Philosophy is the poor man's Poetry

Preamble

Note: Skip this section if you simply want to dive right in. The Appendix should provide colour.

Only when a Man dies, does he Awake outlines:

1. the ultimately symbolic nature of Reality, a nature that mandates interpretation
2. criteria for what constitute good symbols (they faithfully represent their source, and don’t cause the interpreter to confuse them for their source)
3. the modes of intelligibility (verticality, by which the necessary principle governing a symbol is intuited, and horizontality, by which the particulars, and distinctions of a symbol are clarified)
4. the responsibilities we have on encountering the symbols of Reality:
   1. to see (and love) the Absolute as represented in them (serenity)
   2. to act on the symbols so that they better represent the Absolute

Not Objectivity but Annihilation outlines:

1. the need for a new epistemic standard, one that does not simply accumulate data, but expresses wisdom. It is not enough to “apprehend” a truth: one must additionally integrate that truth into you.
2. this higher objectivity is thus an expansion of the subject to truly integrate the meaning of the principle the symbol being interpreted represents
3. The Truth must have a bearing on who you are, and if it does not, it is not integrated. We call this bearing a collision with Reality.
4. higher objectivity is not arbitrary; it is constrained:
   1. ontologically: symbols can only disclose what accounts for them
   2. semiotically: false interpretations fail to deepen clarity, and coherence
   3. existentially: interpretations must be positively reintegrated into the subject
   4. aesthetically: Beauty is Truth’s smoking gun
5. the canonical example of higher objectivity is love. Nobody can describe or elucidate or clarify what it means to fall in love. It is very real, very transformative, and very subjective.

If the first essay concerned the symbolic nature of Reality, and the second provides an epistemic standard by we assess our interpretations of those symbols, then this essay is concerned ultimately with the limits of the symbols themselves.

The question we are exploring here is simple: what is the most we can say about Reality, about the Divine?

When do our symbols fail us?

The Ego’s Last Refuge

In Not Objectivity but Annihilation, I defined:

1. Lower objectivity is the practice of securing propositions or facts that describe Reality. It stabilises Reality into propositions, models that can be handled, exchanged, and manipulated independently of the subject. It is the view from Nowhere.
2. Higher objectivity is the practice by which transcendence (verticality) is subsequently followed by immanence (manifestation), i.e. by which one not only seeks to ascertain how something works independently of me, not only, why it works this way independently of me, but also what does this mean for me? It is the view from Everywhere.

Lower objectivity is the dominant epistemic standard in the modern world.

It reduces “I know” to “I can state”, rather than “I am transformed”. Propositions stabilise truth precisely so that the interpreter remains intact. By converting collisions (direct experience) into statements (theories of the world) that we collide with instead, we “strip” Reality down, and encounter the statements instead. In a sentence: we have substituted the experience of Reality with the experience of our representations (models, theories) of it.

Ultimately, the claim is that we hide our egos, and shield ourselves from Reality by very virtue of the misuse of our conceptual apparatus, our language, our symbols (horizontal, clarificatory tools).

Language is the last refuge of the ego. When used improperly, it does not simply limit, but positively cripples our capacity for higher knowledge, a veil draped over the intellect.

It is startling (unnerving!) to realise just how very much needs to be unlearnt before Reality can be approached. Before it unveils the Counenance of the Divine.

Let’s then consider the purpose, limits, and proper use of Language.

The Finger and the Moon

What is language? What gives the words, symbols, and signs we use meaning?What is the most we can possibly say about the Absolute?

To see this, let’s return to what it means to signify something. Signification of any sort relies ultimately on 3 things:

1. A symbol¹
2. A source
3. An interpretant

When you read a sentence, such as this very one, you are apprehending these symbols and then interpreting them in order to derive from them a meaning that the symbols signify.

What, however, is meaning? And is all meaning inextricably intertwined with language?

Why is it the case that efforts in metaphysics, ethics, politics, and mysticism have been so inconclusive? Why have arguments about the nature of Reality, about the nature of love, goodness, truth, justice gone nowhere relative to discussion on the behaviour of electrons, the architecture of the genome, the dynamics of laminar flow, or even galactic formation?

To get a handle on this, let’s briefly consider both Early and Late Wittgenstein.

Early Wittgenstein

The opening lines of the Tractatus go:“1 The world is all that is the case.1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and is all the facts.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein I (in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) illustrates a “Picture” Theory of Language.

1. The world is no more than a set of facts.
2. Names stand for objects, and sentences correspond to configurations of objects (even if abstract) in Reality.
3. The logical structure (grammar) of language mirrors that of Reality itself.
4. A sentence is a “picture” that has some logical similarity (isomorphism) to some state of affairs in Reality, the way an image of the moon is similar to the actual moon, or the way a piece of sheet music is a picture of a symphony. Importantly however, neither is the image the moon, nor the sheet the symphony.
5. Therefore, sentences are representations whose truth or falsity is conditional on their representational fit to facts of the world.
6. Language maps the relationships between particulars in Reality, and it is only sensible insofar as it is able to do that.

Language here is fundamentally horizontal, the clarification of particulars, and the orientation of the subject at some level of abstraction. When we discuss the physical world, we discuss the relationship of physical objects to each other, their efficient causes, their properties, and their affects. We are laying out a map of the physical world. We could then well discuss the relationships between mathematical variables or the Laws of Nature or our emotional states or our social customs.

However, all this ultimately does is to illustrate a map of the domain of inquiry. It tells us how these various objects behave, how they relate to each other, and how they are structured in Reality.

If the world is a giant Lego set, then facts are the specific way certain bricks are arranged right now. Language is a diagram for how some bricks click together or that describes some arrangement of bricks in the Lego set. If the diagram demonstrates an impossible arrangement of bricks, the diagram is nonsense. Importantly, language cannot tell you why some arrangement is good or necessary or beautiful.

It is an exercise in the determination of proximate or material or efficient causes. Deep meaning doesn’t really enter into the picture of language: the question is simply one of sense (a sentence corresponds to some possible fact of Reality) or nonsense (there is no possible fact of Reality the sentence could correspond to).

Importantly, Wittgenstein clarifies that ultimately, the deep questions of Justice, Beauty, Truth, and meaning remain fundamentally beyond the purview of language or all representationality.

Language remains simply the finger pointing at the Moon. A finger that is structurally incapable of becoming the Moon. He notes, “what can be shown, cannot be said.”

Therefore, it is clear to me then, that in order to get at principle and meaning, one must engage Reality vertically. A man who eats the menu and not the meal will starve.

Late Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein II (in his Philosophical Investigations) departs radically, insisting instead on a “Tool” Theory of Language.

1. Meaning is not a private object that words “hook on” or “attach” to: it is, on the contrary, public, practical, and embodied: a word’s meaning is precisely what it does in human activity. Meaning is intensely context-dependent.
2. To “understand” a word’s meaning is not to form a picture of the world, but to recognise what action or response it implies.
3. The fundamental unit of language is not “a word” but “a word inside an activity'“. These activities are called Language Games.
   1. A Language Game, therefore, is a rule-governed human activity in which words have roles to play.
   2. Inquiry, promising, command, prayer, calculation, jokes, confessions, flirtation are simply different games with distinct rules and where the same word can assume radically different roles.²
   3. The truth of an utterance is seldom the point: its utility within the game is.
4. Words and concepts don’t have one strict, defining feature. Instead, they bear a Family Resemblance to each other:
   1. words are not unified by a common property, but by overlapping, “criss-crossing” similarities
   2. the canonical example here is the word “game”. What is a game? What about board games or team sports or imaginary friends? There’s no single “essence” shared by all these ideas, and yet the word “game” is seldom confusing: its context and use clarifies its meaning instantly.
   3. children don’t learn words like “pain”, “red”, or “truck” by divining their inner essence, but by an initiation into Reality facilitated by their participation in these Language Games³

If Wittgenstein I was concerned with the boundary between sense and nonsense by mapping propositions to facts of Reality, then Wittgenstein II attempts to deny you the temptation for a single essence underlying the words we utter and to instead illustrate their social use and context-dependence.

That is: a sentence’s metaphysical implications are ultimately incidental, and secondary to its deployment within a Language Game, within life itself.

All of this, of course, should clarify not simply the limits of language, but also its intentionality. Words are meaningless without their intentional deployment in life, and that intent coupled with the context in which their deployed is what specifies their meaning.

Meaning, therefore, is intensely intersubjective.⁴

Misplaced Concrete

We have two accounts of language: as symbolic representation, or as tool of activity. How are we to make sense of this?

The primary aim here of both accounts is ultimately sanitation and purification: what is the proper use of language?

Wittgenstein’s fundamental claim in both accounts is that all philosophical confusion stems from a disease: the improper use of language, from the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, where we form abstractions (which are epistemological, our impressions of what constitutes the source of a sign, the essence of an object, as distinct from ontological principles that undergird an object’s existence) and then to treat the abstraction as if it were the thing itself.⁵

That is: error is a by-product of confusing form for essence, of absolutising symbols.

The very reason discussions on ethics, and metaphysics have failed is not because they’re vague, but because these deep, vertical truths are not facts among facts. They are not simply arrangements of lego bricks. They’re outside the lego structure entirely.

Wittgenstein II takes us further. Even after we accept the limits of propositional language, we nevertheless maintain that words have meanings attached to them, that words “attach” to meaning, which is the residue of that very same disease. Namely, we recognise here that not only is propositionality limited in scope, but additionally, it is inseparable from intent and intersubjectivity (i.e. the speaker’s intent and the context he’s participating in).

This is the one-liner: the form is not the essence, the symbol is not the source, and the map is not the territory.

All philosophical mess and confusion results from us wrongfully blurring this distinction:⁶ the reduction of Reality to the conditions of symbolic intelligibility. (I would go even further and say this is sin: a mutilation of the Divine Mystery.)

We are not to make idols of concepts, lest they handle us instead of us handling them.

The finger simply points to, but is not, the moon.Importantly, however, that’s not all: the finger pointing at the moon also tells us something about person doing the pointing.

The Silence of Heaven

There’s another implication of all this: Wittgenstein II is right. The words, and very conceptual apparatus we employ to make sense of the world are “ill-defined”, have no static meaning, and bear only family-resemblances (rather than precise correspondences) with their meaning in different contexts and with different intentions (their use in a Language Game).

This is important because it illustrates that the deep principles that undergird Reality in which concepts, and objects participate will never entirely be precisely expressible.

Every word, depending on the intent and context, will mean a specific thing at a specific time, it will participate in a specific principle under specific conditions at a time, and may participate in a distinct one at a later time. All we can ever do here is to simply recognise that our representations, our words for Reality are merely metaphors, regardless of how analytically we dress them up. This of course includes the words you’re reading right now.

This is not radical skepticism, it is not relativism, it is not functionalism, and it is not the claim that meaning is free-floating or the idea that words can mean anything at all.It is, instead, a resistance to the temptation to insulate the ego, a reverence for Reality’s depth, a refusal to confuse representation for the Truth itself, to absolutise symbols.

I do not claim that “nothing can be known.” Instead, I claim “the deepest things can’t be possessed as statements without mutilation.”

Grammar, concept, and language are ultimately acts of horizontality: symbolic descriptions or configurations of other symbols at a certain level of abstraction. It is not the language itself that can result in the vertical leap required to “intuit” or intellect their source, the principles that the sentences are representing.

These principles themselves can never be spoken. They can only ever be gestured at, and never captured. Reality simply is: vast, mysterious, and primal.

Reality denies us disclosure without first the willingness to sacrifice the self on its altar. This is the nature of higher objectivity.

Silence, and apophatism in the face of Reality is not cowardice: it is respect.

Reject History. Embrace Myth.

We have considered the limits of language⁷ so far in maximum generality: let’s now concretise a bit in the interest of intelligibility. I ask:

What is history?Is it an account of all the events that occur in some period of time? Is it necessarily consigned to the past? Is it the discovery of narratives that causally explain a set of events?

Importantly: is that enough? Is that Real?

Let’s consider two different forms of history:

1. Descriptive History: History at its worst is simply a concatenation of descriptive facts, propositions that describe events, for instance:

   1. 3100 BC: the political unification of Egypt
   2. 1754 BC: the Code of Hammurabi is enacted
   3. 27 BC: the formation of the Roman Empire from the Republic
   4. 33 AD: the Crucifixion of Jesus
   5. 622 AD: the Hijra of the Holy Prophet ….

   This can be done with as much detail as you like, describing everything from the geographic incentives to unify Upper and Lower Egypt, or the political pressures resulting in Octavian’s consolidation of power, or the Via Dolorosa that Jesus carried the Cross up, or the motivations and oppressive climate that resulted in the Holy Prophet’s flight to Medina.

2. Narrative History: History at its best is not simply descriptive at the level of material or physical facts, but the discovery (or invention) of a narrative that weaves all these various facts together cogently and coherently in order to make sense of them. The output of history at its finest, is a story.

The point here is that the object of history is not facts but the re-enactment of thought: the historian must “re-live” past intentions and experiences from within. What is not re-enacted, of course, is not an event as such, but a meaningful act (dare I say…a ritual?) via imaginative participation.

This participation is interpretive. History only becomes meaningful via a process called emplotment (quite literally, the imposition or discovery of a plot): where the historian unearths tragedy, comedy, romance, satire, or heroism in the activity of human life. The history is inseparable from its narrative form. The historian confers (or discovers) a mythic grammar in which context the events become intelligible at all. That is, the historian chooses a Language Game to play, without which, the facts are simply noise.

This is how data becomes wisdom.

History, therefore, is already contingent on a proto-mythic act: an act of verticality in fact, that synthesises disparate occurences into a meaningful whole that isn’t simply observed but can be inhabited, intuited, felt.⁸

If it is not clear already: descriptive history is a base form of lower objectivity, and narrative history is closer to the higher objectivity we’re looking for.

Importantly, this approach of history from data to wisdom occurs to the extent that it is mythical. History invokes myth, participates in it: in order for history to become meaningful (a form of higher knowing), it needs interpretation, narrative, and ultimately your participation. Myth is the grammar of meaning, an architecture that represents principle into image, so that the soul can apprehend it without losing itself in abstractions.

This is not to say that it requires embellishment, fantasy, magic and bullshit claims about physical reality.

The value of a myth is not what it says, but what it means.

What principle is the myth illustrating? Romance, contemplation, mercy, heroism, glory, peace, struggle?

Myth is not embellished history: quite the opposite, in fact: history is simply bastardised myth.

[An aside: this is why I have absolutely zero respect for people who exclusively read non-fiction.]

Transition: If principles are what we are starving for, we need a medium that can carry principles without flattening them into slogans. That medium is not further explanation, but a different epistemic posture: poetry.

Poetry begins where Philosophy ends

Let us consider now the limits of language in a distinct domain: in philosophy itself.

The fundamental question is: what is the most we can say about the Divine? If it is higher objectivity that we’re looking for, the relevant principles and their transformative effect on the self, then what are we to do here?

We have discussed that:

1. Language and the profusion of facts often insulates the ego from collision with Reality
2. The principles undergirding Reality are ultimately unspoken; even more, they’re unspeakable
3. This is not a consequence of cowardice or unimaginativeness: it’s respectful epistemic discipline
4. History is meaningless without a mythic grammar that permits the participation of the historian or the reader

Given that the principles are both fundamentally necessary, and yet unspeakable; given that the language and philosophy we employ simply (inadequately) represent rather than “encompass” Reality; given the risk that language poses for insulating the ego from verticality, what do we do?

The closest metaphor for the appropriate epistemic posture is that of Poetry.

The claim here is that good poetry is just self-conscious philosophy. A philosophy that is both:

1. self-conscious of and sits with its contradictions rather than pretending it can resolve them
2. actively engaging the interpreter, demanding of him the requisite inner transformation that higher knowing demands; beautiful poetry is fundamentally experiential

Let us return to the canonical example of love. There is no set of propositional facts that can clarify what love is: a fact that nearly everybody intuits already.

Love is not a set of biological reactions, neither is it a series of physical behaviours, nor is it a confluence of emotional states, nor is it a profound shift in salience. Those are all consequences of Love, but not what it is.

Love is better invoked with the myth of Layla and Majnun, Hafez’ Couplets, Shakespearean Sonnets, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Zulu Izibongo, the Han tale of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl, the Dionysian Hymns, or Solomon’s Songs of Songs.

Do any of these encompass Love? No! They’re ultimately symbolic, they all contradict each other and themselves, and know they do.

They are metaphors, first and foremost, and know they are. But moreover, they invite participation on the part of the subject. This is why our hearts stir when Juliet drinks the poison. Poetry doesn’t insulate you, it implicates you.

It is not, and never has been, a question of information-transfer. It has always been a question of attention vertically. Language and all symbolic representation can never capture. All we can do is point at the Moon, and to never confuse our pointing with the Moon itself.

Poetry demands of you a humility and receptivity to meaning. To engage with poetry is to put not simply your beliefs, but your very soul up for grabs, like an offering on the altar, solemnly awaiting collision and the transformation that Grace, the Divine’s Eternal Embrace, affords.

The added subjectivity and comfort with contradiction (an inevitable aspect of deep principle’s manifestations at a lower level of Reality), of poetry is a feature not a bug.

This is the nature of the distinction between higher and lower objectivity, between collision with Reality as is, and its flattening and mutilation. It is the difference between data and wisdom.

The Just Roles of Poetry and Philosophy

We have to be very careful here. In particular, not all poetry is good and not all philosophy is bad. The purpose of these ideas is not to elevate poetry at the expense of philosophy: it is simply to accord each their just roles.

For this, it’s important to clarify what it is I don’t mean:

1. Poetry is not “truer than logic” because it is beautiful: it can be true because it can exhibit properties that philosophy tends to falsify: disciplined ambiguity, an acceptance of self-contradiction, and participation on the part of the reader.
2. I am not claiming that all poetry is good. In fact, nearly all poetry is terrible as a representation of Reality. It is vague, self-indulgent, and far from bringing the ego closer to the Real, often mutilates our understanding of the Real by projecting the ego on to it. This is a consequence of insufficient horizontality and rigour, incidentally.
3. I am not claiming that subjective feeling is the truth: far from it, subjective feeling is a product of the ego, itself a symbol, a veil, a shadow. It is improper (even sinful) to absolutise our emotions and selves and project them onto the Real.
4. I am not claiming that philosophy is useless as a means of apprehending Reality (after all, we are engaged in it right here). It is absolutely critical to recognise that philosophy and rigour more broadly are critical at horizontal clarification, at the demarcation of self, symbol, and source that is critical for a proper interpretation of Reality. In its absence, all we are engaged in is self-indulgence, navel-gazing, symbol absolutisation and the further confusion of form for essence.Philosophy is here to tell us what’s what, and what things aren’t.
5. Not all philosophy is purely horizontal and not all poetry is vertical. Much philosophy is, in fact, vertical, and much poetry is, in fact, horizontal. At that point, the value of each of poetry and philosophy, i.e. these symbolic representations of the Real, is to be determined by the extent to which they facilitate higher knowing, or collision with Reality.
6. I am simply highlighting that certain esoteric forms of knowing¹¹ (those that involve the subject’s expansion) like poetry or myth have properties that can result in them being superior metaphors/signs for Reality than static, dead exoteric forms (like propositional philosophy or history).
7. The former is akin to the verticality and return of higher objectivity, and the latter as horizontal clarification and contextualisation (the provision of matter from which to leap and bound upwards, scaffolding)

I am claiming that:

1. Propositional discourse is excellent for delimitation and coordination (horizontal clarification and hygiene). It is not a corpse or a distraction. It is scaffolding and judgment. It clarifies, delimits, and disciplines so that the vertical leap is not hallucination. The purpose of horizontality is orientation.

   1. But there is a difference between a ladder and a summit. A proposition can stabilise an insight, contextualise it, protect it from nonsense, but it cannot substitute for the transformation by which the insight becomes real and meaningful. Philosophy and history provide the matter and the measure and importantly illustrate the direction. Poetry and myth provide the form of disclosure that implicates the soul.
2. But it is structurally prone to treating Reality as an object and insulating the knower. (Lower objectivity)
3. Poetry/myth can be better vehicles of disclosure at the boundary of ultimate principles because they preserve:
   1. opacity (prevent premature absolutisation),
   2. polyvalence (multiple levels of meaning),
   3. implication (the interpretant is addressed personally),
   4. return (principle applied to salience, the transformation of self).
4. Naive philosophy/history are often horizontal, poetry/myth are often vertical-return. To clarify once again what I mean here:
   1. Horizontality is clarification, rigour, mechanism, and the search for efficient causes. This mode of cognition answers “how”-questions.
   2. Verticality is principle, intuition, disclosure, the search for ultimate causes. This mode of cognition answers “why”-questions.
   3. Return here is the re-integration into an interpreter’s salience, ethics, attention (the interpretant transforms).

A note on the consequences of Confusion

Separately, philosophy is static, immutable, prone to clear manipulation. This impulse for control, and risk-aversion (the modern positivistic impulse) bastardises the truth, renders it static, unchanging, particularises and reduces it (crippling its generalisability). There is no coincidentia oppositorum because there is no tolerance for contradiction. In the West, this can broadly be traced to the Enlightenment Project.

This positivistic impulse and risk aversion triggered a commensurate response, namely, the Romantic Idealism of Byron, Schelling, Keats, Hugo, Dumas and Wagner, for examples.

But here, once again, in the absence of a commitment to principle and Reality, without sufficient horizontality and philosophical clarity, we ended up with poetry that stirs and moves and inspires, but which is ultimately hollow.

It is the drive to beauty that is aimed at nothing, with no purpose, telos, or point. It is no more than the projection of the ego, the self, onto Reality.

It is immanentism and the idolisation of the self. More sin and error.

If the Enlightenment Project (and its subsequent positivism) was too much horizontality, mistaking Reality for being flat, then the Romantics engaged in misdirected verticality: a drive towards nothing at all except the self.

More shadow.

Our task here is to tread the line between horizontality (in the name of orienting ourselves) and verticality (in the name of opening ourselves) with great care, and respect.

This is a matter of critical importance: our souls are at stake, and the Divine is at hand.

Appendix: What I am trying to do here

It is important to note that the greatest mystics and philosophers, everybody from the Holy Prophet or Christ themselves, but including Rumi, Ibn Arabi, Eckhart, Nietzsche, Adi Shankar, Guenon, Evola, engaged very actively and productively in both horizontality and verticality.

They spoke aesthetically and vertically, gesturing at the Absolute, but simultaneously spoke rigorously and horizontally, clarifying misconceptions, demarcating the self from the Real, and pronouncing judgments on the nature of symbols.

Nevertheless, what remains of interest here is that the philosophy, while excellent at demarcating the Real from illusion, and providing clarification, is, by its very propositional nature, static, rigid and incapable of encapsulating the deep principles that undergird Reality.

The poetry remains more supple, however, and while they do not provide us with sufficient clarity, they continue to be self-involving and to hint at the depth of Reality.

This is why most horizontal or exoteric claims from the past feel dead, and why most vertical or esoteric claims still feel alive. It’s because they are.

Static, propositional claims are critical for orientation, but have a shelf-life. But as we have just acknowledged the limitations even of poetry (they are vague, insufficient symbols for the Divine that could well result in the idolisation of self and sentiment), we recognise that horizontality is here needed to clarify what is going on.

To make this more concrete: the only reason we are here taking aim so aggressively at philosophy is because we live in a world where propositional, and positivistic thought is so dominant and pronounced. If we lived in a world of Romantics, then the primary target of this horizontality would be the idolisation of self, the projection of ego, and the requirement for transcendental value. We would “tilt” towards rigour in the name of principle. But since we are living in the wake of Modernity, we “tilt” towards poetry instead.¹²

This is all in the name of principle and the Divine.That is the nature of these essays. This is what I am doing here.