Digressions&Impressions

Newton on the laws of nature and interstellar space

Since Space is Divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allowed that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several Parts of the Universe.--Isaac Newton Opticks Query 31 

The quoted passages dates from the 1706 Latin edition of the Opticks and ended up in Query 31 of the later English edition. As regular readers know (recall here), I am rather fond of it, and I have explored the significance and implications of it also in my scholarly work (including writing with Zvi Biener here; and here solo). Because of a visit to Duke, and my conversations with Katherine Brading and Caleb Hazelwood while there, I had occasion to revisit the passage. 

Before I get to that let me offer some clarification on Newton's terminology for those of you who have never seen this passage before: the universe can (but need not) be composed of different worlds. Ordinarily, when Newton uses 'world,' he means thereby to refer to a solar system. Newton recognizes that the universe could be composed of different worlds that coexist (in the General scholium he remarks [recall] on the beauty of the night sky to aliens in other worlds)! A 'system of worlds' is a collection of solar systems (we would say, a 'galaxy') that, presumably, share in a uniform motion or frame of reference.

But Newton also uses 'world' in a metaphysically richer sense. A world in this richer sense is constituted and characterized by the kinds of “particles of Matter” and forces that are to be found in it. The matter and forces of a world can be described by laws of nature. Newton's attitude toward matter and forces is realist in that they are part of his basic ontology; matter and forces ground the laws of nature, which are derivative from them: note Newton's "thereby."

In fact, as an aside, at the start of the Principia, Newton notes that the "basic problem of philosophy seems to be to discover the forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces." So, the ontological priority of forces (and matter) is reflected in his epistemic aims. 

The passage quoted at the top of this post suggests that Newton's laws are not primitive or productive in the sense that, say, Maudlin's treatment of laws implies (recall). In my work with Biener, especially, I have tried to explain how we should think of the metaphysics of laws according to Newton (short version: it's complicated). But in what follows I want to make a further suggestion about what we might call the extension or locality of the laws of nature.

For Newton, at every point of space, there is time and God, and places that might be filled by matter. (Conversely, there are space and God at every moment of time.) But there are also enormous number of otherwise empty spaces, some enormous. Now, we can discern in Newton treatment of four kinds of empty spaces: first, there are (interstitial) empty spaces within bodies. Second, there are empty spaces among (planetary) bodies within worlds. Third, there are vast empty spaces between solar systems. Fourth, there are enormous empty spaces between galaxies. (I think this is the doctrine of the Principia, but Newton did not always think this because he sometimes experimented with aether theories.)

Now, according to the doctrine that I ascribe to Newton based on the passage quote at the top of the post, the properties of bodies, and their forces of interaction generate the laws that govern them. How to think about the grounding relation between laws and the bodies they describe, I leave to others. (In fact, Caleb Hazelwood is circulating a fascinating paper about this.) On my view (see here), and also (say) David Miller Marshall (here), the Newtonian laws really are about interactions of bodies or systems of bodies (in which they are grounded).

So, here comes the pay-off of this discussion. It follows from these features of bodies, forces and laws, that on Newton's views the laws can be said to be present in interstitial spaces. They are also present in the spatial voids within and between solar systems. You may wonder, given the view I am sketching here, why I am so confident this is so between solar systems for Newton. However, on his view light easily and rapidly moves between solar systems, and we know that for Newton light rays themselves are composed of particles (with mass). Moreover, on his view solar systems tend to be part of a galaxy  which follows a uniform motion or has a general frame of reference.

I do not mean to suggest that all the laws of nature that exist in a galaxy are also always present in the vast voids that occupy the spaces of a galaxy. It's possible, after all, some kinds of bodies that can be found in parts of a galaxy are, in principle, unable to move among different solar systems. Notice, that lurking here is genuine lack of knowledge how many kinds of bodies there are in the universe and so how many kinds of laws will be discovered. Newton knew that he was making all kinds of homogeneity assumptions (this was explicit in hypothesis 3 of the first edition), and he also knew that the evidential basis of his claims was limited to a small speck of vast space.

So, on the view that I am sketching here, there need to be no laws of nature present in the vast empty spaces or darkness among galaxies (that is, the fourth kind of spaces). So, for Newton it's possible the total universe is rather dappled (in Nancy Cartwright's sense). Of course, in so far as light also may move among galaxies there may be considerable possibility for uncovering unified laws. (Brading teased me that on my view, as bodies move into empty spaces the laws of nature are simultaneously extended--which I find a lovely implication..) But that's an open question. (Zvi Biener and I argue that methodologically, within physics research, Newton assumes universal laws until there is evidence otherwise. But that's a different register.)

One final thought. Often discussions of Newton assimilate his views of laws of nature to Descartes. In Descartes, the laws are kind of second causes and are universal in scope. The issue I have sketched here does not arise there because, in principle, all bits of matter of the universe are indirectly in contact with each other (and are either part of a universal vortex, or mediate among large solar vortices). Spinoza grasps the significance of this picture with a beautiful treatment in a justly famous letter to Oldenburg (that I suspect shaped Leibniz's metaphysics non-trivially):

all bodies are surrounded by others, and are mutually determined to exist and operate in a fixed and definite proportion, while the relations between motion and rest in the sum total of them, that is, in the whole universe, remain unchanged. Hence it follows that each body, in so far as it exists as modified in a particular manner, must be considered as a part of the whole universe, as agreeing with the whole, and associated with the remaining parts. As the nature of the universe is not limited, like the nature of blood, but is absolutely infinite, its parts are by this nature of infinite power infinitely modified, and compelled to undergo infinite variations. 

While in my writings I tend to bring Newton rather close to Spinoza, it should be clear that on the view sketched here, Newton cannot endorse this lovely picture.

 

 

 

Spinoza, Hudde, and Monotheism, PT 2

This is the second post in a series triggered by an invite from Karolina Hubner and Justin Steinberg to write on the Spinoza and Hudde (1628 – 1704)) exchange.  According to Spinoza (recall this post), Hudde's original request to Spinoza was to provide [1] "a demonstration of the Unity of God from the fact that his Nature involves necessary existence." (Curley 2016: 25) From what follows in Spinoza's letter (OP 34) from 7 January 1666, it is clear that Spinoza understands 'unity' here as a kind of monotheism which rules out a plurality of Gods:

But from his true definition (as I have already demonstrated previously from the second and third hypotheses) the necessary existence of many Gods cannot be inferred. There follows, therefore, only the existence of one God. Q.E.D. (Curley 2016: 26)

Hudde was evidently not satisfied, and seems to have written two follow up letters. Spinoza's wording suggests that Spinoza wrote a response (now lost) to the initial follow up (from 10 February 1666), in which expressed his difficulty grasping Hudde's continued problems with Spinoza's argument. (All of Hudde's letters to Spinoza seem to be destroyed.) And after the second follow up (30 March, 1666), Spinoza takes Hudde's true worry to be: [2] "whether there is only one Being which subsists by its own sufficiency or power?" (Curley 2016: 26; Letter 35 OP, 10 April 1666.)

What's interesting about the formulation now attributed to Hudde by Spinoza is that the terminology of 'subsistence' is new here in their discussion. To the best of my knowledge, Spinoza does not use it when discussing substance or god. The one exception I have found is in the Cartesian Principles of Philosophy, in Proposition 16 where the incorporeality of God is demonstrated. (Curley 1985: 260) There Spinoza seems to use 'subsist' and 'exist' interchangeably. But, he is here clearly treating Descartes' position, not his own. And he is using 'subsist' in a conditional mode. So, I am inclined to suspect the terminology reflects Hudde's attempts to grapple with Spinoza's view. (As I noted, if Hudde is responding to Cartesian Principles of Philosophy, the argument is rather cryptic.) 

One advantage of this new formulation is that it gets at the worry that [i] it is not obvious why the kind of power that produces God should itself be limited in number. That's subtly different from the original version of the worry (recall) that I attributed to Hudde based on Spinoza's original response: this initial concern is the worry that [ii] it is not obvious why the power that produces God should be limited to producing only one God.* 

From the perspective of this re-formulation, Spinoza's new response to Hudde is frustrating. Because rather than focusing on the nature of such power (or sufficiency), Spinoza's new proof relies on the relationship between necessary existence and pure perfection (and we seem, as Wiep van Bunge suggests [in Dutch], in the real of ontological proofs). His fifth step in his new reformulation is: "whatever involves necessary existence cannot have in it any imperfection, but must express pure perfection." (Curley 2016: 27) This is then used to argue that there is only being with such pure perfection.

That Hudde was not fully convinced is clear. But rather than pressing the point about perfection, he seems to have rephrased his concern by splitting it in two as follows:

[3a] that it is a contradiction to conceive something whose definition involves existence (or what is the same, affirms existence) under a negation of existence. (Curley 2016: 29)

[3b] why there could not be many beings, existing through themselves, but differing in nature, just as thought and extension are different, and can perhaps subsist by their own sufficiency... (Curley  2016: 3o)

What's neat about [3b] is that it shows that (in light of the initial concerns of [i] and [ii]), Hudde de facto accepts something like the identity of indiscernibles.(I put this in Leibnizian fashion because I think [3b] clearly anticipates some of Leibniz's worries about Spinoza's position.) And Hudde concedes a principle like: same perfect power must produce same perfect entity. And so Hudde now recognizes that if there are to be (at least) two gods (self-causing, self-sufficient, necessarily existent, etc.) these must be at least different in nature. (This also shows that Hudde was not convinced by the language of perfection.) 

By contrast, the way I understand [3a] is as an instance of a more general worry at least in the vicinity of [3a] about Descartes and Spinoza's general approach when it comes to God/Substance. They seem to hold that one literally cannot be said to really think the denial of certain clear and distinct or adequate ideas, not even, as it were, at arm's length. And Hudde -- who pioneered the use of negative numbers -- clearly seems to think that one can at least conceive the denial of whatever one affirms (even if it is a thing with necessary existence or whose definition involves existence). 

The other neat thing about [3a] and [3b], from the perspective of the original worry [1], is that Hudde now is decomposing different levels at which concern about Spinoza's argument might enter in. One is at the level of what can be thought/conceived by the meditator. The other is at level of what God(s)'s nature/identity might be. And what he puts his finger on is that in Spinoza's philosophy these two levels seemingly get intertwined.  In my next post, I'll explore Spinoza's final known letter to Hudde in response.

 

On Throwing Out Philosophical Babies with the Bathwater

Newton's Corollary VI, however, is not in the Principia for mere ornament. Newton needs it to establish that to a first approximation, the system of a planet and its satellites can be treated as an isolated gravitating system if one ignores the shared orbital motion around the sun. Thus we have a case--treating the sun's gravitational field in the region of the system in question as essentially homogeneous--of what Einstein was to call the "principle of equivalence." Indeed, Newton's sixth Corollary (which deals with a homogeneous field of acceleration), and Huygens's discussion of centrifugal force (which deals with an inhomogeneous one), together adumbrate the principle, exploited so fruitfully by Einstein, that the dynamical states and behavior of bodies in no way distinguish between, on the one hand, a certain kinematical state, and on the other, a second kinematical state implying the same distances and rates of' change of distance, together with a suitable applied field of force. It is a little surprising that Mach, with his relativistic view of motion and his interest in seventeenth-century mechanics did not at all notice these things.--Howard Stein "Some Philosophical Prehistory of General Relativity." Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 8 (1977): 20.

Last week, after my digression on Harman's rediscovery of Adam Smith, I mentioned in a correspondence with Nathan Ballantyne, that Howard Stein also had documented a case in which a philosophical move/insight/distinction had been lost (and then recovered). And after stating this confidently, I thought it prudent to re-read the Stein piece I had in mind (and only belatedly realizing I had blogged about this material before--today's post is thus a retracing of steps). Before I get to the Stein piece a few words of introduction.

Let's stipulate that due to linguistic or geographic isolation or the (deliberate and accidental) destruction of sources sometimes philosophical moves or distinctions are not available at a later date. These may well be cases of linguistic injustice (recall), but do no present further philosophical challenges.

Then there are cases -- now known as Kuhn-losses -- in the sciences, where insights in a discarded paradigm are not ready-at-hand in a new ruling, scientific paradigm. I use 'ready-at-hand' in order to make clear that not all such cases of Kuhn-loss have to involve strict incommensurability.  The insight from the discarded paradigm may just be thought unintuitive or unlikely-to-work in a new paradigm. (This is especially likely to occur in complex policy contexts.) In so far as paradigms structure the availability of intellectual choices (we might call them theoretical affordances), Kuhn-losses are just a natural effect of the disciplining of an intellectual community by text-books and a shared sense of salient experiences (statistical regularities, decisive experiments, etc.). I say 'natural' because time and cognitive attention are scarce goods, and so at the margin there will be a trade-off between the cost of memory and the costs of advancing the paradigm (etc.). The previous sentence may seem abstract, but some such reasoning was (and is) often used to remove the history of the discipline from the graduate curriculum in a field of expertise/science. There is more to be said about such matters, but hopefully that's sufficient for present purposes.

Now, since philosophy does not have paradigms in the scientific sense, and since graduate education in philosophy is not standardized in the way the sciences and the discipline's history is preserved within the graduate curriculum, the existence of the philosophical analogue to Kuhn-loss in philosophy is prima facie a puzzle. Because Kuhn-loss is a term within the philosophy of science about science, and I both deny that philosophy is a science and -- more polemically -- think it a bad idea to think about philosophy in terms familiar from the philosophy of (Kuhnian) science (because unhealthy to the flourishing of philosophy), I use (after nudging from Ballantyne) 'throwing out the baby in the bathwater' when discussing prima facie puzzling cases of the loss of philosophical insight/moves, and distinctions.

And as I noted last week, Harman felt the force of the puzzle. As it turns out, in my reconstruction of the case, it was Sidgwick's strategy, to turn philosophy into a text-book-driven field with the aim of both (i) demarcating normative philosophy from empirical psychology and (ii) to treat ethics as aiming at (and now I use the felicitous phrase of Aaron Garrett) "comprehensive and coherent normative moral theories" that basically caused Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be dropped from quasi-standard reading lists in philosophy. And this entailed that some relatively cutting edge responses to objections to impartial spectator theories were not ready at hand when the topic was revived. This opened the door to what we may (in honor of Liam Kofi Bright) call historical arbitrage. 

I think such arbitrage is needed when whole eras of philosophy are treated with disdain in subsequent ages. It's pretty clear that the early moderns actively promoted disdain toward and a lack of acquaintance with scholastic philosophy. And this meant that lots of distinctions and concepts developed by the scholastics were removed from philosophical vocabulary or emptied from a lot of previous significance. And without wishing to raise a prejudice against the practice, we can see that post-Kantian university philosophy in Germany and later in Anglophone world re-introduces a lot of these distinctions and terms back into mainstream philosophy. (To what degree these are really the same concepts given shifting background metaphysics I leave aside.) 

Now, re-reading Stein (one of my doctoral supervisors) was instructive.  First, I was reminded that my own rejection of the ban on using anachronistic terms -- a ban common among certain historians of philosophy (inspired by a species of contextualism)--, is anticipated by Stein (whose paper I read in graduate school).  His version of the argument is instructive:

For the avoidance of anachronism, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to restrict conceptual vocabulary to that of the period under discussion. To impose such a restriction is to inhibit flexibility of thought without any important compensating guarantee against error. It is an intellectual stratagem analogous to that of the shallow empiricism in science that seeks security in rules for the construction of concepts, and achieves only a hobbling of theory. (p. 14)

Stein is explicit that Mach is an example of such shallow empiricism. (p. 14; recall also.) But perhaps forms of operationalism  may also be classified as such. Be that as it may, Stein is right that one can still be anachronistic in interpreting the past even if one only uses actor's categories. For, one may well add apply these categories in a way that is a-historical and at odds with the historical sources. I once claimed (rather too polemically in a NDPR review) that this had happened among scholars who polemically rejected looking at the past through the prism of contemporary issues, but who had tacitly projected a version of the fact-value distinction (in fact, I now understand it was Sidwick's) onto the past that was anachronistic. Moreover, as Daniel Schneider taught me, by using actor's categories, which may well be contested concepts, one is likely to take sides (without always realizing it) in past debates. So, Stein seems to me right that the deployment of anachronism can be illuminating of the historical actors' actual positions (etc.). Stein himself does this throughout the article.  

Okay, now let's turn to the baby with the bath-water. First, in the major key (as it were), Stein himself is an anti-Kuhnian. He concludes his essay with the the claim that "I see, from the seventeenth century up to today a profound community of concerns and a progressive development that has involved both cumulative growth and deepening structural understanding." (27) Stein does not deny a 'conceptual revolution' by Einstein (building on Riemann).

Second, in the minor key (as it were), but my present interest, Stein recognizes that within this profound community of concerns, historical cul-de-sacs and forgetting are possible. Mach really misses something that was available to Newton and Huygens. And while Stein does not  harp on this, plenty of folk influenced by Mach (even after the Einsteinian revolution) missed the point when describing seventeenth century relativity and its development. That the later folk do not see as clearly is especially striking because not only is the seventeenth century mathematical vocabulary is relatively impoverished relative to the later ones, but also there is intellectual continuity from late seventeenth century thinking through the nineteenth century. No major texts are lost and the philosophical vocabulary of the seventeenth and eighteenth century about physics and astronomy does not pose major difficulties to the nineteenth century mind. 

Now, while Mach's case happens within science (broadly conceived), it also involves what we may call the metaphysical principles of science and so, also part of (natural) philosophy proper. (Mach's own institutional position reflects this in his own shifts from mathematics and physics to becoming one of the first professors in the history and philosophy of science.) I put it like that because full awareness of the implications of the "principle of equivalence" seems to have been missed. Now I don't think of myself as an expert on 19th century physics, so take this with a grain of salt. But it's pretty difficult to test empirically the principle of equivalence and so was, perhaps, not of active concern to practicing physicists and natural philosophers. In addition, and this seems to me crucial to Stein's argument, later reflection on relativity was shaped primarily by Leibniz's views (who was treated as the standard bearer for relativistic thinking).

I think this happened in part because of the effect of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence on philosophical thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This displaced interest in Huygens' views (some of which were hardly accessible) and let people to miss that Newton himself had important stuff to say on the topic. While I am pretty convinced that Leibniz-Clarke shaped people's views of Newton's natural philosophy (to this day, alas), I also say this with some nervousness because I don't know if anyone has checked in a systematic way what folk did with or commented on Newton's sixth Corollary. Of course, and this I feel confident in saying, in many places people studied physics through text-books that while Newtonian in some expanded sense did not follow Newton slavishly at all. Even so, because Newton's achievements were culturally so central to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is really striking that some of his most profound insights were only appreciated in the development of a physical theory that surpassed his. 

At this point one may be impatient and suggest that in fact the case at hand while no Kuhn-loss is the effect of paradigmatic thinking in science, which can, in fact, obstruct the insights of (what we may call in homage to Kuhn) the scientific-legislator of the paradigm. And that by creating a division of labor in science (among different fields, but also among theory and experiment), it was left to relatively few to study relativistic theories while Newtonianism ruled. And, in fact, once Maxwell's equations and concerns about the ether opened the door, relativistic principles were explored by (say) Poincare in the late nineteenth century. So the critic may refuse to accept the example as a case about lost philosophical babies.

Fair enough. But, of course, one of the effects of the split between philosophy and science, and the relatively high status of physical science, is the tendency toward paradigmatic thinking in science and philosophy. And one may well conclude, as I do, that in so far as paradigmatic thinking and the prestige of science within philosophy as such shape philosophy we should expect the bathwater, even one nourished with the fruits of science, to carry away important insights. Of course, documenting such cases involves a kind of practical contradiction because in the very act of retrieval the baby is saved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

Leibniz, Clarke, Newton, and Reformation of the Solar System

Thanks to Leibniz, there is a common reading of Isaac Newton in which Newton is committed to the idea that God periodically restores the solar system. I do not mean to suggest Leibniz is solely responsible for this; Clarke's response to Leibniz fails to disabuse clearly the reader of this. And since for a long time Clarke's response was taken to be authoritative of Newton's views the idea has persisted.  

Here is Leibniz's charge right at  the start of the Correspondence:

Sir Isaac Newton and his followers also have a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty needs to wind up his watch from time to time, otherwise it would cease to move. He did not, it seems, have sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. No, the machine of God's making is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen, that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work; he must consequently be so much the more unskillful a workman as he is more often obliged to mend his work and to set it right. Leibniz to Clarke (November 1715), Letter 1, par. 4 (copied from the Ariew edition).

The charge is curious because [A] Newton never claims that God needs to rewind the universe (or solar system) and [B] Newton never compares, I think, God's work and his creation to a watchmaker and watch. Newton's favored analogy is God as the perfect geometer. There are subtle similarities and differences between the two analogies, but I will explore these in a future post.

In his response Clarke comes very close to noting [B], but he fails to do so unambigiously and simultaneously muddies the waters: "the notion of the world's being a great machine, going on without the interposition of God as a clock continues to go without the assistance of a clockmaker, is the notion of materialism and fate, and tends (under pretence of making God a supramundane intelligence) to exclude providence and God's government in reality out of the world." Clarke's first response, par. 4 (copied from the Ariew edition). It is quite natural to read Clarke as accepting [B] and endorsing [A].

As an aside, that Clarke actually rejects [B] (the clock analogy) only becomes clear indirectly. In the fourth response to Leibniz, in the context of explaining that gravity does no fit the mechanist's conception of causation by contact, Clarke writes: "If the word natural forces means here mechanical, then all animals, and even men, are as mere machines as a clock. But if the word does not mean mechanical forces, then gravitation may be effected by regular and natural powers, though they are not mechanical." (par. 46) The natural powers that Newton has really shown to exist make it impossible, ipse facto, to conceive the universe as a (mechanical) clock. (See also Clarke's fifth reply ad 110-116, which also seems to assume this kind of argument.)

Notice, too, in his first response to Leibniz, Clarke does not actually concede the mending charge. All he wants to insist on is God's "providence and God's government." And this he is opposes opposes to "materialism" (Epicurean/Hobbesian system) and "fate" (Spinozism).  The key here is their denial of (general) final causes and the idea that there is really a three-way debate among the systems of fate, materialism, and mind/providentialism. Of course, this also turns on what he might mean by 'government.' I also think Kenny Pearce (whose tweets on the topic prompted this post) is right to claim that "Clarke's response to Leibniz's allegation that Newton's God is an incompetent watchmaker depends essentially on Clarke's view that there are no absolute miracles, only relative ones." I'll let him explain why this is so.

As it happens, in my own work on Newton (following Ted McGuire and Howard Stein) I am not inclined to treat Clarke as authoritative on Newton. So, it is worth explaining why I think Leibniz's charge shouldn't have gotten off the ground at all.

It is, I believe, agreed by all that the following passage from Query 31 of Newton's Opticks gave rise to Leibniz's original charge:

For while comets move in very eccentric orbs in all manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in concentric orbs, some inconsiderable irregularities excepted which may have arisen from the mutual actions of comets and planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase until this system needs a reformation. Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice.

I included the final sentence in the quote because I think this helps explain Newton's reasoning. Notice, first that Newton does not mention clocks or watches here. Second, the argument is directed against the system of blind fate and in favor of the system of God's (providential) choice. I think this nobody would deny. 

Now, it is natural to assume that [C] Newton is here anticipating the eighteenth century debate over the stability of the solar system. And that [D] his answer is negative. And if one thinks Newton is committed to [C&D] then it's quite natural to assume that Newton thinks that God needs to rewind the solar system regularly. But I don't think Newton should be taken here to be committed to be thinking about [C-D.]

For, notice, that the claim about the system requiring a reformation is offered as a reductio of the system of fate. And the underlying claim is that the particular patterns of motions we see in the solar system, must be the product of intelligent choice.  That is to say, rather than being worried about the stability of the solar system, Newton is interested in cosmogony (the origin and evolution of the system). And the underlying claim is that from the perspective of the system of necessity one cannot device a system of laws that can account for the simultaneous origin and evolution of the irregular motions of the comets and the regular motions of the planets (and their moons) and their interactions. So, the charge is that Spinozism (which, as Clarke and Newton argue elsewhere, lacks a compelling physics) does not provide an account of the particular motions we observe and would be internally inconsistent if it tried. In my view (see here for details) variants of this argument are trotted out by Newton in his exchange with Bentley and in the General Scholium, and by Clarke in his Demonstration (also directed against Hobbes and Spinoza). 

 

Adam Smith, Plutarch, Foucault, Leibniz, and a Forgotten Utopian.

Wherever prudence does not direct, wherever justice does not permit, the attempt to change our situation, the man who does attempt it, plays at the most unequal of all games of hazard, and stakes every thing against scarce any thing. What the favourite of the king of Epirus said to his master, may be applied to men in all the ordinary situations of human life. When the King had recounted to him, in their proper order, all the conquests which he proposed to make, and had come to the last of them; And what does your Majesty propose to do then ? said the Favourite.--I propose then, said the King, to enjoy myself with my friends, and endeavour to be good company over a bottle.--And what hinders your Majesty from doing so now? replied the Favourite. In the most glittering and exalted situation that our idle fancy can hold out to us, the pleasures from which we propose to derive our real happiness, are almost always the same with those which, in our actual, though humble station, we have at all times at hand, and in our power. Except the frivolous pleasures of vanity and superiority, we may find, in the most humble station, where there is only personal liberty, every other which the most exalted can afford; and the pleasures of vanity and superiority are seldom consistent with perfect tranquillity, a the principle and foundation of all real and satisfactory enjoyment. Neither is it always certain that, in the splendid situation which we aim at, those real and satisfactory pleasures can be enjoyed with the same security as in the humble one which we are so very eager to abandon. Examine the records of history, recollect what has happened within the circle of your own experience, consider with attention what has been the conduct of almost all the greatly unfortunate, either in private or public life, whom you may have either read of, or heard of, or remember; and you will find that the misfortunes of by far the greater part of them have arisen from their not knowing when they were well, when it was proper for them to sit still and to be contented. The inscription upon the tomb-stone of the man who had endeavoured to mend a tolerable constitution by taking physic; 'I was well, 1 wished to be better; here I am; may generally be applied with great justness to the distress of disappointed avarice and ambition.--Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 3.3.31, pp. 150-151.

The charming exchange between The King of Epirus and his favourite receives a note by the editors of the Glasgow edition of Adam Smith's works; they helpfully point to Plutarch, Lives, Pyrrhus, x4. And then add, "The king was Pyrrhus, the favourite Cineas." The passage is introduced by what we may call an axiom of status quo bias: "Wherever prudence does not direct, wherever justice does not permit, the attempt to change our situation, the man who does attempt it, plays at the most unequal of all games of hazard, and stakes every thing against scarce any thing."

The latter part of the axiom is reminiscent of Pascal's wager, but then in reverse. The axiom basically suggests that only in the context of the established rule of law (that's how I am glossing 'justice' here), and then only when one acts prudently, can it be sensible to try to change one's situation. At this point it is easy to get caught up in the circular nature of the axiom because presumably it is only prudent to play games of hazard when the odds are favorable.

But notice that there is a more important point lurking here -- one pertinent to the exchange between Pyrrhus and Cineas -- that outside the rule of law, one should not act from honor, ambition, spirit of revenge, or desire for plunder at all. That is, one should not go to war unless one is sure to win (and, if there is established internal law, within one's right). Since one is rarely sure to win in war, Smith's axiom is quite anti-militaristic. And this fits with Smith's much broader criticism of mercantilism (which exhibit a warlike spirit). I don't mean to deny that the axiom also fits his criticism of projectors/speculators (who are over-optimistic and over-ambitious). The passage also links up with other themes in Smith (about the nature of true happiness, and the tendency of our imagination to delude us).

Now, as it happens, the axiom is not in Plutarch.

Recently, I noticed that in a lecture of 22 March 1978, Foucault directs attention to a now forgotten work called The New Cyneas. The author was a man called Émeric Crucé (1590–1648). While I am only a third way in, The New Cyneas is an amazing work. It's relative obscurity is a reminder that as a society we are keener on remembering the conquerors, the Clausewitzes, and the liberators, than creating statues of the true friends of peace. I will blog a bit about the book when I can. 

I do not mean to suggest he was always obscure. As others have noticed, Leibniz had read the work as a young man and told others about it (see here; here). Interestingly enough, on one such occasion Leibniz repeats the anecdote from Plutarch:

When very young, I came to know a book titled the New Cyneas, whose unknown author counseled sovereigns to govern their states in peace and to resolve their differences through a tribunal; but I can no longer find this book and no longer recall any details. We know that Cyneas was a confidant of King Pyrrhus, who advised him to rest [and rejoice] first, since it was his purpose (as he confessed) when he had conquered Sicily, Calabria, Rome and Carthage.--Leibniz to Leibniz to Saint Pierre, 4 April, 1715. (The Abbot Saint Pierre wrote a famous proposal for European pacific Federation, which also inspired some work by Rousseau (recall))

In Leibniz there is no hint of Smith's axiom.

However, and unterestingly enough, we find a predecessor to Smith's axiom at the start of The New Cyneas. After pointing out that wars are usually fought for honor, profit (plunder), or revenge, and then dismissing the idea that they are fought for religious purposes (which "serves most often as a pretext), Crucé goes on to write that the ordinary fruits of war is a bunch disasters. He proposes as a fine lesson to Princes,

[T]o learn that there is more dishonour to fear, than glory to hope for in war. For the bad comes often [in war]  than the good; and if it is considered a folly to leave the certain for the uncertain, princes should guard their honor, without risking it [sans le mettre au hazard] for the appetites and promptings of those who nourish them with hopes, and hold out to them what they can gain and not what they can lose.--Translated by Thomas Willing Balch (1909)

Now Crucé wrote before Pascal and Fermat had their celebrated exchange. I do not want to claim that he anticipates all the details of Smith's axiom. But I hope it is fair to say he anticipates its spirit. As I hope to show soon, Crucé anticipates quite a bit more in Smith. 

 

On Being Inside Leibniz's Mill (on Remainder, Smith and Kramnick)

Remainder’s way turns out to be an extreme form of dialectical materialism-it’s a book about a man who builds in order to feel. A few days after the fake homeless epiphany, at a party, while in the host’s bathroom, the Enactor sees a crack in the plaster in the wall. It reminds him of another crack, in the wall of “his” apartment in a very specific six-story building he has yet no memory of ever living in or seeing. In this building many people lived doing many things-cooking liver, playing the piano, fixing a bike. And there were cats on the roof! It all comes back to him, though it was never there in the first place. And now Remainder really begins, in the mission to rebuild this building, to place reenactors in it reenacting those actions he wants them to enact (cooking liver, playing the piano, fixing a bike), doing them over and over till it feels real, while he, in his apartment, fluidly closes and reopens a fridge door, just like De Niro....To facilitate his reenactment, the Reenactor hires Nazrul Ram Vyas, an Indian “from a high-caste family” who works as a facilitator for a company dedicated to personal inauthenticity: Time Control UK. It takes people’s lives and manages them for them. Nazrul is no more a character (in realism’s sense of the word) than I am a chair, but he is the most exquisite facilitator, and it is through him that every detail of the reenactment is processed. He thinks of everything. In place of the pleasure of the rich adjective we have an imagined world in which logistical details and logical consequences are pursued with care and precision: if you were to rebuild an entire house and fill it with people reenacting actions you have chosen for them, this is exactly how it would play out. Every detail is attended to except the one we’ve come to think of as the only one that matters in a novel: how it feels. The Reenactor in Remainder only ever has one feeling-the tingling-which occurs whenever his reenactments are going particularly well. The feeling is addictive; the enactments escalate, in a fascinating direction.--Zadie Smith in "Two Directions for the Novel," in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, pp. 86 (First published in 2008 in NYRB as "Two Paths for the Novel"). 

After (recall) I wrote about Tom McCarthy's Satin Island the distinguished literature scholar, Jonathan Kramnick, mentioned to me he thought McCarthy's Remainder one of the most important novels of this our comparatively new century (having almost passed a fifth of its projected years, it's still fresh). Chapter six of Kramnick's collection of essays, Paper Minds, taught me that he, in turn, was echoing the judgment of "Zadie Smith, in an influential essay in the New York Review of Books, [touted Remainder] as both the most significant novel of its decade and the direction Anglophone fiction should follow into the new millennium." (130) As it happens, I was familiar with Smith's essay, but somehow had remembered mainly the devastating criticism of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, which has discouraged me from reading the book (life is short!), and the subtle use of a poem by Szymborska.

In re-reading Smith's essay I was reminded of her comic description of the International Necronautical Society (INS). In its manifesto, the INS assumes, with the logicians of old, the necessity of death and commits itself to reinventing death in rigorous ways. In the new logic, if we can make it (recall this post on Regina Rini), death will be a violent possibility.

But somehow, I had completely forgotten that Smith treated the seven year path (and presumably many rejections of) Remainder to publication as exemplary of "our ailing literary culture." (71) This culture represents unhealty times. In healthy days literature has multiple, possible futures. This (in 2008) is now denied. The opposition between Netherland and Remainder is a form of prophecy in order to re-open paths (and also recall the American metafiction -- "Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Gaddis, David Foster Wallace" [I would add Fran Ross's Oreo]-- now languishing in a safe corner of literary history (73)). Since that very literature culture has rewarded Smith greatly, one cannot help avoid sensing some ambivalence (she uses "violence") in these remarks.

As Smith's description reveals, Remainder presents a character, a reenactor, who is very much a part inside Leibniz's Mill argument:

[W]e must confess that perception, and what depends upon it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is through shapes, size, and motions. If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will find only parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception. 

But the novel suggests that Leibniz is inviting us to look in the wrong place. Perception is co-constituted by the body moving in space, the body's interaction with its umwelt, and repetition with (to echo Deleuze) occasional variation. Kramnick expertly connects Remainder to recent developments in enactive philosophy of mind (although understates the significance of repetition). Strikingly, the only feeling that occurs inside the reenactor, occurs when a pattern is recognized as, and thereby projected, as having occurred before. This constitutes a reenaction as going well.

The reenactor is a person who suffered an accident. His experience of recovering motor-control, which the able bodied ordinarily take for granted, reveals that the only person with truly fluid movement is a fake (De Niro's screen character). There is no what it's like of that. Once our behavior is (now quoting Kramnick) "slowed down and made unfamiliar, the experience in each does not layer on top of the [body-]motion. It is, rather, identical to it." (135) This claim is made visible (I almost wrote felt) by a kind of stripping away, that is, abstraction.

Both Smith and Kramnick note that Remainder's aesthetic is fully (ahh, I almost wrote self-conscious) present in the art. I quote Kramnick's description before I close with a comment: 

“In school, when I was maybe twelve, I had to do art,” the reenactor begins one chapter; “I wasn’t any good at it, but it was part of the syllabus” (90). What follows is a revealing meditation on the making of art as its own type of perceptual activity. “For a few weeks we were taught sculpture. We were given these big blocks of stone, a chisel, and a mallet, and we had to turn the blocks into something recognizable—a human figure or a building. The teacher had an effective way of making us understand what we were doing. The finished statue, he explained, was already there in front of us—right in the block that we were chiseling away at” (91). The art object is already there, only requiring a certain kind of physical motion—the lifting of one’s arm and hammering—for it to come into its own. The action is a deliberately plain shucking away of what is not art; thus, the reenactor can “not be any good at it” while also standing as the form-giving example in McCarthy’s ordinary sentence. “‘Your task isn’t to create the sculpture,’ he said; ‘it’s to strip all the other stuff away, get rid of it. The surplus matter.’ ” The reenactor takes this as a lesson on how to create his building (“chiseling away at surplus matter” will “scare my building out” [96]), and we are in turn supposed to take both as an account of how to see form as a kind of matter, the novel as a thing in the world rather than the world’s representation. Creative engagement merely strips away the surplus matter of what is neither experience nor art. (137)

One part of the (serious) joke here is that the teacher echoes (with a non-trivial difference) Vasari's definition of the nature of sculpture:* "Sculpture is an art which by removing all that is superfluous from the material and reduces it to that form designed in the artist's mind." Of course, the joke is that the traditional artist and his design has been removed from the (perhaps mis-remembered) teaching; there is now -- as Leibniz feared -- only motion and rough pattern recognition.

That would have been the best end to this long digression. But the other or same part of the joke is, of course, that one encounters the reenactor and his teacher through the words of McCarthy and (ahh) one's imaginary participation with these...and just then one recognizes the looming regress.

And so I close with gratitude to Kramnick with Swift:

• But art no longer can prevail,
• When the materials all are gone;
• The best mechanic hand must fail,
• Where nothing's left to work upon.
• Matter, as wise logicians say,
• Cannot without a form subsist;
• And form, say I, as well as they,
• Must fail if matter brings no grist.

On Paley's (and Nieuwentyt's) Watch, Spinozism and the Scientific Revolution

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to shew the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be enquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone?...For this reason, and for no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the several parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use, that is now served by it.--William Paley (1802), Natural theology: or, Evidence of the existence and attributes of the Deity, 1-2 (emphasis in original; capitalization modernized.)

There is no doubt that Paley's design argument "displaced" Cicero as the source of pre-eminent design arguments (see Jantzen, p. 119). This got reinforced, perhaps constituted, by its (that is, Paley's) role in debates over Darwinism and Creationism (see this neat paper by Adam Shapiro). To be sure, there are ways of understanding Paley's argument that can be traced back to arguments presented in Cicero (go read Jantzen it's splendid book). In addition, as Jantzen notes (pp. 121, 168-9, Paley's argument was itself clearly inspired on a design argument presented in the preface to a translation of Nieuwentyt's Religious Philosopher (see pp. xlvi-xlvii). So, we should not assume that Paley's argument was wholly new. In what follows I will remain resolutely agnostic about the epistemic status of Paley's argument.

I want to talk about watches, but first we need to discuss stones. Stones are absent in Nieuwentyt's argument. The introduction of a stone in Paley's argument is not a minor detail. To underststand this, we need to remind ourselves that traditionally the design argument is contrasted with two alternatives: chance and necessity. The former is associated with Epicureanism, the latter with Spinozism. Now both Paley and Nieuwentyt oppose the watch argument to chance. 

Nieuwentyt's argument is explicitly directed against Spinozism. I don't just base this claim on the contextual detail that Nieuwentyt's other (posthumous) book -- Gronden van zekerheid (The Grounds of Certainty) -- is a brilliant methodological polemic with Spinozism. Rather, "necessary laws of nature" are the explicit third contrast to an "understanding artifice" as the cause of the watch (xlviii).+ So, Nieuwentyt is still in the orbit of the traditional design argument. Now, to be fair sometimes Nieuwentyt treats an appeal to the ignorant "laws of nature" as identical to an appeal to chance. But when he needs to sometimes he clearly distinguishes them).*

But Paley is distinctly uninterested in Spinozism. First, he treats laws in deflationary (even nominalist) manner. When Paley turns to the possibility of treating "necessary laws of nature," he demotes them to mere "laws of metallic nature." (7) For Paley, harking back to an older, more traditional view, laws presuppose “agents” (or “powers”) and its these powers which are causally efficacious. The only necessity Paley allows is hypothetical necessity (549). And this turns out to be the way in which chance events intersect. (He uses hypothetical necessity to explain the appearance of chance.) I actually think this reflects the impact of Hume, who is mentioned just once coincidentally on the previous page (548), and Hume's famous attack on the presupposition of natural order. But I can't prove that today.

Now, a Spinozist would not accept that a stone and a watch are treated fundamentally differently. Obviously they have different degrees of complexity (or perfection), they may resist destruction in different ways, and they may have different effects on the world. But God is immanent in both, and there are no fundamental differences in their nature.**

By contrast, Paley treats stones and watches differently because (as I suggested the other day) he wants to treat living and inanimate things differently. For Paley it’s not the case that all the parts of nature exhibit apparent design. Paley clearly distinguishes between living things (which do exhibit design) and inanimate ones, which may not. For, there is a lack of symmetry between living and inanimate things. In chapter 17, he shows that the living things are so formed that they can successfully navigate and draw from the inanimate surroundings. But the reverse claim is not made. So, for Paley (but Nieuwentyt), nature is bifurcated in a way that begs the question against the a Spinozist if the Spinozist had to be taken seriously. The bifurcation also helps prompt a further key difference between Paley and the more traditional design arguments. And it connects to the changing understanding of what a clock/timekeeper is.

As regular readers know (recall), I am fascinated by a feature in what I have dubbed the Posidonian (design) argument. A key premise in it, is this (quoting Cicero): "our friend Posidonius has recently fashioned a planetarium; each time it revolves, it makes the sun, moon, and planets reproduce the movements which they make over a day and a night in the heavens." That is, the argument uses as a premise that a concrete model accurate represents nature's patterns or order. But if we look at Paley's argument, he makes no such claim.

Rather, all Paley needs is that the the watch has a particular, functional internal coherence and complexity and indicates time ("its several parts are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day.") In fact, even if the clock is irregular or sbroken altogether, it makes little difference to Paley's argument. "It is not necessary that a machine be perfect, in order to shew with what design it was made: still less necessary, where the only question is, whether it were made with any design at all."  Irregular, even “stopped” watches are sufficient for Paley’s purposes (5)! 

As an aside, one may well think that Paley's argument is an obvious improvement, because his works with more minimal assumptions than the ancient argument. They need a working machine, he can do with an irregular one. Fair enough.++

Now, it is worth noting that all of the scientific instruments that Paley mentions – telescopes (e.g. 24), microscopes (e.g., 182), a lever (e.g, p, 48), a pump (e.g., 171), a hydraulic machine (82)  – are means toward creating a model of nature or intervening in nature, but not themselves such concrete models. The same is true of Paley's treatment of the eye which is an “optical instrument,” (e.g, 277) rather than, say, part of a model that successfully represent nature. (Paley mentions temperature, but never a thermometer or a barometer.) By contrast, a planetarium does represent nature. 

There is an important, underlying issue. In ancient times it was quite natural to think of the motions of the celestial bodies as being time (or the true measure of time, for present purposes that makes no difference). We can find an important representative of this view in the Timaeus (itself non-trivial when it comes to reflecting on Design arguments):

Wherefore, as a consequence of this reasoning and design on the part of God, with a view to the generation of Time, the sun and moon and five other stars, which bear the appellation of “planets,” came into existence for the determining and preserving of the numbers of Time... Of the other stars the revolutions have not been discovered by men (save for a few out of the many); wherefore they have no names for them, nor do they compute and compare their relative measurements, so that they are not aware, as a rule, that the “wanderings“ of these bodies, which are hard to calculate and of wondrous complexity, constitute Time. Plato, Timaeus [38C-39D]***

So, if you  take such a position on the nature of time, the successful concrete model of the heavens is simultaneously not just an indicator, but a kind of representation of time. During the scientific revolution such a view was decisively abandoned. Leibniz, Huygens and Newton don't agree about much, but the heavenly motions themselves become imperfect means toward measuring (what I'll call) a 'temporal frame' (see here for explanation). But the measurements of these motions require all kinds of corrections and themselves don't bring you in contact with absolute time (if you are Newtonian), something you may well think non-existent (if you are Huygens/Leibniz). More important, a local time-keeper may be calibrated with astronomical motions, but can be decoupled from them. What a watch indicates is local time; there is no clear representation of nature's motions in them. 

 

 

 

 

On Anscombe on Hume and an Obscure argument

The first argument, however, is obscure and dealt with rather sketchily. It is that 'all the points of time and space, in which we can suppose any object to begin to exist, are in themselves equal; and unless there be some cause, which is peculiar to one time and place, and which by that means determines and fixes the existence, it must remain in eternal suspense.’ Hume replies ‘Is there any more difficulty in supposing the time and place to be fix'd without a cause, that to suppose the existence to be determin'd in that matter? The first question that occurs on this subject is always, whether the object shall exist or not: the next, when and where it shall begin to exist. If the removal of a cause be intuitively absurd in the one case, it must be so in the other: And if that absurdity be not clear without a proof in one case, it will equally require one in the other. The absurdity, then, of the one supposition can never be a proof of that of the other, since they are both upon the same footing, and must stand or fall by the same reasoning.’

Why does he say 'The first question is whether an object shall exist'? This seems  to  consider the matter from the point  of view of a creator, which suggests that Hume is consciously in Leibniz country; for Leibniz argues for  the identity of indiscernibles on the ground  that God must have a reason for putting A here and now, and B there and then, which there could not be unless something distinguished A from B. Yet Hume doesn't consider  this. The questions are not easy to reformulate  and seem better left out.--Elizabeth Anscombe , 'Whatever Has a Beginning of Existence Must Have a Cause': Hume's Argument Exposed,” Analysis, Vol. 34, No. 5 (Apr., 1974), p. 147.

The obscure argument quoted from Hume by Anscombe  is Treatise 1.3.3.4, which starts follows: "Accordingly we shall find upon examination, that every demonstration, which has been produc’d for the necessity of a cause, is fallacious and sophistical. All the points of time and place,17 say some philosophers, in which we can suppose any object to begin to exist, are in themselves equal" (etc). Treatise, T 1.3.3.4 Anscombe pays no attention to Hume's footnote, which mentions Hobbes, and suggests he is in "Leibniz country." Leibniz country is a nice place where one's passport allows one entry to all possibility.

Before I get to Leibniz country, the distinguished editors, the late David and Mary Norton, comment, "Hume appears to paraphrase Hobbes, who said that ‘a man cannot imagine anything to begin without a cause...but if he try [so to imagine], he shall find as much reason, if there be no cause of the thing, to conceive it should begin at one time as another, that he hath equal reason to think it should begin at all times, which is impossible, and therefore he must think there was some special cause why it began then, rather than sooner or later; or else that it began never, but was eternal" (Of Liberty and Necessity, 276 [see for example, here].)* If Hume is really paraphrasing Hobbes, he has also made non-trivial changes or improvements: in the Hobbes passage (ii) there is no symmetry between time and place (which goes unmentioned in Hobbes). In addition, (ii) in context, Hobbes is really interested in agency (which is why place is irrelevant), whereas Hume seems -- as Anscombe notes -- to be focused on creation (which is why place also matters). In addition, in larger context (iii) Hume is taking aim at the principle that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of existence (1.3.3.1) -- a key premise in the cosmological argument(s) for God's existence --, while Hobbes is only interested in a subjective or psychological version of the principle: "a man cannot imagine anything to begin without a cause." And finally, (iv) Hume wants to challenge the epistemic status (certainty) of the (cosmological) principle in order to undermine the claim that causation is a necessary relation, whereas Hobbes is taking aim at the idea that every action must have  a preceding cause (the will). Now, with Paul Russel, I believe that Hume was very influenced by Hobbes, but I think the note to Hobbes by Hume, if it is by Hume, was an error.

Anscombe's suggestion, that Hume is focused on creation, is not without merit. With Hume, but not Hobbes, we are in the realm of  ex nihilo nihil fit, or a weak-ish version of the PSR (akin to the principle of causality). This is indeed Leibniz land. It's also Clarke's land, especially Clarke of the  Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God; more particularly in answer to Hobbes, Spinoza, and their followers. As it happens, in the very next paragraph, Hume footnotes Clarke.

Now Clarke relies on a very particular metaphysical principle (it's also in Newton [recall]), I quote from his letter to Butler explaining it, “Necessity absolute and antecedent in the order of nature to the existence of any subject has nothing to limit it; but if it operates at all (as must needs do), it must operate (if I may so speak) everywhere and at all times alike….” (Dec 10, 1713) I call this principle 'absolute metaphysical necessity.' The background context is Clarke's (neo-Spinozistic) version of the cosmological argument in which he explains God's existence as a peculiar kind of self-cause (in which such metaphysical necessity grounds existence of God as a kind of formal cause). 

Hume's argument does justice to the principle which basically says there is no reason why God's existence should start at any given time or at any given place--no place or time has any distinctive quality/property which could single it out. This principle grounds God's omnipresence and eternality. (It also underwrites monism and the lack of limitation on God's power.)

But as Hume discerns (and Clarke exploited) this principle makes it had to see why the universal isn't a pure, homogeneous plenum (something that Clarke things Spinoza should be committed to). So, something special is required to ground any (non-Godlike) particular, non-necessary existence (which breaks the pure homogeneity of a universe governed by necessity alone). For Clarke it's obvious this means you need something like God's (completely free) will. Hume kind of agrees with Clarke, for Hume, however, it entails there is no necessary connection between creation at a given time and place and the object caused then and there.

There is, thus, a sense then in which a theory that emphasizes God's will is akin to a theory that sees us governed by brute facts. Leibniz would invoke the PSR and identity of indiscernibles in order to explain God's choice and so avoid the unwelcome result (as Anscombe discerns). But the nice thing from Hume's perspective is that he can show that from an embrace of (i) absolute metaphysical necessity, and (ii) the existence of particular variety, he can show that (iii) not all causal relations are necessary. And he does so in a way that does not rely on his separability principle.

What about Anscombe's Leibniz? I doubt Hume was thinking of Leibniz in context. And Hume has other reasons to challenge final causes and the PSR. Of course, Leibniz has resources to defend the PSR or the principle of causality (etc.), but on Hume's account one can't simply assume that causal relations are necessary in one's argument for these, and that's no small matter.**

 

On the Significance of an Anonymous Review of Newton

The work of M. Newton is a mechanics, the most perfect that one could imagine, as it is not possible to make demonstrations more precise or more exact than those that he gives in the first two books on lightness, on springiness, on the resistance of fluid bodies, and on the attractive and repulsive forces that are the principal basis of Physics. But one has to confess that one cannot regard these demonstrations otherwise than as only mechanical; indeed, the author recognizes himself at the end of page four and the beginning of page five that he has not considered their Prin­ciples as a Physicist, but as a mere Geometer.
He confesses the same thing at the beginning of the third book, where he endeavors nevertheless to explain the System of the World. But it is [done] only by hypotheses that are, most of them, arbitrary, and that, conse­quently, can serve as foundation only to a treatise of pure mechanics. He bases the explanation of the inequality of the tides on the principle that all the planets gravitate reciprocally toward each other ... But this supposi­tion is arbitrary as it has not been proved; the demonstration that depends on it can therefore only be mechanics. In order to make an opus as perfect as possible, M. Newton has only to give us a Physics as exact as his Mechanics. He will achieve this when he substitutes true motions for those he has supposed.---Anonymous, Journal des Scavans (2 August 1688), pp. 153 sq., translated by Alexandre Koyré, Newtonian Studies, p.115. [see also here]

The 1688 review was the first public continental response to Isaac Newton. It is often taken to be the expression of a (neo-)Cartesian rejection of the Principia along the lines of Huygens or Leibniz. This is undoubtedly influenced by Koyré suggestion (he's not the first) that the reviewer was probably the Cartesian Regius. On the now standard reading the reviewer is rejecting action at a distance and asking for an explanation in terms of colliding bodies. I now think this standard reading does not do justice to the details of the review. I was prompted to re-think the review by a fascinating paper, "Beyond the “Continental Translation” of Newtonian Mechanics: The Beginnings of Rational Mechanics Reconsidered" (forthcoming in a OUP Handbook on Isaac Newton edited by Smeenk & Schliesser) by J.B. Shank (who has independent grounds to think the reviewer is Varignon).+

There are two oddities in the review that are incompatible with the reviewer being a standard neo-Cartesian-mechanical philosopher: the author of the review (i) rejects hypotheses; and s/he (ii) insists that knowledge of "true motions" of the planets is possible. But, as Huygens affirmed in his introduction in the Treatise on Light and Discourage on Gravity (which includes his published response to Newton's Principia) the mechanical philosophy was a hypothetical philosophy, relying on reduction to intelligible models, and it insisted that motions of the planets were too complex to be fully known with certainty. (Descartes himself had thought the motions of planets could only be known with rough approximation.) They were, in fact, in no position to complain about a science grounded on hypotheses or suppositions--that was, in fact, Newton's complaint about them. (They could, of course, claim that different hypotheses than those adopted by Newton's were preferable, but not that they were hypotheses.) In fact, for the first time since the Copernican hypothesis had errupted, Newton's Principia gave genuine hope that the true motions of the planets and their causes could be found and were within possible reach.

But the anonymous reviewer is attacking Newton from a more rationalist side: action at a distance is criticized for being (a) arbitrary and (b) un-grounded in indubitable foundations (that track the causal structure of the world).* In the Preface to the Principia, Newton himself had allowed that his foundations were, in an important sense, provisional: "the principles set down here will shed some light on either this mode of philosophizing or some truer one." Unfortunately, the reviewer does not explain what the starting points or standards of an exact and certain physics look like.

There is a sense, in fact, in which the reviewer can be read as a disappointed Newtonian. For, in the early 1670s, in his early lectures and correspondence on color, Newton had grown infamous for his assertion that his mathematical science of optics could be certain. The claim was watered down in print such that Newton granted Hooke that "the absolute certainty of a science cannot exceed the certainty of its principles." In fact, one can discern in the anonymous reviewer somebody who, after all the high flowing rhetoric of the 1670s (say), had expected from Newton more certain principles than the ones he had supplied in the Principia.

If I am right about this then one can say that rather than representing the informed response of a leading figure in an old paradigm, the 1688 review expresses the perspective of a new possible paradigm, what we may be dub -- with a glance ahead toward Émilie du Châtelet -- Newtonian-rationalism.