Philosophers v Artists v Pat Robertson

The terrible earthquake in Haiti is very sad. I hope our government and our citizens continue to give high levels of support to the relief effort. I hope the people I know who have family and friends there are able to locate them and that they're safe.

I also wish I believed in Hell, because I would enjoy picturing Pat Robertson there. He blamed the earthquake on Haiti's pact with The Devil, which they entered to evict the French. What an evil, evil nutcase! And that's all the attention I will give to that worthless sack of shit.

I believe that artists think quite differently than philosophers and scientists. Good artists, anyway. It seems like the best art is committed to exploring specific things. Either a character, or a set of colors, or an image, or a place. The artists tries to bring out the truth of that thing, regardless of whether that thing fits into some more general truth or not. And the artists is therefore very detail oriented. It matters for him or her what color the character's eyes are, because that's the truth of the character. Sometimes this up-close exploration will illuminate a larger truth, and sometimes it won't. Sometimes it serves to actually belie the generally accepted narrative.

Philosophers and scientists are interested in exploring general principles. They are interested in specifics only because they need them to derive, or illustrate, general principles. Now, within social science, there are deep disagreements over best approach to deriving these general principles from specific observations, with the infamous qualitative vs. quantitative research divide, but both camps share the goal of trying to establish generalizable truths. Within philosophy, this question about whether the locus of truth lies with the general or the particular has been debated throughout the history of the discipline. It was a central theme for Plato in ancient Greece, and it's a central theme in 19th century German idealism and 20th century German existentialism. That's pretty much where I jumped ship on philosophy, so who knows...maybe it's still kickin around.

I don't really have a point. I've just thought about this a lot because I've never been a very good artist, and I've come to believe that it's because I don't like to think at that level of detail. I'm naturally more inclined to think in principles and generalities. So, when it comes time to draw a picture, I just do big, bright outlines. I don't understand how people can be so naturally detail oriented to want be able to draw somebody's hair. It's amazing to me. It's like people who are clean and organized...it's just magic to me! I don't get how they do it!

I will now acknowledged that this dichotomy is vastly overdrawn and oversimplified. Obviously, there are plenty of artists (Ayn Rand?) who simply use their stories as parables to illustrate some moral lesson or philosophical concept. And there are scientists (anthropologists and historians in particular) who are very interested in specifics. And there philosophers who write poems and stories that are legitimate literary works (Kierkegaard, Sartre, Nietzsche).

So...um...yeah...I guess I'm done with that topic.