The Second-Highest Heaven (Big Bang Part II)

Darrel Abel was born in Lost Nation, Iowa in 1911. He taught American literature at Purdue for many years, and at some point, working from the obscurity of Lisbon Falls, Maine, he produced a rather lovely little paper called "Robert Frost's 'Second-Highest Heaven'," which he published in 1980. The paper's title refers to a piece of Frost's prose on Ralph Waldo Emerson. Frost wrote:

Everybody votes in heaven but everybody votes the same way, as in Russia today. It is only in the second-highest heaven that things get parliamentary.

Abel goes on to quote one of Frost's letters, which expresses a similar sentiment:

whatever great thinkers may say against the earth, I notice that no one is anxious to leave it for either Heaven or Hell. Heaven may be better than Hell as reported, but it is not as good as earth.

Frost was an American who knew the pioneer's feeling of diminution before the vast inhuman wilderness, "An emptiness flayed to the very stone," as he describes an abandoned, clear-cut piece of land in his brilliant 1923 poem "The Census-Taker." Like his predecessors Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville, he saw in the American situation a figure of the human situation in the universe itself. And like those former masters of American modernity, Frost refused despair any lasting purchase. They refused despair not because they were plucky and upbeat, but because they saw too deeply to ignore the true proportions between chaos and beauty, emptiness and humanness, in this complex, mysterious world of ours.

As Abel points out, Frost's famous poem "Desert Places" consciously rebuts Blaise Pascal in his terror at the emptiness between the stars. Here is Pascal worrying about space in his Pensées. You've heard of "penis envy" and "castration anxiety"--call this pensée anxiety:

When I consider the short duration of my life, an eternity that stretches behind and before, and the little space which I fill and even see, engulfed in the immensity of spaces I know not and which know not me, I am frightened and astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.... The eternal silence of the infinite spaces--it frightens me. Quoted in "Robert Frost's 'Second-Highest Heaven'" by Darrel Abel, Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. 16: Iss. 2, Article 3, 1980

The Big Bang can amplify the terror Pascal describes, which is in the first place not so easily dismissed. Paul Tillich, according to Abel, called such cosmic queasiness modern man's "real vertigo in relation to infinite space." Big Bang astronomy of course implies that those spaces, those desert places are not just infinite but stretching out, and so they're diminishing our physical stature in the cosmos. (To diminished stature, I say, so what? Short people achieve amazing things nowadays. Who cares how big or small we are in relation to the cosmos? Why should an electron care if it's smaller than the atomic nucleus? And would my funny bone feel any better if my elbows were the size of the Horsehead Nebula?) The vertigo is the more horrible thing; the Big Bang theory creates it by explaining so much without successfully delivering us from the painful tautologies with which we began our search for knowledge. It's the intellectual equivalent of whirling around and around.

Infinity and eternity aren't problematic because they're big (and they're not always big--a finite space may be infinitely subdivided), but because they're at once inescapable and nonsensical aspects of the cosmos. Mathematics seems to acknowledge as much since the symbol for infinity, ∞, also means "undefined." (As in 20 divided by zero = ∞.) The universe appears to have begun at a point in time. But how does something come from nothing? What was before? Something else? Some other universe? None of the alternatives appeal to common sense, and so the Big Bang theory pictures a universe whose perfectly comprehensible laws lead to perfectly incomprehensible conundra of origins and endings, limits and infinity. That's how I interpret Tillich's vertigo, and the theme of Frost's poetry--in Abel's words, "man's lostness in space." Not only do we not understand the limits of the universe in time and space, but it seems they are constitutionally inaccessible to understanding. They are non-parameters, they are outside reason and experience, yet reason and experience lead us straight to their door.... This is a miserable and untenable state of affairs.

In the last decades, the mental health field has often and without good reason blurred the traditional medical dividing line between symptom and diagnosis. I would argue that pensée anxiety, Tillich's vertigo, Big Bang-o-phobia, etc., is not a diagnosis. It's not even its own symptom. Rather, it's but one instance of a more commonplace problem I call "under-the-hood nausea." (For a fuller discussion of under-the-hood nausea, here is another blog I wrote on the subject. Under-the-hood nausea, in turn, is but a manifestation of neurosis.)

Science reaches out, by instruments and inferences, into planes of reality that exist on different scales from our own. This is what creates under-the-hood nausea. The Big Bang was named by Fred Hoyle, an important physicist who happened to despise the theory and applied the phrase "Big Bang" in derision. But the theory is perhaps rightly named in the sense that it bashes you over the head with under-the-hood nausea like nothing else. It's looking under the hood of the cosmos, and just as looking inside the body at the guts makes some people feel sick, looking under the hood of the cosmos can fill you with vertiginous questions: What is infinity? Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there a god? If there is, can I still masturbate? Why are so many cosmologists named George?

Scientists must look at reality on every plane, at every magnification, but if we can't relate our findings to our own scale, our own plane, then the work of comprehension isn't done. If we can't interpret and appreciate our knowledge in human terms, then the science may have the effect of urging us on in our despair--despair which belongs to our own homely little world of birth and death and not to the vacuous spaces between the stars. Help me, Mr. Frost:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Wittgenstein was a very fine doctor for treating sickening cosmic questions. He suggested that such questions must have bad syntax--just like the meaningless proposition twenty divided by zero. If you look out into the cosmos and feel despair, remind yourself that despair is 100% human. If our understanding of physics is too incomplete right now to relate the cosmic to the quantum to the human scale of affairs, our psyches do it for us in a crude way--with despair. Yet the more we look, the more order we see in the universe. In that sense, the universe appears to be a more and more hospitable place the more we learn about it--a more human place, since humanity and life are founded on a principle of order and the development of more of it.

Fred Hoyle, the Big Bang skeptic, discovered how heavy elements are forged in the furnaces of the stars and he did it by an anthropic inference: we exist; we're made of carbon; therefore nucleosynthesis of carbon must occur; therefore stars must have a way of doing it; therefore certain isotopes of helium and beryllium must react quickly to form an excited conformation of carbon-12. He was right. Multiple generations of stars must refine lighter elements in their breasts to make heavier ones like carbon. The stars are our mothers and fathers. The universe has music in it. It has despair in it. But it's all ours.

Like the joke says:

There was a costume party where everybody was instructed to dress as an emotion. The party hosts greeted the first guest, who was dressed from head to toe in red, and asked him, "What emotion are you supposed to be?" He said, "Rage." The next guest was dressed all in green--green tights, green leotard, a green hat. When they asked what emotion she was supposed to be, she said, "I'm envy." Then a guy came to the door completely naked, with a pear stuck on the end of his penis. The hosts asked, "What emotion are you?" He said, "I'm fuckin' despair."

A Dog's Dog

Ribsy by Beverly Cleary


No one but Jack London, perhaps, has ever written so convincingly from a dog’s point of view as has Beverly Cleary in Ribsy. Like most dogs, Ribsy seems charmingly brain damaged. His loyalties are permanent but also have a happy-go-lucky fluidity that embraces many; he forgets to be ashamed for very long; and forgets discouragement. He’s in a word dogged.

When he’s ashamed, he rarely knows what he did wrong, and moves on with admirable alacrity. He solves problems with the tools he has at hand, for example, waiting. This is how he deals with young Ramona Quimby, who constantly irritates him. There’s waiting and there’s also trying, again and again. There’s subterfuge. At one point he feigns sleep, waits for a ticket-taker to walk away, and then sneaks into a stadium—I think in pursuit of hot dogs. Wittgenstein said that a dog is incapable of hypocrisy, but he never met Ribsy. I assume he had met a hot dog somewhere along the line since Wittgenstein was from Vienna, hometown of the original wiener.

Wittgenstein, Cleary, and Jack London aren’t alone in imagining what it is to be man’s best friend. Franz Kafka’s short story, “Investigations of a Dog,” predictably imagines a dog in rebellion against his own nature, a dog apart from other dogs, a dog who’s uncomfortable being a dog. Ribsy is by contrast one of those unquestioning dogs that Kafka’s tormented narrator would have envied. Kafka was famously not at home in his body and with his instincts. He is the greatest of artists devoted to that problem Freud named Civilization and Its Discontents, and it makes sense that Kafka chose the dog as a representative creature who (except for his unusual narrator) is content, in direct proportion to his incivility. My grandfather called all dogs “he,” and I always felt this had something to do with their incivility. There’s something unfussy about drinking out of a toilet.

Jack London’s White Fang, however, who’s three parts wolf and one part domestic dog, shares in the Kafkaesque dog’s alienation from his own species and in his struggles with the yoke of civilization. A harsh Indian master called Grey Beaver gives White Fang his first taste of civilization, and White Fang learns to revere human beings as gods. But he doesn’t feel at home with the civilization forced upon him in the company of men until he discovers the hidden instinctual pleasures that civilization alone makes possible: love and even violence on behalf of those he loves.

In a non-fiction book that tries to imagine the psychological experience of a dog, Jeffrey Masson quotes the 19th century pediatrician Louis Robinson on the presumed centrality of human beings in the canine weltanschauung. I wonder if Robinson got this from London or the other way around:

It has been said that a man stands to his dog in the position of god; but when we consider that our conceptions of deity lead us to the general idea of an enormously powerful and omniscient man, who loves, hates, desires, rewards, and punishes in human-like fashion, it involves no strain of imagination to conceive that from the dog’s point of view his master is an elongated and abnormally cunning dog—of different shape and manners certain from the common run of dogs, yet canine in his essential nature.

Dogs have much that’s human in them, and we have much that’s canine. If dogs have something to teach us, perhaps it’s not to be too discouraged by civilization and its discontents. Like Ribsy, or like a child, we can still love and can still find outlets for a natural aggression that is, after all, part of the life-force. We, too, can run after hot dogs and forget what to be ashamed of.

The Fly in the Bottle

Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The cessation of hostilities in World War I seems to have had a salutary effect on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who began his philosophy career literally under fire as a soldier in the Great War.  And that goes to show that in addition to blowing people’s limbs off, artillery fire also interferes with their ability to formulate coherent philosophies.  I wouldn’t call Philosophical Investigations crystal clear (the Nazi bombardment of England interrupted Wittgenstein’s work yet again in late career, one notes), but it’s much clearer than the preceding Tractatus.  For one thing, it’s written in plain English, having been apparently inoculated against Bertrand Russell and his infectiously supererogatory and unreadable style of writing about logic.  (Even commenting on Russell’s logic writings appears to render me too incomprehensible.)

What’s more, Wittgenstein’s second book has great charm.  Ludwig Wittgenstein is a very underrated comedian.  Many of his thought experiments are exquisitely, comically absurd, almost like Monty Python sketches.  (He considers, for example, whether a dog could be a hypocrite.  The answer is no, but it’s hilarious to think about.)  And something of Wittgenstein’s long-suffering and, in a way, good-natured character shines through the book’s disorder.  Fragments and aphorisms constitute the whole of Investigations; Wittgenstein seems to shun sustained argument as if that would only lead him back into the wilderness of paradox from which he was so desperate in the first place to escape.  He’s unflagging in his battle with philosophical confusion, which he regards as a pathology of thought almost akin to those of speech, like stuttering.  And yet the battlefields of thought and of two World Wars have had their triumphs too in wearing down the noble philosopher.  He couldn’t shepherd this important work into publication at all, and had to rely on friends to do it after his death.  The book wears signs of neglect, both that of the brutal world with which the philosopher mentally wrestled, and Wittgenstein’s despairing neglect of himself: in addition to being disordered and unfinished, there’s hardly any scholarly apparatus in it apart from a completely neurotic preface by the author.  It descends to us from the Upper Saddle River (where Prentice Hall ekes out a living publishing works that nobody outside academia cares to read) on Kinko’s-white, Kinko’s weight pages.  The cover of my third edition says exactly nothing besides the title, edition number, author, publisher, and translator (G.E.M. Anscombe), and its paint chips easily, leaving dings and scratches of white on a field of color that is either black or dark blue—a perceptual confusion which invokes the fallacious epistemic problems that Wittgenstein sought to cure.  Inside, little mice seem to have eaten away at its vowels and consonants, with many nicks on the letters where the ink never stuck.  The translation, it must be said, reads fluidly.  (Anscombe, for one, cared a great deal about this book, even if she didn’t know how to spell the word ‘show’.)  But some corrosive force seems to oppose Wittgenstein’s insistence on the unity of letter and sound, the unambiguous influence of letters on our mind, even when describing ambiguous conditions of black or blue.

[309.] What is your aim in philosophy?—To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. p. 103

In this endeavor, W helps us solve many philosophical dilemmas (by showing them to be faux-dilemmas produced by bad grammar), but it’s also a rather affecting image.  It encodes the desperate confusion and frustration of the human being, and W’s wish to free himself and others from this prison of tormented consciousness.  One feels Epicurus’s benevolent gaze here.

Of many philosophical questions that are self-evidently uninteresting and nonsensical to the layman, W assures us: they are also uninteresting and nonsensical to the philosopher (or, he says, they ought to be).  Sometimes the result is that W seems like a man struggling nobly to escape the quicksand of previous wrong thinking, only to get back to solid ground on which the reader already stands.  W himself articulates this position: “678…. Yes,—now you have only repeated with emphasis something which no one has contradicted anyway.” (p. 170)  Reading Philosophical Investigations sometimes is like reading about that protégé of Oral Roberts who came belatedly to disavow the notion of eternal damnation for the unbaptized—it’s a disproof of something that for me was never true to begin with.  W disavows all manner of dualist, skeptical philosophies, which are just religion by another name.

W is most helpful with more subtle and insidious forms of nonsense.  “464. My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.” (p. 133)  Solipsism is nonsense to Wittgenstein, a result of misapplying words like “consciousness,” which were learned from other people in the first place and never intended to refer to a unique experience.  By definition, a word refers to shared experience.  Anything named in a communally shared language can refer only to objects of communal relevance.  The problem of induction is for W nonsense too.  And his arguments against these forms of skepticism are as powerful as they come, though developed in his curiously aphoristic, reticent way.  In debunking certain confusions in the use of language, he also points out that thought begins with pictures, not words.  Spoken language arises “as if we were translating from a more primitive mode of thought” ([597.] p. 156), a pictorial mode perhaps.  “[O]ne can point to a thing by looking or listening,” W writes on p. 169, again citing levels of thinking deeper than mere words.  Today, cognitive neuroscientists search for the physiological correlates of such states by devising experiments that direct the subject’s attention and intentions.

Before Wittgenstein’s honesty, nonsense retreats, shorn of romance.  We call it nonsense.  We look at the stars, real and far away.  We love reality instead of nonsense.  The fly is out of the bottle.

Coffee and Beer Required

Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

1.      The world is all that is the case. 
1.1    All that is the case is slightly better with coffee. 
1.2   All that is the case is slightly less so with beer. 
2.     What we cannot speak of without the aid of coffee or beer, we must pass over in silence. 

Wittgenstein composed some of the Tractatus while in the Austrian army and a World War I Italian prison camp--and it reads like the written equivalent of a man banging his head against his prison bars. 

Some people credit this work with the notion that ideas are pictures of the world. My initial thought was that perhaps someone with a greater knowledge of philosophy could explain why this is noteworthy millennia after Plato, centuries after John Locke, and all the very many others who have written on mental processes and mimesis. You have to read Wittgenstein's next book, the much more straightforward Philosophical Investigations, for a comprehensible exposition of his inferences about pictorial thinking, and pre-verbal depths of thought. 

The more frustrating Tractatus is written in the style of a geometric proof, with numbered postulates and corollaries, but it's evident that this structure has been imposed after the fact on a bunch of disorderly notes--of the sort that might be composed, I guess, while being shelled by the French. 

While it's famous for its earth-shattering pronouncements on knowledge, thought, and language, in fact I found it almost entirely consumed with refuting obscure arguments in the work of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. (I have no doubt that that work is not obscure to students of the work of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, but Wittgenstein certainly does not provide a compelling reason to become one of those.) 

This book had me wondering whether Wittgenstein's mentor, Bertrand Russell, was under the spell of Wittgenstein's domineering self-regard (perhaps, but W's brilliance is also evident in later work), and whether Russell's philosophy itself was also basically incomprehensible (haven't read enough to say). I've been away from math for a long time, but I studied it up through multivariable calculus; why can't I understand Wittgenstein's math-ish sentences? Why doesn't he define any of his symbols? Isn't that a basic element of math technique--to define your terms? Do some people adore Wittgenstein precisely because they can't understand the cryptic runes contained here and mistake them for religion? And is it religion? 

These questions and many more will not be answered within the pages of the enigmatic Tractatus, whose philosophy Wittgenstein later retracted anyway. 

The Relevance of Psychoanalysis

Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

Neuroscientist Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2000 for his research on the neurochemistry of the Aplysia sea slug, wrote in 1999 that “psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind.”

That may come as a surprise to people who think of Freud as a relic or a quack, and there are many who feel that way, and with a passion; I've learned that Sigmund Freud, like politics and religion, is a dangerous topic of conversation.  But Eric Kandel’s 1999 paper, “Biology and the Future of Psychoanalysis: A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry Revisited,” ought to give some pause at least to anyone who despises Freud without having carefully read and considered his ideas.  Kandel’s paper opens like this:

“During the first half of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis revolutionized our understanding of mental life.  It provided a remarkable set of new insights about unconscious mental processes, psychic determinism, infantile sexuality, and, perhaps most important of all, about the irrationality of human motivation.”  Kandel, American Journal of Psychiatry 1999; 156:505.  Or, to put it more simply, it provided insights into the relation between what you feel now and what happened in your childhood, even if you can't remember it clearly, and insights into dynamic relationships in the mind between desire, love, anger, loss, guilt, fear, and the lies we tell to ourselves to make it all feel better.  Finally it made the point that talking about it (aka psychotherapy), and in so doing coming to look at yourself truthfully, is a real help.  These ideas are so deeply subsumed into our culture that they're almost clichés at this point.

Yet canards, misconceptions, and prejudices against Freud abound, and many could be cured if Freud-haters actually read the brilliant and brilliantly written Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis from beginning to end, carefully, and with an open mind.

The British empiricist Karl Popper (who Ludwig Wittgenstein famously threatened with a fire poker) believed that psychoanalytic ideas were not only unproven but unprovable; he thought there was no way to evaluate the truth or falsity of a psychoanalytic proposition because psychoanalysts interpreted data in such a way that any and every possible finding would be consistent with their theories.  (Some physicists have said as much about "string theory," by the way.)  Popper's view is a common one, partly because Freud and the psychoanalysts who followed have sometimes treated doubters as patients and doubt of Freudian theory as a symptom (called "resistance").  While emotional "denial" and "resistance" are real phenomena, worthy of study and recognition, it seems like a bad strategy to forestall healthy intellectual skepticism in this way.  Kandel argues that despite the tricky nature of the emotional and cognitive phenomena that psychoanalysts study, they have to do a better job demonstrating the validity of their findings in the methodological terms with which most scientists are familiar.  He's right.  If not, psychoanalysis insulates itself, prevents others from reaping its benefits, and prevents itself from reaping the benefits of advances in other fields of study, like psychopharmacology.

Psychoanalysts do, of course, base their theories on close observation, and their interpretations are no different in syllogistic form from other scientific interpretations.  For example, we know the core of the earth is made of iron and nickel even though no one has ever seen the core of the earth directly; scientists have interpreted seismic wave patterns as signs of the presence of iron and nickel, just as psychoanalysts identify conscious and unconscious ideations by signs--mainly, words.  You might say to a psychoanalyst, "I feel worried but I don't know why."  You are conscious of part of the contents of your own psyche, but perhaps not all of them.  You talk more and in the raw material generated by your talking you discover clues--signs--of the full nature of your worries.  You find yourself talking about your health a lot.  You are worried about your health, you've been having chest pains...  It occurs to you that you are turning 52 years old this month...  50 was the bigger milestone, but you had no worries at the time of your birthday two years ago...  You read an obituary about a famous lawyer.  Your father was a lawyer who died, it occurs to you, of a heart attack at age 52...

Maybe you could care less about your own inner life.  If you can get away without examining yourself, then you're lucky.  For the rest of us, there's Sigmund Freud.

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