[MD] Creative Freedom in Jazz

[Ant McWatt]

Mark Smith stated to Carl Thames, April 8th 2012:
 
I think it is the firm historical ties with history that makes it seem that 
philosophy is like a juggernaut.  It was nice that Pirsig was not a philosopher 
or a historian when he wrote his books.  This gave him more latitude.

Ant McWatt comments:

Mark, 

I think you meant "philosophologist" (rather than "philosopher") in the 
above paragraph.  Pirsig considers himself (as I do!) a philosopher because he 
created a (largely) original philosophical work while philosophologists (as 
usually found in university philosophy departments) tend to study 
established ideas and thinkers:


"Philosophology is to philosophy as musicology is to music, or as art
history and art

appreciation are to art, or as literary criticism is to creative
writing.

It's a derivative, secondary field, a sometimes parasitic growth that
likes

to think it controls its host by analyzing and intellectualizing its
host's

behavior."

 

"Literature people are sometimes puzzled by the hatred many creative
writers

have for them.  Art historians
can't understand the venom either.  He

supposed the same was true with musicologists but he didn't know enough

about them.  But
philosophologists don't have this problem at all because

the philosophers who would normally condemn them are a null-class. They

don't exist.  Philosophologists,
calling themselves philosophers, are just

about all there are."

 

"You can imagine the ridiculousness of an art historian taking his
students

to museums, having them write a thesis on some historical or technical

aspect of what they see there, and after a few years of this giving
them

degrees that say they are accomplished artists.  They've never held a brush

or a mallet and chisel in their hands. 
All they know is art history.

Yet, ridiculous as it sounds, this is exactly what happens in the

philosophology that calls itself philosophy." (LILA, Chapter 26)




 
>Liked the haiku [of Carl's]:

"breathtaking beauty
beheld in a passing glance
once captured is lost"

Ant McWatt comments:

I did too.
 
Best wishes,

Ant


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