In 1984, my marriage to Cindy was in serious trouble. I had started once a week therapy with a McLean Hospital based psychiatrist named Lenore Boling, and I used the sessions really just to give voice to my unhappiness with what my relationship with Cindy had become. Despite the unhappiness, I do not think I ever shed a tear in those sessions over the shambles of the marriage. One day, however, I started talking about my work. I tried to explain to Dr. Boling that in all of my writing, whether it was on Kant's First Critique or Hume's Treatise or Das Kapital, my goal always was to plumb the depths of the author's central idea and recast it in a form so simple, so clear, so transparent that I could hold it before my students or my readers and show them its beauty. As I said these words, tears started to well up in me, and I finally had to stop talking because I could not finish. It was the only time in twenty years of psychotherapy that I cried openly in a session. Ever since that day, twenty-five years ago, I have understood that it is this intellectual intuition of the transparent beauty of an idea, not the desire for status or recognition or money, that has throughout my life been the driving force behind my writing and teaching. This is why it makes little difference to me whether reviewers agree with what I say, and it is why I am made somewhat uncomfortable by praise. The intrinsic beauty of the idea is the focus of my concern. It seems that I am, after all, more capable of shedding tears for the central argument of the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding than I am for a failed marriage or even for a deceased parent. I am not at all sure that is admirable, but it is closer to the truth about myself than I have ever come before.
That's from Robert Paul Wolff, hat tip goes to The Browser.
If Cindy is lucky, she got out of that marriage.
A moving description of the emotional reaction we can have to ideas. The bother is when beautiful ideas are not the ones with the highest correspondence to measured reality. Wittgenstein and quantum mechanics strike me this way. I was in love with the power and elegance of Newton, in awe of the perspective altering genius of Einstein, and just wanted to vomit every time I saw a wave equation of state.
He clearly doesn’t know himself very well, or else he would have figured this out when he was twenty and then gone on a few years later to figure out why he was screwed up in this way. Whatever he is crying about, I suspect it ain’t the pristine beauty of the idea.
He has remarried; he’s just finished blogging the portion of his memoirs that covers the end of his marriage to Cindy and his re-meeting his now-wife.
Well, genius is often a kind of madness. Specifically, autism spectrum disorders. I can say that I have found as great an emotional impact as any in my life contemplating the integers as anything else. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if you have never been moved to tears by beauty, you live a grey life.
And yes, my wife is a very special woman.
Putting principles over opinions is a recipe for disaster. Just like using mathematics to help people.
“my marriage to Cindy was in serious trouble”: ah, no moral agency there, I see – just an abstraction suffering from a rather abstract condition.
Gaining clarity about the nature of one’s deepest longings is, in my judgment, a most beautiful moment in a person’s life, a moment that some people never have the pleasure of experiencing. The author is sharing the moment he truly understood his place in this universe. I find his triumphant realization moving and important.
I don’t really understand the sort of caustic antipathy to the man. He had a bad marraige and he loves his job, the actual work of it. Most people don’t get to make a living doing work that they love. He does and that’s an emotional thing for him. Are libertarians the ‘acceptable things to be passionate’ about police now?
I frequently break down and cry because the beauty of my own thinking simply overwhelms me. In fact, I feel an attack coming on right now.
The wiki on Althusser is amusing, in a black way:
“Althusser’s later years were marked by a pronounced fall from grace after he strangled his wife to death.” One would hope….
Extremely well put. The irreducible beauty in a simple idea like that is a great experience, be it in philosophy, physics, math, or any other field.
Tyler,
I find it interesting that what you took away from that paragraph was a person’s dedication to clear exposition rather than a person who cares more about abstractions than people and most importantly his wife. Are you more dedicated to ideas than people as well?
Regards,
Ken
“my goal always was to plumb the depths of the author’s central idea and recast it in a form so simple, so clear, so transparent”
A noble aim. Few scholars succeed. Many try to do the exact opposite. Most just take awful shortcuts.
The experience of gradually becoming aware of a simple great idea at the core is beautiful but difficult to share. If you are wrong it matters not a fig because you found it and now it is yours.
“Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.†
I couldn’t disagree more with this, except if you are talking about the bad ideas of despots (and a lot of intellectuals). With bad ideas, and without good ideas, we’d have a lot fewer people because their ancestors would have died by sword, hunger and disease. Ideas and people are not separable or to be prioritized one over the other. We have brains for a reason.
Johnson starts his article with:
“If people get in the way of ideas they must be swept aside and, if necessary, put in concentration camps or killed.”
This is an example of a BAD idea. I would say that the people who agree with this idea should be swept aside by the GOOD idea that is the antithesis to it. Don’t reject Robespierre because he espoused ideas. Reject his terrible ideas. And if he gives you static, cap his ass.
Andrew,
When you call Paul Johnson’s quote (“If people get in the way of ideas…”), “an example of a BAD idea”, you are falling into the same trap as the old Wolff did: the abyss of unreality. Get out, quick! What Johnson directly refers to is harsh, sinister, brutal, bloody reality, sometimes known as History. Or do you think The Terror during the French Revolution boils down to a “simple”, “clear”, “transparent” “idea”? No! Chalk that one up to Things That Really Happened. Therefore, far from being an “idea” — good or “BAD” — Johnson’s quote is an accurate description of a state of affairs, which real human beings experienced. He gives many other historical examples in the article to prove the point, such as the millions who were butchered in the name of an idea by Lenin and by Mao and by Pol Pot.
Ortega y Gasset, in “The Revolt of the Masses”, has the following to say on the matter: “their [philosophers, mathematicians, naturalists] clarity was of a scientific order; that is to say, concerned with abstract things. All the matters about which science speaks, whatever the science be, are abstract, and abstract things are always clear. So that the clarity of science is not so much in the heads of scientists as in the matters of which they speak. What is really confused, intricate, is the concrete vital reality, always a unique thing.”
“Take stock of those around you and you will see them wandering about lost through life, like sleep-walkers in the midst of their good or evil fortune, without the slightest suspicion of what is happening to them. You will hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defence of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.”
Thank you Fabio Franco. As an engineer I have to convince people of this in the most roundabout ways, cause my job is really to make living more easily for those in my company. A lot of ideas get tossed around, but if they miss the mark of improving the lot of living people, then they are not good ideas. I might even say categorically.
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