Subjectivity | Subjectivity

Nov.20.2012 The Sufferings of Young Werther--a new translation Goethe wrote The Sufferings of Young Werther in 1774 and the book soon became a sensation, following Goethe throughout his career as emblematic of a romantic passion he came to distrust. Now Stanley Corngold has brought out a fresh translation--a good one--and the book’s oddness, its power...	Jun.12.2012 Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson Absence of Mind, which originated in the Terry Lecture Series at Yale, is subtitled: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. That subtitle ought to tell you whether you want to read this little book or not. What is “inwardness”? What is “the Modern...
May.12.2012 Bias & Ignorance of Justice Blind justice (that doesn't see the inevitable context of any given event) isn't justice. Such blind justice is plain old ignorance. But the justice that sees (the justice that factors in the context) is no justice either. The justice without the blindfold - the justice...	Mar.20.2012 Objectivity is a Slave to Subjectivity Measurement devices measure our expectations of what we are hoping to find. They have to: as sense-extensions, they can only find the stimuli that we already know how to digest. Nothing new here: Socrates talked about this with a slave boy named Meno way, way back. Point is:...
Dec.22.2011 Review of "The Future of History" by John Lukacs I must admit that I am something of a sucker for short books by master thinkers of encyclopedic scope. That's a good description of The Future of History by John Lukacs. It's a dense meditation on the art and practice of history, aligning it more closely with literature than science,...	Jan.03.2011 The Sunny Side of 2011 A friend sent me a link to this post by agent Nathan Bransford. He's speaking largely to writers, and I think he's right - for the most part - about the pain of rejection. The process of write-publish is a subjective one. It can even be swayed by one's mood of the moment, or by almost any...
Jan.03.2011 The Sunny Side of 2011 A friend sent me a link to this post by agent Nathan Bransford. He's speaking largely to writers, and I think he's right - for the most part - about the pain of rejection. The process of write-publish is a subjective one. It can even be swayed by one's mood of the moment, or by almost any...	Apr.26.2009 Experience is Beyond Translation The sun is love. The lover, a speck circling the sun. These lines are from Rumi, in translation by Coleman Barks. Whose lines are these lines? Rumi's or Barks'? When reading Rumi in translation by Barks, historically, I am reading Barks' translation of Rumi's translation of Rumi's thoughts. Whose...
Jan.27.2009 Subjectivity Science is perhaps the most democratic of all disciplines because more than any other it is reliant on observable and repeatable results. There is little mystery as to what happens when heat is applied to water or when water is frozen even though there is the interesting contradiction in that...