[MD] What is an analogy?

[Heather Perella]

Comments below:


> [SA previously]
> Also, anybody else, try to define analogy.  What is
> it?
> 
> [Arlo]
> Can we define "art". And even if we agreed what art
> "was", does that description
> also define Cezanne's "Pines and Rocks
> (Fontainebleau)"? (Or fill in your
> favorite painting).
> "Analogy", "metaphor", these things are textual
> "art". They point towards the
> undefinable undefined. They are irreducible. They
> are not stable. They are
> cultural. Can you reduce Wagner's Ring or
> Beethoven's Ninth, or Rage Against
> the Machine's "Killing in the Name Of" to some
> "literal" definition and still
> preserve its Dynamic message? No (I say).

     Thank you for responding.  This analogy bit
exploded my mind, to use analogy obviously.  Can say
an analogy, but can't capture it fully with intellect,
yet, intellect creates analogies.  I would go as far
as say intellect is an analogy.  When analogy is fully
in process it is the same as a tree, rock, etc...  It
has so much going on, so much about it, and yet, never
fully captured.  Analogies can be locked in the zoo,
but can't live in a zoo or else they die and crumble
into insanity and irrational efforts.  Analogies, like
a tree, can be scientifically discovered, painted, and
poetically written, but analogies shake off any
hardening or literalization.  Isn't this the
excellence, spirit, value, freedom, and quality of any
static quality?  Harden any analogy and the value of
any particular 'thing' loses 'something' about itself
and 'something' of 'what something is' is left out. 
Hardening, put in a zoo, lifelessness, lose of spirit,
sterilization, zombies, lose of value (or feeling of
value) and inanimate objects, etc... all analogies of
literalization.  Has not poetry and painting, any art,
been described as the very breath of life.  


     [Arlo]
> David Granger writes about this using the art of
> "literature" as a meaningful
> contributor to philosophy. He says, "This
> praxis-oriented account of language
> brings us to still another place where literature,
> in the form of fiction,
> might contribute meaningfully to philosophy. It
> likewise helps to explain
> Wittgenstein's repeated use of fiction in his
> philosophical investigations."

     Who's Wittgenstein?

     [Arlo]
> Earlier, Granger writes, "In her pioneering book
> Love's Knowledge, Martha
> Nussbaum reveals the dominant modes of Western
> philosophy to be significantly
> at odds with Dewey and Pirsig's express commitment
> to everyday lived
> experience.

     Yes, "everyday lived experience" provides
something that is left out in literalization or bare
bones processes.  The flesh and blood of what we
encounter each day and night, feeling is a big one,
are left out in pure observation.  The mind and heart
are to be left out in pure observation.  It is what
Malinowski (spelling?) an early 20th century
anthropologist called the veranda.  In traditional
anthropology when he first went into the field to
study, it was the anthropologist job to be up
somewhere high, observing, on a veranda (a porch)
somewhere overlooking the field of study.  Malinowski
decided one day to go off the veranda into the village
on the Trobriand Islands in the Pacific.  He
participated with the village folk, and discovered a
whole new felt/experienced world going on.  Once in
Africa, an anthropologist studied a village from far
away.  He thought he discovered a part-ape, part-human
village.  After quite some time, he discovered these
villagers were fully human, the part-ape part was just
cloth flapping in the breeze behind them which
appeared as tails while they danced around the fire. 
Pure observation makes a divide, and puts the rest of
the world in some kind of zoo or on display.  As in
the Natural Museum of Natural History in New York City
in the late 1800's where African Pygmies (a people)
where actually put on display in the Museum so New
Yorkers could look at them, as if they were in a zoo. 
Interactive Museums, especially for kids, make
'things' more real.  It is the real, the something
deep down in life, that is shut off in literalization.

     [Arlo]
> My point here is that "art", whether metaphor,
> dance, symphony, literature,
> poetry, didgeridoo, koan or "___", is an important,
> and irreducible, element to
> understanding that S/O foundations ignore, or
> belittle. What's more, it
> situates, in local
> temporal-social-historical-cultural contexts
> "meaning" that
> emerges from participation in the world, rather than
> detached, "objective"
> views that demand we sit on some (fictional)
> armchair and observe the world. 

     Yes, the pure observation detached from the
world, where context is forgotten, heart is thrown
away, and mind's complete doings are ignored as bad,
wrong, and unreal.  Yet, what the mind does in full,
when allowed, the feelings in the heart, the heart and
mind transactions, etc... are in touch with a deeper
reality felt in the wind.

     [Arlo] 
> "At the same time, however, Nussbaum recognizes that
> there has been a long
> history of intense debate over the relationship (or
> lack thereof) between
> philosophy and literature. Historically, much of
> this debate has been couched
> in terms of an intractable "ancient quarrel" between
> philosophy and literature.
> That quarrel, which continues to be reiterated and
> rehearsed in certain
> quarters of academia even today, encompasses
> questions and issues concerning
> both literary form (or style) and content. It was
> first initiated, according to
> Nussbaum, by the following two-part question (and
> expression of the human
> eras): How should we live life as human beings and
> which of the two, philosophy
> or literature, should we most look to for guidance?"
> (Granger, John Dewey,
> Robert Pirsig, and the Art of Living)

     The intellect, the mind, is involved in its'
fuller doings with both philosophy and literature. 
When the mind is allowed to express its' fuller way,
then we notice and experience much more to this life
than just ignoring parts of it just because some might
find these other parts of the minds doings kid's stuff
(the world of pretend, imagination, etc...)  It is
this imaginative world in harmony with the world of
form that we notice the fuller happenings.  It is what
analogy does.  It is the very doing of analogy that
shakes off any total lock down (hardening), but still
grounded in the very web of reality.  What an analogy
does still is like a cougar in the woods. 
Uncapturable and still in touch with the practical
needs of food, water, and shelter.  As Thoreau,
philosophizing, yet, still meeting his basic needs. 
The Amerindian with ceremonies, and vision quests, but
still having a family, hunting, and doing work around
the village.  This is one aspect of an isolated monk,
the non-generational, no children, no family, these
kinds of monks that stifles and cuts-off their
culture.  They must go out into the community, or the
community must come to them.  This is how I find the
Amerindian, or any monks that have families, this is
how they've taken their practice to the next level so
to speak.  This is how a whole Amerindian community
has been discussed as sacred.  Communes, and I
wouldn't doubt Plymouth Rock where the Pilgrims landed
may have felt, thus experienced, this sacred practice
as one of a community effort where their children and
ways could thrive together.  This is where the
question leads, as in the How to be Free thread.  What
of the next step where ideas find a home, a community
where practices can be done conjointly, and
communally.  When we think of Amerindians and other
old way communities from around the world, I don't
think of individuals within the community only living
in a sacred manner, I picture whole communities living
with the earth, and these ways spread into the woods
where bears and ravens where brothers and sisters. 
Now-a-days, much is supposed to be divided and
separated away from each other... SOM... divide and
conquer.


thanks.

blue sky, white snow, black crow,
SA      


 
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