Slog
News & ArtsFriday, May 15, 2009
Arts Some Notes on Future Reading
Posted by Charles Mudede on Fri, May 15, 2009 at 10:42 AM
One of my projects this summer will be to read and compare the major works of Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles Darwin. Erasmus Darwin was a man with a very open mind—he had lots of illegitimate children and lots of crazy ideas. He wrote poetry, and in some of this poetry he praised evolution as if it were the new God, the future of the absolute, something like a secular form of Meister Eckhart's grund. Eramus was not like Darwin. But what interests me is not their differences but the fact that a truth took the form of poetry (Eramus) before it took the form of scientific prose (Charles). Meaning, there was more science in Erasmus's poetry than in much of the scholarly prose produced by the major universities of his time. My goal in all of this is to rethink poetry and its relationship with the actual world and also the future that becomes actual. With poetry, what can not be proved with tests and evidence can still be said, expressed in words. The purpose of this project is to imagine poetry as the necessary condition for expressing new thinking of any kind. What is new pressures the language into a state of poetry. And this means art is not something that is solely situated for reflection (consideration—art as the ultimate owl of Minerva) or recreation but is the natural state of invention itself. It is like that area in the mind's idea of the body that dissolves the point-by-point map into a fuzziness that allows you to connect anything with anything else—meaning, experience the new.
A nice accident happened will preparing my reading of the first volume of Erasmus Darwin's, Zoonomia. I found this:
Would it be too bold to imagine that, in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, — would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!Where else are the last three words of that passage?
A hundred and so years later, they make an appearance in Joyce's Ulysses, in the Proteus episode, which happens on the beach, with Stephen walking with his eyes closed:
Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.
The pleasure those three words give me is also without end.
1
You should include Charles Darwin's... cousin, I think he is: Eugene Galton. He's the father of eugenics, but he's this massively interesting, weird figure that posited a eugenics less about racial purity and more about the recognition that people are, like animals, highly susceptible to a managed breeding program.
He's also sort of a polymath, which is always kind of fun.
He's also sort of a polymath, which is always kind of fun.
2
With poetry, what can not be proved with tests and evidence can still be said, expressed in words.
By that definition poetry is at best pre-science, since anything which cannot be demonstrated with hypothesis testing and replication is not science.
5
they're both alluding to the gloria patri:
"Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end."
"Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end."
6
Charles - I studied philosophy in college, but still, every time I read your Slog posts my head begins to hurt. Make the pain stop. Please.
7
The first place those words appeared is of course Ephesians, in the King James bible, and more pertinently to Stephen, in Philippians in the Catholic Douay bible, and Stephen would have heard them thousands of times both in church and in the churchly prison of his mind.
14
@2, I disagree with your teleological view. Science inspires imagination; imagination inspires science. Different types of knowledge can coexist.
15
By the way, nice post, Charles. Thank you for putting those three words into my head. You are a jazz man among philosophers.
16
Totally agree with @14. I think in just about everything under the sun, complicated interdependencies explain a lot more than silly, linear just so stories. Just to get this straight: You're going to read two authors, the first wrote poetry, the second science, they you're going to take the common traits and 'imagine' that you've found evidence that poetry is THE (not a) natural state of invention itself.
Your project is falling into a really basic fallacy. You're looking at one instance of something and then making generalizations that are wildly beyond what the evidence you're looking at could possibly justify. Just because an idea showed up first in poetry, then in science in no way justifies the 'necessary precondition' part of your project. Read Hume, and you'll see that the jump from sequence to causation is at least highly suspect. And why would you want to put such tight strictures on inspiration (scientific or otherwise), anyway?
Just because the content of Erasmus' poetry is more closely aligned with what we believe today does not make it more scientific (@2). We believe what we do today because of the rigorous observation of empirical fact, and the aesthetic and explanatory capabilities of theories. Science is the process, not the content.
Likewise in philosophy: we can all look at platonic dialogues and see that philosophy is being done, even though next to nobody still believes in the platonic theory of forms.
Sorry, but your project sounds like a load of pretentious horseshit.
Your project is falling into a really basic fallacy. You're looking at one instance of something and then making generalizations that are wildly beyond what the evidence you're looking at could possibly justify. Just because an idea showed up first in poetry, then in science in no way justifies the 'necessary precondition' part of your project. Read Hume, and you'll see that the jump from sequence to causation is at least highly suspect. And why would you want to put such tight strictures on inspiration (scientific or otherwise), anyway?
Just because the content of Erasmus' poetry is more closely aligned with what we believe today does not make it more scientific (@2). We believe what we do today because of the rigorous observation of empirical fact, and the aesthetic and explanatory capabilities of theories. Science is the process, not the content.
Likewise in philosophy: we can all look at platonic dialogues and see that philosophy is being done, even though next to nobody still believes in the platonic theory of forms.
Sorry, but your project sounds like a load of pretentious horseshit.
18
@14: Science and imagination certainly can coexist and cross-polinate, but that does not make them equivalent.
Science may inspire the poet, but let us not kid ourselves that the poet is doing science.
Science may inspire the poet, but let us not kid ourselves that the poet is doing science.
20
I find Charles' thesis quite interesting, but commenter #16 has several very excellent points that should be taken into account to avoid some logical pitfalls.
As a scientist, I find it necessary to keep the mind open. In fact, the job requires one to keep an open mind, in order to bridge the cavern between what is possible and what is true. Something must be imagined before its truth can be discovered - of course! But poetry is not truth in the same sense as science - it is an examination of subjective truth, with aesthetic value. In fact, Charles Darwin's prose is notoriously imaginative and even poetic, in the sense that he finds aesthetic beauty in observing what is true about nature. But he imagined things that no one (kin or otherwise) could have imagined previously without the sort of thorough, methodological, formal inquiry that he engaged in as a scientist. However, C.D. did have a great intuition. For example, here's a recent article describing the finding that, under the right conditions, inorganic molecules can organize themselves into the components of life:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/scienc…
Here's an excerpt:
"If Dr. Sutherland’s proposal is correct it will set conditions that should help solve the many other problems in reconstructing the origin of life. Darwin, in a famous letter of 1871 to the botanist Joseph Hooker, surmised that life began “in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts.” But the warm little pond has given way in recent years to the belief that life began in some exotic environment like the fissures of a volcano or in the deep sea vents that line the ocean floor.
"Dr. Sutherland’s report supports Darwin. His proposed chemical reaction take place at moderate temperatures, though one goes best at 60 degrees Celsius. “It’s consistent with a warm pond evaporating as the sun comes out,” he said. His scenario would rule out deep sea vents as the place where life originated because it requires ultraviolet light."
But let's remember that these little intuitions are only considered insight when they're correct. So, poets should continue to imagine... but honestly, scientists have uncovered more weird shit about the world and ourselves by imagining and validating and reimagining and trying again than poets have by "[dissolving] the point-by-point map into a fuzziness" ... which sounds like a less conscious (and therefore less fun and less human) experience.
More...
As a scientist, I find it necessary to keep the mind open. In fact, the job requires one to keep an open mind, in order to bridge the cavern between what is possible and what is true. Something must be imagined before its truth can be discovered - of course! But poetry is not truth in the same sense as science - it is an examination of subjective truth, with aesthetic value. In fact, Charles Darwin's prose is notoriously imaginative and even poetic, in the sense that he finds aesthetic beauty in observing what is true about nature. But he imagined things that no one (kin or otherwise) could have imagined previously without the sort of thorough, methodological, formal inquiry that he engaged in as a scientist. However, C.D. did have a great intuition. For example, here's a recent article describing the finding that, under the right conditions, inorganic molecules can organize themselves into the components of life:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/scienc…
Here's an excerpt:
"If Dr. Sutherland’s proposal is correct it will set conditions that should help solve the many other problems in reconstructing the origin of life. Darwin, in a famous letter of 1871 to the botanist Joseph Hooker, surmised that life began “in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts.” But the warm little pond has given way in recent years to the belief that life began in some exotic environment like the fissures of a volcano or in the deep sea vents that line the ocean floor.
"Dr. Sutherland’s report supports Darwin. His proposed chemical reaction take place at moderate temperatures, though one goes best at 60 degrees Celsius. “It’s consistent with a warm pond evaporating as the sun comes out,” he said. His scenario would rule out deep sea vents as the place where life originated because it requires ultraviolet light."
But let's remember that these little intuitions are only considered insight when they're correct. So, poets should continue to imagine... but honestly, scientists have uncovered more weird shit about the world and ourselves by imagining and validating and reimagining and trying again than poets have by "[dissolving] the point-by-point map into a fuzziness" ... which sounds like a less conscious (and therefore less fun and less human) experience.
21
"We believe what we do today because of the rigorous observation of empirical fact"
My favorite critique of Hume's empiricism comes from Popper:
"But though he felt rationally obliged to regard commonsense realism as a mistake, he himself admitted that he was in practice quite unable to disbelieve in commonsense realism for more than an hour."
My favorite critique of Hume's empiricism comes from Popper:
"But though he felt rationally obliged to regard commonsense realism as a mistake, he himself admitted that he was in practice quite unable to disbelieve in commonsense realism for more than an hour."
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