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.

Forgeries, From Antiquity to the Present

Constantine the Great and Sylvester I, Pope from 314 to 335, were not close friends. They did not, despite Dan Brown's repeated insistence to the contrary, re-write the Bible together at the Council of Nicea. In fact, Sylvester was not AT Nicea. These and other basic facts of history, which were never well-hidden, caused many people, when a document surfaced in the 8th century, purporting to be a letter from Constantine to Sylvester granting him and his Papal successors spiritual and temporal sovereignty over the Western Roman Empire, to see it for the cheesy forgery it was. Nevertheless, this purported letter, known as the Donation of Constantine, was used from time to time by Popes and their allies as an argument in various power struggles, and has occasionally fooled people down to the present day, including, of course, Dan Brown. 

Although many people knew from the start that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, it was Lorenzo Vallo who proved it in 1440, by demonstrating that its Latin was that of the 8th century. This was a great milestone in textual criticism.

 

In the 17th century some scholars, notably Spinoza with his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, began to take a similarly critical view of the Bible and the Classics, investigating their authorship and time of composition. Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish Community of Amsterdam for suggesting that Moses might not have authored all of the Pentateuch. 

More recently, scholars have determined that of the 13 books of the New Testament traditionally attributed, 6 were written by someone else: Colossians, Ephesians, 2nd Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus.

Less famous than such investigations into the Bible, but at least as interesting to some readers, are those examining traditional attributions of ancient "pagan" texts. Platonic dialogues certainly or almost certainly not written by Plato include Second Alcibiades, Hipparchus, Minos, The Rival Lovers, Theages, Clitophon, About Justice, About Virtue, Demodocus, Sisyphus, Eryxias and Axiochus. Homer, Vergil, Caesar, Sallust and Ovid are just a few of the ancients whose oeuvres have been whittled down in the estimate of textual critics.

The Historia Augusta are somewhat the other way around: until rather recently they were regarded as a collaboration between six historians, a collection of the biographies of the Emperors and those around them from AD 117 to 284. They tended to be regarded as very poor history. Gibbon and Burckhardt, noticing many of the errors, angrily condemned the shoddy work of the authors, which made their own work much more difficult,

Then in the late 19th and early 20 centuries Harmann Dessau asserted that they are in fact the work of one author, a position which has steadily gained support. This of course raised questions such as: why would an author do this? and, What sort of work is the Historia Augusta? Ronald Syme took up Dessau's work, and in 1968 published a volume entitled Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, which suggests that the work is a parody of historical writing, for which modern readers still need to develop the necessary sense of humor. It seems possible that the author had never intended to deceive anyone into thinking that his work was to be understood as history. This case is very interesting, and most definitely still open. 

It's not always texts per se which are under investigation by textual critics. Take the curious case of the Vinland Map, first published in 1965 together with the Tartar Relation, a 13th century text describing a Franciscan mission to the court of then Mongols. This copy of the Tartar Relation seemed to present no great mystery. There was no doubt that this was a genuine 15th-century manuscript on parchment. But then there was the Vinland Map, bound in the same volume, also on 15th-century parchment, and presenting a view of the route from Scandinavia to Canada. This was a map purporting to show the route of Viking voyages to the Western hemisphere, a map supposedly made in the MID-15th century, a few decades before Columbus. 

The parchment really was from the 15th century, but this proved nothing about the map. Blank pieces of 15th-century parchment can be had, and can be used to produce various faked things.

Well, if this was a forgery, it was at the very least an above-average forgery, keeping experts busy assessing it for decades. Samuel Eliot Morison immediately declared it a fake, because it included a very accurate representation of the west coast of Greenland. Morison pointed out that the west coast of Greenland had not been navigated before the 17th century, and that until then Greenland had been considered to be part of a continent, not an island. 

As soon as I read that, years ago, I assumed that Morison had solved this puzzle, and wondered what was taking the others so ling to catch up. Then, literally just a few days ago, it occurred to me that someone, after Greenland had been navigated, could have altered a genuine 15th-century map to include the west coast of Greenland, not realizing that this would make the map seem obviously fake and not more impressive.

So for a few days I was once more very excited about the Vinland Map -- until today, when I read that, along about 2018, chemical analysis of the ink had finally convinced everyone that the map was a forgery.

Still, having taken more than 60 years before the public to be conclusively exposed, that is definitely an above-average fake. 

Although some will find it to be off-topic, I cannot end this essay without a salute to journalistic fact-checkers and their battle against the tide of lies. Because I do not find it to be off-topic.

Just a Thought

Philosophy as we know it began in Greece about 2,500 years ago. No one else anywhere on Earth had done anything like that before.

That really blew my mind at first. Because philosophy consists of things which are really familiar to us: thinking about the nature of reality, of perception, etc etc.

But then I had this thought: perhaps people had always thought about such things, and had always talked about such things, but before Greece, ca 500 BC, it had simply never occurred to anyone to write it down.

So for example, in Babylon in 2500 BC, two temple scribes could be taking a break and talking, speculating about how far away the moon was, and whether matter was composed of one substance or four substances or many substances; and then it was like, "Okay, break's over. I wish we could keep talking about these interesting things, but we have to get back to work, and think of three dozen more things to compare the king to."

Socrates, not the first philosopher but within 100 years of the first philosopher, and the most influential of all of them so far, never wrote any philosophy. He talked to people. That was his full-time job. And then after he was executed, his pupil Plato wrote down those conversations. That's what all of Plato's works are: conversations starring Socrates.

So maybe the explanation of why there isn't any earlier philosophy is staring us right in the face in the form of the best-known philosophy of all time, of some of the oldest: there was earlier philosophy, but it was all just conversations, so it never got recorded, never got organized, just blew away like dead leaves in the wind.

 

Translations from Greek to Latin

In the Roman Republic and the Western, Latin-speaking Western Roman Empire, many people were bilingual and could speak Greek as well as Latin. How many? I don't know, but I do know that some Classical Latin authors such as Cato the Elder and Juvenal complained that it was too many. Many other ancient Latin authors saw Greek very positively: from its beginnings in the third century BC, Latin literature very often copies Greek literature very directly. Many Roman young men were sent to Athens to be educated; some of them liked Greek culture and literature so much that they became poets, instead of lawyers as their families had intended (some things never change), some of them strew many Greek quotations among the Latin texts of their books. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, although a native of the Latin West, wrote an entire book in Greek.

This all changed very quickly when the Western Empire declined and ceased to be in the 5th century AD.

Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate, dominated Western literature for 1000 years.

Although scholarly types in the West never ceased to read the Latin Classics, the ability to read Greek became very rare. The philosopher Boethius (ca480 -- 524), made some of the first translations of Aristotle into Latin. He had planned to translate all of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, but was imprisoned and executed on suspicion of treason before he could complete this project. Apparently already at this time there was a need, even among those inclined to philosophy, for translations of Greek works.

Another illustration of the lack of reading comprehension of Greek in the West is the popularity of the poem known as the Ilias Latina. PK Marshall (in: LD Reynolds (ed), Tests and Transmission, Oxford: 1983, p 191), with refreshing frankness, refers to the Ilias Latina as an "unatractive compendium." Written probably during the reign of Nero, it reduces the 15,693 verses of Homer's Iliad to just 1070, and those remaining lines often resemble Vergil's style much more than Homer's. Nevertheless, in the absence of either knowledge of Greek or fuller translations of Homer, the Ilias Latina enjoyed great popularity from the 9th century onward.

Many translations from Greek into Latin, most notably of the very numerous works of Aristotle, began to cause a great sensation when they appeared at the University of Paris and in other Western centers of learning in the 12th century, coming from the great school of translation in Muslim-controlled Toledo, Spain.

I suppose that this is as good a time as any to point out that, apparently contrary to widespread beliefs, most of the Latin translations of Aristotle and other Greeks which appeared in 12th-century Europe were not, in fact, first translated from Greek into Arabic, and then from Arabic into Greek. Most have survived in Greek, and in the 12th century in Toledo, most of the Latin translations which were to be so popular among Western scholars were made directly from Greek. Even in the 12th century, people knew the hazards of what we now call the game of Telephone. There have been a few cases in which the original versions of Greek Classics have vanished, and an Arabic or Hebrew version has survived, so that all further translation must come from them, and these few cases make for interesting stories. But they are atypical stories.

In the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, as the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, declined and finally fell, many Greek scholars who fled from that decline and fall chose to migrate to Italy, and they taught Greek to those scholars who re-introduced Greek literature to the West in the Italian Renaissance. Numerous full-length Latin translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey began to circulate in the West, replacing Professor Marshall's "unattractive compendium," along with Latin translations of many other Greek works, as the scholarly Western world, or at least wide swaths of it, became bilingual again, mastering both Latin and Greek, as it had done 1000 years before.

mee r munkee. mee thinking bout wot itt all meenz

mee r munkee. mee luv yu. mee bin thnkin bout wot it all meenz.

mee let yu no sune az everthng start maikng senss.

bee4, mee nevr think bout thngs like, wot du it all meen? bee4, mee thnk questyuns laik thatt werr meeningluss.

maibee mee werr rite bee4.

mee think Jean-Paul Sartre wurr gud munkee. mee allwaze thnk that bout Jean-Paul Sartre. mee yuz tu totullee nott laik Plato. mee not totullee laik Plato, now, butt fyoo yeerz uhgo, mee reelize: nobuddee ever seen purfuk surrkurl, butt everbuddee no wot purrfuk suurkurl iz.

nobuddee everr haff tuh splain tuh nobuddee wot uh purfek surrkurl iz kuzz everbuddee allreddee no. that blo munkees mind. an, iff munkee unnerstan Plato theeree uv formz rite, that ukzaklee wot Plato wurr talkin bout. that blo munkeez mind mor. munkee wurr no longr abl tu dissmiss Plato.

munkee furst hurd bowt Plato's theeree uv formz, i don no, wen he wer 15 or so. thenn, wen munkee 50 or so, he reelee here wot plato sed. an he kant blo it off. Plato no longr seem lik totull dushbag tu munkee.

that momunt, wen hee wer 50 or so, wen he reelee here wot plato say bout surklz, and reelize, that Plate izz rite, that turn everthng topsee-turvee 4 munkee. maybee that bout same time munkee start wunnerin wot it all meen.

munkee dunno. that all 4 now. mee luv yu, yr verr nice person, thnk yu verr mutch pleez! baibai!

I Don't Expect A Lot Of People To Understand This Post

Baseball -- Uuuuuuweeeee! Lou Brock!! He's so good -- it's

AMAZING!!!!!

Wow! Philosophy!!! Rrrrrrrrr!! Wuuuuuuuu!!!! Plato's Republic (Greek: Πολιτεία, Politeia; Latin: De Republica) is

LONG!!!!!

Some of his dialogues are just like a dozen pages long, but the Republic (Greek: Πολιτεία, Politeia; Latin: De Republica) is 318 pages long in the MDCCCXCVIII CAROLI FRIDERICI HERMANNI Teubner version and 297 pages long in TOMUS IV of the IOANNES BURNET Oxford Classical Texts edition, FIRST PUBLISHED 1903 REPRINTED 1908, 1913, 1921, 1923, 1931, 1946, 1949, 1952, 1954, 1957, 1961.

That's

LONG!!!!!

But today, I found out that Plato's dialogue The Laws (Greek: Νόμοι; Latin: De Legibus[1]) is even

LONGER!!!!!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!! Wuuu! Wuuuu! Wuuuu! Wuuuuuuuuuuu!!!

Numbers Of Manuscripts Of Some Classical Authors

This in no way resembles any sort of comprehensive list of all known Classical manuscripts. I wish such a list had been gathered conveniently between book covers, and I could just refer you to the title and ISBN.

Maybe such a list exists. I haven't found it yet. What I have found is some running totals of the numbers of manuscripts known for this or that author. I've found some of these figures in volumes I've had for a while. They've often been hiding in plain sight in the footnotes, where I only recently thought to look.

In A Companion to Homer, ed by Wace and Stubbings, London: MacMillan, 1962, on p 229, in the footnotes to JA Davison's chapter "The Transmission of the Text," we learn that TW Allen had listed 190 medieval and post-medieval manuscripts of the Iliad in his 1931 edition, including 7 which also include the Odyssey, that Allen had listed 75 manuscripts of the Odyssey in volume V of the Papers of the British School at Rome, including those 7 already mentioned, for a total of 258 medieval and post-medieval manuscripts of Homer. Davison' notes also mention ancient manuscripts of Homer listed in RA Pack, Greek and Latin Litrerary Texts from Graeco-Roman Egypt, published in 1952: 381 manuscripts of the Iliad and 111 for the Odyssey. That adds up to a nice round total of 750 manuscripts of Homer. Davison points out that these figures do not include quotations of Homer in the works of other authors, nor indirect sources.

And remember, this was in 1962. I would imagine that more Homeric manuscripts have come to light since then. How many more? I dunno. Can I provide an example of even one specific discovery made since 1962? Strangely, I cannot. There's a ton of stuff online about Homeric manuscripts in general and Homeric papyri in particular, and from my personal point of view, none of it is user-friendly.



In Die Platonhandschriften Und Ihre Gegenseitigen Beziehungen by Martin Wohlrab, published in 1887 in Leipzig by Teubner, page 643, Wohlrab says that his survey includes 147 manuscripts. (This Teubner volume is a reprint from an academic journal, and begins on page 643.) Also on p 643 Wohlrab said that surely many more manuscripts of Plato would be found. This was before the Oxyrhynchus excavations began. How many papyrii of Plato have been found at Oxyrhynchus? And down the road at Fayum? I dunno. Lots, I would imagine. But Wohlrab was talking about manuscripts laying around in libraries which hadn't yet been catalogued. Was he right, in the 1880, when he predicted that many more manuscripts of Plato would be found in libraries? I dunno. I would guess he was right.



In Texts and Transmission, ed by LD Reynolds, Oxford, 1983, on page xxvii, Reynolds counts up some surviving manuscripts of Sallust: 2 from the 9th century, 4 from the 10th, 33 from the 11th, 58 from the 12th, 39 from the 13th, 46 from the 14th and 330 from the 15th, for a total of 482, and adds in a footnote: "The figures are incomplete, especially for the later period." In addition to these medieval manuscripts of Sallust, there are 4 ancient papyrii. 486, but "the figures are incomplete."

On p 36 of Texts and Transmission, Michael Winterbottom mentions 162 recent and unimportant manuscripts of Caesar. I was unable to find a figure which included both the unimportant and the important manuscripts.

On p 412 of Texts and Transmission, Michael Reeve informs us that we have over 650 manuscripts of Terence and adds, "Published estimates stop at 450. I owe the new figure to Claudia Villa."

On p 394, Reeve mentions "over 160 manuscripts" of Statius' Thebiad. Just of the Thebiad. The total number of manuscripts of Statius is more. How many more? I dunno.



I don't know how many manuscripts there are of Cicero. I don't want to know. I'm not a fan. (There are lots and lots.)

And one more time for Reeve: on p 107 of Studies in Latin Literature and its Tradition: in Honour of C O Brink, Cambridge, 1989, he counts up 154 of the 3rd decade of Livy. That's just for the 3rd decade (books 21-30). The total number of Livy manuscripts is somewhat more. How many more? I dunno.



On p vi of his 2004 Oxford edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, RJ Tarrant informs us that we have over 400 manuscripts of that poem. How many manuscripts do we have of all of Ovid's works? I dunno. Very many, I would imagine.

Karl Popper? No Thank You

"Der Überlieferung zufolge soll Platon am Eingang zu seiner Akademie die Inschrift angebracht haben, es möge sich fernhalten von diesem Ort, wer nicht Geometer sei" ("It is said that Plato had an inscription made at the entrance to his academy which asked everyone who wasn't a geometer to stay away.") -- That's the first sentence of Peter Sloterdijk's preface to the 1st volume of his work Sphären (Spheres). Sloterdijk not only approves of this elitist motto, he says that the 3 volumes of Sphären to follow are best understood as an even more radical demand for such knowledge. Sloterdijk also mentions the etymologie of "geometer" and "geometry," always a good thing to keep in mind with words which have been in use continually for thousands of years. By γεωμετρία, geometry, the ancient Greeks meant "measurement of the world." Yes, Euclid certainly practiced something which we today readily understand as the branch of mathematics we call geometry, but it's good to keep in mind the origins of words like "geometry," and "tragedy" -- and "philosophy" -- and remind ourselves that they can mean very different things in different eras.

Sloterdijk is full of this sort of helpful insights into the philosophy, the philosophies, of different eras and cultures, brimming with aids to grasping more of the immense complexity of bookish human thought.



All that by way of contrast, refreshing contrast, to Karl Popper. Someone finally persuaded me to read Popper, I've read vol 1 of his offene Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde, and that's that. No thank you. Not for me. Popper is full of platitudes. It seems he can't let a page go by without earnestly reminding the reader that he stands for freedom. Well, goody. He reminds me of the fictional Jerry Seinfeld's characterization of his pal Elaine Benes as a "hater of evil," a line which is so funny because, who's not? Just as we all hate evil, so are we all for freedom. The difficult part, the part where we encounter the complexity which seems to escape Popper, is when we attempt to define things like evil and freedom. Evil to whom? Freedom for whom? Gather 3 people together and you can likely find some small or great disagreement about the concrete application of these generalized good things.



That's right: I'm inclined to think that you'll get more subtle and profound messages about this sweet mystery we call life by watching "Seinfeld" than by reading Popper. I'm afraid Popper just might make things more mysterious -- and not in a good way. Near the beginning of his preface to the 1992 50th anniversary edition of the offene Gesellschaft, Popper remarks, "Seine Tendenz war: gegen Nazismus und Kommunismus; gegen Hitler und Stalin." ("It [the book] was directed against Nazism and Communism, against Hitler and Stalin.") However: "Ich verabscheute die Namen beider so sehr, daß ich sie in meinem Buch nicht erwähnen wollte." ("I hated the names of both of them [Hitler and Stalin] so much that I didn't want to name them in my book.") It might also be that, living in England in 1942, he didn't have the balls to call Stalin as bad as Hitler while Soviets were in the midst of dying by the tens of millions as England's ally.

It seems that Popper meant a lot of things in the book which he didn't say in the book. The 2003 edition is over 500 pages long, and well less than half of that is the main text of the book, the rest being numerous prefaces and afterwords and footnotes in which he explains and explains what he meant and corrects various people who misunderstood what he said. That 50th anniversary edition preface describes Hitler and Stalin as the signers of the 1939 non-aggression pact. Did Popper mean that Stalin signed that pact with Germany only after he had tried to sign similar pacts with his soon-to-be allies and been turned down, but not say it? To be fair to Popper, I think it's possible in this case that he didn't mention something because he didn't know it.

Regardless of whom this volume was really directed against, it's subtitle is Der Zauber Platons (The Magic of Plato). "Magic" is meant here in a bad way. It's magic by which Plato mesmerized people and got him to follow him as the originator and head of the war against the open society...

Popper is so bad, so inept, empty and yet simultaneously so full -- yes, of crap! Just as many changes have occurred in a term originating in ancient Greek between their γεωμετρία and our geometry, so too have societies evolved and changed tremendously. There was no open society in Athens 2400 years ago of the kind Popper envisions. Plato didn't want to plunge the world into a totalitarian Hell, as Hitler most certainly tried his very best to do. Plato was merely a conservative: he lacked the imagination to radically criticize the existing totalitarian society. Before Plato, as Popper correctly observed, Heraclitus envisaged a much more open society than the one Plato championed. Heraclitus' egalitarian vision doesn't make Plato a monster, it makes him an ordinary creature of his time and place regarding certain existing political realities, as, to judge from some of those introductions and afterwords and footnotes, countless people unsuccessfully attempted to point out to Popper.

It takes a lot to get me to defend Plato. Popper pulls it off with ease.

And ironically, reading Popper, who constantly reminds us of how he's fighting for everyone's freedom, makes me feel anything but free. Sloterdijk is rarely, if ever, called an apostle of freedom or some such, and he's often (usually ridiculously) called something like the opposite, but reading him makes me feel free. My mind soars, as the saying goes, when I read Sloterdijk. When I read Popper I feel chained to the plodding footsteps of his pedestrian mind. If ever elitism is called for, I think, it's when one is choosing an author to read. I'm done with Popper. So done. For the moment I'm returning to the 2 volumes of Sloterdijk's Sphären. Sloterdijk calls Nietzsche "the master of dangerous thinking," and Sloterdijk is sometimes described in similar terms.

Maybe Nietzsche and Sloterdijk -- and for that matter, Plato -- are dangerous to many or even to most readers. I thrive on the first 2, and I dislike Plato but there's no danger of my ever being bored by him as badly as I am with Popper. And with Plato there are flashes of brilliance not even I can deny. How does anyone know what a perfect circle is? No drawing or ball made by humans is perfectly round, neither is any planet or moon in the sky. And yet we all know exactly what a perfect circle is. Plato has an explanation for that. I don't buy Plato's explanation, but there's no denying that on this point Plato leads me by 1 explanation to none. That kind of blows my mind. Popper's not on the same level.

Credit Where Credit is Due?

Reading Nietzsche is... Well. Is there a proper English translation of umwerfend? I have some differences with him: as I've said several times on theis blog and repeatedly elsewhere, I think that everything he says in his philosophical works about women is wrong. Plain wrong. (And most of what he says about war. Keep in mind when reading a passage about war by Nietzsche that he was never in one. Closest he ever came was working in a military hospital during the Franco-Prussian War.) He almost always refers to them as one group. He addresses individual male human beings from various places and times, individual ancient Greeks, individual Frenchman and Jews and Englishmen of his own times and a century or two earlier, individual Germans, and his comments about various countries and cultures are clearly based upon his assessment of these individuals.

With the wimmins, it's the other way around: he speaks of the entire gender at once, and on the rare, very rare occasions when he takes an individual woman to task, usually one of the famous Georges contemporary with him, Eliot or Sand, his condemnation is clearly based on his strange notions about the entire gender, such as, they've got no real business being creative artists and are treacherous and primitive and sooooo mean and will just mess everything up.

I'm referring only to Nietzsche's philosophical works. In his letters he's often completely, startlingly different, because there he's often talking about and even to individual human beings who happen to be wimmins, and talks about and to them in a reasonable way for which the philosophical works have left the reader entirely unprepared.

And so the Foreword to Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut und Boese starts off with remarks about women -- about truth actually, but saying "Imagine that truth were a woman" -- which just make me groan and wince. Put it this way, between Nietzsche and me, at least one of us is disastrously wrong about women. At least. But the Foreword winds up talking about what the book, in my opinion, is actually more about: the Western philosophical tradition, in its entirety, from the ancient Greeks down to 1885 when Nietzsche was finishing this book:

"Aber der Kampf gegen Plato, oder, um es verständlicher und für's 'Volk' zu sagen, der Kampf gegen den christlich-kirchlichen Druck von Jahrtausenden —- denn Christenthum ist Platonismus für's 'Volk' -— hat in Europa eine prachtvolle Spannung des Geistes geschaffen, wie sie auf Erden noch nicht da war: mit einem so gespannten Bogen kann man nunmehr nach den fernsten Zielen schiessen."

("But the fight against Plato, or, to say it more plainly and for the 'people,' the fight against thousands of years of pressure from Christianity and the Church -- because Christianity is Platonic philosophy for the 'people' -- has produced in Europe a magnificent tautness of the mind, the likes of which never before existed on Earth. With a bow drawn so tightly, one can now shoot at the farthest targets.")

There are things Nietzsche wrote which I just completely reject, which I don't bother even considering any more, such as the accusation that the womenfolk only screw up art when they participate in it, and then there are passages like the one I just cited, which astound me and make me stop and clutch my munkee head and ask myself, Now what if that's true? First, what if it's really true that, from a philosophical perspective, Christianity is basically a dumbed-down, Readers' Digest version of Plato? And further, what if it's true that certain achievements made in traditionally-Christian parts of the Earth -- such as space exploration, talk about "shooting at the farthest targets" -- were not accomplished in spite of the stifling effects of Christianity, but actually because of them? Because people had to fight so hard for so long against Christianity just to maintain any sort of tolerable life, and the fight made some people's minds so strong, as if their spirits had had to fight a giant from the WWF all day every day from AD 380 until now, that this and that industrial and scientific revolution was just an incidental by-product of all that intensive, non-stop training, as if Christianity had inadvertently, unintentionally created among its opponents Navy Seals or Army Rangers of the mind?

They say that centuries' worth of strict censorship in Russia helped to create the concentrated prose of Turgenyev and Dostoyevsky. An Internet forum which allows no more than 250 words per post does train one in pithiness of style. Could Nietzsche be right here? Is gratitude due here, in one of the strangest, least-expected places?

Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit

I was arguing with someone in the HuffPo readers' comments about Sam Harris,who seems to be the English-speaking world's third-most prominent spokesman for atheism currently, behind Richard Dawkinsand Christopher Hitchens.Dawkins is someone I can proudly call a spokesman of a movement to which I belong, even if I don't choose to call that movement "New Atheism." (PS, 23. September 2015: I really should have read some of Dawkins' writing on religion before I wrote that. I had read some of his work on biology and mistakenly assumed that his work on religion must be just as good. Dawkins really should stick to biology; on the subject on religion he's a dingbat just like Hitch and Harris and all the other New Atheists.) (I just call it atheism. No biggie, but the "New" part seems somewhat silly to me.) (PS, 23. September 2015: I now call THEM New Atheists, and am attempting to show that they by no means represent all atheists.) I have referred to Hitchins as a dingbat, and a drunken dingbat, and similar things, but Lordy -- so to speak -- he's so much more impressive than this guy Harris. Harris is on a kick now about something he calls the moral landscape. Which is just utilitarianism. Which was new in the mid-19th century when John Stuart Millwas presenting it for the first time. New, but unimpressive. Easily batted aside several decades later by Nietzsche'sanalysis of morality, or more accurately, of moralities. Nietzsche pointed out that morality is always a subjective thing, and that was pretty much that for utilitarianism. Or so a sensible person could've been forgiven for supposing. But Lordy -- so to speak -- look at Harris go!

I was arguing with someone about Harris. A couple of others were, too, but, it seemed, fewer than with Harris' previous HuffPo article. Perhaps they found it futile quicker than I. Perhaps they are wiser than I. I really should stop this squabbling on the Internet -- I just get all dirty, and the pigs have all of the fun. I and a couple of others were pleading: read Nietzsche. Read Schopenhauer. Read Sartre.This ground has been covered, and much better than Harris is doing it. At one point, as I gradually gave up on the squabble, someone called Schopenhauer an obscurantist. Schopenhauer?! If anyone at all in the Western canon tells it like it smells, it is Arthur Schopenhauer. He is a model of clarity and frankness. I was about to respond in this vein when it occurred to me that it would be far more enjoyable to read some Schopenhauer than to argue with this person about him. So I did. I have the five-volume Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft edition,st w 661 through 665. A German friend of mine, like me not an academic, but like me someone who reads widely and with great involvement things which are probably mostly read by academics, became very upset when he heard that I had this edition. In his opinion it is a very bad edition. I don't know what he's talking about, but I mention his opinion because I respect it.

Someone else who was arguing in my anti-Harris vein pleaded with HuffPo's readers to read Heidegger. It had been a long time since I'd attempted to read Heidegger, but I decided to finally buy my own copy of Sein Und Zeit.Sein und Zeit is considered to be Martin Heidegger's masterpiece, his Hauptwerk, his chef d'ouvre. A recent poll of philosophers as to the most significant works of philosophy published in the twentieth century placed Sein und Zeit second, sandwiched between works of Ludwig Wittgensteinat first and third. I had tried years ago to read this and several others of Heidegger's works, but quickly gave up, utterly bewildered.

This time, to my surprise, I was only a little bewildered, and seemed to understand some of what Heidegger was saying. It probably helps that my Greek is now weak, as opposed to non-existent back then. Also, in the meantime I had read some Adorno,putting the German-reading part of my brain through some serious calisthenics.

I am enjoying reading Heidegger. This is something I really thought I might never say. And I really very rarely say "never" when it comes to my ability to read anything. Anything.

I wrote down the name of every author mentioned by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit. There are several dozen of them. He included the first initals of some authors who in the meantime -- Sein und Zeit was first published in 1927 -- have become famous enough that they are usually referred to just by their last names, as are Aristotle and Heidegger. For instance, Heidegger made repeated reference to W. Dilthey and K. Jaspers, who these days are usually referred to as Diltheyand Jaspers.On the other hand, Heidegger referred to a scholastic, Suarez, and his work, the disputationes metaphysicae, and I had to look this Suarez up in order to learn that Francisco Suárez was meant, who lived from 1548 to 1617, and that during Suárez' time scholasticism experienced a resurgence. Yikes! I had had no idea.

Most often named are Platoand Aristotle.Named, and quoted in Greek, quotations which Heidegger does not always translate. Heidegger says the question of the nature of being has essentially been dropped since classical Greece. That the concept of being is at once the most universal and the most mysterious. That's within the first couple of pages. I can't tell you much more right now. My mind is reeling, but in a rather pleasant way.

Heidegger was involved with the Nazis. But it seems pretty clear that he saw his relationship to the Nazis as similar to a lion tamer's to his lions, that he did not believe in them or their ideals, but was trying to manipulate them, as opposed to simply emigrating or surrendering his academic post to a party member.

Pretty clear. Not absolutely crystal-clear. After World War II Hannah Arendtspoke up for him, but Karl Jaspers spoke against him. Paul Celanmet with him. I don't have a last word here.

Christians and Atheists Discussing Religion

Is it possible for Christians and atheists (and agnostics and skeptics and so forth) to discuss religion without the discussion either remaining on such a superficial level that it hardly deserves to be called a discussion at all, with the participants either politely avoiding the subject entirely or ignoring their opponents' arguments, and/or or quickly degenerating into a bitter fight which threatens to permanently ruin friendships? I cannot recall a single example of a discussion which avoided both of these pitfalls. And I've seen a lot of discussions of religion between believers and non-. And yet here I am, trying again.

On January 20th of this year, someone noted in an Internet forum that on that day in the year 250, the Roman Emperor Decius began a persecution of Christians. Only with difficulty did I resist the temptation to make some flippant comment such as "A good start." or "And 1,759 years later, so much remains to be done."

I don't actually advocate killing Christians just because of their religion. But they do tend to weary me, when they talk about their religion. Otherwise, they're not necessarily any different to me than anyone else.

A few years ago, Jonathan Miller made a series for the BBC entitled "A Brief History of Disbelief." It's thoroughly excellent, I recommend it highly. Miller says he is an atheist, but that until recently he had been reluctant to describe himself so, and had given the matter little thought. I have heard many other disbelievers make comments similar to both of these. I find this very strange. Perhaps having been raised to believe in God, as I was, and then rejecting belief, causes one to be more inclined to think about the subject, and to think of oneself as an atheist rather than as an agnostic or to resist such labels altogether. Frankly, people who identify themselves as agnostics annoy me. It seems to me that their worldviews tend to be the same as those of us atheists, and that they're splitting hairs and being solipsistic. Strictly speaking, they're right: no-one can be certain whether God does or does not exist. But strictly speaking, nobody can be certain about anything else, either, and yet we get on with our lives as if we were certain of all sorts of things, and agnostics, for the most part, don't get solipsistic about a lot of other things.

Miller does a very good job in his program of showing how recent, in Christendom, is the phenomenon of fully open atheism. (Before Christianity, of course, and in parts of the world where Christianity has not dominated, speech was a bit freer.) He points out that even the Baron D'Holbach (1723-1789), often referred to as the "Newton of atheism," was not all that free and open in his atheism, and that people of his time often preferred to refer to themselves as deists -- sometimes because they were deists, and sometimes because deism was much safer than atheism. Between the 4th and the 18th centuries, in Christendom, you really have to read between the lines and guess just exactly how skeptical this person or that may have been. Besides deism, there arose in the 18th century (and persists to this day among, for example, many neoconservatives) the phenomenon of "elite atheism," where one, assuming oneself to belong to an elite, is an atheist, but believes it unwise to let atheism spread to the masses. Just very gradually did we get to the point of openness and tolerance of debate of such things which we enjoy today. And things could be more open still.

Not that I'm bitching or claiming I'm oppressed. Others still are, but me -- not so much. One unproductive result of Christianity -- and perhaps of many other religions. I don't know them nearly as well as I know Christianity -- is how it has spread the completely unrealistic idea of perfection. (Christianity inherited a lot on the subject of perfection from Plato and his followers.) I'm a firm believer that nobody and nothing is perfect. I admire Miller and Richard Dawkins and Spinoza and Einstein and Leibniz and Voltaire quite highly, even though Miller in his series on disbelief keeps referring to "Christianity" as if Western, that is, Catholic and then also Protestant, Christianity were the only sort there ever was, as if he had never heard of Byzantium and Orthodoxy, let alone the Armenian and Coptic and other assorted Churches; even though Dawkins starts off his fine book The Selfish Gene by quoting approvingly some jackass to the effect of the uselessness of philosophy before Darwin, and despite the fact, a fact which seems to have partly dawned on Dawkins himself, that The Selfish Gene is a very poor title for his very good book; even though Spinoza and Einstein made such easily-misunderstood comments about God; despite Leibniz' thedicee; and even though Voltaire reduced Leibniz, in his famous character Dr Pangloss, to this theodicee, even though Leibniz had all sorts of thoroughly brilliant things to say on a staggeringly wide variety of subjects other than religion. Hate the sin, love the sinner, say some Christians. I say, let's be as decent to them as we can, and not, however eyerollingly teethgringingly painful it may be when they get theological, mistake the belief for the whole believer. Peace out.