A Reply to Someone Who's Fascinated by Mathematical Questions

Another question about math is whether it is something intrinsic to nature which people have discovered, or a very useful tool which we have invented, and which we impose upon nature. I've always seen it as the latter, which diminishes, at least for me, the intrinsic interest of those other questions you mention.

Of course, I may have been entirely wrong this entire time. I have the impression that most contemporary mathematicians and physicians and zoologists and botanists would say that I'm wrong.

Nietzsche believed we invented math. See Menschliches Allzumenschliches, vol 1, section 1, "Von den ersten und letzten Dingen," paragraph 19, "Die Zahl." Mathematicians and physicists might find this passage interesting, among other reasons for the grasp of atomic theory which Nietzsche demonstrates in something he published in the late 1870's.

But many years after I first read that, it suddenly struck me, like a hammer striking a gong, that everyone knows exactly what a circle is, although none of us has ever seen a perfect circle. This very simple fact, available to anyone who thinks about it for as long as a moment, seems to me to be a very strong argument in favor of Plato's forms, and in favor in math being something we discover as opposed to something we invent.

Nietzsche despised Plato more intensely than he did any other single human being. I went through a period of very intense admiration for Nietzsche (except for his sexism and enthusiasm for war, which I always rejected), and I adopted his contempt of Plato. But my gong-moment, my insight about circles, has forced me to reconsider Plato. And when you reconsider something as influential as Platonic philosophy, you necessarily re-consider many other things.

Cicero verteidigt Lisa Eckhart. Sollte man lachen?

Als aussen-wohnender Auslaender (ich wohne in den US) verpasst man auch im guenstigsten Falle eine grosse Menge der jeweiligen fremden Kultur. Zum Beispiel, bis jetzt kannte ich den Namen Lisa Eckhart nicht. Zweiter Beispiel: ich weiss sehr wenig von deutschem Humor, schon weil deutsche KomikerInnen und KaberettistInnen nie in dem sorgfaeltig vorgetragenen Hochdeutsch der ARD und Germanistisk-Professoren sprechen, und ich deshalb bestenfalls ein Wort in fuenf mitbekomme.

Mit Unmengen von Kannmichirren also: mein bisheriger Eindruck von Cicero war einer von unfreiwilliem Komik, gar nicht der Verteidiger, den sich ein/e Komiker/Inn sich wuenschen wuerde. 

Ich lese Nietzsche gern, mit zweieinhalb grossen Ausnahmen: er schreibt komplett ahnungslos ueber Krieg und "Weibern" (seltenst "Frauen"), zwei Bereichen des Lebens, welche er nur von Hoerensagen kennt. Wenn man hoert, dass jemand "leidenschaftliche Nietzsche-Leserin" ist, ist man schon nervoes, weil man nicht weiss, ob sie Fan von den daemlichen Teilen ist. Und die andere halbe Ausnahme, die gar nicht Friedrich Nietzsches eigener Schuld ist: der Antisemitismus seiner Schwester, die 46 Jahre lang (!) Verwaelterin seiner Schriften war, und leider Gottes sehr erfolgreich bis zum heutigen Tag seinen guten Namen und Ruf mit dem Dreck der Antisemitismus and Deutschtuemmelei verbundet hat. 

Ich googlete Lisa Eckhart und fand, dass man seit ein paar Jahren darueber streitet, ob einige ihrer Witze antisemitisch sind. Und dass unter ihren Verteidigern Henryk M Broder ist. Ach, Broder... Also, ein Quagmire auf einem Mal. Es geht hier um eine mir ganz unbekannnte oestereichische Kabarettistin, welche einige Leute fuer nicht lustig halte, und eine liberalala Zeitschrift, welche nicht nur ich fuer albern halte. Man fragt sich, was Lisa Eckhart von diesem Verteidiger haelt -- von Cicero, meine ich. Der Broder ist noch ein weites Feld. Hmm. 

Also, dem Cicero gab Eckhart ein Interview vor nur einigen Wochen. Das enttaeuscht. Aber, widerholt gesagt: als aussen-wohnender Auslaender verpasst man so manches. Ich bekomme ungefaehr ein Wort in Fuenf eines deutschen Komikers mit. Ich hatte bisher gar nichts von Lisa Eckhart gehoert, usw. Kulturen sind doch verschieden, und das gehoert zu den Schwierigkeiten des Uebersetzens. 

Aber in wievielen Faellen schon war ich zuerst unueberzeugt von der ueblen Nachrede, spaeter aber schon und in Unmengen: bei Botho Strauss, bei Peter Sloterdijk... Und wieviele Nietzsche-leser/Innen haben sich doch entpuppt als rechte Arschloecher -- gewiss nicht alle, natuerlich. Nicht ich, nicht Walter Benjamin, viele andere noch auch nicht. Versteht sich. Und mein Instinkt, Dichter und Kuenstler im Zweifelsfall zu verteidigen, scheint mir noch wie vor wie ein gesunder. Trotzdem, in diesem Fall bekomme ich ein ungutes Gefuehl. Vieles erinnert mich schon an andere ungute Faelle. Aber der Fall ist mir noch neu, noch ganz nagelneu, und ich werde zuerst weiter zuschauen und mich nicht entscheiden.

 

Jacob Burckhardt

About 35 years ago, David Lee, then the Head of the department of Germanic and Slavic languages at the University of Tennessee, and the instructor of an undergraduate course I was taking, explained to me, as we were chatting between classes, that Germany has a tendency toward the monolithic. More than some other cultures, the Germans tend to regard one person or entity as being the greatest in its category: the greatest conductor, the greatest painter, the greatest automobile manufacturer, the greatest culinary country (not Germany, Germans freely admit) -- the greatest professor of history.

It's the latter category which concerns us here. In the mid-19th century, the University of Berlin was considered by Germans to be the greatest university -- certainly the greatest in Germany, and perhaps in the world. Cultured Germans were certainly not unaware of the Sorbonne and other great universities in other lands -- and Leopold von Ranke, the chairman of the history department in Berlin, was a figure treated with awe. If there was a greater historian than Ranke somewhere in the world in 1872, then Germans, at least, didn't know much about that. In 1872, Jacob Burckhardt,

who had caught Ranke's attention as a student in Berlin, and who was then a professor at Basel, was offered Ranke's chairmanship -- and to the surprise of many, he declined. Burckhardt preferred to stay in Basel, where he had been born in 1818, where he had taught from 1843 to 1855 and again since 1858, and where he would remain until retiring in 1893. And where he had, among great throngs of devoted students, a notable prodigy of his own: Friedrich Nietzsche. If Burckhardt had gone to Berlin in 1872, and if Nietzsche had come with him -- not an unreasonable thought, surely a number of people would've followed Burckhardt anywhere -- what all might have been different in the world since 1872?

Heinrich von Treitschke ended up succeeding Ranke in Berlin, a highly respected figure, to be sure, but not as charismatic, as individualistic, as memorable as Burckhardt. Somewhat the way Nietzsche did in philosophy, Burckhardt drew outside the lines in history. He did things his own way, to the extent that many people describe him as an art historian, or an historian of culture, or something else rather than just an historian. I think it's best to describe him simply as Jacob Burckhardt. To the best of my knowledge, there have not been others like him. Very much of his prose, perhaps most of it, combines political, art-historical, philosophical and other considerations, in a way which no-one else I know of has done. His best known book is probably Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, but he also wrote Der Cicerone, a book intended to be used as a field guide to painting, sculpture and architecture in Italy, from the Greek temple of Paestum, built around 600 BC, up to 18th-century works; Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen (The Time of Constantine the Great); Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (World-Historical Considerations); and other works which don't fit into similar categories any more than the ones I've named.

Burckhardt's reputation may have faded a bit since his time. One of the reasons I say this is that I had a very, very hard time finding a copy of Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, and the copy I found was published in Bern in 1941. And I can't find any record that it was ever translated into English. World-Historical Considerations, that's my own translation. This is a collection of lectures making up a course which Burckhardt gave at Basel just twice. He didn't repeat himself very much, to put it mildly. Those lectures blew students' minds, and they carried his reputation with them out into the world. He very much believed in the view of history being shaped by geniuses, by "world-historical figures," a phrase made popular by Hegel (and then, after Burckhardt's time, by Edward Albee), although Burckhardt is at pains in these lectures to point out how his views differ from those of Hegel. The view that history is shaped by great individuals, by geniuses, is rather unpopular at the moment among academics. But it makes sense to me. And for that reason, it makes sense to me to assume that Burckhardt's reputation will rise again at some point.

Philosophy or Physics 101 For Journalism Students

In philosophy or physics, the notion that there is no such thing as objectivity is not new. 3 centuries ago Bishop Berkeley was giving objectivity some blows, which to some seemed and seem like knockout punches, and in the 20th century Werner Heisenberg and others gave some substantial scientific underpinning to subjectivism -- the assertion that everything we know is subjective and that objectivity is nothing more than an illusion -- a viewpoint which, in philosophy or physics, may not be universal, but which by no means is unfamiliar any longer. Try to introduce it into a discussion of journalism by journalists, however, and you may well be treated as an annoyance who is interrupting the grown-ups.

Well, journalists, the feeling is mutual, frankly. It's astounding that you are so well-insulated, in the 21st century, from the notion that there is no such thing as subjectivity. If you're covering politicians and politics, tell us your opinions of those politicians -- not just in op-ed pieces, but all of the time. Are 94% of you Democrats? That would be a good thing for the public to know. Republican would say -- some currently are saying -- it's proof that you're biased. I would say that you spend your careers studying Democrats and Republicans up close, which naturally makes you the leading experts on Democrats and Republicans, and that if so many of you prefer Democrats, it probably means Democrats are by far the better major party.

*sigh* I know we're a long way from getting there, practically. But conceptually, it's a very simple step to grasping that the best way you can inform the public is to share your opinions with us. "But's it's only our opinions!" you'll object. "It's always people's opinions whenever they communicate," I'd respond. And we always are aware -- well, some of us are aware -- that we're dealing with opinions, with subjective viewpoints. The problem is that you regard this thing you call "objective reporting" as more than subjective opinion, when really it is less. You start with your subjective opinions about the politicians you cover and the things they do, and then you subtract everything which might betray how you feel about what you cover, until you have reduced it to what you call "objectivity." This "objectivity" is not more information than your opinions, it's much, much less. It's a paltry sliver of all that you know.

All I can do is share with you my opinions and experiences -- which is all that you or anybody can do (in my opinion). And for me, this subjectivism is very clear and obvious. As I learned about philosophy and physics and art and other things, suddenly I could feel relativity, could feel the way that everything I know and experience is subjective -- feel it in a physical way as well as intellectually. And there's no way now to un-feel it or un-know it, to become once again unaware of it, and, for example, unaware of how a painting by Matisse of a potted plant is far richer in information than any photograph of a potted plant could be, because it's far more subjective. I'm not familiar with a page of Nietzsche's work that doesn't appear (to me, of course!) to take this lack of objectivity for granted -- but if you want an example of a passage where this is particularly obvious, check out the famous rant of the crazy person in the froehlichen Wissenschaft who keeps exclaiming that God is dead, saying things like "Aren't we continually plunging, backwards, sideways, forward, in every direction? Is there still an up and a down?"

Belief in objectivity is like belief in God: very comforting, extremely useful in some ways from certain points of view, and entirely farfetched, and some of us are past it and occasionally frustrated waiting for the rest of you to catch up.

How I Can Tell Whether I'll Like A Book

CAUTION! Just because I like a book doesn't mean you'll like it too. Although if you like my writing, there may be a greater chance that you'll share some of my reading tastes than if you find my blog ill-written -- in which case I sincerely hope you find reading material which pleases you better, and recommend Stephen King and John Grisham, reckoning strictly from statistics.

The only way to know for sure, of course, is to read some of it. But there are so many books. How do I decide which ones to try? Here are some of the ways.

-- If a book is written in Latin and I haven't heard of it, I will be intrigued. (If I have heard of, there's a chance I already either have a copy or have decided I'm not interested. Life is to short for Cicero and Seneca.) Being intrigued at first glance is not always the same, of course, as eventually liking a book. But I've got this thing about Latin, seeing as how it's been in use in our civilization for thousands of years and was used by Caesar and Columbus and Milton and Spinoza, besides all of those kings and queens and Popes.

-- If a book is written by a Nobel laureate in literature, the chances are over 85% that I will like it very much. Other prizes aren't nearly so strong an indicator for me, but the Nobel folks and I seem to be on a similar wavelength. Except that they've given it to too many Scandinavian writers. Astonishingly, they managed to avoid giving it either to Ibsen or Strindberg, and still gave it to way way too many Scandinavians. Aside from 85% or so of the Nobel Literature laureates, authors whom I like generally are good guides to other authors I will like.

One notable exception is Thomas Pynchon's rave for Tom Robbins, nota bene, that's Tom Robbins, the novelist, not Tim Robbins, the tall, thin actor who supports the Democratic Party and used to be married to Susan Sarandon. I'm not saying Robbins is a bad writer, he's just -- well, for me personally, he's not nearly in the same class as Pynchon. Your mileage may vary, as Germans say. (They say that in English, about books or movies or whatever. It's weird.)

-- Lots of books have many blurbs on their covers. Sometimes these blurbs are attributed to a publication. For example, "Brilliant and deft." -- The New York Times Book Review. or "A pulse-pounding page-turner." -- Publishers Weekly. By and large, these anonymous blurbs mean less to me than ones attributed to specific people. Especially if they're attributed to Nobel Literature laureates or other writers I like. If King or Grisham recommends it, it's probably not for me. There are some exceptions to this: I cannot recall seeing a single blurb attributed to an individual rather than to a publication on the cover or first pages of any volume by Gore Vidal, although plenty of writers of whom I thought highly, thought highly of Gore. Strange. Perhaps when a writer produces big blockbusting bestsellers, and Vidal certainly did, publishers prefer anonymous blurbs. I don't know.

Nietzsche's reactions to authors are amazingly predictive of mine. The 1st half of p 65 of the insel taschenbuch-edition of Goetzen-Daemmerung (ISBN 3-458-34380-6) could almost have been written by me. Nietzsche compares Carlyle to puke -- nailed it. I hadn't read read any Carlyle before I read Goetzen-Daemmerung -- why didn't I listen about Carlyle? Well, anyway, I found for myself that I too find him absolutely disgusting, and now here I am warning you. Sorry to bring up something so unpleasant as puke, but, assuming my advice is as accurate for you as Nietzsche's is for me, I'm warning you.

-- If I've really liked one book by an author, I'm very rarely disappointed in others of his or her books. I'm not counting unfinished books which have been published posthumously, because, duh, they're unfinished. The biggest exception to my rule about non-posthumous books is the novel Ravelstein by Saul Bellow. That one had me shaking my head all the way through and muttering curses at Allan Bloom, neocon monster, Bellow's close friend, the author of The Closing of the American Mind and clearly the real-life inspiration for the title figure Ravelstein.

-- Different publishers go about their business in different ways. A book published by Oxford or Farrar, Straus and Giroux is more likely to be my kind of book than one published by Simon & Schuster, although here again, there may be exceptions published by Simon & Schuster or other lowest-common-denominator, their-books-are-in-grocery-stores-and-Wal-Mart's publisher. Those exceptions, those glorious exceptions are those few authors like Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer and John Cheever who are both popular and good.

Spinoza, Einstein And Nietzsche

Atheists and believers have been arguing a lot over whether Einsteinwas an atheist, or a pantheist, or a deist, or something else. Over the course of these Titanic struggles of the mind, it has often been pointed out that Einstein was a great admirer of Spinoza,and that Einstein's remarks on religion often closely resemble those of Spinoza.

It is perhaps somewhat less well-known that Nietzschewas also a big fan of Spinoza. He said that he felt a special kinship with Spinoza, that he felt Spinoza reaching across the centuries to him, one outcast genius to another.

As with Einstein, so too in the case of Spinoza it is debated whether he was a devout Jew, or a pantheist, or an atheist, or something else. Those who argue that he was an atheist point out that the conclusions he draws do not conflict with atheism. I have often pointed out that if Spinoza, or Hobbes, or Descartes, or any other 17th-century European philosopher, had been an atheist and openly, publicly said so, he would've been killed. He probably would've been extensively tortured first, then burned, and his ashes scattered to the winds. The only halfway-safe way to publicly express atheist positions in 17th-century Europe was to imply them between the lines. Some people, from Spinoza's time to the present, have concluded that that was exactly what he was doing: announcing his atheism by repeatedly, deliberately, systematically hinting at it. Pointing out that this and that and the other reality did not necessarily require certain traditional religious belief in order to be understood. Suggesting various novel ways to understand that which we mean when we say "God." Leaving certain points vague enough that it could lead some people to speculate that the positions he was advancing were atheist. And some people did, right away, and some people have ever since.

As I said, this approach was only halfway safe. Spinoza was excommunicated from the Amsterdam synagogue for it. I have not yet been able to find out any specific ways in which excommunication altered Spinoza's life. But it's hard for me to believe that some of his social connections weren't cut, at the very least.

Spinoza died in 1677. Nietzsche was born in 1844, and Einstein in 1879, which meant that neither of them ever had to fear any criminal proceedings for expressions of atheism. Nietzsche's atheism was pronounced to the point that he declared that even debating the existence of God was beneath an atheist's dignity. (He said that atheists before him had not understood this, which seems to imply that he may have thought that atheists of his own time, or serious ones, at least, no longer condescended to such silly debates. I think he was over-optimistic, and I wish that more atheists would at least consider whether debating the existence of God lends theists a credibility they no longer deserve.)

Einstein's remarks about religion tend to parrot Spinoza, without seeming to consider that Spinoza may often have been unclear for the sake of his life. I don't see the need for such unclarity, such vagueness in Einstein's case. I can only explain it by assuming that Einstein himself didn't really know whether he was an atheist, or a pantheist, or something else. And if I'm right about that then it's perfectly absurd for other people to argue about it. If I'm right, the debate can never be resolved.

Einstein ought to be read more for the sake of physics. If half of the time and effort which is currently expended debating Einstein's religious view were dedicated instead to studying what he had to say about physics, that would be a great leap forward in the education of the general public. As would it be if people devoted half the effort now spent on examining Darwin's and Dawkins' views on religion to seeing what they have to say about evolutionary biology. Between the three of them, Einstein, Darwin and Dawkins, I have yet to encounter one profound sentence on a subject related to religion. It's such a waste on the part of atheists to get bogged down in this, and all the more so when the wisdom of some others on religious topics, people such as Goethe and Marx and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Freud and Russell, is so boundless.

What Happened And What Didn't Is Important. It's Astonishing That Such A Thing Even Needs To Be Said.

Frank Schaeffer writes, The result of the gospel is the point, not what happened or didn't. The scientific spirit, like the spirit of enterprise is a byproduct of the profound action of the gospel. The modern Western world has forgotten the revelation of the gospel in favor of its mere byproducts, reason and science..

Not everyone agrees about what the result of the triumph of Christianity was. Results I see are 1) Intolerance: every other religion was wiped out except Judaism. The Jews were allowed to continue to exist as second-class citizens, subjected to occasional massacres. But sometime they too were given the choice between conversion or exile or death. 2) Intellectual rigidity: all through the Middle Ages, Christian authorities maintained a monopoly on educational institutions. All scientific and philosophical writings had to conform with theological authority. Not only is it obvious to me that this wasn't good for science, and that science was more advanced not only after but also before the Medieval period of incredibly stifling conformity (Read some Medieval texts sometime), it's amazing to me that there are people to whom such things are not obvious. They're known as Christian apologists, and they're forever trying to tell you how great the Middle Ages were. They're wrong that science was invented by Christians during the Middle Ages, so spectacularly wrong that there's no point debating it with them. The best you can do is to warn others to have their brains engaged when they encounter apologists saying such absurd things. Make no mistake, Christian apologists are the Middle Ages still surviving among us. (More than a few of them would take that as a compliment.)

The scientific spirit wasn't created by Christianity, it survived Christianity. In the Vorrede, the preface, to Jenseits Von Gut Und Boese,along with some very stupid things -- the Vorrede begins by comparing truth to a woman, and Nietzsche couldn't mention women in his philosophical works in any but a very stupid way. Ah, if only he'd lived a little longer, and had Freud help him with that issue! Nietzsche, and the entire world, might've been much better off. And he also mistakenly credits the Germans with the invention of gunpowder, as he enthuses for war as only someone who's never been in a war can do, and makes a couple of offhand stupid anti-democratic remarks; in short, he manages to display almost all of his intellectual weak spots within the few pages of this Vorrede -- he also says something very interesting, which might just also be true: that in the Western world, in order to survive Christianity, an especially sharp and powerful spirit was formed. A couple of years later Nietzsche wrote his very famous "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger" ("Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich staerker"), to which I have always replied, "What doesn't kill me can still maim me for life, and in Nietzsche's case it did, just a few months after he wrote that."

But this related idea, about an especially powerful spirit being created in an entire society, out of necessity, in order for any kind of rationality to have been able to survive the disaster of Christianity -- that's an example of something Nietzsche said which doesn't strike me as silly. To me, that seems worth pondering. It might actually be true. That might actually be what happened in Christendom.

Of course, if what happened and what didn't happen isn't important to you, you might be much happier reading Frank Schaeffer than reading Nietzsche, or me.

Misunderstanding Nietzsche

Nietzsche is very widely misunderstood about some of his central viewpoints. He's associated with Schopenhauer's pessimistic (depressed) outlook, and not without reason. One of his early works is an admiring take on Schopenhauer. But he rejected that pessimistic outlook in the most emphatic way imaginable, even while suffering health problems which might have left many people very depressed.

Another reason why Nietzsche is often misunderstood is because his most popular book, Also Sprach Zarathustra,is written entirely in mostly-cryptic verse, and people have tended to see whatever they want to see in it, the way children see duckies and horsies in puffy white clouds. (He wrote once, in reference to Wagner,that artists often don't know what they themselves do best, because they're too vain to see their own work for what it is. I think this ironically applies to Nietzsche himself. He called Zarathustra his best book. I think his best work is his prose, especially when he's being very direct.)

Then there's the perception that Nietzsche was antisemitic. Not true. However, his brother-in-law led an antisemitic political movement, and his sister did all she could to associate his name with that movement, despite his vehement objections. Also, Richard Wagner, Nietzsche's mentor for a while, to whom Die Geburt der Tragödieis downright gushingly dedicated, was antisemitic -- or, in Nietzsche's account of things, let himself be associated with anti-semites. (Whom Nietzsche referred to as the lowest of the low. How much more clear could he have been?) (And Schopenhauer was antisemitic too.)

It's true that Nietzsche was stupidly sexist, though. In his published works, whenever he mentions women, that brilliant mind just gets shut off. He rarely mentions any individual women, just refers to "die Frau" as such, or, oftener, "das Weib," which is a slightly less respectful way of referring to women. After knowing only his philosophical works, it was quite a surprise for me to read some of his lettersand find him writing to and about individual women in a civilized and friendly way. (Even more surprising that they wrote back, if they'd read his books. He must have been very charming indeed.)