Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (lo gai saber)

I wish to make a serious argument about the relation of the cosmos, God, and the human purpose.

But I wish to do so in a certan lightsome mood.

-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 60

Ein Universitätslehrer, der sein wenig anmutendes Spezialfach  reichlich mit Witzen zu würzen pflegt [to “sow it with jokes”].

-- Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zm Unbewussten (1905 ff)

These could serve as  motto for this site.

~

David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd, 1961)  laments the impairment of the American spirit of playfulness   at the hands of post-Puritan sobersides:  “It may be a long time before the damage done to play during the era depending on inner-direction  can be repaired.”

Richard Rorty writes (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, II.iv.1):

The spirit of playfulness which seemed about to enter philosophy around 1900  was, however, nipped in the bud.  Just as mathematics had inspired Plato to invent ‘philosophical thinking’, so serious-minded philosophers turned to mathematical logic  for rescue from the exuberant satire of their critics.  The paradigmatic figures in this attempt to recapture the mathematical spirit  were Husserl and Russell.

Here the via mathematica and the via jocosa are counterposed.   Whereas for us, they intertwine  like the rose and the briar.

Thus Gerald Holton, in a review (reprinted in The scientific imagination) of the work of Lewis Mumford:

I was … delighted with Mumford’s … acknowledgement that there is a subjective and qualitative side to the doing of science  which scientists hardly ever talk about, the “intellectual playfulness and aesthetic delight” in scientific work, which can be an enormously important component of scientific motivation.

“Playfulness” was one of the favorite words of the Romance philologist (and my former teacher) Yakov Malkiel -- though you would not have known it to look at that hard-working, ever-professorial man, twice over an exile.   This was evident, not only in his writing style (which, for better or worse, has influenced my own), but in his actual etymological practice.  Certain cruxes of etymology, which had resisted the usual attacks of sound-law philology, he would attempt to explain as the free creation of the human spirit: and indeed, such bodacious onomastic hippogriffs abso-blumin'-lutely do exist.  This, in contrast to the sobersides scholar who would attempt to lautgesetz back to some obscure figment of hypothetical Vulgar Latin, or else claim Celtic or Klingon substrate -- thus missing the joke.

E.g., 

On the subject of “Deviations from l’arbitraire du signe”:

There arises the possibility of elevating playfulness to the same kind of pedestal  as economy and clarity, particularly on the strength of linguistic developments where emotional coloration has been achieved  at the expense of economy, or clarity, or both.

-- Yakov Malkiel, “The Inflectional Paradigm”, in W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel, Directions for Historical Linguistics (1968), p. 32

O mistress mine ....

It is key to the cognitive style of such thinkers as Richard Feynman;  and not accidentally, as retaining a streak of the child is helpful in leavening fact-impacted thinking.

Again Holton:

As Einstein himself once said, he succeeded  in good part  because he kept asking himself questions concerning space and time  which only children wonder about.

~

The original Provençal gai saber, which seems to lie at the center of a collection of near-equivalents (joyful wisdom, gai savoir), specifically  denoted the art of composing love-poetry in the then-contemporary style, that of the troubadours.  As that art has alas passed from the planet, felled by the effects of the Albigensian Crusade,  we use it (as did Nietzsche et alia) in a wider sense, denoting the desired confluence of homo sapiens and homo ludens.

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

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

*

We have a genuine philosophic eros.  Knowledge excites us.

-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 22

Da nun  in meine Darstellung  mancherlei einfließen wird, was strengen Richtern  unwissenschaftlich erscheinen muß,  so möchte ich dieses  einigermaßen  durch das Zugeständnis entwaffnen, daß dem Ganzen  die Überschrift  Allotria gebühre …

-- Hugo Schuchardt, “Der Individualismus in der Sprachforschung”, in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 422

~

The fact that language is used for communication  is no more intrinsic to it  than its use to tell jokes …

-- Norbert Hornstein, Logic as Grammar (1984), p. 119

So far, however, from exalting the raconteur’s art, that passage stems from a practitioner of the singularly humorless Chomskyan Government-and-Binding school;  and means, not to enrich our notion of language with that of humor, but to squeeze it dry  even of semantics.

Cf. Karl Jaberg, Spiel und Scherz in der Sprache (1930).

Prospects in Proctoscopic Philosophy

We did our best to trounce a certain excrementitious version of ultra-reductionism, that of those known as "eliminativists" (nomen omen), here:

            Eliminative Materialism

By way of afternote, or pousse-café, these tidbits:

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), p. 373:

The wholehearted behaviorism, naturalism, and physicalism I have been commending in earlier chapters  help us avoid the self-deception of thinking that we possess a deep, hidden, metaphysically significant nature  which makes us ‘irreducibly’ different from inkwells or atoms.

To which we can only reply (after mature reflection):  Bite Me.

~

I wield this term proctoscopists as a handy epithet of hearty abuse, wherewith to belabor the shoulders of those who deserve it:  but it some cases it turns out to be eerily accurate.  For the ineffable Norman “O.” Brown, “all thinking comes from anal erotism”, reports Frederick Crews in a painstaking essay, reprinted  in Out of My System (1975), p. 29.   (This previously best-selling author and cult figure is seldom referred to simply as "Norman Brown", but invariably with that unexplained “O” in the middle.   What it stands for is never made clear;  presumably it represents a sphincter.)

[That same volume reprints an excellent essay distinguishing the (good) reductive from the (bad) reductionistic, in literary criticism, “Reductionism and its Discontents”.]

What Realism is Not

I just stumbled upon this;  and wondered, My gosh, might anyone imagine that, by Realism, I meant that?

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), p. 334:

In just what sense were there physical features of reality  capable of being represented accurately only by differential equations, or tensors, before people thought of so representing them?

No mathematical physicist in his senses holds this delusion;  Rorty is tilting at a straw man.  The example of the discovery of the equivalence of wave mechanics vs. matrix mechanics, discussed previously, is well-known.   And one historian of physics opined that, if the seat of his pants told him anything, it was that the tensor formalism for General Relativity would eventually be replaced by something better.

Nor need two very different-looking approaches to the same thing  be mere historical contingencies, as was the case with wave mechanics vs. matrix mechanics, or the Chomskyan Extended Standard Theory vs. Generative Semantics (in Chomsky’s classic phrase, “notational variants”).  Rather, both views may be built into the very subject itself -- provably two sides of the same coin.  This is the vast and fascinating mathematical principle of Duality, which deserves an essay of its own.  In string theory, it is called Maldacena duality, and is a deep idea.

We could call the straw-man, overreaching philosophy “methodological Realism”, except that the phrase sounds too respectable, too much like an aspect  rather than an exaggeration  of  Realism.   Accordingly we shall dub it Tinkertoy Realism.

At all events -- to answer Professor Rorty's initial question:  planetary orbits existed prior to Kepler and Galileo,  and the electron prior to Millikan, in much the same sense that the nightingale antedates Keats.

Der Fall Rorty (Explication de texte)

 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 19:

If we try to clarify the orthodox notion of ‘the divine’, we seem to have either a merely negative conception, or else one explicated in terms of the notions of ‘infinity’ and ‘immateriality’. Since reference to infinity explains the obscure by the more obscure, we are left with immateriality.

            Rorty seems to have solved the Packing Problem:  This is ten pounds of bullsh*t in a five-pound bag.

            The first clause first, though it is the least exceptionable.  It neither says nor presupposes anything false; the bias is merely rhetorical.  We “try to clarify” (evidently doomed in our efforts, so obscure is the clarificandum) – as though clarification were not likewise a necessity for everything from rocks to snowflakes to the Continuum Hypothesis.  Bishop Berkeley tried, and failed, to clarify Newton’s fluxions; Cauchy succeeded.  Next!  -- And then those little tweezers, the squotes:  I use them myself, so I know what they’re used for.  Preferably not to denigrate divinity before we’ve even begun (“…of ‘the divine’ ….”).   

            The “merely negative conception” does point to a real current in theology (both Christian and Islamic), but a current so rich, that the “merely”, while essentially an emotion-word, almost rises to the status of a lie.  For the “negative conception”, the  via negativa, (discussed elsewhere in this series;  just click on the label) is nothing like nihilism, nothing like negativism, nothing even like skepticism.  It is a stance arrived at after a long – centuries-long – attempt to characterize, in positive terms, what is… well, it turns out, very difficult to characterize, at least in terms of the predicates we inherited from our hunter-gatherer and pastoral past.  We might compare it to the history of our contemplation of the Continuum Hypothesis.  In the early days, red-blooded mathematicians naturally set out on their stallions to prove it (positively) true; or, failing that, to prove it (positively) false.  The current position (after much intermediate agony)  is:  It is true in some models; false in others; and independent of the axioms as usually deployed in set theory.  This whole “independent of the axioms – neither true nor false, exactly, but not nonsense either” is a rich notion, almost too rich to digest,  which required millennia to arrive at.  It is indeed a kind of (unanticipated) negative result; but not “merely negative”.  And since the problem of God is a superset of the problem of the Continuum Hypothesis, we cannot well expect a simple etch-a-sketch portrait of the guy (as it were, posing along the boardwalk at Ocean City).  (Indeed, if you follow me closely, my adducing the C.H. for comparison, so far from being some typical theistical opportunistical move, if anything undermines our naïve conception of the Creator; at least, its initial effect on myself was sickening, as bad as the Beagle on Captain FitzGerald.  And there will be no post-initial effect for quite some time, until – God grant it – I gain greater insight into the thing.)

He goes on:  ”or else one explicated in terms of the notions of ‘infinity’ and ‘immateriality’.”

(Note again the sneer quotes, offered in lieu of argument by this ‘philosopher’.)

Being passably ignorant of theological history, I cannot say whether these two epithets, among the many that might be hazarded as regards the Godhead, are the two statistically most prominent ones, but let us suppose they are.  No theologian, and no widow lighting a candle, ever imagined that these were the crux of the thing.  The integers are infinite and immaterial; so is the Infinite Penguin; we worship neither.  How about “Creator”, “Redeemer” and “the ground of our morality”, yo?

  “Since reference to infinity explains the obscure by the more obscure…”    Good… Lord.  I wish it were so.   If the nature of the divine were actually clearer than the nature of infinity – I wouldn’t need to write this essay, it could be left to the kindergarten teacher, while the rest of us dance table-top, champagne in hand.   Infinity – by which I shall here always mean, the very teensiest flavor of same, aleph-nought – has been very well studied by now.  It is virtually suitable for the nursery.

            If I have hesitated to push the infinity-of-the-integers business too far (their infinity, as opposed to their Necessity), it is not because it is too obscure:  it is rather too simple, too almost shallow.  I can tell you a lot more about little-omega (that least, most modest infinity, with the ordinal type of the natural numbers) than I can about, say, something really difficult, like a duck.

            As for “immateriality”, that’s… immaterial.  Is He immaterial, or nonmaterial, or intangible, or  ethereal, or abstract, or funereal  -- wholly or partly so? Some say He once walked through Jerusalem, leaving footprints in the sand.  That is intriguing, if true (trust Rorty to latch on rather to the boring possibility); but as for immateriality, that is no part of our interest in, or devotion to, Him.  Smurfs are immaterial for the matter of that, and I don’t go to Smurfs on Sunday.  In fact, given a choice (say, by a dating service) between a Material entity and an Immaterial, I’d go with the Material every time.  It might tickle our idle curiosity to find out, whether He is – or rather, for that is nonsense, to what extent and in which ways He is ` ` ` immaterial ‘ ‘ ‘ (and here it is the philospher’s use, not the possible pis-aller use by the theologian, that I am punctuationally excoriating), -- how like a ghost, like the air, like the integers, like the non-algebraic numbers, like the angels, like aleph-one, like our late great-grandfather, like a poem once spoken but never written down, how like a prayer we would have uttered, but that the Reaper came too soon …. You’d need a lot of terminological tidying-up for the question to even make sense, and it isn’t worth doing.  Those who believe they have had some actual experience of God, have a number of tart things – be they true be they false things, but – a number of sharp and hard things, to say, about these experiences, which in no way resemble the mumblings of a sociophobic agnostic concerning the silences of a fog-enveloped all-encompassing blancmange. To ignore all this and focus on “immaterial”, is like never bothering to learn Relativity, yet loudly wondering (peevishly) about just what was Einstein’s favorite flavor of ice cream. (My understanding, incidentally, is that he preferred minkowskian, with sprinkles.)

            Nothing hangs on this red-herring of the “immaterial”.  Most folks who have had (as they imagine; again, righly or wrongly) any immediate experience of God, tend to emphasize the personal.   My own conception of the Creator is actually more immaterial than most, because I’m emphasizing the actual nature of the Creation, than which the Creator is logically-necessarily more complex: a Creation which has – I mean just plain in terms of Measure Theory -- far more of the mathematical (call that abstract or immaterial or whatever you like) than it does of rocks, or turds, or mxlnthnkxs. (These last are certain purely material items of Universe #138; they greatly outnumber our atoms, but there are far fewer of them than there are  integers.)  Were I someday actually to run into the chap, and were He to appear in the quite tangible aspect of Mr. Natural seated beneath a tree, I should, to be sure, feel mildly surprised, but philosophically neither cheated nor refuted.

(Key to that last paradox:

 While we dub the Lord the “Necessary Being”, that description, like that of “Father” or “Creator” or the “Lord of Hosts”,  does not exhaust Him.  It is impossible to conceive of Him as being nothing but the Necessary.  For in that case He  really would be just a giant math book. Hence the boring quality of the ontological argument (whether valid or not). We can conceivably deduce certain things about God along those lines, but nothing of His concreteness.)

*

Rorty adds, later down the page:

If it makes any sense to speak of the existence of universals, it would seem that they must exist immaterially.

First:  It does indeed make sense to talk of universals, if it makes sense at all  to talk about integers, or modus ponens, or “all men are mortal”, or “the most wonderful mom there ever could be”   -- this “existence of” pre-modifier is something of a rogue.  It makes sense to talk of Hamlet, unicorns, democracy, love, and prime numbers; what is added by this “existence of”?  “Please pass the existence-of  salt.”  No, nonsense.

Next: These universals may “exist”, if you like, `immaterially’, or in any other fashion – I wouldn’t insist on the point, nothing hangs on this. For all I care, they exist in a pickle-jar; none of their properties (in universe after universe) are affected thereby.  As it happens, I personally tend to see Hilbert space as rather more concrete and well-defined, and mountains as rather more abstract and ill-defined, than has hitherto been customary. Likewise, Schubert’s piano sonata in B flat is – abstract /ideal/ immaterial/ call-it-what-you-may, it is still acoustically-ontologically tangible, and each recording or performance thereof is quite concrete.

And yet further a bit (Rorty goes on):

“…the immaterial – the mystery beyond the bounds of sense…”

Now this is a nice phrase, suggesting in particular  the existence of something beyond the confines of the lavatory, where nominalists spend so much time; so we receive it with respect.  Still, conscience oblige, we are compelled to observe, that the “bounds of sense” are a purely relative, species-bound, even individual- and moment-bound notion. A pickle-jar exists beyond the bounds of the blind bat, that doesn’t make it a mystery.  Hilbert space exists beyond the bounds of certain uninstructed individuals; whose bad?  The Blorks of the planet Fnoid can neither see nor touch a stationary object, but they can move it, and then sense it, using their solutions to the equations of motion, and this more accurately than with the eyes.   Cantor and Gödel had a sense for the infinite that compares favorably with many an ear for music or nose for wine. 

            And as for “mystery”, a term often used as a sort of hand-waving dismissal: many things, both physical and immaterial, are mysterious until you study them; others, unmysterious until you study them.  Rocks are much more mysterious after the discovery of atoms (my my, mostly empty space. And yet so solid).  Fractions, which every kindergartner now takes for granted, spooked the Egyptians, who for some reason expressed them, not in the simple form of today, but as an elaborately calculated sum of reciprocals.  Algebraic numbers, imaginary numbers, lose their mystery in a single intellectual wedding-night.  Transcendental numbers like e and pi, retain – or rather have gained, in mystery, but in a specific sort of mystery in each case: indeed, we have a solid handle at the hither end of it.  It is a mystery we never would have discovered, let alone elucidated, had we adhered to a Rortyan agnostic-proctological underview.

*

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p. 190, re Rorty’s replacement of epistemology with hermeneutics:

Discourse among scholars, in short, can proceed without worrying about consilience.  About rigor too, it would seem.  Although this concession is welcomed by postmodernist scholars, it is a premature surrender that would drain much of the power and joy from scholarly inquiry.

Wilson counsels eschewing such a replacement, “except at cocktail time” -- a wise proviso, since indeed, prattling on about hermeneutics is much more likely than epistemological discourse  to get you laid.

 

Dialectical Theology

In The Will to Believe (1897), William James, marshalling arguments for the defensibility of theistic belief, writes (p. 61):

God himself may draw vital strength and increase of very being  from our fidelity.

We may christen this  the Tinkerbell Theory of the nature of God.

[Note:  Not making fun of James’ idea,  just naming it.]

For:  Recall when Tinkerbell, having herself imbibed the poison potion, that Peter might be spared, was fading fast;  and Peter Pan, stepping boldly outside the frame of footlit fiction, turns to address the audience, bidding all who “believe in fairies” to demonstrate their faith by some sign, such as clapping or shouting or tossing five-dollar bills onto the stage.   The audience complies, and the sprite recovers -- at least, that was the drill in 1956, the year I saw the play on Broadway (with Mary Martin in the title role).   Who knows what kids today would do, their minds rotted by brutish masscult -- probably drown the little cross-dressing actress out with vuvuzelas.

Anyhow.

The thought, thus limited, is plausible, on the analogy of the inner strength which parents gain while laboring to nurture their babies.  But the parents are fully present before the baby arrives.  Quite otherwise is a variant whereby the creatures themselves somehow bring the Creator -- or the invisibilia -- into being.  We might call this the “…chicken begat the egg begat the chicken begat the egg begat…” Hypothesis (again, just to give it a name).

Thus, we recur to Michael Dummett, “Truth” (1959), repr. in Truth and other enigmas (1978), who (as we saw earlier) wrote, on p. 18: “Intuitionists speak of mathematics in a highly anti-realist (anti-platonist) way:  for them it is we who construct mathematics; it is not already there”, and contrasted this with the full-bore Realist “Fregean notion of a mathematical reality waiting to be discovered”:  Intermediate between these opposing views, Dummett offers a compromise (to my mind, incoherent):

If we think that mathematical results are in some sense imposed on us from without, we could have instead the picture of a mathematical reality  not already in existence, but as it were  coming into being as we probe.  Our investigations bring into existence  what was not there before, but what they bring into existence  is not of our own making.

Here is another spin on this surprising idea:   John McDowell, in Evans & McDowell, eds., Truth and Meaning (1976), p. 48:

The alternative conception of sense would require a novel, anti-realist conception of the world:  if truth is not independent of our discovering it, we must picture the world  either as our own creation, or, at least, as springing up in response to our investigations.

And indeed, one of our own readers -- not a professional philosopher by any means -- recently commented:

God and Man are both Necessary and Contingent. The existence of one depends upon the other. The mind of man evolved to recognize and name God, therefore, God's existence is contingent upon man. God is also necessary because, logically, if Man, and the Mind of Man exist, then so too must God exist. And vice-versa. Man, or rather the mind of man, is necessary to recognize God and therefore bring God into existence.

The only thing I can make of these various related statements, is that they are conflating the notions of Reality or (Existence) and Reality(Existence)-for-us, a move to which I took exception here.

*

            This general style of thinking would seem to cohere with the contemporary complexus of attitudes which we may group under the rubric of “Gaia”.  These appear in many different forms.  Thus from Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), p. 297, commenting on the views of Wilfrid Sellars, Jay Rosenberg, and C.S. Peirce:

Sellars wants to substitute a way of looking at human inquiry which views “fated to be agreed upon” as a description of a causal process which leads to the creation of self-representings by the universe.  Thus we find Rosenberg echoing the later Peirce’s idealistic metaphysics of evolutionary love:

We must come to see the physical universe as an integrated physical system which necessarily “grows knowers” and which thereby comes to mirror itself within itself.

If you prefer that to simple Realism, fine.  “Fated to be agreed upon” sounds like an awfully roundabout way to avoid uttering the forbidden word true, but hey, de gustibus.

 

*

Note:  That mealy-mouthed “fated to be agreed upon” crap  is isomorphic to the celebrated formula of John Stuart Mill, to the effect that actual objects (like a cat) are “permanent possibilities of sensation”.  This was intended to avoid the agnostic absurdity of “it’s all just colour-patches and raw feels”, while skirting the forbidden Realism. -- To which I reply:  That’s the cat.  It’s on the mat.  Deal with it.

Hermeneutics/Epistemology

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Richard Rorty makes much of a dichotomy between epistemology -- the traditional study of how, and whether, we know what we think we know (though elsewhere he redefines it as “the attempt to render all discourses commensurable  by translating them into a preferred set of terms” (p. 349), and elsewhere again (p. 353) as “roughly, a description of our study of the familiar”) -- and hermeneutics -- which is the kind of crap they teach at Yale.   Characterizing those who have qualms about Kuhn, he writes (p. 344):

If the study of science’s search for truth about the physical universe  is viewed hermeneutically, it will be viewed as the activity of spirit -- the faculty which makes -- rather than as the application of the mirroring faculties, those which find what nature has already made.

This dichotomy, then, shares some territory with what I’ve been labeling Realism vs. Nominalism.    However, the professor assures us, none of this matters:

In the view I want to recommend, nothing deep turns on the choice between these two phrases -- between the imagery of making and of finding.

Spoken like a hermeneuticist.

Still and all, the line between our two dichotomies must run not quite parallel, since he then says (p. 345) that this is “still not to say that the atoms, wave packages, etc., discovered by the physical scientists  are creations of the human spirit”, and (though himself leaning to the hermeneutical side of the line) even comes out manfully with:

To say, with Sartre, that man makes himself, and that he differs thereby from atoms and inkwells, is quite compatible with repudiating any suggestion  that part of his self-creation consists in ‘constituting’ atoms and inkwells.

(Imagine our relief!)  even though (p. 354)

its enemies assumed that anyone who overtly practiced hermeneutics  must be ‘antinaturalist’, and must lack a proper sense of the brute exteriority of the physical universe.

(Odd phrase, that -- “overtly practiced” -- as though hermeneuticists were given over to certain ... quite private practices as well...)

Edifying etymological footnote:
Hermeneutics is said to be named for the Greek god Hermes, described in the Homeric hymns as “shifty, cunning, a robber, a thief at the gates”, and by Wikipedia as “a liar, a thief, and a trickster”.  He is also the eponym of hermaphrodite.  Hm.