There is no sense perception that does not immediately transfer itself into our understanding and imagination, gaining interpretation through a moral and aesthetical lens. There is nothing we feel, see, or experience that does not call our entire human history and heritage, cultural, moral, and aesthetical. That a flower is more than a flower — and here we disagree with Science that declares the functionality of things their ultimate truth — is so because since times immemorial the human spirit and imagination interpreted it as so, created it as so. A flower is always more than a flower. And the same is true about every other object of the world, about life itself as witnessed and lived in the human spirit, as created by humanity and the human genius.
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Rooted in Love 
I like this post, everything is always more than what it seems…
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What was it that Blake said, “infinity in a grain of sand”?
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This makes my soul sing. Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you, my friend.
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It has taken me a great deal to arrive at this little passage. It was an either/or approach for me: a foundational reality of love that denies all human constructs of reality; or a human philosophy and carving of reality dancing cynical before the idea of the immanence of love.
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Incredible, isn’t it, to arrive at the “little” insights. Tiny pinholes into brilliance. 🙂
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It certainly is, my friend.
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From a philosopher’s perspective, if I may, the paradox inherent to your proposition that a flower is always more than a flower can be resolved in the following way.
The flower is only ever just a flower. When we want to say that a flower is ‘more’ than just a flower, then we are no longer speaking about the flower at all, but our relationship to it and thereby ourselves. When our statements aim to do more than merely pick out the particular target of our perception or cognition and all that pertains to it and it alone, then those statements seize to be about the target, but more about us.
In short, though what you say is poetic, it can also be misleading. After all, isn’t poetry a little detour from every day life that knows how to use the things in it, the objects and activities that fill our lives, for the purpose of erecting mirrors?
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But, if the distinction between essence and appearance is untrue, it follows that there is no objective reality per se. How do we grasp and understand reality if we go beyond the traditional distinction between form and essence? To my mind, reality is always a mediation, a construct of some sorts, one with which we participate as much as the objects of our cognition. It’s an ever unfolding relationship; and reality is just the tension and middle ground of this relationship.
That reality is more than mere perception only means that it is from the beginning a creative act. If our moral and aesthetic evaluations will weigh in and be at the root of our perceptive and sensory functions, this leads us to a world interpreted and created from the beginning. (The world in the act of being seen is also created.)
How, then, would you, can you speak about the flower as just a flower?
Poetry has brought me into close intimacy with the objects of my every day life, indeed with life itself. Poetry comes through being finely attuned to the objects surrounding us as well as those within us (thoughts, emotions, etc.). I don’t know if I am taking poetry out of context, but, for the life of me, that is how its vein throbs in me.
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You are taking poetry out of context, but maybe, for a poet like you, you have to do that to reconcile your ‘poetry’ with something else, another demand and value of yours that is as rapacious as your creativity and so proficiency in erecting mirrors all over the place. 🙂
That aside, I don’t see how your elaboration contradicts my proposition. All I was remarking upon, effectively, was that when you try to say that the flower is more than just a flower, whatever you add to it is your own and not the flower’s. Your elaboration is commensurate with my conclusion; just different wording and less metaphysical babble on my part.
I can speak of a flower as just a flower, because I am not making a statement about it’s essence or appearance, I am merely picking out an object in the world. For me to succeed in communicating with you and so direct your attention to it. In short: you must grasp that a flower is just a flower if you are to grasp that I ‘mean’ the flower and not the blade of grass and, in turn, if we are to speak about the same things and ‘do’ similar things.
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