It argues that all art is erotic, that if you have a tattoo it is only a matter of time until you murder someone, and expresses something about Negroes that I don't care to look for again. (It was written in 1900 or so. I wonder what people in 2120 will wince about when they read our important works?)
The frustrating thing is, I agree with many of the points in the essay. There's always something there: a grain of truth in the framework of obfuscation. But they dress it up. The essay even frames it as "Here is something I have discovered, which I now bestow upon the world." It's not a direct quote, but it may as well be; many philosophers share that air of fake importance.
If only he was relaxed, he could have gotten his points across to many more people. "I get over a fire much more easily when only worthless garbage has been burned." Interesting point. "Every age had its style, is our age alone to be refused a style? By style, people meant ornament." Great observation! Notice how we eschew ornament; HN is bare, Twitch is austere, Youtube is as minimalistic as possible. If you image search DaVinci, it's hard to find a single example of anything containing ornament. Coincidence? Works without ornament are timeless.
But something comes over people -- simple isn't enough. Me too. I wrote a downvote hiding extension for HN, and I was embarrassed that the v1 was only a few lines of code. "It doesn't even hide your karma if you look at your profile!" So I wrote a far more complicated v2 and shipped that. Surprise, HN shipped an update and now it broke. v1 works fine. You're certainly familiar with this phenomenon in almost every aspect of our profession. What is going on there? It's worth exploring.
But philosophers manage to obscure these observations in the most complicated ways. And unfortunately, those complications introduce mistakes that make it easy to dismiss the rest of the work, along with the good ideas.
It argues that all art is erotic, that if you have a tattoo it is only a matter of time until you murder someone, and expresses something about Negroes that I don't care to look for again. (It was written in 1900 or so. I wonder what people in 2120 will wince about when they read our important works?)
The frustrating thing is, I agree with many of the points in the essay. There's always something there: a grain of truth in the framework of obfuscation. But they dress it up. The essay even frames it as "Here is something I have discovered, which I now bestow upon the world." It's not a direct quote, but it may as well be; many philosophers share that air of fake importance.
If only he was relaxed, he could have gotten his points across to many more people. "I get over a fire much more easily when only worthless garbage has been burned." Interesting point. "Every age had its style, is our age alone to be refused a style? By style, people meant ornament." Great observation! Notice how we eschew ornament; HN is bare, Twitch is austere, Youtube is as minimalistic as possible. If you image search DaVinci, it's hard to find a single example of anything containing ornament. Coincidence? Works without ornament are timeless.
But something comes over people -- simple isn't enough. Me too. I wrote a downvote hiding extension for HN, and I was embarrassed that the v1 was only a few lines of code. "It doesn't even hide your karma if you look at your profile!" So I wrote a far more complicated v2 and shipped that. Surprise, HN shipped an update and now it broke. v1 works fine. You're certainly familiar with this phenomenon in almost every aspect of our profession. What is going on there? It's worth exploring.
But philosophers manage to obscure these observations in the most complicated ways. And unfortunately, those complications introduce mistakes that make it easy to dismiss the rest of the work, along with the good ideas.