2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Theologian Alexander Filonenko gives a wonderful image in one of his lectures. At school, in science lessons, they explain to us the structure of the world: the world consists of solid, liquid and gaseous bodies. Three states of aggregation. In high school, we learn what happens, sometimes there is a special fourth condition called plasma. Well, as it were, nothing like that, but, Alexander quotes his friend, then it turns out that the Universe is 98% plasma. The ratio of large and small parts in the world turns out to be completely different than it seemed to us before. It is not the case that "there is also plasma." On the contrary, everything else happens.
Likewise with poetry. Probably, one gets the impression that poetry, I here use this word as a synonym for the word "art", constitutes a small part of life, a certain special section of culture. Rhymed lines, rhythms, iambics, that's all. I now defend the point of view that the poetic is not a small, but a large part of life and the world inhabited by man. But it is precisely the rigid bodies of logical schemes, structured understanding and scientific knowledge that occupy, albeit an honorable, but small part
The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose philosophy inherits the tradition of the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, speaks of the world as not just a dead object subject to scientific study. The world for Merleau-Ponty is a living world, a world interacting with a person and even, in a sense, talking to him. His phrase is known: "In the human view, the world takes on a human face." The stormy winter sea is not just a body of water, it has character. It was not for nothing that the ancients saw in him a living and willful Neptune. The sea speaks to us and sometimes we come to listen to his speech. This is pre-verbal speech, speech without words. This is communication that takes place in silence. Silence in this case is not a void devoid of meaning. On the contrary, it is a concentrated primary meaning
Or imagine that you are standing on the top of a mountain somewhere in the Crimea or the Carpathians, the Alps or the Caucasus. A beautiful landscape is spread out in front of you, full of light streaming through the clouds. The world speaks to you, these mountains are not just piles of stone, overgrown with biological artifacts. The mountains speak to you in dense, filled silence. Silence in this case is not just the absence of speech, it contains a meaning that cannot be verbalized or expressed. The phrase "I stand on a mountain and look at other mountains" will no more convey the content of what is happening than the phrase "I read Dostoevsky" the plot of the drama unfolding on the pages of the novel
Poetic speech originates in primitive silence and continues it, putting it into shape. It differs from the usual philistine speech and, by the way, often even philosophical speech, in that it is not a copying or commenting on the ongoing reality.
My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here
My heart's in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer
A-chasing the wild deer and following the roe
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go
Scotsman Robert Burns said. It's not just a message that he misses the mountains. His poems immerse us in his own experience. This is poetry, art, this is painting, not reportage photography, testifying to facts
In addition to poetic speech, which continues and expresses the immediate primitive reality, there is a second type of speech. This is utilitarian speech, serving cognitive-logical thinking, speech operating with facts, as a certain model of reality
Reality simulation is great. The complex achievements of civilization became possible thanks to abstract-logical thinking operating with models. We created complex symbolic systems, the apotheosis of which is programming, that allowed us to control and predict behavior. This had a decisive impact on the development of civilization, giving man the most powerful tools in managing nature. We have formed special symbols for measuring space and time - meters and hours, special symbols of wealth - money
The only problem is that at some point, the symbol began to mean more than the content. Money, for example, is a symbol of wealth and abundance. But often money becomes more important than what it was meant to symbolize. The numbers in the bank account may please more than the refrigerator filled with food. The joy of acquiring material wealth is clouded by the need to replace one number with another, smaller one. In particularly revealing cases, someone, like the engineer Koreiko, agrees to endure poverty for the sake of his millions. Often people agree to work in a job they don't like, to deny themselves pleasure in order to acquire symbols of prosperity, the purpose of which is to bring pleasure.
“When the last tree is cut down, when the last river is poisoned, when the last bird is caught, - only then will you understand that money cannot be eaten”
Perls and Goodman view civilization as a neurosis, as a violation of contact with reality due to the splitting of symbol and content. Rather, they say that neurosis has become the price that humanity has paid for civilization. Carried away by control and modeling, we did not notice how we began to live in the world of symbols. Symbols do not saturate; a neurotic who has lost contact with reality remains hungry, unhappy and dissatisfied.
Cognitive-logical thinking, operating with models and schemes, gave us, the great apes, the ability to predict and control. However, at some stage, we became so carried away by a new toy that distinguishes us from other primates that we began to associate ourselves with cognitive-logical thinking. For many people, their personality, their uniqueness, these are their thoughts. While life is wider, many times wider than thoughts about it. I would compare a person to a ship, and logical thinking to a radar. A ship certainly needs a radar to predict collisions with obstacles, without it it will crash, but a ship is not a radar. Radar is just one of the important auxiliary functions.
The radar is tuned to find obstacles and obstacles, and our thinking is to identify and solve problems and overcome obstacles. Our consciousness always scans the world around us for “what's wrong?”. I think each of you is familiar with this state. Constant anxiety is the price to be paid for success.
In this sense, every civilized person needs psychotherapy. I do not want to say that Rousseau was right, civilization is evil, and we need to put on clothes made of leaves and return to khatam-kopanks, leaving modern concrete dwellings. No, I want to say that after the construction of the building, the scaffolding must be removed. The stopping of spontaneous contact, which was necessary for the formation of modern man, must subsequently be overcome and discarded.
I will close this text with a few words about therapy and its relationship to poetry in the light of the issues outlined above.
One of the types of violation of contact is egotism. According to Peter Philippson, egotism is commenting on what is happening, operating with models of reality instead of the actual living experience of the current moment. Thus, the opposite of egotism is poetic speech. This is the speech characteristic of Buber's I-Thou relation. No wonder Buber's text is more like a poem than a logical philosophical treatise. That's right, he is a poem
Gestalt therapy restores contact with reality and bridges the gap between symbol and content, bridges the gap between subject and object. The world of phenomenology, the world of gestalt therapy is a world that is no longer just a world of schemas and thinking, the world takes on its true size and colors. Poetry takes root in everyday life. Suddenly it turns out that the poetic is 98% real, and the logical-cognitive is only a small part
Gestalt therapy restores the integrity of the world and the person in it. Restores integrity means heals. Gestalt therapy in this sense is closer to art than to the classical science of the XIX century, based on the philosophy of the XVI-XVII centuries, one of the fruits of which is modern medicine, which still operates with models and only models
So maybe it won't be crazy to say that, in a sense, poetry is the medicine of the future.
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