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