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)

Burmese Blues

There was something horrible  in that blue, blinding sky,

stretching on and on  over Burma and Siam.

[--George Orwell, Burmese Days (1934)]

Modus tollens tollendus est ! (iterum re-updated anew)

In philosophy there are very few  and perhaps no valid  logical-impossibility  or reductio ad absurdum  proofs.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  101

Wer A sagt, muss auch B sagen.

-- old folk-saying

Die bürgerliche Stellung des Widerspruchs

-- L. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, #125

An example of epistemological ‘character armor’:

All scientific research programmes may be characterized by their ‘hard core’.  The negative heuristic of the programme  forbids us to direct the modus tollens at this ‘hard core’.  Instead, we must use our ingenuity to articulate or even invent ‘auxiliary hypotheses’, which form a protective belt around this core, and we must redirect the modus tollens  to these.

-- Imre Lakatos, “Morphology of Scientific Research Programs”, in I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970), p. 133

In political or religious ideology, there are obvious analogues of this ‘hard core’.  (E.g. 'sacred cows'.)

~

[This exercise originally began as a simple application of cool, unruffled logic  to a sociopolitical topic too hot to handle in less rarified terms.  The point was, If you were logically consistent, you would … (taceo).  But a working-out of the general intellectual idea  led, inevitably, towards that domain (mathematics, logic itself) where the very idea of consistency is most at home;  and led, less obviously, to a kind of backhanded defence of inconsistency  (wherein we follow our countryman Emerson, in his depreciation of that ‘hobgoblin of little minds’).

Modus tollens is that figure whereby, when a proposition entails a falsehood, that proposition is infirmed.   The procedure finds general acceptance among the logically inclined.  This essay considers cases where otherwise logical people nonetheless kick against the pricks of this restriction.

We now return to the original plan.]

~      ~      ~

It should be obvious that the fundamental objections to racism and sexism … apply equally to speciesism.

-- Peter Singer,  Animal Liberation (1975), p. 6; quoted in Stephen Schwartz, A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy (2012), p. 282.

Singer’s proposition has the form  “P => Q”;  we shall call it the “Singer Sentence”.  It is, so presented, a proposition, and no mere proposal, since he claims that it is “obvious”, presumably because founded upon a generally-accepted principle:  basically, What’s sauce for the goose  is sauce for the gander.    Since that principle is reasonable (we have often invoked it ourselves), though extra-logical, we have no a-priori quarrel with the Singer Sentence at all.

Suppose, however, that you yourself eat meat, wear wool and leather, and are content that rabid dogs should be shot.  Suppose further that -- selfish cad that you are -- you do not, like the saintly naked Jainist, wear a veil before your lips when drinking tea, lest you accidentally imbibe some supernatant insect.   Nor (for shame!)  do you enjoin your dentist and your physician  to refrain from administering anaesthia or antibiotics, on the grounds that these, having been developed with the aid of experiments on helpless animals, are fruit from a poisoned tree.   And suppose that (blast your impudence!)  you do not intend to amend your ways.  Well then, in effect, objectively, you hold that “not-Q”.  What follows from this?

What follows (by the most elementary logic -- the rule known as modus tollens) is that, if you assert the Singer Sentence, then you must needs conclude:  not-P.   -- That, of course, would be a political catastrophe.

Short of adopting Jainism, there are only a few ways out:

(1) Have recourse to a kind of meta-tollentic principle, to the effect that any set of propositions which entail not-P  must itself be denied, P being unantastbar.

(2)  Proclaim the truth of Q, even while continuing your carnivorous habits;  shrug apologetically; reference Emerson re the "hobgoblin of little minds".

(3) Boldly hold the joint and several validity of :
P;  P=>Q; and not-Q. 
Then utter not another word upon the subject.

Such a mindset is known as “doublethink”.  It is not so bad once you get used to it, judging by its millions of satisfied customers.

Cf:

Whether the ethic of ‘speciesism’, to use Richard Ryder’s term, can be put on a logical footing  any more sound that that of ‘racism’, I do not know.

-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976; 2^nd edn. 1989), p. 10

(That ‘any more’ sounds rather half-hearted …)

~

There is a different sort of logic-chopping that may be operative in a case like this.   Someone wishes, for non-logical reasons, to assert that Q; then trumps up (fallacious) reasons for asserting that P => Q.   (Thus, currently, in a certain political fringe, the desired outcome is “It’s all Obama’s fault”.  Whatever P may arise in the world, a hasty P => Q is asserted, to reach the desired conclusion.)   But, for psychological and political reasons, I do not believe that Singer himself is here guilty of this:  he in all likelihood does feel ethico-logically compelled to deduce Q, however unwelcome that conclusion may be in many quarters.   For he likewise (by different steps) reaches a quite distinct and socially unmentionable conclusion (this time concerning deformed fetuses or the disabled), and one which is precisely of a nature to enrage that segment of society which would embrace his earlier conclusion about animals.  So, no, Singer was not trying to win any popularity contests.

[Footnote] For those of you in the quandary (2), here is the place 4 U to shop (courtesy of Garrison Keillor):

People’s Meats

Most of us accept strict vegetarianism as the best way,  but many find it difficult to change their eating habits.  People’s Meats is an interim solution.  All of our meat comes from animals who were unable to care for themselves any longer.  Hoping to phase out the operation, we do not advertise hours, prices, or location.  We do not deliver.

~            ~            ~

The analysis above was clad in sociopolitical raiment;  but its skeleton is logical, which is subject-matter-neutral.  Consider the following (which is skeletally somewhat distinct, but in ways  unimportant  for our purpose):

Let P be standard mathematical praxis.   (And here -- as seldom -- we actually are referring to the human practice of mathematizing, rather than to the timeless and species-independent truths of mathematics itself, whatever these may be.   For more on the distinction, see here: http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/08/on-nature-of-mathematical-knowledge.html.)

Something similar to the  P => Q step was broached about a century ago; it concludes (while using reasonable background metamathematical assumptions comparable to the “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” enthymeme above) that this standard practice leads to paradox.  As John von Neumann put it,

A closer study of the merita of the case, undertaken by Russell and Weyl, and concluded by Brouwer, showed that the way in which  not only set theory  but also most of modern mathematics  used the concepts of ‘general validity’ and of ‘existence’  was philosophically objectionable.

-- quoted in James R. Newman, ed. World of Mathematics (1956), p. 2058

Must we then give up P?   Brouwer (a Dutch mathematician who had previously proved important results) now plays the role of Singer, and went on to his logical conclusion:

A system of mathematics which was free of these undesirable traits, “intuitionism”, was developed by Brouwer.  In this system  the difficulties and contradiction of set theory  did not arise.  However, a good fifty per cent of modern mathematics, in its most vital -- and up to then unquestioned -- parts, especially in analysis, were also affected by this “purge”:  they either became invalid, or had to be justified by very complicated subsidiary considerations.

-- id.

(That final clause is a far more dreadful consequence than might be apparent to those outside mathematics, since mathematicians prize elegance and generality of proof. )

Du muss dein Leben aendern ...

So -- shall we bow to these strictures, and surrender our mathematical meat? 

Von Neumann goes on:

Only very few mathematicians were willing to accept the new, exigent standards for their own daily use.  Very many admitted that Weyl and Brouwer were prima facie right, but they themselves continue to trespass, that is, to do their own mathematics in the old, “easy” fashion -- probably in the hope that somebody else, at some other time, might find the answer to the intuitionistic critique and thereby justify them a posteriori.

In short, the bulk of mathematicians adopted strategy (3) above.

Brouwer, like Singer, went on to make a pest of himself for many years.  

[Footnote]

Intuitionism -- initially a sort of mathematical vegetarianism -- is by no means dead.  Michael Dummet, no crank, espouses intuitionistic logic (I am currently painfully working my way through his essay on the subject, line by line.)   And it has subsequently morphed in ways that are quite beyond me, e.g. in topos theory.

[Footnote 2, a half hour later]  In his essay “The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic” (1973), Michael Dummet writes (for our present purposes, the context is unimportant), concerning a proposal that he has just put forward:

What is involved is a thesis in the theory of meaning  of the highest possible level of generality.  Such a thesis is vulnerable in many places:  if it should prove that it cannot be coherently applied  to any one region of discourse,  to any one class of statements, then the thesis cannot be generally true,  and the general argument in favor of it  must be fallacious.  [dbj:  That last phrase has rather a Sherlockian cast to it.]  Construed in this way, therefore, a position in the philosophy of mathematics  will be capable of being undermined by considerations which have nothing directly to do with mathematics at all.

This amounts to offering a hostage to fortune -- specifically, a hostage to modus tollens, in its strong quantified form:    P => ∀x Q(x):  the existence of but a single exception (∃x  ¬Q(x) )  blows the whole game.

~

We need not have recourse to anything so rarified as ethics or metamathematics  to be confronted with an apparently (morally, intellectually) scandalous state of affairs:  It stares us in the face in that favorite tow-headed boy of the philosophy of science, physics.   And here, in that most venerable part of it,  Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism.  Rock-solid in its own day, it survived (and even helped inspire) the introduction of Special Relativity.  It fit smoothly with the new developments in non-EM forces, graciously uniting with the Weak force to form the Electro-weak, and so forth.  And yet, in the context of the atomic theory, it was (if only in whispers) an intellectual scandal, since it predicted that atoms were unstable:  the whirling electrons would radiate energy away and quickly collapse into the nucleus.  Thus, the material world as we know it, could not exist.

Now, one stance of reaction in the face of so bald a challenge, is to say:  “R-r-right!  Science cannot err;  ergo, the world as we know it  does not exist.  Meta-ergo, we all are just brains in a vat.”   Such, in effect, is the path taken by contemporary eliminative materialists -- a shuffling tribe of hunchbacked ne’er-do-wells, who, faced with their irrefutable failure to derive free will, faith, thought, beauty, aspiration, or much of anything of value, from their prolonged and proctoscopic vivisections of sea-slugs and the like (to which the World of Dr Justice, friend to all creatures great and small, responds with the evisceration of eliminative materialists)  -- these gentlemen (stretching that word to its breaking-point), these … bipeds, conclude that Free Will is an illusion, faith and beliefs and reason  all one great gigantic joke, and that we are all just robots, brains marinating in a vat of simulation, or (barely) glorified sea-slugs.   (In this they are partly correct:  the eliminativists -- mark the name -- are but brains in a chamber-pot.)

So, are those who do not take that bold blind path, whenever some contradiction turns up, in a state of intellectual bad faith?

The answer is a subtle and qualified mmmm….n-n-no-o-o …..  For relief, we turn to Quine.

~

We frequently do turn to Quine for relief,  to savor his elegant pellucid prose, when the cacophony of the agora grows too rebarbative.    Yet it is not for his literary qualities that we seek him now, but for his (jointly with Pierre Duhem) holism.  Specifically, his celebrated doctrine that theses face the tribunal of experience, not single-spies, but as a corporate body.  There are (so to speak) concentric shells of propositions relatively dispensible and relatively central:  but in principle, none is immune to revision.  (Intuitionists have even gone dicking about with the Law of the Excluded Middle, and you don’t get more central than that. -- In that case, Quine was unimpressed:  “When you change the logic, you are only changing the subject.”  Rather a Platonist remark, that, Van.)

Thus, consider again the plight of electromagnetic theory, faced with the atomic paradox.  Its bacon was eventually saved, not by any refinement of that theory itself, but by an entirely unanticipated development:  quantum mechanics.

Now, there is no sense in which a pre-quantum physicist could have said “We saw that coming” or “Toleja so”.   Until the quantum theory arrived from nowhere, physicists had been content to simply live with the contradiction, in the classic fashion of Walt Whitman (“Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself.”)   And their quietism was justifiable, even during the years when no resolution was in sight.  For, Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory had done sterling service  both practically and theoretically, in a host of ways.  [This, I am aware, is intellectually comparable to the classic defense of Mussolini, that he made the trains run on time.]  The fact that it predicted an anomaly on the atomic level … well okay, an anomaly involving THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE BLOWING TO BITS -- but still, an atomic anomaly, not a macroscopic one (save secondarily), suggesting that one might, for the duration (until this beast be slain), simply wall-off the subatomic level (“there be dragons”) and get on with our lives.  It certainly did not make sense to throw out the Maxwellian baby with the anomalous bathwater.

In the case of EM, it turned out that there wasn’t even any bad bathwater to discard:  electromagnetism survived intact.   In the case of the aether, the anomaly was the Michelson-Morley experiment, whose results were later explained by yet another where-did-that-come-from new revolutionary theory, Special Relativity;  and in this case, the aether theory had to be discarded.   But both cases illustrate the thesis of Quine-Duhem, that when a body of doctrine is challenged, it is not initially evident which pieces must eventually give, and some may be close to the core of the structure.   In the case of Relativity and quantum theory, the transmogrification went deeply into the core indeed, upending our notions of space, time, causality, and continuity.   In retrospect, those curiously stable atoms seem not so bad;  the explanation is harder to live with than was the thing that was unexplained.

~

A word on our less-than-effusive approval of Quinean holism.

It is all too easy to imagine self-serving uses of such a principle.  As, Dennis the Menace, caught with his hand in the cookie-jar, exclaims:

“Mother, do not prejudge!  Granted, your B-fibres seem to present an image of someone resembling young Master Dennis with his arm hovering above a receptacle of some sort.  The hand itself -- which you suspect of larceny -- is not visible;  perhaps it has been tragically amputated, in which case the young fellow is more to be pitied than blamed.  Yet, how are we to reconcile this dubious alleged image with the far more desireable thesis that his character is pure as the driven snow?  Remember:  Propositions face the tribunal of experience as a corporate body!  Perhaps 'tis but an illusion of swamp-gas;  nay, perchance the fault lies somewhere in that oft-critiqued principle of Induction …”

(Later, as he sits with his pookie-bear in the familiar corner, he steams:  “But I had her epistemologically …”)

~

Of all human endeavors, surely mathematics is the most sensitive to refutations, however slight.    Yet behold this brawny scoffing attitude, specifically as regards the central and indispensible Calculus (famously the target of Bishop Berkeley’s barbs -- which it shrugged off):

If the calculus had not been ‘justified’ Weierstrass-style, it would have been ‘justified’ anyway.  The point is that the real justification of the calculus  is its success.

-- Hilary Putnam, “What is Mathematical Truth?”

Breezy, that!  Huey Long couldn’t have put it more pithily.

~

And now let us bring it all on home:  confronting the challenge of modus tollens, when a refutation or contradiction or paradox is met, in its home territory of mathematical Logic…

Celebratedly, the great German logician Frege  fell into despair (his masterwork already in galleys), upon being informed by Russell  of the latter’s eponymous Paradox. 

There we see  the logical conscience  at its most delicate.  For  Russell’s paradox, worthy though it be, is rather far-fetched, involving sets-that-are-members-or-not-members-of-themselves  (to which your average mathematician, let alone physicist, will say:  Huh??), all too reminiscent of the well-known but trifling Barber Paradox, involving a purported barber who “shaves everyone who does not shave himself”.  Paradox:  Does he shave himself???   Answer:  Fageddaboudit;  ain’t no such barber.

Rather other was the case of Quine’s Mathematical Logic.   In the version of its first edition (1940), this was shown to entail a contradiction.

Now:  an axiomatic system of logic, such as ML, is so tightly knit, that one bad apple really does spoil the whole barrel -- you can’t just shrug and say, “Nobody’s perfect.”  The situation in question, is generally held to be a catastrophe -- that any system which can derive a contradiction, can derive any proposition at all.

However, Hao Wang stepped in (ever the gentleman), and tidied things up, and all was well:  put right  in the second edition.

Haec fabula docet:  Contradictions are a bummer,  but don’t commit suicide  on their account.

[Footnote]   The Duhem-Quinean corporate-body doctrine  can be stated in terms of modus tollens, thus.  Given

            P1 + P2 + … Pn => Q

and

            ¬Q

we conclude

            ¬P1  ∨¬ P2 …  ∨  ¬Pn

That is, at least one of the co-conspirators whose conjunction led to a falsity, must itself be false.

But this does not imply  that the eventual valid conjunction will involve most or even any of those Pi;  we might even toss the whole lot of them overboard, and usher in a whole different set of conjuncts, to accomplish what we previously attempted with the P’s.  Such, roughly, describes the introduction of quantum mechanics, or the refutation of astrology, or any other paradigm-switch between incommensurables.

In his section on Quine-Duhem, Lakatos writes: 

Some people felt intuitively that the modus tollens from refutation  may ‘hit’ very distant premisses  in our total knowledge,  and therefore were trapped in the idea that the ‘ceteris paribus clause’ is a premiss which is joined conjunctively with the obvious premisses.  But this ‘hit’ is achieved, not by modus tollens, but as a result of our subsequent replacement of our original deductive model.

-- Imre Lakatos, “Morphology of Scientific Research Programs”, in I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970), p. 186

~

On a related note, another look at the notion that, should you ever derive a contradiction -- not as a tollentic hypothetical, but as the result of a deduction -- it’s Game Over for everything you’ve ever done.  A noted logician writes:

In an inconsistent system, every proposition is a theorem.

-- Hao Wang, From Mathematics to Philosophy  (1974), p. 42

Yet a few pages later  he qualifies this:

There is a generally accepted principle  that a contradiction implies everything.  We may yet distinguish proofs of the system which go through contradictions  from those which do not.

-- Hao Wang, From Mathematics to Philosophy  (1974), p. 47

~

Purely linguistic note:  A savorsome turn of phrase for the modal-tollentic move, one which I had not previously encountered:

Assume  towards a contradiction  that there is a set U  ∈ T that is not in T’.

-- Volker Runde, A Taste of Topology (2005),

~    ~     ~

There is a curious parallel, or at least an analogy, between, on the one hand,

(1) the foundational challenges to mathematics  alluded to above, together with, not a refutation of that challenge, but a broadly dismissive (and, arguably, pragmatically well justified) response on the part of professionals in the field;

and on the other hand

(2) recent broad-bore philosophical challenges to adaptationism (neo-Darwinism), along with the overall reaction of evolutionism’s professionals: indifference or -- the socio- and noö-politics of the thing being what they are -- foaming hostility.

Consider in particular  a recent (2010) volume co-authored by Jerry Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarelli, the well-written if pugnaciously titled What Darwin Got Wrong.

Their basic thesis is extensively and subtlely argued; hopefully I don’t overmuch crush it by fitting it into the following nutshell:

=>  The (currently hegemonic) gene-centered adaptationist theory  empirically does not work; indeed, for quite general reasons (having little to do with biology per se) it could not work even in principle;

=> A holistic, phenotype-cum-ecosystem-cum-kitchen-sink-centered approach  might -- might -- prove valid, at least in principle;  but in practice, the problem is intractable from a nomologically explanatory standpoint, apart from occasional lucky breaks.

Or, in the author’s own undistorted prose (p. 127):

To be sure, none of that actually shows that there aren’t laws of selection:  there may be, on the one hand, units of phenotypic change, and, on the other hand, units of ecological change;  and there may be laws that connect the two.  But there’s no reasons to suppose, as adaptationists routinely do, that the units of phenotypic change  are anything like what we generally think of as individual phenotypic traits.

(For connoisseurs of academic-polemical rhetoric, there is actually a sly move here.   While rhetorically conceding the possibility of a pheno-unit/eco-unit correlation, thus retrodictively legitimizing the latter two theoretical posits, these supposititious entities “units of ecological change” are by no means as familiar as other entities in the ontology of biology, and on the face of it  sound sort of bogus…)

~

We must distinguish two categories of challenge to any received body of doctrine:  The Anomaly; vs. Foundational.   The former (speaking just psychologically now) can either represent a mere annoyance  (or even:  Something to be hidden from the fickle general public at all costs, lest they overestimate its importance -- e.g.,  Evolution, Climate Change, anything medical), or a (possibly career-making) challenge.   The latter, to almost everyone, from the man in the street to the faculty lounge, tend to be just d*mned annoying.

Thus, consider  the Lasting Atom Scandal of the pre-quantum years, a poster-child example of Anomaly. (Nobody called it that, but  in all candor  they should have.)  This was phenomenologically egregious (in ways even a layman could understand), and had to be resolved somehow (some day, by someone else) -- indeed, imagine that the problem existed today, rather than a hundred years ago:  You’d have Republicans calling for the de-funding of physics, demanding e-mails archives, etc.  But it did not necessarily challenge -- certainly it did not set out to challenge, chin-foremost -- the nature of (say) Time, or Energy, or  for that matter  the existence of atoms (which had indeed been doubted by scientists, much later in history than most folks realize, but on quite different and less sophisticated grounds).

This anomaly, as we have seen, turned out to be handled in the most gratifying way possible:   We got to retain all the Maxwellian E-M we had laboriously learned, and now the new Quantum Mechanics stepped in (Jeeves-like)  to handle the anomaly.

More recently, there actually have been some challenges to physical theory  at a more basic level:  Time, which hoped to have escaped further challenge  by being subsumed into Space-Time, is once again on the carpet, from string theorists and others, who maintain that such parameters should fall out of a final theory, and not be input to it.  

Had such a challenge been posed, say, in the nineteenth century, it would have been an impudent kick at the foundations.  But now it (allegedly)  grows out of theory:  The theory may be mistaken, but it calls Time into question because it thinks it has something better. 

Much of the history of physics has been like that -- which is partly why it has been (politically) such smooth sailing.   Michaelson-Morley presented an Anomaly to the aether theory -- but no-one had been going around snarkily dissing ideas like distance and simultaneity until Special Relativity came along and re-conceived these.  This was (to use the Hegelian terminology, which here does fit) not a destruction, but a sublation  of the old ideas.

Sometimes there will be a simple anomaly, such as the discovery of continuous-but-nowhere-differentiable-functions, or space-filling curves.  These are eventually gobbled up and incorprated into a more robust and sophisticated mathematics.

Often an original sui-generis gnarly anomaly  will suggest a more general research program:  As, We need to pay closer attention to matterns of continuity and convergence (pointwise, uniform, almost-everywhere, etc., on the analytic side; and eventually the full exfoliation into the neighborhood-systems of topology).

Quite otherwise are challenges that come out of nowhere and that threaten to knock the stilts out from under you.  Russell’s Parodox, reaching Frege at press-time, did not strike him as another delightful puzzle to wrestle with some Sunday morning, but as a poisoned dart in his life-work.   Though they individually made numerous important positive contributions, the lytic work of Gödel and of Brouwer can be read this way, challenging the very notion of validity, truth, and proof.   Denial of the Excluded Middle indeed!  “Sirs, there you go too far!”  (“When you change the logic, you are merely changing the subject.” -- Quine, dyspeptically.)

Schematically (in your worst nightmare):

“Miller has reduced mathematics to set-theory;  and Spiller has shown that set-theory is rotten at its foundations.  Therefore everything that you are doing, or have ever done, or ever could do in your sorry life, is utterly worthless.”

Or:

(Pontius Pilate; Brouwer; post-Modernists):  “What is truth, anyway?  Huh? -- Meh.”

~

[Afternote]   It is a highly useful feature of the Blogspot interface, that it allows hot-linked Labels.    So for instance, were you disposed to read more by or about Mr. Hao Wang, for example, you would simply click on his name in the Labels field, and you will see every post so Labeled, in reverse chronological of posting.   But, annoyingly, there is a stringent limit on how many Labels any given essay is allowed.  We filled this one up with mathy stuff and now have no slack left over for the Darwiny bits.  So here you go:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/adaptationism

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/philosophy%20%20of%20science

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/ultra-Darwinism

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Charles%20Darwin

Note:  The last two are not redundant upon each other, and indeed have (I believe) zero overlap.  Darwin was not an ultra-Darwinist;  “Je ne suis pas marxiste” -- Marx.

Additional relevant Labels, which (boo, blogspot) would not fit into the Label field  for this post:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Ernest%20Gellner

[Post-Afternote]  Other examples of modus drasticus tollens.

A mittel-europäischer rationalist recalls “those golden, and, all in all very peaceful final decades of the colonial system”, and adverts ad the hermeneuts:

The argument seems to be -- Descartes led to Kipling.  We repudiate Kipling, so we must repudiate Descartes as well.   The expiation of colonialism must include the repudiation of clarity, for that had been but the tool of domination.

-- Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude (posthum. 1998), p. 176

We, by contrast, raise a glass to Kipling;  so if this Descartes fellow had anything to do with it, chap can’t be all bad.

“During five literary generations, every enlightened person has despised him,  and at the end of that time  nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten, and Kipling is  in some sense  still there.” -- George Orwell, 1942

Modus tollens has surprisingly many enemies. Intuitionists, indeed, reject it:

The intuitionist position is that one can only state “P or Q” when one can give either a constructive proof of P  or a constructive proof of Q.  This standpoint has the consequence that proofs by contradiction (reductio ad absurdum) are not valid.

-- José Ferrerós, “The Crisis in the Foundations of Mathematics”, in Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 150

Holism à la Duhem-Quine  skirts it with a flanking maneuver:

… arguing that a given observational consequence is deduced  not from an empirical hypothesis alone, but rather from the conjunction of this hypothesis with the relevant set of auxiliary assumptions.   Hence, the failure of the observational consequence does not deductively refute the hypothesis by modus tollens, when taken by itself, but discredits only its conjunction with the pertinent auxiliaries.  

--  Th. Kupka, “Introduction”, in: Adolf Grünbaum, Collected Works, vol. I (2013), p. 2

~

Another example from a political context, where propositions are surrounded by swarms of sensitivities --  Re series of premises and conclusions relating ethnicity, nationalism, and industrialism:

The argument is impeccable.  Its premises are valid.  How can a valid inference from true premises  yield a conclusion which appears to be wholly refuted by historical reality?

Ernest Gellner, Nationalism (1997), p. 32

~

Quite different in purpose and detail from the classical modus tollens, is the assumption of a premise known to be contrary to fact, but where you have antecedently proven (at great expense of elbow-grease) that the assumption of this simple premise does not effect the results of calculations which otherwise must be carried out laboriously.  As, when (having slogged through a bit of integral calculus) you prove that, in calculating the gravitational effects of a ball, you can pretend that the entire mass of the ball is concentrated at the center:  an enormous simplification.  Or again:

We can get the correct answer for the probability of partial reflection  by imagining (falsely) that all reflection comes from only the front and back surfaces.

-- Richard Feynman, QED (1985), p. 107

The elegant idiom for introducing such a foredoomed hypothesis is “Suppose, per impossibile, ...”

~

At the antipodes from the “tollendus” camp, are the celebrants of falsification or falsifiability, associated  in particular  with the name of Karl Popper. ...

~

Miscellaneous additions: 

(1) Psychological observations

People seldom intuit what is unpalatable to them.  [Moreover, one can] eliminate any undesirable indirect implication of their special insight  by means of an additional hilfs-intuition, liquidating the embassassing logical relation.

-- Ernest Gellner, The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974), p. 95

In short, one ‘answers’ the sceptic  by striding across logical gaps  to conclusions inconsistent with premises that one does not contest.

-- John Watkins, Science and Scepticism (1984), p. 34

(2) The reductio ad absurdum /”self-mate” gambit:

The traditional argument for the primacy of acceleration-retardation  rests on the absurdity of denying it.

-- Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), p. 216

Chomsky’s book Syntactic Structures, which is regarded by some as a foundation-stone for this kind of activity, has been described by no less an authority than Roman Jakobson  as an argumentum a contrario (Jakobson, 1959), showing the impossibility of the whole enterprise.

-- Hilary Putnam, “Some Issues in the Theory of Grammar”, in  Mind, Language, and Reality (1975), p. 85

.

ON DEPTH AND BREADTH (überarbeitet)

            Someone (and since I forget who, it is as if the words had passed into proverb) once said: “A brilliant person is one of whom I think: I could have done such work, if only I were ten times smarter.  But in the case of a genius [here the reference was, if memory serves, to Feynman, and the epithet might actually have been not “genius” but “magician”], I can’t even imagine how it might be done.” 

            That is the depth dimension, often commented upon.

            Less obtrusively, because  by its nature  never to be noticed save over time,  is a baffling precellence of breadth.

   
  This thought arises as I finish Ian Hacking’s The Taming of Chance.  Hacking is unfailingly intelligent, but not deep beyond one’s reach.  He has a modest, easy style.  He’s not a bibliographic bully, forever quoting Kant or Toqueville or whoever you haven’t read, a propos of everything and not always with necessity (“Will the Red Sox prevail next season?  Only time, as Aquinas would have it, will tell.”).  He does not throw up a Potemkin village of supposed sources, a bibliography stuffed with Lukacs and Plato, longer and denser than the slender article it supports, topped off with epigraphs from Wallace Stevens and Valéry. Yet with everything of him I come across, he reveals a new side of him.  A polymath;  forsooth, a polytope.

            The first thing of his I read – and warmly recommend – was The Emergence of Probability. Here he seemed one of those philosophical mathematicians-manqués of the stripe of Putnam or Quine, who write with wit and erudition about technical subjects, but (one eventually finds) pretty much plow the same furrow in their various works.  Only, in later works he reveals himself as a closet Foucault fan (to this reader, as far from Kolmogorov as, I don’t know, a Red Sox fan).   And he’s written complete books on purely psychological subjects.  In The Taming of Chance, he returns to the subject of Emergence from a (crucially) slightly different angle, so that the book covers much of the same ground  but with a very different feel and specificity.   It doesn’t even have a bibliography, you have to dig it out of the footnotes.  Yet see what the spade unearths! Page after page of primary sources, like one William Turnbull’s Treatise on the Strength, Flexure, and Stiffness of Cast Iron Beams (London, 1831), or of secondary ones from obscure nooks, like the Tübinger Zeitschrift für Staatswissenschaft 4 (1863).  He cites Bernoulli, fair enough – but wait, not (or rather, not only) the celebrated Jakob of the Ars Conjectandi (which --though I haven’t read it and probably never will-- is a recognized landmark in the field),  but Johann – yet wait again, not that Johann, that familiar Johann “Jock” Bernouilli whose works you probably have on your night-table, but the later one; and not his mathematical publications neither, but rather his  no doubt in its day rightly celebrated  Reisen durch Brandenburg, Pommern, Preussen, Curland, Russland und Pohlen, published in four volumes over the course of that busy year of 1779-80 (in memory still green), and of which Hacking’s unobtrusive morsel is quarried from volume two.

            This is not what is meant by being merely, or even hugely, “well-read”.  Well-read means you’ve read all the classics throughout history in every major language in every field, and absolutely every scrap of anything at all in your own particular specialty (published or in preprint – or in papyrus --  ancient or modern), plus the odd condiment from among contemporary novels, Doonesbury,  or the folks at Port-Royal.  That’s hard enough-- I read all the time; always have; and am still just hitting the high points (and forgetting much).  Yet given 400 hours in a week instead of forty, and a couple of lifetimes tacked end to end, plus total recall, one can imagine doing it.  But the “Compte rendu des travaux de la Société phrénologique pendant le cours de l’année 1839”, which Hacking uses to such telling effect, is not on anybody’s reading list.  The ergodic reader ranging over all space  would perish in the heat death of the universe before striking upon this. 

            In fact, the whole situation puts me in mind of what Lszlew Brnzowlski so memorably said in his (partially encrypted) diary entry for 3 April 1648 (U. Tbilisi MS #9784-K) --…  No it doesn’t.  Haven’t read it.  Never heard of it.

Postscript.

            

Hacking himself can strike a stance of amazement at (allegedly) recondite knowledge.  In a chapter on philology (in Historical Ontology, p. 141), citing Foucault’s discussion of Schegel, Bopp, and Grimm, he exclaims: “Who on earth was Bopp?”  (One of the most celebrated names in the history of philology, that’s who.)  This is no doubt a pose, to let the reader catch his breath, and to chummily pretend that we’re all just struggling along here together, lads -- the way someone expounding physics for a lay audience will strive to make it all “more accessible” by sprinkling-in little apology-markers (“what physicists call the ‘spin’ of a particle known as the ‘electron’”;  “the so-called ‘Higgs boson’”;  “something called a ‘photon’”).  But shortly thereafter, Hacking himself calmly goes on to dust off such truly obscure proto-philologists as, um, “Chladenius”...

And if all that is making you feel stupid (as it certainly should),  here’s something to make you feel even stupider:

        De Stultitiâ

*

One naturally does not notice, upon first or second acquaintance, any lack of breadth  in any favorite author of your own.  You go to him for some few things, whatever they might be, and are delighted to find them again.  We do not reproach the humble hamburger, for failing to be a quail;  nor the quarterback, for lacking the qualities of a third-baseman; nor Dickens, for his obstinate indifference to the more recent developments of the higher calculus; nor indeed the Gospels, for lacking tomorrow’s weather forecast. Yet if some author comes to be our guide, our lens upon the variety of life, we do  in time  notice any astigmatism, or narrowness of the field of view.

            For some time, Orwell was my cherished author, seemingly spanning great territories: as novelist, memoirist, and critic – nay, ever as a fighter at the front --: noted in particular for his splended essay attacking insularity, “Inside the Whale”.   It was only a chance remark of his, apologizing for not having read more than several dozen of the (delightful, but) trifling novels of P.G. Wodehouse, that it struck me, how much had escaped his notice while he was so occupied:  scilicet, virtually every world-shaking intellectual development, be it in physics, mathematics, biology, philosophy,  from the mid-19^th century   on.

            Tolkien created a world, Middle Earth,  commended (in Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature) as “one of the more detailed of all fantasy worlds”, yet which always struck me as narrow to the point of suffocation.  GKC  creates an  in some ways  similar world, but which has airholes into the infinite, which let us breathe. C.S. Lewis, in his childhood, together with his brother, created such a puppet-theatre world, reminiscences of which survive in his adult fiction; but he bursts its walls decisively  in all his essays.  His world is wider; retaining (in his own metaphor) the furniture of the nursery, side by side with the cold hard sunlight of the new world.

            It was in the course of reacquainting myself, with the saga of Greek antiquity, and Roman valor, that I happened to notice  the absence of any echo thereof, in any of the aforementioned authors. (The mindworld of Lewis embraces Northern mythology, but nothing earlier.)

*

Other such instances.

Re Otto Rank, Ernest Jones speaks of

… his truly vast erudition;  it was quite mysterious  how he found the time to read all that he did.  One of the compliments I treasure in my life  was when he asked me wherever I had found all that material in one of my non-medical essays;  that the omniscient Rank should be impressed, signified much.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of Maturity (1955), p. 160

Richard Fortey, Earth (2004), p. 314:

            One of the chief proponents of the [Snowball Earth] theory is Paul Hoffman at Harvard, one of those American academics who seem to have twice their fair share of energy. If expertise is defined as knowing  more and more  about less and less,  I am at a loss to describe what it is to know more and more  about more and more – but that is the Hoffmann condition.

*

In a work, written in English, and  ostensibly directed at engineers and physicists, subsequent to a discussion of infinitesimal deformation and path systems, we read:

We shall not go further into this approach here.  It is done quite simply and naturally in a classic paper by J. Radon.  Indeed, since this paper is one of the clearest and most elegant in the entire history of the calculus of variations, we prefer to suggest to the reader  that he consult it directly.

-- Robert Hermann, Differential Geometry and the Calculus of Variations (1968), p. 257

An admirable suggestion!  One hopes, however, that our pocket-protector-sporting anglophone engineer has been keeping up his German, and has ready access to an enormous research library, since it was published in that language (“Zum Problem von Lagrange”) back in 1928, in a relatively obscure series (Hamburg. Math. Einzelschriften, Leipzig).

*

[Update Jan 2012]  Freeman Dyson on his depth stage and his breadth stage:
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/charles-nevin/60-year-job-freeman-dyson

~            ~            ~

For a different essay covering distinct though similar ground, try this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-scope-and-difficulty.html

For depth itself, as deep as it gets (which is in mathematics),  this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-dive-to-depths-expanded.html

On? Dickens ???

[So many hundreds of pages of unpublished notes… and no time to work them up into a book, or even an essay.  Yet almost it is hubris  not to breathe a word of these, since the Reaper might  require my soul  (and thine)  this very night … (and there is no editor to handle the Nachlass …)

And so, ere I lay me down to (perhaps eternal) sleep,

a simple posting, un-proofread, of miscellaneous jottings

re him whom I deem our greatest novelist.]

======================================================

@CHARACTER AND CARICATURE

Complete caricature:

Punch & Judy, Commedia dell'arte

Comic strip characters of the usual sort, like Beetle Bailey, whose tabula becomes again rasa at the end of each four-panel strip.  However many years or decades the strip runs, the character never develops.  If by chance he changes (as, Garfield was more coarsely drawn in the first year of the strip), the change has nothing to do with development within a story, it's just a sort of drift that may not be noticed by readers, so long is the time-span

Intermediate between caricature and situated:

La Bruyère, Caractères de Théophraste

Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (2^nd edn. 1955) , p. 361: "Faulkner's tobacco-drooling phantoms are not the constituents of a representative American epic, protagonists in a great modern tragedy; they are the tonal expression of Faulkner's own torment."

Gissing: "All Dickens might be summed in the title of Jonson's play; no figure but is representative of a 'humour', running at times into excesses hardly surpassed by Ben himself."

(Henry James) : learn nothing abt people

Thus Henry James (may bats sh*t on his forehead as he sits, hat on knees, in the waiting-room of purgatory, his application for admission to that salubrious locality having been indefinitely delayed), citizen James, I say, the paladin of boredom (guano dripping through his brows), has no doubt rendered many lessons about human behavior, but only about such humans as have long suffered from constipation; humans whom (and in this they are more to be pitied than blamed) in the extended absence of any satisfactory defecation, and being so impacted that, in default of an apple-corer or other appropriate reaming instrument diligently applied….[the author died of boredom before he was able to complete this sentence; but we preserve its fragments as a memorial].

I read Saintsbury's once-standard History of Nineteenth Century Literature with little profit and mounting irritation.  It is a ratings-game approach to criticism, literature on a scale of 1 to 10.  But it may at least serve as a springboard for disagreement.

            He writes: "It  was in Dombey and Son (1846-48) that the Dickens of the decadence first appeared. … A new and very inauspicious element appeared in certain mechanical tricks of phrase, and in a totally unreal style of character  exemplified in the Bagstocks …"

What my own experience of Bagstock would have been  had I met him first in print, whether he would have been forgettable or seemed unreal, I'll never know, for I was introduced to him in the brilliant reading by Frederick Davidson on Blackstone Audiobooks, where the Major appeared as a reality of chilling clarity, as unforgettable and looming and alarming as though, strolling through the woods, you had come upon a bear.  The simple formula "Joe-y B…"  rings on in the mind's ear with the resonance of "… and smote him thus" if you've ever heard a good performance of Othello.  No, the portrait of Bagstock  is not a full person, but it is a simple, striking image, a fixed point of reference and a new one in the heavens, and as such a valuable addition to our ontology, as is the outline of an eagle against the sky, or the hiss of an adder, though we personally be no further acquainted with either eagles or adders.  No-one we ever meet will be an undiluted expression of…of what may we call …of Bagstockery:  but with this prototype fixed indelibly in mind, we have a tool to pry apart the confused mix of tints and traits which any actual person presents, and to winkle out whatever there may be of this one, a step towards better understanding that person as a whole.

-------

In his essay "Charles Dickens", Orwell quotes at length  Magwitch's threatening speech to Pip, only to denounce it.  "To begin with, no starving and hunted man would speak in the least like that."  But thank goodness Magwitch did!  The speech is wonderful, simultaneously a pragmatically appropriate horribilis to send the boy smartly on his errand, and a sort of gently winking bit of humor to the adult reader. --  I was startled, upon seeing the movie "Treasure Island" again, now as an adult, to see what an amiable scarescullion Long John Silver really is as there played.  We do not, in literature, seek the transcribed minutes of familiar everyday dithering.  No prince or no pauper ever spoke as they speak in Shakespeare, and the plays are none the worse for it.

===================================

(wish to address that charge that his characters are caricatures).  The charge is embarrassing for me as a reader, since I find these characters  all that one could wish.

(First, characters in most other novels  are not all they're cracked up to be. Often just the author and his various egocentric projections.)
(Then there is the matter of the reader's limitations.  I suspect that we recall even the central characters that we do recall  by a sort of insensible regression to the mean.  We have our own notion of The Hero, and this exerts a gravitational attraction upon our memory of the actual hero of any given novel, which with time therefore  conforms more and more  to this simple common denominator.

Novels are by nature well suited for imparting ideas and for giving full reign to language, but not particularly apt for fixing individualized characters in the reader's mind.  For, our sense of the individual essence of the various people we know  is based partly on a kind of aura each person has, some emanation of the soul, which may be illustrated but is not constituted by that person's sum of utterances over the course of our acquaintance.

(Dickens does not limit his characters to caricatures.  Only, he makes certain that there is a striking visual or lexical figure – a caricature if you insist – which will remain in memory, instantly identifiable, and on which we may, as the case arises, hang further particulars, like hats upon a hatrack.)

Take Bitser in Hard Times, a minor character who would be lost in the shuffle of most novels. (Indeed, how many distinct and differentiated child characters do you recall, from books that are not themselves children's books?)  Dickens begins by presenting him visually, literally in a shaft of light. (Eerily etiolated.)  Next, he complies circumstantially with the schoolmaster's demand to "define a horse".  So far, his position is antithetical rather than individual: his light complexion and male sex contrasting with the dark complexion and gentler gender of Cissy, his bill of particulars with her muteness on the subject (although actually, of course, she knows far more about horses, living as she does in a family of circus riders), his factuality and her fancy; and his import is merely structural: here is a member of the next generation that actually takes to the Gradgrind educational system – as, indeed, in any age, there will always be some individuals who take to the dictates of the prevailing ethos, whatever it might be.  And if Dickens stopped there, the character would fade from memory, probably before the novel was over.  But the author does two clever things. 

First, the reply to the horse question, though perfect for its satiric purposes within the project of the novel  as capturing none of the verve of this magnificent animal  and emphasizing aspects practical for commence, is yet more attractive to the attention of the reader than would have been, say, an intellectually indifferent though mnemonically equally impressive recital of, say, the names of every river in Asia: "  40 teeth….   "  This is actually sort of interesting – some readers, reading this, may perhaps for the first time hit upon the motivation for the expression about looking a gift horse "in the mouth".   Further, for any older reader, it is memorable because rather alarming, triggering that instinct we have (inherited from our troglodyte patriarch, no doubt) of keeping a sharp eye out for any prodigy of a whippersnapper who swims into our ken.  Despite half a century spent roaming about this planet, I did not myself know, prior to reading this passage, how many teeth are in the head of a horse, let alone the tariff of their individual specializations; nor seemed, it must be conceded, in a fair way ever to learn these particulars, in the normal course of living.  When I shall rise from the grave, were Saint Peter to put to me this very question, I should have flunked, and had doubtless to have spent a stretch in some chalky purgatory doing those things that I ought to have done yet left undone, by way of practical learning. Yet here's this bleached-out halfpint of a schoolboy, who can give you chapter and verse!  Better keep an eye on that one!

Second, Dickens gives the lad a gesture: " [quote]  "  And whenever we meet this person again, we see him knuckling his forehead.  Now, this sort of thing may be just what the critics have in mind when they complain of caricature:  but it is no shallow thing, whatever it is;  it is more like the simple yet mysterious whiteness of the whale, in Moby Dick.  The whiteness serves by mere difference  to mark out this whale from the others that fill the seas, but it does something more, which Melville himself can only speculate about, in a chapter devoted to this question.   This forehead-knuckling too, is at once a simple simile for the lad's grad-grinding of so many facts into his own hard head, and something more, an echo from an unseen corridor, which gains in resonance when we meet him again. (gesture of the damned in Michaelangelo…)

(Some of his characters are indeed) too little caricatures to really serve for the later antonomastic use that is made of them.  The dictionary defines "Pecksniffian" as "hypocritical" or "pharisaical".  That is to capture but a sliver of the man.   You do no great injustice to (Prometheus) if you describe (an enterprise) as "Promethean", for of the original we know little beyond what is summarized in the adjective.  But to use "Pecksniffian" as a mere extra synonym of "hypocritical" is to (render the word superfluous), save as you may wanting a rhyme for – well – it is hard to imagine for what; nor will the word ever nestle comfortably among the iambs and trochees.  And to seek to use the word with its full flavor of the essence and accidents of Mr. Pecksniff, is to seek the fleece, or the roc on its fabled eyrie.  Your hairs will grow grey, then white, then drop out one by one, before you encounter on the streets of life anyone fully fitting this eponym; he is no more to be met with, in his fullness, than Hercules, clad in his lion's pelt.

(He fixes his characters in our minds by means of characteristic expressions or gestures, and fixes these by repetition.) 

But repetition alone does not suffice.  Witness Pamela, who over and over (and over  (and over) )  again and again, vents forth the same sentiments in much the same terms.  Yet her we never sense as much more than a wisp amid petticoats.

(It will be well) to compare Dickens with Orwell in this respect, if only because Orwell wrote so superbly on Dickens.

            Now, Orwell (in his fiction), has no memorable characters – not even himself:  for though his weather eye is always in evidence, its lens is not (seems not to be) so to speak tinted, with any personal quirks or particulars; this is indeed the virtue of this trustworthy guide. It is part of his character  not to be overconcerned with his own person, and thus he doesn't flaunt those little mannerisms which round out a portrait and help fix it in the mind.  It's not that he's a nullity, he doesn't disappear into the landscape  so much as overtop it, a firm beacon, fixing it with his beam.

            There are memorable anecdotes in Orwell, some of them even Dickensian.  As, the Loyalist militiaman, a stranger to letters, trying to keep up with the elaborate Tom-Sawyerish system of challenge and countersign, and being told that the S-R of the day was "… "  Asking the meaning of the latter word, he was told it meant "valiente".  Later, challenged with "", he replied "Valiente" – and was shot at by his own sentry.  Now, this is tragic and funny and all-to--human, and you can generally visualize the cast of characters from which such an incident would spring:  but the individuals, sentry and shot-at, are here nameless and faceless.  They exemplify the tragicomedy of a class, memorably and tellingly, but they do it anonymously.

-----------

A word in defense of the mnemonic function of caricature.  An Edward Gibbon or an Edmund Wilson, who remembered everything, had no need of such aids.  But most of us must make do with a more lossy cerebral filing system.  Now, just as a car is meant to be driven, so a novel is meant to be read; and this basic fact has functional consequences.  The earliest automobiles were not usable by the average citizen, and airplanes still are not; this limited their usefulness.  And one may argue that a novel by its nature must be more user-friendly than an automobile: for in the early days one could still get about by hiring a chauffeur, whereas no-one can do your reading for you.

(Dickens imprints his characters on your memory, by repetition of phrases and traits.)  Yet overall he is quite sparing with recapitulation, despite the practical fact of drawn-out publication in installments.  (The postface to Our Mutual Friend, with its complicated plexus of plots, says the process took 19 months.)

(signature tunes)

-----------

So suggestive are his characters, Harry Johnson wrote a novel The Veneerings (1922).  And Wodehouse seems to have taken just certain precious chips from Dickens' characters, and fashioned them into puppets of his own.  Thus Psmith is fleshed out of one facet of Eugene Wrayburn, without the rest.

In defense of caricature names:

To the principle characters, who must be at liberty to develop in any direction (whether or not the author makes ample use of this liberty), give neutral names like Joseph Andrews or Parson Adams.  But the puppets they meet may as well receive humorously appropriate designations: Mrs Slip-slop, Mrs Grave-airs.  This signals their function instantly and keeps them from getting confused in the mind with other minor characters.  It is an annoyance, reading a modern novel, where Tim and Tom and Ben and Bob and Lee and Lisa and Linda and Barb are falling in and out of love and in and out of beds, to try to keep them straight.

---------------------------------------

(Flat chars, round chars, &) spectral characters.  Cf. Fauvism: brilliant surfaces, shallow but not flat, because refracted.

Such depth as they have derives from the dreamer.  As: sexual feelings projected and reflected from a hundred objects over a lifetime, now melded in the dream.

Invitation to a Beheading:

Cincinnatus languishes on death row.  In bustles the prison director, saying things like "But why, may I be so bold as to ask, have you not touched your food? … Excellent sabayon! … And now, pour la digestion, allow me to offer you a cigarette. Have no fear, at most this is only the one before last." 

Are we to docket a new instance of a character-type, the Jolly Jailer?  Cf. & ctr.  ….. in Little Dorrit.

(the actions of the characters do not delimit them as characters, but point to the unreality of the situation.  As: shall we credit the parents in "Die Verwandlung" with remarkable sang-froid, when their son has suddenly turned into a giant cockroach?)

We are dealing with dream-logic, and not, in any proper sense, a plot.

 (but actually the gap is not as wide as we might wish.)  Mr. Dorrit is locked up for what (especially to our twenthieth-plus-century sense) seems an imaginary crime.  Certainly the punishment does not fit it:  He owes money; how is he to repay it if he cannot work?  And the release seems as unreal as that of Cincinnatus.

…is actually dreamt-up.  When it isn't simply a memoir with the names changed, fiction has necessarily a false bottom.

=================

(What characters *do* we come really to know, and why?)

Though Esther Waters, in her eponymous novel, is always front and center, and though we seem to be privy to her thoughts, without hidden depths, yet we do not come really to know her.   E.g. her horror of the ending in workhouse; but when she does wind up there, for what we later learn are several months, we get no description.  Cf: Someone quite close to me once went to jail for a year.  He never talks about it. It's a gap, a phantom limb.

Nor does she give a sense of the relations of mother and child.  (Children have great particularity, and tend to surprise you with the way they keep turning out.  None of that here, he's just a cipher: now a month old, now x years.)

"We never really knew him."

In Darkness at Noon (1941), the icy interrogator Gletkin is too immobile and controlled to offer much purchase for mannerism, but the reader is repeatedly confronted with two traits: "H … settled his cuffs, … while the scar on his skull reddened." (P. 201; & passim)

(opposite of mnemonic)… is John Updike's Couples, which might as well have been called Quadruples or Octets, …   There are many sharp observations in the novel, much masterly prose, but the traits and aperçus don't seem to stick consistently to any particular character.  The effort to keep them straight – Frank and Harold and …… -- was more than difficult, it was actually unpleasant; so that I soon gave up and let the book wash over me, not as a unity, but as notes for a novel, a series of skits.  (Wilfred Sheed had a similar experience with this book.  He called it a "slide lecture" and complains that the characters "become almost interchangeable".)

----

If the fates are favorable, one meets Pooh and Piglet very early in life.  (Archetypes)

The Pooh characters are something like archetypes, and as such they must be timeless.  You can't imagine Piglet grown to – hoghood, God forbid.

C.S. Lewis Of Other Worlds (1966), p. 14: "Why should the characters be disguised as animals at all.  The disguise is very thin, so thin that Grahame makes Mr Toad on one occasion 'comb the dry leaves out of his hair'.  Yet it is quite indispensable." {et seq}

@@char

===================================================

@sentimentalism

GKC (who is worth quoting en mauvaise part as he devoted quite a lot of intelligent and sympathetic attention to this author): "The whole of Dickens is made up of the strand of satire and the strand of sentimentalism; and the strand of satire is quite unnecessarily merciless and hostile, and the strand of sentimentalism is quite unnecessarily humanitarian and even maudlin."

(Hard Times, ch. (ca. 7), incident of Loup père losing his ability to function, beating the dog bloody, then lying on the floor hugging it weeping, as it laps his face)

Perhaps this is a sentimental passage.  Perhaps the tears that even now return in memory of first hearing it, now as I re-type it, are foolish and untutored.  Yet it has a kind of spare power for which it is difficult to find the example outside of the Gospel.

            The death of little Johnny in Our Mutual Friend is told with something of the austerity of that austere novel, to a degree that younger readers (if any there be, of so adult a book) may not fully grasp what is going on; and yet it rings with a sort of steely pathos – the note of the trump of Judgment, or an iron gong.

---

Dickens, as a received and thus domesticated great, is now considered an ornament of empire – or rather was, for a time, before it became the fashion to denigrate everything that rises above the level of a village hut-- but in his own time he expended much effort and energy tearing down the monuments whose cold shadow lies athwart the human spirit.

-----------

There is something of charity, something of the way the shepherd watches for the least of his flock, in the way he keeps track of even his minor characters.  At various points in Hard Times, I had thought we'd seen the last of Bitser, or Sleary, or Cissy's absent dad.  Yet all return in an important part -- even the last, though he dies offstage, sending dog Merrilegs as funeral emissary.

--------

Sometimes basically the same character pops up in more than one novel, but facing different circumstances.

Little Dorritt and Lizzy Hexam are similarly undemonstrative, self-effacing, clear-headed, self-sacrificing for their troubled fathers. But Little Dorritt vis-a-vis the Father of the Marshalsea faces a different task than Lizzy Hexam vis-a-vis Gaffer (who in any event soon turns up dead).

Eugene Wrayburn: "I am a bad, idle dog."  Cf. Sydney Carton.
& cf Psmith.  Both are aristocratic in manner and terribly offhand; untouched, unsullied as they walk through the world's commotion; with too much iron to be properly called smug, and contemptuous (without bravado) of personal danger.

===================

Zola was probably one of the first to describe a real proletarian, and not simply a poor man, as Dickens, for instance, had done.

-- Jan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras:  Europe in 1900 (1967, Eng. transl. 1978), p. 211

In Dickens there is a general sense of plenitude, a wide and well-stocked canvas of the whole of life.  But if with parti pris you seek this or that feature, you may find it missing.  Orwell sought in vain for any genuine sense of (industry and manufacture). 

(The hobby-horse of the last century is sex.  What do we find?  Did we not start from this a-priori project, the corpus of Dickens itself would never suggest it.)  As a concession to this age in which I find myself floating as some foreign particle, a few remarks.

Major Bagstock is a sort of perpetual erection, ever swollen with an overplus of his own humors; and his surname may perhaps be etymologized from the scrotal sac and its stick.  Yet its application is not specially sexual; certainly no fecundation is intended. He represents the mere principle of plethora, as Mrs. Gradgrind, permanently detumesced beneath the labia-like folds of her shawls, represents mere inanition.

(One place where absence of any sexual savvy is odd, is Louisa's marriage to Bounderby.  Before the marriage, we get a glimpse of actual lechery.) He eyes the rose when it is scarcely ripe, and moves to pluck it.  He gets no further then a peck on the cheek; whereafter she, with as much a tomboy's as a maiden's gesture, abrades the spot till it glows.  Now, with so much riding on so little, what might be the scene when, in possession, he forces his attentions and indulges his gross appetites in the nuptial bed? And repeats them, in and out of season (for he is not a man to be denied)? Bounderby himself is a phallic character, gross and swollen and bristling with hair. Yet we have no hint that there has ever been a wedding night.  She loathes him as before; she keeps composure, as before.  And the strange frozen horror with which she shrinks from the suit of Hardhouse (onomastic comment here superfluous), is almost that of one who has never tasted venery.

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@DICKENSIAN EFFECTS chez autrui

Arthur Schlesinger Jr, A Thousand Days (1965), p. 467: "The Dulles world rested on unitary conceptions of the opposing blocs:  on the one hand, the 'free world', capaciously defined to include such places as Spain [under Franco], Paraguay [under Stroesner], Batista's Cuba and Mississippi…"

Arthur Schlesinger Jr, A Thousand Days (1965), p. 480: "After the Soviet Union resumed nuclear testing, the neutral leaders gathering at Belgrade  reacted with stupefying forbearance.  We all knew how they would have blackened the skies with resolutions if we had been the first to resume."

Neil Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (1999), p. 641-3.

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@ARCHITECTONICS @plot

Gissing: "Of Little Dorrit, as of Martin Chuzzlewit, who can pretend to bear the story in mind?"

Orwell slighted the structure but noted the gorgeous gargoyles.

This might apply to the earliest work, in its less successful parts, but seems unfair to the later.  We may agree with Orwell so far, that the top-level architectonics are never quite satisfactory – the plot, the total mechanical arch of the novel.  But they are not simply spotted with little good things.  Rather – to continue the metaphor – there are exquisite chapels, an awesome altar, a beautiful choir, majestic nave, welcoming narthex, noble steeples and thilling crypts, only not perfectly fitted together to the eye of an airplane. Or to return to the literal: the novel as a whole is imperfect in its skeletal description, but consists of perfected novelettes.

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A Dickens plot is like a Jurassic boneyard.  Great ribs and femurs lie about in noble profusion, almost but not quite making up an entire animal, with members from other animals intermixed.

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Why doesn't Eugene Wraeburn simply marry Lizzie Hexam at the outset?  One is almost in the dark, what the impediment was, until he soliloquizes well into the novel, and then it seems absurd:  he worries that she is socially beneath him.  Our distance from accepting this is partly a matter of our perspective conditioned by current social practice, which has evolved since Dickens time in the direction of less distinct boundaries among classes.  More telling, however, is a literary reason:  in fiction, and this is fiction, men are forever wedding women from a lower social class; it's quite expected.  Further, within the framework of this novel, Eugene is not of conformist temperament, and (as a lawyer without a practice) is far from well integrated into society at any event.

@criticism

Gissing isn't bad, but even he does a fairish amount of serial thumbnail censure and praise, praise generous but of no critical specificity ("Every stroke of such outlines is a manifestation of genius", p. 209), like handing out prizes on Parent's Day.

@parallels, @recurring characters

(Cf. an atom in different chemical combination)

Younger brother, spoiled by petulant self-regard, meanly ungrateful to his self-forgetting sister:

(… gradgrind); Charlie Hexam

[Jenny Wren, a "parental child" in modern psychiatric terminology. – Cf. the progeriac Nicolino in Powers' Operation Wandering Soul.]

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(curious, that among the finest passages  are several excellent death scenes)  I would have no idea how to write a death scene.  The one death which should have touched me most nearly, I quite made a mess of; the memory weighs on my heart like a headstone; and am as a result crippled in this regard.

There are short stories which are as acutely observed as any equivalent number of pages in Dickens.  One can even imagine having written those oneself:  simply go out at the top of one's form, have a peak experience, rush home and write it all down before it fades in memory, expending the utmost of one's art.  But one can't rush home and write an entire novel, nor yet a suite of novels, each thick and bursting with detail.  I could right now go out to a coffeehouse and, spending the whole day there in intense observation, come up with a very nice description of someone raising a glass to her lips, in some very particular way.  But I'd have nowhere to stick such a description.  Dickens, writing novel number n, when he wanted such a description, reached into his capacious memory banks and extracted one, of a scene necessarily observed some years previously.

(learning great jokes and comparisons from him – but now it's been done.)  It would have been more charitable in him, had he, from time to time, written simply: "There is an excellent comparison to be made between (darkness) and (cerements), but the margin is too small to contain it."  That would have left something for the rest of us to do.

@wodehouse and dickens

Both have:  A rollicking collection of eccentrics, colliding with one another …

But: The Wodehouse world lacks all evil.  There are weakness and failings behind every plant-pot, and on every sleeve.  But they are amiable peccadillos that raise a smile.  Even the odd burglar is merely naughty, like a Beagle Boy.

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((smash ice))

((some set such a scene, only to smash it -- expls)

((he knew when he set out, that all would end in ruin))

the Maypole ((hearkening back to a green time))

((but already, that time is long past. The inkeeper already of a leaden age))

((something of a wonder how he even managed to keep such an inn -- but keep it he does, and well)

(GKC of CD eclipsing his forbears; and GKC overshadows CD for us. GKC loves England as the knights loved it, and the elves))

Barnaby lives (in his mind) in Elfland; but alas! not surrounded by other elves.

Cf. the Woman in White: a damaged person, whose testimony is here and there of unique value, but who is not treated sentimentally as an oracle, like .... or Owen Meany.

((how to relate a tale, not told by an idiot, but *of* one.  Not, in the idiot's own stumbling, crumpled cadences))((quote: leaves like spirits))

As the novel's end impends, Dickens must drop his leisurely exploration of the depths, and hurry the plot along.  Wham bang, clunk clank.

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Dickens novels tend to fall apart towards the very end, as he hastens to wrap up the plot, pulling rabbits out of hats.   (As might we ourselves, at the very end ….)