Category: Literature

“Fog everywhere” and Other Confusions

Charles Dickens gives us wonderful sociopolitical insight in his serial Bleak House, with his imagery of impenetrable fog in the second paragraph of chapter 1:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier–brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House. Bradbury & Evans, 1852-1853.

Think of the Trump–Epstein cover-up and the machinations of the U.S. government to attempt to conceal everything in a similar fog. We discussed another dimension of our ignorance with Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion that we “are unknown to ourselves”.

Let’s consider a third level of our confusion and how we attempt to extricate ourselves by expressing the world around us through mathematics. For example, the square root of -1 is i. ii is approximately 0.208. To a student encountering this concept for the first time, it can be inscrutable that an imaginary number to the power of itself results in a real number. To quote Wikipedia:

In electrical engineering, signal processing, and similar fields, signals that vary periodically over time are often described as a combination of sinusoidal functions (see Fourier analysis), and these are more conveniently expressed as the sum of exponential functions with imaginary exponents, using Euler’s formula.

Wikipedia, Euler’s formula [with added links]

The esteemed physicist Roger Penrose has said on multiple occasions that he believes the realm of imaginary numbers or complex analysis will be more informative in physics than real numbers. (See his classic book, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.)

Let’s conclude with our inevitable mortality as living beings as another source of perplexity and confusion. As we grow older, half of our mind is fixated on the enjoyment we get from life, while the other half is focused on the anxiety that it is not forever. We attempt to sidestep this anxiety by clinging to the escapist thought that “Besides, it’s always the others who die.”

Is There a Scheme of Things Underlying Everything?

In The Thibaults (the novel sequence for which Roger Martin du Gard won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Literature), a fundamental motif is the question of whether the universe is coherent. Roughly speaking, there are three competing schools of coherence—science, religion and art. Antoine Thibault discusses with the Abbé (French title for abbot):

Antoine did not seem to hear him. “Just think,” he exclaimed, “what it means to a youngster, when he’s turned loose, by gradual stages, on mathematics, physics, chemistry! Suddenly he discovers that he has all space, the universe, for his playground. And after that, religion strikes him as not only cramped, but false, illogical. Untrustworthy.”

Roger Martin du Gard, The Thibaults, translated by Philip Thody & Ellen Kennedy, Bantam Modern Classic Edition, Viking Press, 1968. page 762.

The climax of this debate appears when Antoine says:

“…I talked just now about Universal Order and a Scheme of Things; but that was merely to talk like everyone else. Actually it seems to me that we’ve as many reasons to question the existence of a Scheme of Things as to take it for granted. From his actual viewpoint the human animal I am observes an immense tangle of conflicting forces. But do these forces obey a universal law outside themselves, distinct from them? Or do they, rather, obey—so to speak—internal laws, each atom being a law unto itself, that compels it to work out a kind of ‘personal’ destiny? I see these forces obeying laws which do not control them from outside, but join up with them, which do nothing more than in some way stimulate them.…And anyhow, what a jumble it is, the course of natural phenomena! I’d just as soon believe that causes spring from each other ad infinitum, each cause being the effect of another cause, and each effect the cause of other effects. Why should one want to assume at all costs a Scheme of Things?…”

Roger Martin du Gard, The Thibaults, translated by Philip Thody & Ellen Kennedy, Bantam Modern Classic Edition, Viking Press, 1968. page 768.

The topic of an underlying scheme of things is close to the central question of Western civilization. In Plato’s Republic, we have the allegory of the dark cave occupied by humanity. It looks at shadows dancing on the wall, projected by a fire. Liberating humanity requires leaving the cave and climbing to the surface of the earth, glimpsing the sun for the first time. From here, with the help of philosophy, humanity flies off and encounters the Logos and the Eidos. Mathematical truth crowns this journey.

Aristotle, Plato’s star pupil and later rival, takes this quest and focuses on the biological. The Athenian tradition invents theory, a pillar of Western tradition, culminating in modern science. Jerusalem’s competing tradition, the Judeo-Christian worldview, derives its scheme of things from divinity before biology and mathematics. Thus, the novel’s debate is ultimately the struggle between Athens and Jerusalem.