Comment by aphextron
5 years ago
I can't help but think that there was a certain special something that existed among that generation of late modern intellectuals immediately preceding and proceeding from the first world war. There's an intensity, a level of discipline and seriousness with which they engaged in their work that seems unique in human history. The twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, the Cubism of Picasso, Einstein's field theories, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. All strove to break new ground and push the state of the art beyond what was comprehensible at the time with an air of complete seriousness that seems so lacking today. They treated all of their endeavors, even the creative, with the rigor of a hard science and sought to construct theoretical frameworks around what had always been ephemeral, intangible notions.
One theory is something like this: early modernism was so fruitful because those participating in it were still trained in classical methods. They mastered the rules before breaking them.
Picasso is a good example. He broke the rules of art in creative ways because he had such a firm understanding of artistic methods. Nietzsche, with his deep grounding in Ancient Greek and Latin philology, is another modern innovator.
Today, however, we’ve largely adopted the conclusions of the innovators. Rather than try and recreate what led to these breakthroughs in the first place. Discipline and training are mostly irrelevant in a world that is more concerned with novelty and shock value.
Also, perhaps the fruits that can be masterly picked by single individuals have been picked already.
Yeah, this. And this IMHO is one of the reasons science is in crisis today, because in many ways it is still being conducted according to the late-19th- and early-20th-century models. Scientists are not generally rewarded for doing good science (e.g. replicating previous results or engaging in pedagogy), but rather for making Big Discoveries, because that’s what all the great scientists did before. Trouble is that as time goes by there are fewer and fewer Big Discoveries to be made, and making them gets more and more expensive, while at the same time there are more and more people graduating with STEM Ph.D’s. So you have more and more people chasing fewer and fewer opportunities for career rewards. Another perverse consequence of this dynamic is the pressure to publish any old crap because Big Discoveries are presented in papers and so it is assumed that papers will lead to Big Discoveries despite the obvious logical fallacy. Often it becomes a full-fledged cargo cult [1]. (I once made a very successful career by publishing a lot of crap, so I’m in a position to know.)
Getting this right is a Really Hard Problem because there are entrenched interests for whom this poses an existential threat. There is a lot of power that comes from being an arbiter of truth in a society.
(I think one of the great unsung heroes of humanity is Jimmy Wales. He could have cashed in bigly on Wikipedia, but he chose not to, and as a result Wikipedia is one of the greatest repositories of objective knowledge ever assembled. And it’s free. It’s a freakin’ miracle. Arxiv is also big step in the right direction IMHO.)
[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-10-real-fake-hoodwinks-journals.h...
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I think that argument, which I hear a lot, is a rather poor excuse. Currently it may seem like we're so far in our development, but in the future people will probably look back at our time and make the same argument. I think one big problem is 'hindsight is always 20/20', that is to say, great solutions may seem very simple and almost obvious in hindsight, while we ignore the fact that making the leap to get there was very hard at the time.
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I mostly agree with you, but I'm not sure Picasso would have.
IIRC he expressed the opinion that his mastery of traditional painting was a burden and had to be unlearned before he could make his best work.
I think you're referring to this quote:
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
...or this one:
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
But he also did this:
It always reminds me of the story about the woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”
“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.
“No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”
Ultimately, Picasso made a lot of witty, silly comments. I'm not sure I'd read much into them. Here's one of my favorites, although I can't seem to find an actual source:
Art is the currency of the infinite. I’m rich, I should know.
Ultimately, though, I'm not sure it's quite relevant to what I mean. Today, artists are still "taught" a lot of theory (too much, probably) and the educational goal isn't usually to be childlike.
Wittgenstein's take:
>I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein. A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years.
Here's another take by Wittgenstein from the preface of the Philosophical Remarks:
"This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery -- in its variety; the second at its centre -- in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same."
I can't help but feel that this description of the "vast stream" captures the current trend in most of software development and academia quite well...
There is a beautiful give-and-take between the experience of variety (either consuming or producing) and the grasping of essence. They do not exist independently of each other, nor is one better inherently better than the other. They must be kept in balance, and yet the world seems to favor variety over understanding at every turn.
Consider yourself lucky to be in the minority of those who appreciate what is truly rare and precious about humans, who are in turn a rare and precious part of life, which is in turn a rare and precious part of the universe.
> at its centre -- in its essence
This desire is precisely what leads Faust to become so frustrated with the limits of human knowledge that he makes an ill-advised bet with (more or less) the Devil, trading an option on his immortal soul for the keys to that essence.
In Goethe's Faust anyway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe%27s_Faust
>with an air of complete seriousness that seems so lacking today.
Jaded cynicism, crass commercialism, and the dissapearance of a cultured class that is above mass market culture, they way high/upper middle class, academics, doctors, etc., one were.
Believe it or not, for example, once there was a class of people, more so in Europe, that not only went to the Opera, but also actually liked it, followed it, could get the references, and knew its history and the history of classical/romantic/etc music, the way their today's equivalent will know the pop stars of the day.
Given the above, it's easy that soem of them would take e.g. the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg or Stravinsky's innovations seriously, even if only to be offended by them - and some of, course, to be inspired.
Today's equivalent would at best read something like the New Yorker and the hacks featured in NYT best-selling books of the day, but will seldom have the wide culture that once was quite widespread across parts of the middle and upper middle classes.
People also seem more desperate to sell out quick for a quick buck - even artists today just want to play the game, go ahead with the galleries and agents, and give out much more easily than an early 20th century artist. This diminishes the period between "serious work" and "selling out", often to zero (whereas for Picasso it took decades, and for Van Gogh, it never happened).
Believe it or not, not all of those people were middle class. The UK and the US both had programs which made classical music accessible to the working classes, and they had a significant cultural impact.
In the UK the post-war BBC carried on with (what is called) the Reithian tradition (after Lord Reith) until marketisation started to overwhelm everything in the 80s.
This isn't to say that classical music is somehow always utterly superior to pop. It was about giving people experiences they wouldn't have had otherwise, and to give them more choices about what to listen to and maybe enjoy.
The UK also had an art school track for bright creative working class kids, some of whom went on to make a living in music and/or fashion. Marketisation also destroyed that, because of course student debt destroys your choices and limits your options so you literally can't afford to take risks.
>This isn't to say that classical music is somehow always utterly superior to pop.
Today it's almost forbidden culturally to even suggest that it coule even be (superior).
The thing is, to say such a thing, you need some kind of shared cultural basis (of what's superior and what's not), one that even those who don't "like X" (the way we might like peanut butter or not), nonetheless agree on (and whether they care or not, feel like it's somewhat their loss for not liking it).
Those times, had that (shared cultural agreement).
In more modern times, after the 60s especially, and in the US doubly so, culture is whatever one makes it, the mass consumer is king (because everybody wants his/hers money, so they treat them as such), and personal taste is the be all end all, end of discussion.
Whereas in another era, to say Bieber or Drake are inferior to Bach, for example, would be so self-evident and accepted by all (for the Bieber's and Drake's of their era), as to not even be worth saying.
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BBN, Bolt, Beranek Newman the original ARPANET contractors started out in computational acoustics, tasked to build for the American people concert halls to rival those of Europe, witnessed and lamented simultaneously for the first time in the destruction of war. Chicago Philharmonic and many other orchestras gained concert halls absolutely unrivalled for the next fifty years and equalled only occasionally today. My late cofounder was much better known for managing a important 20th century British classical composer whose preference for the aforementioned hall (and incumbent conductor) was almost as much of a thorn in the side of European musical nobility as receiving his Order of Merit* from HM the Queen in his Nike sneakers. Deutsche Grammafon and the listening public concurred voting with their wallets, driving classical music sales of records beyond all expectations, thanks to the work of BBN and the American people who gave such incredible support for post war music when Europe was stumbling from the beginning of one recovery to the next.
the rest of original comment in my profile simply too long
I've been going deeper into the mid-19th century to pre-WWI era. I keep thinking that the war eras of the 20th century and industrial consumerism lost the diversity of ideas and art that preceded it.
I've been diving into (or revisiting) Darwin, Thoreau, Ruskin, Tolstoi, to name a few. It was an incredibly rich era that could help us better navigate this one.
I get a sense that Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury, had a better connection to it and could articulate warnings of where the mid-20th century might end up if it progresses on its path. I don't think we've ever been closer to realizing their warnings.
Could be a coincidence, but that was just before Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (1927) and Godel's incompleteness theorem (1931) dashed the dream of perfect knowledge.
Wittgenstein famously did not believe in Gödel's incompleteness theorem, as well as thinking Cantor's diagonalisation argument was bunk.
This is unfortunately a widespread interpretation of Wittgenstien's philosophy of mathematics, but it is not a very charitable reading.
Wittgenstein emphasised on numerous occasions (for example directly at the beginning of his lectures on the foundations of mathematics in 1939) that his interest in these proofs was _philosophical_ and that he never intended to criticise any of them _on mathematical grounds_. He explicitly said that his aim was not to interfere with mathematicians, but to investigate the _philosophical conclusions_ drawn by these mathematicians from their proofs.
What exactly Wittgenstein found problematic is hard to describe in a short comment, because much of it depends on Wittgenstein's view of philosophy as a whole, but one example is the platonist bent of Gödel's theorem and his conviction that there are some mathematical "facts" that can never be discovered by mathematical reason. Wittgenstein wants to ask what it means to say that something is "intuitively true", but not provable in any consistent system, but he does not want to object to Gödel's results, merely its "standing".
In Cantor's case Wittgenstein is interested in the concept of the transfinite and of infinities "bigger" than other infinities. He does not object to Cantor's proof at all, but regards the philosophical conclusions drawn from it with suspicion.
(One good example of a philosophical abuse of Gödel's theorem is the argument that computers will never be able to think like humans, because Gödel's theorem demonstrates a limit to what any computer can do as a formal system, but we humans can nevertheless grasp the unprovable statements as intuitively true. This is basically the argument by J. R. Lucas. This is the kind of philosophical nonsense that Wittgenstein wanted to attack and his position on these matters is coincidentally quite similar to Turing's position, who was a student of Wittgenstein's lectures on the foundations of mathematics.)
It certainly did not help that the so-called Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics are in some parts highly selective constructions by the editors of his posthumous writings.
tl;dr: it's complicated. Wittgenstein never objected to the mathematical results by Gödel and Cantor, but he thought that their results were often blown out of proportion by shoddy philosophical conclusions made on the basis of these perfectly fine mathematical arguments.
In general, Wittgenstein wasn't exactly a mathematician...
Can you say more of either of these? Especially the diagonalization argument which seems difficult to, er, argue with.
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Unless he published a formal demonstration of Gödel's 'error', Wittengenstein's belief is of mere biographical interest. History is littered with eminent people who had all sorts of erroneous beliefs about theories and ideas that we now see as having withstood the test of time.
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Also world events. WWI, The Great Depression, WWII, the Holocaust, the Atomic Bomb, and then the following Cold War where everyone lived in fear of nuclear annihilation dashed the dream the human intellect would inevitably lead to a utopia.
Maybe. On the other hand, that period saw incredible technological and societal progress. Thiel called it the period of "definite [technological] optimism." https://archive.org/details/ZeroToOneByPeterThiel/page/n47
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I agree with this impression. I often reflect on our times and wonder why there seems to be such a stark difference. Why do we lack such figures, pushing the boundaries in the same impressive way? Is it that not enough time has passed to fully realize the impact of the discoveries and works of our time, like there has been for the work of the early 1900's? Have the problems gotten harder that we are bumping up against a kind of soft boundary that's preventing the seemingly frequent revolutionary breakthroughs? Or is it a matter separate from the practice of science or art; a phenomenon of culture that is impacting the our capacity to discover? I think it's an interesting question to mull over.
Were the breakthroughs of history regarded as such during their formation, generally speaking? Maybe we will look back on this period as one rife with breakthroughs, but can’t make the historic judgment in real-time.
In the case of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, there certainly was a perception that something radical was being done.
Wittgenstein was one of the richest heirs in Europe so at the least he had all the time in the world, and lived in a time with such little competition that they gave him a PhD for writing a non-academic book none of them understood.
Looking at his biography, you feel like people were just hanging out with him because he was rich, since his personality was so bad and he clearly hated everyone he ever met.
To say that "people were just hanging out with him because he was rich" is a very biased and uncharitable reading of his biography. He gave away all his inheritance pretty early in his life and later often had to depend on friends such as Keynes, Russell and Moore to support applications for grants so that he could continue his research at Cambridge. Of course it's true that he came from an extremely privileged background and was never in danger of starving to death, but he could spend as much time on his philosophy as he did because he lived a modest life and was lucky enough to be supported by Russell when he first came to Cambridge.
Wittgenstein would have a very impressive DOTA MMR today.
Thanks. I have whiskey is my nasal cavity now.
I don't drink anymore. I was still able to vividly imagine the sensation of whisky out the nose.
The same is true in literature. Who today compares with Elliot, Yeats, Huxley, Orwell or the war poets? Maybe that seriousness of purpose is only possible when civilisation is in the balance.
One figure hanging over Western poetry for the second half of the 20th century is Celan, and it is hard to claim he is inferior to Eliot or Yeats. And if you like this kind of serious poetry, I really recommend J.H. Prynne (start with The White Stones), who is still active even.
The problem with poetry today is not a lack of talent, it is an inability for that talent to get mass attention when 1) poetry has been marginalized in today's media landscape, and 2) cultural scenes are now so fractured that people can't reach agreement on who is great and therefore keep the list of great poets going.
Part of it is that there's just so many more people. Many more voices. And a louder speaker for them to yell into. And so much less reason to focus on any particular individual.
You could spend your whole life studying philosophy/economics/political science, etc, write an amazing thesis, many volumes long, have all sorts of insights. And in terms of the world's massive population: how would you stand out? Would you be famous? Would people read you? Considered canon / important? Unlikely. You might get some notoriety, but that notoriety is more likely to spread to rather mediocre or showmen pop-philosophers like a Jordan Peterson (or their equivalent on the "left").
And in some ways knowledge of many kinds has been democratized, and information and materials more broadly available to all. So we're building a broader knowledge base and things are applied in that way, rather than by "great men"... which is likely the sign of a mature civilization and a more democratic ethos.
Christopher Nupen has made an outstanding documentary about Viennese Radicalism portrayed in particular through Wittgenstein and Shoenberg. I can't recommend it enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRI_ZSh6iF4
I think those same people are spending their mental energy on deciphering law, writing code, and trying to predict the stock market now.
Also James Joyce, and others like him.
Things all work around that time. Physics aside even maths ...