addition of several extra essays

1 files changed, 1161 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/extra/philosophy_of_concept_art.tex b/extra/philosophy_of_concept_art.tex
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f2431ef
--- /dev/null
+++ b/extra/philosophy_of_concept_art.tex
@@ -0,0 +1,1161 @@
+\newcommand{\action}[1]{[\textit{#1}]}
+
+\newcommand{\speaker}[1]{\vskip 0.2em \textsc{#1}: }
+\newcommand{\speakermod}[2]{\vskip 0.2em \textsc{#1} \textit{(#2)}: }
+
+\chapter{Philosophy of Concept Art (1987)}
+
+{ \centering \itshape
+An interview with Henry Flynt \\
+by Christer Hennix \\
+Dec. 6, 1987 \par }
+
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} I'm going to give a summary of how I originated Concept Art 
+in order to bring it up to the point where it's understandable why I 
+speak of you (Catherine Christer Hennix) as my only successor in the genre. 
+Summarizing briefly, I see two things coming together. One of them 
+was my involvement with the modern music community of the time---Stockhausen, 
+Cage, LaMonte Young---and the other aspect was that I 
+had been a mathematics major at Harvard and already knew that I 
+thought of myself primarily as a philosopher---that my intention had 
+been when I was very young, when I didn't understand the situation 
+that I was in---my intention had been to become a philosopher with 
+nevertheless a specialization in mathematics. Of course, many people 
+actually did that. 
+
+So, having said that, one of the things that I began to notice about 
+the modern music of that time was this extremely strong pseudo- 
+intellectual dimension in Stockhausen---Stockhausen's theoretical 
+journal \journaltitle{die Reihe}---the impression that they were doing science 
+actually---for example Stockhausen had a long essay on how the 
+duration of the notes had to correspond to the twelve pitches of the 
+chromatic scale \ldots
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} "\ldots\ how time passes\ldots"\footnote{\journaltitle{die Reihe 3}}
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Yes, and what is more, the other rhythms had to correspond to 
+the overtone structure above those frequencies as fundamentals. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Yes, I'm quite familiar with that. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Yes, I would expect you would be. I remember Bo 
+Nilson---you will like this---in 1958 at the same time I saw Stockhausen's 
+score---he went even one step further than Stockhausen because he 
+used fractional amplitude specifications---so this is even more than 
+Stockhausen, and so forth and so on. 
+
+Cage took a considerable step further in the sense that in Cage this 
+kind of play with structure is carried to the point where there is an 
+extreme dissociation between what the composer sees and what the 
+performer sees in terms of the structure of the piece and what the 
+audience knows. They are completely divorced from one another. Cage 
+would compose a piece on a graph in which the time that a note begins 
+is on one axis and the length of the note is on another axis. What he 
+would do was to superimpose that on some picture like from a star 
+catalogue--- 
+
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} \opustitle{Atlas Eclipticalis}--- 
+
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Yeah, well, that's the particular piece. I'm making up a 
+composite of his compositional techniques but the result is that when you 
+break up a sequential event in that way, it's not like a pitch-time graph 
+where there's an intuitive recognition of the way the process unfolds. 
+He would have one structure for beginnings and another structure for 
+durations. Well at any rate, already in Cage's music there was a kind of 
+ritual aspect to performing classical music. I mean in Cage's piece, 
+which is actually all silence---the only thing the pianist does is open and 
+close the lid of the piano or something like that. 
+
+Then LaMonte Young comes along. His word pieces were the first 
+that I ever saw, composed in mid-1960. I saw them in December 
+1960.\footnote{Other composers have earlier dates, but for me, 
+Young crystallized the genre. [H.F., note added]}
+It was a very different kind of structural game. It was no longer like 
+twelve-tone organization and so forth but rather it was like playing 
+with paradoxes---it was nearer to making a paradox than making some 
+kind of complicated network. 
+
+And I felt that matters had reached the point where there was 
+some kind of inauthenticity here because the point of the work of art 
+had become some kind of structural or conceptual play, and yet it was 
+being realized under the guise of music so that the audience had no 
+chance of really seeing what was supposed to be the point of the 
+piece---the audience was actually prevented from seeing. Certainly 
+Cage's methods had exactly that effect. The audience receives an 
+experience which simply sounds like chaos but in fact what they are 
+hearing is not chaos but a hidden structure which is so hidden that it 
+cannot be reconstructed from the performed sound. It's so hidden that 
+it can't be reconstructed but nevertheless Cage knows what it is. So I 
+felt that the confusion between whether they were doing music or 
+whether they were doing something else had reached a point where I 
+found that disturbing or unacceptable. 
+
+At the same time at that period there was a great fascination in sort 
+of taking the Stockhausen attitude and looking back at the history of 
+music from that point of view. Stockhausen's analysis in \journaltitle{die Reihe 2} of 
+Webern's \opustitle{String Quartet [Op. 28]} tried to show that Webern was 
+composing total serial music and not just twelve tone music. That was 
+the attitude, they were rewriting the history of music, trying to show 
+that all previous important figures were essentially preoccupied with 
+structure, that they had been complete structuralists. 
+
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Really? I thought it was only Webern that was given that 
+treatment. 
+
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Well, they were digging up all these composers from the 
+Middle Ages, the isorhythmic motet and everything like that---they 
+were sort of dredging that up because that was the previous 
+period---the medieval scores in the form of a circle and the use of insertion 
+syncopation,\footnote{My term for the rhythmic feature common to Magister Zacharias' \opustitle{Sumite Karissimi} and \opustitle{Klavierst\"{u}uck XI}. See Willi Apel, \booktitle{The Notation of Polyphonic Music} (4th ed.), p. 432 for \opustitle{Sumite Karissimi}. [H.F., note added]}
+it appears with the red notes ina medieval score and then 
+it reappears in Stockhausen's \opustitle{Klavierst\"{u}ck XI}. They were just jumping, 
+they were dismissing what we would call the baroque, classical and 
+romantic periods periods as completely worthless. In other words, the 
+last music before Stockhausen was in the 14th century, this is the way 
+the history of music was being rewritten. And LaMonte was getting 
+into Leonin and Perotin and all that kind of stuff. Well, anyway, that's 
+quite an excursion. 
+At any rate there is in music, there is this preoccupation with---it 
+may be a kind of quasi-Pythagoreanism, I don't know\ldots
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} The way I looked at it was that they saw in Webern, first of 
+all the harmony was going away. And they saw in Webern a way of 
+determining the note more and more precisely, in terms of all of its 
+parameters, pitch, duration, timbre and all that. What was left was that 
+timbre was not serialized yet. And that, as far I see it, was what the 
+Darmstadt school did---they added--- 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Stockhausen's \opustitle{Kontra-Punkte}--- 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Yeah. And they all considered Webern the god of the new 
+music--- 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Yes--- 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} ---and also a little bit Messiaen--- 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Yes. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} It was Webern and Messaien that determined the entire 
+fifties in Darmstadt. In other words, they were saying that Cage was no 
+good. He was just looking in \booktitle{I Ching}---it was a random thing. And you 
+cannot recover the structure, it's hidden, as you said. The problem was 
+that Stockhausen, when he played his \opustitle{Klavierst\"{u}ck XI}, you couldnt 
+recover the structure either. It was so complex now. So the complexity 
+of the serialist music became exactly the complexity of Cage. Cage 
+looked his numbers up in random number tables; the others were 
+sitting calculating rows of numbers. But in addition to that they also 
+had to fake it. Because---you find that yourself when you do serial 
+music---the music moves too slowly. So you change the numbers to get 
+the music up a little bit. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Yes. We're taking longer on this than I meant to\ldots
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} But I wanted to say this. The completely deterministic com- 
+position technique and the completely random, aleatoric technique, 
+gave exactly the same results. And that was the complete breakdown of 
+the Darmstadt school. That's when they started to improvise in Darm- 
+stadt. Not before that was there improvisation in Darmstadt. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} When they first tried to serialize duration, they tried to pick a 
+fundamental unit and use multiples of it; in other words, that's not the 
+way you serialize pitch. You don't take one cycle per second and then 
+use two cycles per second, up to twelve. That's not what you do. But 
+that's what they did with duration. And that's what produced the 
+Boulez pieces that move so slowly. In other words if you treat rhythm as 
+multiples of like a whole note then it was moving too slowly for them. 
+
+But Cage was for them what was wrong with America or something. 
+I mean, the center of what Stockhausen was doing was the 
+concept of scientificity. In other words at that time I fantasized the 
+composer appearing as performer, on the stage in a lab coat carrying a 
+slide rule---there were no electronic calculators at that time, it would 
+have to have been a slide rule---but that seemed completely approp- 
+riate. In other words, a composition was a laboratory experiment. I 
+mean they viewed Cage as a typical American---coming in a vacuum--- 
+American superficiality---a vacuum with no scientificity. But Cage was 
+actually not using a random number table, he was flipping coins, he 
+was using the \booktitle{I Ching}. Yet it was not even that---what Cage was doing 
+was much more whimsical than using a random number book. He 
+would just copy a leaf---in the \opustitle{Concert for Piano and Orchestra} he just 
+put the staff over a leaf and then the main points defining the shape of 
+the leaf he just copied them on and he ended up with a circle or not a 
+circle, but a group of notes in cyclic shape, and so the pianist was 
+supposed to play around the circle. This was completely whimsical 
+actually and yes, I remember very well these debates that they had, the 
+one and the other\footnote{Serial vs. chance.}---I didn't have any idea that I was going to spend 
+this much time competing with the music critic of the \journaltitle{New York Times}
+about who remembers the 1950s the best. 
+
+At any rate\ldots\  There is of course a larger tradition in art which has 
+a kind of quasi-scientific involvement in structure that does go very 
+much to the Renaissance, for example. Althought I was not so conscious 
+of that---I looked that up much later. But it was certainly there. 
+
+So, on the one hand concept art came from the idea of lifting 
+structure off and makinga separate art form out of it. The structure or 
+conceptual aspect, and making a separate art form out of it. The other 
+thing that was coming---the development of my philosophical thinking 
+---I have to explain first that the version of mathematics that I received 
+at Harvard in the 1950s in which Quine was the head of the department 
+and editor of the \journaltitle{Journal of Symbolic Logic} and so forth and the 
+hottest thing in philosophy was considered to be Quine's debate with 
+Carnap. And I was a schoolmate of Kripke, Solovay, Goodman \etc\ 
+\etc, \etc. I'm just mentioning that to locate the period of time. Actually 
+my conversations with them were insignificant as far as the philosophy 
+of mathematics was concerned, there was no discussion between me 
+and them on any of that but it will locate the time frame that I'm talking 
+about.* 
+
+\footnote{I'm being too diffident. I had quite significant discussions with Kripke and Goodman in 1961. [H.F,, note added]}
+
+But observing what was going on at that time, I picked up the idea 
+that the most plausible explanation of what mathematics is, is that it is 
+an activity analogous to chess, or in other words that chess captures the 
+characteristic features of mathematics, even though, as I have told you 
+privately many times, everybody knew who Brouwer was and what the 
+intutionist school was, but nobody studied it, and from my point of 
+view looking at it and knowing what it was, I felt no inclination to 
+pursue it further. 
+
+The reason why this chess game explanation of mathematics 
+seemed so plausible---you know, at the end of the nineteenth century 
+they found themselves with three geometries---this is not Henry Flynt 
+saying this, this is the canard, the story in the text books. There were 
+three geometries; one of them fit the real world. They thought it was 
+Euclidean, but it might not be. It might be one of the others like elliptic, 
+for example; nevertheless, all three were consistent. Now what was the 
+epistemological status of the two out of the three geometries that were 
+true without having any correspondence to the real world, while one of 
+them did have a correspondence to the real world and was also true? 
+But what of the other two---the ones that were called true even thought 
+they had nothing to with the world? You know presumably Hilbert 
+wrote \essaytitle{Foundations of Geometry} as the original answer to that 
+question. 
+
+Although---I can't pursue this here, it is much too technical---this 
+is now an open question for me. It has never been an open question in 
+the past. I just accepted what I was told---that Hilbert solved this by 
+seeing that a system of mathematics that has no relation to the real 
+world---in what does its truth consist? Its consistency as an uninterpreted 
+calculus as they would say---axioms, proofs, formation rules, 
+transformation rules. Certainly it was clear in the early twentieth 
+century that the concept of an abstract space was established. This was 
+what geometry was about. Geometry did not attempt---in Kant's time it 
+was assumed that when you were talking about geometry you were 
+talking about the geometry of the real world. That's the only geometry 
+that there was. The idea that there was a different agenda for geometry 
+other than the real world---how Kant could have moved geometry into 
+the constitutive subject and said that it was congenital to the mind---Euclidean geometry. 
+In hindsight that seems to be one of the biggest 
+mistakes he made, tremendously embarrassing, because by the mid-twentieth 
+century it was completely taken for granted that the job of the 
+mathematician was to study structures which do not have any reality. 
+And that from time to time you will give an interpretation to one or the 
+other of these structures, like a physical interpretation, and then it may 
+be found to be true or false in reality or not. Meanwhile, you have 
+another sense of the word "interpretation" which has to do with relative 
+consistency proofs by something having a model. 
+
+This is now a completely open question for me, what they thought 
+they were doing. In other words what Hilbert thought that he was 
+doing---he interpreted one or another non-Euclidean geometry---what 
+was the interpretation that he used? It was a denumerable domain of 
+algebraic numbers.\footnote{Foundations of Geometry, pp. 27--30}
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} I think his ideas go back to Klein's models---which are 
+Euclidean in the center of the circle and then at the periphery they have 
+turned non-Euclidean (in the complex plane). 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} You had to have an explanation of how mathematics could be 
+true in any sense whatsoever even though any claim of a connection 
+with the real world had been completely severed, and it was being 
+pursued in some kind of vacuum. What does mathematics mean in that 
+case? And the answer that Hilbert gave was that it does not have to 
+mean anything. 
+
+That's the answer. So it's a chess game. And the only difference 
+between mathematics and a chess game is that there are additional 
+complications created in mathematics by the fact that it deals with 
+infinitary games. By the way, I completely overlooked that aspect at 
+that time. You know, I can only see it now, kind of like two superimposed 
+pictures, because I see what I know now and compare it with what I knew then. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Yeah, the same for myself. I didn't know that this idea of 
+Hilbert's was forced by Frege until later. Frege was the one who said 
+that either the parallel axiom is true, or it's not. Which way do you want 
+it? And so he caused the big stir in the foundations of geometry in the 
+end of the nineteenth century and that's why he became enemies with 
+Hilbert. They were life enemies. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} The reason I see it like two superimposed transparencies--- 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} But even today this debate with Frege---you have to go to a 
+single volume in Frege's posthumous writings---it is not mentioned in 
+any textbook---no lecture mentions it, and, so far, nobody has 
+explained it properly.\footnote{\booktitle{Nachgelassene Schriften und Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel}, vol. 2, Felix Meiner, Hamburg: 1976. (Gottlob Frege, The Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, University of Chicago Press: 1980)}
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Yes, yes, yes. You're talking about an obscure origin of something 
+and what I'm talking about is a kind of consensus that had grown 
+up, since everybody agreed that mathematics should study unreal structures. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} But that consensus was forced on us, that that was what we 
+were supposed to do. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} The problem then---I thought mathematics was like chess. 
+What I understand now is that even a good formalist would not agree 
+with that. A good formalist would say that when you have a finite game 
+like chess, the problems of validity and soundness become transparent 
+or intuitively ascertainable, therefore a finite game is too trivial to be a
+proxy for mathematics. At that time I did not understand that distinction. 
+I've read in many books since then that mathematics is the science 
+of infinity---that is the way mathematics is defined now in half of the 
+books that I look at. But at that point I did not understand. I thought 
+the finite game was already, I mistakenly thought, a complex enough 
+problem to stand for mathematics. Or that the reliability of a finite 
+game was sufficiently complicated to stand for mathematics so I basically 
+focused just on a finite game. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} By the way, this was exactly the late Wittgenstein's view of 
+the philosophy of mathematics---it's not a complete misunderstanding, 
+that is to say, other people thought of it that way too. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} The question then arose of even the soundness, the reliability, 
+the consistency of a finite game---this then is the problem for example 
+whether it is possible to follow a very simple rule correctly or not. The 
+other thing that was feeding into everything that was going on was that 
+Wittgenstein's \essaytitle{Remarks on The Foundations of Mathematics} was in 
+the Harvard Bookstore when I walked in as a freshman my very first 
+day there---so in other words I was looking at Wittgenstein's Remarks 
+on The Foundations of Mathematics from 1957--- 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Ten years before me--- 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} ---but very cursorily. Because I had a philosophical 
+agenda---I passed over this material in a very cursory way because I had a 
+philosophical agenda. I was not involved in the distinction between a 
+finite and an infinite structure. I was not involved in that. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} You thought there was no such distinction? 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Well no, I thought that---it didn't seem that there was very 
+much point in worrying about that when there were much more 
+extreme problems to be worried about. But Wittgenstein wrote a lot 
+about the possibility of following very simple rules. And I assumed that 
+if there were epistemological questions for mathematics that this game 
+interpretation---this chess interpretation---had displaced the question 
+of the soundness and reliability of the mathematics to the possibility of 
+understanding a very simple rule like writing the series "plus 2". 
+
+And having gathered that this was the way that I should picture 
+mathematics---I mean we understood very well that there were other 
+pictures of mathematics, but we thought they were philosophically 
+obsolete. In other words the person who believed that mathematics was 
+a description of a real supra-terrestrial structure, and certainly there 
+were people like that--- 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Still today. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} ---we thought that this was a philosophy that had been 
+exposed as superstitious by Positivism and possibly even by Ockham 
+several centuries earlier. So it was not that we didn't know about that. I 
+drew a personal conclusion that that position could not be defended by 
+any arguments that are acceptable by modern standards. What I really 
+meant was by Carnap's standards. That's what modern standards 
+meant to me. 
+
+In my philosophy I was not concerned with the specifics of 
+mathematics; I was concerned with the problem of how I knowa world 
+beyond my immediate sensations. That was actually the question that I 
+began with---the question of propositions of material fact, like "it is raining" 
+or "the \textsc{Empire State Building} is at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street." 
+
+I had read a very simplified exposition---it was actually some 
+lectures that Carnap gave in England in the 1930s on what Positivism 
+was.\footnote{R. Carnap, \booktitle{Philosophy and Logical Syntax} (1935).} 
+They were very simple lectures and very different from his actual 
+published books with all this supposed apparatus and symbols and so 
+forth but a very simple exposition of what it is for a proposition to be 
+meaningful---that it must be empirically testable and so forth and so on 
+and the solution of questions of metaphysics that make assertions that 
+are not testable are therefore meaningless---the possibility of solving 
+questions of what is real by declaring if there is no way of deciding them 
+they are therefore meaningless. That seemed to me to be, at the time, a 
+stunning contribution. Because I come out of a background---I was in 
+high school reading Kant and so forth and so on. And Carnap's 
+solution was much more attractive to me than trying to participate with 
+Kant, to experience his question and try to take one side or the other 
+when he already said it's not really answerable; I solve it by simply 
+having faith or something like that, which is what he said about the 
+famous God freedom and immortality---I found it immensely attractive 
+when Carnap came along and said that there is no way of answering 
+these questions; therefore, words are being used nonsensically. 
+
+I went through a process of thinking about that without ever 
+having seen Carnap's \booktitle{The Logical Structural of The World}. When I 
+was in Israel Scheffler's philosophy of science class, I tried to write a 
+text which in effect gave my own empiricist constructions of what it 
+means to say that A causes B and so forth, to give empiricist constructive 
+definitions of those---which is, I suppose, in the spirit of Carnap's 
+program, even though I hadn't actually seen what he had written, and if 
+I had it would have confused me---no, I wouldn't say "confused"; I 
+would say it would have discredited him completely. I wouldn't say 
+"confused" because that's too modest. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} No, I wouldn't think "confused," I would think it would 
+have upset you\ldots
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} No, I wouldn't say "confused." I would say he had been 
+discredited. 
+
+I very quickly passed to the position that the propositions of 
+natural science were meaningless metaphysics. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} On what basis? Can you pin that down? A little bit, only. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} This is something I want to compress---it says a little bit about 
+this in \booktitle{Blueprint for a Higher Civilization}\footnote{H. Flynt, Blueprint for a Higher Civilization (Milan, 1975). Recently reissued and an expanded and corrected edition by \textsc{Salitter Workings}}---like 
+the proposition, "this key is made of iron" or something like that, I comment on that in the 
+essay \essaytitle{Philosophical Aspects of Walking Through Walls}.
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} I didn't recall the example actually. 
+
+\speakermod{FLYNT}{reading} "The natural sciences must certainly be dismantled. 
+In this connection it is appropriate to make a criticism about the logic 
+of science as Carnap rationalized it. Carnap considered a proposition 
+meaningful if it had any empirically verifiable proposition as an 
+implication. But consider an appropriate ensemble of scientific propositions 
+in good standing, and conceive of it as a conjunction of an infinite 
+number of propositions about single events (what Carnap called 
+protocol-sentences). Only a very small number of the latter propositions 
+are indeed subject to verification. If we sever them from the entire 
+conjunction, what remains is as effectively blocked from verification as 
+the propositions which Carnap rejected as meaningless. This criticism 
+of science is not a mere technical exercise. A scientific proposition is a 
+fabrication which amalgamates a few trivially-testable meanings with 
+an infinite number of untestable meanings and inveigles us to accept the 
+whole conglomeration at once. It is apparent at the very beginning of 
+\booktitle{Philosophy and Logical Syntax} that Carnap recognized this quite 
+clearly; but it did not occur to him to do anything about it." 
+
+The only point that I'm trying to make here is that I began to move 
+very quickly when I was still very young towards a position of extreme 
+disillusionment and cognitive extremism. I moved very quickly. This 
+was not a slow process. I just immediately took Carnap's critique of 
+metaphysics, decided that it applied directly to natural science---you 
+dismiss natural science as meaningless. The problem: is there an object 
+that is beyond my experience, is there a glass which is beyond what they 
+would call the "scopic" glass, the "tactile" glass \action{gestures toward the 
+glass from which he has been drinking}---is there a glass other than 
+those glasses---when you first think about it, that question seems to 
+have exactly the status of the propositions about God, freedom, and 
+immortality that Kant said are unanswerable and that Carnap said are 
+meaningless. However, there is one additional step for people who are 
+interested in the history of philosophy. Kant, in the second edition of 
+\booktitle{Critique of Pure Reason}, added this notorious refutation of idealism to 
+prove the existence of the real world independent of my sense 
+impressions---you may not know about this---this was the basis of 
+Husserl's phenomenology---Husserl's phenomenology was invented in 
+this passage and it also tremendously preoccupied Heidigger. It was 
+one of the sources which causes Heidigger to say that the essence of 
+Being is Time. Kant said that essentially it is the passage of time which 
+proves that there must be an external world. This is notorious in the 
+history of philosophy. Because on the one hand it is so deeply 
+influential for later thinkers; and on the other hand, for example, 
+Schopenhauer said it was a complete disgrace---it was such an obvious sophistry 
+that it was just disgusting---that it had the effect of ruining the 
+\booktitle{Critique of Pure Reason}. 
+
+Actually this refutation of idealism is distributed throughout the 
+\booktitle{Critique of Pure Reason}, it's not in any one place---a foot note here, 
+a preface there, another passage somewhere else. In one of the footnotes 
+Kant makes the same point. In order to ask the question whether 
+there is a glass beyond my sense impression of it---I cannot ask that 
+question\ldots
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Oh you mean the \term{ding an sich} question. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Well that's what Kant would have been talking about but I 
+don't want to fit that narrowly into Kant's controlling the terms of the 
+discussion. I'm trying to ask it as someone who has embraced 
+Logical Positivism and is now turning around to question Logical 
+Positivism---you see the point that I was just making there---when 
+you say that this key is made of iron, which is Carnap's favorite 
+example---and then a protocol sentence, for example 
+"if I hold a magnet near this key, the key will be attracted to the magnet"---it 
+is not clear where Carnap stands on 
+the question whether only my sense impressions are real---just talking 
+about this situation---only my sense impressions are real---or is there 
+supposed to be a substantial key? 
+
+By the way, I don't know Carnap's work that well. I passed over 
+these people in a very offhand way, so much so that many times I've 
+talked to people and they've concluded in their own mind that I dont 
+really know philosophy because I seem to have just glanced at these 
+people---picked up one or two points---the reason for that is that I was 
+moving so quickly to my own terminus---I only needed to see the 
+slightest symptom from these people to know that they were spending 
+all their time worrying about something that it was a waste of time to 
+worry about since it could only be a secondary issue. Here is Carnap 
+with this key made of iron---while I'm trying to ask is there a key other 
+than the scopic key, the tactile key \emph{now}---since the past and the future 
+are beyond immediate experience. I mean they cannot be cited as 
+evidence---or whether they are evidence or not, is the same problem. 
+Should I believe in the past and the future even though they are not 
+immediates? Should I believe in the glass, even though what I 
+presumably have is a scopic glass---at this very moment, a visual glass 
+apparition, from that should I conclude a glass? 
+
+The first reaction to that question for somebody who is coming 
+from Kant and Carnap and who does not mind how extreme his 
+answer is---that's the key thing. In other words, if I came to a 
+conclusion that was completely untenable as far as social circumstances---that 
+didn't bother me at all. At first the question whether there is a real glass 
+beyond the apparition would seem to be an unanswerable 
+question---one of Kant's metaphysical questions---but then you think---that if you 
+know what the question means, then there must be a realm beyond 
+experience, because otherwise it is unclear how the question could be 
+understandable. 
+
+From my point of view---if you want to make an issue out of 
+semantics---this is the profound issue. What the mathematical philosophers 
+and philosophers of mathematics were doing, talking about 
+semantics, interpreting geometry as an algebra and algebra as a 
+geometry---really for the purposes of relative-consistency proofs or 
+because they found they could solve problems by using a machinery 
+developed in another branch of mathematics by seeing these structural 
+similarities---but to confuse that with what I thought the bona fide 
+semantic question is: how would I understand the question whether 
+there is a substantial glass other than the scopic glass---you know the 
+conclusion---I can't tell you the exact breakdown---but I am talking 
+now about the 1961 manuscript, \essaytitle{Philosophy Proper}\footnote{Published in \booktitle{Blueprint for a Higher Civilization}. This book.}
+---I may have 
+already come to the conclusion at that time---that the question itself 
+forces a yes answer. This does not mean that a proof of the existence of 
+the external world has been given. It meant that the proposition of the 
+existence of the external world would verify itself even if it were false! 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} I find this extremely interesting and rewarding, what you are 
+saying now, because I never heard you say it this way before. I just want 
+to ask you one question before you go on: namely, I see something for 
+the first time which I hadn't seen before---but before you go on I just 
+want to ask you one leading question: the simple existential statement, 
+"there is a glass on the table." You include that also in what will be 
+doubtable here. In other words not just "there is a glass on the table" 
+but "there exists a glass," the existential statement. I guess I wasn't very 
+clear now. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} No, the thing is, the approach that I'm taking doesn't break it 
+down the way that you're talking about. Let me tell you. You may not 
+be \emph{sympatico} with empiricism. When you are trying to deal with 
+philosophy at all---you have to make some allowance for the 
+fact---you have to understand that the philosopher may be carving up 
+problems in a way that is temperamentally alien to you. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Yeah\ldots
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} You have to understand that. This is why somebody like 
+Carnap would read Hegel and say it's not saying anything. Actually, 
+Hegel is saying something. In fact, you might go so far as to make a case 
+that Hegel is actually rebutting Carnap, becaue if you understand what 
+Hegel is doing you realize even more than one would realize anyway 
+that Carnap has an untenable position---that he's sort of---that he 
+wants what he cannot have. He has made a set of rules that does not 
+allow him to have the thing that he demands to have. Hegel would have 
+seen that immediately. Carnap thinks that the problem of a logic of 
+consistency is an easy problem and a solved problem. In effect, Hegel 
+was saying there is something very misleading in thinking that that is a 
+solved problem. I'm trying to give you a sense of misunderstandings 
+between philosophers that are the results of temperamental incompatibilities. 
+
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} What you are giving me is a two-step way to skepticism. You 
+ask a certain question---is there something beyond this perception of 
+the glass? And you say the answer "yes" is forced on me, but then you 
+realize this was a meaningless question. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} No, it's the other way around. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Oh, okay, but here's where you have to explain in detail 
+because here's where I miss you. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Let me go through the series of steps again. The series of steps 
+was\ldots\  I'll have to doit all at the same time. You have to understand---I 
+don't think that you even understand what an empiricist is. It's a 
+peculiar attitude. And one of the reasons why you have very little 
+training in this attitude is because people who claim to be 
+empiricists---it's always a fraud. All people who appear in public and say they are 
+empiricists, they are all lying all of the time. The reason that they're 
+lying is that they have this doctrine of the construction of the world 
+from sense impressions. That is their doctrine. But they do not stay with 
+that doctrine. And the reason why they do not stay with that doctrine is 
+because in addition to having the doctrine of the construction of the 
+world from sense impressions, they also want to have things like 
+science--- 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Ethics\ldots
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} No, not ethics---one of the characteristics of the twentieth- 
+century philosopher was the appearance of the tough-guy philosopher 
+who rejects all of ethics as meaningless, which Carnap certainly did and 
+people who are close to him like A.J. Ayer---no, they did not want 
+ethics. But they wanted science. And the problem with wanting the 
+construction of the world from sense impressions on the one hand and 
+wanting science on the other is that the two finally have nothing to do 
+with each other at all---and when they said that the two were the same 
+thing as Carnap did---he was lying---I made a hero out of Carnap---I
+derived some kind of positive impulse from him or something like that 
+without---I never actually read---my serious reading of Carnap was like 
+three or four pages of excerpts in a paperback popularization. I owned, 
+I had in my library Carnap's so-called real books, like 
+\booktitle{Logical Foundations of Probability} and \booktitle{Meaning and Necessity} and all the rest of them 
+and I never read them.\footnote{Again I'm being too diffident. I thoroughly studied portions of the 
+Carnap books I owned---beginning with \booktitle{The Logical Structure of Language},
+which I bought while in high school [H.F., note added].}
+And in hindsight that was good, because I took 
+his slogan seriously and assumed that he meant what he said and drew 
+the necessary consequences of it. If I had actually read his books I 
+would have been thrust into this massive hypocrisy, and I must say 
+stupidity, because the man did not realize that his answers were not 
+adequate, did not realize how preposterous his constructions of the 
+world were--- 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} I would say vulgar. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Yes, yes. And\ldots\ what is even worse about empiricism is, in the 
+case of somebody like Mach, not only does he want to have his sense 
+impressions and does he want to have his science, but he wants to have 
+science explain sense impressions! And nevertheless it was supposed to 
+be the sense impressions that were primary, not the science. Mach is 
+seriously telling you, I will tell you why you see a blue book---because 
+the frequency of blue light is---and then he gives some uncountable 
+number, I mean some number that is pragmatically infinite, or something 
+like that. And how do you know that blue light is exactly 
+$3.2794835\mathrm{e}{15}$ and not one more or less---? Well, 
+certainly not by just looking, I'll guarantee you that! You have to go 
+into a laboratory with a few million dollars' worth of equipment or 
+something. But that's what it is to see that the book is blue. 
+
+I'm trying to give you the sense of what it would be to be an 
+authentic empiricist. You ask does a glass exist; an authentic empiricist 
+would have to say that he already has a problem with that---that he has 
+to regard that as an undefined question or statement. It's undefined, 
+because if you are asking me if at this moment I quote unquote 
+have---interesting word there, "have"---that is what our ordinary 
+language gives us as the idiom for this. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Or "suffer!" 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Yes, "have" or "suffer," that's right. I have or I suffer a scopic 
+glass or visual glass apparition---then that is identically true. That is 
+identically true. If you express any surprise at that, we have a problem 
+here. I have a scopic glass. If I say I have an apparitional glass, would 
+that be okay?---I mean from this point of view the sense impression is 
+not open to dispute. It's meaningless to dispute it. It's an impression, an 
+apparition---the sense impression is that for which seeming and being 
+are identical. For the empiricist the phase of the world or range of the 
+world for which seeming and being are identical is the sense impression. 
+If that seems strange to you then maybe I can make it less strange by 
+pointing out to you to make this as clear as possible---for the empiricist 
+to say that I have an apparitional glass is to say nothing about Reality 
+with a capital R at all! This is the so-called subjective psychological 
+moment---although an empiricist would never say that---the reason an 
+empiricist would never say that is that even to call it subjective is 
+already much too strong because that implies that you can guarantee 
+an objectivity to compare it to. And a bona fide empiricist would not 
+agree that my sense impression is subjective---subjective in comparison 
+to \emph{what}? 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} So an empiricist would be a person who would not doubt 
+whether he had a toothache or not. In other words, if he had a 
+toothache\ldots
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} You would regard it as being a mistake to do what? I'm not 
+sure about the word "toothache"---if you mean that he would not 
+doubt whether he had a toothache sensation. Whether there is an 
+organic---in the language of medicine---whether there is an organic 
+substrate for the toothache impression---this in a medical sense is a 
+question of what is called hysteria or something like that\ldots
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Suppose I have a toothache. But now I'm an empiricist so I 
+say I'm doubting this impression. I probably don't have a toothache. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} No, no\ldots
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} I have to accept the toothache? 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} No, you don't have--- 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} The glass you said was---I couldn't doubt the perception of 
+the glass. You said that was beyond doubt, in some sense, for the 
+empiricist. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} It would be some kind of logical mistake to think that there 
+was anything there to be doubted. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Okay. And the same with the toothache. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Yes, yes. I mean the point is not so much that we have come 
+into an area in which the empiricist is prepared to have faith---that 
+would be completely missing the point. No faith is required---that's the 
+point. The point is that it would be some kind of logical error. Once you 
+understand what a sense impression is, the terminology of doubt does 
+not apply to that level. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} I see. Just that was my question. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} The terminology of doubt does not apply to apparitions. It 
+doesn't make sense to doubt subjective apparitions. The empiricist is 
+already nervous when you ask does a glass exist. If you are asking 
+whether I have a "scopic" glass, it's identically true. Wait, wait. There 
+are already problems there. I'll come back to them. But when you 
+say---it sounds like what you're asking me is whether the fact that I see a 
+glass is sufficient to prove an objective glass---that sounds like \ldots
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} No, no, that's not what---
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Well, ok. Most people when they say: 
+"do you concede that there is a glass on the table---I'm sitting here looking at it," what they 
+mean is: "do you concede that from your visual glass apparition you should conclude an objective glass, a substantial glass?" I'm taking it for 
+granted that you know enough about philosophy to have a sense of the 
+full weight those two words "substantial" and "objective" have in 
+philosophy. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Yes. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} That at great length is my reaction to your question about 
+doubting "there is a glass on the table" versus doubting "there exists a glass." 
+A bona fide empiricist would say, "Why are you asking me this?" 
+The scopic glass is simply here for me. As far as concluding that an 
+objective glass exists from the existence of that apparition---the traditional 
+problem of concluding whether the apparition is a symptom of 
+some transcendent world---I think the word "transcendent" is sometimes 
+used in that sense in philosophy---the world beyond any sense 
+impression--- 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} This is why I used the example of the pain---because it 
+would be senseless for me to claim that \emph{I} can have \emph{your} toothache! 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Now just a minute. An empiricist---what you're really getting 
+at what you're sort of squeezing out of me here---I'm glad to have it 
+squeezed out of me---I have no embarrassment about this---is that with 
+empiricism either you must be prepared immediately to depart 
+absolutely from the conventional world view, or else you will just plunge 
+yourself into a quicksand of hypocrisy. When you're asking me, can l 
+have your toothache\ldots\  A good empiricist would say, 
+\textquote{I have not established so-called other people except the other-people apparitions 
+that occur for me from time to time in waking life \emph{as they do in my 
+dreams!} And are you now going to ask me can I have the toothache of a 
+person who appears to me in a dream?} Then the spotlight would be 
+turned on you---what kind of an issue are you trying to make there? 
+What do you believe is the reality status of the furniture in my dreams? 
+For the empiricist, nothing remotely like that question has arisen yet, 
+because I haven't got outside of my own quote unquote head yet. 
+
+Maybe you're just squeezing more and more. Either the empiricist 
+must be a "madman" or else he must be insincere. I took the alternative 
+of the madman. This is important not for me but for the general public 
+to be told---something which the general public has never been 
+told---and I know why they have never been told---maybe it is necessary to 
+complete this point. The point is that empiricism was contrived to 
+paper over a kind of---I mean there was sort of this 
+epistemological---Science epistemologically was resting on some sort of very shaky 
+foundation---they saw that. They brought in this empiricism in the 
+hope that it would solve a problem, that it would substantiate science 
+while at the same time it would cut away the common-sense notion of 
+causality as being unnecessary to science. Empiricism was going to give 
+you a more sophisticated science that did not need the traditional 
+metaphysical or common-sense notion of causality. It told you how to 
+get along without that, but at the same time it validated everything that 
+the scientist needed. And, at the same time, empiricism was supposed to 
+be---in the case of Neurath---he wanted to make some kind of unification 
+of empiricism with Marxism and make it like a complete demythified view of society. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} There was even an attempt to bring ethics into it. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Well, in Neurath's case, yes. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Schlick too, I think---Schlick, I recall, did something in 
+ethics.\bootnote{\booktitle{Fragen der Ethik}, Vienna, 1930.}
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} I was talking about why empiricism is not portrayed honestly 
+in the general picture that exists of philosophy---the public picture of 
+philosophy---it was brought in to solve the problem of what is a base 
+for science---namely, sense impressions are going to be taken as 
+elemental. Science is going to arise from sense impressions by construction. 
+Nevertheless it is required that both scientific knowledge and the 
+common-sense social world be produced by this approach--- 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Neurath, you mean. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} No, no. Well, Carnap did not deny the existence of other 
+people. All of the positivists\ldots
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Rather, he had nothing to say about it. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} I didn't say ethics---I said the common-sense social world. I 
+wasn't talking about anything ethical\ldots
+
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} The existence of tables and cars and--- 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Well, what I'm saying is that the existence of other people is on 
+the same level as the existence of tables and automobiles. And what is 
+even worse than that is that the ones who were scientists in fact wanted 
+to see perception itself as the product of the abstract and quantified 
+sequence that the biophysicist or the psychophysicist sees---the light, 
+the lens, the retina, the optic nerve, the visual cortex, and so forth and 
+so on---they wanted to have that as prior to the sense impression but at 
+the same time they wanted to have all that constructed up from the 
+sense impressions. Why would this remain in place? Because it was a 
+more palatable---it's just like why would formalism remain in place? 
+Everybody learns that formalism died with Godel's incompleteness 
+theorems---it certainly didn't die for me; it isn't even clear what the 
+incompleteness theorems are supposed to have done or not to have 
+done---the fact remains that if you don't explain mathematics as an 
+uninterpreted calculus, then for us there was nothing left but 
+superstition. Those are the choices that you are given. If you don't explain that 
+science is constructed up froma ground of sense impressions, then how 
+do you want it to be constructed, down from God? You see, we don't 
+take that \emph{seriously} anymore. 
+
+As a matter of fact Hume wrote two philosophical works and in 
+the first work\footnote{\booktitle{Treatise on Human Nature}}
+there is the notorious passage in which he himself 
+understands what it means to be a genuine empiricist.\footnote{Book I, Part IV, VII "Conclusion"}
+He says, \textquote{I feel that I am an outcast from the human race,} and so forth in this famous 
+passage---he says, 
+"I do not know if the glass continues to exist after I've looked away from it." 
+That line in Hume should have told you 
+whatever you wanted to know about the existence of the glass. You 
+should be able to ascertain the appropriate answer to your question. 
+Hume says: "I do not know if the glass exists when I look away from it." 
+
+Hume's second book\footnote{\booktitle{An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding}}, 
+when he was trying to vindicate himself, 
+when he had dropped the whole business of being a madman, it was 
+much nearer to what empiricism means today: an attempt to construct 
+science from a more meager inventory of elements, namely sense 
+impressions. And that is where Hume presents his doctrine that science 
+does not need and should not invoke metaphysical causation, that it 
+should replace the old-fashioned causation with some sort of construction 
+which is more flat or more network-like. 
+
+Well, at any rate, I'm going into this long thing---this is why it's 
+never dealt with in public in a sincere way---the only time it was was by 
+the guy who invented it, Hume, in the book that he wrote when he was 
+twenty-three years old. That's the only honest version of it and everything 
+after that is a fraud. 
+
+The way it goes is this: I ask the question whether there is a 
+substantial glass, an objective glass, a material glass, something that is 
+over and above the visual glass of the moment. When first considered 
+this seems to be a question which I have no method of answering. That 
+would seem to place it like a Kantian metaphysical question which 
+doesn't have a provable solution, though interestingly enough Kant 
+thought that the existence of the external world in general could be 
+proved but only in the second edition. And in that second edition in 
+those little passages, Kant did really get into the existence of this 
+individual thing like a unicornand how that would or would not fit into 
+the general proof of the existence of the world and also the question of 
+how dreams would affect the validity of the proof. He touches on all of 
+those in a way which is just awful. It's a disgraceful performance. But he 
+had the issue there, actually. 
+
+Well, your first reaction is, "I have no way of answering this." Your 
+second reaction is, that \emph{if I understand the question}, then there must be 
+an external world. So it would seem that I have actually proved the 
+external world---that's what Kant actually said. Or he came very near 
+to saying something like that. The third step is the realization that the 
+statement would validate itself not only if it's true---but if it's false it 
+validates itself equally well! 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Given this method of understanding the question. And the 
+method remained unspecified so far---as far as I know nobody has been 
+able to do very well at specifying it. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} What? Do you mean if somebody asks whether there is an 
+external world---my last remark is a comment about semantics---the 
+genuine semantic issue, as I said, and it's very different from the sort of 
+thing that Tarski is going on about which I think is just ridiculous. 
+
+Maybe I'd better stop and tell you why I think it's ridiculous. It's 
+because I'm now talking about things which are exactly the fundamen- 
+tal issues. If Tarski thinks that he can talk about the theory of chess 
+before the question of whether the universe exists or not has been 
+answered---they are deliberately creating specialized problems which in 
+their minds do have answers and then they are proceeding to answer 
+them. The larger question of whether the work has any meaning at 
+all---it's like somebody spending his whole life working on the King's 
+Indian defense in chess or something like that, and thinking that 
+somehow that makes it unnecessary to answer such questions as does 
+the chess board exist or is it only apparitional? If it's only apparitional 
+then there is no guarantee of the continuity of the position of the pieces 
+in the absence of moves. What happens is that people treat those basic 
+questions as if they are so basic that it's sort of preposterous to make an 
+issue of them. Kripke said very clearly in his book on Wittgenstein that 
+once the question, "Does language exist?" has been asked, not to give 
+an affirmative answer is "insane and intolerable."\footnote{S. Kripke, 
+\booktitle{Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language}, p.60} 
+It's the same reaction as there is to solipsism---that solipsism is the philosophy of the 
+man in the lunatic asylum. 
+
+The thing that may come before all the discussion so far is the 
+question of \emph{what is my position on being classified as insane} is the 
+beginning This of philosophy for me. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Well, this is the classical beginning of philosophy. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Because if you're not willing to face up to being classified as 
+insane---if you want to avoid that confrontation---you can't be a 
+philosopher. That confrontation is at the center of bona fide philosophy. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} Or was\ldots
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Yes. At any rate, I had reached this point in something like 
+1961. I had not yet done \essaytitlte{The "Is There Language?" Trap}. But I had reached 
+the point of saying that to claim the existence of a world beyond 
+experience is untenable. However I understood very well that it begins 
+to create problems for me to say, \textquote{I have a visual glass apparition,}
+because there is a lot of structure in that sentence. And it's not clear 
+what is supporting that structure after the world has been cut away. 
+Even the use of the idioms like "have" and "suffer." The use of the word 
+"I"---after the objective world has been cut away it's unclear what is the 
+basis for all of that. And this is the point I had reached in 1961 and this is 
+the point when I did \essaytitle{Concept Art}.
+
+On the one hand you have an art which is about structure and 
+conceptual things. On the other hand this art is not going to \emph{affirm}
+traditional doctrines of structuredness and conceptualization. It is 
+deliberately in every case going to violate them. It is going to express the 
+fact that there has been a philosophical discovery made. I would have 
+said chess is not a sound game. It's not well founded. It can't be. The 
+whole problem of Wittgenstein's famous question---what is the meaning 
+of a rule? My answer would be it doesn't have one. When you look 
+at it from the standpoint of Hume when he says I have become a 
+monster, I am outside the human race---the standpoint of the person 
+who chooses insanity as opposed to intellectual dishonesty! 
+
+The person who chooses being a madman---even chess doesn't 
+work. The whole question of its consistency. The point of Concept Art 
+is on the one hand to transmit the tradition from the isorhythmic motet 
+and the five Platonic solids, in Leonardo---and on the other it's to blow 
+it up because each work of concept art must be a counter-example to 
+that tradition. And at the same time to say that it is art means---when I 
+passed to \essaytitle{Concept Art} I left behind many things that traditionally 
+would have been considered crucial features of art, like sentiment, for 
+example. Let me just leave it at that. 
+
+When the Renaissance people did study geometry and art, they 
+developed perspective to paint people, not to paint abstractions. And 
+you know I have to admit quite bluntly, my Concept Art was already 
+the product of the acceptance of an abstract art. And now, many years 
+later I can see that that was an historical juncture, to consider it 
+tolerable that art should break with sentiment and with the representation 
+of people. It's like moving toward an Islamic view of art. And then 
+saying, now however, in the future, instead of Mosque decoration we 
+will do a piece that has the visual, sensuous delectation, but it's completely 
+abstract. But whereas Islamic art was trying to express the 
+\emph{truth} of a certain theorem in group theory, Concept Art must express 
+that you can't have that---that that theorem fails. Now I'm formulating 
+an unsolved problem---I never did a concept piece the purpose of which 
+was to rebut the symmetry involved in a visual pattern, with that as the 
+opponent to be hit. I mean I very well could and perhaps should. 
+
+All of my pieces were uninterpreted calculi. Because I accepted 
+that that was the only way of explaining what mathematics is: that it 
+consists of a body of truth about a world that does \emph{not} exist, and 
+explicitly so. And that all of the traditional explanations of mathematical 
+content are now seen to be anachronistic superstitions. They are just 
+indefensible in the modern world. Put those two things together and 
+mathematics becomes a chess game, an uninterpreted calculus. 
+
+All of my Concept pieces are using the terminology of Carnap's 
+\booktitle{Logical Syntax of Language}---the formation rule, the transformation 
+rule---but in each case they wish to express the violation, the failure of 
+some traditional organizing principle of these uninterpreted calculi, 
+For instance there is one where, among other things, the very notation 
+itself has an undisplaced active interaction with the subjectivity of the 
+quote unquote reader.\footnote{dated 6/19/61---later titled "Illusions."} 
+And that determines the structure of the derivation, the proof. 
+It was pointed out to me many years later that it's not 
+just that you don't get this in schoolbook mathematics---this is what 
+they are most concerned to exclude. 
+
+I had another one, in which there was no general transformation 
+rule.\footnote{\essaytitle{Transformations}, retitled \essaytitle{Implications} in the second edition.}
+There were only completely nominalistic transformation rules, 
+In other words, for each step you are told, for that step only and for this 
+moment only, what the transformation rule is. And by the time you are 
+ready to take the next step, that rule is forgotten and inoperative. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} This is the \essaytitle{Energy Cube Organism}? 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} No, no. \essaytitle{The Energy Cube Organism} was not Concept Art at 
+all. No, no. It was a different genre. That one was the piece called 
+\essaytitle{Transformations}.
+
+\essaytitle{The Energy Cube Organism} and the \essaytitle{Perception-Dissociator} in my 
+own classification are not Concept Art. Only the pieces labeled 
+"Concept Art" are Concept Art. And I only did four of them until 1987. 
+Three of them are in \booktitle{An Anthology}, and the fourth was published in 
+\journaltitle{dimension 14} (1963). \essaytitle{The Energy Cube Organism} and the 
+\essaytitle{Perception-Dissociator} were in other genres. I drew these distinctions of genre 
+rather narrowly, actually. 
+
+This is the one \action{pointing to 6/19/61 in \booktitle{An Anthology}} where there 
+is, in an uninterpreted calculus, interaction between notation and the 
+subjectivity of the quote unquote reader. 
+
+This is \essaytitle{Transformations.} You are just taking these objects, you 
+are burning them, melting them, doing all sorts of things to them. The 
+point of this is that each step in the proof---you have to think of it as a 
+proof---you see it has the tree structure of a proof. This is my nominalistic 
+transformation rules, because each rule is stipulated only at that 
+step, and then it is thrown away. The point that I was trying to express 
+was that's what they do in all of it---even in chess, when you move the 
+pawn to King's Bishop 3, you think that you are conforming to a 
+general rule written in Heaven. But in fact there isn't any general rule, 
+and when you move the pawn to Bishop 3, you're just making up what 
+you are doing right at that moment, and there isn't any general rule. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} You would label this ad hoc? 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} That's right. That would be perhaps a better word for it. All 
+transformation rules and probably even all formation rules are ad hoc, 
+yes, yes. 
+
+I said "nominalistic" because they are only there individually. 
+They do not add up to any general--- 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} System of rules? 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} No---not that---they do not add up to any generality, to a 
+general rule that covers all cases of a certain class. 
+
+What is inadequate about this---and I realized very quickly that 
+it's inadequate---is that this does not actually give some profound 
+reason in concrete practice for questioning chess. That's what the 
+inadequacy of the original Concept Art pieces is. That they don't really 
+give you some kind of operative situation where you can see that 
+following the chess rules is failing. I don't provide that. I only provide 
+something that's ritualistic. Saying this is how you would behave if you 
+realized that following any rule is ad hoc. 
+
+A conventional mathematician would say, you have not proved 
+that the world that this is designed for is the world that I have to live in. 
+\textsc{That}'s the inadequacy. He would say that I am only ritualizing the 
+world of impoverishment or disorganization. I'm not showing that 
+that's the world that people in general have to live in because it's in 
+force. That's the difference between then and now. The reason that I 
+want meta-technology would be to give a situation where somebody 
+can actually see that you \textsc{Can't} play a game of chess---or that you want 
+to play one and that I, by putting it in the appropriate context, make it 
+clear that the general rules on which playing it depends are not in fact 
+available. 
+
+But to show that in a serious way. From the prevailing point of 
+view I would be talking about contriving a miracle. In other words, to 
+actually substantiate any of these---what is interesting is not so much 
+\essaytitle{Transformations}---but it would be some situation that would substantiate 
+that the conventional view is actually unavailable. And to do 
+that you have to violate what are considered today to be the soundest 
+laws of science. I'd need a miracle to manifest that I'm right, so to 
+speak. So by the time I get to meta-technology I'm in the job of 
+constructing miracles, I mean constructing situations that are
+absolutely physically impossible (or in some cases logically impossible) by 
+currently accepted scientific and commonsense views of what is the real 
+world. 
+
+\essaytitle{Innperseqs} is the one that is visually sensuously the best. You are 
+making a rainbow halo that you can get by breathing on your glasses 
+and looking at a point light---you get a rainbow halo around the light. 
+Eventually I will set it up so that you don't need glasses or anything so 
+that the whole business of seeing the rainbow halo is moved out and 
+does not require any special preparation by the spectator. The rainbow 
+halo is the sensuous delectation. The derivation, the proof, the 
+specification of propositions, is something that you do as the halo is fading. 
+You have to quickly specify---I never analyzed exactly what was going 
+on there but it was as if---you have a notation which is externally 
+changing, and therefore the quote unquote reading of a mathematical 
+system has to be a process that is taking place in experienced time. 
+
+By acts of attention you have to choose sentences, to choose 
+implications---it's a display. You are given an external display which is 
+changing out there, not in your head. And you have to place a structure 
+on it by specified rules. 
+
+You know another point that can be made is, that \essaytitle{Innperseqs} is 
+philosophically inconsistent with \essaytitle{Transformations}---that these pieces 
+are mocking each other. 
+
+At the time that I did this, I did not have the kind of maturity that I 
+would have today to put it together in a strong way. These were 
+gestures. And they are not even uniform ona question like whether a 
+rule exists or not. Well actually, frequently I'm too hard on myself. I 
+think that in the essay \essaytitle{Concept Art} I do say something like, objective 
+language doesn't exist, but I'm still free to work with what you think the 
+text says---I can use that in \emph{art}: this is \emph{art}! 
+
+There are three ways that the art part comes in. One is the visual 
+display, the delectation. The second way the art part comes in is---well, 
+if LaMonte Young's Word Pieces are art, then this is art too. But the 
+third thing is that this does not claim to have objective truth. It is a 
+construction for the world-hallucination or the world-apparition or 
+even a construction for the private world-apparition. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} You are actually extending the world by new constructions. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} But it's the world-apparition. In a sense if I believed that these 
+rules were objectively established, then it would almost indicate that I 
+had not learned the lesson of the very piece which sits beside it on the 
+page!\footnote{\essaytitle{Innperseqs} versus \essaytitle{{Transformations,} second edition.} 
+And what am I doing talking about a page and a text? So the 
+answer is that I have abandoned the provision of truth as the purpose of 
+this activity and I have moved to the provision of experiences where the 
+possibility of these experiences is a surprise. 
+
+\speaker{HENNIX} And you don't have to be an empiricist to be surprised. 
+
+\speaker{FLYNT} Yes. Yes. But the truth claim that you would have from a 
+Kripke or a Goodman has been dropped. The meaning of the text is the 
+meaning that the reader associates to it. And the thing is, that in 
+conventional intellectual work that's an unacceptable answer, because 
+usually you are trying to get independent of the reader's 
+distortion---that's the whole hope---that you can make something that is 
+independent of the reader's distortion of it. This is a different game. This is not 
+classical mathematics; it's not classical science. It's like giving a 
+Rorschach blot. Then I don't mind if you have a unique subjective reaction. 
+If my purpose is to make Rorschach blots, then I do not object, I have 
+not failed, if you have a unique personal reaction. 
+
+These pieces are designed for the individual reaction rather than in 
+spite of it. 
+
+The only other Concept Art piece---in \journaltitle{dimension 14}---\enquote{one just 
+has to guess whether this piece exists and if it does what its definition 
+is.} That was the piece. And that was a response to Cage's dissociation 
+of what the composer sees, the performer sees, the audience sees. 
+Starting from that, going through all the games that LaMonte had 
+played with the idea of performance, where we were performing pieces 
+first and composing them second, maybe many months later. So finally 
+with the Concept Art piece, even whether the piece exists is completely 
+indeterminate, but I meant for people to try to take that seriously. I was 
+having a joke with the person who thinks that concepts form an 
+objective world, which the individual who cognizes only discovers bit 
+by bit. In effect, 1am giving him this: thank you for believing that there 
+is a piece here---I'm leaving it to you to find it. I wash my hands of that 
+Problem---\emph{you} find it! 
+
+Well, there's a natural pause that comes here because I think that 
+I've summarized perhaps fairly thoroughly where I was when I did the 
+work published in 1963. The entire subsequent career of the label 
+Concept Art, its misapplication to Word Pieces and all the rest of it, we 
+have not begun with. After that, we can go on to the discussion of your 
+visual pieces of the 70s and how they resume the genre of Concept Art. 
+