The aim of this book is a recovery of interest in the experience of meaning. Jan Zwicky defends the claim that we experience meaning in the apprehension of wholes and their internal structural relations, providing examples of such insight in mathematics and physics, literature, music, and Plato's ancient theory of forms. Taken together, these essays constitute a powerful indictment of the aggressive reductionism and the reliance on calculative modes of thought that dominate our present conception of understanding. The Experience of (...) Meaning proposes a more just epistemology, arguing for a new grammar of thought, a new way of understanding the relationship of human intelligence to the world. Engaging with philosophy, psychology, literature, fine arts, music, and environmental studies in a profound way, The Experience of Meaning will interest any reader who ponders the question of meaning and its relation to true human expression. (shrink)

These sixty-one numbered paragraphs offer an overview of the idea and practice of lyric philosophy. They draw heavily on the author's texts Lyric Philosophy, Wisdom & Metaphor, and “Bringhurst's Presocratics: Lyric and Ecology”. The present essay outlines key concepts — clarity as resonance, metaphor as gestalt shift, meaning as gesture, the overlap between philosophy and poetry, the nature of lyric truth — and suggests that they are essential to an adequate epistemology. These concepts allow us to address serious gaps in (...) our understanding of how humans think, gaps that have arisen owing to the limitations of linguified intelligence coupled with a disinclination to admit the existence of these limitations. The overview also describes fundamental differences between lyric philosophy and analytic philosophy, while insisting on a robust conception of truth and on the existence of a knowable mind-independent world. The importance of a lyric approach for our understanding of a range of ecological questions is discussed, and lyric philosophy is positioned, politically, as a critique of technocracy. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue, via a revision of Freud's notions of primary and secondary process, that experiences of resonant form lie at the root of many serious ineffability claims. I suggest further that Western European culture's resistance to the perception of resonant form underlies some of its present crises.

In this essay, part of a cluster of pieces on her concept of “lyric philosophy,” the author explores connections between imagination, understood as the capacity to think in images, and what Wittgenstein called “seeing-as.” In seeing-as, we focus on what Wittgenstein identifies as inner structural relations. This is a term that Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of gestalt philosophical psychology, used independently to describe how seeing-as involves seeing into a thing or situation. The present essay suggests that both seeing-as (...) and seeing-into depend on, and develop, sensitivity to ontological resonance, the attunement of things with one another, the deep analogies that constitute the underlying structure of the world. Imagination is thus fundamental to the good, or ethical, life. For its disciplined exercise relieves us of what Simone Weil calls the “Ring of Gyges”: the refusal to perceive significant analogies between ourselves and other beings, which is the root of injustice. (shrink)

Alkibiades, a central character in Plato's Symposium, claims that philosophy touches him to the quick. When Socrates speaks, he's often moved to tears and realizes he must change his life. In Alkibiades' Love, Jan Zwicky demonstrates that this image of philosophy is not anachronistic, but remains the living heart of the discipline. Philosophy can indeed matter to our lives, but for it to do so, we must reconceive the methods that, since the Enlightenment, have dominated its self-image in the West. (...) In these meticulously researched essays, Zwicky argues that analytic and poststructuralist philosophy are not simply fashions in academic discourse, but are manifestations of the technocracy which they sustain and promote. The alternative she develops, by showing it in action, is lyric philosophy - an integrated mode of understanding whose foundations lie in the way we comprehend music and metaphor. Written in lucid and powerful prose, Alkibiades' Love will interest a broad readership, from students of ancient Greek philosophy to ecologists seeking a coherent foundation for their work. Zwicky offers deep and original readings of Freud, Plato, and Simone Weil, and resuscitates Max Wertheimer's work, linking it to our comprehension of mathematics, metaphor, and ecological structures. Zwicky has been hailed as one of the most important and original thinkers of our time. Alkibiades' Love illuminates and extends her groundbreaking work while providing an accessible introduction for those coming to her thought for the first time. (shrink)

In contemporary North American contexts, to say that a claim is oracular is seriously to undermine its philosophical credibility. My thesis is that this negative judgement of oracularity is unwarranted and that it is rooted in an excessively narrow notion of what constitutes ‘good’ philosophy. More specifically, I argue that oracular utterance is appropriate to the expression of views that regard the phenomena towards which they are directed as radically, non‐systematically integrated wholes. Importantly, such views are falsifiable—or at least as (...) falsifiable as scientific paradigms, which, in one important respect, they resemble. However, I argue further that there is good reason to think that such views cannot, without distortion, be expressed using the systematic‐analytic forms of argumentation that are frequently regarded as essential to the pursuit of philosophy. Yet the questions that they compass, concerning the way in which parts are related to the wholes that they constitute, fall squarely within the purview of traditional metaphysics. Thus, in proscribing oracular utterance we divest ourselves of the opportunity to contemplate world orders of potential philosophical interest that systematic‐analytic argument is incapable of conveying to us. (shrink)

This chapter starts with the Socratic definition — loving knowing that you do not know — and explains what it would be to make loving anything a way of life. It examines what is Alcibiades in love with? What is the moral beauty that overwhelms Alcibiades? To encounter philosophy is first to discover that we are not what we thought we were: that what we think most important has little to do with our true nature. The chapter relates that moral (...) beauty is the paradoxical combination of vulnerability and integrity, a clarity and directness of vision, a limpid honesty that results when the skill is exercised. What makes that beauty possible is the same analytic and discriminatory expertise that we cultivate in attempts to determine how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. That expertise is at the heart of the elenkhos, which we still must practice. (shrink)

In this powerful little book, two leading intellectuals illuminate the truth about where our environmental crisis is taking us. Writing from an island on Canada's northwest coast, Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky weigh in on the death of the planet versus the death of the individual. For Zwicky, awareness and humility are the foundation of the equanimity with which Socrates faced his death: he makes a good model when facing the death of the planet, as well as facing our own (...) mortality. Bringhurst urges readers to tune their minds to the wild. The wild has healed the world before, and it is the only thing that stands any chance of healing the world now--though it is unlikely to save Homo sapiens in the process."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Why awaken the soul to justice if the only result can be to increase awareness of the futility of aspiring to justice in the world? Zwicky documents challenges to the belief that teaching philosophy will result in a fairer polity and suggests that perception of being’s integrity sustains pursuit of philosophy as a way of life.

(1999). Freud's Metapsychology and the Culture of Philosophy. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 29, Supplementary Volume 25: Civilization and Oppression, pp. 211-226.

Western civilization is over. So begins Jan Zwicky’s trenchant exploration of the root of global cultural and ecological collapse: a way of thinking that is also linked to some of the West’s most noted achievements. The Renaissance merged imperial enterprise with Islamic algebra and recently recovered Greek mathematics to precipitate mechanized industry and resource extraction; these in turn made possible the growth of capitalism, the military-industrial complex, and Big Technology. Despite its self-image as objective, Zwicky argues, the West’s style of (...) thought is not politically neutral, but intensely anthropocentric. It has led those who adopt it to regard the more-than-human world as nothing more than timber licences and drilling sites, where value is not recognized unless it is monetized. Oblivious to context and blind to big-picture thinking, it analyzes, mechanizes, digitizes, and systematizes, while rejecting empathy and compassion as distorting influences. Lyric comprehension, in Zwicky’s view, offers an alternative to this way of thinking, and she provides a wide range of examples. Once upon a Time in the West documents how a narrow epistemological style has left Western thought blind to critical features of reality, and how the terrifying consequences of that blinkered vision are now beginning to unfold. (shrink)

Abstract“Show, don't tell” is a maxim basic to literary craft. It enjoins avoidance of abstract, cliché‐ridden summaries and use of rich, vividly rendered details. Anyone who has attended an introductory creative writing course will have encountered it. Practised literary writers know it is true. Why is showing so fundamental to good literature? Why is it more effective than telling? Showing constellates details, placing facets of a larger shape before the reader's mind, a shape that cannot be adequately encompassed by a (...) summary, whose power lies in the simultaneous integration of multiple, superficially discontinuous aspects. This sounds like the eureka effect, the “Aha!” of sudden discovery in mathematics and the sciences. I argue that grasping what is being shown in a literary context is indeed related to insight in theoretical fields. Telling the reader “what happened” makes the mind's eye glaze over in just the way that it glazes over when it is forced to memorize formulae that it does not understand. Showing is like offering an elegant proof; the mind reaches to understand what is going on. When it succeeds, it feels the satisfaction of having grasped meaning. (shrink)

TheTractatusfirst appeared in 1921, the same year that Post's “Introduction to a General Theory of Elementary Propositions” appeared in theAmerican Journal of Mathematics. As the latter is the first piece clearly to present and exploit the distinction between a deductive system and a truth-functional interpretation of such a system, we may conclude that Wittgenstein's views had been arrived at somewhat before a variety of logical concepts had received the clarification and refinement incipient on the now taken-for-granted distinction between proof and (...) model theory. One such concept, of considerable interest to Wittgenstein, was that of inference. The following constitutes an attempt to explicate his notion. In particular, I shall attempt to show that his repudiation of “laws of inference” is closely tied to his rejection of logical constants; and that both can be seen as the product of what might be termed a “metaphysics of completeness”—before, of course, any notion of completeness had achieved a measure of precision or currency. (shrink)

Jan Zwicky - Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.4 670-671 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Jan Zwicky University of Victoria Susan G. Sterrett. Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World. New York: Pi Press, 2006. Pp. xxii + 329. Cloth, $26.95 Wittgenstein Flies a Kite focuses (...) on intellectual developments in philosophy, physics, aeronautics, and engineering in the years just prior to the First World War. Sterrett points out that certain thinkers were involved simultaneously in more than one of these fields, and argues for conceptual cross-pollination among them. In particular, she wishes to make a case for connections between the modeling of.. (shrink)