History and Philosophy: Tilted By Poetry
 

POETRY: A NEW WORLD FOR HISTORY

History is philosophy teaching by experience.
-Carlyle in Fabricating History: English Writers on the French Revolution, , Barton Friedman, Princeton UP, 1988, p.17.

The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and ‘discovers’ a new world within the known world.
-D.H. Lawrence in Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Sandra Gilbert, Cornell UP, London, 1972, p.5.


Historical knowledge rendered meaningful
by conformity to some teleological model,
some linguistic construct which we actualize,
reconfigure as we read, shooting the present
with chips of messianic time,
my consciousness with ever higher levels
of connectedness, shooting my life
with questions which recreate some microcosm
in its depth, breadth, beyond the narrow,
distorted into vistas, multiple dimensions,
in the theatre of eternity; for written history
is always ‘history-for’, never divorced
from complicating contexts, condensed,
chosen, displaced, elaborated, rationalized,
structured, emphasized, extrapolated,
vantage-pointed, like the images of a dream
intending some manifest content,
some knowledgework, analogous to life:
far beyond some sequence of rosary beads,
some simple linearity, some neutral facticity.

Ron Price
22 October 1995

Question: What's the point? Sure all humanistic knowledge is tainted by bias, but you seem to also be suggesting that it's trapped within the Ontotheological framework. Is this correct? And are you also suggesting we can't escape this framework?

what ontological framework are you referring to exactly, asaris?

by the way, the most interesting poet i know right now that works on this boundary is susan howe. there are alot of possibilities here.

Not ontological, ontotheological. To put it three different ways: "Ethics is nihilist because it believes the only thing that can happen to man is death", "The end of man (telos) is the end of man (eschaton)", or "Historical knowledge rendered meaningful
by conformity to some teleological model". Of course, I'm very unsure that our new friend really means the same thing as what Derrida meant, but it seemed like an interesting way of approach.

ah, well there we are.
had i read the phrase properly, there'd have been no problem.
i'd also be interested in what the gentleman has to say on this.

Maybe this was a drive-by posting...

Life Has Been Problematic
 

In the last several years I've written what I have entitled: My Chaos Narrative: 66 Years of Bipolar Disorder. This is one reason I have not got back to this thread. You can google: RonPrice BPD, if you want to read my story in cyberspace. Apolgies, too, for not getting back to this thread after so many years.-Ron in Tasmania:thumbsup: