Edward Frenkel
speaker
2,304 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2023
last heard Apr 2023
Edward Frenkel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And yet...
He does, and he has his own unique vision and unique point of view.
And he has integrity, which is almost impossible.
I can't think of so many people who possess those qualities.
Almost no one.
Humanity, also, I would say.
We talk about imagination as a kind of a counterpoint to knowledge or logic.
But just basic humanity, just compassion, just being able to... Because every destructive society, be it Germany under Hitler or Soviet Union under Stalin and so on, was based on some kind of what was considered unassailable truths.
So it's kind of a conceptual system, if you think about it.
There is a beautiful episode of this series by Jacob Bronowski, where he talks about, he filmed it in Auschwitz, talking about the certainty that what led the Nazis to killing people wholesale was almost a mathematical idea.
And they just basically bought into this idea and checked out their humanity at the door.
So I would say that antidote to this type of thing is not necessarily even imagination in a kind of elevated sense that we have been discussing today, that is exemplified by our greatest scientists and philosophers.
But just basic humanity, basic common sense of just knowing that it's just not right.
And I don't care what my ideology tells me, but I'm just not going to do it.
So that, I think, is kind of missing a little bit in today's society.
People get a lot too caught up in the ideology, in certain conceptual frameworks.
Oh, very much so.
But not only society, like a human being.
And Eric is one of the people, I agree with you, keeps that flame of... Like I trust that he will not do something that's not human, that's not right.
You know, there's some people you just kind of feel that they won't cross that line.
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