Poetry and Culture, Philosophy and Nature

Poetry is the most precise means we have at our disposal to engage with culture. Philosophy offers comparable precision in dealing with nature.

I'm tempted to say your culture, your nature. That is, a poem will never occasion a confrontation with culture "as such", and there is of course no such thing. There's only ever whatever culture you carry within you. Likewise, philosophy can show you nature as it inheres in you, not as "it is" separate from your experience of it.

The locus of our philosophical encounter with nature is the concept, which is simply the attunement of our perceptual apparatus to particular things, thus rendered immediately knowable in experience as objects. The temper of our poetic encounter with culture, meanwhile, is the emotion, i.e., the direction of our actual dispositions among particular people, thus immediately empowering us as subjects.

It is by putting these encounters into words, clearly in the case of philosophy, intensely in the case of poetry, that we attain the highest available precision in our engagements with nature and culture.

Language strives towards precision. It articulates us.

Melancholy

All my joys to this are folly,
Naught so sweet as melancholy. (Robert Burton)

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. (John Keats)

If folly is the domination of reason by the passions, let us say that melancholy is the domination of passion by reason. The danger is that folly degenerates into mere stupidity, melancholy into cruelty. But if Erasmus was able to sing the praises of folly, Dowland was able to compose his melancholy into music. That is, Erasmus was able to argue that folly made love possible despite reason, Dowland was able to show that wisdom was possible in the face of great passion.

Something like that.

It is important to recognize folly as a kind of intelligent stupidity—unwise, to be sure, but not a denial of wisdom. Likewise, there is something loveless about melancholy but not a denial of love as such. There is always a kindness in its cruelty.

Finally, consider that folly thrives in seduction, and melancholy dwells in our contradictions. Folly leads us astray, melancholy speaks against us. Always for our own damned good.

Folly

It is, let's say, "the wisdom of the heart", the error in thinking that is caused by feeling, the unreasonableness of passion. But it is not simply a defect. Its ground is in something positive, our emotions. And this is why Erasmus was able to sing its praises.

What is the pangrammatical complement? Spinoza talked about "the intellectual love of a thing". What is to passion as folly is to reason? What do we call the loss of feeling that is caused by thinking, the dispassionateness of reason?

Pathology

I few years ago, I came up with the unhappy notion of "anthropopathy" to capture the idea that there can't properly speaking be a "science of man", a scientific account (logos) of the human, no anthropology, that is, not even a philosophical one, because humanity is a not concept but an emotion, not a reason for being, if you will, but a passion to become. But this has not, of course, brought an end to the human "sciences", which are as strong as ever.

One of the means by which they establish themselves is to interpret all passion as a species of suffering on the model of illness. If you want to replace anthropology with a horrid word like anthropopathy (which I granted at the time was a indeed a very ugly word) then perhaps you also want to abandon sociology and psychology by a similar maneuver. But that just makes you either a sociopath or a psychopath.

It's a clever move. If you are not going to be reasonable, rational about your society or your psyche then you are implicitly admitting you're insane, i.e., irrational. But we should push back against this interpretation. After all, a great deal of mental illness simply is to approach emotions (i.e., one's own) as objects for rational analysis, rather than actual guides to who one might become.

If I'm right, the original error was to let philosophers consider the question of our humanity. They treated it as the unknown object of some obscure concept. Then they helped scientists believe that key parts of the object were now known, and well enough to be theorized good and proper. Throughout the centuries, the poets have been gradually pushed to the side, and with them the fundamental point that the self is not meant to be known in theory but to be mastered in practice.

It is not that the human has been conceptualized badly, but that it has been conceptualized at all. The construal of a pathos under logos has turned our passions into so much suffering. Though it may have been done in the name of rationality, there's nothing reasonable about it. I guess I risk being called insane for pointing it out.

See also: "Emotion and Society"

Manners and Causes

A few years ago I suggested that the pangrammatical analogue of "moral order" is "causal order". This would make pangrammatical complements of morality and causality, which sits uneasily with me. But perhaps etymology can help me rest easier. Our morality derives from our manners. It strikes me as plausible that causes are to knowledge what manners are to power. If the thought had occurred, be advised that reasons and causes are on the same side of the knowledge/power divide. So we have something like this:

knowledge/power
reason/passion
cause/manner
epistemology/ethics
______/morality

I've been toying with filling that space in with "verity", but the root meanings don't line up so well. I don't think etiology quite captures the spirit of the juxtaposition. But if it's true that etiology is the study of "origins", then maybe it's something like this:

origins/morals
originality/morality

Seems a bit like a grammatical joke, of course. But we're not above that here at the Pangrammaticon, neither as poets nor as philosophers.