Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England “a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs.” Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.

Thank goodness it never became a serious problem. It might have left scars.

OK, then, what about this: it’s obvious that the way to do this right would have been as an installment in the Mario series: Mario’s Comedy. With Peach as Beatrice, Bowser as Satan, Luigi as Virgil, providing ‘super guide’ assistance’. Or maybe Virgil should be a Toad. I’m flexible. And the rest of the cast. Mushrooms and King Boo and Koopas and Yoshis and big biting metal balls on chains, disporting in appropriate spiritual attitudes. Lava and ice and howling wind. Various souls trapped in blocks you free by jumping on them, then carrying them to the end of the level, maybe.

Italian guy loves princess, Italian guy loses princess, Italian guy has to struggle through level after level, eventually fighting the Big Boss, to get Princess back again. Writes itself. Nine Levels. Plus climbing the Mountain of Purgatory. Then Paradiso could be the video you watch after you’re done. Boring stuff, but running on kinda long. Like the original. (YouTube mashup artists, take it away!)

Since this isn’t the way we’ve gone, apparently, I think our second best option would be to adapt, say, Super Mario Brothers, as a terza rima epic. So that’s your assigned task in comments. Something about ‘midway along the path’, ‘running always to the right’, ‘jumping on people’s heads’. That sort of thing. If you choose to accept your mission.

Discuss. What’s your favorite Chesterton? Is Father Brown as fundamentally tedious as I take him to be? Is Innocent Smith just as tedious, only I like him because I’m susceptible to any whiff or soupcon of man-and-superman themery? The public is banging on its breakfast table, demanding answers to these and other questions, quite possibly.

Sunday afternoon mashup: Fleetwood mac vs. Daft Punk. Good stuff!

Thinner, Better, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, plus the constructivist implication of ‘you make’, being the spiritual red thread running through this post, as it were. Daft Bodies an all.

I have just been reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Moral Emblems (history of comics is everywhere, you know), and I think he pegs this ‘Harvard Mentality’ with a simple but elegant woodcut and associated poem.

Mark, printed on the opposing page,
The unfortunate effects of rage.
A man (who might be you or me)
Hurls another into the sea.
Poor soul, his unreflecting act
His future joys will much contract,
And he will spoil his evening toddy
By dwelling on that mangled body.

Or, as Michael Bérubé puts it: “I’ll show YOU what’s liberal about the liberal arts!”

Fun facts! The Scarecrow of Oz – the 1915 book – is based on the film, not the other way around. Although I have to say: the relation is kinda loose.

The 1939 film we know and love was not, in fact, the first version to present Kansas in b&w, Oz in color. That honor goes to a 1933 cartoon included with the new set, which was originally released all b&w due to a lawsuit about the color process. You can watch it on YouTube but, again, quality not great. (Music by Carl Stallings!)

Also, The Wiz (1978) was not the first crazy blacksploitation installment of the franchise. That honor goes to the far crazier, Larry Semon-directed/starring, young Stan Laurel-containing 1925 version (again, YouTube provides, at least a bit). It has Spencer Bell as “Snowball”, the black farmhand who is send skipping to Oz on lightning bolts. (He is billed as G. Howe Black.) So far as I can tell, this version is not included in the new set, but one Amazon reviewer seems to think it is. I guess I’ll find out for myself.

One take-away lesson is that, oddly, the whole franchise had been flogged and beaten within an inch of its life by 1939, when what we tend to think of as the ‘original’ film came out. Oz was, therefore, the original too-many-sequels action franchise.

My interest is: I like this stuff. Plus I teach philosophy and film, with a science fiction focus. More generally, the history of visually spectacular film: fantasy, disaster. (We read classic stuff like Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster”.) It’s significant that Melies – of course we watch his little trip to the moon – started out as a stage magician. For him, the special effects came first. (I do like the way Lady GaGa borrowed the look of his Selenians in “Bad Romance”. Did you notice?)

But you know what: when I said I like this stuff, I sort of lied. I’m interested in it. But I’m also, honestly, sort of baffled and frequently annoyed by it. The quality seems so often unnecessarily poor in early silent movies. Obviously there are technical limitations, but so much else seems to be not going right. When what’s carrying your film is a guy who is surprisingly good in a mule suit, one suspects insufficient overall planning. More specifically, there is a weird neglect of basic story-telling values, as if all the thing was ever meant to be was incomprehensible fodder for someone’s music video project. The Scarecrow does look a little like Heath Ledger’s Joker. Again, Oz is sort of ahead of the curve, in that we often wonder why it doesn’t occur to Hollywood that special effects alone aren’t going to be enough. This is by no means a new problem.

The Scarecrow of Oz is a delightful book, a complete mess of a film, and the same man made both – and based the delight on the mess. I want to start reading up on/viewing more ‘fantastic’ films, from Melies on. And the tangled and stained Oz franchise seems a pretty important point along the way. What good stuff do you recommend reading/watching about all this? What early/silent films do you think fit or don’t fit with what I’ve just said? (Obviously I don’t think all silent films are incompetent in this way. Many are wonderful and brilliant. Yes, I think so, too. But many seem less competent than you would expect, given the evident talent of those involved in making them.)

(Me? Last week I taught my students everything’s made of monads; mere universal holograms seem fairly ho-hum.)

But there is one point that should be made in these connections that almost never is: deception is a very different concept than error. Deception is a game for two: one to fool, one to be fooled. Whereas you can be wrong all by yourself. You can smudge the distinction with favorite epistemologist phrases like ‘if it turns out I am massively deceived about the way the world is …’ But if you dramatize the possibility of systematic/fundamental error by imagining deceiving demons, Evil Gods, Agent Smith, mad scientists with brain vats, caves equipped with the latest in projection technology, or giant holograms, you confuse people’s intuitions. Specifically, you confuse them into thinking that error is more conceivable (or differently conceivable) than it may really be. Telling people the universe is a hologram makes it sound as though the universe actually intends to pull the wool over their eyes. Reality itself is the ultimate Long Con! But if you just tell them matter is made of atoms, or water is really H20, that doesn’t make it sound as though the micro entities think all the macro-types with minds are marks and suckers.

To put it another way, the hologram hypothesis makes it sound as if it is somehow the proper function – the telos – of the universe to fool us: trompe-l’œil. Without pretending I understand the hologram hypothesis one little bit, I’m pretty sure that’s not it.

As a result, I think essays like Chalmers’ “The Matrix As Metaphysics” end up – not being wrong, but irrelevantly eroding their own plausibility by bad choice of illustration; a pattern stretching back to Descartes’ “First Meditation”, possibly Plato’s Cave.

On the one hand, it’s reasonable to suppose my beliefs are about the things that they tend to be caused by (very crude first approximation to a causal theory of mental content). So if I am a brain in a vat, living in a ‘Dream World’, oddly my beliefs turn out to be mostly true! They are about the Dream World and are, mostly, true of that world. ‘Hey look, a woman in red!’ (Read Chalmers’ paper for the longer version. Or read Donald Davidson, or anyone else who has argued in this anti-skeptical vein.) Mutatis mutandis, if it turns out tables and chairs are really made of atoms and quarks, it doesn’t follow that there really aren’t tables and chairs, after all. What has been discovered is just what the tables and chairs really are. (Get it? Sort of?)

All the matrix razzle-dazzle Chalmers helps himself to is supposed to make that last point vivid, but it semi-obscures it. Because the one sort of universal appearance-generating brain vat that this wouldn’t be clearly true of would be … the sort of vat you see in movies like The Matrix. Namely, ones with the proper function of deceiving their inhabitants. Here I emphasize function rather than bad intention because … well, put it this way: suppose we had a serious theory that H20 appears to humans as a colorless, tasteless, odorless liquid because somehow this is, functionally, camouflage for the micro thingies. They are ‘trying to hide from us’ by exhibiting this appearance. (Yes, I know it doesn’t make any sense.) It doesn’t matter whether it’s intentional, just that we’ve decided that this is a reasonable scientific sizing up of the functional set-up. If that turned out to be the case, I think we might well say it turned out water didn’t exist after all, just as we say of a stick bug that it isn’t really a stick. (I pick the bug because, presumably, it doesn’t intend to deceive. Yet, functionally, it is a deceiver.)

Chalmers writes:

It is common to think that while The Truman Show poses a disturbing skeptical scenario, The Matrix is much worse. But if I am right, things are reversed. If I am in a matrix, then most of my beliefs about the external world are true. If I am in something like The Truman Show, then a great number of my beliefs are false. On reflection, it seems to me that this is the right conclusion. If we were to discover that we were (and always had been) in a matrix, this would be surprising, but we would quickly get used to it. If we were to discover that we were (and always had been) in The Truman Show, we might well go insane.

This is true, I think, but confusing. Because, by ‘the matrix’, Chalmers means something like … the hologram hypothesis. He doesn’t mean a situation in which Agent Smith is seriously messing with our heads. I think that’s right.

Probably some fine, upstanding academic epistemologist has made this ‘deception not the same as error’ point already, but I missed the memo, so I will be happy to give credit when properly informed, in comments.

The short-form/long-form distinction isn’t, then, the crux of the issue, because it doesn’t touch on the reason why people are anxious about suffering ADD. I think I agree with Henry about how we should have more short-form stuff, for pretty much the reasons he articulates. But what people are worried about, when they vaguely wish away short-form stuff, is a “nudge”-type issue, in the Sunstein and Thaler sense. It’s not that they seriously think all short stuff is bad stuff. or even that short stuff tends to be bad. Rather, all the stuff we are most tempted to overindulge in, against our own better judgment, is short. (If this were Victorian England, maybe we would be wringing our hands about how everyone is disappearing into enormous triple-decker novels for days and days and neglecting to keep up with current events. They aren’t remembering to send everyone else letters twice a day.)

Saying that all the stuff we are tempted to overindulge in is short is perfectly consistent with saying that, on average, short stuff is much better than long stuff. I think that’s it in a nutshell.

The main reason we are tempted to overindulge in short stuff is that it is there. So obtrusively ready-to-hand, like chips on the handlebars. So I maintain that Western Civilization can be saved, and people can return to reading long Kierkegaard books again – possibly even Melville’s Clarel – if only someone will come up with a simple app for time-locking our computers and mobile devices. Indeed, it would be such a basic and powerful productivity tool that it should come standard on all devices.

Let me quote the product description, by way of posing my question for the day:

Before giant robots, space ships, and masked super heroes filled the pages of Japanese comic books – known as manga – such characters were regularly seen on the streets of Japan in kamishibai stories. Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater tells the history of this fascinating and nearly vanished Japanese art form that paved the way for modern-day comic books, and is the missing link in the development of modern manga.

During the height of kamishibai in the 1930s, storytellers would travel to villages and set up their butais (miniature wooden prosceniums), through which illustrated boards were shown. The storytellers acted as entertainers and reporters, narrating tales that ranged from action-packed westerns, period pieces, traditional folk tales, and melodramas, to nightly news reporting on World War II. More than just explaining the pictures, a good storyteller would act out the parts of each character with different voices and facial expressions. Through extensive research and interviews, author Eric P. Nash pieces together the remarkable history of this art and its creators. With rare images reproduced for the first time from Japanese archives, including full-length kamishibai stories, combined with expert writing, this book is an essential guide to the origins of manga.

I’m a comics guy, so this is very interesting to me. Let’s think about it theoretically – in a McCloudish sequential visual art-ish way. Suppose you want to tell a story (tell anything) in pictures, and you want to get reasonable distribution. First, you can bring the people to you. Go monumental. Build something that lots of people can come and see on a regular basis. Paint the ceiling of your church, or carve your images into the walls of a public building/structure. This has been done at many times and in many places. It is a time-honored method for getting lots of people to see your sequential visual art. Second, you can make lots of copies that you distribute widely. This modern method works great as well. Third, you sort of split the difference. You make some copies, but not too many; and you make them large, but still portable. And you make the circuit with them, ‘performing’ for relatively small, paying audiences. Comics as traveling theater. Well, obviously the Japanese went that route for a time. Who else has? It seems odd to me that there aren’t more examples of this kind of thing. It’s seems a natural sort of middle ground to hit upon when you don’t have enough cash for a cathedral and no one has invented cheap enough printing yet (yes, I know there was cheap printing by the 30’s. I’m sure you get what I’m saying.) There’s puppet theater. Why not more of this ‘comics’ theater thing? Who did this before or besides the Japanese (or after)?

Obviously it doesn’t go just for sequential visual art. Any old picture that you wanted to share around might pose you this distribution dilemma. But the theater formula seems particularly winning, potentially. It also seems like the sort of thing that you could do even if you didn’t have, say, paper. Fabric. Wood. Lots of cultures have had access to basic materials that might have served, and that wouldn’t have been prohibitively expensive for small-time operators. So are there more examples of ‘comic’ theater, in the sequential visual art sense?

I’m still waiting for my copy, obviously. I don’t know much about the Japanese case yet. Maybe some of these larger questions are addressed in the book.

How can you dismiss Buddhism so easily? It’s the fastest growing religion in the world.

In the West, Buddhism is the new predominant ideology. Things are so unstable and confusing that with one speculation you can lose billions of dollars in a minute. The only thing that can explain this is Buddhism which says that everything is an appearance. That’s why the Dalai Lama is so popular in Hollywood.

You have also been critical of Gandhi. You have called him violent. Why?

It’s crucial to see violence which is done repeatedly to keep the things the way they are. In that sense, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.

UPDATE: Apparently Zizek was misquoted. At any rate, one person who claims to have been present for the interview says so, and it seems plausible enough.

But there are clear senses in which it is not right that the U.S. is a center-right nation. For example, it’s at least odd to have a center-right nation that lacks a center-right. There aren’t that many Olympia Snowes around – not even Olympia Snowe herself, during this whole health care business. It’s not as though America is the country where, when you elect a guy like Obama, you have to beat the center-right off with a stick, compromise-wise, when the center-left is plainly crying out to meet somewhere in the middle.

I have my own thoughts about this, but I’ll just throw this out. How is it possible, and what does it mean, to have a center-right nation, ideologically and electorally, that lacks a center-right, ideologically and electorally?

So I’ve been watching a spot of “Not Only … But Also” YouTube videos. Very funny stuff. I had never watched it until recently. (Which gives the lie to the whole ‘dead busy’ excuse. I know.) Here’s my question to you. The “L.S. Bumblebee” sketch, which is a hoot and a half – love the shirtless gong player and his sheet music; and which concludes with a hilarious appearance by John Lennon as “Dan”; is a dead-on “Lucy In The Sky” roast. Yet “L.S.” was, apparently, released as a single in February 1967. But Sgt. Pepper itself was only released in June, 1967. It seems that “Lucy in the Sky” was perfectly pre-parodied, months in advance. I’ve Googled around a bit and found quotes from Moore, from the 1970’s (by which time “L.S.” was apparently erroneously popping up on Beatles bootlegs) suggesting that the song was supposed to parody the Beach Boys more than the Beatles, which doesn’t really seem right. (Maybe the Monkees?) Also suggesting it was a response to the whole “Lucy” craze, which doesn’t seem to fit with the dating. Anyway, what is most surprising to me is the thought that, by the start of 1967, Sgt. Pepper-style psychedelia was the stuff of parody to the point where the frame joke of the sketch is that it is fodder for a documentary for Idaho television. Could it really be that Sgt. Peppers was that old hat by the end of 1966, before it even existed? I’m confused? I always thought the Beatles were pretty cool.

At the bottom of the organization are those who form the tables of natural history, a total of twenty-four investigators. Twelve “Merchants of Light” “sail into foreign countries under the names of other nations … [and] bring us the books and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts.” Three “Depredators” collect experiments from books three “Mystery-men” collect experiments from mechanical arts and liberal sciences, and three “Pioneers or Miners” try new experiments of their own devising. They are joined by three “Compilers,” who arrange these observations and experiments into proper tables. Twelve workers are employed at the next stage of the enterprise. Three “dowry-men or Benefactors” examine the initial tables compiled by the Compilers and draw out both technological applications and the first theoretical conclusions that can be drawn from the tables, presumably what Bacon calls the first vintage in the Novum organum. Three “Lamps” as he calls them, then draw new experiments out of the work of the Compilers and Benefactors, which experiments are them performed by three “Inoculators.” And finally, “we have three that raise the form discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms. These we call Interpreters of Nature.”

I think someone really ought to write an SF thriller in which the science heroes of New Atlantis have to race against time to compile the proper Baconian tables that will allow them to understand and technologically defeat the invading Martians. Or something.

Perhaps Adam Roberts will consent to show up in comments and tell us whether New Atlantis is actually as fun to read as it sounds.

This is probably typical of texts that have ‘the x that started all the y’ status. (The first Romantics are the last people you would ask what ‘Romanticism’ means.) If Descartes is the Father of Modern Philosophy, for that very reason he is probably the last modern philosopher you should quiz about what ‘Modern Philosophy’ is – the kids weren’t even born yet. But seeing that this is natural, in such a case, doesn’t make it comfortable. Thinking about how far you have to cast the historical net, a healthy anti-historicist impulse kicks in. We have a course to teach. If you can’t bounce off into the moderns without getting bogged down in the medievals … Also, the history of science is interesting, but the history of modern philosophy is supposed to be a basic, core offering in the philosophy department. If the course shapes up like a land war in Asia, false 17th Century physics-wise …

Maybe we should stop thinking Descartes’s Meditations is a good text to start the kiddies on?

We press on, in historicist fashion, because we have an exit strategy. (Trust us. We’re professional philosophers.) I’m going to assume you already sort of know your Descartes. I’m sketching effective, vivid ways to conjure up the background fairly briefly, while keeping up the teaching pace.

But that’s boring (you object)! Quite likely. What do you think of the new Vampire Weekend album, Contra? After a couple listens, I’m liking it less well than this Pitchfork reviewer. “Vampire Weekend’s second album starts with “Horchata”, ostensibly a punching bag for people who didn’t like their first one.” I loved the first album, and I cringed at “Horchata”, which seems like thin retread. But things pick up and up. I love the last track, “I Think Ur a Contra”, which has a surprisingly satisfactory Radiohead-y-ness. Not that sounding like Radiohead is automatically a good thing! It’s not a terribly original thing to do at this point. But, listening to that last track, I think an album of Radiohead/Vampire Weekend mash-ups would be tons of fun. The bands are so stylistically different, and the mood is poles apart, yet both vocalists work the high thin, sliding around thing.

Right, back to Descartes. I like to start my students out with a funny passage from the John Barth novel, The Sot-Weed Factor:

“Tell me, Eben: how is’t, d’you think, that the planets are moved in their courses?”

“Why, said Ebenezer, “’tis that the cosmos is filled with little particles moving in vortices, each of which centers on a star; and ‘tis the subtle push and pull of these particles in our solar vortex that slides the planets along their orbs – is’t not?”

“So saith Descartes,” Burlingame smiled. “And d’you haply recall what is the nature of light?”

“If I have’t right,” replied Ebenezer, “’tis an aspect of the vortices – of the press of inward and outward forces in ‘em. The celestial fire is sent through space from the vortices by this pressure, which imparts a transitional motion to little light globules – ”
 
“Which Renatus kindly hatched for that occasion,” Burlingame interrupted. “And what’s more he allows his globules both a rectilinear and a rotatary motion. If only the first occurs when the globules smite our retinae, we see white light; if both, we see color. And if this were not magical enough – mirabile dictu! – when the rotatory motion surpasseth the rectilinear, we see blue; when the reverse, we see red; and when the twain are equal, we see yellow. What fantastical drivel!”
 
“You mean ‘tis not the truth? I must say, Henry, it sounds reasonable to me. In sooth, there is a seed of poetry in it; it hath an elegance.”

“Aye, it hath every virtue and but one small defect, which is, that the universe doth not operate in that wise. Marry, ‘tis no crime, methinks, to teach the man’s skeptical philosophy or his analytical geometry—both have much of merit in ‘em. But his cosmology is purely fanciful, his optics right bizarre; and the first man to prove it is Isaac Newton.”

It’s funny because it’s true! and it gets at a standard way of viewing and teaching Descartes. Namely, the skeptical philosophy is the thing. And yet, rather famously, Descartes pooh-poohed his own philosophy’s skeptical start-point as ‘warmed over cabbage’ – nothing new, not all that interesting in itself, only good for what can be made by means of it. Which gets us to: the whole thing was a plot to get all that right bizarre optics and cosmology into the science curriculum, by displacing a lot of other right bizarre stuff.

From an oft-quoted letter to Mersenne:

I may tell you, between ourselves, that these six Meditations contain the entire foundations for my physics. But it is not necessary to say so, if you please, since that might make it harder for those who favor Aristotle to approve them. I hope that those who read them will gradually accustom themselves to my principles and recognize the truth of them before they notice that they destroy those of Aristotle. (AT III 297-298)

So tell your students this: the reason every philosophy student should read Descartes’ Meditations is that it is an attempt to trick you out of believing things that in fact would probably never occur to you (more on hylomorphism presently), by way of tricking you into believing things that, in fact, you should on no account believe. Because the universe doth not operate in that wise.

No, seriously. In fact, I think it makes a lot of sense to teach the skeptical philosophy as the core of Descartes’ philosophy – the stance from which Modern Philosophy flows, even. That’s not a completely wrong picture. When Descartes said skepticism was just old cabbage, he meant the purely negative and rather unsystematic stuff. His attempts to turn skepticism to systematic positive ends – his signature use-its-own-strength-against-it anti-skeptical judo Rationalism – are proper subjects of philosophical study. But: the Meditations are still rhetorically and structurally and argumentatively seriously off-kilter, because of that thing I just said: the point is to wean people off substantial forms, so they can start believing in vortices. It can be puzzling to the Youth of Today.

Option 1: get a copy of Russell’s Problems of Philosophy. Cross out the author’s name and title. Write Descartes’ Meditations instead. Teach. To a first approximation, give or take a few proofs of God, Russell gives you stock versions of the sorts of arguments often read into Descartes’ Meditations. (No one really liked those proofs of God anyway.)

Option 2: eliminate the worst of the incidental confusion in a few steps. The “First Meditation” is basically ok. (We’ll come back to it.) It’s in the “Second” that the trouble starts.

The Wax and the World

Let’s start with the physics we are secretly aiming to establish here. First, the SEP has a good article on the subject of Cartesian Physics. A bit more than the average undergraduate needs, however. Let’s just say:

Descartes thinks the universe is an infinitely extended, semi-fluid geometrical solid. It is infinitely divisible, there is no vacuum. The only forces at work (or play) are pushes (none of that spooky action-at-a-distance gravitational pulling.) Why infinitely divisible? Because any stopping point would be arbitrary. (Principle of sufficient reason at work here. No sufficient reason to stop at any point, ergo no stopping.) Why just pushes? Because anything else would be too weird. It is, allegedly, self-evident how it is the nature of extended stuff to exclude other stuff, and that’s what pushing is. (There are problems with this, but you get the idea. We are supposed to be able to understand, intellectually, why matter is capable of pushing. Any other sort of action would be mysterious.) Why no vacuum? Because space itself is the geometrical solid. On this view it isn’t as though the universe is a big coffee cup into which all this fluid has been poured. (Introduce relative vs. absolute theories of space. File away for future reference.) It is the essence of matter to be extended, according to Descartes. It follows that there cannot be an extended, non-material thing. But a true vacuum would contain no matter. Ergo, a true vacuum cannot have any extent. Ergo, there can be no vacuum. (Possibly a good point at which to make a few points about styles of philosophical argument with reference to David Lewis’ classic paper, “Holes”. But your tastes may vary.)

Speaking of coffee cups. Suppose you have a cup of black coffee, and you pour in a bit of cream. Don’t stir. Looking at it, the white stuff still has some cohesion and general togetherness. Call this blop of cream in your coffee ‘Fred’. Fred is, in a sense, a distinct entity in there – the still-white stuff. But, in another sense, the difference between Fred and the coffee is … well, fluid. There is really only One thing here: the liquid in my cup. Point being: Descartes thinks that really there is only One physical substance, the physical universe itself. We are all – our bodies – just so many Freds. Momentary cohesions in the semi-liquid overall flow. But not really distinct substances (to use a carefully loaded word.) File this thought away for later discussion when we get to Spinoza. Descartes talks about mind and body as though these categories are analogous. Minds and bodies. The mind-body problem. But really it ought to be the minds-body problem, strictly. Because Descartes believes in many minds but actually only one body. It really isn’t conceivable for more than one material substance to exist.

Now stir that coffee! (Bye, Fred) See: vortices! But that’s cheating. I’m moving my spoon in a circular way in a circular cup. Fair enough. But think about the fact (excuse me: seed of poetry) that there is no vacuum. A pushes B. B has to go somewhere. So it pushes C. Eventually what goes around comes around. Z slots in to that spot that A vacated. (After all, it’s not as though a vacuum can live there.) Let’s just ignore the logical possibility that in an infinite space things wouldn’t have to come around again, hmmm yes? This is actually a nice one to pose for the students. Suppose there is no vacuum. Why vortices? See if they think of the solution.

Interesting, in a screwy sort of false physics way. What does it have to do with the “Second Meditation” and beyond? The most direct connection comes with Descartes’ choice of the wax, as a paradigm physical object, at the end of that meditation. This is the case that is really supposed to clinch the whole ‘mind is better known than the body’ deal. The wax has a certain shape, scent, degree of solidity, so forth. It registers on all five senses, potentially, and is readily observable under highly optimal conditions. Paradigm, then, of a thing known by the senses. But now it is held to the fire, all its properties change. (Scent evaporates, now it is clear, liquid instead of solid.) All that remains, through the change, is just the abstract general consideration that here is an extended thing that can undergo these changes. We know it – the wax itself – endures through all these superficial changes. (If we only knew the wax through the senses, we would, presumably, think it was ceasing to exist and being replaced by something else as these changes occur.) Now: I’m not going to go through the details of this argument in any greater depth. It’s problematic. Every smart student objects as follows: it’s stupid to try to prove that ‘the mind is better known than the body’ let alone that ‘the wax is known by the mind alone’ in this way because, concerning any given lump of wax in the vicinity, I wouldn’t detect it to even try to understand it if I didn’t have sense organs. So surely Descartes shouldn’t make it sound as though pure reason is sufficient (even if he is even half-right that certain abstract powers of reason are necessary, to register identity through change.) And isn’t it sort of arbitrary and conceptually conventional what we regard as ‘the same’ wax, through time?

Like I said: lot of problems here. But here’s the thing: it makes more sense what Descartes is getting at if you cut through it like so: Descartes thinks the universe is just one big ball of wax – that is, a semi-fluid mass. The wax, in the “Second Meditation” is a stand-in for the world as Cartesian physics thinks it to be. I’m not going to say this fixes the argument, because we obviously shouldn’t accept Cartesian physics as true, let alone obvious (among other things.) But it does help concerning the obvious problem about how you actually need to detect the piece of wax in some sensory fashion (if if not in any one sensory fashion in particular). That doesn’t apply in quite the same way if it’s just a matter of knowing that there is a physical world at all. And you needn’t bother objecting that the essential identities of individual material bits, pieces of wax, are rather arbitrarily bounded things. Perhaps there’s a culture in which melting wax is said to cease to exist and be replaced by a different thing entirely. In this culture there is one word for the solid stuff and another for the melty stuff. Fine, quite possible. Yes. Ultimately, that’s Descartes’ own point (think about the status of Fred again).

Descartes could be a lot clearer about this. (If the point is to trick us into buying his physics, he might consider making arguments that don’t seem bizarre to anyone who doesn’t already believe in his physics.) Anyway, I recommend teaching the 2nd Med by teaching five minutes of ‘the world basically is a ball of wax, according to Descartes’ physics’.

One more thing, before we turn to the hylomorphic competition: why would you think the world is basically a big piece of (infinitely divisible) wax? There may be some just plain bad reasons, but, skipping any such, there is, we might say, the Winston Churchill argument: “be an optimist. There’s not much point being anything else.” Scientifically speaking, Descartes probably sort of felt it was geometry or nothing, reason-wise. Either it is possible to provide a rational account of the nature of physical world or not. If not, we’re screwed (scientifically speaking). If so, it will have to be basically consistent with the rationality of geometry. (It’s not as though we could have two separate rationalities, one that just works on paper, the other that works in the world.) And anything consistent with geometry will have to be, at bottom, geometry. So: the world is a geometrical solid differing from the paper geometry only in that it ‘exists’ (as Descartes puts it). All this is pretty bad and heading in the wrong direction, most certainly, but it’s at least interesting to think what’s going wrong. Why? For the one reason that Descartes himself gives in his discussion of why you should study history: namely, to broaden your horizons to include different ways of thinking than your own. (Boring truism about history, yes, but it’s the stock reason we really do want, in the present case.) What is this thing called ‘science’? It’s supposed to be better than (up from) myth and common sense and all that. But it’s also interesting to focus on how science turned out to be a lot less rational that thinkers like Descartes assumed it would have to, if it were to turn out to be science at all. Actual existing science is a serious step down from Descartes’ scientific dreams. It’s interesting that the best sort of reason is not the most Rational reason. Well, I’m not going to say any more than that in this post, because I’m concerned now with historical background.

Moving along, the wax-world point should be set beside a cartoon sketch of the hylomorphic alternative. Aristotelian views about substance and form and cause and all that. Descartes tends to be pretty approximate in his targeting of what he calls, dismissively, the vulgar-Scholastic philosophy. The Scholastic philosophy is just so many pretentious ramifications of the sort of unreflective confusion the man in the street suffers from.

I do not think that the diversity of the opinions of the Scholastics makes their philosophy difficult to refute. It is easy to overturn the foundations on which they all agree, and once that has been done all their disagreements over detail will seem foolish. (AT III 231-232).

I like to present the vulgar-Scholastic competition as a stupid-smart philosophy. First, present Aristotelianism as peculiarly stupid. (That is, why did Descartes think this was stupid.)

The Scholastic followers of Aristotle spent waaaay too much time wondering where the bread went, or at least failing to admit that their philosophy committed them to total mystification on this point (Descartes would say.) No, seriously. Please note how close the analogy is between Descartes’ Wax Argument and Calvin’s toast confusion. Namely, we don’t wonder where the bread went, even though its sensory properties have changes. Which just goes to show that we appreciate that what must be going on is that the toaster is somehow modifying the underlying microstructural material properties of the bread to make it into toast. It isn’t as though the toastiness is something slathered onto some x from outside, or the breadiness something hoovered out of the x and then, in some cunning manner, disposed of.

And the name for that thing that we are in fact to smart to believe in – the slathered-on/hoovered-out quality – is: substantial form, a.k.a. hylomorph, a.k.a. that thing the wisest Aristotelian heads are so sure explains stuff.

Were the Scholastics this dumb? Not hardly. We’ll get to that in part II. (More Than Meets The Eyes! Robots In Disguise!)

(I feel that this post is rather disorderly, and yet I wanted it to be fairly orderly. Besides Vampire Weekend. I’m sorry about that. I hope to do better with part II. But we’ll see whether people like this one, for starters.)

In other news, I’m still preparing for my History of Modern Philosophy course and rereading Daniel Garber’s excellent Descartes Embodied: Reading Cartesian Philosophy through Cartesian Science [amazon]. I should distill stuff I’ve gotten from Garber (and others) into a post: four or five things going on in the background of Descartes’ Meditations that you can teach in about 20 minutes; that aren’t too hard to understand; that make reading this stuff easier.

But that’s not what I’ve got for you tonight. (Saturday nights are for jokes.) In his first chapter, “Does History Have A Future?” Garber makes some generally smart and correct (in my opinion) observations about the advantages and disadvantages of history of modern for life. He does so, in part, by picking on a remark by Jonathan Bennett in his (excellent) Spinoza book [amazon].

I do say that Spinoza’s total naturalistic program fails at both ends and in the middle; as though he undertook to build a sturdy mansion all out of wood, and achieved only a rickety shack using bricks, as well as wood. But his attempt was a work of genius; and a thorough, candid study of it can be wonderfully instructive. The failures have at least as much to teach as the successes, if one attends not only to where Spinoza fails but why.

Garber points out the (obvious, I think) ways in which this is actually pretty implausible as a view of the value of Spinoza, assuming the architectonic assessment is about right. Possibly out of respect for Bennett (which I heartily share) Garber does not really take note of just how damn hilarious the image is. It’s quite the inadvertently funniest philosophy I’ve read since that whole Lewd and Prude episode. My first thought was: Donald Barthelme really needed to write a short story about an earnest follower of an architect who is always trying to do one thing but then – out of sheer genius – perpetrating something far less, and different to the point of severe hazard. For which he is lavishly praised. Then it occurred to me: Terry Pratchett already did it. But “if it ain’t” Baruch “don’t fix it!” Spinoza may have been the first!

Possible dramatic developments along these lines: a PBS fixer-upper series, “This Old System”. Or a 1980’s Tom Hanks comedy, The Monad Pit. Discuss!

In praise of Jonathan Bennett: I am relying exclusively on his Early Modern Texts, for my primary text needs. And the more I look at what he’s done, simplifying and modernizing classic texts for student use, the more I like it. In particular, translating John Locke into English was a prodigious act of common sense, more than making up for any excesses committed in defense of Spinoza. (For a couple weeks there I was on the fence, thinking either you should make the kids read the original, extra commas, impertinent semicolons, elegantly plodding roundaboutness and funny old words and all; or you should just read a good secondary text account of what the original says. Then it occurred to me there really isn’t any reason why a middle ground isn’t best. Yes, it is. I’m now won over.) Early Modern Texts is a model of what so many overpriced textbooks are not. Good for Bennett!