What Is Lyric Philosophy?: An Introduction

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 (1992, 2011), Wisdom & Metaphor (2003), and “Bringhurst’s Presocratics: Lyric and Ecology” (1995). 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.