Poetic Knowledge Ch 2 (1st half)

This chapter is called The Philosophic Foundations of Poetic Knowledge. It's a long, long chapter, and I feel like the author is working very hard to define the difference between poetic, and knowledge and philosophy - and he loses me. I'm getting bits here and there, but I'm not sure I'm getting the big picture. But here goes, anyway. This is going to seem disjointed, but that's because it feels disjointed as my mind struggles to make sense of what I'm reading.

Poetic knowledge has to do with the order in which things are taught. It's like training a pianist to have perfect technique, without first teaching him to love music. In the ancient past, leisure was considered a time for renewal and growth - leisure was necessary to learning. In our day, we've redefined leisure to mean free time to be entertained, but we've lost the reflection that the word originally included.

Modern education tends to compartmentalize: we pass through and discard stages to progress to the next phase in the same way that we leave childhood behind and discard our toys when we grow up. It's like leaving one room, shutting the door, to enter the next room. But a poetic concept would be more like adding on. Nothing is ever left behind, everything is kept and becomes part of the whole person. It's more like the rings of a tree.

This is a nice quote from Socrates: "But to love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way . . . for the object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful."

Aristotle said that "the practice and exercise of virtue is the goal of education."

With poetic knowledge, "truths are grasped intuitively."

There's a section about music having power to form character that I didn't find too convincing. Something about "in this 'musical' way of experiencing reality there is a judgment of the senses that begins to 'tune' us to our world, naturally." But if that's the case, I wonder what that implies as far as insipid kindergarten songs? Or putting geography/math facts to simple tunes to aid memorization? If music truly has power to form character, then shouldn't it be put to a higher use and purpose?

Poetic knowledge can be likened to a sense of wonder and awe, and St. Augustine connected it with love: you can't enjoy and internalize something without loving it. So, learning has to include loving the thing being learned. I think this relates to Charlotte Mason: "The question is not--how much does the youth know when he has finished his education--but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care?"

"...Christian philosophy would say that love is ultimately in the will, but what is also being recalled to mind from this tradition is that the objects of love are first placed there by the senses, sensation, and the emotion of love. An important point of the ancient, classical, medieval tradition on man as knower was the consistent view that it was the whole person who experienced the world--not just the eyes or just the mind, but the composite being, body and soul, man."

Andrew Louth is quoted: "We can see in the writings of the twelfth century--on both sides of the growing divide--a separation between mind and heart that had not been the case with the [church] Fathers. With Augustine . . . knowledge and love are held together: there is a coherence of love and knowledge--we cannot love what we do not know, nor do we progress in knowledge if we do not love."

This fits very well with CM - she wrote about the "Great Recognition," which was her revelation that the separation between secular and spiritual, was an artificial divide that had come about in Christian circles after the medieval era, but originally, there was no divide. Like the whole person who is a composite of various facets, the world is a composite of religious and natural things - it's all God's. I see her Great Recognition as the same thing as Augustine's coherence of love and knowledge based on the wholeness of man - or maybe it's two sides of the same coin?

(Katie, I'm on page 32)