Pieter Geyl, Meta Intelligence

Arguments Without End: A Few Simple Examples

In the previous essay (“Is It Good to Be a Detached Observer?”), we just encountered Geyl’s phrase, “arguments without end.” Here we cover a few simple examples.

Language and the Mind

The twentieth century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, tells us that his purpose is “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” Where the fly is, of course, ourselves. He then tells us, that perhaps the main reason is that one is unable to free oneself from bewitchment of the mind by “language games.”

In the song “Hotel California” by the Eagles, there’s the line, “‘We are all just prisoners here / Of our own device.’” In this context, “device” could be interpreted as a bad decision.

My Body and Myself

The American philosophy professor, Samuel Todes, in his book Body and World, analyzes the human body, not as a meat-machine, but more like the silent partner of a person navigating their life. You can get a sense of this from Gabriel Marcel, when he writes:

Is my body my body, for instance, in the same sense in which I would say that my dog belongs to me? The question, let us first of all notice, of how the dog originally came into my hands is quite irrelevant here. Perhaps I found it wandering wretchedly about the streets, perhaps I bought it in a shop; I can say it is mine if nobody else puts in a claim for it—though this is still quite a negative condition of ownership. For the dog to be really, not merely nominally, mine there must exist between us a more positive set of relations. He must live, either with me, or as I, and I alone, have decided he shall live—lodged, perhaps, with a servant or a farmer; whether or not I look after him personally, I must assume the responsibility for his being looked after. And this implies something reciprocal in our relations. It is only it the dog recognizes me, obeys me, expresses by his behaviour towards me some feeling which I can interpret as affection or, at the very least, as wholesome fear, that he is really mine; I would become a laughingstock if I persisted in calling an animal that completely ignored me, that took no notice of me at all, my dog. And the mockery to which I would be exposed in such an instance is very significant. It is linked to a very positive idea of how things must be between my dog and me, before I can really say, ‘This dog is mine’.
Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1: Reflection & Mystery, Harper Torchbooks, 1965, page 117.

Marcel goes on to explain:

We should recall, at this point, what we said in an earlier lecture about the body; the latter is not merely an instrument, it presents us with a kind of reality which is quite different from the reality of any sort of apparatus, in so far as it, my body, is also my way of being in the world.
Marcel, page 257.

Marcel elaborates:

When I try to make clear to myself the nature of my bond with my body, it appears to me chiefly as something of which I have the use (as one has the use of a piano, a saw, or a razor); but all these uses are extensions of the initial use, which is simply the use of the body. I have real priority to my body when it is a question of active use, but none whatever when it is a question of knowledge. The use is only possible on the basis of a certain felt community. But the community is indivisible; I cannot validly say ‘I and my body.’ The difficulty arises from the fact that I think of my relation with my body on the analogy of my relation with my instruments—whereas in fact the latter presupposes the former.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, Harper Torchbooks, 1965, page 14.

The connections between the trio of “me, myself and I” and the body is very elusive (as you may sense from your own introspection). This is another “argument without end.”

Psychology and National Moods

The great historian, George Rudé, in his book, Revolutionary Europe, 1783-1815, tries to give a believable and multifactorial explanation of the French Revolution. Based on Ernest Labrousse’s studies of the French economy during that period, Rudé gives a thoughtful and subtle analysis of how wages, prices and other factors correlated to unrest. Interestingly, he concludes on a note of French national mood:

But, of course, it needed more than economic hardship, social discontent, and the frustration of political and social ambitions to make a revolution. To give cohesion to the discontents and aspirations of widely varying social classes there had to be some unifying body of ideas, a common vocabulary, of hope and protest, something, in short, like a common “revolutionary psychology”. In the revolutions of our day, this ideological preparation has been the concern of political parties; but there were no such parties in eighteenth-century France.
George Rudé, Revolutionary Europe, 1783-1815, Wiley, 1964, page 74.

Rudé uses the phrase, “revolutionary psychology.” Apply this to our time and ask yourself, did a demagogue like Donald Trump create a revolutionary psychology, or did it cough up Trump? Notice that in the recent political tract, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank makes the point that people’s sense of grievance involves not only economics, but also other psychological factors, just as Rudé does with the French Revolution.

Is It Good to Be a Detached Observer?

The famous Dutch historian, Pieter Geyl, in his Napoleon, for and against (Dutch, Napoleon: voor en tegen in de Franse geschiedschrijving) teaches us that there are “arguments without end.” One example is the question surrounding the concept of detachment. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, proposes “eudaimonia,” a Greek word literally translating to the state or condition of good spirit coming from imperturbability. This sense of things is all over the Western tradition. Think of the line from the British poet, Alexander Pope, “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.” (An Essay on Criticism, 1711). You see from this that fools lack detachment and act on impulse.

We get a confirmation of Geyl’s arguments without end when we remember that almost every love song recommends the opposite. For example, “Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear to Tread)” originally made famous by Frank Sinatra and later Elvis Presley, offers us the line “But wise men never fall in love / So how are they to know.” From this, we can interpret that wise men can be foolish and foolish people can be wise. You may also have in the back of your mind Tennyson’s “Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.” It is not wise to be careful always.

We get a twist on this in the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific. Think of “Some Enchanted Evening”:

Who can explain it?
Who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons—
Wise men never try.

Fools give you reasons because they think everything can be explained, where wise men realize this is not always true. The larger point, from existential thinker Gabriel Marcel, is that all the phenomena of life that are explainable are themselves wrapped up in a larger mystery. He discusses the question of detachment in Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, which we covered in “Existence and the Problem of Separability” and “Is the World Broken?”.

Marcel says:

March 8th [1929]

I am more and more struck by the difference between the two modes of detachment: the one is that of the spectator, the other of the saint. The detachment of the saint springs, as one might say, from the very core of reality; it completely excludes curiosity about the universe. This detachment is the highest form of participation. The detachment of the spectator is just the opposite, it is desertion, not only in thought but in act. Herein, I think, lies the kind of fatality which seems to weigh on all ancient philosophy—it is essentially the philosophy of the spectator.

But one thing must be noted: the belief that one can escape pure spectatorship by devotion to a practical science, which cannot quite clearly formulate it as yet. I should express it by saying that the modifications which such a science imposes on reality have no other result (metaphysically of course than of making that science in some sense a stranger to reality. The word ‘alienation’ exactly expresses what I mean. ‘I am not watching a show’—I will repeat these words to myself every day. A fundamental spiritual fact.

The interdependence of spiritual destinies, the plan of salvation; for me, that is the sublime and unique feature of Catholicism.

I was just thinking a moment ago that the spectator-attitude corresponds to a form of lust; and more than that, it corresponds to the act by which the subject appropriates the world for himself. And I now perceive the deep truth of Bérulle’s theocentrism. We are here to serve; yes, the idea of service, in every sense, must be thoroughly examined.

Also perceived this morning, but still in a confused way, that there is profane knowledge and sacred knowledge (whereas previously I have wrongly tended to assert that all knowledge was pro-fane. It isn’t true, profane is a supremely informative word). Inquire on what conditions knowledge ceases to be profane.

Incredible how thronged these days are spiritually! My life is being illuminated right into the depths of the past, and not my life only.

Every time we give way to ourselves we may unawares be laying an additional limitation on ourselves, forging our own chain. That is the metaphysical justification for asceticism. I never understood that till now.

Reality as mystery, intelligible solely as mystery. This also applies to myself.
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, Harper Torchbooks, 1965, pages 20-21.

Notice this discussion starts by analyzing modes of detachment and concludes with Marcel talking about reality and himself as mystery. This brings us full circle to Geyl and his concept of arguments without end because trying to define pros and cons of detachment and what is a mystery is ultimately undecidable. This may remind you of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, that finding a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible.

Arguments Without End: Are They Good or Bad?

The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl (died in 1966) coined the phrase “argument without end” to get at the constant reappearance of old arguments or viewpoints. One gets the impression that arguments are either persistent or perhaps permanent. One simplistic example could be argument about socialism: Sweden is “good,” but Venezuela (or Cuba) is bad. This book takes the view that “arguments without end” are not the end of knowledge but rather a potential beginning: it could be that some issues cannot be captured by one school of thought: the awarding of the 1974 Nobel Prize to both Hayek (“the right”) and Myrdal (“the left”) is an example of this need for hybridity. Both Hayek and Myrdal are each seeing something valid and it’s a “fool’s errand” to decide who is “eternally” correct.

Let’s apply this thinking to a deep “argument without end” within and about history.

Michel Foucault (died in 1984) following Nietzsche, argues that history seems “linear” but is more random and non-linear than the “linear” historians see or admit.

There’s an aphorism in Nietzsche, (from his The Dawn) which Foucault uses…history is made by the “iron-hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of chance.”

In other words the world we know, traveling somehow from the assassination of Kennedy (November 2, 1963) to the impeachment hearings of Trump in October 2019, must be thought of as a kind of “random walk” behind which are trends, cycles, so that one gets a fusion of structure and surprise. If you emphasize surprise you’re closer to Foucault than to those narrative historians who think they can show you the exact threads which connect “then and now.”

Here’s an example of such a historian, the celebrated G.R. Elton of England, whose classic The Tudor Revolution in Government is a masterpiece of orthodox analysis. The book centers on the administrative revolution in the 1530s in England which implied, says Elton, “As regards political and social structure, the sixteenth century produced something quite new in England—the self-contained sovereign state in which no power on earth could challenge the supremacy of statute made by the crown in parliament.”

“In this revolution, in this making of a new kind of state productive of a new kind of society, administrative reforms played their part. It is against this background of controlled upheaval that they must be seen and understood.”

(Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government, Cambridge University press, 1966, page 426/427)

Orthodox historians see history as a “nail-down-able” system of storylines and the controlled upheavals have a direction (teleology) which allows you to use—in this case the 1530s in England—as a beginning, an origin, a “datum line,” and once you have this clear starting point you can follow the story to now and include comparative developments in France or Germany or China.

The orthodox “explain strategy” starts with an origin, a “starting gate” like a horse-race.

The Foucault–Nietzsche view is that these starting points are not entirely useless but in the end don’t help you because history is in the end governed by “the dice-box of chance” even if it is held by “the iron-hand of necessity.” History is more “upheaval” than “control” more surprise than structure. “Determinism” such as perhaps based by pinning down a starting point from which one can “build out,” is a wish-dream since history is nonlinear and nondeterministic. Even Elton’s phrase “controlled upheaval” is full of questions and problems.

Modern “complexity theory” in mathematics tries to get at these differences analytically. A “meta-intelligent” student would go from this historians’ “argument without end” to the analysis of complexity in math as a way of rounding out the exploration.

An “argument without end” can thus be useful if the student does not insist on some final “apodictic” or certain-forever answer.

Enchantment as an “Engine of Education”

We started this book mentioning Wittgenstein’s assertion, “Light dawns gradually over the whole.”

There are two “players”—light (illumination) and the whole.

The learner, especially the deeper variety of learner, then has two quests: the flashlight or searchlight that gives off the light and the “problem” of defining “the whole.”

We argue in this book only something called “enchantment” (seeing the magic in some question or phenomenon or thing) can be the engine that gives you the impetus to go on in this double search.

For example:

Think of the opening line in the great novel from 1959, The Last of the Just, which won the Goncourt Prize, the highest literary award in France.

The opening line, which serves as a kind of “overture” for the entire book, is:

“Our eyes register the light of dead stars.”

The author uses this as a figure of speech which captures the lasting influence of people who came before you who somehow are “stars” in the sense of principal actors in your mental life. When you begin the novel, you don’t know if the writer is going to use this concept not as a statement about stellar objects in the sky, as understood by astronomy or cosmology or optics, but in the personal influence sense, as he does.

This is a beautiful “overture” because it links the physical to the personal in a “dual metaphor.” There’s a secondary poetical device since stars could mean shiny objects in the sky or people as in “movie stars.”

Great writing has this “enchanting” quality and it addresses a deep human hunger for so-called “words to live by.”

Go back to our elementary math example where 1=.9 recurring.

A student gets intrigued by this and senses “how can that be? how can you add these decimal nines infinitely?

In fact, this is a deep and “enchanting” question. If you look into something called infinitesimals (smallest math “objects”) you will find that this issue is still an “argument without end” to use Pieter Geyl’s phrase.

Furthermore: If something is or seems to be “an argument without end,” what does that imply about our ability to “nail” things down in our minds? That’s an enchanting question in itself which resonates with the Descartes “epistemology” and certitude quest we have seen previously.

Then there’s the other elusive “player” in the Wittgenstein sentence: “the whole.”

Does one mean the whole of a novel or math problem? The whole of the world of metaphors and numerical thinking (i.e., math)? Does one mean everything that exists? It’s not a set or static “thing.”

The point is not to decide any of this in a “once-and-for-all” way. The point is only to allow the enchantment engine to carry the student into these realms and domains without insisting on an eternal “final answer.”

This is why this kind of meta-intelligent self-education or re-education parts company with quests such as Stephen Hawking’s, to “know the mind of God” as mentioned in the last lines of his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time.

Enchantment gives you some pre-understanding which pulls you higher and you can relax the insistence on finality or absolute certainty which characterizes the whole trajectory from Descartes through Husserl, who died in 1938 (think of his book, Cartesian Meditations) through contemporary “scientism” such as exemplified by Hawking with his undoubted analytical genius.

What Is Meta-Intelligence?

You have heard of meta-data and perhaps meta-analysis. In meta-analysis you don’t (say) study climate change directly, rather you study all the research and all the reports and papers on climate change trying to sense a grand overall conclusion and implication rather than simply making a synopsis or summary.

Meta-intelligence is in this spirit because it wants to get an overview of other overviews, a view of views.

Let’s do one example, namely, Paul Tillich (died in 1965), the famous German-American thinker.

He “walks around” human language and notices:

“Language… has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.”

He also senses a missing dimension in all modern science: “Whenever man has looked at his world, he has found himself in it as a part of it. But he also has realized that he is a stranger in the world of objects, unable to penetrate it beyond a certain level of scientific analysis. And then he has become aware of the fact that he himself is the door to the deeper levels of reality, that in his own existence he has the only possible approach to existence itself.”

(Systematic Theology I, University of Chicago Press, 1951)

In other words, we design equations and experiments that suit our ways of seeing and thinking, our brains and nervous systems and we never really know if we are glimpsing eternal laws of nature or patterns that satisfy us given the way we are.

We can’t see what part of our scientific world-view is a construct as opposed to a pure discovery.

We never really know: are these problems? Difficulties? Puzzles?Mysteries?

Gabriel Marcel, the French thinker who taught at Harvard in the 1950s, teaches us that a puzzle is something we might successfully surround and solve while a mystery is something that surrounds us and cannot be solved like a puzzle, an issue, a query, a question.

Meta-intelligence is aware of these levels and layers and doesn’t fall into a Descartes-type “whirlpool of doubt” since it accepts the great historian Pieter Geyl’s (died in 1966) category of the existence of “arguments without end” (i.e., finality is always “shy”).

Connectivity and the Need for Meta Intelligence

Arguments without end and our attitude to them:

A reader of this book might ask:

How far does this quest for more holism go? Are there limits on this type of inquiry?

This is a very good question. In order to answer this, we quote something from the famous French historian, Michelet, who died in 1874:

“Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest….all science [i.e., knowledge] is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather all form a single system.”
(quoted in To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1940, page 8)

Our attitude to such radical system building is non-committal. Rather we say, you the student should pursue flexible forms of increased connection and holism while you acquire knowledge and extend it and not worry about some once-and-for-all system underneath or beyond everything. We propose exercises in holism and all exercises are replaceable with new ones or better ones and there’s no “final layer” or hidden “mind of God” to use Stephen Hawking language. The existence of some underlying or final system is something like an “argument without end” (to use Pieter Geyl language).

This argument is captured by the classic “fight” between Hegel (the person that Marx and Kierkegaard rebelled against and who died in 1831) and Adorno in the twentieth century.

Hegel says: The whole is the true. Adorno (who died in 1969) says: The whole is the false.

We skip all such fights.

Thinking about University Knowledge Again:

One cannot major in every field. One cannot make everything a university offers your specialty or concentration.

“Sartor Resartus:” The great British critic Thomas Carlyle (who died in 1881), close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote a famous satire called “Sartor Resartus or The Tailor Retailored” where he lampoons a certain Professor Devil’s-crud who teaches at Don’t-Know-Where University and is Professor of Everything.

Obviously, we are not proposing the creation of professors-of-everything and propose nothing more than the heightened ability to “zoom out” of academic fields, topics, lectures, topics, campuses.

A person who has similar intuitions is Alfred North Whitehead of Harvard (died 1947) who says in his essays on education that the real purpose of university education is to enable the learner to generalize better using that person’s field as a help or aid. The purpose of a university cannot be fields and monographs within fields alone.