Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Units and Unities

I dreamt last night that weight was bread. More precisely, I dreamt that a kilogram was a loaf of dark, rye-like, round bread, about the diameter of a steering wheel. I do not mean that the loaf represented the kilogram, or stood in for it conceptually, in the way that, say, an anatomical foot originally stood in for a unit of length. I mean that such a loaf is just what a kilogram was.

I was in some sort of shop, and the shopkeeper was trying to weigh something out for me on an old-fashioned scale. He kept having to remove whatever it was we were trying to weigh, and replace it with the loaves of bread. Since the loaves just were weight, only they could give any reading at all on a scale.

Plot-wise the dream was a bit thin, but it raised an important conceptual problem. It is as if the creation of a unit of measurement initiates a process of reification that, in its final stage, has us thinking about the unit as a definite, property-rich entity. I recall reading somewhere that some embarrassingly high number of Americans believe that calories exist in the same way marbles or eggs do: like little invisible pellets scattered in the food that makes people fat. And in turn the holy grail of the diet industry --a calorie-free fat substitute-- is conceptualized as fat with the little pellets removed.

This neo-corpuscularianism can perhaps be seen more charitably if we recall that thing-hood is already contained within the concept of unit, a word which in many languages is identical to unity (e.g., Einheit, unité, единство). As Leibniz for one well understood, being and unity are practically the same. A Leibnizian corollary would also have it that whatever is not a thing is not really a unit(y) either, and further anything that is arbitrarily constituted cannot qualify as a thing. Nothing is more arbitrarily constituted than a so-called unit of measurement: there is absolutely no reason why a foot should not be three inches longer or shorter, and moreover nothing at all prevents us from conceptualizing fractions of these units. 

So in effect we are being asked to conceptualize an impossible thing --units without unity-- when we are asked to think about kilograms and feet and calories, and it may be that I, in my dream of the loaves, or the ignorant Americans polled on their dietetical knowledge, are in our mistake simply correcting something that was conceptually garbled to begin with.

Or consider Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy:

 

Because there are three tons of joy, and we naturally conceptualize units as unities, we can suppose that each of the three singers is herself one ton of joy, rather than the alternative interpretation, on which we have Marie Adams, the lead singer, and then two additional 1.5-ton units of joy. But if each of the three is a ton of joy, this means that Marie Adams, herself, is something distinct from the ton of joy that is, presumably, her body, since otherwise she would be named twice in the group's moniker. What is she, then? Her voice? Her soul? Why is she not identical with her body, while her sidekicks are with theirs?

The considerations that went into this act's naming probably could not offer up answers to these questions. But the conceptual issue is important, and in truth its importance never really struck me until I had that dream about the loaves. And this made me think, once again, about dreams, and the unfortunate habit we have in our culture of dismissing what they tell us: as if taking an interest in dreams were already to descend into a magical world-view on which oneiromancy has the power to reveal the future or, even worse, on which dreams just are reality. What this does not leave room for is the recognition that dreaming is simply a variety of thinking ('cogitating', Descartes would say), and one that makes use of different mental faculties (and different regions of the brain) than the ordinary, waking thinking we consider more reliable. In the case of this particular dream, a situation that might on first consideration have been dismissed as absurdist, as 'so weird', turns out to highlight a real problem about the way we carve up and conceptualize the world in our waking life.

What's really curious to me about a dream about units of weight is that dreaming is generally the kind of thinking where reckoning and quantifying are suspended. It is perhaps not surprising that Heraclitus, the philosopher who promoted the idea, by no means original in him, that all is flux, and that you cannot take the measure of the flow of a river, since its flowing entails that there is no single river there at all, is also the philosopher to whom the belief was attributed that the world is sustained in existence by the dreams of sleeping people. I suspect in fact that there is a historical connection between the rise of external-world, thing-based ontology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the appearance of standardized weights and measures (this will remain just a suspicion for now; I think ultimately what is needed is something like a historical anthropology of idealism, which would position, through cross-cultural study, beliefs about the ontology of the external world within the entire web of a culture's beliefs, which in turn would be studied as anchored in a totality of practices and interactions with the environment, much in the same way Jack Goody has traced the appearance of logic to developments in the practices and technologies of writing. Anyhow, I'm working on it.).

But then if dreams are where flux reigns, why a dream where there are not only discrete units of measurement, but in which these units are reified as things? I'm not quite sure, but I note that it was not a pleasant dream: the mood of it was in fact not so far from a nightmare. I did not at all like seeing kilograms transformed into things, and crude lumps of dough at that.

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Things and Stuff

I will certainly not be the first to find it interesting that some languages do not allow for a distinction between things and stuff. In Latin for example there is only res, a word that abounds with ambiguities, though some more easily soluble than others: almost every semester I get a paper or two purporting to analyze Descartes' theory of (sic!) race extensa and how it differs from race cogitans.

There is some ground for supposing that if Descartes had written in English or, say, German, he would have rendered the res that is extended as 'extended stuff', and the res that thinks as '(a) thinking thing'. That is, a res cogitans is understood to be a countable, individuable entity, while res extensa is an arbitrarily delimitable quantum of extension.

Now in the Germanic languages 'thing' and 'stuff' are partially overlapping but still quite distinct concepts. Here I am working from memory, for that is my way when I blog, but I believe I am correct in saying that 'thing' (German Ding, Icelandic þing, etc.) initially did much the same work as res in the phrase res publica: it picked out a composite, yet not arbitrarily delimited, political entity. In fact, the Icelandic alþingi is composed in exactly the same way as res publica: it is the thing that is constituted by all (or at least all who matter; on this point the Icelanders were rather more democratic than the Romans). What is important here is that a 'thing', whether in the political sense or in some more basic ontological sense, is a unit: a discrete, countable whole.

'Stuff' by contrast, if I am not mistaken, was originally (and still is in the German Stoff) a term that designated a quantity, in the primary instance a quantity of fabric. One buys some stuff, in order to transform it into a shirt or jacket, and this transformation can be understood as a sort of imposition of form on undifferentiated matter.

The analogy of stuff to matter is particularly interesting when we consider that for Aristotle there can be no un-in-formed matter waiting to be given form. Matter is thus only an abstraction, a limit-case that we can posit with our minds but that we cannot find anywhere in the world.

Of course we can find fabric, and this means that the analogy between Stoff and matter is only an analogy. Why the analogy works, though, may have something to do with the similarity, noted by P. F. Strawson and others, between mass terms and abstract terms. B. K. Matilal observes, for example, that "abstract terms are also 'much-terms', that is, the grammar of abstract terms, such as prettiness and courage, is similar to the grammar of mass terms" (Matilal, The Character of Logic in India, 25).

The correctness of this observation is borne out by a consideration of the uses of the partitive genitive in languages that rely on it: thus in French one can say Il a du courage, and one can ask Est-ce qu'il y a du lait?, as if courage and milk were both just two great masses of stuff from which one might draw one's share. Matilal explains, in fact, that in the Indian Nyāya school of logic a concept such as 'water' is treated exactly the same as the concept 'ability to swim'. Thus the proposition 'The water in this glass is cold', is in Nyāya transformationally equivalent to:

Water, which is characterized by being locatable, where such locatability is conditioned by a location-hood resident in the glass, is coldness-possessing.

The proposition 'John's ability to swim is poor', in turn, may be understood as follows:

The ability to swim is characterized by being locatable, where such locatability is conditioned by a location-hood resident in John, has the quality of being poor.

So courage, water, milk, fabric, ability: all of these are so much stuff, of which one can take what one needs or desires. All of these differ, in turn, from the countable beings that take of them. Whether this distinction is one that captures a real difference in the world or not is another question altogether, but it certainly feels helpful to have a lexical choice between 'stuff' and 'thing'.

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Let's Merry? A Note on the Uses of Adjectives

Some Indo-European languages rely heavily on neuter singular adjectives to express abstraction, or something approaching what is conveyed by the English suffixes -ness or -hood. Significant work is done by this form of inflection in ancient Greek, where, as many have noted, the possibility of speaking of to kalon ('the beautiful'), for example, strongly suggests that beyond all the various beautiful things, there is a beautiful itself. The neuter singular adjective facilitates abstraction, it turns a word for a property of things into the concept of things themselves, and thus into the ultimate substantivized form, somehow leaping right over the intermediate quasi-substantial thing to which the property might attach.

This possibility is there in German as well (one of the features of German that caused Heidegger to believe it had some particular affinity with Greek), making it a challenge to capture all the subtlety of this otherwise very familiar language in English. Thus das Spannende has to be rendered as 'the exciting thing', and not 'the Exciting'; das Wichtige as 'the important thing' and not 'the Important', and so on.

Yet a new possibility has appeared in the American English of the most recent years, and while I would like to be able to say that this possibility is opening up to us the richness of the Helleno-Germanic thought-worlds, in fact I fear that it is a symptom of what appears to me, in my more pessimistic moments, to be the ongoing impoverishment of our expressive power. When I am visiting the more bourgeois wing of my family, and thus the wing most susceptible to channeling forms of speech they hear in trendy TV ads and other fragments of mass culture that subtly serve to instruct that class as to how to be, I have begun to notice  a troubling new habit. One person will say something like (and I have picked what is likely the most annoying adjective in the English language, just to drive the point home): 'Be careful, these sticky buns are really sticky', to which the other will reply: 'Oh good. I like sticky'.

Now this looks on the face of it like a substantivization of just the sort we see in German or Greek. But does the speaker mean to say that she likes, as it were, 'the Sticky'? I doubt it, and if I might speculate as to the metaphysics behind this bit of peculiar grammar, I would say that whoever says this is likely only capable of conceptualizing sundry sticky things, and has no idea of the Sticky itself beyond these. This is convergent grammatical evolution, then; it looks the same as the abstraction-facilitating device of other Indo-European languages, but, to the extent that it is really just a contraction for the expression of a desire to get one's hands on this or that bun, it is underlain by an entirely different ontology.

And it gets worse still. I have just been to a Starbucks in New Jersey, where I saw a new advertising slogan, something for the 'holiday season' (why, I ask, is this season always at the avant garde of musical, linguistic, and aesthetic awfulness?), that attempts to make an adjective into a fucking verb. Let's merry, it actually says. As in, let us be merry. Plainly, we are not getting any closer to the essence of merriment by letting the real verb drop out. We are just being compelled to thoughtlessly buy shit. The adjective is now degraded in the process of transformation from one part of speech to the other, whereas in Greek and German it had been lifted up and made to do even more conceptual work than the part of speech for which it stood in.

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Non-Western Philosophy, Part 2: the Ladder, the Museum, and the Web

[For the first installment in this series, go here.]

The idea that there is a hierarchy or ladder of world cultures, with European culture at the top (often promoted to the status of 'civilization'), was a cornerstone of most Enlightenment philosophy. It was rejected in the era by a handful of counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as Herder, but it continued to reign in the burgeoning discipline of anthropology until the early-20th-century innovations of Franz Boas and others. It was only definitively displaced from anthropology in the decade or so after World War II. In philosophy today, by contrast, though everyone officially abjures the ladder model of human cultures, it continues to determine much of our reasoning about what counts as philosophy and what does not.

It is worth pointing out that all societies that have produced anything that we are able to easily recognize as philosophy are ladder societies. We might in fact argue, if not here, that philosophy as a discrete domain of activity in a society is itself a side-effect of inequality. The overwhelming authority of the church in medieval Europe, the caste system in ancient India, the control of intellectual life by the mandarin class in ancient China (meritocratically produced by the Confucian examination system, but still elite) present themselves as three compelling examples of the sort of social nexus that has left us with significant philosophical works. The fact that philosophy always comes from the top rungs of ladder societies could have something to do with the difficulty, in spite of our best intentions, of de-Eurocentrizing the current academic discipline of philosophy: New York, London, and the idyllic campuses that are an easy commute from these metropolises are the true locus of philosophy today, in just the same way that royal courts were in ancient India. It is as hard for us to think of the intellectual activity of, say, some village sage in postcolonial, third-worldified India as 'philosophy', as it would have been for a high-caste member of the literate elite to think of the folk beliefs of some forest-dwelling ādivāsī in this way.

When philosophers try to get away from the ladder, as most agree for political reasons it is necessary to do, what they usually end up with is the museum, or perhaps, with apologies to André Malraux, the imaginary museum of philosophical multiculturalism. As the Soviets once did with the traditional costumes of their empire's ethnic minorities, those who aim to promote non-Western philosophy usually end up putting the Chinese and the Indians, and sometimes a slapped-together group they dub 'Africans' as well, in entirely separate, non-overlapping display cases, as if their philosophical traditions were just so many traditional costumes or pieces of pottery.

It is not just that ideas are harder to display in this way than are costumes or pottery, but rather that the display of national traditions in any aspect of life, whether it be material or intellectual culture, in a way that would have the observer or reader believe that this aspect is sui generis and, so to speak, aboriginal with the culture itself, is already a gross caricature of ethnic or national identity. It is a reduction of Herderianism, the proposition that each culture is irreducibly unique, to a sort of kitsch: a display of the different peoples of the world holding hands. Such display is characteristic of ulterior-motive-laden Socialist Bloc iconography of old, as well as of commercials for Coca Cola and McDonald's, along with only slightly less explicitly commercial pageants such as the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. I suppose for those purposes we can all find something heart-warming in the stylized image of an Eskimo holding hands with a Masai tribesman and a Swiss milkmaid. But when it comes to scholarship, one wants something more sophisticated.

And yet, nothing more sophisticated is on offer in the way different national or regional intellectual traditions are presented alongside one another. What has taken shape as 'identity politics' in North America in the past several decades gives us a version of Herderianism even more vulgar than Soviet ethnography. This is the social force that has largely dismantled disciplines like anthropology and sociology and left us nothing but various 'studies' departments in their wake. I know of at least one university that has a 'Canadian Irish Studies' department. Now Irish immigration to Canada is a perfectly good thing to, say, write a Ph.D. thesis about. But how can you claim to have received a liberal education if from the outset you specialized in something as narrow as a single ethnic community in a single country? What's worse, it is not infrequent that the student who specializes in this way is a member of that very community, and the implicit --and sometimes even explicit-- purpose such a program serves is simply to reinforce the student's sense of belonging within that community.

Philosophy departments are increasingly seeking to reproduce at a smaller scale just this sort of zoological park. There is the worthy imperative to increase the representation of minority groups, a goal I entirely support at the level of proactive hiring policies that aim to attract members of historically disadvantaged communities. But where this imperative trails off in a direction I cannot follow is in the confused idea that this representation should also be effected through changes to the curriculum, and moreover that the addition of courses in non-Western philosophy is always a contribution to the recognition of minority groups. I myself was recently lauded for making such a contribution when I proposed to teach a course in ancient Indian philosophy.

But I was doing no such thing. Quite apart from the fact that the authors of the Upanishads were 'Aryans', and in the not-so-distant past have been seen as white par excellence, there is also this small hitch, that no one in ancient India cared in the slightest whether they were 'white' or not, or whether Europeans were imposing hegemonic discourses or not. There is nothing 'minority' about the Upanishads --other than that they were written by members of a privileged high-caste minority within ancient Indian society--, and it is a gross misrepresentation of the tradition these texts represent to pretend that the teaching of them is somehow advancing the representation of minorities in philosophy.

Imagine, for comparison, an archaeologist who has spent a career working on Bronze Age Scandinavia, and then switches to the Mayan or the Indus Valley civilization. Would anyone think to suggest that this scientist is moving from a myopic Eurocentrism to an appreciation for minority cultures and their achievements? Of course not! The archaeologist studies human material culture on the presumption that, within certain parameters, human beings may be found to do more or less the same sorts of thing wherever they reside and whatever phenotype they may have, and moreover that wherever they are found, human cultures have always been linked in complicated, constitutive ways to other cultures, so that in fact the process of 'globalization' is coeval with the earliest out-of-Africa migrations.

Certainly, archaeology has not been free of infection from national myth-making, from the desire to cast ancient remains found on this-or-that country's soil as having something to do with that country's current identity. And certainly, Eurocentrism in archaeology did for a long time occlude from view what has more recently become indisputable: that for a number of the innovations in symbolic material culture associated with what Colin Renfrew and others have called the 'Human Revolution' of roughly 60,000-50,000 years ago, we need to be looking to sub-Saharan Africa. But still, archaeology moved out of its infancy some time ago; it now understands humanity to be a global phenomenon with sundry local inflections. It seems to me that the progress of the study of the history of material culture might serve as a model for the study of the history of intellectual culture, which in certain times and places has been written down and distilled into what we are able to recognize as 'philosophy'.

And here we come to the third possible model for thinking about non-Western philosophy: beyond the ladder and the museum, there is the web. This is the same web that has always linked the material cultures of at least Eurasia to one another, whatever distinctive regional flavors might also be discerned. The possibility of approaching the history of intellectual culture in the same way seems particularly auspicious right now, given the recent, very promising results of the so-called cognitive turn in the study of material culture, that is, the turn to the study of cultural artifacts as traces of distributed or exosomatic cognition, as material and intentional at once. So material-cultural history already is intellectual history of a sort, even if it is not the kind that interests philosophers: there is a great gap between stone tools and, say, medieval logic treatises, and different skills are required for studying the one than for the other. But both are material traces of human intention, and both emerge out of particular kinds of societies only. To know them fully is to know what kind of societies are able to produce them.

When we accept this final point --surely the most heterodox, from the point of view of most philosophers-- we are for the first time in a position to study and to teach Indian, Chinese, European, and Arabic philosophy alongside one another in a serious and adequate way. When we accept, for example, that all of the great Axial Age civilizations, to use Karl Jaspers's helpful label, are the product of a single suite of broad historical changes that swept the Eurasian continent, and thus that Chinese, Indian, and Greek thought-worlds are not aboriginal in any meaningful sense (neither are Cree or Huron or Inuit, for that matter, but this can be dealt with another time), then all of a sudden it becomes possible to study, say, the Buddha and his followers not as an expression of some absolutely other Eastern 'wisdom', but instead as a local expression of global developments, or as a node in a web. 

I was recently wondering about the origins of the widespread folk figure of the antlered cuckold. It dawned on me that any scholarship I might find that really explains why men who have been betrayed by their wives are thought to sprout horns would probably be at least sixty years old. In more recent decades, a belief like this one might be mentioned in the course of some ideological critique or other, or it might come up in the description of the local and supposedly wholly particular beliefs of some ethnie or other whose lifeways are being paid tribute under the banner of scholarship. But what one will not find is a systematic treatment of the entire geographical space of a belief like this, a treatment of all its permutations and of the logic underlying these. There are some very notable exceptions, such as Carlo Ginzburg on folk beliefs about night-wandering from Friuli to the Baltic region. But Ginzburg's work stands out as exceptional in its scope, when, if one pauses to think for a moment, this really just is one of the things scholarship ought regularly to be seeking to do: making out the web behind the nodes.

What makes it so hard to see that this might be the proper approach to the study of the history of philosophy as a global phenomenon is that philosophy is not supposed to work in the same way as folk beliefs. It is supposed to be a pursuit of culture-independent truth. Yet this article of faith has had the awkward and unintended consequence of making the available defenses of the de-Eurocentrization of philosophy --something most in the field hold to be desirable for political reasons-- quaint at best and incoherent at worst. If philosophy is independent of culture, then we cannot go, so to speak, underneath the philosophy and examine the broader social dynamics that sustain it. But we need to look at these dynamics in order to see the connections between one tradition and another. There are, so to speak, tunnels in the basement between India and Greece, but we're afraid to go down there. And so the result is that we are not so much liberating philosophy from culture, as we are making each culture's philosophy irreducibly and incomparably its own, just as if it were a matter of displaying folk costumes in some Soviet ethnographic museum, or in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. This is unscientific, unrigorous, and unacceptable in any other academic discipline.

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Being and Weather

[From the New York Times, August 29, 2011]

Two nights ago, Hurricane Irene was taking her sweet time, making her painfully slow path up the East Coast towards New York. And everyone, but everyone, was talking about the weather. New Yorkers, many of whom ordinarily exhibit a strong aversion to small talk, had given themselves carte blanche to do so until after the storm weakened and passed on to irrelevant Canada.

But what makes us so certain that talk of weather is small, anyway? What, after all, could be more fundamental to our existence as corporeal, terrestrial creatures than the fluctuations of the atmosphere through which we move? What is it, moreover, that we are neglecting to care about when we dismiss weather talk as the stuff of superficial exchange?

Etymology tells us that the banalization of weather is a recent development. In a number of languages the standard word for “weather” is exactly the same as the word for “time”: thus French le temps, Romanian timpul, Hungarian időjárás (literally “the walking of time”), to name a few.

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Experiment, Culture and the History of Philosophy

A guest post for the Early Modern Experimental Philosophy Research Project at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

A question of central methodological importance for the historian of philosophy concerns the appropriate relationship between the aspects of philosophy’s past that a scholar takes on, on the one hand, and on the other the current agenda of non-historical philosophy. Recently, in the results of a query launched by Mark Lance at the NewAPPS blog, my own deep worry about the state of the discipline was confirmed: a good many non-historian philosophers believe that, at the end of the day, history-of-philosophy scholarship should make itself relevant to the cluster of questions currently being investigated in philosophy. I could not disagree more strongly. To riff on John F. Kennedy’s famous line, I believe that we should not be asking what the history of philosophy can do for us, but rather what we can do for the history of philosophy. That is, we should be attempting to do justice to past thinkers by carefully reconstructing their own world of concerns. In doing so, we shall often have to move beyond the boundaries of what we consider philosophy (and even of what they considered philosophy).

I have argued in many fora that we should respect the historical usage of the term ‘philosophy’. Some have objected that it is a semantic issue –as in, a mere semantic issue– what might have been called by a certain name in another era. What is important, they say, is whether the activity so-called in fact has any continuity with what we are doing when we do philosophy. To some today, the discontinuity seems most evident when we consider early modern experimental philosophy. There simply is no meaningful sense, they maintain, in which we can think of meteorology as a proper part of philosophy, even if this is how it was conceived in the history of natural philosophy from Aristotle through (at least) Boyle.

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Forest Paths

I've long held that much of Heidegger's popularity has to do with his mystifying use of language, a use that he draws from the best tradition of German poetry, but that, applied for the aims of positive philosophy, yields nothing more than genre confusion. This mystification is often overemphasized in translation. Thus, for example, Was heißt Denken?, which would be correctly translated as What Does 'Thinking' Mean?, is rendered by the tortured and overliteral What Is Called Thinking? The problem with this is that, in German, it is perfectly normal to use the verb heißen, 'to be called', where in English we would use the verb to mean. Heidegger was not saying something as precious or as extraordinary as the English title implies.

(*Update, May 5, 2011: A sharp reader has written to complain that I misrepresent the title, both in German and in English, of Heidegger's book, since in fact Heidegger did wish to draw attention to the significance of the verb heißen, and to this end ran through many of the ways that 'calling' might be of significance for a philosophical treatment of thinking. For this reason, what I should have said is not that there is nothing extraordinary about the verb heißen as Heidegger treats it, but only that the title of the book in the original German would not strike a German-speaker prima facie as strange, in the way that the English title strikes English-speakers.)

Efforts to make Heidegger more accessible, however, more domestic and approachable, have occasionally resulted in what looks like a sort of pulling back of the curtains on the Wizard of Oz, revealing a rather small man behind the booming voice. One of the more amusing moments of demystification came with the recent retranslation of the philosopher's Holzwege of 1950, a work that had previously been published in English with the title left in the original German, under the new, rather mundane name Off the Beaten Track. What had appeared as dark and impenetrable as the Black Forest at midnight now looked like a common trail-guide for avid hikers!

I was surprised recently to come across an entry for 'Holzweg' in the Grimm Brothers' alphabetical index of the key terms of German folk sayings. The Heidegger text suggests, whether Heidegger meant it to or not, a lone thinker, wandering the forest he calls home, deriving the depth of his thought from the wildness of his surroundings. In fact, however, from Konrad von Haslau in the 13th century through Martin Luther in the 16th, the figure of the Holzweg stood for errancy, for drifting from the true path, God's path. Thus von Haslau writes:

dar an sich manger verschriet, /der einen holzwec geriet: / der dünket in der beste; / dar nâch so vindt er ronen und este, / die von den boumen sint gerêret; / swelch tumber da niht wider kêret, / daz spriche ich wol in sînen hulden, / der muoz vil unrede dulden (verse 1033 ff).  

[Many went astray / in going down a Holzweg / they thought it was the best way / but then they found fallen trunks and boughs / that fell down from the trees / whoever is so foolish and does not turn around / this I say for his own good / that he must put up with the bad things said of him.]

In 1495, the preacher Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg reiterates this connection between the Holzweg and the Irrweg, writing:

man findt under tausent nicht einen, der dem rechten weg nachtrachtet, sonder sie gehn all dem holzweg nach und eilen heftig bisz sie zu der hellen kommen.

[Of a thousand men, you will find not one who strives for the right way, but they all follow the Holzweg, and hasten onward until they end up in hell.]

The institute where I am currently in residence has its own woods, and the members go there, and are encouraged to go there, and to stroll and to think as they stroll. Today I went there, in the horrible heat that hung over the East Coast on June 1, 2011, the end-of-the-world heat, the Jurassic heat. I was there to photograph mushrooms (more on this soon), but I couldn't help but think, as I walked, about the expectation that these woods were there for thinking, that they were a sort of thinking-preserve. These were Holzwege I was walking along, and they were custom-made and preserved for the purpose of doing what we imagine Heidegger did in the Schwarzwald.

Naturally, also, I thought back to the earlier connotations recorded by the Brothers Grimm, who preserved for us a trace of a time when dark forests were exactly what was not recommended for the benefit of the human mind/soul (either because they were not conducive to thinking, or, which is more likely, because thinking itself was already quasi-heathenish). And then I though about the post-Heideggerian attempts to domesticate the dark forests, no longer either Satan's way of leading you astray, or the profound philosopher's natural element, but simply a bunch of 'nature trails', owned and conserved by well-meaning people with money, against the onslaught of housing developments, and to which you should come prepared with a supply of trail mix and a full can of Off.

It was hotter than hell, as I said, and the mosquitoes were buzzing around my ears and the ground was crawling with the sort of creatures that didn't even get names in Genesis. I found some fine fungus specimens, and I suppose that in some way the overall effect of the excursion was to cause me to think. In sum however I found it all rather unpleasant, and after all too short an errancy was happy to return, having made no great contribution either to mycology or to what is called 'thinking', to my air-conditioned apartment.

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Physics Solves Problem of Immortality, Again!

As I've said many times, I do my best here not to enter into the usual blogospheric disputations. But there is a certain kind of science writing that has irked me for years, and that is now much harder to avoid as a result of the proliferation of blogs, that I cannot refrain from briefly denouncing.

It is proliferated by scientists and science amateurs alike, but in both cases it seems to have roughly the same connection to science as Cosmo's sex-position tips have with Eros. Whatever concrete domain of science it addresses, its underlying message is: science is awesome. This genre works by a sort of magic, turning anything and everything that it takes to be of interest into 'science' by its simple attention: the way light shines through stained-glass windows, the way foods cooked sous vide affect the palate, and so on. This transformative power parallels that of the practitioner of yoga, who will claim that in virtue of her commitment to yoga everything else in her life is charged with yogic specialness as well. It is a presumption that, whether yogic or scientistic, must be resisted by intelligent people.

All this a fortiori when, on the basis of this presumption of the universal authority of the scientistic outlook, the science writer ventures into philosophical territory. A fine example of this was Sean M. Carroll's recent blog post for Scientific American on the impossibility of the immortality of the soul. Now Carroll is a friend of many friends of mine, and seems like a gracious and thoughtful person. I hope we can disagree non-crazily, as he would put it. But his post is simply bad: a pseudophilosophical conclusion, drawn from pure non-sequiturs, and based on nothing but the aura of authority with which his social status as a physicist is supposed to imbue his opinions.

At the heart of Carroll's argument is the un-argued-for presumption that souls must be the sort of entities that attach to particles, that they cannot exist without particle hosts, and, further, that since no empirical data about the host particles of souls has been forthcoming in the now-complete physics of everyday life, we are justified in assuming that whatever it is we think of as 'soul' dissolves with the death of the body.

Carroll believes that anyone who is committed to the existence of an immortal soul must answer the following questions:

If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

Now some philosophers have argued that souls must remain attached to or associated with particulate hosts (the Stoics, for example), but this is probably a minority view in the history of Western philosophy. There are varieties of soul, the vegetative and sensitive, that are generally held to be indissociably wrapped up with the body, and thus to perish along with the body. But these are generally contrasted with the rational soul: the soul that is capable of knowing the eternal truths of mathematics, etc., and that is ontologically independent of whatever biological host it happens to ride for a while. There is no reason to expect to find this soul stored after death in a physical substrate that can be accounted for in terms of the physics of everyday life: this soul is not the information stored by the brain, which would then after death be transmitted to some other physical storage unit.

Now I sure as hell am not going to argue for the existence of a soul, but I know that if I were to seek to argue against it, I would not suppose at the outset that what is meant by 'soul' is 'brain-stored information about the self'. There are other options in the history of human thought, options that have been well defended, and that require sophisticated refutations based on knowledge of the history of philosophy.

Since Carroll attempted to impress us all into agreeing with him by trotting out Dirac's intimidating-looking equation --it looks hard, the implicit message goes, therefore anyone who understands it must be able to answer our questions about life after death--, I think I'll reply in kind by citing a profound bit of philosophy in French and declining to translate it: où il n'y a pas un être, il n'y a pas un être. Don't worry about the details; what this says is that for deep metaphysical reasons, it is not possible that reality should consist in physical particles, let alone in congeries built up from physical particles. Whatever deserves to be called a being, is going to be absolutely simple, one, monadic, and this means, among other things, undetectable by the physics of everyday life.

Is it true? I have no idea. I am convinced, as are Carroll and Alva Noë, and as is pretty much everyone who qualifies as salonfähig in our era, that the best explanations are naturalistic, that is, that they are based on what is detectable. But it is one thing to circumscribe the domain of permissible explanations, quite another to dismiss an entire order of explanation as false. So again, I don't know whether reality is one and simple or whether it consists in clumps of particles, but I do know that the author of that French phrase thought at least as hard about the nature of reality as Sean Carroll has, and that if the phrase is not true its untruth will not be established by appeal to the current state of physical science. It is not up to the physical scientists, in other words, to refute it, and still less is it up to them to dismiss it. The fact that they are allowed by editors and readers to do so anyway is a matter principally of sociological interest. 

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Postscript, 30 May:

I realized quickly after hitting 'publish' one thing that I should have made clear, and that is that I am certainly not arguing for a strict division of labor between scientists and philosophers, with scientists holding forth on the features of the phenomenal world and philosophers uniquely qualified to speculate on what if anything is grounding the appearances. To argue such a thing would be to go exactly against the spirit of what I have been pushing elsewhere, as in my recent piece for The Stone, where I urge that what is most needed is a return to the era when science was constitutive of philosophy, rather than at best complimentary to it, or at worst antagonistic. But this reconciliation will not occur simply by allowing any scientist, trained in the way scientists are today, with no real awareness of their place in the history of natural philosophy, to hold forth on philosophical questions.

When I was 10 years old or so I came up with what I thought was a knockdown argument against the possibility of reincarnation: I called it 'the demographic argument', as it appealed to the fact that there are vastly more people alive today than in the past, and therefore only a small percentage of them could have a series of past lives going all the way back to the beginning of human history. This was intellectually satisfying, but it failed to grasp the alternative conceptions of history (roughly speaking, cyclical rather than linear), and of the scope of the shared community of beings (extending to all life forms rather than just to human beings), that make theories of metempsychosis make sense. Understood holistically, embedded in the total belief system of which it is a part, metempsychosis makes powerful sense, and it is only a ten-year-old know-it-all mentality that would rest content with an argument such as the demographic one, which imports all of the presumptions of our own contemporary philosophical (or weltanschaulich) predicament for the assessment of a theory that does not arise from that predicament. This is similar to what happens when scientists untrained in the history of philosophy swoop in to settle its millennia-old questions.

The Flight of Curiosity

From the 'Stone' series in the online edition of the New York Times. To read the entire article, click here.

Today’s natural scientist easily distinguishes his own work not only from his hobbies, but also from the activity of his pseudoscientific counterpart. When we look back in history, however, it becomes difficult to keep this distinction in view, for it has often happened that false beliefs have produced significant experimental results and have led to real discoveries. It is no less difficult  to separate the history either of science or of pseudoscience from what I will dare to call the “real” history of philosophy, for until very recently, what we now call science was not merely of interest to philosophers, but was in fact constitutive of philosophy. In fact, it was not called science at all, but rather natural philosophy.

Thus, tellingly, among the articles in the Philosophical Transactions of 1666, the first year of the journal’s publication, we find titles such as “Of a Considerable Load-Stone Digged Out of the Ground in Devonshire,” and “Observations Concerning Emmets or Ants, Their Eggs, Production, Progress, Coming to Maturity, Use, &c.” Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, researchers studying the properties of magnetism continued to refer to their area of interest as “the magnetical philosophy,” and as late as 1808  John Dalton published “A New System of Chemical Philosophy.” A year later Jean-Baptiste Lamarck brought out his “Philosophie zoologique.” Yet by the early 20th century, this usage of the word philosophy had entirely vanished. What happened?

A Note on Spinoza and Race

As I recall Spinoza is generally held to have a pretty good record when it comes to race. There is as far as I know only one passage of one letter, written to Pieter Balling in July, 1664, in which he seems to use the term 'black' in a negative way. I haven't seen the original Dutch (I've seen notes that suggest it may in fact have have been written in Spanish first, and then translated), which would be helpful, but I will cite Curley's English rendition here:

One morning, as the sky was already growing light, I woke from a very deep dream to find that the images which had come to me in my dream remained before my eyes as vividly as if the things had been true --especially the image of a certain black, scabby Brazilian whom I had never seen before. For the most part this image disappeared when, to divert myself with something else, I fixed my eyes on a book or some other object. But as soon as I turned my eyes back away from such an object without fixing my eyes attentively on anything, the same image of the same Black man appeared to me with the same vividness, alternately, until it gradually disappeared from my visual field (IV 76, 25-IV 77, 6).

Rather than handing out laurels to, or withholding them from, past thinkers on the basis of the connotations we assume must timelessly attach to words, it would be more useful to try to trace back the connotations that led the thinkers themselves to employ these words. And here there can be no doubt that Spinoza is using a stock example from the history of humoral medicine.

To be 'black' in this context is to have a surfeit of black bile or melancholy, and thus to be earthy, and thus to be associated with corpses and other supposedly dark things. In extreme cases, a melancholic person, in addition to being dark or 'muddy' him or herself, can also hallucinate corpses or, alternatively, 'black' men.

In The Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton attributes to Jovianus Pontanus the view that those born under the influence of Saturn are "very austere, sullen, churlish black of colour" (Mem. I, subs. 3, 397). Hercules de Saxonia is cited as holding that "these that are naturally melancholy" are "of a leaden colour or black" (ibid., 399). Burton himself adds that a certain subspecies of melancholics "are fatter than others..., of a muddy complexion" (ibid, 400).

It is precisely such people, according to Guianerius, who "think themselves dead many times, or that they see, talk with black men, dead men, spirits and goblins frequently" (ibid., 400). Gordonius writes that extreme melancholics see and talk "with black men, and converse familiarly with devils" (ibid., 402). Gentilus Fulgosus is cited as relating the story of a melancholy friend, who "'had a black man in the likeness of a soldier' who followed him wherever he was" (ibid.). 

In a footnote to the citation from Guianerius, Burton distinguishes two different sorts of reactions to sudden, unexpected visions: there are those who blandiuntur, and those who territant, i.e., those who are 'terrified', which is to say, etymologically, those who are rendered earthy, of which a sign is the sudden darkening of the face. The extreme consequences of this, for people of a certain humoral disposition, is to come to believe that they themselves are corpses (a condition which has apparently been clinically confirmed in recent years).

I suspect that this particular sort of hallucination originally had no racial connotation whatever, but was thought to be the straightforward consequence of the excessive production of black bile. That blackness is associated with earth in humoral medicine (an association also widely attested in sub-Saharan ethnography too; see, e.g., Goody 1977) enables in turn the association of the melancholic condition with corpses, and the interchangeability of the figure of the black man with that of the corpse. 

It is likely that between the time of Burton's work and Spinoza's letter, there is a superimposition of a racial or quasi-racial connotation upon the figure of the black man, and that the term is gradually deprived of its original humoral significance. In Spinoza's case the figure is not only racialized, but is explicitly associated with a particular geographical region; and yet, at the same time he retains the 'scabrousness' of the old visions of corpses that interested Burton.

In any case Spinoza's hallucinated Brazilian does not appear out of nowhere; if he saw it at all, then this was under circumstances much like those that cause me to see images from old Looney Tunes cartoons when I shut my eyes to sleep: a historically conditioned phantasm. And when Spinoza relates it, in the context of a letter about the nature of misleading perceptions, he is probably drawing more on a (perhaps unconscious or largely forgotten) familiarity with medical literature than he is on any negative associations that he himself attaches to blackness.

The Burton Diet: Notes on The Anatomy of Melancholy

Some day, perhaps, I will tell the full story of my life-long conflict with the alimentative aspect of my corporeal existence. For now I will only briefly mention one example of how difficult it is to lead a life, as one must, as an eater.

I came up under an anti-fat regime, when foods, or packaged food products, were rated according to their degree of 'fat-freeness', and it was taken for granted that to eat fat was immediately to become fat. This regime made natural sense to me; du bist was du ißt, and all that.

Imagine my surprise then, when, a decade or so ago, the entire value system was suddenly inverted as a sort of Protestant Reformation of the diet occurred, where suddenly it was not the fats but the carbohydrates that were on the index alimentorum prohibitorum. This was difficult to grasp since, as I had always understood, carbohydrates just are the default variety of foodstuff: you get a bit of fat here, and a bit of protein there, but for the most part to eat is just to eat carbs. For these to suddenly be prohibited, and in favor, at that, of at least a certain subvariety of lipid, was all really too much for this old diet-obsessed eater to comprehend. It was more than a Reformation. It was a revaluation of all values.

The anti-carb fever seems to have waned in the most recent years, and now other dietary components are being denounced as the real evil (gluten? Who the hell ever cared about gluten before?); and having lived long enough --having not yet been killed off by the things I eat-- to see dietary rules come and go, I feel emboldened in my reading of the historical record on such matters to conclude that, in general, there must always be some element of diet or other that is prohibited, and it does not matter so much which one it is. The anti-carb revolution was a vivid illustration of a sort of social instability, of a historical period in which competing theories of the proper diet could in a matter of years or even months squeeze out their competitors.

We are, I mean to say, no more advanced than Galenic humoral medicine, or than Ayurveda, in our ascription of values to various foodstuffs.

This came to me most vividly in my recent, and very belated, reading of Robert Burton's wonderful Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621. In the section on diet, what strikes the contemporary reader is the evident arbitrariness of all the praising and damning, as well as the evident relishing of the lists of good or bad foods themselves. If the harmful foods cannot be enjoyed in excess, at least they can be written about in excess. Thus, for example:

All black wines, over-hot, compound, strong, thick drinks, as muscadine, malmsey, rumney, brown bastard, metheglin, and the like, of which they have thirty several kinds in Muscovy, all such made drinks are hurtful in this case, to such as are hot, or of a sanguine, choleric complexion, young, or inclined to head-melancholy (I 2, 223).

In general, Burton is most concerned about the artifice involved in the combination of ingredients. In a stunning passage, he effectively denounces all 'kitchen science' (scientia popinae) as so much alchemical transgression:

To the noxious simples we may reduce an infinite number of compound, artificial made dishes, of which our cooks afford us a great variety, as tailors do fashions in our apparel. Such are puddings stuffed with blood, or otherwise composed; baked meats, soused indurate meats, fired and broiled, buttered meats, condite, powdered, and over-dried; all cakes, simnels, buns, cracknels made with butter, spice, etc., fritters, pancakes, pies, sausages, and those several sauces, sharp, or over-sweet, of which scientia popinae, as Seneca calls it, hath served those Apician tricks and perfumed dishes (I 2, 225).

Burton cites Avicenna and Fernel to confirm his view that the fundamental cause of all illness is overindulgence:

To feed on many dishes... 'tis the fountain of all diseases, which arise out of the repugnancy of gross humours. Thence... come crudities, wind, oppilations, cacochymia, plethora, cachexia, bradypepsia, sudden death, etc., and what not (I 2, 225-6).

But what is that pure core of recommendable foods, that list of simple and moderate dishes, that Burton thinks one can steadily eat while keeping the bodily humors in balance? We don't really seem to get an answer to this question, just as, today, no one can specify a particular food that is safely and unambiguously 'good for you'. Everything you eat is perceived as potentially harmful, and that is not because of any real, measurably physiological effect, but only because we will never be entirely at ease with the alimentary nature of our existence, with, to put it bluntly, the fact that in order to keep on going as creatures we must constantly devour other creatures. That is a charged activity, and one that is bound to give rise to endless disputations as to the right way of going about it.

So much for the history of diet. Now a word on the history of literature. As I've already suggested, it seems to me that Burton relishes listing those things he should not be eating. This is supposed to be non-fiction, but it seems to me that the list, and in particular the list of perverse, curious, unacceptable things, would come to be an essential element of the novel as well. We see it clearly in Sterne, and we see it, to my mind par excellence, in the 'cetology' chapter of Moby Dick, where Melville lists all the curious natural-historical knowledge he has managed to accumulate about whales. Is this a list of recipes? No, not technically, but zoology and cookery have never been all that far apart, and I think Melville sensed as much when he spelled out the properties of whales and the names of all their sundry subtypes, just as Burton spells out, and relishes spelling out, all the names of all the things you aren't supposed to eat.

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More Bits that Didn't Make It In Under the Word Limit

History is essential to philosophy, as everyone in the field now agrees. But the adequate study of the history of philosophy involves an understanding of its many dead ends, false starts, and withered research programs. This means among other things that we have to take seriously many topics that scientists can safely ignore, such as alchemy, astrology, and physiognomy, since at some point or other these have played crucial roles in the explanation, respectively, of the nature of material bodies, of the causes of motion, and of the relationship between mind and body.

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Here I cannot help but recall an incident in graduate school, when I was obliged to trek over to the earth sciences library at my university to find Friedrich Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (History of Materialism and Critique of Its Present Importance), a great 19^th-century philosophical study of the concept of matter from Thales through Hegel. I wondered as I walked: Who could have put it in the earth sciences library? Presumably this was not going to be the library of some Borgesian alternative universe, but just a regular geology library. The book could only have been placed there by someone who thought that materialism had to do with matter, and that the earth, in turn, was a prime example of such stuff. In other words, it was put there by someone who, rather late in the game, continued to see the disciplines through the lens of natural philosophy.

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To this day, doctoral students in, say, geology, continue to earn Ph.D.’s, but the ‘Ph.’, which abbreviates the Latin genitive of ‘philosophy’, is vestigial, and few geologists wonder what it is doing there. Yet as in evolutionary biology, we would do well to not dismiss a trace of the past as merely vestigial too quickly. Could it be that there is in fact something philosophical about studying, say, the sediments of riverbeds? We can perhaps understand why the sedimentologists would wish to answer this question in the negative. They’ve got work to do: dirty, muddy work, and no time to worry about the history of the concept of matter.

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There were still branches of philosophy that could not branch off into science departments, such as the core areas of logic, metaphysics, and epistemology. They could not branch off, arguably, because there was no possible positive science into which they might be turned. Logic is useful for thinking about things, yet as Wittgenstein reminds us, logic itself tells us nothing. Metaphysics has been in the philosophical doghouse for most of the past few centuries, because (on one common definition) it pretends to treat of entities that are by definition beyond the bounds of experience, which many agree is impossible.

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It is the crime of looking into what goes on in the heavens and below the earth that marked Socrates, rightly or wrongly, as what was, for a long period between him and us, known as a ‘natural philosopher’. In the comedy of Aristophanes, it is as a natural philosopher that Socrates discovers that thunderbolts and flatulence are fundamentally similar processes, are investigable as interrelated phenomena within the same natural order. Looking into the heavens and beneath the earth was a crime because it threatened to expose the levers and riggings that traditional thought preferred to attribute to the active agency of supernatural forces. Such looking was also, by the same token, one of the most basic things, along with meditation upon the self and on the divine, dialectical exploration of arguments, and investigation of the limits of knowledge that philosophy conceived itself as doing. Natural philosophy was philosophy, and philosophers, to the extent that they practiced natural philosophy, were curious, and so also potentially dangerous.

Curiosity and Method, Princeton, April 9, 2011

Conversations with DHS Agents

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DHS Agent Limburg: You forgot to check off whether you were traveling for business or for pleasure.

Me: Well I didn't really have much fun, or make any money, so I figured I'd leave them both blank.

Limburg: I think that still counts as pleasure.

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DHS Agent Baca: What is the purpose of your trip?

Me: I’m going to Indiana University in Bloomington. You know, Hoosiers?

Baca: What will you be doing there?

Me: I’ll be delivering a paper.

Baca: What is the value of the paper?

Me: Oh, it’s incalculable.

Baca: Sir, if you’re delivering paper in the United States, I’ll need to know the value of it.

Me: Well, I suppose the paper itself is worth next to nothing.

Baca: Sir, what kind of paper salesman are you?

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DHS Agent Murkowski: Where are you going today?

Me: To Princeton University, to give a paper.

Murkowski: A paper?

Me: A lecture.

Murkowski: What on?

Me: The existence of the external world.

Murkowski: So does it exist?

Me: I don't think so, no.

Murkowski: Well have a good trip, then.

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DHS Agent Samuels: Where are you headed today?

Me: To a conference.

Samuels: What kind of conference?

Me: A philosophy conference.

Samuels: A philosophy conference, huh?

Me: Yes.

Samuels: So you're like a 'philosopher-king'?

Me: Except for the 'king' part.

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DHS Agent Horvath: Where do you reside?

Me: Montreal.

Horvath: What do you do there?

Me: I teach.

Horvath: What do you teach?

Me: Philosophy.

Horvath: Oh, I love philosophy. So, who's like your main guy?

Me: I mostly work on Leibniz.

Horvath: Oh yeah? I was just reading about him. Is it true he stole the secret of the calculus from Isaac Newton?

Me: That is a scurrilous slander.

Horvath: OK, just asking.

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DHS Agent Newland: Where is your primary residence?

Me: Montreal.

Newland: What do you do there?

Me: I'm a professor.

Newland: Of what?

Me: Philosophy.

Newland: Oh yeah? I got some philosophy for you. OK, so, like, Plato said, 'To do is to be', and Sartre said, 'To be is to do', and Sinatra said: 'Shooby dooby do'. Does that count as philosophy?

Me: No.

Some Final Words (For a While) on Philosophy and the History of Philosophy

Some recent fairly productive polemics and exchanges over at New APPS have led Mark Lance to issue the following query: "[W]hat I'd like to know," he writes, "is how the historians on this blog think we should draw the line [between what counts as history of philosophy and what is simply historical scholarship that should be housed elsewhere than in a philosophy department]. Is the measure still in terms of some notion of engagement with contemporary philosophy?  Or is there some other consideration that would suggest that there should be a field of history of philosophy, housed in philosophy rather than history, where engagement with contemporary philosophizing is in no way an essential desideratum."

Here is my reply:

I have a straightforward answer, one that will not come as a surprise to some of our readers: I do not believe that any direct engagement with contemporary philosophy should be a requirement of employment as a historian of philosophy within a philosophy department. This is not to say, however, that I do not think that historians of philosophy play a vital role in, let us say, the ecosystem of academic philosophy. I believe historians of philosophy can help current philosophers to gain perspective on their projects by showing them the scope and range of what has been able to pass as an important philosophical question in different times and places, and thereby providing a picture of the flexibility and contingency of what ought to count as a philosophical question.

This sort of contribution might have the effect of changing contemporary debates by showing that some resolution to them was already proposed long ago in an unfamiliar idiom (which often happens, for example, in the study of ancient Indian epistemology: we find the answers to contemporary questions, but we often don't even realize it because the style of argumentation is so different). Or this sort of contribution might simply help current philosophers to bear in mind the extent to which what we call 'philosophy' today really is a mixed bag of leftover questions from various historical legacies. In this connection, I believe it is absolutely crucial as a historian of philosophy to respect actors' categories, and that means to accept that if some Libavius or van Helmont claims to be doing 'philosophy' when he is in fact doing something that looks a world away from what we think of as philosophy, we have to respect his own understanding of the endeavor. This is in part why I was aghast when Leiter, perhaps semi-facetiously, announced recently with surprise that there is such a thing as the philosophy of chemistry: heavens, I can show you countless texts, published over several centuries, in which the words 'philosopher' and 'chemist' were used interchangeably! What does this show? Among other things it shows that philosophy and chemistry go way back together. It also serves as a fine illustration of the flexibility of the discipline.

This flexibility inevitably leads the thorough historian of philosophy down paths that cannot easily be connected up with current philosophical concerns. But it is up to the current philosophers themselves, if they wish to go through the intellectual exercise and thereby to be edified, to take an interest in the findings of the historians of philosophy --the findings that are often so far from current concerns--, and to allow these findings to serve as fuel for reflection on what this project we call 'philosophy' is all about anyway.

If current philosophers don't want to hear it, then I guess I would be willing to work in an HPS program rather than in a philosophy department. The problem with switching to a history department however is that they aren't interested either: whereas historians of philosophy tend to practice a fairly Whiggish march-of-great-ideas sort of intellectual history, professional historians tend by and large to be suspicious of intellectual history, to see ideas as epiphenomenal, and thus tend only to skim philosophical texts enough to get an idea of what is being said, before going back to talk about networks of patronage, the distribution of printing presses, etc. So my natural home, I insist, is in a philosophy department. But I would like to see some changes in the way non-historian philosophers understand the contribution of their historian colleagues. I would also like to see some changes in the way historians of philosophy conceive their intellectual project. I would like to see more of them explicitly reject the demand made by many of their non-historian colleagues that they demonstrate the relevance of their research to current philosophical debates.

I often hear colleagues relating how they first came to philosophy by reading the Tractatus, or the Republic, or some other common gateway text. I had a less usual introduction: as an undergraduate I came across the Philosophical Transactions, and read the first 30 years or so of them, starting in 1666, from cover to cover. This gave me a highly distorted perception of what the field of philosophy includes. But somehow I've always remained loyal to that first impression I had of what philosophy is about (e.g., the possibility of spontaneous generation, the function of the chimpanzee's larynx, vortex theory, the problem of infinitesimals, the refraction of light at the earth's poles..., hell, pretty much everything), and I continue to believe that exposure to unfamiliar conceptions of philosophy, such as the one that gives the Transactions their title, is a good thing for current philosophers, whether they do history or not.

And this is why I think historians of philosophy belong in philosophy departments, even, or perhaps especially, if they don't contribute directly to current philosophical debates.

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Update: I am finding it harder to extricate myself than I had hoped. David Wallace replied to the above comments with I think a very sensible question: Isn't there a semantic issue here? The discipline we call "philosophy" now doesn't automatically map onto any given discipline with the same, or an etymologically related, name in the past. What "Philosophy" meant when the Philosophical Transactions were being published in the 17th century is not obviously closer to modern philosophy than to modern science. After all, Philosophical Transactions is still being published, and these days it's unambiguously a science journal.

Again, here is my reply:

I had somewhat anticipated the semantic question, and probably should have said something about it in the initial post.

Certainly, if there had been some sudden and total shift at some point in the past, after which what they called 'philosophy' no longer overlapped at all with what we call 'philosophy' (say, like the shift from Thomas Aquinas's use of 'metaphysics' to Shirley MacLaine's use), then there really would be no value to current philosophy in studying everything that has ever been called 'philosophy'. But what we see instead is a gradual and continuous transformation (with one fairly abrupt and large transformation occurring over the course of the 18th century, when the particular natural sciences come to be parted out from what was until then known as 'natural philosophy').

But there are at least a few ways in which studying these transformations as a historian of philosophy may be fruitful, rather than simply zeroing in on those elements of past philosophy that remain of clear relevance to us. First of all, we might find that when someone in the past was doing something that he thought of as philosophy but that we do not think of as philosophy, he might nonetheless have been making observations that we can recognize as philosophical; e.g., Galen on the function of the pancreas can tell us something about teleology; Daniel Sennert's alchemy/chemistry can tell us something about the range of possible theories of compound bodies, which should be of interest not only to, say, those who might also be working on Democritean atomism or Descartes' corpuscularianism, but also to readers of, e.g., van Inwagen's Material Beings.

But again, I insist, this sort of pay-off is nice, but must not be a condition of considering some research on some past work research in the history of philosophy. For one thing, at the outset the historian of philosophy is not going to know where these still-philosophically-relevant nuggets might be hidden within some vast treatise on calendrical astrology or some such no-longer-legitimate thing. Second, in taking, say, Libavius's claim seriously that in trying to transmute base metal into gold he is doing 'philosophy', or Joachim Becher's claim that he has invented a perpetuum mobile, sometimes described as the ultimate 'machina philosophica', we might be forced to reflect on forgotten (but still perhaps latent) elements of the philosophical project: in fact these two examples are not so different from at least one of the two accusations, made justly or not, against Socrates at his trial.

So our philosophy does have something to do with their philosophy. This something would have been perfectly obvious to anyone writing before or during the great splitting off of the disciplines (Kant remains perfectly aware of and respectful of this older conception of philosophy as late as the turn of the 19th century). So again it's not a matter of a sudden shift of meaning, but rather a gradual transformation, of which I believe it is one of the responsibilities of the historian of philosophy to provide an account.

One final note: as you point out the Philosophical Transactions is today just another science journal, but that certainly doesn't make it irrelevant to philosophy, any more than the first issues of the journal are irrelevant to the historian of philosophy: it's very relevant, as a source of material for philosophers of science.

*

A postscript (not in the original comment):

Come to think of it, I would not necessarily exclude, from the list of legitimate questions a historian of philosophy might ask, the question as to how it came to be that if you go to the 'metaphysics' section of a bookstore today (or, say, ten years ago, when such bookstores still existed) you will find books by Shirley MacLaine, but not Thomas Aquinas. That is an interesting question, and the full answer to it would probably tell you a great deal about the history of metaphysics. Surely it has much to do with the transformation of 'metaphysical' into a term of derision in early-20th-century positivism, and it might have something to do with the inherent unclarity of what the topic ought to be covering, an unclarity that goes back to the very naming of the work by Aristotle that brought the discipline into existence.

So by all means, fellow historians of philosophy, ask yourselves about Shirley MacLaine's metaphysics, too. Draw on all possible sources of insight that might help you to understand what the project of philosophy is about. It is not that MacLaine herself will actually say insightful things --for the most part, the minor figures I study from the 17th century don't either--, but rather that she serves as a bit of evidence in piecing together the history of a difficult concept.

Mutatis mutandis, just this sort of work has been done by William Newman, who reconstructed the emergence of occult-tinged 'symbolic alchemy' over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, in order to distinguish it from the practical and scientific alchemy/chemistry --Newman calls it 'chymistry', highlighting the fact that the two words were for a long time interchangeable, and thus it is an anachronistic error to suppose that one of them could have been a legitimate endeavor, and the other a fraudulent one-- of the early modern period. With C. G. Jung's reveries cleared out of the way by solid scholarship, we are in a better position to appreciate the contribution chemists/alchemists made to the history of matter theory, which is to say to a part of the history of philosophy. But Newman is, professionally, a historian of science, and so he is free to contribute to the history of philosophy in a way that historians of philosophy themselves are not.

A Response to Robert Pasnau on Studying the History of Philosophy

Robert Pasnau has recently written an open letter encouraging graduate students in philosophy to specialize in the history of philosophy. (Please do click and read it before reading on here.) Now I understand that Pasnau meant this letter to serve as a recruitment tool, and to this extent he was required to tailor it to what he rightly supposes are the preconceptions of most students going into graduate programs in philosophy and who are not yet convinced of the worthwhileness of specializing in the history of philosophy. However, while this approach might indeed raise the number of dissertations with a historical orientation in the short term, it does nothing in the long term to help us overcome, and in fact does much to reinforce, a number of misguided views about the relationship of philosophy to its history, about how the history of philosophy is best studied, about the proper role of history-of-philosophy scholarship within today's philosophy deparments, and so on.

I am currently co-editing a volume with Mogens Laerke and Eric Schliesser on precisely these matters, and when it comes out (OUP, 2012) I am hoping that it will help significantly to transform the relationship between non-historians and historians within philosophy, and that at least some of the contributions will make a compelling case, one that will be understood by non-historians, for the philosophical worthwhileness of plunging into the past, of coming to feel at home there, and of taking the time to really, deeply, get to know the period one studies: all of which are things that students currently specializing in the history of philosophy are not expected to do.

I am going to withhold most of my thoughts on this matter for now, saving them for my own contribution to the OUP volume. But here I would just like to point out the three elements of Pasnau's letter that I found most problematic.

First, by encouraging graduate students to specialize in the history of philosophy on the grounds that (i) it is easier to get a job with such a specialization; and (ii) once employed, they can drop history and move into what are implicitly portrayed as the big leagues, Pasnau's case for specializing in the history of philosophy perpetuates this specialization's status as a second-class, handmaiden, propaedeutic, back-up plan, etc., to real philosophy. It involves, in other words, the implicit presupposition that there is only one way to spend a valuable career in philosophy, and that is by contributing to and helping to resolve current debates.

But what if one spends one's entire career elucidating some period of the past? This changes the present state of things too, though in a different way: it shows us that we could have been wrong in attributing a certain view to a certain figure, and that if that is so we need to revise our understanding of the transmission-history of the ideas and questions we continue to take seriously. This in turn might lead us to take some of these ideas more seriously, and some less.

What if it were to be shown, for example, the Locke was not nearly so much of a nominalist as he has been taken to be? Wouldn't this cause at least a bit of a realignment in contemporary debates that descend from the nominalism-realism controversy? Now how one might show such a thing about Locke brings me to my second major concern about Pasnau's letter. (In this example, some close to the matter will note, I am drawing on the very enlightening work of Peter Anstey.) One could just read the usual, highly abridged editions of the Essay, and follow that up with the usual recent Anglophone secondary literature; in which case, I probably don't need to add, it is unlikely that major new insights will be had in the interpretation of Locke. Or, by contrast, one could study manuscripts, marginalia, even Locke's personal seed collection (!); one could map his relations with botanists, and so on.

This is the sort of work that I think Pasnau has in mind when he says that if you walk into a typical meeting of historians of philosophy at, say, the APA, you are likely to find it dull: the obsessing over watermarks, the piecing together of fragments, and so on. But this is also just the sort of work you have to do if you want to get it right, and the only philosophers, as far as I know, who would deny that that is the goal of philosophy are the ones who think that it's all just 'discourses', 'narratives', etc. There is a current of history-of-philosophy scholarship, of which most non-historian philosophers seem completely unaware, that rejects that view as adamantly as it rejects the anti-historical prejudice of much current Anglophone philosophy.

It is plain to me from years of talking to people (and as many years of overhearing conversations not intended for my ears) that non-historians who walk into a room full of historians obsessing over watermarks conclude that they must be doing this in order to compensate for a lack of philosophical ability. But this is simply a false inference. If you are going to permit historians of philosophy the freedom to try to get things right about whatever it is they are studying, you will have to cease with the demand that they produce a short-term, immediately recognizable philosophical pay-off from their historical work. It might take years of immersion and grappling in order to really understand some local, context-laden debate of long-ago. And with manuscript work in particular one has to allow to the historian of philosophy the freedom to develop a sort of expertise that is not limited to that of extracting arguments. There is in addition something akin to the expertise of the art historian: such a specialist has to stare for a long, long time, and then has to go and read a lot about networks of patronage, and so on; and then, finally, she might arrive at some kind of account of the beauty of a painting. Similarly, you have to stare and stare at manuscripts, and you have to learn about the context of their production, in order eventually to understand whether the points being made in them are good or not.

Now it might in fact be the case that some people who do this sort of work are not the best epistemologists, philosophers of mind, metaphysicians. But even then, so what? Where is the justification for the presumption that they must in fact be working towards an eventual, direct contribution to contemporary philosophical debates in order for their study of old texts to be a legitimate endeavor? Maybe there is simply a division of labor within philosophy, wherein some people excel in elucidating and resolving problems in texts produced by others, and some people excel in contributing to current debates. I want to hear an argument that will convince me of the greater nobility or urgency of the latter endeavor.

In any case, it is simply not true that watermark-obsessers are compensating for their philosophical mediocrity. I have never met a single contextualist historian of philosophy of whom such a judgment would be fair. They just happen to like what they do, and they recognize, for reasons I've already sketched, why doing this is an important contribution to the discipline of philosophy as a whole.

Finally, and relatedly, in his somewhat jocular account of his own approach to working with Latin texts --mastering Latin is in fact a lot harder than remembering that intellectus means 'intellect' and actus means 'act'; in fact, it is by no means clear that even these translations of these two words are adequate in all contexts--, Pasnau seems to reject the notion that a specialist in the history of philosophy might also benefit from liking history itself, as well as philology, the study of languages, and so on. He presents these rather as obstacles to getting at what really counts --the timeless arguments inconveniently shrouded in Latin-- rather than being portals of access to rich and unfamiliar worlds.

What history, philology, foreign-language study, and so on, can often reveal is that in fact what we took to be timeless philosophical problems were in their inception conceptualized very differently, and have transformed over the course of their histories in ways that can cause us to doubt whether we and our predecessors are talking abut the same thing at all. This sort of discovery is one that can generally only be made if one opens oneself up to the world of the past philosopher, to his idiom, his social values and status, his culture and religion, and so on. Those who open themselves up in this way are usually classicists, historical anthropologists, historians of religion, for example, but seldom historians of philosophy. Sometimes however the work of such non-philosophers (Walter Burkert on Pythagoreanism comes to mind) has been so compelling as to force philosophers to reconceptualize the nature of the texts they study (though for the most part it is specialists in ancient philosophy who allow themselves to be influenced in this way). 

Since Pasnau's letter took the form of advice to students, part of me wants to reply in kind with very different advice: to warn prospective graduate students who are interested in the sort of approach I've described to go instead into a history-of-science program, or a history-and-philosophy-of-science program that takes the 'H' in its acronym very seriously (and there are many such programs; to name a few: Cambridge, Indiana, Toronto, Johns Hopkins, Sydney, Pittsburgh, Nijmegen...). If it is the philology part that interests you most, then I am also tempted to recommend going into classics instead, or into some variety of area studies (e.g., South Asian Studies), where one might learn about Indian philosophy in a way that comprehends and respects Indian history, and in a way that values and promotes, rather than taking as an obstacle, the mastery of the relevant languages. Or follow the model of Erwin Panofsky and go into art history: indulge your love of things besides arguments, while still producing arguments and dealing with concepts in a way that could not but impress any philosopher.

Yet it's only part of me that is tempted to offer that sort of advice. (It's the part of me that feels intellectually at home for the first time ever during the present term, which I am spending in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, surrounded by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians of ancient China, historians of medieval Islamic art, and so on). This advice may be the most useful for some people, and it may have been useful to me 15 years ago. But I've grown committed to philosophy, and really would rather reform than secede: so I hope that a generation from now there will be historians of philosophy within philosophy departments who are both rigorous historians from a methodological point of view, and are also recognized as first-tier, full-status philosophers by their colleagues.

So yes, do work on a historical topic in graduate school, not because this is easier and you can drop it later on, but because you love history, and because you know it's good for philosophy.

Animal Intelligence: An Exchange with Abraham Stone and Frans de Waal

I recently had a long-distance exchange with two very interesting thinkers --the eminent primatologist Frans de Waal, and the philosopher Abraham Stone, himself approaching eminence-- concerning the scientific study of animal intelligence; the epistemological problem of the interpretation of data on animal intelligence; the inadequacy of most 'science writers' to the task of communicating what is at stake in the study of animal intelligence; and other no less interesting matters.

The exchange initially began from what I took to be a typically disappointing science writer's article at Discovery, by Jennifer Viegas, concerning some purportedly new signs of elephant intelligence. Have a look at that article before reading on, so that you might better understand how this exchange got rolling.

I took issue with the author's observation that "[o]ther animals clearly engage in teamwork," while by contrast one of the scientists involved in the study, Joshua Plotnik, "thinks they are 'pre-programmed for it', unlike elephants that seem to understand the full process." I wanted to know, in response, what kind of empirical evidence could ever ground such a distinction. Moreover, I wanted to know whether understanding is really incompatible with pre-programming. Those were my deep concerns about animal-intelligence research. I also expressed a concern about Viegas's style of science writing, namely that the condescension and cutesiness of it (using words like 'yummy' and easy alliterations) did not inevitably transform any intelligence animals might display into the same old familiar circus performance, if now in print or on screen, rather than in the three rings of old.

At this point Cameron Brown (who left the exchange early on), set us on the right path philosophically by suggesting that the usual criterion by which scientists attribute understanding of processes is "based on improvisational ability, which must be supposed incompatible with pre-programming." Cameron went on to wonder whether "understanding could be on a gradient rather than binary, similar to how psychologists have sometimes distinguished between goal-directed and rule-based or formal rationality." Another contributor to the discussion also suggested that it is improvisational ability, or the capacity to do something new and unexpected, that signals animal intelligence. He noted that humans quickly and constantly form new meanings through language and custom, whereas ape social behavior, such as hunting, always involves "just a few signals that do not vary or combine."

In response to these two points I took a historical turn, as I often do, and noted that using the apparent absence of spontaneity in animals as an argument for denying them understanding, will, or moral status, is very old. Descartes uses it, for example. But at the same time there is a parallel line of reasoning, that goes back at least to Girolamo Rorario in the 16th century, according to which animals act predictably because they've already figured out exactly what motions of their bodies are most in agreement with nature, whereas we humans are uncertain and floundering. And thus, as Rorario puts it, animalia bruta ratione utantur melius homine [brute animals make better use of reason than men].

Enter, at this point, Abe, with an observation about the proper division of labor between the natural scientists and the philosophers with respect to the question of animal intelligence: "The reasoning and terminology of natural scientists, Abe writes, "typically appear sloppy and insufficiently reflective to philosophers and even to mathematicians. And yet in the end they often discover things that philosophers and mathematicians couldn't. Descartes is a far better philosopher than Newton, but Cartesian physics is crap. So it's not easy to know when we should criticize them. Linguistics and animal intelligence may have been colonized by bad philosophy to some extent, which just makes this more difficult rather than less." At this point I came back with my initial compaint about mediocre science writing, and argued for a role for philosophers in the work of interpreting the data on animal intelligence (and implicitly for a role in disseminating these interpretations to the broader public).

I repeated here my concern that in typical science writing on animal intelligence, such as Viegas's article, anything the animals might accomplish is degraded "in the very framing of the story into the clever trick of a beast already assumed on a priori grounds to be lesser." I also said that philosophers ought to jump into the interpretation of the data on animal intelligence even if the scientists do not want us there; and I said --which I know very much goes against Frans's long-standing practice, as we'll soon see-- that there's something inherently troubling about the use of diminutive names ('circus names', I called them) for animals that are at the same time the subjects of scientific study. It is not necessarily bad, I add here (which I did not say before) that scientists form affective connections to the animals they study, but the problem comes at the stage of dissemination by science writers, when the public is told of all the clever things some Dumbo or Bongo has managed to do.

Abe replied that "[t]here's probably not that much risk of getting in the scientists' way, if only because they'll probably pay no attention to us." He then went on to dismiss my concern about naming practices: "I think we can agree that a lot of science writing is bad. I'm not sure I agree with your criticisms of this particular piece. Should we be worrying about the dignity of elephants in this sense (e.g. their right not to be given diminutive circus names)? It might be kind of like worrying that they aren't decently dressed. Not that I can quite explain what would be wrong about the latter."

I responded with a bold claim, that "[r]eal study of animal intelligence would not have any prior implicit supposition that to be intelligent just is to be like us (that's a strong philosophical claim, I know), and the diminutive circus names are one of the ways in which the animals studied are framed in advance as lesser versions of us (that's a fairly modest sociolinguistic claim, I think, with well-known parallels in the study of class and gender relations)." I add here (again, which I did not say before) that a good example of the study of elephant intelligence is the discovery of the significance to them of the vibrations caused by their stomping. Something we took before to be just brute bodily motion turns out to be an important part of the maintenance of an intricate social network. This sort of discovery is fundamentally different, and I think more important, than the elephants' performance in tests set up by human beings.

At this point Frans joined us with a succinct and optimistic summary of the state of scientific research on animal intelligence: "Joint attention has been found in all sorts of animals, not just apes, it's no cognitive marker anymore. Recently it was reported for wolves (thus negating that dogs have it because of domestication). Theory of mind is hardly a unitary phenomenon, and for all we know some of it can be found in apes, monkeys, dogs, jays. The literature is moving fast." To this, another participant suggested that all of this data gathered on all of these species could simply be the result of scientists 'seeing what they want to see'.

I replied that this latter suggestion in response to Frans's account of the state of the discipline "underlines the difficulty that has plagued the animal-intelligence debate since at least Rorarius: for those who suppose on a priori grounds that any apparent sign of intelligence in animals is only an anthropomorphizing projection, no amount of the sort of evidence that Frans adduces is going to make a difference." I added that "the only reason why we don't have any problem attributing intelligence to other human minds is that we need to suppose their existence on practical grounds, and so when called upon come up with good-enough philosophical arguments to do away with the other-minds problem.

"Frans is optimistic, I went on, "that the empirical evidence is coming in so fast and is so overwhelming that soon everyone will be convinced. I'm more inclined to think that the withholding of intelligence (and other traits associated with human-likeness) has much more to do with the way human societies define the boundaries of community, and if they've already determined that these boundaries don't extend to baboons, then there's no ability a baboon can demonstrate that will change their minds in this matter. So we very much need the sort of empirical data that Frans is spending his life finding, but in order for the prejudice of human uniqueness to be pushed toward decline these data need to be accompanied by arguments, issuing sooner from moral and political philosophy, that are not themselves based on the data."

Here there was a sort of juncture in the conversation, where Frans, it seems to me, laid his cards out (though in a way that is certainly not surprising to anyone who has read his published works): "For any Darwinist the assumption is simple: continuity between closely related species. Even often between distantly related ones. The human brain contains no parts and no transmitters that until now have not also been found in other primates. There are differences, but they have more to do with brain power than with a qualitatively different brain. The reason humans assume they are different are essentially religious, handed down from traditions that arose in the desert where people had never met nh primates. When the first live apes arrived at London Zoo, early 19th century, the queen herself declared them 'disgusting'. And ever since Western intellectuals have been busy trying to determine what sets us apart."

And at this point I could not hold back from the temptation to cite Cicero (himself citing the poet Ennius): Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis ['How similar to us that most ugly beast, the simian!'].

On Orgasm and Irritability

I recently came across a website ridiculing undergraduates for turning in written work in which they had conflated the words 'organism' and 'orgasm'. But this might not have been so much the usual sign of subliteracy, nor even a Freudian slip (if ever such a thing existed); it might, just might, instead have been a sign of incredible erudition.

In Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's La Philosophie zoologique of 1809, the latter term appears to be taken as more or less synonymous with the former. Chapter 4 of the treatise, entitled 'Of Orgasm and Irritability', defines orgasm as "the state preserved by the internal, soft parts of animals insofar as they are alive." Further on he describes it as sensibilité latente, and thus as a notion that is complementary to irritabilité, which is the capacity of the body to sense and react to external stimuli.

'Orgasm' in today's sense is something like a reduction of what Lamarck meant to only its most extreme instance. Somewhere also I remember Leibniz saying earlier, in the 1670s, that the reproductive act in animals is the summum or culmination of its existence as a sensitive being, and a sensitive being is just what an animal is in its very essence. So the idea is that the sensation involved in reproduction is the ultimate expression of what it is that an animal does qua animal. So it is not at all hard to see how we slide from Lamarck's orgasme to our orgasm(s).

Interestingly, as I and others have argued in more scholarly spaces, a similar shift happens in the history of the term 'organism', which starts out describing an abstract state, like Leninism or Judaism, and ends up being a count noun that can easily be rendered in the plural. One might of course speak of 'multiple Leninisms', but one has to strain to do so, whereas multiple organisms or orgasms are easily tallied.

Anyhow, I don't know when the semantic shift occurs precisely, and would be pleased to learn some more details. I expect the occurrence of Lamarck's technical term in the title of this post will, given the way search engines work, garner more readers for it than I am used to having. But alas these will probably not be readers interested in helping me to fill in gaps in my knowledge of the history of science. 

T. S. Eliot: Philosophy and Genre

There was in the early 20th century a now largely forgotten American-English philosopher named T. S. Eliot. He published some scholarly articles, notably one in The Monist of 1916 on "The Development of Leibniz's Monadism." In general however he preferred to return to an older form of philosophical writing, also preferred of Parmenides, Lucretius, and Henry More: namely poetry. 

I would like to cite at length the final segment of Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" of 1940. It sums up perfectly my own views of religious belief, of the limits of human knowledge, and of our prospects for salvation, but that's not why I am citing it. I am citing it because I would like to then go on to make a point about the relationship between disciplines or domains of inquiry on the one hand, and the genres in which they are written on the other. So read it now. But really read it.

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

In the 14th-century Kerala School of mathematics in Southern India, mathematical proofs were, like "The Dry Salvages," written in verse. This delayed for some time the West's ability to discern within these lines of verse many discoveries that the West would take several centuries more to happen upon on their own using a more or less Euclidean style (dare I say 'style' instead of 'method'?).

Here, in Eliot, we are dealing not with mathematics, but with speculative metaphysics of the sort that also interested Leibniz (alongside mathematics): the relationship between the eternal and the temporal, the nature of corporeality, the prospects of surviving the corruption of the body, and so on. As I often say, if this is not philosophy, I don't know what is, and one hopes that the future's historians of philosophy will, in their surveys of the early 20th century, not consider only Carnap, Heidegger, and the rest of the usual canon of authors writing in the prevailing genre of that (but by no means of every) historical period, but instead will enrich their picture of the era by reading at least a few select poets.  The ones who contributed in parallel to philosophy's prevailing genre might yield particular insight, like Henry More in his day, who described the promise and limitations of 17th-century corpuscularianism both in poems such as the Democritus Platonissans as well as in straightforward treatises such as The Immortality of the Soul. 

Read, philosopher, I mean to say, T. S. Eliot, not as a curious reader who has finished his or her work for the day, but as a philosopher.

For Salt, a Cricket: Notes on Folk-Taxonomy and the Hindu System of Reincarnation

Here, from the 2nd-cenury BCE Laws of Manu, is the most explicit elaboration I'm aware of of the system of Hindu reincarnation: that is, the specification of which sort of soul ends up in which species of womb:

A priest-killer gets the womb of a dog, a pig, a donkey, a camel, a cow, a goat, a sheep, a wild animal, a bird... A priest who drinks liquor enters the womb of a worm, bug, or moth, of birds who eat excrement, and of violent creatures. A priest who is a thief is reborn thousands of times in spiders, snakes, and lizards, aquatic animals, and violent ghouls. A man who violates his guru's marriage-bed is reborn hundreds of times in grasses, shrubs, and vines, in beasts that are carnivorous or that have fangs, and in people who engage in cruel actions. Violent men become carnivorous beasts; people who eat impure things become worms; thieves become animals that devour one another; and men who have sex with women in the lowest castes become ghosts...

The rhythm of the list grows more rapid and staccato as it moves on to the crime of theft:

For stealing grain, a man becomes a rat; for brass, a goose; for water, an aquatic bird; for honey, a stinging insect; for milk, a crow; for spices, a dog; for ghee, a mongoose; for meat, a vulture; for marrow, a cormorant, for seseme oil, an 'oil-drinker';  for salt, a cricket; and for yogurt, a crane; for stealing silk, a partridge; for linen, a frog; for cotton, a curlew; for a cow, an iguana; for molasses, a bat; for perfumes, a muskrat; for lettuce, a peacock; for cooked foods, a porcupine; for uncooked food, a hedgehog.

There appears to be a system of correspondences here, as clearly in the pairing perfume/muskrat. Each theft seems, though often in a very cryptic way, to be followed by a transformation into the sort of animal associated with the object stolen, an association either in virtue of a property of the animal itself, or in virtue of the animal's characteristic activity (what Leibniz would call its officium). But then the system grows more straightforwardly just, in a poetic sense, when the sort of theft in question involves the taking of another living being:

[For stealing] a deer or an elephant, [he becomes] a wolf; for a horse, a tiger; for fruits and roots, a monkey; for a woman, a bear.

Presumably, stealing these sorts of animals (or plants) is akin to preying on them, even if one does not in fact eat them as a real predator would; and presumably there is something bearish in the ravaging of a woman.

Far worse than theft or even murder is to fail in the carrying out of the innate activity (the officium?) of one's social class. For this one becomes not an animal but some variety or other of ghost. Thus:

A priest who has slipped from his own duty becomes a comet-mouth ghost who eats vomit; a ruler who slips from his duty becomes a false-stinking ghost who eats impure things and corpses. A commoner who has slipped from his own duty becomes a ghost who sees by an eye in his anus, eating pus; a servant becomes a moth-eater ghost.

This is all very vivid material for the imagination, but what interests me most are the correspondences between animals on the one hand and the theft of various objects on the other. Following a lead from Zimmermann (1982), it seems that in this system we have a basis for claiming that Indian folk-taxonomy is embedded not just in therapeutics and pharmacy (Zimmermann's focus), but also within its system of justice. This would provide grounds for claiming that a text such as the Laws of Manu leaves a rich trace of a science of nature, in much the same way that Leviticus does with its dietary prohibitions: which have to do with morality, hygiene, and taxonomy all at once.

The difference is that the Hindu system of justice is an explicitly cosmic system, where the consequences of moral transgression are projected into a future life that begins through a radical species transformation. Because it is such a bedrock principle of Western natural philosophy that species transformation must involve the eradication of one individual and the generation of another (even lycanthropy in Europe is almost universally explained as a taking on of the outward appearance of a wolf, while maintaining the human species essence), it might be harder to see that what the Hindu system of reincarnation is doing is not only trading in metaphysical impossibilities, but also saying a great deal about the nature of various kinds of social action and about certain salient features of the natural environment. And again, like Leviticus, it is doing this by a single motion. 

I'll be writing on this more in the future, towards an eventual article. But for now I have to keep working on my Sanskrit, and keep reading...

*

See Francis Zimmermann, La jungle et le fumet des viandes. Un thème écologique dans la médecine hindoue, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1982.

See also my earlier post on Zimmermann here.