Beyond Human Poetry to Post-Human Poetry
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is poetry really so valuable that, as Percy Bysshe Shelley once claimed, “[p]oetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar”? This positive view on poetry can be contrasted with the cautious one by Charles Baudelaire, who gave the caveat that “[p]oetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place”? (BQ 2018)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), human poetry (in relation to emotion and non-emotion—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no emotion without non-emotion (and vice versa), to be explained by the “empiricalness-nonempiricalness principle,” the “cognitiveness–noncognitiveness principle,” the “reasonableness-intuitiveness principle,” the “persuasiveness-unpersuasiveness principle,” the “valuation-devaluation principle,” the “sensitiveness-nonsensitiveness principle,” the “convention-novelty principle,” the “absoluteness-relativeness principle,” the “regression-progression principle,” and other ones in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).

Of course, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that human poetry, as a field of study, is worthless, or that those diverse fields (related to human poetry)—such as biology, psychology, mathematics, anthropology, sociology, ethics, aesthetics, political science, religion, economics, communications theory, history, linguistics, education, and so on—should be ignored. (WK 2017) Surely, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of human poetry (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between emotion and non-emotion (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the emotive-nonemotive theory of poetry) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about human poetry (in relation to the dialectic relationship between emotion and non-emotion—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.