stevengharms.com

“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” — Alexander Pope

A recent Wikipedia article of the day sent along notice that the anniversary of the publication of Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” had just past. I thought I would take a look at the original text and see what my substantial investment in Latin education seine me of it. Google Books has a fine scan with the Le Seur commentaries.

I was taking a look at De Mundi Systematae: Liber Tertius and saw several small postulates that were exceedingly brief and nowhere as complicated as the language in the rest of the text.

In philosophia experimentali, propositiones ex phænomenis per inductionem collectæ, non obstantibus contrariis hypothesibus, pro veris aut accurate aut quamproxime haberi debent, donec alia occurrerint phænomena, per quae aut accuratiores reddantur aut exceptionibus obnoxiæ.

My basic 4-semesters-of-Latin Translation

In experimental philosophy, propositions collected from phenomena through an observational process must be held either as true, or as close to it as possible — existing contrary hypotheses notwithstanding — until such time as other phenomena occur by which they [the propositions] may be more accurately given or be found erroneous.

— Regula IV: Regulae Philosophandi: Isaac Newton

The modern might casually assert “No duh,” but this is to give too-short a shrift to the intellectual milieu of the era.

Consider that Newton’s fairly erudite audience — they could read Newtonian Latin, mind you, and that was a relatively small, educated population — lacked sufficient default orientation toward this foundation of scientific reasoning. They lacked it to the extent that Newton had to teach the reader to think scientifically before he could expect him to even consider the revolutionary theories of physics contained earlier in the book. It’s almost like when someone makes a highly contentious blog post and then, to head off the trolls, tries to help the trolls orient themselves so as to minimize unnecessary, follow-up correspondence.

Wikipedia has a translation of Newton’s propositions as well.

Newton was urging us to eschew magical thinking, at least in the realm of natural philosophy. We should have no allegiance to any model any longer than until the data contravenes the model’s existence. But as a deist, or perhaps a latent alchemist, Newton realized that his laws of motion left him open to procedural complaints from Galiean neo-Platonist critique as well as rationalist ontological complaints from the Scholastics. Curiously, he had to defy both ends of the spectrum and find a middle way that both required the non-visible and non-mechanistic, but which also embraced a neo-Platonic / Galilean model of law forming science.

On top of all that he had the humility to say he was a standing on the shoulders of giants!

“Hancock” is Will Smith’s summer vehicle:

The notable attributes of Hancock are that he is:

• Homeless
• Surly
• Prone to intoxication

I thought this was a bit of a predictable gag, the Juno-fication of the myth of the superhero. Instead of doing the right thing ( or, freaking the-hell-out when teenage daughter is pregnant ), witticisms will abound and the surly pregnant-teen ( or, superhero ) will grow on you. The Jason Bateman factor seemed all but to ensure this.

But the other day I listened to the “In Our Time (Radio 4)” podcast with Melvyn Bragg on Kierkergaard and was reminded of the sheer terror and weight underlying the “Fear and Trembling” thesis and I thought: “How would you respond to the proposition if you were a superhero, that is, if you were objectively better than everyone else?

Coloring this thought is the masterful “Superman Scene” from the noir “Kill Bill II”.

As you know, I’m quite keen on comic books. Especially the ones about superheroes. I find the whole mythology surrounding superheroes fascinating.

Take my favorite superhero, Superman. Not a great comic book. Not particularly well-drawn. But the mythology… The mythology is not only great, it’s unique.

Now, a staple of the superhero mythology is, there’s the superhero and there’s the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When that character wakes up in the morning, he’s Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic Superman stands alone.

Superman didn’t become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he’s Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red “S” - that’s the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears - the glasses, the business suit - that’s the costume. That’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us.

Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He’s weak… He’s unsure of himself… He’s a coward.

Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race.

If you were objectively stronger, faster, smarter, and in Hancock’s case, “Fresher” than the entire population of this pathetic planet of small-minded monkeys, how could you act with anything but contempt?

What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape. —Friederich Nietzche ( Kaufmann Transl. )

Just as Robinson Crusoe style adventurers come to accept the presence of the lesser creatures ( a helper-monkey, a parrot, etc. ), so the solitary superhero must accept the piddling company of sub-species companions against the deafening loneliness of being the last / the only / etc.

Wilson, a sub-species of companion

I should suppose the only rational emotions would be contempt for them and yourself, and as an emollient for the latter only copious amounts of booze would suffice.

I hope that this idea is explored in the movie.

When I was in high school, I remember seeing this copy of The Stranger and being immediately blown away by the absolute weirdness of this stage troupe.

Aside: Does anyone know what group this is, who took the photo, what it’s about? I think it’s the Bantam edition.

I then proceeded to check the book out and I honestly can say I didn’t understand Mersault ( does anyone? ) and having read the book at least twice more and once in its native language, I’m still completely baffled by Mersault, his motivations, his identity. Mersault’s wedding plan, Mersault’s bliss over tablets of chocolate and cigarettes, his deadly flat attitude towards marriage, and ultimately his dispassionate choices standing on the sand.

As far as existential icons I prefer the doctor from The Plauge or Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment but there’s something about Mersault that haunts me - and it may be something to do with this cover.

“The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.”

Now that I re-read the title, I’m inclined to think I should change it because this is a very bold title.

But we live in bold times, and bold times call for bold titles.

Recently I read about a “Most Influential Books” list via Daniel Miessler’s post “Episteme”. I commented that it was a bit presumptuous to believe that the reader of the 100 list would be able to get anything out of some of the selections without other key concepts and items discussed in the previous authors’ work. For example, to make sense of Hume or Berkeley, you really need to know Aristotle’s Categories and Descartes’ Meditations. The former is not singled out and the latter didn’t make the list ( cogito ergo sum doesn’t rate? ).

I gave some thought as to how I could give a rough sketch of Western intellectual development in a broad-strokes sense that worked visually. Enter FreeMind. FreeMind is a mind-mapping software ( Free! ) that exports to PDF.

So I took an attempt at producing a PDF that gives context for these books.

Here’s a sample

Full PDF Here

Where possible, I have put a number entry, which corresponds to that book’s entry in the 100 list.

For Updates / Suggestions:

• Leave comments here
  • I will make changes for errors ( Merleau-Ponty never said “changing it changes”! ) or typos
  • Splitting hairs on which school / thought line ( X was born in Romania, why listed as a German? ). Large errors, OK, but keep in mind I’m trying to frame whole books, not write the definitive history of Western Philo
  • Ditto dates. Yes Wittgenstein lived before WWII, but he also lived after. Again, I’m grouping by broad similarity, not hair-splitting difference

I hope this gets some of you reading! If you want two great Anthologies * Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, From Thales to Aristotle. Cohen, Curd, Reeve eds. Hackett press. * The Continental Philosophy Reader. Edited by Kearney and Rainwater. Routledge Press.

You hear about those teachers, those classes, that just change the naive freshman’s ( or senior’s ) life in movies and stories. Bob Solomon did that for me, fundamentally, powerfully, and indelibly. While there was no “captain my captain” moment, Solomon was the kind of teacher that you learned so much from, it’s hard to imagine your life having been the same had he not been in it.

To my great sadness, he has left this world. I left a comment over at Austinist with some surface recollections.

I had the pleasure of taking 18th Century German Idealism ( Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, gateway to Nietzsche ) and his legendary Existentialism class while at the University. I knew his reputation was good, but I didn’t realize what an amazing teacher he was. I had dropped the 2nd symbolic logic class ( not to my taste ) and was looking for a lecture that could take another add / dropper. That was 18th century. I was behind about 2 weeks in the reading so I took to reading the material with a fine grained comb. When I came to his office hours with a laundry list of the finer points about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason he assured me that such depth wasn’t necessary, but that it was important to understand that the Kantian / Newtonian / Mechanical world view was about to be challenged: by both Hegel and the looming French Revolution / Terror.

His cadence, his eyes, the moustache, I suppose it all made him a bit larger than life. But he never was unapproachable and he would take the opinions or quotidian questions of the undergraduate with the same absorbed in thought consideration that he accorded the learnéd.

But as I said, he seems to have changed the younger me so substantially, that I can’t think of how some of my best and favorite conversations would have happened without the background he taught me. I recall being at a party with Alfredo Garcia and remarking off-handedly that the philosophy project was effectively over after Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: if all argumentation is just fodder for that system, and that system can absorb all critique, what’s the point?

And to hear Solomon wax on the topic of love from an existential point of view, God that was pure Nietzschean poetry. Existentialism is rooted in a challenge: God’s eye is watching you with all of His furious intensity ( Kierkergaard ) or life is arbitrary and undefined and absurd ( Camus ) or there is only Being against not-Being ( Sartre / Heidegger ). In spite of these forces which could grind your little heart and soul to dust, why be moral, or even, why be at all? Existentialism says that the doing, the effect, the passion, the purity, the impeccability wherewith you act is all you very well may have, so do it, do it well, and display the beautiful fire that is your being, your soul, your you-ness.

Solomon would often repeat that existentialism was a “bit of a downer” in popular conception, as he saw it, nothing could be further from the truth: Existentialism was a gauntlet thrown down to the apathetic to change the world for the better ( or, arguably, worse ) and to love fully. To ask the pretty / shy / too-cool girl at the record store for a date, to dare to kiss a beautiful girl you don’t know well, to converse, to drink, to be merry. To feel pleasure and virtue run through your veins, to feel knowledge enrich your life: this was life itself, the life worth living, the eudamonaic life Socrates searched for.

As Solomon told this story you could feel the 200 young faces light up with dreams and hopes and aspirations. It was the best sermon delivered to the Church of the Cyncial Doubters. It was the thing, I daresay, that led to the most hook-ups within the philosophy department undergraduate class too. How could you not want to be beautiful, and free, and in touch, and intimate with another soul after that, or to write a novel, or to dream? He didn’t deliver this lecture passionately, but as that door opened we came out an altered mass.

And what can you do for a man, who surely forgot your name and year as you washed into the tide of bodies and people. For someone who changed your world, but that you didn’t keep in contact with (for this is the strange situation of the professor )? His Nietzsche-scholar wife has requested donations to OxFam instead of flowers ( he was ever so charitable ). I will do this.

In the comments section at Austinist where I learned the news I saw this comment:

This is absolutely awful timing. As a philosophy minor at UT, I was finally signed up for Solomon’s Existentialism class this spring, and I’ve been looking forward to it for a few years now. The man is legendary in the UT philosophy department.

I then saw my chance to pay tribute: to share the stories of Solomon or by Solomon that I remember to those who will never have the chance to hear those great stories from the man himself. Here they are…

Posted at Austinist

Story 1: Philosophy as a life changer

Solomon told a wonderful story (other students feel free to correct my memory, it’s been a decade…) about how a young medical student in Michigan saw a flyer on campus for a brown-bag session about Nietzsche. The naive young man attended the session and heard things about love and passion and that fearsome sturm und drang that lay behind Nietzche’s writing. That afternoon the student changed his major to philosophy and thus would-be Dr. Solomon MD became the beloved Dr. Solomon who so changed my life, and so many others.

Story 2: Music as Philosophy

In the 18th c. German Idealism class the Enlightenment as zeitgeist and Kant are the groundwork for the Hegellian heart of the class. I’ll never forget the day Solomon came in with a small stereo and played a bit of Mozart (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik if I’m not mistaken). “This is Kant”, he intoned, continuing: “Order, reason, balance, control.” He stopped the sample. “And this…”, the Hand of Fate opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony filled the wide lecture room on the south end of Waggener Hall, “is Hegel: Passion, Spirit, the Napoleonic spirit.”

My heart shot up to my throat. I could see the march of the Napoleon through the remains of the Holy Roman Empire and understood just how very real art and philosophy both were. It was one of the most sublime moments of my education.

Story 3: Personal Anecdote: Job Interview

In October of 1999 I was invited to interview in Silicon Valley with my employer. I caught the last direct flight from Austin to SJ and lo, who was in 1st class, but the Dr. and his wife. He smiled as we recognized each other from class. I asked where he was off to, and it was Stanford ( I believe ) to lecture on the nature of Love. “You?”, he asked. I said I was to interview with a company in the valley. He smiled paternally, as I think, he blessed my choice of being a philosopher-businessperson headed to the (then) very go-go capitalist mecca of the universe. As a teacher of business ethics, I think he was glad that I was of the mindset to do things morally while doing great things. I daresay this is the Platonic philosopher-king of our age.

Story 4: Book sales

Solomon said that he felt a bit sketchy about making kids buy his books ( I said he was an ethicist ) and getting royalties. As a means to assuage this issue, a festivity was planned at the end of the semester where said royalties ( and I dare say a good bit of Solomon charity money ) were commingled for a bit of a festivity. I had only had one other teacher try to engage the unwashed masses of students outside of the classroom, and Solomon’s doing this was his trip to the agora, his way of staying close to his students’ hearts and minds.

These are the stories I remember, the changes I cherish, and the man I mourn.

College of Liberal Arts Obit

Austin American Statesman Obit

This Post Is Sticky

What happens when you combine Bill Keane’s safe-as-mother’s-milk comic strip standard The Family Circus and cross it with the 19th century’s most aphoristic, volatile, and poetic thinker? I present to you The Nietzsche Family Circus.

“Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.”

—Martin Amis

“Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In researching the religious opinions of the youth of England, the hoary CoE found that the youth are largely non-religious and don’t seem particularly bothered by the idea of there not being a spiritual life at all.

Their creed could be defined as: “This world, and all life in it, is meaningful as it is,” translated as: “There is no need to posit ultimate significance elsewhere beyond the immediate experience of everyday life.” The goal in life of young people was happiness achieved primarily through the family.

Some quasi-revolutionary thinking in a place where revolutionary thinking is rarely found:

He [Brother Consolmagno] described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a “kind of paganism” because it harked back to the days of “nature gods” who were responsible for natural events.

Brother Consolmagno is entirely correct. The human mind has sought to apply reason and narrative to the disorder of our world of experience since the very first humans. First we attributed the creation myths and the “why does X happen” myths to mysterious forces. We then structure those forces to have relationships to one another (The goddess of wisdom erupted whole and unborn outside of the ruler-god, etc.)

Ultimately a revolution happened in Greece a few millennia ago, these paltry explanations were set aside for the love of wisdom: philosophia.

I like to imagine it was the work of Xenophanes that undermined this “story-telling” as explanation of phenomena:

<

blockquote>“Mortals fancy that gods are born, and wear clothes, and have voice and form like themselves. Yet if oxen and lions had hands, and could paint and fashion images as men do, they would make the pictures and images of their gods in their own likenesses; horses would make them like horses, oxen like oxen. Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; Thracians give theirs blue eyes and red hair.” (from Diogenes Laertes “Xenophanes,” iii.)

<

blockquote>

Christianity, for many years, seemed to be at peace with a transcendent God. Yet the plausability of evolution chafes at them (why should you care, if you have faith, ask I) so they posit this nonsense called Creationism. Creationism goes back to making the Christian God a “maker god” not much different than Zeus. I don’t think that’s progress for the religion.