Polytropy

This post concerns different kinds of knowledge, as for example of Achilles, or Cyrus the Great, or even oneself.

According to the last sentence of the “Findings” column in Harper’s for June, 2023,

Researchers developed a blood test for anxiety, which was found to underlie the joy of missing out.

Those researchers need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.

Similar research is reported in the Guardian Weekly for 9 September, 2022. The article is called “‘I’m glowing’: How an app is helping us measure the joy of trees.” The app in question does not detect your joy in the woods; it gives you a way to record your own self-assessment for later study. However, writes Patrick Barkham,

several studies suggest that more biodiversity has a bigger boost on people’s mental health, while the recording of brain activity in response to forest density found a more relaxed state and reduced tension and fatigue in forests with a lower density of trees.

Are you going to need a brain scan to tell if you are chilling out? Other people may relax among a few trees; does that mean you will?

My grandfather Kenneth Crawford described his own grandparents’ house in Wisconsin as being

innocent of plumbing, central heat or telephone. But the proportions were good and it was set in a grove of assorted trees.

I wish he had named some of the trees in the assortment. Right now I’ve got doves cooing in the umbrella pines overhead. Beneath these are oleanders and laurels and pomegranate trees.

Apparently I am in Atarneus, which (I learn from Wikipedia) was

• given by Cyrus the Great to the Chians, after they surrendered to him Pactyes, the Lydian who rebelled after Cyrus left him in charge of Sardis;
• ruled later by Hermias the Tyrant, a friend of Aristotle;
• thought by Stephanus of Byzantium to be the Tarne mentioned near the beginning of Book V of the Iliad.

If you want to look it up in Herodotus, the story of Pactyes is a good one, particularly as it concerns the temple at Didyma. I enjoyed visiting that sanctuary when my wife and I and a few others spoke on Thales of Miletus in September, 2016, in the old Roman theater of his home town.

This is my first post since July 4 (of this year, 2024), when I had been finishing up the teaching of a course of number theory, as well as studying an essay called “History as Re-enactment of Past Experience,” included in Collingwood’s posthumous Idea of History. The author follows Croce in distinguishing between philological and historical knowledge.

About three centuries earlier, Chapman makes the same or a similar distinction, between grammatical and poetical knowledge, in commenting on Homer’s Iliad and his translation of it.

Recently on this blog, because I have been reading

• the Iliad in Chapman’s translation, along with
• Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad by Eva Brann (Paul Dry Books, 2002), as well as
• the Cyropedia of Xenophon,

I have been editing and adding to the posts in my two series on the 24 books of the Iliad:

1. Focussing on Chapman’s translation, from April 14, 2017, till September 26, 2019.
2. Using any convenient translation, mainly Murray or Lattimore, or even the Greek, from November 29, 2022, till May 12, 2023.

Among my additions to those posts are some comparisons with The Education of Cyrus, as for example on the question of whether, or how, a battle can be decided by courage rather than numbers.

In an ongoing discussion of Xenophon’s historical novel (the subject died a century before the author was born), a fellow participant recalled how Herodotus was a better historian than Thucydides, at least according to The Idea of History. The interlocutor had read Collingwood’s book in college, fifty years before.

Collingwood wrote about

persons who embrace the fundamental error of mistaking for history that form of pseudo-history which Croce has called ‘philological history’: persons who think that history is nothing more than scholarship or learning, and would assign to the historian the self-contradictory task of discovering (for example) ‘what Plato thought’ without inquiring ‘whether it is true’.

I wonder how many professors of philosopher teach what (they think) Plato thought, while leaving to their students the job of deciding whether it is true for them.

The Collingwood quote is from “History as Re-enactment of Past Experience,” which, as I said, motivated my last post. This was “Rethinking,” the only post since “Trial” on June 14, the last of a series of 31 posts on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The first of these posts appeared on July 30 last year (2023).

I expect to join a group reading Aristotle’s De Anima, starting in November. I may focus on the translation by my teacher David Bolotin, whom I quoted in “Nature” as saying that Aristotle

presents the true teaching about what our relation to the world must be, if, as I believe, the world as it’s given to us, the world in which we’re born, the world in which we die, is not just illusory or apparent, but it’s the truth. It’s the most real thing there is. It’s not just the necessary beginning of our thinking, but the truest object of our thinking as well.

When I shared this quote with him recently (having forgotten that I had already done so on April 30), a friend questioned whether there could be such a thing as a “true teaching” about the whole world.

I might ask the same thing. For one thing, by what test would one know the teaching to be true?

As I understand Collingwood’s distinction, philological knowledge is what you might use for publishing scholarly articles and impressing your academic colleagues; historical knowledge is more like knowledge of a friend.

George Chapman was a friend of Homer. As Collingwood distinguished the “philological” from the “historical,” so Chapman did the “grammatical” from the “poetical.” He wrote, in his commentary on Book I of The Iliads of Homer prince of poets· Neuer before in any languag truely translated,

Since I dissent from all other Translators, and Interpreters, that euer assaid exposition of this miraculous Poeme, especially where the diuine rapture is most exempt from capacitie, in Grammarians meerely, and Grammaticall Criticks, and where the inward sense or soule of the sacred Muse is onely within eye-shot of a Poeticall spirits inspection; (lest I be preiudiced with opinion, to dissent of ignorance, or singularity) I am bound by this briefe Comment, to shew I vnderstand how all other extants vnderstand; my reasons why I reiect them; and how I receiue my Author.

When he has been disrespected by Agamemnon, Achilles sheds tears that are “vnworthie, and fitter for children, or women, then such an Heroe” – according to other commentators, who, to back up their judgment, cite Plato’s Republic, Book III, in a passage that Chapman identifies as beginning with Ὀρθῶς ἄρα; this is Stephanus 387e, translated by Bloom as,

So, we’d be right in taking out the wailings of renowned men and we’d give them to women – and not to the serious ones, at that – and to all the bad men. Thus the men we say we are rearing for the guardianship of the country won’t be able to stand doing things similar to those such people do.

Lest we believe that bodily features such as tears are an infallible guide to moral worth, Chapman reminds us of

one president of great and most perfect humanitie, (to whom infinitely aboue all other, we must prostrate our imitations) that shed teares, viz. our All▪perfect and Almightie Sauiour, who wept for Lazarus.

A distinction between grammatical, philological understanding, on the one hand, and poetical, historical understanding, on the other, was recognized by Moses Hadas, “Teacher, translator, scholar, rabbi, husband, and father” (1900–1966). By the account of his daughter Rachel, if not for teachers such as her father,

generations of students who knew no Greek and Latin and did not major in classics might never have had the opportunity to read translations of epic or tragedy in the first place.

I have noticed that Rachel Hadas is one of several scholars whose praise adorns Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments. In her memoir of her father, Hadas quotes him as saying,

I am so far a renegade from the principles of my own teachers as to believe that the teaching of ancient books in translation, even of the Bible, is a good thing. In the early years of my own teaching I had simultaneously a course in Euripides, with four students, and one in Greek tragedy in translation, with twenty. At the end of the term I decided that it was useless to set the Hellenists the usual examination, for I had heard them perform daily, so I asked them the questions on Euripides which I was putting to my tragedy class; I had after all not limited my exegesis to metrics and grammar. I learned a useful lesson when I found that what the English readers had received was more meaningful and more likely to endure than what the Hellenists had learned.

Unfortunately it sounds as if Hadas examined his students on what he had taught them, rather than on what they had learned by whatever means. It would be interesting to see the actual questions on Hadas’s Euripides examination.

Apparently there’s a belief that knowledge delivered in a lecture or essay is the only kind worth having:

I would never read a book … I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

So said convicted felon Sam Bankman-Fried (born 1992), as I noted in writing “On Homer’s Iliad Book III,” along with the response of Molly Roberts in The Washington Post:

it’s easier to argue that you can learn everything you really need to know about the history of securities regulation from a cleverly constructed issue brief than it is to insist that if someone tells you Elizabeth Bennet ends up marrying Mr. Darcy, you’ve absorbed the sum total of “Pride and Prejudice.”

The same point is made by a young man (at least he looks like a young man in his photo) in an essay called “Men need to see that novels aren’t for losers”:

Novels contain a kind of knowledge that cannot be condensed or summarised.

I think James Marriott is quite right, although he prefaces his remark in a questionable way:

We neglect an important distinction once made by the critic John Carey, who wrote that successful works of literature “do not tell you what the truth is, they make you feel what it would be like to know it”.

A novel may make us feel something, but can that be a feeling of knowledge, without the knowledge itself?

In reviewing a book called I Wish I’d Been There: Twenty Historians Revisit Key Moments in History (edited by Theodore K. Rabb and Byron Hollinshead), Niall Ferguson wrote,

“What I really want to know,” writes Josiah Ober, at the death of Alexander the Great, “is what it felt like to be at the centre of the world, at a moment when human history had reached one of its great turning points.”

I would say (as I did in “Re-enactment”), you cannot know what it feels like to be Alexander, without actually conquering the world. In the same way, you cannot know what it feels like to be on the Olympic podium, without putting in the years of training to get there.

There is a possibility of knowing the thought of Alexander the Great, or of Simone Biles. I could talk about this in terms of Collingwood, of whom Ferguson claims to be an admirer, without having understood him very well, as far as I can tell. These are difficult matters, and some people will be sure that I cannot understand feelings such as they have them; but then that is somehow the whole point.

Well before I read Collingwood, I read, or was read, a story called “The Innkeeper’s Reward,” in one of the volumes of Childcraft. The innkeeper has hosted Napoleon while the French army are camped all around. The Emperor insists that his host name his price. The response is,

We have heard that when you were in Russia, the Russians captured the farmhouse where you were sleeping and that you hid up the chimney while they searched for you. We would consider it a reward if you would tell us how you felt while the Russians were searching for you.

The Emperor flies into a rage. He has the innkeeper and his wife tied up before a firing squad. Then he calls off the execution and explains,

Now you know how I felt while the Russians were searching for me.

Terror can be created by a ghost story or a horror film. I don’t think it’s the same kind of thing as when somebody ran out of his house one night, yelling, wielding a sword, because he thought I was doing something to his car.

The last quotation from James Marriott continues, first with the sentence I quoted first:

Novels contain a kind of knowledge that cannot be condensed or summarised. When I first read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, I knew that I had learnt something important about what it is like to be a teenage girl – the awkwardness, the embarrassment, the sudden disorienting sexual attention of men.

Obviously, I had been told about those things before. But Ferrante, to employ Carey’s useful phrase, made me feel what it was like to know it. Emotional understanding is a kind of knowledge humans can assimilate and machines cannot. It should not be underrated.

I have read Charlotte Brontë and Betty Friedan, but not Elena Ferrante. Did she give James Marriott a feeling, or knowledge? I think there’s a difference:

• knowledge can be incorrect;
• feelings cannot.

If knowledge is always correct, because otherwise it is not knowledge, then the point remains, since one is left in doubt as to whether one really knows something, whereas there is no illusory feeling. A feeling may lead one to believe in an illusion, but that is something else.

Thus I have to question the following vignette from The Pocket Rumi Reader, edited by Kabir Helminski:

The Touchstone

Iblis asked, “Can you tell a lie from the truth,
you who are filled with illusion?”
Muawiya answered,
“The Prophet has given a clue,
a touchstone to know
the base coin from the true.
He has said, ‘That which is false troubles the heart,
but Truth brings joyous tranquility.’”

This is given as Mathnawi II, 2732–34. I suppose Iblis is the Devil, and Muawiya is the first Umayyad caliph, thus perhaps representing sectarianism.

As I understand, a touchstone is for telling how much gold is in a coin. You rub the coin along the stone, and the color of the streak reveals the purity. I have never done this or seen it done.

Another test of the purity of a coin is performed with one’s teeth. Perhaps this is the ultimate reason why Olympic victors bite their medals.

These tests would seem to be simple ones that anybody can perform.

Tests for the efficacy of a vaccine are not so simple; but there are protocols for the tests, and I suppose that anybody who will learn the protocols can in principle perform the tests.

There is no such test for mathematical truth, at least. It may well bring the Prophet’s “joyous tranquillity” to the trained mathematician; however, this tranquillity is not a foolproof confirmation that truth has been found.