To steal from someone else:
The following story is not mine in anyway, and is most probably some sort of a copy write infringement, so by reading further you agree not to sue me... please?
"There is a deaf boy who is walking home on train tracks... in china. On second thought, maybe he's retarded, I mean why else would he be walking on train tracks when he can't hear anything, doesn't make allot of sense. Any way, he's walking along the train tracks and sure enough a train is coming up behind him. Now there is an old wise Chinese man who lives up in a tower doing calculations. He's so old and he's been up there so long that no one knows if he's even alive. Well, obviously he is alive, or this wouldn't be much of a story. So any way he's up in this ivory tower doing his calculations and he's got papers everywhere from all his inventions and such. This old man of course sees the little boy coming along and sees the train baring down on him. Maybe the boy's a hundred yards away; maybe the train's four miles. For some reason he knows the boy's deaf, I'm not sure why, I didn't make this story up. So any way, he sees the kid and the train and he starts doing calculations. He starts working out all the numbers on a sheet of paper, train velocity and whatever. About thirty meters from the tower the old man finishes his calculations, and realizes that the boy will die ten meters from the tower. He then folds up the paper into an airplane and tosses it out the windows without any regards and goes back to work. Eleven meters from the tower the boy sees the paper airplane (he's deaf not blind) and jumps off the tracks to catch it, thus avoiding certain doom."
There is a moral in that story somewhere. Look through it a couple times before reading onwards, I'll wait.
…Probably something to do with inadvertently saving lives and things about the nicer things in life. Very wise stuff. Maybe it would have helped if I had told you that it was the old man's intention to save the boy's life with the paper airplane. Of course I didn't. In fact, I went so far as to suggest otherwise, because I wanted you to see a moral in that story. It isn't a wise story, and neither am I.
The title of this entry is "To steal from someone else," but if you think its the story I'm stealing you're wrong again. What I am stealing is Socrates theory "true wisdom is knowing you know nothing." I wanted to plainly illustrate how a story can give the appearance of wisdom without actually having any. How people are willing to read the wisdom into the story. Maybe what I am saying is: it isn't the intellectual that is sharing their wisdom with you; it is your own wisdom coming out.
Someone once said "Good artist copy, great artists steal." Apparently the same holds true for philosophers.
From: The Second Coming of Jim by Jim Tzenes
The following story is not mine in anyway, and is most probably some sort of a copy write infringement, so by reading further you agree not to sue me... please?
"There is a deaf boy who is walking home on train tracks... in china. On second thought, maybe he's retarded, I mean why else would he be walking on train tracks when he can't hear anything, doesn't make allot of sense. Any way, he's walking along the train tracks and sure enough a train is coming up behind him. Now there is an old wise Chinese man who lives up in a tower doing calculations. He's so old and he's been up there so long that no one knows if he's even alive. Well, obviously he is alive, or this wouldn't be much of a story. So any way he's up in this ivory tower doing his calculations and he's got papers everywhere from all his inventions and such. This old man of course sees the little boy coming along and sees the train baring down on him. Maybe the boy's a hundred yards away; maybe the train's four miles. For some reason he knows the boy's deaf, I'm not sure why, I didn't make this story up. So any way, he sees the kid and the train and he starts doing calculations. He starts working out all the numbers on a sheet of paper, train velocity and whatever. About thirty meters from the tower the old man finishes his calculations, and realizes that the boy will die ten meters from the tower. He then folds up the paper into an airplane and tosses it out the windows without any regards and goes back to work. Eleven meters from the tower the boy sees the paper airplane (he's deaf not blind) and jumps off the tracks to catch it, thus avoiding certain doom."
There is a moral in that story somewhere. Look through it a couple times before reading onwards, I'll wait.
…Probably something to do with inadvertently saving lives and things about the nicer things in life. Very wise stuff. Maybe it would have helped if I had told you that it was the old man's intention to save the boy's life with the paper airplane. Of course I didn't. In fact, I went so far as to suggest otherwise, because I wanted you to see a moral in that story. It isn't a wise story, and neither am I.
The title of this entry is "To steal from someone else," but if you think its the story I'm stealing you're wrong again. What I am stealing is Socrates theory "true wisdom is knowing you know nothing." I wanted to plainly illustrate how a story can give the appearance of wisdom without actually having any. How people are willing to read the wisdom into the story. Maybe what I am saying is: it isn't the intellectual that is sharing their wisdom with you; it is your own wisdom coming out.
Someone once said "Good artist copy, great artists steal." Apparently the same holds true for philosophers.
From: The Second Coming of Jim by Jim Tzenes
posted by jim at 9/17/2005 11:03:00 PM
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