October 15th, 2010 / 1:27 am
Power Quote
Ken Baumann
Power Quote
To me fiction is not about ideas. It is above ideas. I make a divide between the holy, the sacred, the mysterious, the unexplainable, the implicit, the aesthetic, the moral, and the ethical on one hand, and the empirical, the functional, the explainable, the logical, the true, and the proven on the other. In short, the Holy and the Empirical. Literature belongs to the holy. You can do fiction, nonfiction, a mixture, who cares. Literature is above the distinction. It is sacred.
Tags: nassim nicholas taleb, quote, who cares
Empirically false.
Holy? Seriously? Holy?
I didn’t realize I was a priest.
Were I a priest I suppose I would be arguing that art cannot be known. This would be contradicted by reality. As a priest I would have to argue against reality, in favor of what, as Will sarcastically notes, is empirically insupportable: that art is some wispy spiritual non-thing which cannot be known and should not be known lest I lose my job.
Sorry: I don’t want to take that position.
Above ideas, my ass.
F this. I wallow in the functional. The holy is the explainable.
To quote the great Gregory House: “Just because it’s inexplicted doesn’t mean it’s inexplicable.”
Thanks for that comment Owen; I agree. My wife calls this sort of thing “wallowing in the mystery.”
there is some sense in the taleb quote if you pretend he’s talking about the act of creating literature; but, still, the worldview he lays out (‘mysterious’ vs. ’empirical’) is simplistic at best, and is little more than window dressing for an art/non-art means of classifying human pursuits. in other words:
w3rd. i don’t see how intelligible writing of any kind can be ‘above ideas’.
F this. I wallow in the functional. The holy is the explainable.
To quote the great Gregory House: “Just because it’s inexplicted doesn’t mean it’s inexplicable.”
i like the divide and for the most part agree with the separateness and plant myself as prefering the idealess in fiction but i dont like the “above” ness of the quote. why is it important to be above. i tend to think of it as on the side. there is no above or below, there is just divisions and its okay to have at.
Literature is above the distinction [between the Holy and the Empirical]. It is sacred.
But “sacred” has already been used as a synonym of “holy” – making “literature” one one side of “the distinction”.
This logic is hole-y, and not in a mysterious way.
Say the unsayable, express the inexpressible, communicate the incommunicable. To mock any possibility of this leads us where?