Faculty of Contemplation

Faculty:

Middle English faculte, from Old French, from Latin facults, power, ability, from facilis, easy.
Any of the powers or capacities possessed by the human mind.

A quote for you kids…….

“Understanding is discursive; Reason is fixed. The Understanding in all its judgments refers to some other faculty as its ultimate authority; The Reason in all its decisions appeals to itself as the ground and substance of their truth. Understanding is the faculty of reflection; Reason [the faculty] of contemplation.”

(sourece:-http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/resources/dictionary.html)

I think that we need some kind of course that teaches us the roots and meanings of the words that we use in everyday language. This should be taught in grade school, early in our development. As humans, we literally build our language on a foundation of metaphor. Language, I would say, is probably our first attempt to identify ourselves with the world. The words that we choose to identify objects that we perceive in our minds, is also a product of our minds. Words are our way of identifying objects out in the world to create a picture in our heads so that we can communicate with ourselves and with others. In fact, I can take a group of words about a tree that I saw today in the park, describe the fall colours and the crisp air of that day and present those words to someone else a thousand miles away and they will be able to ‘see’ what I’m talking about in their own minds. My words become a metaphor for the metaphor of light revealed to my mind through my eyes.

That is pretty straight forward, but things get more complicated when we start to talk about abstract ideas and thoughts. The words that we use to describe the abstract represent things that are several degrees removed from the real world. Most times, when people are trying to communicate with others, their communication is based on words that are metaphor. But our society doesn’t really take the time to teach children where words come from. These children eventually grow up to become people like you and I. We continually use words that are removed from their sources by several degrees. This seems to me to present a poverty of introspection or contemplation when we decide on which words we are going to use to speak with.

In Sidney’s time the few that were educated knew Latin as their base of communication. Using this as a foundation an idea could be developed from the tiniest seed and grow in complexity through exacting metaphor for each flowering thought. In reading the ‘Defense of Poesie’ Sidney talks about how he went to learn horsemanship from a gentleman named Pugliano. Sidney came away from the experience not only learning about horsemanship but also learning a bit about Pugliano who ‘sought to enrich our minds with the contemplations therein which he thought most preciuos’. He describes Pugliano as exercising ‘his speech in praise of his faculty’. I had to do some investigation into the meaning of the word faculty, which you see above, because the word occurs several times through out the work. Then when I went back and reread those lines I thought:

‘what a god damn perfect way of talking about another persons abitlity to express their stuff’

Fitzroy Ford “A Blogger”