Quot linguæ, tot homines

[Update of a post from January 2012]

[And, a rhyming version: 

   Quot linguas calles, tot homines vales.
   Karl Vossler's version:  "So viel Sprachen einer kann, so viel mal ist er ein Mensch."
(Replace Mensch by Mann, and you get a rhyming version of that.]

A venerable Latin tag, but I don’t really buy it.  If you spread yourself too thin, you run aground in the shallows:  there is no intellectual depth in maintaining a brain-deck of file-cards à la  book = Buch = livre = libro = kitâb …;  and the question, “How many languages do you speak?”  always makes me grind my teeth. (“No more than one at a time,” I sometimes growl.)  Pursuing multilingualism as a fetish  smacks of calculating-savants, quiz-winners, and that ilk.  Antiquity had its Mithridates of Pontus;  the ottocento, its Cardinal Mezzofanti:  but these polyglots were by no means philologists.

Nonetheless:

There is a quiditas, a je-ne-sais-quoi, a haeccéité  or quintessence, in each linguistic culture, sui generis and untranslatable.   To steep yourself deeply in these, particularly in a language with a long and intricate written history, like Latin or Arabic, or (at somewhat shallower time-depth, but overtaking those in later laps) English, German, or French.  Both at work and in my free time, I use other languages (a different mix depending on the context)  nearly as much as I use English, and am the better for it.   But the point is to go deep, one culture at a time, and not to display some multilingual multitasking like simultaneous tournament chess.   I know many people employed as linguists  who have never read through an entire book in the language that they work with, beyond Harry Potter in translation.  That seems sad.

Anyhow, here is a review, from this morning’s New York Times, of a book on multilingualism, Babel No More, which makes a useful distinction between multilinguals and hyperpolyglots.

(And for a beautiful and elaborate painted depiction of that ancient toppled tower, along with some entertaining philology, click here.)

[Update 18 March 2012] More ammo, from a staff writer of Science:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html?scp=2&sq=bhattacharjee&st=cse

A propos:

Hugo Schuchardt, best known as a Romance philologist, but who studied a remarkable range of languages, not excluding Basque and Berber, and indeed Arabic (which he traveled to Egypt to master) nonetheless wrote:

Wir glauben nicht an den Segen der Zweisprachigkeit;  wenn man mit Recht gesagt hat, qu’une population qui parle deux langues, a deux cordes à son arc, so hat man vergessen hinzuzufügen, daß keine dieser Sehnen  sehr straff ist.

-- Romanisches und Keltisches (1886), repr. in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 363

Note that this assessment did not, however, prevent him from pioneering the study of the neither-this-or-that Mischsprachen known as creoles;  he even put in a good word for those culturally decidedly slack-stringed confections -- not foam-born but test-tube-engendered -- the artificial entities Esperanto and Volapük.

[Update Oct 2014]
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/more-languages-better-brain/381193/

[Update Dec 2019]

The cool eye  and tart tongue  of Rebecca West  opines, in her Balkan travelogue:

…one of those strange polyglots  who seem to have been brought up in some alley  where several civilizations  pour out their ash-cans, since only bits and pieces have come their way, never the real meat.
-- Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), p.707

.

Ruined-Tower tableau

The spider spun her web

athwart the ruined vault

and bats and owls  nestled in those chambers

-- Washington Irving ,“The Legend of the Two Discreet Statues”, in The Alhambra (1832)

An Extra Special Christmas

            The Murphy Brothers were seldom in funds, and could not afford to buy gifts.   They just did the best that they could.

            One year  Joey had managed to scrape together some change  and buy a beer-mug for his brother.   But since it was only a single mug and not a pair, the present proved impractical, and Murphy left it in the box:  until the following Christmas, having nothing else to give, he rewrapped it, and gave it to Joey, placing it under the lone coleus that served them as a tree.

            In this manner the relic passed from one brother to the other, and then from the other brother back, down the years, on each Christmas day:  as the brothers grew slowly older, and the coleus grew dim, and went at last to its reward.   And in time, that practice lapsed,  and the object was put away on a high shelf, until such time as the mug might someday somehow find its mate.

            And then one Christmas,  it snowed and it snowed.

            It was cold in their office-apartment, since the heat had been shut off.  And so they went out to the city streets to gather kindling, though fireplace they had none.  For it was the birthday of the baby Jesus, and it was meet, that they should gather wood.  And yet they found no twig nor stick of it. 

            
 And so they went sorrowing home.

            Yet were astonished, as they opened the door, to be rocked back on their heels by a summer breeze, which blew out from a roomful of snow.

            And there amidmost, stood a towering spruce.   Beneath it, three presents, wrapped in red:  and the fruit of this tree was permitted to them.

            They sat awhile together, and discussed these strange developments.   Where could all this have come from?   Neither of them knew.

            They wondered what might be in the packages.  At length they decided they would have to find out.  Joey motioned for Murphy to begin.

            And so, curiosity overcoming him, Murphy untied the ribbon, and carefully unfolded the paper, and lifted the lid of the box.  Then both brothers leaned forward, and wondering, looked in.

            It was the Gift of Poverty.

            Then both brothers rejoiced, amazed, and embraced.  For this was a wondrous gift indeed:  formerly, they had merely been poor.

            With keen anticipation, Murphy unwrapped the second present.

            It was the Gift of Chastity.

            The brothers sighed, and crossed themselves.   “Thanks be to God,”  they said.  For the solace of connubial bliss had always been denied them, owing to their detective vows;  yet now, their very abstention, might be a sacrament.

 Then gazed together at the final package,  neither one daring to move.

            But yet at last   with terrible trembling fingers,   almost sobbing with expectancy:   as when the bridegroom, as yet untried,  on the wedding night, fumbles at the bodice of his spotless bride, -- managed somehow to unloose the wrapping  (even as the maiden, on that sweet night, bids farewell to her maidenhead, and unloosens her chestnut hair):   and there lay--

            The Gift of Obedience.

            This gift had quite eluded them,  back in reform-school days.  Since that time, the Murphy brothers had always been resigned to their lot in life; but now they did embrace it, as the very will of God.

             “We should drink to this!” cried Murphy, indicating (and just noticing) a vat of ale;  and went to the high shelf, to bring the old package down. 

            And took out -- lo! -- twin goblets of crystal,  and filled them  each  to the brim.

            “This is the best Christmas ever,”  Joey said.

[Notice:  A hymn appropriate to this offering, may be witnessed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2YPsfwSPGg&NR=1 ]

~

For further Murphy mystical mystery

-- a story that will haunt your dreams:

Murphy and the Magic Pawnshop

 Also available for your Nook

Further parables from this pen, may be savored here. 
.

The Brightening, though Frozen Solstice (December, 2019)

This time each year,  the sun doth wend,

signaling days-dying’s end.

Henceforth  throughout  the grateful lands

our daily dose of light  expands.

Thus do we, cheered  by this faint grace,

take heart for Winter’s chill embrace.

And though the brisk winds  scourge the earth,

look forward to  our Spring rebirth.

Christi dedico in nomine;
Gratias agimus, Domine.

1-wd poem

Caledonia!

For years    that word

was a poem in my ear.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

Mystical Animal tableau

tame storks    who stalked

majestically

among the beasts

-- James Michener, Poland (1983), p. 108

*Another* Day that will Live in Infamy

Historians have long wondered, how, as late as December 1941, with a world war raging, and a litany of Japanese grievances against the U.S., the officers and sailors at our principal Pacific naval base  were all sitting around with their thumbs up their butts, the ships berthed cheek-by-jowl, an impossibly alluring target.

A secondary puzzle was, did FDR have any advance intel that such an attack was likely, but ignored it?   (Let us set aside the conspiracy-theory that he knew but let it happen.) If so, he would take a seat beside Stalin, who likewise had been remarkably lackadaisical with respect to Nazi Germany, which had been waging blitzkrieg, but from whom he felt safe, owing to the piece of paper known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.  Stalin actually did have warning, from Japan-based master-spy Richard Sorge, and quite precise warning at that:    “Der Krieg wird am 22. Juni beginnen, ” a message sent on 15 June.   This was ignored.

Toleja so ...

A lesser-known possibility is that Washington did receive warning of an impending sneak-attack, and indeed from Sorge’s circle.   A Comintern memoirist who had repeated contact with Sorge  writes:

Kurz vor ihrem Hochgehen in Tokio   gab die Gruppe “Ramsay” [i.e., Sorge] noch eine hochbedeutsame Meldung  an zwei Adressaten durch:  Moskau und Washingtron.  Gewiß gelangte sie auf auf den Schreibtisch Stalins, vermutlich nicht auf den Schreibtisch Präsident Roosevelts:  die Meldung, daß die Japaner  ohne Kriegserklärung  auf den wichtigsten Flottenstützpunkt der USA im Pazifik, Pearl Harbor, für Anfang Dezember  unter strengster Geheimhaltung  vorbereiterten.
-- Ruth von Mayenburg, Hotel Lux (1978), p. 144

She goes on to state that Sorge’s Yugoslav coworker Branko Vukelić tipped off an American friend as to the impending attack, to no avail.

In any event, the lesson of 7 December was not promptly learned, for on 8 December, in the Philippines, another branch of the service was likewise caught with its breeches down.   Let Professor Wiki tell it:

Even though tracked by radar and with three U.S. pursuit squadrons in the air, when Japanese bombers of the 11th Kōkūkantai attacked Clark Field at 12:40 pm, they achieved tactical surprise. Two squadrons of B-17s were dispersed on the ground. Most of the P-40s of the 20th PS were preparing to taxi and were struck by the first wave of 27 Japanese twin-engine Mitsubishi G3M "Nell" bombers; only four of the 20th PS P-40Bs managed to take off as the bombs were falling.

A second bomber attack (26 Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" bombers) followed closely, then escorting Zero fighters strafed the field for 30 minutes, destroying 12 of the 17 American heavy bombers present and seriously damaging three others. Two damaged B-17s were made flyable and taken to Mindanao, where one was destroyed in a ground collision.

A near-simultaneous attack on the auxiliary field at Iba to the northwest by 54 "Betty" bombers was also successful: all but four of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron's P-40s, short on fuel and caught in their landing pattern, were destroyed No formal investigation took place regarding this failure as occurred in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. The Far East Air Force lost fully half its planes in the 45-minute attack, and was all but destroyed over the next few days, including a number of the surviving B-17s lost to takeoff crashes of other planes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines_Campaign_(1941%E2%80%9342)

Thus, not only December seventh, but December eighth,  is draped in crape.

Evolutions des chevaliers polonais

with maneuvers as graceful  

as the unfolding of a petaled flower

-- James Michener, Poland (1983), p. 93

Feu le roi (mort assassiné, 1934)

the   strange, soft   sound

of a whole      city

                       weeping …

[From: Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), p. 616]

Yaitse, 1936: Tableaux

When I awoke       and saw the sun

a pale-green blaze     in the treetops

~

watching water     clear as air

comb straight      the green weeds on the piers

[From: Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), p. 425]

Touching Down

We landed at Lisbon  at sunset.

The light was   Cognac-colored,

and there was a soft wind  off the water.

-- Nathan Heller, in 1 Feb 2016 The New Yorker

Betrachtungen eines Unphilosophischen (quater)

I don’t like purely philosophical works.  I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art, by way of seasoning;  but to make it one’s specialty  seems to me  as strange as eating nothing but horseradish.

-- Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (1957) (ch. XIII.16; Lara speaking)

Nicht vom Wetter spricht sie, nicht vom Schneider,

höchstens von den Grundproblemen  beider.

-- Christian Morgenstern

[I wrote the following around twenty years ago, before I was baptised.  Just stumbled on it while cleaning up some files. 

Since that time, I’ve read a fair amount of philosophy, often with pleasure, and dabbled in composing some.  But the treatment here of the cognitive problem does not need revision or retraction.]

I must conclude, reluctantly, that I am of a  not very philosophical cast of mind.  Intellectual, yes; thoughtful, I hope so; but philosophical, in the sense of spontaneously grappling with the questions that engage those denominated philosophers, alas not.

Had I never read a line of academic philosophy, I could contentedly have walked for seven decades down the lanes of life, kicking at stones and appreciating the trees, without once wondering, let alone worrying, whether a name denotes a universal, or rather a concept, rather than (snicker snicker) a thing. Left to my own devices, I would likely never have asked whether Being even had a nature. let alone what the bugger might be.

Such questions as these have never troubled my sleep; and it is only with the greatest difficulty than I can induce them to trouble my waking hours.  Yet we read, in the letters of our betters:

"What distinguishes a man from a word?  There is a distinction, doubtless."

--C.S. Pierce, "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities".

This I no more ponder than whether a hawk may be discerned from a handsaw -- indeed, it rather recalls the grotesque title of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.  Yet Peirce concludes, alarmingly, that "The word or sign which man uses  is the man himself."  Should we be troubled by this?

Doing philosophy – well, I seldom do.  But when reading philosophy – something never undertaken save after a sound night's sleep, in the company of pots of strong coffee – I have often had the horrible experience of carefully lucidly processing each phrase of a sentence as it comes along, then finding, when I reach the sentence end, that the meanings of the initial phrases have evaporated:  as were intelligence but a porthole on a passing landscape, seizing each piece clearly as it looms into view, but at the expense of losing the last.  (That was rather a long sentence itself; let us pause.)

            (Pause.)

            Herewith a specific instance, taken from a little work in paperback (Arthur Danto, What Philosophy Is) known for being a relatively clear and non-technical introduction for the layman:

            "It is demonstrable that, for any system of sentences – any theory, say – which satisfies exceedingly weak and undemanding formal criteria, just this alleged desideratum can be achieved."

            This is not a long sentence; and for the first two-thirds of it, it actually calls up to me very visual ideas.  "Any system of sentences – any theory, say": I picture these sentences as speech-balloons, dangling from a mobile, with little hand-icons pointing at other sentences which they imply or from which they derive.  "Which satisfies exceedingly weak and undemanding formal criteria":  here our hypothetical theory is embodied as a sort of Doctor Watson, waving his hand with bluff good humor, in dismissal of the trifling demands made upon him: "No trouble at all, sir!"  And as for that initial "It is demonstrable that", well, we all know that "It is demonstrable that P" means (for the plain man) just that "P", and moreover gives you license to swallow P without troubling yourself to prove it or make it plausible, or even to understand it very deeply:  just one of those solid facts that people our Watsonian society, which the tradespeople have somehow seen to.

            Then comes "just this alleged desideratum".  Alas: this sends you haring back to the previous paragraph, or previous page.  And the "alleged" is troubling:  do we desire this (whatever it is), or do we not?  This centrifugal tension makes subtly more difficult the task of going back and finding the antecedent for "this".  It's not like "she": hmm, hmm, complicated, this, -- aha, Natasha Nikolayevna.

            Now:  one fact about philosophy, which makes the subject hard to follow, is rather to its credit.  Namely:  we never know what might be called into question.  So we can't just sit back and nod  as bits of received opinion are spooned into our open mouths.

            In many non-philosophical areas of life, we can count on so much that is unchallengeable, that their arguments are like sermons in a lazy church.  We can doze; we can idly watch the fly buzzing across the stained-glass windows; and miss nothing that is essential, for we have already all that is essential, the rest is embroidery.  As, in the radical Sixties, syllogism went rather like this.

Granted:
     (1) Amerikkka is a honkey-assed imperialist pig
     (2) The righteous Vietnamese people are righteous, popular, and Vietnamese.

From this it follows:
     (3) Blah de blah de blah de blah (rahht ohwn!) 

Everyone goes home satisfied.

What does it mean, to be "unphilosophical"?  It cannot spring simply from stupidity – which is a general term; too much counter-evidence in collateral fields.  Nor ignorance – not after having sat at the feet of the philosophical:  for, failure to absorb their wise lessons would have to be due either to stupidity (already ruled out of court) or "unphilosophicality" : quite possibly present, but this is the quality to be explained.  (I recall a case from some years ago, in which some Brazilian peasants, or Indians, were brought to trial for having killed quite a number of people: and were acquitted, on the grounds of "invincible ignorance".  A charming verdict; egomet etiam, nolo contendere; but again, this is the explicandum, not the explicans.)

            One possible partial explanation is that, apparently, despite gross this that and the other thing, I do actually, more or less, in some sense, believe in God.  This may even be largely unconscious, but it does determine things.  As:  Good heavens!  Here He went and made Eden for our grandsires to saunter in, and angels to attend our fallen birth – and you're worried about the existence of tables??!??!*  Get a life, man!  Get an afterlife!

[*On page 100 of Danto's booklet, we have an image of the philosophically inclined scientist  swallowing an atom  but straining at a table.]

It is a stylistic characteristic of the philosophic genre, that its reported combatants are generally abstract and shadowy, unnamed figures.  Not Gould vs Dawkins, or Quine vs Chomsky, but: the Realist; the Representationalist; the Phenomenalist, each with his separate agenda; curiously dispassionate partisans, like players in a masque. 

            In one sense, this should make for clarity.  As, I may know a whole bunch about Chomsky, or Chesterton, or Orwell, but it is different from the bunch of things known by disputant P., and different still from the sub-bunch of things that have caught P's attention in the present case.  Hence, when P. says: "….(Orwell)….", a million bells go off in my head, which may obscure his message.  Whereas, when the don refers to the Realist, there is no clanging, nothing to refer to but the Realist's résumé.

            And yet and yet… It is with this as with the medieval allegories, where ((Danger)) orates to ((Faithful)) anent ((Beauty)), and the eyes turn to glass.  These creatures have no form – no warts – no tits – it is difficult to attend, hard to become engaged.

            This lack of philosophical engagement has few consequences for the practical matters of life, such as renewing a driver's license.  Still, it bothers me.  For, philosophy is reputedly fundamental – indeed, is so virtually by definition.  Smart people are presumably interested in problems of ontology, while stupid people are interested in football scores.  [A surprisingly large number of smart people are interested in baseball.  This cannot, then, be an intellectual failing; but it may be a perversion.  The question remains open.]

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

Yet I am troubled by questions of epistemology, for the good and simple reason that certain people whom I know  (those notorious Other Minds, in whose complete integrity I believe implicitly) seem to know (or say that they know) what I don't know; nor know I  how (or whether) they do know it.

As:

CEO (cigar clenched in right mouth-corner, speaking laconically out of the left):  Nyaahh… Dis noo magneddic-stawritch standid, it'll nevah catch on, da mahhkit'll riject it.

Me (thinks): How the F*** does he know that?!?!?

~

On a good day, then, and with a good book, I can – granted, not do, but at least – read philosophy, and engage with it:  an EKG would reveal busy little blips and bumps, I'm not just flatlining with the book open, the mental equivalent of an all-day sucker.  And admittedly, most of the enjoyment comes from the crackling style (as with Quine) or the apt examples (Strawson, Geach), rather than from any genuine penetration into the delicious mysteries of what it means, what it really means, to say that x equals (wait for it) x.  So the author of the book need not feel that his labor is wasted:  here is John Q. Public with his engine turning over and that author's very book in his hands (those hands which might equally as well have held a breast, or a beer).  And yet – the book once laid upon the night-table, all its arguments and all its concerns  go out like a light.

            It is not so with, say, poetry.  To read poetry before retiring is as dangerous as drinking espresso for a nightcap: I toss and turn, the lingering rhythms like a hot blanket, which cannot be cast off till I drag myself out of bed, snatch a bathrobe, and WRITE - WRITE - INDITE!  Whereas philosophical propositions  spark no further fever.  I lay down the volume, fall into a dreamless sleep, and perhaps the next day have some vague lingering recollection – "Yes, that 'x' thing, it was equal to, let me see, was it 'y'? -- no!  'x', that's it!  x = x.  My, the things one learns."  Or:  “Is it true, that snow is white?  Mmmm..mmyes!”

            Perhaps a policy of not asking overmany fundamental questions too often, is not so much intellectual laziness, as the better part of epistemological valor.  For, truly to nail down the simplest everyday phenomenon, is largely beyond the reach of science.
(Physics is really good at addressing problems that it invented itself, like muons;  not so much when it comes to snowflakes, or lightning, or wind.)

            In addition, when you go to the scientist, thou sluggard, you find him not exactly bent over the philosophy-of-science books either.   And this, not only among those sooty alley-dwellers the chemists, with their practical pots, but even those austere, unstained – theoretical physicists, nay, mathematicians.  Mathematics does not need metamathematics to go about its business, whether devising formulae that will predict the stresses of actual bridges, or proving theorems about ideal manifolds in n-space.  (We may define pure mathematics as the subject in which Bertrand Russell does not know what he is talking about, though what he says is none the less true.)

~     ~     ~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(Ich bin Thomas Mann, and I approved this message.)

~        

Other  tragic examples:

Valéry était atteint  de cécité philosophique.

-- Etienne Gilson, Linguistique et philosophie (1969), p. 234

Freud himself  confessed to an insensitivity to philosophy -- or at any rate, to academic philosophizing -- after reading a book a colleague had recommended:

“You cannot imagine how alien all those philosophical convolutions  seem to me.   The only feeling of satisfaction they give me  is that I take no part in this pitiable waste of intellectual powers.  Philosophers no doubt believe that  in such studies  they are contributing to the development of human thought;  but every time, there is a psychological  or even a psychopathological problem  behind them.”

-- quoted in Ernest Jones, Freud: The Last Phase (1957), p. 140.

(Assignment:  How do these observations apply to the case of Wittgenstein?  Discuss)

Latest update:  
"Even when I have moved away from observation,  I have carefully avoided any contact with philosophy proper.  This avoidance  has been greatly facilitated  by my constitutional incapacity."
--  quoted in Ernest Jones, Freud: The Last Phase (1957), p.335

The Ontology of History (updated)

The pageant of all that has happened is, to begin with, a blooming buzzing confusion.   Historically, one aim of the chronicler has been to slice up some of it, and dress it up into a narrative that will be entertaining or edifying for the audience.  More analytically-minded historians (such as Ibn Khaldun and his successors) have set themselves an additional task:  To make sense of it.

ابن خلدون

A wide-ranging comparative historian acknowledges the wealth of data which confront the historiographer, but

The “intelligible fields of study”, the comparable units of history, remain inconveniently few for the application of the scientific technique.

-- Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (12 volumes; 1934-61; introduction, last paragraph)

One classic move is to organize the ever-mingling, ever-onrushing flow of events  into coherent thematic chunks;  as:  the Dark Ages; the Renaissance; the Reformation;  the Enlightenment.   Others refer to calendric stretches but, if so, normally must modify the defining termini a quo and ante quem  to reflect actual historical development:  thus, “the long nineteenth century” (which lasted into the Edwardian autumn, and winked out forever at Sarajevo), and “the Sixties”,  which  in the good sense  began with JFK’s election, and  in the bad sense  with his assassination;  and then petered out ignobly in the early seventies.

Anyhow, huge subject, won’t treat it here, but merely serve up a couple of quotes specifically related to Islamic historiography -- thus posting at least a place-holder for the topic, in our wildly successful “Ontology of …” series (soon to be featured on bubble-gum cards, suitable for trading).

“Classic” or “classical period” is likewise a construct, all the more obviously so  since it is being borrowed from one phenomenon, Greek and Roman antiquity, and used to somehow periodize another quite different one, Islam.

-- F. E. Peters, preface to A Reader on Classical Islam (1994)

History is a seamless garment;  periodization is a convenience of the historian, not a fact of the historical process.  By choosing carefully, one can slant history without any resort to actual falsehood.  For example, a writer on relations between the United States and Japan can start with Hiroshima, or he can start with Pearl Harbor.

-- Bernard Lewis, “In Defense of History” (1997/1999), reprinted in From Babel to Dragomans (2004), p. 389

He goes on to make an exact parallel with the historiography of the Crusades, of intense current relevance, but too hot to handle in this space;  consult the (excellent) original article.

The essential human unit  in which man’s nature is fully realised  is not the individual, [n]or a voluntary association which can be dissolved or altered or abandoned at will, but  the nation.

--Isaiah Berlin, “Nationalism”, repr. in Against the Current (1979), p. 342

(Cf. individual vs. group selection  in Darwinism.)

[Afternote] We sometimes also find explanatory periodization, not by historians, but by the people themselves:

The Aztecs … sought relief … from the oppressive idea of eternity, by breaking it up into distinct cycles … each of several thousand years’ duration.  There were four of these cycles;  and at the end of each, by the agency of the elements, the human family was swept from the earth, and the sun blotted out from the heavens, to be again rekindled.

-- William Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), p. 53

~

Glanced at above is the internal ontology of historiography -- its structure and staffage.  There is also the matter of its external ontology -- how it fits in with other disciplines.

“History is an art, like the other sciences,” a felicitious paradoxical epigram crafted by Veronica Wedgwood.

--John Lukacs, The Future of History (2011), p. 81

.

Modus Ponens Paradox

Dixit Algorizmi:

* All Elephants are Mortal.

* Babar is an Elephant.

* Yet -- Babar is Eternal.

How do we account for this discrepancy?

For discussion, see:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/12/modus-tollens-tollendus-est-iterum-re.html

For additional crispy thought-food, click on any of the Labels below. 

For those who could care a fig for philosophy(**), and are interested only in the mighty Elephant King, click here.

(**) Technically known as the ficus philosophiae.

Red // Light

Then  the  sun,

setting behind the houses,

pointed as though with a finger

at everything red in the street --

the red tops of the dragoons’ caps,

a red flag trailing on the ground,

and the red specks and threads

   of blood on the snow.

-- Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
(1957; transl. Hayward & Harari)

(This is just the latest   of our aperçus of light.

 Click on the Label below,  for the lot of them.)

Gopnik on Popper

Some time back, we examined the fraught subject of academic discipleship  in this essay:

Chomsky, Freud, and the Problem of Acolytes

And now this postscript:

In The New Yorker for 1 April 2002,  Adam Gopnik recounts his pilgrimage, while still a grad student, to  the home of the philosopher Karl Popper, living in prickly retirement (the article is titled “The Porcupine”) in the English countryside:

Many years ago, when I was young and still in search of wisdom,  I went on a pilgrimage to meet the man I thought was the wisest in the world.

The sage’s relations with his philosophic colleagues  had  for long  been far from collegial;  indeed, the occasion for Gopnik’s publishing his meditation now, was the appearance of a book built entirely upon the long-ago incident of Wittgenstein threatening Popper with a poker (presumably upon the theory that “this tutorial room is not big enough for two philosophical prima donnas!”).  In his long talk with Gopnik, Popper denied he had ever received any useful criticism from colleagues.   And as for acolytes:

He smiled sadly.  “All of my students are attacking me now.  Three of my students, all of them I helped to get positions, to get chairs, and they know this, and still they attack me personally.  You know, when you do things for people, there are two types of reactions.  There are those who cannot forget you for it, and those who cannot forgive you for it.”

Gopnik ends his essay with a bravura what-if:

Had Jesus invited a few Pharisees over for the Supper … it might not have been his last.  Dining with disciples is a perilous business.

Ottoman Monostich

A  chilling  light

the color of the iciness outside

filtered through  the upper part  of the small hallway window

-- Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red (1998)

Glimpses of Eternity

[Time: 1937

 Place:  Spain, at the front, where Orwell was fighting the forces of Franco]

                    (1)  

When an aeroplane swoops down
and uses its machine-gun,

the sound,   from below,

is like a fluttering of wings.

                (2)  

As the yellow dawn  comes up behind us,

the Andalusian sentry,  muffled in his cloak,

begins singing.

Across no man’s land,

a hundred or two hundred yards away,,

you can hear the Fascist sentry   also singing.

-- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938; publ. 1943)

Sara(h) / Abra(ha)m

The following question was put to Dr Massey:

Q:  A colleague who goes by her birth-certificate name Sarah recounts that she was accosted by a fellow who admonished her to identify as (that ill-omened coinage)  “Sara”, the initial designation of Abraham’s wife, on the grounds that the -h conferred later was “honorific”. --  Now indeed the name patriarch himself, originally Abram,  likewise later achieved an extension, honoris causâ.
Question:  Is it alphabetically the same h in both cases?  And is there any sense in describing it (assuming they be the same) as an “honorific affix” (the way -ón in Spanish can be an augmentative affix), or is there nothing morphosemantically lofty about the names themselves, which merely happen to have been conferred for the purposes of honor?

The good doctor replied by return of post:

A: The person who told her this was simply wrong across the board. First off, the Matriarch's original name was not Sara, but Sarai. When her name is changed to Sarah is is simply moving to the Hebrew version of her original Aramaic name, both of which mean something like "princess."

I don't read the name changes as conferring honor at all. In the case of Abram --> Abraham, we have an actual semantic change, Exalted Father --> Father of a Multitude. In the case of Sarai--> Sarah, it might be similar to a man named Mohamed changing his name to Muhammad, i.e., making the name more purely Arabic.

The Hebrews seemed aware that, while they spoke their own distinct Semitic language, their origins had Aramaic swirling around. Deut 26:5, "My father was a wandering Aramean," referring to the Patriarchal age. NB also Gen 31:47, in which Laban, Jacob's uncle, calls a memorial stone by an Aramaic name, but Jacob gives it a Hebrew name.

The final h in feminine names and nouns in Hebrew is vocalic, not consonantal. It's equivalent to the taa' marbuta. As a result, it is added by convention in English transliteration, but unnecessary. Sara and Sarah are the same name, basically.

Words of the Day: sublunary, postlapsarian, …

Re Melanesians:

“When a native says that he is a man, he means that he is a man and not a ghost; not that he is a man and not a beast.”

-- Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1896)

~

Perhaps the first word we heard, ourselves still children, which, rather than simply denoting something new (like a previously unencountered animal), designated something old in a new way, and thus reframed us, was:   Earthling.   In terms of reference, the word is synonymous with people;  but its intension  (with an -s-, not -t-; a term of art among linguistic philosophers, referring to the way it picks its referent out) is different.  (Thus likewise morning star and evening star, both referring -- though from different lookouts -- to Venus.) 

We meet this first in science fiction, and it permanently expands the mind.   When the exploits of the spacemen are forgotten  along with other tales of the nursery, we yet retain the spaciousness of the new view.  “I went to the mall with three of my friends”;  “I went to the mall with three…. fellow Earthlings”:  we sense the wider world beyond our plankboard stage.

(We just came across a mirror-term to earthling:

Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space  were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings.

-- Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1991), p. 172 )

Another take on the same referents (namely, our earthly selves) is human.  Though the word is of course by now quite common, it was not always so, being a scientific word, borrowed from Latin (humanus, from homo; if there be a further relation to humus, then we have an interesting parallel -- again ‘earthling’, but now in the sense of ‘sons of the soil’).   By this term we are distinguished from animals;  but as everyone learns that perfectly well from an infant age, we do not need this word to teach us the species perspective.

Rather otherwise is mortal -- again from Latin, from the word for ‘death’.  In this secularized age, the average reader might think of this as a kind of moldy Sunday-school word, but the original sense among the pagan Greeks and Romans  was as opposed, not to God, but to the immortals -- the gods.  This is the sense that survives in the phrase “What fools we mortals be” (in Shakespeare’s most robustly pagan play).
An unexpected limitation in this word immortal  is evidenced by the following splendid epigram:

The actual infinity of a Platonist  is as seen by a mathematician who is eternal;

The potential infinity of the Intuitionists  is as seen by a mathematican who is merely immortal.

This is brilliant.  We expect the distinction to be between an idealized immortal mathematician, with all the time in the world to count to infinity, and a mortal one, who feels time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, though he might make do with Supertasks:  accordingly, we initially take eternal simply as a stylistic synonym for immortal, before the second strophe brings us up short.  The Cumaean sibyl was merely immortal -- and consequently longed for easeful death.   Whereas the Platonist beholds the world of Forms  sub specie aeternitatis.  

(The epigram above comes not from a treatise of theology, but from a book of set theory and its logic.  I am quoting from memory, and possibly amiss, since Google finds, not that, but mostly philosophical and theological works.

-- Ha!  wait, found it, nestling on my shelves.   It is from Understanding the Infinite, by Shaughan Lavine.  He states it thus:

The idealization of experience that yields the actual infinite of classical mathematics  is that of the Eternal Mathematician, while the one that yields the potential infinite of intuitionistic mathematics  is that of the Immortal Mathematician.

But I like my misquotation rather better, and so shall leave it.)

~

A particularly delightful word,  containing, as were it a microcosm, a whole philosophy, is the word sublunary:  meaning, in the old cosmology, all that is to be found beneath the Sphere of the Moon.   (The allusion is not to the Moon’s own sphericity, wonderful though that be,  but to the celestial shell whereon that glowing queen is constrained to move  in regal splendour.)  Which is simply to say:  our everyday world;  except that now, instead of moving about in it like a tadpole in a pond, taking it all for granted, our thoughts now float upwards, and our hearts do yearn.

A simple swain -- yet fain to peer, beyond the sphere

The sublunary world is, in other words, this life Here Below.  And this brings us to a curious etymological fact:  for in Arabic, there are two common words meaning ‘world’:   al-`âlam, which is neutral, like world;  and al-dunyâ, which adds the notion of a contrast:  though now, not to any physical supralunary realm, but to al-âxirah ‘the hereafter’.   Morphologically, dunyâ is a feminine elative adjective, meaning ‘lower, nearer’:  thus precisely encapsulating the notions expressed by sublunary and Here Below, but in a single morpheme.

(The term sublunary has joined its age-mates in the medieval museum;  yet we still retain a kindred metaphor, "everything under the sun".)

~

At last we arrive at the final word of our title, postlapsarian :  a word that contains multitudes.  It refers to life subsequent to the Disaster in the Garden -- the only life that any of us ordinary folks have ever known.

In Adam’s Fall

we sinned all.

Our earliest ancestors, rueing the day

*

For a portrait of Grace and Reprobation,

try this:

The Penitent and the Impenitent Thief

 *

Once again, it is a word that picks us out, every one of us (for even Eve and Adam were postlapsarian at the end), but in a new way, thus differing most starkly from the bland philosophical agnosticism of the coreferential but non-synonymous term human.   It bears within it a deep and stark perspective -- one which we are inclined to disregard, as we scramble for sales at the mall, or lounge back glassy-eyed before the goggle-box (the behavior, however, belying the complacency).  

Yet in a better age, it was borne well in mind;  as when Condillac, in the preface to his L’art de penser (1780), though that work is seen in retrospect as having paved the way to atheism, yet was careful to remark,  that his analyses apply only to the postlapsarian soul:  much as a myrmecologist  (one more modest than Edward Wilson), should preface his monograph with the caveat that the generalizations made therein  might not apply to the world outside the termitary.   Our favorite Neothomist speaks of

… la précaution qu’il prend,  au début de son Art de penser, de rappeler qu’il va décrire l’âme telle qu’elle est à présent, après le péché originel.  Avant le péché, elle avait des idées  antérieures à l’usage qu’elle fait des sens,

«mais les choses ont changé  depuis sa désobéissance».

-- Etienne Gilson, Linguistique et philosophie (1969), p. 28

 Condillac, perhaps having second thoughts about what he unleashed 

We are, thus, all of us, earthlings, mortals, sublunary and postlapsarian.   Each of these words picks us out from among all else in the Creation, yet each from a different angle, in a way that enlarges our humanity.

~

Linguistic footnote:  We have chosen these philosophically rich words for the fun of it; but the basic phenomena here under discussion  occur more widely.  Thus cordate and nephrophoric (in their somewhat specialized use among philosophers) ‘having a heart’ and ‘having kidneys”:  non-synonymous but co-referential.

Or, to take an example quite similar to that of sublunary:

The expression dry land evokes the ocean in a way that land itself does not,  and by this very fact seems filled with sea breezes -- or rather, tempests, since the particular light in which the land is thereby set, is as a place of safety, reached at last after perilous voyages.  "Earthling"-style designation of the denizens of this default environment, from the salty perspective of the mariner: landlubbers.
Likewise terra firma:  it’s a place where you can finally find your foothold, after your return -- O Earthling -- from your voyage to outer space.

~

[update July 2020]

 

Mensch is a rather friendly-sounding German for any human being;  in Yiddish-English, a mensch is a solid, kind-hearted guy.   In the following, the word is contrasted invidiously with ‘policemen’, who thus are delimited outside the circle of humanity:

“ein Mensch schwer und vier Polizisten leicht verletzt. „ https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article211457365/Stuttgart-Festnahmen-wegen-Auseinandersetzungen-vier-Polizisten-verletzt.html#Comments

Reader comments:

“ein Mensch schwer und vier Polizisten leicht verletzt. „ So klingt linker Sprachgebrauch. Macht ihr Journalisten schon unterbewusst. Als ob Polizisten keine Menschen sind.

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Ein Mensch und 4 Polizisten- habt ihr das aus Versehen aus einem linksextremen Kampfblatt übernommen??

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