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In May 1913 Bertrand Russell was working on a manuscript called Theory of Knowledge. The project was abandoned in June when Russell decided that he could go no further. His theory was at a dead-end and he couldn't back out and start over. It was because of Wittgenstein's criticism in conversations with Russell that the manuscript was abandoned and Russell never attempted to publish his "theory." This history is recounted in Russell and Wittgenstein on the Nature of Judgement by Rosalind Carey (Continuum, 2007, 150pp., $110.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780826488114. [That is right; $110 for 150 pages]). The technical reasons for Russell's failure are accounted for in this very expensive book. (Such books are produced for libraries and then mostly cordoned off from the general public on the shelves of security-guarded university establishments; establishments; which are, by the way, supported in one way or another at the public expense. Such is the state of knowledge in the corporate state. For the most part the general public does not feel the loss because these expensive published theses of 150 pages are mostly nests made by the academic squirrels. The historical nut-gathering that these nests are made to hold is often badly written, though sometimes interesting. But the academics themselves are not really to blame since they are fulfilling an institutional imperative -- publish or perish. Publication seems to be the university's way of accounting for the productivity of their professorial employees, like the aggregation of standardized tests are supposed to measure the health of our elementary schools. Call this the "Fordism" of the educational factories.) For biographical, historical, and philosophical reasons I am interested in Russell and Wittgenstein in 1913 and thus this book would be interesting to me. But how am I to get hold of such an outlandishly priced piece of work unless I gather some friends to storm the Columbia Library while decommissioning the security guards in the process? So I must make do with book reviews and with my own knowledge, when discussing Carey's book. Some squirrels do interesting things, and this book is a case in point. I think that someone should write a piece of fiction focusing on the lives of Russell and Wittgenstein from May to June 1913, the period of the writing and abandonment of Russell's Theory of Knowledge, and bringing into the novel the events of the subsequent six years, as if in a dream of history. Within six years of the Russell and Wittgenstein conversations both were imprisoned; Russell for his opposition and protest against World War I and Wittgenstein as an Austrian prisoner-of-war in Como and Cassino. While Russell was in prison in 1918, he returned to philosophy after a long time writing only social and political works, and wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and began the book The Analysis of Mind, which was partially a tactical retreat from his attempt to create "a theory of knowledge." While Wittgenstein was a prisoner-of-war in Italy in 1918-19 he rewrote and rethought some of the portions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he had finished during his course of military service. (Someone should compile a list of the great men and women who were imprisoned during the period of the First World War. Russell, Eugene Debs, and Rosa Luxembourg come to mind immediately, but the list could be extended to hundreds of names. Does anyone know of a good book that gives a global history of resistance to World War I? If it hasn't already been written it should be written.) The countries that Russell and Wittgenstein called home were fighting a war against each other and still, in the early part of the war at least, the two managed to exchange letters and post-cards. In February 1919 Wittgenstein wrote to Russell, I am prisoner in Italy since November, and hope I may communicate with you after a three-year interruption. I have done lots of logical work which I am dying to let you know before publishing it. How did such posts get through the lines of war? Did they go by way of neutral countries? According to Ray Monk this post-card found Russell at Lady Ottoline Morrell's country house, Garsington Manor. A postman delivered the card to a place where Russell was not listed. Perhaps the British postal services favored the ruling classes because it beats me how a card gets from an Italian prisoner-of-war camp to a person of no certain address, unless that person got special attention paid to him by the postal services. But in the Spring of 1913 all of this was in their future. Wittgenstein had not even published a major work when he froze Russell into place on his theory of knowledge. In fact Wittgenstein was in effect Russell's student, not a fellow teacher, and yet his influence, his ability to paralyze thought, was infamous. This shows one of the great missions of Wittgenstein. In spite of the philosophers, because of the philosophers, Wittgenstein's mission was basically an anti-philosophical practice. He endeavored to get philosophers to shut up -- or at least to stop publishing so much of what they write on the "deep" philosophical subjects. He was against proclamations of philosophical "knowledge" and the propounding of philosophical theories. He was engaged in a philosophical practice that would in effect limit the very notions of what we call knowledge. Wittgenstein's only published major work, the Tractatus, was anti-theoretical to the core. It did not present "a theory" of logic and its relation to language, or a "theory" of propositions. What it set out to do is to clarify certain aspects of language use and misuse from within a philosophical frame. The Tractatus attempted to set the limits of what any philosophical theory could accomplish. It did this by attempting to show that the capacity of language could only express through propositions what can be thought, and that there is much else that cannot be thought through propositions but can only be shown. On the level of propositions the Tractatus itself does not present a theory, but rather makes clarifications about the possibility of philosophical theories given the limits of language use. But on the level of "showing" the Tractatus as a whole is emblematic of a kind of anti-philosophy: we are shown the limits of human thought and knowledge. The limits of knowledge that can be made from propositions "show" from the book as a whole. There are only a few philosophers who agree with this interpretation of the Tractatus, and fewer still who agree with the interpretation of Wittgenstein's work which would turn the work as a whole into an anti-philosophical practice. The underpinnings of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, his clarification of language use as putting limits on what we can call thought or knowledge, is itself an anti-philosophical practice to the core. Personally, I think that Wittgenstein is correct, when he insisted that nobody understood the Tractatus, when it was written, and few understand it now. It is because very few people can accept a work that is a set of propositions that say one thing and a book as a whole that illustrates what the set of propositions says cannot be theorized or philosophized by pointing the way to silence. The book is a form of practice. It practices what it preaches. If most philosophers set out to accept the anti-philosophical practice of the Tractatus, they could not write the articles and books, which are their bids for job security in the current academic system. So Wittgenstein while writing from the prison camp in Italy continually complained, perhaps even whined, that Russell would never understand the Tractatus. Russell wrote back: Throughout the war I did not think about philosophy, until, last summer. I found myself in prison, and beguiled my leisure by writing a popular text-book, which was all I could do under the circumstances. Now I am back at philosophy, and more in the mood to understand…. Don't be discouraged, you will be understood in the end. (p. 162) I think in the matter of understanding both men were wrong about the other. Wittgenstein has yet to be understood because philosophers have a hard time understanding books that are also practices. (Perhaps poets best understand such philosophical works.) And Russell understood Wittgenstein on an intuitive level that has never been acknowledged. Back in June 1913, because of Wittgenstein's anti-philosophical criticism, Russell quit his Theory of Knowledge. And for the first time Russell himself began to think about the limits of knowledge and the limits of theory. Theory, after all, can only confront and provide knowledge of a very small part of the world. More than thirty years later Russell came out with a book called Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. It is my contention that this book is a strange bastard child of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In 1913 Wittgenstein planted the seeds of "theory-skepticism" into Russell's thinking and over the course of Russell's long life that skepticism grew. Unlike our modern skeptics, the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, Russell's skepticism constantly turned around on itself and embraced nationalism, the social system of classes, philosophy and even science. Russell's skepticism did not limit itself to skepticism about religion. There came a time at the end of his life that he began to look at his own intellectual pretentions as also a form of superstition. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits is not a "theory of knowledge" but an attempt to describe knowledge and how we come to know. In short, Russell's book is an anti-theory. It is not an anti-theory in the multiple ways that the Tractatus is an anti-philosophy -- propounding, illustrating, and practicing anti-philosophy all at once -- but an anti-theory in a much more everyday way. The goals of Russell's long book were modest, unlike the immodest idol-smashing goals of Wittgenstein's short book; one of the limits of human knowledge is that there can be no grand theory of knowledge, and no metaphysical ground to knowledge, but only local descriptions of how in a common sense way we as individuals, with these brains, can come to know limited parts of the world through specific theories. As Russell himself wrote at the beginning of Human Knowledge: To scientific common sense (which I accept) it is plain that only an infinitesimal part of the universe is known, that there were countless ages during which there was no knowledge, and that there probably will be countless ages without knowledge in the future. Cosmically and causally, knowledge is an unimportant feature of the universe; a science which omitted to mention its occurrence might from an impersonal point of view, suffer only from a very trivial imperfection.
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At ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) anti_philosophy ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) yofaceizscrumpy comments on the whole idea of the anti-philosophical project:
self -contradiction
yofaceizscrumpy
2006-10-15 08:57 pm
Sorry for interrupting you this evening, but it seems like your community is a walking contradiction.
As any sophistica can see from dictionary.com, "the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct" is the definition of philosophy. To be anti-philosophy is a totality that claims truth.
I kindly request that you disband your entire community this instant.
Anti-philosophy is simply an attitude or approach of skepticism to the possibility of most or all philosophical projects as philosophers themselves define their projects.
There is a simple reason to take an attitude of "anti-philosophy." All great philosophers, from the very beginning of the conversation that we call "philosophy", have been in some sense anti-philosophers, rejecting the very idea that any kind of philosophy is possible or that all previous "philosophy" was philosophy at all. Whether Plato or Rousseau or Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, or even such an infamia as Heidegger, (and many more) the first original steps in their philosophical work was to question whether philosophy, or at least systematic knowledge as assumed by philosophy, is possible at all. Is it possible to "know" (or describe or find a method to produce) the structure of "reality," the conditions of knowledge, the foundation of "being" or "thought," or the grand historical movements of "spirit" or the inherent logics of "Mind", in the way that philosophers claim, or are the very claims a form of self-deception?
Further, any advance in "knowledge" (science, theoretical thinking, mathematics) has represented both a break from philosophical rumination and a crisis of philosophy. Every scientific advance has represented a reconception of philosophy because previous philosophy is found to be limited and unfounded... And yet rarely do the professional advocates of the philosophical project look at itself with humility. The whole dung-shifting machine just rolls along as if all previous speculation had not been thrown onto the heap. All philosophy, like all religion, becomes an illustration of shifting into the "holes" left by science and literature, a "God" of the gaps approach... where there is no "science" it is there philosophy shall fill in the gaps. And finally any "advance" in "experiential understanding" has been pre-philosophical and has largely involved the kind of experience we get from the visual arts, poetry, drama, novels, etc. In fact, basically, what we call philosophy has nothing to do with wisdom or knowledge... Philosophical practice is basically a parasite on the arts, out of which the discipline of philosophy grew, during the historical period when arts separated from religious ritual... And philosophical practice is also parasitic on science, from which philosophy reacts by constantly redacting itself and reforming itself as commentary on scientific practice.
To the extent that you can say that an "attitude" or "approach" is philosophical, only to that extent can you say that "anti-philosophy" is a philosophy, and thus represents a contradiction, or perhaps a systematic paradox. But this in-itself represents the kind of imperialism of knowledge that philosophy has been accused of by every great philosopher who started his/her philosophical career as an anti-philosopher. Philosophy seeks to dominate all forms of knowledge, seeks to be a term that is everywhere and nowhere. In this way it is a lot like the word "language" or "ideology". Everything becomes a "language" and thus every aspect of mind or communicative experience is filed under the category of language, thus we get "the language of music" and "the language of architecture", etc., etc. The same occurs with the term ideology.... Among some "thinkers", even some anti-philosophers, all thought becomes an example of ideology and thought-itself is not possible without "ideology". You can parade out as many dictionary definitions of philosophy that you like to prove that an "anti-philosophical" attitude is self-contradictory, but it doesn't negate the fact that the definitions themselves are self-contradictory, assuming that all thought is philosophical and that philosophy is both everything and nothing.
This is the way that many use the term "philosophy". Philosophy is not only some kind of "systematic thought" obtaining to wisdom, knowledge, and understanding of the world, but also something that we "have" implicitly, simply because we think at all. Thus it is impossible to be an anti-philosopher because by definition all systematic thought of any sort is philosophical, and if the thought is not systematic, then the implications of thinking, is itself philosophical. Thus the reasoning goes, "To think 'anti-philosophically' is an example of philosophical thinking." But this is like the Cretan who says all "Cretans are liars", the very fact of making the statement I am "anti-philosophical" is either paradox or contradiction. Well the former rather than the latter. Yet the possibility exists that it is neither. It is simply a double-bind statement created by the systematic gossip of philosophers themselves, those engaged in the intellectual circulation of gossip to the extent that they have imposed a dictionary definition that is totalistic and intellectually imperialistic. But let me suggest that like most double bind situations, this situation was produced by a category mistake or a problem of logical typing. It is possible to be "anti-thinking" in certain situations. If I am a baseball batter, I am not thinking at every moment about how to swing the bat. If my baseball coach tells me that you have to get "beyond thought" and "just swing" wjem you are in the batter's box, I know that he is saying that "conscious" thinking is harmful to my batting average in this situation. But to define his "anti-thinking" statement as also a "thought" and thus self-contradictory is a form of sophistry, the same kind of sophistry that practically all philosophers engage in at one time or another. They, the self-described lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, have propounded their definitions through intellectual gossip, so that you are a philosopher whether you know it or not and no matter what you do or think getting beyond philosophy is impossible.
But lets be real. A "Philosopher" is a professional category in our modern society. Propounding philosophy is what those rarefied "professionals" do. But before "philosophy" was a profession it was a denotation of a systematic orientation to life that was "positioned" outside of organized (western) religion. Philosophers were not so much anti-religious as un-religious. Philosophy had an historical beginning and it has historical limitations. It was born when literature began to separate itself from religion and it began to attenuate when science began to separate itself from both religion and philosophy. Philosophy as an historical practice has always shaded into literature and myth on one side and science and mathematics on the other. Philosophy is not "strictly" bounded or limited by these other experiential practices and ways of producing understanding, but philosophical practitioners have always ignored the fact that they are simply continuers of these other projects. At its best philosophical practice provides abstraction and meta-comment on literature and science. At its worse philosophical practioners pimp off of literature and science while at the same time pretending to dominate both of those practices and proclaiming the originality of their discipline. An anti-philosophical point-of-view is simply a point-of-view that recognizes the historical limitations of philosophy and hopes for the further attenuation of philosophy in the future. But let me emphasize, that It is only the arrogant imperialism of some philosophers that necessitate anti-philosophy. To the extent that any other field -- religion or even physics or biology -- exhibits this sort of arrogant yearning to dominate other fields, then they too should be called to task.
Then what is left of philosophy? Mostly gossip. The true subject of philosophy has always been gossip in one form or another. It is gossip taken to a higher level -- the gossip of complex society commenting on the fact that face-to-face society, where gossip truly matters, is no longer possible. Philosophy is essentially meta-gossip, on the form and function of complex structures of growing human society.
There is no "contradiction" in being an anti-philosophy philosopher: if you believe that philosophy is parasitic meta-gossip, then your function is to reveal how philosophy works as a form of meta-gossip. Yet we assume that this practice of critique of philosophy that I am calling "anti-philosophy", is also a form of meta-gossip. The snake eats its tail.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
27 May 2007
(reedited 28 May 2007)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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Wittgenstein's Fright at Cultish Mathematicians:
An Incident in the History of the Philosophy of Mathematics or
What did Wittgenstein mean by Cantor's theories being a "cancerous growth" on mathematics?
A question asked;
When commenting on Cantor's ideas of uncountable sets and different levels of infinity, Wittgenstein called it a "cancerous growth on the body of mathematics". Cantor's (and others such as Dedekind) ideas have since provided the basis for much of the development of mathematics thereafter. What could have led Wittgenstein to make such a remark? What did he mean by it?
The hard part in answering this question is trying to explain the pure mathematics in everyday language so that a common reader will know what was at issue between Wittgenstein and those, such as Bertrand Russell, who thought that Cantor, Weirstrass and Dedekind provided a solution to metaphysical problems of the foundations of mathematics. If I get the basic statement of the background wrong please correct me. Still I think it is necessary to state the problem in everyday language because one must have a clear view of how much Cantor's discovery went against common sense. If the reader can understand this she will also be able to understand why so many philosophers and mathematicians thought that Cantor's theories of the infinite did not say anything that made sense. But more important for this note the reader will be able to see how Wittgenstein's view differed from the other condemnations of Cantor's line of thinking.
Cantor considered the problems of infinite sets. The common logic since Aristotle had been that the infinite was not actual but only potential.. But against common logic Cantor showed that there are sets larger than the infinite sets of natural numbers. He showed specifically that no infinite set could have as many elements as all possible subsets of that infinite set. This led to a revolution in how we conceived of set theory and of the infinite. The infinite could no longer be considered an anomaly. In other words their were different "kinds" of infinite sets. (Oh mathematicians forgive my simplicity!) What Cantor was able to show was that infinity was "actual" not just an unimaginably large number, not just "potential". He showed there are infintie sets that are larger than other sets that are also infinite. The best example is the set of all natural numbers versus the set of all irrational numbers. Both sets are infinite sets. But the set of all irrational numbers is "larger," or contains more members, than the set of all natural numbers. (Forgive me. I have merely stated the same notion in a number of ways while avoiding technical language. I did this in the hopes that non-mathematical readers will get my drift. Possibly I'm just furthering your confusion. Also for those of you who may belong to the school of mathematical realists forgive me for stating all of this as if it were just another kind of reality.)
When a mathematician comes to such conclusions philosophers sneeze. Why? Because to decide that the infinite set of irrational numbers is larger than the infinite set of natural numbers is to indirectly decide questions posed at the origins of Aristotle's metaphysics, i.e. the metaphysical status of the infinite. Philosophers of Mathematics recognized this if no one else did. Russell accepted the mathematics but spent much time trying to ground the insight into his own formal logic.
Wittgenstein rejected Cantor but he was not the only one.. Ponicare said, "There is no actual infinity; Cantorians forgot that and fell into contradictions. Later generations will regard Mengenlehre as a disease from which one has recovered " Brouwer said that: Cantor's theory was "a pathological incident in the history of mathematics from which future generations will be horrified." Another quote in my notebook is from Wittgenstein. "Cantor's argument has no deductive content at all.' Yet I would distinguish this reaction from Ponicare and Brouwer. I take Wittgenstein to mean that he would not argue with the mathematics but would just proclaim it all irrelevant to any philosophical or logical view.
I think most of these reactions were simply a matter of an inability to reconceive ancient notions. But many mathematicians seized on Cantor's theory. Some philosophers were horrified. It didn't seem gentlemanly that these theories were being used as solutions to ancient problems philosophy. Also, the mathematicians who ceased on Cantor's theories treated them as if they were the second coming of the Pythagorean theorem or a new discovery of Pi. Cantor's theories made much of what was said previously in the philosophy of mathematics hard to justify. There were philosophers who were simply exasperated. Why don't mathematicians stop this nonsense, leave us alone, and get back to their equations? What I wonder is, if there were many mathematicians with a philosophical bent who were discouraged by the narrowness of the philosophers. This is an historical determination that is hard to make. No one can ever know what was lost by way of dogmatism.
Wittgenstein was one of those who looked at all of this as an attempt to establish a New Pythagorean Cult around pure mathematics and formal logic. But even though I reject his view I think it should be fully understood. At base Wittgenstein had interesting reasons, that I think can't be easily countered, unless one is a thorrough going rationalist or believes in a pragmatic realism that states in the long run we just work and see what works. (I am somewhere within those choices.)
Wittgenstein's view of mathematics was unique and I doubt one could find more than two people who would have agreed with him in 1932. But I don't think he cared much about who agreed with him, except for Turing. When he was giving a course on these subjects it seems that the only person he cared to 'make see' his point of view was Turing, who would argue with W all the way. Wittgenstein thought that "belief" in mathematics was a kind of religion among intellectuals. He would throw out what must have seemed like Delphic statements at the time such as:
"There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics."
"I shall try again and again to show that what is called a mathematical discovery had much better be called a mathematical invention."
The quote about "cancerous growth" is not referring directly to Cantor but rather to Russell's discussion of Cantor, Weirstrass and Dedekind.. Russell believed that pure mathematics had laid the foundations which could ground mathematics in formal logic. For Wittgenstein, these mathematicians' solutions to problems of the infinitesimal, the infinite and continuity and Russell's acceptance of these solutions as great achievements of mathematical logic had "deformed the thinking of mathematicians and philosophers." But Wittgenstein's position was not the same as other philosophers and mathematicians who criticized Cantor, et. al. He did not question the mathematics of the solutions or criticize their premises, he questioned whether these solutions were solutions to mathematical problems at all. More precisely he re-categorized the solutions to another context outside of mathematics and tried to demonstrate that the new context where these solutions must be discussed could be either accepted or rejected without effecting mathematics or logic at all.
Wittgenstein's reference to the 'cancerous growth' on mathematics encapsulates two related notions: In his view mathematicians had grafted onto mathematics the following: (1) the idea that mathematics somehow gave answers to what Wittgenstein believed were metaphysical questions and (2) the idea that when doing certain kinds of 'pure mathematics' what you were doing had some connection to that other kind of game called 'formal logic.'
It was these metaphysical 'answers' and the development of a formal logic that were the 'cancerous growth'. Cantor (and the way others developed Cantor) was just an example of this 'cancerous growth.' To the extent that I understand the issues here I think that Wittgenstein was being dogmatic. To the extent that I understand W'ittgenstein's concern I think he was trying to get the best mathematicians (mainly Turing, who he much admired) to see how both mathematics and formal logic had no real 'foundation' but could be restated in ways that were not 'elegant'. These 'non-elegant' restatements would be equally 'true' in that they would come to the same conclusion without flaws but would seem absurd. I think Wittgenstein was saying that sometimes the elegance of the solution tricks us into accepting it as fundamental or correct.
If I remember, correctly some of what Wittgenstein wrote in his notebooks on these subjects was recently published (4 years ago?). It seems to me that much of Wittgenstein's rhetoric seems to come from the fact that he simply could not get Turing to see that his (Wittgenstein's) picture of mathematics was one possible view of the cathedral. He just thought that all mathematicians were misled on the "reality" of Cantor's proofs and then compounded it all by developing false notions about proclaiming that here - at last -- was the foundation of mathematics.
Of course I may be too hard on Wittgenstein here. There was something in his whole notion about how the "game" of mathematics should be played in order to make sense in the world that also led him to reject Godel's theorem. Who knows maybe in the end we will find that the way Wittgenstein viewed the "game" of mathematics was a sort of anti-foundational foundationalism. I trust I am being appropriately obscure!
Again these are very complicated questions and unfortunately unlike during the 80 years between 1860 and 1940 we don't seem to have great mathematicians who are interesting philosophers and great philosophers who are good mathematicians. The other possibility is that I don't know what I am talking about. It has been a long time since I studied these topics, a long time since those courses where very smart and inarticulate professors tried to explain to me (a very dumb but articulate student) the elegance of pure math. At the time I agreed with Wittgenstein on at least one point. The elegance seemed purely imaginary.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
9 March 2006 (originally written - 5 Feb 2005)
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The Dawkins-Gould Dispute Over Evolutionary Mechanism: Intrinsic Understanding and the Narrowness of Science - A Confusion of Mysteries With Problems
"Eldredge maintains that Dawkins and other 'ultra-Darwinians' are far too reductionist, wanting to explain everything in terms of natural selection and the competition of genes for survival. Gould recently published a long polemic about this in the New York Review of Books, but it is not easy to see the disagreement between the two schools as a large or significant one. Both sides believe that the influence of natural selection is enormous, but that it operates only in the context of environmental circumstances that make some characteristics of organisms adaptive and others not, and are responsible for the extinction of species from time to time. Both sides believe that some features are directly explained by natural selection, and others are mere side-effects. They also both acknowledge that physics and chemistry constrain and shape the biological possibilities and the range of possible genetic variation. So why are they so cross with each other?
"My guess is that it is a conflict over purity. In the present state of understanding, the theory of evolution by genetic mutation and natural selection, through the differential reproductive success of individuals, is an explanatory schema. It describes the rough form of an interminable history of births, reproductions and deaths without specifying the enormously complex chemical details on which it depends, most of which will never be recovered. The actual story includes countless minute, non-lethal chemical changes in the DNA of reproductive cells each of which resulted, through embryonic development, in viable alternative organisms, slightly different from their parents.
"This schema inevitably raises the question whether the story can be told entirely from the bottom up - everything being explained in terms of particle physics - or whether some higher-order principles of organisation enter the picture, increasing the story's probability."
From Why so cross? by Thomas Nagel: A review in the London Review of Books of
Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins · Penguin, 350 pp, £20.00
and
The Pattern of Evolution by Niles Eldredge · Freeman, 225 pp, £17.95
at
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n07/nage01_.html
My own observation on the reason for the dispute is entirely different. I think it mainly comes from both sides misunderstanding of the narrowness of scientific explanation and the broader meaning of that narrowness for how and what humans know and can know. Gould tends to emphasize the mysterious side of what we don't know but I see nothing inherently mysterious in the fact that scientific explanation is narrow and the human mind is limited. Dawkins tends to believe that everything is reducible to scientific explanation. But he constantly runs into his own paradoxes of what is not yet explained. Or to put it another way, Chomsky once remarked that human 'ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries'. What rankled Dawkins about Gould was the deeper meaning that he gave to the mysteries, and the belief that some mysteries would always remain mysteries. In short, Gould tended to a mysticism of mysteries. On the other hand what rankled the late Gould about Dawkins was his basic attitude that everything, in principle can be explained by scientific reductionism. Dawkins tended to turn all mysteries into problems that science can solve. I suspect that what divided the two were their basic (philosophical) world-views of the nature and practice of science itself.
Coming at this dispute from the point of view of a physics education one can say several things about the nature of science.
First, one reason why physics is so powerful is that it is very narrowly focused. Second, physics deliberately places limits on what it can explain and is tolerant of the mathematic reductions that may lead to apparent semantic paradoxes. The paradoxes in human thought are accepted as just the way things are and the math is accepted as explaining them.
Third, physics has stopped trying to 'explain' some of these paradoxes and others in other than theoretical terms. The theory may not match everyday thinking but who cares. The theory works anyway. Some paradoxes such as how to explain motion or a continuum are simply considered either outside of theoretical science or are bracketed until the paradox is reframed in theoretical terms.
Fourth, physics does not look at intrinsic explanation as its province. Thomas Nagel, who wrote the review I quote above, once wrote an article called "What is it like to be a bat?" He said that since science can't answer that question it will never be able to explain consciousness. This is the same kind of misunderstanding of science that he displays in his guess about the dispute between Dawkins and Gould. The problem isn't that science doesn't explain consciousness intrinsically. This misunderstands the narrowness of scientific theory. Physics long-ago gave up the belief that it had to understand the basics of what we call matter intrinsically. Maybe intrinsic understanding of what we call 'matter' will result from our physical theories and maybe it won't, but to demand that intrinsic understanding of 'matter' must result from a physical theory in order for it to be complete is itself nothing more than a metaphysical imposition upon science.
To illustrate this more clearly let me quote the beginning of a good article on Quantum Mechanics, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Quantum mechanics is, at least at first glance and at least in part, a mathematical machine for predicting the behaviors of microscopic particles — or, at least, of the measuring instruments we use to explore those behaviors — and in that capacity, it is spectacularly successful: in terms of power and precision, head and shoulders above any theory we have ever had. Mathematically, the theory is well understood; we know what its parts are, how they are put together, and why, in the mechanical sense (i.e., in a sense that can be answered by describing the internal grinding of gear against gear), the whole thing performs the way it does, how the information that gets fed in at one end is converted into what comes out the other. The question of what kind of a world it describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics. Minimally interpreted, the theory describes a set of facts about the way the microscopic world impinges on the macroscopic one, how it affects our measuring instruments, described in everyday language or the language of classical mechanics. Disagreement centers on the question of what a microscopic world, which affects our apparatuses in the prescribed manner, is, or even could be, like intrinsically; or how those apparatuses could themselves be built out of microscopic parts of the sort the theory describes.[1]
That is what an interpretation of the theory would provide: a proper account of what the world is like according to quantum mechanics, intrinsically and from the bottom up. The problems with giving an interpretation (not just a comforting, homey sort of interpretation, i.e., not just an interpretation according to which the world isn't too different from the familiar world of common sense, but any interpretation at all) are dealt with in other sections of this encyclopedia. Here, we are concerned only with the mathematical heart of the theory, the theory in its capacity as a mathematical machine, and — whatever is true of the rest of it — this part of the theory makes exquisitely good sense.
Nobody doubts that QM is a good theory, or that in fact it, at some point in the future, may become a completed theory. And yet the theory may never answer the questions of what a microscopic world is like, or could be like, intrinsically. It is possible that such an answer will be provided in away that seems satisfying. On the other hand it may not.
What Dawkins, expects evolution and biology to provide is an answer to the question of what the biological world is like intrinsically. That kind of answer is neither necessary for a successful scientific theory, nor should it be expected. What the late Stephen Jay Gould, thought was that these intrinsic questions were somehow 'mysteries' in an old fashion sense of the word. I don't think they are mysteries, I just think that the hope for intrinsic understanding is one of our biological insets, which also points to the biological limits of human knowledge.
What Thomas Nagel has always pointed to as his understanding of the scientific project, since at least "What is it like to be a bat?" is that the phenomena of the world must be explained intrinsically in order to be truly understood.
This is the philosopher's misunderstanding of the working's of science.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
30 June 2005
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco
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Wittgenstein & Hemingway, #2 Limitationism, Philosophy, and Illustration through Fiction
(Part One can be found at Hemingway & Wittgenstein #1 The Wound and the Bow, Absence and Insight)
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus famously ends
6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
'7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.'
In the preface of the Tractatus, written long after the main text was finished, Wittgenstein emphasizes the importance of his ending to his whole work.
The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
Thus the aim of the books is to draw a limit to thought, or rather -- not to thought, but the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, who should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be non-sense.
Thus in the Tractatus there is a sense, in which the work begins and ends at the same place.
There is every indication that Wittgenstein himself gave a 'mystical' interpretation to these words, or, to put it in another way, what was beyond the limit of expression of thought could be 'felt' or 'experienced' but not expressed in language. Wittgenstein believed that there might be something 'beyond' the limit of thought, but he also thought that he could show that in order to define the limit of anything, (i.e. what is beyond the bounds of any system of expression) you would have to get to the 'other side' of those boundaries, which is impossible when the boundaries themselves cannot be thought from within the system of expression.
This mode of argument is actually easily understood by reference to a popular book often given to young math students. I am thinking of Edwin Abbott's Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions (Read Flatland at this link). In that wonderful geometrical satire the narrator is a two-dimensional square who is unable to think or understand the third dimension. In fact Square is unable to even perceive three-dimensional objects. Three-dimensional objects are like gods to him. Square is able to have un-expressible experiences of what is beyond his normal two dimensions but those experiences can not be translated into thoughts expressible in either formal or the everday language of the Flatlanders. Of particular interest here is Chapter 16, How the Stranger Vainly Endeavoured To Reveal to Me in Words the Mysteries of Spaceland. In this chapter a Sphere 'enters' Flatland and tries to explain the world of Spaceland to the two-dimensional Square. The notions that the Sphere tries to explain to the Square are of course incomprehensible to the Square. But in the very next chapter the Square is able to experience Spaceland, without comprehending it, or being able to explain it adequately to himself or as it turns out to his fellow citizens of Flatland. One of the problems that all of Wittgenstein's philosophy is trying to put into rigorous form are the same notions that Edwin Abbott is trying to illustrate through narrative in Flatland. (The difference between illustration and a more or less formal system of expression is important, thus I wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that I am using Flatland as illustration and not as formal expression of the limitationist claim.)
Given that human thought is limited, and given that we can only think from within these limits, there is no way that we can think both sides of the limit. Readers of this web log will recognize this as another expression of the limitationist thesis of human knowledge. But they may also recognize another theme that has been a constant in my journals, the theme of the paradox of boundaries that haunt all aspects of human thought, for example as expressed in my little note The Edge of the Universe: Lucretius, Einstein, the Limits of Knowledge. (Also see Evolution, 'Self-Transcendent Belief Systems' where I give Chomsky's definition of the limitationist claim. It is important to note how often these paradoxes repeat in the history of human thought. A partial list would include variations on 'the Liars Paradox,' paradoxes of human choice, and of notions of intentionality and reference. The more important examples I think come fromt the history of mathematics and science. Russell's Paradox in set theory, the notion of limit in calculus, the use of the idea of 'absolute space' in physics, etc.) Part of my proposition is that much of what we call 'modernism' and 'post-modernism' in philosophy, literature, and criticism is simply a more or less self-conscious probing of these paradoxes of boundaries and limits. It is also my thesis that these paradoxes are not in fact 'unexplainable' it is just that from within whatever system we meet up with these paradoxes they can't be explained with the tools of that system. Sometimes there is simply a limit that we reach which is the boundary of expressible thought of the system. The problem comes when that system is human thought itself.
Human thought is expressible in many forms, natural language, formal systems of logic and mathematics, or various kinds of artistic expression. The boundaries of the expression of thought in language and mathematics are simply the limits of those systems. Knowledge is one form of experience but it is not the only form of experience. (Not all experience is knowledge but all knowledge is a form of experience.) To put it simplistically, knowledge is a limited form of experience, which is distinguishable from other forms of experience because it is expressible in a more or less formal system. In this case I am using the term 'formal system' very loosely. When compared with most expressions in the world of mammals (for instance cries of alarm like the signals for 'snake' and 'hawk' among some primates) human natural language is a formal system. But a natural language is not as rigorous as mathematics or Fregean systems of formal language or attempts at rigor within physics, which to some extent, tend toward the definitional quality of a formal language. But something more complicated happens in literature and art because the boundaries of the work of art must be evaluated in several ways. For my purposes in these philosophical reflections the two most important ways to evaluate a work of art are the 'frame' of the work given to it by the artist and the 'experience' of the work by the viewer or reader.
The great narrators of the modernist tradition such as Hemingway in his short stories and Nabokov in his great works, Lolita, Pale Fire, and, Ada, or Ardor : A Family Chronicle often reveal the frame while hiding the frame's intricacies. There is the obvious frame of the novel itself but there is also the frame that is delimited from within. In effect what we see as readers of these works is the two-dimensional frame but not the three and four-dimensional frame that the author constructed in the story. The frame becomes an absence within the work that the good reader can only experience, yet is unable to define by remaining within the limits of the whole of the work of art. Writers such as Nabokov deliberately constructed their novels so that the reader could experience the internal frame without seeing it, unless the novel was reassembled from without after many re-readings. In many ways Nabokov's strictly philosophical reasons for doing this was to put both the characters he invented and the reader that pays good attention to the novel in the same position that Wittgenstein believed that human beings were in relation to human thought. (For a good attempt at an explanation of how Nabokov's fiction work I would suggest Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery by Brian Boyd. I only wish that Mr. Boyd would write a short essay on what Nabokov was trying to do in Pale Fire, In the end, we don't know how works of art 'work' as experience, how they give us a new sense of 'experience,' but what I take as the most important aspect of art is this experiential side to the work, that the work gives us that is beyond what can be formally expressed.
What Wittgenstein was trying to do through out his philosophical career is show the limits of language or, what in his later philosophy he called more broadly, language-games. He concentrated on the thinkable aspects of 'propositions about the world' (in the early philosophy) and language-games (in the late philosophy). He was not trying to show the limits of what could be 'experienced' as a whole. Thinking is only a small portion of 'experience as a whole.' What he was trying to show was the limits of what was 'thinkable' from within a system,. He was not trying to show the limits of what could be experienced as a human being. In respect to what may be called Wittgenstein's 'art' he in fact trying to illustrate something very similar to what both Nabokov and Hemingway were trying to illustrate -- he was illustrating what could not be expressed.
Wittgenstein himself tried to show this to his first readers: I quote his letter to a friend and potential publisher of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus written in November 1919, not long after Wittgenstein's return from a prisoner of war camp.
"In reality... the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the forward which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I'm convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are bubbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it." (Quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk p. 178.
From what I said above, the reader may guess that I believe that the best illustration of Wittgenstein's way of 'delimiting from within' among modern novelists can be found in the works of Vladimir Nabokov. But Nabokov is as intricate and as complicated as Wittgenstein himself, more so in fact. Thus by way of illustration I prefer to use first Edwin Abbott but more prominently Ernest Hemingway. I also think that there is something psychologically similar between the nortoriously introverted Wittgenstein and the raucously extroverted Hemingway. The psychological similarity between the two, I hope, will point the way toward how we can think historically about the ideas and the wounds that provided the historical experience which made the ideas accessible as a certain tendency of thought among writers, both novelists and philosophers.
For now I would like to leave the reader with two quotes from Hemingway and a final note on 'the dangers of illustration.'
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway outlined his "theory of omission"." He states:
"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing."
In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway writes of his character's relation to language and specifically of his relation to certain hollow words.
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene besides the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. Gino was a patriot, so he said things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I understood his being a patriot. He was born one. He left with Peduzzi in the car to go back to Gorizia.
Finally, by using Hemingway, Nabokov and Abbott in reference to Wittgenstein, I am simply trying to illustrate something about the 'limitationist' thesis of human knowledge, that I will try to define more rigorously later. But when ever illustrating something or drawing a picture of something we both produce a deficit and a surplus. Bertrand Russell, when writing about the structure of the atom and the theories upon which atomic structure is based said something that we should keep in mind.
"The theory of atomic structure... like everything else in theoretical physics, is capable of expression in mathematical formulae; but like many things in theoretical physics it is also capable of expression in the form of an imaginative picture.... When we consider the nature of the evidence upon which the above theory of the atom is based, we can see that the attempt to make a picture of what goes on has led us to be far more concrete than we have any right to be. If we want to assert only what we have good reason to believe, we shall have to abandon the attempt to be concrete..." (In Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy p. 83.)
What we run up against, once again, when we try to provide an illustration for something, which can only be said with utmost accuracy more formally, is the difference between knowledge as a limited experience, and all that we are able to experience beyond our more or less formal systems of knowledge. It is the same limitation that Abbott's Square runs up against in the difference between the attempt to understand, in formal language, the difference between the two dimensional world and the three dimensional world. The Square in Flatland has three possibilities: He can experience the three dimensional world or describe it accurately in the formal language of his two-dimensional concepts. The other alternative is to try to draw a picture or make an illustration of the three dimensional world with his two dimensional tools. This will end up being an attempt to bring his experience of three dimensional Spaceworld into the two dimensional world of Flatland. But in making this attempt the illustration will loose something in preciseness and accuracy and also loose something of the Square's original experience of Spaceworld. On the other hand the mere attempt to make an illustration will also gain something for the world of Flatland. The 'stronger' the artisitic attempt the more the more the potential surplus of experiential gain will be through the use of the imagination. The Square's attempt to make an illustration will itself become an experience with its own rules and imaginative possibilities, an experience that was not there in the first place, an experience not only for the Square, but also for others in Flatland.
Jerry Monaco
New York
23 March 2005
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco
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| » Hemingway & Wittgenstein #1 The Wound and the Bow, Absence and Insight |
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Hemingway & Wittgenstein #1 The Wound and the Bow, Absence and Insight
It is possible to use Wittgenstein to understand Hemingway. It is also possible to use a close reading of Hemingway's short stories to reveal a way to read Wittgenstein.
I am not making a claim that there is a 'theory' of Hemingway's short stories and that theory is revealed by Wittgenstein's early notions in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of how the world is delimited. Nor am I am making a claim that using Hemingway's fiction provides special insight into Wittgenstein's early thought or his later thought on language games. But I do think that there is a confluence between the two that has not been noticed. There is a certain symetry in how they conceived their disparate work. That symetry is probably psychological and trivial in a personal sense but is less trivial when considered historically, as part of the philosophical and literary consequences of World War I and the modernist revolution. The symetry may also be able to give students a better view of both Wittgenstein and Hemingway. I claim that my rather odd reading of both of them together can show how they used language and narrative to reveal certain boundaries of human knowledge and language. Specifically, both tried to show what could not be told within the frame of reference of a story or the frame of reference of a 'language game' or in the early Wittgenstein the frame of reference of propositions about the world. Both came to understand their very different kinds of practices (story telling and philosophizing) as developing techniques to show the places of omission and absence in narrative or in our understanding of the world of philosophy.
I have several main points. First, my intention is to say something about the psychological reasons why these two different personalities developed their techniques in the context of each practice. I will do so by pointing out how the historical wounds, both psychological and in the world-view of the writers led to deep insight into certain absences in how we view the 'world'. I would like to do this using the insights of Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow. Both Hemingway and Wittgenstein were engaging in a psychological project of reparation of a missing world. The strange psychological confluence between the two is a merely tenth order concern for both Wittgenstein's philosophical conclusions and Hemingway's aesthetic accomplishment, but I think that it may help the reader of both to understand how historical and psychological contingencies give us insight into the world we wish to write about.
Second, I would like to show how the experience of narrative can give us insight into philosophical concerns that may at first seem remote from the specific narrative, and especially how that experience can give us insight into all the parts of the world that are currently beyond our theories or beyond the possibility of human knowledge.
Third, I want to show that it is impossible to ignore the experiential side of any philosophy, whether that experiential side is in the actual writing or saying of the philosophical work or practice, or whether that experiential side is in the world-view that we derive from the philosophical work or practice. (I would like to make a narrow exception for formal logic but only to the extent that the person following a formal system does not derive a world-view from the system. To an uncertain extent the person using a formal system does derive a world-view from that system, but it is to a smaller extent than most post-structuralists believe. I think formal systems are mostly delimiting. They show us where we have run into contradiction and paradox. When the map of the limited formal system is made into a map of the whole world beyond the formal system then the experiential side of the formal system becomes relevant to the derivation of a world-view. I am using the term 'world-view' very loosely at the moment, similar to the way Engels used it at the end of the 19th century to distinguish ideological doctrine from something more amorphous.)
Fourth, in analyzing these two writers, who do not have much in common on the surface, I would like to illustrate certain notions about the 'limitationist' thesis of human knowledge -- i.e. the thesis that since we are biological systems there must be preset biological limits to what we can know.
Jerry Monaco
20 March 2005
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
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Mar. 20th, 2005 @ 06:12 pm
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| » The Edge of the Universe: Lucretius, Einstein, the Limits of Knowledge |
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The Edge of the Universe: Lucretius, Einstein, the Limits of Knowledge:
by Jerry Monaco
A Reader Asks
suppose you were to travel to the end of the universe, the very edge
of it. Would you emerge from the other side?
Lucretius' Question
Lucretius famously posed the following thought experiment, If there is a boundary to the universe imagine tossing a spear at it. What would happen? (See Lucretius, De Rerum Natura.) Lucretius said that there were two possible answers to this question: (1) The spear would strike the edge of the universe as a spear would strike a wall and bounce back, or (2) The spear would go through the boundary of the universe and emerge into some kind of 'other side.' If the spear bounced back then one could conclude that the universe is bounded by a wall. A wall must exist in space. A wall that is in space implies that, whatever is beyond the surface of the wall is beyond what we have been calling the universe. Therefore the boundary of the universe is bounded by another 'space' that is 'beyond' the boundary. In other words there must be something beyond the surface of the wall and outside of the wall. On the other hand, if the spear went through the boundary of the universe then one could assume that this boundary is only illusory and that as far as we can tell the universe is infinite. Either way it would prove that there was something beyond what we call the universe and therefore 'space' could be thought of as infinite. I think there are significant ways in which your question can be interpreted as a repetition of Lucretius' thought experiment.
From Lucretius' point of view your question is a philosophical question and not simply a question that can be shown either empirically or theoretically. The basic question is about how we conceive of boundaries within a finite system of any kind and how we conceive of 'beyond' boundaries and 'infinity' from within a bounded system. Both Kant (Critique of Pure Reason) and Hegel (Science of Logic) pondered these questions in their obscure ways. Some say that they can derive 'answers' to these questions from Cantor and Godel, but if so those answers do not settle well with our everyday common sense. But neither do the answers of our current theories of the physical universe conform to common sense.
In this respect your question is also very similar to questions such as 'what was before the universe began?' and 'what will be after the universe ends?' and 'why is there a universe instead of nothing at all?'
There is a sense in which all of these questions are unanswerable. But I think more importantly all such questions point to the limits of our ways of understanding 'the world.' My basic belief is that such questions, taken seriously, do not say much about the limits or boundaries of the universe but rather about the limits and boundaries of human knowledge as determined by human evolution. These questions are potentially un-answerable for the same reason why a rat will never be able to understand a prime-number maze.
Sense and nonsense
To the extent that your question is answerable you would have to have an ideal all-knowing physicist say exactly what 'the universe' means. Unfortunately such a physicist does not exist. I hope that it will become clear that this is not merely a semantic question. It seems to me that 'universe' in some respects has become a natural-kind concept meaning 'everything there is.' Similarly, to the extent that 'space' cannot be defined by equations it is also a natural-kind concept meaning 'all that' everything exists 'within'. If we take 'the universe' to mean all 'reality' or all 'physical reality' then 'the universe' is un-definable and what is beyond it is inconceivable. If some interpretations of quantum mechanics and string theory are correct, then there are an infinite number of parallel 'universes.' The question now becomes, 'what universe are you talking about when you ask about the 'edge' of the universe?' The answer to this might simply be that 'there are universes all the way down and I want to know what is beyond "all that".' So then the question would be, 'Is there an edge to all of these 'universes' that we can go beyond? Let's, for the sake of argument, assume that this interpretation of string theory is true. Are all the universes taken together 'the universe-as-a-whole' or the 'world-as-a-whole'? Then the next question follows: Is only 'the universe' of our existence the universe as a whole and can we some how get beyond our 10 or more dimensions?. This way of framing the question shows that it is very similar to the thought experiment as framed by Lucretius. It is a question about the limits of the universe in the context of how we think of boundaries and infinity.
Again, I don't think that the problem is empirical but rather a problem about how we can or cannot conceive of 'beyond' and 'beyond the infinite.'
In my view this is what the analytical philosophers would call a 'nonsense question.' I think they are wrong, in doing so, for the following reasons. The answers to the question are conceivable if you define 'universe' as what I am calling the 'universe of our existence.' But if you define the universe as all 'potential' universes then there are no answers to the question. Let us suppose we define the universe in the second manner, then can we conclude that the question is a 'nonsense question' along the lines of the question 'Why is there something and not nothing'? No. Because even if the question is unanswerable I believe that the question points to something about the possible limits of human ways of understanding and human knowledge. Therefore, even in a form where the question is unanswerable by physics, the question still makes sense. You can conceive of the question as a question about time or a question about space or a question about beyond whatever is beyond all of that, it does not matter, these questions mainly makes sense as pointing to our limited conceptions of all of these 'realities'.
If I understand correctly, Einstein once gave an answer to this question within the limits of Relativity theory. He believed that if one could travel the whole universe, then at the edge of the universe, because of the curvature of space-time, you would simply follow the curvature of the universe, without noticing there is an 'edge' and 'eventually' come back to where you started. This of course assumes that you can travel for long enough and you could complete the whole circuit before the universe expands into icy death.
Einstein was saying that the universe for us, is simply a form of non-Euclidean geometry. Thus a 'straight' line drawn on a globe, with the surface of the globe assumed to be 'all dimensions of space-time', will simply return the straight line to its beginning. We are in the position of the straight line. From the point of view of the straight line, 'Where is the edge of the globe?' and 'What is beyond the globe?'. The answer is, from the 'point of view' of the 'straight' line there is no edge to the globe. According to Einstein, the position of the straight line in relation to the globe is analogous to our position in relation to the universe as a whole. Einstein made the point that even though this may be the 'non-Euclidean' answer to the question it is not satisfying to our Euclidean common-sense.
This final comment of Einstein's brings us once again back to Lucretius and his thought experiment. Lucretius' thought experiment is 'very' Euclidean in its assumptions. It shows that within our Euclidean common sense it is hard to imagine even the simplest common notions of Relativity Theory, much less the seemingly paradoxical worlds of quantum mechanics and string theory.
I will give you one more question, which is possible to answer, but still points by way of another direction of why the original question both makes sense but is impossible to conceive as having a definite answer. 'Where did the Big Bang take place given that there is some time-certain that one can say that the Big Bang took place anywhere?' The proper answer to this question is that the Big Bang took place 'here,' wherever you are in our 'universe'. It is impossible for us to imagine that there was no space or time in any sense in the first micro-seconds of the Big Bang but that is what the mathematics tells us and who are we to argue? The point here is that our 'everyday' notions of space are inadequate for comprehending even the best answers, which we already 'know' are correct. These are answers to some of the most basic questions, answers with definite conclusions, and answers although provided by science reach the edge of what we can comprehend outside of using the mathematics. When it comes to questions that both seem paradoxical and for which we have no mathematical analogue to apply we are somewhere in the realm of 'the beyond.'
In the above ways I disagree with the commentators who say that the limits to answering to these questions are merely those of 'language' and not those of the human mind. Framing, the question in one way makes it answerable to a small degree assuming that we gain the theoretical knowledge. But framing the question, as one of limits, boundaries, and 'a beyond of all boundaries and limits' will make the question unanswerable. Framing the question as part of any possible experiential universe, taking this to include our experiences through mathematics and physics makes the question possibly answerable through theoretical knowledge. But framing the question as one about all possible infinity of universes (even within the context of interpretations of string theory) frames the question in such a way as to make it mpossible to find the correct answer.
Jerry Monaco
New York
25 Feb. 2005
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco
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Feb. 25th, 2005 @ 11:23 am
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