two different kinds of biographies

In connection with the class I’m teaching I’ve been reading and watching a fair amount of Picasso-related material, and it leads me to a general reflection about the difference between the lives of intellectual/cultural figures and all other kinds.

What I found, as usual, is that Picasso’s life starts to bore me as soon as he’s famous. It’s not that interesting to hear about his prizes, public appearances, and the latest change of mistresses once he’s already a world figure. I think the same holds for writers, philosophers, and anyone else in the loosely defined “intellectual” professions. Two specific kinds of things are interesting in such lives:

(a) what made this person not simply conform to the existing professional standards in the field?

(b) how did the wider public eventually come to agree that this was an important breakthrough and not just some crackpot maneuver?

In short, what is interesting here is: how do strikingly new ideas emerge, in the mind of the creator and then that of society at large, despite the apparent crushing obviousness of the old ideas?

In Picasso’s case, then, what is biographically most interesting is the Blue Period up through the collective cubist labors with Georges Braque in 1911. All right, I’ll go a little further and say that the collaboration on the ballet with Cocteau in Rome, where he also met his first wife, is also fascinating stuff. 14 or 15 really interesting years of excitement, struggle, and new ideas gradually condensing and being made communicable. After that, he is Picasso, Established Great World Celebrity, and I find it boring.

Same with Heidegger. His life interests me only up until about 1929, at which point Sein und Zeit is already a known quantity globally. Personally, I also happen to think that he’s scared by the dead end of his 1929/30 animal life course, and readers of my Heidegger books are already familiar with my (unorthodox) view that all the material on truth from 1930 and thereafter is a dreadful regression. I think he bounces back intellectually during the 1950’s, but his life’s generally a bore to read about even then.

What makes Nietzsche so interesting, biographically, is that he never exited this period of his life. He was insane before he was famous, and dead before he was super-famous. Same thing for van Gogh, and for Kafka. And pretty much the whole of Cézanne’s biography is also interesting since only at the very end did he earn the adulation of the young painters.

It’s just no fun reading about intellectuals who have already succeeded and are now simply picking up honors and awards and making political proclamations using their past intellectual work as leverage. There may be a few exceptions to this in the intellectual sphere, but they will be few in number, and will probably be exceptions for very specific reasons.

But notice that there’s a whole other set of possible lives where the opposite is the case. The really interesting part in any political biography will, of course, be the period of greatest power and recognition, because success here by definition must be success by someone already established in the public eye.

The same for military biographies. It’s not uninteresting to hear about Grant’s early life. But it’s not that interesting, after all, and I found myself impatient to get to the battles between Grant and Lee, even though both had been famous for 2-3 years before that, based on their prior battles.

Movie stars, the same thing. Most of the interesting events in the lives of actors are not during the early, undiscovered period. Most of them have to do with the actual production of movies.

Athletes, same thing. I doubt Michael Jordan at 15 is a very interesting topic, and neither is he such an interesting topic in his 40’s. The best section of his biography will be the one where he’s already in the public eye and still at the peak of his powers.

But as for intellectual figures, you want to read about the period when they are struggling and obscure. After that, they’re generally just disseminating work already done and accepting the gratitude of a public that would never have understood or cared for what they were doing at the time.

Music may be an exception among the intellectual professions, now that I think about it. The pre-fame period for musicians usually isn’t as interesting biographically as the fame period. Cinema as well. I suppose the factor here is that these professions aren’t quite as “individual” as the other intellectual professions… You need to be working with at least mid-sized groups of people to be making progress as a musician or filmmaker. That’s not as true of writers, philosophers, and visual artists, who can be making plenty of rapid progress in private before achieving a major public breakthrough.

Changing subjects here at the end… Readers of this blog know my theory that the central fact of ethics is not the rules that everyone must follow, but the fact that each individual person gets away with breaking a specific handful of rules that the others all must follow. I really think ethics ought to revolve around that fact, which becomes more glaring the older I get.

There are certain things other people can do which would get me fired or place me in a state of public humiliation; in fact, a particularly outrageous professional colleague is the one who first inspired me to this idea. He could easily have been fired ten times over by now, but keeps on getting away with the same things. But the contrary is also true: there are incidents now and then where I say to myself: “I can’t believe I got away with that.”

And of course, from time to time there are people who actually get away with outright criminal behavior– sometimes even once it becomes known! My theory is that all these factors are extremely specific to individual people, and don’t just fall into a small number of categorical types. If I ever write a book on ethics, this will be the starting point of it, because I think you should always start a book (if possible) with whatever truly fascinates you about a topic, and this inherent unfairness of the ethical sphere is the most interesting aspect of it. We are all governed at all times by different standards, not uniform ones. Nor is this “a lamentable hypocrisy that needs to be remedied”: no, I think within limits there are good and justifiable reasons why we hold different people to different standards in different areas, though I know the idea may be controversial.

Anyway, all of this is a digression to say that Picasso was astoundingly able to get away with cruelty towards those close to him, women especially, but also his eldest son and others.