Between reverence and rejection

Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Carlo Rovelli teaching in Rome, 2015 (photo by Marco Tambara)

In physicist Carlo Rovelli’s Anaximander: And The Birth of Science, he writes:

The ancient world teemed with masters and their great disciples: Confucius and Mencius, Moses and Joshua and the prophets, Jesus and Paul of Tarsus, the Buddha and Kaundinya… Mencius enriched and studied in depth Confucius’s thought but took care never to cast doubt upon his master’s affirmations. Paul established the theoretical basis for Christianity, far beyond what is in the Gospels, but never criticized nor openly questioned the sayings of Jesus. The prophets deepened the description of Yahweh and of the relationship between him and his people, but they most certainly did not start from an analysis of Moses’s errors.

So when it came to ideas in the ancient world, you had two extremes: reverence between disciple and master on one hand, and you had rejection of other people who hold different views on the other hand.

What you didn’t have — and, again, this is Rovelli’s argument — is a third way, halfway between reverence and rejection, in which you could take in everything your master had to offer and then pick at it, tweak it, and improve upon it.

This, Rovelli says, is “perhaps the most important keystone of Anaximander’s contribution to the history of culture”: the “profoundly new” relationship between Anaximander and his own master, Thales.

Anaximander reveres Thales and leans on his master’s intellectual accomplishments, but “he does not hesitate to say that Thales is mistaken about this or that matter, or that it is possible to do better.”

Anaximander… immersed himself in Thale’s problems, and he embraced Thales’ finest insights, way of the thinking, and intellectual conquests. But at the same time he undertook a frontal critique of the master’s assertions. Thales says the world is made of water. Not true, says Anaximander. Thales says the Earth is floating on water. Not so, says Anaximander. Thales says earthquakes are attributable to the oscillation of the Earth’s disk in the ocean upon which it floats. Not so, says Anaximander: they are due to the Earth’s splitting open.

“In my view,” Rovelli writes, “modern science in its entirety is the result of the discovery of this third way.”

Like with art, nothing in science comes from nowhere and nobody starts by chucking everything that’s come before out the window. You study your masters, make their knowledge your own, and then you “identify the errors in the master’s thinking, correct them, and in doing so improve our understanding of the world.”

I don’t know enough to begin to investigate whether or not Rovelli is correct that Anaximander is the actual beginning of this kind of thinking, but I like his emphasis on this creative tension, this middle path between reverence and rejection, especially in these all or nothing, pick a side, are you in or are you out times.

Filed under: Carlo Rovelli

Philip Glass on lineage vs. legacy

Monday, November 11, 2019

Here are my clippings from a profile of composer Philip Glass in the Sunday NYTimes. (Whenever you publish a book, you can be sure that in the years following you’ll find several tons of stuff that should’ve gone into it.)

Glass had the right spirit from his beginning: “I had the naïve but probably correct idea that if I wrote enough music, I would start to get better,” he wrote in his excellent 2015 memoir, Words Without Music.

The online version of the profile has the headline, “Philip Glass Is Too Busy to Care About Legacy,” but he’s spoken at length about the subject before. In a 2015 interview, Terry Gross asked Glass about his experiences with death. “What kind of afterlife do you want for your body? Do you want to be buried? Do you want to be cremated?” He answered:

I’m not so interested in that so much. But I’ve had other thoughts about that lately, which are quite interesting ones. I’ve thought of the lineage of music that goes way into the past and the future of music, which we hope will go into the future, and where does my life fit into that? I think just expressing it that way: What is the meaning of an artist’s life? Or of anybody’s life? A doctor’s life, a teacher’s life, or a radio interviewer’s life — what is the meaning of that? I’m more and more coming to the idea that it’s the lineage and the connection to the past and the connection to the future — that is the real connection. Everything else, I think, is kind of imaginary. Is there a heaven that is waiting for us or some afterlife of some kind? We have no idea. In fact, it’s not even important.

The important thing is how [you are] connected to the past. Does that represent not only continuity, but does it bring us closer to something that’s richer, that’s more interesting? What have we brought to the world and what do we leave behind us and what does the future have for us? The future … is in our children. It’s in our friends. It’s in our work. It’s all around us.

I find that the most reassuring when we contemplate living and dying, that [it] really misses the point: It’s not the living and dying, it’s the continuity of the lives that’s important.

Emphasis mine. Glass has made the point that when it comes to artistic lineage, it “is often something chosen. Before choosing it, we have to become aware that there’s something to choose. When I first began writing music, I really didn’t know where to begin…. The lineage is something that became revealed to me through several remarkable teachers.”

Here’s Jay-Z in Decoded (quoted in Steal Like An Artist):

We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.

I like this idea of thinking about lineage vs. legacy, because it means you can sort of reframe any worrying about immortality and how you’re going to project yourself into the future, and think more about what you’re taking from the past and what you’re adding to it that creates a more interesting and helpful present. Whatever you keep alive or re-animate from the past in the present has that much better chance of surviving into the future. (This also explodes your options as an artist: perhaps, for example, your part isn’t to invent so much as it is to preserve?)

A new connection (Corita + Thoreau)

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Corita Kent, *The Stamp of Thoreau*, 1969

When I toured the Corita Art Center last weekend, I kept seeing evidence of Corita Kent’s thoughts on the seasons (I wrote about them in Keep Going):

I’d noticed Thoreau quotes in Corita’s work before. She seemed to especially like these lines from Walden: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” She used the quote in at least two different pieces over the years:

So I asked (former) director Ray Smith if she knew of any explicit imagery with Thoreau. She led me straight to a drawer with The Stamp of Thoreau piece (from Corita’s series, A Set Of Heroes And Sheroes) that you see above.