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That's just, like, your opinion, man
Jul. 17th, 2012 03:21 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 26. High today: 32. It poured here for about two solid hours yesterday afternoon. EC reported that someone with a reliable rain gauge in "southwest Scarborough", which would be somewhere in the neighbourhood, measured 88 mm of rain between 2 and 4 p.m. Pearson only got 5 mm. The forecasts are calling for around 36 tomorrow (or, well, today). This continues to be the most ridiculously hot July since ... last year.
Due to a happy coincidence of interests here in the eljay neighbourhood, I am now in possession of a Canon EOS 20D DSLR camera. (And another happy coincidence has the deadline for that contest extended until next weekend--although the guy running it says I might get away with bright pictures from my 3.1 MP camera anyway.) Will you notice an improvement in the quality of my bug pictures? Who knows. I think I've been getting better at working my old point-n-shoot lately anyway. The ones below mostly aren't the best I've got right now, but there's a story to the better ones, and it'll have to wait, as right now I am overdue in preparing a paper for rejection.
( The caterpillar and fly on this black-eyed Susan in the morning-- )
Have I posted this before, years ago? I think I've probably just mentioned it. I'm going to throw it out here now because, as I sometimes do, I just went looking for it in the wrong place:
In observing philosophers ... one really does not get the impression that they are insensitive to praise, or even to flattery. One can even say that, like all intellectuals, they are on the whole more vain than men of action. Indeed, it is readily understandable why they would be. Men do the specific things they do in order to succeed or "to achieve success" (and not to fail). Now, the "success" of an undertaking involving action can be measured by its objective "outcome" (a bridge that does not collapse, a business that makes money, a war won, a state that is strong and prosperous, etc.), independently of other people's opinion of it, while the "success" of a book or of an intellectual discourse is nothing but other people's recognition of its value. So that the intellectual depends very much more than does the man of action ... on other people's admiration, and he is more sensitive than the man of action to the absence of such admiration. Without it, he has absolutely no valid reason to admire himself, while the man of action can admire himself on account of his objective (even solitary) "successes." And that is why, as a general rule, the intellectual who does nothing but talk and write is more "vain" than the man who acts, in the strong sense of the term." (Alexandre Kojève, "Tyranny and Wisdom", in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (U of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 162 n. 6. I just started out looking for it in Kojève's Hegel lectures.)
But what of the bug photographer? Or, seriously, the artist? (There's something to what Kojève is saying here, but ... it ain't necessarily so. For that matter, on the other hand, if nobody else cares that your bridge doesn't collapse, you might wonder whether it's really so great to have built a bridge that doesn't collapse.)
Due to a happy coincidence of interests here in the eljay neighbourhood, I am now in possession of a Canon EOS 20D DSLR camera. (And another happy coincidence has the deadline for that contest extended until next weekend--although the guy running it says I might get away with bright pictures from my 3.1 MP camera anyway.) Will you notice an improvement in the quality of my bug pictures? Who knows. I think I've been getting better at working my old point-n-shoot lately anyway. The ones below mostly aren't the best I've got right now, but there's a story to the better ones, and it'll have to wait, as right now I am overdue in preparing a paper for rejection.
( The caterpillar and fly on this black-eyed Susan in the morning-- )
Have I posted this before, years ago? I think I've probably just mentioned it. I'm going to throw it out here now because, as I sometimes do, I just went looking for it in the wrong place:
In observing philosophers ... one really does not get the impression that they are insensitive to praise, or even to flattery. One can even say that, like all intellectuals, they are on the whole more vain than men of action. Indeed, it is readily understandable why they would be. Men do the specific things they do in order to succeed or "to achieve success" (and not to fail). Now, the "success" of an undertaking involving action can be measured by its objective "outcome" (a bridge that does not collapse, a business that makes money, a war won, a state that is strong and prosperous, etc.), independently of other people's opinion of it, while the "success" of a book or of an intellectual discourse is nothing but other people's recognition of its value. So that the intellectual depends very much more than does the man of action ... on other people's admiration, and he is more sensitive than the man of action to the absence of such admiration. Without it, he has absolutely no valid reason to admire himself, while the man of action can admire himself on account of his objective (even solitary) "successes." And that is why, as a general rule, the intellectual who does nothing but talk and write is more "vain" than the man who acts, in the strong sense of the term." (Alexandre Kojève, "Tyranny and Wisdom", in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (U of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 162 n. 6. I just started out looking for it in Kojève's Hegel lectures.)
But what of the bug photographer? Or, seriously, the artist? (There's something to what Kojève is saying here, but ... it ain't necessarily so. For that matter, on the other hand, if nobody else cares that your bridge doesn't collapse, you might wonder whether it's really so great to have built a bridge that doesn't collapse.)
