February 14, 2024
August 27, 2021
August 12, 2021
“What Is X?” A New Podcast for The Point Magazine
Listen now to the first episode of my podcast, “What Is X?”, featuring the luciferous Agnes Callard on the question, “What is philosophy?”
July 18, 2021
Queries IV
Whether gold may be obtained from the transmutation of base metals, as tin, brass, copper, lead.
Whether life may be restored to an animal dead.
Whether the time (whether the weather) be felt first by the crows.
Whether there be knowing wherein a man knows not, what he knows.
What the power ascribed to the sea, to eject dead bodies, succinum, ambergris.
What the shining of the sea in the night. And what the fish there whose heart giveth light.
What a brute. And what a tree. And whether there be a God. And what he be.
March 15, 2021
December 12, 2020
e. e. cummings in French and Sakha
I've been trying to translate English-language poetry into Sakha, mostly out of curiosity, but also because this exercise reveals new limits and expressive possibilities of both the original and the target languages. Because I speak French with my Sakha tutor, I am also in the habit of translating whatever I come up with in Sakha into French as well. I have recently tried to render three poems by e. e. cummings in Sakha, but have only succeeded with one of them. The other two I have been able to render in French, while the huge differences in the grammar and vocabulary of Sakha and English respectively leave me practically unable even to start their Sakha translations.
The one successful translation is the famous “I carry your heart with me...” of 1952:
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
I came up with a serviceable French translation first (numerous French translations already exist in print):
je garde ton coeur avec moi(je le garde
dans mon coeur)je l'ai toujours(où que
j'aille tu vas,ma chère;et tout ce que je fais
tout seul tu fais,ma chérie)
je n'ai peur
d'aucun sort(car c'est toi mon sort,ma douce)je ne veux
aucun monde(car tu es belle mon monde,ma fidèle)
et c'est toi que la lune a toujours voulue dire
et ce que le soleil chantera toujours c'est toi
voici le plus profond secret que personne ne sait
(voici la racine de la racine et le bourgeon du bourgeon
et le ciel du ciel de l'arbre qui s'appelle vie;qui croît
plus haut que l'âme ne puisse espérer et l'esprit ne puisse se cacher)
et c'est ça la merveille qui maintient les étoiles séparées
je garde ton coeur(je le garde dans mon coeur)
And finally, in Sakha:
мин эн сүрэххин кэтэбин(мин маны
сүрэхпэр кэтэбин)хаһан да кинитэ суох сылдьыбаппын(ханна эмэ
барабын, тапталааҕым, эн миигинниин;уонна тугу барыта мин
соҕотох оҥоробун, эн оҥорогун, күндүм)
дьылҕаны
кутаммаппын(эн дьылҕам буолагын, минньигэһим)аан дойдуну
баҕарбаппын(эн кэрэ аан дойдум буолагын, эрэллээҕим)
уонна тугу эрэ ый мэлдьи көрдөрдө, диэн эн буолагын
уонна тугу эрэ күн мэлдьи ыллыа, диэн эн буолагын.
бу саамай дириҥ ким да билбэт кистэлэҥэ
(бу силис силиһэ уонна үнүгэс үнүгэһэ
уонна олох аатынан мас халлаанын халлаана;кини
эрэнэр дууһатааҕар уонна кистэнэр өйдөөҕөр уһун үүнэр)
уонна бу дьикти сулустары түмэр.
мин эн сүрэххин кэтэбин(мин маны сүрэхпэр кэтэбин)
I'm sure there are still problems with this, but it's a start.
Next I tried the lovely 1961 poem, “2 little whos”:
2 little whos
(he and she)
under are this
wonderful tree
smiling stand
(all realms of where
and when beyond)
now and here
(far from a grown
-up i&you-
ful world of known)
who and who
(2 little ams
and over them this
aflame with dreams
incredible is)
It comes out very nicely in French:
2 petits qui
(elle et lui)
sous sont cet
arbre inouï
souriant sont
(tous les pays
d’où et de quand au-delà)
maintenant et ici
(loin d’un ad-
ulte monde de su
avec moi&toi)
qui et qui
(2 petits suis
et sur eux cela
embrasé par de rêves
incroyable est)
I have no idea how even to begin to render it in Sakha. This reveals an interesting limitation: how do you convey the aesthetic qualities of brokenness, fragmentariness, and childlikeness in a language that you still have only mastered in a broken, fragmentary, and childlike way?
The final cummings poem is “all nearness pauses...” of 1952:
all nearness pauses, while a star can grow
all distance breathes a final dream of bells;
perfectly outlined against afterglow
are all amazing the and peaceful hills
(not where not here but neither’s blue most both)
and history immeasurably is
wealthier by a single sweet day’s death:
as not imagined secrecies comprise
goldenly huge whole the up floating moon.
Time’s a strange fellow;
more he gives than takes
(and he takes all) nor any marvel finds
And in French:
Toute proximité s’arrête, lorsqu’une étoile peut croître
Toute distance respire un dernier rêve de cloches;
parfaitement esquissé sur les dernières lueurs
sont toutes merveilleuses les et pacifiques collines
(pas ici pas où mais ni leur bleu surtout les deux)
et l’histoire immesurablement est
plus riche de la mort d’un seul doux jour:
comme le comprennent les secrets non imaginés
énorme d’or la toute lune ascendante.
Le Temps est un drôle de type;
il plus donne que de prendre
(et il prend tout) sans y trouver une merveille
I am somewhat less satisfied with this translation than with “2 little whos”, mostly because I am sometimes unsure whether cummings is intentionally “breaking language” and descending downward into meaninglessness for a reason, or whether I simply haven't understood the fractured but still extractable meaning. This is particularly the case in the parenthetical line. Once again, with the Sakha translation, I barely know where to start. But for now I'm happy with one out of three.
November 29, 2020
October 22, 2020
September 7, 2020
August 22, 2020
Ecstasy; Or, Further Remarks on Cultural Appropriation
New readers! Subscribe to my Substack newsletter: justinehsmith.substack.com.
I recently published a short piece on cultural appropriation in Persuasion. Some of my fears about its reception quickly came true. Within hours of its posting, I had the singular misfortune of being linked approvingly by the odious cornball Ben Shapiro. In no time at all I was being followed by all manner of know-nothing right-wing riff-raff, people I do not respect and do not at all wish to affirm in their flimsy little construction of a belief system. This made me think it would be worthwhile to dilate somewhat more longwindedly on the topic here, in the hope of making it clear to those people the many respects in which I am not one of them, and also in the aim of reflecting a bit on how it is that we have arrived at this strange conjuncture, where defense of cultural appropriation is interpreted as a right-wing talking point, and on why I still believe it is essential to win it back from them.
I’ll say in passing, before getting to the main part of my reflection, that in part I blame the structures of information-flow, in which we are all forced to (pretend to) communicate today, for the automatic channeling of this topic to the side of the right. The algorithms on which the social-media parody of a public sphere operate are dichotomous in nature, and every statement has to be channeled in the one direction or the other. You can fight against these structural constraints, speaking your mind as your conscience dictates, etc., but all the forces are against you. Persuasion is itself an effort to defy the dichotomy, and so far, from what I have seen, it is maintaining a rather delicate balancing act. As for me, I find that my conscience comes through most clearly when I am writing on my own website— but this is only because it stands somewhat further apart from the structures that support all media interventions in the proper sense. Which is to say that the only way for me to say what I really mean, and not to be misunderstood, is to accept that I will be read by far fewer people.
But on to more pressing matters. I have been thinking a great deal recently about the intellectual debt that I owe to a generation of scholars who were formed in the sensibilities of the 1960s. I have many debts, of course, but this is the one that I have recently come to feel it is important to call by name, to draw out into the light, and to defend against the currently prevailing tendencies in humanities scholarship. I am thinking in particular of a cluster of scholars, working in various disciplines, all of whom share some significant family resemblances, including: Walter Burkert, Hans Peter Duerr, Johannes Fabian, Carlo Ginzburg, Frits Staal, R. Gordon Wasson, and --the true heroine of today's story-- Wendy Doniger. From an earlier generation, one might also mention E. R. Dodds, Mircea Eliade, and Aby Warburg, whose disciples continued to promote at least some of their aims and interests into the 1960s and beyond.
Now, one thing that those in the know might quickly point out is that this cluster of thinkers leans pretty far toward the crackpot side of the spectrum. They are all real scholars, there is no question about that, but in at least two or three of the cases my guys went dangerously far in the direction of self-delegitimisation through flirtation with forms of thought that render the scholarly project meaningless: forms of thought, namely, that may be described as “mystical experience” or as “higher states of consciousness”, that part ways with the normal state of consciousness in which, by common agreement, a typical reader of a scholarly publication is expected to remain.
Note that I exclude from this list certain figures, such as Carlos Castaneda or C. G. Jung, who veered so far to the crackpot side of the spectrum as to no longer feel any responsibility to account for their veering. Not that there is anything wrong with that: Castaneda and Jung are surely powerful sources of inspiration for contributions to the creative arts, and some scholars, notably Gilles Deleuze, have shown themselves able to go dreamwalking with Castaneda's Yaqui shaman, for example, and subsequently to come back and still be taken seriously by at least some sober-minded people, even if most today try to skip over all the zany errancies that may be written off to the intensity of the early post-'68 moment. Of course one should not skip over such things. The excesses of the 1960s counterculture, and the way these seeped into scholarship, are just as much part of the historical record now, just as deserving of study, as anything else. But anyhow, here, in attending more narrowly to the cluster of scholars I identified above, I am trying to stay focused on scholarship that may still be recognised as such today, even if it belongs as indisputably to a bygone era as, say, the fin-de-siècle Viennese sexology of Richard von Ebbing-Kraft.
Some of the scholars I've listed (e.g., Ginzburg, Burkert) were never particularly countercultural to begin with. But one thing that they all have in common, and that clearly comes to them as part of a broad cultural inheritance from the psychedelic turn of the 1960s, is an abiding interest in the question of ecstasy. I mean this term literally, as the experience of getting outside of one’s self. Different thinkers pursued this topic in different ways. Some studied ancient mystery cults, others the anthropology of witchcraft and vestiges of paganism in early modern Europe, others tantric sex rituals, others the role of hallucinogenic drugs in premodern societies, others the cosmic disruption of the shedding of animal blood compensated by the ritual of sacrifice. While they often focused on records from antiquity and early modernity, there was a broad interest in forming hypotheses about human experience extending back to the Paleolithic, and in this connection many set themselves up, among other things, as prehistorians.
There was, moreover, a general commitment to the belief that ethnographic or ethnohistorical data drawn from one cultural setting was just as useful for drawing general conclusions about the human predicament as any other. Thus in his delirious 1978 magnum opus, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, Duerr moves freely back and forth within the first few chapters between proverbs of Nietzsche, Bantu songs, Sepik proverbs, classical Greek mythology, court documents from early modern witch trials, and his own autobiographical reminiscences of talking to a Hopi man at a Greyhound station in Albuquerque: all in the course of explaining to us why native cultures (some of them European) in all times and places have conceptualised caves as “the vagina of the earth”. Even in its era Duerr's work was seen as over the top, yet it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and triggered considerable scholarly debate and criticism over the course of the early-to-mid-1980s. There is simply nothing remotely comparable happening today.
Now to the extent that we think about it all, we are used to thinking of this psychedelic quest for ecstasy, this desire to get outside of one's own body and one's own quotidian state of mind, as primarily a desire to take drugs and make everything “go kablooey”, as Jerry Garcia memorably put it, perhaps to commune with djinns or angels or God himself thanks to the entheogenic properties of the ingested substances, and then perhaps to recap it all later with one's psychonaut peers.
But in the extension of that era's broad quest for ecstasy that I am attempting here, it has recently come to seem to me that an equally important, or perhaps even more important, dimension of the effort to get out of one's own head was, precisely, seeking out cross-cultural experiences that, at least to some extent and at least temporarily, permitted a person to transcend his or her own cultural origins, the mere contingencies of birth, in favour of an experience that was universally human.
Of course, often, the two sorts of ecstasy were combined: one went looking into other cultures precisely because of the belief, justified or not, that those cultures had preserved more powerful forms of self-transcendence, through ritual and ethnobotanical knowledge and so on, that the modern west had lost. But in any case appropriating other cultures, in the literal sense of making them one's own, was central to the goal of ecstasy as I have identified it. And to account for the loss of this interest in ecstasy as a motor of scholarship is also to tell at least part of the story of the current dismal state of the humanities, which makes it so hard to make oneself properly understood when one declares today that what are generally bracketed off as “other people’s cultures” are very much one’s own business too.
***
The thinkers I have invoked are all roughly my parents’ age, so I am far too young to claim membership in their generational cohort. I was born in 1972, which means that even if I am too young to be one of them, I am at least old enough to possess a living memory of the era when their idea of humanistic inquiry floated around in the air. It helps in this connection that I grew up in California, which is in many respects the spiritual homeland of the sensibility I am attempting to describe. A single visit to a used bookstore on Telegraph Avenue at the age of ten may have done more to shape me, or to damage me if that is how you see things, than all my subsequent years of graduate school.
I have previously described myself as an “ecstatic rationalist”. I will not rehash here the basic commitments this entails, other than to note the one that is most relevant to the present matter, namely and again, the belief that other people’s cultures are my business, and that the prime directive as it were of humanistic inquiry is to undertake the hard work of thinking your way into forms of life that are not, in the narrowest and dullest sense, your own.
While acknowledging what is obviously true of standpoint epistemology in concrete examples where it is invoked (e.g., police officers who commute into inner cities from the suburbs are less likely to have a sympathetic understanding of the life-world of the people they are policing than officers who are from the same community), nonetheless as a principle that governs and limits what it is that we should be trying to do in relation to others, I reject standpoint epistemology utterly. It is not just a failure of the imagination to suppose without effort that you cannot really know what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes, but a failure of conscience. You think you can’t know what it’s like to be, say, in a refugee camp? Standpoint epistemology lets you off the hook; ecstatic rationalism tells you you’re just not imagining hard enough.
***
Those of us who resented the field known as “cultural studies”, as it developed over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, did not know how to appreciate what in retrospect appear to be its charms. Notwithstanding its excessive preoccupation with the ephemera of life under late capitalism, and its corresponding lack of interest in the sort of ecstatic experiences sought out by the generation of scholars with whom we began, it is interesting, now, to look back and note the positive celebration of appropriation within cultural-studies scholarship.
While earlier theoretical engagement with culture maintained a barrier between high and low that blocked any real understanding of what we may call culture's “flow” (think for example of Theodor Adorno on jazz, or, far worse, Allan Bloom's mandarin dismay at the peacock-like “strutting” of Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson), cultural studies sought to track the way pop-cultural signifiers move out from their points of origin and eventually are taken up and given new life and new purpose by communities that have no legal or financial power over the production and management of commercial icons.
Thus Disney-oid characters show up in some sorry dilapidated theme park in the Balkans, and Calvin (of comic-strip fame) ends up on some enormous Ford pick-up truck's mudflaps, except now his face bears a malign expression and he appears to be urinating on a Chevy logo, something Bill Watterson surely would never have condoned. When we see such symbolic migrations, the cultural-studies pioneers argued, we should sooner celebrate than condemn the inexhaustible creative power of the people to make of our cultural detritus what they will. We never agreed to live in a world in which we are bombarded from birth by trademarked figures, of Garfield or Mickey Mouse, so who dares to tell me I cannot reach up out of my cradle, grab whatever anthropomorphised mascot happens to be dangling from the mobile, and claim it as my own?
Nor is it only commercial ephemera that impose themselves in this way. This is also the basic operation of pop-art, as when Jasper Johns reclaims a symbol as ubiquitous and overbearing as the American flag. And it is also in evidence when the outlaw bikers and anarchist punks take up the swastika, that most charged and untouchable symbol of the twentieth century, and make it their own.
In a strange inversion of the hierarchies so important to Enlightenment thinkers, many today believe that it is the power differential that dictates when a certain instance of appropriation is acceptable or not. The Balkan theme park with the knock-off Mickeys and Donalds is engaging in acceptable appropriation, according to this calculus, since a multinational corporation has more power than a scrappy post-Yugoslav nation-state. By contrast the European who takes an interest in Native American art forms is in a position of relatively greater power, on this line of thinking, and so is engaging in impermissible appropriation.
But power is many-headed, and defies simplistic calculi. Though Euro-American hegemony on the North American continent is as undeniable as it is lamentable, Native American recitative art may still have powers unknown to European poetry. If I may be blunt, it is my considered view that in general the art forms of the Europeans are today sickly and withered, gasping for breath, for something really worthwhile to do, in the aftermath of the past century's various crises and horrors: the famous “No poetry after Auschwitz” problem. Yet there is still the possibility in the poetic forms of the Seneca, as I attempted to suggest in the Persuasion piece with the story of my friend Jerry Rothenberg's “summoning of the animals”, of speaking in the voice of a bear. And if that is not real power, I do not know what is. What hope do the Europeans have of achieving something nearly as great, if they are prohibited even from learning to speak in the voice of their fellow human beings?
It is in relation to this question of power that the idea of ecstasy, as I have explained it, proves particularly useful, and also affords us an opportunity to retrospectively discover at least something of a shared spirit with the academic discipline of cultural studies as it was pursued in the 1980s and '90s. The early modern Inquisition was powerful. But old women who anoint themselves in psychoactive salves and undertake an ambulatio animae are powerful too: they have the power to experience something their pious persecutors will never know in their own sad little lives. Those who are ever looking for ways to get out of their heads --whether through summoning animals, ingesting a witch's brew, or simply reading and learning about the life-worlds of other people-- have hidden superpowers that the apparatuses of discipline and control will never know, and will never be able to fully suppress.
***
Speaking of pious persecutors, my principal contention in these further remarks on cultural appropriation, what I hope you will experience as the “kicker”, is this: first (for it is a double kick), the enemies of cultural appropriation, the people who believe that it is an expression of moral uprightness to discipline others into “staying in their lanes”, are the latter-day descendants of the persecutors of witches (imagined or real); what remains the same across the centuries is the perceived need to suppress ecstasy. Second, what permits these persecutors to rise up at particular moments is the opportunity to grab for some power. Today that opportunity has been opened up by the neoliberal devastation of universities, and their consequent abnegation of the role of preservers of the mission of humanistic inquiry as this had been conceived since the Renaissance.
When I taught in Montreal, in an underfunded philosophy department, the upper administration told us at one point we should try to follow the model of the new “Irish-Canadian Studies” department down the hall, which had recently received a large gift from an association of Irish-Canadian businessmen. But philosophy is not an ethnicity, and there simply was no Philosopher-Canadian business community to which we might turn. And so we remained, for the remainder of my time there, in the dean's dog-house.
Later I was on a committee to evaluate a newly launched MA program in “East-West philosophy” at an American university. The program was to involve a strong component of Indian philosophy, and it did not take much questioning before I learned that it was being backed by a local Indian-American financier with a pronounced fondness for Narendra Modi's populist BJP party. I would subsequently learn that it is in fact very difficult to study Sanskrit or classical Indian civilisation in the English-speaking world without sooner or later coming into contact with diaspora representatives of Hindutva ideology, always happy to find non-Indians who will testify to the broader world of the singular greatness of India.
There was a time when to follow a course of study in, say, Sanskrit philology, or Norse philology or whatever, required the cultivation of a distanced attitude to the object of study. There was a high scholarly premium placed on understanding the object of one's study in global and comparative context. But the more money that filters into American universities from the largesse of Indian businessmen with ideological agendas, or indeed the greater the presence the Confucius Institute is able to establish in the same setting, the more we will find students undertaking degrees with a focus on, say, India or China, and coming out the other end speaking in a way that suits the ideology of the governing regimes in these countries: affirming that there is evidence in the Vedas of a mastery of aviation technology by the ancient Indians, to cite one particularly egregious claim that any aspiring Indologist will encounter soon enough.
These days what we might fairly call the populist model of the human sciences reigns in universities: you study a particular culture in order to have confirmed for you the greatness of that culture, and you are invited to think about that culture as if it alone existed in the world, or at least as if every other culture is locked in a zero-sum battle for attention with it, rather than being a reflection of the same underlying human capabilities that give shape and meaning to every other culture. This zero-sum battle, moreover, is part of the same all-encompassing war that pits academic units against one another in competition for dwindling perks.
And it is the same, too, as the one that pits newly minted identity groups against one another online. We have witnessed a Cambrian explosion of new social kinds over the past few years --our species now has more genders than a slime mold, for example--, and the way their members cultivate their own self-understanding and fight for recognition, in the parody of a public sphere that is social media, is substantially the same as the way that ethnonational groups, some of which have been around for millennia, advocate for their own collective interests under neoliberal austerity.
***
Consider in this connection the deplorable twist in Wendy Doniger's late career. A reputed scholar of Hinduism since the 1960s, a specialist in the history of tantrism, Doniger always had a particular knack for drawing out jaw-dropping anecdotes from the civilisation she studied, such as that of the Vedic ogress Dirgha-Jihva, who sprouted vaginas all over her body, in a sort of genital arms race with her many-penised lover. Everything I have read suggests to me that Doniger sincerely loves what we may call, for shorthand, “Indian culture”, and knows a great deal about it. Over this past dark decade, her love and dedication have not proven sufficient to keep her safe from censorship and death threats issued by extremist Hindu nationalists, who do not like to see a non-Indian, and a woman at that, enjoying the delightful excesses that Indian history has at certain (happier) moments shown itself capable of generating.
This is where the suppression of what Americans are now calling “cultural appropriation” inevitably ends up. There is nothing progressive or liberatory about the campaign against it. This campaign is, on the contrary, one local modulation of the same global sickness that we are perfectly able to recognise as reactionary when it is happening far away.
Whatever country you are in, whatever century, beware the enemies of ecstasy.
July 28, 2020
Disambiguation
Antinomy is when, of two things, both can’t be right.
Antimony is mostly found in sulfide mineral stibnite.
A big difference indeed, but still not quite antonymy,
Nor yet, like bank and bank, bark and bark, homonymy:
As also when we learn,
That coke is something that you burn,
And coke is something that you drink and something that you snort,
And Edward Coke sollicited before the English court.
Parsimony is, like, when you say no more words than suit,
Persimmony’s the essence of a common Asian fruit.
Possum is Latin for whatever I can do,
Opossum with an o entails things I can’t do too,
Like playing dead, or tonic immobility (synonymy),
Among the other features of this noble beast’s zoonomy.
June 22, 2020
May 21, 2020
The History of Philosophy in Global Context: Three Case Studies
This is a slightly modified version of a talk delivered to the Department of History and Civilisation, European University Institute, Florence, on May 21, 2020.
*
A question, to begin: What would intellectual history look like if its pedigree were traced back not to G. W. F. Hegel, but to G. W. Leibniz?
Peter Gordon has observed that “German nationalist historians of the nineteenth century tended to believe that history is first and foremost a study of political narrative.” They thus modeled themselves on the ideal of historical Wissenschaft as national-historical narration. No author embodies this approach more fully than Hegel. For him, the home of history is in Europe, as history is nothing other than the coming-into-self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit. Hegel thinks it is the work of European philosophers to help Spirit along, to birth it, while European states are for him, as it were, the armed wing of philosophy. Beyond the boundaries of Europe, what we find in terms of statecraft is either its absence, or some species of more or less eternal and unchanging despotism, while in terms of philosophy what we find is its admixture into, and vitiation by, mythology and other expressions of culture. For Hegel, the Greek miracle lay in the separating out of mythology and philosophy, so that the articulation of questions about, say, the nature of time, could be addressed in a universal idiom that would not presuppose the existence of Chronos as a divine personification of time. For the ancient Persians, by contrast, to use Hegel's own example, reflection on the nature of time could only proceed through culturally embedded narratives inseparable from religion and lore.
Thus for Hegel only those expressions of philosophy that descend from the Greeks have any claim to universality, and thus only these expressions deserve to be exported from their place of origin throughout the world. This 19th-century Europeanisation of philosophy witnessed the destruction of millennia-old disciplinary divisions in India and China, notably, as newly subjugated institutions of learning rushed to model their curricula on those of European universities, creating neologisms for “philosophy” where these had not existed before. Thus, to note one striking example from China, the cultivation of wisdom was separated from the perfection of calligraphic technique.
This disruption of intellectual traditions throughout the world is just one of the many measurable shockwaves of imperialism. Hegel's articulation of it is not surprising, yet it is a far cry from the common view among European philosophers of barely more than a century prior, where we find, for example, Leibniz calling for a “commerce of light”, a bidirectional exchange of wisdom that would piggy-back upon the commerce of goods between Europe and Asia. Nor, for Leibniz, would this exchange be limited to the textual traditions of literate non-Western “civilisations”; it would also extend to the oral traditions and natural languages of Indigenous peoples. Thus Leibniz writes in 1704, that
When the Latins, Greeks, Hebrews and Arabs shall someday be exhausted, the Chinese, supplied also with ancient books, will enter the lists and furnish matter for the curiosity of our critics. Not to speak of some old books of the Persians, Armenians, and Brahmins... And when there is no longer any ancient book to examine, languages will take the place of books, as they are the most ancient monuments of mankind.
In time, Leibniz thinks,
all the languages of the world will be recorded and placed in the dictionaries and grammars, and compared together; this will be of very great use both for the knowledge of things, since names often correspond to their properties (as is seen by the names of plants among different peoples), and for the knowledge of our mind and the wonderful varieties of its operations.
The fruit of such research, Leibniz thinks, will be a sort of mirror of the rational order of nature itself; it would amount to a sort of global survey of human reason, differently inflected according to circumstances, but nonetheless unified and universal.
In what follows I would like to look at three complexly intertwined cases of transregional philosophical encounter in the early modern period, each of which illustrates in its own way the challenges, for us, of studying the history of philosophy across borders, and the challenges, for the people we are studying, of understanding one another.
1.
Hegel's view is not without precedent in the early modern period, and it should not be surprising that its clearest expressions come from figures we may fairly associate with the “radical Enlightenment”: materialists, crypto-atheists, neo-Epicureans. François Bernier, to turn to our first of three case studies, furnishes a vivid example of this incipient tendency.
A devotee of the French Epicurean philosopher Pierre Gassendi, and a physician by training, Bernier found himself working as a doctor in Shiraz for six years, where, according to his own claim, he passed his time translating Descartes and Gassendi into Persian. Subsequently he was assigned in 1658 as the court physician to the Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb, in Delhi, where he befriended the Persian prince and philosopher Dara Shikoh.
A Muslim keenly interested in “interfaith dialogue,” Dara Shikoh nonetheless understands this in a very different way than today's multiculturalist. For him, the possibility of finding truth in the Brahminic faith is premised on the conviction that the Upaniṣads, properly understood, reflect and confirm the fundamental, revealed truth of the Qur’ān. He has translated large portions of the Sanskrit text into Persian, thus working towards the same target language as Bernier, but is doing so within an intellectual framework that calls to mind nothing so much as Jesuit figurism, as for example in Athanasius Kircher's interpretation of Chinese sources, which buys the harmony of traditions at the expense of understanding foreign traditions on their own terms: figurism, that is, argues that, properly understood, the claims of foreign wisdom traditions corroborate and deepen the truth of our own.
Bernier himself is far less ecumenical; he tends to understand Sanskrit learning as the crystallization of Indian folk tradition. In this judgment, Bernier is in part importing battles he has already long been fighting in Europe. In effect he is disappointed to see Indian popular tradition unwittingly favoring the world-view of Gassendi’s adversaries, such as Robert Fludd, particularly in their interpretation of a recent eclipse as a harbinger of supernatural wrath, rather than as a natural phenomenon “of the same nature with so many others that had preceded without mischief.” Bernier believes that his Muslim interlocutors are better disposed to appreciate the force of his own rigorously naturalistic philosophical views. He discerns a spirit of toleration in the political order of the Mughal empire that he himself would not support in Europe, describing the emperor, “though he be a Muslim,” as “suffer[ing] these Heathens to go on in these old superstitions,” simply for the sake of maintaining social harmony.
When for his part Bernier listens to the pandits, he hears only “tales”, that is, articulations that, whether they contain any philosophical insight or not, are so vitiated by local cultural forms as to make the philosophy unrecoverable. He writes that when he grew weary of explaining to his Muslim host “those late discoveries of Harvey and Pecquet in Anatomy, and of discoursing with him of the Philosophy of Gassendi and Descartes,” the two of them would turn to the Hindu pandit in their midst, and beseech him “to discourse and to relate unto us his stories, which he delivered seriously and without ever smiling... At last we were so much disgusted with his tales and uncouth reasonings, that we scarce had patience left to hear them.”
Bernier listens attentively enough to be able subsequently to recall from memory, and more or less accurately, the six schools of āstika philosophy. He also correctly identifies Buddhism as a nāstika school, whose members are despised by the pandits “as a company of irreligious and atheistical people.” He is simultaneously attentive and dismissive, curious and contemptuous, and his negative judgments flow from his status as a libertine materialist philosopher in the battle against superstition back home in Europe. Bernier does recognize tendencies that bring certain Indian traditions closer to his view than others, traditions for example “which approach the opinions of Democritus and Epicurus.”
At one point Bernier relates a remarkable, indeed absurd, effort he had made, during a particularly tense interfaith dialogue session, to give an impromptu lesson in physiology by cutting open a live goat and thereby displaying the truth of Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood. The image of Bernier sacrificing an animal in front of an audience of horrified Brahmins could very well serve as an emblem of the difficulties of communication between intellectual traditions.
2.
Some decades later, another noteworthy philosophical encounter took place in an aristocratic court after a long voyage. This time, however, the court was in Germany, and the voyager, when he arrived in 1706, was still a small boy. Anton Wilhelm Amo, who first came on a Dutch West Indies galley ship from Guinea to Amsterdam, and was sent from there to work at the court of the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, was baptized into the local faith, Lutheran Christianity, in 1707. He soon began learning Latin, and it is likely that as a boy he also conversed with Leibniz on the philosopher's frequent visits to the Wolfenbüttel Hof. In 1727 Amo is sent to the University of Halle to study, first law, then philosophy. He produces two philosophical dissertations, and one lengthy treatise on logic. His patron Duke Anton Ulrich dies in 1731, initiating several years of financial hardship partially mitigated by precarious employment at the Universities of Halle, Wittenberg, and Jena. In 1746 Amo writes a letter to the Dutch West Indies Company, requesting transit on a slave ship back from Amsterdam to Guinea, and he departs in January of the next year. If the somewhat unclear circumstances of Amo's arrival in Europe are anything like those of his fellow Ghanaian Jacobus Capitein, the author of a 1741 work entitled Slavery, Not Incompatible with Christianity, it was likely with the intention of training Amo up as a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church and sending him back to Africa to lead an orphanage school that he made the initial voyage. How he ended up in Germany instead of stopping in the Netherlands, and how he passed from theology to philosophy, are questions we are still seeking to understand.
I have read every known word written by Amo, and I can report that nowhere in his writing does he mention even once his identity as an African, let alone does he speak as a representative of any native African tradition. Unlike Bernier, Amo arrives in the foreign court still too young and pliable to see it as his mission to mediate between traditions, to represent one tradition while witnessing another. Amo is, therefore, I maintain, a German philosopher, the author of a handful of minor works in the Lutheran academic tradition of the early 18th century.
It may or may not be surprising, however, to learn that Amo has been posthumously taken up and restyled as, precisely, an African philosopher. The founder of the Republic of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, for example, gives significant space to Amo in his 1964 philosophical treatise, Consciencism, depicting Amo as a materialist thinker and thus as an embodiment of traditional African thought's anticipation of Marxism-Leninism. Nkrumah's speculation is interesting in its own right as a matter of intellectual history. What interests me more, however, is to determine what significance the case of Amo might have for our understanding of the global context of early modern intellectual history, even in the absence of any explicit engagement with the question of cross-cultural encounter in Amo's work?
Part of the answer to this difficult question lies in the history of institutions, and the way German universities came to conceive their mission in the early 18th century. Halle, in particular, from its origins deeply symbiotic with the Pietist Orphanage in the same city, had an academic mission that was inseparable from missions in the narrow sense. It is to the Halle Pietists that Leibniz turned with his vision for a Protestant emulation of the Jesuit missions to Asia. It is also to Halle that, for a time, scholars from Europe and beyond would turn to study the Orient, conceived broadly as the cultures and languages reaching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Kamchatka peninsula. The learning was, as Leibniz always insisted it must be, bidirectional, with missionaries heading out, and young students coming in: Salomon Negri from Syria, a certain Ahmet Gül from Rajasthan, a handful of Jewish students (a first in Germany), and Anton Wilhelm Amo-Afer of Guinea, via Wolfenbüttel.
In his elogious afterword to Amo's 1734 dissertation, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind, the rector of Halle Johannes Gottfried Kraus appears to mistakenly identify Amo's place of origin is not Axim, in West Africa, but Axum, the ancient Ethiopian city associated with the antiquity of African Christianity. In this way and many others, Amo was a representative of Africa, and of African learning, whether he wrote of it or not.
But Amo, who spent the last part of his life back in Africa, represents the Leibnizian bidirectionality of which we have spoken in surprising ways, in ways that might confound our expectation of the respective intellectual goods that Europe and Africa have to bring, as it were, to the exchange. Two fragmentary but revealing documents may illustrate this. The first is a description from the archives of the University of Jena, for a course Amo was to offer in the Michaelmas term of 1736. He promises to cover for his students “parts of the more elegant and curious philosophy,” including:
physiognomy; chiromancy; geomancy, commonly known as the art of divination; purely natural astrology; ... dechifratory, or the art of deciphering, which is opposed to the superstitions of the common people.
For any philosophy professor who complains today that curricular standards are slipping, it might help to remind them that in the early 18th century you could teach palm-reading in a philosophy classroom. We also see, as with Bernier, a concern to disavow superstition, and an identification of superstition with the beliefs of the benighted masses. However, the boundaries as to what ought to count as superstition are drawn differently in the two cases.
This document is mirrored in a curious way by the final documentary testimony of Amo's life recorded in 1753 by the Swiss traveler Henri David Gallandat, who met the philosopher in Axim after his return home. We learn from Gallandat that in Africa Amo “lived as a hermit, and was reputed to be a soothsayer. He spoke various languages, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, High and Low German, was very learned in astrology and astronomy, and was a great philosopher.” This description suggests that Amo had taken up a social role in his late life in Africa that was in some respects analogous to that of a philosopher in Europe. It also suggests that he had acquired or re-acquired the Nzema language to which he would have been exposed in early childhood, as he would not have been able to gain the reputation ascribed to him without the ability to communicate with local people.
Together with the Jena course description, it also suggests that Amo's restyling of himself for a local audience might not have been as radical an overhaul as some may imagine. Bernier had expressed his disdain for Brahminical superstition by comparison to those of the common people of Europe; Amo, whether in Europe or Africa, was more adaptable to the interests of the common people, whether first-generation university students in Jena, or, we may suppose, African merchants operating in the liminal trade zones between Africa and Europe. It is of course possible that Amo had not only adapted his soothsaying to the local idiom, but was also helping to promote the bidirectionality of the exchange of ideas, and just as Bernier had translated Gassendi into Persian, Amo may have been busily discoursing, between or during his fortune-telling sessions in Africa, on Leibnizian preestablished harmony in Nzema. This remains a matter of pure speculation, but is somewhat more grounded in plausibility than Nkrumah's transformation of Amo into a proto-Marxist.
3.
But let us move back now to the path carved from Halle to Russia. We know, incidentally, from a 1736 letter discovered by my student Dwight Lewis in an Estonian archive, that Amo himself had sought to go down this path, writing to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and requesting a research position there. His letter goes unanswered, and a few months later he will begin his Michaelmas course at Jena. If he had made it to the new Russian capital, he might have been swept up in some capacity, like so many other former Halle students, in the Great Kamchatka expedition that was currently under way. As I have shown elsewhere, this expedition might justly be seen as the systematic, institutionally backed mise-en-oeuvre of a vision of science that Leibniz had spelled out to Peter the Great some decades before, beginning from their first encounter in Hannover in 1698.
The list is long of desiderata that Leibniz, before his death in 1716, spelled out to Peter and his advisors, for an eventual scientific mission across the eastern reaches of the Empire. These desiderata included the determination of whether northeast Asia and northwest North America are connected by a land bridge; the establishment of research stations at fixed intervals for the measurement of magnetic variation; the collection of unknown plant species, pressed dry in books; and the collection, as well, of samples of unknown languages, also pressed into books, in the form of short translations of the Lord's Prayer or the Apostle's Creed in the indigenous languages of North Asia. The choice of canonical prayers as the standard unit of such samples was part of Leibniz's thoroughgoing commitment to bidirectionality: we European researchers get a fragment of Samoyed or Yakut, the Samoyeds and Yakuts get access, by the same gest, to an article of Christian faith. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that, throughout the 18th century, Leibniz would be principally known as a Sprachmeister, that is, as a collector and classifier of language samples. He received many such samples from the Dutch naval architect and voyager Nicolaes Witsen, corresponding from Moscow. Witsen sent him not only indigenous languages of the polyglot Russian empire, but others he had collected from his own global network of Dutch seafarers. One such sample sent to Leibniz from Moscow was a bilingual transcription of the Lord's Prayer in Dutch and “Hottentot”, which is to say a Khoi-San language of Southern Africa. I have found as late as 1809, demotic editions of polyglot prayer manuals would include the Hottentot prayer with the notice: ex Leibnitio.
Leibniz never made it to Russia himself, let alone to Siberia, though he became a Privy Councillor to the Tsar in 1712, and like Amo he spent some years petitioning to relocate to the new Russian capital. If Leibniz came to have the posthumous reputation of a language-prospector, this is in large part thanks to his many proxies working in the field to realize his vision. No one demonstrates this relationship more clearly than the Swedish officer, geographer, and linguist Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, the author of the 1730 work Das Nord und Ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia. Like many Swedish officers, Strahlenberg had been taken prisoner in the 1709 Battle of Poltava, which ended Swedish military ascendancy, and yielded the first wave of prisoners to be “sent to Siberia”, with all the connotations that phrase would come to have. Like many generations of intellectuals who suffered a similar fate, Strahlenberg passed his time studying the region and the peoples around him, distinguishing himself in particular as a pioneer of Yakutology and thus of comparative Turkic linguistics.
At several points in his 1730 work, Strahlenberg explicitly cites Leibniz as his guide and director in the collection of language samples. The Swedish author has read and internalized a set of instructions that Leibniz had decades earlier sent to Giovanni Batista Podestà, interpreter at the court of Vienna and author of a 1677 trilingual Ottoman-Persian-Arabic dictionary. Podestà had been in charge of an expdition into “deepest Tartary”, which is to say to the region of the Caspian Sea, and Leibniz took this opportunity to send the Italian dipomat a list of queries pertaining, particularly, to the diversity of the Tatar language subfamily: which region do the speakers of Karakalpak inhabit? What of the Tatars of Cathay, whom we today know as Uighurs? And so on. This list of queries was published in the first posthumous edition of Leibniz's writing, in 1718, a miscellaneous compendium of Leibniz's notes and letters principally on linguistic questions.
We know with certainty that Strahlenberg read Leibniz's vocabulary list, because it is substantially the same list that appears as a fold-out appendix to Strahlenberg's book, to which he gives the title “Tabula Polyglotta Harmoniae Linguarum”: The “Polyglot Table of the Harmony of Languages”. The invocation of “harmony” is also explicity Leibnizian, and it shows that Strahlenberg followed Leibniz not just in practical matters, but in philosophical commitments as well. For Strahlenberg, the study of comparative linguistics reveals the preestablished harmony between the different perspectives or points of view that rational beings have on one and the same world. Languages, like monads, are mirrors of the rational order of nature.
Like Dara Shikoh, Strahlenberg presupposes the unity of human reason, but he discerns this unity not at the level of textual traditions, but rather of natural language. Unlike Dara Shikoh, he does not suppose that any of these “monuments” has any pride of place alongside the others, as the Persian prince had supposed the Qur’ān stands in relation to the Upaniṣads. Stripped of their canonical texts, every society stands naked with its bare words, and is seen to be substantially the same as every other. This, as Han F. Vermeulen has also remarked, is the key conviction that underlies the newly emerging science of ethnography, which Leibniz did so much to stimulate. It is also the central commitment of the communitarianism of Johann Gottfried Herder, which we might fairly describe as a “monadological egalitarianism”. It is also, finally, the ideal to which the Soviet model of the autonomy of ethnic groups often sought to adhere: the union of socialist republics and oblasts as a sort of imaginary museum of folk costumes and songs and traditions, each with its own room and none primus inter pares.
Except that of course Russia was always de facto first among equals. This is inscribed in the first lines of the anthem of the USSR; and it is detectable too in Leibniz's earliest explanations to Peter of the value of a comprehensive linguistic survey of the empire: Leibniz is no friend of, say, Samoyed nationalism, but rather believes that knowledge of ethnolinguistic diversity brings into relief the magnitude of the empire and thereby glorifies its sovereign. Here, then, we may reach a limit of the cosmopolitan aspiration of Leibniz's thought: our equality as rational beings does not translate into an imperative for political equality. And yet, as an alternative to the project, as exemplified notably by Immanuel Kant and others, of bringing indigenous peoples within the fold of reason by expanding the boundaries of European historical agency, the Leibnizian alternative, and its reverberations in Herderian communitarianism and elsewhere, continues to hold out some attraction as we negotiate, in the 21st century, the delicate balance between the preservation of dwindling Indigenous communities, on the one hand, and on the other the universal claim to basic rights, such as to education or to medical care, that in some cases only the homogenising apparatus of the modern state is capable of furnishing.
*
But to conclude, in this talk I have, by way of a tour of some case studies, attempted to convey an idea of what intellectual history may look like when it is decisively decoupled from national narratives. I have effected this decoupling by shifting the point of anchorage of the tradition of intellectual history from Hegel, often taken as the tradition's patron saint, to Leibniz, seldom if ever considered for such a role. I have taken the history of philosophy, against the protectionist interests of those who study this history from within academic departments of philosophy, as itself an appropriate, indeed ideal, focus of intellectual history. I have shown that with such a focus, when we depart from the history of political philosophy narrowly conceived, and consider also the history of natural philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics, we do not so much abandon the political as rather enhance our capacity to discern its contours.
Finally, in showing some of the ways in which early modern European philosophy was implicated in the commerce of both goods and light with the world beyond its borders (and here I emphasise only some of the ways, for I have not even mentioned America and the conceptual revolutions unleashed by the Columbian exchange): in showing some of these ways, I have shown that, far from Western philosophy being the unfolding of Absolute Spirit, it was all along, but particularly from the early modern period on, much sooner an enfolding of foreign spirits, faintly discerned, generally misunderstood, often held in contempt by the voyagers who first encountered them and by the philosophers who got reports of them, but nonetheless fundamental for the emerging shape and character of modern European thought.
May 12, 2020
May 9, 2020
Television Is Still Terrible
Until our current quarantine began, the last time I had intentionally watched a TV show was when TV sets had knobs, and TV signals came down into them straight from the ether.
I was never one of those self-righteous prigs who boasted of not having a TV. I liked TV very much when I was a kid; it constituted, I would even say, the canon of my first education. I knew it was bad, but it was bad in a way that always seemed to me honest and true, never pretending it was something it wasn’t. It offered, through its obvious artifices, enough truth to impart to a child a fairly good idea of what the world of adults is like: the opera buffa of Jack Tripper’s ruses and Mr. Furley’s exophthalmic fits; little Tattoo, the island, the eternal return of the plane.
I never renounced TV, I mean. It abandoned me, with its ever more complex boxes and wires and remotes, with the subscriptions and customised services that were now obligatory, when TV as I had known it, as I had been born into it, had been an ambient force all around us like the air, always ready to appear in human form to anyone who summons it.
Now when I check into hotel rooms I see the flat screen on the wall, and I know if I turn it on I’ll find some complex textual instructions that will cause my life-long situational illiteracy to kick in. If I happen to guess at the right buttons and get past this part, I will enter an unexplored world of further options, all of which will seem to straddle the strange boundary between the entertainment part of the technology and the revenue-seeking part, and will make me think of ridiculous, foreign Professor Pnin looking in dismay at an unwieldy American newspaper of a Sunday morning, and declaring: “I do not know what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.”
Let us agree for the sake of argument that Breaking Bad and The Wire and the other vaunted representatives of the new golden age of television excel in what is called “raw realism”. Even if this is consistently so, the techniques in question might still be said to bear somewhat the same relation to true dramatic art that recent photographic hyperrealism in painting bears to the Dutch masters. You do not automatically arrive closer to the ideal of an art form by ramping up the verisimilitude. What you get, usually, is the gratuitous display of talent, talent without style, talent wasted: talent, most importantly, that is subordinated to impressive new technologies.
Often in the history of art, what appears at first natural, instinctive, “artless” turns out only to have appeared so in view of its novelty. Give it a few more decades, and I'm willing to bet that the current fashion for naturalism in television will appear as stylised as Chinese opera. And apart from the question whether it is naturalistic, we may also ask whether it is self-evident that naturalism is something for art to aspire to. It is, after all, a curious thing for art to aim for artlessness -- not that it never should, just that the imperative to do so should not be taken for granted. For every Renaissance Italian painting exhibiting all the hot new techniques of perspective and lifelikeness, there is a highly schematic, rigidly two-dimensional Eastern Orthodox icon that, seen in the right way, is just as capable of inducing profound admiration, and experience of life, as its supposedly more naturalistic Western competitor. The great genius of Eugène Green's films lies in his total abandonment of the aspiration to eliminate artifice. Of course people don't use Molièrean diction on the streets of twenty-first-century Paris. If you want to hear people talking the way people talk in Paris today, then go take a walk in Paris! If you want to see the transfiguration of the commonplace through the cinematic art, go watch an Eugène Green film.
Anyhow the talk of realism and naturalism in the new critically acclaimed television series is more confusing than anything else. I saw an episode of Better Call Saul, and the Mexican drug-dealer toughs had to my eyes all the verisimilitude of the comically caricatural extras knocked off by Charles Bronson in the Death Wish franchise. I saw an episode of Unorthodox, and the group of musician friends Esty falls in with in Berlin was as two-dimensional as anything I ever saw on an ABC after-school special. I saw an episode of House of Cards, and its sex scene recalled nothing so much as Red Shoe Diaries, that wonderful softcore series on Showtime from the stone age of subscription television, back when it knew how bad it was. What, I kept wondering as I surveyed all of this golden-age output, was the source of all the critical effusions? Why was so much space being given over to it in august venues that used to engage with, say, literature?
My real problem, anyhow, is not just that it is mostly schlock. My problem is that even when it is well-executed, the adjective one naturally reaches for is not “great”, or even “good”, but only, at most, “successful”. It succeeds on its own terms, but what are those terms? Even when it is technically virtuosic in a way that suffices in the current critical context to earn glowing praise, the question still comes back: to what end? What would the pay-off be for sitting through this? Is there any shred of a possibility of any trace of moral growth, cultivation of one’s sensibilities, expansion of one’s sense of self? Of course there isn’t.
This is not a defense of some pristine art form, “cinema” over low entertainment. For one thing, nominally big-screen movies, even the “serious” ones, have for the most part been pulled down to the same level as the content made for streaming. Natalie Portman’s supposedly high-minded production of A Tale of Love and Darkness (bearing a genealogical relation to, but sharing in none of the same spirit as, the Amos Oz novel of the same name) was, visually and technically, very much like an episode of The Spanish Princess or The Outlander. Circa 1966 you could chart the trickle-down effect from, say, Nouvelle Vague films to the televised Batman series; today by contrast there is a clear and unmistakable evaporation-up, or spilling-across, or just a general moldy spread from television to the movies.
To the extent that this distinction can still be made at all. The closest thing I’ve seen to an entertainment made in the past few years with a passable film-like quality was an episode of L’amica geniale. It was pretty good, as middle-high respectable melodrama with a fair dose of Neorealist nostalgia. (Producer Paolo Sorrentino's La grande bellezza was, similarly, a pretty good ode to La Dolce Vita, while La Dolce Vita was not an ode to anything but to Fellini's own singular vision.) But the merciful thing about Natalie Portman’s movie is that it unfolds within a closed universe: when it’s over, it’s over, and the absence of an internal need to drive the potential binge-watcher ever forward means that it was made without the same algorithmic dopamine-enhancing tricks by which our social-media feeds are also custom-designed to sap us of our humanity. Portman’s film, I mean, in being mercifully self-contained, is also mercifully humane, in the way that cinema has always been, at bottom, humane, while television has always been, at bottom, an exploitation.
The boundary between the forms —the cinematic and the televisual, art and entertainment— is also compromised by the franchises that are increasingly making the experience of movies a serial experience: The Fast and the Furious, or the never-ending additions to the Marvel comics “universe”. Full-grown adults, some of them even my age, have exchanged their dignity in order to live in this universe as eternal children; I even read recently of a newlywed couple that repaired straight from the wedding back to their home to celebrate... by watching a Marvel movie. To say that the passion they are indulging is “as bad as television” does not get anywhere near the bottom of the moral and aesthetic abyss this wedding announcement invites us to sound.
I see the smart young people on Twitter sitting in what I imagine are their extremely expensive, extremely crowded apartments in Brooklyn, tweeting about Game of Thrones, or whatever came after it to instantaneously fill its void, and I think to myself: what did you go to the trouble to move to New York for, to brave all the challenges of life in the capital, when you could have stayed in your parents’s suburban home outside Columbus and watched these same dumb shows with them? What’s the difference where you are if your life is still anchored to substantially the same cultural touchstones as the lives of the people you thought you had to get away from in order to create yourself anew? I understand you don't have a lot of money left over after rent is due. But there are webcams turned on the inside of beaver dams streaming live on the internet, right now, and to watch costs less than your Netflix subscription, and the rewards are infinitely greater. Take a street-view tour of Yakutsk. Watch the cargo-ship GPS trackers, the global wind maps. There's an amazing world out there.
My feeling, after this recent tour d’horizon of the recent wave of critically acclaimed television, is this: if it’s not Hee Haw or The Gong Show or some other ridiculous farce from our pre-internet past, then leave me alone about it. You say the medium has developed of late into an art form? Roy Clark’s fiddling is an art form. Effin’-and-hambone is an art form. That moment when Gene Gene the Dancing Machine’s signature song begins to play and Chuck Barris soars into ecstasy? We arrive with him at the very summit of the artistic sublime.
To despise the unfounded conceits of the middle-brow, of which Emily Nussbaum et al. are the dutiful cataloguers, is not the same thing as to proclaim the superiority of the high-brow. I still love Hee Haw. I wish there were still television being made that could be appreciated in that register. The problem is that today TV is made to be appreciated with the same serious face we were supposed to put on a few years back when Marina Abramović convinced Jay-Z to rap at us under the banner of performance art. It’s the idiot face of people too easily convinced, by other people with lots of financial capital translated too easily into cultural capital, to take something more seriously than it deserves to be taken. If there is anything that preserves the spirit of the Gong Show, it is of course not on television, but on Twitter and TikTok. Those are venues for the true creative genius of humanity (almost exclusively very young humanity), and it is a corollary of this fact that no one mistakes these venues for the sort of place where you have to put on your reverential art-appreciation face.
Lauren Oyler, one of the few lucid truth-tellers among the critics who came up in the generation of new media, has said that while it is wrong to follow fashions in books and visual art, it is acceptable to do so with, say, television and cookery: the idea being that, where nothing is really at stake, there is no harm in going along with the chattering crowd. Her priorities are right, I think. Yet one still must express disdain, not towards those who follow what is not important --where is the harm in that?--, but towards those who seek to artificially inflate the importance of the thing followed. I usually regret expressing my disdain, and revert back to my usual quietism after an occasional outburst such as this one. But if I were truly righteous I would never shut up about it: the content vendors deserve to be driven from the temple of art.
May 6, 2020
On Ancestry
Two thoughts have long come unbidden to my mind whenever I hear people talking about doing their family trees, or, more recently, getting their DNA done. The first is of Bruce Willis’s character in Pulp Fiction, the boxer Butch Coolidge in the back of the taxi, who, when asked by his South American driver what his name means, replies, “I’m an American, baby, our names don’t mean shit.” The other is of Seneca, who wrote in his Moral Letters to Lucilius: “If there is any good in philosophy, it is this, -- that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods.”
To be an American is to bear a name with no historical resonance, or at least none worth looking into, to orient oneself in the world without regard for lineage. To be a philosopher is to know consciously what the American feels by instinct: that the reason lineages are not worth looking into is the same for all of us, namely, that we all derive from the same divine source.
But I am, or like to think of myself as, an American philosopher, and so of course I always scoffed when my late father --who did not share my sensibility, did not see being American in the same way-- used to come home with all sorts of vital-statistics records from Utah and Arkansas, with genealogical scrolls stretching back to Olde England. I always got a vague whiff of prejudice moreover from those family-history buffs more extreme than my father ever was, displaying with pride their ancestors’ tartan patterns above the fireplace, or hanging up a coat-of-arms and explaining with pride why the stag is rampant as opposed to statant, say, or offering an embroidered pillow with some implausible sentiment about Irish or Polish or Swedish superiority. No, I always thought, to hell with all that. I come from nowhere. I come from no one but the gods.
And yet, I am also among other things a scholar of the history of the concept of race, and I know full well that this is the same thing as the history of genealogy. To put it very succinctly, “race” in its Latinate variants first appeared in the sixteenth century in the context of animal husbandry: paying attention to which horse, pigeon, or dog should be coupled with which other of its own kind in order to artificially create a better “breed” (that is to say, in Italian, razza; in Spanish, raza; in French, race) of creature. Eventually, as Marx would later caustically point out, it came to be understood that “the key to aristocracy is zoology,” and by the mid-seventeenth century it was common to speak of the “race” of the Plantagenets, the “race” of the Carolingians, and so on.
The real revolution in the history of the concept came not with the virus-like leap from animals to monarchs, but from monarchs to the nations over which they reigned. G. W. Leibniz, who was in his professional capacity for many years the court genealogist to the Elector of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, came to understand that some of his methods for discovering the medieval marriages of the ancestors of his employer could be extended to the study of ethnohistory in general, and so from writing about the “race” of the Guelf-Este lineage he came to write about the “race” of the Germans, and how it slowly separated out into the Bavarians, the Dutch, the Danes, the Crimean Goths, and so on. And in 1686, in turn, François Bernier asked why we should stop at “nations”, and proposed that it might be more useful still to divide the entire world into a handful of supranational continent-spanning “races” of mankind. For good measure he proposed to colour-code them: the “black” people, the “white” people, and so on. We know the rest of the story. We're still living it.
So, given the strange balance between what I have said in the preceding paragraphs, the history of my thinking about ancestry took a strange twist when I recently began corresponding with Henry Louis Gates, who among other things hosts the PBS series, Finding Your Roots (and who knows from my books about my interest in genealogy and race as a topic of research, but had not previously known anything of my distaste for autogenealogy). When I mentioned to him that I am against DNA testing as a matter of principle (both because I am descended from no one but the gods, etc., but also because the companies spearheading it are engaged in a project of mass-data collection that makes Facebook’s surveillance methods look tame by comparison), he told me that I might be surprised at my emotional reaction if I were ever to give it a try, and that he’d be happy to have his producers send me a DNA test kit here in Brooklyn. You don’t just tell Skip Gates you have a principled opposition to discovering your ancestry, and expect that that will be that.
One thing I didn’t tell Skip is that I am at the outset in a very favoured position among roots-seekers, with or without DNA analysis: I am a Mormon. Well, sort of. My grandfather fled Utah in the 1930s and never spoke of it to his wife and children. But my father, who was born in 1940, found out anyway, and was able to take advantage of the tremendous resources the Latter Day Saints have made available for genealogical research. The Mormons, among other noteworthy points of dogma, believe that a person’s soul can be saved retroactively, and thus that one’s dead non-Mormon ancestors, once posthumously baptised, will suddenly undergo an unexpected promotion in the ranks of the afterlife. So they keep records, good records, and if you are, by their standards anyhow, one of them, they can tell you quite a bit about your roots without first collecting a saliva sample.
So the kit arrived, and I spit in it (if there’s anything to which I’m more committed than my principles, it’s seizing the opportunity to tell a good story) and mailed it off to the lab. I’m still waiting for the results, but in the meantime I found myself wondering what I could learn from the paper records of the LDS in advance of the history that was in the course of being unwoven from my DNA.
I had memories of a few of the things my father, who died in 2016, told me about his own discoveries when he was most intensely engaged in family history in, I believe, the late 1980s. And I had a living memory of my grandparents, and their stories of their parents, but little beyond that. I knew on my mother’s side (for which the Mormons have no records) that my grandfather was born in Minnesota to Norwegian immigrants, and my grandmother in Minnesota to Swedish immigrants.
I knew my paternal grandfather was a Mormon, as I have said, and that his grandfather had come from England at some time in the nineteenth century. As for my paternal grandmother, I knew she was from Arkansas, and I believed that her ancestors were forever lost in the dark abyss of time, too insignificant to leave even a trace in the vital-statistics records.
They were rumoured to be “part Cherokee”, as many Americans who don’t know their ancestors are. Partial absorption of Indigenous blood was thought necessary for the successful appropriation of the continent, as Thomas Jefferson already understood in his Notes on the State of Virginia, which also means that one of the unique traits of the American strain of white-supremacist ideology is that white identity is compatible with, even enhanced by, a certain degree of mestizaje, real or imagined. The mestizo component of my family lineage was always suspected, vaguely, to lie on the side of my paternal grandmother. That was also by far the most truly American segment at the family get-togethers, the ones with the Arkansas accents, the ones with the baked mac-and-cheese and candied yams, the ones with beat-up Chrysler Le Barons and tales of debt and downtroddenness that seemed to go all the way back to the Fall.
Within five minutes of searching on the LDS genealogy website, after entering the barest information on my grandfather (Von Harris Smith, born Sugar City, Idaho, 1912), I was led to this biographical-information page from the LDS Missionary Database on his grandfather, my great-great grandfather, James Smith (born 1838, Oakley, England, died 1922, Utah).
I confess Skip Gates’s prediction was correct: this discovery moved me. For one thing, I see the family resemblance between James Smith and me, which has the power to cut across time and create the appearance of familiarity. I recall the chapters on passing through Utah Territory in Mark Twain’s Roughing It, and all the bemused mockery of those strange frontier utopians that this voyage provided him. At the time James Smith was out there proselytising, the Mormons still hoped to prevail in a long and sometimes violent stand-off with the US army, which would have transformed Utah into a breakaway theocracy, the last and most radical strain of the wave of radical Protestant sects that emerged in England two hundred years earlier. James Smith made me feel, truly, a part of that legacy.
But that was just the beginning, and as it would turn out it was my paternal grandmother’s side that had the deeper and much more surprising connection to radical Protestantism. Through Bertie Mae Cruce (born in Monticello, Arkansas in 1918), I am a direct descendant of Elder William Brewster and his wife Mary, who arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, as passengers on the Mayflower. (It’s all there on the LDS website, with every official document duly scanned, from Bertie’s birth certificate to the arrival logs of the Pilgrims’ ship, spanning nine generations in 298 years). The Brewsters had daughters named Patience and Fear, and sons named Wrestling and Love, but I am descended from the one called Jonathan. Elder William Brewster wrote a Treatise of the Ministery of the Church of England, which I’ve now read and will perhaps write about on another occasion. His motto was drawn from Psalms 39: Hebel est omnia Adam. There is an Elder William Brewster Society, open to all who can prove their descent from him. (I will not join.)
A few comments are in order about the special way in which this discovery hits me. A first is that one should not really be so surprised. An estimated 12% of Americans are directly descended from a Mayflower passenger, and the LDS records on my family, reaching back as far as the eighth century, attest to the presence of countless Lords and Ladies of Cornwall, Normandy, Brabant. Droit de seigneur and a host of complicated statistical factors I'm not sure I fully understand mean that virtually everyone is descended from nobility. A significant number of Americans are descended from Mayflower passengers, as I've said; it is just that much of the early formation of my identity and orientation in the world involved assuming that I could not have been one of them.
I can recall the lessons on the Mayflower and the Pilgrims in my elementary-school history classes, and I clearly remember thinking: this doesn’t concern me. My people were the little people, nés pour le petit pain, as the Québecois would say: the people whose ancestry does not raise them up, the people whose ancestry is not worth writing down. This is in particular a prejudice that I had formed largely from exposure to the Arkansas wing of my family, which included my grandmother and her siblings and some of their spouses. The irony, though, that she was the one linking me to a sort of American nobility without my realising it, also contains a lesson about American history: somewhere in the generations between the Plymouth Colony and my grandmother’s birth, at least one line of descent from Elder William Brewster experienced what we might call “indigenisation”. This is the same process that Henry David Thoreau observes of the Québecois: whether they are born of métissage or not, the French settlers, unlike the English, took to the forests and came to truly inhabit the continent.
My ancestors did not linger in Brewster, Massachusetts, practicing a strain of Protestantism that would come to be as “mainline” as the original Puritanism had been radical, thriving through hard work and Puritan virtue in prosperous and level-headed New England. They went south, became Baptists, impoverished themselves, learned to embrace desperation as a mode of being. They remained “white” (as far as I can tell from the scanned records, though perhaps the DNA results will confute this), but did so in a way that made them feel as if they must hypothesise an impurity of the blood somewhere in there, in order to make sense of the kind of Americans they were: white trash, to cautiously utter the slur I know I’m not supposed to use, but which seems necessary in order to get to the heart of the matter.
The existence of this class of people is part of America’s success and its tragic failure. It is through them that Jefferson’s hope was realised: the expropriation of the continent and the near-total annihilation of its Indigenous people. But this process also degraded the people who carried it out, and part of the degradation was a sort of forgetfulness, a loss of an orientation to the world through an idea of the ancestors that can ennoble a person even without proper nobility in the political and economic sense, a nobility the Americans rejected from the outset, even if they did not hesitate to set up societies for the descendants of the Mayflower, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and so on. And at the end of several generations, it yields up someone like me, who spends his life insisting he is descended from no one at all. This insistence is born of a sort of pride, and its results in their Senecan inflections are perhaps valuable, but it also conceals, and poorly, a history of violence (both enacted and received) and loss.
“But at least you get to be white,” will be the refrain from both the white-supremacists and the identitarians of the left. In the history lessons on the Pilgrims, it is true, my inchoate thought was not simply that this does not concern me, but that while it does not directly concern me I might at least get to be included among the descendants of the Mayflower par courtoisie. And this is where I think the lesson of the history of race, as it makes its leap from horses to kings to nations to “races” in the current sense of essentialised biogeographical populations, may be of particular value to our thinking about ancestry and identity in the American context. When Leibniz extends genealogy from families to nations, he is enfolding great masses of people, from different social classes, into the same dynasty, and so into the same great narrative of the origins of the body politic, even if only, again, par courtoisie. This surely served to delegitimise the hereditary forms of sovereignty his work was meant to glorify, and to tip early modern Europe that much closer to the republican revolutions that grounded sovereignty in the people. It also served, though he could not have seen this coming, to contribute to the racialisation of political communities, a process that would eventually mutate into such an absurd, contradictory, and destructive form as we still know in the United States today.
Race is, politically, a dead end. Courtesy is --literally, etymologically-- a courtly virtue, and is useless as the glue that binds democratic citizens together. For a ten-year-old American to feel, inchoately but surely, that it is only this courtesy that binds him to the Mayflower, but that this courtesy at the same time is one that is extended only on racial grounds, is the disgrace of American history in a single exemplum.
I suppose I’d rather be truly descended from the Mayflower than be enabled to behave as if I were on the basis of racial identity alone. But the discovery of true descent is not a simple one. I cannot claim any American simulacrum of nobility, as some of the Brewster descendants in New England seem to enjoy doing. The indigenisation process is irreversible: I am, in the sense already described, white trash. I certainly cannot buy into the form of political community that the public-school curriculum-setters hoped to install, which would have had me experience community with Elder William Brewster simply in virtue of our shared whiteness: to be white trash in the sense I have in mind is to be able to smell the artifice and lies that make the fiction of universal whiteness work in the service of power. Nor, finally, can I deny that I am moved, as Skip Gates predicted I would be, by the discovery of my descent from a Mayflower passenger.
I am moved, and then in my motion I am soon swung back around, and recalled to my former way of being American, the way that harmonises with Seneca’s vision of philosophy’s divine origins. We all share a genealogy, hidden in plain sight, that no church archive, no royal court, no DNA test, can ever discern.
Still, for the sake of the story, and to come good on my acceptance of Skip Gates's offer, it makes sense that I should divulge the results of the test, and my reaction to them, in a follow-up post, in due time...
April 10, 2020
March 4, 2020
Latin in the Voynich Manuscript
I think I'm finally ready to come out as a Voynich scholar. I've been studying hi-res scans of the manuscript off and on for four years or so, and I've been reading the so-called secondary literature for about a year. What compels me to come out is the discovery over this past year that for the most part commentators really do not know what they are doing. They divide roughly into two camps: the cryptographers and information scientists, on the one hand (the “quants”, as we say), and on the other hand the ravers and enthusiasts, the people who do not know how to distinguish between gut feelings and real evidence. There seem to be very few proper palaeographers writing about this text: that is, people who know how to attend to handwriting and codicological evidence until plausible patterns of intention begin to emerge. It may be that such people are scared away by the ravers; one need only briefly glance at a list of all the time-travel, Illuminati, and UFOlogical theories the manuscript has inspired to see that it is a real intellectual danger zone. For me it is however a wonderful case study and autoexperiment in the use of abductive inference. I do not yet think I know anything with certainty that no other researcher has established before me. But over time a picture is emerging that leads me to lend significant credence to some explanations over others.
I am, say, 85-90% certain that the manuscript is not a hoax, or, if it is a hoax, it is one that was perpetuated long before the manuscript came into Wilfrid Voynich's possession in 1912. I am attracted to the idea that, if it is a hoax, this was a hoax perpetuated on Athanasius Kircher, the one-time owner of the manuscript who was known to hastily claim to have cracked other codes (e.g., Egyptian hieroglyphics), and whom his contemporaries may have wanted to expose in his rashness by sending him a nonsense text to interpret. But this is a low-probability explanation. I am, say, 80-90% certain that the text was in the possession of a German, Dutch, or Flemish scholar who knew Latin, but that the manuscript itself is not written in any of these languages. As others have pointed out, the script of the main body of the text gives no indication of any regular repetitions of inflected word endings, of the sort that exist in all Indo-European and Finno-Ugric languages (e.g., the -s and -ed that are attached to plural nouns and passive participles respectively in English). It is plausible, based on quantitative analysis of the script, that it is written in a Sino-Tibetan or other East Asian language, perhaps by a European traveller (e.g., a German Jesuit such as Kircher himself) in Asia. But the lack of any distinctly Asian visual elements in the illustrations weakens this conjecture. The lack of any success so far in identifying any of the numerous botanical illustrations speaks strongly, in fact, in favour of the view that the work is a hoax, or at least a description of fantastical entities coming from nowhere in particular. The calendrical pages however strongly suggest a European provenance, and the illustrations of women bathing strongly suggest that the work is concerned with distinctly European traditions of balearic treatment of illnesses, which, in the early modern period, became a topic of scientific research for iatrochemists and other naturalists working at the intersection of medicine, chemistry, and natural history.
Almost all of the manuscript is written in an unknown script in an unknown language. There are however a few very small exceptions to this: the final page (f116v) features handwriting in Latin and what appears to be German, as well as two words in the “Voynichese” script. The calendrical pages (f70v-f73v) also feature the names of the months, from March to December, in some neo-Latin or Romance variant. The page f66r features, at the bottom, next to an illustration of a man (or perhaps a woman), what appear to be the German words, or partial words: der mus del. Thus:
I do not wish to concentrate on f66r today, other than to note that analysis of the handwriting makes it nearly certain that the same person who wrote these apparently German words is also the author of the Latin/German text on f116v, to which I now turn. The reader will have to look at the text in a hi-res version in order to discern some of the elements I will be discussing, but here is an image of the text sufficiently zoomed-out to see all of the elements on the page:
I am not prepared today to discuss the first line of text. The first word may be pox or vox; the second word may be leben or lebet. I have no conjectures, for now, for the next two words, and would rather move straightaway to the main body of the text. I am using blue to indicate words for which I am very confident in my transcription, green for words for which I am moderately confident, and red for words for which I am not at all confident. The repeated v's at the beginning of the third line indicate the two words that are written in Voynichese script, and that therefore have never been reliably transcribed by anyone:
I next list plausible alternative readings, and where appropriate provide further commentary.
anchiton = michiton. This is the most common reading, in fact, to the extent that some people have described this text as being written in “Michitonese”. But the initial part of the conjectured letter m looks much more like the other a's in the text (e.g., in ola) than like the other m's (e.g., in maria).
ola dabas = oladabas. There certainly does not seem to be any break between the a and the d, but separating the two has the advantage of giving us a meaningful Latin word (dabas = “you gave”). This in turn leaves us with the problem that ola has no meaning in Latin, and certainly is not in the feminine singular accusative, as one would expect if this ola, whatever it is, is the thing that “you gave”. So perhaps oladabas is a proper noun. It is possible, but not likely given the differences in word-length, that anchiton oladabas in line one corresponds to the Voynichese vvv vvvv in line three.
ceve = ??. Note here that the author began by crossing something out before beginning to write the word that remains. We can extract a Latin meaning out of this word, but only with difficulty: it could be the singular imperative form of a verb that means “to swivel” or “to walk lewdly or effeminately”.
fi[x] = si[x]. I'm reading the initial letter as an f only because it preserves the possibility of a concrete meaning in Latin, namely, the singular imperative of “to do” or “to make”.
ubren = obren, uhren. The advantage of my rendering, and of the first alternative, is that it preserves the possibility of referring to “the above”, which presumably in context would be the Latin text above, on which the author is now commenting in German.
gas = gar. This latter has been the more common reading in the scholarship, and it is better at conveying a plausible meaning in German (“So take even me” or “So take me quite [fully or completely]”. But what I take to be the long s is simply too much unlike the other r's in the text (e.g., in ubren) to be plausibly read as one. Here moreover there are other, holistic considerations that militate in favour of gas, to which I now turn.
One thing to note, first of all, is the overall form of these three lines: the first two are in Latin, and the words are generally concatenated by a + sign; the last is in Voynichese and German, and seems to be an attempt at rendering a meaning in a full sentence of natural language. One thing that other scholars have not noticed is that in the second line in Latin, the x that follows the first four of the six words is not an element of the words themselves, but seems to serve an ordering or registering function in the same way the + sign does. Once we remove it, we have four perfectly meaningful Latin words; as long as it is still there, we have four Latin-seeming nonsense words.
So, as a rough stab at a translation, we have something like this:
+ anchiton ola [you] gave + many + you + * swivel + doors + n +
make + maria + move + by force + alka[line] + ma+ria +
vvv vvvv false above so gas take me.
Don't ask me what this means; I'm not working at the level of comprehensive translation, yet. However, a few comments may help us to make sense out of it all. One is that the appearance of the word “false” (valsch, a Low German variant of falsch which strongly suggests a proximity to Flanders or Holland, rather than, say, a Central European origin) makes plausible the interpretation according to which this inscription is itself an effort to crack the code of the manuscript as a whole, and thus that it is superadded at a later date (like the German on f66v as well). If the manuscript does originate in the early 15th century, as carbon-dating indicates, then there could be no mention of “gas”, which is a neologism invented by Francis Mercury van Helmont (of Flemish origin) in his 1648 Ortus medicinae. There could however be mention of alkaline waters, which would have been an important part of balearic therapies and of treatises thereupon already in the Renaissance. So, I conjecture that the first two lines are someone's notes towards a decipherment of the contents of the manuscript word for word, and the final line is some sort of comment on the meaning suggested by this concatenation of words. I suspect that whoever this was knew more about the contents of the work than we do today, and that he rightly understood the Voynichese text to be dealing with the subject of medicinal spa therapies. I suspect that this person was writing after 1648, with a now-expanded vocabulary for describing the chemical properties of bath waters and, now, “gases” as well. See here for example Nicolaus Steno's 1660 treatise, composed in Amsterdam, Dissertatio physica de thermis [Physical Dissertation on Thermal Baths], in which the author develops his earlier notion of “chaos” (from which Van Helmont coined the term gas), understood as the maximum unstructuredness of particulate matter, to describe the effects of steam on the human body. I suspect that the author of the Latin/German text has read Van Helmont, and is writing broadly speaking in the intellectual context of northern European iatrochemistry.
February 16, 2020
Are Birds Dinosaurs?
How long have dinosaurs been around? There is one obvious sense in which they ceased to exist 66 million years ago. There is another sense in which they began to exist only around the middle of the 19th century, when Richard Owen identified a “distinct tribe... of Saurian Reptiles” in 1842. Most animals have a long history of social salience before science comes along to tell us exactly where they belong in the order of nature. Not so with dinosaurs: they didn't have any place in society at all until science informed us of their past existence, and from that point on their salience has been entirely wrapped up in cultural representations. These representations are anchored in something real, in a way that those of unicorns are not, but the fact that we have fossilised skulls and vertebrae to point to in the case of dinosaurs, while we do not have equine skulls with a horn in the middle to point to in the case of unicorns, only makes it more difficult, not less, to understand what we may expect the folk-categorical term “dinosaur” to do.
At first glance it may seem surprising that there should be a folk-category filled by representations of a class of beings that we (the “folk”) only know to exist at all thanks to what science tells us. But the folk are particularly adept at taking the austere information science delivers, and filling it in with fantasy. This is why black holes figure so prominently in science-fiction scenarios about cosmic consciousness. Yet in the case of palaeontology the people making the discoveries and fleshing out the dry bones with their imaginations, are often much closer to the folk than is generally the case of, say, black-hole cosmologists. And so the original image we have of dinosaurs as “terrible lizards”, an image that never really fit all the available evidence (even if at least some of them had large teeth), is one that was produced by field scientists who were simultaneously making the discoveries and letting these discoveries fuel their imaginations. And from the starter dough of their early imaginings, cultural representations begin to ferment and grow on their own.
As Claudine Cohen has vividly shown, these representations have been very different in different cultural settings. Nowhere did the dinosaur take on a more iconic status than in the United States, in the early 20th century, and this had to do largely with the political-geographical project of incorporating western frontier territories into the economic life-blood of the country through the extraction of natural resources from them; and from the 1910s or so no natural resource was more important than the stuff that was to fuel automobiles. Of course the vast majority of organic matter that goes into the slow subterranean generation of “fossil fuels” comes from algae, and not from dinosaurs, but this did not prevent the Sinclair Oil Co. from using the image of a diminutive brontosaurus on its corporate logo beginning in 1933, marking out gas stations across the Arizona desert for American families assaying the length of their nation's territory in a station wagon. Keychains and other souvenirs were available for purchase.
In the generations that followed, the cartoon representation of the dinosaur, often with a caveman on its back, would come to be as familiar as the “exotic” megafauna of Africa. By the 1970s there emerged however a pedagogical current, with which I'm very familiar from first-hand experience, that encouraged elementary-school children to uphold a certain standard of correctness in the way they spoke of dinosaurs: to insist on not placing a prosauropod of the Triassic next to a Cretaceous triceratops in a diorama, for example, let alone next to a Neanderthal. This new standard of correctness as a value emerged simultaneously in American history with a countercurrent that deviated radically from more or less everything the accumulating evidence was telling us about the history of life on earth: namely, so-called “creation science”, a movement that appears --though I won't try to argue this today-- to exist not only in tension, but also in dialectical interdependence, with the pretence of science and its volunteers from among the folk to be getting the earth's distant past definitively right.
It is against the background of these parallel developments --both the new premium on correctness as a value among the folk, as well as the rise of a prominent ideological countercurrent that flagrantly rejects this value-- that we must begin to reflect not just on the recent claim that birds are dinosaurs, but also on the implicit normative force of that claim. That is, it is not just that birds are dinosaurs, but also that you, fellow members of the folk, must affirm that they are.
Now, in phylogenetic terms, a dinosaur is: (i) either a modern bird, or (ii) a triceratops (which went extinct 66 million years ago), or, finally, (iii) any member of any species descended from the last common ancestor of both birds and triceratops. So this excludes crocodiles, because the last common ancestor of birds and crocodiles occurs earlier than the last common ancestor of birds and triceratops, even though crocodiles are the closest living relative of all members of class Aves. This definition has the virtue of being clear, and permitting us to avoid the difficulty of setting up an arbitrary boundary as we move forward in time, between the last dinosaur survivor of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed triceratops and most other dinosaur species, on the one hand, and on the other the first so to speak post-dinosaur, descended from the so-called feathered dinosaurs, but now just too morphologically distinct to be considered a dinosaur itself.
But fear of an arbitrary boundary, at least at the closer end of the temporal range of the dinosaur, seems to force the basic distinction such a boundary would have permitted to make its entrance under a new guise, namely, the distinction within this temporal range between the “avian” and the “non-avian” dinosaurs. It is not hard to find other cases in which the expansion of a classificatory term forces new distinctions within the space opened up by the expansion. For example, from the moment the American census began to distinguish between “racial” groups such as “black” and “white”, on the one hand, and overlapping “non-racial” identity groups such as “Hispanic” on the other (here, emphatically, I am using US census terminology, and not my own), we unsurprisingly began to hear the phrase “non-Hispanic white” with much greater frequency. “Non-avian dinosaur” seems to work the same way: there is a group we often find ourselves wanting to talk about, that is defined more broadly than it was in the past; but in many contexts we still want to talk about the group as it was defined in the past, so we construct a negative phrase that indicates we are subtracting a subset of it.
“White” is a folk category par excellence, and no respectable person today looks to it in the expectation that there is an underlying metaphysics forcing it upon us. The same is not generally thought to be true of “dinosaur”, though, and so the ease with which the folk revert to the phrase “non-avian dinosaur” upon being told that birds are dinosaurs, signals that there is a strong tension between the folk category and the phylogenetic definition.
What should we make of this? Are the folk simply mistaken? The claim that birds are dinosaurs is a claim among other things that phylogeny trumps morphology, that is to say that to be a dinosaur is to have a dinosaur's lineage, no matter what you look like, or how much you deviate from the most paradigmatic representation of, say, a quadrupedal, somewhat tortoise-like, lumbering sauropod. And here it is curious, and worthy of pause, that we play this trump card in a case where the paradigmatic members of the kind are long extinct.
Compare the case of whales and fish. John Dupré has compellingly shown that “fish” is yet another folk category par excellence; when we try to delimit it precisely, we find that the very task of drawing precise boundaries generates new problems in its wake. One problem is that many species that most folk and most scientists would be willing to call “fish” do not meet the standard definition of “gill-breathing craniate animal”. Consider the tellingly named “lungfish”, class Dipnomorpha, which is both capable of breathing air, and is the currently extant species closest to the ancestor of the first land-dwelling tetrapods, which emerged around 400 million years ago, and from which dinosaurs and mammals, including ourselves, and indeed including whales, would eventually evolve. That is, there is a species of fish, or “fish” in scare quotes if you're not ready to commit, that is more closely related to whales (and to human beings) than it is to ray-finned fishes (class Actinopterygii) such as tuna or cod. In other words there is no meaningful phylogenetic basis for putting lobe-finned fish such as Dipnomorpha or coelacanths together with tuna and not with whales, even though whales have the curious distinction of having evolved from land-dwelling animals that themselves evolved from sea-dwelling animals (they have this in common with numerous species of sea snakes too).
Phylogeny, I mean, seems to be invoked inconsistently, with no clear rule that could explain when paraphyletic classes might be legitimately admitted into our system of carving things up. Now in the case of lungfish, tuna, and whales, we are dealing with species all of which are today extant, even though of course part of our consideration of where they stand (or swim) in relation to one another has to do with other species long extinct. But when we turn our attention to avian and non-avian dinosaurs, by contrast, we are faced with two different classes of beings in very different ontological predicaments: the ones exist, and the others no longer do.
One might suppose on first consideration that this shouldn't make a difference, that the present has no special status in our taxonomical efforts. This would be true, except that the present happens to be the moment in which we are making these taxonomical efforts. We have no choice but to work outward from it, and we find in this work that we have a different sort of epistemic access, for living species than for extinct species, to the criteria for classification that interest us. This is a problem that has been perceived by palaeontologists at least since Georges Cuvier sought to classify the enormous “saurians” excavated from the gypsum mines at Montmartre in 1798. Having more or less passively adapted the Buffonian conception of species, as that which is held together by the “unity of reproduction”, Cuvier was struck, as one cannot fail to be, by the fact that fossils do not reproduce, and so if the species you are trying to classify only exist in fossil form, you are not ever going to be able to apply the criterion by which they are marked off from one another. It is in part for this reason that Cuvier's program of comparative anatomy veers into a structuralist project of establishing anatomical similarities across species, without any regard, or at least explicit regard, for what these similarities might imply about kinship or shared lineage.
This difficulty would be addressed directly in George Gaylord Simpson's important 1951 article, “The Species Concept”. Simpson is responding here to the so-called “Biological Species Concept” proposed by Ernst Mayr, which defines a species as a group of potentially interfertile individuals: thus a definition showing significant continuity with the Buffonian idea of a species as that which is held together by the “reproductive power”. What Simpson calls “typological definition” of a taxonomic group by contrast is the establishment of the group on the basis of its correspondence “with an abstract or ideal morphological pattern.” He notes that typological classification is “pre-evolutionary and non-evolutionary.” Yet prima facie it would seem that palaeontology leaves us no other choice than to revert to it.
Simpson is interested in interrogating the notion of species in particular as deployed in palaeontology, whereas both “dinosaur” and “bird” are significantly higher taxa than this. But we may nonetheless learn something from his observations. He maintains that “[t]he palaeontologist... uses the designation 'species' for two sorts of entities which are radically and fundamentally incongruent.” One possible approach to paleontological species classification, for Simpson, is, starting from morphological features, “to recognise central lines as species and to distinguish branches as other species, ... even though their delimitation is genetically arbitrary at the point of branching.” Thus:
“Another possible approach,” Simpson goes on, “is to recognise each evolutionary lineage as a unitary species until it divides and then to consider the descendent branches as species distinct from each other and from the single ancestral line.” Thus:
As for the first possibility, as represented by B (we are leaving some out here), Simpson notes that “the only reasonable criterion of choice would be designation of certain terminal branches as more important, or somehow definitive, than others.” Intriguingly, he mentions a view that he attributes to “a philosopher,” a certain H. Miller (as we learn only from the bibliography), in the long-out-of-print book, The Community of Man, published in 1949. According to an extreme formulation of this view, as Simpson summarises it, one might “take Homo sapiens as the supreme species, and consider its ancestry, from the beginning of life (or even before) as the main line, not specifically separable from H. sapiens... Taxonomists will surely agree that this result and the whole procedure involved are impractical if not absurd.”
Again with the caveat that Simpson is speaking of species while birds and non-avian dinosaurs are both enormous clades, could it be that the contention that birds are dinosaurs resembles the absurdity Simpson has identified here? Suppose the meteor had not hit the earth, and that triceratops and all of its Cretaceous contemporaries had survived and evolved into new forms, differing at least as much from the ceratopsians as, say, the sparrow differs from the archaeopteryx. Suppose some of these descendants of Cretaceous dinosaurs eventually returned to the sea, like the ancestors of whales did, and, like the whales, evolved an outer morphology similar to that of fish. It seems unlikely that any taxonomist trying to make sense of such a scene of biodiversity would think to insist much on the fact that those ceratopsian-descended sea animals, on the one hand, and the birds on the other (let's stipulate that they evolved in the meteor-free world more or less in the same way as in this one, which is naturally impossible, of course, but not logically impossible), are members of the same category of beings, even if it were known that they have a common ancestor (again, whales and lungfish, or if you prefer, humans and lungfish, also have a common ancestor).
This thought experiment suggests that perhaps the insistence that birds are dinosaurs is conditioned in part by a conviction among those who promote it that birds are somehow definitive of the branch that reaches back to the common ancestor of birds and triceratops. This would not be in the way that “the philosopher” seems to imagine Homo sapiens to be definitive of the lineage that led to it -- that is, in a way that strongly implies teleologically guided evolution. Rather, birds perhaps present themselves as the suitable end of the lineage in part because there is the appearance of some need at the present moment, some sense-making exigency, to argue that the dinosaurs survived after all, that in spite of what we had previously thought, they are still with us.
Before we venture any suggestions as to what the source of this felt need might be, it is worth noting that in general efforts to shorten the gap between the folk conception of birds and the folk conception of dinosaurs has involved as it were the avianisation of the latter, rather than the dinosaurisation of the former. From particular discoveries of filament-like layers protecting the outer surface of the bodies of many dinosaur species, the conclusion is quickly reached that these filaments must have been feathers; new artist's renditions are hastily drawn up, and on occasion they have to be retracted when it is learned that they went further in the avian direction than the evidence permitted. Overcorrection from the Godzilla template for the tyrannosaurus rex has on occasion made the tyrant king of the lizards into a sort of chicken. Thus:
There will always be corrections, and overcorrections, and renegotiations of our representations of the past. That is normal, and it is good that over the past several decades T. rex has been made more gracile, less like an upright Gila monster. But again, what is at stake in the particular direction in which our most recent overcorrections are sending us? Even if we are prepared to admit that birds are a branch of dinosaurs, we may still ask: Why must dinosaurs in turn be birds? I am not going to venture an answer to this second question today, except to say that it seems to fit a general pattern of revisionism in science education over the past decades that compels us to revisit whatever had previously been marked as “terrible”, and to discover that it was actually rather gentle or even cultured: the same pattern has been evidenced in cases as seemingly far apart as whales (perhaps the first trailblazer in this transformation), bats, sharks, and Neanderthals.
As to the particular need that I've already identified however, to have the dinosaurs surviving the great extinction event and into the present day, a few tentative remarks may be in order. Contrary to what some people's intuitions here might be, it does not seem to me that these newly discovered (or newly legislated) survivors of the Cretaceous-Paleogene die-off have something to do with the current climate of ecological crisis, in which, after all, the prevailing sentiment is that nobody gets to survive a major extinction event, let alone come out the other side even more gentle and cute than before.
It may have something more to do with the dialectical relationship, to which I've already alluded, in which the public presentation of evolution is constantly formed and deformed by the political forces of evolution denialism. In this context, creationists have for decades weaponised the rather healthy skepticism that philosophers of science have brought to empirical claims about a distant unrepeatable past, and transformed it into a sort of universal denial of the possibility of having a science of the past at all. If dinosaurs were entirely a thing of the past, such skepticism could perhaps be seen as having more of a foothold than in a world in which dinosaurs are in fact well represented in the present.
That's all I'll say about that for now, in order by way of conclusion to return to our guiding question: are birds dinosaurs, or aren't they? Even if we agree with Dupré, as I think I do, that whales were fish until the mid-19th century, and then ceased to be so as a result of new taxonomical legislation (which, as D. Graham Burnett has nicely shown, was itself influenced by actual legislation concerning the importation of whale blubber into the early United States: should it be taxed as fish oil? Or is there perhaps a way to get around that?): even if we agree with Dupré about this mid-19th-century adjustment, I was saying, it is not at all clear that a similar adjustment has yet been successfully carried out in the early 21st century as concerns the status of birds. Folk categories are not determined by fiat, but by actual usage among the folk. In certain scientific matters (say, geocentrism), the folk can be shown to be wrong over time, and gradually correct themselves. But in taxonomy it's generally the case that the folk do no worse than the scientists: how can they, when any classificatory scheme is relative to the initial concerns of the classifier? Whales became non-fish, and then they became gentle wise ones of the sea, not just because of science, but because of a pervasive trust in scientific authority to reveal to us the true natures of things, and a fairly active post-whaling propaganda campaign on the part of scientific and political bodies to convince people to revise their conception of whales.
The political landscape is very different today, and not surprisingly what we see in response to the question whether birds are dinosaurs, as we see almost everywhere else, is a rift and a stalemate. Some people adopt the new ordering with pride and with a supercilious commitment to the correction of their peers who are still getting it wrong, while others hold back, somewhat suspicious but often unable to articulate the nature of this suspicion, and if you show them a sparrow they'll say: “That just doesn't look like a dinosaur to me.”
Whether in the end these people cross over, and the 21st century proves to be the one in which the status of birds as dinosaurs is consolidated, depends much more on the calibration between scientific authority, the propagandistic aims of science education, and popular sentiment, than on working out any further finer points of phylogenetics. There are lessons here for many other debates about social kinds that are currently on people's minds, some of which touch on questions of biology too, but I'll leave those for another day.
Books
Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason
(Princeton University Press, 2019)Justin E. H. Smith
The Philosopher: A History in Six Types
(Princeton University Press, 2016)Justin E. H. Smith
The Leibniz-Stahl Controversy
(Yale University Press, 2016)Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by François Duchesneau and
Justin E. H. Smith
Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference:
Race in Early Modern Philosophy
(Princeton University Press, 2015)Justin E. H. Smith
The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy
(Oxford University Press, 2014)Edited by Ohad Nachtomy and Justin E. H. Smith
Philosophy and Its History:
Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy
(Oxford University Press, 2013)Edited by Mogens Laerke, Justin E. H. Smith
and Eric Schliesser
Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life
(Princeton University Press, 2011)Justin E. H. Smith
Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz
(Springer, The New Synthese Historical Library)Edited by Justin E. H. Smith and Ohad Nachtomy
The Rationalists: Between Tradition and Innovation (The New Synthese Historical Library)
Edited by Carlos Fraenkel, Dario Perinetti
and Justin E. H. Smith
The Problem of Animal Generation
in Early Modern Philosophy
(Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology)Edited by Justin E. H. Smith
Recent Posts
- Found Sounds (2001)
- Leibniz's “Request of the Dogs”
- “What Is X?” A New Podcast for The Point Magazine
- Queries IV
- Verbal Mood in Sakha: A Comprehensive Analysis
- e. e. cummings in French and Sakha
- The Philosophy of Astrobiology
- Brave Er Soğotox: The First 1000 Lines
- Please Subscribe to My Substack Newsletter
- Ecstasy; Or, Further Remarks on Cultural Appropriation
Categories
- 3QuarksDaily (7)
- Cabinet (8)
- Canadiana (4)
- Cargo Cults (4)
- Death Penalty (2)
- Dreams (5)
- Early Modern Primitives (6)
- Elephants (2)
- Etymology from Memory (1)
- Film (4)
- Français (10)
- From Memory (12)
- From the Bookshelf (13)
- Imaginary Tribes (5)
- Language and Animals (21)
- Literature (26)
- Love (41)
- Melancholica (25)
- Metadata (12)
- Music (2)
- Mycology (1)
- n+1 (4)
- New York Times (6)
- News in Review (1)
- Obituaries (3)
- Op-Ed Pieces (1)
- Philosophy (83)
- Poetry (32)
- Prisons (2)
- Product Packaging (1)
- Religion (9)
- Romance Philology (1)
- Sakha/Yakut (8)
- Science (28)
- The Everyday (14)
- The Graveyard of Words that Went Beyond the Editor's Word Limit (5)
- The Internet (4)
- The Mythical (3)
- The Sacred (6)
- Timely (82)
- Translations (9)
- Untimely (36)
- Voynich Manuscript (1)
- Weather (7)
