Another Ominous Parallel?

[Roger Bissell]

In "The Goal of My Writing" (The Romantic Manifesto), Rand said "Art is the technology of the soul."

I always thought that was a particularly cool insight on her part.

Then I discovered a very similar remark: "Writers are the engineers of the soul."

Who said it? Josef Stalin in 1932. 

And Deng Xiaoping echoed it in 1979 referring to artists and writers as "the real engineers of the soul."

I guess there are various ways of interpreting this eerie parallel. But I guess it's no more odd than the fact that both capitalist and communist countries recognize the Law of Gravity.  

REB

[Guyau]

.

Strange Tools:  Art and Human Nature

Alva Noë  (2015)

This book is to be the subject of a symposium this coming Friday morning at the APA Pacific in San Francisco.

Your quotes, Roger, would be interesting to compare to what Plato has to say about it in Republic and Laws, considering also his city-soul analogy in the former.

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Roger,

It would be interesting to see what Marx and Engels had to say about art. I have a feeling there's a conceptual root there somewhere. I'm going to look into this when I get more time.

Just on looking at Wikipedia Marxist aesthetics, I found this passage:

Quote

Marxists believe that economic and social conditions, and especially the class relations that derive from them, affect every aspect of an individual's life, from religious beliefs to legal systems to cultural frameworks. From one classic Marxist point of view, the role of art is not only to represent such conditions truthfully, but also to seek to improve them (social/socialist realism)...

That's looking a lot like using art as a set of plans for building something (technology or engineering), starting with a model or prototype.

Granted, that quote is not the words of Marx or Lenin, but if this idea was in the air when Rand was at the university, that would be where she got it.

I know for a fact her division of art between Romantic and Naturalistic didn't come from her. I dug into this once. This division was in French culture way before she came along. She merely took the seeking for the transcendental in Romanticism and replaced it with volition and took the scientific-like realism of Naturalism and replaced it with the urge to take a snapshot or slice of life. 

I don't want to demean Rand with this, merely to discover her roots since part of her personality was to deny most of her intellectual influences. 

Here is something you might want to look at that I came across Googling. It starts with the Rand and Stalin quotes. Artist Shrugged by Peter Saint-Andre (1999).

 

Stephen,

I have this book and I've watched a few videos by Noë on YouTube. Off the top of my head, though, I need a refresher to get to what I was thinking as I watched them. All I remember right now is being excited by Noë's fresh angle on art and philosophy.

His ideas, along with those of Denis Dutton (The Art Instinct) are on my plate for a deep dive. I'm more familiar with Dutton simply because I've spent more time with his stuff. I really like his approach of evolutionary psychology. He tends to get overly-speculative, but he does back his ideas up with a lot of archeological and cultural examples.

Both are very interesting. (I'm irritated at myself for not remembering the gist of Noë's ideas, but I have other things to do right now and I will only get to this later. btw - I have found that embarrassing myself like this is a great way for ideas to stick later when I look them up again.  )

Apropos Dutton, I've read some things by Louis Torres on Dutton and they were, frankly, awful. He went scorched earth on Dutton's ideas by misrepresenting them and not even trying to understand what Dutton was getting at. Both even communicated before Dutton died and poor Dutton kept trying hard to understand why there was so much hostility coming from Torres. I've thought of writing something about that one day, but I'm getting tired of O-Land squabbles.

These days I'm more inspired by your model of being on the caravan of learning wisdom while letting the dogs bark as it passes.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

6 hours ago, Roger Bissell said:

In "The Goal of My Writing" (The Romantic Manifesto), Rand said "Art is the technology of the soul."

I always thought that was a particularly cool insight on her part.

Then I discovered a very similar remark: "Writers are the engineers of the soul."

Who said it? Josef Stalin in 1932. 

And Deng Xiaoping echoed it in 1979 referring to artists and writers as "the real engineers of the soul."

I guess there are various ways of interpreting this eerie parallel. But I guess it's no more odd than the fact that both capitalist and communist countries recognize the Law of Gravity.  

REB

Rand was arguably wrong and the communists, being at least somewhat right, wanted to keep their writers working for the sake of the state and the party.

--Brant

Ayn was being literary--nothing wrong with that

[Roger Bissell]

9 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

These days I'm more inspired by your model of being on the caravan of learning wisdom while letting the dogs bark as it passes.

 

Sometimes the dogs bark something that sounds semi-intelligible, and I reflect on what it means and whether that can help me get clearer on my own thoughts. I call the resulting written pieces my "ruff" drafts. 

I have always valued internet forums where I can share not only things I've written/published, but also to try out new ideas, in order to get feedback and to see whether they're valid or not. OL has been good for that.

But you're right, Michael - it's really good to keep moving, to keep learning, to realize that you can't convince everybody, and to realize that not all critical-sounding noise is helpful communication.

REB