An Italian “Pentecost miracle”

Before I get to the top­ic of this post, a few open­ing remarks, in lieu of a for­mal “notice” to our read­ers, if you will.

Since I am aware that quite a few of our email sub­scribers are also fol­low­ing, or par­tic­i­pat­ing in, the dis­cus­sions on the AAAS¹ Member Community Board, some of you may have read my com­ment there speak­ing of “dehu­man­iz­ing” repet­i­tive tasks. Our stria­tum helps us han­dle reg­u­lar­i­ty, reliev­ing us from hav­ing to pay atten­tion to some of it by help­ing to cre­ate sub- or semi-con­scious­ly observed habits. To the very end of free­ing up our cre­ativ­i­ty. “Creativity” sig­ni­fy­ing: to (1.) change a giv­en state in an at least to an extent (2.) sus­tain­able way – the log­i­cal mean­ing of “to cre­ate” – , where (2.) requires that the new state have (3.) con­sis­ten­cy both with­in itself and with regard to those ele­ments appear­ing as its envi­ron­ment, so as to be able to (4.) form, mod­i­fy and pos­si­bly expand a sys­tem (in the process estab­lish­ing some new reg­u­lar­i­ty, which is then hand­ed over to the stria­tum aso.). An impor­tant, and the deep­er, sense of devel­op­ing robots – besides sav­ing costs, of course – is to save humans from doing repet­i­tive, mechan­i­cal work that reduces them to machines rather than acknowl­edge them as the infi­nite intel­lec­tu­al cre­ativ­i­ty that they are – in prin­ci­ple, and admit­ted­ly in vary­ing marked­ness, but what prin­ci­pal­ly mat­ters is, of course, the principle.

My cur­rent work on final­iz­ing the first work­ing ver­sion of our fore­cast­ing soft­ware suite is most­ly pro­gram­ming, and while there is a say­ing among pro­gram­mers that you should auto­mate every­thing you would do more than three times, every­one devel­op­ing soft­ware him­self knows that there are a lot of annoy­ing repet­i­tive ele­ments in pro­gram­ming that one would rather they com­plet­ed them­selves when con­ceived, because once con­ceived and the awe moment over, they have lost our human inter­est set on cre­at­ing rather than repeat­ing. It is not lost on me, of course, that a “soft­ware devel­op­er” will nor­mal­ly look down on mere “pro­gram­ming”, which he typ­i­cal­ly leaves to oth­ers, but I do both. So at times I – log­i­cal­ly – need a break.

Since we are per­son­al­ly not accus­tomed to enter­tain­ing enter­tain­ment as such – we decid­ed 22 years ago we had nei­ther the space in our liv­ing room for a tele­vi­sion set nor the time to watch it con­stant­ly change the images on its screen (“con­stant­ly change”, notice the con­tra­dic­to­ry ten­sion – a hall­mark of actu­al log­ic, as we will see and dis­cuss on this site in depth and also touch upon fur­ther down this post) – , “break” from pro­gram­ming means occu­py­ing myself with try­ing to form some obser­va­tion (hope­ful­ly) “out­side of the box”, and pos­si­bly shar­ing it with others.

In this sense, we may hence­forth take the lib­er­ty to use one or the oth­er break from our respec­tive cur­rent work to muse about and observe, en pas­sant, what strikes us as inter­est­ing, amaz­ing, poten­tial­ly impor­tant with regard to actu­al log­ic. Since log­ic-inspired obser­va­tions will thus appear in a more blog-like for­mat, we have for now set­tled on call­ing this cat­e­go­ry “Blogic”.

On a pos­i­tive note, the progress in the devel­op­ment of our fore­cast­ing capa­bil­i­ties makes us con­fi­dent that we will be able to make a pre­dic­tion for the out­come of this year’s US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion that will have a very high prob­a­bil­i­ty of being cor­rect. A very large part of the input we use is finan­cial mar­ket behav­ior, and it was pri­mar­i­ly finan­cial mar­ket behav­ior that has enabled us to pre­dict a win of the Republican can­di­date last time. Nobody and noth­ing is per­fect, of course; every­one, includ­ing us, sim­ply strives to be as good as he can.

Speaking of “per­fect”, and now I am final­ly arriv­ing at the top­ic of this first “Blogic” post: The author of a book on Leonardo da Vinci, high­light­ing how Leonardo and his work, in the author’s view, are char­ac­ter­ized by con­scious and will­ful “imper­fec­tion­ism”,² has, one might mar­vel, achieved a kind of “mir­a­cle”. A mir­a­cle which may only, at least at this time, be pos­si­ble to occur in Italy, the “home coun­try” of beau­ty and art.

Those inter­est­ed in European polit­i­cal devel­op­ments will be aware of the emer­gence – by now in large part reversed – of the Italian “5-Star-Movement” (M5S), in terms of seats still by far the largest force in the two cham­bers of the Italian par­lia­ment (though in terms of poll-assessed cur­rent con­sen­sus among the pop­u­la­tion by now only about half as strong as Matteo Salvini’s Lega). The founder and by far the most promi­nent fig­ure of the M5S, and for a long time the recip­i­ent of the most Facebook likes for an Italian politi­cian by far, being the first to amass a back then unheard-of two mil­lion likes, is Beppe Grillo. Beppe Grillo is a high­ly suc­cess­ful com­ic. Some might even say he turned Italian pol­i­tics into – and oth­ers might say: even more of – a comedy.

We say nei­ther of this, but we observe that the author of the book on Leonardo we men­tioned, Vittorio Sgarbi, has, just in the run-up to Pentecost, over­tak­en Beppe Grillo in terms of Facebook likes for Italian politi­cians.³ Sgarbi is – among many things – also a politi­cian, mem­ber of the low­er house of the Italian par­lia­ment (the “Camera”) and may­or of a small­er Italian city. And he is an astute art his­to­ri­an gift­ed with a deep sen­si­tiv­i­ty towards actu­al log­ic appear­ing in art, known by essen­tial­ly every adult Italian and prob­a­bly the most “pop­u­lar” art his­to­ri­an in the world, judg­ing by the num­ber of his Facebook likes now approach­ing two mil­lion. We at loico do not always agree with his views as regards art, but he is cer­tain­ly one of the most orig­i­nal, intel­lec­tu­al­ly intre­pid and refresh­ing con­tem­po­rary minds that we know of.

That an art his­to­ri­an and orig­i­nal thinker, almost equal­ly con­tro­ver­sial with regard to his “man­ners” as Grillo but infi­nite­ly more knowl­edge­able, in our assess­ment, has now trumped the com­ic in Italian pol­i­tics, that deep-search­ing thought and sin­cere and knowl­edge­able admi­ra­tion of beau­ty have over­tak­en a most­ly super­fi­cial mak­ing-fun of things, may, in our time, be regard­ed as a “Pentecost mir­a­cle” we want­ed to share here, and may even have a more wide­spread sym­bol­ic sig­nif­i­cance at least for Italy. His – in terms of actu­al votes entire­ly insignif­i­cant, he has been vot­ed into par­lia­ment with anoth­er par­ty – polit­i­cal move­ment is called “Rinascimento”, “Renaissance”. One would be inclined to think of Italy as one of the most “prob­lem­at­ic” coun­tries Europe has to offer. And one would clear­ly not be blamed for doing so. Yet since the spring of 2017 we have begun to observe a num­ber of signs, some more sub­tle, some less, that Italy’s funda-“mental”-s, if you will, are actu­al­ly much more sol­id than those of many if not most oth­er European coun­tries today. Italians owe this, of course, to the man who has vir­tu­al­ly cre­at­ed their lan­guage and woven the most pro­found sense of log­ic into its fab­ric: Dante.

With regard to Sgarbi’s book on Leonardo and “imper­fec­tion”, one Italian ana­lyst has written:

“Sgarbi draws, per­haps con­scious­ly, from the phi­los­o­phy of Hegel who, as we know, believes that the ful­fill­ment of the Spirit is real­ized in a jour­ney into real­i­ty that is always imper­fect, dirty. But ten­sion is the most ele­vat­ed moment of thought: The very fact of striv­ing towards per­fec­tion, of want­i­ng to over­come imper­fec­tion, the tor­ment of the neg­a­tive, of search­ing for the Absolute, makes the artist unique.”⁴

Which is only log­i­cal. “Perfection” would mean stand­still, yet the Absolute which man strives towards can­not log­i­cal­ly stand still, thus exclud­ing move­ment from itself, which it would then have to exter­nal­ly relate to, aware that it was the very move­ment that brought the “per­fec­tion” about. So a per­fect­ed Absolute would have to be not­ed as being depen­dent on the move­ment it excludes from itself, and being depen­dent on some­thing con­tra­dicts the con­cept of “absolute”. It is exact­ly because of this that we abhor pianists who play like a metronome, while, of course, we equal­ly abhor those who take too large a lib­er­ty in “inter­pret­ing” what they are sup­posed to “per­form”. It is this ten­sion between the sub­tly demon­strat­ed lib­er­ty of the per­form­ing pianist and his still-adher­ence to the pre­scribed notes that log­i­cal­ly makes a per­for­mance “per­fect”. We will come back to this.

Vittorio Sgarbi him­self attrib­ut­es to Leonardo’s life what may be char­ac­ter­ized as his own indi­vid­ual ver­sion of a some­what sharp­ened Pentecostal meaning:

“For Leonardo, man was meant to fly, and indeed he flies now. His prob­lem was to com­pete with God, to mea­sure him­self against Him.

All Leonardo’s work is not born from a com­mis­sion­er, from a prince: Leonardo needs to align him­self with God’s cre­ative process. This is pre­cise­ly what artists do, and the artist is proof of God’s exis­tence. Leonardo does not die and it is use­less to look for his body. What is essen­tial is his thought that lives in his work, that is pro­ject­ed into a time that exceeds our time.
The work of art is man’s chal­lenge to God, it is the way in which man becomes eter­nal, with which he over­comes time, with which he over­comes death. Here, this is the process that moves all Leonardo’s thought: to com­pete with God, to engage in an arm wrestling with Him, to show that God is man.
What moti­vates Leonardo, more than any oth­er artist, is the attempt to over­come time, to over­come death: it is to enter the dimen­sion of immor­tal­i­ty.”⁵

The ulti­mate ten­sion the ana­lyst speaks of and Sgarbi describes may be expe­ri­enced by look­ing into Saint John the Baptist’s eyes in the fea­tured image above this post: His right eye looks at us – the oth­er to where his fin­ger points to. A quick web search did not yield any arti­cles high­light­ing this obvi­ous­ly not unin­ten­tion­al “squint”, so it appears that also in con­tem­plat­ing art it is log­i­cal con­scious­ness that cre­ates savor­ing con­nois­seurs. Note, also, how Leonardo paints the high­est light inten­si­ty on the fore­head of John the Baptist, appar­ent­ly, as one is inclined to sur­mise, to empha­size what mat­ters most to him: human think­ing; which, in a first descend­ing, then ris­ing flow of light end­ing in the upward-point­ing index fin­ger, he then relates to what he was cer­tain was its origin.

Happy Pentecost!

1. American Association for the Advancement of Science, edi­tor of “Science” mag­a­zine, https://www.aaas.org/[↩]
2. https://www.vittoriosgarbi.it/libri/index.php?route=pagine&p=19&pd=130[↩]
3. https://www.politicasufacebook.it/politici/[↩]
4. https://www.glistatigenerali.com/arte/leonardo-da-vinci-di-sgarbi-come-dio-e-in-mezzo-a-noi/[↩]
5. Cited from https://www.glistatigenerali.com/arte/leonardo-da-vinci-di-sgarbi-come-dio-e-in-mezzo-a-noi/[↩]