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Hands as the Language of Thought: Correcting a Kant Attribution

There is a line about hands that travels well. It reads cleanly, carries an air of philosophical dignity, and arrives in print wearing the name of Immanuel Kant. “The hand is the visible part of the brain,” runs the most common English form, or, in an older rendering, “the hand is the outer brain of man.” The phrase appears in publishing copy, in teaching materials, on Goodreads quotation pages, in popular psychology, in surgical textbooks, in neurology lectures, and in essays on sign language and gesture. It has the shape of something Kant should have said. The difficulty is that no reliable evidence supports treating it as a verified Kant statement.

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The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

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The Generative Excess: Soul, Dream, and Idea

There are three things you cannot show me. You cannot open your hand and reveal your soul. No technology exists to replay your dream from last night with any fidelity. And no surgeon can extract from your skull the moment a thought first assembled itself into an idea. Each of these phenomena exists, if it exists at all, only as a first-person event, invisible to external observation, resistant to measurement, and stubbornly private. That shared inaccessibility is worth taking seriously, because it suggests that the most important operations of human consciousness happen in a place that science can describe from the outside but never enter.

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Critic as Censor: How the Humanities Sacrificed Art at the Altar of Theory

My beloved friend, mentor, and Columbia University Professor Howard Stein, was fond of saying, “The Enemy of the Arts is the Humanities.” That insight, and advice, has stuck with me over the past 35 years. Now, that phrase is not the glib provocation it may seem. It is a precise diagnosis of an institutional disease, a declaration of war against a century of academic drift that has created a schism between the act of creation and the act of analysis, and we’re here to discuss this with you today. The Arts, in their purest form, are the domain of creation itself, of non-verbal expression, of performance, and of the direct, visceral encounter with an aesthetic object.1 They are a primary, generative impulse. The Humanities, by contrast, have become the domain of secondary analysis, of verbal codification, of research, and, most critically, of the theory of the arts.1 The relationship is not symbiotic; it is parasitic. Over the past half‑century, many university humanities programs, eager to claim scientific gravitas yet wary of prescriptive taste, have privileged metacritical theory over direct aesthetic encounter, often at the expense of studio practice. They have replaced the artwork with the interpretation, the artist with the critic, and beauty with politics. The evidence for this enmity is overwhelming, found in the testimony of artists, the language of critics, and the desperation of shrinking university budgets.

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Never Discuss Process

Your process — of creation, of thinking, of being — belongs to you and only you, and to discuss your process for understanding the world, and for coping within its spinning — is something you should never do, because nobody but you comprehends the when and the why of how you get things done to contextualize meaning.

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A Hopeless Whipsaw Cascade of Warping and Woofing: Managing Your Own Feels

In the Rise of the Millennials, feelings are given a whole new status above and beyond any shared fact or shred of righteous communal reality. Today, “feels” are peculiarly individualized, and non-universal, and they are now powerful cudgels used against the unwashed and unwitting others.

Instead of honoring every whim and ninny, we need to be in control of our own feelings, evaluate the reality surrounding them in context beyond the self, and then make a rational, logical, decision on what to do next based on perceptive thinking and not on implied — explicit or otherwise — slights and insights and invented microaggressions and their ilk.  We must not only keenly know the difference between purposeful cruelty and interpreted, environmental, intention, we must proactively act upon the right result.

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New Boles Book: Poetics and the Dramatist

Today, we are pleased to announce the first volume in the new “Boles Books for…” series of learning precis: Poetics and the Dramatist!  This Boles Book will help both the amateur dramatist, and the seasoned professional, learn how to best use Aristotle’s Poetics to build a better dramatic piece!

BUY NOW!

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Depression, Alzheimer's and Grieving

Clinical Depression is a horrible, nasty, bit that can ruin people and destroy families.  So many people are living in the gloom of depression without realizing they are so far into the depths that they cannot see there is a way out.

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University Infantilism

Helicopter parents are hovering over higher education like a black cloud waiting to pour its contents onto a blissful countenance.  When parents become the students for their children, the entire structure and memeingful experience of a university education is discounted and downgraded.

Why do universities allow parents to attend class, have access to grades they did not earn, and sit in on meetings with professors?

Do the children of these helicopter parents have any rightful privacy?  Or is the only meter of power held in the hands of those who pay the bills?

Part of growing up and away from your parents must include making mistakes, falling down and getting up and — as hard as it is to confess the reality — lying and getting caught should teach more than it punishes.

We need to remove the parents from the higher education of their children or there will never be any hope for the future in helping to create a smarter and more independent generation that can stand alone on the shoulders of those that came before them while thinking and wondering with the same freedom that was won by those that fought the condescension of the paternalistic master and slave dyad of experiencing only what is allowed in the world instead of what should be in the universe.

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Computer Mind Melding

As computers become more like us and as we purposefully program our computers to reflexively behave as if they are us — instead of us — are we risking the loss of autonomous thought?

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