Elective Acolytes

 

Not many are called, and even fewer chosen.

Tales from the Vienna Circle Woods

 

Vienna, 1927:

After several more appointments with Schlick alone, Wittgenstein had been persuaded to get together with a select group from the Circle, though he had never once attended an official Circle gathering.

Waismann began, subconsciously, to imitate Wittgenstein’s speaking-patterns.  Schlick began to attribute  some original ideas of his own  to Wittgenstein, though they had been expressed before he had even read the Tractatus.  Wittgenstein must have approved of this submissive attitude:  by the fall of 1929  he was choosing to restrict his discussions to Schlick and Waismann alone, usually at Schlick’s home.

-- David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick (2020), p. 48-52

 

Though recalcitrant about joining, or even really following the lead of, the Wiener Kreis, Wittgenstein did attend their summer 1930 congress in Königsberg (the one-time hometown of Kant, who was the Circle’s Aunt Sally), which honored him with a presentation re “The Nature of Mathematics:  Wittgenstein’s Standpoint”.  Here he again encountered a couple who had known him as a teen:

Present too at Königsberg  were Professor Stanislaus Jolles and his wife, Adele.  They were the couple with whom Wittgenstein had stayed during his spell in Berlin, 1906-08.  Their relationship with their lodger had been affectionate;  Stanislaus felt protective and paternal toward “Little Wittgenstein”, as they called him.  But, as so often with Wittgenstein, there had been a rupture, and, typically again, it seems to have arisen from Wittgenstein’s perception that his hosts had fallen short of his exacting standards.

-- ibid, p. 97

It didn’t take much for the prickly master to cancel you (or, to use the term current among Berkeley lefty groupuscules during the 1970s before cancel acquired its later flavor among the Woke, to “break with” you).

If you did manage to remain in Wittgenstein’s good graces, it was a mixed blessing, for he tended to treat such scholars as acolytes or thuriféraires, rather than full colleagues.  Consider the case of Friedrich Waismann, mathematician and physicist, and a core member of the Kreis, who enjoyed the rare privilege of occasionally being closeted with Wittgenstein alone:

 

Waismann’s principal function was prompt and note-keeper.  One philosopher later described his relationship to Wittgenstein as one of “glove puppet to controlling hand.”  … There was something shocking about the degree to which he subordinated his interest to those of Wittgenstein, and the ingratitude with which his efforts were rewarded.
-- ibid, p. 101, 104

 

Bertrand Russell, a supremely well-established logico-philosophical panjandrum himself, could not be so scanted; yet “Bertrand Russell, according to Ayer, was now downgraded to being merely ‘a forerunner of the Christ (Wittgenstein)’.” (ibid, p. 109)

Russell himself was cordial to Wittgenstein, who had read Russell’s mathematical philosophizing, and who in 1911  showed up at Russell’s rooms in Cambridge, and soon formed a close relationship.   Russell had been a member of the Cambridge Apostles, cosily known to themselves as simply “the Society”;  and Wittgenstein received an invitation to join.  But once again, Wittgenstein held back from any circle whose multiplicity made them unwieldy to dominate as a whole.

In a letter of 1913, Russell wrote to a friend:

My friend Wittgenstein was elected to the Society, but thought it was a waste of time, so he imitated henry john roby and was cursed.

-- The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (v. 1, 1951), p. 364

 

(The reference is to an earlier selectee, who disdained ever to attend the Apostle conventicles;  the miffed members promptly canceled him by decapitalizing his name for all eternity, and pronouncing a ritual malediction from time to time.)

 

~  ~  ~

 

In 1932, through the good offices of Gilbert Ryle, the Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer  was introduced for the first time  to Wittgenstein at Cambridge.   Queried by the eminent Austrian  as to what was the most recent book he’d read (cocktail-party filler or ice-breaker, one would have thought),  Ayer replied, La Vida es Sueño, adding modestly that he hadn’t understood it very well.  That was actually owing merely to his shaky Spanish; but Wittgenstein apparently took it as trenchant skepticism, much along the lines of the logical empiricists protesting that they “didn’t understand” (i.e., considered as rubbish) a great many everyday non-scientific statements.  “From then on he treated me as a protégé.” (-- A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life (1977),  p. 120.)

Ryle appears later to have some regrets about those good-offices:

 

Ryle had met  and got along with  Schlick, but his encounters with Wittgenstein left him with serious reservations.  This was evidently a man who needed acolytes, not colleagues;  someone always on the brink of an explosion,  too quick to divide the world into the saved and the damned.

-- Nikhil Krishnan, A Terribly Serious Adventure:  Philosophy at Oxford  1900-1960, p. 54)

 

In the same memoir, the mild-mannered Ayer recounts the brusque reception that met Waismann, who had so long sedulously served Wittgenstein, when they later became colleagues at Cambridge University:

Waismann was Jewish, and when Vienna fell to the Germans  he fled with his family to England.   He went to Cambridge, which was willing to accept him, but Wittgenstein did not desire that what he regarded as a deceptive echo of his own thought  should be audible in the same university, and therefore announced that anyone who attended Waismann’s lectures  would not be allowed to come to his.

-- A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life (1977),  p. 132

 

Horresco referens, but such petty and revanchist behavior reminds me of Tr*mp.

~

 

The incomparable logician Kurt Gödel  played a notably honorable role in this Kreis of often quarrelsome prima donnas.   While faithfully attending their gatherings, he was content so remain modestly in the background, and be taken for a subaltern, while all the time excogitating, leading to work more important more lasting than anything any of the others in the Kreis would accomplish.   Again, let the portraitist tell it:

 

Although almost all Circle members became convinced that, drawing on Wittgenstein and Ramsey, they had solved the problems of mathematics -- that mathematical truths were a type of tautology -- Gödel had sat quietly at Circle meetings  without believing a word of this.  He was a mathematical Platonist.
-- David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick (2020), p. 148

 

Those affordances of the Circle, and of Wittgenstein in particular, were worse than useless: positively stultifying for the practice of mathematics.  [For our essays on the subject, consult

=> https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Platonism  

]

 

As for the excesses of acolytism, Gödel kept a level head:

 

While Schlick and Weismann revered Wittgenstein, Gödel was among several  bemused by the cult-like deference he inspired in his acolytes. … [And later, when Wittgenstein reigned at Cambridge:]  Many students became disciles -- who, like Waismann in Vienna, subconsciously came to mimic his mannerisms.

-- ibid, p. 149, 247

 

The socio-historian and polemicist Ernest Gellner  provides a glimpse of the Cambridge period of Wittgenstein’s ascendency.  There grew up

 

… the first set of ‘companions of the prophet’.  Initially, there was a small, carefully vetted, conventicle of devotees in Cambridge, in the years preceding the Second World War. … But the movement grew …

Maor premise:  all cultural cocoons, all forms of life, are valid and self-sufficient, and Wittgenstein has shown this to be the case.  Minor premise, never spelt out or discussed, but operationallly taken for granted:  only our cocoon is of any interest. … Entry to Wittgenstein’s seminar was restricted at the master’s whim, and the ideas circulated in privately-copied typescripts which Wittgenstein himself refused to have published.  This esotericism greatly enhanced the appeal of the ideas, which were treated as a major revelation by the adepts.

 

-- Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude (posthum. 1998), pp. 160-165

 

(Parallels from the history of linguistics  during the Chomsky years, could be adduced…)

~  ~  ~

 

Let it not be supposed that the field of philosophy is at all atypical  among academic specialties, as regards such interpersonal rugosities.  Parallels from the history of linguistics  during the Chomsky years, could be adduced.  As, the mathematician Mark Kac, father of the linguist Michael Kac, remarks in his memoir:

 

Linguistics is a strange field, full of cliques and fiefdoms, each fiercely attached to its staked-out territory, and consumed with enmity toward the others.

-- Mark Kac, Enigmas of Chance (1985), p. 107

 

For an extended look at academic acolyte relations, pour yourself a brandy  and relax with these:

 

=> http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/02/chomsky-freud-and-problem-of-acolytes.html

and its appendix

=> https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-agony-and-acolyte_28.html

 

These include anecdotes about my fondly former Berkeley Doktorvater  in Rom. Phil.,  Professor Yakov Malkiel, including portraits of the (pro tem) Malkielitas, and one (canceled) Malkielito.  One will detect, in the telling, a Nabokovian tone;  which is only just, as the Malkiel family and the Nabokov clan  were BFFs in Berlin, back in the ‘30’s (while it lasted).

 

For Whom the Bell Tollens

Miscellaneous additions to our essay on the logic and rhetoric of modus tollens,

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

(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

Truth and Provability (expanded)

[A footnote to this.]

Trying to suss out the nature of Truth by staring straight at it  is like attempting heliology by staring at the Sun.   In both cases, more assimilable enlightenment  comes from the corona.

Thus the related but distinct notion of Provability. Gödel was the first to neatly delineate the two notions:  the Propositional Calculus is deductively complete (i.e., all truths may be derived via the defining rules of the system), whereas anything as robust as the integers is deductively incomplete :  one can, within that more expressive system, formulate statements that are true but (intra-systemically) unprovable .  Previously, the Formalists (Hilbert et al.) had seen provability as an analytic explanation of what is meant by ‘truth’ itself.

Kurt Gödel
("I'm looking throuuuugh you...!")

Pre-scientifically, and indeed theologically, we are not surprised that the two notions should not be equivalent (though of course we had no notion of the precision afforded by Gödel’s results).  Some things, existing from before we were born, and lasting ever after,  just are true;  why should they be logically derivable, or even humanly comprehensible?

~     ~     ~

There is a perhaps related notion within the philosophy of language:

~ Whatever can be meant,  can be expressed.  ~

(Intended-meaning : truth  ::  expression : provability)

Yet the very existence of our word ineffable, suggests that we at least entertain the possibility that this may not be so.

In the words of a Neothomist philosopher:

La communicabilité de la pensée  est un fait immense, incontestable  et elle n'est possible que par le langage;  mais tout suggère que, dans le langage, la pensée reste  par nature  essentiellement autre que son moyen de communication.

-- Etienne Gilson, Linguistique et philosophie (1969), p.  39

Taking this in a maximalist sense  would imply, not merely that certain thoughts are ineffable, but that no thought is quite equivalent to its verbal expression.

A further discussion of this topic may be consulted here:
The "idea" idea.

~

It is clear that we need a notion of truth independent (or partially independent) of provability (however vexed and vague that notion must necessarily be, without such buttress), else how to assess the validity of what purportedly is proved.   In the Awful Warning against dividing by zero, delivered to pupils in their tender years, the young scholars meet a Falsidical Paradox:  an impressive display of mathematical handwaving, purporting to show -- there it is on the blackboard, plain as day --  that zero is equal to one.  Yet even a lad in short-pants surely resists such demonstration, if only with an incoherent “Uh, no, it’s not.”

Compare the smoke and mirrors with which philosophers and neuroscientists demonstrate that consciousness is an illusion, and free will  a will-o’-the-wisp.  Equally we reply: “Uh, no, it’s not.”

~

Relativist conceptions of truth  are familiar.  As the Harvard philosopher wittily put it, mimicking the cant of the post-‘60’s undergraduates:

“You may not be coming from where I’m coming from, but I know relativism isn’t true for me.”

-- Hilary Putnam,  Reason, Truth, and History (1981), p. 119

Less familiar is a relativist conception of provability.   Here, Ernest Gellner comments on the position of fellow-philosopher Michael Oakeshott:

What is proof? -- he asks.  There is no such thing as proof in general, he answers himself.  There is only proof  persuasive for this, that, or the other kind of man.   Cogency of proof  is relative to what you are.  he notices that this does not seem to apply to mathematics, and brazenly comments that just this has always made him suspicious of mathematics.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 180

Actually Oakeshott  put his case too weakly:  varying standards of proof are relevant in mathematics -- indeed, it is only within mathematics  that such scruples have structure and are in point.   In pre-Cauchy/Weierstrass analysis, proof was a bit of a kludge.   Later on, Constructivist qualms  came into play.  And in our own day, we distinguish between theorems whose proof requires the (disputed) Axiom of Choice, from those that can dispense with it.

Ernest Gellner on Truth

“Truth” is, on the one had, a bland and boring concept:  “Paris is the capital of France” is true, “Las Vegas is the capital of France” is false.

Yet in other venues, fraught:  as in, Pravda.  Shading into metaphysical mysticism (“The Search for Truth”).  If I am trying to find out, for which X the sentence “X is the capital of Albania” is true, then in a sense I am Searching for Truth; but really, only for a truth; and indeed, not really under that description:  I merely wish to know what Albania’s capital is called.

~

Ernest Gellner on Truth

Relevant quotes, bridging the gap, from works by Ernest Gellner.  (For our full essay on the subject of truth, click here.)

Re Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Freedom is the recognition that 2 plus 2 makes 4 :  not because there is no escaping such necessity, but because only such necessity is a refuge from arbitrary social power. [It is] an extra-social objective truth, which account for why such fuss should be made  of a morally and emotionally rather neutral piece of arithmetic.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978),  p. 4

On a strategy of self-validating beliefs (which he dubs “auto-functionalism”, a term which seems not to have caught on):

It consists of establishing the soundness of one’s beliefs, not directly, in the ordinary and straightforward way, by showing them to be true, but, on the contrary, of deriving their soundness by showing them to play an essential role, to be ‘functional’, in the internal economy of one’s own personality or society … The first step is to put forward a theory of truth: truth ‘really is’ the fulfilment of a biological, or social, linguistic, etc., function.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 14-15

(Truth, soundness, validity, provability -- actually an interesting Wortfeld;  a topic for another day.)

And, re the egregious Althusser:

He argues, in effect, not that Marxism is true, but that the Marxist epoch is still with us.  What is defended, in the end, is not the truth of a doctrine, but its alleged role.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 17

Now,  that all sounds rather feckless and po-mo; but to add some perspective, it is reminiscent of the “regressive justification” in axiomatics, particularly for set theory.  (More here.)

A somewhat more degenerate version of this auto-functionalist approach, endemic to the America of “pot, pop, and protest” -- degenerate in that, unlike that of Althusser et alia, it makes little reference to the world outside the speaker’s individual ego-bubble (indeed, it works best for pure solipsists, for whom the external world need not exist):

In America, it possesses a theory of knowledge, and above all an associated style of expression, which goes back to populism and beyond it … Its basic idea is that sincerity is the key to truth.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 82

(It’s amusing to hear such a stance referred to as a “theory of knowledge”, but social scientists really do talk that way, speaking  for instance  of a baby’s “theory of the world”.)

“The hysteria of complacency of the postwar period,

and the hysteria of protest of more recent times.” (1971)

And again, back to the math connection, reporting the fantasies of Michael Oakeshott:

What is proof? -- he asks.  There is no such thing as proof in general, he answers himself.  There is only proof  persuasive for this, that, or the other kind of man.   Cogency of proof  is relative to what you are.  he notices that this does not seem to apply to mathematics, and brazenly comments that just this has always made him suspicious of mathematics.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 180

Actually Oakeshott  put his case too weakly:  varying standards of proof are relevant in mathematics -- indeed, it is only within mathematics  that such scruples have structure and are in point.   In pre-Cauchy/Weierstrass analysis, proof was a bit of a kludge.   Later on, Constructivist qualms  came into play.  And in our own day, we distinguish between theorems whose proof requires the (disputed) Axiom of Choice, from those that can dispense with it.

The ultimate selbst-aufhebung of all such alethic egalitarianism is plain:

If almost everything is true in its own fashion, truth cannot matter very much.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 16

~

Bonus nuggets, from the bottom of Gellner’s crackerjacks-box:

It is a travesty to say that martyrs die for Truth.  Real truths seldom require such dramatic testimony.

-- Ernest Gellner, The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974), p. 55

the feminine theory of cognition:  that truth is not a matter of exploring or penetrating an external reality, but of gestation and parturition.

-- Ernest Gellner, The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974), p. 62

Only psychoanalytic interpretations that tally with what is real in the patient, can mediate veridical insight.

-- Adolf Grunbaum, quoted in Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2^nd edn. 1993), p. 185

.

CAMPUSES ON SHUTDOWN

ALERT -  ALERT  -  ALERT

Acting on an anonymous Smartphone tip, the Speech Police are reporting an allegation of a possible rumor of a Microaggression, either recent, or in progress, or expected to occur,  at an unnamed educational facility. Ladies and those identifying as ladies  should proceed to the nearest Safe Space. Other students are advised to shelter in place.

Documented examples of actual micro-aggressions :

http://chronicle.com/article/Facing-Protests-About-Racial/234191

http://claremontindependent.com/we-dissent/

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/11/13/hls-profs-challenge-doc/

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1011-orlin-yale-alumni-interviews-20151011-story.html#navtype=outfit

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-college-become-the-victims-of-progressivism/2014/06/06/e90e73b4-eb50-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/us/warning-the-literary-canon-could-make-students-squirm.html?hpw&rref=us&_r=0

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/demands-for-percent-black-faculty-at-mizzou-would-put-it/article_ae7b6f21-1b5c-593a-b674-68593e4d1d2e.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IEFD_JVYd0

http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/09/meet-the-privileged-yale-student-who-shrieked-at-her-professor/
[Background, quoted from a liberal source: 

"Yale’s student body is 42 percent of minority descent."]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/18/princeton-protesters-occupy-presidents-office-demand-racist-woodrow-wilsons-name-be-removed/

http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/19/harvard-students-decry-hate-crime-after-tape-found-on-black-profs-portraits/

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/american-society/yale-identity-politics/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/23/university-yoga-class-canceled-because-of-oppression-cultural-genocide/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/us/yale-lecturer-resigns-after-email-on-halloween-costumes.html?_r=0

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/01/02/dean-tall-order-making-harvard-more-inclusive/LTWpX1UvbxnTcsjjgAsuBL/story.html#comments 

http://www.syracuse.com/state/index.ssf/2016/02/ualbany_bus_attack.html#comments

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/03/01/black-college-students-who-cops-say-lied-about-racist-attack-and-were-actually-the-aggressors-appear-in-court-heres-how-they-plead/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/party-culture/2016/03/03/fdb46cc4-e185-11e5-9c36-e1902f6b6571_story.html

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/04/harvard-law-school-recommends-retiring-shield/B8m8IVEatnrCSac946olOM/story.html#comments

http://www.newoxfordreview.org/note.jsp?did=0616-notes-being 

~

Ernest Gellner (mitteleuropäischen Ursprungs; later taught at LSE) wrote, in a perceptive and indeed prescient essay (“The Panther and the Dove”, 1969)

What is worrying about the student part of the movement  is its occasional illiberalism.  However libertarian its members may be about legalizing marijuana, they do sometimes put forward proposals such as the student control of ‘what is taught and how’.

-- reprinted in: Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 83

The deformations that Gellner noticed on campuses, almost half a century ago, have continued to grow like weeds.

Psychological Epigrams (weiter erweitert)

From random reading, things worth noting -- things worth quoting.

(Plus some of them I made up myself.)

(0)

If analysis worked, the Japanese would long ago have adapted it, and flooded the market …

-- Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2^nd edn. 1993), p. 205

(1)

The self-betrayal of another  is sucked in through all our pores.

-- Theodor Reik, The Search Within (1956)

(2)

In localities where people belch at meals,

it is unwise to ask after the womenfolk;

and in localities where people are asking after the womenfolk,

it is unwise to belch at meals.

-- Eric Berne, Games People Play (1964)

(3)

Fat people  are more inclined to eat their object  than to bite it.

-- Theodor Reik, The Search Within (1956)

To appreciate the epigrammatic force of this,  you need to know that, in psychoanalytic parlance, “object” refers, not to an object,   but to a human being.  -- The basic idea behind the epigram, is that of Caesar:  “Let me have men about me that are fat / bald-headed men, such as sleep o’ nights …”

(4)

The dream is not prophetic of ill  but is ill itself.  It is bad to dream certain things.

-- Jonathan Towers, characterizing shamanism; in Io viii (1971)

(5) Re joining the “Magic Mountain” sanatarium for consumptives, Hans Castorp (etwa the naïf of the novel) observes:

Manche gewöhnen sich nie, sagte mein Vetter mir gleich, als ich ankam.  Aber man gewöhnt sich daran, daß man sich nicht gewöhnt.

-- Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (1924)

 (6)

The quicker  second childhood kicks in,

the happier U will B.

-- Bozo the Button Buster

(7)

Prostitution ist ja eine Angelegentheit,  bei der

es einen grossen Unterschied macht,

ob man sie

von oben sieht ….

od-er    von ….

un-ten  betrachtet …

-- Robert Musil, Der Mann ohneEigenschaften (vol. I: 1930)

*

Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:

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

*

(8)

Observe the curious working of history:  Archimedes’ death is familiar  because of Plutarch’s interest in Marcellus;  of Marcellus  it is generally remembered  only that  one of his soldiers  murdered Archimedes.

--  James R. Newman, ed. World of Mathematics (1956), p. 179

(9)  Freud on Nacktheitsträume and the origins of Paradise:

Diese  der Scham entbehrende  Kindheit 

erscheint unserer Rückschau später  als ein Paradies,

und das Paradies  selbst

ist nichts anderes

als die Massenphantasie  von der Kindheit des einzelnen.

-- Die Traumdeutung (1899)

Actually, if that were true, you would expect an individual’s conception of Heaven to correlate strongly with his personal experiences in early childhood;  but seemingly they do not. 

I myself, for example, had quite a nice childhood, with storytime and Pooh-bear and my very own coonskin cap.   But my idea of the Afterlife  is purely that of doing math, with the insight of angels.

~

Was für Krimi liest wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?

Schauen Sie mal!

Sigmund Freud und Sherlock Holmes

~

(10)  

Civilization consists in progressive renunciation;

 contrariwise  the superman.

-- Sigmund Freud, letter to Wm Fliess, 1897.

(Note:  Very early in his career;  don't call him on this.)

(11) Finally, one perhaps pardonable autocitation:

Every normal male must repeatedly withstand the beckonings of his testes, and is the better for having learned to do so.  Yet some of those who do not share his natural inclinations,  are proceeding extraordinarily far in punishing and repressing that inborn bloom, on the strength of which -- and without which, not -- civilization has managed to survive and thrive, through wind and wars and pestilence.

-- Dr J, Looking at Someone Up and Down

Where does linguistics fit in?

[Our essay  Consilience in linguistics has been considerably updated, including this latest addition:]

Where does linguistics fit in -- among the humanties, or the sciences?

Um die Sprachwissenschaft   haben sich bekanntlich  die Natur- und die Geistes- (order Geschichts-)wissenschaften gerissen,  wie in der mittelalterlichen Legende  die Teufel und die Engle  um die Seele des Menschen.  Jetzt pflegt man sie  ihrem Inhalt nach  zu den Geisteswissenschaften,  ihrer Methode nach  zu den Naturwissenschaften zu zählen;  mit fast dem gleichen Rechte  könnte man das Umgekehrte tun.

-- Hugo Schuchardt, (1892), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 105

Contra sociological-anthropological structuralisme:

… eager souls who think they can easily borrow  and fruitfully adapt  a formal model  from simpler and perhaps more fortunate fields such as linguistics  or even phonetics.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 122

(Here he means rather phonology;  it is phonology, and not phonetics, that is structuralist.)

[For the full essay, click here.
For linguistics-internal constitutive factors, this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-ontology-of-linguistics.html ]

“Heads we win, Tails you lose”

Contemporary atheists point to cosmological findings of the Big Bang Theory, to argue that no Creator is logically necessary.   Earlier writers, compassing the same end of assailing theism or even deism, likewise adverted to Big Bang Theory, but put an opposite spin on it.   A philosopher, reviewing Filosofskie Problemy Sovremennoi Fisiki (Moscow, 1957), by  Marxist author Ernst Kolman:

He appears to reject outright the docrine of a cosmological commencement, on the grounds that such theories inevitable lead to the invocation of non-material causes  and hence to religion.  Do they?  How pleased some of our theologians would be if this were so.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 138

(Note:  Gellner is not here by any means espousing deism, but merely critiquing one instance of Physics Porn.)

For further discussion, try this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/07/more-physics-porn-further-updated.html

On “Realism”

That is to say:  Not directly concerning that deep philosophical subject (which lies, alas, beyond our reach), but dealing more with just the socionoëtic and lexicographic aspects of the thing.    Our principle essay-series on the matter  begins here:   Realism:  What;  and here:  The Realist Vernacular.   Here are the latest stray quotations  appended to that.

As a Platonist, he saw everything on earth as broken arcs, which merely suggested the perfect rounds above.

-- Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin (1964), p. 92

Realists [with a capital R] are not the same thing as ‘realists’ in daily life, who are men who expect neither themselves nor others to be any better than they ought to be, and generally much worse.

-- Ernest Gellner, “The crisis in the humanities” (1964), collected in The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974), p. 15

To mathematicians who study them, moduli schemes are just as real as the regular objects in the world.

-- David Mumford, Forward to Mircea Pitici, ed., The Best Writing on Mathematics 2012, p. xi

Cruore spumantem

 

New states are born free,  yet everywhere  they are in chains.

-- Ernest Gellner, “Democracy and Industrialization” (1967)

One gets the impression, after a slackening  following the end of the traditional Cold War, and the period of high hopes for newly-independent nations, born both of the breakup of the Soviet bloc, and the retreat of European colonialism  from the continents they once stabilized  tant bien que mal,  that lines are being drawn, for some wide-ranging upcoming conflicts.  But their pattern is not yet clear.  The antagonisms and (very unstable) alliances  will likely be determined as much by climate change, and water shortages, and the general worldwide “scissors effect” (Trotsky, before his time) as any traditionally recognizable allegiances.

Europe is nervous.  It looks south, and sees its future in Lampedusa.

[On that matter, consult the article "The Anchor", in the current New Yorker.]

Hannibal ante portas!

World population growth has been leveling off, save in the one region least able to feed itself, Sub-Saharan Africa.   And so the population presses north.

Fears of political submersion and cultural annihilation  would drive the privileged population into an ultra attitude:  liberalism would go by the board. … One can hardly feel very confident that Europeans-in-Europe, faced with a situation analogous to the one facing settler populations [e.g. Boers in South Africa, Jews in Palestine] -- no other world to which to retreat, and in danger of submersion -- would behave in a way markedly better than did or do the colons.

-- Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (1964), p. 178

It is notable that this was written in the early 1960s, just before a wave of Western romanticization of the Third World arrived.  Gellner in 1964, like Enoch Powell in 1968,  was looking farther down the line.

*

Travaillant au noir,

le détective  se trouve aux prises

avec le Saint-Esprit

C’est quoi, le péché irrémissible ???

*

The 1996 book It Takes a Village, by Barbara Feinman (writing as “Hillary Clinton”), was meant -- commendably -- to point to the need (which in practice, in America, had never been denied, until recently) for community involvement in child-rearing, beyond the autarky of the nuclear family.  Such was the unquestioned state of affairs during my own childhood:  church, school, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, Little League, summer camps, YMCA, …  The need has become more acute in this time of fragmented families, or households that were never a full and normal family at all.   The book dissents, though in liberal guise, from the new-hatched doctrine that all you need for healthy happy productive children  is a baby-mama and her welfare check.

The title purports to translate an African proverb (which has enough truth not to quibble with;  see Wiki for originals);  and indeed, in the setting of traditional Africa (which largely no longer exists), it is true enough.  But in our own time, such does not suffice.  In the words of an especially perceptive socio-historian, writing over half a century ago:

A Greek village can produce a little Greek, a Nuer village can make new Nuers … It is however awkward to say that (for instance) a French village can produce a Frenchman.  Can it?  It can certainly produce a French peasant, who is a kind of Frenchman.  But a Frenchman without qualification?  [Meaning not: “a Frenchman without qualifications”, for that is exactly what a village can produce, but:  a Frenchman tout court.]

Village-size social units  are no longer competent to produce fully life-sized human beings.  A Nuer village can still produce a Nuer, but it is incapable of producing an effective Sudanese citizen.

-- Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (1964), p. 158

Note the date.  The insight is striking, now that Sudan itself has fragmented into two, and the fragments themselves are dysfunctional.   A friend who has followed the Sudanese situation for years, reports that the race war between Nuer and Dinka  is currently absolutely savage, though this finds little reflection in the press, which (understandably) has its own space-limitations for Third World meshugaas.

This (widely anticipated, though unspoken) result, illustrates once more  the instability of micronationalisms;  and exemplifies (Gellner again), the tenet, “The world is richer in cultural differentiations, and in systematic injustices, than it has room for ‘nations’.” (http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/03/spheres-of-influence.html )

(More here: http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/08/rise-of-la-racaille.html)

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~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

 

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[Update 21 April 2014]  When I suggested that battles over aqueous resources  might occasion fierce and feral realignments, I had principally in mind  certain regions of the Mideast.  But cf. this headline from today’s LATimes:

Lake Mead, the reservoir that supplies 90% of Las Vegas' water, is ebbing as though a plug had been pulled from a bathtub drain.

Now, that particular pickle  leaves one ambivalent.  What a blessing, were that urban blot upon the desert  to evaporate without a trace!   Still, in a general way, it is not a good thing  when lakes dry up.

~

There was also an update today on the little-followed Nuer/Dinka bloodbath:

According to the United Nations mission in South Sudan, rebel forces entered the town of Bentiu in Unity State and separated groups of residents — who had sought refuge in churches, mosques and hospitals — by their ethnicity and nationality.

Members of the ethnic Nuer community who did not support the rebels, along with South Sudanese people from other ethnic groups and Darfuris from Sudan to the north, were targeted and killed.

At the Kali-Ballee Mosque, “more than 200 civilians were reportedly killed and over 400 wounded,” the statement said. Some rebels used FM radio to broadcast ethnic-based “hate speech” and encouraged “men from one community to commit vengeful sexual violence against women from another community,”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/22/world/africa/ethnic-groups-targeted-in-south-sudan-killings.html?_r=0

[Update 26 April 2014]  And yet, remarkably, the riverains of the Tiber are currently actively welcoming the flood,  deploying the Marina Militare and the Guardia Costiera, not to defend Italy’s borders, but to make them more porous, at taxpayer expense:

Polémique : Mare nostrum coûte cher

http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=5826955

Malta cannot believe its good fortune, as the Italian navy proactively undertook to rescue migrants in Maltese waters as well;  that overwhelmed island has accordingly seen its unwanted influx drop to zero:

http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/news/national/38170/italys_mare_nostrum_taking_over_maltas_refugee_burden

[Update 16 September 2014]  Meanwhile, as Italy and Malta bend over backwards to help aliens attempting to reach their shores illegally, the traffickers themselves care less than nothing for their fellow Africans:

Up to 100 children may have been among 500 people who drowned after a migrant boat was sunk by traffickers near Malta last week, a migration body says.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) spoke to four survivors who were rescued from the water.  Four survivors told the IOM that the traffickers were Egyptian and Palestinian.

They said that had been forced to change boats three times since leaving Egypt in early September. However, when told to switch to a smaller vessel which many passengers deemed unsafe, a violent argument ensued.

The traffickers then rammed the larger vessel, causing it to begin sinking immediately, the survivors told IOM.

"After they hit our boat they waited to make sure that it had sunk completely before leaving. They were laughing," one of the survivors said.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29225371