In 1943, a scientist, at one remove from the world of biology, gave a series of lectures in Dublin - called provocatively ‘What Is Life?’.
Erwin SchrödIn 1943, a scientist, at one remove from the world of biology, gave a series of lectures in Dublin - called provocatively ‘What Is Life?’.
Erwin Schrödinger, had shared the Nobel prize in physics in 1933 for laying the foundations of wave mechanics. In his Dublin lectures, Schrödinger addressed what puzzled many students — why biology was treated as a subject completely separate from physics and chemistry: frogs, fruit-flies and cells on one side, atoms and molecules, electricity and magnetism, on the other. The time had come, Schrödinger declared, to think of living organisms in terms of their molecular and atomic structure. There was no great divide between the living and non-living; they all obey the same laws of physics and chemistry.
He put a physicist’s question to biology. If entropy is (according to the second law of thermodynamics) things falling apart, the natural disintegration of order into disorder, why don’t genes decay? Why are they instead passed intact from generation to generation? He gave his own answer. ‘Life’ is matter that is doing something. The technical term is metabolism — ‘eating, drinking, breathing, assimilating, replicating, avoiding entropy’. To Schrodinger, life could be defined as ‘negative entropy’ — something not falling into chaos and approaching ‘the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death’. Genes, he said, preserve their structure because the chromosome that carries them is an 'irregular crystal'. The arrangement of units within the crystal constitutes the hereditary code.
The lectures were published as a book the following year, ready for physicists to read just as the war ended and they looked for new frontiers to explore. To this new breed, “What Is Life?” was the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of biology — a small book that started a revolution. For post-war physicists, suffering from professional malaise, Schrödinger showed a new way forward - ‘When one of the inventors of quantum mechanics could ask ‘‘What is life?’’, they were confronted with a fundamental problem worthy of their mettle.’ Biological problems could now be tackled with their own language, physics. The first half of the Twentieth-century science belonged to physics, with the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and nuclear fission. The second half would belong to biology....more
Can Physics account fully for the mysteries of Biology? This is what Schrödinger wants to know. He ends up writing something half-mystical, half-radicCan Physics account fully for the mysteries of Biology? This is what Schrödinger wants to know. He ends up writing something half-mystical, half-radical and fully-confusing, as Manny says in another review to this book. Now the beauty of any sufficiently confusing book by a good/great scientist is that it is capable of triggering inspiration many times over.
These lectures which are mostly musings on a nascent new branch of science (genetics) in the light of another nascent new branch of science (quantum physics) inspired Haldane, Watson, Crick, Wilkins, etc. to take some of the greatest scientific leaps of the modern world. We shouldn't bet against it inspiring more even today - perhaps the next round of disciples will come from among the ones who pursue AI today? Just a hunch....more
Taleb picks a new idea to challenge (after randomness and risk): Resilience. Taleb argues that some things are not just resilient but actually thrive Taleb picks a new idea to challenge (after randomness and risk): Resilience. Taleb argues that some things are not just resilient but actually thrive in chaos and disorder. He calls these things "antifragile" and says they're a crucial part of the natural and man-made world. Taleb's main idea is that randomness and uncertainty can actually be good for us. He gives a lot of examples, but check out "The Coddling of the American Mind" to see how the idea is catching on and being applied by other thinkers.
How to be Anti-fragile? With his ongoing infatuation with the gym, he gives us: the "barbell strategy". It is about combining extreme positions or strategies to get the best of both worlds. For example, a barbell investment strategy might involve holding a lot of safe, low-risk investments and a small amount of high-risk, high-reward investments. This way, you can benefit from the upside potential of the high-risk investments without being too exposed to the downside risks.
"Antifragile" joins the ranks of unconventional and counter-intuitive (easy to do) yet important (not so easy) books out there. Read it if you can....more
In The Choephori, the bloodshed begun in the first play is continued (see Agamemnon for details, and for a discussion on translations). The theme of revenge and blood-curse continues to haunt the House of Atreus. At first glance it might seem as if there is indeed no end to this recurring tragedy that has been playing itself out in these intrigue-filled halls, but despite all the mirroring Aeschylus effects between the first and second plays (both have legitimate avenging missions, both weave a web of deceit, both murders the unsuspecting, both murderers are accompanied by unidimensional accomplices, both murders leave everlasting stains, both think that the buck will stop with them) that is supposed to show the inevitability of this tragic course/curse with no scope for a resolution, there are significant differences:
1. Clytaemestra acted alone, under her own sense of right and wrong; Orestes acts under the express direction and protection of Apollo himself. 2. Clytaemestra makes a token gesture of atonement by promising to give up her wealth but instead establishes a tyranny; Orestes is racked by guilt and renounces his position and wealth to atone for his crime. (I wonder who ruled the kingdom in his absence...) 3. Clytaemestra defends her actions and takes no steps to alleviate them by rituals, etc. until a nasty dream shakes her up; Orestes accepts his guilt immediately and takes protection under Apollo and does all the ritual cleansing and prostrations required. 4. Clytaemestra is probably egged on by Aegisthus's greed and allows him to benefit by her actions. Orestes turns to Pylades just once who only repeats Apollo's words and has no personal stake in the business. (though could it be that he becomes the regent in Orestes absence?) 5. Clytaemestra never hesitates in her deed of revenge and as an add-on murders an innocent (?) Cassandra too; Orestes shows his reluctance till he very last moment and had to be driven to his deed. He murders only the expressly guilty. (One has to wonder if Apollo was in fact avenging Cassandra and not Agamemnon!) 6. Most importantly Clytaemestra thinks she can be the final arbiter while Orestes is willing to allow himself to be judged by greater powers, be it the Gods, or the Law.
All this allows for hope that the ending of this second installment, of Orestes' story, and the punishment for his crime need not be externally imposed but might in fact be sanctioned by this modern man himself.
How exactly this will play out Aeschylus leaves for his climactic play, but the Greeks of his time would have been in no doubt as to where it was all leading and would have been eagerly awaiting the mythical re-imagination/show-down it would entail. Society is progressing, and like in Hegel it was all going to culminate in the Perfection of the Present!...more
Each of the plays that make up The Oresteia tetralogy are supposed to be stand alone pieces as well as perfect complements to each oth The First Strike
Each of the plays that make up The Oresteia tetralogy are supposed to be stand alone pieces as well as perfect complements to each other. All the themes that The Oresteia is to explore later are planted and ready for internal development at the end of Agamemnon. Aeschylus works magic with the triadic structure of the plays and of greek rituals (the fourth was probably a conventional satyr play and is lost to us) by going for a feeling of tit-for-tat of conventional revenge stories in the first two and a ‘third and final’ resolution in the third (though I feel game-theory wise a tit-for-two-tats additional play would have made for a good thought experiment!).
So in Agamemnon we are presented with the first strike -- and the tit-for-tat is ready, prophesied and waiting inevitably for the reader/viewer in the next part. It is the bleakest and most ominous ending to a play that I have witnessed because unlike a Hamlet, here there is no cosmic meaning to give us solace either. Agamemnon ends ominously and without significance-in-itself, leaving us with the feeling that the tragedy has just begun and there is a long road yet to be traversed before we can glimpse any possibility of a resolution.
A Note on the Translations
I have over the past several months read the whole play (only Agamemnon) in multiple translations. A few thoughts on each:
The Richmond Lattimore Translation: is sonorous and grand — quite impressive. You feel like you are really reading an ancient master, unlike in the Fagles version. However, it uses complex structures and hence the reading is not quite smooth. With Fagles you can just read on and on and never stop due to a complex phrasing or unclear meaning, but with lattimore you have to pause and rewind often to catch the exact drift.
The Robert Fagles Translation: is immediate and easy on the ear. It is also quite easy to grasp as the words do not form confusing structures as it does in the Lattimore translation. However I felt a certain something missing and couldn’t put my finger on it. I prefer the Lattimore version.
E.D.A Morshead Translation: Rhythmic but compromises on ease of reading to achieve the metric scheme. Could hardly grasp a thing on first reading of most verses. Has the advantage that it demarcates the Strophe, Antistrophe & Epode of each choral ode and that helps the reader visualize better. None of the other translations do this and I felt it was very useful.
The Alan Shapiro Translation: Written in beautiful blank verse, this is probably the best placed to merit first rank as a poetic work. Shapiro injects new power into the verse by his poetic take and provides a fresh perspective on almost all important scenes and imagery. But needs to be a supplementary read since it departs often from the other translations in sometimes subtle and sometimes significant ways. It tries to be an improvement on the Lattimore version but in my opinion it can at best be read as an additional indulgence by the reader already well acquainted with Lattimore.
The Headlam Translation: is bilingual and gives the Greek text on the facing page. This is useful in clarifying doubts arising from conflicting translations or interpretations. The translation itself is slightly long winded and pompous and does not strike the fine balance that Lattimore strikes between majesty and simplicity. Does provide the most elaborate stage directions and that is a plus as an aid to accurate visualization (which in my opinion can make or break your reading of almost-exotic plays).
The Denniston Commentary, the edition under which this review appears: is one which I have not read (and do not have access to) and in the interests of neutrality I have selected it — since it has no translation and is in fact the Greek text itself with english commentary, which seems to be widely accepted as some of the best scholastic commentary on the play.
I will add notes on other translations if and when I track them down....more
The Prolegomena is valuable as a summarization that is intended to be less obscure and suited for popular coHieroglyphics: A Reluctant Translation
The Prolegomena is valuable as a summarization that is intended to be less obscure and suited for popular consumption. It tries to compress Kant’s criticism of (all) previous work in metaphysics and the theory of knowledge -- first propounded in the Critique of Pure Reason, which provided a comprehensive response to early modern philosophy and a starting point for most subsequent work in philosophy.
A note on the Edition: This is a wonderful edition to approach the Prolegomena with -- meticulous introductory essay and copious notes. Plus it comes with a summary outline of all the sections! A summary of a summary. What more could you want?
Summing up the Beast
As is well known The Critique of Pure Reason is a notoriously difficult work. When first published, the early readers were not very different from modern readers — they found it incomprehensible!
Kant was a poor popularizer of his own work and when it was finally published in the spring of 1781 (with Kant nearing 57), after almost ten years of preparation and work, Kant had expected that the evident originality of the thoughts would attract immediate attention, at least among philosophers. He was… well… to be disappointed — for the first year or two he received from those whom he most expected to give his book a sympathetic hearing only a cool and uncomprehending, if not bewildered, silence.
What else would you expect for such wild intentions:
My intention is to convince all of those who find it worthwhile to occupy themselves with metaphysics that it is unavoidably necessary to suspend their work for the present, to consider all that has happened until now as if it had not happened, and before all else to pose the question: “whether such a thing as metaphysics is even possible at all.”
He had proposed a “Copernican Revolution” in thinking. He should have known that such stuff cannot come without a user manual.
Soon Kant caught on to this, and started having some misgivings about the fact that he was clearly not getting the reception he had expected for his masterpiece:
Kant is known to have written to Herz expressing his discomfort in learning that the eminent philosopher Moses Mendelssohn had “laid my book aside,” since he felt that Mendelssohn was “the most important of all the people who could explain this theory to the world.”
Mendelssohn later wrote to a friend confessing that he did not understand the work, and professing pleasure at learning that, in the opinion of her brother, he would not be “missing much” if he continued not to understand it!
Kant’s colleague in Konigsberg, Johann Schultz, in the preface to his 1784 Exposition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, mentioned the “nearly universal complaint about the unconquerable obscurity and unintelligibility” of the work, saying that for the largest part of the learned public it was “as if it consisted in nothing but hieroglyphics.”
As a reaction to this lack of public appreciation for such a vital work that was to have "brought about a complete change of thinking," a great deal of Kant's effort during the decade of the 1780s had diverted away from further development of his system and towards the unforeseen task of clarifying the critical foundations of his system of philosophy that he thought he had completed in May 1781. This work took a number of different forms: the publication of a brief defense and attempted popularization of the Critique in 1783 until, finally, Kant came to think that an overview would be of great value to aid the reading public in comprehending the implications of the Critique. The Prolegomena was the result. We can only guess what more productive use could have been made of this period!
It is sometimes obvious in this work that Kant was pained by the need to summarize his great work (and with the necessity of expending valuable time on it). Only someone who has written an elaborate masterpiece would know how difficult it must be to write a summary of it. And Kant lets it slip often enough (one might even think deliberately) that he is not too amused by having to do so:
But although a mere plan that might precede the Critique of Pure Reason would be unintelligible, undependable, and useless, it is by contrast all the more useful if it comes after. For one will thereby be put in the position to survey the whole, to test one by one the main points at issue in this science, and to arrange many things in the exposition better than could be done in the first execution of the work.
Whosoever finds this plan itself, which I send ahead as prolegomena for any future metaphysics, still obscure, may consider that it simply is not necessary for everyone to study metaphysics; and that in such a case one should apply one’s mental gifts to another object.
That whosoever undertakes to judge or indeed to construct a metaphysics must, however, thoroughly satisfy the challenge made here, whether it happens that they accept my solution, or fundamentally reject it and replace it with another – for they cannot dismiss it; and finally, that the much decried obscurity (a familiar cloaking for one’s own indolence or dimwittedness) has its use as well, since everybody, who with respect to all other sciences observes a wary silence, speaks master- fully, and boldly passes judgment in questions of metaphysics, because here to be sure their ignorance does not stand out clearly in relation to the science of others, but in relation to genuine critical principles, which therefore can be praised.
Kant hoped to hit more than one bird with the Prolegomena:
It was meant to offer “preparatory exercises” to the Critique of Pure Reason — not meant to replace the Critique, but as “preparatory exercises” they were intended to be read prior to the longer work. It was also meant to give an overview of that work, in which the structure and plan of the whole work could be more starkly put across — offered “as a general synopsis, with which the work itself could then be compared on occasion”. The Prolegomena are to be taken as a plan, synopsis, and guide for the Critique of Pure Reason.
He also wanted to walk his readers through the major arguments following the “analytic” method of exposition (as opposed to the “synthetic” method of the Critique): a method that starts from some given proposition or body of cognition and seeks principles from which it might be derived, as opposed to a method that first seeks to prove the principles and then to derive other propositions from them (pp. 13, 25–6).
What this means is that Kant realized that most of the readers were dazed by his daring to start the Critique from a scary emptiness of knowledge from which he set out to construct the very foundations on which any possible structure of knowledge can stand, and also the possibility of such a foundation i.e metaphysics. There he proceeds from these first (newly derived) principles of the theory of knowledge to examine the propositions that might be derived from it that are adaptable to a useful metaphysics.
In the Prolegomena, Kant reverses this and takes the propositions (i.e structure) as a given and then seeks to expose the required foundations that are needed to support such a construction. This he feels is less scary for the uninitiated reader.
It is true. The abyss is not so stark when viewed through this approach, and we can ease into our fall!
Kant’s work is easy to summarize (well, not really — but enough work has been put into it that at there least it is easy to get good summaries) but is infinitely rich with potential for the inquisitive reader. This reviewer has no intention of summarizing and thus reducing a method/system to its mere conclusions. And to summarize the method would be to recreate it in full detail! Instead the only advice tendered would be to explore Kant’s work in depth and not rest content with a superficial understanding of only the conclusions. That is precisely what Kant criticizes (in the appendix to the Prolegomena) his reviewers of doing back in the day. We should know better by now....more
Heraclitus is all rolled into one. His fragments are tantalizing, hinting at a wisdom lost to us, but I am sure tha Philosopher-Poet-Prophet-Proverbist
Heraclitus is all rolled into one. His fragments are tantalizing, hinting at a wisdom lost to us, but I am sure that he meant them to be fragmentary, so that all he does for the reader is a quick nod in the direction of a distant window, leaving the reader to make the journey, to peep out, and to make of the sight what he will. In the sure knowledge that Heraclitus had pointed him there and whatever he sees there is worth interpreting.
“Things keep their secrets.”
Herclitus is often called a Wisdom-Poet, sharing kinship with the authors of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job. Such Wisdom-Poetry specializes in a special sort of pessimism -- one that frees the reader from the shackles of a cherished belief. Heraclitus does this repeatedly:
They raise their voices
at stone idols
as a man might argue
with his doorpost,
they have understood
so little of the gods.
Like Buddha, Heraclitus is known to have given up his throne to seek wisdom. He became the author of what is today often considered to the first philosophical treatise of the Western mind -- that tries to arrive at the truth through a discourse.
However, the philosophy is nascent in these writings, being more prophetic and poetic than a structured discourse, with ideas leading one into the other.
These aphorisms tread lightly, avoiding being an elitist composition open only to the initiated. Heraclitus makes himself mysterious and accessible at the same time. it is no wonder that most philosophers after him refer to him with an awe reserved for a master who first teaches one to truly see the world anew.
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