The Tragedy of Philosophy

There can be two main aesthetic tastes in the form of philosophical writing: philosophy that reveals its origin and thought process and follows the initial development of ideas, and philosophy that presents ideas in their most sophisticated, aesthetic, and complete form - and evokes astonishment. The second taste teaches less about how to do philosophy, and it contradicts the principles of learning philosophy, but it teaches the philosophy itself better, and evokes a sense of sublimity for philosophy and the height of its ideas - because it throws away the ladder. But there is also a third and tragic form of philosophical writing: when philosophical work does not reach completion, and evokes sorrow for the spiritual loss, but also opens a door for continuation

The formal confusion between a linear description of the development of ideas and their reasoning produces the illusion of philosophical proof - instead of philosophical learning (Source)

Ancient Japanese painting copied everything from the Chinese, but did it more beautifully. The Koreans, on the other hand, are just a shade of Chinese culture, because they are not an island, and therefore there remains a continuum of influence rather than something distinct - an analog rather than digital difference. An island, like Japan, creates a break in the graph of influence. After all, the most important thing on a world map, the zero or one, the most important first bit - is it sea or land. A phase transition between liquid and solid.

But Japanese painting is more important, which means we don't care who was first, but who did it best. That's how it is in culture too - the claim that he took it from someone else is not important, compared to the claim that someone did it better. We are used to someone who copied and did it less well and more popularly, like in music, or in Christianity compared to Judaism. Christianity simply stripped down the most general pattern of a biblical hero and turned it into the life story of Jesus - the lowest common denominator of the Bible, and therefore more abstract, and sometimes more extreme, in a simplistic way, like the Son of God.

From a literary perspective, there is a process here of taking an entire literature as examples, abstracting the most general pattern through deep learning - and creating something similar. The Kabbalah did this too, but more to rabbinic literature. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai is a general Tannaic hero. They did this to the commandments too, with "Love your neighbor as yourself". And who did this to Greek culture? Who is the general Greek hero? Virgil tried to do this. And who is the general Shakespearean hero? The Russian classics with the Russian soul is also a kind of summative move of the drama.

In other words, it's not important to be the first, but the first has the advantage that he can easily do it best, and choose the most fruitful path in the field because no one has taken it. It's relatively easy for him to spread out the basic vectors of the space, and after him any other combination will not easily spread more dimensions. In the long run, there can be two aesthetic tastes in understanding and describing history (including the history of technology or science or painting, etc.): who led to what, or what is the most perfect and complete expression of something. Alternatively: how did the phenomenon begin (or end, meaning something else began), versus how is the peak of the phenomenon. The first allows understanding, and learning how to do new things, new directions, and the second leads to fascination and lack of understanding of how such a thing was done at all, like the pyramids or the Bible or the Odyssey.

That is, in the second taste, it looks in terms of complexity like NP, not P - we know how to judge that it's amazing but not how to do it. And the two types of complexity are the real reason there are two tastes in writing history, which should be called: the scientific taste form (the first) and the artistic taste form (the second). In different fields, it is more common to write in one form or the other, for example in painting it is mainly customary to look at masterpieces, and in science there is importance to originality. The scientific form is the taste that is interested in learning from the beginnings, and the artistic form is the taste that is interested in getting inspiration and learning from the most complete examples.

For example, the textbook, the university study material for the theory of relativity, the most complete thing and the most complete understanding of the theory (and especially in mathematics this is so), as opposed to the first articles that were written, say what Einstein or Fourier wrote. Because the question in the end is what teaches more. No one looks at a painting by a bad painter to learn how to paint, or at a half-painted and incomplete painting. In mathematics, they teach the most beautiful thing there is, and also in painting and also in physics. They don't teach the first proof, the stammering one, with holes and inaccuracies, and with concepts that were defined differently.

Blurring the origin creates a sense of divinity, as opposed to historicity that creates a sense of humanity. That is, there is a secular taste and there is a religious taste, two ways of describing the phenomenon (its beginning and moment of peak). And the war of secularism on the Bible in trying to find its origins, or the war of the twentieth century on art - this is the secularization of art, which is a Christian genre. And so is the war in literature, from within literature, in an attempt to deconstruct its origins. That's why Japan evokes admiration, and China doesn't. Despite China being the source. That's why art needs to present the moment of peak or just before it. Or just after it. And not the beginning of the thing.

The problem with Japan today is the feeling that it's past its peak. And this is an even more dubious artistic taste - decadence, presenting the corruption of the thing, or the beginning of corruption - which is the tragic - or the end of corruption - which is the comic. This is a form of presenting the end of the thing, how it disappears, and what causes things to disappear. For example, the fall of the Roman Empire. Unlike the fall of Greece which was not presented as a tragedy, but as the peak moment of culture, as fascination. Were there periods of decadence in Judaism? It's not clear. Because fewer written things were preserved from them, and what was preserved is the peak of what was written. And also because this culture doesn't perceive itself in a form of decadence. Maybe once, before the destruction, as sin, but because in the end punishment comes it's not the same structure, because the meaning is not lost to the culture.

After the destruction there is no longer a cyclical perception (the Crusades and pogroms are not punishment for our sins we were warned about, but anti-Jewish wickedness, the act of Satan and not the act of God). Instead, there is indeed a perception of deterioration, but in the end there is a Messiah, which does not allow decadence, at the end of which there is something else and real disintegration. That is, what's important is the genre in which a culture thinks about itself, like this type of investigation, which is definitely in the scientific taste, meaning it seeks the beginning of thought and not the purpose of thought, meaning not its complete peak and end. And therefore it is fragmentary and not a display of purpose.

Although it may also be argued that it is intellectual decadence. And then it fails. That is, it seeks the questions that it finds interesting to ask and that it thinks are not being asked. And so the question is why in music we are very sorry about Mozart and Schubert who died early, while we are less sorry about Raphael, and in mathematics we are very sorry about Galois, while we are less sorry about Van Gogh, or Lennon, or Baudelaire. That is, there are people whose beginnings we miss, and there are people whose peak we miss, and therefore what we have is the peak. And there are also those whose decadence we miss, and this we will never know, whether it would have started and when.

But sometimes it's sad about a peak that didn't reach as high as it could have, and sometimes about beginnings that could have still come out. Here now there is a direction in science where the computer of genes and the computer of the brain are mixing in their computational abilities, and maybe the brain also uses the genome to compute, and even in a digital way. And it's interesting if there's no connection to the third computer of the body which is the immune system, these are the three computers known in the body. And here we always thought there were dichotomies between the systems and now there can be other connections between body and soul and between heredity and culture. And actually why think that there won't be exploitation of this system, after all why wouldn't evolution exploit other existing computers and use them for computation. But what if it's not true? If it turns out in the end that there's a deep reason - or worse, a random one - for the dichotomy? Who mourns directions that could have been interesting and turned out to be incorrect in science, or in evolution? Who checks how an alternative universe would have looked?

We can look for a fossil of the beginning of a species, or of its peak development, or be interested precisely in its extinction, which is a kind of combination of the scientific taste (and therefore the necessary, the causal) and the artistic taste (peak sophistication - aesthetics) that this combination is the tragic. Therefore, we don't see tragedy in what never really started, we don't mourn it. On the other hand, the closer the destruction was to the peak of sophistication (like in the Holocaust, which was in the middle of the Jewish cultural golden age in Europe) then both tastes of description are stronger - and the tragedy is greater. The greatest tragedy is ending exactly at the peak of life and vitality and potential, and not in the death of a baby, or an old person. 20 is the most terrible age to die at. Tragedy.

Therefore, the corruption of Japan is not a tragedy but old age, and the corruption of the USA at its peak - a tragedy. And certainly that of Europe in the world wars. At the beginning of corruption, when it's close to the peak, then it's most regrettable, but if the corruption is gradual, then by its end we get used to it and it's already ridiculous. Therefore, sudden or faster death is more tragic than slow death. If there could be a creature in which the brain computer is connected to the gene computer - it could, for example, prevent cancer and diseases - and it would be a less tragic creature. Because tragedy stems from the gap between the brain and the body, between spirit and matter, and between aesthetic taste and scientific taste. Since there is a dichotomy between the biological learning of the body and intellectual learning - man is a creature with tragic potential. The brain can completely understand that the body is not okay, and what's not okay with cancer, but still has no direct access to its body and systems to stop the cancer that's killing it. This gap between the stupidity and banality of the bacterium or cancer that kills and the sophistication and awareness of the creature that dies - is tragic.