Betrachtungen eines Unphilosophischen (quater)

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

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

Nicht vom Wetter spricht sie, nicht vom Schneider,

höchstens von den Grundproblemen  beider.

-- Christian Morgenstern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            (Pause.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone goes home satisfied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

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We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

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

As:

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

~     ~     ~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

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

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

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

~        

Other  tragic examples:

Valéry était atteint  de cécité philosophique.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simulated Annealing and the Art of Detection

“My way of learning  is to heave a wild & unpredictable monkey-wrench  into the machinery.”
-- shamus Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon (1929)

Dashiel Hammett’s P.I.’s find themselves in large, chaotic situations, in which the methodical self-discipline of, say, Dragnet, won’t get you anywhere.   Joe Friday is scrupulous, professional, polite;  Hammett’s guys  are none of those things.

Nor do they follow the cool, cold-blooded approach of what we might dub “Newton’s method “of successive triangulations and approximations.  Instead it’s: stir up the pot. Stir and observe, stir and observe;  add bullets to taste, p.r.n.

cf. Newton’s method of repeatedly refining an initial guess.

~

The police want to grill a man they suspect of having abused and murdered his step-daughter, but have no tangible evidence.

“I don’t know.  What are we going to ask him?”
“If he reads the Evening News. … Christ, Tommy, we can ask him what his favourite colour is.  I just want him in here, under pressure, so we can see what happens.”

-- Val McDermid, A Place of Execution (1999), p. 205

~

And thus it is with Murphy, Private Eye.  He is no master of empirics nor of ratiocination, like Holmes;  nor of intuition into souls, like Father Brown;  but he’s got heart, and he can take a punch, and he’s got a gun;  plus what’s a fella to do?  He’s got a Mission.

So Murphy has what starts out as yet another hopeless case:  His so-called “client” is a ditsy dame with no simoleons to pay him;  plus she gets bumped off practically at the outset;  but he soldiers on.  Because that’s what soldiers do, when they’re on a Mission.

And so it looks hopeless but, he stirs the pot a little, tries this and that, and the next thing you know …

To follow this sobering  yet inspiriting  adventure, simply click here.

For more from Murphy -- philosopher and P.I. -- check out his blog:

=>   http://murphybros.blogspot.com/

~

In sum:   Jiggle the system, let it settle into a local equilibrium;  then jiggle again.  Repeat (with decreasing strength of perturbations as the ideal is neared).

Related to this is an epistemological principle, valid for scientists and detectives alike:   Don’t jump to conclusions.   Or, in a quantum-computing metaphor, don’t provoke a premature collapse of the wave-function.  Keep the various possibilities  juggling in the air, until one or more can be definitively ruled out.

 

Rules of Evidence

Farther back than Iago, or than those who slandered A’ishah (the Prophet’s denunciation of these  constitutes the longest of the Ahâdîth), stands, or rather skulks, the figure of the Calumniator (al-wāšī, el calumniador):  impugning the reputation of a faithful lover, to break up a union.   The question of motive is something of a mystery.

A comparatively innocent instantiation was the 1960 song “Staying In”, sung with teenage angst but on a gently rocking rhythm:

I punched my buddy in the nose after lunch.
Now I'm in trouble 'cause the dean saw the punch
He was tellin' things that were not true about her
So I let him have it in the:  cafeteri-a.

Now I'm stayin' in,   stayin' in
Now my baby's walkin' home with him.
They passed my window hand-in-hand just then
But what can I do? 'cause I'm stayin' in.

If she just knew what that son-of-a-gun said
I know she wouldn't   be caught    with him dead
She don't know what he has got up his sleeve
But she would find out if I could only leave

 

(Note, by the by, that here, by dint of syncopated ictus, the lyricist manages to make her rhyme with cafeteria.  No mean feat.)

By 1963, the tone was less Galahadean, and meaner: “My Boyfriend’s Back”.  A girl sneers with Schadenfreude at the thrashing her calumniator will soon receive:

You’ve been telling lies   that I was un-true-hoo.

Well look out now,  ‘cause he’s coming after you-hoo!

The rhythm here is relentless, four-on-four, like a sledgehammer, or a fist on a face.

Antedating these is a gem from that vintage year of 1959: "My Heart is an Open Book".

Some jealous so-and-so
wants us to  part

That’s why he’s telling you

that I’ve got -- a cheating heart.

Don’t  - be - lieve !
All   -  those - lies !

Dar-ling just be-  lieve your eyes, and

Look;

Look;

My heart is an  op-en book.

I:

love:

No-bod-y  but : You.

It is difficult to convey, in mere print (however much we fiddle with the formatting), the plain candor, the openness, conveyed by this song.   He does not argue the matter, but lets himself be read:  like Jesus in the oleographs, pointing to a glowing heart within his chest.

The music too reflects this simplicity, though in an antisymmetric way.   A chirpy girl-choir accompaniment  trips lightly up the scale, like cherubs on the stairway to heaven:  “Tootle-e-tootle-e-tootle-e-TOOT!”;  while on the key pleading, containing the whole of the singer’s epistemology, his voice descends, unhurriedly,

            Dar-

                ling

                   just
                       be-

                         lieve
                            your

                                eyes

like Plato descending the steps in the “School of Athens”.

~

To return:   For most crimes, whether pecuniary or violent, the payoff for the perpetrator is manifest.  But what could motivate the Calumniator? In the “Staying In” case, apparently bare rivalry: the calumniator wants the same girl (though one suspects that a relationship cadged by such means  will be unstable).  But that is not the case with Iago, nor with the “so-and-so” here.   No self-interest is readily discernable;  the motivation appears to be actually Satanic.

Or, perhaps, there are unconscious motivations.   To expend your envy, you can do something as simple as keying the guy’s Jaguar.   But here, crucially, the goal is not so much to injure the Envied One in his person, as to deprive him of an amour:  thus incidentally (in fantasy) placing him back in play…  But such spelunking we leave to the Viennese alienist.

Pop ! goes the Positivist

 [This is a continuation of a thread begun here.]

Another example of fetishizing the visible (cf. now also this)  occurs in Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1962; page refs. to the Harper paperback reprint), p. 284:

In the last pages of Testability, Carnap discussed the sentence ‘If all minds should disappear from the universe, the stars would still go on in their courses.’  Lewis and Schlick asserted, correctly, that this sentence was not verifiable.

They so asserted incorrectly.  After all, we have a pretty good handle on those stars in their courses, beginning from not long after the Big Bang  through the present, during most of which there were no human minds.

And here’s a simpler experiment:  Let’s all just refrain from observing the moon for the next two weeks.  Now we open our eyes.  Surpri-ise!  Right where we expected to find it, and at a phase two weeks more mature than when we last checked (rather than the phase as last seen).

One occasionally observes a very young child shut her eyes and announce in a sing-song: “Youuu ca-han’t seee mee….!”  I doubt the child actually believes that, it’s just fun to say.  But suppose she did. She is then entertaining an erroneous optical theory, but not an erroneous ontological one.  She imagines that the lights went out for you as well; but she never entertains the thought that you yourself have been extinguished, or been transfixed into some mute deaf motionless limbo until such time as she shall be pleased to gaze again – after all, she has just shown this, by addressing you.

Incidentally, the whole Schlick-shop with its merry/morose band of logical positivists, appear to have created enormous problems for themselves, and come up with completely counter-intuitive results, from the basic motivation of wishing to exclude all metaphysical propositions from the outset as strictly meaningless.   (The story here is in line with our overarching defense of theism.)  In other words, it wasn’t enough to denounce as wholly unconvincing,  all purported metaphysical statements hitherto; nor to brand it a particularly uninteresting language-game; nor to marginalize the enterprise with the derision usually reserved for circle-squarers.  Metaphysics as such, and for all time, had to have a stake driven through its heart, the stake itself consisting in pure reasoning from selbstverständlich  (metaphysically a-priori? God-given? -- oops, NOT) first principles.  For a demonstration of the absurdities that apparently resulted, cf. Popper, passim.  As (p. 281, op.cit.)

My criticism of the verifiability criterion has always been this: against the intention of its defenders, it did not exclude obvious metaphysical statements, but it did exclude the most important … of all scientific statements … the universal laws of nature.

Why even go near such a disaster, for the sake of excluding-in-principle all metaphysical statements – which they were ignoring anyway?  Popper goes so far as to hazard a guess in a footnote to p. 175:  “One not need believe in the ‘scientific’ character of psycho-analysis (which, I think, is in a metaphysical phase) in order to diagnose the anti-metaphysical fervour of positivism as a form of Father-killing.”  (Note, b.t.w., the capital initial of “Father”.)

*

Since we were obliged, a moment ago, to deprecate Popper, let us hasten to another example, in which we find him on the side of the angels.  First let us note:

             * Our conduct is guided by moral laws.

             * Our scientific activity is guided by metaphysical principles.

             * Both categories are philosophically vexed, and any concrete application of these laws and principles may prove problematic; but we cannot do without them.

            Here is Popper (p. 287) characterizing the logical positivists: “They implicitly accept the rule: ‘Always chose the most probable hypothesis!’  He goes on:

Now it can be easily shown that this rule is equivalent to…’Always choose the hypothesis which goes as little beyond the evidence as possible!’  And this, in turn [amounts to] ‘Always choose the hypothesis which has the highest degree of ad hoc character!’

an undesirable result for science.   (Cf. Chomsky, passim, re the extraordinarily abstract and roundabout way you may have to proceed  to get valid results, by no means simply tip-toeing a bit beyond “the evidence”.)

            The principles which we require instead  may be best illustrated by an old joke (presented here in a slightly revised form):

     A zoologist, a mathematician, and a positivist  are touring the hinterlands of Bohemia by train.  Through the window they spot, standing motionless at some distance, a purple cow.

     “Fancy that!” exclaims the zoologist. “There are purple cows in Bohemia.”

     The mathematician, in a low voice, amends: “There is at least one purple cow in Bohemia.”

     The positivist, raising his finger, crisply corrects to:  “In Bohemia there is at least one cow, purple on one side.”

            The joke is that the positivist has the most precise view of the evidence; and of the three statements, only his own is certainly true (interpreting an unmodified “purple cow” in the natural way, as “purple more or less all over”); yet his scruples are absurd.  Science would not progress, were it bound by such fragmented literalism.  (Indeed, we should have to replace “cow” with “an apparently bovine organism”, and always assuming that we can rule out a mirage, or a collective hallucination, or some effect of swamp gas; or for that matter an analogue to one of Hilary Putnam’s pet entities, the Mechanical Cat from Mars.)  And we would have to gloss Quine’s celebrated interjection, gavagai!, as possibly:  “Lo, a rabbit-stage, seen from the east.”

(For more on bovine mathematics, see "How Now, Round Cow".)

A gathering of Positivists

Note:  Occasionally one meets with such unilateral positivist agnosticism  in a non-jocular context:

Franz Ferdinand rode erect, his visible foot deep in the stirrup, a saber at his side.

-- Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts (1993), p. xxvi

The above scenario has been much discussed among epistemologists, under the rubric “Henry and the barn façades”.   However, the cow version is much funnier.

Ceci n’est pas une grange 

~

To move from this to an outlook useful for science, we need these metaphysical principles:

   (1) a certain uniformity or self-cohesion to nature

   (2) the reliability (not in a logical, but in a practical sense) of induction.

(There are others, of course, such as the usefulness of deduction;  but that applies in every world, not just in this contingent one.)

            Now, both these principles are of vexed and delicate application; as are, indeed, the Commandments.   Just as it is difficult to avoid situation ethics, I see no way around a kind of “situation metaphysics”.   The zoologist, using these principles, together with his discipline-specific knowledge (to the effect that animals generally come in species, not as singletons), concludes the presence of purple cows.  But here I must side with the formulation of the mathematician: there is at least one such cow, but perhaps no more.  For, nature’s uniformity depends on the domain.  Were an experiment ever to identify, say, a Higgs boson, we should conclude the existence of an emphatic plurality of Higgs bosons; that there should only be one in the universe, is inconceivable.  But biology is more mottled than that.  Given our collective prior acquaintance with hundreds of thousands of cows, none of which was ever purple, we would hypothesize here an extremely rare mutation for (bilateral) purple (bilateral because bilaterally symmetric animals generally continue to evolve with bilateral symmetry, pace the occasional narwhal).  Since a cow delivers but a single calf at a time, this one has no identical siblings, so it is probably unique.  Moreover, the bulls will likely shun her for her color, and she shall have no offspring.  The mutation dies with her.

Carnap attempts to avoid the assumption of a metaphysical principle, by declaring (1) to be “analytic” (i.e., more like “2+2 = 4” than like “animals tend to come in species” or “each elementary particle is invariable within its class”).  Popper comments (p.289) that “no such principle of uniformity can be analytic (except in a Pickwickian sense of ‘analytic’)."  In fact, we noticed, the principle is nothing remotely like analytic, having always constraints on its application, which in some domains may be severe.  And as for (2), I concur with Popper (p.292) that it is “a principle of a priori metaphysics.”  And none the worse for that.

[For further notes on ineluctable metaphysical underpinnings of the scientific enterprise, see here.]

Climbing Mount Ineffable

[A Lenten meditation]

Darwinians use a nicely heuristic image for evolution as blind climbings of a fitness-landscape.  Richard Dawkins sharpens the metaphor with the title of his (excellent) book, Climbing Mount Improbable : thus recognizing that, though he is a staunch proponent of Natural Selection, evolving something as nearly perfect as a Penguin  is not a slam-dunk.

The pinnacle of Natural Selection  so far

(Indeed, penguins represent a classic case of Irreducible Complexity:  remove one single feather, and the creature is not nearly so cute.)

Our own essays have recurred to a mountaineering metaphor, in support of Platonism (the Realism position in math).  Namely:  Team A sets out to conquer Mount A from its forbidding southern face;  Team B sets out to conquer Mount B  from its frigid north one.  They meet at the summit, to their mutual surprise.   A equaled B, all along!  This attests to the reality of the mountain, prior to and independent of all human endeavor.  (For ‘mountain’ read:  the truths of mathematics, arrived at independently  by various researchers  using quite disparate methods.)

Now, Imre Lakatos  is neither (statically) Realist nor Nominalist -- he is a Dialectician, and juggles both views.   In the course of a quite intricate examination of the evolution of the Euler characteristic  (don’t imagine you really understand the following sentence unless you have worked through that monograph), he remarks in a footnote:

As far as naïve classification is concerned, nominalists are close to the truth when claiming that the only thing that polyhedra have in common  is their name.  But after a few centuries of proofs and refutations, as the theory of polyhedra develops, and theoretical classification replaces naïve classification,  the balance changes in favour of the realist.

-- Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (1976), p. 92  (**)

Presumably what motivated this formulation, was the experience of beginning with a hopeful conjecture that soon is drowned in a welter of disparate counterexamples; yet with time and hard analysis, we do progressively manage to sort things out -- as though our fumblings were being guided by something real, though unseen.

Similar remarks, I would cautiously submit (under correction), might apply to the multimillennial evolution of theology, in the Historical Church.

Apart from the dogmatic mouthpiece ‘Episilon’ in his classic dialogue/sotie, Lakatos suggests that we have not reaching the summit of any mathematical mountain, and perhaps never will.  With that I concur wholeheartedly;  only admonishing, that the summit is there.  Nor are we likely to get much insight into the internal workings of the Godhead, this side the eschaton;  but those workings are there as well. 

And so we strategically retreat  to the more modest metaphor of the base-camp.  We never quite reach the summit, but with luck and elbow-grease, we might climb high enough that we can detect the smoke from the campfires of the North Face team.

(The theological analogue here is one of the favorite themes of C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man and other works:  the anticipation of Christian insights in other traditions.)

The mathematical upshot of all this, goes back to a repeated theme of these essays:  the distinction between our (human, contingent, fallible) mathematicizing, and the (antecedently existent, transcending) mathematical truth.   (For anyone who might dispute that, answer this:  Did the Universe even exist, prior to Newton?)

The theological upshot -- Well, longstoryshort:  Don’t go cutting off heads, merely because you imagine you perceive some straw in your neighbor’s eye.

(**)  More pointedly: 

… the problem of finding out where God drew the boundary dividing Eulerian from non-Eulerian polyhedra.  But there is no reason to believe that the term ‘Eulerian’ occurred in God’s blueprint of the universe at all.

-- -- Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (1976), p. 68

Amen.  But He has a blueprint, of which our notion of “polyhedra” is a primitive glimpse.

Similar remarks might apply to the Trinity.

~

Another parallel:

Consider a theological scholar  working on an apparent inconsistency between two Biblical passages.  Theological doctrine assures him that the Bible, properly understood, contains no inconsistencies.  His task is to provide a gloss that offers a convincing reconciliation of the two passages.  Such work seems essentially analogous to ‘normal’ scientific research as depicted by Kuhn;  and there are grounds for supposing that he would not repudiate the analogy.

--  John Watkins, “Against ‘Normal Science’”, in I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970), p. 33

Epistemological Minimalism

 

The Crusoe myth enters philosophy mainly in the form of an epistemological orientation, as opposed to ontology or metaphysics.  … Crusoe enters, not as a deus, but as a homo ex machina.  He has passed through the fire of total doubt, and has come through.

-- Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (1964), p. 105

We earlier, in extenso (here and here and here) examined the ins & outs, and roundabouts, of the mystery-movie “Memento”.  The film is a puzzle-box, challenging and entertaining;  though we ultimately had to conclude that the pieces don’t really all fit together.    Its essential pleasure lies in its premise:   a man finds himself alone in a room, with no memory of his past, but an intense drive to piece it all together, starting from the most minimal of information, and eagerly hoarding each new scrap.   

Epistemologically, it is a modernist development (I almost wrote, ‘extension’, but it is more like a contraction) of the theme of Robinson Crusoe.  (This we observed earlier, here;  the comparison occurs explicitly in Auster’s The Locked Room.)

The other day, browsing the remainder tables, I happened upon Paul Auster’s 2006 entertainment, Travels in the Scriptorium, which managed to pull me in from the very first paragraph.   I purchased it  knowing that, like the other enjoyable stories of his I have read, it would ultimately prove an empty drawer.   But -- as with “Memento” -- the fellow is pushing my buttons, whether I like it or not.  I can’t help responding, much like those otherwise-sensible women whose buttons (one in particular) are pushed by bodice-rippers.

The dust-jacket calls it “A Novel”, a thing which it is not.  It is a conte, a sotie, a long-shortstory, a mini-novelette, and none the worse for that, except commercially.  Indeed, as a short-story, of that by now familiar kind which begins in medias res, and ends there as well, it’s not a bad read, while you’re waiting for the light to change.  But if you seriously expected the depth and development, the hard-won insights of a real novel, you would be disappointed, and likely storm right back to the overstock store, blustering, “I don’t care if it did cost me only two dollars -- I want them both back!”

Fact is, it is extremely easy to set up an atmosphere of dread, anomie, mystery, conspiracy, or anything you like;  the hard part is the follow-through:  actually delivering on any of the promising plot-points.

The book(let) is decidedly ‘intertextual’ -- narcissistically self-referential.  It trots out the names of characters from earlier efforts (Fanshawe, Quinn), but as those characters were spectral to begin with, and as they  in this later work  are little more than a name, there is no layering or synergy at work:  the instructed reader simply nods in recognition, and awards himself a sugar-plum.   The business about switching labels for things (bed/lamp; lamp/bed) is foreshadowed in Ghosts, but in this later work turns out to be an annoying red-herring, since the explanation of the ‘conundrum’ there thrown up (how did the labels get so quickly switched, given that they are stubbornly adhesive) is never answered.  It's like "Lost":  flourish a bunch of tantalizing mysteries, and then forget about them.

I had rather hoped nonetheless,  that some of the tantalizing puzzles the author trots out, might find elucidation, but it was not to be.   At some point, the story simply bites its own tail, and stops.   (At least it was decently briefer about coming to this non-conclusion than was Finnegan’s Wake.)  And so we rest, le miel sur le lèvres, in an eternal posture of disappointment, as the story freezes to a close.   It is, at the end, a chat, an elegant but empty exercise;  a jack-in-the-box with no jack in it.

(There!  Now that’s lapidary.  Let them put that on a dust-jacket!)

~

I looked the thing up on Wiki (yes, it rates its own page), to see what the critical reaction had been;  the English article, very sketchy, gives none.   The German entry (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reisen_im_Skriptorium) shows more Gründlichkeit, and quotes this review, whose sentiment we second:

 „Hier wird keine richtige Geschichte erzählt, die mit Stoff gefüttert wurde, einen Anfang, eine Mitte, ein Ende und eine Bedeutung hat. Wieder einmal hat Auster eine literarische Fingerübung aus dem Ärmel gezaubert […].“

– die tageszeitung, 28. Juli 2007[2]

~

For a real novel, that actually goes somewhere --

beginning with guns, and ending in Grace --

Try this instead:

Murphy on the Mount

~

For our own experiment in locked-room mysterious minimalism,  try this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-tale-of-oliver-twisted.html