I feel inclined to discuss Robert Maniquis’ “The Puzzling Mimosa: Sensitivity and Plant Symbols in Romanticism,” because I believe that he accurately describes many of the central ideas discussed in class over the past few weeks. He opens by tracing the career of the mimosa as an ideological symbol of life, or life force. The discovery of sensation below the stratosphere of man and the canopy of animals begged for Romantics to comment on, symbolize and analogize the mimosa into something that represents life, sensation and mankind. The discovery of this sensation also seems to reopen and redefine various perceptions of nature touched on by William’s article. Some see it in an entirely mechanistic sense, where plants (or nature) have no sensation and thus a clearly defined separation from man. Whereas others such as
"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose." ~Dr. Seuss
I think its fitting that we similarly had an issue with figuring out what Shelley was advising we do to rectify the situation. It seems as though both Shelley and these authors are aware of the ideal that Shelley includes in his poem, but may not be as aware of how to achieve that goal.
ReplyDeleteIn the late eighteenth century, the question you pose often came back to the problem of analogy. Under the auspices of Baconian philosophy, seventeenth-century science pursued a course of observation, collecting, arrangement, and comparison, amassing a huge databank of "facts" about the natural world. By the end of the 18th century, there was a definitive move toward synthesis, an attempt to figure out the larger principles of life that would tie the facts together. The question became how to achieve this synthesis, and analogy was one of the answers. However, as Dobson's comments on Darwin suggest, there was a great deal of skepticism about how far analogy could be carried: when did analogies stop being philosophical and become mere figures of speech--connections in the mind rather than connections existing in nature? As Dugald Stewart argued, the analogies "which fancy delights to trace between the material and the intellectual worlds" are "apt to warp the judgment in speculating concerning the phenomena of the human mind" (Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. 2, Edinburgh, 1814, p. 385-6). Critiques of this ilk suggest why defining "sound philosophy" is quite difficult in the period: the act of observing and attempting to understand nature will always be conditioned by the perceiving mind and its propensity to compare, link, to forge imaginative connections. We might, then, ask the question another way by looking to another genre: in place of sound philosophy, we're reading poetry that puts the rhetorical modes of philosophical thought on display, allowing us to understand them as such. What this means for the feet I leave you to decide.
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