Goethe On The Artist’s Supposed ‘Originality’
In Conversations with Goethe With Johann Peter Eckermann, Goethe says, People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us and...
View ArticleLate Work And Shying Away From Decay And Death
In ‘Late Francis Bacon: Spirit and Substance‘ Colm Tóibín writes: It would be easy to imagine…that Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was written toward the end of his life. In fact, it was written in 1911,...
View ArticleFreidrich Hebbel’s ‘Profound Question’
In ‘Notebook 11, February 1817’ from Writings From The Early Notebooks (eds. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, New York,...
View Article‘The Spring is The Autumn’
In ‘Henriette Wyeth: Scenes from a painter’s life’ (from A Certain Climate, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1988, pp. 164) Paul Horgan makes note of, and subsequently quotes Wyeth on, the...
View ArticleDescartes, The Planned City, And Misplaced Philosophical Desires
In Part 2 of Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences Rene Descartes, as a prelude to his ‘clearing away’ of prior philosophy, writes: [T]here is...
View ArticleFreud On Group Production (And ‘Intellectual Property’)
In ‘Group Pyschology’, (Standard Edition, XVIII, 79; as cited in Peter Gay, Freud for Historians, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 150), Sigmund Freud writes: [A]s far as intellectual achievement is...
View ArticleSkyler White, The Anti-Muse?
Yesterday I wrote a short response to Anna Gunn‘s New York Times Op-Ed about the negative reaction to the Skyler White character on Breaking Bad. I want to add a couple of points to that today. Some of...
View ArticleAdam Gopnik on the Scientist’s Lack of ‘Heroic Morals’
In an essay reviewing some contemporary historical work on Galileo, (‘Moon Man: What Galileo saw‘, The New Yorker, February 11, 2013), Adam Gopnik, noting Galileo’s less-than-heroic quasi-recantation...
View ArticleSeamus Perry on Samuel Palmer and the Laying Bare of the Artist
A quick pre-disclaimer: Pardon me for referencing the London Review of Books two days in a row, but that’s what weekend-catching-up-with-a-stack-of-unread reviews can do to you. In reviewing Rachel...
View ArticleThe ‘Narcissism of the True Artist’ and Reading What One Writes
In his seminal Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy, RJ Hollingdale, after noting that Nietzsche made note of some forty-six poems composed between 1855 and 1858, goes on to say: The sign that he was...
View ArticleSaul Bellow on Artists and Philosophers
In his two-part essay in the New York Review of Books on being a Jewish writer in America, Saul Bellow is typically uneven. There are some rambling portions (Bellow seems to have a talent for such...
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