"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." --poet William Butler Yeats
"Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious." -- Paul Valery
"The best answers are those that destroy the question." - Susan Sontag
"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers" -- James Baldwin
Albert Einstein had a playful passionate and childlike approach to his research: "Einstein himself attributed his achievements to a childish innocence that most of us lose on transition to adulthood, but which he retained to the end of his life. Certainly, the unorthodoxy and resistance to authority needed to challenge conventional wisdom..."[1]
Such playful passion is the stuff of invention and genius --- of people who cannot turn their brain off after the standard 9am to 5pm day of the so-called "Professional". Perhaps what separates the professional from the passionate individual who one might call a "passional" is that the professional does his or her job as a matter of duty, with a clear distinction between work and personal everyday life. There are many of us who do not fit into this mould of professionalism.
Marshall McLuhan was not a professional. He referred to himself as an amateur and was thus unbound by the fetters of professionalism and professional affiliation. Much like University of Toronto's Larry Richards, he was both populist and scholarly at the same time.
What McLuhan and Einstein had in common was that they both openly described their own pursuits as childlike and amateur. Thus in the same tradition as the Jester or Fool, they were unbound by the intellectual constraints of professionalism that might be expected of a doctor, dentist, building inspector, customs official, or the like. ("The Fool always speaks truth to the King, and is never put to death or banished for speaking the truth...")
The domain of the Amateur is often the domain of the hobbyist, as, for example, is so commonly found in Amateur Radio ("Ham Radio"). Many of the world's most important discoveries and innovations are made by Hams (e.g. the G3RUH modem, the Terminal Node Controller, etc., and many other inventions that are named after the radio callsigns of those who invented them).
At the University of Toronto, Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, we have the Leonardo Competition, in honor of Leonardo da Vinci, who was perhaps the world's best engineer ever.
"Da Vinci was the most extraordinarily versatile genius of the Renaissance. As a man of science and engineering, he towered above all contemporaries. If his views had been published and well known, they would have revolutionized the science of his day."
In addition to perseverence and patience, what Leonardo had that made him so successful, was passion. His thinking was unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries.
A feature of the playful childlike amateur passion is to be unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries and departmental fiefdoms. It is thus often the passinary who makes new discoveries at the boundary of various specialized fields of research.
It is common for Professionals to attempt to imitate the Passionary by creating so-called Interdisciplinary research programmes. For example, there are numerous programmes that attempt to bring together professionals from disparate disciplines, to collaborate on a common goal that has concrete milestones. However, there do not appear to be any programs that support a playful or dynamic interplay between actual bodies of knowledge and experience that would allow one or more participants of the collaboration to freely transcend his or her own professional label.
Leonardo da Vinci was an artist+scientist+inventor, so one might ask what happens when today we bring together an artist, scientist, and inventor. But simply bringing together these three people does not a da Vinci make.
It is not merely the interdisciplinary nature of the genius, that made the da Vinci mind, but it is also a matter of what Einstein said about Duty versus Love.
To tie together the three disciplines of art, science, and technology does not make for the unfettered and playful passion of Einstein or da Vinci.
Instead, one might ask what would happen if we could bring together people like da Vinci, Einstein, and McLuhan. Let us refer to this kind of collaboration as "interpassionary" rather than merely interdisciplinary. It refers to bringing together people of various passions, rather than bringing together people of various narrowly defined disciplines.
Passionaries are unlikely to make any distinction between personal and professional lives. Thus it may be worth thinking about how we can foster a spirit of collaboration among passionaries.
There have been traditional interdisciplinary collaboration attempts to combine professions like engineering, law, medicine, and design. The MIT Media lab, for example, combined engineering, computing, business, and design (corporate design). But what happens when we combine the passionate elements of invention (engineers who are inventors of new technology), science (discovery), art, architecture, theatre, comparative literature, education, philosophy, and political science?
Where professionalism often weighs us down with concrete milestones. Passionism fosters a more loose and unfettered exploratory vision.
This is not to suggest we abandon Professionalism: We will always have a need for doctors, dentists, lawyers, administrators, and educators. But, rather, we must acknowledge the need for both the Professionals and the Passionals. Professionals are already appreciated by the world; their need is unquestioned. And there are plenty of professional societies plenty of existing opportunities to bring professionals (disciplines) together toward interprofessional (interdisciplinary) pursuits. However, it is necessary, for the benefit of our world, to have and appreciate both the professional and the passional.
There are a number of us at the university, senior administrators, tenured faculty, post doctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students, who exhibit a burning passion for collaboration.
I would like to invite a group of passionate people to come together in the spirit of an unrestricted interplay of ideas in the hopes of creating an organized forum for interaction, collaboration, and debate that will invigorate the notion of interpassionary collaboration at the University of Toronto.
It is therefore, a goal of this meeting, to explore how we can further foster Interpassionism at this great university.
http://wearcam.org/interpassionary/interpassionary.htm --S. Mann, Thu Dec 18 13:58:26 EST 2003