Can Songs Replace Philosophy?

* All the early philosophers used esoteric writing.

* This can be shown by viewing works like The Republic not as factual explanation of knowledge, but as puzzles that contain intentional error, which the student must decipher to find true meanings.

* During the Renaissance, with writers like Machiavelli, a shift began to start arguing for the modern view.

* Upon adopting belief in this view in the Enlightenment, scholars could no longer accept esotericism, and parsed older texts at face value, leading to nonsensical interpretations.

In this light, encoding in song and story, and encoding with esotericism, both reflect a multilayered approach to knowledge transfer: the goal is not to surface large quantities of facts and figures, but to imprint a very strong impression of a few ideas, one that can survive even false readings by the unbelieving.

There is also a technical angle to the modern development, in that reliance on printed word became normalized in the later Renaissance, and therefore, "weakly encoded" ideas could proliferate at scale. Or in other words, the West became sophomoric, capable of knowing a lot of things without the wisdom to apply them usefully.

Didn't the famously miserable old sod carve out an exception in his bleak post-Kantian world view for music as some direct channel to truth?

lest every man be blind

emily dickinson

all the really good stuff can’t be effed, and i encourage you to see the fierce joy in this.