Heh

Nietzsche's Family Circus. Random combinations of Family Circus panels with Nietzsche quotes. Here's one that came up for me:

A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.

Update (Oct. 16): Here's another one.

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

Hymn to Life

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote music. Take a listen.



From here. The other day I told someone that Nietzsche's philosophy was his attempt to talk himself into enjoying hell.

Books!

I received a couple of gift certificates for a bookstore -- really, that's the best possible gift for me: not only is it books, but it's books I get to pick -- and I've already managed to spend most of it. Here are the titles I've bought:

Works of Aristotle, volume 2. This is part of an old series by Encyclopedia Britannica entitled Great Books of the Western World, with two volumes devoted to Aristotle. This second volume has the Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, the Athenian Constitution, Rhetoric, On Poetics, and the biological treatises (the History of Animals, On the Parts of Animals, On the Motion of Animals, On the Gait of Animals, and On the Generation of Animals). Yes, it's all available online, but I want to have them on my shelf as well. That way, when society collapses, I'll still have something to read.

Discourse on Metaphysics and Monadology by Leibniz. Two very short works. I didn't realize how short. All I've read of either one is parts of the Monadology since I reference it in my dissertation. These are also available online (the Discourse here, the Monadology here), as is nearly everything else I bought.

Principles of Human Knowledge & Three Dialogues by Berkeley. Never read, only read about. You can read the Principles here and the Dialogues here.

Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion by Hume. I've read this before but it's been a while. A couple of posts ago, I mentioned Dennett's claim that Dawkins's absurd argument against the existence of God is "as unanswerable" as when Hume presented it in the Dialogue. I don't think it's really the same argument, but I need to re-read it.

An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding by Hume. I've always seen it spelled "Enquiry" rather than "Inquiry" -- like here -- but that's what's on the cover of the copy I bought.

The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche. You can read it online here. This is the one book of Nietzsche's that I've never read at all. Well this and The Case of Wagner.

Twilight of the Idols & the Antichrist by Nietzsche. I've only read sections of both. You can read Twilight here and Antichrist here. I mentioned before that Twilight of the Idols has the greatest subtitle in history.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche. I've read many sections of this, but have never sat down and read the whole thing cover to cover. Online here.

Philosophy of Biological Science by David Hull. Hull is one of the most important philosophers of biology around (although he passed away a few years ago). This is the most recent philosophy book I bought, and it's about 40 years old.

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis. I gave my copy to my promoter after I defended my dissertation. Some may say that this shouldn't qualify as philosophy, since it's written by an outspoken Christian apologist. Obviously they haven't read it. Even though it's not in the public domain, it's available online here.

I also bought a book I used to have, but I loaned out and never got back: Letters from a Skeptic by Gregory Boyd and Edward Boyd. It's an interesting series of letters wherein Gregory Boyd tries to convert his father to Christianity, and is ultimately successful. Not that I agree with all of his explanations, in particular his defense of openness theology in order to explain the problem of evil. Like I wrote before, the oddity of openness theodicy is that in their attempt to solve the problem of evil, they produce the very worst theodicy possible. Despite this, Gregory Boyd's letters are very insightful and the book is well worth the read.

Also some science-fiction:
The Plot to Save Socrates by Paul Levinson.
Singularity Sky by Charles Stross.
The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley.

Heh

 

20 Terrible First Drafts of Famous Quotes.

Nietzsche?

Is that you?

Thought of the Day

I told my father that Nietzsche said God is dead. My father laughed, then said, "I don't think Nietzsche's going to win that particular fight."

My Vote for "Best Subtitle Ever, Ever"

How to Philosophize with a Hammer.

Time, Eternity, and Meaning

Great post by Bill Vallicella (Maverick Philosopher) on meaning and the passage of time in light of Nietzsche and Boethius. This part really got me:

The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity. To the moment I say, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.

This is very similar to the overall idea behind my ongoing attempt at writing a science-fiction novel, Kalypso's Envy. I haven't yet reached the point where I explain the title, but when I do it will make a very similar point to Vallicella's.

Update (April 3): I thought about this issue again recently. My son and I started walking around a restaurant near our apartment, and we did it over and over again. More to the point, my son wanted to do it exactly the same way each time: he held my hand while walking up the stairs at a particular point, would run halfway around the restaurant (which is round), then sat down on a curb. I sat next to him, he'd drape his arm over my leg, then jump up and run down a ramp, then around to where we started. Over and over. It occurred to me that by repeating the experience, he was trying to capture it in a way that experiences cannot be captured in time. He was trying to relive the experience, even though after reliving it, it would be gone once more. Indeed, this may be the motive behind the battle cry of the child: "Again!" I don't want the experience to be over, I want to continue experiencing it, I want to capture it, contain it, and keep it. So perhaps we are aware of the "temporal diaspora" as soon as we are able to think.

Then this got me thinking about rituals. In repeating certain things, we are participating, so we think, in something eternal, something which does not end. But we do not capture the experience, the experience captures us. Thus the temporal is subsumed into the eternal.

But that's not the whole story, since many rituals are repetitions of past events. Jewish Passover or Christian Communion are repeating events that took place at a particular place at a particular time. So how does this involve eternity? Perhaps it does not. But perhaps the original events were expressions of something eternal, and the repetitions are further participations in that eternal event. Passover is not just a meal repeating an earlier meal, it is repeating a meal that symbolizes the ancient Hebrews' emancipation. Communion, or the Lord's Supper , is not just repeating the Last Supper Jesus ate with his apostles. It symbolizes Christ's death, the bread and wine becoming, in some sense, his broken body and spilled blood: in Communion, the Christian participates in Christ's atoning death. Jesus died at a particular place at a particular time. Yet he is also "the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world". So time weaves itself into eternity -- and vice-versa -- in interesting ways.

Quote of the Day

Night had fallen on Death Valley, but for the three men sitting there on the edge of a cliff in the spring of 1975, the darkness was anything but inert. It was crackling with anticipation and with the electronic music of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontakte.

Soon, for each of them in different ways, it was also exploding with the ecstatic visions of their LSD tripping. Two of them, the younger Americans, had experienced acid before. For the third, a Frenchman in his late forties, the experience was novel and shattering. Two hours later he gestured toward the starry heavens: "The sky has exploded," he cried, "and the stars are raining down on me. I know this is not true, but it is the Truth."

The trip was enough of a gamble for the Americans. It was their idea, and they might have blown the fuses of the man they considered "the master thinker of our era." It was a far greater risk for Michel Foucault, world-famous philosopher, militant, and professor at the prestigious Collège de France, but one he undertook eagerly.

Ever since he was a young man, Foucault had been on the Nietzschean quest "to become what one is," or as Nietzsche had expressed it more strangely: "Why am I alive? What lesson am I to learn from life? How did I become what I am and why do I suffer from being what I am?" Foucault aimed to complete his quest through the ordeal of "limit experiences" (experiencing extremes in order to unleash creative forces and intense joy) and through the rediscovery of the "Dionysian element" in his personality (the wild, untamed animal energy within).

"It is forbidden to forbid," the notorious Sorbonne slogan had protested in 1968, reflecting Foucault's thought. That night in Death Valley he increased the stakes of his lifelong wager. He had always been fascinated with madness, violence, perversion, suicide, and death; now he wanted to liberate himself further by transgressing all boundaries.

Buffeted by a strong wind, the three men huddled together on the promontory. Foucault spoke again, tears streaming down his face: "I am very happy. Tonight I achieved a full perspective on myself. I now understand my sexuality. We must go home again."

Only Foucault's friends know the full story of that evening in Death Valley, but there's no question that it changed him -- especially his thinking on sexuality. It propelled him with reckless abandon into the doomed, midseventies San Francisco world of free sex, powerful acid, altered states of consciousness, and death from AIDS. Defiant in its openness, reckless in its conviviality, the homosexual world of Castro, Polk, and Folsom Streets had suddenly become one of the wildest, least inhibited sexual communities in history. For Michel Foucault, the lure was irresistible. Here was a nonstop testing ground rich in "limit experiences" for both body and mind.

To be fair, the dreaded term AIDS wasn't in currency in the seventies and was unknown to most people until film star Rock Hudson died of it in August 1984, just two months after Foucault himself. But the character and consequences of "the gay cancer" were slowly becoming undeniable, and Foucault faced the gamble openly.

"Should I take chances with my life?" a California student asked Foucault one day.

"By all means! Take risks, go out on a limb!" Foucault replied.

"But I yearn for solutions."

"There are no solutions," he said.

"Then at least some answers."

"There are no answers!" the philosopher exclaimed.

A Lost Wager
Foucault gradually came to associate death with pleasure, especially after surviving a brush with death back home in Paris. In a 1982 interview he said, "I would like and hope I'll die of an overdose of pleasure of any kind." Asked to explain, he added: "Because I think that the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn't survive it. I would die." He used to say, quoting Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, "It may be a basic characteristic of existence that those who know it completely would perish."

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault wrote, "The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for."

In the end, the character of his Faustian pact was unmistakable: "To die for the love of boys," he said. "What could be more beautiful?" There was, he believed, no more fitting climax to his work than the free embrace of a beautiful death. Was he courting AIDS and committing suicide? No, said his friends. In those last months before the dark plague came into the full light of day, Foucault and his partners wagered their lives and simply lost the wager.

"If I know the truth," Foucault had said in a revealing interview, "I will be changed. And maybe I will be saved. Or maybe I'll die, but I think that is the same for me anyway."

Truth Twisters with a Reason
The story of Michel Foucault's dark wager of death-for-pleasure opens up an important question for anyone exploring the quest for meaning. If it's so important to have a world-view, a philosophy of life, a set of governing beliefs, why aren't we conscious of it more often? Why don't people care more about it? Why do most people not seem to mind the "unexamined life" that Socrates thought was not worth living?

One obvious answer is that a dependable world-view is like good health. It's usually experienced most when it's talked about least. In the same way, philosophies of life that work well are those of which we're barely aware, like a pair of glasses we don't notice until they're dirty or scratched. We think with our world-view, not about it.

Another obvious answer is that many people are only too happy to leave such questions to others, especially to those whom society considers designated experts, such as priests, pundits, or psychologists.

But there's a deeper answer still. As many thinkers over the centuries have observed, human beings need a source of meaning and belonging, yet we also mount defenses against thinking and caring too deeply about the human condition -- and especially against the fact that we all will die.

"All but Death, can be Adjusted," wrote Emily Dickinson. "Any man who says he is not afraid of death is a liar," said Winston Churchill. The reason is obvious. Death is the fear behind all other fears, the endmost end beyond which there is no beginning. For all our limitless mental reach, our minds and imaginations are cased in finite, transient bodies. One moment we see a cloudless forever; the next we hear a rasping death rattle. Being human we know this, and being human we can do nothing about it.

The Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti knew well the absolute claim of time and death. When he reached thirty, he created No More Play, a sculpture portraying a field of graves and a meditation on the theme of death. When asked why he was a sculptor, he would often reply, "So as not to die." Yet nearing his end, he said: "I am convinced that nobody in the world believes he must die. Only an instant before death, he doesn't believe in it. How could he? He lives, which is fact, and everything in him lives, and still a fraction of a second before death he lives, and in no way can he be conscious of death."

So yes, we're "truth seekers," but that isn't the whole story. We're also "truth twisters." Sometimes truth is a matter of a serious search; sometimes it's an intellectual game -- played for a reason. "We all fear truth," Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo. "Humankind," as T. S. Eliot observed, "cannot bear very much reality." There's a threat in the trio of reality, time, and death that we instinctively seek to deny.

Os Guinness
Long Journey Home

The Oddity and Audacity of Openness Theodicy

Openness theology is a sort of halfway house between traditional Christian theology and process theology. Much of the motivation for it rests in its theodicy, the attempt to reconcile the occurrence of evil with the existence of an omnibenevolent God.

According to process theology, God is dependent on the world; as such, he is unable to directly cause any events, but can only "woo" free agents (free in the libertarian sense) to submit to his will. This absolves God of evil fairly easily: God doesn't stop evil because he can't. Such a view, however, can't be reconciled with Christianity, or even theism -- it's panentheistic rather than theistic. God cannot perform miracles, such as the creation of the universe or raising Jesus from the dead. It exchanges God's omnipotence for impotence.

Traditional Christian theology has claimed that God, being omnibenevolent, is not responsible for evil. Human beings, being free agents, are responsible for most of the evil that they experience. God, however, allows such evil, but then uses it to bring about good. Jesus' crucifixion is the paradigm for this: the one innocent human being that has ever lived was brutally tortured and executed. Yet, by his death, the human race is reconciled to God. In fact, this seems to suggest that the greater the evil, the greater the good that God can bring out of it.

Openness theologians and philosophers object to this scenario, since it would mean that God foreknows horrific evils and doesn't stop them. God knew the Holocaust would happen, recognized it as evil, and then let it happen anyway. By allowing evil to take place, God is culpable for it, and this is incompatible with his omnibenevolence. They consider this to be simply unacceptable. God must not know that evil will take place before it happens, and therefore he must not know anything before it happens. The future is "open". It is not already laid down for us in the divine mind. We are free to choose the evil or the good. Of course, traditional Christian theology says we are free as well, but openness theologians do not think this view of freedom is acceptable, partially, again, because it makes God bear much of the responsibility for evil.

But this raises enormous problems for openness theologians, not least of which is whether their theodicy really accomplishes what they think it does. First, although God may not know infallibly what will happen, does that mean that he has no idea whatsoever what the future holds? To deny this would seem absurd: human beings can often know what's going to happen before it actually does, and while this knowledge is certainly fallible, it still allows us to sometimes see evil approaching before it reaches us. Thus, openness theology does not deny that God may know with great probability what we will freely choose to do, he just doesn't know it with absolute certainty. But this raises the question, how often is God right? Wouldn't it be possible for God to know everything with such a high degree of probability that he's never wrong? If so, we're faced with the same problem of evil as traditional Christianity has wrestled with; if not, why not? If God's foreknowledge is not infallible, on what basis does the openness advocate determine the degree to which God can know our future free decisions?

So the openness theologian's claims would seem to suffer from the same critiques which he gave to traditional Christian theology: if God knows that a particular evil will probably transpire, why wouldn't he stop it? The only way out of this for the openness theologian that I can see is if every instance of evil goes against what God expected would probably occur. But surely this is preposterous; after all, Nietschze predicted that the twentieth century would be the bloodiest that humanity had ever seen, a prediction that was fulfilled. Would the openness theologian maintain that an atheist philosopher had more insight than God? (If so, the atheist philosopher would appear to be right. Perhaps Nietschze meant to say God is dumb instead of dead.) The point here is that human beings have some capacity to successfully prognosticate when bad things will happen, so it would seem absurd to deny God the same faculty. The difference is that God supposedly has greater motive and ability to intercede.

Even if God were surprised by every instance of evil, this would still leave openness theology with a less adequate theodicy than traditional Christian theology. After all, according to the latter, God allows specific instances of evil only to prevent greater evils or to produce good. In the openness view, God is surprised by specific instances of evil, has no purpose in allowing them to continue, but allows them to anyway. Openness theology claims it is completely implausible that God could have had morally sufficient reasons for allowing the Holocaust; it's more reasonable to think that God didn't know the Holocaust was going to happen. But if this is the case, why didn't God stop it once it started? Why didn't God intervene and stop the Holocaust when it first began instead of letting six million Jews be killed over several years? The traditional Christian theologian can claim that God had morally sufficient reasons for allowing the Holocaust. The process theologian can claim that God was incapable of stopping it. But the openness theologian must maintain that God had the capacity to stop the Holocaust, had no morally sufficient reason not to, but didn't anyway. In other words, their attempt to build a better theodicy has produced the very worst theodicy possible, short of maltheism.

Linkfest

-- Further steps towards curing cancer.

-- I remember claims in 2003 that Iraq may have sent WMDs and other material to Syria, but there is apparently a new chorus suggesting there is some evidence supporting it. Via Patterico.

-- More on private business in space.

-- This is just heartbreaking. A disturbingly large number of couples who go through incredible difficulties trying to get pregnant and are eventually successful with in-vitro fertilization, end up aborting the babies for "social reasons".

-- I hadn't heard this song in years, but after listening to it again I remembered something I thought about it when it was popular: the guitar solo is one of the clearest expressions of hell I've ever heard. I don't mean that it's a bad solo at all, I mean it expresses in audible form what I think a damned soul would feel.

-- Japan is testing a solar sail to see if a spacecraft can be propelled by the sun's rays. Photos at the link. Also, Japan's spaceship that landed on an asteroid several years ago, took samples, and then had difficulty returning to Earth ... has returned to Earth. Very cool.

-- The blogosphere is abuzz with the news that Afghanistan has immense mineral resources, trillions of dollars worth. I think this is a very good thing: the Afghanistan economy is based on non-perishable crops like opium, because they lack the infrastructure to make farming perishable goods profitable. This discovery would give them the ability to be economically independent, which in turn would give them the ability to be militarily independent. Of course, it will be years before the benefits will be realized, and there will undoubtedly be the danger of corruption.

-- Bill Vallicella has some great posts on Nietzsche of late. Start here, then go here, and then here. The latter post is only incidentally about Nietzsche, as it deals with a silly misconception of the Imago Dei doctrine, and two of the posts deal with the book Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief. And if you still need some more, read this.

Superman's Secret Identity

I was just re-reading my ridiculously long post on Nietzsche and realized something. Nietzsche makes a sharp distinction between the rational man and the intuitive man. The rational man lives his life by forcing everything into categories, allowing him to learn from mistakes so as not to make them again. This is unacceptable to Nietzsche for several reasons: first, classifying things like this would mean ignoring all the things about an experience that make it that particular experience and treating it as if it were the same as other experiences which are, by definition, different experiences. It is to ignore the uniqueness of each experience. Second, classifying things like this is motivated by fear: the fear of not being in control (by not being able to understand things), which amounts to a fear of life itself. It is the attempt to limit the effect life has on us. But you can't do this without also excluding the great joys that life offers as well. Thus, the rational man lives by fear, and lets this fear determine how he lives. He is afraid of life, running away from it. Third, classifying things like this can only be done if one accepts a Platonic/Christian worldview, which posits a world beyond the physical universe, a world of which the universe we experience is just a shadow or pale reflection. Nietzsche absolutely rejects such a worldview. Indeed, his philosophy is the working-out of the consequences of God's non-existence.

In contrast, the intuitive man -- the Übermensch (overman or superman) -- is the one who accepts life on its own terms, as it comes to him, not trying to understand it but just experiencing it, living it. He does not live negatively out of fear, but positively. This allows him to experience all the great joys that life has to offer. It also means that he will experience all the great pains and even horrors that life has to offer, and will never learn to avoid them -- in order to avoid them, he would have to learn from previous experiences not to do certain types of things, but that would mean classifying certain types of experience. Thus, the Übermensch rejects this, refuses to run away from life by living in fear, and allows himself to live life to its fullest.

But if that's the definition of the Übermensch -- someone who will not rationally think about things, will not try to understand things by comparing them with similar things in order to learn from them -- then a rather radical conclusion follows.

The Übermensch is ... Homer Simpson.

This can easily be verified by simply watching the Simpsons to determine for oneself that Homer exemplifies precisely these qualities.

So if you want to be a full-blooded Nietzschean, if you really want to reject the Platonic/Christian worldview, just be aware of what you're aspiring to. Homer Simpson: the ultimate realization of Nietzsche's philosophy.

Thus Spoke Cratylus

Below is a paper I wrote several years ago on Nietzsche’s essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’. The title, a takeoff on Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, refers to the ancient Greek philosopher Cratylus, a disciple of Heraclitus, and one of Socrates’ interlocuters. In Metaphysics 4.5 Aristotle wrote,

But the reason why these thinkers held this opinion is that while they were inquiring into the truth of that which is, they thought, ‘that which is’ was identical with the sensible world; in this, however, there is largely present the nature of the indeterminate—of that which exists in the peculiar sense which we have explained; and therefore, while they speak plausibly, they do not say what is true (for it is fitting to put the matter so rather than as Epicharmus put it against Xenophanes). And again, because they saw that all this world of nature is in movement and that about that which changes no true statement can be made, they said that of course, regarding that which everywhere in every respect is changing, nothing could truly be affirmed. It was this belief that blossomed into the most extreme of the views above mentioned, that of the professed Heracliteans, such as was held by Cratylus, who finally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his finger, and criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once.

I think if Cratylus, in a fit of inconsistency, tried to write down the philosophy that led him to forsake communication, it would be something very close to Nietzsche’s.
__________

The acumen of Nietzsche’s parable with which he begins his essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ rests in its definition of humanity as ‘clever beasts [which] invented knowing.’ One might first think that Nietzsche is stating that the clever beasts tricked themselves into thinking they knew something when they really did not; that their ‘knowledge’ about reality was incorrect. But this is not the case. Knowledge refers to some kind of objective information; even if it is information about the subject, it is about the subject qua object. If man’s ‘knowledge’ is false, it would imply that there might be correct knowledge, ‘truth,’ to be had, even if merely theoretic truth. But there is no such information. This does not mean that Nietzsche is a solipsist, but that what does exist is so radically different and discontinuous with man, that there is no way for him to ever come into contact with it. By saying that humanity invented knowing, Nietzsche is saying that there is no such thing as knowledge; that the dichotomy of true and false is illusory. The beliefs that plague humanity exactly parallel those that any other animal has: they have no corresponding object, and only reveal something about those who hold them.

The reason Nietzsche’s point is particularly brilliant is that he is taking Kant’s claim that man cannot know the noumena, the thing in itself, and then takes a step further back by applying this to the concept of knowledge itself. While claiming that man cannot know the object qua object does not necessarily mean that there is no object, when man looks for knowledge qua knowledge, the whole epistemological pursuit necessarily self-destructs, since it is by knowledge that he seeks it. Since he cannot know knowledge qua knowledge, Nietzsche necessarily concludes that there is no such thing.

Nietzsche then goes on to wonder how this belief in knowledge could have arisen from the intellect, an evolutionary adaptation, the only purpose of which is to help the individual survive and produce progeny. The answer is that the individual protects himself from others and the world by means of deception, since he does not have the capacity to do so by physical means. However it is not merely the deception of others, but his own deception as well. His dreams deceive him, but he does not object. He tricks himself into thinking he knows about the external world, when there is not anything to know. He thinks he knows himself, while nature is preventing him from having even the most rudimentary knowledge thereof.

One major point Nietzsche makes here is that man only employs his senses (which, themselves, are entirely untrustworthy) superficially to try to understand reality. Such exercises are only a ‘groping game on the backs of things,’ and man’s ‘eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see "forms."’ This is the beginning of Nietzsche’s direct assault on Plato’s doctrine that the sensible world is merely a shadow of the world of forms or ideas. Humankind has immersed itself in deception—man can never know things as they are, because there is nothing to know, so he only superficially looks at the information presented to him by his senses, and then tricks himself into believing that he has encountered reality; and in so doing, becomes completely enamored with his own excellence.

This gives rise to a very important conundrum: humanity finds itself in a state of constant deception and dissimulation. But given this state, how could man have a genuine desire for truth? Nietzsche’s answer is that humanity does not merely want survival, but fellowship with each other. Man is a social animal. Therefore, as Hobbes declared in Leviathan, the individual must make a kind of peace treaty with others in exchange for such fellowship—and such a treaty necessarily involves the establishing of ‘uniformly valid and binding designation(s),’ in order to achieve some kind of rapport with each other. Hence, the ‘truth’ is now what the herd has established, and the ‘liar’ is one who uses these appellations contrarily to their designations.

However, this is only a first step towards the desire for truth. Nietzsche shrewdly points out that one who behaves as a ‘liar’ will be excluded from the herd—not for lying, but for causing harm by means of lying. The point being that it is not the deception itself that is offensive, just the consequences. Similarly, man wants the truth as long as it is comfortable and safe, but if it is inconsequential or harmful he is apathetic or hostile towards it.

This is precisely where Nietzsche’s view of the nature of language comes in: he argues that language must have subjective reference in order for it to have any meaning to man. The phrase ‘the stone is hard,’ does not say anything about the stone itself, but about man’s subjective experience of the stone, since ‘hard’ does not refer to something in the external world, but to man’s encounter with an object. Here, Nietzsche seems to be saying that if language had no subjective reference, it would not make sense to man as subject, because it would not have any connection to him; but insofar as language has a subjective reference, it cannot be considered to be describing objective reality, and hence, cannot be considered to be truth. Truth would be for language to describe the noumena, the ‘thing in itself.’ But this is simply impossible. Man can only describe things as they come into contact with him, and the consequent relationship determines his understanding thereupon. Language does not describe things: it describes man’s relationship with and perception of things.

Nietzsche goes on to further remove language from objective reality, by arguing that it is even discontinuous with man’s perception itself. He points out the fact that most, if not all, words are totally arbitrary designations. Even in the case where they are not, they simply take their cue from another designation, and this process itself is entirely arbitrary.[1] Many languages assign gender to objects, but it is difficult to see this as reflecting any objective reality. The fact that there are different languages makes this point evident. Nietzsche is once again arguing against Platonism here, particularly the position Plato takes in Cratylus. The only way to avoid this is through rigid application of the laws of logic, which Nietzsche dismisses as ‘tautologies’ and ‘empty husks’; that is, these laws do not reveal anything that is not already contained within the concept.

He further illustrates this by pointing out that the spoken word is merely ‘the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus,’ and any inference to an external cause is an invalid application of the principle of sufficient reason (contra Schopenhauer, whom he more often agrees with). He states that there are two unjustifiable inferences made in the process of language: first, a nerve stimulus is translated into an image; second, the image is translated into a sound. But there can be no connection between these three spheres. To ‘translate’ a nerve stimulus into an image, or an image into a sound, means to make one thing into something entirely different and other than what it is. He illustrates this by asking if someone who is deaf can understand the experience of hearing when sound is ‘translated’ into touch (vibrations) or sight. The obvious answer is: no. When translated thus, it ceases to be sound. Similarly, when man translates an image into a sound, it ceases to be an image, and consequently has no relationship to the image. Thus, Nietzsche calls these translations ‘metaphors’ and ‘illusions,’ and elsewhere in this essay, he refers to them as ‘lies.’ The word-symbol used to designate an object has no logical relation with the thing in itself, not being derived from its essence; and hence, everything the scientist and philosopher build on the content of language, i.e., concepts, is straw.

Nietzsche thus broadens his assault to include concepts themselves. He argues that conceptualizing necessarily involves classification: making the commonalities shared between individual entities preeminent and definitive, while disregarding the differences as trivial. But, Nietzsche points out, the differences are the only thing man actually experiences. He does not encounter ‘the’ leaf, he encounters countless individual leaves, not one being exactly the same as another. He then disregards all the unique properties of all of these experiences, and classifies them according to their commonalities. But, in this process, man has done two things: first, he has equated things which are not equal. He has chosen to ignore those aspects which made them unique, which simply means that he has made them what they are not. He sees two leaves, and calls them such; but in so doing, he has taken two things which are not the same and claimed that they are. Second, he has created a concept that does not resemble any particular example of which it is supposed to be the archetype. Once again, he is arguing against Plato’s doctrine of the Forms. He uses this to not only mock Plato, but ‘Platonism for the masses,’ by suggesting that if all of the individual leaves are copied from an original, it would imply that the ‘counterfeiter’ is incompetent, since none of them are accurate representations.

While the example of the leaf is perfectly in line with Plato’s philosophy, it is not the most evident example. When an individual sees a leaf, he does not tend to instinctively infer a larger reality of which it is merely a representation. Thus, in order to attack Plato head on, Nietzsche further illustrates his critique with a clearer example: honesty. This is a more lucid example than the leaf because when man encounters someone behaving honestly, he tends to see this as representative of something about that individual; that is, he believes the particular act of honesty he witnesses is a manifestation of a larger reality, namely, a character trait. But, Nietzsche says, this is precisely the lie that man tells himself. He has individual encounters of people behaving honestly, none of which are the same, and then invents a trait called ‘honesty’ which he then claims is not only the commonality between these encounters, but is actually the cause of this behavior in the first place. He has invented an unseen and obscure property, and claimed that it is the reality, instead of the actual experience.

Nietzsche even applies this to the distinction between individual and species, that is, the difference between experience and the categories under which man classifies them. However, he quickly qualifies this: to say this distinction is not part of the world itself would be just as dogmatic as saying in fact that it is. This, I think, shows the primary weakness in his argument: his claim is that our concepts (the species) do not reflect the real world at all, and the linchpin is that by inferring the species via the observation of the individual, man leaves behind his actual observations for a hidden concept. But Nietzsche recognizes that he would be contradicting himself to say that the distinction between species and individual itself actually reflects the essence of the way things are: not only because he has already argued that man cannot approach the way things really are, but because this distinction is itself a concept. Thus, he finds himself, for consistency’s sake, having to point out that this distinction cannot be said to represent reality. But since his whole argument depends on this distinction—that by focusing on the species, man misses the individual, and exchanges his experience for an imaginary world—he also points out that it cannot be said to not do so. However, to make this point at this juncture is arbitrary, since the same thing could have been said of any step in the argument. This inconsistency parallels how Nietzsche’s denial of metaphysics led him to affirm the doctrine of the eternal return—which is itself profoundly metaphysical.

Truth, therefore, is ‘a sum of human relations, … illusions which we have forgotten are illusions … the duty to lie according to a fixed convention.’ But, this still does not explain how man could ever desire ‘truth’ in sincerity. In order to do so, Nietzsche must couple what has been said thus far with what is, essentially, a case of collective amnesia. Man has grown so accustomed to this scenario, that he participates therein unconsciously. A subjective standpoint is established in order for people to coexist, and it is soon mistakenly thought to represent an objective standpoint. This is precisely how these clever beasts obtain a drive for ‘truth’: man feels morally obligated to acknowledge the traditional arbitrary designations. But, as has already been noted, these designations are removed from the individual and unique experiences that the individual has actually had. Hence, he governs his life according to abstractions, rather than experiences. He is supposed to let these abstractions guide him, rather than be ‘carried away’ by sudden impressions—that is, actual experiences—and thinks, in so doing, that he is being ‘rational.’ This is the first step toward the creation of an entirely different world than the one in which man really lives, a project that is distinctively human. Man is trying to impose an order on the world that does not exist in order to make it easier for him to endure. He does not realize that he is just using the agreed-upon symbols in order to avoid exclusion from the herd.

Now that man has these abstractions, Nietzsche says, he can arrange them into whatever order he wants; subordinating one to another or vice versa. He can then use this invented schematization to create laws and systems and castes to further itself, and further remove himself from his actual experiences. In fact make itself seem ‘more solid, more universal, better known, and more human’ than the latter, or in other words, make itself seem more real. But of course, this is a complete illusion; it is a ‘crap game.’[2] Nevertheless, Nietzsche points out, it is a particularly brilliant maneuver: men are geniuses of construction who have built ‘an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water.’ Such construction requires great ingenuity. It is like a spider’s web in that its parts are simultaneously malleable and strong. And yet, the spider builds his web out of given material; the bee builds his hive with that which he collects from nature. Man, however, does not merely construct his edifice, but actually invents the material he uses in the construction itself.

However, Nietzsche takes away with one hand what he has offered with the other. The ‘material’ with which man constructs his tower of Babel is simply the result of anthropomorphic thinking, which, of course, has nothing to do with reality. Concepts have no reference beyond man, they are merely the ‘residue of a metaphor.’ Man is classifying and constructing a world out of human interests. He is trying to make the world seem more like himself, because he has a powerful need to feel as if he belongs in it. He wants to be a part of the world, so it would only seem reasonable that he can apply the terms of his own existence thereupon. Man sees the universe either as a person par excellence, or as having such a person behind it. This leads to an interesting twist: the traditionalists, with their attempts to know objective reality as it is in itself, independent of themselves, are the ones who have made man the measure of all things. But they err in that they have mistaken their experience with actual objects, with things in themselves, and have forgotten that they are merely metaphors.

Thus far, Nietzsche has engaged in criticism or deconstruction. At this point, he begins to propound his own view of these matters. Man’s forgetfulness that the world is a metaphor is the forgetfulness that he is the one who created the metaphor in the first place. The fact that man has crafted the world as an artist according to his instincts of survival and community implies that he can craft it according to more appropriate ends: he must take into account aesthetics. This is a point which forms the basis for much of Nietzche’s later philosophy. Man is to create the world he wants, while holding before his mind all the while that it is his creation. As soon as he forgets this, he has slipped back into the lie of believing that his creations actually correspond to things in themselves, and hence, are true. The Übermensch is the one who can accept this scenario, and thus live life on its own terms. After the lion destroys the world that has been deeded to him, he is free to metamorphosize into the child who simply plays, by creating and then destroying for no external purpose.[3] It does not take anything into account other than aesthetics.

By contrast, the man who is unable to accept this scenario is the philosopher who has effected his own survival ‘only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid.’ This was not done primarily for aesthetic purposes, but in order to survive and commune with others. He refuses to live life on its own terms, and instead tries to tame it. Precisely by creating the world of concepts in order to sustain his own life, he denies life. The phraseology in Nietzsche’s quote above illustrates the contempt he has for this process, a contempt which is further demonstrated by his referring to this process as the ‘dissolv[ing of] an image into a concept’ which itself is ‘less colorful’ and ‘cooler’ than that of which it is supposedly the archetype.

However, this is not meant to imply that Nietzsche does not understand how this situation came about. It is the desire to live with ‘repose, security, and consistency.’ To deny the world of concepts requires one to not only give up all security and constancy, but to destroy their self-consciousness.

Nietzsche then builds on a claim he made at the beginning of his essay: since all animals perceive that the universe revolves around them, perceptions only reveal something about the one who experiences them, and thus, these perceptions have no corresponding object. Even if humankind had the strength to admit this fact, it would only lead man to ask which animal has the correct perspective. Nietzsche destroys this from both sides: first of all, in order to determine the correct perspective, one would have to have some kind of independent perspective by which he could judge them all. But this is unintelligible. How can one have a perspective independent of perspectives? Such a vantage point is simply unavailable. Thus, when man tries to move from himself to the world, he fails.

Second, when he tries to move from the world to himself, he fails again, since these are two different universes. The world is an entirely different realm than man, and between the two no information can flow. It is not that humankind has not yet discovered a way to move from one to the other, but that such movement is nonsensical. The question Nietzsche has been implicitly asking throughout this essay is, what would it mean to know the thing in itself, apart from experience? This question makes no sense. In order for man to know something, he has to experience it. Knowledge presupposes experience. It is basically asking, what would the experience of something which man does not (and cannot) experience be like? The only way for man to have ‘knowledge’ is by experiencing something—and this means that such knowledge is not of the thing itself, but of man’s experience of and relationship with it. Since man’s knowledge is based on his subjectivity, it cannot be said to have anything in common with the object he is supposedly encountering. ‘Truth’ would be knowledge of the noumena, the thing in itself, knowing it in its objectivity. But this is simply a contradiction in terms. There is no causal link between these two domains. One cannot express itself in the other.

Where does this leave man? There is still ‘a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue—for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force.’ There is, in other words, an aesthetic relationship between these two spheres. ‘Aesthetic’ because it involves free invention or creation, which is precisely the role Nietzsche sees for the superman: the ability to live life on its own terms. Man creates his own sphere and forces it to mediate between himself and the world. However, it would be a mistake to think that this mediation actually enables him to make contact with the world. Man has created this sphere; it is not an invention, it is a work of art, the purpose of which is to please, not to accomplish an external goal. The lie is that man has forgotten this is the way things stand with him. He has spent so much time looking at the same work of art, that it has hardened and congealed in place. The lie has been repeated so often that it has the same status as if it actually established a causal relation between ourselves and the world. Man has mistaken his creation for something it is not, in much the same way that a dream can be mistaken for reality.

At this point, Nietzsche changes his focus to another audience. He recognizes that the last step before one achieves his philosophy is the positivism which the natural sciences promulgate.[4] So he addresses those who hold this view, by broadening his assault to include the scientist as well as the philosopher. He begins by stating that those who are familiar with the objections he has made thus far obviously reject any sort of idealism, and instead embrace what they perhaps consider to be the only alternative: ‘the eternal consistency, omnipresence, and infallibility of the laws of nature.’ This is the view that science (or, perhaps, ‘Science’) will continue excavating a reality which is completely consistent with itself, and shows forth no hint of the anthropomorphic thinking Nietzsche has thus far condemned. Such faith is reasonable, for, unlike idealism, it is strikingly discontinuous with man’s imagination, and therefore is unlikely to be a product thereof.

Nietzsche’s response is to ask what the positivist means by the ‘laws’ or ‘regularity’ of nature. He has no experience of such laws; he only has experiences of their (alleged) effects, and infers a larger reality of laws behind them. Nor can he infer any particular law in isolation, since he only experiences the supposed effects of such a law in its relation to other laws, and thus as a collection of relations, which only refer back to each other. Such a construction is particularly reminiscent of the edifice of concepts, although, in this case, it is more closely based on experience. These laws are simply the medium through which humanity perceives things. What if, Nietzsche asks, each individual experienced things differently? Would this not render the community impossible? What would it mean to ‘lie with the herd’ if each man did not even have the same experience to lie about? At the very least, he would not perceive the world as regular or law-like; rather, ‘nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree.’

Obviously, man does not experience nature in such a way; he experiences it in ways common to all, and this is precisely what allows humankind to be communal animals. But the positivist has mistaken these common paths of experience with reality itself, instead of recognizing it as just a part of humanity’s collective makeup. These paths allow him to unify that which is divergent. All of these laws are based on the imposition of mathematical precision on the world via the representations of time and space. But, as Kant pointed out a century earlier, time and space are simply the nets which man cannot help but throw over the world in order to comprehend it. Man is unable to understand anything divorced from these media, so it is not particular impressive that he perceives everything in accordance with them. ‘All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical process, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things.’ Through science, man tries to investigate the world mathematically; but the concept of number is not something in the world, but is merely in man’s experience. Thus, man’s amazement with the laws and regularity of nature is simply amazement with himself. The edifice of concepts is only made possible because of the edifice already constructed ‘by the firm persistence of these original forms.’ Idealism, in other words, is an imitation of positivism, in that it copies the latter’s use of metaphors (in this case, time, space, and number) in order to construct a world.

However, in another sense, it is positivism which copies idealism, since it is simply ‘filling in’ the cells of the great edifice composed of concepts, just as the bee fills the cells of his hive with honey. To be sure, it does not accept this edifice on its own terms. It certainly renovates. But to renovate a building is not to create a new one in its place. The positivist/scientist thus modifies the structure, remodels the schematization, and reforms the caste system, in order to bring it up to code; that is, in order to bring it into agreement with the empirical—the anthropomorphic—world. The scientist works with concepts, derived from language, just as the philosopher does. Both seek to remove themselves from life by constructing a shelter from the continuous hail of powers that oppose the ‘truth’ they have created.

Thus far, Nietzsche has explicated the human condition, and scorned those who would seek to escape it. Rather, humankind should embrace the creative nature of life, and live in consonance with it. In the past man has created metaphors and mistaken them for reality. The solution is not and cannot be to stop creating such metaphors, since this is the ‘fundamental human drive.’ The tyranny of concepts, which has forbidden man from creating new metaphors, does not in any way lessen this drive. Man must instead find a new way to express this drive, and this is done, Nietzsche says, in myth and art. The reason these channels are better suited to the formation of metaphors than concepts, is because they have no pretense to constancy. Instead of capturing experiences and subordinating them under abstract rubrics—where they sit and grow stale, tasteless, and tepid—myth and art focus on the exhilaration, the color, the sharpness of the experiences themselves; and as soon as the focus begins to dull and the colors become less bright, they immediately change the view.

Of course, this also entails leaving behind the constancy, regularity, and reliability which the conceptual framework has afforded. The metaphors of myth and art do not allow coherence or results, since there is no regularity upon which one can rely in order to achieve them. Instead, the world will be like a dream. Not a fulfilled wish, but a dream, where there is no assurance from one moment to the next of any kind of stability. In a sense, preferring myth and art to reason and concepts is a matter of preferring the dreaming life to the waking life. Art awakes this possibility, and this is why the positivist sees value elsewhere (in scientific inquiry). Myth captures it even more beautifully, since it creates a world where anything can happen. Nietzsche mentions some of the incredible motifs of Greek mythology, and one hardly need catalogue the tales of the gods’ deceptions in order to see how the waking life of one who lives in such a world would be like a dream: chaotic, unpredictable, untamable, colorful, intense, and brilliant. ‘All of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes.’

There are, essentially, two conflicting and irreconcilable drives waging battle within man. One is to create, to accept life as it comes and glory in it. The other is to effect one’s own safety, to run away from life; or at the very least, tame it so that it can no longer cause harm. The bravery of the former contrasts with the cowardice of the latter, which is based on the fear of misfortune, and seeks to minimize the experience thereof. To this end, it dulls life, by denying experience and upholding concepts as ‘reality.’ Of course, the same medium which makes possible this experience of misfortune which the philosopher and scientist so desperately seek to avoid, also makes possible the experience of overwhelming elation. ‘The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions.’ Man cannot cancel out one without simultaneously canceling out the other. By neutralizing misfortune, he has neutralized elation, and neutered life. The fear of misfortune holds the pursuit of elation hostage.

Nietzsche ends his essay with another parable which sets these two drives against each other in the form of two men. As the rational man lacks artistry and fears the intuitive man, so the intuitive man lacks rationality and has nothing but contempt for the rational man. One cannot choose both reason and art; they are mutually exclusive. One must choose whether to govern his life by abstractions or by experiences; he must choose between concepts and creating. Both men seek to conquer life, but by different means; the rational man by seeking to minimize its effect, the intuitive man by embracing it, by living it. He glories in the dissimulation, the deception which art and myth make possible. While one cowers in the face of life, the other ‘play(s) with seriousness.’

Both also seek to avoid misfortune, but again, by different means. The intuitive man ‘reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption’; in other words, he seeks to avoid misfortune positively, by pursuing elation. Of course, this means that he experiences misfortune more often, and that when he does, it is more intense, since he lacks any method for avoiding or minimizing it. ‘He does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch. He is then just as irrational in sorrow as he is in happiness: he cries aloud and will not be consoled.’ The rational man, on the other hand, seeks to avoid misfortune negatively, by running away from it. Instead of a human face, subject to the distortions which misfortune wreaks, he wears a mask, unaffected by circumstances.

Thus, both employ deception. However, the intuitive man does so in his elation, the rational man in his misfortune.

Notes:
[1] Nietzsche’s example of this is how the German word Schlange (snake) is derived from the verb schlingen (to wind or twist), a connection which could have been made to many other things, and which only arbitrarily selects one aspect of the object in question.
[2] I have to believe that Nietzsche would fully appreciate the double entendre this phrase captures in modern English.
[3] ‘Of the Three Metamorphoses’, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
[4] ‘How the "True World" Finally Became a Fable’, in Twilight of the Idols.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Size Doesn't Matter (thank God), part 1

Contemporary western culture is dominated by the "conflict thesis", the claim that science and religion are at war, and that religion (or at least Christianity) is losing. The latter claims that human beings are the pinnacle of creation, but science has revealed that we are merely animals evolved from simpler forms of life, which in turn were just the product of matter and energy acting upon each other, all of which occupies an insignificant dot in an insignificant location in an infinite universe. Nietzsche illustrates this perspective well with the parable with which he opens his brilliant essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense":

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.

To think we have any significance or value in light of this is essentially to stick your fingers in your ears, shake your head, and say, "La la la la, I can't hear you!"

One of the elements in this metanarrative is the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, only discovered in the modern scientific era, and the infinitesimal size of the earth in comparison. This renders absurd any suggestion that human beings, occupying only a speck of dust in a cosmic sandstorm, are special, showing (once again) that contemporary science has refuted Christianity. Or so the story goes.

This view is expressed well by Douglas Adams' Total Perspective Vortex and Monty Python's Galaxy Song. I was going to embed the latter, but since there are some, shall we say, improprieties therein, I decided to go with a different song that expresses this sentiment in a more family-friendly fashion.



Unfortunately (at least for some), there are multiple problems with the conflict thesis in general, and with the claim regarding the spatial insignificance of the earth in particular. Regarding the latter, everyone, of course, feels a sense of insignificance when faced with the vastness of the cosmos. This is universal, although some ages and cultures feel it more intensely than others. But before it can made into an argument against Christianity, several further questions must be answered. For example, why would something's value or importance be connected to its size? Does Christianity actually teach that humanity is the most important thing in the universe? If so, does it tie this to a belief that the universe is small and the earth the largest thing in it? Is it really only with modern science that we've discovered the universe's immensity, and thus the disparity between it and ourselves? In the remainder of this post I'll be addressing this last question from the side of science.

-- The impression that the universe dwarfs us is based on a sort of common sense view of measurement. But a couple of years ago James made a very important point about this issue. He compared human beings to the smallest and largest things in the universe; that is, he used the exponential scale which is precisely the standard of measurement which physicists employ. When this is done, it reveals that human beings are actually closer to the larger end of the scale than the smaller end. The smallest is the Planck length at 10^-35 meters, and the largest is the universe itself, at about 10²⁵ meters. "So comparing our absolute size to the smallest and biggest possible things in the universe, we are about three fifths of the way up the scale. In other words, we are of medium to large size using the exponential scale, the only scale that makes any sense in physics."

Of course, one could simply reject this standard of measurement as having any relevance to the issue. If one does, however, then one would have to reject the argument under discussion as well: for it depends on the claim that modern science has demonstrated our spatial insignificance. You cannot make this claim while rejecting the very method of measurement actually used by the sciences in question.

-- Another scientific point involves the Anthropic Principle. One of the characteristics I mentioned in this post is that the universe's mass density must be precisely what it is in order for life to be possible anywhere at any time in the universe's history. The mass density is the amount of matter in the universe. The velocity with which the matter and energy created in the Big Bang burst outward was precisely governed by the universe’s mass density, since the more mass there is, the more gravity would slow down the expansion, matter being what gravity acts upon. If the universe's mass density were different by one part in 10⁶⁰, life could never exist at any place and at any time in the universe's history. In other words, if the universe was just a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth smaller or larger than it is -- an amount equal to "about a tenth part of a dime" according to the link above -- the universe’s velocity would either have overpowered gravity, or it would have been overpowered by gravity. The first case would have prevented the matter from being collected into stars and galaxies. The second case would have resulted in the universe collapsing back in on itself. Either way, life would have been impossible anywhere at any time in the universe. So in order for life to be possible on our dust speck of a planet, the universe must be precisely the size that it is.

Of course, some people will insist that this is not enough. Just because every piece of matter had some relevance to the universe's initial expansion, it does not have any connection to our existence now -- and this calls into question any view that sets up the earth and humanity as significant. In other words, unless every rock, planet, star, and galaxy in the universe is always and only there for our benefit, Christianity (somehow) cannot be true.

But what exactly is being asked here? Given the necessary fine-tuning of the universe's mass density, the matter making up these rocks, planets, stars, and galaxies had to be there. To ask why they're still there is to ask why God didn't destroy them once they served their initial purpose. In other words, it is to expect God to destroy the evidence of what he has done. This is problematic on several levels, not least of which is that if God did do this, the same people who raise this objection would obviously be pointing to the lack of evidence for God. So it seems that no matter what he does -- whether he keeps the matter there as a testimony to his actions or whether he destroys it once it has served this purpose -- they will use it as an argument against his existence. I may come back to this in future installments.

-- Alexandre Koyré argues in From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe that there is an element to modern cosmology that is lacking in its ancient and medieval counterparts. Regardless of how big they thought the universe to be, they clearly believed it to be finite. But modern science has, according to Koyré, demonstrated that the universe is infinite. The reason this is significant is because moving from one finite size to another is not the same as moving from a finite size to an infinite one. Regardless of how large the ancients and medievals conceived the universe to be, there is a difference in kind involved here, and this is the significant aspect of modern cosmology that refutes the ancient and medieval cosmology. "Let us not forget, moreover, that, by comparison with the infinite, the world of Copernicus is by no means greater than that of mediaeval astronomy; they are both as nothing, because inter finitum et infinitum non est proportio. We do not approach the infinite universe by increasing the dimension of our world. We may make it as large as we want: that does not bring us any nearer to it."

I will not contest here Koyré's claim that an infinite universe is a different type of thing than a finite one, and as such, would represent a complete change of our view of the cosmos as well as ourselves. On this score, C. S. Lewis agrees: in The Discarded Image (a text to which I'll be returning) he argues that there is a radical difference between believing in a distant horizon and believing in no horizon at all.

Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest -- trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The 'space' of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.

This explains why all sense of the pathless, the baffling, and the utterly alien -- all agoraphobia -- is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky. Dante, whose theme might have been expected to invite it, never strikes that note. The meanest modern writer of science-fiction can, in that department, do more for you than he. Pascal's terror at le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis never entered his mind. He is like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea.

Perhaps, then, one could argue that since an infinite universe presents us with an object in which the mind cannot rest, this sense of "agoraphobia" that it produces entails a greater sense of insignificance than any finite universe could convey; and hence a greater assault on humanity's dignity. However, Lewis argues to the contrary: an infinite universe would have no absolute standard of measurement, only relative standards. But a finite universe would have both absolute and relative standards of measurement.

The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our [infinite] universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything -- and so what? But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison. ... The word 'small' as applied to Earth thus takes on a far more absolute significance.

Koyré argues that modern science requires a complete overhaul of our view of the cosmos and our place in it because we have discovered that the universe is infinite. The irony is that, even before Koyré wrote this, Einstein's relativity equations and Edwin Hubble's observations of the expansion of the universe indicated something different. Today Big Bang cosmology has established that the universe is spatially and temporally finite. It began to exist a particular time ago, and has a finite size. In this sense at least, the ancient/medieval cosmology has been exonerated. Whether Lewis is right to describe it as "unimaginably large" will be the subject of the next installment.

Update (11 Aug): (see also part 2 and part 3)

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Thought of the Day

Nietzsche said, "Anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger".
Nietzsche went insane.