John Pillette, another lovely comment. It is nice to feel that I am getting through.
Jerry Fresia, my experience of the ideas with which I spend my life is essentially aesthetic as well as intellectual. My goal is always to grapple with difficult concepts and simplify them in my mind until I can show them to my students or my readers with the power and beauty that they have. That is why I rarely respond to criticisms of my writings. If I have succeeded in showing the beauty of the ideas, that is all I really want to do.
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Simplicity on the far side of Complexity
"I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, But I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
This quote begins a chapter entitled "On Simplicity and Complexity" in one of my favorite books of all time, entitled "The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace" (John Paul Lederach). The thesis of the chapter is that you have to "complexify before you simplify" (33) because the simplicity that comes before knowing all of the varying in sundry complicating factors in a situation is really worthless, inane and naive. But, often times, the true answer is also remarkably simple: you just have to be on the far side of complexity in order to see it clearly.
source: five small stones: Simplicity on the far side of Complexity
Makes total sense.
But the question it also raises, for me, is: when this aesthetic - "the power and beauty in your mind" is manifested - is it not more than an "idea" - along the lines of a frisson - not the goose bump variety necessarily, but rather a "click" that you definitely "feel pleasure"....? Which dampens, to a degree, the notion that "the power and beauty" of the aesthetic moment begins and ends with the "idea" or "life of the mind."
Pissarro, a well read anarchist, has said that the aesthetic frisson that is manifested noticeably for him (in his choice and execution of subject matter) is a "sensation." Cezanne, the most articulate of painters that intrigue me, echos Pissarro (as does Monet). "It's all about the sensation," which I also think links up with the Manuscripts - in realizing one's power in that moment.
In my experience at least, an idea is beautiful if it reveals a truth which I hadn't seen before.
For example, Marx's idea expressed in the Manifesto that capitalism reduces all human relations to one of cash nexus. That struck me the first time I read it and still does.
s. wallerstien,
All human relations? So, because of capitalism, no one falls in love anymore?
It's a sociological generalization about a tendency that occurs under capitalism.
And love has an aspect of economic rationality and calculation.
That has been studied by sociologists like Eva Illouz.
s. wallerstein,
It may be a sociological generalization, but, like many generalizations, it is false. "All" means "all," and trying to qualify the generalization as correct because "love has an aspect of economic rationality and calculation" does not transform an erroneous generalization into a valid generalization. There are many couples who live in capitalist systems who fall in love and throw caution to the wind, despite the harsh economic consequences this has on their lives. I suspect you have even known such couples. I certainly have. They are even the subjects of great art, such as La Boheme. Les Miserables, West Side Story, and on and on.
"All" is mine, not Marx's.
If I say that non-Orthodox Jews are more liberal about gay marriage than southern Baptists, it's a sociological generalization and I'm sure you can find some exceptions, but that's how sociological generalizations work.
By the way, in West Side Story they mate within the same social class, the difference is one of ethnic group, not of social class.
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