| | Bill, I agree with all of that.
Dean, you can say that it is an argument over definitions, but the real question is whether Mises' statements and definitions are arbitrary or whether they fit a purpose. The creative genius discussion might sound arbitrary if you view it as him just expressing a view unconnected to everything else. But in the context of the rest of that section on labor, you can see that he has described labor, and is dealing with strange or uncommon exceptions. In that case, his goal isn't to define "creative genius" for its own sake. His goal is to describe a kind of productive activity that differs in significant economic respects from the more general form of labor. He has to identify that form of productive effort in order to explain why it is different. If you remove his comments from the context, then he might seem to be making some random assertion about creativity and using strange definitions. But put in the right context, and the definition is not arbitrary.
Merlin, I didn't say that labor and production are separate activities. I said that it wasn't a continuation of the "creative genius" discussion. That was just addressing an exceptional form of productivity in order to contrast it with labor. He wasn't making the claim that all labor is like that, or that no labor is creative. In the creative genius section, he refers to the creative genius, not creativity in general. There's every reason to believe that this is a new and different point he is making.
The producer is creative in this sense. This is contrary to Mises' statement "Production is not an act of creation."
I don't think it is. I'm not sure how you can read the full quote and not see that he's distinguishing between creation and transforming in the physical world. Mises again:
In the world of external phenomena he is only a transformer.
I don't know how he can be any clearer. In the external or physical world, you can only transform, not create. Rand agreed, but used the word "rearrange". The distinction he's making is clearly between creation and transformation, not between innovation and production. The beginning of the quote starts by contrasting creation with transformation. "Production is not creation....It [production] is transformation".
What's more likely? That he's restating the same point he made at the beginning of the paragraph (Production is not creation) in a slightly different way, and is continuing the context of creation vs. separation, or that in the middle of this point he makes a crazy and unsupported claim that producers are inherently incapable of innovation, and then goes immediately back to discussing the distinction between creation and transformation?
Steve, the name is Mises, not Mise. Ludwig von Mises. And as for him being obtuse, any author would be considered obtuse if their words were taken out of context and given an ungenerous interpretation. Going back to my earlier example of someone knowing nothing about Objectivism showing up, if he talked about Rand promoting "selfishness", and you pointed out the meaning, he would say that it's not his fault she's obtuse, silly, or whatever other insults you provided. And there might be an argument that she could have been clearer, since she was being intentionally provocative. Take a ton of what she wrote out of the context of her ideas or even the rest of the article, and she'll sounds insane as well.
Take her comments that I quoted regarding creation. Note that she merely defines it by whether something is an original configuration. There's no connection to the usefulness of it. Does that mean that she thinks of creativity as unproductive? That an act of destruction is equal to an act of creation if the final configuration is original? Does she not think that intention has anything to do with creation, and that random acts or chaos is creative? Talk about a silly definition or obtuse writing!
In the two examples so far, the creative genius and this creation/transformation distinction, I think he's very clear when you read it within the context. If you aren't familiar with the concept of the "creative genius" (again, not original to him), you might be confused. That confusion might increase if you consider yourself a genius who's creative. And if you're simply reading that bit in isolation, you might not understand the contrast he is making with labor in general. There are plenty of sources of confusion. But that isn't helped when a reader skips to the middle of a book, past all of the context. It isn't helped when you don't know why he is writing something, and can only focus on the exact words he uses. Then it does become a silly argument about definitions with no context to help.
This isn't to say his language is always clear. As I mentioned earlier, he comes from a Kantian background where the philosophical language doesn't lend itself well to discussing objectivity. Much of what he says, especially in the epistemology/methodology section, can be seen as faulty in form. That is, any particular sentence may seem inaccurate or incorrect. In Rand's Marginalia (a terrible, terrible book), she tries a line by line dissection of Human Action pointing out each phrase that doesn't quite fit with her philosophical position. What bothers me most about that is how anti-contextual that approach is. Let's look at each sentence in isolation, and try to draw conclusions from it! That's a terrible approach. Sure, it'd be great if Mises had been an Objectivist and used our terminology and phrasing for everything. But he wasn't. The question is, did he properly identify reality? A faulty philosophical language can make valid concepts difficult to express, but that's not as important as whether the ideas are true.
So yes, there are parts of his writing that requires concentration on the context in order to fully grasp his point. But I don't think that's true of either of these examples. The points he made are clear within the context. If you want more than that, clarity without context, nothing will satisfy you.
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