A wonderful treatise! Un vero capolavoro!
The concept: Correlating the evolution of the world with the evolution of beauty! And the marriage of functionalism and beauty. And then fitting mankind into the world as the copier and extensor of all that beauty and function.
And beautifully done! I began to read it immediately. I will continue until I have finished it. But a book like this is never merely read once. It is read, then it becomes a book of reference and inspiration, a source of many hypotheses about the origins and multiplication of art media and forms.
You suggest a magnificent competition: the competition between man and nature in producing beauty. Man devours as many of the million forms and colors that nature has produced as he can; then he reproduces them. Then he can even go beyond them, and as homo sapiens schizotypus he can vary all the characteristics of all the species. He might vary the myriad artistic product of nature infinitely and rapidly if it were not for the fact that he is also at the same time restrained by the compulsive, obsessive, habit-making components of his character. Who will win the eternal game of artistry, nature or man?There seems to be no end to the variety that both man and nature can manufacture.
And you know, it is not only the marvellous beauties of nature, for you could write another volume on the mechanics of nature and those of man, where the same principles of the competition hold. Actually you do, I notice, pay attention to the ingenious pragmatism that accompanies the beauty. You could hypothesize that all the machines of the world are premeditated by nature.
The fact that you adopt the oldest possible ages of conventional science for teling your story does not bother me much. I simply take my short chronology of a few million years and translate your big numbers into little numbers. It works well. Your Nature works slowly to invent its beauties; my Nature works fast. So, too, with mankind.
Prof.Alfred de Grazia
Political scientist, author, consultant, and editor.
He has been professor of Social Theory at the University of Chicago, Minnesota, Brown University,
Stanford University, New York University and Università degli Studi di Bergamo (Italy).
He wrote Books in Political and Social Science.
The concept: Correlating the evolution of the world with the evolution of beauty! And the marriage of functionalism and beauty. And then fitting mankind into the world as the copier and extensor of all that beauty and function.
And beautifully done! I began to read it immediately. I will continue until I have finished it. But a book like this is never merely read once. It is read, then it becomes a book of reference and inspiration, a source of many hypotheses about the origins and multiplication of art media and forms.
You suggest a magnificent competition: the competition between man and nature in producing beauty. Man devours as many of the million forms and colors that nature has produced as he can; then he reproduces them. Then he can even go beyond them, and as homo sapiens schizotypus he can vary all the characteristics of all the species. He might vary the myriad artistic product of nature infinitely and rapidly if it were not for the fact that he is also at the same time restrained by the compulsive, obsessive, habit-making components of his character. Who will win the eternal game of artistry, nature or man?There seems to be no end to the variety that both man and nature can manufacture.
And you know, it is not only the marvellous beauties of nature, for you could write another volume on the mechanics of nature and those of man, where the same principles of the competition hold. Actually you do, I notice, pay attention to the ingenious pragmatism that accompanies the beauty. You could hypothesize that all the machines of the world are premeditated by nature.
The fact that you adopt the oldest possible ages of conventional science for teling your story does not bother me much. I simply take my short chronology of a few million years and translate your big numbers into little numbers. It works well. Your Nature works slowly to invent its beauties; my Nature works fast. So, too, with mankind.
Prof.Alfred de Grazia
Political scientist, author, consultant, and editor.
He has been professor of Social Theory at the University of Chicago, Minnesota, Brown University,
Stanford University, New York University and Università degli Studi di Bergamo (Italy).
He wrote Books in Political and Social Science.
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