DPI: Philosophy vs. Poetry

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Greetings folks. I make no apologies for my friends. I post with some knowledge that I am the Snakes-On-A-Plane of returning legends, and I can’t live up to any hype. The hype itself will have to suffice, and I’m here with a humble philosophical question and little more.

As many of you know, dpi refers to dots per inch and is a way to describe the resolution of an image. Dpi is a wonderful term to describe things made up of constituent parts, such as, well, everything.

Philosophy is commonly made up of seemingly clean little acts of reason that form a seemingly cohesive whole. That may be a simplistic definition, but let’s agree that if you walk into any major college and do philosophy, you will be expected to say a=b and therefore b=a, etc. It is not a time to use “Yellow Submarine” logic, such as a=b therefore b is not a or c.

But if you follow a given system of reason precisely, you get all the clean little facts lined up and then you’re done. It’s all there, with finite potential, waiting to be seen. In that sense philosophy is a still image, and it can be perceived when all its dots are seen at once in the right order. Truth in philosophy has a high dpi - the finite potential of philosophy is made up of many, many components. But like a still image, it is, in a sense, dead. Perhaps this is what Wittgenstein meant by dead philosophy. All that can be known via philosophy is out there, inert.

Surely philosophy isn’t alone in this. Poetry must also have a dpi. But my contention is that the dpi is much, much higher - which is why my mind perceives the truth potentiality in poetry to be living rather than inert or finite. What are poetry’s dots made of? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. (I don’t mean faggy poetry such as poems and shit. You know what I mean.)

It is interesting that philosophy, in its own defense, cries out that poetry, too, is merely a still image - there are only so many combinations of emotions that can be conveyed, and only so many ways of doing it.

In graphics, a higher dpi makes things seem more real. Sometimes the dpi is too high to send in an email. My favorite is when I send something with too high dpi – so high that no one, but no one, can receive it.

My rejection of philosophy in favor of poetry is an act of love, not for poetry, but for people. Nobody wants a custom letter from Rorty or Aristotle, but imagine if Bukowski or Whitman knew you well enough to write something to you, about you, in a post. That’s something to write home about.

Any thoughts about “dpi” the philosophy and poetry, are requested. Counter arguments asked for.

2

All I can say is I prefer a low enough dpi or resolution on both philosophy and poetry - even the kind you don’t like - so I can fill in the gaps myself. Anything ‘that tells me’ is crap because nothing can truly be told in either subject. This keeps both the reader and writer honest at least up to a certain point. This is very different from rearranging the ‘facts’ the way they do in ‘news’ programs. There it’s not a matter of dpi but misrepresentation and distortion.

Anyways, this is my dpi on the matter according to the way I understand yours but of course much more can be expressed poetically and philosophically. Besides everyone had a different resolution on life and its miscellaneous landfill areas.

3

Poetry is the best philosophy, I reckon.

4

The confusion arises when attempting to match DPI to a display device, such as a printer or your computer monitor. Choose your metaphor. Most printers are 300 to 2880 DPI, while most monitors are 72 to 100 DPI. some scanners don’t perform well below 150 DPI. You will get a picture that is full of “the jaggies”. When you scan below the hardware resolution of a scanner, each sensor in the scanhead takes a narrow sample of the photo, leaving out the pieces between the sensors that are being used. If you scan at 96 DPI on a 1200 DPI scanner, the scanner is only using every 12th sensor on the array. This is like trying to look through a picket fence. To avoid this effect, first scan at 150 DPI or higher, then reduce the photo to 96 DPI through software. The software that came with your scanner should be able to do this sort of scaling. If not, blame your mom for the lead paint or your dad for the blows to the head. Speaking of blows, if you want to blow up an image, yet keep a good amount of detail, then you should scan at a higher DPI. Say you want to print a 8x11-inch photo from a 5x7-inch print, and you want the detail of 300 DPI. Get out the calculator, unless you’re born with one in your head, like some people around here who shall remain nameless.

5

Gamer

One way to think about the structure of poetry is that it is ‘high bandwidth’ relative to other types of writing, or ‘synchronic’ rather than ‘diachronic’. It is a matter of how the mind works, of the relation between ordinary processes of thought, and ‘extraordinary’ ones. Some mediums present material more or less chronologically, whereas others do not. The mind has a certain capacity, and certain limitations. Different mediums relate to this ‘given’ in different ways. There are different ‘speeds’ of thought.

Of course I can contrive a language so idiosyncratic that only I may understand it. The subjective sense of having ‘imbued’ the marks on the paper with ‘meaning’ is something which doesn’t really have much significance for me. It appears, superficially at least, to be rather like the idea of telepathy.

On the other hand, many people, I feel, conceive poetry as being ‘underdetermined’, in the sense that a discourse with a fine ‘filter’ will only allow the fish to get in from a very specific angle, whereas poetry, with its wide filter, allows many different approaches. And so, to follow this reasoning to its conclusion, if we can enter the ‘net’ from many different angles, we can exit it from many different angles as well.

The best we could then say about poetry was that the reader could, potentially, catch a number of different ‘meanings’ simultaneously, and unlike other discourses where all but one of these interpretations would be false, each interpretation would instead be another perspective on the same object. Perhaps we could even combine this thought with my original one, concerning bandwidth. Poetry would then be seen to present an object to the mind in a peculiar and perhaps unique manner.

In the end though, I have personally never experienced a ‘broadening of sight’ from reading poetry which would be comparable to what I often get from reading philosophy.

And those are my two cents.

Regards,

James

6

…and a fine two cents at that, #2.

7

I’ve been waiting for Faust to comment on this thread, and he hasn’t.

So I’m gonna write this and hope he does once more.

He has an interesting take on this subject, Gamer. If he doesn’t reiterate it soon I’ll also give my two cents, as they coincide with his to an extent.

8

James, detrop, gobbo, monad, phaedrus, nice to see all of you. To those of you reading but not commenting, hi to you to.

James ince you had the most to say, I’ll responod to that, although I do agree with Phaedrus as well.

The most I was able to gather from your post was that poetry has merits but that in the end it can have too many meanings and so it’s less effective. High bandwith to me meant that it was a more raw conveyance of what’s in the brain, versus philosophy, which is organized, and trimmed down to something clear and cogent.

I would like to state my thought a different way and see if it stimulates more…if you hold philosophy, as a mirror on reality, the image is of a lower dpi, if you hold poetry as a mirror on reality, the image is a higher dpi, not sure why. Dpi does not mean accuracy, though. It means something else. Poetry may not be a more accurate view of the world, but it is more complex and wet.

9

I’m thinking apples and oranges, Gamer. Philosophy makes one think. Poetry makes one feel. James, perhaps more of a thinker than a poet, has his sight “broadened” by philosophy. Somebody contemplating the world in more emotional ways might instead see that approach as limiting. The DPI level, in other words, might be dependent on the particular mind that is doing the contemplating.

10

To cut a long story short, it must be said that traditional philosophy denies poetry the right to advance on the path of knowledge, to provide a firm scientific viability. Philosophy is synthetic, poetry is analytic. This is, of course, the way it should be. Everyone knows, after Plato, that our world is a mist of appearances, which fuse promiscuously with their prototypes, the world of eternal forms. Man has a dual nature, one caduceus, the body, and the other immortal, the soul, that once found itself in proximity of these forms. The phenomenal world is a replica of the world of prototypes, and art is a second-order replica. Hence the poet is a delirious madman, or an impostor. For Schopenhauer, the World is the appearance of a blind Will, which unfolds itself by the schema of the same ideas, seen as eternal forms. Art, poetry, is seen as the uprootal from the plane where the blind will affirms itself, into the realm of Ideas. As an individual, man knows only particulars – as a poet, he is immersed into the universal. According to Hegel, to speak in lighter terms, the Universe is the unfolding of God, The Absolute. God reveals Himself to us historically, so metaphysics becomes an ontology. Logic is not only a whim of our intellectual life, but the primal Law of the Universe. How does our thought work ? Logically , dialectically, through thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Out of this idealism two things are derived for art: that it doesn’t follow an object distinct from that of philosophy, its object being the same ideas, but more obscurely, and that art is nothing more but historical phase of the human spirit’s tension towards the absolute.

As charming as all this may seem, it’s easy to see that The Absolute, The Prototype, Eternal Beauty, etc. do not clarify a great deal. The majority of these idealists deny the valour of art for the sake of its own being. What follows is an unjust rebuttal, which is conciliated in early 20th century modernism, through the likes of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Joyce, Yeats, etc. Truth is, poetry not only withstands the corrosiveness of critical estimation, but outlives many of its counterparts, and enjoys at least the same dignity as so many efforts of secular thought. Poetry demands as rigorous and complex intellectual effort as philosophy does, while dealing with the same structures and words. Ever since Plato, the world is polarised, but the Antics before him knew better than to divide the world into the receptive subject and the perceived object. Their conception was in terms of up and down, the sky and the earth, considering that man is the purpose and measure of the universe, while reuniting in him the same mechanisms and laws that govern the grand body of the universe. No wonder that Eliot appreciated Homer more than Plato, for in Homer’s poetry you find appreciation of a principle that’s been true for ages: that lyrism is a substance, that its generation requires a discipline of the spirit, that it reflects an interior order of the artist, which is nothing but a mirror of the macrocosm.

11

Gamer

This is not what I meant. Rather, it is a different ‘kind’ of effectiveness.

Let’s approach the matter from a different angle. It is all about methods of exposition. In a thesis style exposition, ideas are laid out one after the other, chronologically and logically speaking. Or at least let us stipulate that this is how it is with this style of writing. I term this method ‘diachronic’ - meaning, roughly, ‘one after the other’. In poetry what I suppose you get is ‘synchronic’, meaning ‘all at once’, or ‘simultaneous’. That was my vague take on the matter, in any case. It should be remembered that in both cases what we are typically doing is piecing together a whole from parts given seperately. There are, for instance, many components in an idea, and I need to be fed each one in isolation, and then shown how they go together. Once I have done this, I can conceive of the parts in unity, all at once, as it were. In poetry, I had suggested, we are given more parts at once than in other forms of writing. And so, in this sense, it can be called ‘high bandwidth’.

What I wanted to do in addition to this, and which I thought was a more novel suggestion (at least novel for me), was to say that the defining characteristic of poetic writing is not that it is semantically underdetermined - and that this is not the explanation for what makes poetry ‘different’ from other forms of meaning. A poem is not, in other words, a bit of quasi-nonsense that spawns endless interpretations because it doesn’t play by ‘the rules’ of normal language. There can be a single object, a single idea, in a poem as in a theoretical treatise. What is different then is the manner in which this object is revealed in the medium of language. It is a temporal difference, a chronological difference, as I said above.

It is though - and this was my other point - something which is dependent on the nature of the mind, as such. Some people get nothing from poetry because they are not good at the kind of non-linear processing that it requires. (‘Linear’ and ‘non-linear’ can also be substituted for ‘diachronic’ and ‘synchronic’.) Furthermore, if I had the kind of mind that could think diachronically really fast, then my phenomenal experience would approximate and perhaps even replicate that of someone who processes a poem synchronically. And vice versa.

It is not, though, a matter of poetry being more a “raw conveyance of what’s in the brain”, as such. Unless you think ‘poetically’, which I don’t. Instead I think in terms of spatialities and images, but also in terms of habitual connections. So for me, a raw conveyance of the brain would be a series of 3-D images, shapes, and chronological orderings which come together to form a ‘single’ movement. The fact that poetry has the function it does is only ‘statistically’ true, and it is not something that everyone is capable of. Probably you know this already. In any case, the brain can function in many different ways, including ones which haven’t been thought of yet.

This did not stimulate more, unfortunately. I do not think that poetry offers something more ‘complex’, unless by ‘complex’ you mean ‘more communicatively immediate for brains calibrated to function in a certain way’. Or something like that.

Regards

James

12

I appreciate your explanations James. I now have a more communicatively immediate picture of what you’re thinking. When you say “sadly it did not stimulate further,” I feel strangely victorious. I should feel a tinge of letting you down, you who has shown me more respect than I deserve, But I couldn’t give a whit, which is my tiny victory.

The flaw in all of this is my use of the word poetry in my OP. What I meant was art…those utterances that carry the pointless with the poignant, the sychronic aromas of our innards, the frolic architecture of psychological DNA, the unbleached flour.

Philosophy, the secret daddy-pleasing stepchild of emotion, is refined, sanitized. But philosophy, too, is the wrong word, unless by philosophy we mean the art of using the wrong words. The art of telling half the story. The wrong half.

As far as I can see, the only difference between synchronic and diachronic is dots per inch. Human philosophy, the purging of logical consequence, is the act of omission, whereas human art, purging the emotional response, is the act of inclusion.

Philosophy is a sober moment, the bookkeeper. Art is the dying breath, the growl of a baby, the midnight post by a man too far gone to edit the primordial semen spewing from his fingertips. The ugly truth told by an erratic breeze playing on the leaves. The elves pay no mind, but the wood nymphs do – so does Papa Smurf.

But.

When you blow up my low DPI image, my philosophy, you begin to see flaws, it gets blurry, unusable. When you blow up the carefully controlled anarchy of my typical gonzo post, it holds up stubbornly well. if perhaps transparently so to you few, you proud, you marines. Imperfect as it may be, it has higher DPI, and becomes a clearer picture. Of something. Of me?

Maybe this is not a blanket statement of art and philosophy, but only in regard to my own art vs. my own philosophy. So in sum, you, too, have earned a tiny victory.

13

Gamer, it has been a long time, you post is quite a communication, articulate insightful, a good ole’ thrashing war between Philosophy and Poetry: Poetry wins that battle every day.

It’s the only good fight there is…

14

As I am but a humble beginner on this forum, much of the vocabulary used in this discussion, or so it seems to me, has escaped me. Nevertheless, I feel it my duty to stand up in defense of philosophy.

First of all, the word “poetry”, which is stated as not meaning “faggy poetry such as poems and shit”. Later on, Gamer replaced this with the word “art”, elaborating that “those utterances that carry the pointless with the poignant, the sychronic aromas of our innards, the frolic architecture of psychological DNA, the unbleached flour”. What does this very poetic expression mean? To me, it sounds that “art” as defined by Gamer is human observing, human experience, recreated by an artist outside of a mind, in such a medium as words on a paper. Then there is the addition that “human art, purging the emotional response, is the act of inclusion”. As such, it seems that art is, in this context, a mixture of human experience, emotion and observation, taken out of its original place inside the human mind for all to see.

The word “philosophy” means, as you most probably know, the love of wisdom. It means, at heart, asking questions. Questions such as “what?” and “why?”. My personal view is that there are two fundamental questions that need to be asked from a person who seeks knowledge: “Who are you?” and “What is the world?”

Philosophy’s role has been, in recent years, greatly changed by the ascension of science. Science seeks the objective study of the world, yet it can only ever answer the questions “why?” and “how?”: why is this rock gray, why does it fall when I let it go, how did it end up looking like this?

There are countless works of art which focus on the subject of love. An artist will most often be content with describing what love is, or even more often some individual instance of love. How would an artist go about, when trying to answer the question “what is love?”. What is it, anyway? How can art, based on human observation and emotion, even try to tackle this question? It cannot, for this is not what art does; it describes, it shows, it changes the world, it argues, but it does not give answers. And this is because love, in itself, is not something which can be observed or described.

Here is where philosophy is greater. A philosopher, a true lover of knowledge, will seek an answer to the question “what is love?”, even though he may never find it. But if he attempts an answer, those that come after him will be able to see what is wrong with the answer he provided, and build upon that, to find even greater understanding of, in this case, love.

Of course, philosophy and art have many things in common. One very important is history. Both have phases, during which certain views are held as being better than others. Art has the romantic age, the classical age, the modern age, just as philosophy has had rationalism, empirism, idealism and what not. In my opinion, the currently leading direction of logical analysis and analytical philosophy is equivalent to the classical period in art, during which form, harmony and good taste left the works, to a very large extent, without content, and therefore useless.

15

Yeah, but you see, my fine feathered friend, with all the fancy verbiage and it’s still the philosopher who’s being laughed at when the day is over. Cause, like you said, they through a burlap over reality and say: “this is my burlap; neither rain, nor snow can mar it.” But then, just when they thought their shroud is perfectly water-proof and it’s safe to enter the one-way descending elevator, ravens swoop down and tear the fine-woven tapestry, rogues creep up and defile it, stupid birds shit on it, and sagaciously auditorial types remove it with irreverence. Better to never have been born at all.

Now, to corroborate this with my former post, and maybe to actually get a point across, I think it’s a ultimately a case of the Necker cube: one vision ensconces the other, while both are legitimate. One uses words to articulate synthetical boxcars onto a reason-locomotive , while the other uses them as hot-air ballons in search of good wind. You can carry more by train, but the view is better from the air.

More specifically, there is a certain reflexiveness both to philosophy and art in general, which serves as fuel for both of them. DPI is a useful metaphor, but only in so far as it refers to one’s own density of thought, which makes it kind of relative. Art draws heavily from philo, and, probably, viceversa; so placing them in opposition would be rash. Denying them the right to method is wrong, but so is it to synchronise them. Bergson is not diachronic, while Milton could be said to be. Being that philosophy and art are both spiritual occupations of man, I wouldn’t divorce them so much.

Anyway, in cocnclusion, my pseudoprecept is kinda like this: the observing explanation offered by philosophy and sincerity of poetry don’t imply a disparate authenticity, but rather the finding, in elements, of a structure that the normal spectator had not observed.