Paper presented at a University of Waikato Conference,
August 15 & 16 2012
The Creative University: Education and the Creative Economy
Knowledge formation, Global Creation and the Imagination
1 Preamble Contents
What does it mean to debate the status of the 'Creative University'? Why is this an interesting question to ask when the twenty-first century planet is wall-to-wall with centres of University education, all brimming with various forms of creativity across faculties? Is there a relationship between a University-based conference such as this and the apprehension that the University offers only specialised forms of creativity somewhat apart from the creative potential in the world? (1) (2)
The deeper question relates to the idea of a University itself, or the Tertiary level education, and its role and relevance in the modern world. We could ask was the University once considered the height of creativity and are we really in troubled times for the Creative University. If so, are there options that might allow the Creative University to be the institution that speaks more inclusively to global creativity for the twenty-first century.
In this paper, I want to outline a scenario that identifies a palpable gap between the highest level of creativity available in Tertiary and a level of creativity evident in a few seminal thinkers whose deepest work is demonstrably not yet part of the Tertiary program. My argument will be that the absence of their deepest insights from Tertiary is at the heart of the disquiet about creativity reflected in the conference title.
2 William Shakespeare Contents
The thinker/artist who best exemplifies the disjunction between Tertiary creativity and the full human potential for creativity is William Shakespeare. The telling distinction lies in appreciating that Shakespeare uniquely incorporates a profound systematic nature-based philosophy in his set of 154 sonnets of 1609 to present the philosophy behind all his plays and poems.
What does it say of the philosophic basis of University education and creativity that Shakespeare's Sonnet philosophy has remained completely unknown in Tertiary worldwide for 400 years? The absence since the seventeenth century of Shakespeare's philosophy from the highest level of learning is undeniably the case despite the efforts of very distinguished thinkers and artists. Even those who have apprehended a profound philosophy in Shakespeare's works have had to admit their failure to discern it. (3)
The oversight is monumental for a thinker/poet/dramatist as significant as Shakespeare who still holds centre stage worldwide. Shakespeare's complete 1623 Folio of 36 plays is now performed often and everywhere internationally – compared to only a few tragedies and other plays performed rather pompously in corrupt versions only sixty years ago. (4) In 2009, all the plays were performed at Stratford Upon Avon. (5) More recently, performances based on his works commanded six major billings at the 2012 International Festival of Arts in Wellington. No other artist could presume on multiple exposures at one festival. (6)
I can only give a brief indication in this paper of the significance of the consistent and comprehensive nature-based philosophy Shakespeare articulates in his set of sonnets. I have produced extensive argument and evidence in William Shakespeare's Sonnet Philosophy of 2005 and on the Quaternary Institute website over the last twelve years that Shakespeare lays out the philosophic basis of his life-long creativity in his sonnet set of 1609. (7)
Because his creativity is acknowledged near universally as peerless, just what keeps Tertiary worldwide for 400 years from penetrating his lucid philosophic articulation and poetic evocation of his creative program? The answer has to lie at the very heart of the Tertiary conception of creativity.
3 Universities founded Contents
We know Universities were founded around the year 1100 in cities such as Paris and Bologna. We also know they were Christian/Catholic centres of learning that took the biblical myth of the creation of the world by a male God as an unquestionable given. One of the aims of the nascent University was to demonstrate that the biblical dogmas were not at odds with the findings of natural science, or at least were not excluded logically. (8)
Hence, around 1250 we have Aquinas arguing for God's dominion in relation to nature and later around 1650 Spinoza argues for the unity and inseparability of God and nature. (9) (10) However, Aquinas and Spinoza, and most recognised philosophers of the last 1000 years, have been unwilling or unable to both challenge and supersede the dogma of a male God creating the world from nothing. (11) As effective apologists for biblical verities, philosophers have used syllogistic methods of valid argument perfected by the Greeks to establish a case regardless of the soundness of its premises.
Many impressive buildings and works of art were created over the 1500 years from the Medieval period to the Rococo in the name of the male God. Despite the divine sanction, however, many have not proven resistant to the forces of nature. Consequently, in the twenty-first century, the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, Christchurch, when asked about the role God had in the devastating earthquake of 2010, confessed that the shaking was nature's work whereas God is evident in the love between those helping in the recovery. (12) At moments like these, the purely mind-based status of the male-God is revealed as the doctrines and dogmas that support his nature-creating reputation prove unavailing.
Critically, at the foundation of the University as an institution of rigorous learning there existed a double inconsistency of male-God priority and creation ex-nihilo – all welded together with unsound argument. Tertiary today is still afflicted with the inconsistencies. It is in a psychological bind driven by the remnants of apologetics. Effectively it continues to justify unsound precepts without a full recourse to nature as the only indubitable given.
In ordinary usage, compared to God/gods, world/worlds, universe/universes, we use 'nature' only in the singular and neither do we use it in English with articles such as 'a', 'the' or 'an'. The word nature requires no preconditions, no mandatory capital N and no special commandments to assert its status. Because Tertiary still operates under the mandate of countermanding mind-based constructs, it is unable to offer sound nature-based creativity for the increasingly nature-orientated culture of the twenty-first century.
4 Biblical inconsistencies Contents
Again, the measure of Tertiary's failure to throw off the inconsistencies in the biblical paradigm and millennia of apologetic psychology is its failure to appreciate the profound nature-based philosophy Shakespeare articulates in his 154 sonnets for a global constituency. Worse, for 300 years commentators have wilfully emended, altered and reattributed large tracts of Shakespeare's works making the history of interpretation of his oeuvre one of the greatest travesties visited on the extant works of a profound writer/thinker. (13)
The upshot of the attempt to institute a University level of education based on unsound biblical precepts has been the epistemological scepticism typical of Hume or the God is Dead headline pronounced by Nietzsche. (14) Hume commented on the relationship between his sceptical mind and the absence of scepticism when performing his day-to-day activities. (15) Revealingly, for his part, Nietzsche still validated male-priority and believed Bacon was Shakespeare. (16) The consequence for the twentieth century has been a self-referential form of creativity that is stylistically anxious about admitting it has no idea what to say. When considering the current status of the Creative University, we are all too aware of postmodernism's stranglehold on our freedom not to be postmodern. (17)
Although, the profound problem for Tertiary creativity is at its most evident in its inability to understand the work of Shakespeare, there are three other seminal thinkers – Marcel Duchamp, Charles Darwin and Ludwig Wittgenstein – whose work has not been done justice in Tertiary. I studied these three thinkers (and all the associated literature) for 20 years before apprehending the sonnet philosophy in 1995. I needed to bring together the most philosophically penetrating aspects of their specialised contributions to appreciate Shakespeare's overarching achievement. (18)
I will highlight aspects of the work of artist Duchamp, scientist Darwin and philosopher Wittgenstein that are not fully appreciated or taught in Tertiary.
5 Marcel Duchamp Contents
To begin measuring creativity at the appropriate level, we turn to the most influential artist of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp. Whereas for many Pablo Picasso and others seem very last century, Duchamp still exerts a powerful influence in the twenty-first. (19) For an artist who was the antithesis of a university Don, Duchamp provides endless fodder for dissertations about just what he was up to in his challenging art.
Typical is a recent PhD out of Victoria University – with an accompanying exhibition – that examines Duchamp's influence on New Zealand artists. (20) As an artist active in the 1970s, I appear in the PhD and am represented at Adam Gallery at Victoria University. However, and maybe ironically, I accepted inclusion in the thesis only on the proviso Duchamp did not influence directly my art works of the time. Instead, I acknowledge I was a voracious student of his work just when significant tomes on his whole oeuvre were beginning to appear in the 60s and 70s. (21) At one time, I withdrew my work from the Adam Gallery show because the PhD graduate did not resist examiners' demands to align Duchamp with a 1960's artistic movement, so obliging the graduate to conform to the Tertiary conception of creativity against the evidence (pers comm).
All the artists in the exhibition draw on secondary themes peripheral to Duchamp's principal focus on the logic of mythic expression. (22) They are influenced by issues such as chance, movement, optical phenomenon, mechanics, transparency, puns, which Duchamp used directly or themes such as nominalism and alchemy, which Duchamp refers to very obliquely or unintentionally. (23) My interest is in Duchamp's major works and their role in providing the philosophic basis for all his other works.
Significantly, Duchamp does something with his complete body of work no other modern artist comes anywhere near achieving. In his early major work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (aka the Large Glass – 1913-23), Duchamp lays out the logical conditions for any mythic expression. (24) All his other works or readymades are satellites to the Large Glass that are based in the same mythic sensibility. To emphasise the significance of the Large Glass as the generating statement for everything else he made, Duchamp parenthesised his whole oeuvre with a counterpointing final major work Etant donnes, which was unveiled only after he died in 1968. Etant donnes recapitulates in figurative form the content of the schematic Large Glass.
Octavio Paz the Mexican poet and thinker put it this way: Duchamp effectively makes a 'criticism of myth' by articulating the 'Myth of Criticism'. (25) Paz appreciated that unlike other artists and writers who attempt to incorporate all myths in their works (James Joyce called his multi-mythic writing, 'monomyth' (26)) Duchamp depicted in the Large Glass the underlying logic for any mythic expression. Unfortunately, though, when Paz goes on to compare the iconography of the Large Glass with Hindu mythology, he slips back into the sensibility that has ruled Tertiary understanding for over a thousand years. (27)
The problem Duchamp resolves goes back to the beginning of scribal culture. His articulation of the logic of any mythic expression, with mythic expression as deepest form of creativity in a culture, corrects 4000 years of male-based mythology by recovering at the level of myth the natural originary status of the female over the male. The implication of his work is that for 4000 years mythic expression has been at odds with reality. Over the last 1000 years particularly, the University as an institution based in the biblical myth (or in failed attempts to shake off the biblical myth as with Nietzsche) has been constrained by adherence in some form to the male-based nature-occluding biblical paradigm.
It is not inconsistent that the heightened ecclesiastical creativity of the period from the gothic through the renaissance was a direct consequence of the conformity of the early Tertiary with the biblical myth. (28) The downside of the universalising of scripted male-based myth, though, was the accompanying culture of mayhem and murder between irreconcilable sects. (29) The horrendous dysfunction drove the process of questioning the role of religion in a culture. Even worse was the demeaning and marginalising of women with frequent witch hunts, arranged marriages and forced confinements in nunneries.
But the process of rectifying the inversion of female priority in biblical myth was hamstrung by the system of logic practised by philosophers. By using the formal logic devised by the Greeks conveniently at the time when there was a need to justify the imposition of male-based domination, validity trumped soundness in philosophy. (30) Biblical inconsistencies could not be completely overturned because an embargo was in place with inquisition, banishment or execution exacted for heresy against challenging its most fundamental tenet – the mind-based nature-creating status of the male God.
Moreover, Duchamp's most revealing insight into the logic of mythic expression is that its protagonists reproduce erotically not sexually. (31) This means that every myth of origins – including Genesis and the Christ myth – self-identifies as non-sexual or logically non-biological or as an expression of purely mind-based desire. Through its constitutional eroticism, myth reflexively demonstrates its status as a deeply affective mind-derived story about a period of prehistory we cannot know about. Even modern scientists exhibit the logic of eroticism when they stretch their understanding into Black Holes, Big Bangs and God Particles. (32)
Because no recognised philosopher or scientist in history accommodates the eroticism endemic to mythic expression, the nature-based logic of all life and understanding has never been completely formulated. (33) Only Duchamp in modern times lays out a substantive and systematic understanding of the logic of myth for artistic expression.
6 Charles Darwin and Ludwig Wittgenstein Contents
It helps at this point to turn to Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. In The Descent, Darwin presents his understanding that the mind is a natural consequence of the evolution of the body over evolutionary time. (34) He demonstrates by evidence and argument that the mind-based syndrome of prioritising biblical myth over nature is a construct inconsistent with the natural evolution of the mind from the body in nature. In The Descent, he even spends two-thirds of its length examining the erotics of sexual selection in animals. (35) He, though, was too focused on his scientific findings to extend the criticism to human creativity evident in biblical and other myths.
In the annals of modern philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein is the foremost philosopher to investigate systematically the natural relationship of the body or world and the human mind without recourse to apologetics. (36) Wittgenstein appreciates that philosophy presents the logic of the world (body) to mind relationship, whereas apologetics is embattled in the psychology of mind constructs.
In his early Tractatus, Wittgenstein gets it wrong. He tries to relate body and mind by using a mind-based construct – the atoms and molecules of theoretical physics. (37) His shift from the macrocosm of the extraterrestrial God to the microcosm of atomic physics still fails to provide the appropriate degree of logical multiplicity between language and the world.
In Wittgenstein's second period of philosophy he corrects the mistake and comes to see that 'nature' and 'parents' at the level of ordinary language usage are the unquestioned givens or preconditions behind every kind of language game and are constitutional of what he calls 'forms of life'. (38) However, as Wittgenstein did not analyse the language of art at the mythic level, his investigations fall short of revealing the basis of deep human creativity.
To my mind, these three seminal thinkers hang rather loosely and could not be said to provide the necessary substance and systematicity to supplant the Tertiary program. This is despite not one of them being studied in sufficient depth in Tertiary. Symptomatic is the focus on Duchamp's readymades without addressing issues raised by the Large Glass by the world's artists – including those in New Zealand. (39)
Similarly, the focus on the prehuman in The Origin of Species rather than the human in The Descent of Man by star scientists such as Richard Dawkins and David Attenborough (40) means humankind is evaluated by the criteria of the Tertiary Geological period of 30 million years ago instead of the current Quaternary period of human evolution. And the difficulty of seeing the implications of the later Wittgenstein's roughly sketched theory of nature-based language has prevented Tertiary from getting a handle on Shakespeare's global philosophy. (41)
Only after applying for a number of years the breakthrough discovery into Shakespeare's sonnet philosophy was it possible to formulate the above comments on Duchamp, Darwin and Wittgenstein. Shakespeare anticipates and overarches their specialised contributions with a consistency and comprehensiveness that is breathtaking. Only the work of Shakespeare can be said truly to have the required level of substance and systematicity to engender a level of education above Tertiary – which I call the Quaternary.
7 Shakespeare's global philosophy Contents
My current work in Shakespeare began in 1995 after I attended by chance a reading of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets. During the reading over a couple of days of the overly romanticised 'love' sonnets, I apprehended a sound and systematic presentation of a philosophy I had cobbled together rudimentarily from my then understanding of the above three thinkers. (42)
Effectively, I can now show, and do show in my writings, that in his set of 154 sonnets published in 1609, Shakespeare articulates a nature-based philosophy that recognises the originary status of the female to the male. Moreover, it accepts the logic of perpetuation or increase we know as Darwinian evolution. It recovers the natural relationship of body before mind, and acknowledges the erotic logic of any mythic expression while giving the natural logic of body and mind a comprehensive and consistent philosophic and artistic expression.
Shakespeare is also devastatingly precise in his understanding of the relationship between incoming sensations from the primary senses and the argumentative logic of language. Even more significant for creativity is his understanding of the move from the give and take that is the lexicon of language to the sensations we generate that are peculiar to our minds as intuitions, art, music and poetry. These are the mind-based sensations to which we give so much value and which have their deepest creative expression in myth.
As apparent in the Nature template (below) I derive from the 154 sonnets, Shakespeare lays out an isomorphic connectivity between the sexual dynamic of female and male in nature and the workings of the human mind in terms of sensations, language and art. He fulfils Wittgenstein's hope of finding the correct logical multiplicity between the world and language, illustrates Darwin's arguments about the derivation of mind from body over evolutionary time and deepens Duchamp's elegant expression of the logic of myth. (43)
Nature Template (Sonnets)
In addition, and of no small significance, I show the Sonnet philosophy was purposefully published by Shakespeare in 1609 twenty years after he started writing plays to present the philosophy behind all his plays and longer poems. The Sonnets have the same relationship to Shakespeare's plays and poems as Duchamp's Large Glass has to his readymades. Only Shakespeare and Duchamp in any culture worldwide create a specific work to both articulate the logical conditions for any mythic expression and contextualise their whole oeuvre with that work. The Sonnets and the Large Glass are unique and at the crux of the blind spot in Tertiary creativity. (44)
8 Tertiary to Quaternary Contents
We may be beginning to see why no one in 400 years has come anywhere near revealing the Sonnet philosophy. More pertinent, is its relevance for a global constituency that is becoming increasingly aware of the harm that the inappropriate application of illogical myths to the body politic have done to nature.
Effectively, since the Enlightenment, Tertiary has been missing its head and in the 3000 years before the Enlightenment its head thought far too much of itself to the point of murder and mayhem to prove one mind-based construct of the male-God had ascendency over the other. We still see the totally avoidable mindless killing in the world today where mind constructs battle for ascendency with no recourse to nature and the female as moderating influences. (45)
Significantly, in the Folio of 1623, fourteen female-based comedies are followed by ten male-based histories and twelve male-based tragedies. (46) In the Folio plays, Shakespeare first shows with his fourteen female led comedies how to correct male-based excesses. He then case studies in the ten English histories the malconsequences of investing power of Church and State in a Monarchy. Then in the tragedies he examines twelve examples from history and literature of male-based excesses leading to needless murder and mayhem of kith and kin. (47)
We now accept that the natural resolution of these concerns provides the basis of a modern liberal society. Shakespeare anticipates the dissolution of Monarchies, the separation of Church and State, the abandonment of patriarchy, the recovery of female rights, the banning of slavery, and the democracy of freely chosen governments and partnerships. (48)
By any measure, Shakespeare bestrides the centuries since then but as yet his nature-based philosophy has not been recognised either in the world about or in educational institutions. Tertiary's inability to appreciate the philosophy embedded in the 154 sonnets and plays is an indictment of its post-modern malaise where it has been unable to break free to be a learning institution of truly global investigation, responsibility and creativity.
The experience in presenting the findings over the first five or so years after 1995, led me in 2000 to create an uncluttered space to continue to unravel the findings with their great explanatory power and global implications. I established the Quaternary Institute for my own peace of mind not quite sure whether Tertiary could be altered to accommodate the discoveries or whether a completely new level of education is required for which Primary, Secondary and Tertiary are the precursors.
When it comes to creativity, or better, a context in which a creative institution can flourish, Duchamp has demonstrated his credentials for art, Darwin for science and Wittgenstein for philosophy. Invention and inventiveness are at the core of evolving humankind as the changing demographics continually challenge us to produce ever new ways to survive and enjoy.
However, as well as and alongside creativity, Shakespeare in his famous love sonnets and throughout his plays teaches us to mature our natural understanding and experience of love and life. (49) Not only does Shakespeare offer the germ of a substantial and systematic educational creativity, in the process he keeps alive the very qualities of creativity and emotion many find missing from the current Tertiary program. The adolescent male-based love offered by the University from its founding days in Christian Europe has proved inadequate for the demographics of our modern world.
I ask then, is Tertiary or Quaternary the most likely forum where these manifold issues can be addressed and fostered for a learning demographic hungry for ways to embrace nature and ourselves in equal measure. I would participate in a forum that considered the Tertiary/Quaternary hiatus.
# Notes Contents
1 Disquiet about the role of the University appears quite frequently in the media. In a book review titled 'Troubled halls', the Economist (February 4th 2012, p 69) considers Stefan Collini's reference in What Are Universities For to Newman's expectation that a liberal education might enhance the 'perspective they have on the place of their knowledge in a wider map of human understanding'. What, the reviewer asks, is the relationship between 'intellectual purity' and the 'grubby business of picking and preparing the future middle class?' Back
2 Around the same time, the NZ Listener (March 3rd 2012) features Alain De Botton questioning the relevance of the University to the needs of modern students. Unfortunately, De Botton's very simplistic take on philosophy sees him suggesting the removal of courses on history and literature and replacing them with life-skill programs. Back
3 Lytton Strachey predicted in 1905 that 'for its solution (the mystery of the Sonnets) seem to offer hopes of a prize of extraordinary value – nothing less than a true insight into the most secret recesses of the thoughts and feelings of perhaps the greatest man who ever lived'. From: Peter Jones, Shakespeare Casebook, London, Macmillan, 1977. Back
4 Typical is the return to the 1623 Folio by the Original Shakespeare Company in the early 2000s. They presented their performances entirely from an unedited, unaltered Folio text. Back
5 To mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the 1609 Sonnets, all Shakespeare's plays were performed at Stratford Upon Avon in that year. Despite the recognition accorded the 1609 Sonnets in 2009, none of the productions looked to the Sonnet philosophy for guidance. This is not surprising as The Shakespeare Institute based in Stratford Upon Avon is an offshoot of Birmingham University, hence Tertiary standards of creativity prevail at the Royal Shakespeare Company. This is evident in the recent William Shakespeare Complete Works, Modern Library, 2007, London, edited by Jonathan Bate, Eric Rasmussen for RSC, which leaves out Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint but trumpets an anonymous ditty titled To the Queen. Back
6 At the New Zealand International Arts Festival, 2012, there were performances of Henry V, The Winter's Tale and a Maori-language version of Troilus and Cressida. Two independent productions focused on Hamlet's words 'To be, or not to be', and Germaine Greer gave a talk on her book Shakespeare's Wife. Back
7 Roger Peters, William Shakespeare's Sonnet Philosophy, Quaternary Imprint, 2005, Kaponga. The Quaternary Institute website is at: www.quaternaryinstitute.com . Forthcoming are: Nature, Love and Shakespeare, an updated 350-page summary of the 1760 four-volume WSSP, a 100-page essay shakespeare @ love . nature on mature Shakespearean love, and a Pictorial Volume with numerous charts and diagrams as teaching aids for Quaternary. Back
8 This seems to be a common perception of the role of the early University as witnessed by an anecdotal entry online: “…a community of scholars, primarily communicating in Latin, accelerated the process and practice of attempting to reconcile the thoughts of Greek antiquity, and especially ideas related to understanding the natural world, with those of the church. The efforts of this “scholasticism” were focused on applying Aristotelian logic and thoughts about natural processes to biblical passages and attempting to prove the viability of those passages through reason. This became the primary mission of lecturers, and the expectation of students”. (From Wikipedia entry under 'University'.) Back
9 Thomas Aquinas drew a distinction between truth available through reason (natural revelation) and faith (supernatural revelation). (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1665-73 and Summa Contra Gentiles, 1661-3.) Back
10 Benedict de Spinoza considered God and Nature, or “Deus sive Natura”, as having indeterminable attributes. He held that there is no difference between body and mind. (Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, 1677.) Back
11 Even Ludwig Wittgenstein, despite his determination to avoid traditional metaphysics or apologetics, could not accept the full implications of Darwinian evolution. In a conversation with Maurice Drury, Wittgenstein averred: “I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn't account for all this variety of species (in the Zoological Gardens, Dublin). It hasn't the necessary multiplicity. Nowadays some people are fond of saying that at last evolution has produced a species that is able to understand the whole process which gave it birth. Now that you can't say!” M. O'C. Drury, 'Conversations with Wittgenstein', in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Personal Recollections, ed R. Rhees, New York, Rowman and Littlefield, 1981, p. 160. Back
12 Dean Peter Beck of Christchurch Cathedral, in an interview on TVNZ One, Closeup, with Mark Sainsbury after the special commemoration service held in Christchurch's Hagley Park in March 2011. He later reiterated with National Radio's Noelle McCarthy on Sunday, July 3 that God is in the actions of people, in our reaching out to other people, in our being human, and that that love is the lifeblood of the universe (paraphrase). Back
13 Once the philosophy Shakespeare articulates in his Sonnets is understood then the 300 year practice of altering his works to conform with the default Tertiary paradigm is rendered redundant. Shakespeare's Sonnets, plays and longer poems make complete sense as published in the early seventeenth century by him or his colleagues. The modern desperation to justify the emendations made originally by Reverend Malone on the 1790s by Mac Jackson of the University of Auckland is a measure of Tertiary frustration. And the reattribution of parts of plays to other authors by Gary Taylor, as with his recent publishing of parts of Measure for Measure in a volume of Thomas Middleton's plays, is a gross admission of failure to work out the philosophy behind Shakespeare's oeuvre. Back
14 Nietzsche proclaimed the death of the male God of Christianity in his Gay Science in 1882. Back
15 The Oxford Companion to Philosophy reports Hume as saying: “'Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose'”. It seemed to Hume that, 'A few hours of good company and backgammon make his melancholy and sceptical conclusions seem ridiculous'. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p379, Oxford University Press, 1995. Back
16 Nietzsche says of Shakespeare, “We are all afraid in the face of Truth; and while I recognise that I am instinctively certain and sure of this, that Lord Bacon is the creator, the self-torturer of this most gloomy sort of literature”. Alfred von Weber Ebenhof, Bacon (Shakespeare) and Friedrich Nietzsche, www.sirbacon.org/nietzsche.htm, accessed 22.06.04. Back
17 The circularity of the Post-modern or Post-structuralist embargo on meta-theories or meta-figures is warranted for those beliefs and thinkers who demonstrably base their thinking in mind-based constructs as do all biblical religions and the sceptical backlash. Caught in the embargo are thinkers like Darwin, Duchamp and Shakespeare who ground their understanding on preconditions or givens based in nature and the sexual dynamic of female and male, which even Wittgenstein came to appreciate are the undeniable basis of all thinking. Back
18 See the essay on Duchamp's relationship to Shakespeare in Part 1 of Volume Four of William Shakespeare's Sonnet Philosophy. Back
19 In Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of Purity of 1970, Octavio Paz compares Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp characterising Picasso as rendering the century 'visible' and Duchamp as showing that the arts begin and end in the 'invisible' (unpaginated). In what follows we will see the adequacy and inadequacy of Paz's view of Duchamp. Back
20 Marcus T. G. Moore, Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art, 1965-2007, PhD Thesis, Victoria University, 2012. Back
21 For instance, books by Arturo Schwarz not only gave as full a catalogue raisonné as was possible at the time of publishing, they also made available in facsimile form the Notes Duchamp published at intervals over his lifetime that explained amongst other things the workings of the Large Glass. Back
22 Calvin Tomkins in his Marcel Duchamp of 1998, discusses the influence of Duchamp's readymades on the artists of the 1950s to the 1990s, but near the end of the book Tomkins admits he has not accounted for the Large Glass and wonders if it will be necessary to turn to Christian mythology to begin to understand it. (Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp, New York, Owl Books, 1998, p. 465.) Back
23 Thierry de Duve wrote Pictorial Nominalism in 1991 to validate the conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s. The issue of Nominalism and the conceptual artists response to Duchamp's achievement is so peripheral to the mythic logic of the Large Glass, de Duve has to devise a theory that the Large Glass was an inconsequential joke whose sole purpose was to dismiss the history of art. Nothing could have been further from Duchamp's intention. (Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, University of Minnesota Press, 1991.) Back
24 It is necessary to approach the Large Glass knowing that Duchamp published the Notes at intervals over his lifetime to provide essential clues to its workings and purpose. Back
25 Octavio Paz, (unpaginated), toward the end of his short book, comments about 'critical myth' and 'Myth of Criticism'. Paz suggests Duchamp creates a critical myth for the modern age different from 'a professor who makes a criticism of myth'. Back
26 James Joyce uses the word 'monomyth' in Finnegan's Wake into which he packs elements of all the world's myths producing a concatenation of sub-mythic unreadability. In a similar vein, Carl Jung scoured the world's many mythic cultures for their common symbolisms. Joseph Campbell, taking Joyce's lead, talked of 'monomyth' as the ultimate expression of the mythic sensibility. None of them, though, matches Duchamp's penetration of the logic of mythic expression consistent with natural prerogatives. Back
27 Hindu, Christian and other myths of the world's cultures, as male-based myths, do not have the generic basis to provide the logic of mythic expression. Back
28 The male or masculine disposition toward idealism, especially when it alienates the originary disposition of the female, produces an intensified creativity that drives the artistic program toward ever more fanciful expressions of otherworldly expectations. Back
29 The imbalance and prejudice toward women in male-dominant cultures leads to unconscionable violence in the society. Back
30 Demonstrations of validity do no more than connect mind-based constructs in an endless debate as witnessed in the to and fro of philosophical movements over the last 3000 years. Back
31 No myth of origins has its principal protagonists reproducing sexually. Mythic births occur from the head, from the thigh, from virgins, from the blood of testicles, from clay, from the rib of the male, etc. Back
32 Theism and atheism, as Duchamp realised, are flipsides of the same mind-based constructs. He was interested in another possibility. When asked if he believed in God, he replied: 'No, not at all…..God is a human invention.... I don't mean that I'm neither atheist nor believer….'. (Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Da Capo, 1971, New York, pp 106-7.) Back
33 Kant's 'space/time', Schopenhauer's 'Will', Descartes' 'doubt', Wittgenstein's early 'atoms/molecules', all talk to an unwillingness to accept female and male as the logical basis for understanding and consequently for the eroticism of all expression because no form of understanding can substitute for biological sex. Ironically, all thinkers who avoid the female/male basis for thought adhere to the overarching male/female dynamic in biblical or other myths. Back
34 In Chapter 3 titled 'Mental Powers' of The Descent of Man Darwin says; 'My object in this chapter is to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental abilities' p99. He concludes at the end of Chapter 4, which continues the discussion of 'Mental Powers' into 'Moral Sense' by saying; 'Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind' p193. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, John Murray 1909, London. Back
35 Part 1 of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex deals with 'mental powers' and 'moral sense'. Parts 2 and 3, oddly to some, seem to spend an inordinate number of pages on a peripheral topic. But Darwin recognises that the erotic or secondary sexual characteristics are an important consequence of the separation of male from female over evolutionary time. Back
36 Following the example of Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead, Wittgenstein takes the atomic world to its logical end point and consequentially demonstrates its inadequacy as a model for logical multiplicity between language and the world. Back
37 In Proposition 6.53 of his Tractatus, Wittgenstein says: 'The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science – i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy – and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions'. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961, London.) Back
38 'Forms of life' are socially determined groupings of language activities that create a sense of connectivity and boundedness for language users. Because they are effectively constructs, they stand in a secondary relationship to 'nature' or 'parents' or 'natural history' as the grounds or givens for all languages. Back
39 See Notes 20 to 25 above. Back
40 Richard Dawkin's theory of 'genes and memes', and the extreme anthropomorphism in his coinage 'selfish genes', applies Origin of Species findings to humans. David Loye shows that the Descent of Man is where Darwin discusses morals and love – each word occurring over ninety times compared to two times for the survival of the fittest. (David Loye, Darwin's Lost Theory of Love, Lincoln, toExcel, 2000.) Back
41 Like Darwin and Duchamp, Wittgenstein has been reduced methodically to the level of teachability in Tertiary. His challenge to postmodern circularity based in mind-based constructs has largely been ignored. Back
42 Unpublished booklet, Roger Peters, Human Being, 1987. Back
43 By arguing for nature/female/male/increase as the logical givens for 'truth and beauty' Shakespeare recognises that the mind derives from those preconditions and operates according to their logic – as per the Nature template. Back
44 The relationship of Dante's La Vita Nuova to The Divine Comedy and the vague reflexivity in the sonnet sequences of Phillip Sidney etc., do not prepare for the massive shift from their psychological romanticism and idealism to the relentless logic of the 1609 Sonnets. Similarly, the Cubists, Futurists, etc., do not prepare for Duchamp's Large Glass conceived when rejected by his brothers and others because he would not conform to their stylistic/formalistic precepts. Back
45 Amongst the numerous examples are the religious conflicts between the Palestinians and Israelis, the sectarian feuding in Iraq, Ireland, Sudan etc. Back
46 In Shakespeare's Wife, Germaine Greer argues that Anne Hathaway, who died in 1623, may have had a part to play in the arrangement of the Folio published in 1623 by Shakespeare's close colleagues. Sonnet 145, which seems to pun on Anne Hathaway's name, identifies her as central to his creativity. (Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife, London, Bloomsbury, 2007) Back
47 All the comedies in the 1623 Folio have generic titles in that none of them carry the names of characters. In contrast, all the Histories and Tragedies have the names of the principal perpetrators of male-based mayhem and murder in their titles. The fourteen comedies are examples of the Sonnet philosophy applied to affect a resolution of male-led dysfunction. The twenty-two histories and tragedies select named males from history and literature who are responsible for exacting male-based injustices. Back
48 Shakespeare's play Henry VIII, focuses on the first two wives of Henry VIII's murderous reign to highlight the absurdity of male primogeniture and celebrate with the birth of Elizabeth to Anne Boleyn in the last scenes the inevitable surfacing of female priority. Some Tertiary commentators, immensely uncomfortable with the plays patent content, attribute critical passages to John Fletcher. A. R. Humphreys does so with unparalleled disingenuousness: 'If these sardonic references are Shakespeare's, the King becomes a cynic and a hypocrite, and this the play does not at all seem to intend. If they are Fletcher's – and both occur in scenes attributed to him – the explanation is the simple one that, inadequately consulting Shakespeare's intentions, he intruded them from his sense of worldly court gossip and thus confused the rendering of Henry's motives at a time when, one would deduce, Shakespeare meant them to be honest'. (A. R. Humphreys, Introduction, Henry VIII, New Penguin Shakespeare, 1971, p20) Back
49 shakespeare @ love . nature (forthcoming) explores the relationship between mature Shakespearean love and life and art as discussed in his Sonnets (esp. sonnets 32 and 80) and explored in his plays and longer poems. Back
