What is lyric philosophy - Heiti

• Highlight, page 188 criteria for the concept of lyric philosophy are never stipulated in that book, and refraining from such stipulation is connected with the very nature of the investigation

• Highlight, page 188 “Lyric meaning,” writes Zwicky, “is proto-linguistic. It underlies and informs linguistic meaning but is, at the same time, broader in scope. Its root is

• Highlight, page 189 gestural.”

• Highlight, page 189 “Form and content are inextricably bound up with one another—how you say is what you mean”

• Highlight, page 189 the experience of finding some music deeply meaningful and yet failing to fit any words to it. such an experience might be shelved as a mere curiosity if music’s resistance to linguistic articulation were trivial or unique. But it isn’t: a few moments of reflection suggest that it shares this feature with many other phenomena. consider loving someone; being in the presence of beauty; bearing witness to atrocity. or pausing on a gravel road at twilight, caught in the gaze of a deer. sitting down at the kitchen table, after a death, and trying to write an adequate letter of sympathy. Trying accurately to describe something relatively commonplace, but specific, like the sound of a clarinet, or the aroma of coffee. Why can’t it be done?

• Highlight, page 189 some things, she suggests, “can be more clearly shown than said”

• Highlight, page 189 “It doesn’t mean the same way as language does. Music’s meaning is a function of resonance and resonance involves a kind of integrity.”

• Highlight, page 189 Zwicky’s work is one of the most original and elucidatory defenses of that practice; but it is, also, an exemplary contribution to it. she is responsible for, among other things, having offered the practice an apt name, and having performed the service of perspicuously collecting more than a few members of its family.

• Highlight, page 189 the practice itself is at least as old as Herakleitos

• Highlight, page 190 and Lˇao Zi.

• Highlight, page 190 it is a mistake to fixate on written work, instead of turning to that toward which the work is gesturing.

• Highlight, page 190 Each two-page spread is composed as a structural unit, which has been called a “duon.” on the left hand, one finds text authored by Zwicky (which is not itself monologic, since it moves around and splits, questions itself, impersonates a variety of interlocutors with different tones of voice, some impatient, others sympathetic, for example); on the right hand, one finds excerpts from texts by analytic, continental, and lyric philosophers, musical scores, paintings, photographs, et cetera.

• Highlight, page 190 “The right-hand text is a scrapbook; a way of paying intellectual debts; a series of suggestions for further reading; a chorus of agents provocateurs; the vocal score for a conceptual opera; a homage… The relation of the two texts to one another is somewhere between counterpoint and harmony, somewhere between a double helix and the allemande of the earth and moon”

• Highlight, page 190 to see that a work of philosophy can proceed both contrapuntally (left/right on each duon) and sequentially (page one to the end)—that appears to be something new.

• Highlight, page 190 within the counterpoint of any given duon, in the left or right entry, there may be an intra-textual dialogue: the left-hand text may be questioning itself, or members of the right-hand chorus may be harmonizing or disagreeing with one another. Equally importantly, some of the echoes between disparately placed entries move along an axis at an angle different from either the contrapuntal or the sequential axes.

• Highlight, page 191 Philosophy is thinking in love with clarity.

• Highlight, page 191 Zwicky repeatedly cautions that she is not attempting to supplant analysis with lyric

• Highlight, page 191 her work might be read as reminding philosophy of the range of its indigenous resources.

• Highlight, page 191 The accuracy of the definition can be tested by its ability to save the phenomena, to save what we already recognize as philosophy while also inviting us to extend recognition to cases that have been neglected or marginalized. and we might notice something else about the definition: it is sonorously composed

• Highlight, page 192 This pair of texts—Zwicky’s aphoristic definition of philosophy on the left-hand page and Bringhurst’s poem on the right-hand page—also shows us one of the forms that clarity can assume: resonance

• Highlight, page 192 a contrasting form of clarity, the one with which many twenty-first-century anglophone philosophers are more comfortable, is, of course, analysis.

• Highlight, page 192 “a methodology that, for the most part, appears … to proceed on the assumption that understanding is a function of breaking a whole into its component parts, plus the view that such a breaking, in the case of ideas, is not attended by any loss of meaning”

• Highlight, page 192 “an insistence on the generic superiority of the rational intellect to emotions, desires, and ‘the body’”

• Highlight, page 192 We may call the first feature (1) “analytic method,” and the second feature (2) “hierarchical dualism.” Both receive a definitive modern formulation in the work of descartes.

• Highlight, page 192 These different forms of clarity are responsive to different sorts of structures.

• Highlight, page 193 Logico-analytic arguments should work in this way, too: we should be able to abstract from any stylistic particulars and paraphrase the thing purely, for example in unornamented prose, or in symbols. and such representations can be very useful for achieving a clarifying overview of some argumentative structures.

• Highlight, page 193 Whatever the thought, it is more clearly embodied in, enacted by, Bringhurst’s gesture. We might say that his poem has integrity.

• Highlight, page 193 “Resonance is a function of the integration of various components in a whole” (L34). When they stand in an appropriate relationship—when they are integrated, or attuned—distinct components can transit vibrations to each other. and to permit of integration, the whole itself needs to be complex or “polydimensional” (L5). Here it is worth remembering, as one model of polydimensionality, the many different axes of motion exemplified by Zwicky’s book: contrapuntal and sequential and dialogic and echoic, et cetera. (For the sake of contrast, we might ask: is “integration” imaginable for a unidimensional object? Would it make sense to claim that the conclusion of a valid argument “resonates” with its premises?)

• Highlight, page 195 the roots of these metaphors are not esoteric; they are physical.

• Highlight, page 195 stringed instruments are “good physical analogues” of some kinds of “lyric structures.”

• Highlight, page 195 When the complex structure is in tune—integrated—it is capable of resonance.

• Highlight, page 195 one could say that a chord is its component tones; and there

• Highlight, page 196 is no hierarchy of importance among these tones: each makes an indispensable contribution, in collaboration with its brothers and sisters, to the identity of this chord. (compare, while also noting the differences among, a chord, an organism, a family, an ecological community.)

• Highlight, page 196 We speak of understanding something in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which means the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other.

• Highlight, page 196 some thinking—lyric thinking—is more chord-like than device-like, and that different forms of clarity are appropriate in response to different contexts. some things—whose way of meaning is like the way that music means—can be more clearly shown through resonant gestures than through those that foreclose on resonance.

• Highlight, page 196 It is in this way, then, that philosophy might assume lyric form: when thought whose eros is clarity is driven also by profound intuitions of coherence—when it is also an attempt to arrive at an integrated perception, a picture or understanding of how something might affect us as beings with bodies and emotions as well as the ability to think logically…

• Highlight, page 196 When philosophy attempts to give voice to an ecology of experience. (LP, L68)

• Highlight, page 196 ecological structures are lyric structures

• Highlight, page 196 “The

• Highlight, page 197 coherence that lyric awareness intuits, and that lyric thought attempts to render, is ecological in form”

• Highlight, page 197 can lyric thinking be beautiful? does it, like beauty, offer some relief from time? How can it, when it seems sensitive to, inflected by, the mortality of things? and what about geometrical thinking, which emerges as a contrasting case in its alleged freedom from time: can’t it be beautiful, too? We find that none of lyric, geometry, and beauty are identical with one another; but it seems that there are lyric and geometrical species of beauty.

• Highlight, page 198 In the Western analytic tradition, knowledge has standardly been defined as (some version of) justified true belief.

• Highlight, page 200 it is crucial to stress that the method is not expository, but enactive. The thought is not merely asserted and then explained; instead, it is shown, and the reader is enabled to experience it, through the rhythms of the writing.

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