The Geometric Mind and the Spirit of Finesse: Pascal

The Geometric Mind and the Spirit of Finesse: Pascal was a French philosopher. He played with these to ways:

Geometric Mind: “the skill or capacity for demonstrating truths already found, and of elucidating them in such a manner that the proof of them shall be irresistible”. Thinking with principles, causes and consequences. Also, geometry separates things, draws lines.

Spirit of Finesse: “The intuitive mind, with its instinctive twists and turns, lucky hunches, and inspired guesswork”. Intuition. You feel things, but it will maybe not clear for others. Finesse embraces things.

Excellence needing both, of course!

It’s about “to adapt your mindset to the problem”. You need to have the “right” view not to think wrongly on… known principles. One way of thinking helps the other way.

Then we can have fun with it. What do we prefer? Are we able to tango with both? What does it bring? What do we lose? How to communicate with one type of spirit?

Have a nice day!

—–

See also:

Bake two Cakes

Both Sides Now

Bothness

Questions about Difference

There are “seed words” like this one. Just a word. This word is covered with moving strings. It resonates. It’s like a multi-tool. Difference:

• Difference “of what”? Intensity? Nature?
• Do we talk about meaning, or identity?
• Can two things be different in appearance, but not in itself?
• Quality or quantity?
• Are differences oppositions? What (and why) is affirmation of difference(s)?
• Are differences states? Like raw and cooked, alive and dead.
• What’s the struggle to define differences and where do we see that?
• If compliance is a state, what is a superior accomplishment? What is deviance?
• What is resemblance? How is resemblance a difference?
• Must difference be represented?
• What is simulacra? What is virtual? Is it the same, but not the same?
• What are structures, or models? Finding “the same” within differences? Are there levels of differences then?
• Is negation opposition?
• What is differentiation? The process of becoming different? Who notices?
• What is diversity?
• Can one cancel differences? What for? How?
• What is extension? What is “to grow”? Evolution? Are there levels and stages? What are stages?
• What is an evolving system? What evolves, what parts? Is there a “system of growing differences”?

Where do we see this?

Thanks for reading!

To consider the world like something to decipher

“To consider the world like something to decipher”, says Gilles Deleuze, “to be mindful to signs is a gift”.

Decipher is a splendid word, right? What’s the engine?

• We are structuralists (we find some knowledge on systematic structures)
• We are phenomenologists (we find some knowledge on pure experience)

Hey, maybe we’re post-structuralists (doesn’t that sound good?)!

Here’s Wikipedia :

A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object (e.g., a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.

 

So when we watch a person, an object, a text, as we globally function with analogies, we seek structures, skeletons inside. And then we watch something else…

Therefore if a new teacher enters the room, we quickly seek, we try to decipher if he’s a Type (an Archetype?) – is he a Boss, a Preacher, a Guide? Are his ways chaotic, structured? What’s his pace?

We seek structures, but also we notice. What do we notice? Signs.

What do we expect? What is disappointment, here? How do we offset against disappointment?

Proust says he has a burden : for him, things (persons, events, anything) HAVE TO recall him something else – or have to make him imagine something else.

Let’s call it the addiction of links.

All this, because we seek. We need to decipher.

Effort of the will is not enough – Deleuze mentions “Those truths of the intelligence that lack the claw of necessity”.

What do you think?

 

 

 

 

The Persian Letters Tool

Nestor Almendros is a great cinematographer, and in a documentary I just watch about this “craft” (men who take care of light in movies), he says mischievously that most of great cinematographers in cinema come from other countries – which is true!

The need to have a fresh eye…

Which made me think about one book : Persian Letters, by Montesquieu, recounting the experiences of two Persian noblemen, Usbek and Rica, who are traveling through France.

Like when one says that one good part of the philosopher’s job is to not understand.

The capacity to see things “as they are” (and not for granted) is a strange funny power, all society can become a carnival, and what is human becomes singular, crazy, mechanical, dumb, and all conventions become hilarious and sinister, unbearable, unbelievable!

So this book, France seen by two Persians, is disconcerting, on purpose. You surprise people with what they are, what they do. You show them that all the fabric of their lives is relative…

To conclude, let’s think about this : The Persian Letters was written by… a French, of course, who must have “this” state of mind :

“Taken for granted” questioning

If you have that, you have a great tool, but it’ll put you on an island. So what?

Have a nice day!

Paul Valéry : Enjoy your hypotheses

Enjoy your hypotheses…

Valéry writes that one good part of the philosopher’s job is to not understand.

That makes sense and we like it, right?

Being able of being amazed by what is granted and ordinary for most people…

That’s what some photographers also do, I beg. Having new eyes.

But there’s more. What I like in this extract is this attitude, which is to voluntarily go and watch things we don’t understand at all, just to…

Enjoy your hypotheses…

We could go further : studying what we think we don’t like, for example, or too complex, or too far in the past (for literature), or… what else?

What’s that sect, made of people who like that, enjoying hypotheses?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Montaigne, skepticism & casual forms (does it work for bloggers?)

Skepticism questions the possibility of certainty in knowledge.

Montaigne was a French philosopher (1533-1592), his “Essays” (the word “Essai” in French means “attempts” or “tests”).

I know you won’t read Montaigne (988 pages in translated English, paperback, $27) – I once read an interview of Orson Welles who said it was the book of his life, and he had one copy next to his bed all along.

This guy was a mess, and he wrote his essays for years, in French (in this time, you had to use Latin if you were a serious scholar), like… thinking all along.

 

With the goal of describing man with complete frankness and using himself as his most frequent example, Michel de Montaigne first published his “Essays” in 1580. This collection of 107 chapters encompasses a wide variety of subjects – he saw the most basic elements of man as variety and unpredictability. “What do I know?” This embodies the spirit of the entire volume, for it reflects both the inquisitory search for intellectual knowledge as well as the more personal anecdotal quality of a work that has had an enduring impact on both French and English literature for hundreds of years.

 

He flits around, from a thought to another. No rigor, no plan. Really!

• “I love the poetic gait, by leaps and gambols”
• “I lose myself, more by permit than by inattention”
• “My ideas follow each other, but sometimes from far away”
• “Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly”

 

So : breathe! Life is short! Your blog is not perfect, it’s bricolage and brain odd jobs. Who cares? Share! If Montaigne can do it, you can do it!

Is this casualness French? Nope : wisdom & folly, there are everywhere, little soul, right?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Assemblage & consequences

There’s a “Deleuze and Guattari” Twitter account that I love.

Those two (a philosopher and a psychotherapist) wrote books like Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) – which is the biggest seeds tank I’ve ever seen.

I love the Twitter account because they daily lay Deleuzian sentences like “A housewife sings to herself, as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work” – which you can take jargonistically humourously or try to link it to some truth.

(Which is always the same with these guys. You could be flabbergasted by 1000 Plateaus, a crazy & enthralling book, where delirious stands alongside genius).

Today I found this :

An assemblage is an increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections

There’s a little pattern, a structure map here, if you puncture the gibber…

Assemblage? I thought about these houses in Seattle, de-foundationned and put on huge boats, sold and… deterritorialized (this to avoid awful prizes, which climb a lot because of Amazon).

Therefore a territory (a house) put on another territory (another terrain). With all consequences : is it fragilized? What about the light (the course of the sun)? Are there new foundations?

You’ll find also articles on the web about… floating houses. Big, normal, American size houses which you can move because they float on water. And there’s plenty of water in Seattle!

Assemblage. Where do you apply this? The building of a porch behind a house, of course, but in the spirit of mind? Or in Art? Assemblage of poetry and marketing? The beginning of a team, or a couple? Old and new architecture?

What do you put together? Things of same nature (is it a must?)? What does is bring? Do you make one thing from the twos? Or does a frontier, a line, stays as a mark, a scarf? What is graft? A transplant? What is dangerous? Rejections? What are the connections? Doors? Different natures of doors? Changing ones?

 

Have fun! Thanks for reading!

   

 

A to B : Frontiers & Movements

Deterritorialization is a funny tool/dial to use!

 

Paths of Iron & Supple Escapes

“No one knows what the body can do”
Spinoza

 

Railroad. In French we say le “Chemin de Fer” : “Path of Iron”.

Deleuze, the philosopher, used to talk about a “between people geography”, links made of hard lines, supple lines, escape lines…

 

ONE

Well, that makes sense : we are surrounded by powers, who want us to stay on paths of iron, right? “Obey! Rules are made for you too! It’s dangerous outside!”.

But desires and grapes of possibilities transform our lives in (oh a new word!) an unremitting evolution of connections.

Paths of Iron are there : what you’re told to do (education, instruction, social obligations). We follow and we have to. Laws and contracts and pressures.

But we watch outside, by the window, we dream and play with possibilites. And about what the body can do…

 

TWO

Supple, subtle, little : now we talk about what happens “under”, in small moments : the small magic, the unpredictable.

In a company, under the schedules and duties, people (and bodies) never cease to dream, to change, to try, to escape control, to invent, to dig little tunnels. Lines of life! A smile, a gesture, tiny cracks (see the light?), a triangle of sun on a table, a seventeen words conversation…

Haecceity! A dance, or a resistance. Denying iron!

We are a group of different speeds and slownesses, an individual, a singularity, constantly inventing grapes of possibilities, a play of forces or encounters. Lines, new lines, inventions.

 

THREE

We can’t grow if we don’t escape, if we don’t walk out of the paths of iron. We all have our ways to do that : knowledge, hunting, exploring, trying…

One escape line can last one minute or two weeks or a life. An on our own becoming…

Fuir -> To Flee/To Leak – a #Deleuze word game

 

c’est toujours sur une ligne de fuite qu’on crée, certes pas parce qu’on imagine ou qu’on rêve, mais au contraire parce qu’on y trace du réel, et que l’on y compose un plan de consistance. Fuir, mais en fuyant, chercher une arme.

it’s always on an escape line that we create, not because we imagine or because we dream, but in the contrary because we trace some real life on it, and because we arrange a consistency. To flee, but in fleeing, to seek a weapon.

 

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

(thanks to Pierre Ansay – may Deleuze’s tools spread)

 

Meandering Rolling between Differences

Reading the preface of Gide/Valéry ‘s correspondence, I kept this idea : these guys, so different, had almost nothing in common. Their friendship lasted 50 years for no reason other than itself. An intimacy where they judge each other, enrich each other, confess the deepest, on a kind of rare air summit.

Manon Lescaut is a French novel which came a Puccini opera (“Manon Lescaut”) and a Massenet opera (“Manon”). Every classical music lover knows that there’s a pleasure in comparing versions of the same opera (I wrote an article about this : What does Manon Lescaut want?). But here, you can also have fun noticing the differences in the librettos – inventing a 3D game of differences of differences…

A model (a car, a boat model) is “the same, littler”, but not exactly, right? Like a map for a territory. A model is a lie. It’s the same for representation, “this is not a pipe”, says Magritte under his painting of a pipe. Indeed it’s not. Same with words? This differences-dance between real and representation or telling is a rolling dance…

A map misses something (the wind, the changing light, events). But it’s an analogy. “This for that”. A line for the road. A dot for the house. A cross for the church. Different.

Displacing effectiveness or for effectiveness. A model is tinier. When you focus on analogies, you notice the differences. It can become a code. An icon. A symbol. The christian cross has no Jesus on it. A drawing of a knot shows something, but doesn’t secure anything. And when you tell a story, you miss 99% of it and you change the rhythm.

Noticing differences between two things, ideas, persons : a source of happy tension, thoughts, your brain stands up : enrichment.

 

You have your A? Find your B thing!

 

Thanks for reading!

 

A possible Machine-Manifesto for afrenchtoolbox

Here’s to the ones who dream
Foolish as they may seem
Here’s to the hearts that ache
Here’s to the mess we make

She told me
“A bit of madness is key
To give us new colors to see“

 

I could use a deleuzian concept for this blog : Machine… a word Gilles Deleuze used for S/Z of Roland Barthes, too. Those who know, will know.

My blog is a Machine, an entity which swallows things, ideas, concepts, memories, sights, life, quotes, website. Anything can enter my blog and will potentially come out a few paragraphs later like a little candypoo.

The machine itself is a bit quirky :

• It’s changing all the time
• It’s casual (because I’m an amateur, and… “I’ve seen things…”)
• It’s multi-faceted
• It contains plenty of little engines

 

Many little engines are indeed running in operation here.

• Recycler (I use old letters, emails, diary, even my own blog)
• Thief (I steal concepts from many books or articles, and I built up two bookshelves of “books with seeds” for this purpose).
• Many mouths (sociology, music, art, psychology, parenting, etc).
• Antennas. To guess.
• Combiner that links ideas that should never be linked.
• Microscope that searches tools, structures, patterns, skeletons.
• Translation : I’m French and I write in English on purpose. Like a “necessary displacement”, an important decenterization. I needed it.
• Collecting : I like to gather ideas like seashells, which will in the end draw something, globally.
• Blender mixing concepts or domains to see what spillspurts out.
• Frenchiness : I don’t work that much, I’m casual and I like to define my own rules. I’m disobedient. And certainly not steady. And I judge. Ohlalaaaaa.
• A bunch of tools : a map drawer, a mirror, a fences jumper, a rules eroder, a veiled referencer.
• Hydra : A child having fun. A storyteller. A thinker. A lover. A father. A bookseller.
• Inchoater (“don’t finish, please, and let it opened”).
• Grid : most of the time unappropriate, to see what it can see.
• Energy. It’s been provided – at the beginning – by the golden knowledge that a splendid high-level of conversation can exist. It stayed in the machine, like a burning core. This core radioactivate a wave : SHARE.

 

This machine held me alive for a long time! Today it’s a part of me. A daily one. I’m this machine. I like to blog!

Most of the time, everything I put in it helps me to know who I am, what I want, what I’ve been through, what I wish, what makes me smiles.

This article was the meta-article of the month, yeyyyy.

Is your blog a machine too? What is YOUR machine made of? Do you need to decenter too? Why?

 

Have a great day!

 

Here’s to the mess we make

Instagram : bodylanguage

 

Pecking ways & means of apprehend a work of art

#French #Blogging in #English : un Songe

Finder Keeper Sharer, “What is my blog about?”

 

 

Everybody’s talking about “golden voices”. But don’t you hear, when Emma Stone speaks at the beginning of the clip, that her voice is made of silver?? There’s a veil. It’s silver. Period.

Examining a problem with Valéry

In found this very little structure in Paul Valéry’s notebooks. I cut, bolded and translated my way. As it’s a “tool”, Mr Valéry won’t be angry (and well, he died in 1945). Where would we apply this screwdriver? How do I say “I will can”, in English? I’ll be able to? Hmm?

 

The spirit won’t be in a hurry to imagine what is necessary to considerate a problem.

it will examine, not caring about time & duration of the process.

Aware of the remarkable contrast between 1/ promptness, impatience and worries of the “heart” and 2/ this slowness, made of criticism and hope.

This lateness, this delay – which can can unlimited – has an effect : to transform the problem.

The transformed problem will be able to transform the questioner…

 

 Also :

“To overcome one’s talents.

My skills unplease me.

My easy bores me. 

My difficult drives me”.

 

Event VS Structure

“Event VS Structure” – This is a title, right?

A philosophical problem I pick like a screwdriver, to examine it.

1. A Structure, it can be a rule, a law, a “it’s the way things are”, a habit, a skeleton under things, an axle, a map, a followed road.
2. An Event is what suddenly happens, it’s life, it’s a surprise, an accident, a happiness, a present, a mishap, a disturbance, a movement, a change.

 

This article is an invitation. The game will be : choose your structure, and invent an event :

Where do they touch? Is it good, bad? What happens? Can an event change a structure, or entertain it? Destroy it? What then? Is a new structure needed? Is there a thirst for other events? What is a suite of events? Can a structure hide another one? What triggered the event? Another structure? Can a structure contain an inner “events invention”? Do you have to protect the structure against events? Are there Metastructures? Do a structure USE events to grow, to increase knowledge, to breathe life in? What is a mutation? What is a call for event?

Structure : Battle? Symphony? Plan? Marriage? Company? Life? Body?

Suddenly, an Event. Mutation, change, disease, sudden victory, cut, inspiration, meeting another structure, thoughts, failure, ending, bend, ideas…

Does an event have a structure?

 

What do you choose to study?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : anapaula

 

​”The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play” – Nietzsche

“The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play”.

Nietzsche

 

Hegel’s “Unhappy Consciousness” as a pattern for us all

ONE

People like to talk. They talk about things, or events. They talk about their life. That’s OK.

Only some people like to talk about concepts. If I meet someone who, instead of asking what I had for lunch, asks : “You’re French, do you think you have your own way to be skeptical? How?” – then sits and weaves a good two hours conversation with me about it, I want to keep this friend around me. No : I want to marry her!

TWO

What I do here is totally far-fetched, inappropriate and probably useless for almost all of us. What’s the point? I really don’t know. Maybe I’ll discover it while I write it?

THREE

“Unhappy Consciousness” is a concept from Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit) – it’s very complicated, so… forget it. I just performed surgery on it to extract the pattern, the structure, the tool which is in it, then I wringunwrap it, just to see.

Hegel says “the Unhappy Consciousness is the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being” : it can happen when you are in state A, you wish to reach a better state B, but there’s a moment you realize that you’re very far from it.

There’s a big gap (or a rift) between the reachable and the unreachable, the changeable and the unchangeable, and you understand it.

Euphoria meets the swamp of skepticism… You’re stuck. You met contradictions. Powerlessness. Stuck as a stuck.

Unhappy consciousness wishes relief from its misery, but it’s a surrender process which doesn’t work : thus a “perpetually self-engendered disorder”.

You have to let go. You need to take comfort. You have to find how. And you don’t.

This happens in Master-Slave couples, when the slave really tries to be exactly what his master wants him to be. Or more tricky : vice-versa. And it’s of course impossible.

FOUR :

What are other examples? How do you do – since you can not get out of it? What is it not as simple as “acceptance”? Do we have to wait? To find other paths? To admit we were wrong? Is it a selftrap? A spirit vicious circle turning like a hamster in its wheel between euphoria and despair?

FIVE :

Hegel seems to say that there’s a solution, though. It’s not in reason. It’s not in letting go. It’s not in surrender. All the logical solutions, at one point, fail and will fail.

It’s where I like it : Solutions are in the oblique.

It’s to forget some frames. To dare. To be crazy. Killing some rules. Finding the good sense of “idiocy”, the opening doors power of the fool’s wisdom. Stop the “desire to act in a comprehensible fashion”.

How to do that?

I don’t know!! Listen to strange advices? Take the wrong roads? Build on other territories of spirit? Kill your Gods and your certainties? Smell the winds? Jump where you never jumped? What is the Revolution you need?

Where do you apply that? In your couple? In your creativity? Religion? Politics? Where are you stuck in a far-fetched way? Can you feel the energy charging inside the stuckystuck situation?

 

Let Hegel play with our mind now. Amen :

“its enjoyment becomes a feeling of its own unhappiness”

 

Thanks for reading!

Instagram : itspeteski

Elbowing the Audience by killing the Suspension of Disbelief

“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and,
instead of bleeding, he sings.”
R. Benchley

 

ONE

If you go see a theater play, you have to make a deal with yourself, even if you even don’t realize you do it  :

“I accept to believe that these people on the scene are real”

If you don’t, you’ll watch actors making as if, that’s weird, right?

This is not new, of course : Coleridge (an English philosopher) called it Suspension of disbelief :

“a willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe the unbelievable; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.”

You watch Braveheart on TV. You need your good “willing suspension of disbelief”, and if you don’t, you will laugh all along : you’ll see Mel Gibson (Australian actor) running in a skirt, pretending to fight for Scotland, hahaha.

And in a magic act, “an audience is not expected to actually believe that a woman is cut in half or transforms into a gorilla in order to enjoy the performance.”. Now imagine the work you have to do to accept an opera! 🙂

OK, you got the concept.

TWO

Creators and critics are aware of that. Nathalie Sarraute, a French writer, wrote a book (The Age of Suspicion), where she says that the novels’ readers less and less believe in the author “I know all” invention, and therefore that the writers tend to depersonalize the characters. Readers are more and more also critics, they analyze their pleasure, and you have to be smart and inventive to catch’em back.

In fact, this phenomenon appeared in many Arts.

• In theater, directors began to play with the old “suspension of disbelief” trick : keeping the lights on in the room, allowing characters to call out to the audience.
• In novels, the “omniscient narrator” began to speak to the reader (about his doubts, or the way the story was told).
• In movies, characters suddenly watched the spectator, talking to him (Cf Pierrot le Fou, Godard).

THREE

I found this idea in interviews of movies directors like Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock and Brian de Palma. Their idea is the same, I would formulate it like that :

“I KNOW for sure that I want to make movies for an audience who is AWARE that it’s a movie. I don’t want to put them in a classical “dream mode”, but I want to play with the audience with the fact a movie is like a clock, a fake funny mechanism MADE FOR HIM, therefore I constantly ELBOW THE AUDIENCE with nods, tricks, implausible twists and turns. They have fun not because they believe it, they have fun because they know I’m here with the scriptwriter working for their entertaining intelligence – so there!”.

So what is played here is not “sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment” any more, like in the normal Suspension of Disbelief. It’s a weaving between entertainment AND logic and realism. Inside the audience, the spectator AND the critic are dancing tango, with a smile. Intelligence is summoned, not only the dreaming capacities…

TOOL :

Where would you use this? Advertising? Poetry? Marketing? What would be a private joke to an audience? What is to elbow you spectators, and how to? Why? If you succeed, what happens?

You can also read : Strangeization.

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : __bodylanguage__

 

#Deleuze about classification

“All classifications belong to this style; they are mobile, modifiable, retroactive, boundless, and their criteria vary from instance to instance. Some instances are full, others empty. A classification always involves bringing together things with different appearances and separating those that are very similar. That is the beginning of the formation of concepts.”

“Toutes les classifications sont de ce genre : elles sont mobiles, varient leurs critères suivant les cases, sont rétroactives et remaniables, illimitées. Certaines cases sont très peuplées, d’autres vides. Il s’agit toujours dans une classification de rapprocher des choses très différentes en apparence, et d’en séparer de très voisines. C’est la formation des concepts.”

Gilles Deleuze, Le Cerveau, c’est l’Ecran, in “Deux Régimes de Fous”.

 

#minimalism #minimalist #minimalistic #minimalistics #minimal #insect #minimalobsession #photooftheday #minimalninja #instaminim #minimalisbd #simple #simplicity #keepitsimple #minimalplanet #love #instagood #minimalhunter #minimalista #minimalismo #beautiful #art #lessismore #simpleandpure #negativespace

 

 

Fuir -> To Flee/To Leak – a #Deleuze word game

Fuir is a French verb, well, TWO French verbs, which are homonyms :

1. Fuir : To flee
2. Fuir : To leak

Therefore, it’s the same for “la fuite”, two homonyms :

1. Fuite : a flight, an escape
2. Fuite : a leak

So I suppose you understand it’s a bit “weaved” in our French brain. And if I ask “Fuite” in http://www.wordreference.com/, I find interesting things to prove it :

• Fuite de capitaux : Capital flight (a leak, a flee)
• Fuite des cerveaux : Brain drain (idem)
• Ligne de fuite : Convergence line (in French, so, more like “a lign of flight”)

Gilles Deleuze is a playful philosopher. He likes to play with concepts to make tools.

He notices that to flee is NOT to renounce, or to give up, it’s a real action. To fly away is going on a line which stays like a symbol. It’s fuir (to flee) but also faire fuir (to “make a leak”). To run away is sometimes like to puncture the place you leave. You leave a hole, maybe… Therefore, a leak…

Fuir/Fuir : Flee/Leak.

Yeah I know, it’s a game of words, but it can give birth to ideas, right?

I like this idea too : to run away is to draw a line. Where you ran away, you have to do something else, the place you “leaved” (OK, left) does something else too. Flee as a disturbance. Each of them draws new lines, more lines. It’s like inventing new maps. To flee is quitting a territory A to go to another territory (B). Is it a “go back”? A flee & discovery? If there’s a leak on B, what is its nature? What happens, then? Can the runaway bird be replaced? By what? If you fly away, are you forced by something, pushed away, is it a choice?

More Territories games : you can see here.

Have a good day!

 

Socrates has a question for you

I read one day that Socrates asked to a master of ballet :

“Who are you and… how do you know?“.

There are many questions you can ask to someone you’re interested in, where do you come from? or what happened in your life? or what’s new? or what are you working on? or tell me what’s difficult? or what did you learn? or who is important in your life?, etc, but :

How do you “know” means a lot. How do you increase your knowledge? What is your package, your bond to reality, your system, your measures? Do you read? Do you watch things, people, actions? Do you think? Do you remember? In what way? What do you seek? What is the nature or the knowledges you pile up in your brain? Do you have models? How is it cleared up? What for? Are you curious, where, how, and why? What are you weary of? Senses? Interpretations? Where could we be mistaken, why? Do you need to understand or to change something?

It could seem pointless, but I don’t think it is. Because these questions ask about this :

What is your out/in interface with the world, and how does it work?

Just an example : memory. We all know that our memory is not perfect, and THAT is interesting : it doesn’t work properly, this is why we can work, interpret, metathink, analyse, retry, write, rethink, etc…

You’re a photographer : how do you know? You have your technical skills, right? And then? How do you know what to photograph? How do you know when to trigger? How do you know if the frame or the light is OK? How do you… make progress?

Now play this game with others :

Tool : How do you KNOW?

…when you’re a poet, a photographer, a teacher, a priest, a spouse, a journalist, a blogger, a writer, an architect.

And yesss, haecceity : you can be all of them, right?

Thanks for reading!

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

Paul Valéry

 

 

“A model is a lie that helps you see the truth” – H. Skipper

“A model is a lie that helps you see the truth” is a quote by Howard Skipper, an American doctor.

Here I try to extend this pattern, replacing “model” by cousin ideas : “pattern”, “structure”, “map”, etc.

So what? A “model” is not the real world, it’s a construction made to help us to understand the real world.

A MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY, right? A map is a LIE, it doesn’t give you changes, colors, moods, light, temperature and life. But it’s a useful, thought, for a purpose…

You can be very serious while modeling things (in Science) and an architect will build models (in cardboard or on computers), but you can also be a little casual “just to see what you’ll see”.

For example you can see each of these things : a school, a couple, or a battle, as : a machine, a living creature, a computer, a kingdom or a business company. If you “apply” your model, you’ll rule out something, but you’ll find interesting things too. Then, trash the model. Because it’s a LIE, of course!

A model is a construction made to help us to understand the real world.

It can be using a structure and also “a way to explain how it works”, moves and evolves. Let’s use the model of “a business company” to study “a married couple”. Who’s the CEO, how does the money flow, what are the goals, etc…

It can be more like a skeleton, a complex map of “what it is”, or a single archetypal word :

• Mauss studied suicide or gift and made entire books about these. A way to search for “what is common”, the “fundamental characteristics”.
• Simmel studied the bridge : it links two territories, it is a territory itself, it “shows itself” as a bridge, and it is a “will of connection” (over a river, for example).

Yes, this leads to Archetypes (Jung)

a statement, pattern of behavior, or prototype (model) which other statements, patterns of behavior, and objects copy or emulate

To Forms in philosophy (Plato)

pure forms which embody the fundamental characteristics of a thing in Platonism

and to the most precious diamond : the Symbol.

a symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different concepts and experiences.

(All quotes from Wikipedia – I bolded some words)

Questions :

Who’s right? Skipper who uses the word “lie”, or Plato and Jung who seem to seek a “pure form”? Is all this a search for a link, common aspects in different things, or are these just tools to explore a concept , moving aside difficulties and details? Are you more interested in details, or structures? Why do we say that there are only a few ways to tell a story (Google : Seven Basic Plots)? What are the “order” games like MBTI, Zodiac or Enneagrams? Is a symbol the tiniest and more radioactive possible model?

Let’s say you’re introvert, fast, jealous, a father, a murderer or a valet. Is it a lie, because it’s true but way too simple (and a label on your face) – then you list the subtilities, the movements, the reasons, etc -, or is it a funny truth which could lead you to make decisions, or find other archetypes to think about?

You can also read : Ecceity

Yeahh, overthinking, I know…

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

“It’s not wise to simplify things in order to understand them”. Gilles Deleuze

“It’s not wise to simplify things in order to understand them”

Gilles Deleuze