Recognizers and Discoverers. What satisfies you? Are you the type to be satisfied in recognizing that you are living the “good life” or the type who’s not satisfied until he has given new meaning to the very idea?
Music. I hear a new catchy tune that’s popular and has some nice hooks. I like it. I hear another song that I’m not sure about. I don’t immediately like it or dislike it. I listen to it more. I get the album. Listen to it. It begins to grow on me. I am discovering it. In the end, it’s the music that I had to discover that ends up meaning so much more to me.
Academics. Who went through school and developed a passion for grammar? Good grammar requires a lot of tedious practice and rote learning. Conquering this, however, we are soon expert recognizers of bad grammar and improper sentence structure. But how does being an editor/grammarian compare to writing your own poem (perhaps you were assigned to write a sonnet in English class)? Grammar involves recognition while poetry is discovery. And in literary interpretation, there are those who would like to recognize themes and symbols and those who would like to articulate new ones. How about another discipline: chemistry. Most of us learned the periodic table of elements in school. We learned about fundamental chemical laws. About atoms. Etc. This is recognition. If you liked science in school and you are a discoverer you were probably bored by the memorization and the simple statements of fact. You wanted to experiment and discover new reactions and think about new ideas and theories.
Philosophy. You would think people who study philosophy would be discoverers. However, in my experience, a lot of “students of philosophy” just want to chronicle the history and development of philosophy. They’re embarrassed if they can’t talk with authority on all the major philosophers. This embarrasses the recognizers. The discoverers, however, once proficient in a basic sampling of ideas, get miserably bored or depressed if they are hearing the same ideas and concepts over and over and are not pushing boundaries.
I’d like to mirror WilliamCrocodile’s closing statement:
Stop trying to live correctly!
(Stop being so concerned with recognizing what’s been set forth as correct!)
As much as I agree with that sentiment, I have to warn of going too far the opposite direction as well.
“At least TRY to be a little accurate in what you do and say.”
I’m not sure how many times I heard the ole “there are two kinds of people in this world bit…”, but all in all it must add up to thousands of kinds of people if you combine them.
It’s an interesting way of categorization, having more to do with ideology and perspective than any statement of eternal truth. I would think of it as a spectrum - from recognizing ← to → discovering. I’m not positing inherent characteristics that can be identified biologically, for example. However, I can see that the thread title might be unclear.
Any successful art is part recognition and part discovery. There can be no discovery without recognition, and all recognition is, at base, a discovery.
I don’t think avante garde art is more “discovery” than conventional art. Many times, it’s less so. We can fruitfully talk about spectrums, but I just plain disagree that certain artforms are more about discovery than others. Recognition and discovery are about the appreciation of art, and the making of successful art - they’re not about the particular form a work of art takes.
There’s a nice irony here - and maybe some self-mockery? You seem to side with the superiority of being a “discoverer”, while making the case that there are, in fact, two kinds of people - surely the kind of thing a “recognizer” would say. Nice!
I am using the terms recognition and discovery to describe people and their attitudes – their attitudes toward anything, not just art. I am not categorizing styles of forms of art, but styles and forms of human perspective.
I think your view is mistaken. I am praising discovery over recognition, that’s correct, although no one is either always a discoverer or always a recognizer. But I’m concerned with tendencies, not eternal absolutes. Recognition means acknowledging established frames of view and knowledge. And that’s not what I’m doing, here. WilliamCrocodile’s idea was new to me, and I am trying to extend it in my own way. I would say this is more an act of discovery.
The goal of discovery is not to be right or correct. It is to grow one’s experience.
I just watched the movie, after all this time. I almost knew it would be good because of the way WilliamCrocodile reviewed it. I thought: if someone can write such a poignant review, if someone can see so much meaning in it, then it must be a film worth seeing. I finally experienced it myself and am not let down. It was a completely new kind of film for me. Tree of Life.
