Every philosophy is a poetics (II)

The principle of relativity in metapoetics

Abstract

The article argues that the major forms of knowledge-science, philosophy, the sacred, and the arts-are constitute forms of poetics, that is, language games which possess ontological status, whose identity is preserved through conceptual deformation and regeneration. The starting point is the distinction between stable and unstable thinking: science and the sacred produce stability (through verification and revelation, respectively), philosophy seeks stability through intellectual intuition, and poetry cultivates creative instability. This architecture is connected to a formulation of the "principle of relativity in thought" which is responsible for preserving the identity of the rational approach at the cost of conceptual deformation and transformation, but also for diversification of poetics, in any creative and instituting act, language and reality are mutually born. To apply the metapoetic principle, a classical lineage of the Logos is reconstructed (Parmenides, Gorgias, Heraclitus, Platonism, and Stoicism), then it is shown how in modernity, the same poetics emerges as polarized around the problem of nature and the preservation of the ego, of the individual.

The principle of relativity is further applied in the cases of Hume (the dissolution of the ego in perceptions), Kant (apperceptive unity and temporal schematism), Nietzsche (the grammatical fiction of the subject), Husserl (noesis/noema, protention/retention), Bachelard (the material imaginary and the poetic function of language).

German idealism with Fichte and Schelling, as well as the Leibniz-Whitehead relationship (which will be explored in depth in a future series) give the principle of relativity a new dynamism, related to ontology, preservation, and the primary role of the ego in the birth of order from instability. 

Mental space appears as a place of poetic translation between the sensible and the intelligible, the principle of relativity becomes a unifying scheme for the relationship between form and deformation, stable and unstable, concept, object, subject, and experience. In the metapoetics presented, the principle constitutes a signifier of active factors which dominate all levels, from the physical and material to the biological, mental, and metaphysical. The principle of relativity in cognition shows only that it mirrors an ontological counterpart. This counterpart may appear as a unified physical field or as an active metaphysical vision.

It can be observed that the metapoetic principle metamorphoses with each poetics in order to express the preservation of an entity, phenomenon, or process at a logical and formal ontological level.