Democritus et Heraclitus ont esté deux philosophes, desquels le premier trouvant vaine et ridicule l’humaine condition, ne sortoit en public, qu’avec un visage moqueur et riant : Heraclitus, ayant pitié et compassion de cette mesme condition nostre, en portoit le visage continuellement triste, et les yeux chargez de larmes.
alter Ridebat quoties à limine moverat unum Protuleratque pedem, flebat contrarius alter.
Juvenal
J’ayme mieux la premiere humeur, non par ce qu’il est plus plaisant de rire que de pleurer : mais par ce qu’elle est plus desdaigneuse, et qu’elle nous condamne plus que l’autre : et il me semble, que nous ne pouvons jamais estre assez mesprisez selon nostre merite. La plainte et la commiseration sont meslées à quelque estimation de la chose qu’on plaint : les choses dequoy on se moque, on les estime sans prix. Je ne pense point qu’il y ait tant de malheur en nous, comme il y a de vanité, ny tant de malice comme de sotise : nous ne sommes pas si pleins de mal, comme d’inanité : nous ne sommes pas si miserables, comme nous sommes vils.
It seems to me that none of these interpretations [of quantum theory] is at all satisfactory, and in the gap left by the failure to ?nd a sensible way to understand quantum reality there has grown a pathological industry of pseudo-scienti?c gobbledegook. Claims that entanglement is consistent with telepathy, that parallel universes are scienti?c truths, that consciousness is a quantum phenomena abound in the New Age sections of bookshops but have no rational foundation. Physicists may complain about this, but they have only themselves to blame.
But there is one remaining possibility for an interpretation that has been unfairly neglected by quantum theorists despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that it is the closest of all to commonsense. This view that quantum mechanics is just an incomplete theory, and the reason it produces only a probabilistic description is that it does not provide suf?cient information to make de?nite predictions. This line of reasoning has a distinguished pedigree, but fell out of favour after the arrival of Bell’s theorem and related issues. Early ideas on this theme revolved around the idea that particles could carry ‘hidden variables’ whose behaviour we could not predict because our fun- damental description is inadequate. In other words two apparently identical electrons are not really identical; something we cannot directly measure marks them apart. If this works then we can simply use only probability theory to deal with inferences made on the basis of our inadequate information. After Bell’s work, however, it became clear that these hidden variables must possess a very peculiar property if they are to describe our quantum world. The property of entanglement requires the hidden variables to be non-local. In other words, two electrons must be able to communicate their values faster than the speed of light. Putting this conclusion together with relativity leads one to deduce that the chain of cause and effect must break down: hidden variables are therefore acausal. This is such an unpalatable idea that it seems to many physicists to be even worse than the alternatives, but to me it seems entirely plausible that the causal structure of space-time must break down at some level. On the other hand, not all ‘incomplete’ interpretations of quantum theory involve hidden variables.
One can think of this category of interpretation as involving an epistemological view of quantum mechanics. The probabilistic nature of the theory has, in some sense, a subjective origin. It represents de?ciencies in our state of knowledge. The alternative Copenhagen and Many-Worlds views I discussed above differ greatly from each other, but each is characterized by the mistaken desire to put quantum probability in the realm of ontology.
Peter Coles, From Cosmos to Chaos
I am far too ignorant to say how plausible Coles’s thesis is, other than that acausality doesn’t seem any less plausible than decoherence or Everett’s multiple-worlds. And it has the side effect of delegitimizing one of the most overused scientific metaphors of our time. (The most egregious example offhand being Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen.)
Isn’t this the best cover for a philosophy book…ever? (This volume concerns the Tractatus only.)
(Okay, maybe it would be better if everything in the painting was a word in the shape of the corresponding thing, like “TREE” in the shape of a tree, but this is still pretty good.)
Whatever my reservations about the New York Review of Books, if it subsidizes reissues of things like this, I pardon its sins. Extra points for choosing such an apt cover painting to implicitly portray its hapless professor hero:
And here is Stoner speaking:
Stoner looked across the room, out of the window, trying to remember. “The three of us were together, and he said–something about the University being an asylum, a refuge from the world, for the dispossessed, the crippled. But he didn’t mean Walker. Dave would have thought of Walker as–as the world. And we can’t let him in. For if we do, we become like the world, just as unreal, just as…The only hope we have is to keep him out.”
Walker is an ignorant, smooth-talking, careerist academic, and there’s little separating his portrayal in this book (from 1965, but taking place mostly in the first half of the century) from these sorts of people today. Stoner is an impractical dreamer, a farmboy who goes to a local college and discovers he loves literature, and so does his graduate work at the same school and then gets a professorship there. He makes two mistakes: he marries the wrong woman, and he makes the wrong enemy in his department. These are big mistakes, and he pays big for them.
I cannot recall any other academic novel that treats its subject material with such unremitting gravity. The standard model of an academic novel is to either indulge in high melodrama (Mary McCarthy, Iris Murdoch) or to make light of the intellectual pretenses of its characters (Kinsley Amis’s overrated Lucky Jim, Malcolm Bradbury’s far funnier Stepping Westward). Williams’s approach seems to have been to adopt the social realist approach of George Gissingand Sinclair Lewis’s more sober moments and apply it to the incongruous and hermetic world of a university. Consequently, he treats the small events of Stoner’s life with a sense of real consequence, as though they were matters of life and death. And so they become.
After his mistakes, Stoner is a defeated man, and it takes him years to recover. But what saves the novel from being just an exercise in misery is that Stoner does get his triumph. He fights against the inertial decline of his life, and he wins. It is, objectively speaking, a small triumph, but on the terms that Williams has set, it validates his existence without qualification. The novel is a passage from ideals that cannot be fulfilled to a non-tragic view of life, and it’s summarized best in this passage:
In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age, he began to know that it was neither a stae of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as an act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.
I don’t mean to downplay the brutally accurate portrayals of academic politics and fleeting trends, which feel absolutely au courant, but the novel would not stand out as it does if it did not treat its subject matter with the same respect and humility with which Stoner himself treats literature and teaching.
