Q&A: On the Meaning of Poetry, Hasidism, and Literature
On the Meaning of Poetry, Hasidism, and Literature
Question
In many of the Rabbi’s posts (both recent ones and older ones), a distinction comes up between “philosophy” and philosophical arguments that deal with truth and falsehood, and “psychology” (which pretends to be philosophy, or at least thought [assuming there is in fact a difference between those]) and psychological arguments that deal with therapy and with a person’s feelings and sensations.
In other words, there are many texts/arguments that present themselves as philosophical or as having philosophical value, but in the end they deal with human emotions and not with arguments and claims. Usually they sin by way of conceptual vagueness and lack of definition of the basic concepts they deal with, and the result, according to the Rabbi’s words, is nonsense with at most therapeutic value; consequently, reading texts of this kind is not worthy of being called learning.
My question is this: isn’t there a fall here into analyticity? The Rabbi’s epistemology is based largely on intuitions and immediate cognition, and less on conceptual analysis, and likewise on undermining the accepted absolute dichotomy between emotion and intellect.
It seems reasonable to me to argue that immediate cognition (intuition, eidetic seeing, intuitive logic, etc.) depends greatly on a person’s “emotional” state. That is, there are “ideas” that can be grasped with greater clarity in a certain emotional mood. In some states there is a greater ability to grasp the concepts themselves and not only their definitions. From here, the path to understanding the connection between literature/poetry/Hasidism and learning and thought (philosophy) is relatively short. The writer’s goal is to bring the reader into a certain frame of mind in which his spirit will be able to grasp a certain concept more clearly, a concept with content. True, texts of this kind do not contribute to the definition and analysis of a given concept, but as said, they do have the ability to “teach” that new concept.
I would be glad to hear the Rabbi’s response.
Answer
I am really not undermining the dichotomy between emotion and intellect, but between cognition and thinking. Emotion and intellect are two entirely different things. It is obvious that the right emotion can enable the intellect and cognition to function more properly, just as proper food can do that. So is eating therefore an engagement in philosophy? After all the preparations and the more or less suitable circumstances, there are still supposed to come defined concepts, claims, and arguments. Once we have those, I really do not care what enabled them or where they came from. That is the distinction I made between the context of discovery and the context of justification.
Discussion on Answer
Obviously we would agree. But what does that have to do with existentialism? Experience in itself has no philosophical implication. Anything you describe about it belongs to the world of phenomena. Try to infer something about the world from the experience of the color red in itself. In my opinion, nothing at all.
Every philosophical discussion is accompanied by an understanding that takes place within us, but that does not take part in the discussion; it merely accompanies it in parallel. It is not in itself a subject for discussion.
Inference is deductive and analytic; I was speaking about receiving information in a cognitive synthetic way. Sensory experience may be limited to the world of phenomena, but human cognition is not limited only to the world of phenomena; rather, it penetrates to the very substance of concepts (to my mind, this is the main innovation of synthetic thinking). According to this, it seems to me that experience is the essence of philosophy; inference and deduction always come after the already familiar world of concepts and on its basis.
Now, if a given text creates in a person a clear apprehension of some concept, it would not seem exaggerated to me to say that he learned the concept from the text (or from the writer, heaven forbid). And certainly we would see the reading of texts of this kind as having intrinsic importance (not therapeutic) and as part of the philosophical process (in some sense).
(I really don’t know what this has to do with existentialism.)
The question came up while a discussion about existentialism was going on, so I thought you were suggesting a solution to that.
As for your actual claims, I myself spoke about that in the posts on poetry. More than that: I wrote there that there is a way to convey insights on the philosophical plane through poetry (and not only the experience regarding the substance of concepts).
Hmm… maybe I didn’t explain myself properly.
When I say “emotion,” I mean experience. Experience can be sensory experience in the simple sense (sight, say), and it can be more “psychological” or inward (the death of a close family member). Just as sight teaches me about the objects experienced through it (you can’t know what red really is without seeing it, and no amount of definitions, clarifications, and defined concepts in the world will help), and it is impossible to learn about them without that sense, so too it makes sense to argue that other emotions grasp objects in a way that cannot be grasped otherwise (thoughts and insights about death, for example). Of course, after these objects have been grasped, one can analyze and clarify them, but definitions and clarifications are of no use in the absence of the initial cognitive/experiential basis.
It seems to me that this goes beyond creating basic conditions for knowledge and is part of the content of knowledge itself. I believe we would agree that in seeing the color red there is an element of learning about the world.