ENGL 3045 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Philip Sidney, Noumenon, German Idealism
11 Apr 2016
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Historian too tied to past particular, can"t tell us why things happen. If the historian starts filling in the causes, then they start moving into realm of poetry. Can"t know someone"s character, ethos, intellectual thought if they are dead can only hypothesize about what they are thinking. Studying history only increases terror only calamities of the world repeated over and over. Narrative undone by what we call fortune (undoes historical analysis things happen all the time, coincidence) Fortune is unknowable, unpredictable you can"t know fully the causes behind things in reality. In a fictional example, you can put a cause behind fortune. Poets are in charge of creating logical sequences. The arts are kind of neutral sure, they could be used to teach us vice, but the fault lies in the bad poet. Poetry has all the advantages of history because poet teaches examples from exemplar.
