A superstition not more frightful than grotesque

In which I present excerpts from three books about belief in life after death, one culled from my proposed fundamentals list and the other two from papers I wrote this quarter. I don’t want to say too much about how they interrelate–there’s too much to say, and my thoughts are too unformed–but it’s a subject well worth meditating on.

In Pensée #272 we find Blaise Pascal’s infamous wager:

“God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. “No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.”

Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

“That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.” Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.

Applying probability theory to the problem of faith can seem a bit coldblooded, I suppose. But the basic idea isn’t new. Look back two millenia to consider the words Plato puts in Socrates’ mouth in Phaedo 114c-d, and we see again the philosopher’s venture:

But, Simmias, because of all these things which we have recounted we ought to do our best to acquire virtue and wisdom in life. For the prize is fair and the hope great. Now it would not be fitting for a man of sense to maintain that all this is just as I have described it, but that this or something like it is true concerning our souls and their abodes, since the soul is shown to be immortal, I think he may properly and worthily venture to believe; for the venture is well worth while; and he ought to repeat such things to himself as if they were magic charms, which is the reason why I have been lengthening out the story so long.

It’s not just that philosophy leads to belief in immortality; without such a belief, philosophy cannot take place. Not in 399 BC, anyway. (Though one has to wonder: it is immortality Socrates needs, or just eternity?) For Herman Melville in 1853, it’s a bit different. From “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles,” Sketch First:

Nor would the appellation “enchanted” seem misapplied in still another sense. For concerning the peculiar reptile inhabitant of these wilds—whose presence gives the group its second Spanish name, Gallipagos—concerning the tortoises found here, most mariners have long cherished a superstition not more frightful than grotesque. They earnestly believe that all wicked sea officers, more especially commodores and captains, are at death (and in some cases before death) transformed into tortoises, thenceforth dwelling upon these hot aridities, sole solitary lords of Asphaltum.

Doubtless, so quaintly dolorous a thought was originally inspired by the woebegone landscape itself; but more particularly, perhaps, by the tortoises. For, apart from their strictly physical features, there is something strangely self-condemned in the appearance of these creatures. Lasting sorrow and penal hopelessness are in no animal form so suppliantly expressed as in theirs; while the thought of their wonderful longevity does not fail to enhance the impression.

Nor even at the risk of meriting the charge of absurdly believing in enchantments can I restrain the admission that sometimes, even now, when leaving the crowded city to wander out July and August among the Adirondack Mountains, far from the influences of towns and proportionally nigh to the mysterious ones of nature; when at such times I sit me down in the mossy head of some deep-wooded gorge, surrounded by prostrate trunks of blasted pines, and recall, as in a dream, my other and far-distant rovings in the baked heart of the charmed isles, and remember the sudden glimpses of dusky shells, and long languid necks protruded from the leafless thickets; and again have beheld the vitreous inland rocks worn down and grooved into deep ruts by ages and ages of the slow draggings of tortoises in quest of pools of scanty water; I can hardly resist the feeling that in my time I have indeed slept upon evilly enchanted ground.

Nay, such is the vividness of my memory, or the magic of my fancy, that I know not whether I am not the occasional victim of optical delusion concerning the Gallipagos. For, often in scenes of social merriment, and especially at revels held by candlelight in old-fashioned mansions, so that shadows are thrown into the further recesses of an angular and spacious room, making them put on a look of haunted undergrowth of lonely woods, I have drawn the attention of my comrades by my fixed gaze and sudden change of air, as I have seemed to see, slowly emerging from those imagined solitudes, and heavily crawling along the floor, the ghost of a gigantic tortoise, with ” Memento * * * * * ” burning in live letters upon his back.

Skepticism has emerged triumphant; reincarnation, now, is just a frightful superstition. But still Melville cannot forget the image of the tortoise or its memento mori message. The question: what does memento mori mean without an afterlife?

Is ontological nihilism ontological omnism?

In other words: Is the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” equivalent to the question “Is there something rather than everything?”?

That’s one possibility raised by this surprisingly enjoyable article. The author takes a mathematical/informational approach to the problem “why is there something?” and actually says some interesting things using that rather limited toolset. I quite like the measure-based fix for the existential subtraction argument, and the information-theoretic stuff does a decent job trying to talk about form versus matter.

As for the question at hand: Well, they’re not the same, exactly, but they are rival ways of formulating the same skeptical confusion. To paraphrase the linked-to article in a more classical philosophical idiom: to a certain sort of idealist, “Is there something rather than nothing?” is nonsensical–of course the laws of mathematics exist, for example. The question is whether matter exists independent of form; if it doesn’t, everything that can exist, does exist, since it doesn’t make sense to talk about an idea that could exist but doesn’t. If it can be thought, it’s already an idea. So the question becomes, are there things that exist in some “potential” sense, as mathematical equations perhaps, but that don’t “actually” exist in the world?

Is there something rather than everything?

I get why things in general exist, but why these particular things?

This is what the Aristotelian concept “matter” is supposed to deal with, I suppose, but I’m not sure that it solves the problem. Doesn’t it just reduce our confusion by letting us give it a name? Well, maybe. Can philosophy do anything more than that?

Theft, pt. 3: magical ownership

[part one here, part two here]

In my previous post I talked about J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books and how the purpose of magic is to make it possible to place people, arbitrarily, the kind of abhorrent situations that cause skepticism. Murder, torture, mind control, etc: for the most part I’m comfortable with how Rowling gives these sins magical life; I have more problems with how she treats those sins that are less abhorrent. Consider things like property and privacy and honor, and their attendant sins, theft and charity and voyeurism and exhibitionism and slander and boasting. How would magic affect these? And what is their relationship to skepticism, anyhow?

Honor is perhaps the least badly done. The Potter books are at least fairly critical of Rita Skeeter and her Quick Quotes Quill. But the quills themselves aren’t treated as particularly problematic. Wouldn’t the kind of power they give be even more socially dangerous than love potions and memory spells, since they affect not just one person, but the whole community?

Well, yes, and I think that’s why Rowling doesn’t explore the problem further: Rowling isn’t interested in magic that calls into doubt the standing of the community. A loss of honor’s skeptical correlation isn’t a personal/universal worry (“is there an external world?”, “do other minds exist?”), it’s a communal one: “what if the community is wrong?” The wizarding community being wrong is something that happens all the time, of course, but it’s never blamed primarily on magic, it’s blamed on the people who are wrong. Rowling doesn’t seem interested in how difficult magic would make it to build up enough trust to form a community in the first place, because she needs the community to be there already so that Harry can rebel against it.

In a related issue, the Potter books basically ignore the problem of privacy, and I can see why, but it’s not really an excuse. Potter-verse magic makes it possible to observe anyone at any time undetected; it’s perfect surveillance technology, and available to everyone, not just the government and big corporations. Really now–a handful of (fairly bright) teenagers were able to create a Marauder’s Map that was able to tell you the exact location of anyone within Hogwarts’ school grounds. What would stop a wizard a bit smarter from switching that map from “street layout” to “satellite”? How would the Ministry of Magic deal with magical peeping Toms? I’ve no idea. I’m not sure it could.

Privacy is a really complicated thing, and magically calling it into question raises a number of skeptical worries, but the most important one, maybe, is this: “what if the community makes up its mind?” Whenever we do something wrong we don’t want it to be found out because we want a chance to take it back; with privacy gone, we lose the gap between what we do and who people think we are. Does this just mean eliminating hypocrisy? Well, maybe, but hypocrisy’s not all bad, for reasons I’ve outlined elsewhere. It’s a complex issue, in any case. And Rowling almost entirely ignores it.

And what about theft? That’s perhaps the most complex of all. With scarcity done away with (and thus commerce as we know it, though Rowling ignores this implication), theft only makes sense if what’s stolen has more than material value: if it’s an artifact, an artwork, a sentimental token. A relic. The theft of a relic is a strange in-between case. It’s not quite a crime against grammar, because even relics are objects and really can be owned, but it’s not just stealing money either (well, as if money were completely material!). Theft of magical artifacts plays a big role in Harry Potter, of course, but artifacts in those books seem to always gravitate towards their “proper” owner, as if by magic. There don’t appear to be spells to change an artifact’s owner; moral and magical and legal ownership are coextensive.

This is reassuring, but perhaps not very plausible. Mostly, I find it an unfortunate failure to explore what could have been a fascinating question: what happens when I’m forced to confront the fact that the things I care about don’t care about me? This isn’t a form of skepticism only because it’s true, because putting your faith in aesthetic objects has always been an absurd proposition. Except in the Potter-verse, it’s not; swords can chose their swordsmen, paintings can talk back to you, hats can tell you who you are. Which is charming, until it begins to seem horrifying: what is it like to be a person in a painting? Would destroying the painting be tantamount to murder? If so, is there any way for the painting-person to die a natural death? Or is the painting world a kind of hellish afterlife?

And that hat: why would you trust anyone other than God to know you that well, and to announce to the world who you were? To invade your privacy and make or break your honor? Harry Potter takes as an unstated premise the idea that we would let society do these things to us, without batting an eye. It matters who’s running the Ministry of Magic, of course, and when bad men get control of it, things get very bad–but the existence of that Ministry, and its simultaneously haphazard and absolute powers of propaganda, surveillance, and enforcement, aren’t up for debate.

Theft, pt. 2: the abhorrence of skepticism

[part 1 of this post found here]

I said, last time, that plagiarism is wrong in the same way deception is wrong; seduction is wrong in the same way infidelity is wrong; abduction is wrong in the same way apathy is wrong; murder is wrong in the same way suicide is wrong; torture is wrong in the same way opium is wrong; memory-erasure is wrong in the same way repression is wrong; remote-controlled action is wrong the same way rash action is wrong. And all of these sins are abhorrent in a way theft, for example, is not.

To pursue this Dantean system-building further: why isn’t theft abhorrent in this way? It might sound as if what I’m saying is that these possessions are fictional, and the sins are abhorrent because they reveal the fiction. But in fact I mean the opposite. Material possessions are fictional too–indeed, fictionality seems inherent in the idea of a possession. A possession is something I can give away, or have taken away from me, because it was never “really” mine. Immaterial “possessions,” we want to say, are really mine, but this, I argued last time, isn’t true either: they’re not mine, they happen to me. Possessions are a fiction agreed upon by the community, and theft is a crime against both the owner and the community. The sins I discussed last time aren’t either, at least not primarily; they’re something deeper, something like crimes against nature, or against grammar, or against God. This is what I mean by the word “abhorrent.”

But to call them all abhorrent is not to say that they’re of equal seriousness (if it makes sense to say that some sins are more serious than others). It’s to say that they’re things that can’t be done in the normal course of things; they’re a kind of magic. Once you get past the increase in material well-being, this is what magic promises: the ability to commit unnatural offenses, that is, to put people in situations where otherwise absurd skepticism would begin to seem justified.

And really, this is what J.K. Rowling’s Potter-verse is all about. The Dark Arts center, of course, on the Unforgivable Curses: Avada Kedavra kills, Imperio controls, Cruciatus tortures. Life, liberty, (un)happiness: most of us cannot imagine giving these away. That’s what makes taking them with magic so unforgivable: it puts the victim in an unimaginable situation. But love potions and memory spells? The Harry Potter books treat those with a great deal more leniency (in ways I often found rather disturbing), in much the same way that infidelity and repression may be troubling, but aren’t seen as evidence for skepticism, they’re just part of ordinary life. Abusing language, apparently, is so integral to ordinary life that it’s truth serums, not spells that aid in plagiarism or deception, that have to be regulated. It seems our words and our hearts and our memories are not quite as inalienable as our lives and our liberty and our sensations.

Theft, pt. 1: stolen words and owned selves

This First Things apology for an instance of plagiarism discovered in that magazine makes an intriguing observation: “Plagiarism is a sin against truth, not property. It’s first and foremost a kind of lying, not a kind of stealing.” And that seems right to me. The OED may define plagiarism as “literary theft”; but what’s that, exactly? It doesn’t mean stealing a letter, say, from someone’s mailbox; that’s not literary theft, it’s just theft.

“It means speaking someone else’s words and claiming them as your own.” So, this “someone else’s words”: how can someone own words? Aren’t words just a way of expressing concepts, and aren’t concepts universal? How can you own a universal? If you can’t own the concept “April” or “cruel” or “month,” how can you own the words “April is the cruelest month”? And if you can’t own words, how can you steal them?

Well, let’s take a step back. The OED also traces the word “plagiarism” back to “plagiary,” for which it gives this etymology:

< classical Latin plagiārius person who abducts the child or slave of another, kidnapper, seducer, also a literary thief (Martial 1. 53. 9), in post-classical Latin also (adjective) concerning plagiarism (15th cent.) < plagium kidnapping (see plagium n.) + -ārius -ary suffix1. Compare Middle French, French plagiaire (adjective) plagiarized (1555), (noun) plagiarist (1584), kidnapper (1603).

I like how Latin has a single word for plagiarism, seduction, and abduction. Just as there’s something odd about the idea that you could steal someone’s words, there’s also something odd about the idea that you could steal someone’s heart, or steal someone–not steal something from them, but just steal them. They’re all things that can’t quite be stolen because they can’t quite be owned in the first place. They can’t be owned in the normal sense of the word because they can’t be sold or given away; they’re inalienable, and it doesn’t make much sense to say you own something that you can’t get rid of. But of course we do say we own them. Language is funny that way.

We say it for practical reasons, of course; intellectual property may not be natural the way physical property is (or is usually taken to be), but it’s a useful legal fiction (at least until it’s not). And it would be difficult to talk about our hearts or our selves without saying whose loves and selves they were. But saying we own our words, or our hearts–or our pains, or our pasts, or our fates, for that matter; or even our selves–also seems intended to assert our agency in the face of our evident passivity. We want to ignore what our words mean to us, what our heart does to us, whether it hurts us, what has happened to us, what will happen to us. What made us who we are.

These assertions of agency are maybe necessary, but that doesn’t make them true. We find plagiarism and seduction and abduction abhorrent because they reveal to us that the assertions are false, and precisely by attempting to make the exact same assertions: “I own these words,” “I own these feelings,” “I own this person.” They’re attempts to take away what it’s impossible to take away, but what that really means, I think, is that they try to assert a possessor-possession relationship with an object that by its nature cannot be possessed, an object that’s not an object at all. Incidentally, this is, I think, the real meaning of Heidegger’s “authenticity” (more literally “appropriateness”). Something appropriate to me isn’t something I own, it’s something that happens to me.

In a Wittgensteinian sense, we might say, these are grammatical errors; which I can’t say without bringing to mind Stanley Cavell’s insight regarding the connections between grammar and skepticism and tragedy. So plagiarism is wrong in the same way deception is wrong; seduction is wrong in the same way infidelity is wrong; abduction is wrong in the same way apathy is wrong. Also murder is wrong in the same way suicide is wrong; torture is wrong in the same way opium is wrong; memory-erasure is wrong in the same way repression is wrong; remote-controlled action is wrong the same way rash action is wrong. And these pairs of practical sins correspond with various theoretical skepticisms: about language, about other minds, about meaning, about God, about the external world, about the past, about free will. Some of these connections may be less obvious than others, but I think they’re all quite defensible.

Deus ex machina, deus ex anima

This First Things article by Glenn Arbery is at times somewhat disorienting (I almost wonder if the editors took out some of the transition sentences and rhetorical cuing words), but It’s a fascinating meditation on the difference between divine and machine omniscience. Titled “Search Me, O God: The implicit theology of technological surveillance,” it touches on hacker culture’s dislike of authority, surveillance in the war on terror, and the theology of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter:

What if the understanding of God is confused by the political usefulness of belief? If God is Big Brother in any sense, then God’s omniscience is already surveillance, an externalizing “letter” of being judgmentally watched instead of sustained by the inner Spirit. It is certainly fair to say that many Christians have experienced their faith in precisely this way. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories about the theocratic New England Puritans suggest that their “fear of the Lord” is the cowed response to a panoptic regime rather than the beginning of wisdom. Arthur Dimmesdale agonizes about letting Hester Prynne take the whole blame for their adultery, but his real suffering begins when Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s estranged husband, arrives in Boston and puts Dimmesdale under his surveillance.

*

The fear of surveillance is what happens when you imagine God to be a machine. Something different happens when you imagine God to be an animal–but still something that makes you want to resist Him. Something like that seems to be going on in Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color (my review of which is here). For those interested, here’s an intriguing New Yorker article about Carruth and Henry David Thoreau, whose book Walden plays a major role in the film. That article won’t make much sense if you haven’t seen Upstream Color, but if you have, it’s quite fascinating, though I’m not sure I agree with its conclusion. That is, I can respond positively to these rhetorical questions:

What if the blue neurotoxin secreted by the worm in Carruth’s movie is the Thoreau poison? What if memorizing “Walden” isn’t incidental to Kris’s infection with the worm but tantamount to it?

But I don’t see how that makes Upstream Color Thoreavian rather than anti-Thoreavian. In any case, however, it does seem right to me that the film contemplates a Thoreau-style gnostic pantheism, and that this pantheism is figured as an unwitting entanglement in the life cycle of an ageless organism, as the liner notes to the movie so helpfully put it.

To hold in a single thought

From W.B. Yeats’s Introduction to A Vision:

Some will ask if I believe in the actual existence of my circuits of sun and moon. Those that include, now all recorded time in one circuit, now what Blake called ‘the pulsation of an artery’, are plainly symbolical, but what of those that fixed, like a butterfly upon a pin, to our central date, the first day of our Era, divide actual history into periods of equal length? To such a question I can but answer that if sometimes, overwhelmed by miracle as all men must be when in the midst of it, I have taken such periods literally, my reason has soon recovered; and now that the system stands out clearly in my imagination I regard them as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi. They have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice.

But how can art hold in a single thought reality and justice? A related problem: how can it hold in a single thought beauty and truth? How to yoke together the polaroids of Andrei Tarkovsky and Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics?

If I say ‘I wonder at the existence of the world’ I am misusing language. Let me explain this: It has a perfectly good and clear sense to say that I wonder at something being the case, we all understand what it means to say that I wonder at the size of a dog which is bigger than any one I have ever seen before or at any thing which, in the common sense of the word, is extraordinary. In every such case I wonder at something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case. I wonder at the size of this dog because I could conceive of a dog of another, namely the ordinary size, at which I should not wonder. To say ‘I wonder at such and such being the case’ has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case.

In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.

I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it’s clouded. But that’s not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it’s just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.