Come vedono l'arte i primitivi?

Nel post precedente mi chiedevo se i Dogon o i Cro Magnon perceepivano l'aura delle loro bellissime opere.  A leggere Malinowski, che dà una rappresentazione vivissima della della Weltanschauung "primitiva", viene proprio da pensare di no, perché non sembra proprio, stanto al grande antropologo, che i trobriandesi abbiano la dimensione del sacro. il magico e il mitico esistono, ma sono fenomeni in fondo essenzialmente materiali. Del resto anche Aristotele intende l'arte come riproduzione di immagini, non come qualcosa di sacrale.

Nobel a Dylan

Baricco, quando dice che Dylan non è letteratura non vuol dire che Dylan non sia un grande artista, dice che la canzone non rientra nella letteratura, esattamente come il cinema, che pure molto ha a che fare con il romanzo (il cinema è essenzialmente romanzo per immagini, anche se non sempre, Kubrick e Godard sono forse più pittura che romanzo).

Ora il problema sarebbe veramente solo di classificazione, se non fosse per un problema più profondo. Sentivo un intelligente commentatore che a proposito di questo Nobel citava Walter Benjamin. Il problema è proprio l'arte nell'epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica: quando irrompe la tecnica non puoi più fare arte come si faceva dal 500 all'800. In pittura il problema si pone con l'invenzione della fotografia e ci sono voluti un centinaio d'anni per risolverlo (se si p risolto). Nel momento in cui si possono fare le fotografie, l'arte non può essere più una fotografia (l'aristotelica imitazione della natura), e Picasso e Kandinsly e un po' dopo Duchamp prendono il problema di petto rinunciando alla mimesi per mantenere quello che oserei chiamare lo "spirito" della mimesi. Direi che la poesia nell'epoca della cultura di massa è affrontata in modo molto simile dao "canzonettisti", rinunciando alla poesia, mantenendone lo spirito. Del resto era successo esattamente lo stesso con il romanzo. Il romanzo antico (la vera storia di Luciano per dire) era un divertissiment, o un divertissement con risvolti soterici (l'asino d'oro), e tale è rimasto per tutto il medioevp finché Cervantes non dice ironicamente che il romanzo non solo è inutile ma addirittura è dannoso - in modo assolutamente equivalente al "sono solo canzonette" di Bennato.

Talmudic marxism and mastery marxism

I quote a passage I read on the web:

We can thus distinguish between two types of Lacanians:  Oedipal or Talmudic Lacanians and post-mastery Lacanians that work on the premise that “there is no Other of the Other” and that “the big Other does not exist.”  A Talmudic Lacanian is a Lacanian that restricts their discussion of Lacan and clinical practice to what Lacan taught, treating him as a master or Father who knows the truth, and endlessly interpreting that text in much the same way that the Talmudic scholar endlessly interprets Talmud without ever adding anything to it.  The post-mastery Lacanian, by contrast, holds that Lacan showed us the way in terms ofhow he read and interpreted– for example, we get something entirely new in his way of approaching Freud, not a rote repetition of Freud –and in terms of how he worked with the mathemes.  Recognizing that every Father or Master is castrated, that they’re allshams or imposters and semblances of mastery, the post-master Lacanian recognizes that Lacan said many valuable things, but that he didn’t say it all— indeed, Lacan constantly emphasizes that no one can say it all because “truth can only be “half-said” –and works with his teaching not as a closed system, but as a generative methodology for generating new insights that are remote from anything Lacan himself ever articulated.

This is even more true of Marx: there are talmudic  marxist that endlessy repeat the words of the Master only permuting them, and (a minority of) marxists that think marxism is a method, not a doctrine. Good examples are Lenin and Wu Ming. But the same is true of many master, such as Aristotle or others. In (good) science masters are always discoverers of a method (Netwon for instance).

Digital Aristotle?

The perspective outlined in this video is amazing. Nonetheless, I think there si place for teachers in the future, although very different teachers than today.
In fact, internet is very good for teaching notions (the boring part of teaching), but is very poor in teaching language. If you want to master a discipline, it is not sufficient to knows what is known i the field, you must be literate in that discipline. And probably in the future teachers should concentrate more on teaching the language than the notions (altthough the two are stngly intertwined).
Currently, I spend more time on youtube than on books and papers for studying (and I study many hours every day), bui 1) I have strong cultural bases, so I can otient myselef in the jungle of youtube 2) I have a method for sorting out useful from unuseful or wrong information 3) I am literate in many fields of science, politics and economics. Wihtous these abilities it is difficult to ezzploit fully the huge potential of the internet. Aristotle didn't teach notions, he taught a methods. Teachers are very rarely Aristotle, in the age of itnernet they need to become.

What the internet lacks (for the moment) is itneraction. Plato taught us that the best way to master the spirit of things is to dialogue with a philosopher. If you don't speak, you cannot learn a language. Of course experienced reader can dialogue with mute things, like books and sources, and this is the essence of literacy,.but you first need to become literate. In my experience very few teachers are able to answer the questions of students and the number of philosophers is avnishingly small (as pointed out in the video); in a good faculty you probably find one or two.

Mimesis (understanding imagination)

We thought that art had to do with representing nature – or expressing feelings - and we found out that it concerns imaginations. Should we understand art, perhaps we could understand imagination. Philosopher investigated the first question for centuries with unequal success, and we are astronomically far away from even framing the second.

Models

In the funny but important paper Putting the plants back into plant ecology: six pragmatic models for understanding and conserving plant diversity" Keddy contrasts two widespread approaches in platn ecologists. He calls the first "theoreticians", that start from principles and deduce complex mathematical models, and the second "pragmatists" that begisn from observations and generalize to borad regularities. The first approach is clearly winning, but ecologists (in particular American ecologists) are well known for their episthemological unsofisticatedness. The contrast of Keddy is the two-thousand year old Aristotelian constrast between deduction and induction, and we know all too well that science is based enither on induction nor on deduction, but on a third process known as "abduction". Curiously, it was an American geologist and philosopher, Pierce, that highlighted the question (that had already been discovered, in other terms, bu Kant at the end of the XVIII century). In abduction, you neither start from principles and end with test, nor begin with observation and arrive to generalization, but you start with observations and ask "which theoretical model can possibly explain the observations?" After the model is build up, you look for confirmation in independent observations. For instance, Schrodinger equation, that describes the properties of electron in quantum mechanics, is not derived from obeservation (it is a wave function in a probability space that cannot be observed) nor from principles (in fact it seems quite crazy), but is the only model that explains observations such as the distribution of spectral lines of hydrogen or the scattering of electrons. In simpler terms, you begin with observation, build the model, and test the consequences of the model, not the model in itself. I have found two or three examples of this procedure in the ltierature, but 90$ of ecologists are still in the age of Aristoteles.

Philosophy of ecology

Ecology is a strange discipline. A few ecologists are familiar with the innumerable diversity of organisms and habitats, and propose generalization based on their observations. This is standard science, but oddly enough this method is fiercely opposed by the dominant school of ecology, that thinks that generalizations rooted in observations are “pattern based ecology” and that "explanatory mechanism" must be provided. This boring debate dates to the beginning of ecology, and has much to do with the fact that there are about  300,000 species of vascular plants, 23,000 vertebrates and 1,000,000 species of insects, a dozen or so of major biomes and an astounding number of different communities, and it takes long to get acquainted with this diversity, whereas many abandon direct observation of ecosystems after their degree and become much more familiar with books than with nature. There is also an obvious relationship with political spirit of the time – “pattern” ecology was probably dominant in the 70s when the left was dominant, but is a minority today with vociferous radical Republicans in America and conservative grovernemes all around European countries.


But background is just a fragment of the picture. There is a more profound phylosophical underlying contrast, revealed by the frequent use in debates of term “mechanistic”. The Law of Gravitation is not mechanistic, it is phenomenological (strange to an ecoogist but true); Newton didn’t provide a mechanism for the attraction among the bodies; he explained with the force of attraction among the bodies the patterns of motion of planets obsreved by Kepler. I bet that an ecologist would have criticized him, and it must be said that Newton was actually criticized for not providing a mechanism by a few – mainly by aristotelians. The contrast between the dominant and the minority schools of ecology is the fundamental contrast between aristotelians and platonics. Ecology is largely aristotelic, physics is largely platonic. Galileo was condemned not because he was copernican – the theory was admitted as possible by the chief of the Vatican astronomers, the jesuit Christophorus Clavius – but because in the book “Dialogue concerning the two chied systems of the World” he ridiculized the aristotelian Simplicius. There is a famous ecology blogger that is ostensibly similar to Simplicius to any ecologist that have read the (fantaastic) book of Galileo. A platonic sees the regularity of mathematics in the apparently messiness of phenomena – in phylosophical terms he believes in the reality of universals – whereas Aristotelians thinks that regularities do not exist – universals do not exist - and it is impossible to convince him of the opposite. But it is impossible to do science if you believe that mathematical regularities do not exist, and this is the reason why Galileo adopted a rather neoplatonic point of view - he says that the book of nature is written in mathematical language, a typical platonism – and attacked harshly the aristotelians (eventually succumbing) and why Aristoteles is still actual in the politics, in literature, and logic, but his physics and to a lesser extent biology are close to superstition.

And yet science –as put forward by Galileo- of Aristoteles and Plato, of particular and universal. It would be nice if the two phylosophical attitudes could cooperate as happens in theorical and experimental physics, instead of purposelessly quarreling all time. This doesn’t happen because the overcoming of the depp but naive intuitive positions of Aristeoteles and Plato happens only if things are considered not statically – as invariably the ancient Greeks did – but dinamically. The synthesis of Galielo arose from the study of cynematic - the motion of bodies - and ecologists - while repeating endlessly the word "process" - rarely consider patterns in time - with a notable exception, the ecology of limnos, undoubtedly vecause such ecosystems are very simple but not real, not laboratory constructions.

Art

Art consists in taking form out of ideas - i.e., out of imagination. And the same applies to science.

If we take into account the traditional aristotelian distinction among form and substance, it follows as a corollary that imagination is the substance - something jung would have agreed upon.

Forma

Ho letto un’intervista di Sanguineti secondo cui il ‘900 distrugge l’Ordine. A parte che il ‘900 crea un ordine nuovo, mi sembra che al fondo ci sia l’idea che se si distrugge la forma emerge la sostanza – che spinozianamente è dio. Ma si vadano a rileggere Spinoza: dalla sostanza consegue necessariamente la forma. Sono gli aristotelici – e in parte i cartesiani – che pensano che la sostanza sia necessariamente informe, e che gli vada sovrapposta una forma. Nella realtà, questa forma imposta, impedisce che emerga la forma naturale che consegue dalla sotanza. Annah Arendt, in “Forza e violenza”, diceva una cosa del genere.

essere

I filosofi si occupano sostanzialmente dell’essere. Ma, mi chiedo, non sarà che l’essere, non esiste? In fondo abbiamo bisogno dell’essere perché – da Pitagora in poi – pensiamo che le precezioni siano diverse dalla realtà – ma le percezioni sono – temo- la realtà. Certo, ci sono gli abbagli, le allucinazioni, ma un’allucinazione non dipende da un difetto della percezione, dipende da un malfunzionamento dell’intelletto. Moltissimi si sono accorti di quanti problemi comporti l’intelletto, ma spesso non realizzano che stanno non in un intelletto forte ma in un intelletto debole (e quindi spesso prepotente),– perché confondono l’intelletto con quel chiacchericcio interiore che ci accompagna (a me di solito no). E’ un bel po’ che non credo più al modello kantiano che tanto mi piaceva da ragazzo– per lo meno il Kant che ci hanno insegnato a scuola – secondo cui il magma delle percezioni deve essere ordinato dall’intelletto per risalire al noumeno soggiacente alle percezioni. Il problema è che le percezioni sono innumerevoli, pressoché infinite, e l’intelletto è generalmente troppo debole per adeguarsi a questa moltitudine di percezioni, e deve ricorrere alle categorie dell’intelletto per selezionare le più importanti – ma è solo una propedeutica. Voglio credere che quando l’intelletto è abbastanza forte da sostenere tutte le percezioni - e soprattutto il groviglio infinito di relazioni tra le percezioni – allora il noumeno si vede con gli occhi e si sente con le orecchie e si tocca col tatto e si gusta col gusto e si annusa con l’odorato. Lo so, sembro aristotelico perché dovrei dire dio, invece che noumeno.

Nel mio piccolo posso dire che quando ci si è abituati alle scienze, la matematica, che all’inizio sembra un’astrazione, si vede in tutte le cose – si vedono le formule, i logaritmi, le equazioni , le curve, gli spazi multidimensionali, le funzoni, gli integrali– il caso più semplice è la serie di Fibonacci che per primo Leonardo ha visto nella disposizione delle foglie delle piante.