Digressions&Impressions

On Being Distant in Time

Medieval readings of Boethius’s Consolation tended to smooth the forcefulness of its message, by making its arguments harmonise too easily with the Christian culture that the people of the time shared with its author. Readers today have a distance from the work that enables us to read it more precisely in the context of Boethius’s own times, and to discover how much Boethius’s way of thinking has in common with our own. We can see the Consolation both as a bold defence of human reason in the face of injustice and impending violent death, but also as an uncovering of reason’s inadequacy. Boethius the Prisoner receives some consolation from Philosophy, but more instruction, and the most important lesson that he learns is one about epistemic humility.-- John Marenbon (9 October, 2020) "Why read Boethius Today?" Aeon.

The main message of the very passage, -- the final one of Marenbon's essay -- that has us learn epistemic humility, is that we're in the best or merely a better position to study the past than our predecessor. And let's call the idea that we can read better from a distance "Machiavellian readings" in honor of Machiavelli. --Why Machiavellian? you may ask. Because for Machiavelli a certain distance is required to get an objective view on the object of study (say, the prince).+ And we can contrast this Machiavellian reading or stance with the "Spinozist reading" which is conscious of the fact that as time passes all the evidence that can make understanding a past work, its context, even the very language in which it is written, is a marvelous act of self-deception or political legislation.*

On the side of the Machiavellian stance we might say that technologies of recovery (philology and languages, cultural and hermeneutic studies, archaeology, anthropology, digital humanities, analytic rigor, etc.) are constantly improving. It is such confidence that  led analytic readers of Plato in the second half of the twentieth century to ignore confidently two millennia of Plato interpretation. In addition academic specialization allows the cultivation of highly trained readers of an author or even particular works. So, for example, I have friends who have spent most of their adult life studying Hobbes' Leviathan, but who are functionally illiterate when confronted by, say, Gilbert's On the Magnet or Suarez's Metaphysical Disputations (both written half a century before). 

The previous paragraph suggests that there may well be a kind of path dependency to making a text from the past seem legible. Martin Lenz has emphasized that such path dependency -- stabilized by canon-formation and education -- generates a kind of sense of clarity. Lenz is critical of this sense (see also here) because it is no better than a kind of pattern-matching. If Lenz is right then most scholarly eureka moments (including, alas, my own) need to viewed with some suspicion because informed by a great deal of unnoticed confirmation bias.

There is a further risk lurking here due to the way philosophical scholarship has been organized. As I have noted before it is a rare department where the selection of historical specialist is governed by such specialists themselves. And, all other things being equal, others prefer to have historical (or comparative) specialists  that can discuss topics of contemporary interests as decided by the 'core' or 'authoritative' 'generalists'. And so this generates another sieve of unacknowledged pattern-confirmation bias. (If you don't believe me, how come the previous generation of scholarship made every other historical figure into a proto-Quinean naturalist; and the more recent ones every figure into..?)

Of course, the argument is not that the pattern that is picked out is somehow unreal. Lenz' argument is not skeptical about historical meaning in the way the Spinozist stance is. Rather, what it suggests is that searching for commonalities ("discover how much Boethius’s way of thinking has in common with our own") itself risks reinforcing such confirmation bias. 

As an aside, I tried reading Boethius' Consolation one chilly Summer somewhere in the Scandinavian Northlands while conceiving of myself as a poet. I found it bewildering. Marenbon has encouraged me to give it another try before long.

Regular readers may be surprised here because I have a tendency to defend methodological anachronism and lampoon scholarly methods that try to dwell on the strangeness of the past (even comparing folk in Cambridge robes to disaster tourists). But my criticism is not of seeking out the multiplicity of the strangeness of the past -- the patterns that fit ours badly; it's the dwelling on such strangeness that I reject.

To be sure, Marenbon is undoubtedly right that some distance can be useful to weed out shared prejudices against and in favor of certain readings. After all, early reception is often influenced by hagiographic or institutional politics and cleverly instrumentalized anecdotal evidence that is used to devalue or praise an author. There are very sound psychological and political reasons to be mistrustful of students' readings of their teachers, even if the students are themselves eminent (cf. Quine and Davidson on Whitehead).

And as Marenbon notes, sometimes a whole culture conspires against making a certain message explicit. But, of course, that cuts both ways unless one assumes -- and this is far removed from epistemic humility -- in our air we can think more honestly and more aptly than before. This is not exactly, Marenbon's claim. For, Marenbom claims that while the book was a bestseller, it was so in virtue of its exoteric/"more obvious" features. (It would be amazing if otherwise.) But his argument is that "if read carefully," and properly situated "in its historical and literary context," the esoteric/"its hidden complexities and subtleties are what can open its appeal to readers" now. It's easy to make fun of this given that this text appears in Aeon. But since I have defended the practice of esoteric reading, don't expect such fun from me.

The more serious problem is the confidence in thinking one has firmly grasped the proper 'historical and literary context' of a work == okay, don't forget I last read it when I was an angst-ridden, self-important teenager == that in one of its (ahh) registers is the eternal one, transcending context and, simultaneously, attempting to shape the context of temporal reception.  Or to put the point methodologically, what counts as context may be stipulated, as Mogens Lærke has argued, but it is not merely given. It may well be a complex conversation between, say, the author(s)'s and reader(s)'s commitments.**

Let me wrap up. Readers aware of my tendency toward skepticism may suspect that I incline toward the Spinozist stance. And the polemicist in me finds it tempting to trot it out as true species of epistemic humility: the past is like a distant shore that can never be reached by mortals like us in the leaky boats we possess. This thought may generate a kind of defeatism. But if we only traveled to safe destinations Boethius would have never landed in that prison cell. 

 

 

On Being Scooped

As philosophers have begun to express scepticism with traditional briefs for their discipline—including various forms of conceptual analysis and metaphysical speculation—some have suggested instead that our role should be to draw together the results of many different sciences, with the aim of providing a balanced and coherent image of our place in nature that is both conceptually disciplined and properly grounded in empirical enquiry. One problem levelled at this synthetic mission statement for philosophy is that it makes the business too demanding: it is simply implausible that anyone can attain the necessary critical mastery of such a wide range of fields. Kim Sterelny’s wonderful new book, which knits together results from ethnography, theoretical biology, cognitive science, and biological anthropology, constitutes an intimidating possibility proof for others who would aim at such syntheses. Tim Lewens  (2014) reviewing Kim Sterelny (2012) The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 65(1):  185–189 [HT: Walter Veit]

I have described before (recall) the strange sensation of becoming aware that one has been scooped. But there is a huge difference between an independent discovery and losing the proverbial race to publish, and being anticipated by several years. And while sometimes there are linguistic, technological, and disciplinary barriers to a failure to cite, I could have found and read Lewens' piece if I had searched harder.  And while my own piece is not strictly speaking a research article -- it's a "review essay" -- Lewens' anticipation of my own though is really striking. It's also stylistically and thematically similar to my own professional writing persona with its fondness for the ciceronian sentence, the m-dash, the meta-philosophical tendency toward sociology of knowledge, etc.; I found the similarity in combination of content and style so uncanny in fact, that when I first read it, I thought, this could be written by me!

Mea Culpa. And sincere apologies to Tim Lewens. I should have cited Lewens on Sterelny 2012 in my (2019) piece on synthetic philosophy,* and in the various blogs and even a Dutch publication since in which I elaborate on and sometimes distinguish my own conception of synthetic philosophy from alternatives (recall) including Kitcher's Deweyan senseand even (recall) Sterelny's sense based on an interview in 2019.

It would be relatively easy to argue that this was an innocent mistake. But I am conscious of the fact that when I wrote my Biology & Philosophy review, I was aiming for something that would be widely read and could have wide uptake,  perhaps even impact on the profession. So, while writing it, I was not merely reviewing Dennett and Peter Godfrey-Smith as best as I could, but I was trying to situate them in a much wider intellectual landscape. And I was grateful to Michael Weisberg (the editor) for encouraging me to be ambitious in this very way. So, when the piece went viral -- it's been downloaded 7880 times and I have seen others drop it casually in conversation since -- I was pleased. I was also surprised because I had never ever before see my own non-blog, scholarly writing go viral.

So, my scholarly conscience makes me wonder whether my desire for glory got the better of me. For, while Lewens' piece lacks my historical narrative (although Lewens, too, has a clever nod to Darwin), he got their first. In particular, Lewens treats synthetic philosophy as an integrative project that brings together insights of many sciences that is supposed to generate a new kind of coherent image ("together the results of many different sciences, with the aim of providing a balanced and coherent image of our place in nature that is both conceptually disciplined and properly grounded in empirical enquiry.")  So do I.

I like, in particular, Lewens' emphasis on 'conceptually disciplined.' Mere creative integration is insufficient to count as synthetic philosophy on my view because it risks encouraging a kind of cult of romantic genius. (I do worry that Lewens' depiction of Stereny's eclecticism can conjure such an image: "the sorts of explanatory tools Sterelny draws on to tell his story are of an extremely eclectic kind.") On my view what's needed is the embrace of some kind of generic, but broad theory to provide the synthetic/integrative glue. This makes synthetic philosophy disciplined (perhaps even conceptually disciplined). I also emphasize this feature because it makes journal publications about features of the generic theory or its application in partial projects toward a synthesis possible. And as the quoted paragraph of Lewens suggests synthetic philosophy otherwise becomes a colossal achievement for the magisters and not the rest of us.**

Another important anticipation by Lewens is the fact that synthetic philosophy may even not appear as philosophy "if by ‘philosophy’ one means the sort of discussion that goes on in the pages of our professional journals. There isn’t even much philosophy of science."+ 

Even so, it may be useful to distinguish one feature of Lewens' description of my own. Lewens' "our place in nature" is ambiguous between a manifest and scientific image, and could also just convey what used to be called a 'worldview' (e.g., Koyré's From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe).  But this is just a matter of degree. For, on my view the aim of synthetic philosophy is the generation of a scientific image that may, in turn, influence the development of the special sciences, philosophy, public policy, or the manifest image. However, Lewens, too, emphasizes that synthetic philosophy can help the specialized sciences communicate with each other, at least indirectly: "help to bring the biological anthropologist’s vision of the genealogy of human cognition into closer harmony with the social anthropologist’s vision of the constitution of human cultures."

So, to sum up. Theoretically I believe that nobody is ever truly original and that what explains the fruitful circulation of (ahh) successful memes tend to be features of the (selection) environment and not the inventive capacity of a particular scholar who contributes primarily personality (although it can be very much worthwhile getting clear on the distinctive contribution of each of us). This informs much of my scholarship. But that thought turns out to be predictably compatible with the further thought that when I think I have something distinctive to say, it's extremely likely others have anticipated me. So, if you are inclined to discuss my (metaphilosophical) work on synthetic philosophy (and its history), please cite Lewens first!

 

Hayek on the Epistemic Benefits of (Class) Diversity; the conditions of Radical Change in Spontaneous (Dis)-Order

Where a real change in the law is required, the new law can properly fulfill the proper function of all law, namely that of guiding expectations, only if it becomes known before it is applied.
The necessity of such radical changes of particular rules may be due to various causes. It may be due simply to the recognition that some past development was based on error or that it produced consequences later recognized as unjust. But the most frequent cause is probably that the development of the law has lain in the hands of members of a particular class whose traditional views made them regard as just what could not meet the more general requirements of justice. There can be no doubt that in such fields as the law on the relations between master and servant,36 landlord and tenant, creditor and debtor, and in modern times between organized business and its customers, the rules have been shaped largely by the views of one of the parties and their particular interests—especially where, as used to be true in the first two of the instances given, it was one of the groups concerned which almost exclusively supplied the judges. This, as we shall see, does not mean that, as has been asserted, ‘justice is an irrational ideal’ and that ‘from the point of rational cognition there are only interests of human beings and hence conflicts of interests’,37 at least when by interests we do not mean only particular aims but long-term chances which different rules offer to the different members of society. It is even less true that, as would follow from those assertions, a recognized bias of some rule in favour of a particular group can be corrected only by biasing it instead in favour of another. But such occasions when it is recognized that some hereto accepted rules are unjust in the light of more general principles of justice may well require the revision not only of single rules but of whole sections of the established system of case law. This is more than can be accomplished by decisions of particular cases in the light of existing precedents.--Hayek (1973)  Law, Legislation and Liberty, 88-89 (emphasis added).

I have a tendency to read Hayek's political theory, especially the parts that treat the rule of law as a spontaneous order, as flirting with a variety of potentially troubling forms of status quo bias. So, it was good to be reminded of the quoted passage above.* Hayek explicitly notes three sources in which an evolved common law can have reached a kind of cul-de-sac such that it requires "radical change" (a term Hayek does not use frequently): (i) an erroneous application of legal principles or a judgment based on errors of fact; (ii) or that some legal principles generate unjust consequences over time; (iii) perversions of judgment -- a failure to be properly impartial -- due to class bias. On the previous page, Hayek also recognizes (iv) that circumstances may change faster than the law does--here he echoes Lippmann's focus on technology generating a spirit of legal adaptation.

And, in fact, (i-ii-iii) are often connected; these can endure a very long time. These facts are clear from Hayek's own footnote 36, where Hayek cites, without qualification, the nineteenth century economist, Jevons (one of the co-inventors of marginalism), as follows,‘The great lesson we learn [from 650 years of legislation of English Parliaments] is that legislation with regard to labour has almost always been class-legislation. It is the effort of some dominant body to keep down a lower class, which had begun to show inconvenient aspirations.’ (from The State in Relation to Labour (London, 1882), p. 33. Not to put too fine point on it, but Hayek explicitly recognizes that in some areas the vaunted rule of law, which has generated reliable expectations, has entrenched class warfare for much of its existence.+ 

Because of Hayek's focus on possible solutions that won't work, and the intriguing thought that a spontaneous order can require "radical change," it is easy to miss, and so especially worth noting that Hayek also explicitly recognizes that it is difficult for judges to become truly impartial when they are surrounded by like-minded with sympathy for their own. (They become effectively what used to be known as a 'faction.') That is to say, I read Hayek as suggesting that class bias isn't noticed as class bias in homogenous population of judges and legislators. That is to say, Hayek recognizes that, at least momentarily, class diversity may be constitutive, epistemically, for the discovery of more general, and more impartial principles of justice.

My own view (see pp. 202-208) is that Adam Smith was inclined to support one of the measures rejected by Hayek: "a recognized bias of some rule in favour of a particular group can be corrected only by biasing it instead in favour of another." But Hayek prefers that in practice impartiality is aimed at. So, how can this be generated on his account?

It seems to me that when it comes to the selection of judges (and legislators) some kind of carefully announced and cautiously implemented temporary affirmative action or extra effort to recruit for especially salient forms of diversity can be derived from Hayek. Obviously this is not required on Hayek's account if society has other means of discovering 'more general principles of justice' and making this discovery felt on the legislative process and case law decisions.

Undoubtedly there are Hayekian arguments against more general use of affirmative action. But if the class of legislators/judges has the character of a faction, that is, it systematically serves the group interests from which judges are appointed, then this can be a useful remedy that does not seem ruled out by Hayek.

I recognize that the previous paragraphs will be met with disbelief. But notice that Hayek recognizes that the existing rule of law is not sacrosanct and can require quite serious remedy, including the abandonment and overturning of well established common law. That is itself very costly. So, from the perspective of preventing such radical, destabilizing change, preventing a homogeneous judiciary may well be welcome.**  

 

 

 

 

 

Transforming Philosophy By Diversifying Its Traditions

A very similar transformation actually occurred in Western philosophy not too long ago. When a major European university began to teach the ideas of a particular noncanonical thinker, mainstream philosophers on the faculty objected that the new philosophy was not part of “our tradition,” and that it was watering down the curriculum in the name of a misguided fad. Because the new philosophy was inconsistent with many widely held positions, some philosophers resorted to a flaccid relativism, arguing that there were “two truths” on these matters. This sort of approach only convinced the mainstream philosophers that the new philosophy was nonsense. However, a brilliant philosopher argued that the best way to discover the truth is through a pluralistic dialogue with all the major world philosophies. This philosophical genius was Thomas Aquinas. In the thirteenth century at the University of Paris, Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and others encouraged students and colleagues (who had previously only learned a form of Platonized Christianity) to expand the canon and learn not just from the philosophy of the pagan Aristotle (only recently rediscovered in Western Europe), but also from Jewish and Muslim thinkers. The result was to reinvigorate and deepen the Western philosophical tradition.... The case of Aquinas and the rediscovery of Aristotle is just one of many examples that illustrate that the Western philosophical canon is not, and never was, a closed system. Philosophy only becomes richer and approximates the truth more closely as it becomes increasingly diverse and pluralistic.--Bryan W. Van Norden (2017) Taking Back Philosophy: a Multicultural Manifesto, 18

The widespread turn to meta-philosophy, even discussion of the merits of progress, if any, in philosophy are simultaneously signs of self-confidence -- as Montaigne, Pascal, and Margaret Cavendish show it takes a certain courage to question oneself -- and a sense of malaise, not always fully justified, induced by a sense of exhaustion of approaches that have had their trial. And this turn to meta-philosophy occurs after vanquishing -- a word I don't use lightly --, its parochial rivals, and benefitting from soft association with imperial power, analytic philosophy strides the world as a global hegemon increasingly being taught in colleges, often branded with American and European names, around the world.  

While there is a strain of argument in Van Norden's Taking Back Philosophy preoccupied with the distribution of jobs in 'ranked' departments (e.g., 2; 5; 25-26; 31-34 162; see also Garfield's foreword, p. xii; xx) and the scarce resource of  time in the curriculum (e.g., xviii-xix; 8, 36, 103, 115), his more important argument is that philosophy would benefit from what is known as 'diversifying' its canon. And the paragraph quoted above is supposed to offer an instance of such fruits. 

Before I get to that, it is worth noting three features about contemporary analytic philosophy: first, analytic philosophy has exceedingly few substantive dogmas. I don't mean this only as the bad joke that Quine and Davidson jointly could only count to three (and with Socrates we may ask where is the fourth?). But rather in the more serious sense that analytic philosophy always has been like a sponge drawing in ideas and techniques from the sciences and logic, and even rival schools, and, like a high energy shape-shifter, has had an open-ended capacity to reinvent itself. This is why most critiques of analytic philosophy lodged by its rivals often seem so comically off-base within a short amount of time.*   

Second, because analytic philosophy's self-identity is constantly re-invented over time, it has no felt requirement for a fixed canon of texts to give it identity.** So, for example, Feigl's and Sellars' (1949) Readings in Philosophical Analysis. was welcomed as a "book" which "contains a good number of the classics of analysis and should therefore provide useful source material for courses in Contemporary Philosophy, Problems, and Methods." Most of the authors of these classics are still familiar names, - "Feigl (4 essays), Kneale, Quine (2), Tarski, Carnap (3), Frege, Russell, [C.I.] Lewis (3), Schlick (4), Aldrich (2), Adjukiewicz, [Ernest] Nagel, Waismann, Hempel (4), Reichenbach (2)" - , but it is to be doubted that most of the articles themselves, or what they argue for, play much of a role in contemporary undergraduate or graduate education (outside those that cater to specialists in history of analytic). I bet a few names are completely unfamiliar.  One can play a similar game with Rorty's more recent (and larger) Linguistic Turn. To be a classic within analytic philosophy is to risk oblivion quickly from the perspective of eternity. 

As an aside, the author of  the review from Philosophy of Science just quoted, Russell L. Ackoff, became one of the founders of operations research and systems thinking in management science. Even the limited biography of Wikipedia suggests wonderful avenues of research for sociologists of analytic philosophy.

Third, analytic philosophy is, despite inhabiting extremely steep prestige and economic hierarchies, and having become a (near) mono-linguistic culture, still a dispersed discipline with many local nodes doing their own thing. And while a shift to standardizing text-book education may change the dispersed nature, for now analytic philosophy evolves -- despite our natural tendency to be guided by the Williamsons', Chalmers', Siders', Pauls' (etc.) -- in virtue of countless many relatively independent, contingent curricular and refereeing decisions. And while, with Condorcet's jury theorem in the back of the mind, such a structure may offer confidence that we're somewhat truth-apt, it also means that the content of the destination of such a dispersed philosophical 'market' in ideas may be intrinsically uncertain. This means there is also space for local arbitrage opportunities, including (as Justin Smith has remarked) richly supported non-university think-tanks funded by (self-proclaimed) Libertarian billionaires. 

Okay, let's grant Van Norden his main claim that a philosophical tradition can be reinvigorated by a kind of systematic exposure to another tradition or, as in the thirteenth century example, a diversity of traditions. It doesn't follow, as he tacitly recognizes, that it will always do so. Some novelties, regardless of their sources, are fads and claims to ancient wisdom may, upon inspection, be banality. In that respect, it is striking that the thirteenth century transformation involved purportedly incompatible, even contradictory traditions. The contradiction could only be resolved by the genius of a synthesizing mind who created a kind of aufhebung. 

My criticism is not that Van Norden seems to presuppose civilizational intellectual traditions with a true essence here (he denies that the page before, see the quote below); nor is that Van Norden seems to have replicated a basically neo-Hegelian-Romantic scheme of progress and (so the worry goes) imposed it on the historical 'data'. But rather that if the mere fact of contradiction is not a reliable means toward distinguishing fad from source of renewal, the episode seems to teach that one can never know that some innovation isn't fad (given our canons of rigor).  

So, I do like Van Norden's other exemplar better, which is closer to our current situation:

There are also clear historical examples of intellectual traditions accepting and being broadened by alien systems of thought. When Buddhism was brought to China by missionaries from India in the first century ce, there already existed a robust and diverse native spiritual tradition, including Confucianism and Daoism (each of which had a variety of competing interpretations). Buddhism was a completely alien system of thought that challenged many of the fundamental ethical and metaphysical assumptions of the classic Chinese thinkers. However, Chinese philosophers studied Buddhist works, translated them into their own language, learned a new technical vocabulary, and engaged with Buddhist arguments. As a result, the Chinese intellectual tradition was permanently deepened. Even if one refuses to bestow the label of “philosophy” upon any of these systems of thought, the fact that Confucianism and Daoism were able to adapt to and incorporate Buddhist ideas dispels the illusion that intellectual traditions have an unchanging essence that makes them hermetically sealed (17)

What this example reveals is that intellectual traditions can be internally heterogeneous and still sufficiently distinct from each other such that internally heterogeneous alternatives may seem, at first, 'completely alien.' And that members of a resourceful home tradition can bring themselves, despite the barriers of entry [language, technical vocabulary, techniques, argument styles, etc.], to study such an alternative system of thought. I am sure that Van Norden could name these intrepid philosophical explorers/abitreurs that created intellectual trading zones among Confucianism & Daoism and Buddhism at various sites. But these these under-laborers are not named, and the local turmoil that surrounded them effaced, even if (despite presumably some unnamed Kuhn-losses) their fruits are "permanent." 

So, one way to think of attempts at diversifying analytic philosophy, and its relationship(s) to a 'canon', is to generate the conditions of such self-transformation of the tradition without -- pace Condorcet -- any guarantee of success, but with the expectation that the unknown destinations may well give us rewarding sights, even, as I learned from Eileen O'Neill, a better, but painful, political and intellectual self-understanding, and, as collective transformative experiences, unexpected views on the truth.

On subaltern horrors, Borges, and the Natural History of an Idea

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors, operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism .... I have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.--Borges (1939) The Total Library.

I have quoted the concluding paragraph of "The Total Library," which is the forgotten sibling of Borges' more celebrated (and slightly younger) "The Library of Babel" although it shares some underlying insights. The Total Library is an articulating of the thesis that "the fancy or the imagination or the utopia of the Total Library has certain characteristics that are easily confused with virtues." That we recognize the name of the story in the sentence describing the utopia of the total library alerts us that use and mention, and even baptistic designation intermingle on macro and micro level, which is a feature of the story, not a bug. 

The main narrative, such as it is, of The Total Library, is a history of ideas in Lovejoy's specific sense: an idea is treated as an isolated cultural unit with a clear natural history ("Between Democritus of Abdera and Fechner of Leipzig flow-heavily laden-almost twenty-four centuries of European history"). The most familiar token, Dennett calls it proverbial, of the "typographical image" whose natural history is recounted is Huxley's claim that "half dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum."

Inscribed in this narrative in the history of ideas, is a report on the "polemic" between the system of chance or necessity and the system of divinely organized order. This polemic is decided in favor of Democritus (the proponent of the system of chance). 

As an aside, Borges treats Cicero (not his character) as refuted. But Cicero had been introduced not as a proponent of the system of divine order, but as an ironic skeptic. In other words, Borges treats the rise of Darwinism (who is represented by Huxley) and Logic (Carroll) not, altogether without wisdom, as a refutation of the system of divine order, but rather as a defeat of ironic skepticism. This is, of course, not just an aside because one can understand Borges' story as the revenge, or eternal return, of ironic skepticism (which competes with a more successful skepticism familiar from the extension of the holographic principle to a holographic universe.)

The version told by one of Cicero's characters, and now I quote Borges, goes like this:

 I do not marvel that there should be anyone who can persuade him-self that certain solid and individual bodies are pulled along by the force of gravity, and that the fortuitous collision of those particles produces this beautiful world that we see. He who considers this possible will also be able to believe that if innumerable characters of gold, each representing one of the twenty-one letters of the alphabet, were thrown together onto the ground, they might produce the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether chance could possibly create even a single verse to read.

Because of the familiarity of Huxley's token of this image in recurring debates over Darwinism, we might overlook that in Cicero the image is used to undermine an epicurean cosmogony (recall yesterday's post on Newton)--the existence of species is a mere subset of this. This cosmogony held that the structure we encounter is the product of the collision of atoms, which have an innate gravity, subject, as we learn from Lucretius and Cicero, to random swerves.

I don't mean to suggest that Cicero or Huxley are idiosyncratic to connect cosmogony to the origin of species. As I noted a few weeks ago, in the revised preface to his Bridgewater Treatise, Whewell trots out Cicero's sibling argument -- which I have dubbed 'Posidonian,' which is just before the passage recounted by Borges' narration  -- in response to Darwin's Origin (as I learned from David Haig). And while Whewell treats the nebular hypothesis as plausible, he does not think it is sufficiently explanatory about the origin of the order it exhibits.

But rather than returning to that material, my eye stops at Borges' two-fold claim that Swift's "Trivial Essay on the Faculties of the Soul," (i) is a "museum of commonplaces," and (ii) itself a token of this idea. Part of the joke here is that the correct title of Swift's essay is "A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind."  "Tritical" being (now archaic) "trite" or "hackneyed." And in the joke Borges' discerns that a single typographic mistake can be memetically or fitness enhancing.

And when we turn to Swift we find indeed a museum of commonplaces, which presents us not so much with a natural history of the typographic idea, but with a philosophical history, which as the title already suggests, itself a polemic against (ahh) then recent philosophy (and the commitments of an Enlightenment age: democracy, science, etc.).

And lurking in the essay is not so much the observation that democracy is vulnerable to demagoguery, which is indeed trite, but rather the more philanthropic point that would have been evident to Borges' initial readers -- that democratic theorists fail to grasp the true nature of the best kind of democratic public speech. This nature is not truth-telling (as democrats deceives themselves) nor flattery (as the the critics of democracy claim), but rather the art of hiding its artfulness ("in oratory the greatest Art is to hide Art.")

There is no better way to hide artfulness if the surface is random characters which "chance would organize and which would eliminate intelligence." And this would be the case "for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings."

It is tempting to domesticate the thought by saying 'it's fiction' or 'science fiction'. But in the refutation of Cicero  the ground from which to deny we inhabit the subaltern horror became unstable, even a trapdoor.

 

 

On the Epicurean Conception of Gravity, and Newton

[T]here is a second aspect of Newton’s thought that is relevant: there are numerous instances in which both Newton and his followers reject action at a distance in strong terms. Newton’s apparent rejection of distant action in the correspondence with Bentley has been subject to considerable debate, but Newton makes similar points elsewhere, even in unpublished works that cannot be read as involving a hedging of his bets. For instance, in the unpublished corollaries to propositions 4 through 9 of Book III to the Principia, written in the early 1690s, when Newton thought a second edition of his text might appear, he writes:

For two planets separated from each other by a long empty [vacui] distance do not attract each other by any force of gravity or act on each other in any way except by the mediation of some active principle [movente principio] interceding between them by which the force is transmitted from one to the other.[1]

Unlike the Bentley correspondence, this is a direct expression of Newton’s own understanding of gravity, one that is entirely independent of the questions about Newton’s views of the essence of matter and his attempts to distance himself (perhaps) from what were then called “Epicurean” conceptions of atoms in the void (cf. Henry, 2011). There cannot be a clearer statement of his views: two planets do not act on each other in any way except through some mediating item.--Andrew Janiak (2013) "Three concepts of causation in Newton." Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44.3 (2013): 403

As regular readers may recall, I am one of Janiak's targets in context.* And I have to admit that when I first read Janiak's paper I thought his evidence was so strong that I had to concede that after the publication of the Principia, Newton did not return to the position that I attributed to him (here; here) based on my reading of the posthumously published Treatise of the System of the World, an early version of what became book III of the Principia.

But before I was going to throw in the towel, I wanted to check out the wider context of the passage quoted by Janiak. It reads as follows:

The Epicureans making a distinction of the whole of nature into body and void, denied the existence of God, but very absurdly. For two planets separated from each other by a great expanse of void do not mutually attract each other by any force of gravity or act on each other in any way except by the mediation of some active principle that stands between them by means of which force is propagated from one to the other. [According to the opinion of the ancients, this medium was not corporeal since they held that all bodies by their very natures were heavy and that atoms themselves fall through empty space toward the earth by the eternal force of their nature without being pushed by other bodies.] Therefore the ancients who grasped the mystical philosophy as Thales and the Stoics more correctly taught that a certain infinite spirit pervades all space, and contains and vivifies the entire world; and this supreme spirit was their numen; according to the poet cited by the Apostle: In him we live and move and have our being. Hence the omnipresent God is recognized, and by the Jews is called 'place'. To the mystical philosophers, however, Pan was that supreme numen...By this symbol, the philosophers taught that matter is moved in that infinite spirit and by it is driven, not at random, but harmonically, or according to the harmonic proportions as I have just explained.[2]

As McGuire notes (1968: 169), the manuscript probably dates from the mid-1690s when Newton became eager to situate his own work in light of ancient epicureanism. (I have tried to explain why this would be so here.) Here the mediating active principle just is the Stoic world soul, which appears to be an electric spirit of some sort. So, at first glance the wider context seems to support Janiak’s position.

And before I address the position, I have to note a complication. A very natural reading of the General Scholium, which was drafted a decade or two later, of the Principia is that he denies that God is a world soul (Newton 1999: 940; recall last week's discussion.) Rudolf De Smet & Karin Verelst have convincingly argued that here (and in a few other places of the General Scholium) Newton is echoing Lipsius's attack, inspired by Philo, on the old stoic notion  of anima mundi. So, we are by no means required to accept this manuscript as authoritative expression of Newton’s all-things-considered views. But because I have expressed some doubts that Newton really does reject the world soul altogether, this move is not entirely open to me.

However, and more controversially, I now think Janiak was wrong to think that the manuscript offers "a direct expression of Newton’s own understanding of gravity, one that is entirely independent of the questions about Newton’s views of the essence of matter and his attempts to distance himself (perhaps) from what were then called “Epicurean” conceptions of atoms in the void." In fact, now I deny that we are supposed to treat the key sentence – “For two planets separated from each other by a great expanse of void do not mutually attract each other by any force of gravity” – as really expressing Newton’s own position. For, he could be expressing the Epicurean position here. In fact, I think it is a natural reading of Epicurus' physics as expressed in the "Letter to Herodotus" reproduced in Book X of Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers.  

Epicurean gravity is directed down to a privileged place (Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, section 61). And this is so in infinite worlds (section 45). In a void atoms, which constitute bodies, do not interfere with each other unless they accidently deflect each other from their path (Epicurus, Letter to Herodutus, section 44). So, in Epicurean cosmology, the atoms on a planet move down, barring deflection and the swerve, and planets do not attract each other. So, a natural way to read the Epicureans is that two planets separated from each other by a great expanse of void do not “mutually attract each other by any force of gravity.” The atoms that constitute such planets have a tendency to press toward the center of each planet. But there is no reason to think they attract each other across the void. 

So, if one is antecedently convinced that Newton rejects the possibility of action at a distance, then, indeed taken in isolation --- "for two planets separated from each other by a great expanse of void do not mutually attract each other by any force of gravity or act on each other in any way except by the mediation of some active principle that stands between them by means of which force is propagated from one to the other" -- seems like a smoking gun. But the sentence before it and the sentence after it discuss ancient theories. In fact, the following sentence ("bodies by their very natures were heavy and that atoms themselves fall through empty space toward the earth by the eternal force of their nature without being pushed by other bodies") just conveys the Epicurean position. 

So, a natural reading of the first three sentences of the manuscript is as a description of a debate between Epicurean atheists and ancient (mystical-theist) critics. And I am willing to believe that Newton agreed with the critics that the Epicurean position was absurd. Not just because the Epicureans could be taken to deny God's existence, but also because Newton himself has established that Jupiter and Saturn did influence each other (Principia, Book III, Proposition 18, Theorem 18; Newton 1999: 818)

 

 

7 March 1979: Foucault on The Demands of Critical Morality (XXIV)

I have dwelt so long on this problem of German neo-liberalism first of all for methodological reasons, because, continuing what I began to say last year, I wanted to see what concrete content could be given to the analysis of relations of power—it being understood, of course, and I repeat it once again, that power can in no way be considered either as a principle in itself, or as having explanatory value which functions from the outset. The term itself, power, does no more than designate a term of relations which are entirely still to be analyzed, and what I have proposed to call governmentality, that is to say, the way in which one conducts the conduct of men, is no more than a proposed analytical grid for these relations of power.
So, we have been trying out this notion of governmentality and, second, seeing how this grid of governmentality, which we may assume is valid for the analysis of ways of conducting the conduct of mad people, patients, delinquents, and children, may equally be valid when we are dealing with phenomena of a completely different scale, such as an economic policy, for example, or the management of a whole social body, and so on. What I wanted to do—and this was what was at stake in the analysis—was to see the extent to which we could accept that the analysis of micro-powers, or of procedures of governmentality, is not confined by definition to a precise domain determined by a sector of the scale, but should be considered simply as a point of view, a method of decipherment which may be valid for the whole scale, whatever its size. In other words, the analysis of micro-powers is not a question of scale, and it is not a question of a sector, it is a question of a point of view. Good. This, if you like, was the methodological reason.
A second reason for dwelling on these problems of neo-liberalism is what I would call a reason of critical morality. Actually, going by the recurrence of certain themes, we could say that what is currently challenged, and from a great many perspectives, is almost always the state...--Michel Foucault, 7 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 8, The Birth of Biopolitics, 186

After my last post, I wanted to move on quickly to lecture 9 with its spectacular fireworks on Gary Becker. But an unease -- I almost wrote 'daimon' -- held me back. When last week, I re-read lecture 8, again, I realized I had underestimated the significance of Foucault's treatment of the evolution of the French welfare state, which Foucault treats not just as one of the diffussions of ORDO liberal though (in elite opinion not among wider public) -- the other, among a wider kind of counter-elite, is the American diffusion --, but also as an instance of its "radicalization." (207)

And, yet, rather than discussing the significance of such radicalization, here i am back again at the start of lecture 8, which is the middle of the lecture-series. And suddenly, with clarity, I notice that Foucault is offering, again, a kind of Apologia Pro Lectiones Sua. As the passage above shows, he offers two reasons for dwelling on the ORDOs. 

First, the lecture series is supposed to exhibit a methodological innovation. It is supposed to exhibit what happens when one discards 'power' as a ground, or explanation, and replaces it with 'governmentality,' which is the way one conducts the conduct of men, not just on the micro scale, but also on the macro-scale, in particular, "as an economic policy...or the management of a whole social body." We might say governmentality is a tool in the study of a kind of meta-orchestration. This should be distinguished, I think, from the art of government. Governmentality is a concept or method within the study of the art of government.

However, the distinction between the art of government and its study by way of governmentality is not un-permeable; in so far as the normative art of government reflects on its own ground, that is, it becomes philosophical, it can appropriate governmentality in its own self-understanding. The problematic of this lecture-series can be, then, stated that Foucault has taken upon itself (recall first lecture) the obligation to present his analysis of German neo-liberalism as yet another exemplar of governmentality, and, simultaneously, contribute to the art of government at its best.

It is important to discern that like the German counterparts -- (recall here his fifth lecture; and here) the fraternal strife between Frankfurt and Freiburg -- Foucault is grappling with the legacy of Weber. And we see him here, as it were, with stiletto in hand, deciding to strike at the fact-value distinction while, simultaneously, he is developing an ideal-typical analysis of Ordoliberalism capable of entering into a kind of, if not social science, then social theory.

Second, he explains he does so because of what he calls "a critical morality." Unfortunately, in the lecture series he does not explain what he means by this term. In my last post I explored what, in the name of a critical morality, he attacked: namely the widespread and intellectually lazy uptake of a state-phobia which manifested itself in a certain form of the road-to-serfdom thesis outside its original formulation, by thinking types across the political spectrum that becomes an instrument for manichean thinking and de facto a new form of populism. It sees the rise of fascism everywhere and, if I am not mistaken, is itself in its own way a contribution toward fascism because it refuses to make distinctions and address political reality in its concrete manifestations.

And, so, critical morality has its task to diagnose, police, and correct a kind of thinking man's (and other humans') shared conceptual deformation that prevents better thinking in the intellectual life of (ahh) public opinion. And, in my last post, I got so fascinated by Foucault's first-order analysis of the uptake of inflated state-phobia, that I failed to address the nature of serving or promoting critical morality.*

To the best of my knowledge Foucault does not use 'critical morality' [moralité critique] again. But we see here a willingness to embrace not just the demands of responsible speech, but a desire to challenge and even try to reform leading ideas in circulation. 

I have deliberately not used 'ideology' because it is clear that the main business of "critical morality" is not the policing of ideology, but rather the engagement with the kind of background, low-level conceptual framework by which intellectuals, (people like you and me), journalists, students and policy-makers describe and analyze, even try to mobilize, social reality.  That is to say, critical morality is addressed at the shared commitments of what Julien Benda called 'clerks' and their wider circle/habitat. 

Somewhat surprising, Foucault here takes on something very close to the very project Isaiah Berlin had articulated for himself in his famous inaugural lecture. Recall that Berlin thought that the role of the political theorist was to guide society's ideas (if we don't such ideas "remain blind and undirected.") In particular, Berlin believed it is the duty of philosophers to "disarm" dangerous ideas before they become too dangerous.

Foucault clearly, and one might say, more liberally, does not think it is his role to guide society's ideas. But from the perspective of critical morality, he does think, more Socratically, it his role to criticize and disarm society's critical doxa. And, so part of the point of the Birth of Biopolitics is to supply the educated with a better conceptual framework, and narrative, to describe and analyze contemporary political life. 

 

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That dog – called aptly Dog – has a status that’s uncertain. He was dumped two years ago at the homeplace of a neighbor some few hundred yards away. Because the neighbor neither ran him off nor shot him, Dog counts in the calculus round here as belonging to that man. Dog accedes to this some days and patrols the yard around the neighbor’s trailer, but he is more usually just a rambling presence, a creature mysterious in his ways and unaccountable to any. Some days no one sees him, some days he never leaves our porch. Most days, he likes some petting, but some days, not – he once showed up carrying a slice a pizza and kept his distance lest I try to steal it. One day he cornered an armadillo only to sniff it with disdain and walk away. On another he tortured a groundhog, mortally wounding it but declining to finish what he started. I then went for my rifle and did the work he wouldn’t. Every night they’re near and howling, he answers the coyotes with his voice – in this at least, Dog is reliable. I suspect he is unsure if he wants to count himself as feral or as tamed. He is, in short, about what someone might expect from a dog that has learned Zhuangzi.--Amy Olberding

In order to save my marriage, and to get some research done, I rented a small office -- yeah don't cry for me -- in a different part of town a few weeks ago. I go there every day, and when I am not needed in zoom meetings, I work on my Newton's Metaphysics manuscript. The tube runs on a frequent schedule and the ride is under fifteen minutes.  Most of the time it's very easy to social distance inside the carriages. 

I found an excellent espresso bar a seven minute walk from my new office in the heart of Fitzrovia. It's one stop on the tube, but because the weather has been so nice, as it has been this whole pandemic year, it's a lovely amble through the back streets of the neighborhood. I enjoy the blue plaques with the names of former (mostly nineteenth century) prime ministers and (mostly twentieth century) authors and social reformers. Sometimes I first get a wrap at a very fine middle eastern hole in the wall on Goodge street.

On Tuesday, at my favorite espresso bar I noticed he had no sweets on offer. When I asked about the lack of brownies, the barista/owner mentioned that his supplier had stopped delivering because his orders fell below the minimum. I quietly wondered whether there were payment issues. I said that must cut into your profit margins. Behind his face mask I guessed a dry smile, because I was told that he just broke even. Emboldened by the small talk, I asked the barista whether the landlord had offered a discount. Indeed he had, 50%. But this had been declined because it was supposed to be added to next year's rent. The purpose behind this offer struck me as a bit dubious, too. I wondered if his rolex was a fake.

I mentioned the story about the brownies to the building manager on the way back. In response she told me the Pret around the corner had stopped selling her favorite tuna mayo sandwiches. She had complained to the store-manager, who informed her they stopped selling it because too few people were coming into the store. 

Anyway, today, i walked through the rain, to find the espresso bar closed. (This will not have surprised you, my perceptive reader.) I looked around and suddenly I realized the street was near empty. I checked my watch (no, not a rolex). It was 3:15pm. On the way back to my office I started counting closed bars and shops. Many were, in fact, boarded up; I stopped at two dozen. I found a bakery near Warren St. with decent espresso. On my way back to the office, on Euston Road, I registered the half a dozen homeless people hiding in front of a (closed) furniture store.

One of my son's favorite classmates' step-dads drives a real London black cab. It has the largest sky roof I have ever seen in a taxi. Anyway, recently he told me (the cabbie, not the son) that he was doing one third the business he did last year. This is no surprise: London is a city that thrives on international travel (tourism and business), and wealthy expats for a lot of its traffic.

A few weeks ago the official unemployment rate in the UK was 4,1% (that was up  to July). All kinds of temporary measures have ended since then. In August 2020 "the number of employees in the UK on payrolls was down around 695,000 compared with March 2020." It's getting worse. 

Let me change tack for a second. 

A few novelists -- Arnon Grunberg, Zadie Smith, and Niña Weijers -- tell the story of my social habitat especially well. (I leave you to guess who have satirized me effectively,) But during this pandemic I have been drawn to Amy Olberding and her epic Ozark Stoics. While I once commented on one of her papers, and am proud she has guest-blogged for me, I have never met Olberding. But as my life has closed in on itself, I have grown needy of her story-telling. 

I imagine her in her pick-up truck in the parking lot of a giant Wallmart, stealing wifi; after she has responded to student emails, and has uploaded her lecture, she writes up her intellectual diaries, with her rifle and her laptop on her lap. One of my favorite passages is this one:

The region around our farm is a lacework of gravel roads that trace through hill country, and what happens when families like ours just can’t keep it all going is told everywhere upon these roads.  Abandoned farmhouses sit in fields given over to elaborate beef cattle operations held by wealthy ranchers who buy up old places when a family can no longer keep them.  In these places, the fencing is bright and taut, well maintained but by people who live elsewhere.  The tarpaper and rock homes that once sheltered families working the land become just bits of a landscape, too much trouble to tear down when the elements will eventually do the work for you.  Some old homeplaces don’t even have the care of wealthy ranchers but instead sit nested in trees that have come up since the families left, the houses now effectively forested.  Bereft of the people who kept the houses whole, they become home to all manner of wildlife, though given the area, some also come to host meth cookers.  But the most haunted examples, I find, are the old family farms where no house at all still sits.  On spring’s arrival they emerge like ghosts across the landscape, as vast armies of yellow daffodils arise to tell of what once was.  The daffodils stand in fragile, temporary signal, their patterns marking out where a house once stood – now lining a path where no path sits or surrounding where a porch once stood.  The daffodils stubbornly outlast the ones who planted them and abide as the only sign of what was once a homeplace. 

Without thinking, I turn left to the tube station. It's slightly longer that way in the shadow of the BT tower. On the sidewalk I evade two boys  on their electric step-scooters who seemed indifferent to the possibility of running me over. It's pouring.

It's been a decade since Lehman. I see myself reflected in the window of another abandoned shop. I am clean-shaven today; not quite an old man yet, but when I look around I see an older man shuffling in a Zimmer-frame. He is drenched. I know I see the dreary future staring at me. He smiles. It's the first maskless smile from a random stranger in months.

As I walk to the entry of the station, all I can think of are those vast armies of yellow daffodils filling Fitzroy Square.

Newton, Spinozism, and mind/body interaction

Every sentient soul, at different times and in different organs of senses and motions, is the same indivisible person. There are parts that are successive in duration and coexistent in space, but neither of these exist in the person of man or in his thinking principle, and much less in the thinking substance of God. Every man, insofar as he is a thing that has senses, is one and the same man throughout his lifetime in each and every organ of his senses. God is one and the same God always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially, for active power [virtus] cannot subsist without substance. In him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him, experiences nothing from the motions of bodies; the bodies feel no resistance from God's omnipresence.---Newton, "General Scholium" Principia, translated by Cohen & Whitman (1999), 941-942

The first three sentences of the quoted paragraph were inserted into the  third (and final) edition of the Principia (while the rest was added to the second edition). They have become subject of intense scholarly scrutiny because of the light they might share on the constraints on any possible explanation of the cause of gravity. So, for example, my good friend Andrew Janiak thinks that in the quoted passage there is a hidden premise that 'a substance cannot act where it is not substantially present' and this reinforces his argument that Newton (always) rejects unmediated action at a distance (Hylarie Kochiras has also argued this; in context my work is one of their targets.) Here I want to bracket that debate (but will return at the very end to it), and reflect a bit on Newton's underlying metaphysics of mind and mind-body interaction.

In context, in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, Newton has just asserted that God is eternal and omnipresent ("will not be never or nowhere," (941)) And in the paragraph following the one just quoted he claims that "the supreme God necessarily exists, and by the same necessity he is always and everywhere." (942; emphasis in original) That is to say, Newton's God is immanent in the universe. Quite a few more remarks in the General Scholium suggest this.

And, in fact, as 'the same necessity' suggests Newton's God's relationship to space and time is very tight (I would say an internal relation). Rather than creating space and time, by an act of will, they exist when he exists in virtue of the same necessity. How to think of Newton's modal metaphysics here is no simple matter (and I have devoted some space to it recall here; here; here). In an early text, De Gravitatione, Newton had tried to characterize this relationship in terms of an emanation doctrine, and there, too, it signals that space and time are not created (or so I argue here).

It's crucial to Newton's general argument that space and time are not nothing or merely ideal or useful conventions. (In De Gravitatione he makes a point of emphasizing this. In the General Scholium it's treated as self-evident.) And it follows from this that there are structural features of the universe (space and time) that are as infinite and eternal as God is. My interest is in trying to characterize one of the relationships between sentience and this spatial-temporal structure.

Now, a few paragraphs before  Newton had explicitly denied, and he added a second denial to the third edition, that God is a world soul (940). But a natural reading of the quoted passage at the top is that God is sentient with a soul. (I return to this below.) And such ensouled sentience makes a person. But unlike say, in Descartes' metaphysics, Newtonian ensouled sentience can be spread out in space and time. Yet, like a Cartesian soul, such a Newtonian ensouled sentience does not, despite existing in space and time, itself have parts or is even divisible.

As an aside, my own view is that Newton is a substance monist. For Newton, a substance is a directed source of activity, that is an agent.* (Janiak and I agree about this. But we differ on the monism.) And that the only truly active agent in his metaphysics is God. I grant that Newton uses the plural 'substances' (942) in order to deny, in Lockean fashion, that we have knowledge of their essences (and even less of God's essence). But when he uses 'substances' he means it in the more innocent sense of a 'material entity' not an 'agent.' 

Now, an obvious way to make sense of the contours of Newton's position on ensouled sentience in the General Scholium is that he thinks sentience is a kind of emergent property of matter immanent in nature. And so Newton articulates a kind of property dualism.+ This works well for what he says about human persons. 

In fact, Newton returns to the question of ensouled sentience in his fascinating closing paragraph of the General Scholium:

A few things could now be added concerning a certain very subtle spirit pervading gross bodies and lying hidden in them; by its force and actions, the particles of bodies attract one another at very small distances and cohere when they become contiguous; and electrical [i.e., electrified] bodies act at greater distances, repelling as well as attracting neighboring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the limbs of animals move at command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit being propagated through the solid fibers of the nerves from the external organs of the senses to the brain and from the brain into the muscles. But these things cannot be explained in a few words; furthermore, there is not a sufficient number of experiments to determine and demonstrate accurately the laws governing the actions of this spirit. (943-944)

As Dempsey has argued, building on I.B. Cohen's interpretation of some draft manuscripts while Newton was developing a response to Leibniz (published in 1715 Account), Newton explicitly refers to experiments done by Hauksbee. Here it looks like Newton is sketching how sentience itself is ground in a powerful, "very subtle spirit" that pervades bodies. In particular, the presence of this spirit helps explain the exciting of sensation in beings like us. Now ''spirit" is a fluid (we use it in that sense when we describe liquor as 'spirits'). And for Newton a kind of (subtle) matter. So, this fits with the emergentism I attribute to Newton. (To be sure, I agree with Stein (2002) and Dempsey that Newton viewed this as a research program because we simply know to little about the nature of mind--so my claim is not meant to be doctrinaire, although Newton is an adamant critic of some positions he rejects.)

In particular, Dempsey calls attention to a passage, "if this spirit may receive impressions from light and convey them into the sensiorium & there act upon that substance which sees & thinks, that substance may mutually act upon this spirit for causing animal motions’" (quoted by Cohen in Newton 1999: 282) I agree with Dempsey that Newton thinks this spirit is a key element in mental causation. But the most natural reading of the passage is, I think, that this subtle spirit is a mechanism by which mental causation takes place. It is not obvious that this spirit also helps constitute or ground the substance which sees and thinks.

Interestingly, Dempsey argues it is likely that Newton is "not here endorsing the independent existence of the mind, but rather is distinguishing it from the organs of sense and the brain. What is more, one straightforward explanation of the natural interaction of this spirit and the mind is precisely that the mind and the spirit with which it interacts are quite similar in nature." (Dempsey 2006: 438) And this fits very nicely with my own emergentist reading. But as I note this very monistic interpretation of Newton's metaphysics of mind is rather speculative.

In fact, I often read Newton in Spinozistic fashion in which God is the one and only substance. (This is, in fact, Clarke's position in 1704, which is what made him a juicy target for Leibniz.) And the universal quantifier in the first sentence of the quoted paragraph, seems to suggest that what Newton says about human minds must fit also God's mind: "Every sentient soul, at different times and in different organs of senses and motions, is the same indivisible person." And if this 'every' includes God, this suggest that God is not just immanent nature, but also material (e.g., "motions").

But I have always hesitated about this because in the General Scholium Newton rejects, as I noted above, the idea of God as a world soul and he writes shortly hereafter that God "totally lacks any body and corporeal shape" (942). So, I think it is not obvious that God's sentience is an emergent property of matter. For (a) God's sentience cannot be grounded in such matter, and (b) in various places, Newton seems to suggest that conceptually and temporally God precedes matter. (In the General Scholium that is not explicit, but it is a kind of implication of his claims about the designed nature of the visible universe.)  And so if this is right God's sentience and personhood is not ensouled. But something altogether mysterious.

The passage in which I take him to reject God as the world soul reads as follows:

But, in looking again  He rules all things, not as the world soul but as the lord of all. And because of his dominion he is called Lord God Pantokrator. [Newton adds a note: 'that is, universal ruler.'] For "god" is a relative word and has reference to servants, and godhood is the lordship of God, not over his own body fas is supposed by those for whom God is the world soul, but over servants. (940)

Drawing on early work by Dobbs, Rudolf De Smet & Karin Verelst have convincingly argued that here (and in a few other places of the General Scholium) Newton is echoing Lipsius's attack, inspired by Philo, on the old stoic notion  of anima mundi. The effect of this Lipsian reading is that God remains immanent to nature, but is not ground in body. 

In re-reading the passage, it is not obvious to me anymore that Newton rejects conceiving God as the world soul as such. Rather, he is rejecting analyzing God's rule in terms of the world soul because it does not capture the hierarchical nature of God's dominion.

So, it is possible that Newton thinks God's sentience in the pervasive more subtle (electric) fluid/spirit. Even so, given that Newton is explicit that God "totally lacks any body and corporeal shape" (942). it seems unlikely that we're supposed to read Newton as claiming that God's sentience is ground in, and emergent of a, subtle electric (etc.) spirit.++ So, I don't think it is correct to treat God's sentience in terms of emergent properties (in the way, say, Spinoza's parallelism encourages).**  Even though Newton and Spinoza agree that thought is a something like an attribute of substance.

So, where does this leave us? First, rather than seeing Newton as relying on a principle of local action, he is articulating an account of the relationship between sentience and body. For human sentience this is ground in a kind of emergent quality of body, especially a subtle fluid. Second, God is immanent in nature, and features of his existence can be derived from the study of nature. Ordinarily,** bodies are not hindered by his presence, and "he does not act on them nor they on him." In so far as God does interact with the bodies and spirits in nature this is fundamentally mysterious, as mysterious as his substance. In fact, in a passage that echoes a skeptical trope in Locke, Newton really stresses the fact that we really have no epistemic access, not even analogical, to God's sentience.

he is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting, but in a way not at all human, in a way not at all corporeal, in a way utterly unknown to us. As a blind man has no idea of colors, so we have no idea of the ways in which the most wise God senses and understands all things. (942)

Third, rather than positing a principle of local action, Newton is developing an account of sentience that may be illuminated by experiments on electricity. But leaves us without any resources to make claims about God's agency.