A Mountain: Final Note Toward A Medium Opus XIV

I was thinking this would never end, if that's any comfort.

It all began with two distinct thoughts after reading an article nearly thirty years ago: How is it possible I cannot grasp the meaning of the phrase "one billion kilometers"? How is it possible the "laws of celestial mechanics" could be completely wrong? Over the ensuing years and decades, I've ventured far and wide as the initial path branched off, sometimes several times, until the relationships among the variety of things I was studying started to look nonexistent. What possible relationship exists among the theology of Jurgen Moltmann, the philosophy of Isaiah Berlin, the cosmology of Hawking, and the detailed description of the life and times of the ai-ai?

It wasn't a flash of light that illuminated the many dark paths. It wasn't some marvelous book of wisdom or thought or insight that made me stop and think, "Wow! So that's it." Rather, it was the realization that all these shared one thing in common: Me.

I say that with absolutely no boasting. They were meaningful and important precisely because they were meaningful and important to me. That did not and does not mean I am under any obligation to make any other individual care about any of them. Their importance for me shaped the way I thought and, more important, how I communicated my sense and understanding of the world to others. Beyond that, well, so what? The tie that bound them together is the language I choose to use to describe my understanding of the world, but that is hardly a big deal. That's all any of us do.

Far from something that brought a sense of pride, this coalescing understanding made me understand even more how little I had about which to boast. After all, what had I learned? That the world exists quite independent of me and my concerns; that we human beings, in trying to make our way in the world, run up against obstacles to our understanding that are impossible to overcome; that the world, and the larger universe in which we exist, is filled with all sorts of strange and beautiful things and creatures and events and none of it has anything to do with me. Even those things that seem so intimately connected with human life - the need for clarity in matters of social life, for example; an understanding of the faith I claim as central in my life - do not concern themselves with me, in particular. All these things, even the far less certain realities of human society and religious practice, exist without me being a part of them. They existed before I came a long. Centuries after I'm dead and dust, they will continue in ways that I cannot, now, imagine.

The only thing that really matters for me is how I make my way through this life. Living with others, being with those I love, struggling against those things I understand dehumanize and are otherwise detrimental to the full flowering of the humanity of others. These matter; even then, however, they only matter to me and for me.

There's a famous saying that describes the way of wisdom in Zen Buddhism: "First, there is a mountain. Then, there is no mountain. There is a mountain."  I spent a very long time indeed denying the existence of the mountain, insisting there had to "be" "more". Understanding that meaning was nothing more than the way we human beings put words together about things started to clear the haze. I started to see that mountain, but I wasn't sure if I was really seeing it.

A couple weeks ago, though, when those photos from the Cassini Spacecraft showing the geysers on Enceladus flashed on my computer screen, I understood that it was, in fact, just a mountain. That lack of understanding about what "one billion kilometers" might actually mean? Nothing more than a specific instance of human wonder, undamaged even by the mathematical detail. It is more than possible to look at the night sky, or listen to the rustling of the leaves on a forest floor, or look in to the face of another person, and for all that we can describe what we know and understand about these things, still let what we don't understand be a part of our understanding. As for those "laws", well calling them "laws" is a bit presumptuous. Mathematical descriptions of possible resolution of the movement along the arcs circumscribed by the ellipses to which certain objects are restricted are not "laws"; they serve as ways not only of understanding and interpreting the variety of things we encounter, but also of predicting how we should interpret our encounter with events of a similar class under similar conditions. When those Shepherd Moons were found to trace a mutually orbiting double helix - the path around which both revolved in a spiral motion was itself an elliptical line; that spiral, though, was nothing the understanding of celestial mechanics could have predicted - the scientists encountering the phenomena came to the conclusion pretty quickly that our understanding of celestial mechanics, for all it had been pretty well developed (we got a spacecraft from Earth to Saturn, right on schedule after all) was also fairly primitive. That understanding had to change precisely because the data encountered didn't fit our understanding. Again, no big deal.

Everything's connected because we human beings have to understand all this stuff, and so much more, to make our way through life in this world. None of it is any big deal. Our understanding of it is no big deal; it's all there, for the taking, should any of us be so inclined. Not being so inclined, however, doesn't make one somehow less human.

All that is, well . . . it just is. That's it and that's all. No big deal, no mystery, no deeper meaning or significance to any of it. We do not lose a scintilla of awe or wonder, fear or joy, when the clouds lift and the mountain stands there, clear and real. It is just as worthy of celebration as before; it just doesn't mean anything, is all.

Words Mean Things II: Notes Toward A Medium Opus XIII

Moriah is taking European History in school. A couple weeks back she asked me to review an assignment she had due. For each major event, she had to produce a list of terms, related photographs, and major points for each term used. She confessed she was unclear about the names of the major antagonists in the First World War; were France and Britain and Italy the Triple Alliance or Triple Entente? I told her that they were the Alliance. "So, the Triple Entente were the bad guys," she said. 

"No," I said. "They weren't 'the bad guys'. There aren't 'good guys' and 'bad guys' in the world."

In the wake of the September 11th attacks, there was much ballyhoo over President Bush's use of the phrase "Axis of Evil" to describe the regimes of Libya, Iran, and North Korea, none of which had anything to do with the attacks on the United States. Throughout much of the rest of his Presidency, Bush would often call terrorist groups "evil doers". The use of this word became a focus of some debate among some on the right who claimed that "liberals" and others were somehow unable to call evil by its name; by using the words he had, Pres. Bush had not only correctly called out al Qaeda, but had stolen a march on domestic political opposition. Who would want to oppose an Administration that was actively opposed to evil and those who do it?

Calling the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington "evil" is, indeed correct. Technically, those who envisioned the attacks, planned them, funded them, hired those who would carry them out, actually did carry them out, then celebrated their accomplishments are, indeed, evil. My on-going problem with this formula is simple enough to state: So?

"Evil" as an epithet adds absolutely nothing to our understanding of the root causes of the rage against the United States. As a practical matter, it became a way of avoiding doing the far more difficult work of understanding al Qaeda and related groups. What need do any of us have to understand "evil". It is, by definition, unintelligible, existing solely for its own sake, in need of neither justification nor intelligent analysis.

Moral understanding is a peculiar form of clarifying particular events.  Unlike other ways of understanding the world, moral pronouncements are absolute.  There is no such thing as "less evil".  Whether rooted in religious commitments or some general sense that certain acts lie beyond the pale of acceptability, once such judgments are made, further investigation is no longer needed.  Even the shorthand of such kinds of labeling, "good guys" and "bad guys", makes analysis superfluous.  It is also morally questionable; why attempt to understand what is clearly outside acceptable norms of human conduct?

Our ways of describing and labeling events and persons and groups have weight; they carry implications for how we move forward together.  Seeing a world abounding in evil-doers and bad guys certainly makes it easy enough to find one's place in the world; it makes understanding the world impossible.  Our moral sense, a product of our collective sense of how best to live together in big and small ways, is an important part of what makes us human. Compassion, empathy, the fellow-feeling that leads us to mourn with those who suffer even if we share no immediate connection with them are necessary personal and social attributes; their expression is often what people understand as their greatest asset.

We humans also have a horrible penchant for cruelty and depravity, expressed interpersonally and socially in any number of ways.  While it may well be necessary to understand instances of the expression of these tendencies as "evil", we cannot allow that to call a halt to the necessary work of understanding the why's and wherefore's of them.  Precisely because the judgments embedded in our moral vocabularies, whether the simplistic one my daughter used or the more sophisticated-sounding ones used by the varieties of our moral scolds, are absolute, we need to take care their weight doesn't prevent us from the important work of understanding what brought about the events in question.  Precisely because "meaning" resides not in events or persons or object, but only words, the weight of meaning in moral judgments, far too often, removes our ability to find any other meaning in those we call evil.

Shaken: Notes Toward A Medium Opus XII

You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.

William Carlos Williams, Paterson

The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

Wallace Stevens

Some people find themselves overwhelmed by this life and the many ways it undermines our confidence that living, not just surviving but thriving, is its own reward, offered to those who are willing to risk. Whether because of personal tragedy, perhaps, or being caught in the crossfire of forces beyond our control or even our ken, so many people find themselves, as an old phrase has it, "too much with this world."

An odd turn of phrase, I think, because it suggests that "this world" is a place so filled with darkness and depravity that to sink in to it is to mire oneself without hope of escape, except death. I would be the last to claim there is no such thing as evil in the world. I just wrote quite a bit about some of the horrors we encounter when we look around us. If this all this life had to offer, I wonder how it is possible any of us move forward, day to day.
Life, however, is not just strange and terrible; it is also punctuated by moments of such power, to which we assign a variety of words such as love and grace and even beauty, they can come close to breaking us. It is often suggested that the power of beauty and love are so much greater than evil is demonstrated precisely because such moments are rare and brief.  Imagine, if you will, existing for all time in that single moment when you held your new-born child in your arms for the first time. Or perhaps that eternal second when you gazed in to the eyes of the first person for whom you felt real, honest love.

Even speaking of the possibility of the existence of such moments leaves us struggling to find the words to do them justice; they become smaller, somehow, less vital if we try to describe them, or even narrate them. The world is more than just the terrors we know far too well. It is also, occasionally so filled with joy and wonder we can find ourselves staggering to grasp the events we have experienced. 

The human need to understand the world as best we can, a survival strategy all living creatures possess to some degree or other in order to succeed, includes an ability, unique to Homo sapiens sapiens (so far as we can know), to experience singular events as qualitatively distinct in a way for which our normal means of communication has only limited descriptive power. We speak of them as ineffable, perhaps; transcendent is another word, implying that for all their uniqueness, their singularity in time and space they also, in some way we cannot understand, spread beyond those moments, filling much of the rest of our lives with some kind of meaning that is, yet, beyond our ability to articulate. Beauty, joy, the peace that comes with sharing a moment with a beloved Other, love - these are things that, in whatever form they present themselves, offer the opportunity to say, "Yes" even in the midst of all the clamoring voices demanding only "No" as a response.

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

Wallace Stevens

For all that there are strange and terrible things in our Universe, perhaps a near infinity we cannot even imagine yet, to concede either to ignorance or fear the final judgment on these matters is an act not only of moral and existential cowardice; it is an act of singular, perhaps even purposeful, amnesia. Even as death takes our loved ones, sometimes a bit at a time, are we going to yield the field in the face of those moments, much shorter by some temporal measure of events, that nevertheless weigh as much in the scale as these drawn out times of pain and loss and suffering? We human beings have a gift, as I say, unique in the Universe. We can experience joy and beauty so powerful it leaves us shaking, mute in our attempts to convey the events and their import, yet assured that existence, for all its terrors, also holds moments that defy our sometimes overwhelming preference to give in to fear. 

Stripped of the slightly indigo prose, love and beauty and joy exist as much as hatred and ugliness and sorrow; these experiences of the better things life has to offer are so fleeting precisely because of the immense power they hold, the danger that power poses to our equanimity. Human beings can survive long bouts of depression; I do believe living too long in those moments when happiness overwhelms us would leave us a husk, unable to function.

Understanding this reality was a necessary part of coming to grips with my changing understanding of the world. Even something as technical as physics contains a kind of beauty that cannot be reduced to equations or their interpretation. All of life shares in this singular quality: From the array of experiences and events through which we human beings live, we find meaning and purpose, always with the occasional surprise that at any moment, something that breaks the bounds of our ability to make clear may yet occur. We may be left shaken by the experience, but it will always remain with us, these defining moments that escape our ability to define.

Here There Be Monsters: Notes Toward A Medium Opus XI

If you don't think there are horrors among us, check this out:

 The parasite, Leucochloridium paradoxum, takes over not only the physiognomy of the snail, but its behavior, leaving the snail vulnerable to predators in order for the parasite to continue its reproductive cycle. The first time I heard about this, I was terrified. Not quite as disquieting as the previously mentioned parasitic wasps - the eggs are hatched inside a caterpillar and, when they hatch, devour it from the inside out; I once watched two burst out of a large, green caterpillar on a tomato plant in our garden in Virginia, not the most pleasant experience - but certainly disquieting. Evolving together, the flatworm had developed the ability to strip the snail of its usual behavioral patterns in order to further its reproductive ends. There is just something unnerving at the thought of a creature taking over another in this way.

It was watching some documentary on parasites when it all started to come together for me. There are monsters in this world, and they are not unearthly horrors or supernatural beings. They, like us, are creatures who have evolved strategies to survive and thrive at the expense of other creatures. This is a nice description of some more things that could make anyone uneasy.

They aren't the only monsters on the planet.

The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around what is now Greater Manchester, England. The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17—Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans—at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. The murders are so named because two of the victims were discovered in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor, with a third grave also being discovered there in 1987, over 20 years after Brady and Hindley's trial in 1966. The body of a fourth victim, Keith Bennett, is also suspected to be buried there, but despite repeated searches it remains undiscovered.

Brady and Hindley recorded one of their victims, a sixteen year old girl, begging for her life, screaming in horror at the things they did to her.  They would sit and listen to the tape as sexual foreplay.

Then, there are the monsters that gather in packs.

In the light of long-established and heavily "gendered" strategies of intercommunal conflict in the Balkans, it was hardly surprising that the gender-selective massacre of non-combatant males would emerge as the dominant and most severe atrocity inflicted on the civilian population in the modern Balkans wars. Regardless of their often-atrocious maltreatment of other population groups (including the destruction of entire cities and the mass rape of women), Serb forces -- and to a lesser extent Croats and Muslims -- concentrated their attention systematically on "battle-age" men. As the Bosnian Prime Minister Hasan Muratovic described the Serb strategy in 1996, "Wherever they [the Serbs] captured people, they either detained or killed all the males from 18 to 55 [years old].

While the line from parasites to psychopaths to genocide might seem nonexistent, it was in fact the parasites that convinced me the link exists. After reading Mayr, I went back and read both The Origin of Species and The Voyage Of The Beagle. Then, I perused various of Gould's articles from Natural History. This late education in the surprising and marvelous details of the contemporary theory of evolution not only tamped by enthusiasm for some broader, comprehensive "philosophy of science". It also demonstrated that, by and large, all the odd phenomena for which we continually assigned some odd, metaphysical source - whether it was comets bringing disaster; illness brought on by an invasion of creatures; the destruction of whole populations for political reasons - were little more than instances of events for which mundane explanations existed.

It is a commonplace of discussions in the history of ideas that the emergence of the mechanical understanding of the universe, then the theory of evolution by natural selection "disenchanted the world." No longer a domain where causes for events included unseen spiritual forces, the world and the larger universe all became little more than puzzles to solve, questions that would yield answers without an appeal to invisible beings or moral forces that had been, up until then, reified in everything from the plague to the famous Lisbon earthquake in 1755. Not only was the world a place open to human understanding; the ability to understand the world through the various tools human beings had developed had removed the sense of wonder and awe from the phenomena under investigation. No longer beautiful points of light in the night sky that form pictures as we gaze upward, the telescope revealed thousands, tens of thousands, more such lights, which were discrete objects an unknown distance from us, similar in kind to the sun we human beings see each day. Nothing marvelous about that, right?

Rather than the punishment, just or not, for sins known or unknown from the hand of God, diseases and other natural disasters were removed from the arena of moral casuistry and set down, firmly and fully, within the world as events to be studied, phenomena to be understood and, as Bacon pointed out, if understood they could be controlled. We no longer live in a world filled with agents of evil who manipulate objects, animals, people, or even nations to pursue whatever nefarious purposes they might desire. It's just stuff. It's animals, even creepy animals, living their lives as they've evolved over the millennia; we no longer need to wonder if, say, an earthquake struck a city, killing even those nominally faithful when the roofs of their churches collapsed upon them (a point in the discussions over the theodicy of the Lisbon earthquake) that might be some kind of judgment upon the dead. It's just the plates that make up the earth's crust, jerking loose after getting stuck together. The jolts are pretty horrific. They are not, however, a judgment from God.

Ours is a world no longer filled with monsters, at least in some transcendent sense.

The one joker in this deck of disenchantment, it has always seemed to me, is the infinite capacity human beings possess to visit massive violence on other human beings. While we may be able to remove all sorts of natural occurrences, from disease to the occasional disaster, from the realm of moral judgment and metaphysical causation, surely the existence both of individuals and groups willing not only to cause massive pain and suffering but to take pleasure in it leaves room for transcendent evil. A realm exists, it seems, in which our moral judgments, emotional responses, and the facts of the matter justify not only some kind of juridical determination of moral viciousness, but the implication that the source lies outside the normal range of human action. While horrifying, parasites are nothing more than critters doing what critters do, living out their lives. Whether the individual or paired psychopath killing for sport or sexual release or simple joy, or a political organization that uses mass death and terror as a tool of policy, how is it possible to understand these events without an appeal to external, metaphysical evil?

Part of the problem with this question is confusing our obvious and justifiable revulsion at the persons responsible for these events, and our refusal to place such monstrous events within the realm of human possibility, which results in the insistence that no human being would act these ways without an impetus from outside. Except, of course, the acts these individuals perform are intelligible within wholly natural categories of understanding. Disgust at the acts is certainly understandable; excluding those who perform such deeds from the human race, calling them "monsters", creating an unbridgeable gap between them and the rest of us in order to insulate ourselves from the corollary that flows from the insistence that these acts are both intelligible and fully human. If these are people just like us - although, perhaps in the case of the psychopathic or sociopathic murderer missing something key in their emotional make-up - then what separates us from them? Are we capable of such terrifying acts against our fellow human beings? Sad to say, frightening even, the answer is yes.

While there is nothing wrong with pronouncing some kind of moral judgment upon the individuals and groups involved in such deeds, we must be cautious not to separate them from the realms of possible human action, agents not of psychological dysfunction or political calculation but rather of forces from some agent of outside evil. The category error here is clear: the line connecting the parasitic worms, serial killers, and politically motivated mass death is just this: they are "natural" occurrences, wholly intelligible within categories and frames of reference that need no external, metaphysical source for our innate revulsion.

Words Mean Things I: Notes Toward A Medium Opus XI

Of all the things they teach in seminary, the most important is vocabulary. You can't understand what all those folks through two thousand years and more of Church history (if you take seriously the Jewish roots of the Christian faith, then our faith tradition extends far back in time from the life of Jesus) if you don't understand the words. Just as philosophy uses words in specific ways that are different from mundane usage, so, too theology appropriates words and phrases for particular purposes. The difference between philosophy and theology on this point is the vocabulary and grammar, the syntax and structure of theology are unique. It is difficult to take theological language and set it down, say, in botany or even existentialist philosophy and make oneself at home. How much sense would it make to start blabbing about the hypostatic union in a class on ornithology?

There's a reason for this. It is summed up in the title to this post: Words mean things. Meaning is important. If words could mean whatever we wish them to mean, like the walrus in Alice in Wonderland, we are nearing the realm of chaos. Meaning flows from language through our lives back to language again. Of all the things that irk me, the claim that we are in the realm of metaphor or symbol when we talk God-talk makes me want to scream. If this is the case, pretty much anything will suffice to make intelligible the ineffable experience of the communities called Christian. Why not borrow the poetry of Rilke or William Carlos Williams (OK, I really like Williams, and there are theological themes there . . .) instead of deploying theological language? If it's all symbolism, we can use the songs of the Gershwins if we wanted.

This is not to say that we have to use the same, tired, many would say quite dead language borrowed from the Greeks, the Latinate West, and the Germans. Are we compelled to speak Spanish or Francophone African to be clear about how we understand our experience of God today? I think it is vital that we, particularly we Christians living in North America, understand how limited our understanding of the faith is, hemmed in by the narrow concerns of our (mostly bourgeois) way of living and our history of dehumanizing others, defining "human" by similarity of skin color and cultural milieu, and understanding difference as dangerous, threatening error. All the same, we North American Christians need to demand the integrity of our own experience of the encounter we have with God, and its various expressions. In order to do this, we need to be clear that the words we deploy have meaning. For this reason, we must always always always choose our words with the utmost care. 

Dutch Thomist Josef Pieper has a tiny volume, the transcript of a lecture he gave, entitled Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power in which he argues for the meaningful integrity of language. It is in the manipulation of language that power demonstrates its contempt for the powerless. In demanding meaningful discourse from those in positions of authority, we are demanding a respect for the substance of communication. Falling back on "symbol" and "metaphor" allows for the manipulation, and eventual destruction of other human beings precisely because we become used to them no longer understood as human.

So, too, with theology. Even learning the vocabulary of theology isn't enough; it's a starting point for joining a conversation that has ranged over time and space and language and culture and even, in recent decades, gender. One has to be aware of the plurality of discourses as well as the specificity and substance of the meanings invoked by the use of various words if one wants to "do" theology right. Not that this is either onerous or exclusive; it is little more than acknowledging that theology is little different from chemistry or pottery; you can't do the work of making our experience and the understanding of that experience intelligible if you don't know how to talk about it in ways that others who share similar experiences can understand.

Theology, like vocabularies in general, are not up for grabs. They are points of contention, to be sure, the focus of conflict; this is only because they are the one source of meaning in human social life. Our world is not only unintelligible without discursive interchange; it is empty, a surd, a meaningless flux of images and experiences that, absent meaningful, linguistic expression, just is. Words make our world. They take our collective experience and give it form and substance. All this is to say that this lesson first came in discussions with those who, in my opinion preferring an easy out from making any commitment to the substance of theological language, decided it would be easier to say, "It's all metaphor, really." It isn't, and is an easy out from the heavy lifting of actually learning something. 

When we proclaim our faith, we are making a commitment to a meaningful, substantive discourse that, as I have said repeatedly, can be summed up, "Jesus is Lord." Just as Jesus himself said the whole of the Law and Prophets could be summed up in the commandments to love God and love our neighbors, so, too, can meaningful Christian discourse and faith be summed up in those three words. Because, as I repeat, words mean things.

Justice To The Living World: Notes Toward A Medium Opus X

Since the Scientific Revolution, the philosophy of science has been characterized by an almost exclusive reliance on logic, mathematics, and the laws of physics. But in recent years we have witnessed a laudable state of ferment in the field. This unrest seems mainly from the growing realization that any philosophy of science must do justice to the living world as well as to the physical one.

Ernst Mayr, Towards a Philosophy of Biology, p.v.

It was my great good fortune to take high school biology with Bill "Mo" McGee. A trained geneticist, Mo had worked for a while with the US Forest Service, in a project to assist in the revival of various species of southern pines that faced, in the 1950s, something of an attack. The group with which he worked managed not only to save the trees, but get them to thrive. As my father said once while visiting our home in Virginia, "Mo would love it here. He knew everything about these southern pines."  

Mo was also unafraid to bring up Charles Darwin. In fact, he was quite clear that it was impossible to understand biology without understanding what Darwin taught; it was impossible to understand the living world, medicine, even what we were learning in our labs when we dissected everything from a sheep's eye to two-foot long sharks (removing the eyes, the nasal bulbs, and the spinal cord from its cartilaginous sheath) without understanding what Darwin said about the development of life on earth. He did so simply, directly, without muss or fuss or even mentioning that there might be a controversy about the subject. 

While I have always maintained an interest in what is loosely termed "naturalism" - a fascination with the study of various species of plants and animals as they live out their lives in the world - it wasn't as high on my list as other things; other than the occasional grumpy mumble whenever I read about some yahoos going after Darwin's theory of evolution, I didn't pay nearly enough attention as I did to other things. Fast forward from that dim lecture hall in 1980 to the book shop in the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian in 1998. Lisa and I traveled to DC for a quiet, family Fourth of July. Moriah was days away from her first birthday, and despite typical heat and humidity, it was nice enough to stroll through the streets of the nation's capital, visit our favorite museums, and generally spend a pleasant day together. While in the gift shop after seeing the major sights, I was perusing the books shelves when one title practically smacked me in the face. 

I had left CUA and the philosophy of science a year before; I faced the choice either of full-time graduate student work for many years, or full-time fatherhood, which really didn't seem like much of a choice. All the same, my still unformed thoughts on the subject swirled about, and the book was inviting me to take it home. The opening paragraph of the Preface, the epigraph above, was more than intriguing. It was a reminder of a point that had been made, over and over, by several faculty in the School of Philosophy: Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was not science. Mayr himself cites none other than Karl Popper writing in 1974 that the theory was a "metaphysical research program". Precisely because it, and the larger science within which it worked, was different from physics, the theory of natural selection was different in kind from theories in physics, astronomy, and even chemistry, most philosophers held it in a certain kind of contempt. Kuhn, whom one might have thought would have mentioned Darwin in a book explaining scientific revolutions, talks more about Benjamin Franklin - whose work in electricity altered the study of the field - than he does Charles Darwin, or Gregor Mendel, or even Watson and Crick. "Science", it seems, is physics and, as long as it pays homage to physics, chemistry. 

I wrote yesterday that reading Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life was like a huge bomb going off, forever altering how I understood matters of life and evolution and necessity versus contingency. Reading Mayr was similar; by reminding readers that biology was a science, just different in its assumptions, methods, and structure than physics or chemistry, he forced this reader to reconsider the whole question of "philosophy of science". Already familiar with the divide between what the Germans call the natural sciences and the human sciences, I realized that even in the natural sciences, there was a divide between those who understood themselves to be discussing "science" and other, lesser things.  

Like biology. 

Mayr argues in this series of essays that the reduction of "science" to physics is mirrored in these same philosophers, and many practitioners of the scientific enterprise, with a demand that biology reduce itself, at the very least, to biochemistry. Because chemistry itself faces the demand to reduce to physics, the through-line here should be clear enough: Biology, with its preference for qualitative research and description, its basic research program - natural selection - priding itself on its inability to predict specific events in the future but only describe the past, should surrender to the Truth that, at heart, we living things are little more than masses of particles in motion. If we can understand the chemistry and physics of living creatures, that should teach us all we need to know, as well as serve the usual, predictive, function of scientific theories that natural selection happily eschews. Like many who thought they might know a thing or two, reading Mayr was a lesson in the reality that, as that old song says, "Don't know much biology." 

Part of the problem non-biologists have with biology is the reality that it encompasses a wide variety of sub-specialties that study specific questions that can only be understood within a larger framework. As the various levels of study - from biochemistry through histology to anatomy and physiology - each demonstrates a certain amount of integrity; at the same time, these lower-order specialties exist within a whole that cannot be reduced to these specific areas of study. This is best demonstrated by our flirtation with genetic reductionism. It is often argued that, should we find specific genetic sequences that can be linked to anything from alcoholism to cancer, we could intervene during gestation to prevent the development of what are considered these "faulty" sequences. The problem with this view is that DNA does not "determine" our life. Deoxyribosenucleic acid codes for the metabolizing of proteins. That's all it does. As specific proteins are metabolized, the resulting chemical reactions produce higher-order phenomena, the creation of cells with specific metabolic functions. These cells, in turn, become organized through chemical tracers used for communicating function, in tissues. This synthesis to ever higher, non-reducible structure and function results in the creation of a tree, a frog, or a person. 

That there is a correlation between certain gene sequences and alcoholism is now well-known. This does not mean, however, that a person with that particular gene sequence is destined to be an alcoholic. Even should an individual with that particular gene sequence live within a context in which alcohol consumption is accepted and practiced, there is no cause-and-effect that links this particular genetic sequence to alcoholism. Many other factors, some biological while others are behavioral, come in to play. We cannot reduce our understanding of individuals to DNA. With the rare exception of certain physiognomic traits - hair and eye color, say - higher-order phenomena, including disease and behavioral and psychological dysfunction, cannot be understood from a study of genetics. It may well lead to certain paths for further research; DNA, however, is not destiny. We may look the way we do thanks to our genes. We are not, however, who we are, even in a biological sense, because of our DNA. 

The matter is further complicated by the fact that biology deals not only with individuals. It also has to consider populations. Natural selection works both on the individual level, as genetic variation results in specific differences between individuals; it also works within the larger pool of genetic variation to produce, over time, either greater diversity that can lead, over time, to specific differentiation, the heart of evolution by natural selection, or should a population become isolated and genetic variation shrink, to extinction. We cannot understand evolution if we forget that it is constantly at work within populations, using the total pool of genetic variation within a population. Responding to ever changing environmental circumstances, evolution works to enhance those biochemical differences that result in individuals who are more likely to provide offspring, adding their distinctiveness to the larger population. Speciation occurs within populations, thanks to the large pool of available genetic information. It cannot be reduced to specific differences between individuals even within the same consanguineous, reproducing population. 

Understanding that biology is different in kind from physics and chemistry, yet nonetheless has an integrity, method, and self-understanding no less sophisticated than either dealt, in essence, a huge blow to my thoughts regarding philosophy of science. How was it even possible to use those three words together when, in fact, what most people engaged in the pursuit were really attempting was a description of physics? Furthermore, the success and on-going practice of the various fields of the biological sciences, as well as the refinements of Darwin and Mendel and the success of this synthesis in guiding research mocked the insistence of those who insisted that biology, or the theory of natural selection, or medicine, are not sciences. They are, and folks studying in the field are quite happy with the designation. All those folks who nod in approval at Popper's comment about "metaphysical research program[s]" demonstrate more a kind of intellectual blindness than they do an acumen about biology that biologists themselves lack.

Wonderful Life: Notes Toward A Medium Opus IX

I grew up watching all those great old nature programs on television. Marlin Perkins and Wild Kingdom, obviously, but there were others. When I was older, episodes of Nova and Nature on anything having to do with animals or natural history would find me seated front and center. Ours is a world filled with wonders and horrors, sometimes both at the same time - nothing gives me the willies quite like contemplating parasitic wasps, let me tell you - and every time we learn something new about the world, it just becomes all the more wonderful.

In the winter of 1989-1990, I read one of two books* that would shape the way I thought about all sorts of thing. Stephen Jay Gould was the nature columnist for Natural History magazine, a professor of biology at Harvard University, and a die-hard baseball fanatic of the first water. He published many of his columns as collections; Wonderful Life, however, was a marvelous study in historical detective work. It concerns the reconstruction of the fossilized remains of the Burgess Shale, a massive formation in Canada that was discovered and mined for what it told paleontology about an extinct ecosystem. The only major deposit from a mass extinction during the Cambrian period, hundreds of creatures, many of which found nowhere else, had their deaths recorded despite the fact they were all invertebrates, soft-shelled creatures without any bony structures to survive the hundreds of millions of years between them and us. Gould recounts how decades of accepted interpretations of the creatures within the Burgess was overturned once it became possible, through three-dimensional computer modeling, to recreate the creatures who left, in essence, two-dimensional representations of themselves. What had been understood as separate creatures suddenly, through the images offered by the computers, became parts - organs and body sections - of the same creature. The end result was a completely different understanding of the fauna of the Cambrian oceans.

Gould took the title of his book from the 1947 Frank Capra film, in which Jimmy Stewart discovers what the world would look like without him. Part of the problem with the original reconstruction of the Burgess Shall fauna was the scientists who worked on the remains began with known classifications of various animalia. The results, therefore, found precursors to later creatures. The new models, on the other hand, demonstrated whole ecosystems in which later families, orders, even phyla were totally absent. The Burgess Shale, rather than capturing in stone a snapshot of the evolution of known animals, in fact showed us a mass of animals that bore no relation to later creatures. Through the historical accident of mass-extinction (one of several that have hit our planet; the one during the Cambrian is only second in terms of the extent to which it extinguished so much life, with something like 92% of animal and plant species disappearing completely) these creatures left no trace of their existence in the genetic record. The question this reality posed, for Gould, was simple enough: What might our world have looked like had that mass extinction not occurred?

Our world, from the perspective of natural history, is an accident. Nothing like necessity lies behind the marvelous diversity of life, including human beings. These creatures, of which we only know anything thanks to chemistry and geology, would have made the Earth a very different planet had they not been extinguished in one of the several Great Dyings. Stripped of the wonder such thoughts should inspire, there is something terrifying in this thought. We human beings, regardless of our religious or ideological or other commitments - even those that insist they owe nothing to metaphysics - insist there is something special about us as a species. We continue, even when we should know better, to celebrate the significant difference between us and all other animals, even as those things we insist mark that difference - tool-making and using; language as the communication of discrete bits of information; sociability; even the capacity for the violation of accepted social norms - continue to show up in animals both near and far from us in the genetic tree.

Gould's humbling narrative, offering the merest hint not only that things could have been different, but that they were, indeed, very different, was little less than the equivalent of a nuclear bomb for me. In all honesty, I can't even remember how I thought about such things before reading Gould. Take a gander at the birds out in your feeder. The dog curled up on the floor or cat on your lap. Look in to the eyes of the person who shares your life, the faces of your children. None of this exists because it has to. There is nothing of necessity here. That we human beings, with our vaunted skills and intelligence and language and all the rest exist is not necessary. Indeed, going back to the creatures who exploded in development and variation after the Cambrian mass-extinction - even those things didn't exist because they had to. Our world is as it is, including we human beings contemplating it as it is, as an accident. Period. I realize this makes people uncomfortable. That doesn't make it any less the way things are.

*The other is Parke Godwin's Waiting for the Galactic Bus, the only work of science fiction I read at least once a year. If you want to know what I really think about things like life, death, the afterlife, ethics, politics, and John Wilkes Booth, check it out.

Untangling The Web II: Notes Toward A Medium Opus VIII

It was nothing to find a glaring contradiction in the thought of a major philosopher. In fact, it's the easiest thing in the world. As I explained to my thesis adviser - who knew Popper and was impressed with my thesis - the goal was to move from this reassessment of the structure and nature of Popper's thought to a consideration of Popper and Kuhn, as well as Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos, on what science is.

In The Copernican Revolution, one long-standing issue with which Kuhn deals is what, precisely, was at stake as astronomy moved from pre-Copernican to Copernican views of the heavens. One thing most assuredly was not even a question, nor would have been understood to be such, was whether or not the Ptolemaic cosmology offered a more accurate representation of the Universe. It was a particular conceit, particularly in the 18th century, to consider Copernicus' De Revolutionibus nothing less than a complete shift not only in astronomy, but in the way we human beings understand the universe and our place in it. Actually reading Copernicus, however, should disabuse anyone of such an idea.

Since Ptolemy, astronomy had been a thoroughly quantitative science; by the early 16th century, it had developed to the point that the equations used to describe the movement of the planets against the background of "fixed stars" might not have been recognizable, yet was clearly within the parameters set by Ptolemy. The increasing complexity of the equations involved was a result of attempts to account for observed variations in the purported regular motion. Of acute concern was what is known as the retrogression of Mars. As Mars moves across the sky, at irregular intervals, it appears to move backward against the fixed stars. Other issues, from slight variations in the periodicity of Mercury to similar, yet less frequent and small, retrogressions of Jupiter and Saturn, had led to the creation of what were called "cycles" and then, added to these, "epicycles", sometimes several piled upon one another as repeated observations invalidated previous attempts to resolve observed irregularities.

In their simplest terms, the cycles and epicycles were mathematical representations of variations on the assumed circular motion of the planets within their "spheres". Rooted in a Platonized Pythagorean dedication to the "perfection" of the heavenly realm, this insistence on understanding the movement of the planets within "spheres" that traced perfect circles led astronomers to include calculations in which the spheres appeared to circle round particular foci, then the center of these alternate movements also became foci for further "epicycles". Copernicus offered a couple simple suggestions. The mounting number and complexity of cycles and epicycles was clearly far too complex to make the construction of tables of planetary motion - needed for everything from calculating the planting and harvesting of crops through regularizing calendrical conventions to calculating certain holidays - so Copernicus suggested shifting the earth from the center to a position in orbit around the new center, the sun. In so doing, dozens of cycles and epicycles dropped away, and Copernicus offered the promise of more precise calculation in the future.

At no time had Copernicus suggested that the Sun was the actual physical center of the solar system or universe. Indeed, had such a notion been ascribed to him (the work was published posthumously, in large part because it took him so long to redo the new calculations), it would have been unintelligible to him. Astronomy had nothing to do with the structure of the heavens. It was a way to calculate the movement of pinpoints of light human beings used to determine the passing of the seasons and years; the cosmos was as God created it, with the heavenly realm a place of perfection, with God - not this or that heavenly sphere - at the center. It took over a century for the full implications of Copernicus humble suggestion for clearing away the rubble from mathematical astronomy to be felt.

Along the way there was the not unimportant fact that the promise of better predictive results from streamlining away dozens of those epicycles didn't pan out. In fact, reverting to earlier tables, with the earth at the center and all those circles around circles around circles, rendered more accurate observable results, at least in the case of Jupiter and Saturn, than Copernicus' innovation. Furthermore, most astronomers were wary of the innovation, not because it violated some theological or philosophical conviction, but for the far more mundane reason that people don't like innovation.

At no time during the century and a half of the working out of Copernicus' theory did anyone consider that the developing theory of the structure of the heavenly spheres (as they continued to be called) prove either that the previous view was "wrong" in that it did not correspond to the way the universe was "really"; nor did they believe the new discoveries demonstrated that the developing science of astronomy now had a more accurate "picture" of the universe. This popular notion - that the Copernican Revolution succeeded because it offered a more accurate representation of the "real" structure and shape of the solar system - is mistaken for one simple reason: no one actually involved in the controversies of the century and a half from Copernicus afterward would have understood the issues in those terms. 

The broader implications, for Kuhn's narrative, should be clear enough. Elaborating on them in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn makes the exact same point Popper had made: Science is not about representing to us the way the world "is". Rather, science is the construction of mathematical and verbal models, which themselves exist within interlocking, contingent frames of reference (here, Kuhn fell back upon the idea from psychology of Gestalt) for which there exists no outside arbitrator to decide how accurately they represent "the world". Language, it seems, even the mathematical sciences, do not "represent" anything; science uses the tools available, including language, broader social understandings, and the various rules of social interaction and discourse, to make clear, in terms that are always contingent and sometimes unintelligible across the barriers of language, society, and time, how we understand the world. This description of science is little different from Popper's. The difference between the two men - and Popper's essay in Criticism and The Growth of Knowledge is one of the most condescending pieces of writing from one scholar to another I've read - was Popper's assumption that the rules of logic and mathematical rationality were constants that were the bones upon which the contingent structures of science hung. Kuhn, on the other hand, while certainly not disparaging rationality, made the point over and over again, that this was never a matter under dispute. His was not an attack on science or human reason. It was, rather, a description of the scientific enterprise that made clear something in which both men believed: Science does not represent "the world".

There is no way for human beings to represent with anything like accuracy or even approximation "the world" precisely because "the world" is an open system; science, limited by the fact that it is a human construct with all sorts of factors both within language itself as well as extraneous factors, clarifies particular matters of interpreting and understanding the world without ever making the category error that it, somehow, "describes" the "world".

I offered this as the topic I wanted to explore for my dissertation, and my thesis adviser told me to go for it. The only reason I didn't entered the world on July 10, 1997. The happiest decision I ever made was turning my back of the above because I had this beautiful tiny bundle of new person for which to care.

Untangling The Web I: Notes Toward A Medium Opus VII

All the while I was taking classes at CUA, I was also searching for a suitable topic for a Master's Thesis that would serve as a good starting point for a dissertation. I arrived at the conclusion that I wanted to reconcile the irreconcilable: The philosophies of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn could not seem more different. At the same time what each said seemed, at least intuitively, correct. How could this be possible?

Much of the first half of the 20th century in philosophy were consumed with the question of Truth. By this, they weren't concerned with whether or not something was factual or not; rather, the question was, and remained for a long time, a variation on Kant's dilemma in The Critique of Pure Reason: How is it possible that human beings represent to themselves the world in such a way that correct judgments both about the world and human action in the world can be made with any reliability? The assumption behind Kant's query was that the world, whatever that word might be, existed independently of human beings. In order for the world to be intelligible, this manifold noumenal world had to be rendered in to discrete phenomenal events through a series of epistemological structures within the human mind. That human beings only receive their impressions of the world mediately, through their senses, the world as noumena is ultimately this shadowy whole; our encounter cannot penetrate to what Kant called the Thing-in-Itself, but rather had to settle for understanding that our knowledge claims were always only about our sensory impressions of the phenomena filtered through a series of categories that gave shape, form, and substance to our experience.

The big shift, however, between this (admittedly rough) sketch of Kantian epistemology was where intelligibility was rendered. For Kant it was the categories of synthetic judgment within the human mind. In the early 20th century, it became language. Back in the dim, dark 1980's, reading up on the background to Adolf Hitler, I remembered reading that Vienna, from roughly the 1880's through the beginning of the First World War, was an even greater hub of exciting experimental discussion than Paris or London or Berlin. In particular, the focus became human language. The pre-Great War epitome of this was, of course, Sigmund Freud, for whom the words we use can be clues to unlock our hidden, repressed desires. After the war, a group of philosophers, impressed by Freud's explorations of the way language can render the unconscious intelligible, sought to expand the way it was language that offered a way for common intelligibility.

Impressed with the way science, particularly physics, had made huge strides in the first two decades of the century, they thought it was by clarifying what it is science does, and how it does it, that the way language creates intelligibility could create the conditions for understanding how we human beings make sense of the world. They became known as the Vienna Circle. Their way of doing philosophy was called "logical positivism".

Their first order of business was, strange enough, not to clarify our understanding of science, but rather to declare what words were, by their very nature, unintelligible. Along with pretty much the whole vocabulary of theology, such words as love and freedom and justice were simply dismissed as inherently unintelligible, therefore of little to no interest to philosophy. Not winning a whole lot of friends, they then declared, through a series of essays and monographs, what it was scientists did and how they did it. Not a single physicist of whom I'm aware jumped up and down upon reading, say, Otto Neurath's understanding of protocol sentences precisely because, despite an overstated devotion to science, the logical positivists weren't speaking about science.

When Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery first appeared, however, many scientists, and not just physicists, at least nodded their heads. Describing the scientific enterprise as the careful accumulation of a series of data, as defined by strict experimental guidelines within an ordered, intelligible theory that provided an hypothesis for which an experiment served as a falsifying test, I can't imagine a more succinct description of the scientific enterprise.

At the heart of Popper's discussion was the question of intelligibility and the relationship between science and truth. Early on in Logic, Popper states quite explicitly that no event in the world can falsify any sentence. Setting forth, very thoroughly and carefully, the rules that limit and determine the structure, function, and method of scientific theories and what constitutes their testability, Popper is adamant that, like that old joke about the tortoises that make up the universe, it's sentences all the way down. This position - that the meaning of scientific theories was entirely conventional, limited only to the definitional limits set forth within the theories themselves - was one from which he ever wavered. 

Later in his career, Popper published an essay in his collection, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach entitled "Epistemology Without A Knowing Subject" in which he argued, quite forcefully, that he was now and always had been a philosophical realist, and that his theory of science was little more than an elaboration of that dedication to the most basic principle of realism: the world is intelligible, and we human beings approach true knowledge as we eliminate false understandings through rigorous adherence to the principles of science. Nothing, however, could be more wrong. A philosophical realist is dedicated to the idea that the world outside human experience exists with its own integrity. One of the corollaries of realism is what is known as the correspondence theory of truth: Our representations of the extra-human world are true if and only if there is a direct, one-to-one correspondence between these representations and that external reality. Yet, Popper was quite clear, and adamant, that scientific theories, and the sentences rendering them both intelligible and testable, were mere conventions; he was further clear and adamant that there was nothing "out there" that could falsify any sentence human beings made regarding the world.

This was a rather glaring problem, to say the least. While Popper was clear that he was not a positivist, his own description of science made it clear that he was, indeed, just that. A curious kind of positivist, to be sure; he was disdainful of the work, for example, of Rudolf Carnap*, perhaps the most respected of the logical positivists whose Meaning and Necessity was perhaps the greatest attempt to create a grammar and semantics within philosophy that was limited to logical coherence. Most people don't even read Carnap anymore, but at the time the disputes between Carnap and Popper hinged precisely on Popper's rejection of Carnap's wholly logical attempt to render human language intelligible.

For Popper, definitions, like sentences and axioms and theories and hypotheses and the rest of science, are all conventions. Setting forth criteria for universal intelligibility, the great project of the end of Carnap's career, would make scientific advancement impossible precisely because it would make no room for the conventional nature of the language of science. I planned on solving this problem, in essence, by making clear through a detailed look at both claims in the two different works - and Popper's adamant insistence on his own consistency - and offer the view that, in fact, what Popper called "The Third World" (the world outside human control and reason) was little more than the sum total of the basic statements not yet falsified by scientific experiment. He as much as admitted this to be the case, although, again, denying he ever said such a thing. From here, I hoped to move toward reconciling Kuhn and Popper on the question of science, the world, and the matter of truth and reality.


*If you ever have insomnia, pick up Open Court Publisher's Library of Living Philosopher's volume on Carnap. You may never finish the 1000 pages, but you will enjoy long nights of dreamless, uninterrupted slumber.

Getting Medieval On Your Ass: Notes Toward A Medium Opus VII

Every story has a through-line. In this case, it's the relationship among all this disparate stuff, always with one eye not only on how it all fits together, but how "making sense of the world" is done. When I arrived at the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America for the fall semester in 1995, I discovered their through-line was simple enough: human understanding peaked at the University of Paris and St. Thomas; the whole narrative structure of their approach both to the history of philosophy and its product became intelligible once you grasped that.

Whether general survey classes - in four semesters, from the pre-Socratics to Rorty and Searle - thematic courses (moral philosophy from Aquinas through Kant to Mill), or seminars (Aristotle's Politics, Heidegger's Being and Time, even Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil) the point all along was to show that, for all its vaunted successes, thought after Aquinas was, as some theologian said of St. Augustine's influence, merely footnotes.

This was driven home to me in a seminar I took on Isaac Newton's Principia. If it seems odd to read one of the major texts of post-Renaissance science in a philosophy class, you probably shouldn't feel bad. I took the class because it was offered, because my concentration was the philosophy of science, and because I needed to get a handle on the particulars of certain key points in the history of science if getting to my own point - making Popper and Kuhn work together - was going to work. For those not familiar with it, the Principia is the single text that created what most people think of when they consider "physics". Indeed, the so-called "Laws of Motion" are introduced at the very beginning by way of making clear the axioms Newton will be using throughout as he works through various mathematical problems related to bodies in motion (if you ever idly think of cracking Newton's opus to see what's inside, you should bone up on your geometry first; most of it is just that).

After these "laws" are introduced, he goes on, in the first section, to demonstrate their usefulness. One of the problems he addresses through careful application of these laws concerns the precise definition of curvilinear motion. The laws work far better for calculating such motion - useful for astronomers who are trying to figure out planetary motion, as well as artillery gunners for calculating what angle to set their pieces; who said math wasn't practical, right? - when one, as Newton states in an early lemma, or problem, considers the areas of the triangles formed by (a) the path of the body in motion; (b) some arbitrary, stationary point; (c) the distance between these two at successive time intervals, as proceeding to infinity. In other words, demonstrating the greater precision for calculation inherent in the Laws includes assuming something - a set of potentially infinite objects - that for centuries was firmly denied any reality. We came to that particular problem, and a fellow student - who went, where else, but Aquinas College - started in (and here I'm not quoting, but paraphrasing from memory), "But, Aristotle made clear in the Physics [quoting book, chapter, and line] that this is impossible. Newton just jumps in and says its necessary. How is that possible?" The professor began to explain that, while Aristotle indeed proclaimed an actual infinity to be impossible, Newton here only states that one should "imagine" this set of triangles going on to infinity. The student, continued on for a bit until finally asking the question that I couldn't imagine anyone saying: "Doesn't this invalidate Newton's work?" 

"Last time I checked, Newton was right and Aristotle was wrong," I said. Several eyes turned to me. 

The young man, so earnest and full of Aristotle and St. Thomas, started quoting both of them, and I shook my head. "You do understand that Newton was right." He entered, yet again, in to a long quote session, impressing himself with his ability to cite and quote passages from these gentlemen from memory. I think the oxygen level in the room fell long enough for him to shut up, so I tried another tack: "Are you suggesting that the history of western science, from the 17th century until now, is flawed because Aristotle insisted that an actual infinity was impossible? Because, see, if you insist that Newton 'cannot' do what he has done in the way he has done it, then you are insisting that western science, rooted in calculus that takes potential and actual infinities seriously, is wrong despite its evident success."

Like discussions on the internet, my point was lost on this young man who was so intent on repeating, yet again, what Aristotle had said. When the day came to turn in our papers - I have to be honest and admit I have no recollection of what I submitted; I got an "A" in the class, though, not that it means that much - I saw the title of this young man's: "To Infinity And Beyond". Thirty pages revising and extending his original in-class remarks. I was in the presence of a certain kind of brilliance; I was also in the presence of near-insane myopia.

Part of figuring out the world includes using the best available tools to do the job. There is little doubt that the work of Aristotle was important as well as influential. There is little doubt that his qualitative discussions of motion and rest, of time and space, are well-written, concise, and intelligible. This was the first time, however, I met anyone who didn't understand that he was wrong about, well, pretty much everything when it came to these matters. I wouldn't use a chariot to get around, not because there's something inherently wrong with a chariot, but because there are better modes of transportation available. I might study the construction of a chariot, admire the simplicity and economy of the design of so versatile a vehicle, but I wouldn't use one, or recommend its use. So, too, my thoughts regarding philosophers. I can admire the subtlety of Aristotle, the poetry of Plato, the precision of Ockham, the moral fervor of Kant all the while understanding that they have little to no relevance to our world. Trying to consider them as anything more than museum pieces demonstrates, for me, a fundamental failure to take them seriously; it also demonstrates a failure to take our world seriously.

We are nearing our conclusion here, but it is important to make one point clear.  It is important to wrestle with what these and many other people thought if one has an interest in understanding, say, how human beings have asked and answered questions regarding why things exist, the nature of the good life, the best possible society for achieving the end of realizing our common humanity.  One should never dismiss them, most of all if one has no knowledge of what they said, or the way they said it, precisely because such things are clues to the larger question of how different human beings in different societies make sense of the world around them.  Trying to make them contemporary commentators, however, does violence to their thought as well as trivializes our current reality, essentially insisting it is in no way different from times far removed from us in time and space and the particular differences of history.  Disregarding these differences demonstrates, for me, not only a lack of clarity, but a lack of seriousness.

Self-Taught Can't Be Done: Notes Toward A Medium Opus VI

The year between my decision to study philosophy and actually entering graduate school I learned that if a person who represents himself in court has a fool for a client, an auto-didact has a moron for a student and an ignoramus for a teacher.

Ignorance has never been a deterrent in human affairs, so why should I be any different?

Reading through the essays in Criticism and The Growth of Knowledge, it became clear to me that if I was going to figure out what my subject was all about, not only would I have to go back and re-read Kuhn, there was this other guy I was going to have to read. The fact that Karl Raimund Popper wrote a lot during his very long life wasn't intimidating. More books? Bring them on. At the same time, the specific criticism Popper made of Kuhn in his essay in Criticism demonstrated to me that Popper just didn't understand Kuhn. At no time did I think it odd that I had absolutely no basis upon which to lay such a claim, and even less understanding of the questions and issues at stake. 

So, there was Popper. There was one of the editors of the volume, whose very long essay - "The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes" - demonstrated that he was yet another person of interest on the matter. Other, somewhat related subjects appeared.  For example, there is what is called the sociology of knowledge. This is addressed generally, as in Peter Berger's The Social Construction of Reality or specifically, such as David Bloor's Knowledge and Social Imagery* or Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth.

Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery was an immodest work by an immodest thinker. If anything characterizes Popper's entire career as a philosopher, it is a palpable, smug satisfaction that he exists in a world of fools, some of them quite dangerous**. Dismissive of pretty much everyone from the 19th century neo-Kantians through the Vienna Circle Logical Positivists (whom, he insisted, didn't understand what he was doing) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (in a sarcastic footnote early in his magnum opus that is an example of ur-snark anyone writing on the internet should admire), Popper not only argued that was setting forth a clear understanding of scientific practice and knowledge, but precisely because science was the one true way to Knowledge and Truth, he was setting forth the only path to Knowledge and Truth. The rest of his career, everything Popper wrote with the exception of his The Open Society and Its Enemies was dedicated to defending the basic structure he set forth in his first, major monograph.

Popper's description of science is simple enough to summarize: Using the deductive method (as opposed to induction, assumed since Bacon's Novum Organum to be the logical method of the emerging sciences; the Logical Positivists, who reigned as the philosophical definers of science, were particularly enamored of it), scientists construct theories out of a series of basic statements (a technical term he introduced that far too many people confused with the "protocol sentences" of the Logical Positivists; more on these later) along with specific criteria for falsifying their theories (as opposed to verifying theories, the preferred approach of, you guessed it, the Logical Positivists; if you're detecting a theme here, you're spot on). The work itself is long and detailed, including a very long section on the roll of probability, particularly in regards to quantum mechanics, in falsification, but this suffices for the major points to which Popper would return again and again. And again. And again.

My problem, which I didn't even know I had, was figuring out what, precisely, all this meant. What are the stakes in these competing visions of the scientific project? What is the relationship between these abstruse musings on the nature of human knowledge and understanding and my own, still whispered, questions regarding what any of it might mean for figuring out how it related to all this other stuff I'd learned at seminary, and other concerns including shaping it in to some coherent whole.

Lacking any context for really understanding the stakes and issues, I had, in a sense, been introduced to yet another conversation in yet another language, been taught a few words so I wouldn't be completely lost, yet thought I was ready to jump right in. When I started graduate school in the autumn semester of 1995, I had no idea that pretty much everything I'd taught myself the previous year would vanish in short order, leaving me with . . . well, that's for more posts.


*I discovered a great go-to publisher for titles in philosophy and history of science is University of Chicago Press. Many academic publishers have specialty imprints or specialize in certain topics. I learned very quickly to scan through the catalog from UoCPress for something new and interesting.


**While in the midst of graduate studies, a now-famous work entitled Wittgenstein's Poker was published.  Musing on matters of contemporary philosophy, the title recalls the one, infamous encounter between Popper and Wittgenstein, each of whom held the other in contempt for what each believed to be the other's idiocy.

The Story So Far: Notes Toward A Medium Opus V

Last week, I saw a BBC report on the latest from the Cassini Spacecraft orbiting Saturn. I was struck almost immediately with a fit of nostalgia for that long ago summer afternoon when I first discovered human's initial close encounter with the planet. It was the awakening of a kind of curiosity inside me about the world, how we understand it, and how we may well not understand it. Over the years, I've ranged far and wide in my courses of study, prompted by concerns of the moment or long-standing interests, but at the heart of all of it is a simple desire to figure out a couple basic questions: How is it we human beings understand the world around us? Is it possible these things are connected in some way, ways perhaps that we overlook in our pursuit of different kinds of understanding? Is this understanding linked in any way that might yet prove fruitful for making our life together as over six billion people on this planet not just less hazardous, but easier for all?

So far, I've mentioned a few names, teachers I've had in class and instructors who have offered their works to the ages in print, that provide some of the clues I needed, either to understand the questions I didn't even know I had, or the information to move forward in answering the questions I was starting to understand. We'll encounter other names and ideas soon enough, as before in no particular chronological order, but always drawn together, for me, in the hopes of making sense of so disparate a phenomenon as human understanding.

I decided to start this because, after reading the stories of our latest discoveries around Saturn, I realized that something had come full circle for me. While much of what I've already written and will follow has been settled for me for quite a while, I thought a bit of self-reflection was in order, if for no other reason than to make explicit those links that, until now, had only been implicit. What better time than now? What better way than to tell the silly story of me reading a magazine one summer afternoon when I was a kid, and the surprising impact it had upon a large part of my life? I've learned a few things on the way, offered some clues as to the direction I'm heading, as well as some red herrings just to keep things interesting. Making clear why it is I have such a wide array of interests has always been something I thought I might do at some point; with the prompting I received that point has come, and moving forward I'm looking forward to making sense of it all.

At its most basic, my curiosity revolves around the related points of human understanding and human sociability. Making our world a more livable place for its inhabitants certainly involves understanding our world, yet how do we understand it? How is it possible to work together toward particular goals of common justice and humanity when it is quite possible we have no idea what we're talking about when we insist we understand all sorts of things about the world? Does that leave us without any resources for improving our common life, hoping perhaps to keep things from sucking so much (the position of Richard Rorty)?

There are keys, not the least of them being a lesson I learned, first from my father, then from life: A little humility can go a long way. Beginning with the premise that no matter how much we think we understand, (a) it might all be wrong; or (b) even if what we have so far isn't wrong, there is still ao much left to discover and learn and understand, should keep us from getting too caught up in our own wonderfulness at all the things we think we know. It is far better to expect to be wrong, if for no other reason than the happy surprise that comes with being proved right.

There is no special virtue in having a lot of stuff crammed in one's brain. I don't consider it a point of pride that my interests are broad, my reading at least somewhat more deep than the average person, and my ability to articulate my thoughts a goal toward which I work. On the contrary. Compared, say, to those who work with their hands, those who teach, or even those who work each day to improve our world just a bit through their work with and for others, being impressed with the ability to read books is hardly something one should bandy about as marking some special virtue. First of all, there are always those who read and understand those books better; second, and far more basic - who cares? The information and understanding is meaningless unless it serves a larger goal and purpose. Since this includes never resting or settling easy with the answers and solutions we have so far, closing one book inevitably leads to opening the next. And the next. And the next. No matter how much we might think we have it figured out, a point is going to come when we say, with St. Thomas when he was asked why he had given up writing his Summa Theologica: "It's all straw."

We should never become so impressed with our own accomplishments that we forget no one else is. We should never forget that most basic, important lesson that has come from a lifetime of study and work and living: None of it, not a bit of it, is about me. For that reason alone, I have little for which to be proud. I do, however, have some explaining to do.

Learning To Read: Notes Toward A Medium Opus IV

Systematic Theology may have been the pump that rendered my head far too large to carry around. A course on interpreting Scripture taken the very next semester was the antidote I didn't even know I needed.

Under the bland, rather presumptuous title, "Texts and Exegetical Methods", the class offered itself as an introduction to a variety of interpretive strategies, including using various extra-Biblical resources for exegesis. The professor who taught that class was a tall, thin, good looking, charming man named David Hopkins. I'd taken David's Hebrew Bible survey class and was more than impressed with his intelligence, wit, and teaching style. Looking forward to his class, I had no idea that David, being witty and intelligent, was singularly unimpressed by those qualities in his students unless they were amply demonstrated with output. It took very little time for me to realize his class was not going to be easy. For which I will be forever thankful.

The goal of the class is easy enough to understand: Take all that stuff you learn in the survey classes about different literary styles and historical criticism and the various other types of critical reading styles, and demonstrate them using specific texts. Along the way, I learned, for example, that the story in Genesis is not about Cain and Abel. Abel is, for all intents and purposes, a prop. The story is about Cain and God (which should be a hint to folks paying attention; if at least one of the characters in a Biblical story isn't God, you might not quite understand what's going on). I also learned that there is a passage at the end of the story of Lot fleeing Sodom that would be difficult to preach. David actually challenged us to preach a sermon on it: it's the passage where, hiding in the caves, Lot's daughters get him drunk and after he passes out, rape him. The children conceived this way become the leaders of the tribes that were the traditional enemies of the old Kingdom of Israel.

At its heart, the class was about reading. Rather than treat any particular text as "Biblical", as if that was enough information for getting on with, the reader needs to understand what kind of text it is. Reading different texts requires different interpretive tools and exegetical mindsets. Part of the exegetical task is understanding not only what questions to ask, but even more basic, what the text is NOT saying. Reading the Bible, like reading anything else, leaves us with nothing more than . . . text. It's right there in the course title, a big clue to some of us not quite smart enough to get it for the first couple weeks. In order to understand what questions to ask, we have to understand there are certain things, as text, the Bible does not and cannot say to us. It does not give us "facts". It does not give us "truth". It does not give us historical information or details on the lives of famous people. As a particular kind of text - a religious holy book that contains the stories and claims about who God is - these are the matters that should always be in the front of our minds when reading the Bible. Searching through the Bible for clues about, say, when Abraham might have made his journey to Palestine, say, or whether or not Job actually lived (I heard of a preacher who not only insisted that Job was a real person, a contemporary of Abraham, but that it says so right there in the Bible; I've searched in vain for that information, and anyway, I'm still waiting on the whole "Abraham" as a real, historical person) is a bit like rooting through property deeds at a county records office and asking if the people who lived in these houses were alcoholics, say, or if they were good parents. It is possible, in other words, to ask and answer the wrong questions. When we do that, we may not be committing some mortal sin, but we certainly aren't interpreting the Bible.

During the class, David would drop a few names that intrigued me. One was Gerhard Ebelling, not very well known except among some few rarefied circles in English-speaking theology studies. Another, Roland Barthes, seems far more the preserve of literary critics. Both offer not so much method as something far more basic - an awareness that reading is a playful, interactive activity. Even something as simple as a novel can offer a reader rich rewards who comes to the text seeking something, not just passing one's eyes over a page. Reading is a playful activity, in which human imagination is as engaged as the critical faculties. Not elaborating too much on the role these particular individuals played in his own approach to reading Scripture, David did seem to see, and offered to his students, the marvelous notion that reading the Bible could be surprising and fun. As long as one kept in mind that all we were doing was reading.

Few classes I took at seminary were more liberating, not least because the class wasn't geared toward providing a bunch of information. It was, rather, about inculcating a habit, a practice that engaged one's eyes and ears, one's imagination and critical faculties. At its heart, David's class taught us that we did not know how to read the Bible; here were some intriguing possibilities for moving forward. There was one vital piece of information, however, that hit like a ton of bricks. In an early paper I turned in, David came down pretty hard on me for ignoring certain historical trends in interpretation. I went to him - David was tough but fair, always accessible, and even at his most adamant always cheerful and friendly; needless to say, he remains one of the great teachers for whom I'm always thankful - and asked him about this and he told me, in no uncertain terms, that it is always necessary to be aware of the history of interpretation when making exegetical choices. Even if that history is disagreeable, we cannot ignore it for the sake of convenience.

It was a nice surprise, at the end of the course, to discover that, twenty-two years after my mother first taught me to make sense of the marks on paper, I was finally learning to read. It involves being attentive to the text on the page. It involves understanding that text may well exist within a history of its own. It may also exist within a history of interpretation, which may itself be involved in larger circles of understanding. Even if we can never know everything about that whole history of overlapping discourses, we should at least be aware they exist. These thoughts were swirling about me, and, in a bit over three years, I would put them to good use in a totally different context. If you want to understand why I do the stuff I do the way I do, you need to understand it has a history, and is part of larger historical discourses. A realization I owe to David Hopkins.

The Finite Cannot Contain The Infinite: Notes Toward A Medium Opus IV

There is, perhaps, no single individual from the first half of the last century who transcends our typical categories of celebrity than Albert Einstein. Due in no small part to his own natural humility and accessibility - in later life, people in and around Princeton, NJ, would find him sitting on the porch of his small house, chatting with whoever might be passing by; parents would bring their children by for help with mathematics, into which he would dive enthusiastically, if not always successfully - Einstein seemed to radiate the exact opposite image of the buttoned-up intellectual, far afield from the concerns of the rest of us, even as his own area of study was understood, even as he admitted, by fewer than two dozen people.

Not long after my second semester in college began (that would have been January, 1984), I was in the bookstore in town. Ramming around the shelves, not particularly sure what I was looking for, or even why I was there, I stumbled, quite by accident, across a thick volume on the discount shelves. Entitled Einstein on Peace, edited by Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden, it was for sale for seventy-five cents. That, I thought, was a deal at any price.

I had no idea what I'd just done; reading through that book over the next couple weeks, sitting quietly in my dark dorm room, the only light the lamp on my desk - January and February in western New York, no matter the time of day or amount of sunshine, are very dark indeed - I entered a strange world that offered, I thought intuitively, a key to the puzzle I'd set myself to putting together a year and a half before. There was a link here between the questions proposed by that long-ago National Geographic article and my own, current, course of study and far more personal interest in politics. Nathan and Norden were the literary executors of Einstein's estate; after his death they gathered letters, essays, interviews, pamphlets, petitions he'd either written or signed, set them chronologically, and offered editorial comments, dates and other ways of setting context, to present the changing nature of Einstein's views on peace between and among nation-states. Perhaps best known, late in life, as both the instigator (on many levels) of the atomic bomb and the most visible advocate for the tiny but eloquent World Federalist movement (the head of the American branch of the World Federalists was a young California attorney; he won a seat in Congress in 1948 in no small part for his advocacy of reducing national sovereignty in matters of atomic armaments, and thirty-six years later was still in Washington as California's senior Senator, Alan Cranston). While I gleaned a lot of historical information from the work that has come in handy over the years, perhaps the biggest thing I got from the book was, alas, more questions: What was national sovereignty? Why were relations among states liable to break down? Was the logic Einstein used in his frequent arguments in favor of some kind of supranational mechanism for control of nuclear arms flawed in some way?

In 1905, Albert Einstein was an unhappily married, frustrated physics student, making ends meet as a clerk in a patent office in Switzerland. In his spare time he read the physics journals, and thought it would be interesting to offer his own views on some matters. He had been working on several different problems for a while and, finally, in three successive issues of the leading academic journal of physics, he published, first, a statistical analysis of Brownian Motion, what was thought to be the random motion of particles suspended in either liquid or gas. Einstein showed that, in fact, the movement was not random; there was a statistical regularity, once one examined the evidence closely. The answer Einstein offered was there had to be a force at work between the particles that operated at a level that was superceded once one moved from the very small setting of these particles. The second article considered the well-known but puzzling photoelectric effect. It was common knowledge among physicists that when materials are struck by light, the emitted electrons at particular frequencies. Einstein suggested that it was possible light, while being a waveform phenomenon might also be particulate, a bundle of specific energy that also had mass called a photon. It was when these photons hit the metal that, acting according to the laws of physics, the metal reacted and electrons were emitted, releasing not only energy but also mass in order to remain in steady-state.

The last concerned the problem posed by his solution to the photoelectric effect. How was it possible that light acted this way? How was it possible that materials, which were mass, reacted this way to light, which was energy? Einstein simplified many intersecting and contradictory possible solutions using Ockham's Razor - the simplest solution was probably right - and provided an equation, after much mathematical deduction, between mass and energy. In the process, by making the speed of light a constant as part of an equation concerning the most basic physical structures of the Universe, he went on to insist that the speed of light was a constant within all frames of reference. In other words, no matter velocity or acceleration, the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second - was always the same. It would be eleven years before the implications of this, what became known as the Special Theory of Relativity, were worked out. For the rest of his life, no matter what else Einstein would do, he was known for E=mc2, a formula that, while well known, was little understood.

Of the many virtues of Einstein's work here and later in life, perhaps the most important was his willingness to reduce the matters in question to their simplest, which would in turn create conditions for solutions that were not only logically foreseeable but also aesthetically pleasing. This insistence on the relative simplicity both of the problem and solution changed the way physics was understood, perhaps the greatest of Kuhn's paradigm shifts in the history of science. This quest for simplicity and elegance, rendering logic as necessary to understanding Einstein's thought as calculus, was also operative in his thoughts on the question of peace in world affairs. In particular after the Second World War, there was no small amount of discussion about control over both atomic armaments and the materials used in their construction and the engineering involved in their construction. Not long after the war, Harry Truman had industrialist and politically connected financier Bernard Baruch lead a small committee that would consider these problems and offer a plan to the UN Security Council. What became known as the Baruch Plan offered the gloss of international controls over the entire structure, from procuring nuclear materials to the creation and deployment of nuclear weapons in the hands of the UN Security Council; in practice, however, the entire plan was created to fail precisely because the other major powers, in particular the Soviet Union, would face massive violations of their sovereignty. A sociopath like Stalin, who didn't even trust those closest to him, was not about to allow huge numbers of American military personnel under the guise of the United Nations to wander freely through Soviet territory. The Security Council rejected the Baruch Plan before the ink was dry. 

Einstein understood the basic flaw in the Baruch plan slightly differently than did other observers. In 1905, he had started a revolution in science by making the one constant in the Universe the speed of light. Everything else, including time, was now a variable that could be altered as long as the key to the equation between mass and energy was intact. The equations, and the phenomena they represented, only made sense this way. After 1945, as Einstein saw it, the fundamental problem facing the world was the possibility of mass destruction through the use of atomic weapons in the hands of several nations with no realistic curb on their sovereign power. If that was the problem, the solution for Einstein was simple enough: alter the constants in current understanding in order to arrive at a simple, elegant solution. As Einstein understood it, his argument for some kind of supranational agency was to be limited to control over the material, technical expertise, construction, and deployment of nuclear weapons. Other matters in international affairs could be left to nation-states (although Einstein did note that, should such a mechanism be set in place, nations might well find it convenient to use as a way of settling disputes without the fallback of war that had become, even without nuclear weapons, devastating). Part of the key for Einstein was the creation and maintenance of an international force with both the authority and ability to intercede any time and place a nation might try to gain what would be the illegal understanding for building the Bomb. What, Einstein thought, could be more simple and clear given the massive destructive capability of such weapons?

Simplicity. Clarity. Elegance. These qualities were rooted in the belief that the Universe was intelligible in terms that, once reduced to their most basic were, in principle, available to anyone. Whether in physics or politics, the key was to rid ourselves of the baggage of superfluous nonsense, cut to the heart of the most basic problematic, and the questions and answers both would practically fall in to our laps.

It was difficult for a naive, young, idealistic, and extremely ignorant young man like me to articulate the fundamental flaw in all this. It was nearly impossible for a man who had all these qualities as well as a further one: I had no idea, at the time I was reading Einstein, how to articulate what I intuitively understood was the flaw. I just knew there was something amiss here. If a gun had been placed at my head, however, I wouldn't have been able to say what, precisely, that might be. Finding that flaw, being able to articulate it, became important to me, not least because right here, in this single volume in which a physicist ruminates on political matters, a big piece of the puzzle I had dumped on the table became clear. That puzzle - how was my innate interest in political matters related in any way to my growing interest in figuring out what the heck was up with things like science - had seemed impossible to put together.  No two realms seemed more different; Einstein, it seemed, offered an easy way of connecting them. Except, it was clear to me even though I couldn't have said why, I had discovered that the easy way was, in all likelihood wrong.