365 Years of Isaac Newton

In a Letter to Roger Cotes, Cambridge mathematician who proofread second edition of the Principia, Newton is ambivalent about hypotheses:

'For anything which is not deduced from phenomena ought to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses of this kind, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy, propositions are deduced from phenomena, and afterward made general by induction…'

In Newton’s scientific system, induction, or the movement upward from observed phenomenon to general law, is highest status a proposition can attain. Before a proposition can make sublimation to law, it must be supported by proof derived from experiment. But before proof can be applied to an idea, there must be formulated proposition of that idea. Seems contrary then that a hypothesis should not be formed previous to experimentation. Newton’s resistance to hypotheses suggests that they are involved in a personalization of experiment, which might compromise the supposed objectivity of experiment. Newton would like to suggest it possible to get at truths from a position that is supra-lingual; that, by observation and experiment, the experimental scientist might work their way inward from phenomena through nebulous proposition(s) to axiomatic truth. In an earlier letter to Roger Oldenburg, original fellow at the Royal Society, Newton is less guarded about his philosophy:

'…For the best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first, to inquire diligently into the properties of things and to establish those properties by experiments, and to proceed later to hypotheses for the explanation of things themselves. For hypotheses ought to be applied only in the explanation of the properties of things, and not made use of in determining them; except in so far as they may furnish experiments. And if anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science; since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties. Hence I judged that one should abstain from contemplating hypotheses, as from improper argumentation…'

Although Newton keeps caveat that hypotheses may be useful in furnishing experiment, their epistemological status is nonetheless secondary to experiment in his scientific system. He would like to pretend that experiment might be possible without the pernicious fact of language. Certainly, Newton was not harboring the sort of polemical attitude to language in science that we find in somebody like Bruno Latour:

'In actual practice, one never travels directly from objects to words, from the referent to the sign, but always through a risky intermediary pathway.'

Newton’s faith in the enlightening wholeness and totality of the natural world would not permit such statement. But the surfacing of certain ambiguity and even arbitrariness regarding the import of symbols is another matter. As early as Locke, there is a challenge to the claim that linguistic symbols are essential to the referent they represent. Language is identified as socially constructed; non-inherent to the things it names. Taking as premise this configuration of language as external and essentially alien to the things it stands for, Newton’s other, less surveyed writings, especially on theology, align more compositely with his better-known scientific works. When his natural philosophy, as an attempt to prioritize objectivity in linguistic exchange, is applied in theological investigation, the substance of those investigations (i.e. the Bible) loses textual objectivity, or totality, and becomes open to as many permutations and complications as are active in the natural world that it is supposed to explain.

Fact of science is that it becomes a social construction the moment a phenomenon is observed. Language subsumes observation from that moment of observance until and through the (possible) sublimation of observation to law. The exegetic potential within any scientific law further suggests that language never releases phenomena after phenomena have been formatted through language to data and facts. I have folded a number of passages of Newton on Moses into one, from a letter to Thomas Burnet:

'As to Moses, I do not think his description of the creation either philosophical or feigned, but that he described realities in a language artificially adapted to the sense of the vulgar. Thus when he speaks of two great lights, I suppose he means their apparent, not real greatness. So when he tells us God placed these lights in the firmament, he speaks I suppose of their apparent, not real, place, his business being, not to correct the vulgar notions in matters philosophical, but to adapt a description of the creation as handsomely as he could to the sense and capacity of the vulgar… To describe [things] distinctly as they were in themselves would have made the narration tedious and confused, amused the vulgar, and become a philosopher more than a prophet... If it be said that the expression of making and setting two great lights in the firmament is more poetical than natural, so also are some other expressions of Moses, as when he tells us the windows or floodgates of heaven were opened (Genesis 7) and afterward stopped again (Genesis 8), and yet the things signified by such figurative expressions are not ideal or moral but true…'

Surrounding this argument on the fictive in Moses’ dyadic firmament, there is a lengthier discussion of the six days that it took to create the earth. Newton's six days are ideational, each assigned the sense of a day according to the thing created, in order to convey the notion of diurnal, developmental creation. Grammar is secondary to rhetoric. According to Newton, Moses is configuring his description of the creation of the universe to create a sense of aesthetic wholeness or continuity. The implication is that the textual objectivity of Moses as we receive it from the Bible is undercut by and not correlative to the natural objectivity of the universal process of creation. Moses’ rhetorical purpose receives primacy in Newton’s reading of him. Additionally, if we concede, as I suspect we must, to Newton the idiosyncrasy of his intellectual engagement, the probability that he is as heavily invested in the factuality of his reading of Moses as he is in the factuality of observations sublimated to scientific truth, we must assume that Newton arrived at his conclusion of Moses by means parallel to those used in scientific experiment.

In essence, it must be assumed that Newton submitted Moses to as much experimental rigor as was received by his theory of gravity or light. Moses too must be a conclusion from deduction to induction. Moses, too, has received the burden of experimentation. There is, however, no materiality to Moses. He is undeniably, in so far as he is concerned to Newton, an idea—-a rhetorical template placed by God—-by which Newton could extend his own understanding of the genesis and nature of the physical world. Between the theological and the scientific, the permeability is not defined as faith against fact. These are not spheres in conflict. Experimental capacity suffuses all manner of observation, especially when channeled through language. Moses’ sagacity, to Newton, is determined by his nimble manipulation of the amorphousness of language.

De Man on Locke:

''Abuse' of language is, of course, itself the name of a trope: catachresis. This is indeed how Locke describes mixed modes. They are capable of inventing the most fantastic entities by dint of the positional power inherent in language. They can dismember the texture of reality and reassemble it in the most capricious of ways, pairing man with woman or human being with beast in the most unnatural shapes. Something monstrous lurks in the most innocent of catachreses: when one speaks of the legs of the table or the face of the mountain, catachresis is already turning into prosopopeia, and one begins to perceive a world of potential ghosts and monsters. By elaborating his theory of language as a motion from simple ideas to mixed modes, Locke has deployed the entire fan-shape or (to remain within light imagery) the entire spectrum or rainbow of tropological totalization, the anamorphosis of tropes which has to run its full course whenever one engages, however reluctantly or tentaviely, the question of language as figure. In Locke, it began in the arbitrary, metonymic contiguity of word-sounds to their meanings, in which the word is a mere token in the service of the natural entity, and it concludes with the catachresis of mixed modes in which the word can be said to produce of and by itself the entity it signifies and that has no equivalence in nature. Locke condemns catachresis severely: 'he that hath IDEAS of substances disagreeing with the real existence of things, so far wants the materials of true knowledge in his understanding, and hath instead thereof CHIMERAS... He that thinks the CENTAUR stands for some real being, imposes on himself and mistkes words for things' (bk. 3, chap. 10, p. 104). But the condemnation, by Locke's own argument, now takes all language for its target, for at no point in the course of the demonstration can the empirical entity be sheltered from tropological defiguration. The ensuing situation is intolerable and makes the soothing conclusion of book 3, entitled 'Of the Remedies of the Foregoing Imperfections and Abuses [of Language],' into one of the least convincing sections of the Essay. One turns to the tradition engendered by Locke's work in the hope of finding some assistance out of the predicament.''

ie. Newton or, more dynamically, Newton through Edwards. More on this at some other point. This post is meant as tribute to the genius of Isaac Newton

Polyphloisbos and Arnaut Daniel

Plato’s Cratylus deals at length with the original nature of some words. There are certain words which naturally surface like oxygen through the pool of language to the world. Some words actually do just come up from the ground like Holderlin’s flowers-—words that seem to embody their sense in their sound—-perfect, natural words. Pound’s proselytizing of Arnaut Daniel, troubadour, as the greatest poet that ever lived was premised on Daniel’s capacity to use these kinds of words with greatest range and ease.

An example from Homer: In the Illiad, phloisbos refers to the noise and confusion of battle. Elsewhere, in describing the sea, polyphloisbos is used for the sound of waves on the shore or on the fore of a ship. It channels the noise and confusion of a battle scene onto the crash of water against an object. Polyphloisbos is aggregate, percussive, embattled, confused and specific. It is the only word for the crash of water on a ship’s crest.

Additionally, it circles sonically on its percussive stresses. POlyPHLOisBOS: Crash/recession/surge/recession/final, conclusive 'B'-crash. It is sonically a wave against an object, surging and receding and returning with upshot. Listen to the way waves sound next time you are by a sea-beat, rocky shore. They SAY ‘polyphloisbos’

Poetry’s purpose, then, perhaps, is to improve our attention to the natural sound of our world through the language we use to consider that world. Arnaut Daniel is the greatest poet that ever lived if he is able to suffuse our grasp of the world with the feel of cleanliness and clarity in the sound of his language. His words make us better witnesses to the aural niceties of our world

See also Gavin Douglas, Pound’s translations of Daniel, and a number of passages from the Divine Comedy

Titus Flavius Vespasianus

Roman Emperor 69-79 AD noted for administrative and financial reforms that salvaged the empire from the critical state it was left in by Nero

Suetonius: 'Industrious, and the simplicity of his life was taken as model... He cultivated a bluff manner, characteristic of the humble origins he liked to recall. His initial appointments reflected his astuteness in building a powerful political party of which the core was his own family'

After the Year of the Four Emperors, the civil war, and the destruction of the capital by fire, the Roman republic was utterly baffled and beaten financially and psychically. Vespasian immediately supplied grain and granted pardon to those embroiled in Nero's excessive treason hunts. Brought sense along with grain. Said: 'I will not kill a dog that barks at me'

Vespasian headed massive public works projects to rehabilitate the republic, including the Colosseum and a Temple of Peace. Especially generous to men of letters and rhetoricians. Many authors speak suspiciously well of Vespasian. Reminds us that the key to history is endearment to its authors.

Last words were 'Væ, puto deus fio,' 'Shit, I think I'm becoming a god'

Flattened Time In Barry Lyndon, X

The ontological implications of aesthetic comport for Barry Lyndon transcend mere usage as model for character development. In confluence with the flattened portraiture of the film and a narrative tendency to flatten time as it is exhibited in the film, Barry Lyndon abides in a larger argument of synchronicity, or resonance, of existence.

Bazin:

If there are, still, tensions and climaxes in [certain films] which leave nothing to be desired as regards drama or tragedy, it is because, in the absence of traditional dramatic causality, the incidents in [these] films develop effects of analogy and echo. [A certain hero] never reaches the final crisis (which destroys him and saves him) by progressive dramatic linking but because the circumstances somehow or other affect him, build up inside him like the vibrant energy in a resonating body. He does not develop; he is transformed; overturning finally like an iceberg whose center of buoyancy has shifted unseen.

The duels, as I have described, echo each other and fold the film into a momentous singularity. The framing of narrative action around the imminence of events further flattens out the way we experience the film. It progresses but, as it seems to do so in a more vertical mode, it also holds still. From this peculiar axis, action happens, has happened and is about to happen at once. And rather than focus on the flux between past, present and forthcoming, the film focuses on synchronic fluxions and the flat presence of their occurrence. The epilogue reads:

IT WAS IN THE REIGN OF GEORGE III THAT THE AFORESAID PERSONAGES LIVED AND QUARRELLED; GOOD OR BAD, HANDSOME OR UGLY, RICH OR POOR THEY ARE ALL EQUAL NOW

All fluxions are compressed to one. With the same ideational totality by which the narrator is ubiquitous across time, the persons narrated in the story are equal upon the final account of the film. They are flattened in the hands of history. Like the 18c paintings that are the film’s aesthetic reference point, the film’s sense of history is of totality upon a canvas. All players are together and, taking account of the film’s narrative frame as premise for understanding history on a vertical axis of ubiquity, all players are carrying out their actions in perpetuity.

Barry Lyndon forces its viewer to experience film as painting: cinematographeum, ut pictora. But, beyond its handle on historical representation, the film’s sense of time suggests that history, as we experience it, is totalizing. By extension, we too become flattened in the hands of time, if we follow the argument of this film. Barry’s poetry, his aesthetic comport, becomes pictorial. And portraiture, by its subsuming presence in the lives of the film’s personages, seeps into the poetry of these people.

I will finish my account of the film with the same integrity to ambiguity, which characterizes Bazin’s more compelling writings. The film seems to be an effort to mediate an interface between time and aesthetic. Its aesthetic, its poetry, becomes contra-chronological. It is a poetry that, by its peculiar alignment with portraiture, becomes contra-poetic. And its portraiture becomes, by the sheer diachronic nature of film, spread into time like measured, poetic verse. Whether or not Barry Lyndon indeed resolves the epistemic rift between painting and poetry—-whether or not film could serve in the capacity of an aesthetic meeting point between these two, ancient rivals—-is a crucial question which I note without resolving.

Flattened Time In Barry Lyndon, IX

Proper aesthetic comport is structurally determined by the relative amount of positive alignment of a character to a shared, social mode. Barry’s success with Lady Lyndon is measurable by his capacity to apply a courtly manner to situations necessitating it and to transcend that manner when needed. There is a certain daring and disregard when Barry and Lady Lyndon are walking together in a courtyard, soon after their initial meeting, and they step together over a partition of lawn. All other people in the scene are definitely on the designed paths. Barry and Lady Lyndon are together carrying courtliness beyond its said limits. Like Lady Lyndon, when she brings the Schubert out with her onto the balcony, they carry their courtliness inside them. They embody it, in so far as they have made its aesthetic system their ostensibly natural system.

Barry elsewhere carries more courtliness than members of an aristocratic hierarchy who, presumably, should more naturally bear that aesthetic inside them. The duel scenes are an example of this. In both scenes, but especially in the latter, Barry, the “insolent Irish upstart, [of] lowness [of] birth and general brutality of manners... this lowbred ruffian,” as Bullingdon describes him, exhibits greater stamina and sprezzatura than Bullingdon, who, due to the nobility of his birth, should be calmer and more in control. As Bullingdon vomits and trembles in terror, Barry stares unabatedly at his opponent. Barry takes his opponent’s shot without a shake of insecurity. He is, in short, more courtly and aesthetically in keeping with the measure of the situation. The quality of certain manners is completely subsumed into and sensible by the extent of those manners’ alignment to an aesthetic exhibition. Barry simply looks better in his station than Bullingdon. And Barry’s capacity for comport is qualitatively natural: He exhibited as much relative stamina and sprezzatura in his first duel with Quin.

There is, however, a quantitative growth, or cultivation, of this natural capacity as the film progresses. Barry enters the Prussian army because he was idiotic about the extent to which he could manipulate his comport and language to his benefit. He oversteps his aesthetic, pretending to Captain Potzdorf that the British Ambassador in Berlin is his uncle, with the preposterous name of O’Grady, even going so far as to offer the Captain a letter of introduction, and further describes the English king and his ministers as if he were intimate with them. Potzdorf thus determines that Barry is an imposter and a deserter. And Barry must consequently volunteer for the Prussian army to save himself from prison. In this capacity, he saves Potzdorf’s life and is awarded two Frederic d’or as the Colonel says to him:

Corporal Barry, you're a gallant soldier, and evidently have come of good stock but you're idle and unprincipled. You're a bad influence on the men. And for all your bravery, I'm sure you'll come to no good.

At which Barry replies:

I hope the Colonel is mistaken regarding my character. I have fallen into bad company, it is true, but I've only done as other soldiers have. And, above all, I've never had a kind protector before to show that I was worthy of better things. The Colonel may say I'm a ruined lad, and send me to the Devil. But, be sure of this, I would go to the Devil to serve the Regiment.

Barry has gone from ostentatious fabrication to artful manipulation. His lies have become more artfully absorbed into his language. The plane of Barry’s falsity could be described as less bulging, less adjunct, and its smoothness more ingratiating to Potzdorf, who soon commissions Barry to the capacity of prevaricator and fabricator, as a counter-spy in the city of Berlin. Barry’s equivocation is nearly flawless as he machinates a counter-counter-espionage, by revealing himself to and collaborating with the Chevalier de Balibari. There is a sense that Barry is determining a character that has always been within him. Bazin on this kind of character development:

As for the characters themselves, they exist and change only in reference to a purely internal kind of time… Let us not say that the transformation of the characters takes place at the level of the “soul.” But it has at least to occur at that depth of their being into which consciousness only occasionally reaches down. This does not mean at the level of the unconscious or the subconscious but rather the level on which Jean-Paul Sartre calls the “basic project” obtains, the level of ontology. Thus [this type] of character does not evolve; he ripens or at the most becomes transformed…

Bazin indexes this kind of characterization by its ‘vertical gravity,’ as opposed to a development by ‘horizontal causality.’ Barry’s growth comes from a character that rises upward from inside him. In regard to character development in relative alignment to the situational mandates of the film, this film’s character development is horizontally flattened and contained. Barry’s cultivation of character contained within him is the ontic measure by which I identify aesthetic comport. His being comes to be by a bringing forth through aesthetically structured behavior. And it is more distinguished in Barry because he seems to be the only personage in the film that conscientiously cultivates and applies his aesthetic comport. I have already discussed this in regard to the determined posture he assumes in his courting of Lady Lyndon.

Letter to Anita McBride, Assistant to George W. Bush and Chief of Staff to Laura Bush

"Why did an Iraqi journalist throw his shoe at George Bush? Is our president so little respected in that land to which he fancies himself liberator? What could he possibly do between now and his departure to disprove the preponderant moronic presence that he has projected to the world?"

Not the first letter I've written to the White House. They have, as one might suspect, never responded to any of my queries.

Flattened Time In Barry Lyndon, VIII

Andre Bazin (1918-58)

An Aesthetic of Reality: "The dramatic role played by the marsh is due in great measure to deliberately intended qualities in the photography. This is why the horizon is always at the same height. Maintaining the same proportions between water and sky in every shot brings out one of the basic characteristics of this landscape. It is the exact equivalent, under conditions imposed by the screen, of the inner feeling men experience who are living between the sky and the water and whose lives are at the mercy of an infinitesimal shift of angle in relation to the horizon. This shows how much subtlety of expression can be got on exteriors from a camera in the hands of the man who photographed Paisa."

An Aesthetic of Reality: "The construction introduces an obviously abstract element into reality. Because we are so used to such abstractions, we no longer sense them. Orson Welles started a revolution by systematically employing a depth of focus that had so far not been used. Whereas the camera lens, classically, had focused successively on different parts of the scene, the camera of Orson Welles takes in with equal sharpness the whole field of vision contained simultaneously within the dramatic field. It is no longer the editing that selects what we see, thus giving it an a priori significance, it is the mind of the spectator which is forced to discern, as in a sort of parallelepiped of reality with the screen as its cross section, the dramatic spectrum proper to the scene… “ The flattened axis of reduced depth becomes a three-dimensional figure by the manner in which it is received by the viewer. It is given intellectual dynamic and depth by the absorption (the viewer’s projection) of psychological impact into the scene.

An Aesthetic of Reality: "Thus, the most realistic of the arts… cannot make reality entirely its own because reality must inevitably elude it at some point. Undoubtedly an improved technique, skillfully applied, may narrow the holes of the net, but one is compelled to choose between one kind of reality and another. Future technical improvement [ ] will permit the conquest of the properties of the real (color and stereoscopy for example)… The quality of the interior shots will in fact increasingly depend on a complex delicate and cumbersome apparatus. Some measure of reality must always be sacrificed in the effort of achieving it." Bazin’s negative corollary to realism is metaphysical. Reality is compromised by the surrealism of equipment. At the opposite end, I would add that reality is further compromised by oversaturation possible with certain photographic apparatuses, such as the Zeiss lens.

Cabiria: "As for the characters themselves, they exist and change only in reference to a purely internal kind of time… Let us not say that the transformation of the characters takes place at the level of the “soul.” But it has at least to occur at that depth of their being into which consciousness only occasionally reaches down. This does not mean at the level of the unconscious or the subconscious but rather the level on which Jean-Paul Sartre calls the “basic project” obtains, the level of ontology. Thus [this type] of character does not evolve; he ripens or at the most becomes transformed..."

Cabiria: "If there are, still, tensions and climaxes in [certain films] which leave nothing to be desired as regards drama or tragedy, it is because, in the absence of traditional dramatic causality, the incidents in [these] films develop effects of analogy and echo. [A certain hero] never reaches the final crisis (which destroys him and saves him) by progressive dramatic linking but because the circumstances somehow or other affect him, build up inside him like the vibrant energy in a resonating body. He does not develop; he is transformed; overturning finally like an iceberg whose center of buoyancy has shifted unseen."