Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses. Metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars.
Interpretation
This quote contrasts the abstract nature of metaphysics with the sensory immersion of poetry.
Giambattista Vico highlights the dichotomy between metaphysics and poetry. While metaphysics seeks to understand universal truths by abstracting from sensory experiences, poetry requires a deep, sensory engagement with the world, emphasizing the importance of particular details and lived experiences. This contrast suggests that both approaches are essential to grasping human understanding—one grounded in abstract reasoning and the other in tangible experience.
In practice
In a lecture on the philosophy of art, you might use this quote to illustrate the relationship between abstract thought and sensory experience.
It is true that men themselves made this world of nations... but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves.
The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.
The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.
People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner distress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind.
From silly devotions and from sour-faced saints, good Lord, deliver us.
I was indeed a snob, if you agree with this definition: 'A person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people.' I do believe that. Not superior to all other people, but to some, most probably including those who think Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen is a great film. That is not simply ego on my part. It is a faith that after writing and teaching about films for more than 40 years, my tastes are more evolved than those of a fanboy.
Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
You go on being reincarnated until you reach the actual Truth. Heaven and Hell are just a state of mind. We are all here to become Christ-like. The actual world is an illusion.
I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.
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