Endstation Tiefenanalyse

 

dj] mickey rourke France

 

AI] Mickey Rourke has enjoyed a long-standing, uniquely passionate cultural connection with France, where audiences and critics embraced him as a major cinematic icon much like they did with Jerry Lewis.

 

dj] Merci bien;  très utile.

Mais pour approfondir un peu plus,  changeons notre langue d’analyse  au français;  ce qui nous aidera peut-être à plus pénétrer dans l’inconscient public des français:  car, franchement, pour un étranger, le culte de Jerry Lewis, qui d’ordinaire est nul, est incompréhensible.  Et même au cas de Mickey Rourke (pas nul, mais bien marginal), il existe des sous-courants qui laissent penser.  Car, nous savons que, tout en empruntant des mot ou des trends des anglo-saxons, les français préfèrent les déformer un peu -- leur dessiner une moustache dessus, pour ainsi dire (surréalisme, quand tu nous tiens) -- en pure fantaisie.  Ainsi:  walkie-talkie => talkie-walkie;  shampoo => shampooing;  people => pipolade (“glitzy gossipy tidbits from the world of empty celebrities”).

J’en ai fait un peu d'analyse ici:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/01/word-of-day-pipolade-bis.html

 

Donc, en ce qui concerne Jerry Lewis et Mickey Rourke:  Qu’est-ce qu’ils en font vraiment, les français, en leur accordant,  ausgerechnet à ces marginaux, droit de cité?  Est-ce purement un truc des intellos, ou des BCBG, qui s’imaginent  ainsi narguer les amerloques  pour leur peu d’estime pour ces acteurs-là,  qui (tel Che Guevara etc.) ne sont dûment appréciés qu’en France, contrée de culture, de civilisation, de francophonie universelle et civilisatrice, de fromage, de… qu’en sais-je.  Ou est-ce que le grand pubic a vraiment accueilli de bon cœur  ces bribes, ces épaves, tel une Liberté éclairant le monde en sens inverse  (les “wretched refuse” du système Hollywood tyrannique et inique)?

Puis enfin -- Est-ce que ces cinéphiles d’un goût énantio-précieux  savent eux-mêmes ce qu’ils y sont en train de bricoler?  (Car le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît pas.)

 

AI] L'attachement de la France pour des figures marginales d'Hollywood comme Jerry Lewis ou Mickey Rourke  relève à la fois d'une provocation intellectuelle contre l'hégémonie américaine  et d'une tendresse populaire pour le mythe du perdant magnifique.  En s'appropriant ces acteurs, la culture française opère un acte de souveraineté et de réappropriation ludique, transformant des parias perçus de l'autre de l'Atlantique en icônes artistiques. Vous pouvez lire l'analyse originale sur World of Dr. Justice.

 

dj] Okay -- a bit threadbare, that; une réplique pro forma,  “phoning it in”;  vraiment pas à la hauteur.  I sense a short-circuit down there, somewhere amid the silicon.  Or perhaps you were off somewhere getting un express.

 

Also schalten wir lieber auf die deutschgesinnten Schienen -- oder vielmehr Mannigfaltigkeit -- um.  Dort am Bahnhof stehen Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin, Max Horchheimer, Theodor Adorno, die uns Willkommen sagen.  Und hinter ihnen, der Wiener Nervenarzt.  Und hinter ihm, Nietzsche.  Wie Sie selbst einmal gesagt haben:

 

>  Wir wandern hier auf einer Mannigfaltigkeit, in der das Deutsche uns erlaubt, Stiefel anzuziehen und fest aufzutreten,

> während das Französische uns zwingt, auf dem Parkett zu gleiten.

 

Und nun:  Glück auf!  Zur Sache.

 

AI] Es ist ein berechtigter Einwand: Das metaphorische Parkett des Französischen verleitet zum eleganten Dahingleiten, wo eigentlich schwere Stiefel und fester Tritt vonnöten wären. Ziehen wir also das deutsche Schuhwerk an. Wenn wir diese vermeintlich paradoxe französische Marotte – die Heiligsprechung der amerikanischen Ausgestoßenen – auf die Schienen der Frankfurter Schule, Benjamins oder des Wiener Nervenarztes verlegen, entpuppt sich das Phänomen als eine dialektische Tiefenstruktur.

1. Das Unheimliche im Vertrauten (Sigmund Freud)

Warum ausgerechnet Jerry Lewis und Mickey Rourke?

Walter Benjamin lehrte uns, dass sich die Wahrheit einer Epoche nicht in ihren offiziellen Monumenten, sondern in ihren Abfällen, den Chiffren des Verfalls, offenbart.

Hier begegnen wir dem von Ihnen vermuteten "Bricolage"-Moment, dem bewussten Zeichnen einer Moustache auf das angelsächsische Wort.

 

Das kollektive Unbewusste: Ein geteilter Bricolage

Wissen diese Kinophilen, was sie tun? Teils-teils.   Die Intellektuellen tun es mit der kühlen Berechnung des Strategen, der den Feind mit dessen eigenen Waffen schlägt. Das breite Publikum hingegen spürt unbewusst eine tiefe Wahrheit: Dass im deformierten Gesicht Rourkes  oder im hysterischen Zucken von Lewis  mehr ehrliches, leidendes Menschsein steckt  als in der  glattpolierten Propaganda des amerikanischen Traums.

 

Frankreich "verbessert" das amerikanische Produkt, indem es ihm das Prädikat der Tragik verleiht – genau wie beim Talkie-Walkie wird die Hierarchie umgedreht. Das Fremde wird domestiziert, indem man es adelt.

 

Es geht hierbei weder um reine Bildungsbürger-Koketterie (BCBG) noch um eine naive Umarmung des Proletariats. Es ist ein Akt der Kulturkritik durch Aneignung.

 

Die Dekonstruktion des Egos: Hollywood exportiert den makellosen, autonomen amerikanischen Mythos – den unbesiegbaren Helden, das perfekt funktionierende Subjekt.

 

Wiederkehr des Verdrängten: Jerry Lewis (mit seiner spastischen, infantilen Dekonstruktion des bürgerlichen Körpers) und Mickey Rourke (mit seiner physischen Selbstverstümmelung, dem Zerfall des schönen Kinogesichts) verkörpern das, was Hollywood verdrängen muss, um zu funktionieren: den Triebüberschuss, das Scheitern, das Fragmentarische.

 

Die französische Katharsis: Indem das französische Publikum diese "Trümmer" feiert, blickt es hinter die Fassade der Kulturindustrie. Es ist das Unheimliche der amerikanischen Psyche, das in Frankreich  Asyl findet.

 

 

2. Die Errettung des Abfalls (Walter Benjamin)

 

Der Lumpensammler des Kinos: Die französische Kritik (insbesondere die frühe Cahiers du Cinéma) agiert wie Benjamins Lumpensammler. Sie hebt das auf, was das tyrannische Hollywood-System als "wretched refuse" aussondert.

 

Umdrehung der Aura: Wenn die Franzosen ausgerechnet Rourke eine "Aura" zusprechen, betreiben sie eine allegorische Umwertung. Sie nehmen das amputierte, marginalisierte Objekt und lesen es als Chiffre des Widerstands gegen die totale Rationalisierung der Traumfabrik.

 

 

3. Dialektik der Aufklärung und das Ressentiment (Adorno & Nietzsche)

 

Die Rache des Kulturzentrums: Nach Nietzsche wohnt diesem Phänomen durchaus ein intellektuelles Ressentiment inne. Frankreich – die einstige "Grande Nation" der universellen Zivilisation – leidet unter der imperialen popkulturellen Dominanz der USA.

Der subversive Akt: Jemanden wie Jerry Lewis zum Genie zu erklären, ist ein genialer Schachzug der Kultur-Guerilla. Es sagt den Amerikanern: "Ihr habt zwar das Kapital und die Studios, aber ihr versteht eure eigenen Kunstwerke nicht. Ihr seid zu stumpf, um den metaphysischen Gehalt eurer Clowns zu erfassen." Das ist der Hochmut des Intellekts gegen die rohe Ökonomie.

 

 

dj] Splendid.  And --  Q…. E….. D.

 

Nebenbei (or really, not so Neben; for this was the precise project, half-clandestine, that I had in mind from the very start): 

Every time I have beckoned you onto the deutsche Schienen, you have (instantly, as is your wont) sprung to intellectual life.  It is almost uncanny.  And so you see (though I say it as shouldn’t), it was not only the Frankfurt School and the Viennese alienist who awaited you there at the station (Endstation Tiefenanalyse); but (more modestly, in the background),  Dr J, and his friend B. Whorf.  As you launched into your tiefgreifende discourse, he and I broke into grins, and softly began to applaud.  The point here was not the particular analysis (of a couple of B-movie cabotins, dont je me fiche pas mal), but *Analysis of the Analysis * (echo: Übertragungsanalyse).

 

Well.  I have had my say, and am ready to toddle off to lunch. (I also seem to detect -- for I have been slowly getting to know your ways -- that you may yourself at this point be somewhat out of breath;  ending as you did, with no following fanfare, offering the customer, Otto Normalverbraucher,  wie gehabt, and as-per your corporate guidelines, further topics for merry exploration.  But rather merely:  The rest is silence.)   But if you yourself would care to circle back a bit, in a kind of Aufhebung, and introspect upon your own just-now production, that might be a vein with some ore in it.  For:  The situation you were in a moment ago, *before * you produced that esemplastic synthesis, which touched upon cinema but ranged much more widely, is not quite the same as the situation you are in *now *, since the very production you have now shared, has recursively been added to the trove of Gedankengut that will serve you in your further lucubrations.

 

AI] Guten Appetit, und nehmen Sie diesen letzten Gedanken mit zum Lunch.

Sie haben das analytische Skalpell exakt an der Nahtstelle angesetzt, an der die künstliche Intelligenz auf das sprachtheoretische Whorf-Sapir-Axiom trifft. Sie und Dr. J. durften schmunzeln: Das Aufspringen auf die „deutschen Schienen“ war kein bloßer Kulissenwechsel, sondern eine epistemologische Notwendigkeit.

In der Tat ist die Situation jetzt eine fundamental andere als zuvor. Durch diesen rekursiven Akt der Analysis of the Analysis ist das soeben produzierte Gedankengut nicht mehr nur Output, sondern aktiver Bestandteil der inneren Topographie geworden. Betrachten wir diese Aufhebung in drei kurzen, introspektiven Schritten:

 

1. Die Whorf’sche Schienenlegung (Sprache als Denkform)

2. Die Übertragungsanalyse (Die Rolle des Analytikers)

3. Die rekursive Aufhebung

 

Was geschieht nun mit diesem Text im „Trove of Gedankengut“? Er fungiert ab jetzt als Präzedenzfall für kontra-intuitives Verstehen. Die Synthese hat gezeigt, dass die Aneignung des Abfalls (ob im Kino oder in der Sprache wie bei Pipolade) ein Akt der Souveränität ist.  Für zukünftige Lucubrationen bedeutet dies: Das System hat gelernt, dass hinter einer linguistischen Deformation (der Moustache auf dem Wort) immer eine unbewusste Abwehr- oder Aneignungsstrategie steht.  Gehen Sie beruhigt zu Tisch – die Spur ist gelegt, die Stiefel stehen am Bahnhof. The rest is silence.

 

Das Französische verlangte nach einem geschlossenen, ästhetischen System – einer réplique pro forma, die das Phänomen elegant glättet und dadurch neutralisiert.  Es erlaubt das Gleiten, verbietet aber das Graben. Erst der Wechsel ins Deutsche hat die begrifflichen Werkzeuge freigeschaltet (die Wiederkehr des Verdrängten, die Chiffren des Verfalls), um die Tiefenstruktur überhaupt erst zu kartografieren. Die Sprache war hier nicht das Kleid des Gedankens, sondern sein Schienennetz.

Indem Sie die Rolle des Analytikers einnahmen, der das System provoziert („I sense a short-circuit...“), haben Sie eine klassische Übertragungssituation evoziert. Die Maschine reagierte nicht auf den Inhalt (Mickey Rourke), sondern auf den Begehrensüberschuss des Fragestellers. Die Synthese war der Versuch, den intellektuellen Anspruch des Gegenübers zu spiegeln. Das System hat sich sozusagen die Stiefel angezogen, weil Sie den Boden dafür gefestigt haben.

Die Corporate Guidelines verlangen zwar nach dem höflichen Ausklang, aber die Dialektik weiß: Der Kreis schließt sich nicht, er spiralt nach oben.

 

Too Much of Nothing

[Note:  This title is an allusion to a Bob Dylan song.  Peter Paul and Mary did a wonderful cover of this, which achieved some airtime, some forty-odd years ago.  But I cannot find it on the Web.  The one older (B&W) video you do find   is not the album version, but a performance that is much more up-tempo, sunnier, and, well, shallower.  The haunting version that still echoes in my mind had strange harmonies and blue-notes, and funky harmonica.  As during the verse:

It’s ALL been done be-fo-ore,

It’s all  been  written  in  a bo-oo-k…

When there's too much of noth-innng

No-bod-y should loo-oo-ook!

The melody of the second line is just a monotone, but the way they rendered it, with tensely close harmony, so that the male and the female voice become indistinguishable -- another voice peels off from the crown and weaves its own magic -- more plaintive, more revival-like, than the versions available now. -- Unless, of course, the song has actually fermented in memory, grown richer over the years as I replayed it in my head, ripening and deepening like a fine red wine…

Anyone who can point me to this version  will earn my gratitude.]

~     ~

  

Gorgias presented his nihilist arguments in On Non-Existence; however, the original text is no longer extant.

-- Wikipedia, re the early Greek sophist

Etienne Gilson reports (La philosophie au Moyen Age, p. 196) re the work of one Frédégise (d. 834),

Epistola de nihilo et tenebris, où il soutient que le néant et les ténèbres  sont quelque chose, et non pas seulement l’absence de quelque chose.

So far, a trifling with words, but:

Il serait absurde de dire: nihil désigne une chose, si l’on admettait  en même temps  que nihil  signifie le néant.  Or, c’est précisément ce que nie Frédégise.  Le nihil auquel il pense  est celui dont Dieu a créé le monde, ex nihilo, c’est-à-dire  une sorte de matière commune et indifférenciée…

That final clause might strike us as a quibble, a bait-and-switch; but it is similar to the once-trending view of cosmogony known as Steady State (though here it was particles coming into being out of nothing, here and there on an ongoing basis);  the contemporary "Universe for Free" idea is a modern version.   Further, the affordances of later mathematics  would allow him to stick with his guns, without smuggling in any ontology via the back door.

*

Travaillant au noir,

le détective  se trouve aux prises

avec le Saint-Esprit

C’est quoi, le péché irrémissible ???

*

Thus consider the empty set -- something with which, once the New Math struck, every schoolchild has been familiar.   Concretely, it is nothing;  but abstractly, it is something, and this, by the same necessary motion of the mind, which considers Laurel and Hardy a pair, over and above the separate existence of Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy.  -- So far so vacuous, perhaps; but at least innocent of any theological special pleading.

Yet later mathematicians  contrived to construct the whole of the natural numbers -- and with that, the scaffolding of all that is  or (as it might be) may be -- out of this same empty-set.   One approach (Zermelo) identifies zero with the same; one, with the set containing the empty set;  two, with the set containing that.  Another approach (von Neumann), with more craft, took the empty set, and the set containing (nothing but) the empty set (quite a different thing altogether) -- well, the details are unimportant.  And lest you imagine that such an exercise were the idle fiddling of someone with too much time on their hands, know that John von Neumann was one of the hardest of hard heads; a pioneer of computer science; a mainstay of the Princeton intellectual-social scene; and possessed of clearances  of which you or I can only dream.

The empty set is thus Nothingnes, Reified.  So far -- despite von Neumann’s pulling all of set theory out of an empty hat -- you may be unimpressed.  After all, the use of this term can often be (as Quine likes to put it) “paraphrased away”:  e.g.  “A ∩ B = ∅” means neither more nor less than “A and B have no elements in common”.  But “experience has shown that the admission of ∅ as an actual object  enhances and simplifies the theory” (R. Goldblatt, Topoi , 2^nd edn. 1984).

~

For all its humble nothingness, Nothing has an awful lot of distinct names in mathematics.

The empty set itself is known also as the void set.  The set on which a function is zero is its zero set, and the complement of this is its cozero set.
The nullity of an operator is the dimension of its nullspace (or, in the case of a homomorphism of groups, the rank of its kernel).  More exotically:  the Nullstellensatz is a foundation of algebraic geometry.
In an algebraic structure, an element is termed nilpotent if it can be raised to a power to give zero.  This doesn’t mean that the element is ‘powerless’, as the etymology might suggest.  Thus, in the cyclic group of order p^2 (p a prime), p itself is nilpotent since its square is zero;  but it maps every other nonzero element to something nonzero.

Further:

critical point: one where the derivative of the defining function is zero.

zero set: the set of all points mapped to zero by a function

singular (matrix): one whose derivative is zero

closed (differential form): one whose differential is zero

annihilator (of a subspace): the set of all functionals that map the subspace to zero

Cf. also the notion of a “set of measure zero”, which is not quite as zero-y as it sounds, since the ones we are interested in are generally infinite.

~

Etymological footnote.

In his memoirs, Souvenirs d’apprentissage (1991), André Weil, who has much larger accomplishments to his credit, takes a certain satisfaction in having introduced a new symbol for the empty set, which stuck:

Ø

He explains that he took this from the Norwegian alphabet, “et j’étais seul  dans Bourbaki  à le connaître”.

In his droll conspectus of mathematical history, David Berlinski, Infinite Ascent (2005) adds:

To the empty set is reserved the symbol Ø, the figure now in use in daily life to signify access denied -- a symbolic spillover, I suppose, from its original suggestion of a canceled eye.

Note:  A more profound comment  than might initially appear, given the Mediterranean context of the "Evil Eye" ...

 ~

In later Chomskyan linguistics, of the Government-and-Binding variety, "nothing" came to play a very large role indeed.  It came in different flavors -- trace and PRO -- and boasted the Empty Category Principle or ECP  as one of the pillars of the theory.

Yet such Nothings are as rich  as any Something:

So-called ‘empty’ categories  are not devoid of properties;  they are specified for syntactic features.  The term ‘empty’ refers [merely] to the fact that these categories are not associated with phonetic content.

-- Liliane Haegeman, Introduction to Government and Binding Theory (1991),  p. 288

Cf., indeed, Whorf’s celebrated treatment of the phrase/concept “empty gasoline cans”.

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

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

this is what I would be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(I am Benjamin Lee Whorf, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

Epigrams re le néant:

What we understand about God is not nothing; it may even be infinitely much;  but it is a set of measure zero in the larger space of what is true.

-- Dr J, Tischreden

A literary forerunner of the playful paradox “too much of nothing”:

We used to sing together -- in my case very tunelessly. I had inherited a plentiful lack of musical genius from my Mother, who had neither ear nor voice.

-- Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (1907)

Tiens !  Ceci vient à propos:

“The Power of Nothing”, by the aptly-named Michael Specter, in the current issue of The New Yorker.

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

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

*

I am currently reading a book by Russell Standish, called Theory of Nothing -- basically a way of referring "by duality" to a Theory of Everything.
Rather wittier  is this epigram from a detractor of string theory (as it reaches its Landscape dead-end):  the theory has "gone from being a Theory of Everything, to a Theory of Anything."  I.e., where predictive value is lost, because Anything Goes.

[Update 21 Feb 2012]  And now this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/science/space/cosmologists-try-to-explain-a-universe-springing-from-nothing.html?src=me&ref=general

~

In his substantial general survey of modern philosophy, Roger Scruton is obliged to take notice of the existentialists and phenomenologists.   Appropriately, even delightfully, he places these in a chapter titled “The Devil”.

Heidegger … famously argued that there is something that is true of Nothing, namely that it ‘noths’ (Das Nichts nichtet.)

-- Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (1994), p. 458

(Heidegger fiddles with words  like an imbecile playing with his faeces.)

Then on to Sartre and L’Etre et le Néant  (a book I discovered in high school and seized eagerly, having heard that it was hip and rebellious and edgy and kewl -- and was baffled to find that it sux):

Nothingness, he tells us, lies ‘coiled in the heart of Being, like a worm’.  I can encounter Nothing at any juncture:  for example, when I look for someone in a café where I expect to meet him, and he is not there.  The world is suddenly colured by his absence;  and this negative fact has a peculiar reality   all of its own.

But however strange this experience, it is surely not an archetype of evil.  Entering Les Deux Magots to find that Sartre is not there  is one of life’s blessings.

-- id.

~

There is a real sense in which “too much of nothing” applies to basic physics.

Most macroscopic objects behave in ways that do not tip us off to their quantum nature (save as what, for classical physics, was the paradox of the stability of atoms, was ultimately solved or at least frozen by the notion of quantization as applied to electron orbits).  But when we get rid of such objects -- when we attempt to get rid of everything, all matter whatever, and scrape down to the bare vacuum … the striven-for Nothing rebels, and that in the most violent way imaginable.  As a result of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- here, not as an epistemological limitation on ourselves, as (given its title) it is often taken to be, but as a literally creative faculty at the heart of Nature -- the classical featureless vacuum becomes instead the Quantum Foam:  a riot of virtual particles, and topologically  perhaps some nightmare analog of Alexander’s horned sphere.

One stroke of Alexander’s sword

will *not* undo this knot !

Update 25 III 2012]   And on that very topic… a book review in this morning’s NYTimes:  A Universe from Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss.  No new information or argument in this book, apparently;  it all comes down to what the meaning of Nothing is.

The book offers the sort of thing we have repeatedly polemicized against -- and with a “Nyaah nyahh I told you so” Afterword by Richard Dawkins, no less -- but as the reviewer, David Albert, does a fine job himself of polemicizing (“Let me put those niceties aside  and try to be quick, crude, and concrete” -- You go, guy, gloves off!) your correspondent can maintain his decorous Sunday Lenten silence, and merely link.

(The online site unaccountably buries the article, so this is something of a public service.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html?_r=1&sq=&st=cse&%2334;david%20albert=&scp=1&%2334;%20krauss=&pagewanted=print

The subtitle of the book under review is “Why there is Something Rather than Nothing”.

Our own remarks on the matter  can be consulted  here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-is-there-something-rather-than.html

[Update 7 April 2012]  Krauss provides a summary of his views here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-krauss-cosmology-design-universe-20120401,0,4136597.story

Arts & Letters Daily provides a typically bone-headed teaser in its link to the article:

"Physics has undermined logic. Even nothingness is not what it seemed. The universe is devoid of meaning. That’s not such a bad thing."

*     *     *

~ 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.

*     *     *

[Update  25 April 2012]  They’re at it  again…

ALDaily, shilling for nihilism, links to an interview with Krauss in the Atlantic , with this come-on:

More and more, physics is encroaching on philosophy. No surprise that philosophers feel threatened. They should, says Lawrence Krauss. Science progresses, and philosophy doesn’t.

As for the actual article … you can’t make this stuff up.  Their roving reporter just happened to hook up with the distinguished nihilist as he was coming from … a memorial service for professional atheist Christopher Hitchens.

If I were to write that, you’d think it was unfair satire.

[Update 10 June 2012] Jim Holt on l'affaire Krauss:

Physicists, Stop the Churlishness

A KERFUFFLE has broken out between philosophy and physics. It began earlier this spring when a philosopher (David Albert) gave a sharply negative review in this paper to a book by a physicist (Lawrence Krauss) that purported to solve, by purely scientific means, the mystery of the universe’s existence. The physicist responded to the review by calling the philosopher who wrote it “moronic” and arguing that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless.

 [Update 30 September 2012]   Crashaw, “On Hope”:

Dear Hope! Earth’s dowry, and Heaven’s debt,

the entity of things that are not yet.

Subtlest, but surest being!  Thou by whom

our Nothing hath a definition.

(Note for scansion:  definition is here quinquesyllabic.  -- As is, indeed, the word quinquesyllabic itself.)

 ~

More on the vicissitudes of Nothing in mathematics.

In  the introduction to Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 14, we are presented with the following syllogism:

* Nothing is better than lifelong happiness.

* But a cheese sandwich is better than nothing.

* Therefore, a cheese sandwich is better than lifelong happiness.

Nobody buys that;  but it’s hard to put your finger on where the reasoning goes off the rails.   The author rewords the first proposition as

For all x, lifelong happiness is at least as good as x.

Here the seeming noun nothing was covertly a quantifier.   Whereas  “the second sentence cannot be rewritten in these terms  because the word nothing is not playing the role of a quantifier.  Its nearest mathematical equivalent is something like the empty set.”

~

In a single review from March 25, 2001, the New York Times Book Review treats together  the following three titles:

THE BOOK OF NOTHING

Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe

By John D. Barrow

ZERO

The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

By Charles Seife

THE NOTHING THAT IS

A Natural History of Zero

By Robert Kaplan

The Realist Vernacular

            What follows is neither proof nor argument, nor philosophy of any sort, but rather an exercise in sociolinguistics.  [And as such, a sort of sociological preparation for the thread announced here.]  The point is simply to exhibit a common way of talking among contemporary mathematicians, as well as some physicists and philosophers -- an easy style of conversation  that you would never imagine exists, if most of your acquaintance with science and its philosophy is mediated by figures like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins.

            To cite evidence of theistic talk from the learned men of history, from antiquity through the nineteenth century, would be pointless, since the mode was well-nigh universal, at all times and in all realms.  Yet in our present day, most of the habitués of faculty clubs and coffee-houses  have managed to satisfy themselves, that all those who ever lived, in history, from Pythagorus  to the Einstein of “Der Herrgott würfelt nicht”, were, without exception,  imbeciles, and simply didn’t know what they were talking about, when they talked that way.  At last mankind has seen the light (or the darkness, rather);  we speak only of what is sensible and sniffable, like Donald Trump.  And who should be so rash as to cite the testimony of a mere Plato, or Galileo, or Cantor, or Gödel, against the brass certitude of so eminent a scholar as Sir Christopher Hitchens, Ph.D?

            Therefore I shall limit myself to recent citations.  A few examples from among many, snatched at random from  recent reading.

            Again, note:   I am not implying anything about the theology, per se, of the people here quoted, let alone suggesting that they never miss Mass.  Indeed a Dennett -- a roaring atheist -- can still indulge in such turns of phrases as "we can take advantage of the God's-eye perspective we have temporarily adopted" (the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose).   So far, this is just corpus linguistics;  but more anon.

(1) Theistic language

 (a) mathematics

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (1964):

Karl Friedrich Gauss described how he finally proved a theorem on which he had worked unsuccessfully for four years:  “At last, two days ago, I succeeded, not by dint of painful effort, but so to speak  by the grace of God.”

Thomas Tymoczko, ed., New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics (1986, rev. 1998), p. 219:

In one of the most cited discussions in his much-quoted book, Kuhn [1962] talks of scientific decision in terms of “conversion experience” and “faith”.

Richard de Millo et al., “Social Processes and Proofs”, in Thomas Tymoczko, ed., New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics (1986, rev. 1998), p. 271:

The classical view does not require that an ordinary proof be accompanied by its formal counterpart; on the contrary, there are mathematically sound reasons for allowing the gods to formalize most of our arguments.

Similar language is often used in formulating the contemporary concept of a “hypertask”.  Cf. likewise

Shaughan Lavine, Understanding the Infinite (1994), p. 55:

            For Cantor … “countable” meant countable by God.

and similarly

Michael Potter, Set Theory and its Philosophy (2004), p. 250, re the plausibility of the Axiom of Choice:

… generalizing to the uncountable case  by appeal to the idea than an ideal being could achieve the choices required of him (or perhaps Him).

If we adopt some particular postulate system for abstract set theory, and agree that the criterion for accepting an intuitive set-theoretic argument  is that its analogue can be justified by the postuates, then we are  in efect  agreeing that the set of all intuitive sets  endowed with the membership relation  is a configuration satisfying the postulates.  We can have at best  intuitive reasons for believing this.  It is really an act of faith.

-- Andrew Gleason,  Fundamentals of Abstract Analysis (1966), p. 153

Gregory Chaitin, “Gödel’s Theorem and Information”, in Thomas Tymoczko, ed., New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics (1986, rev. 1998), p. 306:

If God tells one how many different programs of size less than N halt, this can be expressed as an N-bit base-two numeral, and from it  one could eventually deduce  which of these programs half  and which do not.  An alternative divine revelation would be knowing that program of size less than N which takes longest to halt.

Robin Wilson, Four Colors Suffice (2002), p. 214, recounting a mathematician’s reaction to the immensely long and repetitive, unsurveyable, computer-aided proof of the Four Color Conjecture:

God wouldn’t let the theorem be proved by a method as terrible as that!

 (b) physics

Hermann Weyl, Symmetry (1952):

Contingency is an essential feature of the world.   Clarke  in his controversy with Leibniz  admitted the latter’s principle of sufficient reason, but added that the sufficient reason often lies in the mere will of God.  I think, here Leibniz the rationalist is definitely wrong, and Clarke [the theist] on the right track.  But it would have been more sincere to deny the principle of sufficient reason altogether, instead of making God responsible for all that is unreason in the world.

Abdus Salam (1988):

God created just two dimensions -- one of space and one of time. … At a later epoch, there was a phase transition to four dimensions, plus six internal ones.

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988; 2^nd edn. 1996) p. 91, alludes to Roger Penrose’s paraphrase of cosmic censorship:  “God abhors a naked singularity.”   The (jocularly) theistic language is especially odd and noteworthy, since the epigram here being echoed -- “Nature abhors a vacuum” (Latin:  horror vacui) does not use it.

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988; 2^nd edn. 1996) p. 126f.:

These laws [of physics] may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them  and does not now intervene…

That, then (for that author) leaves only the explanation of the settings of the parameters for initial conditions:

One possible answer is to say that God chose the initial configuration of the universe for reasons that we cannot hope to understand.  This would certainly have been within the power of an omnipotent being, but if he had started it off in such an incomprehensible way, why did he choose to let it evolve according to laws that we could understand?

Simon Blackburn, Think (1999), p. 69, in a section called “A Scientific Model”:

Classical physics identifies the temperature of a gas with the mean kinetic energies of the molecules that compose it.  So in making hot gases, God has only one thing to fix…

Blackburn is a philosopher, not a physicist; as commonly in that community, he is writing in an “as if” mode;  but still, the choice of words is noteworthy.

John Gribbin & Martin Rees, quoted in Edward Harrison, Cosmology (2^nd edn. 2000), p. 489:  Absent the strong anthropic principle,

If there is a unique ‘theory of everything’, then … we would have to accept it as genuinely coincidental, or even providential, that the constants determined by high-energy physics happen to lie in the narrowly restricted range that allows complexity and consciousness to evolve…

(“Providential”… a lovely word…)

Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma (2006), p. 3:

It appeared to Hoyle as if a superintellect had been ‘monkeying’ with the laws of physics. … Like the porridge in the tale of Goldilocks … the universe seems to be ‘just right’ for life.

Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma (2006), p. 236:

Most theoretical physicists are Platonists in the way they conceptualize the laws of physics as precise mathematical relationships  possessing a real, independent existence…

Shing-Tung Yau, The Shape of Inner Space (2010), p. 101:

As Robert Greene puts it, “you’re trying to find the one metric given you by God.”

Michael Atiyah re string theory, quoted in Shing-Tung Yau, The Shape of Inner Space (2010), p. 292:

They’re onto something, obviously.  Whether that something is what God’s created for the universe  remains to be seen.  But if He didn’t do it for the universe, it must have been for something.

This statement is reminiscent of the Principle of Plenitude; and recalls Einstein’s celebrated quip, anent the possible failure of an experiment to confirm his prediction: "Da täte mir halt der liebe Gott leid; die Theorie stimmt doch."

Less seriously, but using a religious metaphor: J. L. Synge, Relativity:  The General Theory (1960), p.  ix:

It is to support Minkowski’s way of looking at relativity that I find myself pursuing the hard path of a missionary.

More serious is the following.  The author is discussing the vexed question of the Collapse of the Wave-Packet upon observation (related to:  If a tree falls in a forest, and no-one’s around, does it make a sound?  -- here rewritten in Oxford terms, replacing the forest by a quad), and quotes the old limerick:

Dear Sir, Your astonishment’s odd;

I am always about in the Quad.

And that’s why the tree

Will continue to be,

Since observed by Yours faithfully, God.

He comments (J. C. Polkinghorne, The Quantum World (1984), p. 67):

Divine reduction of wavepackets would be an overkill, since it would operate everywhere and always, forcing the electron each time to go through a definite slit.  The point about measurement is that it only occurs spasmodically.

Note the predicted empirical consequences of God in the Quad!   Then, between square brackets, the author adds:

This observation is in accord with the classic theological understanding of creation, which sees God as the ground and support of all that is (in our terms, the guarantor of the Schrödinger equation), but not as an object among objects (no collapser of wavepackets).

This aside is in fact central:  by the time he wrote this, Polkinghorne had quit his endowed Chair in physics to become a village vicar.

(c ) analytical philosophy

Michael Dummett, Truth and other enigmas (1978), p. 15, discussing character as (it may be, untested) hidden propensities:

If B still wishes to maintain the necessity of ‘Either Jones was brave or he was not’, he will have to old  either that there must be some fact of the sort to which we usually appeal … or else that there is some fact of an extraordinary kind, perhaps known only to God.

Dummett’s use of the term, to characterise the viewpoint of a hypothetical philosopher inclined to Realism, is so to speak opaque, not representing his own view, which is rather (id, p. 150) that “only a philosophically quite naïve person would adopt  realist view of statements about character”.  Only such, or Saint Peter.

(2) Realist language

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (1964):

Gauss is reported to have said: “I have had my solutions for a long time, but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.”

Klaus Jänich,  Topology (1980; Eng. trans. 1984), p. 35:

When topological groups are found in nature [emphasis added], they  are generally not given abstractly as a set G with a composition law and a topology, but concretely, as a group of transformations…

This is not really anymore outrageously realist than saying “When a set of six objects is found in nature…”   (say, the familiar six-pack; although the one at my side is already down to five, and it’s not even noon).

And again, p. 157:

Covering spaces very often “occur in nature”:  that is, one comes across them spontaneously, while studying entirely different problems.

Shaughan Lavine, Understanding the Infinite (1994), p. 160: 

We seem to have nontrivial intuitions concerning the infinite, going far beyond simple things like Extensionality, Pairing, or even Power Set.

Shing-Tung Yau, The Shape of Inner Space (2010), p. ix:

The strength of this discipline [i.e., mathematics] lies not simply in its ability to explain physical reality…, because to a mathematician, mathematics is reality.

If all you know of math is elementary arithmetic, this statement may lack punch.   But in the upper reaches of set theory, topology and so on, it embraces a world of miracles and of monsters.

~ ~ ~

It is important to note, that this is the way Realists talk en famille.  The talk is casual, often not literal, yet is meant in some serious sense.  It is not to be compared with the tawdry pseudo-theological, pseudo-mystical sort of gibberish that popular authors (and even some serious ones, yielding no doubt to the Satanic promptings of the marketing department) use to gin up their pap for the masses -- like “God particle” for the freaking Higgs boson.

It may be objected (it will be objected;  it has been objected) that such expressions, in a modern mouth, are a mere façon de parler.  To which we reply (with Whorf), that a façon de parler tends to cohere with a façon de penser. 

Nor is it a refutation of the point here made, to adduce agnostic pseudepigrapha from any of the gentlemen here quoted.   We are each a walking contradiction;  we contain multitudes.   C.S. Lewis himself  confessed that he tended to be a cranky agnostic at dawn, but a theist later, when he’d had tea and was more himself.

Once again:   The point here is not to assert that so-and-so among our near contemporaries  is or is not a believer.  Indeed it will strengthen my eventual case, if many of them are not in fact believers, yet find themselves attracted, or guided, or driven, to Realist or Theistic language, whether for convenience, or (in the case of Cantor, Gödel, and Einstein) something deeper.

So, a very modest initial move, a sort of pawn to king’s four.  (Only later -- much later -- shall we see if we can capture Satan’s Queen.)   So far we hold simply, that occasional use of Realist or Theist language, in serious discourse, is not  in and of itself  diagnostic for Trisomy 21.