In a Glass Dome

So let us begin with a classic case of simplifying.

Ptolemy’s planets from the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1st Edition, 1771). Wikipedia

In this diagram of Ptolemy’s universe (developed ca. 150), planets revolve in epicycles around invisible points revolving around a stable earth. This explanation squared with the ancient belief that our earth was the center of the universe. 

Based on Nicolaus Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Wikipedia

Move the sun to the center as Copernicus did in 1543, and the need for epicycles disappears. Natural philosophers had found Ptolemy’s explanation satisfactory for about 1200 years and resisted Copernicus’s. Beginning in 1609, however, Galileo began making observations with telescopes, producing a series of phenomena that made the geocentric model of the universe harder and harder to defend. However, even Copernicus, for whom the starry dome of the night sky overhead became the “immobile sphere of fixed stars,” did not get it all right.

The accuracy of the sun-centered explanation of the motion of the planets seems obvious to us now, since it is a so much simpler explanation. We often refer to Occam’s razor to explain the scientific preference for the simplest explanation, but William of Occam (1287-1347) was not the first one to formulate this idea; ironically, a much earlier statement of it, “We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible,” was made by Ptolemy. However, another formulation of Occam’s razor is more precise in its application of simplicity: “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected” (Wikipedia). 

The Ptolemaic model required many assumptions, some of which reached far beyond astronomy and were entangled with religious belief so that in the 16th Century, disassembling the world view based on the geocentric universe was hardly a simple act because the heliocentric view of the planets required a whole new view of the world.Religion functioned then as science does now: a universally accepted schema for explaining the world. For us, science predicts the future, tells us what to eat, heals us, speaks the obscure language of mathematics, explicates the stars and planets to us, and understands the mysteries of the invisible quanta, just as medieval Christianity did. If some discovery falsified crucial assumptions of the scientific process—the discovery that, for example, the earth is actually a computer simulation and the code has just been changed so that some conclusions already proven are no longer true—if such a proposition were itself proven, would we all embrace it immediately because it was a simple explanation for why some outcomes defied science? For the 16th Century, heliocentrism was not a simple solution.

Galileo’s proofs of the Copernican universe met with serious push-back, and he died while still in official disgrace, but later, when he was reburied in a place of greater honor, the middle finger of his right hand was removed from his body. Currently on display in a glass dome, it is suitably mounted in a vertical position, perhaps as a warning to those of us too invested in our assumptions to see the simple truth of our situation.

The Ambiguity of Humor: The Joke’s on You

From the King Trump Bible. Real Time with Bill Maher, 

September 18, 2015

This Bible parody from Bill Maher’s show is intended to be humorous. I think it is. It uses the wonderful camel/needle eye, rich man/heaven comparison, which appears in all three of the synoptic gospels, and uses it to satirize a man whose primary claim to fame is that he is a rich man as he tries to gain the support of Christians. It also throws in a shot at Trump’s exaggerated promises and his Mexican wall proposal. 

However, the humor depends on what the reader or viewer brings to the transaction.

Maher introduces the segment including this and other Trump Bible passages by referring to Trump’s ranking his The Art of the Deal as the second-greatest book of all time. Anyone’s response to this joke and the others will depend on what the reader/viewer thinks about Trump and the bible. A Trump supporter might see this as an attack on his values, an effort to ridicule his beliefs; he is unlikely to notice the point about the incongruity between the avaricious Trump and the poverty espoused by Jesus. A Christian Trump supporter may see this as mocking the inconsistency between the teachings of Christianity and the wealth in religion. Some people could see it as an insult to the bible. Humor is all about frame of reference. Part of what makes the Trump campaign so frightening for some people is that given their values, the Trump campaign is a joke; those people are terrified and astonished to realize that so many people actually have values that are so outlandish that Trump is a serious real option.

Let’s look at someone who is the opposite of Donald Trump: Henry David Thoreau. Here he is talking about taking a walk. After referring to the Crusades, Thoreau advises,

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk. “Walking” The Atlantic (June 1862).

He is exaggerating, using hyperbole, for humorous and rhetorical effect. I always smile at the end, when his list crescendos. For me, he is not making fun of taking walks seriously; he is pointing out that a walk in the natural landscape is an opportunity for adventure, and though he is exaggerating, his description endows the simple walk with an air of grandeur. Later in the essay he compares the landscape of Italy, rich in Roman ruins, to the landscape of the U.S. and concludes that we are actually living in the kind of golden age that those ruins commemorate.

 

Henry David Thoreau

By Benjamin D. Maxham 

active 1848 - 1858 

- National Portrait Gallery, 

Washington, Public Domain, 

There he is arguing seriously; in the case of the walk, he must overload the comparison using irony to make the point and not make the point at the same time.

Not everybody got Thoreau’s ironic humor. Based on Thoreau’s writing, in 1865 in the North American Review, James Russell Lowell concluded that, “Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he was a sorry logician” (338). Though Lowell did have some reputation as a humorist, as well as a poet and an essayist when he wrote that, he has little reputation left to speak of today.

Perhaps even Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson may have not always gotten the joke:

The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. (Emerson’s Eulogy)

Many, more modern critics, including E. B. White, have found humor in his writing, but how can we tell whether Thoreau was serious about preparing for a walk by preparing for death? Surely if he was, he would be Lowell’s “sorry logician.”

We can’t know for sure, but Thoreau was a great admirer of Thomas Carlyle and of Carlyle’s brilliant and wierdly ironic Sartor Resartus. In his essay “Thomas Carlyle and His Works,” Thoreau observes,

Sartor Resartus is, perhaps, the sunniest and most philosophical, as it is the most autobiographical of his works, in which he drew most largely on the experience of his youth. But we miss everywhere a calm depth, like a lake, even stagnant, and must submit to rapidity and whirl, as on skates, with all kinds of skillful and antic motions, sculling, sliding, cutting punch-bowls and rings, forward and backward. The talent is very nearly equal to the genius. Sometimes it would be preferable to wade slowly through a Serbonian bog, and feel the juices of the meadow.

Here Thoreau uses ice skating images to describe the “antic motions” of the work. According to Sophia Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife, Thoreau was “an experienced skater” who executed “dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice.” Thoreau contrasts two extreme states—the swift, precise movement of the skater and the slow, deliberate movement of one wading through a bog—both of which his life and writing suggest he was capable of and capable of appreciating.

Whether a passage like his prescription for walking is humorous or not will depend on what each of us thinks of the context and the author. The difference between Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report version) and Bill O’Reilly was essentially the audience. Lowell thought Thoreau was a humorless mediocrity; I think Thoreau was brilliant. Although what the author intended to say does not determine the outcome (many who intend to be funny are not), in the case of humor, we would like to know whether we are laughing at or with the author. Sometimes we will never be sure, especially when authors sail close to the wind, the most exciting point of sail, but ultimately humor depends on an agreement, real or illusory, between an author and an audience.

  

The Metaphorist in the Metaphorest

[The last paragraph of the original version of this post has been revised: The last paragraph has been split in two, and some hard-to-follow leaps of thought have been clarified (he said, confidently)]

The same mental predisposition that attracts us to the satisfying uncertainty of open-ended questions may explain the essential power of metaphor as a tool for expressing the balance and tension that characterizes experience. In another place, in answering the question “Is the Self an Illusion?” I suggested that metaphors are a way to clarify irreducibly complex ideas because metaphors combine resolution and ambiguity.

Metaphor is normally introduced in school in contrast to simile, which is “a comparison using like or as.” Metaphor then becomes a comparison that does not use like or as. This approach is so unhelpful since it underestimates the complexity of the difference. For one thing a simile advertises that it is a comparison and makes clear that what is being compared maintain separate identities. T. S. Eliot begins his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofrock,”

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

And a little further on, he speaks of,

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

These comparisons (with their wonderful evocative language) make a clear distinction between the two things being compared and they communicate across the like. The sky and the patient share characteristics, perhaps a different one for each person: a sense of time suspended before some great event—night and an operation—a sense of blankness or clouds like the white hospital gown. The same is true of the image of the back streets and the tedious argument.

Later in the same poem are these lines:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

Purdue Cooperative Extension

Here is the comparison without like or as, and we are in the middle of the comparison before we even know it has started. Not until “sprawling on a pin” do we realize that we cannot take what is being said literally. Because there is no clear signal that a comparison is being made, the writer depends on the reader not only to interpret the comparison but even to know it is happening. So we can see the speaker as an insect, mounted and labeled in some collection, pinned in place while still alive, at the same as being subjected to the judgmental eyes of those attending a social gathering. The two parts of the comparison remain separate and blur together at the same time. The metaphor of the bug is then displaced by the metaphor of how talking at such an event involves people merely spitting out the conclusions they have drawn, a shift which brings us back to the social event. Each of the metaphors involved in the example requires at least two frames of reference present at the same time, frames of reference that must still coexist after the metaphor is deployed: the eyes fixing and the pin fixing.

This preservation of the frames of reference is the key to metaphor’s power. Deciding what to do within a frame of reference—which vegetable to plant first, which book to read next—involves comparing conventionally similar objects, but deciding whether to plant a vegetable or read a book requires a larger frame of reference so that planting and reading also become two instances of the same thing--two self-nurturing activities for example. Looking for a logical solution requires the platform of a single frame of reference. Because most complex and interesting problems do involve different frames of reference, that preliminary step means the subsequent solution is always simpler, flatter, than the formulation of the original problem.

Thus some complex problems will not be solvable in a single frame of reference. Thinking metaphorically may be the only way to understand such problems, since a metaphor creates a comparison in two frames of reference at once, a relationship that is both true and untrue at the same time: you are pinned to the wall and not pinned to the wall. 

The Irreconcilable Difference

Often movies begin well—lay out an intriguing conflict, create tension among interesting characters, complicate a promising situation; however, once they have completed constructing the problem, they deteriorate into a facile resolution. That may be because problems are more satisfying than solutions, or maybe more believable. Since everything, in being alive, is connected and temporary, every resolution of a problem requires a frame of reference, literally something that surrounds problem and crops off all the messy complications. At the end of the classic romantic comedy, in which the boy and girl connect and get married, the assumption is that they will live happily ever after, but such living will take place outside the story’s frame.

C. E. Brock Illustration for 1895 

edition of Pride and Prejudice 

(public domain)

After Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy have been happily united and professed their mutual love, Elizabeth risks opening up the plot that brought them together and look at the clockwork inside. He was attracted to her, she tells him, because, unlike all other women, she did not faun all over him; her behavior had been “bordering on the uncivil.” She notes, “To be sure, you knew no actual good of me -- but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love." But that daring move by both Elizabeth and Jane Austen is a clue to why Pride and Prejudice works so well.

Such deconstruction is consistent with what Austen has done throughout the novel (for example, of all the marriages that Jane and Elizabeth can look to, only one is a happy one), and it is also consistent with Elizabeth’s character. And while Austen implies that their suitability means that Elizabeth and Darcy will live happily together, in the last chapter Austen also makes clear that all the other disagreeable characters in their lives will remain consistently disagreeable, though manageable. Austen steps outside the frame of reference of the happy couple to remind us of some of the open questions, but Austen frames the story’s resolution in terms of family and relationships; she excludes those real threats that could destroy the frame itself: disease, death in childbirth, murder, and, of course, zombies.

Life’s problems usually involve more than one frame of reference, perhaps even overlapping frames of reference that like a carpet of Venn diagrams stretch to the horizon. Even if we go to stories for escape, we must find the resolution convincing. The willing suspension of disbelief can hold off the disruptions of daily life for only so long before they flood our minds again. Perhaps questions are more convincing than answers because they stand up better when hit with a bucket of cold water. It should not surprise us that the interlocked complexity of questions creates a stronger tool for dealing with problems than an answer useful only so long as we don’t move.