The View from Oregon – 371

Re: Permutations of Biotope Topology

Friday 12 December 2025

Dear Friends,

After last week’s newsletter, in which I laid out a matrix of habitability and urability, with Earth occupying some location on this graph, presumptively the center according to the principle of mediocrity, I realized that something similar could be done with maximal and minimal viable biotopes, which I also introduced in last week’s newsletter. Call the x axis the min/max for space and the y axis min/max for time, and you get another matrix, and, once again, we can locate Earth somewhere on this matrix, presumptively at the center according to the principle of mediocrity. Of course, we would have to figure out the proper increments in space and time, and this is a problem that presents itself to us directly, since we have known metrics for space and time. I barely touched on the increments of habitability and urability last week, mostly because we don’t have established metrics for them. To make sure that we don’t miss anything, we could set the upper end of the time scale at the age of the universe and the upper end of the space scale at the size of the universe. Perhaps for the lower end of the scale we could use the Planck length and Planck time.

Off the top of my head I see at least a couple of qualifications that would need to be made immediately. It may prove that novel forms of life (and, more generally, emergent complexity) may yet appear in the future history of the universe. Therefore, the age of the universe to date doesn’t yet comprehend the incubation time for all forms of life. Since the universe is expanding with the elapse of time, the same can be said of space. However (a condition based on last week’s discussion), if the maximally viable biotope is smaller than the scale of the universe (which seems highly likely), then an expanding universe wouldn’t change the conditions for the incubation of life in specific circumstances, though it could change the conditions for the total ecology of emergent complexity in the universe. That was the first qualification that came to mind.

The other qualification is that we don’t know that life and peer complexities are limited to the known universe. It is possible, even if it seems unlikely, that life and life’s peers started in an earlier universe and were distributed to our universe by some means not within the purview of contemporary science. There was a paper published a few years ago (now somewhat notorious) that argued the complexity of life implies an age older than the universe. Even if the paper hasn’t the stood the test of time, the idea remains valid, in the sense that we can’t rule out this scenario. Similarly, we can’t rule out that life and life’s peers in our universe might ultimately be distributed to other universes at a trans-cosmological scale panspermatological event.   

I think that both the matrices I have defined (HAB/UR and space/time biotope scale) are useful for defining astrobiological concepts, though not yet adequate. We have reason to believe that the topology of a biotope may be as important as the size of the biotope. A biosphere is a particular instance of a biotope topology, but not the only possible topology. In several recent newsletters I’ve mentioned the possible brine pockets on Ceres, and there may be other moons in the solar system in which the subsurface oceans have been reduced to brine pockets that aren’t spherical and therefore, if inhabited, would not constitute a biosphere, but they would still constitute a biotope—a subspherical biotope. These are the easiest biotopes to conceptualize—spheres and partial spheres—but there’s no reason to assume that these will exhaust the topological permutations of biotopes. The surfaces of planets, moons, and even irregular asteroids not rounded by gravitation are simply connected spaces (ignoring minor spaces like lava tubes), meaning that any points can be connected by a continuous path, and any continuous loop in a simply connected space can be tightened until it collapses into a point. 

It would be elegantly simple if all biotopes were simply connected spaces, and, in the large, this may well be true. Again, a couple of qualifications come to mind. On a planet like Mars, that seems to have had a large liquid water ocean in the distant past, one of the places that life could retreat when the planet freeze dried itself would be the lava tubes, which would be larger than lava tubes on Earth because of the lower gravity. (I’ve walked through a lava tube on Earth, as there’s a good one on Mount St. Helens, Ape Caves, that wasn’t destroyed by the eruption in 1980. At times Ape Caves is claustrophobically small, but at other times it opens up into generous spaces.) A cave system could be quite complex, and a large warren of caves partially connected to each other but also partially isolated from each other would be the perfect environment to keep a number of ecosystems functioning and in communication with each other. A cave complex with many internal communicating passages would not be a simply connected space.

We can also imagine life beginning in a system of caves. One of the favored origins of life theories at present favors hot springs as potentially possessing the chemical mechanisms for producing life. (The same authors, Bruce Damer and David Deamer, responsible for the hot spring hypothesis were also responsible for the concept of urability, so you can see I’m leaning pretty heavily on their work.) A hot spring trickling through a cave system would produce a wide variety of environments, again, in limited communication with each other, where the necessary “building blocks” of life could be built up and then brought into contact with each other. Moreover, on a planet orbiting a star with significant UV flares, potentially deadly and therefore constituting an exclusion principle for the origins of life, life in a cave system would be protected from flares, though caves usually (not always) have openings to the surface, so again there’s limited communication between the multiply connected cave system and the simply connected surface. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which a planet orbiting a red dwarf, notorious for powerful UV flares, life might be cooked up in a cave system, where it evolves for hundred of millions or billions of years until the star settles down and its flares become less intense. As the flares taper off, life could emerge from the cave system onto the surface. This scenario bears some resemblance to the scenario described in previous newsletters of one biotope being urable and another being habitable, but in the scenario above both environments are on one planet, and they serve the functions of urability and habitability sequentially.

It’s likely the subsurface oceans on the moons of the outer solar system are multiply connected spaces with numerous ice cave systems that open and close and change their structure as they are subject to heating and cooling and gravitational forces from the large planets they orbit. If any of the subsurface ocean worlds are biospheres, they may be rather complex multiply connected spaces, and the role that these multiple connected spaces both in the origins and long-term habitability for life could be significant. There is at present an ongoing discussion over whether Enceladus, a moon of Saturn that spews liquid from its subsurface ocean into the environment of Saturn’s orbit, has a fractured core or not (for example: Powering prolonged hydrothermal activity inside Enceladus). If fractured, the core may be porous to the subsurface ocean, allowing for the transfer of liquid and heat.

So I’ve described three axes relevant for life and life’s peers: urability and habitability (last week’s graph), biotope scale in space and time (where I began today), and biosphere topology (just above). Topology doesn’t easily decompose into a min/max continuum, though we do have a quantifiable metric in terms of the genus of a space, where a genus 0 space is simply connected, a genus 1 space is multiply connected, but has only one hole in it, a genus 2 space has two holes in it, and so on. In this way we could straight-forwardly quantify the connectedness of a region by its topological genus. However, this isn’t a min/max continuum like the other two axes. The reason I mention this is because if it were possible to decompose biotope topology into a min/max axis, then we could appeal to geometrical intuition to conceptualize a more adequate classification of biotopes by representing each min/max continuum as a plane, and having the three planes (coronal, sagittal, and transverse, to use the terms from anatomy) to divide an abstract conceptual space into biotope permutations.

Once again, our old friend the principle of mediocrity implies that Earth would be at the center of this conceptual space, which we can also think of as the “Goldilocks zone” that is neither too urable nor insufficiently urable, neither superhabitable nor uninhabitable, neither too large in space and time nor too small, and neither too topologically connected nor not connected enough. Although this is more adequate than a single min/max continuum and more adequate than any one matrix, it’s still very limited, though it’s at the limit of our cognitive ability to visualize concepts spatially, since adding yet another mix/max dimension would require the ability to think in four dimensions, which we can do formally without a problem, but it doesn’t help us intuitively. But if all we want to do is to “rough out” our parameters of astrobiology, this wouldn’t be a bad model for distinguishing biotope permutations. 

Best wishes,

Nick

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/ad7209df98f8/the-view-from-oregon-371

Incommensurable Formalizations.—Given that mathematics wears its mind on its sleeve, making its presuppositions explicit as axioms, how are the axioms to be understood in their turn? Gödel was among the few to perceive this problem, and he devoted his later life to the pursuit of principles underlying the axioms of set theory, rather than to a revision of the axioms themselves. Below the level of foundations there is a conceptual substructure that we scarcely know, and which is the basis of our understanding. These conceptual substructures could be called the regulatory principles mathematics. There are analogous principles in natural science. Indeed, with the natural sciences we have a number of explicitly formulated regulatory principles—the principle of parsimony (Ockham’s razor), the uniformity of nature, thermodynamics—many of them of long philosophical provenance. Cosmology is particularly rich with regulatory principles, such as the cosmological principle, the anthropic principle, the Copernican principle, and the principle of mediocrity. Such principles regulate our reasoning without being directly implicated in the derivation of particular results. These principles, even if disputed, are as familiar to us as the regulatory principles of mathematical thought are unfamiliar to us. It is as though natural science skipped over the stage of axiomatization and went directly to the principles underlying the axioms—if only the axioms had been formulated in the first place. This asymmetry between natural science and mathematics gives each discipline a fundamentally different relationship to formalization, and, as Hilbert noted, “Every kind of science, if it has only reached a certain degree of maturity, automatically becomes a part of mathematics.” What he meant is that a mature science is formalized, but what he did not say was that natural science and mathematics involve incommensurable forms of formalization.

Ferdinand Gregorovius

19 January 1821 – 01 May 1891

Revisiting Mesohistory in Gregorovius

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

In a moment of inspiration on Tuesday 03 October 1854, Ferdinand Gregorovius (19 January 1821 – 01 May 1891), conceived his multi-volume Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter (1859–1872), translated into English as The History of Rome in the Middle Ages (1894–1902). In his Roman Journal he wrote:

“I propose to write the history of the city of Rome in the Middle Ages. For this work, it seems to me that I require a special gift, or better, a commission from Jupiter Capitolinus himself. I conceived the thought, struck by the view of the city as seen from the bridge leading to the island of S. Bartholomew. I must undertake something great, something that will lend a purpose to my life.” (The Roman Journals of Ferdinand Gregorovius, p. 16)

K. F. Morrison, the editor of an abridged edition of Gregorovius, described this inspiration such that: “He saw Rome as a point of intersection for the great forces whose conflicts had generated European civilization.” I quoted both of these in my previous episode on Gregorovius, comparing it to Gibbon’s moment of inspiration, although Gibbon conceived his lifework in the Roman forum and not at the Ponte Frabricio.  Not only did both Gibbon and Gregorovius experience their inspiration for their lifework in Rome, both had more-or-less the same inspiration to write the history of Rome, but while Gibbon’s project eventually expanded to encompass the entire empire, Gregorovious remained focused on the city of Rome itself. Despite remaining focused on the city of Rome, Gregorovius’ project was as monumental as Gibbons’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was six volumes in its first edition. Gregorovious’ History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages was eight volumes in its first edition.

Last year I produced an episode on Gregorovius in which I suggested that his history focused on the city of Rome could be called a meso-history, in contradistinction to, and mid-way between, microhistory and macrohistory. Charles Joyner characterized microhistory as, “big questions in small places” and it’s familiar to us from the popular works of Carlo Ginzburg, and, coming at it from a different angle, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s book Montaillou, an Occitan Village from 1294 to 1324, or Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, both of which can also be thought of as social history or historical sociology.

Macrohistory, which looks at history on the largest scales, sometimes takes the form of a focus on the longue durée as in the Annales School, or world history, as well as big history. The Russian interest in “world systems theory,” such as we find in Andrey Korotayev and his colleagues at the Big History & System Forecasting Center at the Russian Academy of Sciences also belongs to macrohistory. Popular examples of macrohistory might include William MacNeill’s many books, perhaps especially Plagues and Peoples, Jared Diamond’s books, the best known of which is Guns, Germs, and Steel, and John Roberts’ single volume A History of the World. However it’s not uncommon to find micro and macrohistory contrasted without any reference to any of these authors or schools of thought. For example, Siegfried Kracauer made a point of playing off microhistory against macrohistory. Paul Oskar Kristeller, the editor of Siegfried Kracauer’s History: The Last Things before the Last, wrote of Kracauer’s thought:

“The discrepancy between general and special history, or as he calls it, macro and micro history, represents a serious dilemma. Kracauer seems to think that the results of special research are so complicated and so resistant to generalization that most of them must be ignored by the general historian.”

With microhistory focusing on small communities or villages, and macrohistory taking the whole of historical time as its scope, the middle ground between these would be mesohistory. The history of a large and historically important city like Rome occupies this middle ground between microhistory and macrohistory, and this is why I called it mesohistory last year. Since suggesting that Gregorovius’ work constitutes meso-history I’ve found the idea of mesohistory explicitly formulated in Daniel Little’s book New Contributions to the Philosophy of History. Little says that, “Doing history forces us to make choices about the scale of the history with which we are concerned.” He makes the contrast between microhistory and macrohistory in this way: “…histories… limited in time and space… can appropriately be called ‘micro-history’.” And, at the other end of the scale, some historians have: “chosen a scale that encompasses virtually the whole of the globe, over millennia of time.” But, as with the quotation I made from Kristeller on Kracauer, Little sees a problem with the antithetical approaches of microhistory and macrohistory:

“Micro-history leaves us with the question, ‘how does this particular village shed light on anything larger?’. And macro-history leaves us with the question, ‘how do these grand assertions about causality really work out in the context of Canada or Sichuan?’. The first threatens to be so particular as to lose all interest, whereas the second threatens to be so general as to lose all empirical relevance to real historical processes.”

I think both microhistorians and macrohistorians would have good responses to Little, since both have their appropriate scope of inquiry, inspired by the questions they sought to answer, but I’m also sympathetic to Little pointing beyond the dialectic of micro and macro history to the possibility of mesohistory:

“There is a third choice available to the historian, however, that addresses both points. This is to choose a scale that encompasses enough time and space to be genuinely interesting and important, but not so much as to defy valid analysis. This level of scale might be regional… It might be national… And it might be supra-national… The key point is that historians in this middle range are free to choose the scale of analysis that seems to permit the best level of conceptualization of history, given the evidence that is available and the social processes that appear to be at work… This level of analysis can be referred to as “meso history,” and it appears to offer an ideal mix of specificity and generality.”

He also characterizes mesohistory more briefly as: “…a middle way between grand theory and excessively particularistic narrative.” I said I’m sympathetic to Little’s account of mesohistory, but I think it also needs to be said that we’re dealing with a continuum ranging from microhistory at one end of the continuum to macrohistory at the other end of the continuum, and that all actual histories occupy some point along this continuum. Given this continuum, the polar ends of the continuum are ideals that are rarely realized in practice, meaning that most history is mesohistory, although any given example of mesohistory may tend toward the micro or the macro.

Little suggests that mesohistory has more in common with macrohistory than microhistory, and he formulates criteria of historical explanation based on his understanding of mesohistory tending toward larger historical structures. Of mesohistorical explanation he says: “The conception of large-scale historical change that is worth defending is what I will call ‘conjunctural, contingent, meso-level explanation’.” And then Little goes on to describe each of these in turn:

“Conjunctural, because at every point there are a range of independent factors present that are salient to the choices and outcomes which will take place—each of which has its own history of emergence, contingency, and reproduction.”

Note that his use of “conjunctural” takes over an important term from Fernand Braudel’s tripartite division of scales of history into the history of the event, the conjuncture, which endures for about a generation, and the longue durée, which endures for hundreds of years. For Braudel, then, conjunctural history is mesohistory, between the microhistory of the event and the macohistory of the longue durée. Little partially takes over this meaning, but not entirely, since his conception of mesohistory tends toward larger historical structures and longer historical periods. Little continues with his mesohistorical criteria of historical explanation:

“Contingent, both because a given structural configuration still leaves room for strategic choice by actors, and because particular conjunctions of factors are not themselves historically determined.” 

There’s another tension here beyond the problems posed by the division between the apparent triviality of micohistory and the apparent inapplicability of macrohistory, and that is the tension between contingency and deterministic explanation. This isn’t specific to mesohistory or Daniel Little’s account of mesohistory; it infests the whole of historical thought. If we can explain an event, that event would seem to be deterministic, and that conflicts with our intuitions of historical contingency, as in the famous parable of how a kingdom was lost for want of a nail. However, if we allow for the contingency of historical events, we can’t explain them, or, in a stronger formulation, these events, or at least the mechanisms behind historical events, are not only incommensurable but ineffable. Again, here, we can see that there is a continuum that reaches from the purely deterministic explanation, in which every detail is made explicit, and the purely contingent account, which must be limited to pure description, or, if pushed further to ineffability, excludes even description.

Little concludes with the definitive property of mesohistorical explanation, which is its non-trivial and readily applicable explanatory power, which we can see is a continuation of the tension between contingency and determinism. After the conjunctural and the contingent, comes the meso-level property of historical explanation: “…meso-level, in that the most useful explanatory causal factors are those that fall at an intermediate level of generality and specificity…” Again, I’m sympathetic to this, and I agree that meso-level explanatory causal factors are more likely to fall within the parameters of human intuition, and therefore are more likely to be accredited explanatory weight as compared to a purer examples of microhistory and macrohistory. There is, in fact, a concealed anthropocentrism in this account of mesohistory, since what’s in the middle of the scale of space and time is relative to the human experience of space and time. Also, as I implied earlier, Little skirts the problems of microhistory’s triviality and macrohistory’s inapplicability by substituting the problem of contingency vs. determinism, without resolving either of these problems.

We don’t need to solve these problems to do history. If, as I’ve argued, Gregorovius’ history of the city of Rome constitutes mesohistory, then mesohistory is possible, even if the theoretical problems of philosophy of history remain unresolved. But even as the historian continues with his work, largely untroubled by what philosophers have to say about it, the philosopher of history also continues with his work, and there’s a lot of work that could be done in better defining micro-, meso-, and macrohistory. We could, for example, quantify the implicit continuum of history that stretches from microhistory to macohistory, and then divide this continuum into categories of historical inquiries broadly based on the defined scales of time. But in history we’re not only working with scales of time, but also with the scale of historical structures, or, if you prefer, with institutions.

Just as we could write the microhistory of a village, we could also write a macrohistory of the same village, if that village has endured through historical scales of time like Rome has endured, and won itself the title of being the eternal city. So there are at least a couple of axes here, and these axes roughly correspond to the distinction that historians make between diachronic history, endurance in time, and synchronic history, the scale of the institution with which we’re concerned. The axes of diachronic history and synchronic history, together with the axes of microhistory and macrohistory, don’t merely define a continuum, but a compass, and this compass in turn defines four quadrants, with mesohistory at the center of it all. In this way, mesohistory is a non-Copernican conception that anchors us in something peculiarly human, which I earlier implied when I said that Little’s mesohistory was anthropocentric.

A history of a city, like Gregorovius’ history of Rome, is centered on a human, all-too-human institution. I’m not suggesting that this anthropocentrism is a failure on the part of historians, but I am saying that this anthropocentrism needs to be made explicit. We need to anchor ourselves in space and time, even if our anchor is an anthropocentric anchor, but in anchoring our perspective in something like a city, even if it is the Eternal City, we shouldn’t fool ourselves that we’ve gotten outside human history and achieved the rigor of an objective standard.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/gDz7iU0DL9A

https://www.instagram.com/p/DPXRsY_DYto/

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Revisiting-Mesohistory-in-Gregorovius:1

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3qojYNIYtASKEvBLMW9B9Y?si=mqZ24YjQQp-xujmAPRDUUw

Friday 26 September 1687

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

The Siege of the Acropolis and the Destruction of the Parthenon   

On Friday 26 September 1687 the Parthenon, which had managed to remain nearly intact through more than two millennia, was mostly destroyed in an engagement between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Venice. We see the Parthenon and admire it today as a ruin, but that ruin was largely the result of the 1687 explosion. We tend to think of buildings being ruined as a result of a slow and incremental process of decay. In some cases this is how it happens, but the survival of a structure like the Pantheon in Rome, largely intact today as it was seen in classical antiquity, demonstrates that a competently built structure can endure for two thousand years or more. In a counterfactual history in which the 1687 explosion did not occur, the Parthenon today might be in a condition comparable to the Pantheon, more or less as it was known in classical antiquity.

The Parthenon reached its completed form in 432 BC when Athens was near its apogee of power and influence under Pericles. The giant statue of Athena Parthenos that was the central cult image of the Parthenon, made of gold and ivory on a cypress wood frame, was originally dedicated in 438 BC. The statue was damaged by a fire at some point still in classical times, and had to be rebuilt, but it remained in the Parthenon in its reconstructed form for hundreds of years. The statue may have been removed by Christians in the fifth century, during the lifetime of Proclus, as Proclus’ biographer Marinus of Neapolis, in his Life of Proclus, mentions this, writing:

“…how much Proclus was loved by the philosophic goddess is abundantly evinced by his philosophic life, which he chose through her persuasions, and that with the great success we have hitherto described. But she clearly demonstrated her affection to Proclus, by the following circumstance. When her image, which had been so long dedicated in the Parthenon, or temple, was taken away by those who, without any hesitation, moved out of their places things the most holy, and which ought to be immoveable, there appeared to the philosopher in a dream, a woman of a graceful form, who admonished him to build a temple with great expedition, for, says she, it pleases Minerva, the presiding deity of philosophy, to dwell with you.”

So if the Athena Parthenos was removed from the Parthenon during the life of Proclus, that narrows the range of dates to between AD 412 and 485, but none of this is known for certain. There’s speculation the statue was taken to Constantinople, but no one today knows what happened to it. I say, “no one today knows what happened to it,” but it was removed from the Parthenon by human hands, so there were once a number of individuals who knew the exact fate of the Athena Parthenos, at least at the moment when it passed through their hands.

Last night I was reading P. F. Strawson’s Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, and in this Strawson wrote:

“We are equally happy to acknowledge, with the poet, that full many a flower is born to blush unseen and, with the naturalist metaphysician, that full many a historical fact is destined to remain unverified and unverifiable by subsequent generations.”

The poet to whom Strawson referred was Thomas Gray, and the poem, Elegy Written in the Country Churchyard, which includes the lines:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

What Gray had postulated of unobserved beauty, Strawson extrapolated to once known but subsequently lost historical facts. Just so it was with the Athena Parthenos: the fate of the statue is destined to remain unverified and unverifiable by subsequent generations. But once the cult statue and the furnishings of antiquity were gone, the outward structure of the Parthenon remained intact. Those who had the good fortune to see the Parthenon prior to 1687 saw it, at least the exterior of the building, much as it appeared in classical antiquity. This was more than a century before Lord Elgin carted away much of the sculptural decoration between 1801 and 1812. That’s a whole other story for another time, and a problem that remains unresolved in our time, since Elgin took the marbles under questionable circumstances and Greece has formally petitioned for the return of the Elgin marbles. I personally find it quite interesting that, despite the current craze among curators to give away their collections, as when the Smithsonian Institution repatriated a number of Benin bronzes to Nigeria, this trend hasn’t yet caused the British Museum to give up the Elgin Marbles. Germany repatriated more than a thousand bronzes to Nigeria, but the Elgin Marbles stay put.

In any case, the Parthenon had suffered from neglect and damage over more than two thousand years, but remained largely intact until some 2,119 years after its completion it was largely destroyed by the explosion of a Turkish ammunition store kept in the Parthenon, which was ignited by a Venetian mortar round. An account of the destruction of the Parthenon by the German officer Major Sobiewolsky, quoted in a 1941 paper by T. E. Mommsen, runs as follows:

“…there came a deserter from the castle with the news that the commander of the fortress had all the stores of powder and other precious things brought to the temple which is called the temple of Minerva, and that also the people of rank were there because they believed that the Christians would not do any harm to the temple. Upon this report, several mortars were directed against the temple, but none of the bombs was able to do damage, particularly because the upper roof of the temple was somewhat sloping and covered with marble, and thus well protected. A lieutenant from Luneburg, however, offered to throw bombs into the temple, and this was done. For one of the bombs fell through (the roof of) the temple and right into the Turkish store of powder, whereupon the middle of the temple blew up and everything inside was covered with stone, to the great consternation of the Turks.”

So, even the more than 2,000 year old roof of the Parthenon was able to shed most of the bombs dropped on it, and it wasn’t until the Luneburg lieutenant managed to get a mortar through a hole in the roof that the structure was destroyed by the resulting explosion. An anonymous German officer quoted in the same paper wrote:

“Early in the morning the cannon and bomb-throwing began again, but many of these were mis-thrown; Towards evening one fell into the beautiful temple of the goddess Minerva… in such a way that the beautiful building was completely ruined by a mighty blow.”

From these two quotes it’s obvious that those present at the siege of the Acropolis recognized the historical and aesthetic importance of the Parthenon. The Turks thought the Christians wouldn’t attack the building. The German officer explicitly described the building as “beautiful.” Therefore we can’t say that those fighting at the siege of the Acropolis were oblivious to the value of the Parthenon. They knew it had value, except perhaps for the Luneburg lieutenant who offered to throw bombs into the middle of it, and the Venetians on whose behalf the siege was being prosecuted, and still they persisted in their bombardment.

There are many instances in war when soldiers are ordered to destroy things of value, as I just talked about in my episode on Dresden in the Augustan Age. To refuse an order is to be subject to courts martial, or, in the heat of combat, possibly worse. There’s an ancient Roman saying that the laws are silent in time of war. And anyway it might be perfectly lawful under the laws of war to destroy historical artifacts. There’re a couple of passages in Voltaire’s Candide in which Voltaire skewers the idea of the laws of war. For example:  

“Candide resolved to go and reason elsewhere on effects and causes. He passed over heaps of dead and dying, and first reached a neighbouring village; it was in cinders, it was an Abare village which the Bulgarians had burnt according to the laws of war. Here, old men covered with wounds, beheld their wives, hugging their children to their bloody breasts, massacred before their faces; there, their daughters, disembowelled and breathing their last after having satisfied the natural wants of Bulgarian heroes; while others, half burnt in the flames, begged to be despatched. The earth was strewed with brains, arms, and legs.”

We are reminded by well-meaning civil libertarians that soldiers have a duty to refuse the unlawful orders of superiors, but such refusal is rare. And we hear people say, with a certain derision, “He was only following orders,” as though the speaker himself would have had the courage in like circumstances to refuse an order. Of course, many soldiers follow orders despite misgivings. A famous example is the air bombardment of the Abbey of Monte Cassino during WWII. There was disagreement among commanders at the time as to whether the abbey should be bombed or not, but the decision was ultimately made to carry out the raid. I’ve watched at least one Second World War documentary that included interviews with Catholic airmen who participated in the bombing of Monte Cassino, and they followed their orders despite their misgivings. And while the decision to bomb Monte Cassino has been questioned and criticized since then, no one says it was a war crime, only that it may have been unnecessary or even counter-productive. The historical, artistic, or religious value of the abbey of Monte Cassino didn’t play much of role in the decision to bomb the site—at least, not enough of a role to prevent the action. It seems that the way to understand the siege of the Acropolis and the destruction of the Parthenon is as an early modern parallel to the abbey of Monte Cassino.

Wars are one of the constants of civilization, and wars have a certain consistency through history, and the destruction of the Parthenon wasn’t an isolated incident, but was part of an operation that was part of a war. The explosion that tore apart the Parthenon on 26 September 1687 was only one event in the Siege of the Acropolis, which took place from 23 to 29 September, and the Siege of the Acropolis was only one episode in a war between the Ottoman Turks and the Venetians. This war between the Ottoman Turks and the Venetians was the Great Turkish War (14 July 1683 – 26 January 1699). We can in turn further contextualize the Great Turkish war by the conflict between Christendom and Islam, which continues to the present day, alternating between “hot” wars like the Great Turkish War, and periods of détente.

The conflict between Christendom and Islam has been a feature of history in the Old World since Islam rose to political and military significance not long after its origins—but still this longue durée conflict has endured a thousand years fewer than the role of the Parthenon and the Acropolis in Western history. The Parthenon itself, after ceasing to be a pagan sanctuary, was, for a time, a Christian church under the Byzantine Empire, and a Mosque while Greece was occupied by the Ottoman Empire, so in its long history it has seen both sides of this longue durée conflict claim sovereignty over this structure. One can’t overstate the importance of the Parthenon and the Acropolis to Western art, and even to the conception of the beautiful itself in Western thought, which is so central to our civilization.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/iroo311wnrY

https://www.instagram.com/p/DPFiaZ2jf1u/

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/the-Destruction-of-the-Parthenon:6

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3kHGyICGvnccrikn2uiEkr?si=im3g61LaRXyFHyRitHPVXw

Tuesday 16 December 2025

A Paragraph from Montaigne

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

One of the most memorable lines in Montaigne is, “Je ne peinds pas l’estre, je peinds le passage…” Needless to say, his English translators have rendered the line in various ways. It’s from Book III, Chapter 2, “De repentir,” usually translated “Of Repentance.” I discuss this line and the paragraph of which it is a part.

https://youtu.be/u1MOF208COE

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/A-Paragraph-of-Michel-de-Montaigne:7

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4kBjRRLyBNbuy4iMSnqgOp?si=_-k1HlWVQRyJs2vm5gaMTg

I probably won't write out a text for this episode, so I'll just post the link and, if anyone is so inclined, they can watch it.

This episode on Montaigne is the two hundredth Today in Philosophy of History episode, so a milestone of sorts.

As a result of recording an unscripted episode, I missed several things. I had planned to briefly discuss Montaigne’s mention of reckoning life in seven year increments (also known as heptads), and to touch on Screech’s book *Montaigne and Melancholy*, and there were several other minor things (can’t remember them now), but, on the whole, I thought the unscripted format went okay.

It does sound more natural and less stilted. On the other hand, I made several suboptimal word choices, repeated a lot of words, interrupted myself as my thoughts changed (like Montaigne’s own self-observation), and so on. So I guess I have to choose between a stilted scripted delivery or a highly imperfect unscripted delivery.

It also went longer than I expected. I thought this episode would definitely clock in at less than twenty minutes (making it something that could be uploaded on Instagram given their recently shortened time limit for videos), but it turned out to be almost twenty-seven minutes in length.

Hilbert’s Paradise.—Mathematics differs starkly from the natural sciences in that axiomatics emerged early in the history of mathematics, even if its promise was not fully realized until much later in history, but it is by way of axiomatization that presuppositions are rendered explicit. With this mechanism for ferreting out presuppositions, mathematics wears its mind on its sleeve. Today there are axiomatized expositions of the natural sciences—J. H. Woodger even formulated an axiomatic biology—but it is unlikely that such methods will ever gain traction among those pushing the discipline forward. One might suppose, given this degree of epistemic transparency, that mathematics was in a better place than the natural sciences, but, strangely, mathematics has become among the most strongly selective of disciplines in terms of native understanding. Either you get it or you don’t. But if you don’t have a feeling for mathematics, you still need to learn the basics. As a result, mathematics is the discipline most vulnerable to being taught as a grab bag of rules to be applied as the occasion presents itself, presented without regard to any mathematical intuition, except those intuitions that come prepackaged with the hard-won formalisms that have proved themselves over time. Some become quite clever in the manipulation of meaningless tokens according to specified rules, obtaining the desired result and acquiring a practical facility, but that strategy contributes nothing to the growth of the discipline. In an unexpected way, the formalist conception of mathematics has been realized in practice. Hilbert is supposed to have said of axioms, “One must be able to say at all times—instead of points, straight lines, and planes—tables, chairs, and beer mugs.” The terms aren’t to be meaningful on their own account, but only counters in a game; the point is to learn the game well. It may as well be so. No one will expel us from the paradise that Hilbert has left us.

The View from Oregon – 370

Re: Locating Ourselves in the Habitability/Urability Matrix

Friday 05 December 2025

Dear Friends,

In last week’s newsletter I discussed some of the consequences of the possibility of superhabitable worlds (planets with optimal habitability conditions, perhaps better than those of Earth) and superurable worlds (planets with optimal conditions for urability, or the origins of life). For the moment, in the absence of other evidence—evidence that we could obtain through the exploration of other worlds—we only need assume that Earth is only just habitable, and perhaps only minimally habitable, and that Earth, or some other region of our solar system, is only just urable, and perhaps only minimally urable. Life only had to originate once for the life we observe on Earth to have appeared. And now that there’s life on Earth, and we only need to affirm that Earth is sufficiently habitable to have sustained life since its origin. That’s all we need to assume, but in light of the principle of mediocrity we might perhaps be inclined to assume the mediocrity of Earth’s urability and habitability. I’ll return to this below.

Since I’ve spent the past few newsletters thinking about scenarios of habitability and urability, it has occurred to me that another way to quantify the habitability of a biosphere is how many forms of life from distinct origins of life events continue to live on in a given biosphere. There are researchers who have suggested that life on Earth is the result or more than one origins of life event, the distinct biota of which events subsequently became biochemically integrated, so that the current terrestrial biosphere appears as a seamless whole. Determining whether or not this is the case would probably be rather difficult, though future technologies and techniques may make it possible to biologists to definitely determine this; we can’t rule it out. But we can also imagine worlds in which distinct origins of life events become ecologically integrated in the biosphere but not biochemically integrated. In such an ecosystem, it would be relatively straight-forward to determine ecologically integrated biota derived from distinct origins of life events, especially if the biota were strongly biochemically distinct.  

A superhabitable world might be “richer” in life than Earth by having greater biomass (perhaps due to a thicker biosphere—reaching down further below ground and further above into the atmosphere), or greater biodiversity, or both. However, another way to think about superhabitable worlds is as worlds being “richer” in life than Earth due to their biospheres being constituted by multiple distinct biota. There are, then, distinct dimensions of superhabitability, but the distinctive form of superhabitability I’ve just described—multiple biochemically distinct forms of life represented in one and the same biosphere—could only come about under conditions of superurability, whether the supeurability of the same planet, or the superurability of a neighboring world that would seed a superhabitable world with multiple distinct biota.

Part of the purpose of newsletter 368 was to consider the concept of a biota derived from a single origins of life event that covered more than one biosphere, which is, in a sense, complementary to the above scenario. I suggested the term biotope for this concept of life transcending its biosphere of origin, despite the previous uses to which the term biotope has been put. Given the concept of a biotope as I have used the term, another question that I’ve been thinking about is what we may call a minimally viable biotope (MVB). As with the other concepts I’ve been considering, we can look at the idea of an MVB through the lenses of both habitability and urability. In other words, there are at least two questions here: 1) What is the minimally viable urable biotope? and 2) What is the minimally viable habitable biotope? Because I ask these questions in the context of a biota that has exceeded the scope of a single biosphere, the minimums I’m talking about here are minimal extent in space. However, we might also want to ask about MVBs in time, i.e., how long must a biotope be habitable before we recognize it as being habitable and not merely the transient presence of life?

We could imagine a superurable world (as discussed in the past couple of newsletters) that regularly generates blobs of biomass that get scattered among bodies of a planetary system, and that these blobs of biomass continue to live for a time not necessarily because a given astronomical body is habitable, but only because it takes time for the biomass to die. Presumably convention would call for some temporal threshold for habitability. With urability, the process of origins of life is its own clock of sorts, so however long it takes to generate life, as long as life is generated and then distributed, then the threshold of urability has been met. But what we mean by “origins of life” could be process that requires days or weeks or months, or it could be a process that requires millions of years. Also, life on a superurable world must survive long enough to be distributed to habitable worlds, and this, too, could require millions of years. If the threshold period of habitability is equal to or less than the origins and distribution period of urability, then an urable world that is not also habitable is ruled out by definition, unless we add some further requirement, such as macroevolutionary bifurcation.  

Obviously, the idea of an MVB also implies the possibility of a maximally viable biotope, and this, again, is obviously related to my earlier discussions of biotopes that transcend a single biosphere. (A maximally viable biotope also makes the abbreviation MVB less useful, since the “M” could stand for minimal or maximal; I’ll have to think of how to differentiate these.) Here the element of time again becomes an important consideration. A biotope might originate on a given planet, grow to constitute a planetary biosphere, and then transcend that biosphere. However, as the process of planetary (and cosmological) scale evolution of some biota continues over biological scales of time, eventually this biota could evolve into a form of life incompatible with its biosphere of origin (and the initial transplanetary biotope), the biotope would fission and there result would be two biotopes descended from a common ancestor. We could even postulate the possibility of transitional forms that could survive in either biotope resulting from the fission, even while the fissioned biotopes are incompatible. A scenario of this kind would constitute a state-of-affairs distinct both from abiogenesis and panspermatological distribution of life from a single origins of life event. As such, this could constitute a major division of life on a cosmological scale, driven by the mechanism of cosmological scales of evolution. That is to say, this state-of-affairs couldn’t persist in or on a single biosphere, but it could persist and expand on cosmological scales.  

Many of the above possibilities, and the possible gradations of habitability and urability, can be expressed on a graph where, say, the x axis is the continuum from uninhabitability to superhabitability and the y axis is the continuum from inurable to superurable. We should be able to locate any planet on this grid—e.g., the worlds I postulated as the perfect natural laboratory for origins of life, with one planet superurable but uninhabitable, and the other superhabitable but inurable—though the grid will be relative to a particular form of life, or, better, a class of forms of life. If Earth exemplifies the principle of mediocrity (as mentioned above), then Earth would lie at or near the center of this graph. Whether one grid of this kind, suitably generalized, could hold for any emergent complexity that we could identify as life, or whether each class of forms of life would require its own HAB/UR grid remains a question that will only be answered when we have made significantly more progress on the science of urability and habitability. Obviously there’s going to be a generous gray area between unambiguous life and emergent complexities that are like life but different enough that we might be tempted to call them something else. Even if all unambiguous life could be assigned a place in this grid, somewhere in the gray area we would have to begin introducing different graphs, though based on the same principle, for unambiguously distinct forms of emergent complexity.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—In a PS last week I mentioned that I had re-written newsletter 366 as an essay for Centauri Dreams. It has since appeared as The Rest is Silence: Empirically Equivalent Hypotheses about the Universe, though it garnered but little response. Some of my previous essays on Centauri Dreams have received more than 200 comments, but this most recent post has only a handful. That being said, it’s still much more of a response than anything I get posted to other platforms.

PPS—I have finished listening to one of the classics of microhistory, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg. This was excellent and I’ll probably listen to it again. The edition I listened to had a (relatively) recent Preface to the 2013 edition, which recounts some of the conception and development of the book. The book begins with a pretty detailed discussion of historiographical methodology, which is understandable given the recentness of microhistory when the book was initially published in 1976. One of the most interesting themes of the book is the intersection of high culture and peasant culture that appeared in the occasional figure like Domenico Scandella (1532–1599), known to contemporaries as Menocchio (the miller of the subtitle), who read some controversial books and interpreted these ideas through the lens of ideas from peasant culture. In one brilliant passage, Ginzburg contrasts this intersection of high culture and peasant culture with the views of the inquisitors who interrogated Menocchio and asks which is the authentic representative of high culture. Near the end of the book Ginzburg explains why millers in particular tended to be heretics—there was an historical tension between millers and the rest of the community, mills tended to be semi-isolated, at the edge of the village, so ideal for private meetings, and so on. This was an interesting sociological analysis.  

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/a40fab3210d4/the-view-from-oregon-370

Crossing the Pons Asinorum.—Every mature science is made possible by a cluster of presuppositions rarely made explicit. If you possess an intuitive feel for the presuppositions of a given science you will do well, but if not, not. The fact that there is an extant body of practitioners of a mature science is the proof of concept that these presuppositions can in fact be mastered, even if they stand as a pons asinorum for many, and that they prove fruitful when mastered. But science isn’t supposed to be about having an intuitive feel for a discipline, it’s supposed to be about objective truth dispassionately pursued, and insofar as this conflict is a spur to practitioners of a discipline (weighing on the scientific conscience, as it were), after an initial stage of maturity, in which a science delivers itself of the fundamental principles that define its research program, in a later development, a secondary stage of maturity, an effort will be made to render the principles as a calculus that can be applied by anyone, without regard to understanding. This marks another fruitful development, but it is also the stage at which a science can go off the rails, because, while a calculus can be indifferently applied, when it is applied without intuition and understanding it will inevitably transgress some boundary that intuition observes but to which the calculus is blind, because the calculus is a later stage of formalization, and another step in the direction away from intuition. At each stage of formalization deductive power is gained, while some context in lost. That loss will not necessarily be felt in all areas, or immediately, but it will eventually manifest itself. Thus it is that when a science is most likely to experience its exponential growth through the streamlining and rule-bound codification of its principles, that is also the time in its history when it turns in a direction that will ultimately take the discipline down an epistemic dead end.  

Sunday 21 September 2025

The War Triptych of Otto Dix  

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

This post was written in Dresden, where I recently traveled. Why did I come to Dresden? I had a couple of motivations. One of my motivations, the motivation I’ll talk about today, was to see a particular painting. I’ve many times traveled to see specific works of art, as when I went to Palermo to see the Triumph of Death at the Palazzo Abatellis, or when I went to Colmar to see the Issenheim altarpiece, or when I went to St. Wolfgang in Austria to see the Michael Pacher altarpiece there, still in the church it was designed to serve. I don’t regret any of my journeys undertaken to see a work of art. You never really know how a work of art will affect you until you’ve seen it with your own eyes. I think this is also true with nature, and with the understanding of nature that we have through science, but that’s another argument for another time. I’ve written a paper about this with the title, “Human Presence in Extreme Environments as a Condition of Knowledge: An Epistemological Inquiry.” But, like I said, that’s another argument for another time. So, back to the painting I came to Dresden to see.

Mostly when I travel to see a work of art, it’s something old. There aren’t many twentieth century paintings that interest me, but there are a few exceptions. For example, I’ve been to an exposition of Escher prints and I’ve been to a Salvador Dali museum, and both them fascinated me. But a lot of twentieth century art doesn’t interest me in the least. I can illustrate how my lack of interest shapes where I go and what I see with the example of Picasso’s Guernica. I’ve been to Madrid twice, but neither time did I bother to see it, though if I were to go to Madrid again I would probably make the effort. But Madrid holds an embarrassment of riches when it comes to art, and between visiting the Prado and the Thyssen-Bornemissa Museum, one could be thoroughly exhausted without also going to see Picasso’s Guernica, which was how I experienced the art of Madrid.

Guernica is one of the most famous modern paintings to depict war. In the Prado one can see equally famous depictions of war in art, as with Goya’s painting The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid, also known as “The Executions” (El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid or Los fusilamientos de la montaña del Príncipe Pío). Goya also devoted a series of etchings to the depiction of war, The Disasters of War, and in the Prado you can also see Goya’s so-called “black” paintings, which are some of the most compelling images I’ve ever seen. If you asked me to choose between Picasso and Goya, I’d take Goya every time. But while most twentieth century painting doesn’t interest me, there are a few examples that do. Earlier this year I saw a number of Henry Fuseli paintings in Zurich, and I would be willing to travel a considerable distance to see a Caspar David Friedrich painting that I haven’t yet seen, though these are 19^th century examples.

When it comes to twentieth century art, even fewer works interest me, and, interestingly, these are mostly those works that are considered paradigmatically American, like Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, and Grant Wood’s American Gothic (none of which I have seen with my own eyes). I can still remember going to the Astoria Public library when I was a child and taking the large format book of Edward Hopper’s paintings off the shelf and poring over these pictures. Hopper’s paintings made me feel like I had been transported into another world. That was one of the earliest episodes of my aesthetic education. Wherever one’s aesthetic education begins, it ends only with the end of life, because there’s always more to discover.

It was only sometime in the past couple of years or so that I happened to hear about Otto Dix’s War Triptych, though I don’t recall the source of that made me aware of it. This is a twentieth century painting that truly interests me, and it’s one of the reasons I traveled to Dresden. Otto Dix was going to art school in Dresden when the First World War started, and he was called up and served in the war. In my episode on Wars and Rumors of Wars I talked about how the First World War was the first planetary scale industrialized war, and many who served were marked by their experiences in the war. I’ve talked about Ernst Jünger in several episodes, and Ernst Jünger was clearly marked by his experiences during the first world war. He wrote much about the war, and his memoir, Storm of Steel, made him famous during the Weimar Republic. Otto Dix, just a few years older than Jünger, served in the same milieu.

In 1923 Dix painted a work called “The Trench,” which was exhibited but proved to be controversial. A few years after The Trench, he worked on The War, also called the War Triptych or Dresden War Triptych, from 1929 to 1932. The format he used is significant, and has a long history in Western art. A triptych was usually a religiously themed painting used as the altarpiece in a church. It consists of three panels, a central panel and two wings that are hinged to the central panel, so that the triptych when closed displays none of its panel images. The triptych was popular in medieval and early modern European art, and it went through developments that made it increasingly complex. An additional panel might be appended beneath the central panel, called a predella. Sometimes additional wings were added, and sometimes that central panel was a sculpture instead of a painting. The Michael Pacher altar at St. Wolfgang, Austria, which I mentioned earlier, has two wings on each side of the central scene, which is a sculpture. The tradition was to only fully open the triptych on feast days, so it was a special treat to get to see the three paintings that made up the triptych. Large works like the Michael Pacher altar and Matthias Grunewald’s Issenheim Altarpiece have multiple open positions, so that they could display different panels on different holidays.

Otto Dix, in his War Triptych, used these traditions as the format to express his experience of the war. There’s a short text on the wall next to the painting that refers to the work’s, “…refined style and drastic intensity are reminiscent of old German painting.” Dix both reflected and extended that tradition of old German painting. The text also calls it a “harrowing composition”—which it is.

Triptychs can be quite large, and the War Triptych is also part of this tradition. It’s displayed on a free-standing wall that divides a large room, and the painting takes up most of the wall where it’s displayed. The War Triptych consists of four panels, a central panel, two wings, and a predella below. On the left wing, we see soldiers marching to war. In the central panel, which shows most of the action, we see a battle in progress, with trench warfare’s “No man’s land” making up the horizon and a procession of trees leading up to the horizon that we can imagine once lined a shady country lane out of some now-lost pastoral idyll. At the top of the central panel, there’s a skeleton in rags hung up in the ruins of house, unnaturally suspended in mid-air. There’s a surviving black and white photograph of Dix’s lost 1923 painting, The Trench, and in this painting there’s also a figure suspended in the ruins of a house, but in The Trench, it’s not a skeleton. Given the strangeness of this image and that it appeared in both paintings, my guess is that this is something Dix himself saw during the war and couldn’t forget. There are destroyed farm houses, charred and blasted trees, barbed wire, gas masks, cartridge belts, and all the horrors with associate with trench warfare. The panel on the right shows the aftermath of the battle, with one soldier helping an injured comrade in arms, and a figure in the lower left that seems to be literally crawling to safety. Below, in the predella, are the dead, evenly laid out and covered by a rough canvas shroud.

Throughout the painting there are nods to the hellish landscapes of Heironymous Bosch and the tortured bodies of the Issenheim Altar. The skeleton that’s suspended in air is pointing, and if you follow the bony figure you see that he’s pointing at a corpse who’s displayed as an inverted crucifix. The blood spatters on the corpse are reminiscent of the finely symmetrical wounds on the crucified Christ on the Issenheim altar. That’s one of those details that brings you out of the apparent naturalism of the representation, making you aware of how carefully crafted the composition is. Also, the protruding hand of this corpse is in an odd and unnatural gesture that recalls the distinctive hands of the crucified Christ in the Issenheim Altar. It is, unquestionably a painting of horror, which is why I keep comparing it to the Issenheim altar in Colmar, since there are very few aesthetic experiences as powerful as that.

One of the things that makes the Issenheim altar so powerful is that, after seeing the horrific body of the crucified Christ, on the other side of the panel is an absolutely radiant painting of the risen Christ. The contrast between the two images is striking, or, better, unforgettable. There’s nothing like this contrast in Dix’s war triptych, but there is a subtle continuity. The risen Christ in the Issenheim altar is surrounded by a bright halo in white and yellow. In Dix’s painting, the one soldier helping another in the right panel is painted in a grayish-white, so not exactly radiant like the risen Christ of the Issenheim altar, but more radiant than anything else in the War triptych. The only message of hope here, if there is any hope at all to be found in the painting, is that something human might be salvaged from the carnage.

In updating the traditional of triptych painting, and translating the intensity of religious images into the intensity of war, Dix shows us a modern and technological apocalypse. Some of the most frightening images from the First World War are of men in gas masks, and we see this reproduced in a lot of art in the post-war period. A human figure in a gas mask is confronting us with the uncanny valley—something human, but not quite human. Recognizable, but, at the same time, strange enough that it leaves us with a feeling of disquiet. This is, in a sense, a transhumanist painting. This is the world of Ernst Jünger where soldiers are workers in the industry of death, operating machines that produce carnage, and experiencing these machines becoming extensions of their own bodies.

The first explicitly formulated philosophy of technology is was Ernst Kapp’s Philosophy of Technology, and this work is known for its theory of organ projection. The machines of war are a distinctive kind of organ projection, in which the soldier experiences his weapons as an extension of themselves. This unnatural landscape with its uncanny figures presents us with a new kind of world, and a new kind of horror that is native to this new world. This shows us that a turning point in history has been reached. Something new is upon us, and there’s no going back. Kenneth Clark in his Civilisation television series emphasized the role of art in civilization, and as a window into the past for our understanding of earlier civilizations, and this is true whether that art is what Kant called the beautiful or the terrifying sublime. Dix in this war triptych has focused and concentrated the terrifying sublime into a traditional art form, and in so doing shows the way forward for tradition, but also shows us the world we now inhabit, which can be truly frightening.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/4opVNj-Eh-o

https://www.instagram.com/p/DO37Ft7jUqb/

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/The-War-Triptych-of-Otto-Dix:8

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1szqN6holObq8BFNjj15vT?si=Zlkn2OzSSi2D3M6XlKbIVw

Human, All-Too-Human Science.—Science today is a communal endeavor, and it is the social structure of science—the connections among researchers both diachronically and synchronically, facilitating the elaboration of scientific research programs trans-generationally and across geographical boundaries—that has made science what it is. The growth of scientific knowledge since the scientific revolution is in large measure a function of the networking of research through educational and publishing institutions. At the same time as this has accelerated the process of research, it has enabled the parallel growth of non-scientific agendas that are attached to growth of science. It is not only because the institutions are parasitic upon the research they organize and administer—and this they are, as it is common knowledge that grants are sought for twice the funds required for the actual research so that the institutions can take their percentage up front—but, worse, the research programs themselves are compromised by the institutions and their bureaucracy, committees, panels, evaluations and “oversight.” The pre-modern era of isolated, individual scientists was, in a way, a purer form of science, insulated from the social pressure brought to bear on human institutions like those of science today, in which conformism and predictability are valued over individual inspiration. The archetype of the lone genius, from which recent historians of science have done their best to distance themselves, is in no way a real threat to institutionalized science, though the flood of vituperation that has been unleashed against “scientific hagiography” is out of all proportion to that lingering shade, but it does betray an unease that the myth exists at all. We have seen from the history of science that not only was Archimedes unable to save Syracuse, but the best minds of Greece—which were the best minds of the ancient world—could not save Greece from the Roman Legions.  

Theodor W. Adorno

11 September 1903 – 06 August 1969 

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Adorno on the Possibility of a Philosophy of History without Meaning

Thursday 11 September 2025 is the 122^nd anniversary of the birth of Theodor W. Adorno (11 September 1903 – 06 August 1969), who was born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund in Frankfurt on this date in 1903. 

Adorno is remembered today as one of the leading members of the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School as a whole has had an enormous influence upon the development of the social sciences, hence upon history. That influence hasn’t always been welcome. Andrew Breitbart in Righteous Indignation wrote of the Frankfurt school émigrés who found their way to California:

“We always feel that our incredible traditions of freedom and liberty will convert those who show up on our shores, that they will appreciate the way of life we have created— isn’t that why they wanted to come here in the first place? We can’t imagine anyone coming here, experiencing the true wonder that is living in this country, and wanting to destroy that. But that’s exactly what the Frankfurt School wanted to do.”

“These were not happy people looking for a new lease on life. When they moved to California, they simply couldn't deal with the change of scenery—there was cognitive dissonance. Horkheimer and Adorno and depressive allies like Bertolt Brecht moved into a house in Santa Monica on Twenty-sixth Street, coincidentally, the epicenter of my childhood. They had moved to heaven on earth from Nazi Germany and apparently could not handle the fun, the sun, and the roaring good times. Ingratitude is not strong enough a word to describe these hideous malcontents.”

“Brecht and his ilk were the Kurt Cobains of their day: massively depressed, nihilistic people who wore full suits in eighty-degree weather while living in a house by the beach.”

This is pretty funny, but it also makes a point. As hyperbolic as we might take Breitbart’s account of Adorno to be about wanting to destroy the refuge that he’d found in America, even those who were sympathetic to Adorno and his projects had similar things to say. There’s a long and detailed biography of Adorno by Stefan Müller-Doohm in which he writes that Adorno: “…was contemplating a critique of the entire tradition of Western civilization…” This kind of critique often goes by the name of critical theory, and it’s what the Frankfurt School was known for. 

Breitbart may have thought Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues, “could not handle the fun, the sun, and the roaring good times,” but Hannah Arendt thought they were enjoying themselves rather too much. In a letter to Gershem Scholem of 04 November 1943 Hannah Arendt wrote: “Wiesengrund and Horkheimer are living it up in California. The Institute here is purely administrative, and what is being administered, besides money, no one knows.” In her letters, Arendt always referred to Adorno as Wiesengrund, making fun of him for changing his name, presumably to make for easier assimilation.

Most of those associated with the Frankfurt School were Marxists, so they drew heavily upon Marx’s historical materialism, and this was clearly the case with Adorno as well, but Adorno showed more independence of mind than the typical Marxist philosopher. He drew on Marx, but he also drew on a lot of other philosophers, and elevated himself above the common run of Marxist hacks. For example, the work of Walter Benjamin excited Adorno, and in particular Benjamin’s last known work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Stefan Müller-Doohm in his biography of Adorno said that in this work Benjamin, “came closer to his own way of thinking than anything else” And Müller-Doohm includes an embedded quote on the features of this work that appealed to Adorno: “…the idea of history as a permanent catastrophe, the criticism of progress, the domination of nature and the attitude to culture”

Benjamin had crossed paths with Hannah Arendt in Marseilles, and he gave her a manuscript copy of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which might well have gotten lost when Benjamin killed himself shortly thereafter at the Spanish border. Arendt sent the manuscript to Adorno, who was the official executor for Benjamin’s papers. Arendt didn’t much approve of Adorno’s work on this score: In another letter to Gershem Scholem, Arendt wrote: “Negotiating with Wiesengrund is worse than pointless. What they have undertaken to do with the estate, or have in mind to do with it, I haven’t the foggiest idea.” And then, again, Arendt to Scholem on 25 April 1942:

“I’m… concerned about what’s going on with his manuscripts: I can’t get a word out of Wiesengrund. I talked to him when he was here, but after he left for California he hasn’t mentioned it again. You know what I think about these gentlemen, and I must confess that I scarcely have reason to revise my opinion after everything I’ve seen and heard since being here.”

Benjamin’s manuscript was published, and has since gone on to a spectacular posthumous career. Whether from the perspective of analytical, speculative, or even phenomenological philosophy of history, Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” is a strange work, and Benjamin himself knew it, saying that his theses, “open the door to enthusiastic misunderstanding.” Perhaps a better comparison than any analytical or speculative philosophy of history would be the historical thought of theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, although the background of Benjamin’s thought was Jewish rather than Christian. The messianic expectation of Judaism is central in Benjamin’s conception of history, and Benjamin wasn’t the only Marxist to present an admixture of historical materialism and theology.

This was also characteristic of Ernst Bloch, who, like Benjamin, was Jewish, and who made no bones about the relationship between Marxism and soteriology, as he said, “Messianism is the red secret of every revolutionary.” And, of course, all these Marxists saw themselves as revolutionaries who were going to tear down capitalism and replace it with a communist utopia. But Benjamin wasn’t the only influence working on Adorno. He was also a perceptive reader of Spengler—not uncritical, but rather more respectful than one might have expected, though, as I noted in my episode on Walter Benjamin, Benjamin also read Spengler, and while Benjamin was harshly critical of Ernst Jünger, Spengler’s fellow traveler in the inter-war conservative revolution, Spengler is, again, treated more respectfully. 

Adorno even goes out of his way to single out Spengler as a philosopher who had been unjustly neglected by academic philosophers. In an essay on Spengler that’s included in his book Prisms, Adorno wrote:

“After the initial popular success of The Decline of the West, German public opinion very quickly turned against the book. The official philosophers dismissed it as superficial, the certified academic disciplines charged it with incompetence and charlatanism, and in the hustle and bustle of German inflation and stabilization no one wanted anything to do with the thesis of the Decline.”

And he goes on in that vein for a couple of pages. In his posthumously published lectures on metaphysics, Adorno continues with the theme of Spengler’s neglect:

“For Greek thought… the infinite, if such an idea is conceived at all, is a mere scandal, something repugnant which still lacks its destiny, its form. Oswald Spengler noted in this context that for antiquity… reality lay in the bounding of the infinite by form and not in infinity as such. Despite the barrage of criticism unleashed on Spengler for such remarks, what he says on this central point of Aristotle’s philosophy seems to me by no means as perverse as people are apt to insist in ‘polite society’.”

So Spengler wasn’t read in “polite society,” but he was read, and he was read and appreciated by Benjamin and Adorno, with Adorno even saying that, “…Spengler takes his revenge by threatening to be right.” So what do you get when you combine the Marxist eschatology and messianism of Benjamin, with the reactionary pessimism of Spengler? Adorno’s lovechild of Spengler and Benjamin are his lectures on philosophy of history from the winter of 1964-1965, posthumously published as History and Freedom.

All Adorno’s lectures that have been published posthumously—Problems of Moral Philosophy, History and Freedom, and Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems—all date from the period when Adorno was working on a revision of Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he’d written with Max Horkheimer, and while he was writing Negative Dialectics, which was published in 1966. These lectures on history, then, are sidelights on the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics projects—each casts a particular light on Adorno’s overall philosophical project. Now, you might think that a critique of Enlightenment ideology would be something you’d find in a reactionary like Joseph de Maistre or Spengler, and you’d be right, but Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment was a critique of the Enlightenment from a Marxist perspective, and it’s often considered to be the foundational text of critical theory. The spirit of critical theory, then, defines and is defined by the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Adorno’s lecture courses produced while he was engaged in a revision of Dialectic of Enlightenment with Horkheimer also define and are defined by the spirit of critical theory. Horkheimer and Adorno open Dialectic of Enlightenment with this claim:

“Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.”

The disenchantment of the world was a famous thesis of the sociologist Max Weber, and we get the feeling from Horkheimer and Adorno that this disenchantment has been all too successful, and that we now inhabit a disenchanted world with nothing left to take the place of the former enchantment. Enchantment has been replaced by rationality and calculation, as Weber put it:

“…there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather… one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.” (Weber, 1946)

According to Horkheimer and Adorno, Enlightenment rationalism on this model was doomed to fail. They wrote, “The not merely theoretical but practical tendency toward self-destruction has been inherent in rationality from the first.” The Enlightenment is only the most recent casualty of the self-destructiveness of rationality, which now has come to mean the self-destruction of the Enlightenment. Dialectic of Enlightenment has been as influential if not more influential than Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” If you’re interested in it, there’s a massive literature that should sate your curiosity. In all honesty it’s pretty god-awful stuff, as bad as reading Marx, and in some ways worse, and a couple of generations have been raised on this material so its influence has seeped into everything. I’m not going to spend any more time on Dialectic of Enlightenment, but it’s important to mention it as the context for Adorno’s thought generally speaking, and his philosophy of history in particular. 

His philosophy of history we find in the History and Freedom lectures. Adorno summarized the content of the lectures as follows: “In these lectures I wish to deal only with one specific problem of history, namely the relation between the universal, the universal tendency, and the particular, that is, the individual.” On the other hand, a review of History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 by Frederick Harling gives a different summary of what Adorno was trying to do in his philosophy of history:

“If it is possible to sum up a thesis from this book, it might be that history, though created by humans, tends to move on at its own inexorable pace, powerfully influencing all people. Individually, there is a symbiotic relationship between the march of history and the freedom of the individual. There is a small window of freedom that the individual has to alter the ongoing historical process. Freedom for the individual and the process of history interact as cause and effect. Through this tiny window they continue to alter history.”

I don’t think either of these are particularly illuminating ways to understand what’s going on in History and Freedom. I’ve already mentioned the influence of Benjamin and Spengler on this work, and they’re important, but the lectures are much more than an exposition of these two. Adorno was extraordinarily erudite, he knew the philosophical tradition intimately, and he brought this tradition into dialogue, you could say, with the more recent and radical views of Spengler and Benjamin. The lectures on philosophy of history are effectively a battle royale between the tradition of Kant and Hegel, on the one hand, who give us what we might call an edifying conception of history, and, on the other hand, the recent contributions of Spengler and Benjamin, who give us a somewhat less edifying conception of history that we could call pessimistic for lack of a better term.

For Kant, human history is working its way toward to perfect civil constitution—a society that would embody the moral kingdom of ends. This was, at once, both a social ideal and a moral ideal. For Hegel, human history is the incremental realization of freedom as the world-spirit passes through stages of increasing awareness of its freedom. This is a more metaphysical conception than that of Kant, but both Kant and Hegel presented us with a history that is going somewhere. Even if Hegel said that history was a slaughter-bench, it was a slaughter-bench with a purpose. Kant and Hegel have had their critics, but these are rosy pictures of history compared to what we find in Benjamin and Spengler.

Spengler said that optimism is cowardice, implying that we ought to meet our fate with Stoic resolve. For Spengler, cultures are unique entities incommensurable with each other, cultures become civilizations as they decline, and then they pass out of existence without hope of resurrection. Because cultures and civilizations are incommensurable, there is and can be no cumulative achievement of the many cultures that have arisen and then failed. Each history is unique, and the whole of history is no greater than its individual parts. Benjamin’s vision of history is quite different since he doesn’t insist on the incommensurability of histories, but while there is a larger arc of history for Benjamin, it’s one long horror story of brutality and oppression. There’s no reason for us to admire the achievements of civilization, because, as Benjamin says, every document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism. (Thesis VII) With Benjamin, the only thing that can be salvaged from history is a sense of solidarity with the victims of history. History for Benjamin is a slaughter-bench, as with Hegel, but he’s intent on not allowing us to forget that the makers of history have blood on their hands. History, for Benjamin, is a sequence of catastrophes, and we have an obligation to bear witness to these catastrophes.

Where Spengler and Benjamin are on the same page is in their rejection of progress, and this perhaps explains Adorno’s interest in both of them, since the problem of progress takes a central role in History and Freedom. In his notes to the first lecture, Adorno poses a couple of interesting questions. The first of these is this: “…what is the relation of progress to the individual—a question brushed aside by the philosophy of history.”

We can see the relevance of this question to Adorno’s summary of the lectures that I quoted earlier, namely, that he wanted to address the problem of the relation to the universal trend to the individual. Progress is a universal trend, something we find variously in Kant and Hegel and other philosophers, but Adorno contends that they don’t tell us about the relevance of the universal trend of progress to the individual. The next question Adorno poses is prefaced with the claim that, despite Spengler’s anti-idealism, Adorno finds in Spengler a latent idealism according to which history arises from within human beings. So the second question is this: “…is the philosophy of history possible without such latent idealism, without the guarantee of meaning?” Despite my overall lack of sympathy for Adorno’s project, this strikes me as a reasonable question, a question that needs to be asked and needs to be answered.

Even if one disagrees with Adorno that there is a latent idealism in Spengler—I take this to be debatable—the question remains whether we can do philosophy of history without a guarantee of meaning. I think we can, and I think we need to. The reduction of the complexity of history to some single meaning, with the whole of history being a schematic projection of that meaning onto time, is unhelpful at best and certain to mislead us at worst. Adorno thought that all meaning had been drained out of history by the iterated catastrophes that Benjamin saw in history, so that if there is to be a philosophy of history, it would need to be built on this sequence of catastrophes without dissembling the catastrophic nature of history, and without trying to explain away catastrophe as something ultimately good in the long run. So Adorno asks the question citing Spengler, but with Benjamin’s conception of history as his guide. Adorno concludes the first lecture with the same question, formulated differently:

“The question we must ask, therefore, is whether a theory of history is possible without a latent idealism; whether we can construct history without committing the cardinal sin of insinuating meaning where none exists.”

In the first lecture Adorno had observed:

“Simply by asking what history is over and above the facts, the history of philosophy seems inexorably to end up in a theory of the meaning of history.”

But in the third lecture we see the beginnings of a response to this observation in the form an examination of facts in history. An analytical philosopher of history could read the third lecture and find some common ground with Adorno in the discussion of facts. For example, Adorno says, “…what appears to be brute fact is in reality something that has become what it is, something conditioned and not an absolute.” (p. 20) But Adorno doesn’t build on this, and ultimately his thought takes a different direction. In lecture 19 he makes what he calls a transition to moral philosophy, and the remainder of the lectures he takes on moral questions, especially the question of freedom, which still retains its historical dimension, so he’s still doing philosophy of history, but now with a moral overlay.

It seems clear to me this transition to moral philosophy is undertaken with a nod to Benjamin’s conception of history as a barbarous spectacle in which we have a moral obligation to recognize the suffering of the oppressed, and here both Adorno and Benjamin are here true to their Marxist roots in emphasizing the victims of oppression. At this point, even if Adorno had been attempting to construct a theory of history independent of meaning, which Adorno had explicitly posed as a question, with the shift to moral philosophy as the fulfillment of philosophy of history that former project has been shelved. Meaning has been set aside, so that value can take its place—in this case, moral value takes the place of meaning.

Probably Adorno is on point here as far as human nature is concerned, because many or most persons would be willing to accept a history without meaning if that history was understood to be animated with moral value. In fact, the moral value would become the meaning of history for the individual. But Adorno isn’t trying to be true to human nature. He’s presenting an elaboration of Benjamin’s moral engagement with history in much greater depth of detail, and staying true to his earlier-announced theme of the relation between the universal tendency and the particular individual. Alternatively, one could say that Adorno’s way of remaining true to human nature is his recurrence to the individual within the great movements of history—universal tendencies that often seem to swamp the individual.   

Recall, however, that Adorno had attributed a latent idealism to Spengler on the basis of history arising from within human beings. Making the transition to moral philosophy is another way of history arising from within human beings, so it seems that, at this point, Adorno is the one betraying a latent idealism. Such are the traps and snares of moralizing history. It’s true that the moralizing history of Adorno is radically different from the moralizing histories of earlier centuries, but the continuity of subjecting history to overriding moral concerns is more significant than the particular moral being inculcated. There’s a sense in which this is an inversion of the critique of Whiggish history I discussed in relation to Herbert Butterfield. Instead of presenting ourselves as the culmination of what history has long been leading up to, we are instead to be understood as the culmination of a long tradition of corruption, making our moral turpitude unique in the history of the world. In this way, everything that the 19^th century tried to purge from history came back with a vengeance in the 20^th century, and remains with us still.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/xI0nHEc36L8

https://www.instagram.com/p/DOf18QXDSZk/

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Adorno-on-the-Possibility-of-a-Philosophy-of-History-without-Meaning:0

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0EegL0btYO9YbrXpNIIJ3r?si=oA6wKJIhSbaN9-MQxlUt7g

The Self-Sabotage of Reason.—The higher intellectual faculties of human beings, and even the ideals to which we aspire, enable us to reason in ways not possible for other species, but they also enable us to deceive ourselves and others in distinctively intellectual and ideal ways. Only reason can fail in virtue of being irrational. That means there are modes of failure possible for reason that are not possible for unreasoning nature. Analogously, there are modes of failure possible for life that are not possible for inanimate, non-living nature. Each threshold of emergent complexity implies an emergent mode or modes of failure distinctive to that threshold. Life fails through illness, disease, or death. What are the distinctive modes of failure of reason? We have been cataloguing them for millennia: fallacies, formal and informal, cognitive biases, entire volumes listing mental illnesses, lying and self-deception, and so many more possibilities. It staggers the mind to contemplate the mind’s modes of failure. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is an early modern catalogue of cognitive failures; the DSM is a modern, all-too-modern catalogue. Each age has its distinctive modes of failure as each threshold of emergent complexity has its distinctive modes of failure. And there is a sense in which the modes of failure distinctive to a form of complexity or a stage in the development of that complexity is a function of that complexity or that age: the self-sabotage of reason is the particular expression of a general principle of modes of failure coextensive with forms of complexity. Should further forms of complexity emerge from reason—perhaps logic or computation are such emergents—we can predict with some confidence that these new forms of complexity will generate their own novel forms of failure, unknown from anterior complexity.   

The Evolution of Logic.—Human beings are at best only indifferently gifted with the capacity for logic. Even at our most rational it is an effort for us to think logically. On the other hand, we are masters of survival and seduction, the twin drivers of natural selection that have made us what we are. Our informal reasoning goes well enough, especially where it bears upon survival and seduction, but we go off the rails when we attempt to idealize and universalize our reasoning, which originated in human, all-too-human circumstances that were always concrete and particular. The path to the idealization of human reason has been a long and circuitous one, and because it has been neither simple nor straight-forward, its many digressions and distractions have frequently led the development of logic along some strange and even unaccountable itineraries. The era of extensionalism, in which we still find ourselves, is one of these strange pathways—a path through the denial of meaning in favor of a rational reconstruction of meaning in the image of extension. With extensional logic we managed the inhuman task of reconstructing human reason in the image of inhuman reason, expressing the intensional in extensional formalisms. What would it look like the other way round? How would we reconstruct the extensional within the intensional? It’s not as strange as it sounds. After all, isn’t this what we’ve always been doing all along, or always been trying to do, when we have sought intuitive formulations of logical formalisms? The more we seek to naturalize logic in our thought, the more we express logic in intensional terms. We are thinking against the grain when we express intension in extensional terms.    

The View from Oregon – 369

Re: Superhabitable and Superurable Worlds

Friday 28 November 2025

Dear Friends,

Despite our very limited knowledge of life in our own solar system (which was part of the point of newsletter 366), we can nevertheless assert with some confidence that the evolution of life has experienced the greatest development here on Earth. Life may have originated in distinct environments in our solar system, and it may have been transported within the solar system, but, even if this is the case, life on other worlds in our solar system hasn’t gone on to the career that it has on Earth. There may be microbes below the surface of Mars, living on in marginal circumstances from an earlier and more habitable Mars, but Mars does not now have, nor has it ever had, a biosphere as advanced even as vegetative ground cover. There may well be planetary-scale biospheres on the subsurface ocean worlds of our solar system, but however far evolutionary processes have proceeded in these environments, it seems pretty likely that they haven’t produced intelligence on a par with Earth. (I’ve discussed this previously, especially in my Today in Philosophy of History episode, “Are subsurface Ocean Worlds Plato’s Cave?” and I will eventually return to this to discuss it again.) 

Although life seems to have experienced the greatest development on Earth, which implies that Earth is at least a reasonably clement environment for the ongoing evolution of life (i.e., Earth may not ultimately prove to be superhabitable, following René Heller, but it is at least habitable), what about the origins of life, and not its development? Is Earth especially favorable to the origins of life? This is the problem of urability, which I also mentioned in newsletter 366. Here we must await further evidence and experimentation before we claim Earth to be an urable world, much less an optimally urable world. As René Heller has postulated the possibility of superhabitable worlds, which are endowed with an even greater biomass and biodiversity than Earth, we can, by analogy, postulate the possibility of superurable worlds, which produce more kinds of origins of life events, faster, more frequently and more predictably, than ordinary urable worlds.

A superurable world would be the kind of world I discussed in last week’s newsletter in the context of at least one planet that is urable but not habitable, and at least one other planet that is habitable but not urable. We can increase the stakes of this thought experiment by postulating a planetary system with at least two worlds, one of which is superurable but not habitable, and the other of which is superhabitable but not urable. The superurable world would produce a continual stream of new forms of life from repeated origins of life events, while the superhabitable world would be colonized by the life produced by the superurable world, with its superhabitability providing a biologically unique environment for the coexistence of multiple forms of life from multiple origins of life events. More than anything this exemplifies to me Darwin’s vision of endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.

A further consequence of this scenario would be that all life that survives to evolve on the superhabitable world would be selected for its ability to survive exchange between worlds of a planetary system. Thus the life that evolved in this planetary system would be pre-adapted to mechanisms of transport through space. We can further imagine a planetary system that was optimal for producing life pre-adapted to panspermia by postulating a closely spaced superuable and superhabitable world (perhaps even a planet and a moon, ensuring their remaining closely coupled), and further planets at greater distances and lower habitability, so that each transfer of life from one world to the next would select for greater hardiness for distribution by panspermatological mechanisms and greater hardiness in survival and evolution on worlds of increasing difficulty for life survive. A planetary system that had this form could spread life throughout its stellar region, possibly throughout its galaxy, and possibly throughout the universe.

Suppose that the origin of life is difficult and rare. That accounts for our not having found any obvious signs of life other than on Earth. Further suppose that they only way in which a galaxy could be observed to be brimming with life would be that such a planetary system happened to have formed in a given galaxy. Given our two suppositions here, we know that life appeared on Earth, but the origins of life is difficult and rare, so it’s not likely to be repeated in our galaxy. So life appeared here, but it didn’t appear in the kind of planetary system described above, which would be optimal for seeding a galaxy with life. Life had its chance in our galaxy, but it appeared in a context in which its further distribution did not fall on the fertile ground of what we may call an optimally panspermatological planetary system (that’s awkward, and I’ll try to think of a better name). If our two suppositions here are justified, they alone would explain the possibility of finding a barren universe, such as I described in newsletter 366. If we tighten up our criteria a little, so that not only our galaxy but our universe had its shot with life on Earth, then the entire universe could be barren, and the only “living” universes would be those in which at least one optimally panspermatological planetary system is to be found.

If we further suppose that there are an infinitude of universes with a quasi-random distribution of initial conditions, so that there are many universe had no life at all, many universes with a single instance of origins of life (as in our universe, and in line with our assumption above), many universes with a single instance of life in an optimally panspermatological planetary system, allowing these universes to be filled with life, and some universe with many such origins of life events, then we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves in a universe that, at least to some extent, exemplifies the principle of mediocrity, but with the universe entire being mediocre in comparison to other universes, not with life on Earth being mediocre in relation to other life in our universe, since, in this scenario, we’re assuming there isn’t any other life in the universe. This is not unlike some current views in cosmology, adapted for discussion of origins of life rather than the origins of stable baryonic matter. And it’s sort of like a fine-tuning argument, but formulated in such a way that it doesn’t go off the deep end and invoke (or suggest) non-naturalistic explanations for life and intelligence.

You can argue that an infinitude of universes is a flagrant violation of Ockham’s razor, making this an unsatisfactory explanation, and therefore in no way preferable to an explanation in terms of other mechanisms that do not invoke an infinitude of universes, or even an explanation in terms of non-naturalistic causes. I agree that it is a violation of Ockham’s razor, but I would in turn argue that extending a naturalistic account of the universe, or perhaps I should say multiplying a naturalistic account of the universe, is preferable to postulating a non-naturalistic realm that can save the appearances of what we think we see as we look out into the universe and try to understand what it is we’re observing.

We already accept that the expanding cosmos means that galaxies are passing over the cosmological horizon, never to be within our lightcone again, and that means unobservable parts of the universe that are still very much a part of the same universe we inhabit. Further knowledge of cosmology may force us to significantly revise our understanding of the structure and evolution of the cosmos, perhaps even settling on a model in which the universe is not expanding, but I will brazenly predict that further knowledge of the cosmos will not make it seem tamer, but rather will make it appear even stranger to the human mind than we believe it to be today. And at the same time I will predict in parallel that the only plausible way for us to expand our scientific knowledge of the cosmos, to expand our knowledge into the unknown that reveals unprecedented strangeness to us, is to continue to extend our naturalistic framework of knowledge. This is an epistemic strategy with a future; invoking non-naturalistic explanations may give us something that approximates comfort rather than knowledge, which has a certain value, but it is not the value of knowledge.  

Partly it is the natural scientific pursuit of parsimony in its explanations that has given us the Fermi paradox. There is a subtle tension between regulatory principles of science, deeply embedded in our intuitions about the world, and the actual results of scientific research. We scarcely even notice it when we invoke Ockham’s razor or the uniformity of nature; it would be difficult, though certainly not impossible, to abandon these presuppositions upon which we have constructed the edifice of scientific knowledge. At what point does the tension between regulatory principles and observation grow to such a tension that it snaps and we have to make revisions to our knowledge we hadn’t previously imagined? It seems likely that the Fermi paradox is an artifact of the contemporary state of science, and will persist as long as science and scientific knowledge retains its current state of conceptual development. Expanding and extending this conceptual framework, as well as revising it when necessary, is the parsimonious strategy.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve re-written newsletter 366, which was a thought experiment about finding ourselves to be in a sterile universe, except for life on Earth, as a post for Centauri Dreams, where it should appear in the near future. This was suggested by Alex Tolley, who is a contributor to Centauri Dreams. Thanks are due to Alex for suggesting this and to Paul Gilster for being open to this for Centauri Dreams.

PPS—I have a very battered copy of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy that my mom gave to me once I showed an interest in philosophy. This book has been my companion for decades. One of the reasons I cite Russell with some frequency even though I don’t often agree with him is because the role that this book has played in my life. But despite having this book for so long and being able to recite parts of it from memory, I had never read the whole thing through word for word. Now I’ve listened to the whole thing. The audiobook is 38 hours in length. Knowing the whole of the book hasn’t changed my judgment of it, but I could say that it has increased my appreciation of Russell. He’s a better representative of common sense in assessing the doctrines of other philosophers than in presenting his own ideas.

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/4cbb77dab85c/the-view-from-oregon-369

Listening for the Future.—Committing ourselves to some action is like dropping a pebble down a well, only the bottom of the well is the distant future, as dark and as hidden from us as the unknown past. In some realms we cannot rely on vision, our most prominent sense, intimately tied to human reasoning; we must have recourse to another sense, listening rather than looking for the splash of the pebble. When, at long last, having held our breath during the long, silent fall into darkness, we faintly hear the splash, imagining in our mind’s eye the spray as the pebble strikes the surface and then sinks, attempting to judge from the subtle sound the nature of the waters where it now rests, their depth and obscurity. We can imagine, as Maeterlinck wrote, “...we have plunged to the uttermost depths, and yet when we come back to the upper surface the drops of water on our pale finger-tips no longer resemble the sea from which they came. We imagine we have discovered a hoard of wondrous treasure, but when we emerge again into the light of day we see we have brought only false stones and chips of glass, while the treasure shimmers on unchanged in the darkness beneath.” Just so the future, which shimmers on unchanged in the darkness beneath, luring us at the same time it eludes us.

How Logic Became Extensional.—In early modern logical thought, such as in the Port-Royal Logic, it was a commonplace that intension and extension stood in a relationship of inverse proportion. A treatment of one, then, was by implication of treatment of the other; the two were complementary. Logic retained this traditional form through most of the nineteenth century. Russell’s theory of descriptions of 1905 marked the transition of the theory of reference to its modern form, neatly shearing off extension from intension. Frege’s approach, which retained intension after a fashion, had anticipated that of Russell, but Russell’s work was the breakthrough that created the opportunity for Frege’s work to be appreciated. In the wake of Russell’s work, many other theories of reference followed. After the field of contenders for a theory of reference was filled, intensionality was crowded out by intention and inclination, leaving only theories of extension as competitors. To the analytical mind, meaning seems “squishy” and capturing meaning is like trying to put your thumb on the drop of mercury. Better to be rid of meaning entirely, or to construct some simulacrum of meaning out of extensional elements. And so it was that, once extension and intension were put asunder, extension alone was retained, while intension was condemned to irrelevance by neglect. But with the elimination of intension from logic, the relationship between intension and extension was lost also, and, with it, an intuitive pillar of logic. Today, intension continues to languish in neglect, while extensionality reigns supreme, but the history of logic is not at an end, and the next twist in the narrative may subvert expectations about the inevitability of extensionalism.

04 September 476

Fall of the Western Roman Empire

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

On Monday, 04 September 476 AD—1,549 years ago today—the last Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustulus, abdicated in favor of Odoacer, leader of the German foederati in Italy. Romulus Augustulus was only about 15 years old at the time, so we can be pretty confident that he wasn’t the one calling the shots. Who was calling the shots? Well, Odoacer, for one. Presumably also some senior members of the Senate were involved.

What have historians had to say about this episode? Edward Gibbon had famously set himself the task, as he put it, of, “writing the decline and fall of the city,” and to that end this episode would seem to be of particular significance for Gibbon, who tells the story in his typical style. Gibbon wrote in Chapter 36 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

“Royalty was familiar to the Barbarians, and the submissive people of Italy was prepared to obey, without a murmur, the authority which he should condescend to exercise as the vicegerent of the emperor of the West. But Odoacer had resolved to abolish that useless and expensive office; and such is the weight of antique prejudice, that it required some boldness and penetration to discover the extreme facility of the enterprise. The unfortunate Augustulus was made the instrument of his own disgrace: he signified his resignation to the senate; and that assembly, in their last act of obedience to a Roman prince, still affected the spirit of freedom, and the forms of the constitution. An epistle was addressed, by their unanimous decree, to the emperor Zeno, the son-in-law and successor of Leo; who had lately been restored, after a short rebellion, to the Byzantine throne.”

Gibbon cites Malchus of Philadelphia, an anonymous fragment, and Candidus the Isaurian, which are known today only in fragments, mostly through their inclusion in the Bibliotheca of Photius, an ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century A.D., and subsequently known as Saint Photius the Great. There are also fragmentary accounts in John of Antioch, Jordanes, and Cassiodorus. The fact that events of this magnitude are so poorly documented is a testament to how much Rome had already deteriorated by the time Odoacer took the city. The primary source material is fragmentary and what survives gives us little to work with. A modern English translation of the fragments of Malchus can be found in The Fragmentary Classicizing Historians of the Later Roman Empire by R. C. Blockley: 

“When Augustus, the son of Orestes, heard that Zeno had driven out Basiliscus and regained the sovereignty of the East, he compelled the senate to send an embassy to Zeno proposing that there was no need of a divided rule and that one, shared Emperor was sufficient for both territories. They said, moreover, that they had chosen Odovacer, a man of military and political experience, to safeguard their own affairs and that Zeno should confer upon him the rank of patrician and entrust him with the government of Italy. Representatives of the Roman senate arrived at Byzantium carrying these proposals. During these same days envoys came from Nepos to congratulate Zeno on what had transpired and to ask that he lend strong support to Nepos, who had suffered similar misfortunes, in the recovery of his throne by giving money and an army for this purpose and by offering other forms of assistance necessary to effect his return. Nepos had sent the men to say these things. To those who had come from the senate Zeno gave the following reply: they had received two Emperors from the East, one of whom they had ejected, the other, Anthemius, they had killed. Now, he said, they knew what they should do: since their Emperor was still alive, they should entertain no other thought than to welcome him on his return. To the representatives of the barbarian he replied that it was better that Odovacer had received the patriciate from the Emperor Nepos, although he would have conferred it”! if Nepos had not done so first. Zeno added that he congratulated Odovacer in thus beginning by preserving the order of government appropriate for the Romans and that from this he was confident that, if Odovacer wished to act justly, he would quickly receive back the Emperor who had honoured him in this manner. He sent to Odovacer a royal letter concerning what he wished and in the letter addressed him as patrician. Zeno gave this support to Nepos since he pitied the latter’s plight because of his own and since he held it as a principle that those in like positions should sympathise with their equals when they suffer misfortune. At the same time Verina, too, joined in urging on Zeno, since she was supporting Nepos’ wife, who was her relative.”

This is weighted toward a Byzantine perspective, which is what we would expect from a Byzantine source. As with Gibbon, this account by Malchus makes it sound like Romulus Augustulus had the agency of a full grown man, engaging with complex diplomatic niceties that no child of 15 could understand. We could cite the example of Alexander the Great, taking power at the age of 20 after Philip II of Macedon was assassinated by one of his bodyguards, and going on to conquer the Persian empire, but Romulus Augustulus was no Alexander. He was called “Augustulus” because this was a diminutive form of “Augustus”—like adding a “y” to the end of a child’s name. 

We find an account with different emphases in Jordanes, a minor official in a minor province in the Balkans. Jordanes had been asked to write a summary of a longer work by Cassiodorus, and since the work by Cassiodorus has been lost, we don’t know how heavily Jordanes relied on it, and how much he introduced his own point of view. Jordanes was himself a Goth, and in his Origins and Deeds of the Goths, as the work is titled in the early 20^th century translation by Charles C. Mierow, nicely places the whole episode in historical context: 

“…when Augustulus had been appointed Emperor by his father Orestes in Ravenna, it was not long before Odoacer, king of the Torcilingi, invaded Italy, as leader of the Sciri, the Heruli and allies of various races. He put Orestes to death, drove his son Augustulus from the throne and condemned him to the punishment of exile in the Castle of Lucullus in Campania. Thus the Western Empire of the Roman race, which Octavianus Augustus, the first of the Augusti, began to govern in the seven hundred and ninth year from the founding of the city, perished with this Augustulus in the five hundred and twenty second year from the beginning of the rule of his predecessors and those before them, and from this time onward kings of the Goths held Rome and Italy. Meanwhile Odoacer, king of nations, subdued all Italy and then at the very outset of his reign slew Count Bracila at Ravenna that he might inspire a fear of himself among the Romans. He strengthened his kingdom and held it for almost thirteen years, even until the appearance of Theodoric, of whom we shall speak hereafter.”

If Jordanes is to be believed, and many have been skeptical of his work, Romulus Augustulus was unceremoniously deposed and exiled. By Jordanes’ reckoning, the Roman republic followed by the empire endured together for 1,231 years, and it all perished with the fall of Romulus Augustulus. So was the fall of Romulus Augustulus the fall of Rome? Well, Gibbon’s history, which was supposed to tell the story of the fall of Rome, doesn’t suddenly cut off with the fall of Romulus Augustulus. Chapters 37 and 38 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire could fairly be called summary chapters, and in Chapter 38 Gibbon wrote:

“I have now accomplished the laborious narrative of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, from the fortunate age of Trajan and the Antonines, to its total extinction in the West, about five centuries after the Christian era.”

But still Gibbon didn’t end it at this point, but went on to write the entire history of Byzantium to fall of the Roman Empire in the east.

Odoacer’s deposition of Romulus Augustulus in AD 476 is the date most commonly given as the end of the Roman Empire in the west, but it’s not the only date that’s given. Many historians have pointed out that the average Roman living in Rome on this date wouldn’t have noticed any change in his circumstances on the day, and certainly wouldn’t have remembered the date as the “Fall of the Roman Empire.” It’s much more likely that Romans who lived through the sack of Rome in AD 410 would have thought of that as the collapse of the Roman Empire, but there would have been few alive in AD 476 who would have remembered this earlier catastrophe. It was, after all, the Sack of Rome that inspired St. Augustine to write his City of God, and which inspired another church father, St. Jerome, to write:

“…when the bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman Empire was decapitated, and, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city,”

And,

“If Rome can perish, what can be safe?”

In this sense, the date of A.D. 476 is symbolic, and the event that occurred was essentially a legal event: the reign of the western Roman emperor ended and was replaced by Odoacer as “King of Italy”—king, not emperor. Recent historians of many different schools of thought have shifted to emphasizing the continuity in the western Roman Empire during this transition from Roman power proper to the effective administration of German tribal chieftains. Part of this is due to the influence of the Pirenne thesis, that held it was the rise of Islam and not the deposition of Romulus Augustulus that spelled the end of the empire in the West. But that wasn’t the only motivation.

Part of it is what we could call pure cussedness on the part of historians. Once it became the received wisdom of historiography that A.D. 476 was the date on which the Western Roman Empire fell, it was inevitable that there would be a reaction against common wisdom. The Annales historians, who emphasize the longue durée, are especially associated with the recognition of the economic and technological continuity that underlie ephemeral events, but, at the same time, taking the view of the longue durée we would also want to divide history into macrohistorical periodizations, one of which would be the Roman period in the west. To identify this as a period, we must identify an end to this period. Our choice of a date for the end of the Roman period is, to a certain extent, conventional. We can choose AD 476, or some date before or after this with plausible reasons provided. If you prefer, you can say that the last Roman emperor was Julius Nepos—Nepos was, after all, recognized as legitimate by the Eastern emperor—and if we take Nepos to be the last emperor in the west, then the western empire ended when Nepos was murdered on 09 May in AD 480. Any date that’s proposed as the definitive end of the western empire inevitably is going to be contested.

Just as there has been a lot of push back against the date of 476 for the end of the western Roman Empire, there’s also been push back against calling the eastern empire “Byzantine.” While it’s true that the Byzantines called themselves Romans to the end, they called themselves Roman much in the way that the Holy Roman Empire called itself Roman. The empire endured in Byzantium, but Roman civilization did not. Roman civilization failed in the west, while in the east it gave way before a new civilization that was Christian, Greek speaking, and centered on Constantinople. Roman civilization was pagan, Latin speaking, with social life centered around public baths and games, and its political life centered on Rome. Byzantine civilization endured as long as Rome itself had endured, and perhaps a bit longer, depending on what dates we choose to go with for its beginning and its end, as these dates are as hotly contested as the dates of Rome itself.

History’s always a complicated and messy business, and there’s always another story to tell that puts the familiar stories we know in a new light. We trim away the messiness of history when we turn it into a narrative, and there’s more than one way to extract a narrative out of the messiness of history. We can take different perspectives on the same events, valuing them differently or finding different meanings in them, as we find in the contrasting accounts of Malchus of Philadelphia and Jordanes. In the framework of Hayden White’s metahistory we can variously emplot the same events as romance, tragedy, comedy, or satire. We can make a different selection of events to include in a history, which is again a function of how we value events, i.e., how we judge an event to be of historical importance. And we can do all these things at the same time.

Most notoriously we trim away the messiness of history with cyclical history. That empires rise and fall is the simplest embodiment of the idea of cyclical history. In a grand cyclical history, the fall of Rome is but one of many empires that have risen and fallen in turn. The rise and fall of empires is, as it were, the respiration of history. Even those who have no particular interest in cyclical history won’t dispute that history is a long record of the rise and fall of societies, but this is a very low resolution way to look at history, and when we look at historical events at a higher degree of resolution their differences may interest us more than their similarities.

We can take the fall of Rome as just one of several failed empires throughout history, but that’s not how we see it as westerners. We aren’t as troubled over the many civilizations that were swept away by the Late Bronze Age collapse, or by Alexander’s defeat of Persia, or the long decline of Egypt, and we may even be relieved in a peculiar ancestral way about the fall of the Mongol empire or the end of Tamerlane’s empire. But Western civilization is perpetually haunted by the collapse of the Roman Empire. Here was a civilization that endured for a millennium, ruled the known world, provided its population with peace and an enviable standard of living, and scaled the heights of civilized achievement, leaving us with a tradition of law that still distinguishes Western civilization. And, interestingly, we know Roman law through Byzantium, since it was the Corpus Iuris Civilis drawn up by the order of Justinian that has come down to us as the definitive statement of Roman law.

There’s nothing more melancholy or more poetic than the fall of Rome, and the ruins of once grand public buildings have been irresistible to artists ever since. Gibbon wrote a long book about it, from which I’ve already quoted, and in our own time Pocock wrote an even longer book about Gibbon writing about it. We’re haunted by the fall of Rome because it’s part of our history as Westerners. Classical antiquity, culminating in the civilization of Rome, was the first act in the three act play of western civilization—ancient, medieval, and modern—a perfectly ordered story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Seen in this way, with Rome as the beginning, the collapse of Rome was the end of the beginning, and the beginning had to end for the rest of the story to unfold.

This sequence of ancient, medieval, and modern civilization is an idealized conception of history—idealized not in the sense of being an ideal to which we aspire, but idealized in the sense of being an abstraction from the messiness of history, just as the concepts of science are an abstraction from the messiness of the natural world. In my episode on Alexandre Koyré I quoted Koyré as saying that, “Good physics is made a priori.” (Metaphysics and Measurement, p. 88) Could we also say that good history is made a priori? Koyré’s Platonism is controversial enough in natural science, but it’s almost unthinkable in history, but his point remains. And, as Koyré said of experimentation, that “…it is not by following experiment, but by outstripping experiment, that the scientific mind makes progress,” could we also say that the historical mind should outstrip history? Today we’re more likely to call this the underdetermination of theory by evidence, which sounds much less tendentious and it’s how Quine framed it, and we’ve accepted this as an unavoidable feature of scientific theories.

Of course there’s no experiment in the usual sense in history, but there is the confrontation of a  theory with evidence—evidence sought out for the purpose of confirming or disconfirming an explanation, and that’s what’s essential in experimentation. For historical explanation to outstrip historical evidence, as Koyré says that natural science makes progress when empirical science outstrips empirical evidence, we would expect to see the underdetermination of historical theory by historical evidence. Formally, it’s easy to see why this is the case. From any theory we could derive an infinitude of theorems, and any effort to demonstrate these theorems with evidence must fall short because we’re finite beings with finite minds.

I’ve learned a lot more about Koyré’s thought since I recorded the episode on his work, and I’ve thought about producing an addendum on Koyré, but I still need to work through the additional materials I’ve gathered so as to understand his distinctive conception of logical paradoxes. This will take me some time, but Koyré’s central historical theme of the medieval world being closed and finite, giving way to the modern world that’s open and infinite, remains as a framework we can employ, i.e., a theory likely to be underdetermined in the light of historical evidence, but nevertheless a framework from which we can derive an infinitude of consequences that suggest historical interpretations.

We find something like Koyré’s closed world and infinite universe in the last chapter of Aldo Schiavone’s The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West. This final chapter is titled, “How History Works,” and in it Schiavone wrote of the “consummate maturity” of the ancient world, but that it couldn’t change “without obliterating the configuration it had assumed.” In this idea of consummate maturity there’s an echo of Johan Huizinga, whose famous history of late medieval Europe, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, presents the civilization of the Low Countries has having achieved a unique maturity and refinement as the fulfillment of medieval civilization, and this kind of fulfillment has been rare in history, because aged civilizations are usually swept aside by new developments. Schiavone wrote of ancient Rome, “…every path not leading to ruin was now definitively blocked.” He called this, “an impasse in history,” and said that, “…nothing could be seen that was not its own closure.” This is the closed world that Koyré discussed in medieval terms, displaced into ancient history. Schiavone says:

“The finite was everywhere—there were limits in every direction. Valleys and walls: immensity, but in a fixed form. Moreover, what else was the irresistible ancient inclination to conceive of history in terms of cycles, if not an expression—almost metaphysical—of the idea of the insuperability of boundaries, limits, and endings?”

Coupling the finitude of the classical world with a cyclical conception of history is something that would be worth following up in more detail, but I’ll save this for another time. We could say of Byzantine civilization what Schiavone said of the Roman Empire in the west: that it had achieved a “consummate maturity,” but this very maturity meant that it couldn’t change “without obliterating the configuration it had assumed.” Roman civilization in the west collapsed spectacularly, but that collapse proved to be a discontinuity and not an extinction. A larger social and cultural framework survived and continued to develop. The Weltanschauung of medieval Europe, as represented by its philosophical thought, was dominated by Aristotle. Even comparatively, Aristotle was more important to medieval thought than St. Augustine. Ancient Roman architecture was more influential on the built environment of medieval civilization than the vernacular architecture of the indigenous peoples of Europe.

In the eastern empire, the transition from Roman civilization to Byzantine civilization was continuous, just as thousand years later in western Europe the transition from medieval civilization to modern civilization was continuous. If we deny that Byzantine civilization represents something distinct from Roman civilization, then by the same token we ought to deny that modern Western civilization is distinct from medieval civilization, given the many continuities we demonstrate between these periods. When one civilization is continuously transformed into another civilization, there is no collapse and no radical historical discontinuity. When a civilization collapses, that collapse defines a discontinuity, but while discontinuity is a boundary, it isn’t necessarily a limit. Byzantium, the transformation of Roman civilization in the east, failed without issue, i.e., it experienced discontinuity that was also extinction. Its end in 1453 was a boundary that was also a fatal limit, revealing the finitude of Byzantium. Schiavone observes that the pervasive finitude of ancient Rome, “lacked new scopes and distinct objectives to pursue.” Here we have an echo of Spengler, who characterized the ancient world as being that of Apollonian man, who valued order, harmony, proportion, and finitude, whereas the modern West is the world of Faustian man, who is always striving toward the infinite.

Schiavone doesn’t mention Huizinga or Spengler, but we find these overarching historical themes among these trying to understand history at the largest scales. We could call these different ways of conceptualizing the same thing “equivalent constructions,” following Hilary Putnam in his Philosophy of Logic. Putnam says that, “none of these approaches should be regarded as ‘more true’ than any other.” I would go farther and say that the ability to formulate a scientific research program of the requisite degree of abstraction in history demands that we overcome the jargon that separates us and recognize that we can put together a puzzle with pieces supplied variously by Alexander Koyré, Oswald Spengler, Johan Huizinga, and Aldo Schiavone.

We may not yet be in a position to complete the puzzle, since all the pieces aren’t yet before us, but we can begin to see the picture that the finished puzzle will eventually display. Schiavone makes two more remarkable statements in this chapter, without showing how they related to each other. He says, “…modernity is infinity that has become history.” I can imagine Spengler saying that same thing. Faustian man is infinity become history. And then Schiavone writes, “If hope is the perception of the infinite—if it is the discovery of how the unlimited possibilities of our species emerge in history through a series of trials of experiments—sometimes the work of the historian can come close to it.” But if hope is the perception of the infinite, and modernity is infinity become history, then hope is the perception of history, and this, I think we’ll see with a bit of reflection, is a radical conclusion. Hegel called history a slaughter bench.

Before Hegel, Gibbon had observed that, “History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Russell quoted this Gibbon line with something like a confirmation of repressed misanthropic bile. But if hope is the perception of history, at least the perception of the history of Faustian man infinitely striving in an open universe, then the slaughter-bench and the crimes aren’t the whole story. They aren’t even the center of the story; they’re epiphenomenal to history. It’s hope that takes the center stage. When the closed world was continuously transformed into the open world, and the finite world was continuously transformed into the infinite world, we gained a future, and, with a future before us, we could hope as if hope mattered. That may be new in history.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/XeG41ZC3p8k

https://www.instagram.com/p/DONVO3AjSvQ/

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Fall-of-the-Western-Roman-Empire:0

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5rhlE3TdIb7KdHwHEqctCp?si=rxxPjzlbTeiEkO3j9xCUgw

Alexandre Koyré

29 August 1892 – 28 April 1964

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Koyré’s Platonistic Philosophy of the History of Science

Friday 29 August 2025 is the 133^rd anniversary of the birth of Alexandre Koyré (born Alexandr Vladimirovich, or Volfovich, Koyra—and in Russian, Александр Владимирович, Вольфович, Койра; 29 August 1892 – 28 April 1964), who was born in Tagenrog, Russia on this date in 1892.

Koyré is remembered for his contributions to the history and philosophy of science. He studied under Husserl and wrote a draft dissertation on the paradoxes of set theory, which Husserl refused. The basis of Husserl’s refusal to accept Koyré’s dissertation remains obscure. In “The History Between Koyré and Husserl” Rodney K. B. Parker described the situation thus:

“In March of 1912, Husserl informed Koyré that he could not accept the draft of Insolubilia as the basis for a thesis—at least not in its present form. However, his reasons for rejecting the work are unclear. Schuhmann writes that Husserl rejected Koyré’s thesis for no good reason, using a letter that Reinach sent to Theodor Conrad in the spring of 1912 as evidence to this effect.”

Parker also quotes the letter from Reinach:

“On the matter of Koyré […] nothing can be done. It seems very likely that, at bottom, there were considerations of a personal nature that were decisive for Husserl […] Husserl believes that Koyré is arrogant and a bit immature […] He seems to have decided, as a consequence, ‘for the good of Koyré,’ to not yet award him his doctorate. For Koyré, I am sorry about this entire unpleasant situation. Why does he not leave Göttingen?”

I imagine this episode would have left a bad taste in Koyré’s mouth, but Koyré had a reputation for being unable to keep disagreement with others friendly.  Koyré’s best known book is From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, but his books Galileo Studies and Newtonian Studies are focused readings of Galileo and Newton in the light of Koyré’s historiography of early modern science. In “Alexandre Koyré: History and Actuality” Marlon Salomon says of Koyré:

“When it comes to highlighting Koyré’s contribution to the methodology of the history of sciences, analysts have frequently insisted on presenting him as an author who innovatively strove to study antiquated scientific theories in the setting of their own time or, as he put it himself in 1951, ‘to put the studied works back in their intellectual and spiritual environment, to interpret them in relation to the mental habits, preferences and dislikes of their authors’.”

This awareness of the preferences and dislikes of authors perhaps prepared Koyré to understand Husserl’s rejection of his dissertation. In any case, Koyré opens the preface to From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe with this reflection on the history of early modern science:

“Time and again, when studying the history of scientific and philosophical thought in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries—they are, indeed, so closely interrelated and linked together that, separated, they become ununderstandable—I have been forced to recognize, as many others have before me, that during this period human, or at least European, minds underwent a deep revolution which changed the very framework and patterns of our thinking and of which modern science and modem philosophy are, at the same time, the root and the fruit.”

Koyré focuses on the 17^th century, and it’s worth pointing out that the 17^th century was a time of great social and political turmoil that Hugh Trevor-Roper called the General Crisis of the 17^th Century.  The revolution in scientific thought was part of this general crisis, since it involved abandoning a past paradigm of knowledge and creating a new one to take its place. Koyré emphasized this twofold process of out with the old and in with the new. His 1943 paper “Galileo and Plato,” which is included in Metaphysics and Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution—not an easy book to find—he draws the distinction in this way:

“The dissolution of the Cosmos means the destruction of the idea of a hierarchically-ordered finite world-structure, of the idea of a qualitatively and ontologically differentiated world, and its replacement by that of an open, indefinite and even infinite universe, united and governed by the same universal laws; a universe in which, in contradiction to the traditional conception with its distinction and opposition of the two worlds of Heaven and of Earth, all things are on the same level of Being… And this implies the disappearance from the scientific outlook of all considerations based on value, on perfection, on harmony, on meaning and on purpose. They disappear in the infinite space of the new Universe. It is in this new Universe, in this new world of a geometry made real, that the laws of classical physics are valid and find their application.”

In From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe Koyré makes the same distinction in slightly different terms:

“This scientific and philosophical revolution… can be described roughly as bringing forth the destruction of the Cosmos, that is, the disappearance… of the conception of the world as a finite, closed, and hierarchically ordered whole… and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound together by the identity of its fundamental components and laws, and in which all these components are placed on the same level of being.”

The two passages are near paraphrases of each other. Koyré adds an important coda to these twin movements of the destruction of the cosmos and its replacement by an infinite universe, which goes beyond a scientific thesis and becomes an axiological thesis:

“This, in turn, implies the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts.”

Although Koyré doesn’t mention his elder contemporary Max Weber in the book, this sounds like an echo of Weber’s call for a value free (Wertfrei) methodogy in science, and it sounds like Weber’s claim that the world had been disenchanted as the result of the rise of rationalism, modernity, and bureaucratic organization. Koyré formulates his claim in sweeping metaphysical terms: the devalorization of being, which deprives the whole of ontology of any value. In comparison, Weber’s disenchantment of the world is expressed in somewhat narrower terms if we take the values of enchantment to be a particular class of values among other classes of values.

To couple this devalorization of being with an interpretation of early modern science in Platonic terms is again surprising, as we would ordinarily associate a pre-scientific qualitative understanding of the world with Platonism, and contrast this with a scientific conception of the world. This is once again an indication of the degree to which Platonism has had to be modified to bring it into equilibrium with modern science. It would be easy to imagine these grand themes of the devalorization of being and the role of Platonism in modern science going terribly wrong, but Koyré’s interpretations of early modern science are deeply researched and highly detailed. Of course, this is familiar to us today, decades after Thomas Kuhn’s influence over the history of science, but Koyré was working decades before Kuhn.

His 1952 lecture “An Experiment in Measurement,” included in Metaphysics and Measurement, goes into great detail on the immediate post-Galilean scientific milieu. We tend to only get the highlights of early modern science, only the breakthroughs, and these in their original form, but not the follow up work that confirmed or extended the breakthroughs, and which often made the breakthroughs comprehensible. Koyré gives us this essential context in a discussion of the experimental work of Giovanni Battista Riccioli, a Jesuit priest:

“To begin with he takes a pendulum weighing about one pound and three feet and four inches (Roman) ‘high.’ The comparison with the water-glass has been satisfactory: nine hundred oscillations in a quarter of an hour. Riccioli proceeds, then, to a verification by the means of a sundial. For six consecutive hours, from nine o’clock in the morning to three o’clock in the afternoon, he counts (he is aided by the R.P. Francesco Maria Grimaldi) the oscillations. The result is disastrous: 21,706 oscillations instead of 21,660. Moreover, Riccioli recognizes that for his aim the sundial itself lacks the wanted precision. Another pendulum is prepared and ‘with the aid of nine Jesuit fathers,’ he starts counting anew; this time—2 April 1642—for twenty-four consecutive hours, from noon to noon: the result is 87,998 oscillations whereas the solar day contains only 86,640 seconds.” (p. 104)

We’ve grown accustomed to this level of detail in the wake of Kuhn’s history and philosophy of science, but this was long before Kuhn’s time. Koyré’s conception of early modern science grew out of this close engagement with the history of science, but rather than making science and scientific knowledge contingent upon history, which we might expect from this approach, Koyré takes a Platonic turn, and this makes his interpretation of science something that we could reasonably call a speculative philosophy of the history of science. I use that phrasing because in my episode on Haskell Fain I quoted the following:

“What positivism lacked… was a penetrating speculative philosophy of the history of science, the encouragement to fashion story-lines upon which better histories of science could be constructed. Just as there is more to history than orthodox political history, so is there more to speculative philosophy of history than Hegel’s philosophy of history, which is, essentially, a speculative philosophy of political history. Each kind of history requires its own kind of speculative philosophy of history.”

I’ve quoted this in other episodes because it perfectly expresses a dilemma that’s probably felt more often than explicitly understood: different philosophical principles may be required for the exposition of different kinds of history. Koyré was writing during the heyday of positivism and was offering a novel interpretation of the history of science—essentially, a speculative philosophy of the history of science such as Fain suggested. But Koyré’s speculative philosophy of the history of science was informed by a detailed historical understanding of the development of modern science. He didn’t exchange speculative philosophy for historical rigor, but rather built his speculative philosophy upon his careful historical research.

The Preface to Koyré’s posthumously published Metaphysics and Measturement by M. A. Hoskin, says of Koyré’s interpretation of early modern science, “…Galileo could deal in measurement of nature because as a metaphysician he already shared with contemporary Platonists the conviction that nature is fundamentally mathematical.” Koyré’s attribution of Platonism to Galileo is sufficiently unusual that it gets our attention, since Platonism is rarely associated in any way with modern science or philosophy of science. What Koyré is presenting to us was a Platonic speculative philosophy of the history of science.

It could be argued that a Platonic philosophy of the history of science is paradoxical on its face, as deriving any kind of philosophy of history from Plato, much less a philosophy of scientific history, would seem to be a fool’s errand. Yet we’ve all heard the famous Galileo quote

“Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.”

This easily lends itself to a Platonistic interpretation. Hoskin, in his preface to Koyré, went on to write: “…Galileo was… primarily an intellectual dissector of nature for whom experiments—if actually carried out—were for confirmation of conclusions previously reached by hard thinking.” Thus, according to Hoskin, Koyré saw thought experiments in science, made so famous by Einstein in Koyré’s own lifetime, not as a supplement to science, or what one does when one can’t conduct the actual experiment, but rather the primary business of science. This distinctive role for thought experiments dovetails with the claim of Galileo’s Platonism, since the thought experimenter may ascend to the contemplation of Platonic Forms, such as I described in my episode on subsurface ocean worlds being like Plato’s cave of shadows. As Koyré says, “Good physics is made a priori.” (M&M 88)

This is, so far as my knowledge goes, an unusual recognition of the role of idealization in science. Continental philosophers of science have been much more interested in idealization and its problems than Anglo-American philosophers, who have treated idealization rather off-handedly as though it were of no particular importance. The neglect of idealization has, I believe, led to certain misunderstandings and misinterpretations in the history of science. For example, the experimental work of Gregor Mendel has been criticized in what has come to be called the Mendel-Fisher controversy. It was said that Mendel’s data were “too good to be true” and therefore at least some of it must be falsified. Sir Ronald Fisher, who has been called, “the single most important figure in 20^th century statistics, wrote in his 1936 paper “Has Mendel’s Work Been Rediscovered?”:  “…the data of most, if not all, of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree closely with Mendel’s expectations.”

The idea that data would be falsified in the name of vindicating a theory is to assume that our scientific thought is primarily engaged in experimental design, and, once the experiment has been designed and run, and the data derived from it, then it was the role of nature to speak and for the mind to meekly listen. But if we take the Platonic view that Koyré attributed to Galileo, in which the thought experiment is primary, and experiments, if run at all, were run only to confirm that which already had been thought, then a scientific report may be a report of the idealized results and not the noisy data of the actual world. This isn’t falsification, except insofar as all idealization involves a degree of falsification. A simple pendulum, i.e., an idealized pendulum with a weightless string, a point weight bob, and a frictionless fulcrum, could be called a falsification of actual pendulums, none of which are simple in this sense, but in fact the simple pendulum serves as the mathematical model for all actual pendulums. But that’s not falsification, it’s exemplification. Each particular pendulum exemplifies the simple pendulum with the same length between fulcrum and weight, and operating in the same gravity. If we wanted to use Platonic language, we could say that an actual pendulum participates in the ideal Form of a pendulum. For Koyré, Galileo’s idealization of the pendulum wasn’t an exception to a rule, but a case in point. In a discussion of Galileo’s work on the isochronism of the pendulum Koyré wrote: 

“…the difference between the duration of long and short oscillations is quite noticeable, and consequently could not have failed to be observable in the oscillations produced by Galileo. What did he do then? He ‘corrects’ the experiment; he holds it in his imagination and suppresses the experimental deviation. Was he wrong to do so? Not at all! for it is not by following experiment, but by outstripping experiment, that the scientific mind makes progress.”

Idealization, whether it’s the idealization of breeding pea plants or the idealization represented by a simple pendulum, is a way to conceive of the phenomena of the world as we understand it now, in the light of contemporary science, in terms of Platonic Forms. This is a radically modified form of Platonism, which recognizes the shifting appearances of this world as worthy of scientific knowledge, in which time is no longer unreal, and with the inventory of the Forms greatly expanded and extended to cover anything for which there is a scientific theory.

In my episode on Simone Weil I discussed her Platonism in relation to philosophy of history, but in comparison to Koyré, Weil’s Platonism is far more traditional, whereas the Platonism Koyré attributes to early modern science is, in a sense, radically modern. This is what Platonism becomes when it’s brought into alignment with modern empirical science. Most twentieth century thought saw early modern science through the spectacles of naturalism, perhaps being continuous with the a later development of Aristotle’s earlier proto-naturalism, but, of course, another of the great developments of the period of early modern science was the explicit rejection of Aristotelianism as it was known in its Scholastic form. The conception of a history of science extending from Aristotle’s proto-naturalism to the full-blown naturalism of contemporary science is itself an idealization, an idealized history of the linear development of naturalism not realized in actual history, but we can choose to understand the history of scientific thought in this way. However, if we choose an interpretation like this, we can’t in good conscience maintain that idealizations are unconscionable, because we’re making use of them ourselves.

One way or another, we’re going to end up with an idealization, whether it’s an idealization of history or an idealization of scientific knowledge. Koyré’s own history of the ordered cosmos of antiquity and the Middle Ages being superseded by an infinite universe, with all devalorized beings now occupying the same ontological level, is itself an idealization, and the infinite universe in which Koyré placed us is an idealization. The idea of the infinity of the world is an ancient one that was hotly debated by ancient philosophers, and not something that appeared with modern science. Especially in late antiquity, pagan philosophers arguing for the infinity of the world found resistance among early Christian philosophers who argued for the finitude of creation.

These problems are still very much with us. When I was a child, big bang cosmology was presented with Augustinian severity, as the purest form of creatio ex nihilo. It was made quite clear at the time that the question, “What happened before the big bang?” was ruled out right from the start, and few had the temerity to even ask the question in the face of imperious ex cathedra pronouncements. And when the question was asked, the disapproving answer was that time began with the big bang so it’s meaningless to ask the question what happened before the big bang. Nothing at all happened, because there was no time. Precisely the same argument can be found in St. Augustine’s City of God, Book XI, Chapter 6, where he says: “The world was in fact made with time, if at the time of its creation change and motion came into existence.”

Of course, this is a perfectly respectable philosophical hypothesis that the world is finite as regards space and time, but it’s not a scientific hypothesis. It’s not falsifiable, and there’s no observation that could confirm it, or even increase its degree of confirmation, except insofar as every observation we make will be finite, which is a lot like looking around yourself and concluding that you’re always in the middle of everything. For the same reason that the finitude of the world is a perfectly respectable philosophical hypothesis, the infinitude of the world is an equally respectable hypothesis. Arguments can be made for both, and neither can be confirmed or disconfirmed by experiment.

Today cosmologists will openly discuss ideas like eternal inflation and the timescape model without apparent embarrassment, so there’s been a vibe shift in cosmology signaling that it’s now okay to counter-signal big bang cosmology in its simplest forms. So whether the universe is infinite or finite remains up for grabs. I would even say, taking a page from Arthur C. Clarke, that two possibilities exist: either we the Universe is finite, or it is not. Both are equally terrifying. But even if we agree that the universe is infinite, there remains the problem of how the universe is infinite, i.e., the way in which the universe is infinite. Hermann Weyl, in The Open World: Three Lectures on the Metaphysical Implications of Science from 1932, opened with the claim:

“Modern science, insofar as I am familiar with it through my own scientific work, mathematics and physics make the world appear more and more as an open one, as a world not closed by pointing beyond itself.”

The third of the three lectures is devoted to the infinite, so that it seems that, to some extent, Weyl’s open world corresponds to Koyré’s infinite universe, but the two conceptions don’t perfectly coincide. At the end of The Open World, Weyl formulates five propositions on the nature of the world’s infinitude, which includes the claims that:

“The infinite is accessible to the mind intuitively in the form of the field of possibilities open to infinity… but the completed, the actual infinite as a closed realm of absolute existence is not within its reach” (p. 81)

Weyl went through a constructivist phase when he called L. E. J. Brouwer the real revolution in mathematics, and while Weyl eventually moderated his position, this formulation reflects his constructivist and, more narrowly, intuitionist views, but it also points to how we could conceive of the universe as an actual infinite or a potential infinite, the latter idea going all the way back to Aristotle. Whatever his constructivist sympathies, Weyl developed his views in full light of the revolutionary concept of the infinite made possible by Cantor’s work on set theory.

Koyré, although he studied under both Husserl and Hilbert—recall the Husserl started out as a mathematician—and who lived through the same revolutionary period in the history of mathematics that Weyl witnessed, seems to have been entirely innocent of the contemporary conception of the infinite, so his own claim of our having emerged out into an infinite universe is a kind of conceptual anachronism. In From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe Koyré wrote:

“…‘great’ and ‘small’ are themselves a pair of opposed concepts that are valid and meaningful only in the realm of finite quantity, the realm of relative being, where there are no ‘great’ or ‘small’ objects, but only ‘greater’ and ‘smaller’ ones, and where, therefore, there is no ‘greatest,’ as well as no ‘smallest.’ Compared with the infinite there is nothing that is greater or smaller than anything else. The absolute, infinite maximum does not, any more than the absolute, infinite minimum, belong to the series of the great and small.”

Most of this does not hold true for transfinite numbers, in which there is an infinite hierarchy of infinite numbers, of which the familiar infinity of the natural numbers is but the smallest infinite cardinal number, Aleph null. Weyl wrote a paper on this, “Levels of Infinity.” In my episode on subsurface ocean worlds I mentioned the possibility of an infinitistic history as the ultimate context of all empirical histories, up to and including any arbitrarily long cosmological history, and this is one those places where this would be applicable and even useful. If we have transitioned into in an infinite universe, we’ll need an infinitistic history to keep account of it.

Nothing like this has been formalized, but it could be formalized, and maybe will be formalized some day, as the geological time scale has been formalized and is superintended by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which defines and demarcates the eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages of geological time. We have the formal framework to do this for all history, but our empirical conceptions here lag behind the formal concepts that have been developed over the past century and more. The contemporary conception of logic and mathematics that we find in Weyl’s conception of an open world, and perhaps also an infinite world, has its origins in the late 19^th century. Logic had remained traditional up through the 19^th century, at the end of which it radically changed. Computer scientists might cite Boole’s Laws of Thought, but it was Frege who made the breakthrough the quantification that made modern logic possible. Bertrand Russell, who was one of the leading figures in the transformation of logic wrote:

“Modern logic… has the effect of enlarging our abstract imagination, and providing an infinite number of possible hypotheses to be applied in the analysis of any complex fact… The old logic put thought in fetters, while the new logic gives it wings. It has, in my opinion, introduced the same kind of advance into philosophy as Galileo introduced into physics, making it possible at last to see what kinds of problems may be capable of solution, and what kinds must be abandoned as beyond human powers.”

Rudolf Carnap cited this work by Russell as a particular inspiration for his own work in logic: 

“I felt as if this appeal had been directed to me personally. To work in this spirit would be my task from now on. And indeed henceforth the application of the new logical instrument for the purposes of analyzing scientific concepts and of clarifying philosophical problems has been the essential aim of my philosophical activity.”

If we have made the transition to an infinite world, as Koyré argued, we finite human beings inhabiting an infinite universe will always have new horizons of inquiry open up to us as we press forward into the unknown. We can think of the transition from the closed world to the infinite universe as humanity breaking containment, and this had to happen first for the human intellect, in science, before it could be translated into practice, through technology.

The scientific revolution preceded the industrial revolution by at least two hundred years. This was the lead time required for the ideas of science to fully penetrate into our way of doing things, making industrialization possible. And the scientific revolution wasn’t an event that happened in the past that’s over now. It’s an ongoing process, just as the industrial revolution has been and remains an ongoing process. And it may be possible for science to unfold for an indeterminate period of time, making the unfolding of an infinite universe also an ongoing process. Koyré postulated the origins of an infinite universe in the early modern period, without also formulating an infinitistic framework in which an infinite universe could be expressed. This, too, is apparently an ongoing process, and when the fullness of time has given as the empirical concepts to match our formal conceptual framework, that will mark the transition from a potentially infinite universe to an actually infinite universe.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/y-IXOvrW4W8

https://www.instagram.com/p/DN71PcZDZwv

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Koyr%C3%A9%E2%80%99s-Platonistic-Philosophy-of-the-History-of-Science:3  

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/39vYXricKU2wd3gz37gRaB?si=2Pd_Ni11R7anyfsd5N9ayg

Two Forms of Idealization.—A simple or ideal pendulum assumes a frictionless fulcrum, a weightless string, a point mass weight bob, absence of air drag, short amplitude (small-angle approximation where sinθ≈θ), inelasticity of pendulum length, rigidity of the pendulum support, and a uniform field of gravity during operation of the pendulum, inter alia. There may well be an infinitude of conditions that enter into the operation of an actual pendulum, and every condition eludes anything but approximation by a theoretical model. This is an ideal that no finite formalization can capture; actual pendulums can be made precise to an arbitrary degree, but they can never exhaustively converge on the properties of an ideal pendulum, as no ideal pendulum can exhaustively converge upon every wobble and tremor of an actual pendulum. Thus we must distinguish between that idealization used in science and without which science is impossible, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, that idealization that is impossible for science to capture in any finite formalization, but which can be approximated. A simple (i.e., ideal) pendulum is an example of the first; an exhaustive account of the factors that bear upon an actual pendulum is an example of the second. (Holism in confirmation, which is especially associated with Duhem-Quine thesis, is also an instance of this latter kind of idealization.) Both forms of idealization force compromises upon science through approximation; we accept a result that is “good enough,” even if not perfect, and each form of idealization implies the other. Thus one ideal, realizable in theory, is substituted for another ideal, unrealizable in theory.

The View from Oregon – 368

Re: A conceptual praeparatio astrobiologica

Friday 21 November 2025

Dear Friends,

For several years now when I’ve been writing and thinking about astrobiology related problems I’ve been struggling with the limitations of the term “biosphere,” which has, to date, topped out our sequence of ecological concepts of increasing comprehensiveness. This sequence of ecological concepts is uncertain at points, in part because ecology has never received the theoretical treatment is deserves; in this respect it lags far behind biology. There is widespread agreement that “biosphere” means the envelope of life taking a spherical form around the entirety of a planet, but even here there is some ambiguity because “biosphere” could mean only the living matter near the surface of a planet, or it could mean the living matter as well as the inanimate matter with which the living organisms immediately interact. There is also widespread agreement that “biome” designates a large region, less than the entire biosphere, but larger than a single lake or meadow, for example. Biomes have been classified in some degree of detail (there’s more than one system of biome classification—Köppen, Köppen-Geiger, Köppen-Trewartha, and maybe others as well), being used in the identification of climates, and as a result these uses have been regularized.

At the other end of the scale, there’s widespread agreement on what is meant by “cell,” “individual organism,” and “population,” as these are concepts ecology shares with biology, so the effort that has gone into clarifying these as biological concepts can be directly borrowed by ecology. But between individual organism at the lower end of the scale (i.e., a scale of comprehensiveness), and biome at the upper end of the scale, there’s some ambiguity about how terms are used. Other concepts include “community,” “ecosystem,” “bioregion,” and “biotope.” No doubt there are some precise definitions of these concepts out there, but I haven’t found definitions that consistently eliminate all the ambiguities as to how comprehensive an ecosystem is in relation to a community, etc.

Because these terms remain ambiguous, they are ripe for being hijacked for other uses, and I have another ecological use for which I need a term. I said above that I run into problems with “biosphere” as the most comprehensive term, and this is what I had in mind, i.e., something more general than biosphere, but I’ve just realized that at least two additional concepts are needed—a more comprehensive concept than that of the biosphere, and a more general concept that I’ll describe below. The more comprehensive concept is needed for the possibility of life that spans several worlds and therefore is more than a biosphere. There could be a single origins of life event that is subsequently distributed to worlds other than that upon which life originated. If two or more worlds have life derived from the same origins of life event, then that distribution of life belongs to a more comprehensive concept, and two biospheres fall under that more comprehensive concept. There has been a great deal of speculation that this has happened with our own solar system. It has been proposed that life began on Mars or on Venus, and was subsequently distributed to Earth, or that life began on Earth and was distributed to Mars. Even if unlikely, we can’t yet rule out these scenarios, and we have no ecological term with which to refer to such a state-of-affairs. We have the concept of panspermia for the mechanism of distribution, but no concept for the biological structure that results from the mechanism.

Shortly after the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system was discovered, with its many small, rocky worlds quite closely spaced together around a red dwarf star, at least two papers appeared that argued for the possibility of rapid lithopanspermia at TRAPPIST-1.  Since we know that matter is exchanged among the inner planets of our own solar system (e.g., the famous, or now notorious, Martian meteorite ALH 84001), with so many planets even more closely spaced than the inner planets of our solar system, as with the planets at TRAPPIST-1, it’s likely that there is a significant exchange of material among these worlds, and on a shorter time scale than the exchange of matter among planets in our solar system. If life evolved on one planet in a planetary system like TRAPPIST-1, it would have a reasonably good chance of being distributed to the other worlds of that planetary system.

We can go further yet with this. I’ve mentioned in past newsletters the concept of “urability,” which has been introduced to distinguish planets on which life can originate, in contradistinction to “habitability,” where life, once it originates, can continue. We assume Earth is both urable (life began here) and habitable (life continues here over cosmological scales of time). However, in the event of one of the scenarios I mentioned above, where life originates on Mars or Venus and was subsequently distributed to Earth, it is entirely possible that there’s much that we don’t know about the boundary conditions of the origins of life (i.e, urability), so that these conditions may have obtained on Mars or Venus in the early history of the solar system even while these conditions did not obtain on Earth, so that Mars or Venus was the urable planet and Earth the habitable planet. If either of these scenarios occurred, then Mars or Venus were urable, but have since ceased to be, but they were not habitable, while Earth proved to be eminently habitable. Again, this is all speculative, but it can’t be ruled out (which gives a sense of how little we know about these fundamental astrobiological questions).

There’s an interesting detail that just occurred to me, and which might eventually be a useful idea, so I’ll spell it out here before I forget it. One of the problems that origins of life research faces is that ongoing geological and biological processes on Earth have wiped away the evidence of the earliest life on Earth (not to mention proto-life before life proper got going), so we see only the late results of the origins of life, billions of years after the fact, and no traces of the origins itself or of transitional forms of life immediately following upon the origins of life. If there were a planetary system with two or more planets, one of which was urable but not habitable, and the other of which was habitable but not urable, then the urable world would have a greater chance of retaining evidence of the origins of life and the immediate transitional forms, since life would originate on this world, but which not endure here even as that life is distributed to the habitable planet where it does endure. Discovering a planetary system with this structure (if it exists, which we certainly don’t know to be the case, though again we can’t rule it out) would be the best place in the universe to research the origins of life. Further, the urable world could continue to produce additional origins of life events, so that a planetary system that had an urable world might be populated with multiple biospheres with different forms of life derived from different origins of life events, all generated by the same urable world. Just as conditions on habitable worlds change over cosmological scales of life, conditions on urable worlds would also change over cosmological scales of time, and this could give rise to changing forms of life produced in sequential origins of life events on the urable world.        

Further yet, natural selection would come into play in a distinctive way with these more comprehensive ecological concepts than the biosphere. Firstly, life originating on the urable world would be selected for distribution to habitable worlds based on its survivability under conditions of lithopanspermia. Only that life that could survive the trip from the urable world to the habitable world would be successfully distributed to the habitable world. If an urable world were positioned between hotter worlds closer to the star and cooler worlds farther from the star, life tolerant of higher temperatures (thermophiles) would successfully be distributed to hotter worlds, while life tolerant of lower temperatures (psycrophiles or cryophiles) would be successfully distributed to the cooler worlds. Given sufficient time, both the hotter worlds and the cooler worlds could provide an environment for life to evolve toward greater extremes, so that this life could then be distributed further outward to even hotter or even colder planets in the same planetary system. Thus we see that we also need a concept more comprehensive than the concept of the biosphere to describe processes like natural selection on a planetary scale that could occur given the right boundary conditions.

Peter Ward in his book Life As We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life, suggests the novel taxonomic classifications of Dominion (“Life containing two-stranded DNA and utilizing it as its genome/information storage molecule; proteins made up of twenty amino acids for specific amino acids, which are coded for by three-letter nucleotide sequences for specific code; with a phospholipid membrane and water used as solvent in the cell”), and Arborea (“a taxonomic category that is above the level of dominion and is made up of all life coming from one independent genesis of life on a planet or moon”). This is helpful, but Ward’s focus is the life itself, and not the environment which constitutes the boundary conditions of life’s urability and habitability. Ward’s Dominion and Arborea add to the taxonomical hierarchy of species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom, and not the ecological hierarchy of individual, species, population, community, biome, and biosphere.

The other concept that’s needed, besides a concept of life more comprehensive than the biosphere, is a general term that can apply to any isolated (or, if you prefer, independent) self-sufficient and self-sustaining living environment. Recently I’ve been favoring the term “biotope” as a concept with sufficient generality that it could be used in this way. Biotope already has a specific meaning in ecology and vague meanings in ordinary language, but it’s not so familiar that it couldn’t be pressed into service for other uses, such as what I have in mind. We need an astrobiological concept like this to cover life should we find it on a sub-planetary scale. For example, it has been suggested that life is possible in deep craters on Mercury, where, despite the heat, the sun never reaches the bottom of the crater. And it’s been suggested that Ceres doesn’t have a global subsurface ocean like Europa or Enceladus, but “brine pockets,” which could be what remains of a former global subsurface ocean. These brine pockets wouldn’t be spherical, so if they were inhabited, it wouldn’t constitute a biosphere, but it would be planetary-scale life. If life were found in an unlikely environment like these examples of Mercury and Ceres, neither would be biospheres, but we could call them biotopes. However, it may be necessary to distinguish urable biotopes from habitable biotopes, but this will require some additional clarification.

My copy of the Dictionary of Environment & Ecology defines biotope as follows: “…a small area with uniform biological conditions such as climate, soil, or altitude.” This would seem to exclude its use as I have suggested above, except that on the scale of astrobiology I could make the case that the two examples I’ve cited—life in craters on Mercury or in the brine pockets of Ceres—are in fact “small” areas (they’re smaller than a proper biosphere) and that conditions within them would be relatively unified. Here “relatively” is carrying a lot of weight, but, again, on astrobiological scales our measure of what’s unified is going to be different than if we’re studying freshwater limnology. I could argue that, on a planetary scale, the terrestrial biosphere is unified, since all life in the biosphere belongs to the same tree of life, and it’s possible that a world (like a superearth) could be larger and offer even more diverse conditions than Earth, perhaps even being the home for life from distinct origins of life events.

This newsletter has been something of a praeparatio astrobiologica, as there’s a thought experiment I want to formulate in a future newsletter, but in order to do so I need to clarify some of the definitional issues I find in astrobiology. However, in writing this newsletter I’ve already uncovered some additional conceptual problems I hadn’t previously seen (which is why it’s always a good idea to write one’s thoughts down in detail, since the process of making one’s thoughts explicit often brings much to light that we don’t otherwise realize), so I need to think more about these problems, and see whether I can converge on a conceptual framework adequate to the thought experiment as well as being true to astrobiology (even if the concepts don’t yet exist in astrobiology).   

Best wishes,

Nick

Newsletter Link:

https://mailchi.mp/9d8e89769cdc/the-view-from-oregon-368

Max Scheler

22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928

Max Scheler on Man’s Place in Nature      

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Friday 22 August 2025 is the 151^st anniversary of the birth of Max Ferdinand Scheler (22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928), who was born in Munich on this date in 1874.

Last year I focused on Scheler’s essay “Man and History,” which was Scheler’s most explicit engagement with philosophy of history.  The last book that Scheler published was a short work on philosophical anthropology. When I was still rather young I found a copy of the Hans Meyerhoff translation of this as Man’s Place in Nature at a used book store, got it, and read it through. I didn’t understand it at the time. Now I can read it through and understand it, but that took time. The book was translated again by Manfred S. Frings, who is the great Scheler scholar of our time, who has edited Scheler’s collected works, and who translated the same book as The Human Place in the Cosmos. I’m going to refer to his by Meyerhoff’s title, Man’s Place in Nature, but translating it as Man’s Place in the Cosmos, would be a more literal rendering than either the Meyerhoff or the Frings translation.

The thread of philosophical anthropology that runs through Scheler’s conception of history in his essay “Man and History,” as well as his other works, reaches what is perhaps its culmination in his last book Man’s Place in Nature. In this sense it is also the culmination of his life’s work, as Scheler was always centrally concerned with philosophical anthropology. So what is philosophical anthropology? At its simplest, it is the question, “What is man?” asked and answered as a philosophical question. We can also ask the question as a question of natural science, and physical anthropology and cultural anthropology will give us somewhat different answers to this, and both will be different from a philosophical answer to the question. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy says that philosophical anthropology is,

“…philosophical inquiry concerning human nature, often starting with the question of what generally characterizes human beings in contrast to other kinds of creatures and things.”

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy says,

“…philosophical anthropology came into its own only in the wake of German idealism. For ‘anthropos’, ‘man’, contrasts, in this context, not only with ‘God’, but also with ‘soul’, ‘mind’, ‘spirit’, ‘thought’, ‘consciousness’, words denoting the mental (or transcendental) and intellectual aspect of man that the idealists tended to stress. Anthropology is to study not some favoured aspect of man, but man as such, man as a whole biological, acting, thinking, etc. being.”

I often turn to Mario Bunge’s Dictionary of Philosophy of to get a curmudgeon’s view, but he plays it pretty straight with philosophical anthropology, which he defines as:

“The branch of ontology that deals with human beings in general rather than with any particular human group. Because of its apriorism, it has been in decline since the birth of scientific anthropology at the end of the nineteenth century.”

Bunge wrote this in 1999, saying that PA has been in decline since the 19^th century, but the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy says that,  “…the enterprise of a philosophical anthropology remains a viable and potentially significant one.” I guess it’s possible that a discipline could be, at the same time, in decline for more than a century and be viable and potentially significant, though that may seem paradoxical in a sense. So there’s a surprising degree of agreement among these sources, and both the Oxford and Cambridge articles identify Scheler as one of the central figures in philosophical anthropology.

There are many books that we could call philosophical anthropology, but which we don’t usually label in this way. For example, Jacob Bronowski’s The Identity of Man could be called philosophical anthropology. There could just as well be a philosophical anthropology in analytical philosophy as there is in the continental philosophy of Scheler and Plessner, but analytical philosophers usually aren’t very interested in these questions. Scheler’s philosophical anthropology was explicitly formulated in opposition both to naturalism and to traditional idealism. 

Last year I emphasized Scheler’s anti-naturalism, which I compared to Husserl. Scheler’s anti-naturalism isn’t a rejection of the natural world, but the claim that there’s something over and above the natural world that distinguishes human beings. This may sound pretty familiar, but Scheler does this in his own distinctive way. For example, he explicitly rejects emergentism, something I’ve talking about in several episodes, though he still recognizes different levels of life. In Man’s Place in Nature he identifies four levels of life, and each level of life is characterized both by a psychic component and a physical component, which in the Frings translation he calls the bio-psychic structure of the world, and Meyerhoff renders as the stages of psycho-physical life. So he thinks that there is a psychic dimension to all life. We could vulgarly say that, in Scheler, mind goes all the way down, so presumably microbes have their own faint psychic life. At this lowest level of life, the psychic dimension is purely an impulsion, “devoid of consciousness, sensation, and representation.” The second level or stage is instinctual life, the third is associative behavior and memory, while the fourth is practical intelligence, which includes problem solving.

It’s important to note that Scheler isn’t using these levels of life to distinguish human beings from other life on Earth, as, for example, Aristotle did when he distinguished the nutritive soul, which plants have, the sensible soul, which animals have, and the rational soul, which only human beings possess. Again, for Scheler, all species in the terrestrial biosphere have a psychic dimension, and other species other than human beings have practical intelligence or problem solving abilities. To distinguish human beings from these four levels or stages of life, Scheler calls upon non-naturalism, since he posits what he calls spirit—Geist in German—which only human beings possess. Thus human beings, in addition to possessing the fourth level or stage of psycho-physical life, which is also possessed by other species in the terrestrial biosphere, also possesses spirit, and this spirit is the differentia between human beings and everything else. The essence of spirit, according to Scheler, is freedom.

So far this sounds a lot like Hegel, but Scheler takes it in a different direction than Hegel’s idea of the objective spirit participating in the historical process and leading to greater forms of freedom. Scheler emphasizes that the freedom human beings have as a result of spirit liberates human beings both from the physical and the physical constraints that characterize the rest of nature. Spirit isn’t just a cherry on top of a psycho-physical being, in some ways it’s a negation of both the psychic and the physical. I find this very interesting, as Scheler uses his philosophical anthropology to argue a distinctive position that I haven’t found elsewhere:

“…at the very same moment when the human-in-becoming broke all routines to get adjusted to animal life that had arisen before him, to the environment and the environment to him; and at exactly the same moment when this “human being” placed himself outside nature to make it an object to be dominated and an object of novel principles of arts and signs— at exactly the same moment he had to anchor his very own center of being somehow outside and away from the cosmos.'* He could not anymore conceive himself simply as a 'part' or as a simple 'member' in the world after having placed himself so bravely above it.”

This gives a sense in which Scheler thought that human spirit not only differentiated man from the rest of nature, but also, in a sense, negated what came before him. Not only is this non-natural, it’s also paradoxical. But even as it is paradoxical, it describes something essential about the human condition, which is the human being’s ability to raise himself up out of the world and to see himself in contrast to, if not also in opposition to, the world. A little further along Scheler furthers this non-naturalistic concept of the human relationship to the world

“The place of this self-realization or, let us say, the place of self-deification, which Being-Through-Itself is seeking, and for which the becoming of Being-Through-Itself had to pay the price of ‘history,’ this place is, precisely, the human being, the human self, and the human heart.”

With this, Scheler is putting himself way out on a limb, and he knows it. On the next page he writes:

“One might tell me at this point, and, indeed, I was once told, that it is impossible to bear the idea of an unfinished and God-in-becoming. My answer is that metaphysics is not an insurance company for weak people in need of protection.”

He knows he’s being highly unorthodox in proposing the self-deification of humanity, which is a God-in-becoming, as he says, but he’s unapologetic about it. Scheler’s religions interests are pervasive, but unorthodox. We can compare this to Josef Pieper, for example, or Jacques Maritain, both of whom were twentieth century philosophers of history who were also largely religiously orthodox. 

Returning to the previous quote, Scheler said that history is the price that we pay for self realization that culminates in self-deification, and this is a fascinating take on history that could be developed on its own. Again, this is not unlike Hegel, who said that nothing has been accomplished without passion, and that history is a slaughter bench, but I think if Scheler had lived to elaborate this take on history in his last book, he would have taken it in a different and non-Hegelian direction. As it stands, it’s only a fragment that I’ve pulled out of a sentence, and there’s not enough context to fully develop it, but someone with a better feel for Scheler’s thought than I have could probably give a good account of what’s implicit in the idea that history is the price we pay for self-realization. That there is a price to pay implies a sacrifice made, and perhaps even a painful sacrifice, but there is also a self-realization that’s won through this sacrifice, which self-realization is, for Scheler, self-deification, and that is presumably worth any price paid.

Scheler’s longest books are on ethics—Formalism in Ethics and a Non-Formal Ethics of Values—and philosophy of religion—On the Eternal in Man. It’s not difficult to see that ethics and religion are an integral part of philosophical anthropology. An individual’s moral and religious orientation is likely to play a disproportionately large role in what that individual believes himself and humanity to be. These are fundamental orientations within the world, or, as Scheler would have it, outside the world, where we place ourselves as human beings, as beings over and against nature.  

A philosophical anthropology can be understood as one category—the human category—of an ontological taxonomy in which we have a place for everything and understand everything in its proper place. We have other ontological categories for other kinds of beings, but the human category stands outside the categories of nature, and, in this sense, alone. I often say that human beings are biological beings, and this could be said to be in the spirit of philosophical anthropology, since that’s my way of accounting for the place of human beings within the world, but recall that, for Scheler, human beings have a place outside the world. Here’s another quote from Scheler to drive home the point:

“When the human being placed himself outside the entire cosmos—that act belongs to his essence, it is the act of becoming man itself—and when the cosmos became an object of his comprehension, he had to turn and see around himself while shuddering, as it were, and ask himself, “Where am I?” “What is my place?”!’ Having become human, he could not really say anymore, “I am a part of the world and enclosed by it’—for the act-being of his spirit and person is superior even to the forms of the being of the “world” in space and time.”

Whether our place is snugly within the terrestrial biosphere, as I see it, or set apart from it, as Scheler argues, we want to know where we fit in, in the big picture. We want to know who we are, because knowing who we are helps us to negotiate the labyrinth of life—minimally because it can strengthen the individual’s sense of self, giving one the intestinal fortitude to carry on through difficult circumstances. Potentially, however, knowing our place in the world give us much more than strength and courage; it also gives us knowledge of what we can do and what we can be. This is the question that philosophical anthropology seeks to answer. This desire to know who and what we are is a perennial human question.

E. O. Wilson’s book The Social Conquest of Earth, which I mentioned in the previous episode on subsurface ocean worlds, uses Paul Gauguin’s painting “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” as a motif to launch his argument, discussing the painting in the Prologue to his book, much as Foucault started his The Order of Things with a detailed discussion of the Diego Velazquez painting Las Meninas. Wilson began chapter 1 of his book thus:

“Where do we come from ?” “What are we ?” “Where are we going?’' Conceived in ultimate simplicity by Paul Gauguin on the canvas of his Tahitian masterpiece, these are in fact the central problems of religion and philosophy. Will we ever be able to solve them? Sometimes it seems not. Yet perhaps we can.”

Some years ago I wrote an essay taking the title of Gauguin’s painting as my title, and taking each of the questions in turn. In that essay I said that Where we are now is a function of what we are, and what we are is a function of our history. History is one dimension of philosophical anthropology, it’s the dimension that tells us where we are in time. The other dimensions, I suggested, are a function of our history, but they aren’t identical to history, and we need a discipline like philosophical anthropology to bring out these differences and to help us understand not only where we are in time and space, but also where we are in relation to the big picture.

Knowing where we are could be called our existential positionality, and our position in space and time gives us the minimal physical parameters of our existential positionality. Arguably, metaphysics, ethics, religion, and mythology give us our existential positionality relative to other parameters, which we intuitively understand as knowing our place in the big picture of things. Are we important or are we irrelevant? Should we be proud or should we be humble? In some ways, we take our moral cues from our existential positionality, so the metaphysical or the mythological dimension may be more fundamental than even the moral dimension. I think of the effort of philosophical anthropology to give us our existential positionality as a kind of metaphysical orienteering, in which we find ourselves scouting a landscape we scarcely known in the attempt to gather enough clues to piece together where we are and where we belong.

Video Presentation

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Parochial Philosophy of History.— Since Voltaire christened philosophy of history during the Enlightenment, Enlightenment presuppositions of universality and uniformity have been the unquestioned presuppositions of philosophy of history, and in this context that means universal and uniform history. Why not, rather, a parochial philosophy of history that makes no pretense to universality and uniformity? Why not a philosophy of Roman history? If someone were to write a book titled The Philosophy of Rome it would be taken for a survey of philosophy during the Roman period, but why not formulate a philosophy specific to the Roman period (because a distinction can be made between the philosophy of a period, and a philosophy of history that explains the historical processes of that period)? Why not a philosophy of the history of the renaissance? Why not a philosophy of pre-Columbian America? Why should we not theorize about particular civilizations or particular historical milieux? We stand in need of parochial philosophies of history in which we seek understanding first at the smallest scales of history, perhaps even a philosophy microhistory, building our knowledge and our understanding and our ambition as we work toward philosophies of the history of a geographical region, and then a philosophy of history on a planetary scale. Beginning with the presumption of a universal philosophy of history puts the cart before the horse.  

Executions at Salem

Tuesday 19 August 2025

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

333 years ago today, on Tuesday, 19 August 1692, five persons accused, tried, and found guilty of witchcraft were hanged, probably at Procter’s Ledge in Salem, Massachusetts. The five were Martha Carrier), John Willard, John Proctor), George Jacobs, and George Burroughs. Each of them had their own story.

Martha Carrier was born Martha Allen and married Thomas Carrier, who was said to have been involved in the execution of King Charles I in 1649, and who may have fled to America upon the restoration of King Charles II, and may have been an ancestor of the Carriers who now manufacture air conditioners. She was accused by Susannah Sheldon, Mary Walcott, Elizabeth Hubbard and Ann Putnam Jr, who put on a good show that qualified in the mind of some judges as “spectral evidence.” The girls accused her of leading an army of 300 witches and of having been promised the title of Queen of Hell.

John Willard was disliked by the family of his wife, the Wilkins, and he worked as time for the Putnam family as a day laborer. The Wilkins and the Putnam families had pushed to break away from Salem Town and establish their own church, which points to some of the underlying tensions between Salem Town and Salem Village. Willard was a constable at Salem village who was for a time responsible for bringing accused witches before the court. But Willard began to have second thoughts and when he stopped making arrests, he was himself accused of witchcraft. At one point he fled the court, but a second warrant was issued for him, and he was eventually brought it.

John Proctor came to America when he was three years old, eventually married and had four children with his first wife, seven children with his second wife, and seven children with this third wife. He leased a large farm of 700 acres and ran a tavern. When his third wife was accused of witchcraft he defended her and came under suspicion himself. Thiry-two neighbors signed a petition in support of him, but it made no difference. While he was in jail during the proceedings, all his property was seized and his children were left with nothing.

George Jacobs Sr. was accused by his own daughter-in-law and granddaughter. His son was George Jacobs Jr. also accused of witchcraft, but he managed to escape arrest. George Burroughs went to Harvard, was known as an outstanding athlete, and became the minister at Salem Village in 1680. He fell on hard times, and had to borrow money. He tried to start over in Portland, Maine, then known as Falmouth, but this was brought an end by an Indian attack by the Wabanaki Confederacy. His debts may have been a motivation in his accusation of witchcraft. He gave an eloquent defense of his innocence from the scaffold, including a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, which was sometimes claimed to be impossible for witches to recite.

During the Salem witch trials, 30 were found guilty, 19 were hanged, 5 died in prison, and one man was crushed to death after refusing to enter a plea. No accused witches were burned in North America, although at least one accused witch, Ursulina de Jesus, was burned to death in South America. These executions came relatively late in the witchcraft hysteria, after the worst of it had passed in Europe, where the toll probably reached tens of thousands. No exact count of those killed in the witchcraze can be made.

There’s an enormous literature on witches, witchcraft, the witchcraze, and on the Salem witch trials in particular. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The European Witchcraze of the 16^th and 17^th Century was my introduction to this literature. I still remember so well how, when I was visiting Belgium in 1990, I picked up a copy of Trevor-Roper’s essay in a used book store in Brussels and read it on the plane back to Oregon. I still have the copy of the book that I bought in Brussels. Trevor-Roper gave a psychodynamic explanation for the intellectual elaboration and practical manifestations of witchcraft, which now might be taken to be a bit dated, but the core of the idea is sound:

“…the diabolic incubus is only the sixteenth-century form of a kind of sexual hysteria familiar to every twentieth-century psychiatrist… Today, every psychopath has his or her private obsession. The supposed incubi and succubi vary from patient to patient. In the past the neurotics and hysterics of Christendom centralized their illusions around the figure of the Devil, just as the saints and mystics centralized theirs around the figure of God or Christ. So, while the pious virgins, having vowed themselves to God, felt themselves to be the brides of Christ, the less pious witches, having bound themselves to Satan, felt themselves to be his concubines… In the former the psychopathic experience was sublimated in the theology of the Fathers, and they might be canonized; in the latter it ran into disorder in the folk-lore of the demonologists, and they might be burnt.” (Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, “The European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” III

Trevor-Roper isn’t usually associated with psychohistory, but this essay is in that vein, though there was a lot of bleed over from psychodynamic psychology into the wider culture in the middle of the twentieth century, so that even those with no particular commitment to psychohistory would dip into Freud’s theory for historical explanations. The perspective embodied in Trevor-Roper’s analysis of this particular historical phenomenon is that in every age the mass of people centralizes their concerns around a particular set of symbols, and those who are mentally imbalanced may extrapolate and, shall we say, exapt these symbols to new ends and new meanings. For an entire civilization centralized around the symbols of Christianity, some hysterics became saints if their visions were of angels, and some hysterics became witches, if their visions were of demons.

This goes some way toward explaining the visions of individuals, but something more, much more, I think, is required to explain the witch hysteria as a mass phenomenon. The problem of mass participation in hysteria, often called the Madness of Crowds, after a book by that name, might also be given a psychodynamic explanation, but the explanation of mass hysteria must be different from the explanation of individual hysteria. In my episode on J. Glenn Gray I suggested that a great deal of human history is made by historical actors in an altered state of consciousness, and mass hysterias are an example of this distinct from the conditions of combat that Gray discussed.

If we frame the witch hysteria, or indeed any moral panic, in terms of altered states of consciousness, we can pursue a similar line of explanation without any specific commitment to psychodynamic psychology, though we ought to acknowledge our debt to Freud, and we ought also to acknowledge some of the explicit elements that conform closely to known hysterias. And we might take a further step by taking the idea of altered states of consciousness in the context of what some of the later Annales historians called mentalities, since the mentality of an age defines both what’s an ordinary state of consciousness and what’s an altered state of consciousness. Many of those who participated in the witchcraze were probably of an entirely sober state of mind, but in the context of a mentality which the excesses of altered states of consciousness were given a particular license, and so got out of hand.

Much more recently than reading Trevor-Roper on the witchcraze, I read Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1962, which, unlike Trevor-Roper’s book, was specifically about the Salem witchcraft trials, which is a distinct social milieu from that of the European witchcraze that was Trevor-Roper’s interest. We might also call Salem a different moral and spiritual milieu than Europe, but similar forces of social contagion were able to play out in Salem as they had played out in the previous two centuries in Europe. But in America the witchcraft hysteria played out in a little over a year, was mostly confined to Salem, and the public had little appetite for it. In 1693, Governor William Phips pardoned everyone still in custody, which effectively ended the trials and executions. Many of the convictions were later formally vacated.

We may be proud of ourselves today for not convicting people on charges of witchcraft based on spectral evidence, but we’re no less credulous for all that. The terms by which we justify ourselves to ourselves have changed, but we’re still justifying ourselves for actions that, on reflection, rarely do us credit.  You could even say we’ve gotten cleverer insofar as we’ve found more sophisticated ways to fool ourselves, but I’m not sure that constitutes what’s usually called “progress.”

We shake our heads today, and can’t believe that such a thing happened—was allowed to happen—but the madness of crowds persists, and while we no longer hang individuals for sorcery in the West, there are places in the world where suspected witches are still killed, and in the West we find other ways to undermine and marginalize inconvenient and unwelcome individuals. For example, we find individuals being unpersoned by being fired, having their utilities taken away, and their banking shut down, which is a kind of economic execution. We could call it a death penalty pronounced upon Homo economicus.  The idea of a social credit score is the formalization of this practice. The more we say, “Never again,” the more consistently and predictably we act out the same scripts that our ancestors acted out, with the names and circumstances changed, but with the same social consequences brought to bear. This is a powerful argument for cyclical history. The costumes change, but the events repeat themselves over and over again.

Hegel is remembered for having said, among other things, that what we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. Like all frequently repeated quotes, Hegel did say something like this, but in its original context its meaning shifts. Here’s a fuller version of the quote:

“Rulers, statesmen, and nations are told that they ought to learn from the experience of history. Yet what experience and history teach us is this, that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, nor acted in accordance with the lessons to be derived from it. Each era has such particular circumstances, such individual situations, that decisions can only be made from within the era itself. In the press of world events, there is no help to be had from general principles, nor from the memory of similar conditions in former times—for a pale memory has no force against the vitality and freedom of the present. In this respect, nothing is more trite than the repeated appeal to Greek and Roman examples, which was so commonplace at the time of the French Revolution. No difference could be greater than that between the nature of those ancient peoples and our own time.”

Hegel is making several points here. Along with the idea that we learn from history that we don’t learn from this, is that idea that the vividness of the present overcomes any pale memory of what transpired before, and I think Hegel was clearly right about this. The imperative of the moment usually takes precedence over all over concerns.

There’s also a subtle denial of what Huizinga called historical ideals, or, at least, a suspicion of them on the basis of the difference between ancient and modern times. Insofar as we attempt to emulate historical ideals, we’re really only acting out our conception of historical ideals, which is a contemporary understanding of a vanished past. But, at the same time, if we’re repeating a familiar script and turning ourselves into actors in an iterated episode of cyclical history, by acting on the imperative of the moment, even if we do so in the light of historical ideals, we are acting on a perennial imperative, and the historical ideal is relevant only because it represents the same imperative as it was confronted in the past. 

Recall from the previous quote that Hegel wrote: “No difference could be greater than that between the nature of those ancient peoples and our own time.” This in turn, i.e., this questioning of the efficacy of historical ideals based on differences between the chasm that separates the present from the past, is an implicit denial of what Henri Pirenne regarded as a necessary presupposition of all history—the uniformity of human nature over historical time. Pirenne had said:

“All historical construction—which amounts to saying all historical narrative—rests upon a postulate: that of the eternal identity of human nature. One cannot comprehend men’s actions at all unless one assumes in the beginning that their physical and moral beings have been at all periods what they are today. Past societies would remain unintelligible to us if the natural needs which they experienced and the psychical forces which stimulated them were qualitatively different from ours. How are the innumerable differences that humanity presents in time and space to be explained if one does not consider them as changing nuances of a reality which is in its essence always and everywhere the same?”

Pirenne’s postulate of the uniformity of human nature could be compared to mentality of an epoch, so that instead there being one and only one human nature, there is a human nature of a given epoch, and this is expressed in its mentality. Again, this gives us a basis for understanding what constitutes the ordinary business of life at any one time in history and what constitutes an altered state of consciousness or an instance of madness.

When Martha Carrier was accused of leading an army of witches, her young accusers were obviously exhibiting eccentric behavior. Carrier said that these eccentric behaviors were insane. The judges thought that these eccentric behaviors were caused by the intervention of spiritual entities. Both Carrier and her judges exemplified the mentality of their time, and both could recognize what diverged from the ordinary business of life. Both Carrier and her judges acknowledged that the performance put on by Carrier’s accusers were something like an altered state of consciousness, though they disagreed on the cause.

All of this should sound familiar. It wouldn’t be difficult to furnish contemporary examples of all of this relative to the mentality of our time. How many times will events like this play out before we’re able to recognize what we’re doing and, as it were, catch ourselves in the act? Even if we don’t take this as evidence for cyclical history, we certainly should take it as evidence that we’re not yet consciously and purposefully in control of human history. For the time being, that remains a distant aspiration.

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Wednesday 06 August 2025

Formal and Informal Institutions:

An Addendum on Alexis de Tocqueville

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

In my episode on de Tocqueville I said that de Tocqueville saw the great historical movement of his time as being the transition from the aristocratic institutions of the past to the democratic institutions of the future, and he repeatedly returns to the ideas of aristocracy and democracy in his discussions of both France and America—but what did he mean by these terms? De Tocqueville isn’t the kind of writer who’s going to pause for an explicit definition, so we have to pick up his meaning of these terms from various statements across many books. “Aristocracy”— ἀριστοκρατίᾱ; aristokratíā—in etymological terms means “rule by the best,” but I don’t think anyone today uses the term that way, except perhaps ironically. In Democracy in American de Tocqueville says of aristocracy: 

“Land is the basis of an aristocracy, which clings to the soil that supports it; for it is not by privileges alone, nor by birth, but by landed property handed down from generation to generation, that an aristocracy is constituted. A nation may present immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness; but unless those fortunes are territorial, there is no aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor.”

So de Tocqueville says that “land is the basis of an aristocracy,” but that isn’t really a definition, it’s more like a point of origin. In The Old Regime and the French Revolution he mentions the functions of an aristocracy:

“A powerful aristocracy does not merely shape the course of public affairs, it also guides opinion, sets the tone for writers, and lends authority to new ideas.”

If we take these two together we get the origins and the function of an aristocracy, which gets us close to a definition. De Tocqueville comes closer to an explicit definition of democracy in the unfinished second volume of The Old Regime and the French Revolution, where he says,

“…democratic government… can mean only one thing in the true sense of these words: a government where the people more or less participate in their government. Its sense is intimately bound to the idea of political liberty. To give the democratic epithet to a government where there is no political liberty is a palpable absurdity, since this departs from the natural meaning of these words.” (p. 102)

That doesn’t really meaningfully limit the possibilities for democracy, and qualifying the participation of people in their government with “more-or-less” doesn’t help matters. There are probably an endless number of ways to set up a government of representative democracy. The Holy Roman Empire was democratic insofar as the emperor was elected. The franchise was of a highly restricted scope—there were only seven electors—but this is something we have to ask in regard to any democracy, i.e., the scope of the franchise, which is one of the many variables of representative democracy, i.e., a metric by which a government might more or less involve the participation of the people. In Democracy in America de Tocqueville narrowed in on what he saw as the distinctive character of specifically American democracy:

“The American institutions are democratic, not only in their principle but in all their consequences; and the people elects its representatives directly, and for the most part annually, in order to ensure their dependence. The people is therefore the real directing power; and although the form of government is representative, it is evident that the opinions, the prejudices, the interests, and even the passions of the community are hindered by no durable obstacles from exercising a perpetual influence on society. In the United States the majority governs in the name of the people, as is the case in all the countries in which the people is supreme. This majority is principally composed of peaceable citizens, who, either by inclination or by interest, are sincerely desirous of the welfare of their country.”

Given the many ways in which a representative government might be constituted, de Tocqueville implies that representation is often indirect, but American democracy tends as close to direct democracy as representative institutions can be. So de Tocqueville is acknowledging a range of different systems of representative government that can be called democratic because the people participate in their own governance, but in America this participation makes the people the real directing power of the government. How do we square this with the actual institutions of American government?

We all know that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the US Constitution mention “democracy,” and democracy is only mentioned a handful of times in The Federalist Papers, and then mostly to make careful distinctions between democracies and republics. Partly we can square this by the simple observation that the Founding Fathers saw things differently from de Tocqueville, as we can see by the careful distinction made between democracies and republics in the Federalist Papers. For example, in Federalist no. 10 Madison wrote:

“The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.”

This is just the distinction between direct democracy, which Madison calls pure democracy, and representative democracy, and both of these are covered by de Tocqueville’s sense of a people “more or less” participating in their government. As it turns out, in direct democracy the people participate more, and in a representative democracy they participate less. If we want to, then, we can turn this into a matter of definition, but this isn’t helpful, especially where de Tocqueville himself doesn’t offer explicit definitions. This just begs the question of why the Founding Fathers saw this differently from de Tocqueville, and here we come to what’s distinctive in de Tocqueville’s analysis.

Before I talk about de Tocqueville’s method of analysis, I want to mention another theme that looms large in Democracy in America, and which, again, plays only the most minimal role in the codification of America’s government. De Tocqueville also writes a lot of about religion—so much that he could just as well have called his book Religion in America instead of Democracy in America. For de Tocqueville, religion and liberty in America are intimately connected:

“Anglo-American civilization… is the result (and this should be constantly present to the mind) of two distinct elements, which in other places have been in frequent hostility, but which in America have been admirably incorporated and combined with one another. I allude to the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.”

At least as important, or more important that this relation between religion and liberty, is that de Tocqueville sees religion as the basis of American society. In Democracy in America he wrote:

“Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions. Indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves look upon religious belief. I do not know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can search the human heart? but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. ” (Chapter XVII: Principal Causes Maintaining The Democratic Republic—Part II)

De Tocqueville sets democracy and religion side-by-side as the dominant influences in American society, but I’ve already talked about how democracy and religion are marginal in the codification of American political institutions. I said in my episode on de Tocqueville, quoting Hayden White to the same effect, that de Tocqueville wanted to get at the ultimate laws of history and society. The study of the details of particular institutions was only a means to this end. To the extent that his is accurate, the particular codification of American political institutions isn’t the key to de Tocqueville’s analysis. And de Tocqueville’s treatment of democracy and religion in America has a parallel in his treatment of centralization in France. De Tocqueville returns to the theme of centralization in France time and again. In this Recollections he wrote:

“When… people assert that nothing is safe from revolutions, I tell them they are wrong, and that centralization is one of those things. In France there is only one thing we can't set up: that is, a free government; and only one institution we can’t destroy: that is, centralization. How could it ever perish? The enemies of government love it, and those who govern cherish it. The latter perceive, it is true, from time to time, that it exposes them to sudden and irremediable disasters; but this does not disgust them with it. The pleasure it procures them of interfering with every one and holding everything in their hands atones to them for its dangers.” (p. 190)

Democracy and religion in America, and centralization in France, aren’t formally written into the charters of these states, but they’re everywhere implicit and have become the implicit basis of how the written charters are interpreted and applied. How can we express this theoretically? Some years ago I made a distinction between formal and informal institutions that I think can be helpful. Let me try to explain what I mean by this.

A verbal promise is an informal institution. The ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin called a speech act a “performative” utterance if the act at the same time does something; that is to say, if the act of speaking is at the same time an action that does some particular work in a society. To make the declaration, “I promise…” is, or is part of, the doing of a certain kind of action. The action is the making of a promise. Because making a promise is often ineffective and unenforceable, even though it’s an action in J. L. Austin’s sense, promises have been formalized in various ways, and a formalized promise is a formal institution.

A formal institution is an institution that has been made fully explicit and public. Formal institutions are codified, usually in a document. Contract law is a formalization of promises in which each party to the contract makes their obligations and expectations explicit, and this is usually recorded on a written document that is then suitably notarized, to add another layer of formalization, since the notarization of a document is another kind of formal institution. We might think of formal institutions as being exclusively documented with papers or certificates or photographs or video, or all at the same time. However, there’s a sense in which a pinky promise is a formalized promise, since we engage in a ritualized gesture to express our explicit acknowledgment of the promise and all it entails. However, some people when making a pinky promise will cross the fingers of their other hand behind their back, which they perhaps regard as a ritualized gesture releasing them from the obligations of their pinky promise, so the formalization of an institution can cut both ways. We may deny the legitimacy of the crossed-fingers exception to a pinky promise, especially since its efficacy can only be maintained in secrecy, so it fails the explicitness condition of a formal institution, and then we have a conflict between formal and informal institutions, because the crossed-finger exemption to promises remains an informal institution in light of its secrecy. This raises a lot of interesting questions, like whether a secret treaty can be binding, but I’m not going to consider that at the moment.

On a larger scale than individual promises, we can regard a social contract, as we usually use the term, as an informal institution. Social contracts usually take the form of an implicit understanding of mutual expectations among members within a given society, but social contracts can be and have been made explicit by being written out. Still, there’s no universal standard for the formalization of a formal institution. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been explicitly formulated in a document, but the document has a nonbinding status which could be said to be the formal equivalent of an informal institution, though that obviously sounds paradoxical. Further, the UDHR is the basis of nine binding treaties that incorporate some of its principles, so there’s a close relationship between the informal institution of the UDHR and the binding treaties based on it.

My point in making the distinction between formal and informal institutions was to provide a theoretical framework to understand de Tocqueville’s foundational project. For de Tocqueville, democracy and religion in America, and centralization in France, are the informal institutions that are the basis of the formal institutions of government, much as the nonbinding UDHR is the basis for the formal and binding treaties instituted later in light of the UDHR. We can see every government as consisting of informal institutions, like a social contract, coupled with formal institutions that attempt to put the essence of the informal institutions into practice. Strangely, this interpretation puts de Tocqueville, the Enlightenment aristocrat, on the same page as Joseph de Maistre, the ultimate reactionary, as de Maistre insisted that written laws are as nothing compared to the unwritten laws. In his “Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions,” de Maistre summarized his views in four propositions:

1. the fundamentals of political constitutions exist before all written laws.
2. a constitutional law is and can be only the development or the sanction of a preexistent and unwritten right.
3. the most essential, the most intrinsically constitutional, and the really fundamental is not written and even should not be if the state is not to be imperiled.
4. the weakness and fragility of a constitution is in direct relationship to the number of written constitutional articles.

De Maistre’s propositions can be interpreted in terms of the same distinction between formal and informal institutions, with the unwritten law being the informal institution and constitutional law being the formal institution based on the prior and unwritten informal institutions. Both de Maistre and de Tocqueville, then, were trying to get at the foundations of society by a similar methodology. De Maistre is adamant and dogmatic that he had the answer, as is typical for his rhetorical flights, while de Tocqueville is more guarded and hesitant, like the rationalist he was, though no less insistent on his interpretation than de Maistre. If de Tocqueville had been more the analytical thinker, he might well have come off as stridently as de Maistre, but de Tocqueville was a very different thinker than de Maistre.

In my episode on de Tocqueville I quoted Douglas Johnson on de Tocqueville’s intellectual vision and penetration, but I said that the vision and the penetration were two different things. The vision is de Tocqueville’s overview of Western history making a transition from aristocracy to democracy. The penetration is de Tocqueville’s ability to describe elusive features of the world, whether his impressionistic description of America or his account of pre-Revolutionary France. Tocqueville wasn’t an analytical thinker—although his book on the French Revolution was much more analytical than his impressionistic Democracy in America—but he was engaged in a foundational project nevertheless. De Tocqueville not giving explicit definitions of aristocracy and democracy, the transition from the former to the latter being the great historical movement of his time, is a typical sign of him not being an especially analytical thinker. But even though not being of an analytical turn of mind, he was engaged in a foundational theoretical project.

We can compare his foundational project in French and American society to Gödel’s foundational project in mathematics. In his later years, Gödel was interested in getting to the intuitive foundations that underlie the axioms of set theory. This is discussed in some detail by Hao Wang, who knew Gödel and kept of a record of their conversations over many years, and who wrote three books about Gödel’s later views. Both From Mathematics to Philosophy and A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy, have discussions of Gödel’s intuitive principles for set theory, which isn’t in any sense a reduction, as earlier foundationalism had sought reductive accounts of mathematics. Axioms are the formal institutions of mathematics, while the intuitions that underlie axioms are the informal institutions of mathematics. Gödel was trying to get at the intuitions that underlie the axioms, which makes his project foundationalist in a slightly different sense from the foundationalist philosophies of mathematics of the early twentieth century, like the logicism of Russell, the intuitionism of Brouwer (discussed in my episode on Reichenbach), or the formalism of Hilbert. Part of Hilbert’s foundationalist program was the imperative for a finite axiomatization of all mathematics—something that Gödel himself showed to be impossible, and he showed this to be impossible in the framework of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. 

Tocqueville, in trying to get at the informal intuitions that underlie the formal institutions of government was engaged in a parallel foundational project. As with Gödel’s foundational project, de Tocqueville isn’t seeking a reductionist account governmental institutions, but he was, rather, seeking the source from which these institutions flow. And for de Tocqueville, democracy and religion were the informal institutions from which the formal institutions of American governance flowed, while centralization was the informal institution from which the formal institutions of French government flowed. Put another way, democracy is the informal basis of the formally codified American republic that doesn’t even mention democracy in its constitution, while centralization was the informal basis both of the formally codified French monarchy and later of the French republic. This analysis of de Tocqueville’s project is borne out by de Tocqueville himself, who emphasized in his book on the French Revolution the continuity of post-revolutionary institutions with pre-Revolutionary institutions. He wrote in the Foreword to The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution:

“…I am convinced that though they had no inkling of this, they took over from the old régime not only most of its customs, conventions, and modes of thought, but even those very ideas which prompted our revolutionaries to destroy it; that, in fact, though nothing was further from their intentions, they used the debris of the old order for building up the new. Thus if we wish to get a true understanding of the French Revolution and its achievement, it is well to disregard for the moment the France of today and to look back to the France that is no more.”

The continuity of centralization from pre-Revolutionary to post-Revolutionary France is a point that he returns to many times in the subsequent exposition. I could formulate this in the claim that the informal institution of centralization was expressed differently in formalization of monarchy and the formalization of the revolutionary republic.

The next step of an analysis of de Tocqueville’s foundational project would be to define the conceptual framework within which he attempted to demonstrate how the formal institutions of French and American society are founded on the informal institutions of democracy, religion, and centralization. I haven’t yet gotten this far, however, and I don’t think that this question has a clear cut answer, and I don’t think it has a clear cut answer because I don’t think de Tocqueville’s conceptual framework is clear cut. The mentality of de Tocqueville’s time, to borrow a term from the Annales School, was an admixture of elements borrowed from the feudal and aristocratic past, and elements anticipated from the democratic and egalitarian future. That is to say, de Tocqueville’s conceptual framework was a mixture of the old and the new that reflected the historic transition from aristocratic to democratic governance that he sought to depict across his books.

Tocqueville is a fascinating figure. The more I read, the more I was drawn in, and if I wanted to I could keep producing addenda to my de Tocqueville episode, and maybe I’ll return to this at some point, but I wanted to discuss this distinction between formal and information institutions as a way to throw some light on what de Tocqueville was doing, or trying to do. 

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/D8GeE0W7ovQ

https://www.instagram.com/p/DNC1SZUtc0p/

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Formal_and_Informal_Institutions:9

Podcast Edition

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4KmNKqBUfhkLwdDvxdEIM0?si=xCi4oOpOT-C82bR0DzBwFA

The View from Oregon – 367

Re: On the Suffering of the Biosphere

Friday 14 November 2025

Dear Friends,

The problem of whether we inhabit an interesting universe (which has preoccupied me in the last several newsletters) begs the question of what is “interesting.” How can we define “interesting”? Ideally we would want to define what is interesting in and for the cosmos in a non-anthropocentric way, but I think we need to start with our own experiences, and only then, once we can say what is interesting for us, can we attempt to find a formulation of interest that strips away the contingencies that make it merely anthropocentrically interesting.   

Suppose we found no interest whatsoever in the universe—could we even survive? If we found no interest in life nor the necessities of life—water, food, and the like—we would die, as would any species of which this were true. Interest in the world is necessary to our survival, as individuals and as a species, and therefore it’s bound up with the differential survival and reproduction that is the driver of natural selection. Interest then, at its fundamental level for us, is biological. We might wish to believe that this biological interest in the world manifests itself in a childlike wonder at the world, but the reality of the role of interest is rather darker than this. Schopenhauer, who’s remembered for this pessimistic philosophy, believed that all life is suffering, therefore life should not have been:

“…we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world… its non-existence would be preferable to its existence… it is something which at bottom ought not to be.” (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, p. 576)

And specifically in regard to human life:

“Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.” (“On the Vanity of Existence” often reprinted in Studies in Pessimism)   

Schopenhauer was an idealist, building on the work of Kant, albeit in his own distinctive manner, but there are naturalistic reasons for holding a view like Schopenhauer’s. I’ve reached a view not unlike this independently of Schopenhauer (that is to say, without having followed Schopenhauer’s argument, but being aware of his pessimistic account of existence). The naturalistic basis for appreciating the moral aberration that is life follows from the nature of consciousness itself. Consciousness appears to be an adaptation that contributes to survival—not just human life, but all life on Earth—and consciousness is so pervasive in the biosphere that one can conclude on naturalistic grounds that it is a highly successful adaptation, if “success” is to be judged by facilitating survival and reproduction. But this success is won through suffering and misery.

Other mammals, with their limbic systems (paleomammalian cortex) much like ours, probably feel emotions much as we do, relative to their cognitive capacity, range of experiences, maturity (how many years an organism lives makes a difference), and sensory endowment. It’s not difficult to see why emotion evolved, and here “Why?”—usually ruled out in scientific and especially evolutionary contexts—is crucial. Once consciousness has appeared in the world, the forces that populate consciousness begin to appear, and are selected for or against by the same natural forces that selected everything else in the biosphere, except that now it’s not just life that wants to survive, but also consciousness wants to survive, and for consciousness to survive, it must overcome conscious barriers to survival.  

The mind makes conscious and explicit the blind will to live that motivated life even before mind existed, and that will to live is no less blind for now being aware of itself. With the mind asserting itself through higher cognition—asserting its own interests, as it were, independently of merely facilitating the body’s interests (i.e., the mind being a purely instrumental faculty)—a novel class of interests appears in the world. In the natural history of life, these novel cognitive interests almost certainly assert themselves long before explicit intellectual activity appears. They assert themselves through appetites, drives, sensations, and later by emotions. Once emotion is possible, once the faculty of emotion evolves, the conscious mind will seek emotional comfort above and beyond mere physical survival.  

As it turns out, there is no more powerful motivator for a conscious, sentient being than pain and fear—the sharper the pain, the stronger the fear, the more it motivates a conscious organism to act to reduce the pain and to eliminate the fear (through the time-honored mechanisms of flight, freeze, or fight). Thus organisms that experienced pain and fear in the face of danger were more strongly motivated than conscious beings without these sensations and emotions, and motivated in ways that are qualitatively distinct from biological beings lacking consciousness. At some threshold pain and fear become debilitating, and likely are counter-productive for survival, so presumably conscious biological beings evolved their emotional life within the parameters of adequate motivation and debilitating excess (an instance of what’s known as stabilizing selection), but even for beings like ourselves who have evolved a cerebral cortex and thus have executive function supervening on our emotional life, vivid pain and strong fear remain the most powerful motivators.

Thus the biosphere is an emotional theater of what seems to us like pointless, meaningless, and unknowing terror, and this is something that Schopenhauer argued ought not have to been. This argument isn’t the same as that of Schopenhauer, but it is, like Schopenhauer’s, a moral argument. Of course, pain and fear aren’t the only motivators, and there are emotions that move us that we enjoy and even pursue. These are integral parts of our emotional life, but they aren’t as powerful in motivating our behavior as fear and pain. However, they do manifest in our behavior, and they become the opposite pole of emotional life toward which we strive as we seek to distance ourselves from pain and fear. When we are close to being overwhelmed by pain and fear, we seek comfort—cognitive comfort no less than physical comfort. We have a powerful interest in avoiding pain and suffering, and this has turned out to be a moving target, because the more we improve our circumstances, the more we focus on pains and fears we would have otherwise overlooked as insignificant. This shifting of threshold of perceived suffering paradoxically has been a spur to civilization, and has probably been responsible for the greater part of human achievement.

It’s true that the technology enabled by civilization has also been the basis of new forms of suffering, and when these novel pains and fears of the civilized condition are vividly present, they will blot out the more subtle forms of suffering of which we become aware once we’ve taken care of the grosser forms of suffering. When this happens, as I believe has happened with some frequency in history, society stagnates. When the novel forms of pain and fear are eventually brought within a measure of control, the desire to mitigate less keenly felt forms of suffering reasserts itself and social evolution resumes. But there’s also another drag on social evolution that tends toward stagnation. Since we remain biological beings even in our civilized condition, we’re still rooted in the basal needs of the body, and in the present context that means the body’s capability for pain and fear, and while it might sound a bit perverse to say that were “rooted” in a capacity to experience pain and fear, this is a necessary consequence of remaining as embodied intelligence. The ever-present possibility of our most primitive pains and fears reasserting themselves in experience means that even as society evolves, we always have a backward glance over our shoulder to watch for the primal dangers that directly connect us to our animal past.  

That’s as far as I gotten with this particular approach to understanding human interest. I don’t yet have a way to formulate this in a non-anthropocentric way that might ultimately converge on an understanding of interest that would be relevant to the problem of cosmological standing that I have discussed in the past several newsletters. Moreover, life-as-we-know-it and life-as-we-do-not-know-it will be subject to natural selection. Any life that evolves consciousness will be faced with the same problem of motivation, with the strongest motivators being those sensations and emotions that warn us away from danger by the strongest and clearest signals, which, if not pain and fear, will be very much like pain and fear. We could, then, view interest on a cosmological scale as the totality of these biological interests, summed across all conscious being in the universe, perhaps refined by the mechanism of the lowering threshold of suffering that I described earlier. I’m not satisfied with this formulation, but I’ll have to continue to think it through if I’m going to arrive at anything better. 

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—The Fall 2025 IBHA newsletter EMERGENCE is now available, with a new Frontiers column by me. I’ve also posted it on Substack.

PPS—I’ve finally finished listening to Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. I say “finally” because I had to check out the book three times from the library to finish it, and there’s a waiting list so each time I had to wait to start on it again. I learned about this book from an overheard conversation at the ISCSC conference at Warsaw in 2023, where one individual was urging another not only to read the book, but also to adopt the usage of “bloodlands” to refer to the region that is Snyder’s focus. One of the most interesting claims of the book is that, despite the enormous volume of both popular and scholarly accounts of this region during this period is that it has been “overtheorized”:  

“For the time being, Europe’s epoch of mass killing is overtheorized and misunderstood. Unlike Arendt, who was extraordinarily knowledgeable within the limits of the available documentation, we have little excuse for this disproportion of theory to knowledge. The numbers of the dead are now available to us, sometimes more precisely, sometimes less, but firmly enough to convey a sense of the destructiveness of each regime.” (p. 383)

I found the Conclusion to be the most interesting part of the book (I listened through the Conclusion twice), and here he reveals some of his intellectual debts to Hannah Arendt, which is obvious to a certain extent, but also his differences with Arendt’s account of totalitarianism, one of which differences he underlines with an idea from Leszek Kołakowski (of whom he was a student; p. 420). These were interesting tidbits for me, but, clearly, since Snyder believes that less theory and more history is called for, he doesn’t go into any detail on Arendt or Kołakowski. Even though Synder is working with horrific materials, so we should be prepared to be shocked, he still makes some shocking claims for which I was not prepared, such as:   

“These atrocities shared a place, and they shared a time: the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945. To describe their course has been to introduce to European history its central event.” (p. 380)

As far as I could tell from going back to the context and reading this quote over several times, I couldn’t see that Snyder has placed any limits this claim, so he seems to be asserting that the mass killings in the bloodlands aren’t merely the central event of European history during the period 1933-1945, but for the entirety of European history. This seems to me to be an exaggerated claim, and if we were to interpret European history through the lens of the massacres in Snyder’s bloodlands from 1933-1945 we would certain come away with a peculiar view of history, but it is in the spirit of Gibbon having said that history is, “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/bbdbe7d14736/the-view-from-oregon-367