Elephant Talk

From a comment by Infinite Jester on the Immanent Frame blog:

"...philosophers ought to talk more like people in the street rather than people in labs."


Indeed.

The World Question Center and Jazz

An intriguing reply to the World Question Center question of the year, which is "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"


Editor, The Feuilleton (Arts and Essays), of the German Daily Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich

Free Jazz

It's always worth to take a few cues from mid-20th-century avant-garde. So when it comes to improving your cognitive toolkit Free Jazz is perfect. It is a highly evolved new take on an art that has (at least in the West) been framed by a strict set of twelve notes played in accurate factions of bars. It is also the pinnacle of a genre that had begun with the Blues just a half century before Ornette Coleman assembled his infamous double quartet in the A&R Studio in New York City one December day in 1960. In science terms that would mean an evolutionary leap from elementary school math to game theory and fuzzy logic in a mere fifty years.

If you really want to appreciate the mental prowess of Free Jazz players and composers you should start just one step behind. A half a year before Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz session let loose the improvisational genius of eight of the best musicians of their times, John Coltrane recorded what is still considered the most sophisticated Jazz solo ever — his tour de force through the rapid chord progressions of his composition "Giant Steps".

The film student Daniel Cohen has recently animated the notation for Coltrane's solo in a YouTube video. You don't have to be able to read music to grasp the intellectual firepower of Coltrane. After the deceivingly simple main theme the notes start to race up and down the five lines of the stave in dizzying speeds and patterns. If you also take into consideration that Coltrane used to record unrehearsed music to keep it fresh, you know that he was endowed with a cognitive toolkit way beyond normal.

Now take these almost 4:43 minutes, multiply Coltrane's firepower by eight, stretch it into 37 minutes and deduct all traditional musical structures like chord progressions or time. The session that gave the genre it's name in the first place foreshadowed not just the radical freedom the album's title implied. It was a precursor to a form of communication that has left linear conventions and entered the realm of multiple parallel interactions.

It is admittedly still hard to listen to the album "Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet". It is equally taxing to listen to recordings of Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton or Gunter Hampel. It has always been easier to understand the communication processes of this music in a live setting. One thing is a given — it is never anarchy, never was meant to be.

If you're able to play music and you manage to get yourself invited to a Free Jazz session, there is an incredible moment, when all musicians find what is considered "The Pulse". It is a collective climax of creativity and communication that can leap to the audience and create an electrifying experience. It's hard to describe, but might be comparable to the moment when a surfer finds the point when the catalyst of a surfboard bring together the motor skills of his body and the forces of the swell of an ocean start in these few seconds of synergy on top of a wave. It is a fusion of musical elements though that defies common musical theory.

Of course there is a lot of Free Jazz that merely confirms prejudice. Or as the vibraphonist and composer Gunter Hampel phrased it: "At one point it was just about being the loudest on stage." But all the musicians mentioned above have found new forms and structures, Ornette Coleman's music theory called Harmolodics being just one of them. In the perceived cacophony of their music there is a multilayered clarity to discover that can serve as a model for a cognitive toolkit for the 21st century. The ability to find cognitive, intellectual and communication skills that work in parallel contexts rather than linear forms will be crucial. Just as Free Jazz abandoned harmonic structures to find new forms in polyrhythmic settings, one might just have to enable himself to work beyond proven cognitive patterns.

Vladimir Jankelevitch on Musical Charm

From Jankelevitch's Music and the Ineffable:

"...anyone who seeks music somewhere will never find it: our curiosity will end up disappointed if we aspire to some revelation of who-knows-what anatomy of musical discourse. But if we agree, in the end, that we are dealing with a mystery and not some material secret, with a Charm and not a thing; if we understand that this Charm is wholly dependent on human intention, on the moment in time, the spontaneous lurch of our hearts; if we realize that such a Charm is fragile and not always obvious to our minds and is allied to so many imponderable factors; that it depends first and foremost on our own honesty; the and only then will we know how to consent to this, the Charm created by music, which is the only, true state of Grace."

Brian Eno on Empathy, Art, and Chaos

From Brian Eno's A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary:

"So how do we develop this ability to experience and speculate about other ways of thinking and feeling about the world? I think we do it by continually immersing ourselves in cultural experiences that rehearse us. This is obvious in films and novels- where we quite explicitly enter an imagined world and then watch characters in imaginary quandaries. In doing so we develop a lot of surrogate experience about what it is like to be someone else, somewhere else, with different assumptions."

On Morse Peckham's Man's Rage for Chaos

"....this is what art is for: to confront us with mysteries, things we don't properly understand, we know we don't understand, but we nonetheless find ourselves excited and stimulated by. This linkage of uncertainty with pleasure is the key to his theory- a way of training ourselves to enjoy exploring, to act without complete information, to improvise."

Some Nuggets from Whitehead

From Alfred North Whitehead's Modes of Thought (1956):

On Perfection and Plato

"... 'perfection' is a notion which haunts human imagination. It cannot be ignored. But its naive attachment to the realm of forms is entirely without justification. How about the form of mud, and the forms of evil, and other forms of imperfection? In the house of forms, there are many mansions."
                                                             
                                                                On the Positivist Taint

"... the observation of insects on flowers dimly suggests some congruity between the nature of insects and flowers, and thus leads to a wealth of observation from which whole branches of science have developed. But a consistent positivist should be content with the observed facts, namely insects visiting flowers. It is a fact of charming simplicity. There is nothing further to be said on the matter, according to the doctrine of a positivist. At present the scientific world is suffering from a bad attack of muddle-headed positivism, which arbitrarily applies its doctrine and arbitrarily escapes from it. The whole doctrine of life in nature has suffered from this positivist taint. We are told that there is the routine described in physical and chemical formulae, and that in the process of nature there is nothing else."

Wendell Berry

From Wendell Berry's wonderful new book on poet William Carlos Williams:

"...the metaphor of the machine has grown upon us until it has ceased to be a metaphor and has become an equation or an identity, so that organisms, including our minds and the world itself, are now conventionally spoken of as machines, and this has helped to make us cold-hearted and destructive."

"When you are mindful of all that is involved in the making of a poem, schools of criticism and schools of composition, whatever their uses, will look small in the presence of poetry itself and of the good poems you know. The only equipment at all equal to those presences is the human mind, complete: imagination, intelligence, reason, instincts, senses, shared knowledge and loyalties, and the personal furniture of experience, memory, history, and culture. And insofar as that mind is conscious, it will be conscious of mysteries, of being baffled."

"As Williams saw, as anybody who looks can now see, it is precisely in their granting of priority to ideas over things and over the world that the universities have failed us, for that priority is established and maintained by the industrial technology that oppresses and exploits the material world and all its bodies."

Heidegger on Encountering the Thought of Another

From Martin Heidegger's What is Called Thinking? (1954):

"One thing is necessary, though, for a face-to-face converse with the thinkers: clarity about the manner in which we encounter them. Basically, there are only two possibilities: either to go to their encounter, or to go counter to them. If we want to go to the encounter of a thinker's thought, we must magnify still further what is great in him. Then we will enter into what is unthought in his thought. If we wish only to go counter to a thinker's thought, this wish must have minimized beforehand what is great in him. We then shift his thought into the commonplaces of our know-it-all presumption. It makes no difference if we assert in passing that Kant was nonetheless a very significant thinker. Such praises from below are always an insult."

Or as Bob Dylan put it, "please don't underestimate me, and I won't underestimate you."

Ivan Illich on Irrational Consistencies

From Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (1971):

"Irrational consistency mesmerizes accomplices who are engaged in mutually expedient and disciplined exploitation. It is the logic generated by bureaucratic behavior. And it becomes the logic of a society which demands that the managers of its educational institutions be held publicly accountable for the behavioral modification they produce in their clients."

Kieslowski on America

From director Krzysztof Kieslowski's Kieslowski on Kieslowski. A cartesian meditation on American cities and highways:

"I'm afraid of America. Whenever I'm in New York I always have the feeling it's going to cave in and all I can think about is how to avoid being there when that happens. The same goes for other places in America. You don't get all those people and all that noise in the streets of California as you do in New York but, in turn, there's a huge number of cars going to and fro and I always have serious doubts as to whether there are any Americans inside. You know, who's inside? I've always got the impression that those cars drive themselves... ."

Cage on Life Without Art

From David Revill's revelatory Cage biography, The Roaring Silence:

"I can imagine a world without art, and it would not be a bad place. If there were a part of life dark enough to keep out of it a light from art, I would want to be in that darkness, fumbling around if necessary, but alive."

John Cage

Cyberspace Cowboys

From Democracy Inc.--Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism: "Outer space was soon overshadowed by the discovery of "cyberspace," the domain where [Jackson] Turner's fromtier thesis took on new meaning as its champions proclaimed that democracy had been reinvented. A band of young pioneers, personified in Bill Gates, explored and exploited a hitherto unknown world where physical power was irrelevant. The new frontiersmen were enterprising in the extreme, hypercompetitive, ruthless in their methods ("take no prisoners"), and able to create staggering amounts of wealth in a relatively brief time. Above all they invented forms of technology that appeared to have the potential for endless innovation: Turner's utopia, a frontier land that, like the universe, appeared to have no borders. Predictably, the introduction of the Internet was hailed as the perfect expression of democracy: that everyone could enter the Web and voice whatever happened to be on his or her mind=democracy.

Thomas Merton on Poetry

Thomas Merton invokes "the solidarity of poets" as a defense of the innocence of wonder and of art. From Merton's Raids on the Unspeakable.

"The Solidarity of poets is not planned and welded together with tactical convictions or matters of policy, since these are affairs of prejudice, cunning, and design. Whatever his failures, the poet is not a cunning man. His art depends on an ingrained innocence which he would lose in business, in politics, or in too organized a form of academic life. The hope that rests on calculation has lost its innocence. We are banding together to defend our innocence."

Ionesco via Merton

"In all the cities of the world, it is the same... The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots."

Eugene Ionesco, as quoted in Thomas Merton's Raids on the Unspeakable

Jacques Ellul on Information

A prescient passage from Jacques Ellul's Propaganda (1965)

A surfeit of data, far from permitting people to make judgments and form opinions, prevents them from doing so and actually paralyzes them. They are caught in a web of facts and must remain at the level of the facts they have been given. They cannot even make a choice or a judgment in other areas or on other subjects. Thus the mechanisms of modern information induce a sort of hypnosis in the individual, who cannot get out of the field laid out for him by the information. His opinion will ultimately be formed solely on the basis of the facts transmitted to him, and not on the basis of his choice and his personal experience. The more techniques of distributing information develop, the more the individual is shaped by such information. It is not true that he can choose freely with regard to what is presented to him as the truth. And because rational propaganda thus creates an irrational situation, it remains, above all, propaganda-- that is, an inner control over the individual by a social force, which means that it deprives him of himself.

On Thinking

From Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind,

"If thinking is an activity that is its own end and if the only adequate metaphor for it, drawn from our ordinary experience, is the sensation of being alive, then it follows that all questions concerning the aim or purpose of thinking are as unanswerable as questions about the aim or purpose of life".

George Steiner

I have been reading George Steiner's In Bluebeard's Castle (1971). Thanks are due to Morris Berman, who recommended Steiner on his excellent blog, Dark Ages America. Here are some passages from the book that seem to foreshadow current anxieties about the internet and literacy:

"We 'undergo' much of reality, sharply filtered and pre-sensed, through the instant diagnostic sociology of the mass media. No previous society has mirrored itself with such profuse fascination. At present, models and mythologies of fact, quite often astute and seemingly comprehensive, are offered at bewildering short intervals."

"Analogue and digital computerization are transforming the relations of density, of authority, between the human intellect and available knowledge, between personal choice and projected possibility. Connected to telephone lines or to more sophisticated arteries of transmission, multipurpose computers will become a routine presence in all offices and most homes. It is probable that this electronic cortex will simultaneously reduce the singularity of the individual and immensely enlarge his referential and operational scope."

"Our ethics, our central habits of consciousness, the immediate and environmental membrane we inhabit, our relations to age and to remembrance, to the children whose gender we may select and whose heredity we may program, are being transformed. As in the twilit times of Ovid's fables of mutant being, we are in metamorphosis. To be ignorant of these scientific and technological phenomena, to be indifferent to their effects on our mental and physical experience, is to opt out of reason." A view of post-classic civilization must, increasingly, imply a vision of the sciences, of the language-worlds of mathematical and symbolic notation. Theirs is the commanding energy: in material fact, in the "forward dreams" that define us. Today, our dialectics are binary."