*Love and Value Judgements*

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Was just thinking; maybe poetry once had the same power and influence on people as science does now.

For example when Lorna Wing connected Aspergers with Autism, ( and afterwards said that if she had known what a Pandora's Box it was going to turn out to be she might have been more careful/hesitant about doing so ), did she in fact do something similar, from a science base, as the person who wrote the Song of Solomon did in writing about relationship with god, ( or god's relationship with Israel, or whatever, depending on which interpretation you accept ), using the metaphor of sexual/physical love?

Perhaps the poem had the status of a scientific "discovery" nowadays; it spread a new idea; a link between sexual and religious experience. It was an original creative act to connect the two, and poetry, subjective reality vividly and powerfully communicated through words, had the same authority then as science now.

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Just read that apparently the traditional/ancient role of poets was "teacher", to whom all of society paid attention.

So it is quite likely that the connection made between sexual and religious experience/feelings in the "Song of Solomon" would have had a great deal of impact on society; triggered a revolution in people's perception of not only feelings but also of their relationship to "god". Like Darwin's theory of Evolution, for example, did.

Use of language was seen as science is now, which is why the sophists created such a stink, ( for a while until Plato et al buried them ), because they exposed it as illusion. I imagine they must have seemed like alternative health practitioners do now, ... labelled dodgy/bad science, because expose the delusions/pretensions of supposedly objective "real science".

So in a way "love", the spectrum, ( which grew and grew under examination by language ), was originally "discovered", ( "observed/perceived", with all the subjectivity that we now know this process means ), with a "science", the science of language, used by a master/teacher.