Category: Notes from Terra

The Image Book: A Review

James Ashley

image-book

Jean-Luc Godard released Le livre d’image in 2018. It is a montage film that stitches together brief film images – from the history of cinema, from the news and from his own films.

While it uses the same strange score editing as Farwell to Language, the overall effect is much more hypnotic – and beautiful.

The quick edits are overlaid with narration by Godard himself. At a certain point, his reflections turn to France’s relationship to the middle east and there is some original footage that Godard shot.

Montage films are kind of wonderful. There’s Wong Kar-wai’s film Hua yang de nian hua that stitches clips from Asian cinema totally unfamiliar to Western audiences. Watching it feels like glimpsing into a secret world. The beautiful scene in Cinema Paradiso that collects all the scenes deemed by the Catholic censors to be too explicit is a celebration of life, sexuality and cinema all at once. A recent discovery for me was The Road Movie from 2016, which basically takes dashcam footage uploaded by Russians and serializes it. Most of the footage involves car crashes. The best parts of it, though, are the moments before the sudden car crashes where you listen in on friends chatting, spouses fighting or the Russian version of AM talk radio. There’s a strange feeling of normalcy to those moments that makes one feel that we are all the same, wherever we are, whatever language we speak.

And then the crash happens.

The Image Book doesn’t contain any crashes. Instead it feels like a journey through Jean-Luc Godard’s mind while looking at the world through the eyes of one of cinema’s great masters.

Goodbye to Language: A Review

James Ashley

goodbyetolanguage

I’ve watched Godard’s Goodbye to Language (“Adieu au Langage”, 2014) once so far. It deserves and requires multiple viewings. It is a montage film, shot with multiple cameras (including a Go Pro) and covering multiple overlapping and unrelated story lines. There are also lots of shots of Jean-Luc Godard’s dog.

The movie is purposefully annoying. Take for instance the use of fast cutting. Fast cutting comes from music video editing and is used to convey forceful action. But the fast editing is still tied together with an underlying soundtrack to provide a sense of continuity and to bracket a series of related footage. Godard, on the other hand, undermines this by starting a piece of the score and then chopping it unceremoniously like a record player losing its groove. And then he does this over and over with the same piece of unsatisfyingly broken music in different places throughout the film.

If there’s a clue to what the film is “about” (and does it really need to be about anything) it’s in a line in the last third of the film, about a couple on the verge of breaking up, where both characters say that they understand what their partner is saying but cannot understand what they themselves are saying. It’s like a reverse gaslighting. Which, to be fair, is what marital fights feel like.

Other parts of the film include ponderous philosophical monologues and dialogues about the “tyranny of the image” – the tendency of myth and magical thinking to displace discursive reason. Godard also has lots of scenes of people interacting with their phones in book stalls and standing next to other people, highlighting something that has become so common that we no longer comment on it, but which can still shock when we see it on film. Smartphones and internet culture are in their own way manifestations of the tyranny of the image, since they replace long-form thinking with easily digestible memes. To the point that we now take for granted that long-form is a  waste of time and assume that it is normal (or even possible) to absorb complex thoughts in a few minutes.

Naturally there is irony in the title and concept of the film since film itself is a replacement of discursive thought with images and syllogistic reasoning is replaced with a musical score to move us from one narrative moment to the next. Except in Godard’s hands, the film resists us and makes even the simplest things hard. It fucks up the score. It limits the beautiful long shots. It uses gritty camera footage at a time when high quality digital images are cheap and easy. The handling of the sex scene is bleehhhh. Worst of all, the central story is anti-ship in a medium that requires sexually appropriate relationship building to ensure commercial success.

The overall effect of the movie on me is that I struggled to watch it but can’t stop thinking about it even weeks later. And parts of the movie I thought were pretentious and had less there than met the eye – I now think contain infinite depth.

An extra feature of the film is that it was originally shot in 3D and was exhibited at Cannes in 3D. I watched it in 2D but now will try to track down the 3D DVD. Like other amazing films – such as Bi Gan’s masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night  — it uses a cinematic medium that has since fallen out of favor.  I fortunately still have an old 3D flatscreen and a 3D DVD player to watch it on.

Other movies, like Ang Lee’s Gemini Man, which is ultimately a technical master’s experiment in 3D cinema, isn’t even available in 3D DVD format. Given the current death of the movie theater in America, there’s even a chance that we won’t ever be able to see it in its intended form again.

The Future of Cinema and Reader Response Theory

James Ashley

bigfootboardgame

One of the great burdens and pleasures of being at home is filling a lot of down time with streaming content. I currently stream from Amazon Prime, Netflix, Comcast, Disney, Shudder, Criterion Channel, Crunchyroll, Hulu, Master Class and HBO Max. Of these, Amazon Prime seems to be the least curated. You find the weirdest things.

Prime has a lot of Sasquatch movies. My early fascination with Bigfoot starts with the Leonard Nimoy In Search of … series and continues through Harry and the Hendersons, multiple The X-Files episodes, Abominable (the bigfoot movie based on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window) and more recently The Man Who Killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot starring Sam Elliott and Aidan Turner.

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None of this had prepared me, however, for the experience that is Bigfoot Tales of Darkness. Here is the irresistible synopsis provided by Amazon:

This is a series of tales of Bigfoot, of a mythical creature from heaven that once was a arch angel named Lucifer has come to earth and man knows him as Bigfoot. As he kills and rampages humans through all the tales in this story.

I couldn’t get through more than ten minutes of it. The film seems to be pieced together out of stock video purchased online with some homemade electronic music layered over the top.

But I still want to give it the attention it may not deserve because it is so crazy and someone somewhere, using the tools available to them, went to the trouble of making a movie about Bigfoot being the devil and somehow got it onto Amazon Prime. Plus I have lots of extra non-commuting time these days.

There’s a theory of literature called Reader-response criticism that fits well into the way we currently consume media. It rejects modernist theories of authorial intent and concerns itself more with the experience of the reader. This was a precursor of the “death of the author” movements that came in the 80’s.

In our own times, the way people access media and the rise of cult followings has dramatically changed the way films are created, marketed and distributed. Audiences are balkanized in such a way that content marketed to small groups and genre fans can be highly profitable and can even afford to alienate large swathes of people. This is in contrast to massive budget superhero films that can only achieve profitability by killing on opening day as well as in overseas markets (esp China) and then in the cable, streaming and DVD aftermarkets as well as product tie-ins and merchandising.

Following some of Umberto Eco’s ideas, this made me wonder if I could make myself an ideal reader for this movie. An audience of one.

To accomplish this (and overcome my physical response to the first 10 minutes of Bigfoot Tales of Darkness, a combination of lethargy and nausea) I need to put it in a different intellectual context.

Godard

Because it might be some kind of highly experimental film that plays on genres and narrative structure, eschewing actors for stock video clips, I decided the avant-garde French film director Jean-Luc Godard might be a good reference for understanding (or creating an understanding) of what the ideal author of this Bigfoot movie is trying to say.

Godard’s last two films, in particular, have adopted a bricolage style of film-making, clipping together images and fragments, using both high quality film and low quality video, with often confusing sound editing that breaks up the continuity instead of tying it together like a normal movie score would do.

Over the next week I plan to watch and report on Godard’s 2014 award-winning film Goodbye to Language, about a couple’s breakup interspersed with shots of a dog playing, and his 2018 film The Image Book about the misrepresentation of Arab culture in Western movie making.

They both have poor reviews on IMDB. Critics, amirite?

I’ll follow this with a fair attempt to assess Bigfoot Tales of Darkness on its own terms.

How I Lost 139 Pounds Following Animal Crossing Workout Routine

James Ashley

While the worldwide pandemic has been hard from many angles, one of the hardest has been being forced to sit around slothfully at home. The pounds seemed to just accrue of their own accord. And then I found Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

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My children had been talking about it incessantly but it had mostly been background noise for me as I was pre-occupied with the health of friends and family and the future of work in a changed economic hellscape. Then in a bout of late-night insomnia I hooked up their switch to the living room TV and started playing. Before I knew it I was obsessed. A couple months later, I found I had lost 139 pounds. Here’s how:

1) The first thing is you have to find ways to stay active while you are playing Animal Crossing. One good way is to heavily use the A button when you are walking around in-game. The A button generally makes you sneak, but if you swiftly release it, it makes you swing your net. Spam the A button so while you are walking, you are also constantly swinging your net and building up those biceps and triceps.

2) Another important thing to do is to shake every tree vigorously, especially on mystery islands. You will burn a lot of calories by shaking trees. Additionally, shaking trees will occasionally cause a wasp nest to drop from the tree. You can then spam your A button to whip out your net and get some extra reps for your biceps and triceps.

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3) The A button isn’t just for nets. By pressing the A button repeatedly, you can speed past those crafting animations. In addition, pressing B will let you zoom past conversations with the creatures in Animal Crossing. Basically, if you have no idea what is going on because you keep skipping past things with your A and B buttons, it means you are getting a good workout. No pain, no gain.

4) Break tools. Tools break easily in Animal Crossing so break as many as you can. This will afford you the opportunity to craft more tools and spam that A button.

5) Don’t spend all your time collecting turnips for the stalk  market. Time travel is a better way to make quick money anyways. Instead, you should be spending most of your time collecting rocks and wood. Why? Because you can then use these rocks and wood to craft tools which you can then break while spamming the A button to speed through animations.

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6) Combine these game playing strategies with a sensible diet and take reasonable breaks from the game. I typically start the morning with a breakfast bar, with nuts but no dairy components, and preferably hazelnut but dark chocolate will work in a pinch. Then I play Animal Crossing for about six hours. I take a sensible break in the afternoon during which I run eight miles through the deer crossing that starts in my backyard. When I get back, I don’t bathe because I find that the smell of my own sweat helps me stay sharp, and I play for another eight hours and finish the day with a simple meal involving a single non-GMO turnip flavored with half a teaspoon of margarine, accompanied by a simple glass of tap water dosed with Ex-Lax. Rinse, repeat.

I can’t guarantee that you’ll achieve the same results. I’m legally obligated to say that. But you might, if you fully commit yourself  to the Animal Crossing Workout. What have you got to lose?

Reminder to pre-buy your Black Panther tickets

James Ashley

black_panth

Tickets are actually already selling out for the new Black Panther movie, in part because of buy outs of complete theaters for children like these Ron Clark Academy students in Atlanta:

happy1

happy2

For those who don’t know (bad nerds) the Black Panther is a superhero in the Marvel Universe who is also the king of the African nation of Wakanda. Wakanda is secretly the most technologically advanced country in the world, the sole source of vibranium in the world (magic metal, Captain America’s shield is made of it), but projects an image of just being another African nation in order to avoid interference. In the marvel universe it had an all out war with the Submariner’s Atlantean army a few years ago and currently auteur Ta-Nehisi Coates is taking a turn at writing the series and problematizing it (which I don’t totally like but tastes and all that).

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The history of the series is basically the usual Marvel thing – Marvel takes advantage of racial trends and exploits them (like with Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Shang-chi) and end up creating something kind of miraculous. In this case, a kingdom of black people who are more advanced than anybody else, culturally and technologically.

wonder-woman-4

If I can talk race and gender a little (feel free to squirm) according to a friend, it does for black people what she assumes Wonder Women did for white women. You get to see yourself in an ideal way without any cultural or political baggage. How do you create a movie hero without any cultural baggage or identity politics attached – you create a fictional country like Themyscira or Wakanda and make your characters come from there – that way they don’t become walking political arguments but instead just _are_.

thorteamup

So after seeing Wonder Woman, my wife asked me if that’s what it’s like for men to see movies, and I think, yeah, pretty much. I’m not Thor, but he’s an ideal projection of myself when I watch the movie and he gets to drink and carouse and hang out with his buddies and women admire him and no one ever neggs him for it. And my wife said she’s learned to watch and enjoy those kinds of movies but Wonder Woman showed her what that experience could really be like.

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At the risk of overselling — Black Panther is going to do that for race, according to a friend who got to go to the Hollywood premiere. No white guilt, no resentment, no countries getting called sh* holes, just gorgeous, powerful black people and a reprieve from our crazy mixed up world for a while. Plus, again according to the friend, it’s also another fun Marvel movie.

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And here’s the catch for lovers of VR and AR – obviously there’s going to be lots of great Cinema4D faux-holograms used to show how advanced Wakanda is. Not only did Marvel movies pioneer this, but holograms are the chief way movies and tv show “advanced” societies (e.g. Black Mirror, Electric Dreams).

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But more importantly, when we talk about “virtual” immersive experiences I think we implicitly know it means more than just having objects in a 3D space. The world is a given and stuck thing, while virtual reality frees us from that and lets us see it differently. The killer AR/VR app is going to do that at a very deep level. I think Black Panther is going to provide an ideal/target/goal for what we want to achieve with all of our headgear. An artificial experience that alters the way we see reality – if only for a few hours plus the afterglow period. Great virtual reality needs to alter our real reality – and make it better.

50 Shaders of Grey

James Ashley

This isn’t actually a blog post yet. Just a title and a promise. Someday I will backfill this post with amazingly deviant technical information about pixel shaders, vertex shaders, algorithmic drawing, matrix math, ray tracing, kernel convolutions and nipple clamps. Stay tuned.

What kind of consultant are you?

James Ashley7 Comments

A few Magenic colleagues  and I happened to be in the office at the same time today and were discussing what makes a good software consultant.  We arrived at the idea that there are certain archetypes that can be associated with our profession.  Consulting and independent contracting require a peculiar combination of skills which are not always compatible: leadership, salesmanship, problem solving, commitment, patience, quick thinking, geekiness, attention to detail, attention to vision, and so forth. 

As a consultant, one is often both the salesman and the product being sold, and it requires a bit of a split personality to pull both off well.  Most consultants are able to do well with certain aspects of consulting but not others.  It seemed to us, however, that if we could identify certain “types” of consultants rather than try to identify the particular skills that make up a consultant, we would arrive at something approaching a broad spectrum of what consulting is all about.

After a bit of work, Whitney Weaver, Colin Whitlatch, Tim Price-Williams (who needs a blog because he knows too much about the entity framework not to share)  and I came up with the following list of consulting archetypes and the qualities that exemplify each one. 

For our unit test, we then tried to match consultants we know first with who they think they are and then with who they actually resemble.  It worked out pretty well, and so we thought we’d turn the idea loose.  (I turned out to be a weird mix of MacGuyver and the Jump-To-Conclusions-Guy, though I also have a savior complex.)

See if any of the following archetypes matches people you know.  And if you think we’ve left an important archetype out of our catalog, please let me know in the comments.

 

jack

Jack Bauer

Jack is the ultimate get-things-done guy.  This is in part because he takes the full weight of any project on his own shoulders.  He is admired by everyone he encounters for his dedication and competence. 

He also comes across as a bit harsh, however, so we can’t really say he has good soft skills.  Some consider consultants like him to be a bit too good to be true.

 

house

House

House is great at diagnosing any problem.  He is methodical and thorough while at the same time he is able to think well outside of the box. 

He is also a bit of a dick and will turn on you when you least expect it.  On the other hand, when he throws you under the bus, at least you’ll know it wasn’t personal.

 

TOP GUN

Maverick

Maverick is charismatic as well as intensely competitive, though his arrogance tends to put people off.  If you think a task will take two weeks, he’ll claim it can be done in two days.  If you estimate that something will take two days, he’ll insist he can do it in two hours.

He always manages to be successful though no one is sure how. 

 

sarah_connor

Sarah Connor

Sarah thinks quickly on her feet and is an extraordinary problem solver.  She has a great mix of soft and technical skills. 

Sadly, she tends to get the people around her killed.  Consultants with skills like hers seem to take on a lot more risk than the rest of us would, and we all reap the consequences.

 

don_draper

Don Draper (Mad Men)

Don has infinite charm and is a perennial winner.  Women love him and men want to be his friend.

He is also clearly hiding something from everyone, and is haunted by the notion that he is ultimately a fraud.

 

neo 

Neo

Neo can re-program reality.

Some consider him to be wooden.  He also has a bit of a savior complex.

 

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The Chick from Terminator 3

Pros: She’s smokin’ hot.

Cons: She will kill you at the drop of a hat.

 

macguyver

MacGuyver

MacGuyver is a jack-of-all trades, the kind of consultant you want on any project.  He also has great hair.

He tends to be a bit of a one-man-show, however.

 

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Kramer

Kramer has the “vision” thing.  He’s the one who will envision and lay out the entire architecture of the project in the first few days despite other people’s misgivings.

Unfortunately Kramer has poor follow-through.  You’ll be living with his architectural decisions long after he’s moved on to bigger and better things.

 

ben

Benjamin Linus

Ben has excellent soft skills.  He is a master manipulator.  He can turn any situation to his own advantage.  In a tough negotiation, he’s the consultant you want at your side.

On the other hand, he is pure EVIL and cannot be trusted.

 

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Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross

“Second prize is a set of steak knives.”  Alec is a motivator.  Other people quiver in his presence.  We all know that sometimes you have to be an asshole to get things done.  Fortunately a consultant like Alec loves that part of the job.

We can assume that he will eventually flame out, as people of this type always do.  Sadly, no one will really feel sorry for him when this happens.

 

cartman

Cartman

Eric Cartman has strong survival skills and is highly self-confident, both of which enable him to accomplish his sometimes overly ambitious schemes. He also aways has a private agenda.

Because of this, he tends to make himself a bit of a target, while his single-minded pursuit of his own ends can cause serious problems for other consultants.

 

george

George Costanza

Everything always seems to blow up on George.  He is also high maintenance.

On the upside, he is generally considered non-threatening, which can sometimes be a very good thing in consulting.

 

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The Jump-To-Conclusions-Guy

This guy is eternally optimistic.  He considers himself to have excellent people skills.

He does not have excellent people skills.

 

 vanilla_ice

Vanilla Ice

Vanilla Ice is the archetypal one-hit wonder. 

He did something important back in 1990 and has been living off of that one success ever since.  Then again, not everyone gets even that one success, so don’t judge him too harshly.

 

lumburgh

Lumbergh

Lumbergh is the anti-Jack Bauer.  He is a human deflector shield, and while you’re not looking he’ll manage to blame you for his screw ups.   When he throws you under the bus, you’ll know that it really was in fact personal.

The best that can be said of Lumbergh is that you don’t run into too many Lumberghs in software consulting.

 

 

We are so happy with this catalog of consulting types that we are thinking of using it in our local vetting of new-hire candidates.  Given the broad range of technical skills people can have, it seems rather unfair to try to label new-hires as “senior” or “junior” or anything like that.  What we’re looking for, after all, is a good fit for our local office, and the best way to do this is to, say, determine that we need another Maverick or a Sarah Connor or a Neo, and to try to find the right person following the guidelines above.

Moreover, when we tell our clients that we are sending them our A-Team, we can mean it literally: they are getting one Alec Baldwin, one Don Draper,  a MacGuyver and a Jump-To-Conclusions-Guy.  On the other hand, if someone wants the cast from Seinfeld, we can fill that order, too.

William James and the Squirrel

James Ashley13 Comments

  squirrel

 

In the same lecture excerpted previously, William James provides an earthy example of what he means by pragmatism.  It involves squirrel.

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel–a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE SQUIRREL OR NOT? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or the other."

Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting, but meant just plain honest English ’round,’ the majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute.

On Pragmatism: some excerpts

James Ashley1 Comment

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Over the past ten years or so the software development world has split itself between two extremes of temperament.  One is pragmatic while the other, for lack of a better term, is purist.  This is a division which actually happens again and again from one year to the next, with members of one party sometimes becoming members of the other, and practitioners of one philosophy in one technical domain becoming practitioners of the other under other circumstances.

This is not a division of temperament unique to programming of course, though it perhaps gets a little more play there than in other fields these days.  As a matter of interest and of clarification, I thought I might provide some excerpts from William James’s work Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking from 1907:

“The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament.”

. . .

“Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his temperament, to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned. I am sure it would contribute to clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention it, and I accordingly feel free to do so.”

. . .

“Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind in making these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art, government and manners as well as in philosophy. In manners we find formalists and free-and-easy persons. In government, authoritarians and anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and realists. In art, classics and romantics. You recognize these contrasts as familiar; well, in philosophy we have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair of terms ‘rationalist’ and ’empiricist,’ ’empiricist’ meaning your lover of facts in all their crude variety, ‘rationalist’ meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal principles. No one can live an hour without both facts and principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it breeds antipathies of the most pungent character between those who lay the emphasis differently; and we shall find it extraordinarily convenient to express a certain contrast in men’s ways of taking their universe, by talking of the ’empiricist’ and of the ‘rationalist’ temper. These terms make the contrast simple and massive.

“More simple and massive than are usually the men of whom the terms are predicated. For every sort of permutation and combination is possible in human nature; and if I now proceed to define more fully what I have in mind when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by adding to each of those titles some secondary qualifying characteristics, I beg you to regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary. I select types of combination that nature offers very frequently, but by no means uniformly, and I select them solely for their convenience in helping me to my ulterior purpose of characterizing pragmatism. Historically we find the terms ‘intellectualism’ and ‘sensationalism’ used as synonyms of ‘rationalism’ and ’empiricism.’ Well, nature seems to combine most frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic tendency. Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly materialistic, and their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous. Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection-is not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic. Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard- headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist– I use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion.

“I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if I head the columns by the titles ‘tender-minded’ and ‘tough-minded’ respectively.”

THE TENDER-MINDED THE TOUGH-MINDED
Rationalistic (going by ‘principles’) Empiricist (going by ‘facts’)
Intellectualistic Sensationalistic
Idealistic Materialistic
Optimistic Pessimistic
Religious Irreligious
Free-willist Fatalistic
Monistic Pluralistic
Dogmatical Sceptical

 

“Pray postpone for a moment the question whether the two contrasted mixtures which I have written down are each inwardly coherent and self-consistent or not–I shall very soon have a good deal to say on that point. It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and tough-minded people, characterized as I have written them down, do both exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type, and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side of the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism, whenever as individuals their temperaments have been intense, has formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic atmosphere to-day. The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear.”

And here’s the bait and switch portion of this post.  When we speak of being pragmatic today, we generally mean by it the items in the second column above.  For James, however, the term describes a way of looking at the world that resolves disputes between the possessors of these two temperaments.  It is the tertia via.

“The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?–fated or free?–material or spiritual?–here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.”

. . .

“It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can BE no difference any- where that doesn’t MAKE a difference elsewhere–no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world- formula or that world-formula be the true one.”

. . .

“There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they are ‘known-as.’ But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they were preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.”

. . .

“At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the ‘temperament’ of philosophy.”

It is a philosophy that requires us to ask, when given two temperamental approaches to the same problem, a very rude question. 

We would be required to ask “What practical difference does it make?”  On the other hand, in programming if not in other spheres, it would save an insufferable amount of time and effort were we simply to ask this a little more often.

The Lees and Scum of Bygone Men

James Ashley4 Comments

 

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The following is a parable about the difference between theory and practice, which Michael Oakeshott frames as the difference between technical and practical knowledge, found as a footnote in Michael Oakeshott’s essay Rationalism In Politics.  I find that it has some bearing, which I will discuss in the near future, to certain Internet debates about pedagogy and software programming:

“Duke Huan of Ch’i was reading a book at the upper end of the hall; the wheelwright was making a wheel at the lower end.  Putting aside his mallet and chisel, he called to the Duke and asked him what book he was reading.  ‘One that records the words of the Sages,’ answered the Duke.  ‘Are those Sages alive?’ asked the wheelwright.  ‘Oh, no,’ said the Duke, ‘they are dead.’  ‘In that case,’ said the wheelwright, ‘what you are reading can be nothing but the lees and scum of bygone men.’  ‘How dare you, a wheelwright, find fault with the book I am reading.  If you can explain your statement, I will let it pass.  If not, you shall die.’  ‘Speaking as a wheelwright,’ he replied, ‘I look at the matter in this way; when I am making a wheel, if my stroke is too slow, then it bites deep but is not steady; if my stroke is too fast, then it is steady, but it does not go deep.  The right pace, neither slow nor fast, cannot get into the hand unless it comes from the heart.  It is a thing that cannot be put into rules; there is an art in it that I cannot explain to my son.  That is why it is impossible for me to let him take over my work, and here I am at the age of seventy still making wheels.  In my opinion it must have been the same with the men of old.  All that was worth handing on, died with them; the rest, they put in their books.  That is why I said that what you were reading was the lees and scum of bygone men.'”

— Chuang Tzu