The word shifting describes something that is taking a new direction either physically or in thought. If you’ve recently decided that the earth may be round, you are shifting from a flat-Earth viewpoint to a round-Earth one. Shifting can be used in several senses, but the constant in all of them is change and movement.
If one wants to delve deeper and from the horizontal axis in Prometheus’ orthogonality (nihilism, absertism, existentialism) shift to vertical, creation, beauty and life, the embryonic development from an abstract and not analytical or anatomical perspective will shed a shining light about the understanding of the language of the forms of living organisms, the inner movements, the coherence, the changing patterns, and the flow of life’s processes.
In the fifth until the eighth week (the un-folding), the body gets its final form. First, the enfolding movement of the fourth week is continued and the embryo gets rounder. Then an unfolding movement can be seen: the spine and the back stretch and the neck and later the waist and the hips appear. Head and limbs become apart from the torso. This process goes vertically from top to bottom: first the neck, then the waist. It is this unfolding process that makes man human. He is centred, and acts from this centre.
Citing the theories of Blechschmidt, he comments on the fact that movement is pre-exercised in the body and that motion is the primary force, while form is secondary. As he stated, “you are a process and you are constantly shaping your body.”
On the side of the head the embryo develops faster than on the side of the tail. The neural tube closes earlier at that side, it is at the head that the digestive tract is formed earlier; the arms develop earlier and faster than the legs. This is called the cranio-caudal (= head-tail) growth movement. This is in contrast with the limbs, where the fingers and toes appear first and the shoulders and pelvis appear last. What is closest to the centre comes last and what is furthest away comes first. This is a reversal of the cranio-caudal development movement. This second growth movement can be called the centre-periphery (or disto-proximal) growth movement. This growth movement is important for humans: this long embryonic development-time, gives more time to develop what arises late. As a consequence, the legs grow longer than the arms and the upper legs longer than the under legs (Verhulst). This growth movement largely determines the upright (vertical) posture of man.
In Prometheus’ orthogonality vertical axis, at the top lies poetry (head) and ethics at the bottom (tail). Now, if you see what lies in the middle, logic will be the one.
Logical principles are important because they serve ethical goals. Logic is peculiarly and essentially a human pursuit; the alleged disconnections between logic and human involvement must be refuted. Logic and ethics are in fact inseparable and each is served by explicit recognition of its involvement with the other.
Ethics is the science that tells a man how he can act correctly with respect to morality, and logic can be termed as the science of thinking correctly. Ethics and logic are closely related to each other. Both deal with doing things correctly.
Logic is a parameter that gives time to develop what arises late. Logic is a growing movement that determines the upright (vertical). Logic is the flow, the rheum, the rheology, the kinematics, the wave, the motion, the abstract, vibrant agent that connects the polarities (poetry & ethics). Poetry has a strong connection with logic (the striker from afar), consequently, with ethics too.
Therefore, if logic and ethics serve the right way, so does poetry!
