See the interview of the wonderful Amanpour with the biographer of Da Vinci.
Needless to say, you do not have to watch this interview, but you could take it as a preliminary shortcut for an upcoming engagement. I do hope
You cannot be exposed to the strange chain of events around Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo De Vinci without wondering about the strange relation of this book to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. After all, it appears that the first supplied the idea and the inspiration to Leonardo De Vinci, while the latter supplied the further support, in terms of library, resources, translations and yes this little New York Times review of a book in which we must have taken not inconsiderable part. We cannot be cynical to the two sides, aside from the author, as you go to clean up his name in his doings. However, from the side of Steve Jobs, he does appear to admit, within and without the book, that he took what he has attributed to Steve Jobs’s saying about Leonardo De Vinci was the point of departure of this book as well.
Please listen carefully to this idiocy, soon to unfold itself.. I am a very nice man and will try to be as delicate as possible here. Unlike the great reporter from the Post writing on Trump, I will have to own every fucking idiot I am about to utter about the guy, and so I will refrain from any such saying about this fucking brilliancy.
At any rate, the historian starts with the following retrospective, according to which he always dealt, a light as he is, with personalities which combined between science and technology from here, and humanities and beauty from there. Studying those great innovators and geniuses of history, it became clear to him that much of the unique sublime power lies in the talked upon synthesis:
“I embarked on this book because Leonardo da Vinci is the ultimate example of the main theme of my previous biographies: how the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technology—is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius”.
The whole thing is a mistake and a reading backwards. The whole thing supposes a separation between morality and beauty and religion from here to science from here. How mistaken this notion could be viewed easily from the preponderant mistake of Da Vinci’s celebrated biography. It could be viewed in this silly application of engineering into nature and about nature instead the notion of revelation through art, helping the side of God as an artist creating through an idea of some sort, becoming the laws of nature or the mathematical language of nature – an idea which is yet revealing the necessity of more revelation.
Here to mention the real difference between the enlightenment and period of revival/rebirth.
To be sure, no discussion why genius consists of the supposed synthesis, and not something else, or what is this brainchild conception of the genius, unless we are having a Carlyle-like readiness to explain the romanticism about the genius and so the genius in history. It seems that we are led to recognise this synthesis because it was his key theme, a pattern he found in names which most of the people who reads biographies tends to recognise, with the author of those biographies, as a clear case of genius. It is enough, indeed, to recognise the author by picking this book, in order to accept delivery of his judgment, but let us not enter to the problem of reading and recognition and how many a time the recognition comes before the act of reading and making reading itself quite impossible, even as it takes place, even if this is the only way it will take place many a time. So we have a few cases, the judgment of the author, this De Vinci in the following, if you like, for a further, ultimate test of the whole thesis; but we also have this a page later as the climax in itself of the whole section and the idea to De Vinci, thus phrased; the idea to the whole becomes so much clearer with Steve Jobs of Apple, which took, as we hear, Leonardo as his “hero”:
And Steve Jobs climaxed his product launches with an image of street signs showing the intersection of the liberal arts and technology. Leonardo was his hero. “He saw beauty in both art and engineering,” Jobs said, “and his ability to combine them was what made him a genius.”
Let us mention the three fundamental problems with this thesis:
1.
What between Leonardo Da Vinci Paintings or art and science, let alone Da Vinci as an Innovator, let alone Engineering.
It is one thing to claim that Leonardo Da Vinci is the renaissance man par-excellence, and to be amazed from many disciplines as viewed from here, it is wholly another thing to say it while forgetting- if ever knowing, what the renaissance means, or what is the uniqueness of this period, at least vis-a-vis ours. Thus or thus, and besides many hilarious mistakes, the biographer misses the One in the many.
What art and science. The biographer reads Da Vinci pairings or rather Da Vinci manuscripts, as if we were after the stage of critical philosophy, where the talk about science is not about the I or God and vice-versa, where the talk about the I or God is already not the objective talk, moving through the discussion about nature.
By way of a note: What art and science? From where came this distinction? Such an anachronism. You read it as if we were after the critical philosophy of Locke and Kant, where talk about science is not about the I or God and vice-versa; and thus nature was open to the work upon it and the change of this very nature. With Kant more implicitly, with Locke more explicitly and happily, the conquer of nature, the engineering aspect becomes part of that which God is blessing, at least in silence. Economically speaking, the talked upon division between disciples starts much later Da Vinci’s time, right about the industrial revolution. The shift in mathematics and the problem with the groundbreaking under the blowing of fresh air on Euclid has brought more basis to the division. Science became a problem to the absolute, thus to philosophy. Hence the growing of the division up top now, when the division exists due to ignorance, bluntly derivative and taken as a matter of fact. At any rate, there was nothing of a kind in this much earlier stage, Good God, what science this man speaks about? Da Vinci’s airplane? Where he draws the wings of the birds? Well, you have to remind yourself what is the real
To put it above- apropos the enlightenment?
End of note.
It is about religion, it is about God. Yes, we are not in the midday of history, yes, but the religious midday is still there in point of fact. Again, though in other words, the mistake lies in the reading of modernity as one-go or in an uncritical reading of enlistment itself, as too easy-going interpretation of the whole in a Copernican-like appellation. Before it was God in the center of things; before it was God as the center of attention, now, with humanism or enlightenment, it is this very thing which takes place: it is man, the human being later on, as opposed to God, which takes the center of things, which becomes a purpose in itself and so on. Not just enlightenment, but the atheistic one, and not so much the atheistic-humanistic one, with a relation for humanism, in the attempt to be all-humanism (Marx, for example, who not only do his Jesus act apropos the universal specialists of Hegel, by starting from those who have not. It is Marx, for example, who do not go to read
2.
Say you have a thesis like the above-mentioned one, about science and art or science as engineering, and art; and say that you see Da Vinci as the consummate example of what Steve Jos told you once, and Bill Gates was generous enough to show you (and then see it on writing and so showing it again, by a generous, unbiased review of the great book which a lunar as Bill Gates could have digested easily);- say all of that and whatever more which goes to substantiate it, it is still behooves on you to show the success in such a synthesis so called. You do not show it by telling us that Da Vinci took himself one day to draw what an accident of history has named as Leonardo Da Vinci airplane or Leonardo Da Vinci flying machine when, in fact, it was a drawing of a bird’s wing with a dream of flying, when the dream itself is about a future BOEING flies commercially; when the dream is about flying as a…bird. NOTE. If you so claim, you certainly not go after this little note to speak on the curiosity of Da Vinci and how they show itself in his notebooks.
At any rate, doing justice to Da Vinci is in the very minimum to dwell upon his paintings with a spill place being give to drawings. There, by the way, we see something of the invention, but an invention which cannot be more estranged
3.
Enough has been said about the fundamental mistake of starting with, nay, concentrating upon the Leonardo by means of his notebooks, saying nothing about the ignorance shown apropos this point, to say nothing about the capacity to hold and move through a relatively-complex dialectic or the lack of the needed tools by the biographer to me by that cliché is between philosophy and art, philosophy and history and this peculiar period of human history,
It is interesting to note that however a menace to the real Lrornado, even the many baby ideas are not enough for the old higue whose magic should be resulted in healing the rupture of yet too many details and not enough of a footing. For the completion of
Review Reviewing Da-Vinci’s Biography
From newyorker.com: The Secret Lives of Leonardo da Vinci
The New Worker had followed the publication of the now celebrated biography of Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson in something like a review of its own. More fairly, the review in question should be considered as a short essay in itself, which makes use and moves through the new biography but does not stick to it all too slavishly. The reviewer, as it appears, will definitely agree with the idea that the secret into the genius of Leonardo, if ever held and knew to the author, was somewhat kept secret from us. Ah, there is a repetition about the same nonsense, quoted from Steve Jobs, where we are being told that Da Vinci was the hero of Apple founder and CEO, which in late reference to the geniuses who changed the world, has claimed a genius to be defined in moving across disciplines, combining beauty and art with science and engineering and technology. To the one who searches for such a combo, there are many claims in the book itself, none, however, come to anything more than showing time and again why Da Vinci is not that genius, but more on that later. For now, please observe the acceptance of the contention regarding the separation between the disciplines, as though the separation, to be overcome, calls into a special kind of a genius.
The writer of this review accepts it, as said, all at once. It appears that she is strong on her German side and presents a light imitation of Adorno where the admiration to Nietzsche is being checked by Freud, who was
Leonardo Da Vinci Leonardo between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates- the Computer, Who was the Inventor,
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Facts
Leonardo De Vinci’s biography is very strange indeed. The strangeness begins with the total ignorance of the “historian”. Or: it is the attempt to find the fixed pattern of the inventor, hitting the person in question and its immediate history quite directly , while, at the same time, in not going to recover that which was known there and forgotten now, or in just wishing to reaffirm that which was found here, to be found there, again, the “historian” falls into a twofold problem. On the one hand, to use Marx’s criticism on Hegel’s work from the end of history – what we get is Is uncritical idealism. More on that later. And much more crucial, we get uncritical positivism.
Thus, anachronism and sediment, derivative, very much of the aside, constantly threaten the core of the book, if the descriptive, positive core itself is not enough to ruin itself in its own deeply-seated self contradictions.
Funny Facts about Leonardo Da Vinci
For anachronism see, for example, the division between art and science…something of a sediment understanding you could easily find in every fact being delivered to us about this Leonardo De Vinci…
The Idea of genius is silly, he speaks about curiosity, not about eros, certainly not about wonder. At any rate, if you claim for
First of all, he thinks that creativity could come about by being interested in everything, as he thinks that De Vinci was lucky to be ignorant or at least not formally educated. Well, De Vinci did not go to the university.
Apropos, lack of education, he claims that De Vinci is gay, perhaps pedophile, because he lived with different teenagers, two, from teenagers years to adulthood- 10 years or so. He does not think that the education was carried on through work and command at the master’s place, nor does he has any idea about Platonic Love, from Plato’s symposium and its recurrence in this period.
Now, the guy is speaking about curiosity and so on, as he thinks that De Vinci lacks culture as his biographer. This guy is so stupid. He takes the notes of De Vinci as the secret to De Vinci. The notes show his inventive side and curiosity.
Never knew that reading this way, with a notebook aside, was quite the new mode of De Vinci’s age. De Vinci was lucky for knowing so little. He was so lucky of moving to Florence as the latter city was very tolerant of gays, etc. The most laughable point here is what he finds as most striking. De Vinci was curious about the tongue of some bird, blah-blah. He thinks it is the most amazing example of De Vinci’s relentless interest in everything. Well, Biology starts with Aristotle dissecting fishes and what not. Michelangelo… well…and I thought he is interested in the carrying of people for both beauty and science. He thinks we are after the industrial revolution, critical thinking of Kant, etc. as if there is such a distinction.
Forgot religion. Forgot God. Forgot the return of God to the eye and beauty. Forgot Michelangelo and the return to Plato’s idea of God as an artist + God as expecting work through nature, now to be revealed further or the judgment as moving more to man. Trying to love Love and finding something of God even in the continuance…
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