The essence of "All We Know"
So I stumbled upon a very short Robert Frost poem that sums up the lyrics to All We Know quite well, so I thought I'd share it with y'all:
"We dance around in a ring and suppose, but the Secret sits in the middle and knows."
There is such a simplistic beauty to this. I was pretty blown away by how concisely it conveys, more or less, what I was trying to express in the song All We Know. The song is more about trying to figure out the Secret through meditation and contemplation, and to question anything science and religion had told you to think... but ultimately even those who have achieved great enlightenment know that true knowledge is understanding and admitting that we know nothing. And the most brilliant astrophysicists realize there is a grandoise mystery yet unsolved.
Until next time...
Posted by:
Rob
2 comments:
"There is no solution, because there is no problem." --Marcel Duchamp
That Frost excerpt seems to me to be an explication of the Kantian dichotomy of noumena and phenomena. That is, our internal world (that of phenomena) can only suppose whereas only the world-out-there (noumenal reality) can be said to know anything. Of course, "supposing" and "knowing" are poetic terms in this case, but they speak to Kant's foreshadowing of existential phenomenology insofar as they clearly delineate the barrier between the subjective human experience of opinion and belief and the objective all-one non-experience of actual capital-letter Existence and Being.
To put it succinctly, all we can know/believe/experience exists as ideas in our minds; we can never know/believe/experience Reality (if it exists at all) for it is not of the mind - not made of ideas. Thus, any contact with such a Reality is ineffable, incapable of conscious description or analysis.
This is rather like Wittgenstein's musings on "religion." (I enquote that term as it is almost never used with its context in mind; "religion" is an arbitrary term for a fairly new academic field of study - it is effable. What we mean when we normally use "religion" is all the ineffable stuff it seeks in vain to describe. I owe Williams James for that point.) In this sense, it's also tied to Logical Positivism, namely that Frost describes the essential difference between analytic and phenomenological truths and nonsense. All suppositions are statements of the first or second type whereas Secrets - ineffable "religious" "experiences" - are nonsense in the context of language.
Just my two cents from thru the wall to unit 406.
Come by and play Katamari Damacy on the PS2 I borrowed from Z and G - I guarantee you've never seen anything like it before. And the music/soundtrack? PHENOMENAL!
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