Lyric Philosophy

M. Morgan Holmes teaches English at McGill University.

It would be impossible to claim that the world is overcrowded with books
like Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy. An independent scholar, Zwicky
confronts Western demands for linearity and reason in philosophical
inquiry with a postmodern alternative vision that places intuition at
the centre of the pursuit of wisdom. Zwicky’s book asks readers to
relinquish their faith in the absolute coherence of time and space as
the concepts are represented by science and oppressed by conventional
language. Instead, a Wittgensteinian-inspired mystical clarity replaces
the “fascism” of rational order.

At the heart of Zwicky’s new foundation of knowledge is “lyric”
insight. Lyric knowledge must be “polydimensional” to be true, and
must “resonate” like “a spray of possible axes of connectedness,
whose relations to one another are neither necessarily symmetric nor
orthogonal.” Like Robert Burton’s 17th-century Anatomy of
Melancholy, Zwicky’s book enters the infinite labyrinth of thought in
search of an endlessly unrealized goal of completion that is itself
productive of a deep awareness of the fruitful complexities and
paradoxes of existence.

Polydimensionality accurately describes the form and the content of
Lyric Philosophy. On every even page Zwicky’s aphorisms, meditations,
and analyses initiate dialogues and arguments with the philosophers and
poets whose words can be found on the book’s odd pages (along with
dictionary entries, musical scores, and paintings). The juxtapositioning
results in a proliferation of ideas and voices that formally embody
Zwicky’s revisionary goal for philosophical inquiry. The reader of
Lyric Philosophy is made complicit in this multiplicity through
recombining the traces of thought scattered over hundreds of pages and
thus participating in the remaking of meaning through personal
engagement and lyric insight. Though it is improbable that this book
will end up in philosophy courses in the near future, those who do
encounter Zwicky’s work will likely come away intellectually refreshed
and questioning the merit of such contained sites of institutionalized
thought that would seek to proscribe the lyrical limits of knowledge.