The accidental monkey  "That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false." —Paul Valéry |
Darwin was a Romantic.
The Romantic is impatient with mystery. He must identify himself, and that means to identify with something, or someone—to be able to say, “That’s me”—which requires indulging in metaphysics, as who can help doing?
The usual Romantic choice is Nature. De Sade identified with a Nature that was bloody, murderous and, well, sadistic (see The Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France); Byron, with the storm; Shelley, with the west wind—“Be thou me, impetuous one!” (perhaps he's punning; péter is French for fart); Marx, with history, which he thought behaved rationally; Darwin, with the orangutan; and Freud with Darwin: the id is the ape within.
For the Romantics, and for much of the nineteenth century, time was an absolute. The ancient Greek absolute was space, three-dimensional Euclidian space. The Greeks knew the diameter of the globe, and one idea moving behind appearances gives the parallax of rational thought.
This same enthusiasm was unearthed in the Renaissance. Three-dimensional painting became an optical science, Baroque perspective dominated everything from Versailles to the ruler-drawn borders of America, and Newton built his universe in Euclid’s space.
The inward-looking Romantics were in love with one aspect of this space, infinite time. An object is inert in that it doesn’t move unless acted upon, and in motion continues forever unless it meets another force. That line describes infinite time. Space, said Kant, is our outer sense, time our inner sense. Likewise for Godard the shot is a glance, montage a heartbeat.
In all of literature, said Northrop Frye, there are only two books that go from the beginning to the end, the bible and The Communist Manifesto. Darwin stopped in the present, but his time-line was infinite.
This absolute collapsed, however, in the 1870s and 80s, when our telescopes became strong enough, and our cameras fast enough, to record the movements of galaxies, and we saw that their placement doesn't fit three-dimensional space. Of this arrangement we cannot construct a model—cannot imagine it. Euclid’s laws, it turns out, are the laws of the mind, and we can’t think outside them. (See on this Catholics and Puritans.)
We call intergalactic space “curved” as a metaphor derived from Mercator’s projection: if Moscow and Saint Petersburg are the right distance apart, Nairobi and Mombasa can’t be, and vice versa. (There’s more on this in What We Know.) But if space is skew, so is the now perhaps finite time-line.
And the nineteenth-century view of things has survived. Is it therefore the fittest? That esteemed entomologist Vladimir Nabokov said, “Perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest.”
Evolution is our myth, our default belief about ourselves. Ask any jerk walking down the street and he'll tell you the score. Have a banana. The “scientists” who publish daily base their speculations on it, as do the literary Naturalists, from Flaubert and Zola to Norman Mailer. Poor disappointed Strindberg wondered if men and women were not descended from different monkeys.
It's a version of the medieval Great Chain of Being, from God and the angels down to minerals, lain on its side and extended in time. Stanley Kubrick, that stern satirist, was having none of it. In a gesture of victory an ape throws his bone-club, the first tool, into the air and, leaping the longest gap ever in a piece of montage, it becomes a space module. No explanation needed—our myth, and therefore invisible. But if being the fittest were just a matter of incremental circuitry the computer HAL (read IBM) would win. (See also Some Thoughts on Stanley Kubrick.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in many ways an exemplary thinker, said, “Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science.” But it isn’t a “theory.” Scientific method requires of a theory that it be testable, “verifiable,” as Karl Popper put it. Nothing in the Theory can be tested.
“Science,” said Paul Valéry, “means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. The rest is literature.” And there are other ways to read the fossil record. "Facts"? Turn a fact a little this way and a little that and it will show you a different face. The proper concern of science, as Edgar Poe said, is not with facts but with laws.
Why do I quote artists rather than scientists? Because they're better. Poe, with his take on Newton, and his understanding that physics is metaphysics, anticipated much that a later century found revolutionary. "Space and Duration are one," he said. Whereas scientists, so numerous, so earnest, are as guilty as the rest of us of scientism, the confidence that science knows it all, can know it all, will know it all.
Most of them are kids publishing or perishing, and have no time to think things all the way through—nor would they dare commit heresy. Sponsor spank. And so the Theory assumes the rigidity of religious dogma. Doubt "science" and you can go to the stake. Just look at the comments on this essay.
Must we be saddled with the effort to imagine one thing turning into another, and to explain the existence of “stuff,” that from which we “evolved”? Or was it always there? Always will be? Are we flirting with a model of God? Are we creationists?
Darwin was a creationist. And the pope is a Darwinist, no problem there. The Scopes monkey trial baffled literate onlookers. Only fundamentalists could insist that the world was created five thousand years ago like it says in the bible. In the movie, Spencer Tracy (marvelous man) shouts “I don’t give a damn about right and wrong!” “What do you give a damn about?” “TRUTH!”
Well, truth is hard to come by, and overrated. We know how things behave, but what they are is a closed door.
Is our local Euclidian time-line long enough to accommodate the Theory? Godard, to come back to him, says no, it’s too short to get all the way from the amino-acid soup to us. “Our ignorance of our nature,” he says, “is total.”
And Valéry, to come back to him (he had what Nabokov calls “the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist”), says:
Humanity is very young and its memory short. Hence it is quite legitimate to surmise that the known physical laws are no more than hasty conclusions drawn from too brief observation and that the human race as we know it (Homo sapiens) has so far existed only between two manifestations of prodigious, discontinuous “laws,” between two gaps in the order of the universe. But a man who watches a church clock from five past to fifty-five past twelve cannot know that it strikes the hour; cannot even guess this. It is not impossible that certain inexplicable phenomena, such as the appearance of life on our planet, are the effects of intermittent laws, laws whose successive manifestations we have not yet had time enough to observe.
Of course that opens things up to uncomfortable speculation. (See Some Notes on God.)
The Romantic is impatient with mystery. He must identify himself, and that means to identify with something, or someone—to be able to say, “That’s me”—which requires indulging in metaphysics, as who can help doing?
The usual Romantic choice is Nature. De Sade identified with a Nature that was bloody, murderous and, well, sadistic (see The Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France); Byron, with the storm; Shelley, with the west wind—“Be thou me, impetuous one!” (perhaps he's punning; péter is French for fart); Marx, with history, which he thought behaved rationally; Darwin, with the orangutan; and Freud with Darwin: the id is the ape within.
For the Romantics, and for much of the nineteenth century, time was an absolute. The ancient Greek absolute was space, three-dimensional Euclidian space. The Greeks knew the diameter of the globe, and one idea moving behind appearances gives the parallax of rational thought.
This same enthusiasm was unearthed in the Renaissance. Three-dimensional painting became an optical science, Baroque perspective dominated everything from Versailles to the ruler-drawn borders of America, and Newton built his universe in Euclid’s space.
The inward-looking Romantics were in love with one aspect of this space, infinite time. An object is inert in that it doesn’t move unless acted upon, and in motion continues forever unless it meets another force. That line describes infinite time. Space, said Kant, is our outer sense, time our inner sense. Likewise for Godard the shot is a glance, montage a heartbeat.
In all of literature, said Northrop Frye, there are only two books that go from the beginning to the end, the bible and The Communist Manifesto. Darwin stopped in the present, but his time-line was infinite.
This absolute collapsed, however, in the 1870s and 80s, when our telescopes became strong enough, and our cameras fast enough, to record the movements of galaxies, and we saw that their placement doesn't fit three-dimensional space. Of this arrangement we cannot construct a model—cannot imagine it. Euclid’s laws, it turns out, are the laws of the mind, and we can’t think outside them. (See on this Catholics and Puritans.)
We call intergalactic space “curved” as a metaphor derived from Mercator’s projection: if Moscow and Saint Petersburg are the right distance apart, Nairobi and Mombasa can’t be, and vice versa. (There’s more on this in What We Know.) But if space is skew, so is the now perhaps finite time-line.
And the nineteenth-century view of things has survived. Is it therefore the fittest? That esteemed entomologist Vladimir Nabokov said, “Perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest.”
Evolution is our myth, our default belief about ourselves. Ask any jerk walking down the street and he'll tell you the score. Have a banana. The “scientists” who publish daily base their speculations on it, as do the literary Naturalists, from Flaubert and Zola to Norman Mailer. Poor disappointed Strindberg wondered if men and women were not descended from different monkeys.
It's a version of the medieval Great Chain of Being, from God and the angels down to minerals, lain on its side and extended in time. Stanley Kubrick, that stern satirist, was having none of it. In a gesture of victory an ape throws his bone-club, the first tool, into the air and, leaping the longest gap ever in a piece of montage, it becomes a space module. No explanation needed—our myth, and therefore invisible. But if being the fittest were just a matter of incremental circuitry the computer HAL (read IBM) would win. (See also Some Thoughts on Stanley Kubrick.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in many ways an exemplary thinker, said, “Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science.” But it isn’t a “theory.” Scientific method requires of a theory that it be testable, “verifiable,” as Karl Popper put it. Nothing in the Theory can be tested.
“Science,” said Paul Valéry, “means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. The rest is literature.” And there are other ways to read the fossil record. "Facts"? Turn a fact a little this way and a little that and it will show you a different face. The proper concern of science, as Edgar Poe said, is not with facts but with laws.
Why do I quote artists rather than scientists? Because they're better. Poe, with his take on Newton, and his understanding that physics is metaphysics, anticipated much that a later century found revolutionary. "Space and Duration are one," he said. Whereas scientists, so numerous, so earnest, are as guilty as the rest of us of scientism, the confidence that science knows it all, can know it all, will know it all.
Most of them are kids publishing or perishing, and have no time to think things all the way through—nor would they dare commit heresy. Sponsor spank. And so the Theory assumes the rigidity of religious dogma. Doubt "science" and you can go to the stake. Just look at the comments on this essay.
Must we be saddled with the effort to imagine one thing turning into another, and to explain the existence of “stuff,” that from which we “evolved”? Or was it always there? Always will be? Are we flirting with a model of God? Are we creationists?
Darwin was a creationist. And the pope is a Darwinist, no problem there. The Scopes monkey trial baffled literate onlookers. Only fundamentalists could insist that the world was created five thousand years ago like it says in the bible. In the movie, Spencer Tracy (marvelous man) shouts “I don’t give a damn about right and wrong!” “What do you give a damn about?” “TRUTH!”
Well, truth is hard to come by, and overrated. We know how things behave, but what they are is a closed door.
Is our local Euclidian time-line long enough to accommodate the Theory? Godard, to come back to him, says no, it’s too short to get all the way from the amino-acid soup to us. “Our ignorance of our nature,” he says, “is total.”
And Valéry, to come back to him (he had what Nabokov calls “the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist”), says:
Humanity is very young and its memory short. Hence it is quite legitimate to surmise that the known physical laws are no more than hasty conclusions drawn from too brief observation and that the human race as we know it (Homo sapiens) has so far existed only between two manifestations of prodigious, discontinuous “laws,” between two gaps in the order of the universe. But a man who watches a church clock from five past to fifty-five past twelve cannot know that it strikes the hour; cannot even guess this. It is not impossible that certain inexplicable phenomena, such as the appearance of life on our planet, are the effects of intermittent laws, laws whose successive manifestations we have not yet had time enough to observe.
Of course that opens things up to uncomfortable speculation. (See Some Notes on God.)
Perhaps I’ve been living too long in Greece. These Mediterraneans are classicists, rock people, as Dalí says, and he evokes Mantegna to prove it. Romantics are Nordics, forest-and-fog people, music-and-flowers people, gazing inward at evanescent visions. “My moustache is the contrary of Nietzsche’s, which is depressive, with plenty of music. Mine is a pair of erect scissors, the rocks of this country.”
And indeed, Romantic depth can usually be traced to indigestion.
Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains, but an intellectual snob.
“Like all that is best in life I am quite useless.”
The Light Touch on Amazon Prime
The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean
