Friday, January 25, 2008

What I'll be thinking about instead of chess for the next week and a half....

Philosophy, out of context

From Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations:
It is a common experience that the excellence of an artist’s mastery over his material, and the decisive certainty with which he judges and assesses works in his art, is only quite exceptionally based on a theoretical knowledge of the rules which prescribe direction and order to his practice, rules that determine the standards of value on which the perfection or imperfection of the complete work must be assessed. Normally the practising artist is not the man who can inform us rightly regarding the principles of his art. He follows principles neither in his creation nor his evaluation. In his creation he follows the inner activity of his harmoniously trained powers, in his judgement his finely formed artistic taste and feeling.
One take home message: the best players are often not the best at explaining what is going on.