Well, I tremble as I begin this post. I don't have a strong grasp on this material. I don't feel like I've processed it and can even regurgitate it let alone comment on it!
So I think what I'm going to do, which may or may not be useful, is to just go through the chapter and talk about the things that jumped out at me. We'll see how this goes. . . .
On thing I am finding difficult in this book is the use of terms I thought I knew but are used in a different sense here. For instance 'gymnastic' and 'appetite.' Gymnastic doesn't mean what Olga Korbut did at the Olympics, instead it means our physical engagement with the world. It's experiencing reality bodily, like dancing to music, or feeling a breeze touch your face. If I'm grasping this right, poetic knowledge is a first knowledge; our sensory-emotion response to encountering experience. So that having to engage physically for poetic knowledge makes sense.
Appetite doesn't mean how hungry you are but rather one's emotions. Taylor quotes Maritain, "Appetite . . . tends toward things as they are in themselves." I think by this he means that say, when we love something, we appreciate it/him/her for what they are in and of themselves and not for how we can use them, for example.
Taylor, it seems to me, is a bit disorganized in this chapter. It is entitled Connatural, Intentional and Intuitive. Where is the nice chart from the last chapter to define and clarify what he is talking about? One has to really comb through the chapter to get at a definition of these terms. Let me make an attempt:
Connatural is to participate in some way with something's nature. The habit of noticing things keenly cultivates this connaturality. This results in a sympathetic knowledge of something.
Intentional means. . . well I realize as I'm typing this I never did get what intentional means to Taylor in the context of poetic knowledge.
Intuitive means the spontaneous awareness of reality (that's one way Taylor explains it.)
One thing that jumped out at me was the idea that connaturality gives one a sympathetic understanding of something. There is a connectedness between the observer who is really an 'experiencer' (observer sounds too distant) and what is being experienced. When I read this my first reaction was that this was the opposite of what existentialism leads to, a feeling that one can never really know or feel union with another. But then later Taylor quotes McInerny who is discussing Maritain (keeping up???) and says that the appetite is existential because it doesn't 'know' in the sense of possess, something but appreciates it for what it is of itself.
Another thing that I appreciated was Taylor's mention of how often understanding of something, that might even be known in a scientific way, can come together in a poetic experience, like when we are busy doing something else in our leisure and then suddenly the answer to a problem we've been chewing on seems to appear out of nowhere. I think everyone has had that experience. This little example made me think about how all the ways of knowing, intuitive, poetic, scientific all work together in some unknown way in our minds and this is so much a given in our lives that it seems strange to step back and analyze it.
Yet another thing that made an impression on me in this chapter was Taylor's discussion of the habit of poetic experience, something that poets do that enables them to create these wonderful pictures and evoke emotions and be so on the mark, true to experience. But I liked Taylor's distinguishing between experiencing what is real via poetic knowledge versus getting all romantically-mystical about it. For instance a poet might convey the sensation of experiencing the beauty of tree, that's poetic knowledge, but if the poet starts going on and on about 'treeness' and trying to move into some spiritual understanding of trees, that is not poetic knowledge. Poetic knowledge is a first knowledge that doesn't draw conclusions. It doesn't work in competition with other ways of knowing, but complements them.
I felt edified by Taylor's distinction between the mystical and poetical. Mystical means that one is interacting with an outside spiritual force. Poetical is grounded in reality, meaning the here and now that can be experienced.
I also liked the connection between science, metaphysics and poetic knowledge; that they all begin in 'marvel.'
And I thought Taylor makes an important distinction between subjectivity and subjectivism. Subjectivism means there is no reality outside of what the individual experiences. This in my mind leads to relativism and that existential loneliness or alienation I was talking about earlier. Subjectivity is when someone experiences reality as something passionately apprehended. It is the way a person takes an objective truth and makes it his own, not his own truth but his own understanding or relationship with the objective truth. At least that was my understanding of Taylor's point.
My favorite part of the chapter, and the part that resonates the most with unschooling and poetic knowledge was when Taylor talks about how the modern overemphasis of the scientific knowledge as the only way of knowing has transformed learning from an act of leisure to an act of work. Learning nowadays is all about labor to acquire facts which is why a factory model for schools seems to make sense to so many.
I just remembered another thing that made an impression on me but I am running out of time so I can't bother to rife through the pages looking for it, is the idea of time flowing differently as we experience things. When we are in love, we can spend hours with the beloved and it feels like no time at all. A child absorbed in play has no idea of time passing. And we can also experience sorrow in this way as well. Poetic knowledge, this intense, nondiscursive encounter with reality is transcendental. It glimpses into the eternal.
And finally, leading from that last insight, Taylor hearkens back to Homer's idea of poetic knowledge revealed in Odysseus's experience at Alcinious's banquet. Taylor talks about the poetic experience of celebration. This made me think of the opposite experience that many teens and college students have of 'partying.' Partying is about getting so drunk or stoned in order to manufactured some kind of heightened experience. It really is the opposite of a celebration because it isn't honoring something like a guest or an event but it is very cut off and lonely and is done in a sort of desperation. Party-ers become addicts and alcoholics and behave destructively. They have no self-control when it comes to sexual relations. There is no true connection or sympathetic experience. I wonder if the reason so many teens engage in this behavior is because in their lives poetic experience has been so undervalued and so atrophied that they search for such an experience in all the wrong places. Poetic knowledge sees the eternal, the big picture, the ennobling. To have that aspect of one's mind so underfed make life very impoverished as a result. So they grasp at anything that might imitate what they are starved for.
