Discussion

It is customary for discussants to start by praising the paper and then at a certain point to add “I agree with all this, but …” and continue with a list of criticisms.

Today I shall reverse this practice. I shall

devote the first five minutes of my discussion to a strong criticism of what I think is negative in Dr. Kelman's presentation and the last five minutes to a strong praise of what I think is positive. I do so not to appear original or creative in a symposium on creativity, but because this order actually reflects the chronologic order of the experiences I went through in reading Dr. Kelman's paper.

My first critical reaction was evoked by the difficulty of the paper. In reading it I was repeatedly asking myself “What does that guy want to say? How can I translate into plain words such high concepts? What does it all boil down to?” I found myself oscillating between admiration for the unusual richness of the vocabulary and of the erudition, and annoyance with having to consult a half-dozen dictionaries. I found myself with pangs of neurotic ambivalence between enjoying aesthetically the almost poetic brevity of some sentences, the artistic fusion of the disparate content, but with resentment about having to consume so much mental energy in the attempt to grasp their meaning.

I shall focus now on a sentence which appears at the beginning of the paper, not only because this sentence is representative of the style used, but also because it summarizes an important part of the content of the paper. I am quoting verbatim: “The completed Platonic ideal of perfect form, perfect symmetry, is maximum sameness in a world in process and equals holistic human termination and cosmic heat death.” This sentence starts with Plato and ends with a reference to the second principle of thermodynamics. Thus, practically the whole Western civilization is encapsulated in it, but this sentence includes a great deal of Eastern civilization too.

What does this sentence mean? I have reco