[Allen Tice]

Not to get gnarly, but I'd develop Rick's "objective subjectivity" to "interestingly realized objective subjectivity" or "attractively realized objective subjectivity".

(Plato, Clamato! Xenophon (with all his faults) was ten times as well-grounded in reality.)

[Siham Karami]

This may seem off-subject, but sometimes what makes a philosophical discussion "productive" (which could mean many subjective things, but generally I'd define to mean "reaching an understanding more comprehensive—and possibly universal— than what was previously understood") is being grounded in survival issues. That includes survival of the spirit as well as the body. I understood Rick's "academic" crit to refer to discussion removed from existential threat or reality. Comfortable and securely positioned people may have the luxury to think and work out ideas, but there often is a certain edge missing, a comprehensive vision, an impetus or urgency to the development of ideas.

"Beauty" and "truth" are much more vital when seen in the light of great difficulties and painful or harrowing circumstances. Many of the great thinkers had periods of wealth/comfort and periods of extreme hardship. Some hardships can be "inner." Emily Dickinson? Or "personal/social." So a "removed" discussion may seem "academic" whereas great ideas came out of vital, urgent issues which thinkers felt compelled to resolve. Having said that, academic work in no way disqualifies one from reaching a high level of vision...as long as one is challenging comfort zones, whatever they may be.

[Norman Ball]

Excellent point Siham. Grace acquires beauty under pressure. Adversity attends the aesthetic. Some of the aversion to the academic pursuit of poetry derives instinctively I think from this realization.

[Michael F]

I have nothing against academics, but didn’t this guy put the point fiendishly well...


The Scholars

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

-- WB Yeats

[Andrew Frisardi]

Yes, Michael F., but Yeats also wrote,

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing‐masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake,
Or set upon on a golden branch to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

And for those irritating briars that bind joys and desires mentioned by Ed, here are some hedge clippers:

Like compassion, love, and peace, beauty is seen as a Divine Quality in Islam, one of God’s Names being al-Jamil, the Beautiful. Furthermore, according to the hadith quoted at the beginning of this chapter, God loves beauty, meaning that the qualities of beauty and love are intertwined on the Divine plane. And this reality is reflected on the human plane as well by the fact that our soul loves what it perceives as beautiful and sees as beautiful what it loves. Beauty also has the power of radiation and emanation and shares therefore a basic characteristic with compassion and mercy. Furthermore, beauty brings about collectedness and helps the scattered elements of the soul gather together in a state of calm. Beauty is therefore also related to peace and has a remarkable pacifying power over the soul, a quality that is essential to Islamic spirituality, as reflected so clearly in Islamic art.

But what is beauty? In the Islamic universe, as in other traditional worlds, beauty is not simply a subjective state existing only "in the eye of the beholder," although each human being usually has the capacity to appreciate certain kinds of beauty and not others. Beauty is a dimension of reality itself, and throughout the ages Islamic philosophers and mystics have confirmed in their own terms the Platonic dictum "Beauty is the splendor of the truth." Now, the Arabic word haqiqah means both "truth" and "reality" and the Divine Name al-Haqq indicates the union of the two in God Who is both the Truth in its absolute sense, the Truth that makes us free, as Christ asserted, and absolute Reality.

Metaphysically speaking, since God is both Truth and Reality, He could not but be beautiful. As the Sufis would say, ultimately all beauty is the radiation on a particular level of reality of the Beauty of the Face of the Beloved.

--Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam

“I’m with Seyyed.”

[ross hamilton hill]

One of my heroes is Kant, I think Wittgenstein had him in mind when he warned not to try to answer everything in one book, (to put it simply) but Kant opened up for me the idea of the categories and I have found those
invaluable.
I'd also mention symbolic logic which is part of philosophy. Studying logic made me far more aware of the spuriousness of many arguments.
I think philosophy stands at the top of the humanities and informs them all,
and it can be very practical, 'necessary and sufficient' is a philosophical nostrum I learnt that I have always thought a good saying to apply in life.

[Michael F]

Thanks for the different angle on Yeats, Andrew. That’s a good thing.

One more ‘philosophical’ poem, by WS. There are many of hers I could choose from … I’m a fanboi, I own it.



Utopia

Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

--Wislawa Szymborska

[Allen Tice]

Some well-informed academics that I know would give Catullus a "high-five" just for starters!

Originally Posted by Michael Ferris

I have nothing against academics, but didn’t this guy put the point fiendishly well...


The Scholars

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

-- WB Yeats

[Allen Tice]

I just realized that Yeats' poem above is a good counter-example to Keats : beautiful, but the implications are quite untrue, even for late-Victorian Latinists.