Poetic Knowledge - the rest of ch 2

I finally finished ch 2 of Poetic Knowledge, although I'm not sure I understood it fully, and I'm not sure I'm any better off for the few things I did understnd.

Taylor emphasizes the ability of "estimation," which is the innate ability of knowing what's normal and good, and being aware that something isn't right without actually going step by step through a rationlization process. It's talking with someone and sensing that the person isn't quite right. It's like a sixth sense. Maybe it includes social cues? Little Red Riding Hood's power of estimation failed her when she met the wolf who asked her where she was going, and she wasn't alarmed.

He gives a definition of "fear" as "the consciousness of ignorance in the face of some reality."

Poetic knowledge is like the power of estimation: it's the ability to recognize and discern from sensory input without going through a conscious thought process - like the guide Charlotte Mason wrote about who saw vultures circling overhead and knew there was a lion nearby.

There are two kinds of will. There's the passive kind that recognizes instinctively and appreciates when it comes across something good - as if there's something placed inside us that knows good/beauty from bad/vulgar. And there's the active will that chooses between one action and another - this is the will that CM spoke of. The two wills are different in that one is a will of being, and the other is a will of doing. The passive will recognizes good instinctively and loves it, and desires it, but not in a conscious, rational, deductive way.

And there's this concise definition of poetic knowledge: "poetic experience where all the knowing powers are functioning prerationally with reality."

Poetic Knowledge more of ch 2

This is from pages 32-42

Augustine wrote about God being at the center of our soul and mind, illuminating our stored memories. This was his explantion for those "aha!" moments we have. Similarly, Charlotte Mason wrote about those times when we sleep on a problem, and wake up suddenly knowing the answer. She thought it was divine, too.

More Augustine:

"He [the student] learns not by means of spoken words, but by means of the realities themselves and his senses . . . He is taught not by [the teacher's] words, but by the Realities themselves made manifest to him by God revealing them to his inner self."

This sounds to me like CM's concept of ideas. They originate from God, and are transferred from mind to mind by words, books, music, even a look. It isn't the words or music that teach; it's the ideas that enter a mind and the mind responds to the ideas.

The simple, hard-working life of Benedectine moks illustrate poetic living. The idea of getting back to the earth, appreciating birds singing, time to refelct - sound appealing. But then the author goes on, and I'm reminded of the book Old Ramon by Jack Schaeffer. Old Ramon is an old shepherd apprenticing a youth, and the sheep they're tending are actually a lost flock of ancient Inca sheep necessary to revive their old religion, so the youth is actually being trained to carry on the ancient way of life. He asks questions, and the old shepherd gives him wise, cryptic answers that are frustrating to me because they never answer the question. The poetic mode is being held up against the scientific mode of progress. When it comes down to it, I think I fall more on the scientific way of progress. So - I'm thinking maybe this book isn't for me. Maybe I'm too INTJ to wrap my head around a poetic way of looking at life. INTJ's are called "systems builders," which the opposite of the poetic mode.

There's a quote from Newman that says:

"As science makes progress in any subject matter, poetry recedes from it. The two cannot stand together; they belong respectively to two modes of viewing things, which are condradictory of each other. Reason analyzes, investigates, numbers, weighs, measures, ascertains, locates, the objects of contemplation, and thus gains a scientific knowledge of them. Science results in a system, which is a complex unity; poetry delights in the indefinite and various as contrasted with unity, and the simple as contrasted with systems. The aim of science is to get a hold of things, to grasp them, to handle them, to comprehend them; that is, to master them. . . Poetry does not address the reason, but the imagination and affections."

I haven't given up on the book; I imagine there are helpful things about how to educate. But I feel like an outsider now, looking at how other people live and think.

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)

Poetic Knowledge chapter 1

Let me see if I can clarify what the term "poetic knowledge" means.

It's the difference between knowing about a person - his name, address, phone number, where he works, what his favorite color is, where he spends his saturdays - without ever actually meeting the person. But poetic knowledge is like being that person's close friend.

With poetic knowledge, a child discovers that he loves books and wants to read because he enjoys having his stories read to him. But our tendency is to drill him in letter sounds and make him sit through phonics rules until he begins to get the idea that reading is a chore.

In a CM context, it might be the difference between reading facts about local plants, where they germinate, when they flower, how they're pollinated, etc - and going outside and just absorbing the delight of the outdoors and becoming acquainted with plant life first-hand.

Poetic Knowledge

I've started reading Poetic Knowledge by James S. Taylor (no, not that James Taylor!) with Katie - she's already posted on chapter 1; meanwhile, I still haven't gotten through the introduction. This isn't any reflection on the book; I just can't get my mind into gear lately. I've been focused on computer issues - I upgraded to a new computer with Linux Ubuntu installed, and installed Xubuntu (Ubuntu Lite) on the old one to make it run faster and prepared that one for dh. And I've been spending a lot of time figuring out what MBTI types everyone is since I read fellow INTJ Merry K's blog post about the INTJ type. So, I've just been too preoccupied to focus my mind on any serious reading. Even my Parents' Review proofreading project has suffered.

After numerous attempts, I've decided to abandon hope about ever finishing the introduction and just jump into chapter 1.

A few weeks ago, when I first got the book and was all excited about reading it and sharing it, I tried to explain to a friend what I thought was meant by the term Poetic Knowledge. I knew it wasn't knowledge about poetry, but I figured it was a sense of the big picture, including all the big questions everyone wonders about - why are we here, what is happiness, what meaning is there to life, etc. I thought it might be tied in with philosophy.

Here's the definition Mr. Taylor gives in chapter 1:

"First of all, poetic knowledge is not necessarily a knowledge of poetry but rather a poetic (a sensory-emotional) experience of reality. . . What must be at the beginning of this understanding is the phenomenon of poetic experience. Poetic experience indicates an encounter with reality that is nonanalytical, something that is perceived as beautiful, awful (awefull), spontaneous, mysterious. It is true that poetic experience has that same surprise of metaphor found in poetry, but also found in common experience, when the mind, through the senses and emotions, sees in delight, or even in terror, the significance of what is really there."

I think I might have been on the right track, but I'll know more when I read farther. And, when I'm clearer about what Poetic Knowledge is, I'll see if I can put it into words I understand.