Bollettino

When LI ruminated this joint into being, we decided that we were not going to spend our time exclusively referring people to other blogs. Our idea was that the Internet is so incredibly big that we could wander through it the way a Borges character might wander through the Library of Babel, randomly pulling out sites, spilling contents, going on eccentric and timewasting tangents. In this library, there is definitely a place for blogs (and for porno, and for pictures of cats, and for listservs, etc., etc.) and we try to sneak in links to those blogs we like or those that have caught our interest for some reason; but the blogosphere is so intensely inward looking that we felt that we couldn’t compete with those bloggers who do this much better.  For this reason, we’ve never constructed a permanent list of links, since the goal was, and is, to embed the shock of recognition contained by the link in the post.  LI has been re-thinking that of late. Should we surrender to the common format? Readers, tell us what you think.

Since the Dem and Republican conventions invited bunches of political bloggers to report on them, there has been another run of “what are blogs”” article in the press, and another run of blog triumphalism in the sphere. I’m rather sick of that. In the meantime, go to this link:  the Bureau of Public secrets  

BOPS is a website run by some old situationalist – or perhaps by some young fan of the situationalists. Lately, they have been doing something very very cool – they have been putting up Kenneth Rexroth’s poems and essays semi-officially, after contacting New Directions. We read Rexroth’s fascinating essay on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry last night,  and have been mulling over this paragraph. It comes after Rexroth makes the obvious comparison of Lawrence to Hardy, with particular reference to one of Lawrence’s early poems, ‘The Hymn to Priapus’:

“Hardy was a major poet. Lawrence was a minor prophet. Like Blake and Yeats, his is the greater tradition. If Hardy ever had a girl in the hay, tipsy on cider, on the night of Boxing Day, he kept quiet about it. He may have thought that it had something to do with “the stream of his life in the darkness deathward set,” but he never let on, except indirectly.”

This led me, following that Library of Babel riff, on a search for Lawrence’s poems. Go in particular to this crazy Danish site, which throws copyright law to the wind and publishes six collections of Lawrence’s poetry (including his worst – the Pansies collection).
Here’s one of the poems that torches a whole lyrical tradition. This is the kind of prophetic anger Rexroth is after, in which a vast, over-reaching cultural despair is poured into a situation so stylized by the love lyric as to have become numb. Lawrence's great idea is to pull out the pliers and work on the numb until he hits a shrieking nerve.  So he progresses from a poor first stanza, with its waxy flower/sunshine image, to heap up images of default, of natural and supernatural catastrophe, until one balked moment -- a moment of impotence -- becomes a blinding stroke of lightning in which the annihilating power of the system of enlightenment -- that butcher's power that systematically strips the animal from the man -- is revealed as a hideous commonplace -- as the implacably cruel intention behind the seeming kindness, the seeming morality, of the civilizing process.  

Last Words to Miriam

 

 

Yours is the sullen sorrow,

       The disgrace is also mine;

Your love was intense and thorough,

Mine was the love of a growing flower
5
       For the sunshine.

 

You had the power to explore me,

       Blossom me stalk by stalk;

You woke my spirit, you bore me

To consciousness, you gave me the dour
10
       Awareness — then I suffered a balk.

 

Body to body I could not

       Love you, although I would.

We kissed, we kissed though we should not.

You yielded, we threw the last cast,
15
       And it was no good.

 

You only endured, and it broke

       My craftsman's nerve.

No flesh responded to my stroke;

So I failed to give you the last
20
       Fine torture you did deserve.

 

You are shapely, you are adorned

       But opaque and null in the flesh;

Who, had I but pierced with the thorned

Full anguish, perhaps had been cast
25
       In a lovely illumined mesh

 

Like a painted window; the best

       Fire passed through your flesh,

Undrossed it, and left it blest

In clean new awareness. But now
30
       Who shall take you afresh?

 

Now who will burn you free

       From your body's deadness and dross?

Since the fire has failed in me,

What man will stoop in your flesh to plough
35
       The shrieking cross?

 

A mute, nearly beautiful thing

       Is your face, that fills me with shame

As I see it hardening;

I should have been cruel enough to bring
40
       You through the flame.

 

Bollettino

My God! Somebody gets it!

Last week, the NEA issued a report, "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America." The report lamented the decline of the reading of novels and poetry and such in America. The reports about the report lamented the same thing. Party line about reading is that it is always a good thing in itself.

Carlin Romano’s column in the Chronicle of Higher C. examined the report, and found some of the statistics not so dire. That is interesting, but what rivets yours truly, a book reviewer who desperately wants out of the trade, is the end of Romano’s article. I could hardly believe it. They are almost word for word what I have been telling people forever – in fact, what I told the book editor at the Austin Chronicle just last week. 
  
"Almost nothing in our culture," the distinguished New York book editor Elisabeth Sifton memorably observed in a Harper's symposium years ago, "encourages the private moment of reading."I love that line. I also believe in its ironic, absurdist corollary: "Almost nothing in the modern American newspaper and magazine encourages the private moment of reading." Owners slash space for book reviews and coverage at the same time that they bemoan their own loss of readers. Then they order the remaining readers to do anything -- ANYTHING -- but read in their spare time. True, the three highest-circulation seven-day-a-week newspapers in America are also the three with the most powerful book coverage. But the NEA isn't worried in "Reading at Risk" about beneficiaries of the enlightened managers of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.So we're left with a general media environment in which the readerly commit a kind of cultural suicide in pursuit of the less readerly. In magazine and newspaper offices across the country, well-educated editors stuff their publications with pieces about trash movies, hip-hop hotties, reality-TV spinoffs, and ingénue profiles -- then go home and read a book. As print people drive their hordes toward nonprint media, TV folks -- supposedly a dimmer breed -- cleverly ignore the competition, rarely acknowledging what's in the local papers and almost never devoting a minute to a nonpresidential book.”

LI wrote something similar to the book editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where Romano works, a few years ago. That editor had written us a very depressing letter about the state of book reviewing – based on the cuts he had to make in the section’s size – and we wrote back:

“That is sad, X… The ice age is all around us, I'm afraid. I hope that after this terrible quarter is over and advertising resumes at some reasonable level, papers will resume running their cultural sections. I don't think that is just optimism -- I mean, books are not only a 20 billion dollar industry in themselves, but they generate movies, music, the public discourse -- they have incalculable benefits. Ironically, just as corporations are discovering intangible assets, i.e. the intricate web of know how among their employees -- newspapers are doing their best to pretend that books, which are the body and substance of that know-how, are a minor part of the whole, dispensable extras. They are cutting their own throats. Those people who don't read books will stop reading newspapers. That's a Q.E.D. To encourage a lively book page is to seed the newspaper readers of the future.”
  
Michael Dirda’s piece on the report in the WP today is less thought provoking.  
  
Dirda says some smart things in the piece, and some stupid things. The smart thing he says is that the literate person can’t just read today’s best sellers. Reading a book that was published this year, without having any knowledge of books that have been written over the centuries, is like examining an ice cube without any knowledge of water. The dumb thing he says is that the Internet is hogging reading time with its daily plethora of boring, trivial matter. Weblogs and such. He makes this charge in spite of the fact that he confesses to not using the Web much.

If he did use the web, then he would discover that, in fact, the Internet has reanimated literary life in ways the survey is designed not to show. When I lived in Gwinnett County Georgia a few years ago I discovered that if I went to the County’s main library and looked for, say, Mill on the Floss, I was shit out of luck – as my pap used to say. The books on display dealt with astrology, investing in real estate, the romances  of Princess Di, and how Jesus could save you from perversion, alcoholism, and bad teeth. The one thing that was systematically absent from the shelves were books (saving the Bible) that had been written earlier than say 1980.

So I went home and looked it up on the web. Sure enough, I found a copy of Mill on the Floss on a Princeton U. site. There is now a national library – in fact, there are several. There is Gutenberg. There is Black Mask. There is the Liberty Library. There is Constitution.org. There are Athena, ABU, Gallica, Les Classiques des sciences socials, etc. etc. Dirda instances his recent reading of Clarissa to show how important it is to read in depth – but where are you going to get a copy of Clarissa in Dothan, Alabama? in Niles, Michigan? In Nederland, Texas? You will get it here. 

The instrumental interpretations of the report are interesting, as far as they go. But LI has long been interested in the fate of reading literature in a modernity characterized by a systematic hostility to ritual. If one uses Victor Turner’s definition of ritual - "prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings and powers" – it describes at least one aspect, a very important one, of reading novels and poems. And it also helps one get a grip upon the ambivalent triumph of the novel over the poem in the in the West – in France, Britain, and the U.S. –  that makes Americans, provincially, believe that poetry is some romantic remnant form. That isn’t true – if you ever talk to Russians, or Bulgarians, or Turks, or Arabs, you soon realize that cultures differ in their preferred literary form, with some cultures being poetry cultures (Turkey, for instance), some novel cultures (the U.S.) and some mixed (Russia). We think that the decline in reading has to be thought of in conjunction with what reading does. Romano points out that there is really a shift in the place of reading, with the survey’s exclusion of reading in the classroom and at work being, perhaps, an overlooked factor in the overt decline in non-leisure reading.  We will do another post about reading and ritual soon. 

 

 

Bollettino

Our fave learned journal, Common Knowledge, has published it’s summer issue. There is a special section devoted to “Neo-Stoic Alternatives, c.1200-2004: Essays on Folly and Detachment.” The dates are a little optimistic. For scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, it has gradually become apparent that understanding the intellectual patterns in these centuries in terms of the opposition between the Aristotelianism of the schoolmen and Galileo’s science is grossly insufficient. Some of the most interesting work of modern scholarship has centered  around the rediscovery of, or perhaps it would be better to say the appropriation of, stoicism, such as one sees it in Montaigne’s essays. 

 We especially like one of the articles, Unmasking The World: Bruegel's Ethnography, by Art Historian Joseph Leo Koerner. Koerner’s goal is to run a couple of themes through Bruegel’s work. One of the themes is this: “The ethics of this neo-Stoicism urged pleasure in the experience of distance—of distance from, though curiosity about, the lifeworld of one's time and place. The neo-Stoic is the ethnographer at home, observing his culture invent its lifeworld and then behave as if it were nature's own.” We wonder about these terms – ethnography, lifeworld - and the alien feel of them to that humanistic vocabulary that meditated on curiosities, and sought keys to hieroglyphs. Still, Koerner’s words seem to work for Bruegel’s work, in which the necessity to expand in scope – and thus to assume a distance – is derived from the multitudinous activities that he has to picture.
Koerner’s a great see-er of pictures. Here he is on a bit of Bruegel’s painting of “Fight between Carnival and Lent:”

“Behind Lent's cart, a boy with a basket on his head is busy munching bread, carrying shoes and pretzels, and staring out at us. His humanizing distance from his function in the ritual dramatizes what Bruegel's painting everywhere confirms. Bruegel seems to document, more than to create, the symbolism of which his painting consists. The peculiar detachment of his performance as a painter from the performances that he records finds a reflection in the represented actors themselves. Shown to stand just outside their own activity, they, like the painter, contribute to our sense that we peer behind their masks to an underlying personality. To further complicate matters, however, Carnival and Lent are themselves both masquerades and rituals of unmasking. Cousin to the dramatic form of the antimasque, Carnival reveals the true nature of people and society by mocking their covering illusions: its bizarre costumes and practices aim at a brief but subversively realistic portrayal of the physical and social body. Lent, in turn, banishes Carnival's travesties by reintroducing with a vengeance the drab infirmity of everyday life. Whereas Carnival unmasks life by giving it a temporarily unrestrained expression, Lent unmasks death—hence, in Bruegel's picture, the several corpses that later collectors masked by painting over them. Even as Bruegel distances himself from these ritual forms, he carries into his picture their negative labor.”

Indeed, there is something to this weighing of distances. We don’t see distance transformed into the heraldic past (as we do in the background of hundred of Annunciations); we don’t see this distance as a divine usufruct; we see this distance as the condition of a certain curiosity. Ethnographic, Koerner thinks – and that works. The participant/observer ambiguity is certainly there. Bruegel, Koerner says, was enrolled into a myth after his death – that he was a peasant. The modern take is that he was a sophisticate. But the myth reads at least part of that distance right. 

Last year, in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Perez Zagorin began an essay on Bruegel with a note on the divergent, contradictory interpretations that his work evokes:

“Since the late nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century, when Pieter Bruegel ceased to be seen simply as the naive artist Pieter the Droll and Peasant Bruegel, chosen, as his first biographer Carel van Mander said, "from among the peasants" to be "the delineator of peasants,"  he has been generally ranked among the foremost artists of the Netherlands and northern Renaissance as well as one of the greatest of European painters. His oeuvre is broad, consisting of moral allegories and satires, panoramic landscapes, religious and biblical themes, and a variety of genre and secular scenes. Anyone who looks attentively at his forty-odd paintings, his drawings, and the prints made after the latter is likely to notice not only their strong formal structure and outstanding skill in organizing pictorial space, their command of the complex disposition of large masses of figures, and their masterly sureness and economy of figural draftsmanship in the depiction of human beings in every kind of posture and action, but also that many of them seem to be animated by some idea. Gazing at such engrossing and intensely vital images of human life and nature as his paintings of proverbs and children's games, festive peasants, the seasons, and religious subjects like the tower of Babel, Christ on the road to Calvary, and the triumph of death, the viewer is bound to recognize that the painter, in the words of Edward Snow, quoting Cezanne, was "a thinker in images." works known through thousands of reproductions, have elicited very divergent readings….  They have been variously perceived as comic and sympathetic representations of peasant life by a humane observer, as detached and accurate descriptions by an objective recorder, as graphic allegories of human folly, as visions of an organic community which is passing away, as products of a literary and pictorial genre of satirical commentaries on peasant crudity, gluttony, and lechery, and as an expression of the social condescension and moral superiority which humanist intellectuals and the dominant landed and urban classes of the painter's time are said to have felt toward peasants and popular culture.”

Simply listing those ideas damasks them – somewhat unfairly, since the list’s very heterogeneity allows Zagorin to avoid committing himself to acts of individual criticism. Since Koerner’s essay is printed in a special section of Common Knowledge dedicated to neo-stoicism, another “idea” is being at least claimed to be countenanced by the painter’s work. Of course, painters have several ideas. They think they’ll put some purple in that corner; they think it is time for a brewsky; they think that armed revolution would be a good thing; they think their girlfriends are betraying them… and so on. Famously, as Zagorin points out, Bruegel – as well as Bosch -- has been the subject of a story started by a critic of the thirties, Charles de Tonay, that he belonged to a millennial sect, the Family of Love. And that sect was a sext sect – to the pure all things are pure, I am pure, ergo, let’s get down.
Koerner has a welcome knack for seeing that a painting isn’t a space that is given all at once. His interpretation of Bruegel’s paintings depends on the fact that the eye tours the surface. In other words, the seeing of the painting exists in time. Too often this aspect of perspective – its deferring function – is neglected. There is a line of painting, going through the minimalists, that takes the painted surface as a means of seizing the eye’s seeing in something that is impossible to tour – and thus throwing the eye back on itself and its present. This is the claim of the purely painterly, and it is present as an element in every painting.  Here is Koerner doing the phenomenon of seeing a Bruegel painting, Jesus Carrying the Cross:
“A viewer needs to remember his or her first impression of Bruegel's picture to recognize its radical design. An initial experience goes something like this. We enter the picture through the grand sweep of the landscape. Bruegel plots this sweep through the flow of figures from the sunken distance on the left, past a middle ground, to a higher distance on the right. There, in the spatial and narrative full stop of the circular crowd, we notice that the cross of Christ is missing and we are sent back to the foreground, to a scene we perhaps noticed but slipped past due to its formal reserve. Yet here, where we expect to find him among his followers, Christ is still absent. The stake and wheel at the far right, together with the skull at its base, help trick us into thinking that the crucifix rises next to the Virgin, on Golgotha, hill of the skull. Between the skull and the wheel, however, a second group of mourners nudge us back into the landscape. Some wear contemporary dress; the man in the red cap at furthest to the right (who, like us, observes the landscape with the stake just to his side) is believed to be a self- portrait. In any case, it is around now that, tossed back into the agitated movement of the crowds, we seek and at last discover the tiny figure of Christ.

Dwarfing him in the expansive landscape, crowding him out by a teeming humanity, Bruegel performs the world's nonrecognition of Christ—also the subject of several of paintings by Bosch. Love of the world, for Bosch, caused everyone to overlook Christ in heaven. Yet whereas in works like Bosch's Hay Wain our own perspective as viewers of the triptych remains aligned with a salvific structure, in Bruegel's Jesus Carrying the Cross our place is inside the sinful parade, not only because Bruegel offers no external standpoint from which to view it with impunity, but also because he assures us that our world is the same. Realism, the sense we get that "this is how people actually look and act" repeats both our knowing the world and our not knowing Christ.”

We love the fancy stepping here. To see in, to go further, to back up – these are not in particular the stages of a narrative, which is, of course, the temptation with Bruegel, and an increasingly over-used trope in criticism -- everything must be narrativized this season. But Koerner's description of the viewer's passage through the painting is a narrative about a non-narrative reality. The narrative, here, is outside of the painting. It was suffered through by Christ.  Inside is the observer’s moment –and the observer’s gains and losses, shuffles and ducks.  

Bollettino

LI recommends Richard Cohen’s column in the WP this morning. Most of the re-assessments of the supporters of the Iraq war have cast their positions, both then and now, in the light of their smooth and consistent use of reason. Meritocrats all, they added up reasons pro and con and do their little checklists, they read the journals, they know all about the history. Except of course they know nothing about the history, the checklists consisted of bogus items, and they wrote for the journals they read – groupthink in monad-land. There are, remember, no windows in monads. Cohen is not having any of this, and he chooses a clever image to make his point: that recent issue of the New Republic that featured a lot of hedging liberal hawks:

“I mention anthrax for the simple reason that no one does anymore. It's a curious silence since, along with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, it all but dominated the news. Some of us did not get mail deliveries and, when they resumed, we went into secure rooms where we donned latex gloves and face masks before opening letters. On a tip, I asked my doctor early on to prescribe Cipro for me, only to find out that, insider though I thought I was, nearly everyone had been asking him for the same thing. People made anthrax-safe rooms, and one woman I know of had a mask made for her small dog. I still don't know if that was a touching gesture or just plain madness.

My point is that we were panicked. Yet that panic never gets mentioned. Last month the New Republic published a "special issue" in which a bevy of very good writers wondered whether they had been wrong to support the war in Iraq. Most of them admitted to having erred about this or that detail or in failing to appreciate how badly George Bush would administer the war and the occupation. But none confessed to being seized by the zeitgeist. I read the magazine cover to cover and unless I somehow missed it, the word anthrax never appeared. Imagine! Not once! Not a single one of these writers admitted to panicking over anthrax.”

According to the Forth Worth Star Telegram, Ashcroft’s DOJ report on the Patriot Act claims that it "has charged 310 defendants with criminal offenses as a result of terrorism investigations" since 9-11, and that 179 have been convicted.

The thirty five of that number who were charged in Iowa have turned out to be a fiercesome group of dedicated jihadists, according to a story in the Des Moines Register (via Atrios). The story, picked up by the Omaha paper, lists some of the villains:

“Included among the 35 cases were:

• Four American-born laborers who omitted mention of prior drug convictions or other crimes when they were assigned by a contractor to a runway construction project at the Des Moines airport or when they applied for manual-labor jobs there.

• Five Mexican citizens who stole cans of baby formula from store shelves throughout Iowa and sold them to a man of Arab descent for later resale.

• Two Pakistani men who entered into or solicited sham marriages so that they and their friends could continue to live in the Waterloo area and work at convenience stores there.”

Our favorite quote in the article comes from Ashcroft’s prosecutor on the spot, Richard Murphey. Surely Murphey was suckled on J. Edgar Hoover’s You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communist). Tough as nails, the man’s x ray vision saw right through that baby food scam, and what he saw sent shivers through his spine: the attack on Western Civilization:

“Prosecutors stressed that many of the Iowa cases were classic examples of illegal activities that are perpetrated by terrorist groups. And though any evidence of terrorist connections or motives was rarely mentioned in the courtroom, officials implied that some of the suspects might still be under suspicion, even since their release.

"'Bona fide' terrorism is a matter of semantics," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Murphy, who heads the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Cedar Rapids. "I don't think you can draw conclusions based on what a person is convicted of."

Murphy has started a strike force to target jaywalking by anyone with a terrorist sounding last name. There are also the terrorist shop lifters to go after – especially the ones that ‘boost’ gateway products, like lipstick and hair dye. In a memo that LI has obtained from the famed prosecutor’s office, he explains: “Lipstick and hair dye look trivial to the civilian eye. The fellow travelers and soft on crime crowd will yell and whine. But remember: yesterday’s thefts of Maybelline TN-100 lead to tomorrow’s thefts of aluminum tubes and yellowcake uranium. There are no gray areas here. You are with us, or against us.

Just yesterday there was report of an Arab looking fellow cheating a McDonald’s take out cashier of a buck fifty. This guy is loose in America. He could meet your daughter tomorrow. Think about it.”

Bollettino
 
This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead - all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.
– Michel Foucault,  Discipline and Punish 
  
 
There is an aspect of the Bush administration’s conservatism that has not often enough been scrutinized: its attachment to the engineering achievements of the late nineteenth century. Hence its love affair with the internal combustion engine, the coal burning power plant, and the test.
 
Bush naïve fondness for testing is like a man who judges the success of his dentist by the amount of pain the man inflicts.  From what we know of Bush’s academic career, he was never a good taker of tests. He took away from that experience a certain awe of them. Tests, in his mind, are powerful idols that must be placated. If you placate them with enough sacrifice, you receive a good grade. And if you receive a good grade, you must have learned something. Given this chain of reasoning, it is no wonder that his educational initiative is perhaps the most concentrated expression of testmania in American history.
 
LI is, on the contrary, an old skeptic of tests. We have taught classes, given tests, and graded them. Indeed, usually our grades did correspond with our intuitions about the relative merits of our students – their grasp of the subject, their willingness to work, and their acquaintance with the elements of English grammar. However, as an instrument for assessing learning, we find testing highly suspect. Like all assessments of human performance, its advocates like to cast over it the aura of objective measurement. But because assessment is embedded in social activity, the measurement, here, inevitably effects the thing measured. While the cloth is indifferent to the ruler the seamstress lays over it to cut off a given length, humans are not at all indifferent to measurements that will reward or punish them, and will change their behavior accordingly. Teaching the test instead of teaching, the numbers achieved by American kids may go up, but the quality of what they learn will certainly go down. This, we think, makes testmania a disaster for U.S. education.
 
That disaster emerges from two things: the qualitative change brought about in the social nature of knowledge from the quantitative change in knowledge itself, which necessitates that shedding of a context of schooling adapted for the assembly line rather than the network; and the nature of the test itself, as a disciplinary, rather than a learning, tool, as it has developed in the American classroom.
 
More later. 
  
 

Bollettino
 
But I will never believe that all natural Knowledge was shut up in Aristotle's Brain, or that the Heathen only invaded Nature, and found out her Strength. We know that Time and not Reason, Experience and not Art both taught the Causes of such Effects, as that Sowerness doth Co[...]gulate Milk; but ask the Reason why and how it does it, and Vulgar Philosophy cannot satisfie you; nor in many Things of the like Nature, as why Grass is green rather than red. Man hardly discerns the Things on Earth; his Time is but short to learn, and begins no sooner to learn than to dye: Whose Memory has but a borrowed Knowledge; understanding nothing truly, and is ignorant of the Essence of his own Soul; which Aristotle could never define, but by effects, which all Men know as well as he. – Sir Walter Raleigh
 
The prestige of the  experiment
In 1877, John Tyndall gave an address in Belfast that was emblematic of the high and confident positivism of the time. In one passage, he violates one of the canons of Victorian gentility – the Oxford variety – by aligning himself with the gloriously vulgar tradition, going back to Francis Bacon, of using Aristotle, conceived of as the father of  a lot of a priori nonsense, as an all purpose punching bag:  
 
“…in Aristotle, as in Goethe, it was not, I believe, misdirection, but sheer natural incapacity which lay at the root of his mistakes. As a physicist, Aristotle displayed what we should consider some of the worst attributes of a modern physical investigator: indistinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a confident use of language, which led to the delusive notion that he had really mastered his subject, while he had as yet failed to grasp even the elements of it. He put words in the place of things, subject in the place of object. He preached Induction without practising it, inverting the true order of inquiry by passing from the general to the particular, instead of from the particular to the general. He made of the universe a closed sphere, in the centre of which he fixed the earth, proving from general principles, to his own satisfaction and to that of the world for near 2,000 years, that no other universe was possible. His notions of motion were entirely unphysical. It was natural or unnatural, better or worse, calm or violentóno real mechanical conception regarding it lying at the bottom of his mind. He affirmed that a vacuum could not exist, and proved that if it did exist motion in it would be impossible. He determined a priori how many species of animals must exist, and shows on general principles why animals must have such and such parts. When an eminent contemporary philosopher, who is far removed from errors of this kind, remembers these abuses of the a priori method, he will be able to make allowance for the jealousy of physicists as to the acceptance of so-called a priori truths. Aristotle's errors of detail, as shown by Eucken and Lange, were grave and numerous. He affirmed that only in man we had the beating of the heart, that the left side of the body was colder than the right, that men have more teeth than women, and that there is an empty space at the back of every man's head.
There is one essential quality in physical conceptions which was entirely wanting in those of Aristotle and his followers. I wish it could be expressed by a word untainted by its associations; it signifies a capability of being placed as a coherent picture before the mind. The Germans express the act of picturing by the word vorstellen, and the picture they call a Vorstellung. We have no word in English which comes nearer to our requirements than Imagination, and, taken with its proper limitations, the word answers very well; but, as just intimated, it is tainted by its associations, and therefore objectionable to some minds.”

Tyndall’s groping attempt to put his chemical stained fingers around a term to distinguish a distinct, yet under-conceptualized  mental act  – and can’t one feel him almost painfully balance just on the edge of the unknown word, like Watson trying to follow one of Holmes’ points – eerily points to the need that was met ten years later, when just the thing emerged under the pen of a German physicist, Ernst Mach. The Gedanken-experiment was born.

Ever since, it has been retrospectively accorded to other times and conceptual schemes, as I’ve tried to point to in previous posts. I’ve also tried to point to the problem in taking the thought experiment seriously as an experiment.

We don’t kid ourselves that our objections will squelch the word. We don’t want to. The relation between the thought experiment and the experiment is like the relation between the red breasted American thrush and the English robin: they look enough alike that English settlers in the New World called the thrush a robin. Lexically, only a pedant would object to that – taxonomically, it is a disaster. 

A common defense of thought experiments, among philosophers, is that thought experiments are a common element of science. In fact,  we have read claims that in certain scientific discourses, they have an essential function. LI doesn’t doubt it. However, the move from saying that that class of things that we call “thought experiments” play a role in science to saying that they are indeed a type of experiment is not dependent on a clear view of experiments, but on the prestige of science, which is considered to be ultimately experimental. In other words, we are eye to eye with a vicious circle. Prestige, here, underwrites this logical leap. What it tells us is two things: we are dealing, first of all, with myth; and secondly, we are dealing with myth in terms of a the archaic system of legitimation that consists in referring to authority, rather than rationality.

Our protest against the prestige of thought experiments in philosophy stems from our sense of what experiment meant in the first place. Tyndall’s cool evaluation of Aristotle might not be textually correct re the man himself, but it is certainly correct about the spirit of Aristotelianism. The introduction of the experimental method in Europe in the seventeenth century was about one thing: the art of discovery. The point was to get outside of your head. That the world outside could be discovered was a tremendously exciting and hazardous thing.

The mania for thought experiments cruelly inverts this moment. Reflection, instead of being forced to confront the obdurant outlines of some irrepressible piece of exteriority, contents itself with the soft and pleasing task of creating bad fictions in the image of its desires. The movement from Bacon, whose death as a ‘martyr to experimentation’ is well described by Macaulay – see our little note – to  the spectacle of a Chalmers, doing “consciousness science’ by means of infantile fantasies of zombies, is a painful indicator that civilization ain’t what it used to be.

In  a conference on thought experiments that was published in the 1992 PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Ian Hacking, one of LI’s favorite philosophers, commented on the papers presented that defended the validity of the thought experiment. He conceded the force of many of the arguments for thought experiments, but his emphasis was on the fact that he felt, in the presence of the thought experiment, unmoved. That is, he felt that the experiment was not explicative. Experiments, in Hacking’s account, have a life – thought experiments exist frozen in their pictorial essence. Referring to Thomas Kuhn’s essay on thought experiments, Hacking points to the character of good thought experiments:
 
“… thought experiments are rather fixed, largely immutable. That is yet another respect that thye are like mathematical  proofs, but good proofs have proof ideas that can be used over and over in new contexts – which is not, in general the case with thought experiments. They have just one tension to expose. Of course there are false starts, and the exposition gets neater over time. And here the prescience of Kuhn’s paper comes to the fore. The reason that people wrestle with thought experiments, use thme for exposition and pu-down argument, is that they can reveal tensions between one vision of the world and another. They can dislodge a person from a certain way of describing the worlds. They can replace one picture by another. That is their job, their once and future job.”
 
This is all we really feel like saying about thought experiments. Campers, come home! We’ll talk about something less elevated in our next post. Promise.
 
Note: Macaulay’s description of Bacon’s death:
It had occurred to him that snow might be used with advantage for the purpose of preventing animal substances from putrefying. On a very cold day, early in the spring of the year 1626, he alighted from his coach near Highgate, in order to try the experiment. He went into a cottage, bought a fowl, and with his own hands stuffed it with snow. While thus engaged he felt a sudden chill, and was soon so much indisposed that it was impossible for him to return to Gray's Inn. The Earl of Arundel, with whom he was well acquainted, had a house at Highgate. To that house Bacon was carried. The Earl was absent; but the servants who were in charge of the place showed great respect and attention to the illustrious guest. Here, after an illness of about a week, he expired early on the morning of Easter-day, 1626. His mind appears to have retained its strength and liveliness to the end. He did not forget the fowl which had caused his death. In the last letter that he ever wrote, with fingers which, as he said, could not steadily hold a pen, he did not omit to mention that the experiment of the snow had succeeded "excellently well"