Anschaulichkeit
In memory of John W. Seybold, who died at 88 on Sunday, March 14, 2004….
Seybold is said to have originated the application of the phrase “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) to computerized typesetting.
The date of Seybold’s death was also the date of Einstein’s birth.
The entry “Clarity and Certainty” for that day contains a discussion by Einstein of the fact that the altitudes of a triangle have a point in common.
A March 14 search for a clear diagram of that fact yielded the above illustration, to which I returned today after reading of Seybold’s WYSIWYG philosophy. The illustration is taken from an article by a British teacher of geometry that contains the following:
“Dick Tahta wrote… of geometry as involving the direct apprehension of imagery, gazing as into the eyes of a beloved and a certain intuition-seeing (Anschauung)…..
His sentences have tremendous power, and yet the terms he uses are slippery and seem unexplainable. What is, or what might be, ‘direct apprehension of imagery’? What is evoked by the powerfully metaphorical ‘gazing as into the eyes of a beloved’? ‘Intuition’ is a tremendously difficult term…. The combination ‘intuition-seeing’ seems to represent an attempt to convey a meaning for the German ‘Anschauung,’ and echoes the original title of the text Anschauliche Geometrie by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen which was published in English as Geometry and the Imagination.”
From the same article:
“… for Lacan ‘mathematics … is constantly in touch with the unconscious’….
Commentators on Lacan frequently write that… he argued that the human being is captivated by an image….
The object, in a sense, gazes back.”
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“Anschaulichkeit” is in my Cassell’s German-English dictionary, with the meanings “visual or graphic quality, clearness, vividness, perspicuity.” For “anschaulich,” this dictionary gives “visual, clear, vivid, graphic, concrete; (Phil.) intuitive, perceptual.” For “Anschauung” it has
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The final meaning above, theological contemplation, suggests that the altitude-intersection diagram above may be used for a meditation on the Trinity. This is, of course, silly†, but no sillier than the third-rate lucubrations of the damned charlatan Lacan.
And so let us pray that Einstein on his birthday was joined by Seybold in rapturous contemplation of the Trinity as revealed‡ in the physicist’s “holy geometry book.”
† For a less silly geometrico-theological metaphor, see “Scalene Trinities” from The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy Sayers.
‡ For a related revelation, see A Contrapuntal Theme.