Jasnah Kholin, Nicolas Bourbaki and disdain for visual arts

[Guest Parallax]

First a bit of background from Wikipedia:

Quote

Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym of a group of (mainly French) mathematicians. Their aim is to reformulate mathematics on an extremely abstract and formal but self-contained basis in a series of books beginning in 1935. With the goal of grounding all of mathematics on set theory, the group strives for rigour and generality. Their work led to the discovery of several concepts and terminologies still used, and influenced modern branches of mathematics.

 Here is an excerpt from a 1997 interview with one of the most prominent members of the group, Pierre Cartier, in which he talks about Bourbaki's attitude towards visual illustrations (I have attached the insert mentioned early on):

Quote

Senechal: Why is there a lack of any kind of visual illustration in most of Bourbaki?

Cartier: I think the best answer would be the description of Chevalley given by his daughter [see insert]. Bourbaki were Puritans, and Puritans are strongly opposed to pictorial representations of truths of their faith. The number of Protestants and Jews in the Bourbaki group was overwhelming. And you know that the French Protestants especially are very close to Jews in spirit. I have some Jewish background and I was raised as a Huguenot. We are people of the Bible, of the Old Testament, and many Huguenots in France are more enamored of the Old Testament than of the New Testament. We worship Jaweh more than Jesus sometimes. 

So, what were the reasons? The general philosophy as developed by Kant, certainly. Bourbaki is the brainchild of German philosophy. Bourbaki was founded to develop and propagate German philosophical views in science. André Weil has always been fond of German science and he was always quoting Gauss. All these people, with their own tastes and their own personal views, were proponents of German philosophy. 

And then there was the idea that there is an opposition between art and science. Art is fragile and mortal, because it appeals to emotions, to visual meaning, and to unstated analogies. 

But I think it's also part of the Euclidean tradition. In Euclid, you find some drawings but it is known that most of them were added after Euclid, in later editions. Most of the drawings in the original are abstract drawings. You make some reasoning about some proportions and you draw some segments, but they are not intended to be geometrical segments, just representations of some abstract notions. Also Lagrange proudly stated, in his textbook on mechanics, "You will not find any drawing in my book!" The analytical spirit was part of the French tradition and part of the German tradition. And I suppose it was also due to the influence of people like Russell, who claimed that they could prove everything formally--that so-called geometrical intuition was not reliable in proof. 

Again Bourbaki's abstractions and disdain for visualization were part of a global fashion, as illustrated by the abstract tendencies in the music and the paintings of that period.

I doubt that Brandon was thinking of Bourbaki when he was creating the character but I think their point of view fits Jasnah's character perfectly. 

Here is the reference to the original published interview, in case anyone is interested:

Senechal, Marjorie. "The Continuing Silence of Bourbaki-An interview with Pierre Cartier, June 18, 1997." Mathematical Intelligencer 20, no. 1 (1998): 28.

Edited November 24, 2019 by Parallax

[king of nowhere]

I'd say not really.

bourbaki are against drawings because they think mathematics has to be abstract. as abstract as possible. a geometrical figure is not abstract enough when you can declare some properties in its place.

jasnah is not against visual representations, she's merely uninterested in frivolous art. after taking in shallan, she sees her drawings useful, like we would find useful a photography. and i think jasnah would dislike bourbakism; it's too abstract to be of much practical value. just like art. she always sqay that knowledge is meant to be used as a tool, and there's not much you can do with a book of theorems based on set theory.

[Quantus]

13 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

I'd say not really.

bourbaki are against drawings because they think mathematics has to be abstract. as abstract as possible. a geometrical figure is not abstract enough when you can declare some properties in its place.

jasnah is not against visual representations, she's merely uninterested in frivolous art. after taking in shallan, she sees her drawings useful, like we would find useful a photography. and i think jasnah would dislike bourbakism; it's too abstract to be of much practical value. just like art. she always sqay that knowledge is meant to be used as a tool, and there's not much you can do with a book of theorems based on set theory.

Agreed.  Jasnah doesnt have an actual objection to visual Art, or to Art in general, she simply doesnt see purely ascetic pursuits as a worthy use of time.  Scholarly drafting and photo-realistic record-keeping are extremely useful to her, as she eventually admits.  Her main issue had more to do with her preconceived assumptions about what sort of Art she could expect from a teenage "Brightness" trying to gain entry to the Alethi Court.   

Which, honestly, surprises me as a go-to response.  Sure, that sort of more frivolous Art is common among women of the Vorin cultures, and she'd have likely been forcefully exposed to it for a lot of her Life.  But the flip side is all scholarly art would have been 100% women too.  It's not like here where women were often historically relegated to the casual pursuits while the Men-folk handled the scholarship, on Roshar women owned both sides of that coin.  

[+Bliev]

8 minutes ago, Quantus said:

Which, honestly, surprises me as a go-to response. 

I mean, I think she’s used to being the only one who takes scholarship seriously so she expects that Shallan has what we call a performance orientation vs a learning or growth orientation: I’ll learn to get my accolades and a spot at court, not for the sake of it. Jasnah has bonded a spren. She is seeking knowledge to save the world. It makes sense that she would see art as less important toward this end, until she sees Shallan’s passion come through it. I think then she sees its usefulness as a tool for learning for her.

[agrabes]

Jasnah does not strike me as a mathematician - someone interested in the pure advancement of means and methods of calculations and equations.  Mathematicians like the Bourbaki say themselves that their driving principles are to come up with more pure and streamlined versions of existing mathematical theorems and/or to develop new theories.  Their work is definitely very valuable to society, but the more advanced it gets the further it strays from practicality.  You have to sift out the practical uses from the theory.

Jasnah strikes me as a very practical person.  She seems more like an engineer or a scientific researcher than a mathematician.  She doesn't seem interested in developing theories for theories sake, she is interested in solving a particular problem that she has identified.  Contrast that with the description of the Bourbaki you provided.  They are not interested in solving a practical problem - they are simply interested in advancing the purity and rigor of mathematics as practiced by French mathematicians.

[Quantus]

5 hours ago, Bliev said:

I mean, I think she’s used to being the only one who takes scholarship seriously so she expects that Shallan has what we call a performance orientation vs a learning or growth orientation: I’ll learn to get my accolades and a spot at court, not for the sake of it. Jasnah has bonded a spren. She is seeking knowledge to save the world. It makes sense that she would see art as less important toward this end, until she sees Shallan’s passion come through it. I think then she sees its usefulness as a tool for learning for her.

That's the thing, she isn't.  She is a world leader in scholarship, raised by a world leader in engineering, and raised to the full expectation that she could and should be those things as proper woman in Vorin society.  She would  more of an aberration in an earth equivalent society where scholarship might not be expected of women, but in Vorin cultures that is the only possibility for scholars.  Saying she's an oddball for taking scholarship seriously is like saying Adolin is an oddball for taking sword duels seriously: it's simply not the case in context of the in-world culture.  

[+Bliev]

@Quantus Just bc woman are allowed to be scholars or are socialized to be them doesn’t mean that they take it seriously like Jasnah does. It reminds me of the feminine arts in Georgian England: needlepoint, painting, drawing, singing, pianoforte, French. Genteel women were supposed to do these and even excel at them. But those who did were rare. They had to make a surface effort but few actually cared. Thus it was unexpected to find a true genius who honed their craft. Because the crafts weren’t the point—the social status was. I think that’s what scholarship in Vorin society has become. You have to pick something and be serviceable at it, but so long as you can pour tea in company and say Bonjour to the French maid, no one actually cares.

Jasnah does though. So she’s used to women putting on the trappings of scholarship for social status but not caring like she does or having the abilities she does.

[Quantus]

2 minutes ago, Bliev said:

@Quantus Just bc woman are allowed to be scholars or are socialized to be them doesn’t mean that they take it seriously like Jasnah does. It reminds me of the feminine arts in Georgian England: needlepoint, painting, drawing, singing, pianoforte, French. Genteel women were supposed to do these and even excel at them. But those who did were rare. They had to make a surface effort but few actually cared. Thus it was unexpected to find a true genius who honed their craft. Because the crafts weren’t the point—the social status was. I think that’s what scholarship in Vorin society has become. You have to pick something and be serviceable at it, but so long as you can pour tea in company and say Bonjour to the French maid, no one actually cares.

Jasnah does though. So she’s used to women putting on the trappings of scholarship for social status but not caring like she does or having the abilities she does.

This is precsiely the point I disagree with.  Despite our natural attempts as earth-born readers to draw comparisons to our own history (such as the Genteel model), that comparison simply does not work:  Nobody took those Genteel feminine pursiuts serisouly because they were, by definition, frivolous pursuits whose only acutal purpose was to relieve boredom between pregnancies.  If it was somethign society actually needed, men-folk were expected to handle the "real" work.  But you cannot claim that nobody expects a woman to be a serious scholar when female scholars are the only option for the society as a whole (to the point where male scholars have to hide their gender). In this scenario, to claim that female scholars are not taken seriously is to claim that Scolarship itself is not taken seriously, and that is clearly not the case.  

[+Bliev]

@Quantus I didn’t say female scholars weren’t taken seriously. I said that Jasnah didn’t take other “scholars” seriously. Society clearly doesn’t disdain women scholars. And Jasnah obviously doesn’t disdain women scholars. She just seems skeptical that any other scholar will actually care like she does, or that their pursuits will be for the (laudable) reasons that hers are—and definitely not some random Brightness trying to get access to Kholin power. I doubt that many other women are at Jasnah’s level, if any, so it’s not about societal skepticism, it’s personal skepticism.