Tag: W.B. Yeats

Chance and Necessity from the Perspective of W.B. Yeats

We have just seen “Chance and Necessity” from the perspective of Thomas Bayes and Jacques Monod. Before we get to the case of William Butler Yeats, let’s briefly consider famous non-scientific cases like Joseph Conrad’s Chance, Charles Sanders Peirce’s anthology of essays, Values in a Universe of Chance, and the phrase “nothing but chance,” which was central to the philosophy of Simone Weil.

Yeats attempted to use words to express largely numerical concepts. In the collection Mythologies, he wrote, “I think that all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours in the events of life, and that, as somebody says in Wilhelm Meister, accident is destiny;…” (p. 336) Here we have chance, but what about necessity? He later states, “I do not doubt those heaving circles, those winding arcs, whether in one man’s life or in that of an age, are mathematical…” (p. 340).

Finally, we read, “I have always sought to bring my mind close to the mind of Indian and Japanese poets, old women in Connacht, mediums in Soho, lay brothers whom I imagine dreaming in some mediaeval monastery the dreams of their village, learned authors who refer all to antiquity; to immerse it in the general mind where that mind is scarce separable from what we have begun to call ‘the subconscious’; to liberate it from all that comes of councils and committees, from the world as it is seen from universities…” (p. 343).

As may be expected from a fundamentally poetic nature, Yeats parts company with the mathematics and science of Bayes and Monod. Like the philosopher Heidegger, who valued equipmental being in use, Yeats is profoundly ruralist, revering the Irish peasant, who has a more primordial connection to nature and folklore. Yeats’ view of “chance and necessity” both mirrors mathematical or scientific thought while trying to remain divorced from it.

Scientism and Its Discontents: Movie About Hawking

Scientism is the view that science is truth and the rest is false, idiotic, or childish.

There’s a wonderful scene in the 2014 movie, The Theory of Everything (Eddie Redmayne plays Hawking) where the young Hawking is courting his wife to be at an evening party and he represents the quest for the theory of everything, hence the name of the movie.

His girlfriend expresses doubts about this and speaks a few words from the William Butler Yeats (died in 1939) poem “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” [full text]:

“Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass —”

The poet (and Hawking’s fiancee in the film) are suspicious of the science-and-nothing-else cosmologists and astronomers “who follow with the optic glass the whirling ways of stars that pass.”

William Butler Yeats (13 June, 1865–28 January, 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.

Yeats says in his works, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire.”

Our desire to “re-enchant” education might cause us to modify this Yeats aphorism slightly, “Education is not merely the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire.”