giants
This is probably a naive position to take, but considering the artistic & philosophical innovations of previous generations in the 20th century (I'm thinking early-mid century, maybe up through the sixties, a few tendrils of innovation seeping into the seventies and even very early eighties), it's hard to see the present generations as doing anything but filling in the details. Jackson Mac Low builds a house from the ground up and we spend our days arguing over what style of fixtures to put in the guest bathroom . . . or maybe I'm just speaking for myself. Still, I don't think I'm the only one who sometimes has the uneasy feeling of having been born into a less innovative age than the one immediately preceding. Is it because artists like Jackson Mac Low pushed something right up to the edge of an absolute horizon? Is it that social conditions and market dynamics no longer permit such sweeping, original gestures? Or are we somehow, as a whole, intrinsically less creative?
3 Comments:
I think everyone feels that way, in all ages. We always have to keep in mind that we KNOW of the past's innovations but don't a have a very good vantage on our own. So it's going on somewhere, we're just not sure it's innovative (even if we're touching it). So that's one line to take, anyway, in the hopes that it gives a little hope (if only to remind us that past talents were pretty despairing themselves, for all the same reasons.)
The other point goes to something I wanted to say about your post about support, which I thought was good to read. Consider the question of what sort of support you need, say, to assimilate the work of Kant and Heidegger in order, say, to "digest" Deleuze. Suppose you wanted to be philosophically "up to date" in some sense and go on to "innovate" beyond this. What sort of environment, social and material, would you need? And do any of us still hold hopes that a university philosophy department can do the trick? (There is no doubt a parallel argument for poetry.)
I have a feeling that in 300 years it will be almost impossible to make sense of our "high energy" physics because the equipment needed to work with matter at that level will not exist. (And I'm not sure if that's because we'll stop being interested in that sort of thing and just pack up the machinery, or because we'll "beyond" it with bigger and better machinery.) I feel about Kant like that most of the time. I find most discussions about his work (including what I can come up with) operate at a level of complexity far beneath what we find in his Critiques (when we go back and read them). But then maybe, just maybe, we've found a way to ignore the parts that didn't work anyway, and his elaborate conceptual apparatus is actually quite useless. I don't know.
Long comment. Point is: we need all the support we can get, because unlike the past masters (who have to talk only with all the other past masters) we have to pay our bills. So did they (before their mastery was past).
Many thanks for the comment, Thomas. I suspect you're right - every generation feels this way.
Good question about support, and I'll give it some thought. My rather glib first reaction is to say that the volume and complexity of such an endeavor -- that is, if one is to do it thoroughly, carefully, not cutting any corners whatsoever -- appears to preclude any possibility of doing it while attempting to make a living at the same time; maybe the thing to do is decide upon a specific problem or topic and work through it slowly, piecemeal, over a period of many years.
Your comment also raises the question of what it means to "advance" when one hasn't fully "digest" what precedes one . . . yet a part of me feels -- probably not the part of me that wrote the immediately preceding paragraph -- that leaving undigested morsels behind is the only way advancements ever really occur. It seems one could devote several lifetimes to teasing out every last implication of just about any philosophical system, mapping its concepts onto the contents of the present day . . . at what point do we announce that we've had enough, that we must move on to something new in order to live? And is it just our immaturity that makes this announcement or is there a kind of world-historical neccessity to it (e.g., the world inevitably unfolds novel content which must be addressed in new ways) . . . ?
I think your piecemeal approach is exactly right. (Blogging, I've found, is an excellent way of getting a sense of what this might involve.) And also the idea of going at problems and topics, instead of authors. There's no way of making sense of getting "through" Heidegger (not in my experience). But there are plenty of people who have a sense of progress. A feeling that they ought to be beyond his "existentialism" or "early phenomenology" or whatever.
It does, after all, make sense to talk about a supportive environment for developing conceptual (or emotional) precision. In fact, we can make some very specific proposals for that kind of environment. It is less clear what support you'd need to "appreciate Kant" . . . because it is unclear what that even means, I guess.
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