Sunday, May 01, 2005
I recently started going through my drawer-of-jotted-upon-paper, and found some old notes towards posts never posted so, without further delay, here's a hodgepodge taste, 2 + one undeveloped fragment:
(context for this one? don't remember)
The world is not everything that is the case, but everything that may be the case.
A poem is a field of probability, which phrase is only another word for definition-limits, more than it allows, accuracy as to perception of the subject’s ‘energy’/nature, unless handled with respect for Schroedinger. At the point things become, are made, are poetry, they ‘are’ not so much as they ‘are possibility’. Anything that is, changes, and therefore simultaneously is not. Any world-sense which denies this is a false one.
Shorter: less is More. Such is WCW’s suspension of what may be—‘so much depends’—from what is.
(people take the statement “the world is everything that is the case” as true—but in my thinking it is not. How is saying this different from saying that the ends justify the means? Both are symptoms of bad thinking, and causes of it, too.)
___________________________________________
(regarding philosophy/mysticism/theology. why I assumed there is an evolutionary heirarchy to these categories I have no idea)
Not the OED’s first def, but eventually, between semicolons, is maybe what I mean roughly by mysticism: “reliance on spiritual intuition or exalted feeling as the means of acquiring knowledge of mysteries inaccessible to intellectual apprehension.”
Philosophy “the love, study, or pursuit of wisdom, or of knowledge of things and their causes, whether theoretical or practical.” So a philosophy would be a system of “knowledge of things and their causes,” or at least an epistomolgy would.
Are these two exclusionary? Why are they for us? (I suspect because of the prior terms of our philosophy, what Barthes would call our mythologies.)
Theology: “[A] study or science which treats of God, his nature and attributes, and his relationships with man and the universe: ‘the science of things divine (Hooker); divinity.” Even broadening it to nonwestern and nongendered systems/divinities, I guess a theology is a personified mystism. Since we’re people, I guess that it makes sense this should be an important category in its own right.
Then, a further definition of one of the three (moral, natural, metaphysical) branches of Philosophy: “That department of knowledge or study which deals with ultimate reality, or with the most general causes and principles of things.” and two more germane definitions: “sometimes used especially of knowledge obtained by natural reason, in contrast with revealed knowledge”; and “The system which a person forms for the conduct of life.”
So according to the OED (extrapolating), a philosophy becomes a mysticism when one chooses to allow one’s spiritual senses’ input as well. And a theology arises when we personify the spiritual. Is this a necessity for communicating the mystic? For its perception? For bridging the natural impulse of philosophy with the metaphysical impulse of mysticism?
I have no idea.
___________________________________________
Don’t you want to be settled now, quiet
in the river from which rain falls?
It started raining, so I did, too.
Whatever I think will be
the reason my small back aches.
(context for this one? don't remember)
The world is not everything that is the case, but everything that may be the case.
A poem is a field of probability, which phrase is only another word for definition-limits, more than it allows, accuracy as to perception of the subject’s ‘energy’/nature, unless handled with respect for Schroedinger. At the point things become, are made, are poetry, they ‘are’ not so much as they ‘are possibility’. Anything that is, changes, and therefore simultaneously is not. Any world-sense which denies this is a false one.
Shorter: less is More. Such is WCW’s suspension of what may be—‘so much depends’—from what is.
(people take the statement “the world is everything that is the case” as true—but in my thinking it is not. How is saying this different from saying that the ends justify the means? Both are symptoms of bad thinking, and causes of it, too.)
___________________________________________
(regarding philosophy/mysticism/theology. why I assumed there is an evolutionary heirarchy to these categories I have no idea)
Not the OED’s first def, but eventually, between semicolons, is maybe what I mean roughly by mysticism: “reliance on spiritual intuition or exalted feeling as the means of acquiring knowledge of mysteries inaccessible to intellectual apprehension.”
Philosophy “the love, study, or pursuit of wisdom, or of knowledge of things and their causes, whether theoretical or practical.” So a philosophy would be a system of “knowledge of things and their causes,” or at least an epistomolgy would.
Are these two exclusionary? Why are they for us? (I suspect because of the prior terms of our philosophy, what Barthes would call our mythologies.)
Theology: “[A] study or science which treats of God, his nature and attributes, and his relationships with man and the universe: ‘the science of things divine (Hooker); divinity.” Even broadening it to nonwestern and nongendered systems/divinities, I guess a theology is a personified mystism. Since we’re people, I guess that it makes sense this should be an important category in its own right.
Then, a further definition of one of the three (moral, natural, metaphysical) branches of Philosophy: “That department of knowledge or study which deals with ultimate reality, or with the most general causes and principles of things.” and two more germane definitions: “sometimes used especially of knowledge obtained by natural reason, in contrast with revealed knowledge”; and “The system which a person forms for the conduct of life.”
So according to the OED (extrapolating), a philosophy becomes a mysticism when one chooses to allow one’s spiritual senses’ input as well. And a theology arises when we personify the spiritual. Is this a necessity for communicating the mystic? For its perception? For bridging the natural impulse of philosophy with the metaphysical impulse of mysticism?
I have no idea.
___________________________________________
Don’t you want to be settled now, quiet
in the river from which rain falls?
It started raining, so I did, too.
Whatever I think will be
the reason my small back aches.
