Saturday, March 31, 2012

Aphorisms

1. No one expects aristocratic virtues from a laborer. In America we all define ourselves as laborers so that no one will ever expect aristocratic virtues from us.

2. To understand the nature of truth, one has to understand the knower as well as the known. There is no deep philosophy without psychology. And in order to understand the psyche, one has to understand the genealogy of its ideas. There is no deep psychology without history.

3. Virtue is to the psychologist as plumage to the ornithologist, or blossoms to the botanist. When the peacock spreads his tail, we appreciate its beauty. But at the same time we know it was contrived by nature merely as a testament to health.

Friday, March 30, 2012

Tamed and domesticated

When Jonas Salk gave his vaccine to mankind, asking for nothing in return, he sent a message to the world. Science is something apart from commerce, something higher than commerce. Its goals are humanitarian rather than commercial in nature.

If this message was heard at all, it was soon forgotten.

Capitalism represents the most successful attempt yet to tame and domesticate genius, to make it useful to the rulers of the regime. Genius is qualitatively different from anything in the bourgeois world. Once traded for a sum of money, no matter how large, it ceases to be qualitatively different, and enters the realm where values are measured by accountants. By succumbing to the lure of comforts and rewards, genius ceases to be genius and becomes just another bourgeois asset. Tamed and domesticated genius is no longer genius.

In order to avoid the necessity of trading itself for wages, genius must of course have a certain amount of wealth. The error of the bourgeois is to mistake how much that amount is. He wants opulence and a corps of servants like the wealthy, but unlike the wealthy, to whom these things come unbidden, he must destroy his genius in order to obtain them.