Let us be humble to our Humanities tradition

European philosophy has lost the palpable connection with both the arts and regular life, thus are effectually dead. The fashionable French theory of the 70s and 80s (and still, sadly, today) not only has no feel for the arts, but neither has a feel for nature, the human body, sexuality, nuanced archetype, or women. I continually cite Dewey, McLuhan, and Paglia (along with Brown) as writers who love the arts, and are immersed in the Humanities, and speak in everyday language, though not simplistically or without reward of close reading. Scholarship is the new philosophy; it adopts a healthy and broad scientific attitude to be fallible, limited, and in touch with evidence and everyday reality.

Philosophy without both must rely solely on poetic word play and becomes "philosophy fiction", which isn't philosophy at all but rather is a sub-genre of literature that appeals to comic-book and sci-fi lovers. Such work cannot be argued against much as fiction cannot be argued against. It is simply to be believed, or not. You buy it, or you don't. Thus it is more than a small admission that Wilber, according to himself, is a "storyteller". In fact, it is rather telling of how he regards his own work. People forget that Wilber, in his own books, says he cites evidence "as if it were true", and then bases complicated theory and pronouncements about, well, everything on those...

If John Dewey is right, and in each of the great works of art are rooted in everyday experience that emerge through several factors as a unity of profound experience, then let our own experiences as working artists swim in the integral tradition, and let our creative works respond to the waves that call forth the timeless dilemmas of human condition, no matter our technological acuity. Let us be humble to our Humanities tradition, so that our works can boldly unify old and new, as living intuition that, when properly rooted, never actually dies. And let it not be theory, but the creative works of the Humanities and especially the arts, that are truly metaphysical. —Matthew Dallman is the composer and producer of the full-length album, I Am Sound. POLYSEMY editor-in-chief Posted September 19, 2006