Does it not occur to you that to write so much is a burden to the reader?Dachshund:
To me, what Wordsworth is saying is that when we use the term "philosopher", it is taken for granted that we are referring to an adult, and we tend to assume, moreover, that the best philosophers are those "wise elders" among us, those venerable old souls who have - after dedicating a lifetime to quiet contemplation and reflection - perhaps managed to acquire at least some genuine insight into the true meaning of life. The great irony, however, is, as Wordsworth says in the lines I have quoted above, that the best philosophers are in fact children; it is they, and not adults, who are are the ones that possess a genius for true insight. Children have the ability to see the truth clearly because their vision has not yet been tainted and corrupted by age. As we grow older we progressively lose the pristine clarity of vision that we had when we were young children, we become increasingly blinded and unable to see clearly that which is most real. As adults, we are "In darkness lost" and " toiling all our lives" just to recapture hazy, fleeting glimpses of those ultimate truths which we could see so very vividly and effortlessly when we were infants.
When Wordsworth describes the child as "Thou best philosopher", he is, of course, speaking metaphorically...........
So we are in English lit class? I do confess I like this. As to your ideas: I agree that W. is saying children are the best philosophers, though it is not metaphor, it is irony. As children cannot be philosophers they possess the only true wisdom. Their "Eye" is deaf and silent, for to speak is to bring corruption to innocence of the spirit. I speak of this to myself often, this irony of having the skill to speak and yet it is by this instrument of the understanding I am lost in the history, the culture, that which is not of God. Now, speaking of irony, there is no one that articulates this better than Kierkegaard, who holds the traditions and erudition of philosophers in far more contempt. You MUST read his Concept of Anxiety, for it contains in drastic articulation the clarity this stanza can only invoke. Wordsworth wrote this in 1800ish, 40 years prior to K. What W had in mind was the rationalism of his time as this was the age of reason, still, and Hegel had just retired his pen. Had W had a glimpse of what K would write, and Lessing's argument that inspired him, he would have had some basis to exclude at least one philosopher from his disdain. But again, I agree with this, though it is the philosopher that brings out the argument and turns the table of the cynic.
i am guessing you are going to bring up the phenomenological reduction, the epoche. I have commented elsewhere that this idea is very close to epiphany, that is, to reduce an object to its appearance, and remove from "sight" the presuppositions that crowd around it is to liberate the moment of apprehension. remember, to do this one is not examining, as he does in his tedious "Ideas" (long and tiring) the details of all that are attendant in the perception of an object, but one is aloof, or so I understand this from my reading of Anthony Steinboch's Phenomenology and Mysticism.Infants and young children are I believe, master exponents of the phenomenological method as it was originally conceptualised by the founding father of the modern school/movement of philosophical phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, in his seminal work "Logical Investigations"
Actually. I think you are closer to Levinas's totality and Infinity. He actually argues like this: There is a more primordial relation of the I to the "other" of the world. It is primitive and totalitarian, the drive to assimilate, to totalize all that lies before one. This also sounds a lot like Kant, on the rational side: all we see we conquer with our synthetic rationality, and spontaneously assimilate what is alien into what is the Same. At any rate, this stands against something that is also primordial, the Other (and the which is also Other). The Other is another person, a complete mystery to our gaze as we can never penetrate into that "dasein" if I may borrow a term, behind the appearance. Husserl speaks to this in his Cartesian Meditations, but for him it is more a bout that mystery Descartes leaves us with with the isolated cogito. Anyway the Other is the presence of God in the Other, Thou, as in Buber's I, Thou. Here is the heart of human sacredness. A very worthy read.So, to continue. The phenomenologists (people like Husserl) were interested in the "shining forth" of things, and they made the presumption that the things that manifested themselves to you as most meaningful were the the most real things. And I think we can make a strong case that this is actually how our brains are "wired up", because our brains are wired to react to things that have meaning BEFORE they construct the perceptions that we think of as objects. The reason for this is because the meaning of things is more real (in some sense) but more IMPORTANT than the view of things as objects. To give an example, when you approach a cliff, you don't see "a cliff"; what you "see" is a "falling off place". It isn't that it's an object "cliff" to which you attribute the the meaning of the "falling off place" perception to, it's the "falling off place perception" that comes first, and the abstraction of the objective "cliff" - if it ever happens at all - comes much later; much later conceptually, because even babies and Dachshund dogs can detect cliffs, and much later historically.
But Husserl would never say, as i have read, there is some kind of pre or protorational apprehension of a thing. Such a thing would clearly be an abstraction to him, for ideas are in the objects themselves, as he would put it. you cannot speak of objects seen through a kind of innocent eye as they are always already conceptualized; that is what apprehending a thing is. Without concepts intuitions are blind, without intuitions concepts are empty, Husserl would abide by this.
I agree with most of this, and defend the notion that we have within us the original joy of childhood. The trouble is that W. does not give a full analysis of how it is we are as we are. Kierkegaard gives this extraordinary detail in his examination of original sin. He calls this hereditary sin and I cannot tell in a paragraph what labors at for many pages. But for our purpose here, know that redemption is not found in the myths about Christ's exclusive divinity, but in the divinity of one person's subjectivity. The extraordinary things W place in the child's vision of the world are ours, and it is ours to reclaim what has been lost in the "heritage" of what he calls quantitative sin: attachments to the world. to achieve the heights the soul can reach, one must take a qualitative leap out of the machinery of past into future (something Heidegger is going to really play up in a hundred years) into the eternal present.In "The Ode", Wordsworth, as you know, notes this phenomenon of the "shining forth" of reality and associates it with childhood. He recalls how as a child, every simple thing in the world appeared to be invested with an intense "dream-like vividness and splendour"; how "The earth and every sight" seemed "Apparelled in celestial light. There are, I think, good reasons for Wordsworth having observed the sense of wonder children manifest in their perception of ordinary, day-to-day commonplace objects; in the simple, mundane things of the world that hold no special significance for adults. One is that your brain is not so much of an inhibitry structure when you are a child before it is fully developed, so their are neurological reasons for noting it; but their are also reasons that stem from the level of lived experience. You can tell when you are around children that they're open to the things of the world in a way that adults aren't. Children are literally wide-eyed with wonder, and adults like being around children for that reason. Wordthsworth celebrates the joy that adults experience just by being having children around them in the following lines from Stanzas III and IV of "the Ode"...
Eternal Present? I think this is exactly what a child lives in, what the Ode is all about.
Now that sounds like Husserl's European Crisis, though i am rusty on this. I agree with this, the idea that while science is great at solving problems, it is lousy at solving the problem of what it is to be human. As so many have said this: science objectifies and we are not objects. Period. What are we? We are blind to this. See Karl Jasper's Philosophy of Existence. His Encompassing is an attempt to name the "sense of Being" that defies the variosu modes of apprehending the world. Interesting.I think the question of whether adults are all irretrievably "fallen"; that is the question of whether or not experience, i.e; the process of growing up progressively "corrupts the spirit" in such a manner that by the time we are fully matured adults we are "afflicted" with an irreversible, indelible and permanent spiritual blindness is extremely important, and never more so than today where the dominant worldview in the West is scientism. Our Western scientific worldview assumes that what is most real is something that is dead, like a stone - dead, like dirt; that at its deepest level reality is something that is essentially like a lump of physical matter, that it is something "heartless" and "soulless", something objective and external; something "amoral" ; something that has no shred of inherent value or meaning or purpose in itself
The one thing I love about literature is that it can evoke the mystery and majesty of being human so as to actually touch upon what has been lost or is elusive.
I'm out of time for now.