January 9, 2007

• Old Style

  For Balanchine’s Birthday

  (continued from
  January 9, 2003)

  George Balanchine Encyclopædia Britannica Article born January 22 [January 9, Old Style], 1904, St. Petersburg, Russia died April 30, 1983, New York, New York, U.S. George Balanchine. ©1983 Martha Swope original name  Georgy Melitonovich Balanchivadze most influential choreographer of classical ballet in the United States in the 20th century.  His works, characterized by a cool neoclassicism, include The Nutcracker (1954) and Don Quixote (1965), both pieces choreographed for the New York City Ballet, of which he was a founder (1948), the artistic director, and the… Balanchine,  George… (75 of 1212 words)

  “What on earth is
  a concrete universal?”
  – Robert M. Pirsig
  

  Review:

  From Wikipedia’s
  “Upper Ontology”
  and
  Epiphany 2007:

  “There is no neutral ground
  that can serve as
  a means of translating between
  specialized (lower) ontologies.”
  

  There is, however,
  “the field of reason”–
  the 3×3 grid:

  

  Click on grid
  for details.
  

  As Rosalind Krauss
  has noted, some artists
  regard the grid as
  “a staircase to
    the Universal.”
  

  Other artists regard
  Epiphany itself as an
  approach to
  the Universal:
  

  “Epiphany signals the traversal
  of the finite by the infinite,
  of the particular by the universal,
  of the mundane by the mystical,
  of time by eternity.“

  – Richard Kearney, 2005,
  in The New Arcadia Review

  

  Kearney (right) with
  Martin Scorsese (left)
  and Gregory Peck
  in 1997.

  “…
  one of the things that worried me about traditional metaphysics, at
  least as I imbibed it in a very Scholastic manner at University College
  Dublin in the seventies, is that philosophy was realism and realism was
  truth. What disturbed me about that was that everything was already
  acquired; truth was always a systematic given and it was there to be
  learned from Creation onwards; it was spoken by Jesus Christ and then
  published by St. Thomas Aquinas: the system as perfect synthesis.
  Hence, my philosophy grew out of a hunger for the ‘possible’
  and it was definitely a reaction to my own philosophical formation. Yet
  that wasn’t my only reaction. I was also reacting to what I considered
  to be the deep pessimism, and even at times ‘nihilism’ of the
  postmodern turn.”

  – Richard Kearney, interview (pdf) in The Leuven Philosophy Newsletter, Vol. 14, 2005-2006

  For more on “the possible,” see Kearney’s The God Who May Be, Diamonds Are Forever, and the conclusion of Mathematics and Narrative:

  “We symbolize logical necessity with the box () and logical possibility with the diamond ().” – Keith Allen Korcz  “The possibilia that exist, and out of which the Universe arose, are located in      a necessary being….” – Michael Sudduth, Notes on God, Chance, and Necessity by Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity, Christ Church College, Oxford (the home of Lewis Carroll)

  • 12:00 pm
  • 4 Comments