaning in that it calls out for a mate, but it also has its own beauty as separated from any further meaning. The song and the poem can be enjoyed just by listening to it. One doesn’t need to understand synesthesia to love how “Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled” sounds – it just rolls off the tongue, it’s pleasant to hear and to say. Yes, it carries a deeper meaning, but it first should be enjoyed at the most sensual level, it should speak directly to the heart before it speaks to the mind. The rainbow can just be a beautiful experience – the possibility that it also carries a more significant meaning is almost irrelevant. — slowlander - split the lark and you'll find the music
What is meant by an 'authentic metaphysics' ?
— Amity
"A field of metaphysics distinct and unique to the imaginative world of general metaphysics" — Gus Lamarch
Metaphysics, regardless of the situation and context in which it is applied, completely depends on the idealization and subjective contemplation of existence — Gus Lamarch
Our disagreement arises from the moment you assert that even in existence, which is a minor and more limiting field than that of metaphysics, concepts can still exist without the perception of "absoluteness", which is what makes up reality. — Gus Lamarch
he appears to be using those terms to describe the commonalities of all poerty, the purpose and intent behind the "poetic enterprise". In this, Gus seems to be suggesting that the impulse behind the poetic undertaking is the elucidation of fundamental truths of the human experience of life.
— Michael Zwingli
:100: — Gus Lamarch
Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in an abstract and fully general manner, the questions:[5]
What is there?
What is it like?
Topics of metaphysical investigation include existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. — SEP - Metaphysics
My best guess is Gus Lamarch wants to say that art has something to do with the Platonic world of forms - faer focus on ideals seems to suggest so. — TheMadFool
Unfortunately or not, Plato had, so it's said, a very low opinion of art, it being an imitation of an imititation (the world we know being an imperfect instantiation of heaven). Sad that. — TheMadFool
Possibly so. — Amity
faer — Amity
My best guess is Gus Lamarch wants to say that art has something to do with the Platonic world of forms - — TheMadFool
faer focus on ideals seems to suggest so. — TheMadFool
Can you say that what impels her - is to elucidate 'fundamental truths of the human experience of life' ? — Amity
Indeed, my position is very similar to that defended by Plato, however, I am against the hypothesis of a "world composed of forms", which Plato fervently defended.
Project into your mind, my vision of the "metaphysical field", as being a distinct field of that of existence, in which there are no forms, images, perceptions, etc...; it is an endless field and paradoxically with infinite borders, where any and all concepts that already exist, that never existed, and that will come to exist, are.
When a "Being" belonging to existence - a smaller and more limiting field than the metaphysical world - captures a concept through its subjective awareness, such "ideal" becomes "real", and a "movement" between both fields - metaphysical and existential - occur - as if two cubes, one immobile - existence - and the other mobile - metaphysics - suspended over the smaller cube, intertwined -.
"Something can only be real, if previously, it was ideal" — Gus Lamarch
Can you say that what impels her - is to elucidate 'fundamental truths of the human experience of life' ?
— Amity
Yes:
A poem is a truth fleshed in living words,
Which by showing unapprehended proof
Lifts the veil to reveal hidden beauty:
It’s life’s image drawn in eternal truth. — PoeticUniverse
The tension between poetry and truth gave Goethe the title of his autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (“From My Life: Poetry and Truth”), written between 1811 and 1833. W. H. Auden borrowed Goethe’s title in 1959 for a prose sequence on love, and, in 1977, the poet Anthony Hecht (a great admirer of both poets) took the same title for a poem in which he considers, among other things, Goethe, the Second World War, and the thorny relationship between truth and art. Hecht conveyed the truth of his war experience as a poet not as a journalist or historian...
Poetry without music is a relatively recent development. A pronounced separation came around 1550, before which, Kirby-Smith notes, “the concept of a unified performance combining melody, words, and dance had never completely faded out.” The songlike cadence of poetry, in fact all of prosody, is in itself semantic and carries an emotional charge. Every syllable, every phoneme, is highly ordered in such a way as to communicate feeling...
What truths can poetry tell us and what could its real-world use possibly be? W. H. Auden wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” He understood that no poem had saved a single Jew from death at the hands of the Nazis. Still, he believed in the necessity of action. “Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do,” he writes, “but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational moral choice.”
In this respect, the poet Anthony Hecht possessed one of the most compelling moral visions in late-twentieth-century American poetry. In “Dichtung und Wahrheit,” he juxtaposes a marble statue and a photo from World War II:
The Discus Thrower’s marble heave,
Captured in mid-career,
That polished poise, that Parian arm
Sleeved only in the air,
Vesalian musculature, white
As the mid-winter moon—
This, and the clumsy snapshot of
An infantry platoon,
Those grubby and indifferent men,
Lounging in bivouac,
Their rifles aimless in their laps,
Stop history in its tracks.
If the documentary evidence, the photograph, does not contain the whole truth of experience, where, then, does the truth lie?...
Hecht’s poetry about the war is filled with echoes of Shakespeare, including the poems in his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, The Hard Hours, which includes “More Light! More Light!” King Lear, in particular, recurs throughout the collection....
The second scene in the poem, quoted above, constitutes a tightly woven pattern of negatives. Goethe’s emphatic dying words become:
Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared.
And, then, two stanzas later:
No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
The final image, again with an echo of Lear, is of sightless eyes:
and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.
The survivors of the camps, as Hecht himself witnessed, were naked, skeletal, their yellowed skin stretched over bony frames. As one soldier from C Company reported: “Many had died with their eyes wide open staring into space as if they were seeing over and over again all the torture the Germans had put them through—their mouths open, gasping for that last breath that might keep them alive.” When a prisoner died, one of his fellows would carry his body to the stack of bodies beside the incinerator. The smell, he added, was unimaginable...
If the poem has a “use” in the sense that Plato intends, then perhaps it is that those “mute ghosts from the ovens” are not entirely silenced.
Through Hecht’s poem, they instruct our emotions. To adopt Auden’s formulation, they extend our knowledge of good and evil, clarifying the nature of action, and leading us to a point where we can make a moral choice. — new criterion: poetry-truth
12 poignant poems (and one bizarre limerick) written by physicists about physics
Though they typically employ the language of mathematics to describe nature, physicists sometimes find ideas are better conveyed in verse.
It can be said that science and poetry share the common purpose of revealing profound truths about the universe and our place in it.
Physicist Paul Dirac, a known curmudgeon, would have dismissed that idea as hogwash.
“The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way,” Dirac grouched to a colleague. “The two are incompatible.”
The colleague to whom Dirac was grumbling, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a lover of poetry who dabbled in it himself — as did, it turns out, quite a few great physicists, past and present. Physicists have often turned to poetry to express ideas for which there are no equations...
Maxwell’s best-known poetic composition is “Rigid Body Sings,” a ditty he used to sing while playing guitar, which is based on the classic Robbie Burns poem “Comin’ Through the Rye” (the inspiration for the title of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye). In terms of melding poetry and physics, however, Maxwell’s geekiest composition might be “A Problem in Dynamics,” which shows both his brilliance and sense of humour. — inside the perimeter - poems by physicists about physics
***A Problem in Dynamics
By James Clerk Maxwell
An inextensible heavy chain
Lies on a smooth horizontal plane,
An impulsive force is applied at A,
Required the initial motion of K.
Let ds be the infinitesimal link,
Of which for the present we’ve only to think;
Let T be the tension, and T + dT
The same for the end that is nearest to B.
Let a be put, by a common convention,
For the angle at M ‘twixt OX and the tension;
Let Vt and Vn be ds‘s velocities,
Of which Vt along and Vn across it is;
Then Vn/Vt the tangent will equal,
Of the angle of starting worked out in the sequel.
In working the problem the first thing of course is
To equate the impressed and effectual forces.
K is tugged by two tensions, whose difference dT
Must equal the element’s mass into Vt.
Vn must be due to the force perpendicular
To ds‘s direction, which shows the particular
Advantage of using da to serve at your
Pleasure to estimate ds‘s curvature.
For Vn into mass of a unit of chain
Must equal the curvature into the strain.
Thus managing cause and effect to discriminate,
The student must fruitlessly try to eliminate,
And painfully learn, that in order to do it, he
Must find the Equation of Continuity.
The reason is this, that the tough little element,
Which the force of impulsion to beat to a jelly meant,
Was endowed with a property incomprehensible,
And was “given,” in the language of Shop, “inexten-sible.”
It therefore with such pertinacity odd defied
The force which the length of the chain should have modified,
That its stubborn example may possibly yet recall
These overgrown rhymes to their prosody metrical.
The condition is got by resolving again,
According to axes assumed in the plane.
If then you reduce to the tangent and normal,
You will find the equation more neat tho’ less formal.
The condition thus found after these preparations,
When duly combined with the former equations,
Will give you another, in which differentials
(When the chain forms a circle), become in essentials
No harder than those that we easily solve
In the time a T totum would take to revolve.
Now joyfully leaving ds to itself, a-
Ttend to the values of T and of a.
The chain undergoes a distorting convulsion,
Produced first at A by the force of impulsion.
In magnitude R, in direction tangential,
Equating this R to the form exponential,
Obtained for the tension when a is zero,
It will measure the tug, such a tug as the “hero
Plume-waving” experienced, tied to the chariot.
But when dragged by the heels his grim head could not carry aught,
So give a its due at the end of the chain,
And the tension ought there to be zero again.
From these two conditions we get three equations,
Which serve to determine the proper relations
Between the first impulse and each coefficient
In the form for the tension, and this is sufficient
To work out the problem, and then, if you choose,
You may turn it and twist it the Dons to amuse.
Read more: “Victorian scientists’ poetry: An anthology“ — New Scientist - A Problem in Dynamics
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