Limitless Fire

Keen, Sam, Apology for Wonder, Harper & Row, 1969.

p 24 “The philosophical term “contingency” most accurately describes one characteristic of objects as they are given to us in wonder. As used here, contingency means that in raw experience the object we apprehend in wonder comes to us without bearing its own explanation. Why it is, or perhaps even what it is, is not immediately obvious. In less philosophical but more modern terminology, wonder-events are happenings, revelatory occurrences which appear, as if by chance, bearing some new meaning (value, promise) which cannot immediately be integrated into a past pattern of understanding and explanation.”

OBSERVATION: Moving through life, observing the passage of time and space, interacting with the inner world of the imagination, and outer world of perceived reality, we begin to recognize the profound nature of all that exists. Whether we try to define the absolute, or whether we simply accept things as they are, moving forward, allowing the mind to ponder the wondrous events we experience, it is important to understand and activate wonder. Tabula rasa, before the indoctrination, free to find profound experience in the mundane, this is the wonder and fascination found in the child’s eye of the mind. Wonder is at the source of who we are as human beings, it is central to the function of the imagination, and helps us recognize the true mysteries of the possible.

“As the man who acts must, according to Goethe, be without a conscience, he must also be without knowledge; he forgets everything in order to be able to do something; he is unfair toward what lies behind and knows only one right, the right of what is now coming into being as the result of his own action.”

OBSERVATION: This quote was extracted from a piece done by Joseph Kosuth. In the context of the art, Kosuth also quoted a newspaper cartoon describing commercialization in art, free thinking and how it is necessary to sometimes sacrifice integrity and values in order to participate in the system where art is simplified in order to be better suited for mass consumption.

There have been times in art history when artists led the pursuit of social responsibility, and freedom of intellect. The lines of art, and commercial production have become blurred in recent years, where the production of art has been centered on the prevailing attitude of conspicuous consumption. Each artist must recognize the purpose of their individual direction, follow that path, and ultimately reap the reward for that personal responsibility: Nietzsche: “the result of his own action”.

ARISTOTLE (384 BC), PLATO (427 BC), SOCRATES (470 BC), AESCHYLUS, LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452), MICHELANGELO BUONAROTTI, GIOVANNI BELLINI, RAPHAEL, ALBRECHT DURER, J ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, ENRICO FERMI, PTOLEMY (90), EDWARD TELLER, ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879), STEPHEN HAWKING (1942), PYTHAGORAS (570 BC), DEMOCRITUS (460 BC), NICOLAUS COPERNICUS (1473), FRANCIS BACON (1561), NIKOLA TESLA ( ), GALILEO GALILEI (1564), THOMAS HOBBES (1588), SIR ISAAC NEWTON (1642), RENE DESCARTES (1596), VOLTAIRE (1694), GEORGE BERKELEY (1685), WALTER BENJAMIN, CHARLES DARWIN (1809), KARL MARX (1818), SIGMUND FREUD (1856), EMILE DURKHEIM (1858), VLADIMIR LENIN (1870), CARL JUNG (1875), BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872), NOAM CHOMSKY ( 1928), ARCHIMEDES (287 BC), JOHANNES KEPLER (1571), ROBERT BOYLE (1627), BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706), JAMES WATT (1736), CHARLES DARWIN (1809), LOUIS PASTEUR (1822) ALFRED NOBEL (1833), ALEXANDER BELL (1847), THE WRIGHT BROTHERS (1867/71), ALEXANDER FLEMING (1881), CARL SAGAN (1934), ALEXANDER THE GREAT (356 BC), RAMESES, JULIUS CAESAR (100 BC), CONSTANTINE THE GREAT (280), LOUIS XIV (1638), PETER THE GREAT (1672), CATHERINE THE GREAT (1729), GEORGE WASHINGTON (1732), THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743), NAPOLEON BONAPARTE (1769), ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809), MAHATMA GANDHI (1869), WINSTON CHURCHILL (1874), FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT (1882), CHARLES DE GAULLE (1890), NELSON MANDELA (1918), MATRIN LUTHER KING JR (1929), ADAM, NOAH, ABRAHAM, MOSES, CONFUCIUS, SIDHARTHA GAUTAMA, JESUS CHRIST, PATANJALI, DHARMAKIRTI, TSONG KHA PA, MUHAMMAD, BAHA’U'LLAH, JALAL AL-DIN RUMI, MARTIN LUTHER, JOSEPH SMITH, PARAMAHANSA YOGANANDA, KASYAPA, MILAREPA, DINNAGA, CHANDRAKIRTI, ST FRANCIS OF ASSISI, JOHN CALVIN, POPE JOHN PAUL II, DALAI LAMA, NEALE DONALD WALSCH, BUCKMINSTER FULLER, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, VITRUVIUS, ARTHUR C CLARKE, LINUS PAULING, LAWRENCE KOHLBERG, HOWARD BLOOM, TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, JOHANN CARL FRIEDRICH GAUSS (1777), EDWIN HUBBLE, MARIE CURIE, JEAN PIAGET, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, PIERRE DE FERMAT, MAX PLANCK, IVAN PAVLOV, GOTTFRIED LIEBNIZ, ST THOMAS AQUINAS, IMMANUEL KANT, B F SKINNER, AND ………

OBSERVATION: Attempting to list all of the great minds who have contributed to the developments of human capability is an exercise of limitless proportion. In the process of contemplating the great thinkers throughout human history, it is necessary to include names of those who contributed intellectual, human, and technological awareness, as well, as to recognize anonymous individuals who contributed ideas without recognition. This being the case, it may not be possible to include all people who should be included in this list of great thinkers. As new revelations come about the list will be updated!

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. 8, Sec. 7-26, 1690.

“Whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call idea; and the power to produce any idea in our mind, I call quality of the subject wherein that power is. Thus a snowball having the power to produce in us the ideas of white, cold, and round,–the power to produce those ideas in us, as they are in the snowball, I call qualities; and as they are sensations or perceptions in our understandings, I call them ideas; which ideas, if I speak of sometimes as in the things themselves, I would be understood to mean those qualities in the objects which produce them in us.”

OBSERVATION: It is always necessary to understand the relation between mind, perception, that being perceived, and the abstraction formed through conscious behavior. It is interesting to note how thinkers throughout human history have observed the dynamics of the mind’s relation to the tangible world, very often attempting to describe that contact.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Activation of Energy, Editions du Seuil, 1963.

page 361…”In a way that is somehow paralleled by the dominance in the fields of pure thought of the ens of the metaphysicians, the energy of the phycisist operates as something against which there is no appeal in the domain of experience: energy, the prime, multiform stuff of all phenomena; and energy, again, the standard by which is measured what is, or is not, achievable in practice.

‘A priori, says the philosopher, ‘only that can exist which is thinkable’.
‘A priori’, says the scientist, ‘only that can appear which is in conformity with energy’….
But the scientist, too, in his own way and on his own level, recognizes that he is capable of deciding, even in advance, under what conditions an event is possible–and in what general direction, once it has been initiated, the course of things must inevitably develop. And this, moreover, applies in all departments of the real; because, running through the rigorous laws of physiology and production, for example the decrees of thermodynamics extend even into zones as apparently ‘spiritual’ as the psychology of the individual and of society.”

OBSERVATION: Arguments persist about the fundamental truth of science relative to art. Chardin points to the question as to whether science and art are relative, and whether they mutually exchange characteristics, behaviors, or actions. At one level mathematics appears to represent pure logic, rationality, and yet in an abstract sense mathematics can represent a fluid representation of nature and phenomena. Far from being a definition of straightforward logic, mathematics approaches, or is identical to any definition of the creative and intuitive found in art.

Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, Cambridge, 1999.

April 1837: “Can the freedom of the will be proven from self-consciousness?”

page 29: “On the other hand, I cannot omit the difference brought about in motivation by that which distinguishes human consciousness from all animal consciousness. This trait, which is properly expressed by the word reason, consists in a human being not merely capable, like an animal, of an intuitive apprehension of the external world, but also of abstracting universal concepts (notiones universales) from it. To be able to fix and retain these in his sensuous consciousness, he denotes them by words, and then makes innumerable combinations with them. These, like the concepts of which they consist, are of course related always to the world that is known through intuition, yet they properly constitute what we call thinking.”

OBSERVATION: Humans possess a complex ability with language that has developed through years of effort. It is possible for communication to take place using specific language elements (0, 1), and other manifestations such as (a, b, c, etc.). Many other forms exist including languages associated with social and cultural developments. Pictograms, or pictographs represent a further development in the abstract and conceptual universe of language. In these forms ideas are contained using visual elements (art) to illustrate the ideas, and surface for communicating these ideas. Noam Chomsky wrote about phonemes and morphemes which demonstrate important avenues for understanding language.

Recently, linguists, and biologists have shown how animals have highly developed language forms, such as bird or whale song. Additionally, dolphins have clearly demonstrated self-awareness. In this context of contemporary scientific exploration (2010), we must understand that a potential for complex conscious activity is not the exclusive domain of human existence.