Simplicity, Pantheism and Digressions: Einstein, Hegel, Shakespeare, and Reflections on Reason

Orientation #

He picks up Anaximander as “the second Milesian” after Thales, and stops “before going to Anaximenes… we’ll start with Anaximenes next time”. He hands out pages of modern scientists on unity, fewness, simplicity and conservation, to be looked at (“those first five pages”) and compared later with the Greeks on the mover (Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras). The previous class treated Thales and the pre-Socratics as “reasonable guesses”; the next continues to Anaximenes, Pythagoras and Heraclitus.

The class, in order #

1. Anaximander after Thales: life began in the water (“water animals come before land animals”) #

Point: Anaximander is not necessarily Thales’ pupil but knows his thought, and one report shows the influence.

• Aristotle in his biological works reports Anaximander saying water animals came before land animals — a reasonable deduction from Thales’ water as the beginning of living things; modern biologists would agree.
• Frogs, beginning as a fish-like swimming thing (“a newt, I guess”) and becoming semi-land animals: the sense confirmation of the deduction.

2. Is the unlimited still natural philosophy? (“begins and ends in the senses”) #

Point: Anaximander says the apeiron, the unlimited, is the beginning of existing things; since natural philosophy (Aristotle and Einstein both) begins and ends in the senses and the unlimited is not sensed, one might deny he is a natural philosopher. Reply: 1. Following the senses does not forbid talking about what you cannot sense; it forbids talking about it except through what you can sense. 2. Reasoning well from what is sensed to what is not sensed is “the road from the senses into reason”, not opposed to it. Conclusion: he stays within natural philosophy if sense experience leads to his conclusion.

• Wilson cloud chamber: the electron is not seen; the undulations of water particles along its path are, and the path is deduced. So the question becomes: is there anything in sense experience that leads to “the beginning is unlimited”?

3. Two senses of “unlimited”, and why Thales had not gone all the way (“water is not entirely qualityless”) #

Point: “unlimited” is negative (not limited), and can be meant quantitatively or qualitatively, or both.

• Qualitative (the formless, not limited to any quality) vs. quantitative (goes on forever, infinite multitude). Argument for the qualitative sense: 1. Thales already thought the one matter of all things cannot be limited to a quality (red wine limited to red, sugar to sweet), so he chose shapeless, colourless, tasteless water. 2. But water in its natural environment is wet and cool. 3. If the beginning is wet and cool and everything is made of it, everything should be wet and cool: how get the dry from the wet, or fire from the cool (water puts fire out)? 4. We live in a world of contraries (hot/cold, wet/dry, sweet/bitter). Conclusion: remove even wet and cool; then no quality is left to describe the beginning, and one can only say it is not limited to any quality — “so it is profound what he’s saying”. Argument for the quantitative sense: every spring new things spring up, without end; if things keep coming to be forever, their origin must be in some quantitative sense endless. So sense experience leads, “strange as it may seem”, to the unlimited in perhaps both senses.

4. DK 1: that from which things come is that into which they corrupt (“into which they are corrupted by necessity”) #

Point: the second statement of DK 1 — whatever things are made of is what they break down into — is reasonable, and he thinks it is in the other Greeks too though explicit only here.

• Wooden blocks / Lego set / erector set: build towers, ships, slot machines; knock them down and you expect wooden blocks, not Lego, and vice versa — you get back “the very thing you began with”.
• If a wooden building broke down into Lego, the Lego came from nothing and the wood went to nothing; “what is cannot cease to be by being cut” (a later thinker): you cut a thing into what it is made of, not into nothing — “which is stupid”. Conclusion: the beginning of things is also their end — the first insight that reality is basically circular.
• Christian parallel: “I am the Alpha and the Omega”, beginning and end; but the meanings differ — God is beginning as maker not matter, end as purpose not destruction; still a circle in reality, reflected in matter. “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return” (Ash Wednesday).
• Order of theology: God in himself, God as beginning/maker, God as end (Summa Contra Gentiles); the psalm “Know that the Lord is God; He made us… the flock He tends” gives the three.
• God too is one, simple, unlimited, beginning and end — but differently from matter. Thomas, using Aristotle’s phrase, says the Greeks were “coerced by the truth itself” to think the beginning is in some way unlimited without understanding how: “the mind is moving towards God without knowing it.”

5. DK 2 and 3: everlasting, immortal, indestructible; the conservation laws (“does not grow old”) #

Point: DK 2-3 follow from DK 1: if the beginning is that to which things return, it is never corrupted — “everlasting and does not grow old”, “immortal and indestructible” — another attribute of God.

• Scientists take conservation laws as basic (Heisenberg and others): something always remains through change, e.g. energy; Newton’s three laws are reduced to conservation of momentum; energy, momentum, angular momentum.
• We understand the changing through something unchanging — an anticipation of the argument for the unmoved mover. Student: can the unlimited be taken as the undefined, the universal? Answer: same word; Latin finis means end or limit; apeiron, infinite, unlimited all negate limit.

6. The last sentence of DK 1: justice and injustice in nature (“they render justice and give up injustice”) #

Point: using “justice” of the natural world is what we do too, since words for common life get carried over to nature.

• Man is by nature political and has language; law is first a city word (driving on the right here, on the left in England); found regularities in nature had no name, so “law of nature” was borrowed — which is why physicists are not called lawyers.
• “Obey”: the electron obeys Newtonian laws in open space, quantum laws inside the atom.
• “Debt”: oxygen debt running upstairs, sleep debt — from justice.
• “Quantum jump”: kidding the physicist at St. Mary’s College — an electron has no legs. Meaning of the sentence: something like paying a debt, compensation — the body compensates; not a legal obligation but like it. Stops here before Anaximenes.

7. The handout: scientists on unity, fewness, simplicity, conservation (“the genuine physicist believes obstinately”) #

Point: he distributes and describes a set of modern texts to compare with the Greeks (the Greeks are “the main thing”).

• 17th c.: Galileo, Kepler, Newton (20th-c. physicists call 17th-19th c. physics Newtonian). 20th c.: Planck (quantum hypothesis, December 1900, “father of modern physics”), Max Born (Nobel for what the waves mean), Einstein, Sir James Jeans, Schrödinger (mathematics of wave mechanics), Heisenberg (the greatest change since Galileo, Copernicus, Newton), Weizsäcker (why the sun does not burn out quickly; on energy), Rothman on conservation. Texts on the mover to be used later with Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras.
• Respect of the moderns for the Greeks: Bohr’s attitude to nature like the first Greeks; Einstein, Greece “the cradle of Western science”; Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks: “science is the Greek way of looking at things” (a compliment, not a definition); Warren Murray citing a fragment and Heisenberg quoting it in Greek.
• (Later, from the sheet:) Kepler, “nature loves simplicity and unity”; the 20th-c. physicist believing “despite any appearance to the contrary” — a natural inclination, said in the context of the periodic table: 92 elements is too many first matters, atoms nearly multiples of hydrogen, proton-neutron-electron makes more sense; Jeans, choose the simpler hypothesis as more likely true; Schrödinger on Einstein’s gravitation, guided by “simplicity and beauty of ideas”. Aristotle will state the principle of fewness explicitly: fewer causes are better if they are enough; Shakespeare couples fewness and truth (“simpler than the infancy of truth”; “brevity is the soul of [wit]”).
• “The mind is naturally inclined towards God because He’s one, simple, unlimited.” Thomas arranges the substance of God around five attributes — simple, perfect, unlimited, unchanging, one (both Summas, order slightly different); the first philosophers have four of the five, not “perfect”, since they think in terms of matter. Cf. the exhortation to use reason: of its five reasons two concern God — reason is God-like, and using it obeys God’s plan — and these go together.

8. Student question: Boethius (“just man making enemies”) #

• c. 480-525, closer to Augustine than Thomas; associated with Rome, later the Ostrogoths; a just man who stopped unjust deeds, falsely charged, imprisoned, killed; a layman with sons who reached high office; a local cult of his sanctity, never official.
• Studied at Alexandria, wrote in Latin, philosophical and theological works; translated Aristotle’s logical works, not all of Aristotle. The definition of person comes from Boethius and Thomas uses it for the Trinity; Thomas’s commentary on the De Trinitate gives a whole article to one word of his; Thomas takes his conclusions and supplies reasons.
• Summa Contra Gentiles, end of book I: God’s blessedness, even measured against false happiness.
• Dionysius: Thomas thought him Paul’s Athenian convert (he is not so sure); works brought from Constantinople (Gregory the Great, he thinks); via negativa/apophatic; Thomas commented the Divine Names, not the work on the angels; Platonic style, harder to expound.

9. Aside: cats and dogs (“a lazy hunter”) #

The psalm “all you beasts, wild and tame”; the cat as contemplative and aristocratic, the dog democratic; the philosopher by definition “a lazy hunter”; boyhood memory of a mother cat arching her back over her litter, and his grandmother’s cat.

10. Pantheism: confusing what is said of all with the cause of all (“said of all with what is a cause of all”) #

Student: a Dominican says different philosophies (Plato, Aristotle) yield different spiritualities; Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind to God seems to treat being in general as God. Answer: it is easy to confuse what is said of all with what is a cause of all; that confusion is behind pantheism.

• Einstein (end of handout p. 7): a “conviction akin to religious feeling” of the world’s intelligibility lies behind higher scientific work; belief in “a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience” is his conception of God; “in common parlance… pantheistic”, citing Spinoza. Compared with Anaxagoras: both reach a greater mind as natural philosophers from the order of the world (Anaxagoras charged with impiety for calling the sun a stone on fire; Einstein a non-believing Jew, denominations “insignificant for me”); but Anaxagoras gives a very good reason that mind is separate, not mixed (DK 12, later), Einstein gives none — so custom is the likely cause.
• de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, chapter on democracy’s influence on religion: democracy encourages pantheism (German philosophy, French literature); Cardinal Siri’s book taking up Rahner’s ambiguous passages; Star Wars, “the Force”, joining it after death — “the idea people breathe in, osmosis”. Science too, with equality fundamental: a greater mind really separate is “very undemocratic”.
• Hegel identifies the being said of all things with the one who says “I am” (in the Logic). Warren Murray at the ACPA: told that at the level of being there is no distinction of nature and art — “that’s the being of Hegel”, the being that passes into nothing. “This is something” says almost nothing, so being seems to pass into non-being and becoming is a contradiction — the old mistake Aristotle refutes in Physics VI, which troubled the Middle Ages and Thomas solves with Aristotle (an article in Laval Théologique on the paradox of becoming traces it back). Thomas says explicitly God is not the esse formale omnium.

11. Shakespeare’s puns: “general”, ground, understanding (“kissed by the general”) #

• Troilus and Cressida: Cressida kissed by the general (Agamemnon) but not yet “in general” — Shakespeare sees the difference Hegel misses, so is wiser. Black satire (vs. Love’s Labour’s Lost, the white satire; the good-natured comedies are better); Ulysses’ speech on fashion “absolutely amazing”.
• “Soldier” is said of everyone in the army, a cause of nothing; Douglas MacArthur or Agamemnon is general as cause, commanding all. Confusing the two is the basic mistake Thomas refutes.
• Puns and amphiboly make you stop and think: “the word of God is about the word of God” (sophism: the Bible is the word of God, the word of God is the Son, so the Bible is the Son); “the wisdom of nature is about the wisdom of nature”; “the knowledge of reason is a knowledge of reason, but not every knowledge of reason is a knowledge of reason”.
• He puns on “ground” (English for cause) and “understanding” (to know a cause), hinting at the etymology. Homer, swearing by the river Styx, may lie behind Thales.

12. Closing conversation (“why philosophy began at that time”) #

• The Greeks say much in few words, so wisdom stayed alive; the moderns bury a little wisdom in verbiage — Merchant of Venice, the joker at Belmont, a needle in a haystack; modern composers.
• Student: why philosophy began then and there? Not necessary, but colonial cities had to break loose from customs and think what city they wanted; why one man and not another, “who knows”.
• Mother Teresa, “no peace until you stop killing your children”. Ethics paper: who is worse, abortionists or terrorists — four reasons abortionists are worse: they kill more; they kill the innocent; they kill their own; abortion corrupts the country while the terror has united it. A student cites Bush on justice for “murderers of innocents”; he: terrorists as a scourge, like God using the Assyrians.

His words #

• apeiron: the unlimited, the infinite; negative — not limited; in quantity or in quality or both.
• formless: not limited to any quality (Thales’ aim, not fully reached by water).
• contraries: hot/cold, wet/dry, sweet/bitter — the world we live in.
• beginning and end: for matter, source and what things corrupt into; for God, maker and purpose.
• circle: the beginning is also the end; the order of theology.
• “coerced by the truth itself”: Aristotle’s phrase (Physics I) used by Thomas of the Greeks.
• conservation laws: something that always remains through change; the basic laws for the physicists.
• finis: Latin, end or limit.
• law of nature / obey / debt / quantum jump: city words borrowed for natural regularities; “compensation” for Anaximander’s justice.
• principle of fewness: fewer causes are better if they are enough [ed.: often “principle of simplicity”].
• said of all vs. cause of all: the confusion behind pantheism; “soldier” vs. “the general”.
• esse formale omnium: what Thomas denies God is.
• amphiboly: a sentence with two meanings (“the word of God is about the word of God”).
• lazy hunter: his definition of the philosopher.

Texts #

Read in class

• Anaximander DK 1, 2, 3 (handout “On the Natural Fragments”, p. 44; DHB Vol. I, p. 157).
• Einstein on religious feeling and the superior mind (handout, end of p. 7); Kepler, Jeans, Schrödinger passages on simplicity (handout).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, biological works (Anaximander on water animals); Physics I (“coerced by the truth”); Physics VI (becoming).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (order; end of book I on God’s blessedness; God unlimited); Summa (five attributes; God not esse formale omnium); commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate; commentary on Dionysius’s Divine Names.
• Revelation (“Alpha and Omega”); a psalm (“Know that the Lord is God”); psalm “all you beasts”.
• Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks; de Tocqueville, Democracy in America; Hegel, Logic; Cardinal Siri’s book on Rahner; Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind to God; Laval Théologique article on the paradox of becoming.
• Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; Love’s Labour’s Lost; Comedy of Errors, Merry Wives of Windsor, The Shrew; Merchant of Venice; Homer (river Styx).
• Anaxagoras DK 12 (to come); the exhortation to use reason (prev. classes).

His questions #

• Is Anaximander a natural philosopher if the unlimited cannot be sensed? Yes — reasoning from what is sensed to what is not is still following the senses (cloud chamber).
• What does “unlimited” mean? Not limited — either in quantity or in quality, or both.
• Is water entirely without qualities? Has Thales gone all the way? No — water is wet and cool; how then get the dry or fire from it? So remove even these.
• Is there anything in sense experience pointing to a quantitatively unlimited beginning? Every spring, endless new things come to be.
• Is it reasonable that things corrupt into what they came from? Yes — blocks, Lego, erector set; otherwise something from nothing and into nothing.
• Why does he speak of justice and injustice in nature? As we speak of laws, obeying, debts, jumps — words borrowed from human society.
• Can the unlimited mean the undefined? Same word: finis is end or limit.
• Why is Einstein pantheistic while Anaxagoras is not? Anaxagoras gives a reason that mind is separate; Einstein gives none, so custom.
• Who is worse, abortionists or terrorists? Abortionists, for four reasons (numbers, innocence, closeness, corruption).
• Why did philosophy begin in Miletus then? Colonial cities loosened custom; beyond that, who knows.