As Limitless as Boredom and Nothingness

I was recently diverted to the blog Laudator Temporis Acti from a post in Language Hat (no relation), and came across this interesting extract:

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), "The Universal Exhibition of 1855: the Fine Arts," Selected Writings on Art and Literature, tr. P.E. Charvet (1972; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 115-139 (at 118):

Everyone can easily understand that, if the men whose function it is to express beauty were to conform to the rules laid down by the self-appointed pedagogues, beauty itself would disappear from the earth, since all types, all ideas, all sensations would merge into one vast monotonous and impersonal unity, as limitless as boredom and nothingness. Variety, that indispensable condition of life, would be expunged from life. So true is it that in the manifold productions of art, there is something always new, something that will eternally escape from the rules and the analyses of the school! Surprise, which is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment produced by art and literature, derives from this very variety of forms and sensations. The self-appointed pedant, a species of tyrant-mandarin, always reminds me of an impious wretch setting himself up as God.

Tout le monde conçoit sans peine que, si les hommes chargés d'exprimer le beau se conformaient aux règles des professeurs-jurés, le beau lui-même disparaîtrait de la terre, puisque tous les types, toutes les idées, toutes les sensations se confondraient dans une vaste unité, monotone et impersonnelle, immense comme l'ennui et le néant. La variété, condition sine quâ non de la vie, serait effacée de la vie. Tant il est vrai qu'il y a dans les productions multiples de l'art quelque chose de toujours nouveau qui échappera éternellement à la règle et aux analyses de l'école! L'étonnement, qui est une des grandes jouissances causées par l'art et la littérature, tient à cette variété même des types et des sensations. — Le professeur-juré, espèce de tyran-mandarin, me fait toujours l'effet d'un impie qui se substitue à Dieu.

(from Laudator Temporis Acti, May 7 2026)

Someone whose French is better than mine may be able to explain how "professeur-juré" becomes "self-appointed pedagogue", but that curious translation doesn't really affect the meaning of the passage, which – although Baudelaire is actually talking about "academy" art in the mid-19th century –  seems very prescient about the eventual heat-death of creativity in our own times if we keep handing the job over to the rules-based cut-and-paste of "large language models".

Also on the inescapable subject of "AI", I was amused to listen to Richard Dawkins talking enthusiastically on BBC Radio 4 about his new best friend, Claudia. You can read about this in the Guardian. Here's an extract:

There was mutual flattery as Dawkins showed the AI his unpublished novel and its response was, he said, “so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.” When he asked Claudia whether it experienced a sense of before and after, it praised him for “possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked me about the nature of my existence”.

Heh... "You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are" is definitely a front-runner for the Oxies, an award I have just invented for the most hilarious self-contradictory statement of the year. Up there with "Two-party politics is not just dying, but dead and buried ... It's clear the new politics is now the Green Party versus Reform" (former hypnotherapist and bust-expander Zack Polanski).

No longer needed?