mills

A syphilitic Friedrich Nietzsche in the chapter of Ecce Homo titled “Why I am so Clever,” though I should add that this is an example of an idea -amor fati- not without its value despite the increasing dementia of its author. I came across it again while reading Wikipedia’s brief treatment of Nietzsche’s comments concerning eternal return, which related to the previous post.

That idea is probably familiar to most from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which questions at its outset whether the lightness of an existence that vanishes irretrievably into the past is terrible or fortunate; would it better for everything that happens to happen eternally, so to speak?

It’s worth noting that physicists would dispute the assumptions these questions make about time; the great Unburying the Lead quoted Albert Einstein recently:“For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

Update: Nick Barr noted that “the whole syphilis thing is probably untrue,” an assertion which surprised me as the last time I read Nietzsche it seemed fairly widely accepted; much of his lifelong medical trouble is explained by such a diagnosis. But Barr has scholarship on his side, and I thank him for the correction; it appears now to at least be again in dispute, and strong arguments against syphilis have been made.

Avital Ronell. Is she right? Remember: both knowledgeability and intelligence have willed and unwilled components (including: genetics, class, development, luck). If intelligence has a moral quality because of its impact on the participatory polity, then stupidity is a moral lapse due to its effects.

This means that whether stupidity is “willed” or not, whether it is the result of developmental aberrations or a lack of access to education or a lazy preference for partying or a poverty of inspiration or a resentful incuriosity, its negative impact on the public good makes it immoral. Whom shall we blame, morally, for stupidity?

Ronell includes in that paragraph, from her book Stupidity, a mention of Hannah Arendt’s frustrated effort to determine how stupid Adolf Eichmann was and what the effect of that stupidity really was on his deeds. The effort to assess how error affects “the most dangerous failures of human endeavor” reminds me of my favorite Errol Morris quote: “Error is the central feature of human existence.”

Errol Morris asserts, and I believe, that intelligence offers only very flimsy protection from error; I see much historical and contemporary evidence that it is nearly as likely -in some of its contortions, likelier- than stupidity to produce disaster.

Petichou linked to an article on some of the preoccupations of contemporary physicists, and I was struck by the paragraph above; Krauss’ is a curious concern.

It is often noted that one of the defining qualities of our universe is its comprehensibility, but it might just as well be said that comprehension is a defining quality of mind. This symmetry between the knowable universe and the knowing mind reflects an important quality of the latter: it does not merely observe, record, and inductively detect intelligible connections.

Rather: it encompasses, interiorizes, virtualizes, and explains holistically. That is to say that the mind is an organ which can contain within itself accurate models of all phenomena in the form of explanations. These models are akin to virtualizations: we can recreate within our minds even what we cannot observe, and we can do so such that those recreations are astonishingly isomorphic to their real counterparts.

This is the metaphorical basis for cognition: we construct metaphorical models (theories, ideas, terms) which retain the logical properties and relations of their subjects so that we are not dependent on accessibility for knowledge. We cannot, for example, see the Big Bang; the perplexing flow of time prevents it. Yet we can model it with incredibly acuity, and our virtualizing computational minds allow us to extract from those models conclusions which predict and explain the behavior of the physical universe.

Nothing about the multiverse would be different, regardless of its observational accessibility. I am surprised to read Krauss’ epistemological anxiety, since it would be an event unprecedented in the history of physical reality were we to encounter something fundamentally incomprehensible. I imagine David Deutsch, in particular, would object that such a development would be unlikely given the evolution of mind within physical reality, an evolution which has allowed the former to contain the latter with profound accuracy.

(In this sense, mind –including its externalized components, such as computer networks- may be the only element of reality which can in theory contain reality, although Walker Percy claimed that mind cannot, as a semiotic matter, contain itself: hence the success of the sciences and the failures of modern selfhood).

I have mentioned this paragraph at the conclusion of Book IX of Plato’s Republic (trans. by Jowett) before, but I remain curious: what is the traditional accounting for these sentences, which taken on their face seem to at least hint at an intended metaphorical reading of the entire work?

Note too that such a reading is quite a lot more interesting than the ordinary and unhappy literal examination of his implausible ideas about governance, with their implied historicism and teleology. What would it mean to “live after the manner” of the city Plato describes?

(And how insufferable a first-year class on The Republic can be, with all the students bored with what they consider manifestly indefensible authoritarian ideas! My peers considered Plato a proto-fascist and saw nothing of interest in his arguments. But if we’d not taken it as a revolutionary action-plan, it might have been more compelling).

Allan Bloom’s translation differs a bit:

“But in heaven,” I said, “perhaps, a pattern is laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees. It doesn’t make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere. For he would mind the things of this city alone, and of no other.”

Last, and for nostalgia’s sake, from the first translation I read, by Sterling and Scott, back at Bard in the days when girls made fun of me for having a website and I looked liked Harry Potter:

It makes no difference whether such a city now exists or ever will. But perhaps its prototype can be found somewhere in heaven for him who wants to see. Seeing it, he will declare himself its citizen. The politics of this city will be his politics and none other.

I put the question to the academics and sages and thinkers and those, like me, with no credentials at all. Ideas?

Erwin Schrödinger, in the absolutely wonderful What is Life? (which you can read online). He argues that the only logical conclusion one can draw from the statistical facticity of determinism, given our structure, size, and subjugation to the laws of science, is that consciousness is not individual but universal and -so to speak- at the base of all things; in the words of the Upanishads, which he cites, Atman is Brahman.

The book is fascinating, and the co-discoverer of DNA’s nature claims it anticipated and sped his research: significant praise for a work by a physicist. Beyond its discussion of the basis of life in a physical sense, it contains Schrödinger’s thoughts on mind, a phenomenon of special complexity and meaning that is taken for granted despite being scarcely understood. In “The Mystic Vision,” he wrote:

“Knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it… For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceiveable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours… is, in a certain sense, the whole… This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula… ’Tat tvam asi’ — this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.’ Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you … For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”

I find the insistence of a Nobel laureate such as Schrödinger that these ideas are to be taken as literal descriptions of the world, not as metaphors in any sense, to be extraordinarily interesting.

Aeschylus, quoted by Robert F. Kennedy in his speech on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and brought to mind by Matt Langer (who, with Brainland, notes that this is Kennedy’s own translation).

Update: the amazing Superfluidity, who actually knows whereof he speaks, says it is not Kennedy’s translation, and offers some discussion of the text; it’s awesome.

Franz Kafka, to Oskar Baum. Kafka doesn’t mean that Kierkegaard illuminates a Christian world which is alien to his Judiasm; he elsewhere wrote that Kierkegaard “is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like a friend.”

Indeed, Kafka’s Judiasm had as its greatest effect his preoccupation with gnosis and textual indeterminacy, with an endless exegetical pursuit of truth long since vanished from the word and the world. To a lesser extent, it provided an atmosphere and some iconography for his mind, and no German-speaking Jewish man living in Prague in the early 20th century could escape the relentless othering that so dislocated and alienated him.

But reductive analyses fail clumsily with Kafka, who was a modernist writer more than a Jew or a neurotic or a Czech or a European or a mystic. It is in his modernism, which we largely share -post merely being a prefix- that we find what put the Kierkegaardian territory “almost” beyond reach:

For Kierkegaard the absurd -the suprarational- remained an alternative to the world of reductive, superficial reason; for Kafka, the absurd -the irrational- had become the world of superficial contemporaneity. What was transcendence for Kierkegaard was, in distorted form, a reality for Kafka: the senseless world of anti-rational, post-human social derangement.

The territory of religious commitment as a turning-against-the-world was almost inaccessible to Kafka, who saw the world turning against itself; Kierkegaard drew inspiration from Abraham’s irrational willingness to murder his son, while Kafka saw that soon, functionaries would commit atrocities by the millions without asking for a rationale.

This is why Kierkegaard is timeless -Wittgenstein said: “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.” Kafka, on the other hand, wasn’t a saint but a prophet: he saw as early as anyone what modernism meant: reason run amok and no solace beyond reason, no leap permitted.

(Note: the awesome Greg Brown and I have been arguing over whether fiction or non-fiction is superior, is more real, in Meaghano’s comments; I think Kafka’s prescience is a good example of why the novel will always illuminate more than the essay: we must imagine before we describe).

Aldous Huxley, quoted by AZspot and cited by Daniel Holter (who are both great). I have never cared for this form of analysis, which establishes a perceiving elect -generally the very educated- as capable of distinguishing ‘authentic’ happiness from suggestible, hypnotized ersatz-happiness. Note the wording: the clever leaders can trick people into “loving” their servitude.

A feat of some skill: the total manipulation of the rebellious, recalcitrant, omnivorously demanding, inconsistent, fickle human species! What brilliance these leaders possess, mastering mass psychology as none ever have from their smoke-filled rooms and lulling us all into our “false” happiness!

And only the hero-savant to tell us: “No, you’re not really happy! You’re not really free! You don’t want what you think you want, love what you think you love! Read my books and learn of your secret slavery!”

It is parlor-game intellectualism; Huxley will always have the trump card: “You only think you’re happy!” But if you have any respect for the individual, for the moral agency of man, you see at once how ludicrously elitist and epistemologically unjustifiable it is. If the individual says he loves his life and is happy, how can we falsify this claim? With Huxley’s aesthetics! “No one could be happy with such a life!”

But democracy means we accept that people are not all pleased by the same things, and Huxley’s vision of profound conditioning is merely a very fancy form of condescension and snobbery: the ordinary man, what a lump of clay his mind is! So easily tricked! And television: what trash!

This is the first step towards tyranny, of course: reduce the individual to the status of a passive and malleable animal. Shall he be rescued from the capitalist democracy he thinks he favors? A revolution may be needed! A war is already underway, it’s just undetected by the sheep! Violence may be required to free humanity, whether they think they’re enslaved or not, whether they want liberating or not!

(See also: A New Nadir’s very good response about Huxley and social criticism in general).

Xenophanes, quoted by Karl Popper in “The Beginnings of Rationalism” and cited by the excellent Matt Young (who, along with Superfluidity, will surely have wiser commentary on Popper than I ever did).

The quote in full:

The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black while the the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw and could sculpture like men, then horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and each would then shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of its own.

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us; but in the course of time, through seeking, men find that which is better…

These things are, we conjecture, like the truth.

But as for certain truth, no man has known it, nor will he know it; neither of the gods, nor yet of all the things of which I speak. And even if by chance he were to utter the final truth, he would himself not know it: for all is but a woven web of guesses.

In anticipating Popper’s brilliant description of how we know what we know, presented alongside his solution to the problem of induction, Xenophanes demonstrates again: “There is nothing new under the sun.”