Interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician Ross Simonini with 47 thoughts on the glory of looking– and living– beyond a specialty…
1. I was raised to believe that I was made to do one thing. Find that one pursuit that fills my life with meaning and empty all my energy into it. This is the realization of human potential: to excel with rigorous focus on a refined lifelong mission. This and only this will bring us to our greatest success and fulfillment.
For me, this was not something I even had to be told—though I was, many times, by many people—because I implicitly understood that this kind of teleology was woven into the fibers of my world. I also knew that rejecting a singular pursuit would be an insult to my very existence. Without this unifying reason for being alive, I would wander aimlessly into the barren void of nihilism. I’d heard about great artists who refused to create, who stepped away from their work to fritter away their time on leisure, and I knew this was a life of tragedy.
Likewise, I understood that sliding your attention across interests is a way to waste your gift. The more hours you put into a skill, the more skilled you become—right? To treat your gift with the proper deference, you must exhaust yourself into it.
Within this paradigm, the most unfortunate people are those who do not have a single, clear vocation. These types float from job to job without a trajectory; they are vagabonds who have given up on greatness.
This may sound a little dramatic, but somewhere inside me, these beliefs are there—and as a lifelong generalist, I spend every day rubbing up against them.
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16. Let’s talk about mastery. Everyone wants to be a master, even if they are disgusted by the monstrous implications of the word. Mastery suggests dominance over something, but every true master knows that they are merely a supplicant at the mercy of their field, which existed long before them and will exist long after them. Anyone who believes in their own mastery likely suffers from hubris. Work hard enough at something and you watch your dominance slip ever further away.
Mastery is an illusion, a notion of a fictional purity that cannot be understood or measured in terms of time. Just look at those young savants who excel wildly after only a few years spent on their craft. For them, mastery cannot be the result of time plus work, as we all assume it is. In fact, maybe the newness of their skills is precisely what gives their work its value.
But these little wonders are exceptions, right? The rest of us have to dedicate our lives to something to achieve greatness, and anyone who doesn’t do this will likely be middling in their work. Most writers I know are immediately suspicious when an actor publishes a novel. We delight in calling the person a moonlighter. Literature is our territory, and the only way to live here is to put in the time and labor.
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24. Isaiah Berlin, the political theorist, ethicist, philosopher, and historian, wrote a book called The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which he divides people into two types: hedgehogs, who see the entire world through one big thing, and foxes, who see the world as many things that cannot be reduced. According to Berlin, hedgehogs include Plato, Dostoyevsky, and Proust, while foxes include Aristotle, Shakespeare, and James Joyce.
“Everything I learned in my life, I learned because I decided to try something new,” said David Lynch (musician, filmmaker, painter, lamp maker, sculptor, writer, actor, and lecturer, mostly on meditation).
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29. Sometimes history hides generalism to preserve a specialized agenda. Isaac Newton, a figure whom we consider the father of modern math, physics, and reasoned thinking, was also a dedicated alchemist. Alchemy, a generalist practice in itself, was a precursor to modern chemistry. It involves spirituality, myth, belief, and metallurgy, but its inclusion of belief stands in direct conflict with the scientific rationalism Newton now represents. Subsequent generations of historians and scientists buried Newton’s dedication to the occult, willfully ignoring the blow it deals to their obsessive, single-minded materialism. But Newton’s own records tell a different story. He wrote over a million words on alchemy in his lifetime, and his study of the subject helped inspire some of his most paradigm-shifting discoveries.
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31. A filmmaker must understand aspects of sound design, photography, storytelling, music, acting, props, environment, finance, writing, and dialogue. In this way, some jobs are naturally suited to the generalist. A skilled homemaker, for example, understands everything from cooking to cleaning to healing to sociology. Acting, too, is a fairly generalist vocation. The practice of writing, what I am doing right now, is extremely broad, without consistent subject matter, form, or even mediums.
Generalism can be an approach of the neophyte or of the seasoned worker. Some entry-level positions (assistant, secretary, intern) are, in fact, compilations of micro-jobs, and some high-level positions— managers, CEOs, directors, business owners, presidents—are positions of vast, nonspecific oversight. Sometimes the highest perch has the widest perspective.
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39. A generalist must engage with both sides of any argument: skepticism and belief, optimism and pessimism. So, for this essay, it would only be right to take a look at the dark side of generalism and the side effects of adopting it as a whole-life philosophy.
The glaring danger of general thinking in its extreme form is relativism, a sort of mushy non-position in which there are no universal standards: nothing can ever be condemnable or universally wrong. At the most dramatic levels, relativism might dismiss murder and genocide. It’s a slippery slope of open-mindedness.
Likewise, a generalist must contend with political centrism. In our bifurcated world, the center is one of the most reviled of all political positions, and a generalist will come to understand whether their own centrism is an evasion of choice or a refusal of unpalatable options.
Few things are more torturous than making decisions, and a mind will do anything to avoid such a relentlessly complex activity. Adherence to these vague philosophies, as I see them, can certainly be used as an excuse for escaping commitment. As a generalist, I must stay vigilant against this kind of laziness of mind and instead allow many fierce, contrary ideas to exist at once.
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42. Generalism is not a thing. It’s definitely not an ism or some kind of doctrine. The general approach defies the nature of ideologies, which are characterized by the limits they place on understanding the world. There is no system of generalism. The general philosophy is to love variety.
For this reason, generalists don’t exist—not in the way that, say, Marxists do—because they can’t identify as generalists. I can call myself intra-, cross-, multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary—which, for some, are all legitimate and distinct prefixes—but that does more to distinguish and alienate me from others than to connect me with a community. There is no lineage of generalists, as there is for microbiologists or flutists, because every generalist works with their own complex bouquet of interests.
Probably this whole essay is my attempt to give a sense of unity to my life. Maybe I have to write a manifesto on “the art of doing many things”because I fear that if our culture doesn’t have a catchy keyword for my role, I’ll just fade away. So here I am, reducing generalism to a single, branded snap, just like a specialist.
After all, generalists are, in moments, great specialists. Likewise, a deep specialist can approach their niche from an ever-growing number of perspectives. A man with a repetitive job can endlessly engage with his work from fresh angles. And, of course, it’s all relative. A single task looked at from another angle is a plentiful cornucopia of individuated micro-tasks.
Some long-term generalists focus exclusively on a single activity for a number of years before moving on to the next. Rather than doing many things simultaneously, they do them sequentially.
Pure generalism and pure specialism are just intellectual games. Our minds drift between unified oneness and individuality without ever settling into either. Binary thinking is for computers.
These two states of being are not roles we need to inhabit but rather nodes to be considered. One situation requires diligent focus, but another benefits from a more diffuse form of attention. Certain qualities of engagement can occur only when you do multiple things at once. This is the value of the glance.
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47. Generalism is not the opposite of specialism. It includes specialism. Everyone gets to experience both. Or maybe both approaches lead to the same place. Maybe the study of quantum physics brings a mind to the same conclusions as basketry. Maybe it’s like meditation: You can sit in open awareness and experience everything until you reach an unprejudiced understanding of life. Or you can unflinchingly focus on a single mantra for decades, repeating it with each breath, and as you plunge deeper toward a single infinite point, you discover that everything is already right there.
As we widen our irises, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Pierre de Fermat; he was born on this date in 1601. While he is remembered as one of the two great mathematicians of the early 17th century (with Descartes), Fermat was (like Descartes) driven by wider interests. Fermat was a trained lawyer, who served as a councilor at the Parlement de Toulouse, one of the High Courts of Judicature in France. He was fluent in six languages and praised for his written verse in several of them; his advice was eagerly sought regarding the emendation of Greek texts… which is to say that mathematics was but one of his interests, and more a hobby than a profession at that. Still, Fermat made foundational contributions to analytical geometry, probability, number theory and calculus.
The Blind Leading the Blind (1568) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, was furiously condemned by his contemporaries. Why did they fear him? Sandrine Parageau explains…
The French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) is generally presented as one of the founders of modern Western philosophy and science, the man who made reason the principle of the search for truth, and who formulated the cogito, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ His assertion of mind-body dualism has given rise to a great number of objections over time, from those of 17th-century theologians to those of 20th-century feminists. In France, even though the decision of the 1792-95 National Convention to transfer Descartes’s remains to the Pantheon in Paris was not followed through, the philosopher is nonetheless regarded as ‘un grand homme’, a national hero, and being labelled ‘Cartesian’ is still today a compliment that emphasises one’s common sense, good judgment and methodical use of reason.
Yet Descartes was not always the undisputed champion of reason that he is today. In 17th-century England and the Netherlands, he was publicly and repeatedly accused of being a fraud and of lying to his readers so as to manipulate them into becoming his disciples. Of course, as one would expect, many intellectual and scientific objections were raised by his contemporaries against Descartes’s philosophy. But those ad hominem allegations were of a different nature altogether: they implied that the French philosopher resorted to well-crafted and dishonest strategies to make his readers ignorant, and therefore gullible, with the aim of making them submit to his control. Thus, according to those critics, the founder of modern science was, in truth, a purveyor of ignorance.
Such an accusation was made for example by the Protestant scholar and theologian Meric Casaubon (1599-1671 [a classicist and the first translators of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius into English]), a Geneva-born clergyman of the Church of England, in a long manuscript letter on ‘general learning’ written in 1668, in which he deplores what he perceives as the growing ignorance of his contemporaries. In this text, Casaubon accuses Descartes of deliberately encouraging his readers to make themselves ignorant by urging them to renounce their beliefs and forget all the knowledge that they have previously acquired: ‘a man must first strip himself of all that he has ever known, or believed.’
This accusation against the champion of rationalism may seem paradoxical at first, but it should not come as a complete surprise: if Descartes did not praise ignorance as such, and certainly not as an end in itself, he did encourage his readers to get rid of all their previous opinions, prejudices and false knowledge, as he himself had done after realising the uncertainty of the knowledge he had been taught as a child. Indeed, in the Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes relates how he initially loved philosophy, theology, poetry and mathematics, which he had been taught at the prestigious Collège Royal de La Flèche, before he became aware of the variety of opinions and the pervasiveness of error, which made him doubt all his knowledge and beliefs. In the Meditations (1641), a few years after the Discourse, Descartes further explains that, in the face of such doubt and uncertainty, he decided to get rid of all the opinions he had formed or acquired in order to rebuild science and knowledge on a firm basis. This experience of ‘radical’ or ‘hyperbolical’ doubt, as it has later been called, which results in the rejection of all knowledge, implying a form of self-induced ignorance, was unsurprisingly construed as an extreme stance by 17th-century commentators, and we may understand how it could be interpreted as a promotion of complete ignorance…
[Parageau unpacks Casaubon’s critique…]
… The 17th-century manipulation techniques here described by Casaubon are strikingly similar to what we now call ‘gaslighting’, a form of emotional and psychological abuse that leads the victim to question their own cognitive faculties and sometimes even their very sanity. As a matter of fact, the Dutch scholar and theologian Martin Schoock (1614-1669), Descartes’s contemporary, had, even more clearly than Casaubon and 25 years earlier, accused Descartes’s ‘new philosophy’ of leading to mental disorder, because choosing ignorance, according to Schoock in his Admirable Method (1643), amounts to deliberately putting off the light of reason in one’s mind: ‘A grown man who forgets everything is ignorant of everything, and where there is ignorance of everything, there is mental disorder.’ (My translation.)
As this passage makes clear, Schoock also thought that Descartes’s radical doubt could not but result in complete ignorance – Descartes’s philosophy was therefore a mere tool devised to spread ignorance. This call for radical doubt, as Schoock understood it, was based on the Cartesian idea that certain and evident truth can come only from within oneself. The French philosopher had allegedly ‘waged a war on books and reading’ and encouraged laziness, especially among young people, who were invited to spend all day lying down and ‘meditating’, in other words doing nothing. Descartes’s victims, Schoock adds, were primarily less-educated or naive people, who fell more readily for his deceptive arguments as they were dazzled by his reputation and influence. Indeed, the example of Descartes’s alleged use of ignorance also reveals the insidious domination of the intellectual elite over less-educated people. Thus, for Schoock as for Casaubon, the aim of Descartes’s so-called philosophy was to turn ignorant people into disciples and ensure their obedience.
If we are to believe Casaubon and Schoock, Descartes’s alleged manipulation was fairly successful, and a great number of people joined ‘the Cartesian sect’. So how come Descartes could so easily dupe his contemporaries? One answer might be that his deception did not rely on lying, but on the more strategic use and abuse of doubt. Doubt is indeed more subtle than crude lies, and therefore more efficient, provided the audience who is being manipulated is not entirely ignorant at first (otherwise, lies would work just as well), yet not educated or sagacious enough to be able to detect and expose the deception straight away. The efficiency of doubt as a strategy may also reside in its versatility. Doubt is indeed both an epistemic virtue, or the first step on the path to truth (the philosopher is always initially a doubter, someone who questions what they have been taught or what seems self-evident), and an epistemic vice, as it can lead to destabilisation and even dissolution of truth and knowledge altogether when it is excessive or misplaced…
… The condemnation of Descartes by Casaubon and Schoock should also be seen as the manifestation of a desperate effort to resist change in the intellectual context that led to the emergence of modern science. The conservative Casaubon feared and lamented the coming destruction of traditional knowledge, which he believed was brought forth by an undue insistence on method to the detriment of learning itself. One must admit that Cartesianism is indeed obsessed with method – Descartes’s famous Discourse is evidence enough. Moreover, Descartes’s call for the rejection by each individual of all their knowledge and opinions was not only interpreted as a means to get power over those who would make themselves ignorant, but also as the programmed extinction of established knowledge, which would give way to something new and therefore suspicious. Schoock shared those preoccupations but was probably even more worried about the psychological consequences of Descartes’s philosophy on his followers and the larger public if ever it managed to spread, which he seriously feared because the mere ‘novelty’ of this philosophy made it attractive to the ignorant multitude. Surprising as it may seem, Schoock’s fears about the sanity of Cartesians were not entirely unjustified. Indeed, if the allegation that Descartes deliberately produced ignorance to control people can be easily dismissed, the claim that his philosophy was likely to lead to madness is more convincing.
Most specialists of Descartes’s philosophy have ignored the affective experience described in the Discourse and the Meditations to focus instead on the order of reason in those texts. Radical doubt and the cogito have thus been interpreted as literary and rhetorical devices, or mere fables (the word is used by Descartes himself in the Discourse). They are generally seen as fictions or thought experiments, rather than as a cognitive process that Descartes actually experienced. If the autobiographical and emotional dimension of self-induced ignorance has been neglected so far, it might be because this aspect does not match the overarching interpretation of Cartesianism as the rule of reason. Descartes urged people to reject all their opinions and knowledge only as a temporary precondition to accessing truth, not as a permanent state. But still, he did encourage self-induced ignorance.
The epistemic anxiety that followed was described by Casaubon and Schoock, as mentioned above. But the origin of the search for truth is emotionally charged as well, as it is grounded in disillusionment and existential despair following the discovery that one was taught erroneous opinions as a child and was therefore deceived. This painful discovery gives rise to the need for purification through the rejection of one’s opinions and withdrawal from the world. The emotional impact of the search for truth is attested in Adrien Baillet’s late 17th-century biography of Descartes, which precisely describes Descartes’s physical and psychological distress.
As Tristan Dagron argues in his book Pensée et cliniques de l’identité (2019), or ‘Thoughts and Treatments of Identity’, the experience that Descartes relates in the First Meditation, where he describes the need for the purification of his mind, can be interpreted as a reappropriation of three dreams that he had in November 1619, which left him confused and mentally disturbed as he was confronted with radical doubt about the distinction between dreaming and waking. When he narrates those dreams, Baillet talks of Descartes’s violent agitations, exhaustion, despair and ‘enthusiasm’, some form of divine inspiration and madness (hence also Descartes’s association with religious sects by his opponents). Dagron shows that those dreams were a traumatic experience for Descartes, which is echoed in the First Meditation and its presentation of radical doubt.
The emotionally unsettling confrontation with radical doubt and madness should be acknowledged as the starting point of the search for truth in what is commonly hailed today as a radically rationalist, emotion-free system of thought – perhaps a consequence of Michel Foucault’s influential reading of the Meditations as a violent and successful attempt at muzzling madness, or a ‘coup de force’, in his book Madness and Civilization (1961). Thus, Casaubon and Schoock were right in arguing that radical doubt implied epistemic anxiety and madness, but madness is not rejected by Descartes – on the contrary, it is embraced and then healed, so to speak, by his philosophy. This might actually be the true reason why Descartes is indeed the founder of modern Western science and philosophy…
As marshall our marbles, we might send magical birthday greetings to John Dee, the mathematician, astronomer, and geographer who was a consultant to Elizabeth I– and who was born on this date in 1527. Dee was a translator of Euclid, and a friend of both Gerardus Mercator and Tycho Brahe; he revolutionized navigation by applying geometry; and he coined the word “Brittannia” and the phrase “British Empire.” He had a tremendous impact on architecture and theater– and was the model for Shakespeare’s Prospero.
“So how come such a significant philosopher– one of very few in a country then considered an intellectual backwater– barely features in British history books? Because of his notorious links with magic” (observed BBC’s Discover). Dee was indeed involved (most heavily, toward the end of his life) in the Hermetic Arts: alchemy, astrology, divination, Hermetic philosophy and Rosicrucianism (the Protestant answer to the Jesuits, which Dee founded). Perhaps most (in)famously, Dee put a hex on the Spanish Armada, a spell widely credited at the time for the misfortunes that befell the Iberian fleet (which readers may recall).
In a way that presaged Isaac Newton, Dee’s work spanned the world’s of science and magic at just the point that those world’s began to separate.
From Liber Divinorum Operum (The Book of Divine Works) by Hildegard von Bingen, composed between 1163 and 1174
The quote above (in full, below) is the reigning substantive understanding of scientific naturalism that is commonplace today. Indeed, the modern era is often seen as the triumph of science over supernaturalism. But, as Peter Harrison explains, what really happened is far more interesting…
By any measure, the scientific revolution of the 17th century was a significant milestone in the emergence of our modern secular age. This remarkable historical moment is often understood as science finally liberating itself from the strictures of medieval religion, striking out on a new path that eschewed theological explanations and focused its attentions solely on a disenchanted, natural world. But this version of events is, at best, half true.
Medieval science, broadly speaking, had followed Aristotle in seeking explanations in terms of the inherent causal properties of natural things. God was certainly involved, at least to the extent that he had originally invested things with their natural properties and was said to ‘concur’ with their usual operations. Yet the natural world had its own agency. Beginning in the 17th century, the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes and his fellow intellectual revolutionaries dispensed with the idea of internal powers and virtues. They divested natural objects of inherent causal powers and attributed all motion and change in the universe directly to natural laws.
But, for all their transformative influence, key agents in the scientific revolution such as Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton are not our modern and secular forebears. They did not share our contemporary understandings of the natural or our idea of ‘laws of nature’ that we imagine underpins that naturalism…
[Harrison traces the history of the often contentious, but ultimately momentous rise of naturalism, then considers the historical acounts of that ascension– and what they gloss over or miss altogether. He then turns to whay that matters…]
… the contrived histories of naturalism that purport to show its victory over supernaturalism were fabricated in the 19th century and are simply not consistent with the historical evidence. They are also tainted by a cultural condescension that, in the past at least, descended into outright racism. Few, if any, would today endorse the chauvinism that attends these older, triumphalist accounts of the history of naturalism. Yet, it is worth reflecting upon the extent to which elements of cultural condescension necessarily colour scholarly endeavours that are premised on the imagined ‘neutral’ grounds of naturalism. Careful consideration of the contingent historical circumstances that gave rise to present analytic categories that enjoy significant standing and authority would suggest that there is nothing especially neutral or objective about them. Any clear-eyed crosscultural comparison – one that refrains from assessing worldviews in terms of how they measure up to the standard of the modern West – will reinforce this. We might go so far as to adopt a form of ‘reverse anthropology’, where we think how our own conceptions of the world might look if we adopted the frameworks of others. This might entail dispensing with the idea of the supernatural, and attempting to think outside the box of our recently inherited natural/supernatural distinction.
History [that is, the “actual” history that Harrison recounts] suggests that our regnant modern naturalism is deeply indebted to monotheism, and that its adherents may need to abandon the comforting idea that their naturalistic commitments are licensed by the success of science. As for the idea of the supernatural, ironically this turns out to be far more important for the identity of those who wish to deny its reality than it had ever been for traditional religious believers…
* “There is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the ‘laws of nature’, and which is discoverable by the methods of science and empirical investigation. There is no separate realm of the supernatural, spiritual, or divine; nor is there any cosmic teleology or transcendent purpose inherent in the nature of the universe or in human life.” – Sean Carroll, The Big Picture
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As we rethink reality, we might recall that it was on this date in 1588 that Tycho Brahe first outlined his “Tychonic system” concept of the structure of the solar system. The Tychonic system was a hybrid, sharing both the basic idea of the geocentric system of Ptolemy, and the heliocentric idea of Nicholas Copernicus. Published in his De mundi aethorei recentioribus phaenomenis, Tycho’s proposal, retaining Aristotelian physics, kept the the Sun and Moon revolving about Earth in the center of the universe and, at a great distance, the shell of the fixed stars was centered on the Earth. But like Copernicus, he agreed that Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn revolved about the Sun. Thus he could explain the motions of the heavens without “crystal spheres” carrying the planets through complex Ptolemaic epicycles.
A 17th century illustration of the Hypothesis Tychonica (source)
On this same date, in 1633, Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome to face trial before the Inquisition. His crime was professing the belief that the earth revolves around the sun– based on observations that he’d made further to Copernicus and Tycho.
Well, yes… Centuries before audio deepfakes and text-to-speech software, inventors in the eighteenth century constructed androids with swelling lungs, flexible lips, and moving tongues to simulate human speech. Jessica Riskin explores the history of such talking heads, from their origins in musical automata to inventors’ quixotic attempts to make machines pronounce words, converse, and declare their love…
The word “android”, derived from Greek roots meaning “manlike”, was the coinage of Gabriel Naudé, French physician and librarian, personal doctor to Louis XIII, and later architect of the forty-thousand-volume library of Cardinal Jules Mazarin. Naudé was a rationalist and an enemy of superstition. In 1625 he published a defense of Scholastic philosophers to whom tradition had ascribed works of magic. He included the thirteenth-century Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great), who, according to legend, had built an artificial man made of bronze.
This story seems to have originated long after Albert’s death with Alfonso de Madrigal (also known as El Tostado), a voluminous commentator of the fifteenth century, who adapted and embellished the tales of moving statues and talking brazen heads in medieval lore. El Tostado said that Albert had worked for thirty years to compose a whole man out of metal. The automaton supplied Albert with the answers to all of his most vexing questions and problems and even, in some versions of the tale, obligingly dictated a large part of Albert’s voluminous writings. The machine had met its fate, according to El Tostado, when Albert’s student, Thomas Aquinas, smashed it to bits in frustration, having grown tired of “its great babbling and chattering”.
Naudé did not believe in Albert’s talkative statue. He rejected it and other tales of talking automaton heads as “false, absurd and erroneous”. The reason Naudé cited was the statues’ lack of equipment: being altogether without “muscles, lungs, epiglottis, and all that is necessary for a perfect articulation of the voice”, they simply did not have the necessary “parts and instruments” to speak reasonably. Naudé concluded, in light of all the reports, that Albert the Great probably had built an automaton, but never one that could give him intelligible and articulate responses to questions. Instead, Albert’s machine must have been similar to the Egyptian statue of Memnon, much discussed by ancient authors, which murmured agreeably when the sun shone upon it: the heat caused the air inside the statue to “rarefy” so that it was forced out through little pipes, making a murmuring sound.
Despite disbelieving in Albert the Great’s talking head, Naudé gave it a powerful new name, referring to it as the “android”. Thus deftly, he smuggled a new term into the language, for according to the 1695 dictionary by the French philosopher and writer Pierre Bayle, “android” had been “an absolutely unknown word, & purely an invention of Naudé, who used it boldly as though it were established.” It was a propitious moment for neologisms: Naudé’s term quickly infiltrated the emerging genre of dictionaries and encyclopedias. Bayle repeated it in the article on “Albert le Grand” in his dictionary. Thence, “android” secured its immortality as the headword of an article — citing Naudé and Bayle — in the first volume of the supplement to the English encyclopedist Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia. In denying the existence of Albert’s android, Naudé had given life to the android as a category of machine.
But the first actual android of the new, experimental-philosphical variety for which the historical record contains rich information — “android” in Naudé’s root sense, a working human-shaped assemblage of “necessary parts” and instruments — went on display on February 3, 1738…
[There follows a fascinating account of examples from the 18th and 19th centuries…]
Plates depicting the components of artificial and natural speech from Wolfgang von Kempelen’s The Mechanism of Speech (1791) — Source
… In the early part of the twentieth century, designers of artificial speech moved on from mechanical to electrical speech synthesis. The simulation of the organs and process of speaking — of the trembling glottis, the malleable vocal tract, the supple tongue and mouth — was specific to the last decades of the eighteenth century, when philosophers and mechanicians and paying audiences were briefly preoccupied with the idea that articulate language was a bodily function: that Descartes’ divide between mind and body might be bridged in the organs of speech…
* Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
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As we muse on the mechanical, we might spare a thought for a man whose work helped pave the way for androids as we currently conceive them: J. Presper Eckert; he died on this day in 1995. An electrical engineer, he co-designed (with John Mauchly) the first general purpose computer, the ENIAC (see here and here) for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. He and Mauchy went on to found the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, at which they designed and built the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC.
Eckert (standing and gesturing) and Mauchy (at the console), demonstrating the UNIVAC to Walter Cronkite (source)
Still, appearances mattered to Leibnitz. And as Richard Halpern explains in a piece adapted from his new book, Leibnizing: A Philosopher in Motion, they give us another avenue to understanding his philosophy…
Possessed of a monumentally impressive intellect, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was not blessed with a body to match. Bald, short, and unhandsome of feature, he accordingly availed himself of that universal male cosmetic—and prosthetic—of his era, the peruke (figure 1). Leibniz’s peruke ameliorated several bodily shortcomings: it covered his bald pate, including a bony growth the size of a pigeon’s egg that purportedly sat there; it added several inches to his height; and it did not so much frame his face as distract attention from it.
Leibniz was hardly the only seventeenth-century philosopher to sport a wig: René Descartes and John Locke did so as well. Theirs were not quite so extravagant and luxurious as Leibniz’s, however, nor did they give quite the same impression that a poodle had curled up for a nap on the wearer’s head. In the portrait reproduced here, by the fashionable court painter Christoph Bernhard Francke, Leibniz’s peruke complements the rich velvet folds of his garment to project an aura of prosperity, prestige, and fashion. Leibniz, who was fond of perfume as well as of perukes, made no bones about his wish to be included in polite society. The duke of Orleans was sufficiently impressed with his elegance to declare: “It is unusual for intellectuals to dress well, not to smell bad, and to understand jokes.”
Leibniz’s peruke silently poses questions: Should philosophers concern themselves with reputation, physical appearance, and fashion in the way that Leibniz does? Shouldn’t the philosopher focus rather on the disinterested pursuit of truth? Ever since Diogenes the Cynic, poverty and simplicity have served as emblems of philosophical authenticity. If we no longer demand that our philosophers be poor, we expect at least a certain slovenliness—a sign that their attention is directed elsewhere, upon more fundamental matters, and not on their appearance.
John Locke seems to make a related point in the dedicatory epistle to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “The Imposition of Novelty is a terrible Charge among those, who judge of Men’s Heads as they do their Perukes, by the Fashion; and can allow none to be right, but the received Doctrines.” The philosopher is supposed to be defined by what goes on in his or her head, not by what is perched upon it. Philosophers pursue truth, but the wig is an emblem of falsehood. The philosopher investigates eternal verities, but the wig occupies the ephemeral realm of fashion. In The Wig: A Harebrained History (London: Reaktion, 2020), Luigi Amara posits the wig as the supremely antiphilosophical object, more at home with the deceptive rhetorical chicanery of the Sophists (and for that reason also a supreme philosophical provocation).
But if philosophy and wigs are conceptually incompatible, this fact did not seem to bother Leibniz, who was perfectly comfortable with both. I would like to suggest, indeed, that the wig takes on enhanced significance if juxtaposed not only to philosophy in general but also to Leibniz’s philosophy in particular. One of the things Leibnizian metaphysics does is take Cartesian dualism and push it to an extreme: bodies and minds not only are of essentially different natures, as Descartes held, but also because of this they do not interact at all. But if bodies and minds cannot affect one another causally, Lebiniz argued, they nevertheless express each other. Every mental event is accompanied by some change in the bodily state of the entity experiencing it and vice versa. These expressive relations are not the result of direct mutual influence but are created by God as part of what Leibniz called pre-established harmony. In place of causal relations between mind and body, then, Leibniz posits something more like aesthetic ones.
Leibniz’s philosophy would claim, therefore, that his own bodily appearance is not unrelated to what goes on in his head…
As we ruminate on rugs, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Robert Pirsig; he was born on this date in 1928. A writer and philosopher, he is best known for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, an exploration of the underlying metaphysics of Western culture.
Pirsig had great difficulty finding a publisher for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He pitched the idea for his book to 121 different publishers, sending them a cover letter along with two sample pages; only 22 responding favorably, and then only tentatively. Ultimately, an editor at William Morrow accepted the finished manuscript; when he did, his publisher’s internal recommendation averred, “This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I’ll wager, attain classic stature.” Indeed, in his review, George Steiner compared Pirsig’s writing to Dostoevsky, Broch, Proust, and Bergson, arguing that “the assertion itself is valid … the analogies with Moby-Dick are patent.”
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