Triangle Man Hates Particle Man

As I've said before, I'm a Unitarian, and from that we can expect that I don't know much about philosophy, theology, or ancient history. In an attempt to rectify that, and as challenged by a bearded Michigander, I'm undertaking Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, a 916 page small-print volume from 1945. My copy comes from the Golda Meir Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I found it wedged under a water cooler (or "bubbler") on the basement level to prevent water from leaking out onto the indoor/outdoor carpeting and thereby creating both a mildewy smell and squishy footfalls 'round the old foosball table.

Here's what I've learned from the first 50 pages:

"Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe" (11). Almost all of what Russell says about the dangers of -- or I suppose I should say "excesses of" -- theology bring the presidency of G.W.B. directly to mind.

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it" (11). This is essentially what Camus and other more optimistic (relatively speaking) existentialists were saying about a decade later. Those Frenchies stole from us!

Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers; ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible" (20). So all these jackasses that are yelling at congressmen because health care for poor people will somehow make them less free are totally leading us to dissolution or subjection to foreign conquest. I say we ossificate the bastards.

Book One, Part One, Chapter One ("The Rise of Greek Civilization") makes it clear that the early Greeks essentially stole their culture from Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Cretans.

I'm interested by Russell's use of the works of Homer to explicate the Greek pantheon of gods. The Iliad and the Odyssey (which date from 560 to 527 BC) "represent the point of view of a civilized aristocracy, which ignores as plebeian various superstitions that are still rampant among the populace" (28). And then: "It must be admitted that religion, in Homer, is not very religious. The gods are completely human, differing from men only in being immortal and possessed of superhuman powers. Morally, there is nothing to be said for them, and it is difficult to see how they can have inspired much awe." (29) Russell quotes from Gilbert Murray's Five Stages of Greek Religion: "The gods of most nations claim to have created the world. The Olympians make no such claim. The most they ever did was to conquer it... Why should they do honest work? They find it easier to live on the revenues and blast with thunderbolts the people who do not pay. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers" (30). So, again, Dick Cheney = Hephaestus.

The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant. This habit began to be important with the rise of agriculture; no animal and no savage would work in the spring in order to have food next winter... Hunting requires no forethought, because it is pleasureable; but tilling the soil is labour, and cannot be done from spontaneous impulse" (33).

Russell makes the case for the influence of the worshippers of Dionysus and Orpheus on modern thought: "Much of what is greatest in human achievement involves some element of intoxication, some sweeping away of prudence by passion" (34).

"We know more or less what an educated Greek learnt from his father, but we know very little of what, in his earliest years, he learnt from his mother, who was, to a great extent, shut out from the civilization in which the men took delight" (40). Someone is probably already on this, but I think it would be interesting to read a History of Household Knowlege, a book that would chart the more domestic aspects of the development of mankind. How did the Greeks approach child-rearing? How did germ theory affect household chores? When was the couch invented?

Aniximander -- "the second philosopher of the Milesian school," mid-500's BC -- argued that "there was an eternal motion" between the elements of fire, earth, and water, "in the course of which was brought about the origin of the worlds. The worlds were not created ... but evolved. There was evolution also in the animal kingdom. Living creatures arose from the moist element as it was evaporated by the sun. Man, like every other animal, was descended from fishes. He must be derived from animals ... because, owing to his long infancy, he could not have survived, originally, as he is now" (45). Then, 2300 years later, Mr. Charles Darwin.

Aniximander is supposedly our first map-maker, and he held that earth is shaped like a cylinder. You have to love these early arguements about the shape of the earth. "No, sir, it is like unto a coffee table." "Certainly not. Our world has the form of an inverted sandal."

On Pythagoras, ca. 532 BC: "Some say he was the son of a substantial citizen named Mnesarchos, others that he was the son of the god Apollo; I leave the reader take his choice between these alternatives" (48). And, later: "He may be described, briefly, as a combination of Einstein and [Mary Baker] Eddy. He founded a religion, of which the main tenets were the transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating beans" (50). The religion, for a time, "acquired control of the Senate and established a rule of the saints. But the unregenerate hankered after beans, and sooner or later rebelled." Turns out that Bertie Russell's a funny, funny man. And kinda looks like Sid Caesar, doesn't he?