Wittgenstein somewhere wrote that old words should be periodically taken out of circulation like debased coins. His aphorism came to mind as I watched this video by Thomas Wictor. It opens: “Breitbart goes full racist, Jew-hating white supremacist” and then shows Breitbart articles about Trump’s constant pandering to pretty much everyone except heterosexual white men. It’s apparently “full racist, Jew-hating white supremacist” to point out that Trump basically ignores the demographic that essentially was America (or a great part thereof) until very very recently.
I grow weary of words like racist, anti-Semitic, white supremacist. We should have a moratorium on such words for a generation or two. I would add “democracy” to the list, a word that has come to mean anything I like just as “fascism” now means anything I don’t like.
The rule should be, when connotation excessively outweighs denotation the word has become effectively useless.
I’m too thick to understand Newton’s mathematical/scientific work, but heard he was an interesting chap so got Michael White’s biography second-hand for 50 pence on Amazon, and lugged it around for years from Germany to Italy, before finally reading it this summer. It’s a good enough work, mostly because Newton’s life & character were so astonishing it would be hard to write a dull biography of the man. Far from just sitting under an apple tree then retiring to Cambridge chambers for his entire life, he was also Warden of the Mint and became a spymaster, running espionage rings to uncover forgeries & forgers. The austere, seemingly asexual mathematical/scientific genius would be the boss Clint Eastwood’s Secret Service agent reports to after shooting a bunch of counterfeiters in In The Line of Fire:
Despite being stupid, I found White’s accounts of Newton’s scientific/mathematical work fascinating. One has something of the received glow of intellect which, I think, draws non-philosophers to Wittgenstein. Curiously, they both attended Trinity College, and both lived there for years; I’d be interested to know how close their rooms were, over the centuries.
White’s subtitle – The Last Sorcerer – refers to Newton’s decades-long study of alchemy:
Venerated by alchemists throughout history, it was said of Hermes Trismegistus that he ‘saw the totality of things. Having seen, he understood. Having understood, he had the power to reveal and show. And indeed what he knew, he wrote down. What he wrote he mostly hid away, keeping silence rather than speaking out, so that every generation coming into the world had to seek out these things.’
A Wittgensteinian resonance here, the opening and close of the Tractatus. The apparent foibles and silliness (as Auden would say) of many great thinkers is not a contradiction but rather the precondition for their achievements; hence the mystical impulse in Wittgenstein, the alchemical quest of Newton, join onto their more practical efforts:
Newton had acquired the information he needed to verify his lunar mechanics, and used it in the second edition of the Principia. It was this work that lay at the heart of computer programs employed by NASA scientists guiding the first spaceships to the Moon almost 300 years later.
The biography is quite serviceable, though there is occasionally a sense of the immense gap between the subject and biographer; White is a second-rater, not terrible, just nothing special, and he also launches into unfounded assertions (e.g. that Newton was probably having sex with X) and anti-Catholic vitriol, e.g.:
[Alexander] Pope’s opposition to Newtonianism sprang from a rich vein of religious bigotry.
I googled White, curious to see if his real name was Weiss, and found he was a second-rate pop star in the 80s, and wrote a biography of Tolkien; and surprise surprise the Tolkien biography is full of assertions like “Tolkien was a fanatical Catholic idiot who hated X because he was a Protestant”.
It’s amusing to speculate, what would Isaac Newton have thought of an ex-80s pop star writing his biography, in the last years of the 20th Century?
Everything is so carefully chosen & worn; and yet it requires a certain nonchalance. The clothing implies an attitude; it would look strange if worn in too formal and stiff a manner. The tie and waistcoat and jacket already look quite inflexible, and so the achievement is to wear such a careful assemblage without undue fuss, to lean against railings, to have a hand in one pocket; to look quite flexible & at ease, or as in this case to be contemplating some distant prospect, no doubt the chap above is thinking about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and so appears quite removed from the carapace of his clothing.
The clothing also invites the prospect of fluidity; I immediately wonder, What would it look like when he moves? Would it tug at the midriff? If he reached into a pocket for his pipe and lighter, would it look suave or awkward? Would he be able to deal out justice to a pack of wandering migrants or chavs?
I read Plato’s Lysis today, as part of the heroic ordeal which is Plato’s complete works. It’s a fairly typical early dialogue, which mostly run as follows:
Socrates is wandering around Athens looking for teenage boys to groom for sex.
He finds some aristocratic teenage boys and initiates a tiresome conversation about some topic, in this case friendship.
Almost nothing he says is sincere or logical. It is mostly sophistry. His favourite technique is a bait & switch, e.g. “we agree, do we not, my lovely boys, that people drink gin because they enjoy it? And enjoyment is a good. Therefore if we want to be good we must drink gin. Whisky is not gin, and what is not good but evil? Whisky, therefore, is evil.”
As he leads his victims down rhetorical rabbit holes they are reduced to baffled assent: to conclusions which, individually, seem fair enough, but which lead to insanity.
He then somehow leads things back to The Good and Wisdom and says the boys need a tutor to teach them about such things. They then beg Socrates to become their private tutors and the dialogue ends with them all agreeing to let Socrates do what he wants to them.
Lysis follows this course up to the ending, where Socrates is interrupted by the relatives and guardians of the boys he is trying to groom, and he is forced to scurry away like a paedophile at the playground.
The older I get, the harder it is for me to stomach Socrates. His sly, predatory manner around teenage boys, referring to them as “my beautiful boy!” and so on, and telling them how only an older man’s love can help them attain Wisdom and The Good, is almost as offputting as his sophistry and utter insincerity. He comes across as something between a paedophile and a used car salesman. In Vox Day’s terms, he is a gamma.
His tiresome “explorations” of e.g. friendship, seem designed to wear his victims down, so they numbly assent to being sodomized because they can’t understand anything and lose all faith in reason or logic and thus surrender to this leering old man.
It’s not all bad, mind you. Just reading a narrative from 2500 years ago is interesting, even if all modern translations make Socrates sound like a kind of Victorian parlour paedophile, full of “my good sir” and “by Jove!” and other incongruous idioms. And there are usually interesting moments, e.g.
“Look at it this way,” I said. “If someone smeared your blonde hair with white lead, would your hair then be white or appear white?”
An interesting question – that is, is there a difference between being and appearance when it comes to colour? But I was struck mostly that Lysis, like the Egyptian Pharoahs, is blonde. I’ve met several Greeks and they all look thoroughly Mediterranean, and when one looks at their dysfunctional corrupt nation it’s hard to reconcile with the Greece of Sophocles and Homer.
Unless – they are no longer the same genetic group, as the modern Egyptians are probably very different to those of yore. And then, perhaps there is a certain civilisational order which only appears in genetic groups liable to produce blondes, and these groups have lived as far afield as Egypt, Greece, modern Turkey, and are now mostly confined to Europe and dwindling fast.
Another interesting point that made this tedious dialogue almost worth reading:
From this we may infer that those who are already wise no longer love wisdom, whether they are gods or men. Nor do those love it who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid man loves wisdom. There remain only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant and stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing what they don’t know.
A point Wittgenstein might have appreciated, that those who are wise don’t love wisdom, that is, they don’t do philosophy.
Remainders 