Cedric Lizotte at The Airship writes about a subject dear to my heart:
Mastery of a second language (or third or fourth) is rather difficult, so writing a masterpiece in a language that is not one’s first is remarkable — and doing it repeatedly is even more astonishing. Yet there are quite a few famous novelists who wrote and continue to write in a language that is not their mother tongue. Joseph Conrad, who was raised speaking Polish, became known for his novels written in English and is perhaps the best known of these prolific polyglots, but there are many others. The list is long and, at times, truly surprising […]
Of course, most of the list will not surprise anyone who’s ever taken an interest in the topic: Brodsky, Nabokov, and Beckett all make their foreordained appearances, and Eva Hoffman and Agota Kristof have been in the cultural news a fair amount. I did not know, however, that Romain Gary “wrote many novels directly in English,” or that Jack Kerouac began On the Road in French, “then started over in English.” Needless to say, it is not an exhaustive list; the name that immediately occurred to me was that of Elsa Triolet (né Ella Yurievna Kagan), who wrote her first few novels in Russian, then switched to French (and was awarded the Prix Goncourt). Thanks, Trevor!
Jhumpa Lahiri, after years of writing in English, taught herself Italian and has published several books including a novel in Italian.
Ah yes, I knew there was a name niggling at me; I posted on her in 2015.
And I posted about the phenomenon of “exophonic writers” in 2017 (mentioning Jhumpa Lahiri, Emil Cioran, Yiyun Li, and others).
I like that the author used Pieter Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel to head the article. (Actually, Bruegel did two painting of that subject, but that one is more famous and far superior, in my opinion.) It’s one of the those paintings that, when I saw it in person (at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien), I could have just stood there and looked at it all afternoon.
I doubt the author chose it, but yes, I reveled in it at the Kunsthistorisches as well.
Célestine Hitiura Vaite, daughter of a Tahitian mother and a French father, wrote and saw published her first three novels in English. Wikipedia:
Elsa Triolet’s first novel was На Таити (In Tahiti)! Cue spooky music…
wrt Joseph Conrad, I’ve always been dubious about the claim “became known for his novels written in English “.
Yes he became known for his novels (I note Lizotte carefully avoids commenting on what they’re known for). Yes his novels use English words. They’ve always read to me as written by a foreigner, not ‘in English’.
So is the conventional evaluation of Conrad the rather patronising: didn’t he do well for a non-native speaker? And/or: excellent plotlines; good character development; racy action; evocative ‘atmosphere’; … pity about the English.
I harbour a suspicion Conrad would have been a much better/better known author if he’d written in Polish (or whatever) and got the novels translated.
Basically every early modern writer in Hebrew (till, say, the ’60s) fits the bill; most notably of all Nobelist S.Y. Agnon.
They’ve always read to me as written by a foreigner, not ‘in English’.
Really? They don’t read to me that way at all; there’s occasionally an odd turn of phrase, but that can be put down to authorial idiosyncrasy — I don’t think I ever have that “nice try, old chap” sense.
I harbour a suspicion Conrad would have been a much better/better known author if he’d written in Polish (or whatever) and got the novels translated.
Better is in the eye of the beholder, but he’s surely as well known as any English author of his time, thanks to the notoriety of Heart of Darkness; I’ll bet he’s more read these days than Henry James. At any rate, I disagree with your counterfactual hypothesis and I’m pretty sure he would too.
I can think of several Indian writers whom I would characterize as being instinctively bilingual. Rabindranath Tagore comes to mind. I understand his Nobel prize was awarded for his own English translation of his own Bengali writing (Gitanjali in particular).
Another example I don’t remember seeing mentioned here or in the earlier discussions—Karen Blixen (under the pen name Isak Dinesen) first wrote Out of Africa and Seven Gothic Tales in English before translating them to her native Danish.
There is of course a long list of writers who immigrated to an English-speaking country at a relatively young age and wrote in English, including Ayn Rand, Kahlil Gibran, Gary Shteyngart, and Kazuo Ishiguro. But Rand was twenty-one when she moved to the US, while Ishiguro was five when he moved to the UK—you wonder if it makes sense to bracket all of these cases together.
Yuval: can you think of anyone who established themselves as a writer (as versus a speaker) in other languages, and later became notable as a writer in Hebrew?
There must be some but I have a surprisingly hard time thinking of any. Mendele, kind of.
Conrad would have been a much better/better known author if he’d written in Polish (or whatever)
I get an impression that his French was better than his Polish or English.
wrote in English, including Ayn Rand, …
I seem to be in a minority on this thread, but Ayn Rand’s ‘style’ is just awful. What’s she doing in the same list as Kahlil Gibran? I note the only people who seem to rate her are right-wing economists (foremost Alan Greenspan) — also not known for their English stylistics, wherever they grew up.
I guess what’s wrong with Rand is not only the awful language but also the one-dimensional characters and poorly-understood/debased Nietzsche. Her spoken English was also distinctly foreign-sounding.
Or are we to allow Melania Trump’s English as somehow acceptable? (Leaving aside that not even her speechwriters can muster original thought.)
“I get an impression that his French was better than his Polish or English.”
Some of Conrad’s Polish correspondence has survived, and it is quite learned and florid. He clearly not only remembered how to speak his mother tongue, but how to write elegantly in it as well.
Does Brodsky count? He’s someone that people complain about: “He really should have stuck to his native language instead of trying to write poetry in English”, and that isn’t something one usually hears about Beckett or Conrad.
I wouldn’t have pegged Ayn Rand’s English style as foreign (certainly not without knowing her biography), though it is unquestionably repellent. However, even this is difficult to judge given how extremely repellent the matter of her prose is. The effect spills over.
I’m not saying anything about Ayn Rand’s literary merits, only that she is known for writing in a language that she learned later in life. As I mentioned, she was older than any of the others that I listed (who by the way have very little in common with each other) when she moved to an English-speaking country.
I have never bothered reading any of her work as I’m turned off by her reputation, but even if I did, I wouldn’t be inclined to criticize her imperfect grasp of a language that she did not grow up speaking—the same with Melania Trump’s English. Style is of course an important part of a literary work, but I would be more tolerant of stylistic shortcomings in the hands of writers struggling with a non-native language. After all, if it was another exophone writer whose ideas I found delightful and insightful instead of abhorrent, then I don’t think I would be too put off by bad style.
There’s nothing wrong with Joseph Brodsky’s writing in English, in fact it’s really, really good. It’s only his poems that are apparently so bad (in contrast to his Russian poetry). I’ve never read them, myself.
With Ayn Rand, I have always wondered if she had some secret help editing her manuscripts to make them sound like native English, like Jerzy Kosiński was accused of doing.
Re Ayn Rand, can someone provide an example demonstrating foreignness? Here are two examples of bad style I would not say are necessarily non-L1.
A. I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
“Atlas Shrugged”
This is for me poor style that a native could produce also
1. by my life and my love of it-what does “it” refer to?If life in general, then emend to “by my life and (by) my love of life”.
2. nor ask another man to live for mine-again the pronoun reference is dangling. Emend to …for my sake.
The author might argue that she is deliberately producing a kind of jerky prophetic prose, so the style is deliberate.
B. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.
“Atlas Shrugged”
Here again very awkward but something a native speaker could produce:
1. great homage as opposed to teeny-tiny homage?
2. corrupting a concept-for me a concept is flawed (or corrupt) from birth, although i would not say this about people ????. I woud emend corrupting to undermining. But the author could argue that she wants a pejorative charged value judgment.
of course this is mostly about modern writers, but the topic reminded me that (I think) nearly every literate Japanese person for a LONG time could read and write Chinese.
For example Dogen, founder of Soto Zen, who wrote a lot in Japanese but composed many Chinese poems. Seems impressive to me, but I’m in no position to judge if these are in good Chinese or not:
http://hycadventures.com/page73.php
Talk about concepts of beauty, how on earth did Ayn Rand get a following with a style like that? It’s absolutely appalling, you have to keep going back and forth within each self-important little sentence to figure out what she’s on about… and then the meaning turns out to be trivial. My guess is she got a bit mixed up; there is a concept that beauty can corrupt (see Dorian Grey) but even if it’s a universal value there’s more than one “concept of beauty”, so for that to be corruptible she’d have to say which concept she’s talking about.
Ayn Rand got popular by telling a certain sort of person exactly what they wanted to hear; specifically, the sort of person who sneers about “do-gooders” and “virtue-signallers.” People who care for style, or indeed for any kind of beauty unreduceable to cash, are unlikely to care for her message anyway.
Of course, real Randian supermen don’t actually need cod-philosophical “justifications” for self-serving greed: they just get on with it. Presumably a true Randian disciple will eventually transcend any need for her actual works: once you’ve used the ladder, you can kick it away.
Christopher Culver,
With Ayn Rand, I have always wondered if she had some secret help editing her manuscripts to make them sound like native English, like Jerzy Kosiński was accused of doing
if Rand or Kosiński required editorial help and received it as a matter of course, that in itself wouldn’t be outrageous. Just offhand I can think of three native-speaker American writers who were in that situation: Thomas Wolfe, who was impossibly logorrheic, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who could not spell, and John Dewey, whose ear was an alloy of tin and lead. But what if the writer who needs editorial help happens to be a literary critic?
That was the case of René Wellek (1903-1995) who wrote primarily in his native Czech as a member of the Prague School before emigrating in 1939 to the United States. His career there was eminent; among much else, he founded and chaired Yale’s department of comparative literature.and collaborated with Austin Warren on the influential, remarkably erudite, remarkably — M’Choakumchildishly! — grim and remarkably fine-printed textbook Theory of Literature. But a colleague of mine once showed me, as a curiosity, a letter in English that he had received from Wellek. Its command of English idiom was at the level of ESL 100.
Re Ayn Rand, can someone provide an example demonstrating foreignness?
I take the point it’s very difficult to separate the execrable style from the repellent content, and the cardboard personas.
@JP I would be more tolerant of stylistic shortcomings in the hands of writers struggling with a non-native language. — is exactly the “nice try, old chap” sense, as @Hat neatly puts it. Of course I am tolerant where a non-native is aiming merely to communicate. (And I’ve no wish to heap more trouble on Melania.) Here we’re making a literary judgment. Rand has neither attractive style nor stimulating content — unlike Conrad.
The Fountainhead is here (text starts page 7).
From para 1 (although nearly every para yields an example)
stone both flowing and having stillness
thrust meets thrust … currents
pause … dynamic … motion
I guess this is trying for some sort of oxymoron/paradoxical effect. But whereas oxymorons enhance the meaning of the opposing elements, this just reduces everything to mush.
I think an idiomatic writer in English would not put it that way.
from para 9 These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice;
She came home in a bath chair and a flood of tears. No evidence Rand is trying for comic effect/a zeugma. No evidence Howard Roark has any self-awareness; in fact he’s an arrogant arsehole, but no evidence the author had any awareness of that either. (Contrast the author’s depiction of another self-unaware arsehole: Aymer Smith in ‘Signals of Distress’.)
middle of page 9 She did not know what it was about him that had always made her want to see him broken.
Ugh. Clunk. Clunk. Contrast the lyricism of Gibran or Ishiguro.
To answer @Plastic’s q, I suppose I can’t show the clunkiness is entirely attributable to foreignness. Perhaps Rand’s Russian would have been just as clunky. (Are there examples? Would what I’ve quoted sound more acceptable if just flipped word-for-word into Russian?) If she were trying for some deliberately alienating effect, I’d expect occasional shafts of sunshine, as a wink-wink to the reader. But it’s unrelenting for as far as I could stomach (not far).
nearly every literate Japanese person for a LONG time could read and write Chinese.
There are also myriad examples of European writers who produced works in the vernacular and in Latin. Dante, Petrarch, Thomas Moore are the obvious examples.
If Romanians writing in French count as polyglots (and no one has mentioned Ionesco?) then could you make an argument for Swiss German speakers writing in Hochdeutsch?
@antC
Thanks.
I suppose what i would consider a “smoking gun” would be the mixing of registers, wrong register or inept reformulation of a commonplace, something like certain Abba lyrics. Your example with bath chair and tear flood (if not deliberate humour or sarcasm) is like this. But as cc says, maybe more blatant errors were caught by an editor.
The author might argue that she is deliberately producing a kind of jerky prophetic prose, so the style is deliberate.
Hmm. No evidence Rand was aware of anything jerky. No evidence Rand was aware of any effects on her audience. Here she’s talking against altruism in front of an audience, who don’t look too comfortable about it.
To make a claim it’s deliberate is like Trump’s acolytes claiming some pronouncement was sarcastic/joking. You gotta have evidence the author is capable of deliberate fluency/inclusiveness before pointing to deliberate jerkiness/alienating. (Or you gotta show Trump has a sense of humour more subtle than sneering.)
The Fountainhead is unrelenting clunk.
David Eddyshaw, Sort of the opposite of the Ayn Rand, I recommend Lynsey Hanley’s writing and her book Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide to you. I just think you’d like it.
I seem to be in a minority on this thread, but Ayn Rand’s ‘style’ is just awful.
You’re clearly not in a minority, and I wonder if even her admirers would praise her style — I suspect they’d sneer that a concern for “style” is exactly the sort of tea-sipping foppery that beta-people would indulge in while losing out to Real Men.
if Rand or Kosiński required editorial help and received it as a matter of course, that in itself wouldn’t be outrageous. Just offhand I can think of three native-speaker American writers who were in that situation
Good heavens, virtually all writers are in that situation — this is one thing you learn as a copyeditor. Writers are writers, not spellers or grammarians; some of them grow up as aesthetes developing a flawless command of the language, but the vast majority are (or historically were, before the days of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) simply people with a need to tell stories and/or earn a living, and their MSS are full of spelling errors and bad grammar. We editors get grumpy about people not realizing how vital our work is! (Also, writers for periodicals do not choose the headlines and captions, people are paid to do that.)
@antC
re clunkiness, i find it difficult to choose between the following texts, one by an L1 speaker and one by an L2 speaker:
1. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
2. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once -somewhere- far away in another existence perhaps.
David Eddyshaw, in my experience Ayn Rand appeals first and most strongly to high school and college students who are looking for absolute truths. For them there’s an annual Rand essay contest whose rules spell out exactly which Rand texts are to be cited and what conclusions are to be drawn from them. These kids aren’t (or aren’t yet) entrepreneurs; they’re just desperately afflicted with the will to believe. Go ahead, be a Freudian about the opening scene of The Fountainhead, the one where Patricia Neal’s pelvis gets out of control as she watches Gary Cooper ramming his drill into the white rock.
@ Vanya – Yes! The Japanese/Chinese came to my mind first, but then the Latin parallel occurred to me right afterward. And it lasted longer than you’d think – I was just reading about a Victorian English poet who was best known for his Latin poetry… Landor, I think?
“if Rand or Kosiński required editorial help and received it as a matter of course, that in itself wouldn’t be outrageous.”
But there is not a difference between the editorial help given to a Wolfe (cutting material) or a Fitzgerald (correcting spelling, and not really changing the prose itself) and what Kosiński was accused of? If Kosiński’s work was at the Tommy Wiseau level, and he secretly got a native speaker to completely reword his text in more highfalutin’ native-sounding English that Kosiński had nothing to do with, then isn’t that somehow objectionable?
FWIW, the fact that Wolfe’s books were only eventually publishable through the enormous intervention of an editor, is often used as a basis to call him a bad writer.
But that’s unfair. He was a good writer who couldn’t get his work into publishable form; there are many such (our late friend thegrowlingwolf was another). Flaubert and Nabokov do not represent the only possible variant of “good writer.”
In what way couldn’t thegrowlingwolf get his work into a publishable form? I thought he was a copy editor.
De gustibus non disputandum est
Nobody can be their own editor, and he was too proud/stubborn/independent to let anyone else touch his writing — a couple of times publishers were interested, but he walked out when they wanted to edit him (this is, of course, according to his own account). He left many millions of words behind when he died, most of them probably in formats no longer readable by man nor beast. We’re fortunate to have his blog, for as long as it lasts.
Yes, well, he may have been right. If it was the thing he did for love rather than for money, if it was what he really cared about, then why allow someone to mess it about? Recognition, money? Maybe he didn’t care very much about those and the hassle was too great a price. Just being the devil’s advocate, you understand.
No, that’s absolutely how he saw it. He would have loved to have been officially published, but the price was too great.
(He did have his famous “pope book,” but of course that wasn’t under his name.)
An English critic (Leavis, most likely) complained that Dreiser wrote as if he had no mother tongue at all but had learned to write by reading American newspapers. Not Dreiser, I would protest, but Ayn Rand.
“The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion.”
Run of the mill, cliched paradoxes. I don’t know which literature birthed this trick: it sound pretty generic to me. You simply take “deafening silence” a step further: “a silence louder than a nuclear blast in Nevada.” Or (a) darkness brighter than a nuclear mushroom. On the other hand, knowing Rand’s interests, these paradoxes could be Aristotle’s, or at least she felt they were Aristotlean.
“…waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice.”
…and my voice to put them to work. It fits logically with the other two.
“She did not know what it was about him that had always made her want to see him broken.”
Not good but neither un-American nor particularly Russian, either.
Knowing where Ayn Rand came from, I wouldn’t blame her for taking her arch-individualism a couple of steps too far. I couldn’t make it past the first quarter or third of Atlas Shrugged so I’m not qualified to judge her work. One comment, though: Dagny was awed by industrial technology no less than by powerful men (she seemed a sexual submissive in search of a master). Somehow this magical-industrial setting resembled a Soviet proizvodstvenny roman to me.
Kerouac’s first language was (Canadian) French.
Nabokov and Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand, who was a well-known anti-Communist, was inspired by Chernyshevsky.
(Hmm, maybe she was inspired by his style too!)
“My life”.
Is love of life such a fixed phrase that it doesn’t allow you to consider “I love my life”?
To me it’s obvious that mine can only refer to sake, so I’d find it clumsy to repeat the word. But that’s probably precisely because I’m not a native speaker: I find for […] sake analyzable (the basic meaning of Sache is “thing”, and it’s a pretty common word; it also means “cause” as in “for a good cause”), while lots of native speakers don’t, judging from the many occurrences of e.g. for God sake(s) out there.
Native speakers produce things like very huge and hugest by the ton – we can argue whether that’s good style*, but hardly whether it sounds native. And on top of that, great homage is evidently intended to be read in a mocking tone which is actually easier to convey this way.
* It is when writing about sauropods.
This perfectly conveys what it’s meant to convey: narcissism. Everything is about him, even the rocks: they’re waiting to be quarried, and they’re waiting for him personally, for his very own mighty voice giving mighty commands to other people to quarry the rocks. No zeugma is achieved or intended as far as I can see – and definitely no comic effect; I’d be very surprised if Rand had any sense of humor other than Trump’s, i.e. a rather boring kind of mockery (see above).
Not so easily, because Not-As-High German is the only written language of the vast majority of them.
That’s clearly not intended. Rand simply took her own taste in faces as an objective fact. It logically follows that everyone who claimed to have a different taste was just lying – and thus damaging the very concept of beauty by obfuscating its True Meaning in general usage, how dare they.
@dm
I did not intend to say that the Ayn Rand quotes are evidently from a L2 speaker, only that i find their style poor. Your “autofilter”on pronoun references is not necessarily a L2 feature, or because you read texts differently from an L1 speaker; I would not be surprised if an L1 speaker had written these texts.
I’ll bet [Conrad’s] more read these days than Henry James.
Since James is the man who wrote fiction as if it were a painful duty (Oscar Wilde, authentically for once), I should hope so.
Leaving aside that not even her speechwriters can muster original thought.
First Ladies who utter original thoughts get into trouble very fast. The ones who have done so in recent years have been Democrats, and even they have gotten into trouble. It’s been a long time since Eleanor Roosevelt, who wanted to entitle her newspaper column “My Damned Day”.
really should have stuck to his native language
Insert here joke about someone sticking to the ceiling if hurled with sufficient force.
secret help editing her manuscripts to make them sound like native English
Well, so did Jack Kerouac [among many others mentioned later]. A pity about him not finishing the French version of On The Road: it would have, I think, had a considerable impact on Canadian-French literature if published as such. He could have still written an English version, as Beckett did with almost all his books.
I’d like to hear AJP on Howard Roark, but he probably can’t be arsed to discuss the arrogant arsehole, and no blame to him for that.
Dreiser wrote as if he had no mother tongue at all but had learned to write by reading American newspapers
This American agrees entirely; after all, he began as a journalist. WP on his early career reduced me to LOLling: “Within several years, Dreiser was writing as a journalist for [names of newspapers omitted]. He wrote several articles on writers such as […], and interviewed public figures such as […]. [paragraph break] Dreiser later became an atheist.” Perhaps he felt that if such as these were the noblest works of God, God’s nonexistence was the simplest explanation.
A cursory check of African authors who wrote in English: Chinua Achebe’s parents were members of an English Protestant church. I don’t know when he started learning English. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o went to an English-medium high school, don’t know about elementary school. Amos Tutuola wrote in English, though at least at the start it was clearly not a fluent medium for him (not that he let it stop him).
I’m not sure that English is really a foreign language for upper-crust Nigerians (like Achebe) or Ghanaians. It’s just part of the polyglot milieu they grow up in, much as with similarly placed individuals in India.
I don’t know enough about Kenya to know if it’s quite the same.
The Palm-Wine Drinkard is wonderful. I suspect that the language style is largely deliberate (and inspired.)
This perfectly conveys what it’s meant to convey: narcissism. Everything is about him, even the rocks: they’re waiting to be quarried, and they’re waiting for him personally, for his very own mighty voice giving mighty commands to other people to quarry the rocks.
I appreciate we’re deep into de gustibus by now. Yes I got it that Roark thinks he has power over rocks; yes I got it that Rand is trying to refer to the might of his command; but no: bare “my voice” is not how a native speaker would put it. On this (very rare) occasion, I’m saying dm’s intuitions are off-key.
… and the command of my voice;
… and the power of my voice;
… and the authority of my voice;
Juxtaposing bare “my voice” with “drill” and “dynamite” suggests he merely shouting is powerful enough to crumble rock without any intermediate chain of command. That’s why I said zeugma.
Also I’m not sure that Rand intends to convey ‘narcissism’. (That is, ‘narcissism’ is the effect, I doubt it’s the intent.) That would suggest she has a level of awareness of how repugnant is Roark’s so-called ‘Philosophy’, which awareness I can see nowhere exhibited.
Rand conveys narcissism inadvertently, as it were, because we the sensitive reader impute it despite what she writes. She just doesn’t have the sensitivities of a reader of literature. As many have commented, that maybe wasn’t her intended readership; certainly isn’t her actual readership.
I’ve heard Paul Ryan (ex-Speaker of the House) interviewed about his infatuation with Rand (he reads ‘Atlas Shrugged’ once a year). IIRC he couldn’t mention any other work of literature that he’s read. His English isn’t as mangled as Trump’s; and perhaps one’s feel for one’s language gets dulled after too long inside the political machine; but how does he stomach the prose?
Our own dear Sajid Javid is a devotee of Rand. There ought to be an ordinance disqualifying such people from any public office. (Obviously. It’s a matter of hygiene.)
While I agree (who could not?) that Rand lacked the gift of humour, she did have a marked tendency to rub the reader’s nose in just how Randian her opinions were. She was self-aware to the extent of preening herself on her own ideological purity and exaggerating manifestations of it for rhetorical effect. She is doing that quite deliberately with her description of Roark: she’s effectively saying “You weaklings may call this narcissism. I call it the behaviour of a Superior Man!” I’d say that the style is actually quite effective in conveying her nauseating message.
@AlexK Run of the mill, cliched paradoxes. I don’t know which literature birthed this trick: it sound pretty generic to me. You simply take “deafening silence” a step further: …
Yes paradoxes are run of the mill (I said ‘oxymoron’ — which is the lit. crit. term). But in that example (and there are myriads more) Rand has gone far too many steps further, to the point of ridicule. A native speaker (even one who read only newspapers or only Aristotle) would not ‘rip the arse out of it’ like that.
I’m appraising this as published work, not as the stream of consciousness of an inebriate speaker (whether native or not).
I’m more horrified if Rand had some sort of editor or amanuensis: does that mean the initial draft was even worse?
she seemed a sexual submissive in search of a master
Yes there’s some very disturbing passages later in ‘The Fountainhead’. It’d be just the source Harvey Weinstein would find ‘justification’ for his defence allegations that women swoon over powerful men. (I’ve no idea if Weinstein was a devotee of Rand.)
John Cowan and others, let me put in a Languagehat-relevant word on behalf of Henry James. Not that he needs any help from me, but do you remember that a few days ago vulgus / vulgate / vulgar showed up in the threads? Well, consider, from chapter 9 (“Philadelphia”) of The American Scene, this.
“I had occasion, repeatedly to find the Pennsylvania Railroad a beguiling and predisposing influence — in relation to various objectives; and indeed I quite lost myself in the singularity of this effect, which existed for me, certainly, only in that connection, touching me with a strange and most agreeable sense that the great line in question, an institution with a style and allure of its own, is not, even the world over, as other railroads are. It absolutely, with a little frequentation, affected me as better and higher than its office or function, and almost as supplying one with a mode of life intrinsically superior; as if it ought really to be on its way to much grander and more charming places than any that happen to mark its course — as if, indeed, should one persistently keep one’s seat, not getting out anywhere, it would in the end carry one to some such ideal city. One might under this extravagant spell, which always began to work for me at Twenty-Third Street, and on the constantly-adorable Ferry, have fancied the train, disvulgarized of passengers, steaming away, in disinterested empty form, to some terminus too noble to be marked in our poor schedules.”
There’s something to be said for mandarinism after all, I should think — if only as a glimpse of some better possibility: a soul-saving contrast with the affect of this political era.
Henry James was a wonderful writer, and I can read some of his things with pleasure, but he’s totally out of sync with our fallen world (as indeed he was already fairly out of sync with his own), and I own I can barely read that one paragraph without sighing, rolling my eyes, and wishing his mandarinism to the devil. How you gonna keep ’em down on the (disinterested empty) form after they’ve read Hem(ingway) and Ham(mett)?
Hat, I wish I could share your enthusiasm for James. It’s not the mandarinism; I can see the craftsmanship, but I find nothing enjoyable about him. Maybe I read the wrong stories?
But then, I don’t appreciate fine wine, either.
How you gonna keep ’em down on the (disinterested empty) form after they’ve read Hem(ingway) and Ham(mett)?
And yet other 19th and even 18th century writers can still hold their own against the modern cult of simplicity. Maybe it’s just James.
I can’t say I’ve read much of him at all. He always sounded like a writer you’re supposed to admire and read but can never muster up the enthusiasm for.
I’ve never read Ayn Rand, either, mainly because she was supposedly one of the favourites of a former Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser. (One of his most infamous lines was “Life wasn’t meant to be easy”, but I did grow to like him more after he left politics and became estranged from his former party.)
I can barely read that one paragraph without sighing
There are many people who talk in such long and never-ending sentences, admittedly much more colloquially.
So this could be just a realistic description of his own speech patterns.
There’s something about the way Henry James’ mind worked, or how he explained his ideas, that puts me literally to sleep after a page or two. Same feeling I get when trying to read Kant or the Duino Elegies.
It’s not vocabulary, grammar, or sentence length, but … It’s like, the thoughts themselves behind the language are too weird, clotted and ponderous for my brain to tackle without shutting itself down in self-defense. Maybe if I stick with it I’ll have some sort of breakthrough and experience something transcendent, but it hasn’t happened yet.
David Eddyshaw: I don’t think Tutuola’s language in Drinkard was entirely an affectation. His autobiographical blurb in the introduction reads like stilted school English, learned but not practiced. I think he filled in the gaps in his English for the story with his own linguistic creations.
I get your point about educated Nigerians; perhaps Achebe’s and Soyinka’s situations were similar in a way to Nabokov’s.
And yet other 19th and even 18th century writers can still hold their own against the modern cult of simplicity. Maybe it’s just James.
Indeed. Give me Sterne or Swift or Jane Austen any day in preference to James. I don’t think it has anything to do with ‘modern’.
OTOH (to return to the topic) I do feel James is writing/composing in English. Whereas Rand (or Conrad) not. And of course any competent writer commits the occasional clunkery. You’d hope the editing/publishing process would squish them out.
With Rand, it’s clunk in every paragraph, and weird clunk that sounds like a poor translation. As another data point, Dan Brown is clunk in every paragraph (or at least for as much as I was able to stomach), but I never doubted it was ‘in English’.
Would an editor’s heart warm to this memoir by James’s “Remington princess” Theodora Bosanquet, to whom he dictated the works of his Late Style?
https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2018/06/mr-james-miss-bosanquet-and-her-palpitations/
About SF Reader’s “long and never-ending sentences” there’s a comfortable old anecdote from one of Edith Wharton’s reminiscences. Edith’s chauffeur had gotten lost while driving her and Henry, and when he stopped the car it was Henry who got out to ask a local for directions — in language so periphrastic and hypotactic that the poor guy had no idea what this man was talking about. But the critic who used to cite that story as a triumphant proof of something or other was F. R. Leavis, so you know it’s actually to be read as a chapter in the life of a contemplative saint. Like Pauline Kael, Leavis had absolute pitch: wrong pretty close to 100% of the time, about pretty much everything.
It seems intentional to me: without his voice, the drill and the dynamite just lie around; the hero’s heroic voice – and not just anybody’s mediocre voice – is the really important part, the one that creates action.
(I have no idea if the similarity to fascism is intended. The fascist hero acts, because action is good and beautiful while hesitation is bad and ugly. When the fascist hero has nothing to do, he does random shit because action is a goal in itself and inaction is simply unbearable.)
Also, remember this is the un-communism. In communism, the workers who actually hold the drills are the heroes. For Rand, therefore, they’re not even as important as the tools themselves (which at least get to be mentioned!); the hero is the lone guy who gives the orders and doesn’t physically do anything.
(As the parody has it: “I only know how to pay people to create new alloys!”)
I agree.
Dan Brown is clunk in every paragraph
Geoff Pullum’s discussions of Dan Brown’s style are brilliant.
Theodora Bosanquet’s reminiscences of James are delightful. Though eminently mockable, he seems to have been a thoroughly nice man.
On the Growling Wolf, the only reference I can find to his Pope books is:
So, to find out more, we need the name he used.
On Howard Roark, John, I haven’t read anything by Ayn Rand; I find it hard enough to keep up with the reading I’m looking forward to to spend any time on her. Many architects do seem to have read The Fountainhead – or to have seen the film – as children or as students (undergraduate). If they were the kind who always wanted to be an architect (that’s not me) it may have inspired them, but I’ve never noticed a grown up mention it without what seemed to be a chuckle, snigger or grunt of contempt or embarrassment. From the one or two tiny excerpts of the Gary Cooper film I’ve seen I associate Roark a bit with awful old Frank L. Wright*, a man with a mission, but that’s the stridency of the presentation style.
*Fallingwater, the Gugg and one (and only one) of those horizontal houses, probably the Robie house, in that order, are worth remembering
Bosanquet writes in an attractive, educated style that not so many people could reproduce nowadays.
So, to find out more, we need the name he used.
Once upon a time I used to know it, but…
It was the Polish pope, and he had a great anecdote about hanging around outside the pope’s tent (?) on one of His Holiness’s US visits and seeing the vodka being brought in. I wish he’d written about all that.
Hat, I wish I could share your enthusiasm for James. It’s not the mandarinism; I can see the craftsmanship, but I find nothing enjoyable about him. Maybe I read the wrong stories?
Try Washington Square; it’s short and minimally mandarin, and if you don’t like that you simply don’t like James. (As an additional inducement, to quote Wikipedia: “James was not a great fan of Washington Square.”)
I remember making my way through a Henry James anthology thirty years ago. I found him long-winded and tiring, and while there were interesting ideas and plots, the language, in my view, didn’t add to that, but subtracted from the reading pleasure. And it’s not because I can’t handle long, complex sentences – I read Thomas Mann with pleasure, and he‘s not exactly Hemingway.
The Daily Growler, August 20, 2007:
Well found! God, I love his prose — I started laughing out loud (literal lol) after a couple of sentences.
outside the pope’s tent (?)
Yes, so did I. I probably saw him at the Ear Inn. Too bad I didn’t know who he was.
“Hey, Ed, how long is an average lizard in North America?”
The classic.
Henry James: Some of the shorter stuff is good, notably The Turn of the Screw. Washington Square and The Bostonians are relatively straightforward stories (although the latter is a bit dull, from what I remember). Of his “big” novels, the only one I’ve finished and enjoyed is The Portrait of a Lady.
Because I saw the movie of The Wings of a Dove (with Helena Bonham-Carter) I tried reading the book. But after a chapter or two I just couldn’t maintain the effort. It takes too much brainpower to keep the beginning of his sentences in mind by the time you reach the middle and, eventually, the end, so that I would lose track at some point of what the heck he was trying to say. And what goes for individual sentences goes for the book as a whole. I tried again some years ago, promising I would really pay attention. I think I made it through about ten chapters before giving up what was obviously a losing fight.
Edith Wharton is so much better.
And on Conrad: I had a big thing for him in my twenties, though I haven’t read him since then. I don’t remember thinking his English sounded unnatural. It seemed a bit stiff at times, but I took that as symptomatic of his era. His prose is way less effortful than that of Mr. James.
ETA: As someone (Rebecca West?) said of James, he chewed more than he bit off.
Your experience with James is much like mine.
PlasticPaddy: Melville had little formal education and learned English style from Shakespeare and the 1611 Bible.
I’ve never met a Pope, as far as I know, though I know someone, a member of the Vatican Academy, who has known three Popes. Come to think of it I know someone else who has interacted with both Francis and Benedict, and has a low opinion of both — Benedict because he was too traditionalist, and Francis because he did nothing much to help the victims of the Argentinian dictatorship (in contrast to the Church in Chile, which behaved very well during the dictatorship).
However, I once had dinner with Noam Chomsky, at a table with just him, me, my wife and daughter (then 16). It was a biggish table and the great man was at one end and we were at the other. I don’t think our conversation went beyond the level of “would you mind passing the salt?” if indeed it reached that level.
I had no idea who he was until after he had left and someone at another table said “Do you know who that was?”, to which I said no. Probably just as well, as I’d have been completely tongue-tied if I had known, and even if he had known my name it would have meant nothing to him. I had been spending a couple of weeks at the University of Siena on a research project (a total waste of time, as it turned out, but it was nice to be in Siena). He was the invited speaker at a linguistics meeting, and most of the other people having dinner were there for that. This was in the Certosa di Pontignano, where they had very traditional ideas about who should sit with whom at dinner, and it was impossible to expect people like Chomsky and me to mix with the peasants. My wife and daughter only came for the second week, so I’d had a table to myself for the first week.
Marilyn “Clover” Adams: “It’s not that he ‘bites off more than he can chew’ but he chews more than he bites off.” A lot of writers seem to hate his work. Here’s something positive by TS Eliot.
I remember Mark, the guy at Language Log saying he’d had dinner the night before with “Noam” at a Thai restaurant in Boston. They probably talked about conferences or their colleagues but I’m sure he’d be VERY interested in South America and that he’d be very easy to talk to. Next time, just say something political eg “I wonder how many people died so we could have this cellar full of salt” and he’d be off. I’ve got to say, I LIKE Chompers but then I know next to nothing about linguistics and from what I do know he does seem to be way out there. There was a film about him and politics, a documentary, in about 1993 (it might have been this one) and he seemed to have a great, sardonic sense of humour.
I’m glad you call him Chompers: that’s what I call him to myself, but I don’t say it out loud as I’m not sure others will understand. I can’t understand his linguistics writing, but I like his politics. For a while the Guardian Weekly had a selection of articles from Le Monde and I used to read him there. Sometimes also in Le Monde Diplomatique.
Clover Adams: but she died in 1885, which was after James had published his first novels but long before he ratcheted up his style in the late stuff — Wings of the Dove, Golden Bowl, Ambassadors.
the Guardian Weekly had a selection of articles from Le Monde
I’d forgotten that. Corriere della Sera too, and one other. Too bad they stopped it.
@rodgerC
Shakespeare’s oeuvre and the KJV are performance works and benefit from being read out loud.
As does Melville (and any good writer, really).
Oh, I was going to say, so does Henry James, though perhaps for another reason. I mean, if you are stuck, read a section out loud. It helped me a lot, forcing me to slow down and feel my way.
Thank you, AJPCrown, for that delicious slice of growlingwolf!
comfortable old anecdote from one of Edith Wharton’s reminiscences
Here it is from 2012. Several examples from other authors there too.
I myself write in these horribly long and winding sentences as well, but I edit them into sentences of reasonable length and complexity (most of the time) before anyone sees them.
The Chomskybot, which picks phrases at random from a list to construct entirely Chomskyesque sentences.
Maybe I should try an audiobook of The Wings of the Dove. When I have a couple of months to spare and want to drive back and forth across the country two or three times.
Obligatory Opinion 04: “Noam Chomsky should stick to politics, Roger Penrose should stick to interior decorating, and Andrew Lloyd Webber should stick to the ceiling if hurled aloft with sufficient force.”
i think What Maisie Knew would be my James For New Readers recomendation…
and to go all the way back @Y: i think mendele went the opposite direction: started his writing career in hebrew (not israeli; the older literary language that it replaced) and then switched to yiddish. but i don’t know whether his cradle-tongue was yiddish or russian.
Rozele: I imagine he grew up with Yiddish at home and learned the gentiles’ languages (Belarussian? Polish? Russian?) later. Kapyl, where he grew up, was a mostly Jewish town.
The Israeli-American raconteur Itzhak Kronzon describes the linguistic situation during his parents’ childhood in Kalvarija in Lithuania:
“Every Jew in Kalvarija (and many of the gentiles as well) spoke six languages: Lithuanian, the language of the villagers; Russian, the language of the rulers of the land; Polish, the language of a different set of conquerors who for long periods of time ruled Lithuania as well; German, which was the language of the many travelers who stopped there for the night, and the international language of commerce; Yiddish; and Hebrew, which was not only the language of prayer, but also the language in which children were educated, in the native land of Avraham Mapu and the Haskalah movement which followed him. On Fridays, during the Kiddush, only the Holy Tongue would be spoken, and as the need arose, they would order the non-Jewish domestic servant in Hebrew, shifkhá, lékhem! ‘Maid, bread!’, or shifkhá, sakín! ‘Maid, knife!’ Eventually, many of those words entered the vocabulary of the local women, who would call each other shífkha, accented on the shif-.”
[The Haskalah started long before Mapu, btw.]
(Nowadays shifkha would mean something like slave-girl; you mostly hear it from mothers telling their child what they do not wish to be regarded as.)
According to the census of 1897, the town of Kalvarija (Kalvarija district, Suwalki Governorate, Tsardom of Poland, Russian Empire) had total population of 9378, comprised of 3578 Jews, 2267 Russians (1960 Great Russians, 223 Little Russians, 84 Belorussians), 1525 Lithuanians, 1418 Poles, 423 Germans.
I can see the need for prolific polyglotism.
Interesting. Kronzon says that “at the end of the 19th century there were some ten thousand residents in it, among them eight thousand Jews.”
He explains that Hebrew-language schools operated in the period of Lithuanian independence, when minorities were allowed to run their own schools, a conition imposed by the League of Nations.
Brief note: census of 1897 also recorded military personnel stationed in the town, that’s why Great Russian population of Kalvaria had more men than women.
Googling discovered that they were soldiers and officers of the 5th Courland Life Dragoon Regiment (2nd Cavalry Division, 2nd Army Corps, Vilna Military District).
DM, very funny. Should that be Roland Penrose, the surrealist who lectured on camouflage*, or does Roger Penrose the mathematician have something to do with interior decorating (tiling, perhaps)?
*In 1941 Penrose wrote the Home Guard Manual of Camouflage, which provided accurate guidance on the use of texture, not only colour, especially for protection from aerial photography (monochrome at that time). – Peter Forbes, Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage
Penrose (Roger) is known for work on non-repeating tilings (essentially, proving that they exist), so that would be the interior decorating link. I think some UK university has an entrance hall or something with Penrose tilings, probably to the detriment of the mental health of the tile workers, but otherwise they are an abstract thing. (The physical one is of course finite, so not strictly a plane tiling and the definition of non-repetition is not applicable or trivially true depending on your mood).
Maybe AJP already knew, but I like showing off what I know. Or think I know.
He also worked in cosmology, maybe that’s what put him on Justin Rye’s bad side.
or does Roger Penrose the mathematician have something to do with interior decorating (tiling, perhaps)
I’m assuming it’s a reference to (Roger) Penrose’s famous pair of aperiodic tiles. I’m not sure what is meant by this reference, though.
I’ve never heard of Roland Penrose before.
I had forgotten about the tiles if I ever knew; that must be the connection to interior decorating. However, where Roger Penrose went off the deep end is quantum woo. For example, he put forth the hypothesis that free will is real and comes from quantum uncertainty inside microtubuli in our nerve cells. He got several books out of this stuff.
(Microtubuli are way too large – like, there’s water inside – and too warm to support undisturbed quantum superpositions. And is random will really free will…?)
I had no idea of Roland Penrose either.
However, where Roger Penrose went off the deep end is quantum woo. For example, he put forth the hypothesis that free will is real and comes from quantum uncertainty inside microtubuli in our nerve cells. He got several books out of this stuff.
Oh, right. I’ve read one of those books, and liked the part about the universal Turing machine (and a few other parts that I no longer recall), but didn’t quite believe in the microtubuli part either.
Wonderful story about wartime work of Soviet entomologist Boris Shvanvich on camouflage.
https://golubentsev.livejournal.com/210364.html
I read about the tilings in Mathematical Games when I was 16, so that’s what Penrose means to me. (Like Conway means Game of Life). I heard of his later woo, now that David mentions it, but I didn’t bother to look into it. (The review mentioning microtubuli was enough, as David says).
I do think I’ve read that there are few enough molecules of neurotransmitters involved in a fire/don’t fire ‘choice’ by a neuron that a significant proportion of them are random to some extent. But that doesn’t need QM. More relevantly, do the configuration changes of transmitter binding sites on proteins depend on quantum tunnelling? I think the binding ‘event’ would have a classical probability in any case, so still no QM ‘leaking’ to the chemical level.
It was a lucky guess from his Wiki about the tiling. I know of Roland Penrose, a pal of Picasso’s whose name pops up sometimes in that connection, first through his son Antony Penrose’s book The Lives of Lee Miller, about the WW2 photographer, his mother and Roland’s wife, that I bought in 1985. These Penroses lived in Downshire Hill in Hampstead, my favourite street in London. I think Roland & Roger have the same Penrose grandparents.
When Roger Penrose suggested that the microtubules supporting nerve cell axons were functioning as quantum computers, that just proved to me that he did not understand either quantum mechanics or biochemistry. I had never particularly been a fan; I remember picking apart some of his arguments in The Emperor’s New Mind* as a teenager; however, the stuff about microtubules is where he totally alienated me. He subsequently had some even dumber ideas, like that somebody falling into a black hole would experience time running backwards. It was probably not until I was in graduate school that I realized he was the same person responsible for inventing the Penrose tiles.
I had never heard of Roland Penrose either, but he sounds potentially interesting.
* The Emperor’s New Mind reminds me now of another popular science book, African Exodus by Chris Stringer. Both books are aimed at demonstrating the correctness of certain ideas (the impossibility of strong AI constructed using existing computer architecture strategies, and the Out of Africa theory of human origins, respectively) which I basically agree with. However, both of them resort at times to extremely unconvincing arguments: over-the-top rhetoric, cherry picking data, and kettle logic.
Lionel Penrose (Roger’s dad) was well known also. He made wooden models of how he conceived gene replication to work (long after the actual mechanism was known). Francis Crick wasn’t impressed.
As for Roger, David M. is right.
Roland and his two wives illustrates how we don’t all have the same humdrum lives.
Here is SF’s story (apocryphal it says elsewhere) but in Vietnamese and with pictures.
Everything is better in Vietnamese and with pictures.
I would like to put in a word or two in defense of Roger Penrose. First, he is a very interesting and charming guy. Second, his early work on mathematical theorems relating to general relativity (some of it with Hawking) was very important. And third, it’s true that some of his thinking (even disregarding the silly brain stuff) has been a little outlandish, but I think that’s a by-product of his general inventiveness. He is an outlier on many issues, but I find he is worth paying attention to, even if you find yourself disagreeing with some of what he says. He is one of those people who does his best to steer away from the conventional wisdom–with mixed results, necessarily.
Well said, DL ! (Not that I know anything, but for standing up for him.)
@David L: I agree that Penrose’s early work on the global structure of classical general relativity was exceptional. The singularity theorems that he and Hawking proved—showing that there are never going to be smooth solutions to the Einstein equations in nontrivially interacting spacetimes—were very important conceptually. But he clearly never really understood quantum physics the way he did relativity.
@brett
Penrose admits that here.
https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/34322
But he clearly never really understood quantum physics the way he did relativity.
I don’t think he’s alone. General Relativity is conceptually beautiful, actually quite intuitive if you can grasp the maths, and makes sense. Quantum physics …
Nobody understands quantum physics. Shut up and calculate.
(…OK, Zeilinger might understand it.)
Penrose is in many ways very old-fashioned. He has written some interesting stuff on the thermodynamics of big bang cosmology, leaving quantum mechanics out of it altogether. He makes some good points, but since the big bang is inevitably a quantum event (in some way we don’t understand at all right now), it’s questionable whether his arguments have any real application.
(I’m sure that’s more than enough for the languagehatters)
Actually, I’m interested in both quantum physics and the big bang!
Actually, Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that because QM is irrelevant for the process of thinking, everyone should preserve their brain after their death. Everyone should do it, because that would drive the price down and his followers (who are of somewhat heightened opinion of the quality of their brains) could do it for cheap. Did I write brains in all caps? Assume I did.
@PlasticPaddy: In that interview, he talks about not understanding relativistic quantum electrodynamics, which is a somewhat subtle topic (although not so much for the reason he suggests, which is the Dirac matrix structure, although that is not trivial either). However, I aver that he does not even understand nonrelativistic quantum mechanics.
@David Marjanović: There are plenty of physicists who do understand quantum mechanics extremely well. Of course, Anton Zeilinger does, but there are plenty more of us. On the other hand, there are also lots of people doing physics who do not understand quantum mechanics properly; some of them are self aware about this, some not. Penrose struck me as not recognizing his lack of understanding of the quantum-mechanical material he was trying to grapple with.
When it comes to modeling the very early universe, the quantum to classical transition stage is extremely important, and not really properly understood, because it inevitably rubs up against the measurement problem and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. (How do quantum mechanical density fluctuations become “fixed” into the classical fluctuations that ultimately nucleated the galaxies we see today?) Some people, such as Alan Guth, are not bothered by this issue and just perform calculations, assuming that decoherence and measurement are effectively equivalent. However, some other people trying to address quantum cosmology problems may find this problem consistently bedeviling their attempts to conceive a useful picture of the early universe.
Actually, I’m interested in both quantum physics and the big bang!
I’m impressed. Like Stu, I lost my appetite for banging some time ago.
There are indeed physicists who understand quantum mechanics. The problem is finding two or more who understand it in the same way.
Quot qui quanta intelligunt, tot sententiae.
I see what you did there.
Quot qui quanta intelligunt, tot sententiae.
Google translate gives me: How many who how great they mean, so many opinions. Quite so.
If I put the Latin into Google directly, it asks Did you mean: quit qui quanta intelligent, tot sententiae
But never mind, I get the general idea….
It’s riffing on Quot homines, tot sententiae ‘As many men, so many opinions.’
Thank you. My one year of Latin at school didn’t help me. (I did very well, I can immodestly add, but decided to drop Latin in favor of German. My Latin teacher was gravely disappointed, something I regret to this day, as he was a very good teacher and a lovely guy. And so few students were interested in his offerings — ancient Greek and Russian, among other things).
@David Marjanović: “I have no idea if the similarity to fascism is intended. The fascist hero acts, because action is good and beautiful while hesitation is bad and ugly.”
The similarity I see is to Schumpeter’s idea of the entrepreneur. He discerned something heroic in those risk-taking, innovating agents of change.
I’d take the Mediaeval Latin / Lojban / Star Trek view and say “Quot personae, tot sententiae”. To a cat person, a cat is also a person; not human, but a person. Lojban defines a person as something with a personality. Star Trek generalizes human instead, but I think that’s too confusing.
Lojban defines a person as something with a personality.
That’s good for the cats, John. But would it also define personality as something coming from a person? Because that’s not so good for the cats.
Star Trek generalizes human instead, but I think that’s too confusing.
Wait, really? I thought ST only used human only for, um, the actual humans, not the Vulcans or the Andorians or any of the other assorted major humanoid species (never mind that most of those could, and did, interbreed).
Come to think of it, what’s Latin for (the noun) “sentient”?
No. It does generalize people.
Sentient is an adjective, not a noun. The Latin is – wait for it! – sentiens.
The noun is impatientia. A stone has all the time in the world, and is thus not sentient.
Kusaal uses the third person “animate” pronoun o for anything that might potentially be referred to with a first or second person pronoun, a flexible category, but likely to include cats for all but the most ailurophobic, and certainly one that includes Klingons.
Trees were animate in the traditional worldview, too; their gender got changed between the 1976 and 2016 Bible versions. Groot may be out of luck now.
Thus patience is portrayed sitting on a big carved stone, not on top of the number 10 bus, smiling at grief.
Can one talk with a plant in Kusaal ? Even if only in schematic form perhaps: “a yam, of a yam, to a yam, a yam, O yam!”
Trees are thought of differently from common or garden (so to speak) plants; trees, for example, can be sɔɔnb “witches” that steal your life force, like human witches do; and the win “spiritual individuality” of a tree can be a human being’s sigir “guardian spirit”, just like the win of a human ancestor can. This is why you come across people called A-Tiig (Atiga) “Tree”; it means that their spiritual minder is a tree-win.
It was your mention of a “third person ‘animate’ pronoun o for anything that might potentially be referred to with a first or second person pronoun” that prompted my question. I was wondering whether “animate” was equivalent to “sentient” here. Some (I have read) will talk to a begonia to make it feel better, as to a child – without expecting a verbal response.
But it appears you are referring to present or former animae of persons. The “o” does not mark sentience in the widest sensience.
I don’t think “sentience” as such is really a category in the traditional Kusaasi worldview, but I’m not really competent to say. I don’t think the concept of trees being animate has anything much in common with Prince-Charles-like talking to plants, though.
An example of how difficult it can be to match up our conceptual categories about personhood etc with traditional Kusaasi ones is the way that you greet a person sitting quietly alone with the greeting that literally means “Blessing on your conversation”, the conversation in question (as I was specifically told) being between the person and their own win; win does not match any of our ideas about “soul” or “personality” exactly but seems at least analogous. So the (wordless) conversation is taking place between two different (?) aspects of the same person (?)
Most wina don’t belong to people and aren’t thought of as in any way anthropomorphic (the Christian adoption of win to translate [pagan] “god” is extremely misleading, to say the least.) They are nevertheless the target that traditional religion is mostly concerned with influencing.
Win seems to have a lot in common with the ancient Egyptian bꜣ:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_conception_of_the_soul#Ba_(personality)
There is a well-known Egyptian text in which a man is represented as having a dialogue with his own ba, but I don’t know if that was just a literary trope or if the Egyptians actually really thought that you could do such a thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_between_a_man_and_his_Ba
Hadrian, of course, addresses his own soul in the famous
Animula, vagula, blandula
Hospes comesque corporis
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nec, ut soles, dabis iocos.
but again, that looks just like a literary device.
Win seems to have a lot in common with the ancient Egyptian bꜣ
I’m glad you said that, because I thought of the Egyptian concept when you first talked about the Kusaal one, but I thought I was just conflating random things I happened to know about.
I was looking at a map on the wall showing the room names at a teaching hospital in Oslo, this morning. There was one room for Kusaal, but looking a second time I saw it was Kurssal or Classroom (of course there’s Kursaal in German too in places like Baden Baden). Nightmare.
There’s a Kusaal Kurssal in this Kursaal!
“Are you Vulcan–or are you human?”
@David L, DE was being Welsh (i.e., devious). A translator (human or AI) will try to make sense of quanta as a declined form (accusative plural neuter) of the Latin adjective quantus = ‘how many’; but in this case it’s of course the English word quantum because that’s what we were talking about, backported into Latin where it came from in the first place.
“Everyone who understands quantums has their own opinion.”
I thought of the Egyptian concept when you first talked about the Kusaal one
They certainly do seem to have an affinity. I’m conscious that making too much of it is likely obscurum per obscurius, though; similarly with the Latin genius.
A proper anthropologist should really look into the whole culture of the Kusaasi and their neighbours (he/she would have a great time doing so.) I don’t think there’s been a whole lot of progress in the academic study since Rattray’s Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland, a title which rather proclaims its own limitations on its face, though perhaps not to the same degree as the same author’s Ashanti Proverbs (The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People.) For his time, in fact, Rattray did a pretty good job.
The best ethnographic account of the Kusaasi that I know of is Ernst Haaf’s Die Kusase; Haaf, like me, was an amateur; he worked as a doctor in the same hospital but thirty years previously. (He was still remembered with affection when I was there.) He was evidently one of those excellent people who are interested in everything, and his work almost invariably matches what my own informants told me. He was both a sensitive observer and an accurate one. I was particularly impressed by the fact the he records many Kusaal words and entire sentences accurately enough to be readily comprehensible, a particularly impressive feat given that in 1967 the language didn’t even have an orthography.
A belated note about Bruegel’s The Tower or Babel paintings: While I think the larger one in Vienna is unquestionably better, the smaller one (which is in Rotterdam and which I have never seen in person) seems to have had much more influence on subsequent depictions of the tower. The Rotterdam painting seems to have introduced a number of features that have become extremely commonplace in depictions of the tower; some of these are shared with the more realistic-looking building shown in the Vienna work, but most are not. The key features include showing the tower built in a spiral, rather than in tiers like a real ziggurat. Bruegel also placed stacked Romanesque arches around the rising walls and gave the overall shape a steep, uniform angle of ascent.
The fame of the paintings made the Tower of Babel a popular subject for painting, especially among artists from the Netherlands. That are are many paintings from the Dutch golden age and afterward that are clearly heavily influenced by Bruegel’s work—including some, or all, of the distinctive features of the Rotterdam Tower. However, as the prototypical image of the Tower of Babel, Bruegel’s painting seems to have been superseded in the twentieth century by the shape from Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. Of course, the movie version inherits many features from Bruegel’s design, but there are also clear differences—such as the angle of ascent, and the presence of three layers of arches in each tier. The cleaner shape from Lang’s film seems to be the one most seen nowadays in new depictions. For example, the cover of this edition of Juan Benet’s The Construction of the Tower of Babel—which is about Bruegel’s paintings and their influence—uses a sketch of the Metropolis version.
The key features include showing the tower built in a spiral, rather than in tiers like a real ziggurat.
I always thought that the spiral made sense – to explain both how they managed to get all that stuff all the way up there (how did it work with real ziggurats?), and how the tower was large enough that getting all the way up took a year but still small enough to fit in Mesopotamia.
It’s not actually very clear on the Vienna version whether there is a spiral or not; it’s just too uneven. It also seems to have been built into/out of a pre-existing mountain (an option for lower-tech large tower building that I somehow hadn’t considered before).
There is a famous spiral minaret somewhere in Iraq that evidently inspired this depiction.
@January First-of-May: In the Vienna painting, the tower might be built in a spiral, or it might have separate tiers; it isn’t clear from the picture itself. However, whether the tiers are connected into a single spiral ramp or squared off, there is something I find quite fascinating about their presence. It appears there may have been a very old cultural memory that the towering edifices built in ancient Mesopotamia had tiers, this general fact remaining known even long after the ziggurats were eroded down into shapeless lumps. At least one famous medieval depiction of the Tower of Babel, shows the tiered structure as well.
@David Marjanović: Yes, the Great Mosque of Samarra was undoubtedly an influence. Actually, there were two mosques with minarets like that constructued during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Al-Mutawakkil in the 850s. The other is the Abu Dulaf mosque, north of Samarra, although the minaret of the Great Mosque is both more impressive and proportioned more like Bruegel’s Tower of Babel. Both mosques are largely in ruins, except for their spiral minarets and curtain walls; the Great Mosque was destroyed by Mongol invaders, and the the Abu Dulaf may have been also. There might have been more structures built in a similar style, had not Al-Mutawakkil, who was engaged in a major building program, been assassinated in 861. This led to a prolonged period of political violence and instability, in which many of the caliphs were really puppets of the increasingly Turkic-dominated army.
Even older, there is this strange square spiral tower in Iran. It dates from late antiquity and is mostly in ruins now, with little of the spiral structure apparent to the casual eye. It is unclear whether it was a significant influence on any later tower designs or not.
I also thought of a another tower also clearly influenced by Bruegel’s designs—the one in the Capcom arcade game Magic Sword.
Authors who wrote in a language not their own: B. Traven (Death Ship). Whoever Traven was, his native language was not English (most likely German, but maybe a Norse language.) He lived in Mexico during his life as a writer, possibly because he had committed a capital crime in Europe.
His English seems awkward and foreign at times but it gets the job done. He is underappreciated by Nabokov-Flaubert type readers, but the substance of his books is compelling.
There is something going on in Brueghel and Bosch that I find hard to relate to earlier or later European traditions. I’ve read 6 or 8 books on these artists in English and they make a lot of connections to humanism, the period before the Reformation, and various medieval Christian motifs, but there’s no illumination of the *difference* of these two artists. (Both were Catholic and seemingly not affiliated with any heresy but during a time when there still was a lot of diversity of belief *within* the Church).
Their nightmare works were popular, and imitative works were produced a century after both were dead (Ruykaert), but the tradition died out.
I’d never heard of B. Traven before. His doubtful history is fascinating! It makes me think of Pletho Pappus.
“Comment on edifia la tour de babilonie. et le languege fust ?mue? en .lxxij. langueges. et les anges la ?despecerent?”
That’s “babiloine.” I hope you can see this:
Yes and yes, respectively. I seem to have become lysdexic at long last.
Friday’s xkcd includes both a representation of the Tower if Babel and a linguistics joke. The tower is tiered at the base, then cylindrical, with a single row of Romanesque arches at each level. It ends up looking halfway between the Bruegel-influnced tower painted by Tobias Verhaecht* and located at the Norwich Castle Museum and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
* Influenced by Pieter Bruegel, Verhaecht did multiple paintings of the Tower of Babel, generally about as different from one another as Bruegel’s. Following on this kind of tradition, the Ukrainian artist Alexander Mikhalchyk is currently producing paintings of the tower, some of which are available for sale, in the ten to twenty thousand dollar range. Mikhalchyk’s paintings are done in obvious homages to the Dutch-Flemish Renaissance style, except for the way he paints the skyscapes behind the towers, which is much more modern.
I have no idea why Bruegel drew the tower as a tapered multistory Coliseum. Towers were depicted as we imagine them, narrow and tall, before and after Bruegel’s time.
I love this painting and everything else he did, but I’ve always had a bit of a dissonance in my mind to have the structure described as a tower.
Y, I assume Bruegel was simply trying to show a somewhat plausible physical structure. Even more important in a time and place where almost everyone understood the Bible stories as actual history.
I think that Breughel’s complex, messy tower serves to represent a whole corrupted society rather than just one thing one king did once.
As I have said before here, I’ve read six or seven books on the topic I’ve never had any confident sense of what Breughel’s paintings meant to him and his time, especially not his and Bosch’s “Hell” pictures, above all not “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. Christian humanism, but is there also millenarian heresy of some sort? And these two artists were mainstream in their time and place.
Don’t miss the alt-text!!!
@Y: Genesis 11:4–5 describes the construction of a city and a tower. I am not sure what translation Bruegel would have been familiar with, but some modern versions (expanding on the laconic Hebrew) specifically state a city with a tower at its center—or even a city that is a tower.
Moreover, while a prototypical tower (the the Tower of the Elephant) is envisioned as tall in comparison with its base, lots of real-world fortresses labeled as towers are actually quite squat. The Tower of London is a basically cubical keep at the center of a larger castle, and it would probably not even be called a “Tower” at all, had the (original) keep not been built well before the baileys and curtain walls. The Genoese thalassocracy built defensive towers all along the coastlines of their Mediterranean possessions, many of which are essentially no taller than the are broad, although they are almost all placed on high points of land (and there are also plenty of somewhat more slender Genoese towers). See also my Stack Exchange answer here, regarding Tolkien’s use of “Tower” in the names of fortified cities.
I also noticed, when I looked at it again today, that that xkcd uses a nonstandard female stick figure for the linguist atop the Tower of Babel. Following a hunch, I checked and found that, yes in fact, the linguist is once again Gretchen McCulloch, depicted as in xkcd 2381.
This would be the archetypal Gretchen McCulloch.
As Jubal to musicians, and Tubal-Cain to blacksmiths, so Gretchen-McCulloch to linguists. She appears in the Biblical account as Naamah. She is not to be confused with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naamah_(demon)
>what Brueghel’s paintings meant to him and his time.
Perhaps you should browse a few back issues of the JHNA.
the linguist is once again Gretchen McCulloch, depicted as in xkcd 2381.
She may be the unfortunate victim in
https://xkcd.com/856/
Towers were depicted as we imagine them, narrow and tall, before and after Bruegel’s time.
I imagined the Bruegel version(s) as being the early stages of construction of something that was supposed to be a lot taller when (or if) finished. Tall towers are often quite squat near their bases; and even if the angle of tapering was to be kept stable all along (unlikely), the result would have still been quite tower-like (compare the nearly-completed version, as drawn by Lucas van Valckenborch).
Note also (as I had already mentioned) that the Vienna version of Bruegel’s tower apparently took advantage of a pre-existing mountain, which can in some places be seen protruding through the tower.
She is, because Internet.
@David Eddyshaw: The victim is child-sized and has a bun: however, that comic was a long time ago….
@January First-of-May: This site has (as well as some other interesting stuff) three excellent pages showing scores of images of the Tower of Babel (although unfortunately, links to larger images are mostly rotted away). The pictures are sorted by time period, medieval, early modern, and post 1900. The second category includes many Dutch and Flemish examples, naturally, including a bunch more by Valckenborch, Verhaecht, Hendrick van Cleve, and Abel Grimmer. Valckenborch, in particular, has a very Mannerist style and often includes depictions of (what I take to be Nimrod) in his foregrounds.
I looked at the pictures, and I’m thinking now, that other than the obvious inspiration by the Colosseum, Bruegel’s design mostly owes to his own originality.
I wish I’d gone to his monster retrospective in Vienna in 2018. I should get my hands on the catalog anyhow.
@Brett:
that rhymes in a certain way with the yiddish cognate, ‘toyer’, which means a gate: if there hasn’t been too much semantic drift, the implication is that it’s the secure-ness of the structure that matters, not its shape…
Thanks Ryan for your tip. Lots of good stuff in the JHNA.
@rozele: I think that makes sense.
@Y: Until these recent discussions, I had not quite realized how culturally influential Bruegel’s images of the Tower if Babel had been in the sixteenth-century Netherlands. Bruegel did a handful of paintings and sketches (at least one miniature has been unfortunately lost), but other artists did dozens. There are the painters I listed above who painted multiple versions, but plenty of other artists in the Netherlands tried their hands at the subject once or twice.
Today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal shows a very conventional depiction of the Tower of Babel—along with a version of the story of how languages originated, combined with one of the comic’s many jokes about questionable parenting practices.
This site has (as well as some other interesting stuff) three excellent pages showing scores of images of the Tower of Babel (although unfortunately, links to larger images are mostly rotted away).
There is a link to this site in Wikipedia accessible only in the Wayback Machine, but I did not notice that it also has a section with illuminated manuscripts! It also has a completed tower on two Portuguese maps. In terra del gram soldam de babilonia, that is… Egypt.
I do not know why they called Egypt “Babilonia”. And the tower, it is complete there. Is it another tower?
A couple random links:
1. A very high resolutionphoto of Bruegel’s tower.
2. A miniature from Breviarium Grimani (in Dutch). This breviary was sold in Italy in 1520 (for 500 ducats). There is also a painting that clearly is in very intimate relationship with this miniature.
They share a lot of elements with Bruegel’s painting and they or their shared source or their copies were clearly part of his context. There is even a treadmill crane (and a spiral ramp, it seems, in the miniature but not in the painting)
that rhymes in a certain way with the yiddish cognate, ‘toyer’, which means a gate
German Tor is “gate”.
Mnemonic: a fool and his functor are soon parted. That could be a Times crossword clue for mathematically inclined polyglops.
It seems like (late) medieval representations of the tower were more likely to make it squared off, rather than round.* I don’t know how much the shift to a more rounded shape was due to Brueghel’s influence, but it’s a interesting question how the prototypical depiction of the tower changed with time. You can almost see it in progress in the work of Brueghel’s contemporary, Hendrick van Cleve III, who painted (or at least supervised the painting of by his studio) at least a dozen Tower of Babel portraits. He had a fairly standard shape he used, squared off at the bottom (and viewed point on), but with the tiers looking rounder and rounder as they went higher. Cleve’s own Babel paintings were apparently common enough that you can see—from the shapes of the tiers—a number of later artists imitating Cleve’s work, rather than Brueghel’s directly.
* It would be interesting so see whether there has been a trend back toward squared towers in the last century, since it has come to be understood that he actual historical Mesopotamian ziggurats were rectangular rather than round.
In terra del gram soldam de babilonia, that is… Egypt.
I do not know why they called Egypt “Babilonia”.
Well, no. Egypt was indeed part of the land of the Great Sultan of Babylonia, that is, the Ummayad caliphate, whose capital was until 744 C.E. at Damascus.
Were those Portuguese somehow confusing the Great Pyramid with the tower of Babel?
@Rodger C: That was a meme during the Age of Exploration, that the Tower of Babel had been inspired by the Great Pyramids. I don’t know how widespread the notion was, but I have seen a number of circa-sixteenth-century documents and drawings comparing the Egyptian pyramids to the hypothetical Tower of Babel. The documented past existence of the Pharos in Egypt may also have been part of the mix.
There is a spiral minaret in the Tulunid capital of Egypt. This city was meant to exactly imitate Samarra. Here, though the current version of the minaret could have been built later. (I only mention it because Brett mentioned Samarra above)
I do not know why they called Egypt “Babilonia”.
It may also be relevant that Coptic-era (pre)Cairo was centred in a neighbourhood called Babylon.
It may indeed!
Coptic-era (pre)Cairo was centred in a neighbourhood called Babylon.
Yes, very interesting! Thanks for that, Lameen!
And all this time I’d thought Babylon was actually in Suffolk Co., N.Y., where there is not yet AFAIK a substantial Coptic presence (although they’ve made it to Nassau Co.).
An exercise with the map of Cairo and a ruler gave an interesting result.
I clicked the center of Al-Azhar mosque and the tower of Babylon Fortress to measure the distance. The line coincided precisely with the minaret (the spiral minaret) of ibn Tulun mosque and also crossed the mosque of Amr. :/
Voici.
I did not change language (I did not want to modify the link) and unfortunately when you open the link anew, it changes zoom. The mosque of ibn Tulun is a grey figure slightly to the north from the center of the line. Enlarge the minaret and трепещите.
The sequence of settlements is:
[Babylon] – Fustat – Al-Askar – Al-Qata’i – Cairo – [Heliopolis]
Babylon and Heliopolis are ancient. Others are admistrative centers. The whole sequence south to north and the Muslim cities are also in chronological order. It is more comfortable to read when you know the distances, but a city is not a “point”, I have no idea where was the center of Babylon, so I chose the tower of Babylon fortress and the important mosque of each city and the center of the mosque. I though I will have to remember triangles.
But no!
Obviously I would choose the mosques of ibn Tulun and Amr ibn al-As when measuring distances to their respective cities (Al-Qata’i and Fustat). The mosque of Amr is said to be righ on the spot where his tent once was set:/
The “center” of Al-Azhar is not ideal. I just clicked it. If I clicked differently, the line would not ideally coincide with the minaret. But it does, and no, it is not aligned with the Nile. The line does cross Heliopolis, but I have no idea what was its center.
It may also be relevant that Coptic-era (pre)Cairo was centred in a neighbourhood called Babylon.
Lameen, thank you! I only learned that there was a “Babylon Fortress” shortly before posting the question and realized: a fortress is usually accompanied by a city, the Arab conquest of Egypt did not mean an end of Christian Egyptian urbanism, both this city and Fustat were likely to grow side by side.
And its previous name could remain in use among foreign and local people.
I just read a brochure The Babylon of Egypt, by A.J. Butler, 1914, referenced in the page:
[sic]s are mine. The typogreaphy also confused similar Arabic letters.
I spotted the Tower of Babel in another old Capcom arcade game, Forgotten Worlds. As you can see, it sits in the background during the second-to-last boss fight (probably the least interesting boss fight of the game). The last level is a vertical indoor scroller, so it may be intended to take place inside the tower, with the villain Bios at the top.
Another Gretchen McCulloch sighting in a linguistics-related xkcd comic.
Oh, alt-text, there used to be an *h₂ in “fire”…
Bah!
ʊ̰̃̂:
https://languagehat.com/butterfly/#comment-4437938
“that rhymes in a certain way with the yiddish cognate, ‘toyer’, which means a gate: if there hasn’t been too much semantic drift, the implication is that it’s the secure-ness of the structure that matters, not its shape…”
If by “that” (the first word in the preceding passage) is meant the English noun tower, one must say that it and Yidish טױער (toyer) ‘gate’ are not cognates (as far back as tower and toyer may now be traced). In a nutshell (with intermediate stages and forms omitted):
1. English tower < French < Latin < Greek τύρσις likely < a Mediterranean substrate of Greek.
2. Yidish toyer ‘gate’ < Germanic < Proto-Indo-European *dhwer- ‘gate’ [also ‘door, doorway’].
Since all the words figuring in etymology 1 mean ‘tower’ and all those in etymology 2 mean ‘gate’, no semantic drift has occurred and the suggested possible implication therefore rests on no evidence.
And of course German has Tür with /t/, unlike English door or Danish dør. If you ignore historical knowledge, you could easily think that E tower corresponds to G Tür/Tor and not Turm. (Danish has tårn).
That is why etymological dictionaries are your friends.
TIL that the nasal in German (and hence Nordic) is from an Old French diminutive tornelle, and English borrowed the base instead.
Tornelle doesn’t begin to explain why Turm ends in /m/. But I don’t have a better idea. I used to wonder if the Latin accusative turrim had been borrowed, but the timing can’t possibly work out, and the lack of umlaut is quite suspicious, too.
My initial thought was that Danish phonotactics would reject torm in favour of torn — but OTOH we have people named Gorm who seem quite stable, and torn was the MLG form we borrowed.
DWDS blame Luther and Middle Germany in general, but does not explain why they changed it to /m/: Mit Luther setzt sich die md. Form Turm durch. Everywhere else had torn/turn. It also adduces LL tornare to explain the /n/ in OF tornelle by contamination or something.
@dm, lars
This was making me curious also, and there is a coincidental parallel with Wurm, which is also a turning thing.
Turm
It’s just a random change. 😀
Aaargh …
OK, they made the mobile version of Wiktionary even uglier on desktop than it used to be. Will wonders never cease? If you lot don’t stop linking to the mobile version, and that goes for WP as well, I shall perpetrate Tampermonkey code to bounce me back to the desktop version. Or make grumpy noises every time it happens. One of these things is more likely than the former.
One thing is ugly looks, another is ugliness of heart. It’s bad to operate with different url’s at the reader’s end for different reading devices.
Amen!
@Trond Engen: Indeed! I have occasionally, when commenting on my phone, linked to a mobile-specific URL, for which I can feel only chagrin.
Haven’t we all! I try to remember editing the url’s, but it frequently slips. A related evil is url’s that are overly specifies database results, e.g. online maps, Here too the providing website should keep its own preferences in display (for their own sake or that of a specific user) seperate from those of the generic and timeless user.
But the ugliest thing is those long links with inbuilt redirections that Google (and other large mediators of content) give us. Now, combine that with a database request.
“overtly specifies”
@Trond, honestly, I find it convenient… I edit them.
I meant overly, not overtly. Transparent systems are the only systems. What I hate is trying and erring un hope of reducing long strings of specifications I didn’t ask for and don’t need.
The weird thing is that going to the non-mobile version on mobile redirects you to the mobile version, and then if you enable desktop mode you’re still stuck — because now the mode is encoded in the URL. User interaction-wise it’s not as helpful as it could be, in my opinion.
@Trond, oh.
Fortunately, I rather overtly typed the phrase I was having in mind rather than using less transparent Ctrl-C:)
Anyway, i’m in a habit of changing values in URL, both for my own purposes and when giving links here. But I suspect, “less overly” is not an option for them. It is everything or nothing:)
About Penrose.
“Microtubuli” is not The Emperor’s New Mind (1989).
It is his collaboration with a reader of the ETM in 90s. And I do not think Penrose believed in them back then or considered them to be the “likely” carrier of consciousness. He did not know a shit about microtubuli or cellular biology.
I think his goal was search for possible carriers.
microtubuli
Seems about as sophisticated (perhaps a bit less?) as the pineal gland being the seat of the soul …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland#Society_and_culture
One of those cases where the problem is not so much giving the wrong answer but asking the wrong question in the first place.
(I hope Lars appreciates my deletion of the “.m” in the link, BTW)
I don’t think science can abstain from looking for physical correlates of consciousness.
Why a wrong question?
People were looking for it, and found the electrical activity of the brain. Now “consciousness is a shameful product of interaction between a complex determinist classical electrical circuit and complex input” is as good claim as any. With a practical consequence: you will have to believe that a computer has a soul (consciousness).
Wrong in the sense that it’s like asking, “Where is Green?” or “Where is Anna Karenina?”
Simply putting the question like that immediately sets you on a hopelessly wrong track.
Thanks, David!
Apparently there’s a newfangled “SEMI theory” of consciousness that says it’s all about the EM field in the brain or something, and that we aren’t finding it in computers because computer EM fields work completely differently.
I don’t quite get it, and TBH it sounds like so much woo to me, but a Discord friend who’s generally pretty good at sciencey stuff is convinced it’s true. So there must be something plausible-looking to it, at least.
(They write hard SF – or they used to, until an unexpected scientific discovery a few months after they published their first novel strongly suggested that one of the main constructions underpinning their setting is likely to be significantly easier to make than the setting’s backstory requires.
Shortly afterwards – probably coincidentally – they hit writer’s block partway through novel three, stumbled around for several months, then put it on pause and switched to fantasy.)
@DE reminded me
(1) what space fights look like? An alien spaceship is localized within a region of space. We send a projectile (or a ray) to there, and make it hot.
But why should we assume that those aliens are contained within some region of space? If they can teleport between stars, who knows if they are.
(2) what is matter? I think usually people expect “matter” to have coordinates.
They also expect it to interact with us electromagnetically or by means of some other known field. I did not mean the physical sense of “interact” here. But it seems it is supposed to alter my energy.
So anythign which (a) we would like to call an entity which “exists” and (b) detectible, but does not have these properties, is presumably not matter.
Well, after all, it seems that most of what exists is not matter*:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy
We just need to get with the programme here …
* A lot of the pretty bits are, though. (Though that could just be matterism on my part.)
He wrote The Emperor’s New Mind specifically to explain why he feels this way about human thinking (and its connection to quantum mechanics). As it is addressed to any readers (not necessary physicists or mathematicians), it mostly consists of: Gödel’s theorem for housewives, thermodynamics for housewives, relativity for housewives and so on.
I enjoyed it more than I normally enjoy popular science books exactly of its subjectivity. It is subjective by design: he wrote not in order to enlighten someone, but to make readers understand why he feels what he feels. I know who is Penrose and I know some of what he did. It was interesting to learn somehtign about his personal relationship with science. Having this said, I know some basics of the theories he wrote about, and I am not sure it a housewife can benefit from it.
Penrose’s microtubuli idea has little to do with electricity. He thought quantum state superpositions inside microtubuli, and random collapses of such superpositions, could explain free will and the like. Obvious problems: 1) microtubuli are way too large (there’s water in them); 2) there’s not going to be a lot of superposition at body temperature – too many interactions with the surroundings; 3) how would the collapse of a superposition inside a microtubulus ever trigger electric nerve activity?; 4) if will is random, it’s not free, is it?
“Mind is what the brain does” seems a better approach to me.
if will is random, it’s not free, is it?
Quite. Even aside from the evident bogosity of the physics and physiology, the idea doesn’t actually solve the (pseudo)problem it was proposed to answer.
Penrose seems to have got hung up on the idea that human beings must not turn out to be deterministic machines even in principle. (Given the enormous complexity of the brain, even if we lived in a Newtonian clockwork universe, this would be no more than a quaint theoretical conceit in practice.)
But in fact the idea that free will is (in some sense) an illusion is not founded on such airy-fairy thought experiments anyway. You need to contend with things like the fact that the electrical activity in the brain associated with “voluntary” movement may actually precede conscious awareness of the decision to move, and the fact that in general our awareness of the “present” moment is a complex psychophysiological construct with an unnervingly loose relationship to the time measured by clocks.
(And as a good Calvinist, I am of course not sold on the idea that even strict physical determinism would be incompatible with either our experience of free will, or with the idea that we are morally responsible for our actions, but that is not really relevant to my point.)
Do you have a better idea than “free will is random will”? Yes, maybe they are not the same (maybe to call it “free will” we need more), but how they are different then? I thought about this as a schoolboy, failed to invent anything better than “a will that appears random to observers” and did not make significan progress since then:(
There are certain negative properties of free will : some sorts of predictability seem to undermine our self-esteem, but they also ruin your randomness.
Are there positive properties?
Apparently there’s a newfangled “SEMI theory” of consciousness
I misremembered the name: it’s actually known as the CEMI theory.
An alien spaceship is localized within a region of space. We send a projectile (or a ray) to there, and make it hot.
But why should we assume that those aliens are contained within some region of space? If they can teleport between stars, who knows if they are.
If they evade fast enough, they might be able to avoid the projectile (and/or ray) even if the projectile/ray moves at c (or nearly so) and they don’t, because in most cases the size of the ship is substantially smaller than the distance between it and the origin of the projectile, so the ship has to move a much smaller distance to successfully evade.
(And of course without functioning FTL communications [and/or functioning FTL sensors] we only see where the aliens were some time ago, not where there are currently, which does not help predicting where they would be when the projectile and/or ray arrives.)
Space combat in the aforementioned “hard” sci-fi setting is in fact a combination of the above – the ships can teleport between stars, but there are functional interdiction methods against that, so most of it is just dodging around really fast to make sure that hostile projectiles (and/or rays) can reach them only by accident. FTL comms are commonplace(ish), but there are no FTL sensors (other than by sending your own ship to check and report), so light lag in observation is important as well… it’s a whole thing.
And a big part of the whole thing is that if a ship is sufficiently disabled (immobilized) as to be unable to effectively dodge, the next volley sent in its direction is going to make it hot, so this is a situation to be avoided if possible. (This kind of position is traditionally known as “sitting duck”.)
EDIT:
Do you have a better idea than “free will is random will”?
I’ve read a pretty good proof that this is effectively the only option. Essentially – I don’t remember it very well, so might be summarizing away some important details here – either “free will” is deterministic, or it is random, or it is controlled by something else, and if it is controlled by something else, we ask where the something else gets their outputs from and end up in an infinite regress (very much resembling the homunculus argument).
@DE has Calvinism ever considered random will? (and moral responsibility of a person whose decisions are determined by the divine dice?)
Calvinism insists on the moral responsibility of individuals, predetermination notwithstanding.
I don’t think “random” will has ever been considered. But then “random” is itself a distinctly modern idea, and a conceptual can of worms at that. In the context of classical physics, to say something is “random” is to say that you don’t know all its causes (or that some presumed causes are not relevant in the particular context): it’s not a property of the event itself. In the context of quantum physics, I don’t know what it is (though personally I have no philosophical problem at all with giving up the “local” in “local hidden variables.”)
Anyhow, the question belongs to the domain of philosophy, not physics, still less of physiology. Penrose has made one of them there Category Errors we hear about.
either “free will” is deterministic, or it is random, or it is controlled by something else
That basically reduces free will to a question of determination, but that totally leaves out what for me is an important part of free will – a self that is at least somewhat in control and can make conscious choices. If my actions are just the result of an internal coin flip, that’s as far away from free will as if they’re the result of a chain of outside events that leads to my actions without leaving me any choice in the matter.
Free will, as usually imagined, is not incompatible with consistency of character or recognizable preferences.
I have never understood the distinction between “free will” and “determinism”. They seem like completely unrelated concepts. I can somewhat understand “determinism” in the Newtonian of Einsteinian sense, although I struggle; but “free will” is so vague I can’t connect it to anything but religion.
The whole thing seems like people who are not trained therapists making up terms as they go. And in a position of power.
a self that is at least somewhat in control and can make conscious choices
The problem here is that AFAIK a lot of the time the actual control is (mostly) an illusion; the subconscious part of the brain makes the choice, then post-factum makes it feel like a conscious decision.
(IIRC there’s been experiments that actually proved this in at least some cases, but I couldn’t recall offhand which specific situations were involved.)
Even talking about “conscious” vs “subconscious” thinking is somewhat iffy; there is some distinction (or discontinuities) somewhere in that general direction, but we don’t really have enough research. We’ve barely even begun looking for a more specific direction.
I’ve read a pretty good proof that this is effectively the only option.
“Proof” is the wrong word; you mean “argument.” It is clearly impossible to prove any such thing.
There’s a further confusion lurking, between “free will” and consciousness. One can readily imagine the latter without the former; conversely, free will probably implies consciousness, but I think that is really just a matter of how you define the terms.
The problem here is that AFAIK a lot of the time the actual control is (mostly) an illusion; the subconscious part of the brain makes the choice, then post-factum makes it feel like a conscious decision.
I’ve read about these phenomena. I’m not actually arguing that free will exists, I’m only saying that the idea involves more than just an opposition between determinism and randomness. Even more, trying to decide the issue of free will based on whether randomness or determinism is true misses the point, in my opinion.
I don’t think those phenomena have anything to do with free will; the problem is the arbitrary demarcation of “subconscious” and “conscious.” Our minds are made up of a whole congeries of parts that we may well never fully disentangle; it’s our current (and deplorable) scientism that makes us believe we can segment everything into component parts and make definitive judgments about things like consciousness, free will, art, religion, etc. Being human is an infinitely complicated thing and the universe is an infinitely complicated place; we do ourselves no favors by pretending we’re Lego creatures in a nice orderly box.
I think Libet was looking at the wrong point in the process. I suspect that freedom, if it exists (i.e. choice between actually possible alternatives) takes place as we consciously move our center of experience and our attention in order to focus our awareness, and that once our subjective world is adjusted, the moment of apparent choice inside that world is automatic. Am I the only person here who’s ever thought, “Oh, I just decided to do that”? Surely this happens all the time in novels?
It seems to me that a totally deterministic universe would contain no reason for consciousness to evolve beyond tropism.
The universe might be totally deterministic at some fundamental level (though modern physics suggests otherwise) without actually being very predictable by any (pre)humanly achievable heuristic. There seems to me to be abundant space in between for consciousness to evolve.
Assuming that consciousness is in itself an aid to prediction or problem-solving – while this might be so, I must say that this link seems far from obvious to me. On the contrary: this looks to me rather like a case of assuming the conclusion: we are conscious, so consciousness must have given our forebears an evolutionary advantage, on first principles, whether we can explain the mechanism or not. Like the Sociobiology delusion. Or Chomsky’s assertions about how Merge miraculously conveyed such an advantage that it conquered the world – because it did, OK?
Late-breaking news, FWIW:
Simon Kochen, On the Free Will Theorem
https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.06295 [revised 28 Jul 2022]
… We strengthen the Free Will Theorem, which proved the spontaneity of particles, based on the free will of the experimenter. The new result is unconditional, and does not require the experimenter’s free will to prove the particles’ spontaneity…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem
[As someone once said, I come away no wiser but I am at least better informed…]
I recommend Peter Watts’s Blindsight as a convincing (and terrifying) refutation of the idea that consciousness is necessary for problem-solving or much of anything else.
I always recommend Peter’s books, no matter the context of the conversation. I’m annoying like that. (I don’t, actually, just when they would seem to like that kind of SF). We met accidentally at the Sofia Piride parade! We didn’t recognize each other at the parade, only later on the internet through pictures.
Only after, when we were looking through photos.
Poe’s unsettling story The Imp of the Perverse plays (in my reading, anyhow) to great effect on the idea that free will is random will.
“Free will, as usually imagined, …”
@Hans, yes and we don’t have to discuss what free will IS, enough to understand what we need from it.
Because we speak of it, call it by the name… there is something that we want from it.
“If my actions are just the result of an internal coin flip, that’s as far away from free will as if they’re the result of a chain of outside events that leads to my actions without leaving me any choice in the matter.”
But does not it make free will identical to “self” (or, accordingly, consciousness)? And are there positive properties of free will?
“Free will, as usually imagined, is not incompatible with consistency of character or recognizable preferences.”
I thought about it too. For some reason, in this context I want to think about individuality of myself and others – and accordingly recognizability, continuity and what else makes us individual.
@J1M, possibly something can be done.
Assume that there is a class of questions that (1) you can’t answer on your own (2) but a girl Masha can and you can easily confirm that her answers are true.
Such answers are unpredictable in some way – but not quite random in some other way (namely, all have the property “a true answer to your question”. Or if you like, “when fed to a truth-checking machine, the machine says ‘yes'”).
Well, it recembles P-NP conjecture (except that the conjecture (1) deals with classical computers (2) with the time of colving a problem, polynomial or not (3) has not been proven – if true) .
But all right, if we don’t want a classical computer to be able to find a true answer at all …
… imagine we can exchange real numbers and instantly do some arythmetics on them.
The girl Masha supplies you with solutions to your equations. A computer can neihter repeat the trick, nor confirm that her answers are true.
Or imagine that some numbers (real or not) are funny. But you can’t predict which ones. A random list of such funny numbers seems utterly random to you. But there is a girl Masha again, and somehow it happnes that ALL numbers she shares with you make you giggle.
As some points have been addressed to me here – I’m not sure I have the time to answer with the depth that the question deserves. I said that I don’t claim that free will exists; but I like it as an idea; I know far too little to discuss this in more detail or to come to conclusions for myself. Maybe I’ll find the time and space in my head for better contributions 😉
Everyone is free to ignore the whole subject, unless they aren’t.
Free or not, you, my browser and MS Windows are morally responsible for everything you all do.
Also Akismet (the Dark God).
Following a link from here, I read most of it once (or perhaps all, and then forgot the frame story…), and found it disappointing in the end. It all seems to be built on the false idea that gorillas are unconscious. No, they just refuse to look at a mirror! Looking someone in the eyes is a threat, and why would you threaten yourself? Give them a camera that isn’t aimed straight at their eyes, and a screen, and they recognize themselves just fine. The biochemistry is pathetic, too, the portrayal of dissociative identity is off, and how it’s supposed to make sense that that one character manages to claim that he lacks self-awareness is beyond me.
I too was unimpressed, though some of the ideas were interesting. I must say that I was put off by the relentless moral nihilism, which always strikes me as a fundamentally teenage attitude. It should be grown out of.
Watts’ other works are worse. His general thesis seems to be that free will is an illusion (which may be so, and can be made true by adopting the right definitions of your terms) and that therefore morality is an illusion too. But this is a thumping non sequitur (though a comforting idea, of course.)
It all seems to be built on the false idea that gorillas are unconscious.
No, it’s built on the idea that it is possible to act purposively in the world without being conscious; the gorillas are just an analogy. Novels are not scientific monographs, you know. I’m sorry you didn’t like it.
I must say that I was put off by the relentless moral nihilism, which always strikes me as a fundamentally teenage attitude. It should be grown out of.
Is this the attitude you take toward all literature? Tsk, that Dostoevsky fellow had quite unfounded views about sin and redemption; if only he’d had a proper spiritual education… (I was put off by the relentless moral nihilism too, just as I am put off by many of the views and approaches of Celine, Pound, and others of my favorite authors, but as well as not being scientific monographs novels and poems are not moral guides. They are literature.)
((Not that I’m claiming Blindsight is great literature, of course, but it’s a damn good sf novel.))
The Emperor Ezar of Barrayar was an atheist, which he described as “a very simple faith, but comforting.” Considering that he spent his life doing terrible things for the best reasons, one can understand why he doesn’t want to believe in a moralist God. Smullyan’s utilitarian God, however, might be a more reasonable belief target for him.
Everything I think about free will is summarized by that dialogue and by Dennett’s book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, which has an excellent precis at Wikipedia. In particular, Dennett nails down why, if determinism is true, we still should hold people responsible for their bad actions: it serves to limit the number of bad actions, something of which a utilitarian God would be likely to approve, as Smullyan says.
As for gorillas, you have to be awfully tough-minded to believe that gorillas aren’t conscious. I declare myself quite incapable of it. Of course they don’t talk, but neither does my grandson Luca, and he is as conscious as you or I.
Is this the attitude you take toward all literature?
Of course not: yet it is repellent, and there isn’t (for me) enough there in Watts to make up for it. (And he is preachy about it, always a turn-off in literature even when I agree with the sermon.)
YM, as they say, MV.
Also, while is undoubtedly true that novels are not moral guides, that doesn’t mean that you have to leave your morality in the cloakroom when you read a novel. What am I, an Ideal Reader?
Quite right, of course, and if I’d liked the novel less I would have been more censorious about its moral universe. Hooray for varying mileage!
@DE, I think yes, for many people consciousness, free will and moral have to do with each other.
You want it, you choose it, and the choice and the desire are moral or not.
One of the best things (or the best, according to some people) Peter Watts has written is “The Things,” which is explicitly fan faction based on The Thing (1982).* That’s a context in which the nihilism of his writing works pretty well, and it offers up an entirely different idea about the nature if consciousness.
* My younger son Ben wanted to watch some classic science fiction horror films last week. We started with Predator, which has mostly an action bent, and he was unfazed by the occasional gore. Then he wanted to watch Alien, and the infamous jump scare with John Hurt spooked him, but he made it through and enjoyed the movie. (His older brother, having heard enough about the film, didn’t watch that scene the first time he saw Alien, but he watched it this time and agreed it was effectively scary.) Then Ben wanted to follow that up the next day with The Thing, and there I said no. The Thing is simply too much scarier and gorier. The scariest scene is qualitatively quite similar to the scariest scene in Alien, but it’s even more horrifying, and it’s just one of many gory scenes with the evil alien. I saw The Thing at a drive-in when it first came out, and I had a blast, terrified and horrified as I was at such a young age. (My father, a fan of both the original story, “Who Goes There?” and the first film adaptation, was not expecting anything as horrific as John Carpenter’s film turned out to be.) However, neither of my boys had the kind of stomach for seeing something like that at a young age, although Reuven, now a teenager, considers The Thing his favorite film.
We used to joke about Russian translations of those titles: оно, нечто, чужой, особь… and, accrodingly, особь-2 etc.
I’m fond of the first film adaptation, but not the second. Horror in general is not my thing:
https://xkcd.com/2056/
(I think this is connected with my dislike of Laurel and Hardy. My enjoyment of their work was always impaired by concern for whoever would end up saddled with repairing the damage, too.)
I agree that Watts’ parody/tribute/fanfic is very good.
Carpenter’s best movie by far is Dark Star. It just is, OK?
I saw Dark Star twice: once as the penultimate presentation of a science fiction film festival that ran for 25 hours (I confess I fell asleep during Metropolis), when I thought it was hysterically funny, and once at a more reasonable hour, when I thought it was rather more eh than heh. I wonder what I’d think now: expecting something to be funny tends to be a mug’s game, even when based on your own past experience of it.
Having mentioned Elbow Room, I see that I forgot to mention Consciousness Explained, a title designed to outrage the New Mysterians, who have dubbed in Consciousness Not Explained or … Explained Away. But as Dennett says with his crocodilian smile, you can only explain consciousness in terms of non-consciousness.
“you can only explain consciousness in terms of…” – does not imply that you can explain it (at least if “you can only make it with tomatoes” = “you can’t make it without tomatoes”)
Consciousness is supernatural stuff that most people believe in.
A pudendum.
A pudendum.
Which of the pudenda is a pudendum ? Can one be singled out ? What are the rest called ? I have never encountered a satisfactory explanation of this.
It’s a pluralia tantum noun, like scissors and for the same reason: it comes in two parts (at least the female pudenda do, and that’s the usual application of the word.
What are the two parts of female consciousness?:-/
I’m sure you have this backwards. I remember a long, detailed Crichton-style expository passage in omniscient-narrator mode about this idea; it justifies the idea by bringing up the gorillas. It hypothesizes that consciousness is a fleeting, transitory phenomenon that flickers up among chimpanzees and is present in humans, while the gorillas are already over it. It seemed crystal-clear to me that this is what made Watts think about consciousness and come up with the idea that it’s a temporary byproduct and actually a hindrance.
(I forgot what was said about the orang-utans, though.)
Death of the author and all that – but some novels and some poems are very much intended as moral guides, sometimes explicitly so, and a few even as scientific monographs. My understanding of Blindsight is that Watts read some fun facts about self-recognition in various apes, was so intrigued he developed a theory of consciousness from it, and then tried to educate the world about it by packaging it in a page-turner. Isn’t that downright common in science fiction?
Check re `Dark Star’ as perhaps best scifi movie EVAH but for the 1950s `Invaders from Mars’.
Re orangs, IIRC they’ve been around for ten or twelve million years and it seems impossible that we will get that far. Orangologists [?] speak of them referring to memories of events (eg application of a bandaid) from years ago; they are said to be the only primates with a (wry) sense of humor. I believe mothers hold on to their young till they can swing through trees, which takes perhaps two years. They seem to me to be sober honest citizens and merit our respect.
“orangs”
Orang-orang.
my dislike of Laurel and Hardy
Laurel and Hardy were by far my favorites of the old b&w films and shorts that were endlessly shown on British TV when I was little.
On the other hand, I have long held to the heretical opinion that Charlie Chaplin is simply Not Funny.
Re orangs, IIRC they’ve been around for ten or twelve million years and it seems impossible that we will get that far. Orangologists [?] speak of them referring to memories of events (eg application of a bandaid) from years ago; they are said to be the only primates with a (wry) sense of humor.
People here often refer to posts from years ago. Almost everyone has a wry sense of humor.
“We” didn’t need 10 million years to get that far. Twenty were sufficient.
It seemed crystal-clear to me that this is what made Watts think about consciousness and come up with the idea that it’s a temporary byproduct and actually a hindrance.
So what? Lots of things make creators think of things to create; their importance disappears once the creation begins. The success or otherwise of the novel has nothing whatever to do with gorillas.
I think this is connected with my dislike of Laurel and Hardy.
Great heavens! I think you’re the first person I’ve known who disliked them; there are even those who don’t find Buster Keaton particularly funny, but I thought L&H were universal. My grandsons demanded to watch them every time they visited us for years (now, alas, they’ve grown out of wanting to spend their time watching old comedies).
The excellent précis of Elbow Room is here.
Success at what? At being a page-turner? I agree. At getting the idea across that I think it wants to get across? I disagree. I think Blindsight is meant to be as educational as Erasmus Darwin’s poems or Theodor Mommsen’s history of Rome that won him a Nobel Prize in literature or Starship Troopers or any Star Trek or Babylon 5 episode that explores a moral dilemma.
BTW, I mostly like Laurel & Hardy, but not horror films.
I think Blindsight is meant to be as educational as Erasmus Darwin’s poems or Theodor Mommsen’s history of Rome that won him a Nobel Prize in literature or Starship Troopers or any Star Trek or Babylon 5 episode that explores a moral dilemma.
Ah, but I don’t care what the creators intended to impart — I don’t read novels for education.
David L:
>Laurel and Hardy were by far my favorites of the old b&w films and shorts that were endlessly shown on British TV when I was little.
>On the other hand, I have long held to the heretical opinion that Charlie Chaplin is simply Not Funny.
I disagree with you on Laurel and Hardy, and agree on Chaplin.
David Marianović:
>Death of the author and all that – but some novels and some poems are very much intended as moral guides, sometimes explicitly so, and a few even as scientific monographs. My understanding of Blindsight is that Watts read some fun facts about self-recognition in various apes, was so intrigued he developed a theory of consciousness from it, and then tried to educate the world about it by packaging it in a page-turner. Isn’t that downright common in science fiction?
That is what Peter Watts did not do with Blindsight. If you came out with that conclusion from reading the novel, I don’t know if we were even reading the same text. It is the antithesis of a moral guide. And you’re the first person I’ve seen describe Blindsight as a “page-turner”.
The Palliser novels* were page-turners for me. As were Bernhard, Nothomb, Dickens …
But the expression is not synonymous with fascinating read. There are fascinating reads whose pages I frequently stop turning for various reasons.
Reading Luhmann, I am often so struck by what he writes that I have to put the book down to think about the implications.
Reading Die Blendung (Canetti), I was so troubled by the story that I couldn’t read more than a few pages a day. It was like watching, on a monitor, open-heart surgery on myself.
*
# The Palliser novels are novels written in series by Anthony Trollope. They were more commonly known as the Parliamentary novels prior to their 1974 television dramatisation by the BBC broadcast as The Pallisers. Marketed as “polite literature” during their initial publication, … #
I found Blindsight pretty readable in fact, and I didn’t actively dislike it qua novel.
I could perhaps say what I didn’t take to about it was that I couldn’t maintain the willing suspension of disbelief well enough, because I think the central conceit of the plot (though certainly interesting) is just too implausible. With very good authors that doesn’t signify: to leave the great Russians out of it, the central conceit of Babel-17, for example, is not so much implausible as outright impossible, but Delany does such magic with it you just don’t care.* But Watts didn’t do enough to coat the pill of implausibility, either with enough cogent-seeming supporting pseudoscience or enough genuine human interest.
On this last point: I also find it hard to enjoy authors (even undoubtedly good ones, like Iris Murdoch) who telegraph their contempt for their own characters (Dickens is the shining star among authors who knew how not to do this, even with villains – he loves his Uriah Heaps and his Bill Sykeseses: they are wonderful monsters, not worms.)
* The Three Body Problem is another example. Much of the physics is not so much physically impossible as logically impossible, but it’s done with enough pizzazz that he pulls it off (I reckon,)
Stanislaw Lem, for example, had much more outrageously alien Aliens in Solaris and Fiasco. Babel-17 is tame by comparison.
Stu: I have not read Die Blendung yet, and I should have…
The Three Body Problem I just don’t want to read.
I think one reads Delany not for the alien aliens but for the alien humans.
authors … who telegraph their contempt for their own characters
This is why I couldn’t read Tom Holt. Pratchett’s generally another shining star on the other side.
@ Stu Clayton
cf perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Matters_(novel) ?
(sorry, unable to reply sooner)
“Yuval: can you think of anyone who established themselves as a writer (as versus a speaker) in other languages, and later became notable as a writer in Hebrew?
There must be some but I have a surprisingly hard time thinking of any. Mendele, kind of.”
“Basically every early modern writer in Hebrew (till, say, the ’60s) fits the bill; most notably of all Nobelist S.Y. Agnon.”
====
Most of rabbinic literature, going back to the period when Hebrew went out of use as an everyday vernacular, has been from the pen of non-natives.
The question is not about writers who were not native speakers — obviously there are a slew of them — but about writers “who established themselves as a writer (as versus a speaker) in other languages, and later became notable as a writer in Hebrew” [emphasis added], which is a much higher bar to clear.
I had forgotten that the Epicureans were already all over this issue of determinism and free will. Lucretius explicitly links the notion of clinamen “(atomic) swerving”, i.e. random microdeviations from predictability within his completely material and atomistic universe, to the possibility of free will (Book II 251ff):
Denique si semper motu conectitur omnis
et vetere exoritur motus novus ordine certo
nec declinando faciunt primordia motus
principium quoddam, quod fati foedera rumpat,
ex infinito ne causam causa sequatur,
libera per terras unde haec animantibus exstat,
unde est haec, inquam, fatis avolsa voluntas,
per quam progredimur quo ducit quemque voluptas,
declinamus item motus nec tempore certo
nec regione loci certa, sed ubi ipsa tulit mens?
“Again if all motion is ever linked together and a new motion ever springs from another in a fixed order and first-beginnings do not by swerving make some commencement of motion to break through the decrees of fate, that cause follow not cause from everlasting, whence have all living creatures here on earth, whence, I ask, has been wrested from the fates the power by which we go forward whither the will leads each, by which likewise we change the direction of our motions neither at a fixed time nor fixed place, but when and where the mind itself has prompted?”
I see that xkcd has solved this question of free will and determinism:
https://xkcd.com/2666/
Where can I order the upgrade? 😉
Sadly, if you are on Universe Lite™, you may well be predestined not to be able to.
Actual (slightly condensed but otherwise not edited) discussion from a Discord server I’m on…
“Universe Free honestly sounds like a Calvinist nightmare, unironically.”
“As in, a nightmare for Calvinists, or by Calvinists?”
“Let’s go with “yes”.”
The limitation to only four angels on the head of a pin is a dead giveaway, admittedly. Straight from the Institutes …*
* I expect.
What matters is, is the number of angels finite (if computation requires a material substrate) or not (if it doesn’t)?
Computation always requires a material substrate, even if it is only a brain in a vat performing the computation.
Perhaps you mean that what is being computed must be material. But that can’t be right either, otherwise it would not be possible to fall asleep by counting imaginary sheep. I’m not sure whether it makes sense to ask whether the number of imaginary sheep is infinite.
In these modern times, the question about angels and pinheads should be put in terms of cardinality. Assuming they don’t stand on each others’ shoulders, angel-on-pinhead cardinality cannot be greater than that of the continuum (the surface of the pinhead).
Yeah, that was a weak point. Should have been 1, ∞, ב_λ
A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what are unreachable cardinals for ?
Pratchett & Gaiman definitively answered the “Angels on a Pinhead” question in Good Omens – it’s only one angel, Aziraphale, because he’s the only one who ever learnt to dance.
Hah! Refuted by Benjamin Britten (as mediated by Auden):
At sounds so entrancing
The angels dancing
Came out of their trance
Into time again …
QED.