Learning how to love
June 24, 2009
I caused some confusion (and a little consternation) at my brother’s wedding when I announced, in a speech before family and friends, that I didn’t know what love is, but I had always been interested in learning. It was supposed to be a Socratic gesture, but it backfired. I had forgotten, of course, that weddings are places where the idea of love is not called into question. Fortunately, no one made sense of what I was talking about and I was duly ignored.
In my defense, I was simply recounting one of my favorite of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas about learning how to love. This comes from The Joyful Wisdom (Die Frohliche Wissenschaft) of 1882. I hope you come to love it as much as I do.
‘One must learn how to love. — This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearances and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally, there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.
But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned’.
Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (also trans. The Gay Science), aphorism 334.
Innovate to change the frame
February 19, 2009
Making any genuine change in life calls for innovation. Sure, you can throw yourself into the cut and thrust of changing circumstance, see what happens. But the play of events can only change you so much. There comes a point where you have to take an active role — re-imagining life and acting to redefine it. That’s a moment of personal innovation.
At the same time, innovation implies change. The great innovators are powerful agents of change — they aspire to change the world. Even if one only intends to transform the order of practice in a restricted domain, the same rule applies. Innovation is an aspirational pursuit. The will to innovation says: ‘Aspire to change the frame’.
I’m developing a perspective on innovation as an aspirational pursuit. By ‘aspirational’, I mean that innovation can be more than just a tool of entrepreneurship but a dynamic catalyst for personal empowerment and elevation. The following theses indicate the direction that the ideas are taking. These theses aren’t intended to describe every act of innovation. They are provocative ideals intended as spurs to thought.
Thesis #1: The logic of innovation is: change the part to change the whole. Innovate to change the frame.
Innovation bears upon a specific aspect of the whole. But it should aspire to transform the whole as such. The initial thing is to develop a conception of the whole that you intend to transform. Perhaps this is the set of styles, approaches and techniques employed in your creative discipline. Perhaps it is a restricted set of techniques comprising a creative method. Perhaps it is a commercial market, or the order of practice in a institution or a business unit. It could be a traffic system, a military strategy, or a political culture. Whatever the whole, an aspirational innovation should seek to transform the frame of reference on this context completely. Innovate to change the frame.
Thesis #2: Identify what’s empowering about transforming the whole.
Challenging the order of things is hard. Our thinking is couched within habits and rituals that stifle creative thought. Innovation requires you to break out of all that. It is usually necessary to prepare yourself first.
Think about how the innovation stands to empower you. How might it boost your spirit, kindle new energies, heighten your capacities to act and exist? How might it open up new time-lines and existential possibilities, freeing space on the horizon and reinvigorating life? You’ll need to be fired up and hungry for change to take that soaring leap of imagination beyond the limits of convention. Innovation shouldn’t only transform the whole — it should transform you in the process.
From this I get a third aspirational thesis:
Thesis #3: Innovate to transform your life as a whole.
Commit your person to the process of innovation. Step into the fires of creation — emerge renewed. Innovators shouldn’t lack for ambition.
