ThinkingAboutTheThinkable

Writing to Go On in Life             A rough outline or a list of points and examples, a sketch of the argument, frees you from global worries. What is right for this sentence or paragraph? The rest will take care of itself, especially when you realize you can rearrange the parts so that you are in accord with your outline, or to reveal a more auspicious arrangement that by the way shows what is wrong with your original outline.             As you go along, sentences lead to the next sentence, and you are more likely to persevere, your momentum making it harder to stop. Now you may write yourself into a corner. At that point you must stop and smell the roses. Return to writing the next day, and eventually you will find a way to write yourself out of that corner. You keep freeing, from yourself, what you need to say, so that you can see it...

I only understand what I am doing after I have written the article or book and it is published. In time, I see just what I was up to, and what I have accomplished. Rereading my earlier work is a revelation. What was written under the influence of a structure and an idea, now is seen as a wholly different achievement than I had intended.             When in my research I go out and photograph, I am shooting what catches my eye, but almost always under a deliberate program. Years later, when I go through my archive, as expected I see more in individual photographs (as we all do when we look again), and see differently under the various topics (topics I had not originally thought of) than I once could have imagined. To see clearly what is going on, I need another’s eye and sensibility, working in retrospect, and surely in actuality soon after I have made the photographs.        ...

Analogy is surely destiny, but a specific analogy may not be our destiny in the particular realm we occupy. So we search for better analogies, ones that allow us to discover what is really going on. Mathematical and physical models have proved productive, especially as they have been supplemented by computational and biological models. At the same time, there are ways of being in the world that demand very different analogies, not to be encompassed by mathematics and natural science. The examples I have employed, the analogies I have described and analyzed, are practical, used all the time by technical experts. Moreover, these analogies are employed thoughtlessly, as the way the world is. Only when we are misled by the analogy, that is, our empirical experience denies the analogy we are using, do we then stop and think, and either check if our sense of the world is accurate or see the analogy for what it is, a very rough and tentative metaphor, and decide we have b...