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ApriorismIs all experience personal? Overnight I received the following note about the definition of apriorism to be found in my philosophical dictionary:
Well there are deep philosophical questions wrapped up in that one little word, aren't there? :) Such as: is there any experience outside the experience of individuals? I have long tended to methodological or epistemological individualism, so in the past I have doubted that there is such a thing as societal experience. But my immersion in the study of history and science makes me doubt my doubts. In a sense, science (in the broadest sense) is accumulated knowledge and a kind of societal experience. Yet in the end, it is an individual mind that must come to grasp any given piece of knowledge (there is no societal mind). And in any case I don't think we use the term "apriorism" to refer to science as accumulated knowledge, but to that individual grasp of something before one has had experience of the realities from which the relevant knowledge has been abstracted (yes, I also tend to epistemological abstractionism). So while perhaps the definition is made clearer by adding the word "personal", I also happen to think it's redundant. Posted on 2007-05-16 at 08:13. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Friendship in Atlas ShruggedYet another essay in circulation... The other day I received my complimentary copy of Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion from Ashgate Press, containing my essay "Friendship in Atlas Shrugged" and a large collection of papers by a wide range of scholars in philosophy, economics, politics, and literature. Order your copy today! ;-) Posted on 2007-05-13 at 14:19. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ An Untroubled LibertyJacob Bronowski on freedom and beauty... Last month I posted about the views of both Alexander Nehamas and José Ortega y Gasset on beauty. Recently I revisited several essays by Jacob Bronowski on the same topic. Here are some quotes that interested me from his essay "The Shape of Things":
And:
Elsewhere, Bronowski discusses the status of art-works as artifacts and the fact that all artifacts have a double aspect: we experience what they are but also how and why they were made. So we can ask two questions about any artifact: what was its creator trying to do, and why did he do it quite that way? The answers to these questions usually fall under the headings "content" and "style", but Bronowski emphasizes that content and style are separable only in analysis, not in reality. By trying to answer these questions about an artifact or more particularly a work of art, you can "relive the heady freedom of making it" and thus experience aesthetics from the producer's point of view. And after all, we wouldn't have art-works if creative individuals didn't produce such works in the first place. Posted on 2007-04-27 at 15:11. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Become What You AreOrtega on ethics... Yes, today seems to be José Ortega y Gasset day at one small voice. Here's another passage I found in Phenomenology and Art, from his essay "Esthetics on the Streetcar", in which Ortega updates and sublimates Nietzsche's dictum "become what you are":
A fine expression of a sophisticated individualism. Posted on 2007-03-24 at 21:09. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ A Certain SeriousnessAn alternate view of beauty... Recently I discussed the views of Alexander Nehamas on beauty. I decided to look around more broadly and picked up a book of essays entitled Phenomenology and Art by José Ortega y Gasset (translated from the Spanish by Philip W. Silver in 1975). I like the following passage from the first section of "An Essay in Esthetics":
To me, Ortega captures more of the essence of aesthetic experience than does a self-confessed aestheticist like Nehamas, because he realizes its sharp edge of dangerous passion, the inner awe that is evoked within one's heart when encountering a work or act or person of great beauty. (And no I don't refer to mere surface beauty, to things or acts or people that merely appear beautiful in the conventional or popular sense of the term.) Posted on 2007-03-24 at 20:49. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Only a Promise?Plato, Nehamas, and the philosophy of beauty... In my copious spare time recently I've been reading some works by Alexander Nehamas, professor of philosophy at Princeton, expert on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, and author of several books on aesthetics and the good life. His most recent book is Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. A good summary of his thesis can be found in an essay he wrote in 2000 for The Threepenny Review. To my mind, the key paragraph is this:
Even though I like some of the specific things Nehamas says on the topic of beauty, I disagree with his central claim: that beauty is only a promise of happiness. First, I distrust any claim that X is only Y. Are you sure? Where is your proof? Is there no remainder? Can your thesis account for all the phenomena? Second, it seems that Nehamas removes any basis in reality for saying that a work of art is beautiful, since the judgment of beauty is not based on the features of a work. He phrases it more carefully than that -- "features of a work which we already know" -- but as far as I can see the import is the same: there are no beautiful things or beautiful features thereof, only judgments of beauty. (Elsewhere he says that you can't argue for your judgment of beauty based on a specific feature, instead the judgment is based on a holistic appreciation for the individuality of the work and the way that all its features combine and work together and are integrated for the sake of the whole, which makes more sense; but as far as I can see, that's not what he's arguing for here.) Third, I detect a strong whiff of Plato's old error that pleasure is driven by a lack and that pleasure disappears once a desire has been satisfied. The desires Nehamas talks about are more ethereal, but pleasures nonetheless. Yet he says the pleasure is the result only of anticipation and imagination, and that the pleasure is gone once you have come to know in fullness that which inspired your aesthetic pleasure -- just as, for Plato, the pleasure of eating is caused by the elimination of hunger: there are no positive pleasures, all pleasure is in some way negative (the removal of pain). Fourth, Nehamas concentrates overly much on objects of art and gives short shrift to beautiful persons and experiences and activities. These are connected with the creation of beauty, not just the appreciation of beauty. And in my experience creation -- whether individual creation of art or co-creation of beautiful experiences in a personal relationship -- matters more than mere appreciation of something that has been created by someone else, because what's important is living rather than observing or making judgments. But all I have done here is make judgments about what Nehamas has written. So one of these days I'll have to write something more positive, eh? Posted on 2007-03-19 at 20:53. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ σκεψιςMore on the value of looking carefully... As discussed yesterday, I am of a skeptical frame of mind, in the sense that I think it is important to carefully consider alternatives, hesitate in accepting theories, and question self-appointed intellectual authorities (the word skepticism derives from the Greek σκεψις, meaning "looking around, considering, or inquiring into, especially in a careful manner"). Coincidentally, on the flight back from Brussels yesterday I found the following passage about the value of skepticism in the essay "Landscape with a Deer in the Background" by José Ortega y Gasset (translated by Tony Talbot):
Posted on 2007-02-28 at 19:23. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ The Same RiverWhat did Heraclitus really think? Heraclitus of Ephesus (flourished circa 500 BCE) is commonly known only for having said that "you cannot step into the same river twice" or even that "you cannot step into the same river even once". The latter statement was uttered not by Heraclitus but by the sophist Cratylus; as quoted in Aristotle's Metaphysics (Book 4, Chapter 5, 1010a13), "Cratylus ... criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is not possible to step into the same river twice -- for he thought not even once". The quote about stepping into the same river twice is from Plato's dialogue Cratylus (echoed in Aristotle) and Plato may have been quoting only Cratylus, who may or may not have been properly characterizing Heraclitus himself. The existing fragments of Heraclitus state only that "different and different waters flow upon those who step into the same rivers" (Fr. 12). (According to my copy of The Presocratic Philosophers by Kirk and Raven, the original Greek is: ποταμοισι τοισιν αυτοισιν εμβαινουσιν ετερα και ετερα υδατα επιρρει -- quite different, I might note, from what you find at the Wikipedia page.) Did Heraclitus extend that insight to "all things" (as Plato, or Plato quoting Cratylus, would have you believe)? I have my doubts, since if Heraclitus said something so pithy as "you can't step into the same river twice" and applied that analogy to all things, then I figure someone would have quoted the exact text. Furthermore, Heraclitus said "I prefer things of which there is seeing and hearing and perception" (fragment 61). This indicates to me that he valued the evidence of the senses and would not violate that evidence in order to expound a doctrine that flies in the face of the fact that certain things are more stable than others (indeed his statement about rivers can be understood as merely an observation about things that can be seen, in this case the flowing of waters down a channel to the sea). Perhaps he held that seemingly stable things are imperceptibly changing as well (the fragments of his writings yield no evidence one way or the other), but that does not imply that he thought that everything is in constant flux and that there are no stable or semi-stable identities (a position sometimes described as a "Heraclitean view of the universe"). At least, that's how I read the Greek. As to psychology and ethics, here are fragments 119 and 101 from Heraclitus, which are quite in line with the Greek tradition:
Posted on 2007-02-19 at 21:47. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Natural DivinityFurther thoughts on the language of religion. Regarding the language of religion (see parts one and two), the following paragraphs from my essay Objectivism: Who Needs It? seem apropos (despite the fact that quoting oneself is in poor taste):
Posted on 2006-12-28 at 21:31. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ EnthusiasmMore on the language of religion. In part one of my series on the language of religion, I talked about the secular etymology of most terms we use to describe religious concepts and experience. In sum, those terms cluster around the phenomena of love, admiration, honor, respect, devotion, passion, joy, emotion, elevation, and a capacity to deeply experience and appreciate life. I know that conventionally religious people experience those phenomena in relation to their own conceptions of a higher god, and I respect that in ways I didn't respect when I was a sophomoric know-it-all. But those belief-systems are not mine -- and I think that the phenomena can be experienced in relation to life in the here-and-now, not only in relation to the above or the hereafter (as I put it in my song Pre-Emptive Strike, "your only life, there's none above / it's here that you must show your love"). Indeed, I think that the essence of spirituality is not belief, it is enthusiasm in the original Greek sense of depth of feeling, of inspiration, of being infused with a kind of shining divine presence. But since I don't think there are any specifically divine beings outside or above physical reality, I would account for that personally divine aspect in a more naturalistic manner -- as the interior and exterior manifestation of the cluster of qualities I mention above. I don't think this is far-fetched (though it is difficult to talk about clearly). After all, we humans differ endlessly. Some are smarter than others, some are more practical, some are more organized, some are more socially adept, some are more athletic, some are more graceful, some are more stable, some are more serene. And some have a greater capacity for love, admiration, honor, respect, devotion, passion, joy, emotion, elevation, and deep experience and appreciation of life. The latter are more inclined to spirituality and to experiencing the divine aspects of human life. That doesn't make them better or higher than other people. It only makes them more spiritual or religious. To my mind, belief is too easy. Anyone can believe. That's good if you care about being inclusive, since it seems that few people have a great capacity for spirituality. Don't get me wrong, I think that many people have glimmers of appreciation for the spiritual aspects of life, but after experiencing such glimmers they pick themselves up and walk off as if nothing profound had happened. Naturally, it may not necessarily be healthy to have continual and deep spiritual experiences. After all, we're physical creatures who need to work, eat, procreate, and otherwise exist in the here-and-now. The challenge as with everything else in life is to achieve balance and integration, which can take a lifetime of passion, reflection, enculturation, appreciation for beauty, openness to experience, and active wisdom. A relatively few people devote themselves to that kind of quest, which is why I think true spirituality is hard-won (and exclusive in a way that professed belief is not). Not that I think I have achieved that kind of true spirituality in my own life, mind you. I've learned enough humility to keep from being that presumptuous. But at least I can aspire... Posted on 2006-12-27 at 20:33. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Ye GodsThe language of religion. At this time of year it's hard to escape spirituality (it's also hard to escape materialism, but that's another matter, as it were). O holy night, the son of god, come let us adore him, glory to god in the highest, and all the rest. I became a non-believer at the age of nine, and when I was younger the language of religion made me uncomfortable. After a while it made me resentful -- why did the believers get to hold a monopoly on the words expressing deep emotion? Then it made me curious about finding a secular meaning for those terms. Can't those of us who don't believe in a higher realm outside or above our human reality also revere, worship, venerate, and adore real-life people and this-worldly values that are holy, hallowed, divine, sacred, and glorious, thus leading to experiences of exaltation, transport, rapture, ecstasy, and bliss? Fifteen years ago I wrote a youthful essay on the topic, and I'm still thinking about it. It's a difficult area to explore without becoming ungrounded. One possible ground is etymology. Consider:
Nothing here says that the object of these actions and emotions must exist in a realm outside or above this-worldly human experience. But few people are comfortable applying these terms to their friends or family or companions -- or especially to themselves (it's considered awfully impudent to think that you're glorious or divine or holy!). Interestingly, some of these words are acceptable when applied to one's spouse or lover -- "he really worships his wife", "I adore you", "our marriage is blissful", etc. Others are sometimes applied in the realm of the arts (such as Glenn Gould's notion of "ecstasy as the only proper quest for the artist"). But most of them are used primarily in the special, walled-off realm of religion. One of these days I'll write an essay about the phenomenon, because I find it endlessly fascinating... Posted on 2006-12-23 at 22:41. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ IdealizationA quote from Malthus. Recently while reading an essay by Ross Emmett, I came across the following quote from Thomas Malthus:
A useful antidote to utopianism and idealization of any kind. Posted on 2006-12-07 at 19:35. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Sapere AudeFreedom and enlightenment. In yesterday's post Five Years On, I extolled the values of freedom and enlightenment. But what is freedom, and what is enlightenment? These are big concepts and they are not always well defined. Perhaps over time I'll work to explain them (or at least explain my understanding of them). Let us begin with enlightenment. One of the classic statements of the nature of enlightenment comes from Immanuel Kant's essay Was Ist Aufklärung? (translation), written on September 30, 1784:
A few points to note:
Posted on 2006-09-11 at 21:17. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Living the Philosophy for Living on EarthAyn Rand and the future of civilization. In the midst of a lengthy screed of the sort that only academics, bureaucrats, the idle rich, and the unemployed have time to write (the rest of us are too busy working to create the wealth that makes such leisure possible), Diana Hsieh makes the following remarkable assertion (previously posted at her blog) regarding the importance of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand:
My word. Our culture (presumably American or Western culture, and by extension the future of civilization) is doomed if Ayn Rand's philosophy does not take hold in academia and the wider culture; Ayn Rand's philosophy will not take hold unless a small number of scholars and intellectuals publish a small number of influential publications (presumably articles and books); that small number of scholars and intellectuals cannot be successful if dangerous pseudo-scholars and supposed defenders of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism are allowed to erect their strawmen and are tolerated by those who do not uphold the highest standards of objectivity; and this crisis, this matter of literally life and death, will be in force for the next few decades. There are many questionable assumptions here:
My conclusions:
In line with Rand's cardinal virtue of productivity, I try to do as much of the latter as I possibly can in my limited time on this earth (although I am no longer an Objectivist, in many ways I still live like one). I respectfully suggest that others do the same rather than wasting their time on writing lengthy screeds about imagined intellectual dangers or getting involved in internecine conflicts that do nobody any good. Posted on 2006-05-31 at 20:21. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Future PhilosophyThe Singularity and Enlightenment 3.0. Over at The Speculist, fellow Denverite Phil Bowermaster speculates on the desirability of formulating what he calls Enlightenment 3.0 -- a renewed commitment to reason and law that will provide "a philosophical/legal/intellectual arsenal of unprecedented scope and corrective qualities". Following Robert Conquest, Phil distinguishes between the British Enlightenment and the Continental Enlightenment. In general, thinkers in Scotland and England valued something like reasonableness over French and German Reason (with a capital "R"), leading to an emphasis on particulars (whether in science or society) whereas the Continental Enlightenment led to uncontrolled generalization and abstract theorizing. One result was a fairly dogmatic, systematic socialism on the Continent and a more pragmatic, flexible capitalism in the Anglosphere, a point made briefly by Jim Bennett here and at length in his book. Given my status as a recovered Randian, it's interesting to me that several commenters at Phil's post adduced Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism as the answer. Yet, as I've argued in my essay Ayn Rand and the Ascent of Man, it's not clear that Rand was an Enlightnement thinker (or, for that matter, that the Enlightenment as traditionally conceived is any kind of panacea):
Rand and her followers seem to think that they have found the one particular form of life and of art that is correct, right, true, and objective: namely, Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, especially as presented in her novels (after all, art is the technology of the soul). I have my doubts, not least because the idea of the one true path is not consistent with respect for the identities of individual human beings and specific human societies. That doesn't mean reason and law go out the window, or that relativism is the only option. It does mean that ihe long-developing Anglosphere values of the British Enlightenment -- individualism, particularism, voluntary relations, economic flexibility, societal resilience, decentralization, entrepreneurship, scientific induction, technological progress, industrial (and now informational) production, free inquiry, common law, etc. -- trump the more artificial values of the Continental Enlightenment. In my experience, Randians seem to be quite enamored of the Continental model (let's deduce it all from axioms, let's spin out theories of everything, let's split hairs, let's not tolerate anyone who disagrees with us, let's ignore science if we can, let's not get our hands dirty with the messy facts of reality but instead opine about how things ought to be). In short, they are hedgehogs, not foxes. And as we've seen from the success of the Anglosphere, it's the flexible foxes who fomented the Industrial Revolution and who are at the forefront of the Singularity revolutions (GRIN technologies, space travel, the ever-quickening pace of life, and all the rest). Rand's Objectivism does not provide a strong, sustainable basis for Enlightenment 3.0 (although it may provide some of the inspiration). Indeed, I would argue that in general philosophy is a result rather than a cause of historical experience (e.g., the mechanistic philosophies of Enlightenment 1.0 emerged only after centuries of experience with machines in the West, starting as early as the 10th century). So I would expect a new philosophy to emerge from the personal and intellectual reflections of those who experience the Singularity revolutions first-hand. What form that philosophy will take no one can say right now. But I'd bet it will take account of the core values of the Anglosophere as adumbrated above, because it's those core values, habits, and practices that will have produced the Singularity in the first place. May you live in interesting times. Posted on 2006-03-06 at 21:13. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ The Conceptual Nature of ArtThoughts on the aesthetic theory of Ayn Rand. I've just posted an essay of mine entitled The Conceptual Nature of Art, which contains the fundamentals of my interpretation of Ayn Rand's philosophy of art. Although I originally submitted it to The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, I've decided to remove it from consideration since the anonymous reader's comments requested a thorough overhaul and I simply can no longer muster the energy and enthusiasm to work that hard on interpreting Ayn Rand. So I present it as-is, and in the public domain. Enjoy! Posted on 2005-12-27 at 19:05. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ ismbook.comVersion 4.0 and more. Finally! I've just launched www.ismbook.com, a dedicated domain for the dictionary of philosophy I first wrote in 1990. Since placing it on the web in 1996 I've hardly touched it, but over time the site has become the source of some embarrassment to me because the definitions have left a lot to be desired. Over the past six months I've rewritten the entire site, put it into modern XML, written some fun little XSL transformations and generation scripts, explicitly licensed it as in the public domain, and now launched it at ismbook.com rather than as one musty corner of saint-andre.com. In the past few weeks I've also decided to broaden the scope to include terminology from intellectual disciplines other than philosophy (politics, religion, science, the arts and humanities, etc.), but it will take me some time to realize the vision of a more generalized "field guide" to intellectual matters, so I've decided to launch the site now and update it continuously. Enjoy! Posted on 2005-11-09 at 20:49. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Ism Book ReduxMore progress. I just completed my first pass through a total revision of The Ism Book, the dictionary of philosophy I first wrote in 1990. I still need to fix up the XSLT transformations a bit and read the entire work again for accuracy and consistency, but it seems that I'll probably be posting version 4.0 in the very near future. Posted on 2005-08-21 at 16:31. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Objectivity Without ObjectivismThe penultimate rung. I've just posted the first draft of an essay entitled Objectivity Without Objectivism, the second-to-last essay I have planned for my collection of essays on Ayn Rand and Objectivism. At some point I'll probably describe in greater detail both Hao Wang's and E.O. Wilson's approaches to building objective knowledge, but the outline is fairly well set at this point. Posted on 2005-07-24 at 12:41. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ NoeticsThe value of logic. Uche reacts to my previous post on Alexander Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics, specifically my questioning of the contributions of logic to human knowledge:
In part I was reacting against Baumgarten, who (as Uche points out) is a bit too pat about the superiority of logic over aesthetic, things known conceptually over things known perceptually, philosophy over art, and so on. I yield to no one in a deep appreciation for the power of concepts -- they are what make us human, whether clothed in language, mathematics, music, visual art, or code. Yet Baumgarten (an arch-rationalist) claims that conceptual knowledge is purely the object of (deductive) logic, and gives short shrift to induction from perceptual experience and abstraction from particulars. By no means do I claim that logic has no place in the clarification of human experience -- but it is only part of the mix, not the "superior faculty" of rationalist myth. (And yes, perhaps I react too strongly to rationalist myth because I was once a rationalist myself.) As to the agonistic nature of science, I do think that good scientists restlessly explore the frontiers of knowledge, recklessly slay the dragons of the unknown, and greedily stake their claims to intellectual gold. Those "animal spirits" are what move humankind forward. Cold deduction of the kind displayed by the likes of Alexander Baumgarten can be edifying, but when you come right down to it reality is messy and the pursuit of truth is a hot, passionate, even agonistic quest. Posted on 2005-06-28 at 21:51. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Find What You LoveJobs on life. Thanks to my friend Leif over at pattern.com, I finally read the commencement address that Steve Jobs presented at Stanford University recently. It seems that Jobs was something of an unschooler. And it's fascinating that both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were college dropouts, is it not? Posted on 2005-06-24 at 21:05. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ AestheticaeThe logic of perception. Although philosophers and critics are happy to use the term "aesthetics", few have read the short treatise in which that term was coined. The book is Alexander Baumgarten's Reflections on Poetry -- actually Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnulis ad Poema Pertinentibus, written in modern Latin and first published in 1735 (Baumgarten expanded upon the topic in his Aesthetica of 1750-8, which as far as I know has not yet been translated into any modern vernacular). In this book, Baumgarten, one of the later rationalists, asserted in quasi-Euclidean fashion a cumulative series of definitions and derivations about what he called "philosophical poetry". His definition of aesthetics comes in the antepenultimate and penultimate sections of the Reflections on Poetry, rendered as follows in the 1954 translation by Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (University of California Press, pp. 77-78):
Baumgarten held that aesthetics is not primarily the philosophy of art, of the beautiful, or of the sublime; rather, it is a psychological science that would do as much to clarify perceptual knowledge as logic had done to clarify conceptual knowledge. Granted, it is arguable how much logic has truly contributed to the clarification of human concepts (personally I think we are more indebted to the agonistic pursuits of scientists than to the armchair theorizing of philosophers and logicians); but I find it interesting that Baumgarten strongly associated aesthetic with the task of "knowing things sensately" and thus granted it an epistemological stature and importance that is too often missing from analyses of the arts. Posted on 2005-06-19 at 15:03. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Revision-IsmDictionary fixes. About fifteen years ago I wrote the first version of The Ism Book for a friend of mine. In 1996 I placed it online (it was tailor-made for hypertext) but I have not revised it since. Amazingly, people still use it as a reference, which scares me a bit because I now find the definitions embarrassingly biased in places. So I've decided to bite the bullet by updating the whole thing. In the last five days or so I've worked my way through the definitions under letters A and B, and I'm now up to "cognitivism". I hope to maintain the momentum and finish these changes in the next few months, but I won't post any of the changed definitions until I'm done since I've modified the XML format and there are numerous cross-references in the text. Stay tuned for updates! Posted on 2005-06-08 at 21:04. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ The Evolution of FriendshipBiology matters. I've just read two fascinating papers in evolutionary biology and psychology on the nature of friendship:
Trivers argues that there are situations in which reciprocal altruism (call it tit for tat, helping each other, even reciprocal benevolence if the word "altruism" scares you off) would be expected to evolve, especially among long-lived animals with long periods of parental care and low dispersal rates who exist in small, mutually-dependent, relatively stable social groups (this description well fits certain primates, especially humans). Tooby and Cosmides build on and extend Trivers's analysis by focusing on the overall system of reciprocal helping as well as the many psychological subtleties that one would expect to emerge in the context of such a system when the actors are highly intelligent, emotionally sensitive, and good communicators (humans yet again). Fascinating stuff. I'll try to blog more about these two essays once I've absorbed them more fully. Posted on 2005-05-31 at 21:59. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ EpistemographyContrasting definitions. In his essay "Science Studies as Epistemography" (chapter 10 of The One Culture?), Peter Dear defines epistemography as follows:
Dear's conception of epistemography provides a useful counterpoint to mine. Following Hao Wang, I am more interested in describing and mapping out what we know than in describing how we know it. Wang called the endeavor of describing what we know "phenomenography" (or, in his later writings, "phenography"), but that term has been in use within educational theory for the past thirty years or so, so we need a different term. Besides, "phenomenography" implies that we are describing appearances as opposed to realities, which betrays a kind of Platonic-Kantian distinction between appearance and reality. Perhaps the term "ontography" would be appropriate: the description of reality as opposed to the theory of being ("ontology"), but I think "epistemography" gets to the heart of what Wang intended because he was most interested in doing justice to what we know, with all that implies: what we know, what we know, and what we know. Such a study would be broader than Dear's focus on science, since there exists much knowledge outside of the sciences (practical knowledge, social knowledge, moral knowledge, aesthetic knowledge, etc.). Such a study would also focus on mapping out and connecting what we know (similar to E.O. Wilson's concept of "consilience"), not describing sociologically, historically, or empirically how scientific endeavor functions. I don't think Dear's program is wrongheaded, I just think it's not ambitious enough. Let's aim high: nothing less than a map of everything we know about reality (including our human reality). Come to think of it, perhaps "ontography" is an even better term than "epistemography": a map of all reality (which, practically speaking, means everything we know about reality, but that is perhaps a methodological detail). Naturally the map would be drawn to a certain scale; no map provides infinite detail, else it would not be usable. The challenge is to find the right scale that will enhance our ability to navigate and explore realities both familiar and unknown, then to fill in the map with greater detail over time through an iterative process of improvement. Wang's proposal was to do this by describing certain higher-level principles that apply to multiple disciplines (e.g., "like implies like" or "equal until proven unequal", which overturns the hierarchical world of the ancients both physically and socially), but I think something akin to Wilson's program of consilience may be closer to the mark. Posted on 2005-05-05 at 21:12. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ SpiritualityUntimely meditations. According to this article, philosopher-mathematician Frank Ramsey once expressed the following thought about the scale of the universe (quoted in Our Final Hour by Martin Rees):
I find Ramsey's thought congenial (Ramsey was a teacher of Jacob Bronowski, another thinker whose insights I appreciate). Coincidentally, today I received an email message from one Soren Sorenson, proprietor of a website called Spiritual Atheism (who presumably contacted me because on one of my web pages I call myself a spiritual atheist). Soren's site defines spiritual atheism as follows:
Well, I'm not that kind of spiritual atheist! To put it prosaically, I'm simply a nonbeliever who happens to appreciate the spiritual aspects of life. It is difficult to talk about such matters (perhaps religion is an area in which I self-censor), but I'm going to try anyway. (My apologies to readers if these thoughts seem too poetic, flighty, or just plain crazy. I write this stuff for myself, not for you. ;-) I agree with Ramsey that the universe is vast, but not divine. I think that if there is divinity, it is a spark that shines outward from within human beings, and does not come into human beings from outside (whether from the universe or from God as the creator of the universe or as a personification of the universe). Indeed, I tend more toward some thinkers in the gnostic tradition, who held that human beings created god in their own image. I am a nonbeliever. (I don't usually call myself an atheist, since most atheists are quite militant, whereas I am not militant about my lack of belief.) I don't believe in a god, in any "person" (however defined) who in some sense created or represents the universe. I think there is a sense in which human beings -- the entities that most deeply instantiate the psychological, intellectual, mental, and spiritual potentiality of life, especially of conscious, sentient life -- are divine, can be divine, or at least have divine aspects. I think that early human beings were uncomfortable with this divine spark within themselves -- it is quite presumptuous to think that you are divine! -- and so they externalized the sense of their own divinity outward onto other entities (trees, rocks, mountains, etc. in the early form of theism called animism), then eventually focused that concept into monotheism and the personal god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yet I don't believe in any such God. To me, the great challenge is talking about divinity and spirituality in a purely secular way. We have no experience with a secular language of divinity. When we use terms like "divine" and "worship" and "spiritual" and "godlike", we are familiar with them only in relation to something higher than humanity, even something higher than nature or reality. But I think there is nothing higher than reality, and that human beings are the highest things in reality. But as we say in English, "it's lonely at the top" so we created these things called gods (in more recent thought, a single God) to sit above us. Yet this "god" is an abstraction from the essence of what is divine in human beings, not something other than or apart from human beings. There is nothing divine about the physical extent of the universe. Awesome, yes. Divine, no. There is no psychological aspect to the physical universe itself -- it is not a conscious entity in any sense. There is a psychological aspect to many living things, and that is to be valued deeply as one of the precious aspects of life. There is no spiritual aspect to the physical universe, and there is no spiritual aspect to lower life forms. Spirituality comes with language, concepts, communication, self-reflection. Human beings are spiritual beings. Spirituality can be seen as precisely the highest potential of the psychological aspect of living things. It is here that I would locate the divine. Not in gods, but in human beings. So, radical as it may seem, I assert the exact inverse of the Christian idea that "God created man in His image" -- for I think that human beings created the idea of god in the image of their highest potential. Untimely meditations, indeed. Posted on 2005-04-11 at 21:59. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ ConsilienceOvercoming philosophy, again. I've started reading Edward O. Wilson's book Consilience. Wilson cites William Whewell as the thinker who coined the term "consilience", which literally means a "jumping together" of facts or inductions from different disciplines (according to J.S. Mill in his Utilitarianism, each result thus assists in "corroborating and verifying the other"). The OED quotes Whewell as follows (The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), II 230):
Wilson further quotes Whewell as follows:
Wilson proposes an updated Enlightenment project of intellectual synthesis that would build the consilience of knowledge across disciplines (and not just the hard sciences, but the social sciences and humanities as well), along the lines of Francis Bacon's Instauratio Magna. And he writes as follows regarding the relationship between this project and the tradition of philosophical investigation:
To which I say: Hear, Hear! I've been thinking along similar lines since 1998 (when Wilson's book was published -- I'm not sure why I haven't read it until now) and probably much earlier given that I was reading Hao Wang's work on phenography in 1987 or so. In all likelihood, the new way to philosophize will mean overcoming philosophy rather than extending its life. Posted on 2005-04-10 at 13:49. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ ExplorationNozick on doing philosophy. I continue to gather my thoughts regarding what Hao Wang called "phenomenography" or "phenography" -- that is, philosophy as a map or picture of what we know (given that "phenomenography" is commonly used with a different meaning in educational theory and that I dislike the shortened form "phenography", I might even coin a new word for such an approach, e.g., "epistemography"). At a basic grammatical level, there are three aspects to Wang's conception: what we know (as opposed to how we know), what we know (as opposed to what gods could know, what humans knew in the past or might know in the future, etc.), and what we know (as opposed to what we believe, feel, etc.). One thing I like about Wang's approach is that it is intellectually honest: we attempt to do full justice to what we know, not to spin theories or craft ideologies. I see a connection here to what is probably my favorite passage in the works of twentieth-century philosopher Robert Nozick. In the preface to Anarchy, State, and Utopia (pp. xii-xiii), he writes as follows:
I am beginning to think that doing justice to what we know involves, in large measure, leaving things as and where they are. While fitting everything into a perimeter can result in a pretty picture, it is crucial to recognize that those boundaries are drawn just so for the sake of human convenience and understanding. Not that human convenience and understanding are unimportant -- after all, often we cannot in fact know something without the presence of a picture, model, or metaphor to give it human context. But we would do well to be able to separate the thing from the picture, the actual terrain from its representation on the map of our (current) knowledge. A hard task, but one worth pursuing, I think. Posted on 2005-03-28 at 20:53. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Letters to Young WillPost-Randian musings. I've been enjoying the occasional series of letters that Will Wilkinson has been writing to his former self on what's wrong (and right) with the ideas of Ayn Rand. The first letter was on free will and determinism, the second letter on human sociality, and the third letter on ethics. If you never went through an Ayn Rand phase, the letters may not speak to you, but as a recovered Randian myself I find them fascinating (and I sure could have benefited from them when I was oh, about, 18 years old). Will makes several key observations:
There are many important implications of these insights. One is that there is a lot of work to be done in fully understanding human nature. Hint: it's not all pretty (we humans are a crafty bunch!), and Randian claims such as "there are no conflicts of interest among rational men" are true only on an extraordinarily desiccated vision of what it means to be a rational human being. If old Aristotle were alive today you can be sure he'd be integrating the insights of anthropology and evolutionary psychology as fast as they were coming in. Those who would move forward with a philosophy for living on earth need to drop the ideology and get scientific in a humanistic way (Jacob Bronowski provided a good example of such an approach, I think, but science has come a long way since the 1960s, when Bronowski did most of his writing). Another implication is that history matters. For a history major, Rand was often depressingly a-historical. The current context of human experience involves a great deal of hard-won knowledge that is embedded in institutions, laws, practices, organizations, technologies, habits of mind, and the like. Granted, also embedded in these phenomena are misconceptions, irrationalities, and outright falsehoods. Is the modern welfare-warfare state far from the ideal form of government? Are modern mega-corporations partially inimical to human flourishing? Well, yeah. Sorry, reality is messy and perfection is not an option. So we try to do the best with what we've got -- which is a lot. Modern gadgetry fulfills Clarke's third law of technology by bordering on magic, modern science has begun to reveal the secrets of biological nature, modern economics shows more and more the connection between prosperity and freedom, and so on. The great challenge as I see it is to integrate all of the theoretical and practical knowledge that we as a species have been gaining, and gaining in a greatly accelerated fashion. Rand's followers exist in an ideological vacuum, even a kind of scientific deprivation experiment. They prattle on about metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics as if philosophy were some lordly queen of the sciences who needs only to legislate and never to listen. All the while, the sciences and practical arts have made incredible progress over the last 500 years, especially over the last 100 years, and amazingly so even in the last generation. In many ways, the world is practically a different place than it was when Rand effectively stopped writing 30 years ago. There is much to learn about the nature of the world from physics, chemistry, and biology. There is much to learn about epistemology (e.g., the processes of conceptualization) from cognitive psychology and the practical methods of sciences such as biological taxonomy. Ethics needs to be informed by anthropology, evolutionary psychology, biology, sociology, history, and related sciences. Politics is not a standalone discipline in which one can opine once and for all regarding the nature of societal interaction and the necessity for government, but instead must be pursued (I think) in an almost experimental manner, informed by history, economics, law, psychology, and business. Even in the traditionally autonomous realm of art we have come to see that art does not exist for art's sake but for the sake of human beings and in particular human groups: the work of Ellen Dissanayake has revealed deep connections between art and biology, psychology, ethology, and technology (what are the tools of the arts but technological artifacts such as the painter's paints and brushes, the sculptor's hammers, the musician's instruments?). In a series of books written from the middle 1980s to early 1990s, Hao Wang adumbrated a vision of philosophy as what he called "phenomenography" -- a discipline that would map out what we have learned about material reality as well as our human selves and our social interactions. Wang held that rather than endlessly arguing about how we know, it would be much more productive to gain a clear picture of what we know. He focused mainly on the sciences, but I would extend his insights also to technology in the broadest sense: the practical techniques, tools, institutions, organizational forms, and instruments by which humans have gained such incredible power over nature. Of course, such an effort ceased to be the job of one person around the time of Leibniz or perhaps Kant. Today we'd use databases, wikis, semantic web technologies, and the like to connect the dots, abstract from particular scientific results, and map out the achievements of both human knowledge and practical pursuits. A huge undertaking, to be sure. But a lot more important than the petty argumentation and analysis that have passed for philosophy over the last hundred years. Posted on 2005-03-13 at 15:16. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Friendship in Atlas ShruggedA forthcoming essay. The other night I finished the first draft of an essay entitled "Friendship in Atlas Shrugged", which I've promised to Ed Younkins for a collection he's editing for publication in 2007 (the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand's magnum opus). The collection is tentatively entitled Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion and it appears that the good people at Ashgate Press have agreed to publish it. If you really want to read this essay and comment on it so that I can improve it before publication, do let me know. Posted on 2005-03-13 at 13:39. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ A Letter from the FutureAyn Rand in historical perspective. Tomorrow is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Russian-American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand. In celebration I've posted an essay entitled Ayn Rand in Historical Perspective. Enjoy! Posted on 2005-02-01 at 19:05. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ The Mind on StrikeAtlas Shrugged as the revolt of the engineers. This evening I wrote the first draft of my essay The Mind on Strike: Atlas Shrugged as the Revolt of the Engineers. Another rung on the ladder... Posted on 2004-12-08 at 21:47. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Aristotle on GolfA recently-discovered fragment from a lost treatise. Back in college a Classics professor of mine provided the following text to a class I was taking on Aristotle's Poetics, and I've just found a copy on the 'net, so herewith some pseudo-Aristotelitan wisdom:
Posted on 2004-12-05 at 10:47. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ GOARandians IRL? While chatting with Ted O'Connor yesterday via Jabber, we were reminiscing about the old days of the MDOP ("Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy") mailing list run back in 1993-1994 or so by our friend Jimbo Wales. Ted mentioned how it's cool that people from MDOP have "made good" (Jimbo with Wikipedia, me with Jabber, etc.). So I got to thinking about how fun it would be to hold an IRL conference of what I think of as "practical Objectivist achievers" -- people who have been influenced by Rand but who are decidedly not academic philosophers or graduates students or Objectivist groupies, but instead have achieved some real success in the world. Not only would it be a lot of fun, but it might result in some fascinating cross-pollination between people who are active and successful in a wide variety of careers -- technology, law, business, science, the arts, medicine, etc. I think of it as a "Gathering of Objectivist Achievers" (GOA). And maybe next year would be a good time to start such a tradition, since 2005 will be the Ayn Rand centenary. Perhaps I'll get busy on organizing this in my copious spare time. :-) Posted on 2004-12-01 at 14:21. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ The Oort CloudA new way to philosophize? In a recent blog entry, Roderick Long links to and comments on John Searle's paper Philosophy in a New Century. Searle claims that the undeniable growth of knowledge during the "present era" renders philosophical skepticism obsolete; instead, it is time for "a new kind of philosophy" whose starting point is "what we know about the real world". I agree with Long that Searle's argument is a bit weird, because it was possible to found a philosophy on the reality of human knowledge long before the present day: in fact, Aristotle did just that over two thousand years ago. The progress of science is not the hinge upon which turns the plausibility of the skeptical premise, and Searle's assumption that science matters in this way elicits from Long a charge of scientism. Yet I would go farther than either Long or Searle: I think that the relentless march of science will eventually lead, not to a new kind of philosophy, but to the extinction of philosophy altogether. As I wrote many years ago in my journal, as the realm of machines and science expands, philosophy contracts. I see the discipline of philosophy as a kind of intellectual nebula or Oort cloud: a hot, gaseous region in which stars are birthed. Once upon a time, philosophy contained many disciplines that have since emerged as sciences unto themselves: astronomy, cosmology, economics, psychology, political science, logic, jurisprudence, and so on. With the advancement of science, we can expect further sciences to emerge from philosophy (a process already underway): decision theory, information theory, cognitive science, even (eventually) notoriously thorny fields like ethics and aesthetics. A big question for philosophers is: what can they do to help those sciences emerge? Part of the work remaining for philosophers is to clarify what Long (following John McDowell) calls "constitutive conditions" (that which makes X what it is), which help determine what investigators need to look for in a certain field of study. Kurt Gödel calls this task a matter of defining the "primitives" of a discipline. For example, he says that "the beginning of physics was Newton's work of 1687, which needs only very simple primitives: force, mass, law" (Hao Wang, A Logical Journey, p. 167). Gödel looked for similar insights within philosophy itself: "philosophy as exact theory should do for metaphysics as much as Newton did for physics" (Hao Wang, From Mathematics to Philosophy, p. 85). I think Gödel's search was overly broad. It's unrealistic to try to do for metaphysics what Newton did for physics. Better to work on more tightly-focused parts of philosophy, just as Gödel himself did in the realm of mathematical logic (which was once considered part of philosophy but no longer is). That's why areas such as decision theory seem ripe for the picking. Some claim that John Rawls obtained similar results with regard to a theory of justice (Gödel's colleague Hao Wang seemed to think so), but I have my doubts -- Rawls made some kind of progress toward a clearer understanding of justice as a "primitive" in social affairs, but he got enough wrong (especially from the more libertarian perspective of contract and other voluntary relations) that his work is not particularly helpful in moving toward a fully free society (if you want justice, work for freedom). Another approach is what Hao Wang called "phenomenography": an updated pursuit of something like Francis Bacon's Great Instauration, which would map out the terrain of accumulated human knowledge and thereby move beyond analytic philosophy by doing justice to what we know. I'm slowly working on an extended essay about Wang and Gödel, in which I plan to explore these issues at greater length. But I think we can safely say that, just as with the original Oort cloud (whose collapse formed the sun and planets), philosophy's contraction will be humanity's gain. Posted on 2004-11-27 at 17:14. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Aristotle's ChildrenToward a history of Aristotle. Yesterday I finished reading Aristotle's Children by Richard Rubenstein. I've long wanted to write a history of Aristotle -- the influence of his ideas throughout history -- and Rubenstein's book provides some material toward such a history, focusing mainly on the period 1150 to 1350 CE. Rubenstein argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition has been challenged in the realm of natural philosophy by three successive systems of thought: Aristotelian philosophy, Newtonian physics, and Darwinian biology. He also maintains that one must not confuse Aristotle's open method with the hardened positions that some latter-day Aristotelians clung to -- a distinction that precious few modern scientists make, but that was clear to Galileo long ago (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems):
Posted on 2004-11-24 at 21:31. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ The StrikeMore on the revolt of the engineers. This evening I came home from the library with about ten books on engineering in Soviet Russia (and given that my saddle bags were full, I had a mighty hard time biking home with all those books -- it's a good thing I live only three blocks from the library!). Following up on my reading of Edwin Layton's book The Revolt of the Engineers, I'm delving more deeply into attitudes towards engineering (what Layton calls the "ideology of engineering") in Russia and America in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly as background for a planned essay on Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged as the story of an engineers' revolt (Rand's working title for the book was "The Strike"). As Layton describes, seeds for the American ideology of engineering were planted as early as the 1890s, came to fruition in 1920s, and then fizzled out in the 1930s despite enthusiasm for the application of engineering to social problems in the early years of the Depression. It seems that Russia never experienced quite the same optimism about the role of engineers in society as America did: engineers with their specialists' knowledge were mistrusted as opposed to the interests of the workers (a conflict illustrated in Bogdanov's 1913 novel Engineer Menni); there were engineers' strikes soon after the Russian Revolution (well before Rand left Russia in January 1926); and Stalin crushed any remaining independent professionalism among Russian engineers with the Shakhty Trial of April 1928 and the Industrial Party Trial of December 1930. Rand undoubtedly was aware of events and attitudes in Russia before her departure, as witnessed by the fact that the protagonist of her 1936 novel We The Living was a Russian engineering student during the early 1920s. As noted in my previous post, the heroes of Atlas Shrugged are almost all engineers (indeed, in one striking passage, the fictional composer Richard Halley describes the process of writing music as a kind of sonic engineering!). But they are not functionaries: almost all of them are simultaneously engineers and entrepreneurs (the main exception in the prehistory of the novel is Galt, who goes to work in an industrial research laboratory -- with fateful consequences, since his experiences there precipitate the strike). Does this combination owe something to Peter Palchinsky's assertion that "the future belongs to managing-engineers and engineering-managers"? (Quoted in Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union, Harvard, 1993, p. 44.) Palchinsky argued for such a combination in the context of a socialist economy, but he opposed centralized planning and thought that such manager-engineers should function autonomously and take into account the particulars of time and place (e.g., the availability of local materials). I see similarities here to Rand's entrepreneur-engineers, who apply their rational judgement to their own companies and steer clear of broader industry groupings and even working for others. Graham provides references to two resources that look like must reading: an essay by Kendall E. Bailes entitled "The Politics of Technology: Stalin and Technocratic Thinking among Soviet Engineers" (American Historical Review 79, 1974) and a longer treatment by Bailes of related issues in his book Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941 (Princeton, 1978). I guess it's back to the library for those two! On a related note, I must say that I found the temporal setting of Atlas Shrugged to be a bit jarring when re-reading the novel recently. There are two mentions of television in the novel, and some rich industrialists have private planes, but radio is the main form of communication and aircraft are not used for commercial aviation (nor, it seems, for military purposes). The events of the novel depict something like a Greater Depression that disintegrates into an economic death-spiral (greatly hastened by the strike of the engineer-entrepreneurs) and a political descent into a kind of bumbling fascism. So the novel seems to be set in something like the 1930s gone even more horribly awry, which is why continued references by latter-day Objectivists to the prospect of "Atlas shrugging" seem so off the mark to me. Posted on 2004-10-28 at 20:49. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ Atlas AgainThe Revolt of the Engineers. For the first time in twenty (!) years, I'm re-reading Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. Long-time readers of this blog know that I was a huge Rand fan in my teenage years and that I've written a number of essays about her novels and ideas. I'm on the hook to write an essay on the topic of friendship in Atlas Shrugged for a book that's due out next year, so I figured I'd better re-read the novel. So far the purely literary aspects of the story have impressed me more than I expected -- Rand builds up the suspense quite artfully (even though I know how things turn out, having read the novel five times before), and despite the periodic vitriol her writing style is, I think, vastly underrated (as I've argued in an essay that's forthcoming from the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies). Unfortunately, I can't be as positive regarding her portrayal of human relationships. There are some exceedingly strange aspects to the friendships and romantic relationships in Atlas Shrugged, most of them occasioned by a monumental lack of communication between those involved. While I realize that much of this is introduced by the author in order to maintain a sense of mystery (we couldn't very well have Dagny meet Galt through Francisco during their college years), the resulting picture of close personal relationships is seriously skewed in some rather unhealthy directions. More on that in my essay-to-be. Coincidentally, I'm currently also reading a book entitled The Revolt of the Engineers by Edwin T. Layton, Jr. (Case Western Reserve University Press, 1971). I'm reading this book because Carl Malamud's reference to it in his recent report on restructuring the administrative functions of the IETF piqued my interest. In chapter 3 (pp. 53-78), Layton explores what he calls "the ideology of the engineer", which he characterizes as a kind of "philosophy of engineering" grafted atop the ethics of Herbert Spencer. The result is a creed that values professional excellence, practical rationality, rugged individualism, and laissez-faire capitalism. That combination probably sounds suspiciously familiar to readers of Ayn Rand, because it pretty well describes her ideas, as well. Then I got to thinking: the plot of Atlas Shrugged is, in essence, the revolt of the engineers! The main characters even cover the founding engineering disciplines: Galt is an electrical and mechanical engineer, Francisco is a mining engineer, Rearden is a mining and metallurgical engineer, and Dagny is a civil engineer. Most of the strikers are engineers, too: Calvin Atwood runs a power company, Dan Conway runs a railroad, Ken Danagger runs a coal mine, Quentin Daniels is a physicist and electrical engineer, Lawrence Hammond and Ted Nielsen run automobile factories, Owen Kellogg and Pat Logan are railroad engineers, Roger Marsh builds electrial appliances, Dick McNamara is a civil engineering contractor, Dwight Sanders builds airplanes, Andrew Stockton runs a foundry, and Ellis Wyatt runs an oil company. Sure, there's a composer and a philosopher or two, but the vast majority of the good guys are engineers. And even though most of them own their companies, they are engineers first and businessmen second. Is this coincidence? I think not. Somehow, Rand imbibed the ideology of the engineer and gave it extended expression in her magnum opus. The Herbert Spencer connection (mentioned by Ron Merrill in his book The Ideas of Ayn Rand) is especially worthy of further investigation, I think -- though not necessarily by yours truly, since I find it hard to sustain an interest in Rand these days. Besides, I've got to leave some fun research projects for others. :-) Posted on 2004-09-07 at 21:20. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ BeautiesMaking good things. Matt Miller (a.k.a. linuxwolf) loaned me his copy of Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters the other day, and in the last 24 hours I've read about the first half of it. Graham's analysis of American schooling from about age 12 to age 18 seems spot on to me (at least, that's how it felt to me growing up), and I appreciate his historical perspective throughout. His call to beauty -- that is, to cultivate one's taste regarding the things one makes (whether that be writing, coding, art, or anything else) -- struck a chord with me. While I am far from one of those who claim that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I would have liked to see him delve more deeply into the nature of beauty. For example, I think that there are different kinds of beauty in any field of endeavor, and in nature itself. The beauty of a desert (such as I experienced in Tucson earlier this year) is different in kind from that of the high mountains here in Colorado, the rocky coast of Maine where I grew up, the rolling hills of the Shenandoah, and so on. In music, the austere purity of Bach (such as the Well-Tempered Clavier, to which I'm listening now) is far removed from the stormy passion of Beethoven, the quiet fervor of Dvorak, the melancholy joy of Ellington, the striving spirituality of Yes, and so on. The same is true of math, physics, biology, painting, sculpture, architecture, writing, coding, athletics, and countless other pursuits -- there is not one beauty in each field, but many varieties of beautiful experience. So it's not all that helpful to challenge people to strive for beauty -- one who would so strive needs to learn more about what makes a certain kind of production beautiful. Part of that is learning the art behind its creation -- and, as Graham says, that often involves a great deal of imitation and putting yourself inside the mind of the person who created the beautiful thing (in painting, this comes in part from copying the works of the old masters; in music, from learning to play the works of Bach and the other masters; in software, from reading good source code). In the past, that learning also came in part not just from familiarizing oneself with the works of the masters, but from working with the masters themselves through apprenticeship. But essential to that learning process is the ability to appreciate many different kinds of beauty -- to analyze beauty into its manifold aspects, such as purity, economy, elegance, coherence, integrity, cleanliness, rhythm, flow, naturalness, symmetry, difficulty, depth, significance, individuality, suggestiveness, and timelessness. The word "beauty" includes as many aspects or meanings as "good", and it's important to understand those aspects rather than to accept each term as an unanalyzable whole. Posted on 2004-07-31 at 20:31. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ More Top RungsTwo more essays published. Sometime in the last few days, the Libertarian Alliance (London) published my two most recent Rand essays: The complete list of my publications has been duly updated. :-) Posted on 2004-06-23 at 20:17. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ The Hedgehog and the FoxOn a fundamental distinction between thinkers. In writing one of the essays I completed recently, I had occasion to re-read Isaiah Berlin's book The Hedgehog and the Fox, which begins as follows:
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