I speak here with feeling which is more intense as far as concerns the scientific artist than the conventional artist, because it is in science that I have first chosen to say something. What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, whereever it may be seen. Moreover, I protest, not only as I have already done against the cutting off of intellectual originality by the difficulties of the means of communication in the modern world, but even more against the ax which has been put to the root of originality because the people who have elected communication as a career so often have nothing more to communicate.
– Norbert Wiener, from the Human Use of Human Beings
I feel like there is an ax at the root of originality in our world… and it grieves me deeply.
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June 7, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Erik Anderson
“Thinkers can be divided into those who think in the first instance for their own instruction and those who do so for the instruction of others. The former are genuine thinners for themselves in both senses of the words: they are the true philosophers. They alone are in earnest. The pleasure and happiness of their existence consists in thinking. The latter are sophists: they want to appear as thinkers and seek their happiness in what they hope thereby to get from others. This is what they are in earnest about. To which of these two classes a man belongs may quickly be seen by his whole style and manner.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
“[W]e have to go back to the physical basis of art as an overflow of energy. This is known as an artistic or creative impulse. The use of the very word ‘inspiration’ shows that the artist himself hardly knows where the impulse comes from. It is merely a matter of inner urge, like the scientist’s impulse for the discovery of truth, or the explorer’s impulse for discovering a new island. There is no accounting for it.” – Lin Yutang
June 9, 2009 at 1:45 am
Juno Atkings
Not sure why this reminded me of a thought I once had and put it down so I wouldn’t forget it:
Beyond the physical awaits the full reality of infinite possibilities, unseen by the oblivious.
June 7, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Hypatia Callisto
<3 Schopenhauer
haha, you found meeeeee.
June 9, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Hypatia Callisto
that Lin Yutang quote is very similar to what Democritus is supposed to have thought about music, that it required a condition of plenty. I’ll have to dig out the exact quotation.
July 6, 2009 at 6:24 am
Erik Anderson
Henri Bergson on William James:
“We ordinarily define the true by its conformity to what already exists; James defines it by its relation to what does not yet exist. The true, according to William James, does not copy something which has been or which is: it announces what will be, or rather it prepares our action upon what is going to be. Philosophy has a natural tendency to have truth look backward: for James, it looks ahead. More precisely, other doctrines make of truth something anterior to the clearly-determined act of the man who formulates it for the first time. He was the first to see it, we say, but it was waiting for him, just as America was waiting for Christopher Columbus. Something hid it from view and, so to speak, covered it up: he uncovered it. — Quite different is William James’s conception. He does not deny that reality is independent, at least to a great extent, of what we say or think of it; but the truth, which can be attached only to what we affirm about reality, is, for him, created by our affirmation. We invent the truth to utilize reality, as we create mechanical devices to utilize the forces of nature. It seems to me one could sum up all that is essential in the pragmatic conception of truth in a formula such as this: while for other doctrines a new truth is a discovery, for pragmatism it is an invention. It does not follow, of course, that the truth is arbitrary. The value of a mechanical invention lies solely in its practical usefulness. In the same way an affirmation, because it is true, should increase our mastery over things. It is no less the creation of a certain individual mind, and it was no more pre-existent to the effort of that mind than the phonograph, for example, existed before Edison. No doubt the inventor of the phonograph had to study the properties of sound, which is a reality. But his invention was superadded to that reality as a thing absolutely new, which might never have been produced had he not existed. Thus a truth, if it is to endure, should have its roots in realities; but these realities are only the ground in which that truth grows, and other flowers could just as well have grown there if the wind had brought other seeds. Truth, according to pragmatism, has come little by little into being, thanks to the individual contributions of a great number of inventors. If these inventors had not existed, if there had been others in their place, we should have had an entirely different body of truths. Reality would evidently have remained what it is, or approximately the same; but quite different would have been the paths we should have traced in reality, for our convenience in finding our way about in it. “