Emmeline
08-12-2004, 07:33 PM
Metaphysics isn't what it used to be, not because the subject itself has changed but because people have stopped trying to understand it. It's true most college philosophy majors will encounter it at some point or another in their journey to comprehending the inner workings of the universe but to the layman it remains an unapprochable topic, [as seen in the absence of posts in this forum]. In any case, metaphysics seemed to be a big thing in the 16th century, not specifically because there was a practical application to the study of what underlies the human experience but simply for the sake of asking the grandest question of all, the one that answers 42 if you've read Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Traditionally, metaphysics refers to the branch of philosophy that attempts to understand the fundamental nature of all reality, whether visible or invisible. It seeks a description so basic, so essentially simple, so all-inclusive that it applies to everything, whether divine or human or anything else. It attempts to tell what anything must be like in order to be at all. That is pretty much the clear cut definition. The term metaphysics originally referred to the writings of Aristotle that came after his writings on physics, in the arrangement made by Andronicus of Rhodes about three centuries after Aristotle's death. A commonly employed, secondary, popular, usage of metaphysics includes a wide range of controversial phenomena believed by many people to exist beyond the physical - mysticism, the occult, etc. etc. etc.
From the big metaphysical writers the one that really comes to mind is John Donne, english poet who lived in the 1500 hundreds and wrote both love poetry and sermons; he converted from catholicism to the anglican church in order to marry and most poems are probably to his wife. In the following, one of his most famous poems he seeks to understand parting for what it truly is. Once understood, the use of language makes this a beautiful poem as well as a metaphysical one.
A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
by John Donne
AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."
So let us melt, and make no noise, 5
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 10
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 15
The thing which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 20
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so 25
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
And makes me end where I begun.
Traditionally, metaphysics refers to the branch of philosophy that attempts to understand the fundamental nature of all reality, whether visible or invisible. It seeks a description so basic, so essentially simple, so all-inclusive that it applies to everything, whether divine or human or anything else. It attempts to tell what anything must be like in order to be at all. That is pretty much the clear cut definition. The term metaphysics originally referred to the writings of Aristotle that came after his writings on physics, in the arrangement made by Andronicus of Rhodes about three centuries after Aristotle's death. A commonly employed, secondary, popular, usage of metaphysics includes a wide range of controversial phenomena believed by many people to exist beyond the physical - mysticism, the occult, etc. etc. etc.
From the big metaphysical writers the one that really comes to mind is John Donne, english poet who lived in the 1500 hundreds and wrote both love poetry and sermons; he converted from catholicism to the anglican church in order to marry and most poems are probably to his wife. In the following, one of his most famous poems he seeks to understand parting for what it truly is. Once understood, the use of language makes this a beautiful poem as well as a metaphysical one.
A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
by John Donne
AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."
So let us melt, and make no noise, 5
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 10
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 15
The thing which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 20
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so 25
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
And makes me end where I begun.