KUNSTENAARS / ARTISTS
______________________________
Hans Theys
A Tribute to Craftsmanship
About Joost Pauwaert’s Work
Genghis Khan
From a sculpted pulpit, seven theologians smile at me benevolently.
Could I theoretically substantiate Joost Pauwaert’s oeuvre?
Everyone knows that theories, in the narrow sense of the word referred to here, are little more than smokescreens designed to shield us from fear.1
For Joseph Brodsky, history was steered by numbers and quantities. How many people? How much food? How hot, cold, wet or dry the climate? The numbers determine the events.
But also, perhaps, by the dreams of a few individuals: Alexander, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, Napoleon.
Mohammed and Khan thought alike: that Muslims and Mongol tribes must stop fighting amongst themselves. All the Mongol tribes thus became one, until they collectively controlled
a territory stretching across the longitudes from eastern China to Budapest and across the latitudes from Siberia to Persia and Crimea, or from northern China to the Indian Ocean.
In his introduction to Viktor Shklovsky’s Le voyage de Marco Polo, M.K. Kounine writes that the Mongol conquests were supported logistically and financially by wealthy merchants who benefited from the creation of one great empire, in which their caravans could travel freely and in which they could organise the “systematic exploitation of large sections of the population”.2 Rulers wanted to collect taxes, traders wanted to move cheap commodities and sell them elsewhere for a hundredfold profit. (In the second half of the third century in Rome, you could sell a pound of silk for a pound of gold: it was literally worth its weight in gold.)
The world is no different today. We expend virtually all our available energy on creating mindless consumers out of children, taming and breaking them in the process, or on manufacturing ever cheaper food, clothing and hollow entertainment. Wars are outlets for arms manufacturers.
From their pulpit, the seven judges look down at me in boredom.
“And what does this have to do with Joost Pauwaert?” they ask.
The Mongols used to ransack and destroy large cities and cut the throats of all the inhabitants. Soldiers were occasionally spared and conscripted into their armies (to profit from their know-how or to use them as a bumper). In 1221, when two of Genghis Khan’s sons captured the city of Urgench after a seven-month siege, they massacred all the inhabitants
but spared the artisans. Why the artisans and not the theologians?
The Mongols knew freedom of religion. They were pagans, not bigots. The few sins they recognised were: “touching a flame with a dagger, fishing meat out of a cauldron with a sword, disturbing a fire with an axe, leaning on a whip, whipping a horse with the reins, urinating in a tent, spitting out food, washing clothes, picking boletus.3 Practical guidelines, as it were, that prevented the blunting of swords and knives. Theological tidbits were irrelevant in this respect.
In the poignant Sentimental Journey, in which he strings the fragments of his life on a skewer, Viktor Shklovsky writes: “People who master their craft are always good people”. As a counterpoint to these people, he places a snitch: “If Semyonov hadn’t been a half-baked intellectual, if he had mastered a craft, he wouldn’t have become an informer,” he wrote. “But there was a Torricellian vacuum in his soul , his hands were idle, he didn’t know how to do anything, so he wanted to do politics.”4 And thirty pages on, one reads: “My arrest was an accidental thing. A concoction of Semyonov, a man without craft.”5
Napoleon Bonaparte
Pauwaert reads books about Napoleon. Why? Who was Napoleon?
In his exhaustive biography, published in 1901, John Holland Rose describes Napoleon as a “master craftsman”6 who, like Julius Caesar, was both “visionary and practical”7 and able to marry philosophical ideals with “practical statesmanship”.8 He was an “encyclopaedic genius” who, as a general, diplomat and politician, never lost himself in “strategic soothsaying” and always stuck to “a close watching of events”.9
Multiple committees had made repeated attempts to modernise the French legal code during the period 1789-1793. It was an intractable knot. Napoleon ordered a fresh effort in 1793. Four lawyers worked for four months on a first draft, which was subsequently simplified, refined and polished over the course of 102 eight-to-ten-hour sessions, over half of which were personally chaired by Napoleon. The result demonstrates architectural dexterity, writes Holland Rose, with Napoleon’s numerous personal interventions contributing to the strength, simplicity and symmetry of the 2,281 articles.
During the winter of 1797-98, prior to the Egyptian campaign, Napoleon attended Berthollet’s chemistry lessons.10 And when he departed, it was in the company of engineers, geologists, geographers, archaeologists and painters. He established a university during a stopover in Malta. Napoleon also travelled with a library that, in addition to historical works, novels and poetry, contained a Bible, the Vedas and the Koran.
When crossing the Alps in 1800, his army ground to a halt before a five mile-stretch of rocky terrain over which it was impossible to transport the artillery. The soldiers detached the gun barrels from their mounts and put them into hollowed-out pine trunks, which were dragged over the rocks and snow. The guns survived intact.11 It was not Napoleon’s idea, but that of two companions, Marmont and Gassendi, who, like him, were permitted to think out of the box. When they encountered a heavily guarded, alpine fortress after the crossing, they covered the streets of the lower town with straw and dung in the night, allowing much of the army to pass by in silence. And there are hundreds of other tactical improvisations that could be mentioned. What matters is that these men thought like bricoleurs, in the sense that Claude Lévi-Strauss gave to the word: the improper use of pre-existing materials and techniques to obtain a pratical result.12
Viktor Shklovsky
In Sentimental Journey, Shklovsky describes his attempt to make grenades with “German-made white cylinder casings”, which he suspected were primers:
“They did have an opening for the Bickford fuse, but it was actually far too wide. You could stick your little finger into it and the slit was made so that you couldn’t compress the edges.
I asked my men to prepare me a fuse from the material of a smoke screen bomb and then walked to the edge of a ravine to take a test.
I started sliding the wick cord into the cylinder, which resembled some kind of schoolboy metal pen tube, with the diameter of a three-kopek piece and about 15 centimetres long. The fuse did not want to remain in the slit; it was too thin.
I wrapped the fuse with paper. I made it a two-second length.
I lit a cigarette. You light a Bickford fuse with a cigarette, not a match. Everything according to the rules of the art.”13
In the moment the short fuse caused the grenade to explode in his hand, Shklovsky thought of his book The Subject as a Phenomenon of Style. “Who would be able to write it now?” he wondered. Shklovsky argued that literature was defined by form: enumerating, mirroring, delaying, repeting, opposing. According to him, the content of a literary work emerges from the manner in which these devices (‘prioms’) are deployed.
“The anarchism of life, its subconsciousness, the fact that a tree knows best how to grow – that is something they (Bolsheviks and theologians) cannot grasp,”14 he wrote. And also, in a phrase reminiscent of Brodsky’s theory of numbers: “everything an individual organises is external to him, her or them. The individual is nothing more than the point where lines of force intersect.”15 Of the first Bolsheviks, he wrote: “Of course, at that time they were not yet exerting any influence on events. The masses were moving like schools of herring or Caspian roach during the shoot – they were only following their instincts.”16
“Mistakenly,” he wrote, “we think that in politics we are so bright and so far-sighted. If we did not try so hard to make history all the time, but rather tried to be responsible for the single events of which it consists, the results might be less ridiculous. The point is not to make history, but to produce a biography.”17
Shklovsky was not only an explosives expert, but also a skilled mechanic. He explains somewhere how sugar in a petrol tank will jam the cylinders and that you have to blow them clean. Elsewhere, he describes the “paradoxical” workings of the Gnome engine that, due to its shoddy construction, continued to operate even when the army mechanics confused the gasoline and the oil lines. (Bolshevik society sputters in a similar fashion, he concluded).
“The formal method is fundamentally simple. It’s the return to craft. The most wonderful thing about it is that it doesn’t deny the content of art but considers this so-called content to be emerging from form.”18
“Art unfolds through the logic of its technique. (...) Hamlet is the product of stagecraft.”19
Can a crafstman be bricoleur? This is the key question.
“I am not the brightest of people,” Shklovsky wrote, “I am a slow thinker. I belong to another semantic realm as well – I’m like a samovar used as a hammer to drive nails.”20
Elsewhere he writes: “Art is, at its heart, ironic and destructive. It animates the world. Its task consists in creating inequalities. It creates them by confronting oppositions.”21
“I was very popular with the soldiers in my section; the narrowness
of my political horizon, my constant desire to get everything done immediately, my tactics – not strategy – all these things made the soldiers understand me.”22
What do we mean by an improper use of materials or techniques?
The craftsman improvises, listens to the material, pushes the technique
to its limits, refines existing instruments, creates new materials, new instruments, new techniques. Craft is alive, it moves, it dances, it lives. It thinks in the hands of the tactician, it dies in the head of the strategist,
the schoolmaster and the ‘manager’.
Georg Lichtenberg
“With her knitting”, wrote Georg Christoph Lichtenberg on 16 December 1797 about his four-year-old daughter Margarete, “it seems to be going very well. Some of what I have seen of it, at any rate, far exceeds the attempts I made in this art when I was ten.”23 And on 1 December 1783, less than a year after the Montgolfier brothers’ first successful balloon flight, he wrote: “This happened to me once with a particularly good pig’s bladder.
I had inflated it rather vigorously, my maid threw rather a lot of wood into the stove, which imperceptibly increased the tension of the bladder still further, so that it burst when pressed a little too strongly. (...) The whole art is not to lose patience. The bladder is inflated and dried, then peeled off one last time with tweezers. If you get close to the Tunica interna, you have to proceed very anatomically and stop pulling, but slowly remove the layer with the tweezers together with the knife.”24
Lichtenberg was a physicist. He thought we should question everything we assumed to be true. He was curious. He experimented. He wrote to Goethe about different coloured shadows he observed. (In the debate between Goethe and Newton, he sided with Newton. Only in the late twentieth century was Goethe partially vindicated: one colour can change how we perceive the tone and hue of another when the two are placed side by side.)
Lichtenberg once had himself lashed to a ship’s mast in order to observe a storm. In a letter, he made a sketch of what he saw reminiscent of Hokusai’s wave.
In one of his most famous letters, he described a bustling street in eighteenth-century London. Nobody else has done this. Elsewhere, he describes what he hears during a beautiful spring evening:
1) the murmur of the water at the big mill
2) passing carts and carriages
3) clear, excited cries of children who are probably trying to catch
maybugs on the city walls
4) barking from various distances, voices indicating different moods
5) three or four nightingales in the surrounding gardens or the city
6) countless frogs
7) the clatter of falling skittles
8) a badly played horn, the least pleasant sound of all25
Lichtenberg witnessed the French Revolution and was a contemporary of Kant and the practical murderer Napoleon. He taught physics at university. At home, he was a dreamer and ponderer. He jotted down thousands of observations, some of which were razor-sharp and which later, with little or no additions, evolved into the oeuvres of Wittgenstein, Freud26 and Nietzsche.
Of the French Revolution, he wrote: “It is fermenting in France, but we do not know whether it will produce wine or vinegar.” And he described himself as singularly unfit to govern a country on account of his inability to maintain a tidy desk.
Many ideas converge in these thoughts. For instance they imply that history is not made by people, but makes itself.27 In general, Lichtenberg thinks that humans instinctively look for a meaning in everything,28 because this helps the mind to remember things. There is no ‘real meaning’ outside our way of knowing. Lichtenberg does more than parrot Kant here because he consistently applies this idea to everything he encounters.
In several places, he describes our thought processes as “a thinking” that occurs within us. It thinks (in us), just as it rains.29 There is no subject. The word “I”, he writes, is a practical but unnecessary concept. Nietzsche reiterated this idea, arguing that our illusion about an acting “I” arises from our accidental use of personal pronouns.
“A tool,” Shklovsky writes in Zoo, “not only extends our body, but it also extends itself within us.”30
Our manner of perceiving and ordering makes us believe, time and time again, that there is an ordering and meaningful principle in the world. Not realising that every ‘perceived’ order arises from our way of perceiving and remembering. Not realising that our brain ‘thinks’ from
a biological necessity.31
Lichtenberg often pointed out that a really efficient social reform can only be a slow process.32 He welcomed the desire for change in France but immediately foresaw the danger of a hastily imposed ‘new order’ (one that rapidly lead to arbitrary terror and, after Lichtenberg’s death, to Napoleon’s absolute power). “Free France,” he wrote, “where today you are free to hang anybody.”33
The order we discern around us stems from ourselves. We know nothing with certainty. Our first task is to question everything we believe. Reading too many books, or too soon, is harmful. They merely fill our heads with explanations and categories that prevent us from seeing, hearing, experiencing.34
Education is just as detrimental. We are drowning in fashionable fake knowledge that inhibits independent thought and prevents us from being as free as the Greeks, who made amazing discoveries without reading much. Greeks did not learn dead languages, Lichtenberg stated.35
Books and schools turn people into pets36 that can no longer think for themselves. We need to free ourselves, to the maximum extent, from all the common falsehoods and theories. Lichtenberg was one of the first people (perhaps the first) to use the word paradigm to describe the form that shapes and frames, but also freezes and inhibits our perception.37 Gombrowicz later formulated the same idea (and argued for immaturity). Two hundred and fifty years later, the philosopher Thomas Kuhn wrote that paradigm shifts are often unconscious and can even happen while
the scientist is asleep.38
Lichtenberg had anticipated this as well, pointing out that we think more freely when asleep, rather than when awake. Our brain is probably unable to clean itself up while it is functioning, he writes. And indeed, many new insights arise from similar patterns occurring in our brains, in the same neural circuits, during the nocturnal clean-up process. Inadvertently, in other words. From a biological need for economy and stylisation. It sounds logical that our brain cannot do this during our waking hours, because we need our paradigms to survive (identify danger, find edible food, chose the right partner). Sleep, as we know today, is indispensable to neural plasticity.
Lichtenberg’s miraculous inventiveness seems to stem from his powerlessness as a physicist. He paid meticulous attention to every scientific branch but failed to make a major discovery in the field of physics. He pinpointed what was missing: an ability to see the relationship between two seemingly different things. (Natural laws are equations, which establish the equivalence between two ‘different’ forces, for example mass and energy.)
“How many ideas hover dispersed in my head of which many a pair,
if they should come together, could bring about the greatest of discoveries! But they lie as far apart as Goslar sulphur from East India saltpetre, and both from the dust in the charcoal piles on the Eichsfeld — which three together would make gunpowder”, he wrote.39
“If only we could make discoveries by following certain rules,” he sighed. “It is obvious that discoveries result from some kind of chance, even if they seem to be the result of a great effort (...), but the main leaps of discovery do not seem to be the work of our will any more than the contractions of our heart.”40
The seven theologians stare at me in annoyance from the pulpit.
“What does all this have to do with Joost Pauwaert?” asks the first.
“Yes, and what does your story have to do with art?” queries the second.
“And where is your theory?” demands the third.
Their colleagues nod in approval at these pertinent questions. And in so doing, their stiff grey beards rise and fall like the tails of birds that are hopping around in search of worms.
“We have the need to believe that everything has a cause, just as we believe that spiders spin their web in order to catch flies. But they does this before knowing that there are such things as flies”, Lichtenberg wrote.41
“Hamlet,” Shklovsky said, “emerged from stagecraft.”42
Is it possible? Can an artist spin a web, weave a texture, create an object, perform an act, without knowing what might emerge from this form, without knowing what our meaning-seeking brains will subsequently add to the deed (or its fruit)? Can we think blindly? And to what extent can we use the term thinking to describe the making of objects, or messing around with materials and techniques, or playing blindly with images, words and ideas? Does thinking through action exist? And can it be blind, like a spider building its first web?
In other words, don’t we need a theory before embarking on something? As per our political parties and art theorists, who purport to know everything beforehand? But what is a theory? First there is the paradigm, the form that prescribes a certain behaviour, a certain way of thinking. And then there is the hypothesis. Which surely leads to experiments? After which a theory is established, which seeks to explain the results? And does it not all boil down to breaking the paradigm and making new discoveries? The broader view? The new insight? A richer experience?
“The great men of this world,” Lichtenberg said, “should publicly praise not only the heroes, nor the man stammering an ode in a poetic intoxication, but also the just and stern judge, the able and conscientious lawyer, the sensible and industrious craftsman.”43
“I observed something that has often been confirmed,” he writes elsewhere: “the most astute scholars often practise an art. Or they tinker.”44
Joseph Brodsky
According to Brodsky, who once worked in a factory, history has nothing to teach us about the future. It is useless to study it with this objective in mind, simply because events are as unpredictable as a game of chance. (And because it is possible to repeat history just because we know it:
Napoleon wanted to conquer Egypt and advance to India, because he strove to emulate Alexander.) You can, however, dabble in history if you want to examine the unforeseeable nature of historic events.
According to Gombrowicz, Hitler was propelled and pushed upwards by a ‘Form’ that the people projected onto him. His self-satisfied, hateful and paranoid character did the rest. And Napoleon? Did he not single-handedly rearrange history? Looking open-mindedly at his thirst for conquest, we see the same movements over and over again. The Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Russians, Moors, Venetians, Genovese, French, Germans have perpetually fought over Sardinia, Cyprus, Gibraltar or Crimea: islands and coastlines that enable control of the Mediterranean. Just as the current Russian tyrant does today, as if grain and earthenware jars of olive oil still have to be shipped from North Africa to Rome. Looking at the size of Russia on the world map, one wonders what the Russian army is doing in Crimea or Ukraine, other than responding to the secret provocations of the US war machine, which serves the same merchants who financed Genghis Khan. There are few new insights to be gleaned. And no workable theories.
What we term ‘theory’ today, vis-à-vis contemporary art, is a fashionable collection of preformed, counterfeit ideas about a field of research that cannot be defined. And they are rarely, if ever, tested against a practice. No one can formulate a precise definition of ‘art’. Why? Because its principal characteristic is perpetual self-renewal. There is no boundary.
There are no indispensable rules. There is only an ignoring, breaking or transcending of rules. But how? From practice. From action. From thinking through action.
Which was not the case with the intellectual and murderer Lenin, who also believed he needed a theory. “Lenin read Marx not from necessity,” Brodsky wrote (for what did rural Russia have to do with London and industrial England?), “but from an inferiority complex, from his provincialism.”45
Only provincials need theories. And only city dwellers. And only people with two left hands. It is provincial to strive for universal truths or norms. Just as ‘universal’ works always spring from a focus on the specific and local (Shakespeare who wanted to make captivating theatre, Homer, Colette, Satie, Warhol, Dylan, Toni Morrison, Nina Simone, Eva Hesse, Morandi and so on).
If we did not read so much and were not ruined by teachers who pretend that there is nothing left to discover (while impressing follies upon us), we could all be Greeks, writes Lichtenberg, and see and think as open-mindedly as the ancients.
Perhaps he did not yet know about the Vedas and other Eastern writings, which were picked up by his admirer Schopenhauer.
For Brodsky, a poem is a confluence of Western (Cartesian) and Eastern (intuitive, synergetic) thought.
The connection, of course, being Russia, or the Silk Road, which stretches from east to west and vice versa, to the extent that Brodsky preferred the name ‘West Asia’ for Eastern Europe. The Russia of the Ukrainian writer Gogol, Russian history with its extraordinary, literary attention to sound (Pushkin), texture (Shklovsky), form (Nabokov) and incongruity (Tarkovsky).
“The first mode of cognition”, writes Brodsky, “puts a high premium on the rational, on analysis. In social terms, it is accompanied by man’s self-assertion… (…) The second relies mainly on intuitive synthesis, calls for self-negation, and is best represented by Buddha. In other words a poem offers you a sample of complete, not slanted, intelligence at work.”46
Lichtenberg, who was unfamiliar with Eastern philosophy, failed to see that the Presocratic philosophers, primarily the so-called obscure Heraclitus, were in fact Eastern thinkers. (My thoughts, not Brodsky’s.)
“The purpose of evolution” Brodsky writes, “whether you believe it
or not, is beauty.”47 For it is beauty that “survives it all and generates truth simply by a fusion of the mental and the sensual”. And elsewhere he writes: “Art shows a man his positive potential.”48
Virginia Woolf
I have not mentioned any women, alas. I could write about Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) or Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (the ‘revealing character of deeds’) or many other women who have shaken up my world, but I’d rather consider the moment when one of the greatest authors who ever lived formulated her initial ideas about her future masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, which took her two years to write:
“I think a little story, perhaps a review, this fortnight; having a superstitious wish49 to begin To the Lighthouse the first day at Monk’s House.
I now think I shall finish it in the two months there. (…) I think, though, that when I begin it I shall enrich it in all sorts of ways; thicken it; give it branches – roots which I do not perceive now. (…) A new problem50 like that breaks fresh ground in one’s mind; prevents the regular ruts.”51
Can art be anything other than pushing boundaries, through a craft, and the (at the time) improper use of that craft? Can it be anything other than a problem? How can something be art if doesn’t pose problems? Who wants to get out of bed to tackle an issue that has already been solved?
Conclusion
Shaking their heads, the seven theologians peer down at me and consult their fashionable wristwatches. I suddenly notice that their beards aren’t real, but the stick-on kind. These are young, educated brats looking down on me from on high, bolstered by their hastily cobbled together, short-sighted, fake knowledge.
“And what does all this have to do with Joost Pauwaert?” one of them asks. She has a tattoo on her neck, I note. She’s hip and trendy. “Yes!” shout the others, “what has it got to do with Pauwaert?”
“That Pauwaert has two hands,” I reply, “a head on his shoulders, a heart in his chest and a soul that connects everything. But since this means nothing to you if I don’t quote an auctoritas, I’ll have to dust off Lichtenberg again.”
“If anyone in this world ever wants an ethic tattooed on his hand,” he writes, “with a needle or with gunpowder, I suggest a quote that I found somewhere in The Spectator: “the whole man must move together”. This doesn’t usually happen, which causes severe and irreparable damage. A man, to me, also means the head, the heart, the mouth and the hands. It takes consummate dexterity to keep your body together in all weathers, until the end, when all movement stops.”52
“Pauwaert,” I tell the pulpit rhetoricians, “moves beyond recognised categories. He acts, makes, feels and thinks. And he leaves objects for us to look at. He makes us look, feel and think with him. He can’t help but be doing good because he is doing good. He reads and watches, tells stories, saws, forges, welds, casts bronze, tries, experiments, fails, acts, feels. And his thoughts are revealed in all this, not external to these actions, but inside and in-between them, not obeying a known paradigm, not underpinned by a static theory, and not following a well-defined hypothesis.
Why your need for theories, venerable theologians? Why your need for meaning, direction and purpose? Why must history have a purpose? Why must an artwork have a meaning? Why can’t it just mean something to you, like a tree? Do you know a tree that means something to you? Why are you afraid of the blindness of evolution? Knowing that it has led to the most beautiful animals and plants? Blindfolded! Because it makes you see your own futility, like something wet beneath your feet? And why do you need interpretations, explanations and elucidations? Because ultimately, you are petrified at the thought of personal responsibility? Because, in other words, you cannot grasp how to be responsible in an utterly indifferent world, a world in which the profoundest truth will always be pre-human, because to nature we are nothing but new-born frauds, as light as the insect on your nose?
“To lose a poet,” Brodsky writes, “is like a brain cell busted.”53 Without artists, there is no thinking, and without Pauwaert, no civilisation, no insight, no poetry, no wonder, no fun, no laughter, no open-mindedness, no dreams of freedom, no life worth living.
And we don’t need theories in the process. “The academics with their ideological bickering,” Brodsky said, “should be kept out of it. For no one has the authority to prescribe in this field on any grounds other than taste. Beauty and its attendant truth are not to be subordinated to any philosophical, political or even ethical system, since aesthetics is the mother
of ethics and not the other way around.”54
And those who don’t feel it, can still learn it.
Montagne de Miel, 5 February 2023
Notes:
1 Especially since Paul Feyerabend demonstrated, with numerous examples, that even scientific theories cannot be conclusively ‘proven’ and that scientists (even theoretical physicists) usually start from concrete data (things, not ‘facts’), which they study while acting. In so doing, they never apply a conclusive method, but work with constantly changing ad hoc hypotheses. It is not
a case of having an idea first and acting afterwards. “Creation of a thing, and creation plus full understanding of a correct idea of the thing, are very often parts of one and the same indivisible process and cannot be separated without bringing the process to a stop. (…) It is guided rather by a vague urge, by a ‘passion’ (Kierkegaard).” (Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, Verso, London/New York, 2010, p. 54) “We now have a situation where social and psychological theories of human action and thought have taken the place of this thought and action itself.” (ibid: 348) “It is clear, then, that the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory of rationality, rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings. (...) It will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and at all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.” (ibid: 55) “Von Weizsäcker showed how quantum mechanics arose from concrete research. (...) a person trying to solve a problem whether in science or elsewhere must be given complete freedom.” (ibid: 346) “The attempt to break through the boundaries of a given conceptual system is an essential part of such research (it also should be an essential part of any interesting life).” (ibid: 221) Pre-eminent scholars, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, plus the dramatist Bertolt Brecht, asked Feyerabend to become their assistant.
He studied history, mathematics and physics, but only after first immersing himself in theatre and singing. As a young man he sang and created plays.
2 Viktor Chklovski, Le voyage de Marco Polo, Payot, Paris, 1938, p. 22
3 cf. Viktor Chklovski, Le voyage de Marco Polo, Payot, Paris, 1938, p. 59
4 Viktor Sjklovski, Sentimentele reis, Uitgeverij de Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 1980, p. 298
5 Ibid: 330 (my italics)
6 John Holland Rose, The Life of Napoleon I, G. Bell and Sons, London, 1919, p. 271
7 Ibid: 177
8 Ibid: 301
9 Ibid: 245
10 Ibid: 182
11 cf. “It was a tough trek. The mules could not carry the mountain artillery. The Assyrians carried it over the mountains on their shoulders.” Sentimentele reis, Uitgeverij de Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 1980, p. 103
12 cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage, Plon, Paris, 1962, pp. 29-33
13 Viktor Sjklovski, Sentimentele reis, Uitgeverij de Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 1980, pp. 264-265
14 Ibid: 231
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid: 17
17 Ibid: 126
18 Ibid: 283
19 Ibid: 285
20 Ibid: 202
21 Ibid: 284 Shklovsky distinguishes between the haughty irony of intellectuals and irony as a blind meeting of two semantic systems. (ibid: 110, 15) “What we need is not irony, but free hands.” (ibid: 327)
22 Ibid: 166 (my italics)
23 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Gekleurde schaduwen. Brieven 1770-1799, Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam/Antwerp, p. 235. cf. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Vierter Band. Briefe, Carl Hauser Verlag, Munich, 1968, p. 974
24 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Gekleurde schaduwen. Brieven 1770-1799, De Arbeiderspers Publishers, Amsterdam-Antwerp, pp. 149-150. cf. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Vierter Band. Briefe, Carl Hauser Verlag, Munich, 1968, p. 540
25 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Erster Band. Sudelbücher, Carl Hauser Verlag, Munich, 1968, p. 794 (J 1004)
26 “Dreams can be useful because, without the constraint of contrived reason, they represent the uninhibited sum of our full being. This thought deserves consideration.” Ibid: 663 (J 72)
27 cf. “The great events of the world are not made, they take place.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Zweiter Band. Sudelbücher II, Carl Hauser Verlag, Munich, 1968, p. 429
(K 170)
28 “In order to incorporate something into our memory, we always try to attach a meaning or some kind of order to it.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Erster Band. Sudelbücher, Carl Hauser Verlag, Munich, 1968, p. 710
(J 392)
29 “Es denkt, sollte man sagen, so wie man sagt: es blitzt. Zu sagen cogito, ist schon zu viel, so bald man es durch Ich denke übersetzt. Das Ich anzunehmen, zu postulieren, ist praktisches Bedürfnis.” [One should say it thinks just as one says: it rains. To say cogito becomes too much when it is translated by I think. To assume an I, to postulate it, is a practical requirement.] Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Zweiter Band. Sudelbücher II, Carl Hauser Verlag, Munich, 1968, p. 412 (K 76) See also, Ibid: 501 (L806)
30 Victor Chklovski, ZOO, L’Esprit des Péninsules, Paris, 1998, p. 23
31 “How can we learn to see only the best in everything, to suspect something good in everything, to always hope and rarely fear? Our species has survived evolution because, as individuals, we well remember what is toxic and dangerous.” Ibid: 404 (K 43)
32 “Building a republic from the materials of an overthrown monarchy
is not easy. In fact, it is impossible before you have given every stone a new cut, and that takes time.” Ibid: 429 (K167)
33 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Erster Band. Sudelbücher, Carl Hauser Verlag, Munich, 1968, p. 784 (J 935)
34 “Reading too much and too soon makes our memory displace or overpower our sensitivity and taste.”
cf. Ibid: 114 (B 264)
35 cf Ibid: 862 (L 76). Cf. Paul Feyerabend, Tegen de methode, Lemniscaat, Rotterdam, 2002, p. 197
en 208
36 cf. “Man has made himself a pet,
that is why he is so depraved.”
Ibid: 220 (C 341)
37 cf. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Zweiter Band. Sudelbücher II, Carl Hauser Verlag, Munich, 1968, p. 455 (K 313, K 314)
38 Thomas S. Kuhn, De structuur van wetenschappelijke revoluties, Boom Meppel, Amsterdam, p. 106
39 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Zweiter Band. Sudelbücher II, Carl Hauser Verlag, Munich, 1968, p. 453 (K 308)
40 Ibid: 501 (L 806)
41 Ibid: 181 (H 25)
42 Viktor Sjklovski, Sentimentele reis, Uitgeverij de Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 1980, p. 285. Lichtenberg writes somewhere that Hamlet springs from an idea. Could they both be right? Can form and idea coming into being simultaneously? For Borges, the greatness of Hamlet is due to the play within the play, just as the modernity of the Quixote derives from the second part, in which Don Quixote encounters readers who have already read the first section and (like Sancho Panza) debate the veracity of certain incidents. (What we learn from both books is that we ourselves are characters in a story we do not oversee.) In both cases, the depth of the work comes from a technical artifice.
43 “Dem sinnreichen und emsigen Handwerker” [The sensible and industrious craftsman], Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Erster Band. Sudelbücher, Carl Hauser Verlag, Munich, 1968, p. 232 (D20 – my italics).
44 “... die nebenher sich mit einer Kunst beschäftigen oder wie man im Plattdeutschen sagt klütern.” Ibid: 268 (D229) (my italics). Translated by Jean François Billeter as: “... ceux qui pratiquent aussi un art ou bricolent”. Jean François Billeter, Lichtenberg, Éditions Allia, Paris, 2014, p. 40
45 Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, Penguin Books, Londen, 1995, p. 112
46 Ibid: 178. See also p. 107: “… one of the saddest things that ever transpired in the course of our civilization was the confrontation between Greco-Roman polytheism and Christian monotheism, and its known outcome. Neither intellectually nor spiritually was this confrontation really necessary. Man’s metaphysical capacity is substantial enough to allow for the creeds coexistence, not to mention fusion (...) Was it necessary to throw out of the window so much of B.C.’s intellectual achievement?’
47 Ibid: 179
48 “If art teaches men anything, it is to become like art: not like other men.” Joseph Brodsky, Less than One, New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1986, p. 273. See also: “A poem, as it were, tells its reader: Be like me”. Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, Penguin Books, London, 1995, p. 178
49 cf. Feyerabend’s “vague urge”: Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, Verso, London/New York, 2010, p. 54
50 Compare with Feyerabend’s: “someone trying to solve a problem” (ibid: 275), see above in note 1.
51 Virginia Woolf, A Writers Diary, Triad Panther, 1978, p. 84-85 (my italics).
52 “... mit hülfe von Nadelstichen und Schießpulver...” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Erster Band. Sudelbücher, Carl Hauser Verlag, Munich, 1968, p. 259 (D 195).
53 Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, Penguin Books, London, 1995, p. 181.
54 Ibid: 179-180.