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the hubris of science and the drive of technology blots out the awe-inspiring business of conscious human existence, what he refers to as ‘the mystery of being’, and replaces it with a set of technical problems for which they purport to have solutions.
in such circumstances we would be too easily persuaded to accept the role thrust upon us, to become an object, no longer a subject, and would connive at our own annihilation.
the mechanical would be the model by which everything, including ourselves and the natural world, would be understood,
Resentment would lead to an emphasis on uniformity and equality, not as just one desirable to be balanced with others, but as the ultimate desirable, transcending all others.
Family relationships, or skilled roles within society, such as those of priests, teachers and doctors, which transcend what can be quantified or regulated, and in fact depend on a degree of altruism, would become the object of suspicion.
‘Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.’
happiness is best predicted by’ – let’s guess: if not wealth, then health? No, not that either, but – ‘the breadth and depth of one’s social connections’.
Happiness and fulfilment are by-products of other things, of a focus elsewhere – not the narrow focus on getting and using, but a broader empathic attention.
the right hemisphere, though it is not dependent on the left hemisphere in the same way that the left is on the right, nonetheless needs it in order to achieve its full potential,
The cycle must be completed
We have no longer a consistent coherent tradition in the culture, which might have passed on, in embodied and intuitive form, the fruits of experience of our forebears, what used to form the communal wisdom – perhaps even common sense, to which modernism and post-modernism are implacably opposed.
These points of weakness in the self-enclosed system are three rather important, indissolubly interlinked, aspects of human existence: the body, the soul and art
The left hemisphere’s world is ultimately narcissistic, in the sense that it sees the world ‘out there’ as no more than a reflection of itself:
Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience,
we do not see works of art, but see according to them, so that although they are vital for what we see, it is equally vital that they become transparent in the process,
Like most answers to boredom, pornography is itself characterised by the boredom it aims to dispel: both are a result of a certain way of looking at the world.
the left hemisphere, the hemisphere of ideal re-presentation rather than embodied fact, of rationalism rather than intuition, of explicitness rather than the implicit, of what is static rather than what is moving, of what is fixed rather than what is changing.
the importance of the transcendental; affirming, not so much religion, as a sense of the holy, in what is best thought of as a form of panentheism
When we decide not to worship divinity, we do not stop worshipping: we merely find something else less worthy to worship.
myths or metaphors are not dispensable luxuries, or ‘optional extras’, still less the means of obfuscation: they are fundamental and essential to the process. We are not given the option not to choose one, and the myth we choose is important: in the absence of anything better, we revert to the metaphor or myth of the machine.
Pathos, which in modernism is replaced by Angst, becomes in post-modernism just a joke. In its place there is a sort of ironic jocularity, or ‘playfulness’
Consider the teen an their responses to confronting reality.
Purely intellectualised, consciously derived art is congenial to the age, because it is easy, and therefore democratic. It can be made to happen on a whim, without the long experience of apprenticeship leading to skill, and without the necessity for intuition, both of which are in part gifts, and therefore unpredictable and undemocratic.
The art taught in school therefore is likely the former as there exist the democratic element in the adjuducated grading system; the parent asking why their child isn't masterful.
to accept that some people will always be exceptional is uncomfortable for us. Instead of seeing great art as an indication of what humanity can achieve, it comes to be seen as an expression of what another being, a potential competitor, has achieved. But a society is, or should be, an organic unity, not an assemblage of bits that strive with one another. It is as if every organ in the body wanted to be the head.
The problem, as Luther realized, lay not in the statues, the icons, and the rituals themselves, but in the way they were understood.
we are involved in doing away with incarnate works of art: metaphor and myth have been replaced by the symbolic, or worse, by a concept.
Symbols and concepts are abstractions pointing to the mythic story which presents the metaphor which communicates the wisdom.
The myth and metaphor can be explianed by the rationalism of the left hemisphere in such a way that enlightens; the essential ying & yang style interplay of the two modes of percieving and processing.
Symbols and concepts also point and can be explained in ways similar to myth and metaphor but they lose fidelity of 'meaning' to the degree with which they gain transferability (for lack of a better word).
For example the symbol of the fish is used by Christians. Does it hint that Christ was a fisher of men, and toward the story that metaphor is drawn from , or is it a reminder of the story of the loaves and fishes and the lessons drawn from that story/miracle? It's Increased transferability, due to its more abstracted nature, allows it to point to both whilst diluting its efficacy as a clear communicator of either.
was on the very concept of holiness, it is noteworthy that it did not need to attack holiness directly. It contented itself with attacking the shared acceptance in the culture of what was holy: shrines, icons, statues
the reformers didn’t even need to say ‘everything and everywhere is equally holy’
And if art can be anywhere or anything – literally a pile of garbage, perhaps – this aims to abolish the beautiful, without needing even to say ‘everything and everywhere is equally beautiful’.
Our relationship with the beautiful is different from our relationship with things we desire. Desire is unidirectional, purposive, ultimately acquisitive.
Our relationship with what is beautiful is different. It is more like longing, or love, a betweenness, a reverberative process between the beautiful and our selves, which has no ulterior purpose, no aim in view, and is non-acquisitive.
The very circularity of things as they really are, rather than as the left hemisphere conceives them, might be a reason for hope.
the sound of its master’s voice evokes to a dog an image of its master’s face, not because the voice ‘causes’ the face but because they are part of a whole experience.
Pavlov's bell became part of the experience of food.
Hence why training anything isnt as easy as the theory suggest and the best trainers are those who most effectively and concistently include the desired cure or 'trigger' into the experience such that the explicit seems implicit.
The same is evident in the reverse; exposure therapy where one is desensitised to triggers implicit to an experience. The implicitly threatening is made explicitly neutral (neutered - made impotent) by familiarity and abstraction. I.e. Boredom (or in other words the triggering object is paired with a low emotional state rather than a high emotional state).
the left hemisphere loves straight lines, not curves or circles. It can approximate a curve, however closely, only by the expedient of laying ever more tangents.
Leonard Shlain has pointed out that the only apparently straight line in the natural world is that of the horizon; but of course that too turns out to be a section of a curve.
Rectilinearity, as Ruskin had similarly demonstrated of clarity, is illusory, and can only be approximated, like clarity, by narrowing the breadth, and limiting the depth, of the perceptual field.
Circular motion accommodates, as rectilinearity does not, the coming together of opposites.
Everything is understood within its penumbra of significances, in its context – all that encircles it.
The learning cycle; from abstract to concrete, shows the transition from the left to right hemisphere as an understanding of the whole comes into focus. Our selection of key points of focus is the narrowing (the breadth and depth) of perception. But as we move into the third stage (production) the context returns as we create a whole piece of performative art.
the part, whose trajectory is linear, is taken up into the whole, whose path is in the round.
a circle: in my end is my beginning, and in my beginning is my end.
Ma fin est mon commencement, et mon commencement ma fin,
our relationship with the world leads us constantly back to what was already known, but never before by us understood, circling and searching our own origins.
Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth, who wrote of ‘an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’,
‘The spirit grows, [and] strength is restored, by wounding.’
AntiFragility
understanding the nature of the problem has to be the first step towards change.
‘the statues have become stone corpses’
they must make themselves open, even to ridicule, rather than shelter behind a self-protective carapace of ironic knowingness and cynicism.
Perhaps this is the foolishness of the man returning to the platonic cave? He bumps into and trips over obvious obstacle for his being temporarily blinded by the light of the sun in the grand world beynd the dank cave.
conscious reflection, the root of the problem, may itself provide the antidote to its own effects.
‘Where there is danger, that which will save us also grows’
Follow thrist and you will quench it, follow hunger and you wil sate it.
it forces us to look beyond its own system to another way of understanding.
Dissolving Dogma through a recognition of the limitations of systems built upon axioms. The system's proof relief on the processes of an alternate system, operating from a position beyond the axioms of the first system.
true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent.’
our vision must not stop there at the bounds of the ‘thing’ – but neither must it be replaced by something else.
