Chapter 4 - “Elate Philosopher”

Summary

Why are Dickinson’s poems abstract? For Dickinson, perceptual processing is abstraction, and generalizing and analogizing are both perceptual processes and powerful analytical tools. Perception involves classifying, but animals do it without language, and items like emotion seem to resist identification. What is the relationship between language and experience? It is abstract. Dickinson’s poems turn to empiricist rhetoric and evolutionary neuroscience like Bain’s to think about intelligence in animals, the physiology and semiology of emotion, the figural nature of sensory perception, and the question of natural kinds. Dickinson’s language traces the emotional figuration in the body’s perceptual processes, and she delights in unsettling conceptual metaphors at the heart of intuitive concepts like time and space. Dickinson’s propositions and aphorisms indicate a poetics not of lyric as overheard privacy, but of empiricist axiom. She works out a pragmatist approach to knowledge, inviting readers to continually renovate their perceptions and thus the culture.