Philosophy

It appears that I am a winter blogger. This weekend is the first of the fall that is cool enough here in Maryland to motivate jeans and a long sleeve shirt. Yesterday, we did the Maryland Renaissance Festival with our visiting student from Extremadura, Spain. RenFest is always wonderful, from Johnny Fox, the King of Swords (swallows them), to Jousting, the Maryland state sport! We actually had a jouster knocked off a horse this year (he was fine).

However, here's what I want to write about soon, from Panhala:

Philosophy

~ Billy Collins ~

I used to sit in the cafe of existentialism,

lost in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke,

contemplating the suicide a tiny Frenchman

might commit by leaping from the rim of my brandyglass.

I used to hunger to be engaged

as I walked the long shaded boulevards,

eyeing women of all nationalities,

a difficult paperback riding in my raincoat pocket.

But these days I like my ontology in an armchair,

a rope hammock, or better still, a warm bath

in a cork-lined room--disengaged, soaking

in the calm, restful waters of speculation.

Afternoons, when I leave the house

for the woods, I think of Aquinas at his desk,

fingers interlocked upon his stomach,

as he deduces another proof for God's existence,

intricate as the branches of these bare November trees.

And as I kick through the leaves and snap

the wind-fallen twigs, I consider Leibniz on his couch

reaching the astonishing conclusion that monads,

those windowless units of matter, must have souls.

But when I finally reach the top of the hill

and sit down on the flat tonnage of this boulder,

I think of Spinoza, most rarefied of them all.

I look beyond the treetops and the distant ridges

and see him sitting in a beam of Dutch sunlight

slowly stirring his milky tea with a spoon.

Since dawn he has been at his bench grinding lenses,

but now he is leaving behind the saucer and table,

the smoky chimneys and tile roofs of Amsterdam,

even the earth itself, pale blue, aqueous,

cloud-enshrined, titled back on the stick of its axis.

He is rising into that high dome of thought

where loose pages of Shelley float on the air,

where all the formulas of calculus unravel,

tumbling in the radiance of a round Platonic sun--

that zone just below the one where angels accelerate

and the amphitheatrical rose of Dante unfolds.

And now I stand up on the ledge to salute you, Spinoza,

and when I whistle to the dog and start down the hill,

I can feel the thick glass of your eyes upon me

as I step from the rock to glacial rock, and on her

as she sniffs her way through the leaves,

her tail straight back, her body low to the ground.

(The Art of Drowning)

Yes...

Chet Raymo has posted a meditation on William James that is sublime. Three short paragraphs say it all. What more can I say? I'll think of something later. For now, just go enjoy Chet!

The Shore of the Cosmic Ocean

This is an annotated transcript of the video clip that can be found in the navigation column, down at the bottom, under the same title. It's Carl Sagan's materialist manifesto, overlying an unspoken declaration of the irrelevance of supernaturalism. It must surely rank among the most eloquent statements of scientific confidence and ambition ever made. A similar transcript is given in the first chapter of the printed version of Cosmos. But that version is missing some of the best touches of this one.

The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our contemplations of the Cosmos stir us. There's a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as of a distant memory, of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.

This defines the intended scope of the Cosmos, but though it fails to rule out anything specific, one understands immediately that the supernatural and the paranormal will not be needed.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home, the Earth. For the first time we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger. But, our species is young and curious and brave and it shows much promise. In the last few millennia, we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos, in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

Adopting a god-like perspective, we are said to be lost in eternity, but yet the present is seen as a special time of awakening, as Carl returns to the collective "we".

We're about to begin a journey through the Cosmos. We'll encounter galaxies and suns, and planets, life and consciousness, coming into being, evolving and perishing; Worlds of ice and stars of diamond; atoms as massive suns, universes smaller than atoms. But it's also a story of our own planet, and the plants and animals that share it with us. And it's a story about us; how we achieved our present understanding of the Cosmos, how the Cosmos has shaped our evolution and our culture, what our fate may be.

A taste of things to come is offered, an enticement, and also a promise to glimpse the future.

We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact. The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths, of exquisite interrelationships, of the awesome machinery of nature.

A credo for study of the Cosmos is advanced, using a balance of imagination and skepticism as we explore. And again, we will be focused on the "machinery of nature."

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little way out into the sea, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. The ocean calls to us. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return. And we can because the Cosmos is also within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.

This is a metaphor that has stayed with me ever since I heard it in 1980, and it became a core concept in a successful early research paper of mine, written about then. But it's our atmosphere that is the shore of the Cosmic ocean, not the surface of Earth. We don't leave the shoals until we venture well above the atmosphere. And Earth's magnetic field creates a harbor of sorts, fending off the solar wind.

This paragraph borrows a concept from Alan Watts that originated at least a decade before "Cosmos" appeared. Sagan says: "We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself." Watts says, somewhat more verbosely: "We are not egos in bags of skin, that come into the world. We come out of it; as trees leaf and cows calve, the universe "peoples". We are the universe, become conscious of itself." Some of the most important ideas are also among the simplest.

The journey for each of us begins here. We're going to explore the Cosmos in a ship of the imagination, unfettered by ordinary limits on speed and size, drawn by the music of cosmic harmonies, that can take us anywhere in space and time. Perfect as a snowflake, organic as a dandelion seed, it can carry us to worlds of dreams and worlds of fact. Come with me.

Leibniz and Spinoza

A recent book by Matthew Stewart: "The Courtier and the
Heretic", 2006, has proved most interesting. This paragraph from the introduction really struck me:

"..., the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century remain unsurpassed, and should perhaps be considered the twin founders of modern thought. We live in an age defined by its reaction to Spinoza and to all that he recorded in his philosophy. And there is no more compelling expression of this reaction than the philosophy Leibniz developed in the long years after his return from Holland (after visiting Spinoza). Contemporary debates concerning the separation of church and state, the clash of civilizations, and the theory of natural selection, to name just a few examples, are all continuations of the discussion that began in November 1676. Even today, the two men who met in the Hague stand for a choice that we all must make and have implicitly already made."

And a summary paragraph:

"... The two men who met in 1676 in fact represent a pair of radically different philosophical personality types who have always been part of the human experience. Spinoza speaks for those who believe that happiness and virtue are possible with nothing more than what we have in our hands. Leibniz stands for those convinced that happiness and virtue depend upon something that lies beyond. Spinoza counsels calm attention to our own deepest good. Leibniz expresses that irrepressible longing to see our good works reflected back to us in the praise of others. Spinoza affirms the totality of things such as it is. Leibniz is that part of us that ceaselessly strives to make us something more than what we are. Without doubt there is a little piece of each in everybody; equally certain is the fact that, at times, a choice must be made."

NB: Leibniz independently developed the calculus a bit later than Newton, and his notation won out eventually to become the one we use today. Spinoza the Jew who was excommunicated in his early 20s, has been credited with inspiring Thomas Jefferson and other Founders of the US Constitution in regard to the "establishment" clause and other key aspects of the constitution and bill of rights, as well as inspiring the perpetrators of the French Revolution, and the rest of the secular, liberal, democratic order of today.It's interesting to track these ideas back before 1776; which I don't recall my world history or philosophy classes ever having done. All this material from the book made The Pope's recent controversial statements about Islam reverberate loudly in my head. Nevertheless, caveat emptor is appropriate and one should perhaps have a look at some of the more negative reviews of this book as linked in the title of this entry. It may be that the scholarship is a bit lacking in this book, in the interests of spinning an entertaining tale.

Spinoza, Credited

A public radio show (Speaking of Faith) recently featured Rebecca Goldstein, author of a new book on Baruch Spinoza, "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity." It has reignited my interest in the original pantheist philosopher. I previously read his "Ethics", which I found pretty dense though intriguing.

It's amazing to me to see Spinoza credited as the inspiration for much of the enlightenment, inspiring the founders of the USA, and the separation of church and state, as a meme. To me, this is an incredible confluence of interests. The book has inspired quite a bit of commentary, including a review in the NYT. We recently passed the 350th anniversary of Spinoza's excommunication by the Jews of Amsterdam, around 28 July it seems. Spinoza was cited by Einstein as having defined a God with which he could identify. Spinoza's God is the God of Nature, or in Einstein's view, the God of natural law. It's easy to appreciate that this was taken to be blasphemous in the 17th century.

Though the book is not in our library so soon after its release, I did find another book that may be as good, and certainly is of great interest if one seeks to know and understand Spinoza: "The Heretic and the Courtier: Spinoza, Leibnitz, and the Fate of God in the Modern World", by Matthew Stewart. Not content to chronicle Spinoza alone, Stewart casts a spell by comparing two figures who could not be more different: Spinoza the optician and lens grinder by day and philospher by night; Leibnitz the polymath prodigy who defends religioin against the tide of Spinoza's thinking, all the while harboring strong sympathies for Spinoza. More when I finish it...