Good morning to everyone reading '
Serious Topics', '
The Third' and all other social media websites onlinetoday. I trust that all is well with all of you this beautiful Wednesday morning and that you are enjoying an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity in the history of humanity. To avoid any confusion, I am replying directly to a posting made by Slightly Optimistic in
Serious Topics late last night! Porn' asks us all to use this thread, topic or forum to discuss investment strategies and financial management. Do not use this forum to advertise or in any way promote personal interests. This site is not authorised to give financial advice and the views of the contributors in no way represent the views of this site. Anyone using this forum to make investment decisions does so at their own risk. Always perform your own research and seek independent advice. 'The Financial Times' leads tomorrow with some editorial comment that
the Tax affairs of American tech groups come under fire. The salmon pink newspaper takes the view that the European Union (EU) is right to seek an accord on what should be levied and where? Everytihing, Slightly Optimistic! If I may nevertheless address your final question directly:
Little c regards accelerating technological change as the principal characteristic of our generation. Our ancestors, particularly here in Britain, created something which became known as the Industrial Revolution over the past three hundred odd years. Yet the pace of technological change has not slowed down at all. Computing, in particular, has accelerated it, roughly over the course of our current lifespan, from its early beginnings with the codebreakers of Bletchley Park during World War II (1940-now)!
1945 is often defined as the start of the Nuclear Age, Slightly Optimistic, but in terms of historical significance, the Computer Age may be even more significant. Computers are changing how we live, how we work and how we play. '
Serious Topics' and social media are changing how we communicate with one another. The great debates of the twenty-first century are fought here, Slightly Optimistic, and you have faced the greatest debater of modern times here online.
The greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, felt that previous philosophers had tied themselves in knots by asking the wrong sorts of questions. They thought philosophical problems were to do with understanding the nature of the world but Wittgenstein thought they were all problems of language. Sort language out and you could knock philosophy on the head. Wittgenstein thus pondered how language related to the world, what the limits of language were and what this all meant for the philosopher.
Ludwig came to two different conclusions; firstly, as outlined in The Tractatus, that language had a logical structure that accurately reflected the structure of reality; secondly, as outlined in the later Philosophical Investigations, that language was a game - full of tricks, jokes and subtleties - the meaning of which was derived from social context as much as logical analysis. Ultimately, however, Wittgenstein wasn't sure that anything could be said about how language related to the world because that was necessarily beyond the scope and meaning of language itself. Thus he concluded that some things remain unsayable and declared "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".
So something which remains unsayable, not even you, Slightly Optimistic, can express here in '
Serious Topics'. What you can do, I suppose, is to play music instead, or create some other art form. The greatest multimedia artform of modern times is arguably cinema, and one of the most critically acclaimed films of all time is called Vertigo! And the loser is – Citizen Kane. In 2012, after 50 years at the top of the Sight & Sound poll, Orson Welles’s debut film has been convincingly ousted by Alfred Hitchcock’s 45th feature Vertigo – and by a whopping 34 votes, compared with the mere five that separated them a decade ago. So what does it mean? Given that Kane actually clocked over three times as many votes this year as it did last time, it hasn’t exactly been snubbed by the vastly larger number of voters taking part in this new poll, which has spread its net far wider than any of its six predecessors.
But it does mean that Hitchcock, who only entered the top ten in 1982 (two years after his death), has risen steadily in esteem over the course of 30 years, with Vertigo climbing from seventh place, to fourth in 1992, second in 2002 and now first, to make him the Old Master. Welles, uniquely, had two films (The Magnificent Ambersons as well as Kane) in the list in 1972 and 1982, but now Ambersons has slipped to 81st place in the top 100.
So does 2012 – the first poll to be conducted since the internet became almost certainly the main channel of communication about films – mark a revolution in taste, such as happened in 1962? Back then a brand-new film, Antonioni’s L’avventura, vaulted into second place. If there was going to be an equivalent today, it might have been Malick’s The Tree of Life, which only polled one vote less than the last title in the top 100. In fact the highest film from the new century is Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, just 12 years old, now sharing joint 24th slot with Dreyer’s venerable Ordet
This classic from the master of suspense was so poorly received upon release that Alfred Hitchcock later withdrew it from distribution for several years. Its reputation has since grown and it is now widely regarded as Hitchcock’s finest film, a haunting examination of male desire memorably filmed in real San Francisco locations. The story of acrophobic Scottie Ferguson (brilliantly played by James Stewart), who compulsively remodels Judy Barton (Kim Novak) in the image of his dead love Madeleine Elster (also Novak), is unflinchingly dark and tragic. Though Hitchcock was originally deemed to have erred in giving away the film’s plot twist halfway through, Vertigo succeeds as a hallucinatory fable about the traps of desire. A thriller of dreamlike allure, it’s whipped to dizzying heights by Bernard Herrmann’s Wagner-influenced score. “If Vertigo remains, unchallengeably, Hitchcock’s masterpiece, this is surely because there the attitude to the unknown and mysterious is not simply one of terror but retains, implicitly, a profound and disturbing ambivalence.”
And yet Vertigo is based upon a central illusion. The heroine is not who she claims to be. The hero has been set up. So, in a profound sense, have we, Slightly Optimistic. I am not little c, and you are not debating with whom you perceive me to be. The nineteenth century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, famously concluded that 'Gott ist tot'. What did he mean? God is dead, although he added that there may still be caves in which his shadow will still be shown. God's death was supposed to be a liberating event, just as Christians have always argued that Christ's resurrection is a liberating event. In the very first of his books, 'The Birth of Tragedy', Friedrich Nietzsche uses this phrase three times:
What he is saying, I think, is that the greatness of the early Greeks, before Socrates, lay in their tragedy. He never really forgave the trivialising practice of rationalising everything with Socratic argie-bargie, or indeed, Plato for setting up a hero whose main qualities are those of talking everybody else into the ground, as has occasionally been attempted here in social media. Nietzsche may be asking, as indeed Shakespeare and Goethe occasionally ask, is the whole world really to be taken seriously, or is it not a great game, a great play like 'Hamlet' or 'Faust', some kind of drama played out by we know not whom, as a spectacle for we do not know whom? Can we make sense of such an aesthetic justification for mankind?
Plato wrote that the sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin. Curiously, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and little c all seem to agree with Plato on that, but on little else. Indeed, little c constantly wonders what he is going to do now. Serious students of philosophy often regard Kant, rather than Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, as the greatest philosopher since the ancient Greeks. Kant was exceptionally penetrating, and he was able to see where an intellectual problem lay in something which had previously been taken for granted. Additionally, he was exceptionally good at seeing how his arguments fitted together into a greater whole, and how one thing might alter everything else.
Unfortunately, whereas Nietzsche is easier to read, and Wittgenstein often quite hilarious, Kant can seem quite impenetrable, at least to little c. C is uniquely both exceptionally penetrating and exceptionally penetrated. The point that needs to be made, however, is that whereas we are used to seeing progression in science and technology, for example, there is not the same sense of progression in philosophy. Plato and Aristotle have never been surpassed, until the emergence of little c, although they would certainly have been surprised to have been so surpassed. Cheers, Alistair, Jason, Uncle Henry and anyone else who may chance upon this particular posting this fine October morning here in London (morning coffee)!