To Gary: Does mathematics seem limited in some way here?
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A collection of scanned scrap book images relating to pop culture, ideology, metaphysics, and philosophy.
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Hello Jordaan, It is now Saturday and I just now found this blog. I am pondering your question. I intend to have something smart and, perhaps unfortunately, smartalic to reply soon. The latter is from that dialectical imp that took up residence in me a long time ago. Gary
ReplyDeletePop art can be seen as either comic or ironic. In our culture it is probably smart to see it as comic if you want to join the conversation. In the comic attitude, one knocks down the high-flying. It shows that the valued things of society are to be ridiculed. It destroys the pretentious and the politically established. It is the way down. Pop art can be seen as cutting up the supposedly perfectly-formed. It is decadence thrown around. It is an overcoming of oppressive things. The high are brought low. Bourgeois values are scrapped.
ReplyDeleteThe dialectically impish way of seeing it, the way I maliciously prefer, is the ironic, a raising up of the ordinary to the stylized, metaphysical heights. It is the way of the angels. The images of pop art look so very much like medieval icons. They are flat and cut. Words are laid out in strips, much as they were put on ribbons coming out of the mouths of the saints. They have unreal perfection. They are displays of passion and mutilated limb. They are over-colorful. And everything is writ large making us still. The low is nervously grabbed and laid up arrested and high.
Now for mathematics and its limits in all that. If mathematics is the totally perspicuous, the ever translucent, the thoughts of disembodied angels, so Cartesian, then, yes, pop art does share in that other-worldliness – in its ironic,iconic form. As comedy, let us just say that mathematics itself is brought low, a childish mistake, when we realize that calculus, the tool of high theory, is built on a hidden act of dividing by zero. We have been deceived. As the dy in the derivative dx/dy, gets smaller and smaller until it reaches the infinitesimal, it is separated from zero by … do you believe in the infinitely small or is that the same as zero? Have we been hood-winked by the calculus as Bishop Berkeley said (mere traces of departed wraiths), or have we learned to handle the Infinite. Is God in our calculating fingers? Is that comic or ironic? Are we on the way of the angels or of Des Carte's evil demon? Pop art is pure mathematics. So?
Heidegger says: "a mood reveals "how one is and will be". In this "how one is" being-in-a-mood brings being into its "there"." Which means that mathematics is a moody thing. You have to be in the mood - like sex. Maybe mathematics IS sex. Or ... I'm lost.
Dear Gary,
ReplyDeleteThat was an entertaining comment that I was not prepared for. There was a lot in there and your background and depth of knowledge are clearly evident in your writing, even what you dismissively admit to be a misdirection.
My intention in posing this question, apart from drawing attention away from the absence of a reply to your question in "Streams of Conscious Reflection" which I am still laboring on, was to provide an illustration of how narrow instrumental reason is (or what you call mathematics).
In asking where “do ideas go to die?”, especially those of large dimensions, it seems that I've struck up against the enclosure of practical thought. Here there is no concept of the unconceived, for it is deemed non-existent. What is stupid is simply the absence of the right content. And yet do we consider the way that ideas are finite? They do seem to outlive their original authors but what of the repetition of those ideas in the preservation of historical records? Although the idea now takes on an objective form, does this not still require the interpretation of a being who in reflection resurrects the past in the present?
My scrap book art is a negational strategy but it might also fit your description of pop art as comic. I was somewhat unclear about what you meant by ironic pop art - do you mean to say that it is art that, in contradicting what is definitive, points to everything that it is not? Surely if that is the case then what is most certainly "not" is infinitude in a world that is exclusively pragmatic.
I apologize about the tartness of my recent responses. Once my final assignment is complete I intend soar in the realm of ideas again.
Jordaan
Dear Jordaan, thank you for writing even though this is, I know, a busy time in school. By all means, let your studies come first. There will be plenty of time for a response later. One other point before I get to your ideas, when you write for your professors you must polish and excessively correct your words, but you shouldn't do that for me. I am more interested in listening to the windy spirit of your thinking blow through your words. You seem to me to have a real philosophical turn of mind. Your problem is that you are only 26. Philosophy has always been written by people much older. And, though you may have had an insight early in life, it takes a long time to find a style of writing it down. I rightly threw away everything until I was 35 when I, in an act of cutting desperation, found my own way with words. A way that most people find to be nothing but mystification. Anyway, good writing, good philosophy, especially among the best is always a mess. Only middling scholars are tidy and well annotated. (Yes, they are a necessary evil and I do read them.) Remember that the Summers in the Hesperides, where the golden apples grow, are long. Your tartness is wild and delightful. It invites thought.
ReplyDeleteGustav Bergmann, a writer I prize, wrote as a motto to one of his books: Oh, how I wish I could keep up with the leaders of modern thought as they pass by going into oblivion.
Oblivion isn't necessarily a bad thing. I use it to name the orgasmic end to a line of difficult thought. Like all acts of love, the gentle struggle always comes again. No thought is lost. The philosopher moves on, ever himself. The first time, the first love, is here again.
Ideas disappear and lie dormant for a long time and then comes a being who, interpreting, resurrects the past in the present. The unconceived is conceived again. The merely "pragmatic", the practical, those lost in the everydayness of life will not understand. From out of the nowhere of unthought, what was is. It is that Presencing from out of the hidden that Heidegger stared at for so long. It is that "coming-to-be", that act of Being, that thing that invades the mind of the young philosopher that he might be what once was.
As for the infinite that perplexes us, Foucault said that the belief in the finitude of man is the defining character of modern thought. Mathematics as the science of the Infinite has always intrigued me. I have delved far into it and I know the madness that threatens all those who do. I insist, Man is not finite. We deal in the infinite right handily. We see with ease what doesn't "exist". It exists. I am not "modern" (or even post-modern).
I am sending you a link of something I daringly call my "autobiography". You should probably copy it and make it a .doc form and then use that "Reading Layout" in the lower left hand corner. There you will see that my life is very different from yours and you will not write and think as I, nonetheless, I will read you assiduously. Even if I am only looking for good ideas to jolt my own. Or to feel the energy of a young mind. Eventually I will come to "see" you better.
http://theontologicalboy.com/Autobiography.htm
Because of the way I write it may surprise you that I find my home in Anglo-American Logical Analysis. I love those severe, strict proofs of what exists (not what we know). That is my passion. If you want a hard argument about ontology (which asks the question of what exists), I'm your man. If you want and you promise not to be bored I will send you an outline of my philosophical beliefs. Extreme Realism. Definitely not that silly philosophy called materialism.