The Morning After

Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier, 1624

There is an inn, a merry old inn
beneath an old grey hill,
And there they brew a beer so brown
That the Man in the Moon himself came down
one night to drink his fill.

The ostler has a tipsy cat
that plays a five-stringed fiddle;
And up and down he runs his bow,
Now squeaking high, now purring low,
now sawing in the middle.

The landlord keeps a little dog
that is mighty fond of jokes;
When there’s good cheer among the guests,
He cocks an ear at all the jests
and laughs until he chokes.

They also keep a horned cow
as proud as any queen;
But music turns her head like ale,
And makes her wave her tufted tail
and dance upon the green.

And O! the rows of silver dishes
and the store of silver spoons!
For Sunday there’s a special pair,
And these they polish up with care
on Saturday afternoons.

The Man in the Moon was drinking deep,
and the cat began to wail;
A dish and a spoon on the table danced,
The cow in the garden madly pranced,
and the little dog chased his tail.

The Man in the Moon took another mug,
and then rolled beneath his chair;
And there he dozed and dreamed of ale,
Till in the sky the stars were pale,
and dawn was in the air.

Then the ostler said to his tipsy cat:
“The white horses of the Moon,
They neigh and champ their silver bits;
But their master’s been and drowned his wits,
and the Sun’ll be rising soon!”

So the cat on his fiddle played hey-diddle-diddle,
a jig that would wake the dead:
He squeaked and sawed and quickened the tune,
While the landlord shook the Man in the Moon:
“It’s after three!” he said.

They rolled the Man slowly up the hill
and bundled him into the Moon,
While his horses galloped up in rear,
And the cow came capering like a deer,
and a dish ran up with the spoon.

Now quicker the fiddle went deedle-dum-diddle;
the dog began to roar,
The cow and the horses stood on their heads;
The guests all bounded from their beds
and danced upon the floor.

With a ping and a pong the fiddle-strings broke!
the cow jumped over the Moon,
And the little dog laughed to see such fun,
And the Saturday dish went off at a run
with the silver Sunday spoon.

The round Moon rolled behind the hill
as the Sun raised up her head.
She hardly believed her fiery eyes;
For though it was day, to her surprise
they all went back to bed!

— J.R.R. Tolkein, The Fellowship of the Ring

Happy 2015. May your new year be a pleasant, safe, and prosperous one.

© 2015 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

His Dark Materials

Joseph Wright, Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night, c. 1782

The best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t. … He’s not available because he’s not a being of a kind that would fit into our availability. … If God were knowable, why would we believe in him?

— Anne Carson

* * *
All religions [have] at least one common commandment: “Thou shalt not disfigure the soul.”

— Frank Herbert, Dune

* * *
Seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.

We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.

— Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials

Do not forget to build the Republic of Heaven where you are, my friends, starting with your family and friends this holiday season. Most of us have no more important work, and most of us will leave no more lasting legacy than this.

Happy Thanksgiving.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Courtly Love

Contrary to the cynicism that can pervade discussions of [mergers and acquisitions], many top level M & A advisors have a genuine concern about the integrity of large scale transactions and a desire for the fiduciaries involved to serve the interests they represent in a good faith and effective way. This is not to say that they do not seek to advance the interests of their clients in obtaining legitimate economic advantage, but they do want the game to be a fair one.

— Leo E. Strine, Jr., Chief Justice, Delaware Supreme Court ^1,2,3

¹ While I appreciate Chief Justice Strine’s sentiment and respect for the basic integrity and desire for fair play which does indeed hold sway among the large majority of professional advisor participants in M&A processes, I find his proposal that we make our lives—and those of our clients—before his and other benches easier by documenting in much greater detail the twists and turns of our recommendations and analyses in medias res of transactions to be both impractical and naive. Surely Chief Justice Strine, among all jurists, must appreciate the role accident, error, and chance play in almost every complex process such as a merger or acquisition and how, even when said twists and turns are faithfully and comprehensively memorialized the twin imps of imperfect memory and hostile interpretation can confuse and bedevil the faithful interpretation of the facts of the matter. I suspect Mr. Strine, being both professionally empowered and constitutionally predilected for the role of fact finder and detective, simply prefers a clearer trail of evidence to allow him to judge the facts of the case properly and render more equitable judgments. However, I also suspect virtually no internal or external investment bank counsel or deal lawyer of any kind will be remotely interested in providing more potential fuel for the fires of devious and aggressive plaintiffs’ counsel for the sole purpose of making Justice Strine’s and his colleagues on the bench’s jobs easier. After all, that is why they pay him the big bucks and solicit him to speak at ABA conferences: because his job is difficult. Plus, we never know when some bozo will relocate litigation jurisdiction away from the Halls of Justice and Light in Delaware to some one-horse hick town in Texas where the judges don’t even know how to read PowerPoint. I’ll go out on a limb and reckon his suggestion is not gonna happen anytime soon. It was a nice try, though.
² This quote also reminds me of an excellent article by philosopher David Papineau, who wrote about the distinction which can be drawn between the rules of the game and the notion of fair play in both sport and politics. I think a similar analysis could be performed for the highly ritualized, rule bound competition which is mergers and acquisitions. Maybe if you’re nice to me and send me a fruit basket I’ll undertake such an explanation one day.
³ Does it count as a blog post if the chief substance of your remarks lies sequestered in footnotes? Does it count as a speech? Did Chief Justice Strine read each and every footnote as well when he delivered his speech? These are some of the mysteries which consume my restless nights.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Labor Day

Diego Rivera, Melancholy Promenade, 1904

Thomasina: “Oh, Septimus! — can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides — thousands of poems — Aristotle’s own library! … How can we sleep for grief?”
Septimus: “By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”

— Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

Do you take stock, regularly, of what you are carrying in your arms, Gentle Reader? Do you take care to pick up and discard the right things, things which make you happy and proud to carry? Do you seek out and cultivate those things you will be pleased to press into the arms of companions who go on without you? Things they will be eager to carry themselves? Love, knowledge, kindness, and wisdom are big things, things which fill up your arms and your soul, but paradoxically weigh next to nothing: they are easy to carry. They make excellent gifts to bequeath at the end of your long journey.

Keep your eyes on the road before you. Stay alert for good things to add to your burden. Those are the legacy you will contribute to the march. That is how we will remember you.

It’s time to go back to work.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

In Memoriam: June 6, 1944

Claude Monet, Haystacks at Chailly at Sunrise, 1865

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

— Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”

Related reading:
Ernie Pyle, “A Pure Miracle” (June 12, 1944)
Ernie Pyle, “The Horrible Waste of War” (June 16, 1944)
Ernie Pyle, “A Long Thin Line of Personal Anguish” (June 17, 1944)

Note:
Poet and Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918, exactly one week before the signing of the Armistice which ended World War I. He had returned to the front from England in July 1918, where he had been treated for shell shock, even though he might have stayed on home duty for the duration of the war.

War correspondent and civilian Ernie Pyle was killed by machine gun fire on April 18, 1945 on Ie Shima, northwest of Okinawa. The monument American soldiers erected to him on site was one of three monuments the Japanese allowed to remain when the island was returned to their control after the war.


© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

A Foolish Consistency

Henri Matisse, Goldfish and Palette, 1914

In short, if you believe this, how can you also believe that? The answer is that the realms of belief supposedly existing in a condition of opposition and conflict are, at least to some extent, discrete. What you believe in one arena of human endeavor may have no spillover into what you believe, and do, in another.

Thus, for example, you may have assented to an argument that calls into question the solidity of facts, but when you’re not doing meta-theory, you will experience facts as solidly as the most committed and polemical of empiricists. In doing so you will not be inconsistent or self-contradictory because the question of a belief in facts arises only in the special precincts of philosophical deliberation. In everyday life, we neither believe nor disbelieve in facts as [a] general category; we just encounter particular ones in perfectly ordinary ways; and any challenge to one or more of them will also be perfectly ordinary, a matter of evidentiary adequacy or the force of counter examples or some other humdrum, non-philosophical measure of dis-confirmation. The conclusions we may have come to in the context of fancy epistemological debates (a context few will ever inhabit) will have no necessary force when we step into, and are asked to operate in, other contexts.

— Stanley Fish

Stephen Jay Gould made a rather controversial claim some years ago that science and religion operate in separate domains of authority, domains which he christened “Non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA). His separation was attacked from many directions, most successfully by those who pointed out that religion does not limit its claims to questions of meaning and value, but rather also makes existence claims (the history of the universe, the existence of miracles, etc.) and claims about the nature of physical reality.

Now we have New Atheists like Sam Harris declaring that science can answer moral questions, claiming that “moral values are facts, no different from the kinds of facts discovered by chemists.” Of course, Mr. Harris stacks the deck for his argument, unpersuasively in my opinion, by simply defining morality as that which can be measured by science. Presumably, under his schema, something like the knotty problem of evil, with which human beings have been struggling for millennia, can be conveniently reduced to a quantitative analysis of unambiguous results from an fMRI scan of someone’s brain. Aficionados of philosophical argument, whom Mr. Harris seems to discount as irrelevant, would probably consider this line of thinking a somewhat epic example of “begging the question.”

One need not be someone who denies that human beings are physical creatures who live in a universe existing independent of our consciousness to see that such reductionist twaddle is utter nonsense. Science is a fabulous collection of tools—an epistemological attitude, really—which has tremendously successful application to many aspects of our lives, primarily in helping us hypothesize and manipulate what is the nature of the reality we presume we inhabit. It is crackerjack in helping us identify and understand facts, but it has virtually nothing to say about the realm of meaning and value. Those are individual, interpersonal, and societal concerns which absorb us in our mental lives and interactions with each other. In order to grapple with that domain, we must employ different tools and different epistemological attitudes, and there is no independently existing universe of meaning or values we can test our beliefs against, fact-like, to see whether we are correct.

This perspective—that we need to and should use different mental tools and practices to address disjoint spheres of human experience—should worry no-one but those little minds burdened with the hobgoblin of foolish consistency. Human minds are protean instruments, and we should celebrate the fact we can plumb the depths of the sky with science in one minute, struggle with the meaning of our lives another, and wonder at the beauty of a painting or concerto the next. One might say this capacity is what makes us human in the first place.

Science is a wonderful hammer, but only someone with a desperately limited imagination could believe that everything we must grapple with is a nail.


© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Duty

Ansel Adams, Oak Tree, Snowstorm

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

— Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Happy New Year, my friends. May you find satisfaction in your duties, joy in your pleasures, and sufficient occupation in both.


© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Turning to Fresh Tasks

Carson River, Nevada, via the U.S. Department of the Interior

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, “I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.”
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

— Robert Frost “The Wood-Pile”

How many wood-piles, carefully cut and stacked, will we leave behind once we finally turn to the last of our fresh tasks? Perhaps it is not such a small thing to warm a forgotten corner of a frozen swamp with the decay of our life’s work. There are worse legacies to offer.

Happy weekend.


© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Our Glassy Essence

Richard Diebenkorn, Knife and Glass, 1963

But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.

— William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

* *
The central epistemological problems of philosophy do not arise primarily from within philosophy at all, but from the recurrence in every area of human thought and practice of rival interpretations, and rival types of interpretation, of events and actions. It is for this reason that every academic discipline is to some degree ineliminably philosophical. The literary critic, the historian and the physicist presuppose, even when they do not explicitly defend, solutions or partial solutions to the problems of representation and justification. Shakespeare and Proust, Macaulay and Charles Beard, Galileo and Bohr cannot be read and responded to adequately without epistemological inquiries and commitments. Moreover, the philosophical problems and solutions in each particular area have a bearing on those in other areas; often enough, indeed, they are the very same problems. Hence the need for a synoptic and systematic discipline concerned with the overall problems of justification and representation...

— Alasdair MacIntyre¹

* *
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.

— John von Neumann²

Press a practicing scientist, O Dearly Beloved, to explain what she does for a living and you will often (usually?) find her describing an extremely elaborate, well-constructed, and beautiful intellectual apparatus built to great height and breadth upon subtly shifting sands. As a von Neumann prediction machine, it is remarkably successful, at least in certain well-defined domains (e.g., quantum physics, astronomy), which she will no doubt point to with pride. Look a little closer, however, and you will begin to see lacunae, cracks, and jury-rigged joints papered over with vagueness and contradiction, especially at the gaps between different scientific disciplines or within the same discipline at different scales. Certain sections of the apparatus (like cosmology) seem to have abandoned their purported identity as prediction machines entirely and devolved into nebulous hypothesizing and vague handwaving. Others barely seem to merit the designation “science” at all. Look longer, and you begin to notice that virtually every section of the beautiful edifice is covered with permanent scaffolding and safety netting, with slightly dusty, battered “Under Construction” signs creaking forlornly in the breeze.

If she has any intellectual honesty, your scientist will acknowledge these defects with a slightly embarrassed shrug and an assurance that she and her colleagues are “working on it.” Pressed further, she will admit that the entire, vast apparatus—and every component section of it—is arguably only temporary, a stand-in theoretically ready to be torn down and discarded at a moment’s notice as soon as a more effective replacement is found. You will notice, however, that despite her protestations to the contrary she seems rather emotionally attached and intellectually committed to the existing bits, especially the ones she has devoted her career to understanding and perhaps improving. She also seems somewhat irrationally fond of the beauty of the apparatus—or what she claims to be its beauty, even though you may be unable to see it—and has real difficulty articulating why she believes the beauty of the machine makes it more fit for purpose, which is predicting future events.

* * *

Now far be it for me, a humble dilettante in all matters scientific, to deny the power, efficacy, and success of Science writ large. Without it—and without the legions of practical engineers and technicians who translate the pristine Platonic forms of pure science into messy, approximate, “good enough” directions for the construction of machines which actually work in the real world—you would not be able to read these words on your computer or mobile device and, more importantly, most of what you and I enjoy as perks of an advanced technological society would not even exist. As a cookbook, modern science is amazingly effective.

But it is important to guard against the notion, so often merely assumed by working scientists but occasionally trumpeted affirmatively by certain mouthpieces thereof, that the instrumental effectiveness of particular sciences provides prima facie proof that their underlying theories correctly describe the underlying reality of the world they purport to. For pace John von Neumann, rare is the scientist (or science writer) who can resist adopting the position that scientific theories actually describe that which is. Rare is the theorist who can treat her pet theory as merely a model which enables her to predict certain outcomes. Rarer still is the scientist who is content to ignore underlying reality (entities, causes, and effects) as a black box which doesn’t matter to the efficacy of her theorem. Such a perspective requires an intellectual rigor and discipline which is both rare and, as a matter of fact, practically unnecessary. Someone once quipped that most scientists are instrumentalists on Sunday and scientific realists the rest of the working week. It is simply easier to believe something like the Higgs Boson exists—or behave as if it does—than to practice particle physics as a mystifyingly effective physico-mathematical game.

The undeniable strength of science as a domain of human thought is that it embeds skepticism and contingency at the very root of its self-justification. Science is not science if it does not consist of theorems and hypotheses which are only—always and forever more—taken as potentially true until they are proven otherwise. And science itself declares its ambition to constantly test and retest its theories and assumptions for completeness, accuracy, and truth, even if this happens more often in theory than in fact. This is a highly admirable thing.

But science is not immune to the challenges of representation and interpretation which all human attempts to discover and describe the nature of reality are subject to. Science cannot finesse the influences and distortions which its practice by real human beings in real social contexts impose on it. Science cannot evade the problems of justification raised by choices driven more by aesthetics and intellectual convenience—like the preference for theories which are beautiful or which satisfy Occam’s Razor—rather than any a priori necessity. Science possesses no special defenses against the radical skepticism which calls into question our very relation to the world and each other. Science, in other words, does not hold a privileged position outside the core intellectual puzzles of human cognition and relation to reality.

* * *

All of which is simply to say that a scientist who claims that philosophy is dead and science has killed it is a fool. He or she is blind to the fact that philosophy is a discipline and way of addressing radical (from radix: root) mysteries and dilemmas at the core of our relationship to the world that science does not even touch. That science takes for granted. Such a scientist lives in a sort of intellectual Flatland, where the two-dimensional inhabitants are either incapable or terrified of grasping the notion they may be embedded in a universe which operates on them with constraints, causes, and effects they cannot even begin to comprehend. Such a scientist literally doesn’t have a clue what he or she is talking about.

The only cure for this, of course—now and always—is a healthy helping of humility. I struggle to remember mine every day.³

Related reading:
Sovereign Triviality (November 19, 2011)


¹ “Alasdair MacIntyre on the claims of philosophy,” London Review of Books, Vol. 2 No. 11, pp. 15–16.
² Cited in Derek Abbott, “The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics," Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 101 No. 10, pp. 2147–2153.
³ Those among you who have read this far only to be disappointed I did not offer stock tips or inside dirt on the size of Jamie Dimon’s washroom may take this post as either self indulgence or self-directed therapy, as you will. Given that this is my blogsite, after all, I couldn’t care less.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Kawase Hasui, Spring Evening at Kintai Bridge, 1947

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

— Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

We have had one of the longest and most beautiful Springs in New York City this year I can remember. The flowers and blossoming trees seem brighter and longer-lasting than normal, although I have nothing but faulty memory to claim this as fact.

Perhaps I have been more alert to signs of Spring than I am wont after a long and difficult Winter, and more appreciative of the tilting of our planet as balmy breezes and warming sunshine replace bitter freeze. Certainly there has been little enough change in my life for me to believe cold Winter has been banished for good. But hope rises up like tree sap.

The cherry blossoms and gardenias of Central Park fade already. Greedy trees suck up snow melt and sunshine to carpet the grass with shade and canopy over the sky with green. Hot, hard Summer is coming.

Get out now, while you can, and drink the sweet dregs of Spring while they last. There is a special glory to warm sunshine when it is tempered by cool grass and the chilly whispers of Winter’s reluctant departure on the breeze.

Get out now. One day there will come a Winter whose Spring you will never see. Do not waste the Spring you have today.

Nothing gold can stay.


© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

What Infinite Ocean

“Men, finding no answers to the sunnan [the ten thousand religious questions from the Shari-ah] now apply their own reasoning. All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God’s universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.”

* *
“Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you’ve always known.”

* *
“Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, ‘I am not the kind of person I want to be.’ It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.”

— Frank Herbert, Dune

With our cities and our lights, pale and ridiculous reflections of the heavens above, I fear too many of us have cut ourselves off from one of the greatest and most beautiful reminders of our own insignificance.

It has been too many years since I have lain out shivering under the stars on a clear, dark, cold night, far away from the city’s glare. Lay there long enough, and I remember feeling pressed against the ball of the Earth, suspended above an infinite ocean of stars with no sensation of up, down, left, or right. Only clear indigo emptiness stretching away forever beyond my reach, out there.

I never look up from the pavement anymore. I miss the stars.


© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Weekend Interlude

Berndnaut Smilde, Nimbus D'Aspremont, 2012

IV. DEATH BY WATER

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.

A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

— T.S. Eliot, from The Waste Land

As that other inevitability approaches tomorrow, do not forget the Boatman. Nobody ever said on his deathbed he wished he’d spent more time preparing taxes.


© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?

Henri Matisse, La Danse, 1910

I.
πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἐχῖνος δ'ἓν μέγα

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

— Archilochus
II.
Science is the characteristic product of our culture. Similarly, understanding where science fits in – metaphysically, epistemologically, morally, aesthetically and otherwise – is our characteristic philosophical problem; we’ve been working on it since Descartes. As of now, the hardest part is to reconcile a physicalistic ontology with the apparently ineliminable multiplicity of discourses that we require when we try to say how things are. Wilson thinks this appearance of tension is unreal. He suspects that if we resist consilience, that’s because we’re suffering from pluralism, nihilism, solipsism, relativism, idealism, deconstructionism and other symptoms of the French disease. Well, maybe, but I for one plead not guilty. It seems to me that scientific Realism is quite compatible with the view that events fall into revealing and reliable patterns not just at the level of micro structure but at many different orders of aggregation of matter. The heterogeneity of our discourse would then correspond to the heterogeneity of levels at which the world is organised, and both might well prove irreducible.

Everything is physical perhaps, but surely there are many different kinds of physical things. Some are protons; some are constellations; some are trees or cats; and some are butchers, bakers or candlesticks. For each kind of thing, there are the proprietary generalisations by which it is subsumed, and in terms of which its behaviour is to be explained. For each such generalisation, there is the proprietary vocabulary that is required in order for our discourse to express it. Nothing can happen except what the laws of physics permit, of course; but much goes on that the laws of physics do not talk about. It would not be entirely surprising if the explanatory apparatus that our higher-level theories require in order to say the sorts of thing that physics doesn’t, cross-classifies the taxonomy that physical explanation employs. Maybe this kind of picture is a viable alternative to consilience. Or maybe it’s not. Or maybe both are wrong. Or maybe it’s still too soon to tell.

— Jerry Fodor ¹
III.
However, the point which is most significant in the present context is that all these laws of nature contain, in even their remotest consequences, only a small part of our knowledge of the inanimate world. All the laws of nature are conditional statements which permit a prediction of some future events on the basis of the knowledge of the present, except that some aspects of the present state of the world, in practice the overwhelming majority of the determinants of the present state of the world, are irrelevant from the point of view of the prediction.

— Eugene Wigner ²

Physics in particular and the natural sciences in general constitute a remarkable intellectual accomplishment of the human race. While they are by definition neither invulnerable to challenge nor complete, they allow us to describe and predict a broad range of physical phenomena with astonishing accuracy and precision. They have enabled tremendous industrial and technological development, as well as allowing us to express the baser part of our natures with distressing power and efficiency.

But as Eugene Wigner explains, their success in large part depends on laserlike focus on only those phenomena which can be described with the explanatory apparatus they possess. Physics and the natural sciences succeed by ignoring particulars they deem irrelevant to their purpose and focusing on a limited number of real or hypothesized invariances which they can understand and manipulate. The present location of a carbon atom does not matter to particle physicists’ prediction of its mass, regardless of whether it resides in a coal seam thousands of feet underground, an air molecule exhaled from an athlete’s lung, or a patch of pigment on the surface of a Matisse painting.

And yet, outside the laboratory, factory, and classroom, the class of particulars which physics and its brethren ignore make up the vast body of phenomena and things which human beings experience every day. Variance is the main concern of our waking lives, not invariance. Variance is what most of us seek to understand, explain, and manipulate most of the time.

The natural sciences’ ability to describe the infrastructure of the world—what matter and energy do, and how we should expect them to behave—is a triumph of our species, and undeniably useful. But physics and chemistry and cosmology stand mostly mute before a painting or a concerto. They reveal the physical origin, composition, and interaction of the components, and how certain photons or sound waves propagate from the pigment or instruments, but they can explain almost nothing that really matters ³ about a work of art. Nor, what is more, about an election, a culture, or a civilization.

* * *Science is our best shot at explaining the constraints of our universe: what is possible, and what we should expect when events occur. Science may even be able, one day, to explain the origins and functioning of consciousness. But unless you believe the entire history of the universe, including all the thoughts, decisions, and actions of conscious beings everywhere, is completely and ineluctably predetermined by the physical facts of our universe, science will never be able to predict or explain the workings of our will. And our will, arising in an as-yet unexplained fashion from electrochemical reactions inside the spongy matrix of our physical brains, is what in turn affects and even alters the physical universe itself. Physical Matisse assembled physical objects to create that painting, then, in that fashion. Why? What does it mean to us? To you? How will that historical fact about that created physical object affect you? What are you going to do about it?

And if you don’t think a primitive figurative painting by a long-dead Frenchman matters much in the scheme of things, consider the atom bomb. Men and women decided to make that, too. Science tells us virtually nothing about why they did so, other than the relatively trivial fact that they could.

Many scientists scoff at philosophy, psychology, and cognate disciplines as empty gibberish, obscurantist mumbo jumbo.⁴ This is a mistake. Such disciplines are humans’ attempts to describe, explain, and, on occasion, even predict the constraints, facts, and nature of our consciousness and how it interacts with the world. This is not a trivial or misguided undertaking, for our consciousness affects the world, too.

Writing on science, Thomas Henry Huxley said,

To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.

Do not make the same mistake about the life of the human mind. Otherwise, you will pass through life incapable of actually seeing any of the paintings turned toward you.

Related reading:
Sovereign Triviality (November 19, 2011)
Pixels Don’t Breathe (May 17, 2011)


¹ “Look!,” London Review of Books, Vol. 20 No. 21 (29 October 1998), pp. 3-6.
² “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 13, No. I (February 1960).
³ Yes, that is a value judgment. Explain value judgment to me using science. Comprehensively. I’ll wait.
⁴ Mind you, some of it is. There is bad philosophy and bad psychology, just like there is bad science. It comes with the territory of being human.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

108 Bells

I have grown tired of the moon, tired of its look of astonish-
ment, the blue ice of its gaze, its arrivals and departures, of
the way it gathers lovers and loners under its invisible wings,
failing to distinguish between them. I have grown tired of
so much that used to entrance me, tired of watching cloud
shadows pass over sunlit grass, of seeing swans glide back and
forth across the lake, of peering into the dark, hoping to find
an image of a self as yet unborn. Let plainness enter the eye,
plainness like the table on which nothing is set, like a table that
is not yet even a table.

— Mark Strand, “Nocturne of the Poet Who Loved the Moon”

At midnight tonight, as they do on December 31st every year, Buddhist temples around Japan will ring out the old year with 108 chimes of the temple bell, in a ceremony called Joya no Kane. Each chime is supposed to symbolize the purification of one of 108 sins, defilements, errors, and worldly desires that stand in the way of a believer’s passage to Nirvana.

I am no Buddhist, but I am a firm believer in the psychological and, dare I say it, spiritual benefit of ritual. No matter what ritual you follow tonight, may you cleanse the errors and confusions from your past life and replace them with the clarity of a clean and hopeful future.

It is time to say goodbye to the last, tired moon of 2012. Say hello to the sunrise of a brand new year.


© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Santa Baby

Santa Cutie,
and fill my stocking with a duplex and checks;
Sign your ‘X’ on the line,
Santa Cutie,
and hurry down the chimney tonight.

Come and trim my Christmas tree
with some decorations bought at Tiffany;
I really do believe in you;
Let’s see if you believe in me...

— Eartha Kitt, “Santa Baby”

Here’s wishing Santa brings you everything you want this year.

For me, I’d just like a little more peace and joy.

Hurry down the chimney, Santa.

Happy Holidays.


© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Thanksgiving Day

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,—and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

— William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29

Lay aside your discontent, your envy, and your unhappiness today. Think not on your wealth, your possessions, your station in life, or the lack thereof. Think instead on the love which makes your brief journey here worthwhile: family, friends, life itself.

And smile.

Happy Thanksgiving.


© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Behind the Wall

“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

— Captain Ahab, Moby Dick

Of course Captain Ahab was insane. Completely bonkers. This should be well and truly understood.

But what, after all, is an insane person but someone who has once and for all dropped the pretense the rest of us cling to, day after day, that the world does not make some sort of horrible sense after all?


© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Prolegomena to Any Future Life

I.

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Panther” ¹

II.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other’s an atheist, and they’re arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says, “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God-and-prayer thing. Just last month, I got caught off away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I couldn’t see a thing, and I was totally lost, and it was fifty below, and so I did, I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out, ‘God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled: “Well then, you must believe now,” he says. “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist rolls his eyes like the religious guy is a total simp: “No, man, all that happened was that a couple Eskimos just happened to come wandering by, and they showed me the way back to the camp.”

— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water ²

III.

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” ³

IV.

Du mußt dein Leben ändern: You must change your life. That much is certain.

But I cannot tell you the way; you must find it yourself. For I am not a wise old fish, either.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

¹ Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. & trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage International, 1989, pp. 24–25.
² David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009, pp. 16–23.
³ Rilke, op. cit., pp.60–61.


© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Odalisque

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.

— Milan Kundera

A happy and peaceful weekend to you all, dogs included.


© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Resurrexit

I. To a Child dancing in the Wind

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?

II. Two Years Later

Has no one said those daring
Kind eyes should be more learn’d?
Or warned you how despairing
The moths are when they are burned?
I could have warned you; but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue.

O you will take whatever’s offered
And dream that all the world’s a friend,
Suffer as your mother suffered,
Be as broken in the end.
But I am old and you are young,
And I speak a barbarous tongue.

— William Butler Yeats

Youth will learn soon enough; too soon. Let them have their dance with the wind, the water, and the flame.

Happy Springtime. Happy Easter.


© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.