Thursday, August 25, 2022

The first man (and woman) in the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns

 The Ancients, the Moderns, and all that jazz

Adam, the first man – and not my son, who bears the same name – has long been a subject of fascination. The story in Genesis of Adam and Eve and the Garden and the Snake and the Tree of Good and Evil has such a satisfying drive, like a beautiful dream; and like a dream, it seems to come to our waking senses to be somehow in fragments, lacking certain important connective moments.
Hobbes, in the Leviathan, uses a very interesting term to distinguish Adam in the first of a line of charismatic beings:
“From the very Creation, God not only reigned over all men Naturally by his might; but also had Peculiar Subjects, whom he commanded by a Voice, as one man speaketh to another. In which manner he Reigned over Adam, and gave him commandement to abstaine from the tree of cognizance of Good and Evill; which when he obeyed not, but tasting thereof, took upon him to be as God, judging between Good and Evill, not by his Creators commandement, but by his own sense, his punishment was a privation of the estate of Eternall life, wherein God had at first created him…”
The Peculiar Subjects are now called Leaders, Geniuses, or even, in the TED era of accelerated bourgeouis banality, Thought Leaders. Hobbes here is replaying the state of nature that Leviathan speculates about – the state of primal war – with paradise, in orthodox Anglican fashion, at the beginning. Hobbes seems to forget, though, that by the same property, i.e. being commanded by a voice, Eve was also a Peculiar Subject. This forgotten “aside” is typical of patriarchy, where the social logic that gives us masculine x does not give us feminine y because… well, we either forget about y or rationalize y away.
If history turns around Peculiar Subjects, it becomes an ultimately inscrutable affair, in as much as there seems to be no scrutable cause in God’s choice. For instance, he chooses Abraham. And out of Abraham’s descendants, he makes a Peculiar people, Israel, and he chooses certain persons among that Peculiar people, like Moses, or the prophets. For the English empiricists, history, then, can't be a science in any but the most bare bones way: a collection of facts, out of which we can speculate about causes but lack experimental apparatus to prove our hypotheses.
Having a Baconian interest in causes, this larger story causes Hobbes some difficulty. There are those who read Hobbes as an atheist, or at least theistically deist. In fact, there’s no reason to think Hobbes’ difficulty is unorthodox – without this historical difficulty, we subtract grace and faith from the world. We partake in the Peculiar Subject that is Jesus in communion. As Weber would put it, charisma is normalized in tradition.
If we look at Adam in the Early Modern British culture, he operates as a peculiar argument for the moderns as opposed to the ancients. Joseph Glanvill, who was the secretary of the Royal Society and on the side of the new learning, takes Adam’s fall (and Eve’s, though she isn’t mention) as an event in meta-physiology: not only do Adam’s descendants die, but they have to scrape by with their diminished sensorium:
“Adam needed no spectacles. The acuteness of his natural optics (if conjecture may have credit) showed him much of the celestial magnificence and bravery without a Galileo's tube: and 'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper world as we with all the advantages of Art. His sight could inform him whether the Loadstone doth attract by Atomical Effluviums. It may be he saw the motion of the blood and spirits through the transparent skin as we do the workings of those little industrious animals (bees) through a hive of glasse Sympathies and Antipathies were to him no occult qualities, &c."
Glanvill’s Scepsis Scientifica, where he made these claims, is prefaced by a defense of this interpretation of Adam. It is a highly wrought passage, the kind of prose that delighted moderns like James Joyce.
“But lest the ingenious rumble at my threshold, and take offence at
the seemingly disproportionate excess, which I ascribe to Adam's senses: I'll subjoin a
word to prevent the scruple. First then, for those that go the way of the allegoric, and
assert pre-existence; I'm secure enough from their dissatisfaction. For, that the
ethereal Adam could easily sense the most tender touches Upon his passive vehicle,
and so had a clear and full perception of objects, which we since plunged into the
grosser hyle are not at all, or but a little aware of; can be no doubt in their hypothesis.
Nor can there as great a difference be supposed between the senses of eighty, and
those of twenty, between the opticks of the blind bat and peripicacious eagle, as there
was between those pure uneclipsed sensations, and aide of our now-embodyed,
muddied sensitive. Now that the pr-existent Adam could so advantageously form his
vehicle, as to receive better information from the distant objects, than we by the most
helpful telescopes; will be no difficult admission to the friends of the allegory. So that
what may seem a mere hyperbolical, and fanciful display to the sons of the letter; to
the allegorists will be but a defective representation of literal realities.”
That time reversal – in which the ancients become young, and the moderns become old, by analogy to the human organism (with its own tender touches upon its passive vehicle – I am going to stifle the obvious dirty joke here, but surely this is referenced somewhere in Finnegan’s Wake), is a pattern that becomes central to the New Learning’s self image. Newton sees farther because he is seated on the shoulders of giants.
Bernard Bouvier de la Fontenelle, the great popularizer of the new learning, recounts the story of Hartsoecker in his Eloge to the Dutch scholar in 1725. This story makes a strong claim that Hartsoecker was the first to examine human sperm with a microscope. It is a story that brings together onanism and science, shame and discovery, in a truly Adamic flourish.
Hartsoecker was 18 when he built his first microscope, on a model he remembered from seeing Leeuwenhoek's. And he shut himself up in his room, for fear his father would find out what he was doing.
“ … [he was} the first for whom was unveiled the most unexpected spectacle in the world for physicians, even the most bold in speculation : these little animals up to now invisible, which were transformed into pleaop, which swam in prodigious qantities in the liquid appointed to carry them, only in those of males, which have the shape of tadpoles, with big heads and long tails, and lively movements. This strange novelty astonished the observer, who did not dare to speak of it. He even thought that what he saw might be some strange sickness, and he did not follow up on his observation. »
The enduring, fundamental narcissism of the human male! I could make the parallels - the hiding from the father, the shame - but I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. I am sure that if this story were abroad in the circles where Fontenelle moved, it was, perhaps, available to Jonathan Swift, who would have loved it – and drawn quite another conclusion than Fontenelle. Hartsoecker has a quality of mind that seems quite… Gulliverian.

No comments:

Asking

Yesterday, I watched a very sparkly Biden official, who looked like he had just come from the Ken-at-High-School-UN box, answer questions fr...