fuckphilosophy.com

In explaining ideas, why can’t people be more clear? Why can’t they just start from the key to the whole system of ideas? After which the whole rest of the picture would just fall into place. There are so many damn obstacles to learning, and that is one of the biggest. On very rare occasions I have come across a book/teacher who made clear sense to me. I don’t mean to speak negatively of people, since it might be my fault, but I get really frustrated trying to understand something that I later find out wasn’t so complicated, and that for some reason I found myself way-off and had basically to try to forget it all in order to continue.

I don’t know where to direct my frustration. Maybe I need to get some ritalin or something. It isn’t that all ideas are hard to understand, it is just some, and I usually blame myself, but I’m starting to think that it isn’t necessarily my fault. This really is misdirected anger, but nonetheless it is a fact that it isn’t always easy to absorb the material.

About all of this philosophy that I study I have this same idea: it isn’t so damned complicated. All of it could be explained clearly and simply. At the same time, it is often these simplifications of people’s ideas that end up confusing people. I don’t really know what the problem is. I remember learning about quantum theory and relativity and all these silly-ass illustrations of quantum/relativistic phenomena really confusing the hell out of me. Just tell me how the equations behave/ just tell me about the experimental data, and let me try to imagine it. So, that is a counter example to my gripes – sometimes these illustrations can just confuse you.

I have these fantasies of a system of information that would be made as efficient and clear as anyone might possibly want. Something possibly like wikipedia, but laid out like this: each topic/idea having a single sentence summary (maybe even keyword/term before that), then possibly a paragraph summary, then a short article, then a longer article, then possibly links to the primary texts. They could be rated too as to how clear they are, and monitored accordingly. I’m thinking particularly of philosophy here, but some kind of encyclopedia/dictionary/library. I’m thinking of clarity and efficiency of comprehension. Linked-up, pop-up bubble definitions, streamlined and intuitively laid out. Not all this fucking-around trying to figure it out. Even some esoteric occult wisdom, just give me the main idea and I’ll be good. I really think it is a problem that it is so damn hard to understand things sometimes; I don’t think they have to be.

I’ve been reading articles on the philosophy of art all day, and I just watched a great 3 part documentary on Picasso called ‘Picasso: The Full Story’ so I thought I might have something to say about art. So ‘art’ is indefinable. (Even though it would be impossible to prove this, our ‘best explanation’ is that it is indefinable in the way of necessary and sufficient conditions, so…great we’ve explained that problem away.) And after we have decided that ‘art’ is indefinable, then what purpose do definitions of ‘art’ serve? Analogous to Danto on ‘The End of Art’, once we have realized that ‘art’ is definable…now what do we do? What is the purpose of defining ‘art’ when “the engines of artistic production [read 'the engines of definition forging'] can only combine and recombine known forms” (789).  In other words, what function does a definition of ‘art’ serve after it has been discovered that ‘art’ is undefinable? It might seem like there is no function, but because I’m asking the question, I guess it is obvious that I don’t exactly agree. I’m glad the aestheticians decided to call off the search. The “cluster” and “family resemblance” definitions of Ziff (’The Task of Defining a Work of Art’) and Gaut (’”Art” as a Cluster Concept’) are really uninteresting frankly. I don’t mean to be vitriolic, but these wishy-washy catch-all definitions accounting for each and every possible attribution of “is a work of art” do nothing but make for the most uninteresting and diluted definitions that one could possibly hope for.

Again, in post-’art’-definability, what purpose does such a definition serve? An idiosyncratic or iconoclastic one, I want to say. And what good is an idiosyncratic definition, you might ask. Well, first of all, it is a hell of a lot more interesting then those watered-down ones. So, it isn’t an all-inclusive definition, and doesn’t aspire to be, but these particular definitions can still serve to isolate what some individual(s) take to be the most salient feature of ‘art’, or good art. So, possibly, post-definability allows for evaluative definitions of “good” art, which are, of course, idiosyncratic.

(I have more ideas; I’ll have to continue with this next time.)

I’ve got three examples of a similar phenomenon:

• Just now I was reading a hard copy of an article, printed, not stapled. I was also sitting in front of my computer. I was just finishing the page of the article I was reading, and I reached for the touch pad as if to scroll down. I knew that my intention was to turn the page, or I guess you might have to say that my intention was to bring up the next section somehow or another.

• I got this program that allows me to control my home computer remotely. I was sitting at school, and I think I had just used the program to do something on my home computer. Just then I had this notion to take some frozen chicken out of the freezer (while I was sitting in class). I can tell you that it wasn’t just an, “damn, I wish I had taken some chicken out of the freezer” idea, it was more like “now that I can control my computer remotely, oh, I should take some chicken out of the freezer too!” I remember the thought/intuition: it was a thought that followed right on the tails of the previous thought, and (possibly in reflection immediately after the thought) the thought seemed premature and unscreened or something.

• The last example was one time I was with a few people in an auditorium and I had a video camera that I had plugged in so that the image would be projected live on the screen. I was aiming it at one of the guys there, and he turned around and saw himself on the screen, and asked me something like: “can I see you in the screen?” I seem to remember him realizing that the question didn’t make any sense as he was asking it. I remember being really curious about the question, and was asking him describe what he meant, but I don’t think he understood why I was interested, and thought I was trying to make him look stupid or something.

What these examples all have in common is a kind of misapplication of a concept, or a kind of unrefined intuition.
In the first example, this isn’t just an example of doing something different with each hand and getting them confused; there had to have been some recognition/similarity between reading this article and reading articles on the internet, possibly at some level at which the two were indistinct, and it seems like this awareness must’ve been subconscious. Either that or, the intention to turn the page is/was at bottom not specific as to how to turn the page – a more general intention to bring about the next section of text. These are the possibilities I’d thought of.

The second example is similar to the first. To have the notion to take chicken out of the freezer remotely, after controlling my computer remotely, it would seem like I was carrying this new accessibility/channel to other objects pre-rationally, in a way. Of course I can’t take something out of the freezer just because I can turn on bittorrent while I’m at school. How could one confuse those? It seems like somehow that idea got out before those rational voices were able to intervene.

On the third example. I don’t remember if the following is what the guy in the third example told me, or if this was my theory of what he must’ve meant, but he had been looking at me while I was aiming the camera at him, and he turned to see himself live on the screen, and he had some strange mirror-like intuition, which would make sense since he was seeing himself on the screen. On one level, of course he could see me in the screen because he was looking at himself. Just now I had the thought that the intuition might’ve been something like looking through a periscope/telescope or tube or something. If I am looking through a telescope at someone, and they have access to what I’m seeing, it might make sense that they could look in the other side of the telescope and see my eye or something. That might have something to do with the intuition, but I was just thinking that it might be something a little different. When I look at you, and I see that you are looking at me, I assume you are perceiving an image of me. When he saw himself on the screen, he was in a way seeing what I was seeing. He saw himself, and was possibly asking whether the image of himself (from my perspective) was seeing me (in the same way that when I see you looking at me, I assume you are perceiving an image of me). Anyways, it seems to belie a kind of mirror/window intuition with respect to other perceivers, screens, cameras, etc.