{"id":1725,"date":"2022-11-06T03:06:03","date_gmt":"2022-11-06T11:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/?p=1725"},"modified":"2022-11-06T03:06:03","modified_gmt":"2022-11-06T11:06:03","slug":"a-reminder-about-the-seduction-of-ready-mades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/a-reminder-about-the-seduction-of-ready-mades\/","title":{"rendered":"A reminder about the seduction of ready-mades…"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
I posted this about 5 years ago. It is even more relevant now,<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
A reminder about the seduction of ready-mades..<\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
Most everyone has heard of George Santayana\u2019s famous aphorism, \u201cThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But there is a corollary observation: “Those who remember best are condemned to repeat their memories.” This causes the most difficulty when something new is presenting itself, and one calls upon the past, the sure knowledge of the past, to explain, interpret and understand the new. With apologies to Marcel Duchamp, I call this using “ready-mades,” as if understanding the new was a matter of taking something \u201coff the shelf of understood things.” The quickness and certainty with which this happens results in a dangerous cascade of self-similar memes that provide those accepting this with a strong sense of agreeable understanding of what we are witnessing when the new and unfamiliar presents itself. This ready agreeable quality is seductive and inhibits any tendency toward \u201ctestability\u201d such as might follow from using Karl Popper\u2019s falsification requirements. What is it that would falsify our ready-made understanding? That question is rarely asked.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
We are all complicit in such ready-made understanding. Complicit too is the failure of ready-mades to engage in the more difficult work of “seeing into” the new, for what it is bringing in its wake. This happens at every level of human understanding, from everyday life to the most complex theories of cosmology. We are like the learned church fathers who refused to look through Galileo\u2019s lens. Cognitive and emotional bias, both learned and hard-wired underlie or favor ready-mades.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I posted this about 5 years ago. It is even more relevant now, A reminder about the seduction of ready-mades.. . Most everyone has heard of George Santayana\u2019s famous aphorism, \u201cThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But there is a corollary observation: “Those who remember best are condemned to repeat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-soon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}