I'd dispute some aspects of Alexei's interesting, thoughtful post about
"genius", "art", and "philosophy".
In this post I'll confine myself to "philosophy".
Alexei writes:
"by and large most philosophy *is* nothing other than a series of technical
skills. Problems and themes are handed down through the tradition and are
taken up by each successive generation. Techniques are improved,
problem-spaces
refined, responses become more mannered or stylized. etc. But this is all
taught
(yes, one must have a head for it, like one must have an eye, say, for
colour. but even much of this can be taught, if one is willing to learn it).
It's a matter of technical skill. Philosophy, at least, is by and large a
matter of technical skill."
As a freshman and sophomore in college, with no idea what I'd major in, I was
drawn to philosophy because of how happily startled I was by various
philosophers' insights that exposed as quite wrong stuff I'd always
unquestioningly
taken for granted. Or at least untenable. Or the insights revealed new ways of
looking at old things. Or they simply put questions I should have asked but
never had.
I've mentioned Peirce's assertion that a belief is no more than "an
anticipation of future experience". That way of looking at a "belief" shocked
me, and
it seemed "true". Before Peirce it was Hume, pointing out that we assume
something we call a "self" but in fact we've never "seen" it. I remember being
knocked back by his observation we also assume something we call a "cause", but
all
we have ever seen is a repeated conjunction of events -- event A seems
constantly followed by event B, so eventually we come to say A causes B. And
yet all
we ever see is sequence, not causal necessity.
As I read more, I realized these novel insights were also shocks to all the
sophisticated philosophers who came before these guys. Wittgenstein's
insights into language were blurry but obviously novel, and they threw a
generation
of philosophers into a tizzy.
My point here is this: The insights that made these guys special were not
merely the product of technical excellence. Hume, coming hard on the heels of
those other empiricists, Locke and Berkeley, was technically no different from
them, he used no novel technical tools -- but he went far beyond his
predecessors. The leaps of the "great" philosophers are perhaps comparable to
Einstein's leaps in the first decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, he was
surrounded by guys with greater "technical" skills than his. But he had an
imagination that propelled him out of the confining box of received opinion.
Again and
again, other physicists cried, "What made him think of it?!" In grad school I
once offered that as the very definition of 'imagination': "that which makes an
informed observer slap his head and say 'What made him think of it?'"
Bertrand Russell had very great technical skill -- at mathematical logic. And
it took what might be called a "technical imagination" to expand it,
principally in "Principia Mathematica". But for all his virtues we can now see
that
his imagination was limited. He was baffled by the later Wittgenstein, couldn't
grasp what Ludwig was on about, thought Ludwig had rather lost his senses.
Russell was a very great technician as he developed his mathematical logic --
and yet he could never see what a very faulty tool it was. I must look into
his autobiography to see if Godel is in the index. I'm interested to see what
Russell's reaction was to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem which proved that
Russell's basic assumption in "Principia" was inherently wrong.
Admittedly, though Godel's imagination was "technical", it did produce a
startling new insight. But it stopped there. The insights of such folk are into
mathematics -- not how we think.
In sum, I don't accept that "by and large most philosophy *is* nothing other
than a series of technical skills." In fact the essential thing in great
philosophy is something quite "other" than technical skill. "Yes, one must have
a
head for it," and what has to be in that head is...imagination.
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