In her essay What is Lyric Philosophy, she presents 61 bare bones, the first 10 of which are:

  1. The characterstic formal properties of lyric thought are resonance and integrity.
  2. For lyric thought, the foundations of meaning lie in the world, and in human experience of the world, unconditioned by language.
  3. Lyric meaning can underlie and inform linguistic meaning, but it is, at the same time, broader in scope. Its root is gestural.
  4. To read analytic thought sympathetically is to be favorably disposed toward the presupposition that meaning is essentially a linguistic phenomenon, although, in any given case, the exact words may not matter. The reading of lyric compositions presupposes that, in signifcant ways, meaning exists prior to and independently of language—but that if language is to bear its trace, the choice of words must be exact.
  5. No two of lyric thought, philosophy, and poetry are identical with one another; but neither is any one fully disjoint from the other two.
  6. Philosophy’s eros is clarity. The eros of lyric is coherence.
  7. Lyric in this sense deliberately sets aside historical associations with Romantic poetry in order to focus on what it is we could be meaning when we use it to characterize Vermeer interiors, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Schubert’s use of diatonic tonality, and the poetry of Ezra Pound.
  8. My use of philosophy, too, sets to one side a characterization that identifes the discipline with systematic logico-linguistic analysis. That use is too narrow to capture our presystematic intuitions about what philosophy is. A good deni- tion will include the thought of Herakleitos, as well as that of the best Anglo- American analysts.
  9. Resonance is a form of clarity
  10. Philosophy is thinking in love with clarity.

What is an argument?—An attempt to assist others to see what we (think we) have seen.

You must go right down to the original sources so as to see them all side by side, both the neglected and the preferred.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein:

The “is”—explicit or implicit—of a metaphor is its lyric aspect. For this reason, a metaphor is true to the degree that it is resonant.

A metaphor is an explicit refusal of the idea that the distinctness of things is their most fundamental ontological characteristic. But their distinctness is one of their most fundamental ontological characthe other being their interpenetration and connectedness.

Metaphor is a part of the not-knowing aspect of art, and yet I’m firmly convinced that it is the supreme way of searching for truth. How can this be?

– Charles Simic

Other than pointing and hoping, there are no rules, no algorithms, by which human perception of a gestalt may be facilitated. But if the perception of gestalts is the basis of understanding, then it is also the basis of philosophical insight. This means there can be no rules or decision procedures whose application constitutes the practice of philosophy. That practice is better understood as an exercise of attention disciplined by discernment of the live, metaphorical relation between things and the resonant structure of the world.

How is it that man becomes a slave to his own method? The essential problem. . . . The mind is enslaved whenever it accepts connections which it has not itself established.

– Simone Weil

To appreciate how our understanding can be limited by fear, by a will to mastery, by a need to control, is to begin the learning/unlearning that constitutes the practice of lyric philosophy.

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