Transcript
The book that I wrote in my 20s called Against Criticism was first going to be called In Praise of Or the Necessity of Imperfection. And in those days, proofs were set up by type by hand. They weren't just transcribed from a computer. And I had sent in several rounds of corrections and I rang my editor and said, "I found a comma in the wrong font." And she said, "I will change the comma, but I think you should now take a holiday."
One of the things I find really encouraging about the millennials, for want of a better word, is that the millennial generation seems to be much more relaxed about loose commas and in fact seems to embody the idea of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. And also seems to be keen on exploring different possibilities. It's well known now that the job for life doesn't exist, but that in a way is a loss of security, but again, in uncertainty and in variety of perspectives. And that gives me encouragement.
I'm sure you're right and I agree, but I also think that the other side of it is that commerce are terribly important. Well, yeah, of course. And I think there's a ... I'm really saying that you can take it too far, but you can also be neglectful of grammar and punctuation in ways that I would not personally be wanting to encourage. Well,
It's the same idea of the subjectivity versus objective.
Yes. If
You take it too far in either direction, it's not ideal.
Well, yes, except that I would say that it's not a matter of going midpoint of this spectrum, but of finding something else, which is one in which the term subjective and objective already have been supplanted, if you like, or made redundant. Right,
Because the subject of an objective doesn't really
Exist.
But yeah, you're right. It's a true one because for the sake of thinking about it, it's easy to imagine it as some midpoint between these two
Polls.
I know. Even though, of course, I don't want to dilute
Your position. It's constantly a problem in writing about it because one finds oneself always falling into manners of speaking one can't avoid.
And sometimes the map is helpful.
Yes. Definitely.
Without a map, it would have been pretty tricky to find a way here.
Very definitely.
We did do it without a map without. There were signposts. I thought it would be worth just for a moment touching on the idea of the infinite being found through the finite.
Okay. Yeah.
Because an interesting idea, and I'll start with a wonderful quote by Blake,
Which
Is just one verse from a larger poem. He goes, "To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, to hold infinity-"
Infinity in the palm of your hand.
An eternity in an hour, which is a beautiful, beautiful passage. And one which I, and again, I think this has this idea of truth as revealing and having truth itself having a temporality because when I first read that poem, I didn't really understand it. I got a sense of the magic of the way the words sound, but I didn't quite see what he was getting at. But then as I live my life, there are moments which just feel so particular and through that, so eternal that I understand what he meant.
I think you've already put it as well as I can. I think it is this experience of the particular as so real that you see through it to a realm in which it is embedded. It's as though when we really understand the individuality of things, it's not to cut them off from everything else, but to embed it, embed them in everything else, to enable us to see everything as through the lens of this particular thing. And of course we can only see it through the lens of something. If we try to see it without a lens of any kind, then we end up with this idea that eternity and infinity are things that you find by turning your back on absolutely everything that we can experience. They are non-events, non-things, non-processes that can't be known in any way. If they have a meaning for us, it has to be that we can't encapsulate them in language, but we can experience them, and we can only experience them through going deeper into our experience of the world, not by turning our back on our experience of the world. (05:22): So I would see them both in that way. And in the case of Blake, it is quite extraordinary how often he uses the word infinite and eternal. And he even talks about the infinite shores of Thames, the river Thames. And clearly he wasn't meaning that the Thames were strictly speaking an infinitely long river. What he was trying to suggest was that the things that we experience and know, if we see them in a certain light are a window on things that have limitlessness in them, we see through the lens of the familiarity of some great image, the mountain here, the river in the city or whatever it is. If we see it just as a limited thing in the field of our vision, then we see it as extremely, well, deprived of its meaning and very limited. Whereas if we see it as an image of something emerging from something much bigger than itself, which for a while manages to communicate to us, then we see as you, what was Blake said, inaffinity in the palm of your hand or eternity in an arm.
I've heard, I'm pretty sure you before talk of a wave emerging from an ocean, and that seems to also express this idea of the infinite and
Finite. Yes. If one sees the sea as an image of the infinite, then the wave for a while is something that you can focus on, you can photograph, you can measure, you can experience. It's there, but it is not distinct from the sea. It's not distinct from the water of which it is made. It is the water. It is the sea at that particular moment of space and time. And I would see us in relation to the cosmos as being similar to this, that whatever this cosmos is, it's far beyond anything we can understand. We are part of it. We emerge from it without being separate from it in any way, but we are nonetheless real and individual while we exist. And what we eventually become is part of the sea again, but that sea goes on and so does the water in it, and that water will manifest itself in another way in time. (07:49): And the fact of the wave's existence also is not lost in that every wave has an impact. Every single movement of everything in the world makes a change to the entirety of the world, in the way that the flap of a butterflies wings
It. And in that sense, the wave has an immortality.
Has an immortality.
Because it's an aspect of the infinite.
Which is never wiped out or destroyed.
Yes. Yeah, I love that image. I don't know where to go now, the conversation. We've spoken about a lot.
What have we not covered that you want to cover?
Have we spoken ... There is actually, I'd like to talk about tension is now becoming a theme. Yeah. And one of the tests- What
Do you mean now?
When I say now, sorry, I meant it's sort of emerged as a theme in today's conversation.
I see. Okay. Sorry.
Whereas it wasn't, tension is not written on this piece of paper, but it's now-
Now has
Become-
It's a constant theme. And
In that sense, there's this idea of emergence, but we're also playing a role in its emergence. But I wanted to talk about the tension between activity and passivity or to act versus to not act.
Okay.
Because on the one hand, some people say to you, and Zengerte, he goes, "The afterlife doesn't matter. This is the world for us to shatter, and it's a plea to act." And similarly, Nietzsche says, "Ideas without action are merely regrets." And if you take that as your governing principle, then it leads one to feel like we need to be constantly moving, moving, moving, doing, doing, doing. And there's another one, Einstein, Sprinceton, of life is like riding a bicycle in order to stay upright, you need to keep moving. But at the same time, if you continue to move, you then can miss other possibilities that can reveal themselves if you stop. And I'm wondering whether you could just discuss this tension of activity versus passion from your own perspective.
It's a very valuable point that activity and passivity are, again, a sort of false pairing where we feel we've got to decide between them, but there is something that is both maximally active and passive at the same time, which is a kind of active openness to things, which is not the same as falling asleep and just paying no attention. It's paying maximal attention, which means often not doing, but stopping. People often ask me about being creative and they say, "So what does one do in order to be more creative?" My answer to that is that you stop doing things because if I tell you do this, that will immediately mean it can't be creative. It's got to emerge and there are certain things you can do that will certainly stop you being creative, many things. And the first step would be to stop doing the things that are getting between you and being creative. (11:08): What one wants is a situation in which one is maximally open to the possibility of something. Then one becomes a field for the realization of whatever is latent or potential in it. And if you like in an image from gardening, a gardener cannot make a flower or cannot make a flower be a flower. All the gardener can do is either permit the flower by creating a space in which it can thrive or stifle it. So often when we are trying to bring about an end, it's not about forcefully moving towards that end, it's about not doing and waiting and giving a possible space for that thing to happen. And that sounds negative, but the paradox is that often things that sound negative are profoundly creative.
I really like that because it's the idea of cultivating a space for something then to emerge. And it's important today because there is a huge emphasis on everything happening immediately. People believing that they will become, they will blossom into a flower in three days, but in fact, personality potential develops in a similar way to how flowers develop. There needs to be a patience, a real waiting on, to use your phrase.
One of the problems in science now, and probably in the world in general, is that, as you say, everything is expected now and must be delivered according to a schedule. You must publish so many papers. And this is enormously distracting and partly because people have to publish whether they've really got anything worthwhile to publish or not. Partly because it makes it much harder to find the really valuable stuff amongst all the draws, partly because it means that people have got to crystallize their thinking far too early. Whereas what they need is not to be crystallizing it or precipitating it into a knowable form because once they've done that, that will become a directive for how things go in the future. It's, in my mind, curiously like the process of taking a photograph of something instead of being with it. If you take a photograph of it, that crystallization of it will from now on become your memory of what it was. (13:39): It's very hard to bypass it. My advice, if we really want good results, is to get good people that we trust, who we think are bright, motivated, and get off their backs, stop trying to micro control what they do and trust them. And it is inevitable if this is going to work, that some people will not deliver. But the price you pay for forcing everyone is that nobody will deliver. Superficially they'll deliver. They'll turn up on time with whatever it is, but you will have ruled out the possibility of excellence. And in the end, it's only the excellent in science that matters. You also rule out the
Possibility of the unexpected.
Which is what I'm really saying, because the excellent will be the new insight. But the trouble with a system where you're being forced to do things very fast is that you haven't got time to explore a new idea because it may lead nowhere for quite a long time. And that's dangerous. You won't get promotion, you won't have fulfilled your quota of boring papers, and this is just the way to kill science. Science is an imaginative enterprise if it's anything at all. And all the great scientists were people of great imagination. This is not enough emphasized. The jerry idea of the scientific method is propelled, that actually all you need to do is follow certain steps. And there's a lot to say about why that is false, but one of the simplest is as ... Sorry.
There's a good moment as well to discuss how you don't need language in order to make scientific discoveries.
Well, not only do you not need language to make scientific discoveries, but having to use language to make them may actually impede the process. And we know that a number of things, a number of great, just because we have the accounts of them, discoveries in mathematics and science were made by people who understood an argument in their mind. It was largely an analogy that revealed to them the structure of what they were looking at, but it took them a long time afterwards to explain in language why they were right. I mean, they were right, but it didn't come to them by a method that they ...
Could you remember some of those? There's the snake, I can't remember.
Well, there's a rather familiar one of Kekule seeing the structure of the benzene ring, which is the basis of organic chemistry, apparently when looking at the fire and seeing a chain of serpents eating their tails, and he realized it had this ring structure, this hexagonal structure, but there are plenty more. I mean, it's very well known that Einstein received, as it were, the insights that he did while playing music. And it often took him a very long time afterwards to construct an argument that demonstrated the results that he got. And it may surprise people that Neils Bohr's notebooks, Neils Bore, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, his notebooks don't contain equations. They contain only drawings. So it's this sort of thing that's a case of the mathematician Poincare having made the discovery or struggling to make the discovery of footsie equations and he battered away at this at his desk writing reams of paper for weeks and drinking lots of coffee and not sleeping and he couldn't get anywhere with it. (17:36): And so he gave up and went into town and as he came back, he wasn't thinking about it at all. At a moment he described it and he put his foot on the deck of the bus, he suddenly realized the answers to the problem he hadn't been thinking about. Now that doesn't mean to say that it was not important for him to do the thinking. We often have to do a lot of, as it were, routine thinking, but it's not usually via the routine thinking that the insight comes. We then have to put that out of our minds. Much like, again, sorry to come back to this, but it's such a good example that in learning a piece of music, you have to do some rather boring analytic work that's not negated by the fact that when you come to the solution, it's nowhere to be seen. (18:24): This is a distinction between the way in which the right hemisphere opens up a space so that more is uncovered than was before by the narrowing down of attention of the left hemisphere. And the left hemisphere's view that it makes things happen and it makes things by putting them together and bringing them into existence. So ideas, one nice idea of Shayla's was that ideas themselves are not even in us, that as we are talking, our ideas are common and are in a common space. Our feelings are not necessarily inside us. We think of them as being in our minds or in our bodies, but they may actually be in the space around us and between us and that they could be shared.
Yeah. And I would certainly agree with that. I often use the story of a football match because there's now got to the point, and not all artists today, but Damien Hurst, for instance, is famous for valuing the idea over the manifestation of that idea, which is why, because he'll come up with, for instance, there's a circle with lots of circles inside, different colors. It's quite famous and you spend thousands and thousands of pounds on
It. They're
Not made by him. He comes up with the idea and he puts all of the value on the idea, none on the craft, whereas
You
Go to any sculpture-
Which is totally disembodied, isn't it?
Well, it is. I mean, all most people who do sculpture would disagree because they recognize that the idea exists within the rock and then they ... It's all about the craft and bringing it to life. But back to the football and the ideas existing in a sort of shared way, when David Beckham was playing for England against Greece and he needed to score a free kick, everyone in the stadium had the same idea, which was to put it in the goal, but it was only David Beckham with his right foot, who was able, through his experience, to put it into the top right.
The idea of the Madonna and Child is ... There it is. It's a part of the thing, but anybody knows that idea. We all have that idea because it's culturally received, but it's the actual expression of it there and then that is utterly different. So the difference between the idea of a human being and you or me. I mean, the idea is purely general. It's all in, they're coming into embodied being. And it seems to me that this not only trivializes art and is not art in any sense at all, even the ideas are so staggeringly banana, aren't they? I mean, circles within a circle. I mean, come on, for a philosopher or a mathematician, that's only the beginning of a path to something interesting. It's tragic. And if I could get 10,000 pounds for a few of the thoughts I have in the bath, I'd be a very wealthy man.
That might be a good point to end on.