Posts Tagged ‘Descartes’
“There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance”*…
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…
On the philosophical Importance of fake hair: “Leibniz’s Peruke,” from @ColumbiaUP.
* Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
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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.”
“Cogito, ergo sum”*…
Rene Descartes (and here), who laid the foundation for modern rationalism and ignited the interest in epistemology that began to grow in the 17th century, been called the father of modern philosophy. Erik Hoel argues that he had very influential help…
Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia—the first person to fully understand the paradoxical nature of the mind-problem, a mathematician, the possible romantic interest of Descartes, and an eventual abbess—was born in 1618, and lived in exile with her family in the Netherlands, a political refuge after her father’s brief reign. Her father’s rule had ended after he lost what was called the “Battle of the White Mountain,” for which he would be known via the sobriquet “the winter king,” having been in power for merely a season.
Elisabeth was a great philosopher in her own right—whip-smart and engaged by the intellectually stimulating times, she maintained numerous correspondences throughout her life on all manner of subjects. For her learning, within her family she was known as “the Greek,” and this was in a set of siblings that included an eventual king, another brother who was a famous scientist in addition to being a co-founder of the Hudson’s Bay Company, another sister who was a talented artist, and a further sister who was the eventual patron of Leibniz. Mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and politician, Elisabeth was, in her day, an important hub in that republic of letters that would become science.
The princess and Descartes only met in person a few times, but maintained a long correspondence over the years, exchanging a total of fifty-eight letters that have survived (more may not have). The correspondence began in 1643, and would last, on and off, until Descartes’s surprising death in 1650 (he died of pneumonia after being forced to wake early in the morning and walk through a cold castle to tutor a different and far more demanding queen). In the princess and the philosopher’s letters, Descartes usually signed off with “Your very humble and very obedient servant” and Elisabeth with “Your very affectionate friend at your service.”
Their letters are vivid historical reading—the two’s repartee is funny and humble and courteous, intimate and yet respectful of the difference in their classes (Elisabeth’s far above Descartes’s); but they also dig deep into Descartes’s philosophy, with Elisabeth always probing at holes and Descartes always on the defensive to cover them…
Philosophical letters from a possible Renaissance romance: “The mind-body problem was discovered by a princess,” from @erikphoel.
For more, see: “Princess Elizabeth on the Mind-Body Problem” (source of the image above) and Elizabeth’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
And for the likely inspiration for Descartes’ most famous phrase– St. Teresa of Ávila– see “One of Descartes’ most famous ideas was first articulated by a woman.”
* Rene Descartes
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As we duel with duality, we might spare a thought for Buddhadasa (born Phra Dharmakosācārya). A Thai ascetic-philosopher, he was an innovative reinterpreter of Buddhist doctrine and Thai folk beliefs who fostered a reformation in conventional religious perceptions in his home country and abroad.
Buddhadasa developed a personal view that those who have penetrated the essential nature of religions consider “all religions to be inwardly the same,” while those who have the highest understanding of dhamma feel “there is no religion.”
“You shouldn’t rely on what you believe to be true. You might be mistaken. Everything can be questioned, everything doubted. The best option, then, is to keep an open mind.”*…
The ancient Sceptics– often called Pyrrhonists after Pyrrho, the ancient Greek master Sceptic who lived in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE– used doubt as a way of investigating the world. As Mahdi Ranaee explains, later thinkers undermined even that possibility…
Ask any philosopher what scepticism is, and you will receive as many different answers as people you’ve asked. Some of them take it to be showing that we cannot have any knowledge – of, say, the external world – and some of them take it to be even more radical in showing that we cannot have any reasonable beliefs. In the interests of getting a handle on the varieties of scepticism, one can locate four different milestones of sceptical thought in the history of Western philosophy. These four milestones start with the least threatening of them, Pyrrhonian skepticism, and continue by Cartesian and Kantian scepticisms to the Wittgensteinian moment in which even our intention to act is put in question…
Fascinating: “Known unknowables,” in @aeonmag.
* Pyrrho (as paraphrased by Nigel Warburton)
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As we question questioning, we might spare a thought for a not-so-sceptical thinker, Thomas Carlyle; he died on this date in 1881. A Victorian polymath, he was an accomplished philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, translator, historian, mathematician, and teacher. While he was an enormously popular lecturer in his time, and his contributions to mathematics earned him eponymous fame (the Carlyle circle), he may be best remembered as a historian (and champion of the “Great Man” theory of history)… and as the coiner of phrases like “the dismal science” (to describe economics).
While not adhering to any formal religion, Carlyle asserted the importance of belief and developed his own philosophy of religion. He preached “Natural Supernaturalism,” the idea that all things are “Clothes” which at once reveal and conceal the divine, that “a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one,” and that duty, work and silence are essential. He attacked utilitarianism as mere atheism and egoism; instead taking a medievalist tack, postulating the Great Man theory, a philosophy of history which argues that history is shaped by exceptional individuals. (Indeed his thinking, which extended to a critique of democracy and an argument for “Heroarchy (Government of Heroes),” was appropriated and perverted by Nazi thinkers in Germany.
Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, a three volume work that assured his fame as a historian, was finished in 1836 but not published until 1837 because John Stuart Mill’s maid mistook the manuscript of Volume One for kindling. The setback prompted Carlyle to compare himself to a man who has “nearly killed himself accomplishing zero.” But he re-wrote the first volume from scratch.
“A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.” – Thomas Carlyle
“I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth”*…
From ancient Egyptian cubits to fitness tracker apps, humankind has long been seeking ever more ways to measure the world – and ourselves…
The discipline of measurement developed for millennia… Around 6,000 years ago, the first standardised units were deployed in river valley civilisations such as ancient Egypt, where the cubit was defined by the length of the human arm, from elbow to the tip of the middle finger, and used to measure out the dimensions of the pyramids. In the Middle Ages, the task of regulating measurement to facilitate trade was both privilege and burden for rulers: a means of exercising power over their subjects, but a trigger for unrest if neglected. As the centuries passed, units multiplied, and in 18th-century France there were said to be some 250,000 variant units in use, leading to the revolutionary demand: “One king, one law, one weight and one measure.”
It was this abundance of measures that led to the creation of the metric system by French savants. A unit like the metre – defined originally as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole – was intended not only to simplify metrology, but also to embody political ideals. Its value and authority were derived not from royal bodies, but scientific calculation, and were thus, supposedly, equal and accessible to all. Then as today, units of measurement are designed to create uniformity across time, space and culture; to enable control at a distance and ensure trust between strangers. What has changed since the time of the pyramids is that now they often span the whole globe.
Despite their abundance, international standards like those mandated by NIST and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) are mostly invisible in our lives. Where measurement does intrude is via bureaucracies of various stripes, particularly in education and the workplace. It’s in school that we are first exposed to the harsh lessons of quantification – where we are sorted by grade and rank and number, and told that these are the measures by which our future success will be gauged…
A fascinating survey of the history of measurement, and a consideration of its consequences: “Made to measure: why we can’t stop quantifying our lives,” from James Vincent (@jjvincent) in @guardian, an excerpt from his new book Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement.
And for a look at what it takes to perfect one of the most fundamental of those measures, see Jeremy Bernstein‘s “The Kilogram.”
* “I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth. Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.” – Epitaph Johannes Kepler composed for himself a few months before he died
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As we get out the gauge, we might send thoughtfully-wagered birthday greetings Blaise Pascal; he was born on this date in 1623. A French mathematician, physicist, theologian, and inventor (e.g.,the first digital calculator, the barometer, the hydraulic press, and the syringe), his commitment to empiricism (“experiments are the true teachers which one must follow in physics”) pitted him against his contemporary René “cogito, ergo sum” Descartes– and was foundational in the acceleration of the scientific/rationalist commitment to measurement…
“The merit of all things lies in their difficulty”*…
Francesco Libetta tackles the toughest…
Critic Harold C. Schonberg called Leopold Godowsky’s Studies on Chopin’s Études “the most impossibly difficult things ever written for the piano”; Godowsky said they were “aimed at the transcendental heights of pianism.” In the “Badinage,” above, the pianist plays Chopin’s “Black Key” étude with the left hand while simultaneously playing the “Butterfly” étude with the right and somehow preserving the melodies of both. One observer calculated that this requires 1,680 independent finger movements in the space of about 80 seconds, an average of 21 notes per second. “The pair go laughing over the keyboard like two friends long ago separated, now happily united,” marveled James Huneker in the New York World. “After them trails a cloud of iridescent glory.”
The studies’ difficulty means that they’re rarely performed even today; Schonberg said they “push piano technique to heights undreamed of even by Liszt.” Only Italian pianist Francesco Libetta, above, has performed the complete set from memory in concert.
Francesco Libetta takes on Godowsky’s Studies on Chopin’s Études: “Extra Credit.”
* Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
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As we tickle the ivories, we might recall that it was on this date in 1619, after the Vigil of the Feast of St. Martin of Tours, that Rene Descartes had his famous dream (actually a series of three dreams that night)– that ignited his commitment to treat all systems of thought developed to date, especially Scholasticism, as “pre-philosophical,” and– starting from scratch (“Cogito, ergo sum”)– to create anew.
Of these three dreams, it is the third that best expresses the original thought and intention of Rene Descartes’ rationalism. During the dream that William Temple aptly refers to as, “the most disastrous moment in the history of Europe,” Descartes saw before him two books. One was a dictionary, which appeared to him to be of little interest and use. The other was a compendium of poetry entitled Corpus Poetarum in which there appeared to be a union of philosophy with wisdom. Moreover, the way in which Descartes interpreted this dream set the stage for the rest of his life-long philosophical endeavors. For Descartes, the dictionary stood merely for the sciences gathered together in their sterile and dry disconnection; the collection of poems marked more particularly and expressly the union of philosophy with wisdom. He indicates that one should not be astonished that poets abound in utterances more weighty, more full of meaning and better expressed, than those found in the writings of philosophers. In utterances which appear odd when coming from a man who would go down in history as the father of Rationalism, Descartes ascribes the “marvel” of the wisdom of the poets to the divine nature of inspiration and to the might of phantasy, which “strikes out” the seeds of wisdom (existing in the minds of all men like the sparks of fire in flints) far more easily and directly than does reason in the philosophers. The writings of the professional philosophers of his time, struck Descartes as failing to supply that certitude, human urgency, and attractive presentation which we associate with a wise vision capable of organizing our knowledge and influencing our conduct. (Peter Chojnowski)
And so was born the Modern Age in the West, and the particular form of Rationalism that characterizes it.
Many scholars suggest that Descartes probably “protests too much” when he insists in his autobiographical writings that he had abstained from wine for some time before the night of his oh-so-significant slumber.
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