I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. We had a drug store that also served as our jewelry store. In the window of our drug store there was this message “If you don’t know your diamonds, you must know your jeweler.†This was the motto of Zales Jewelers, which was the maker of the jewelry sold by this drug store.
I often pondered over this mysterious message; I recognized it as being important, but my young mind could not yet comprehend its meaning. I finally solved the meaning of my mysterious motto and now recognize that it is a great motto for the self-learner. “If you seek to know, know your source.†If you want to know something, go to the expert for your answer.
Our libraries are filled with books written by experts. These experts are not only experts in a domain of knowledge but they are also experts at making that domain of knowledge comprehensible for the lay person.
Forums are great places for becoming conscious of ideas, but forums are not a dependable source for getting the real skinny. If you want to acquire dependable knowledge, take your questions with your curiosity and caring to the books. Don’t depend upon an unknown source for the real skinny when that knowledge will perhaps be the foundation that you will use to make future judgments in your life.
As much as this may be true, some of the greatest wisdom may be imparted to you by a 10 year-old - the son-of-a-son of a lay person. It is all in the listening.
The primary authority is experience. All explanations are secondary. Yes, sources can help one clarify takes on experience. They cannot replace it. The categorical error involved here is seeing information as bifurcated from activity. As DEB noted astutely, libraries amount to other forums. Mozart needed no library to help him manifest his musical insights as a prodigy.
If you’ve read the Richest Man in Babylon, it makes this point very clearly as well.
If you haven’t, the brief summary is a man lends the money he saves to a brickmaker to invest for him. Of course, the brickmaker wastes all of it, and the moral is he should’ve brought it to somebody who knows about money in the first place.
Although one can gain wisdom from any experience, if looking for specific knowledge, seek experts in the field, not any joe shmoe with an opinion.
I absolutely agree that one must experiment on his own. A “master†is a source, and to understand him, one must have understood him beforehand. I exaggerate of course, but only slightly. A “master” is a time saver, he is a person who has resolved before you the questions that you ask yourself, but if you don’t ask yourself these questions, he can’t resolve anything, nor can he save you any time, he can even make you lose time. When he resolves what you were seeking to understand, you then experiment that he has gone further than yourself, and more importantly that he is right.
I certainly believe so, especially when the point of departure of a philosophy is experience (like that of Aristotle). It is best though to have a master at hand (wink). In fact, the work of art (in a general sense - man transforming matter, his environment and the universe) is where Aristotles’ starts his analysis, in as much as it highlights the essential creases of human intelligence. Here is what I wrote some time back, which gives a general idea of the aforementionned.
The analysis of the work of art is at the start of all of the analysis of Aristotle, and he has been much criticized for this, but his critics often didn’t understand that his approach was an analogical one. The work of art is closer to human sensibility than nature, and thus closer to our psychological conditioning. It is therefore normal, even cunning, to start with our manner of analyzing a human work of art to highlight the essential creases of our intelligence, creases which constitute the manner in which we analyze and seek the proper principles of reality. Well then in front of a work we interest ourselves first in what determines in the order of intelligibility: it’s a bicycle or a computer or a table. Thus we look at the form, then matter, then the author or agent (i.e. the efficient cause or the origin), then the purpose or end (in view of what the work was made) and finally the exemplar cause (on what model it was created). We can put these five interrogations in parallel to our five senses: what it is (sight or the formal cause), in what it is made (touch or the material cause); where it comes from (hearing or the efficient cause), in view of what it is (smell or the final cause), on which model it is (taste or the exemplar cause). These five questions are then extended to nature and to man. One must therefore extend this interrogation of the “why†of man, following the formal cause of what is. I know reality in its descriptive form, for example “Julie is a womanâ€, but I want to discover in me (or someone else) what is first. That is the true appetite of intelligence, for the principle is what is first and that beyond which one cannot go. We must progressively understand that the question “what is it?†seeks what is the first determination in the order of perfection and of quality…
That was a very enlightening paragraph. Art then, if I understand, is about what goes on inside the artist more than it is about what goes on outside the artist.