The Irrational Laws of Civility

 On 30 September 1645, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia wrote to René Descartes a letter including

To benefit from the particular truths you mention, we would need an exact knowledge of all these passions and preconceptions, of which most people are unaware. When we observe the customs and values of the country we are in, we sometimes discover extremely irrational ones, which we have to conform to in order to avoid greater disadvantages.

Since I have been here [Riswijk], I have had the most vexing proof of this, because I hoped that a stay in the country would do me good by providing opportunity for study; and yet I find that I have incomparably less free time than I had at the Hague, through having to entertain people who do not know what to do with their time; and although it is very unfair to deprive myself of real benefits in order to provide them with imaginary ones, I am obliged to yield to the irrational laws of civility in order not to make enemies. Since I started this letter, I have been interrupted at leas seven times by such troublesome visits.

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia was daughter of "the Winter King", granddaughter of James I of England. Her letters to Descartes show a lively, clear intelligence.

The letter appears in The Passions of the Soul and Other Late Philosophical Writings of René Descartes, translated by Michael Moriarty.

 

Production Values

 The New York Times crossword puzzle for Sunday, March 29, included the clue "Odd-numbered page"  for the word "recto". This came to mind on Saturday when I was re-reading Mental Acts: Their Content and Their Objects by Peter Geach. It is not that Geach touches on the terms of publishing and printing, rather that I became aware that the odd-numbered page I was reading was on the verso of the physical leaf. And so it runs from page 1 (verso) through page 136  (recto).

This did not impede my reading, merely annoyed me as another example of the carelessness of production at Legate Street Press, which I have complained of before. What did slow me a little was off-by-one errors in references to sections. At times a reference to §x will turn out to be a reference to §x + 1. So in §18, there is a reference to an a treatment in §18, which turns out to mean §19. Now these are are not the sort of errors that can be introduced by optical-character recognition (OCR), which the press pretty clearly used. Was the volume copied by some chance an uncorrected proof?

Carelessness like this is why I qualify my enthusiasm for works moving quickly into the public domain. I don't just want the text of a book, I want the corrected text, meaning among other things text with the references to section numbers squared away. I want some context, for example the date of publication. I would like assurance that somebody, not necessarily a philosopher, but a competent editor, has looked at the page proofs before the book went to press. And that assurance is destroyed by a contradiction of the long-standing practice that odd numbered pages appear on the verso, and by erroneous section references.

Every One is Entitled

 The Gutenberg project this week feature among other books Volume II of Alexander Herzen's My Life and Thoughts. Looking into it, I noticed

Who is entitled to write his reminiscences?

Every one.

Because no one is obliged to read them

In order to write one’s reminiscences it is not at all necessary to be a great man, nor a notorious criminal, nor a celebrated artist, nor a statesman—it is quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell, and not merely to desire to tell it but at least some little ability to do so.

Every life is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter into another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another’s heart, and to listen to its beating ... he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks in himself confirmation, justification, sympathy....

But may not memoirs be tedious, may not the life described be colourless and commonplace?

Then we shall not read it—there is no worse punishment for a book than that.

Simon Leys quotes the first three sentences in his essay Overtures, collected in The Hall of Uselessness.

I think that "some little ability" to tell something is only so widely distributed. Still, as an account of why we like to read memoirs, Herzen is correct.

Reviewing

 About forty years ago, The Washington Post published a review of a biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton, I suppose the one by Edward Rice. The reviewer was Anthony Burgess, the review was informative and readable. Presently the Post's book section carried a letter praising the quality of Burgess's sketch of Burton's life, and remarking on his graciousness in making a passing mention of Rice's book.

Today I went to the Gutenberg Project to check on something Macaulay wrote, and having found it, read on in the Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays, Volume III. In part this was a hunt for typographical errors to be sent in as errata: the text appears to have been created through optical character recognition (OCR), which is pretty good but here and there subject to error. In part this was because (of course) Macaulay is very readable.

The essays in the volume are mostly reviews, and reviews of the sort that the Post's correspondent complained of. The author is often enough dismissed in the first couple of paragraphs, usually with dispraise:

There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy, who was suffered to make his choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa was too much for him. He changed his mind, and went to the oar. Guicciardini, though certainly not the most amusing of writers, is a Herodotus or a Froissart, when compared with Dr. Nares.

After that one gets Macaulay's own thoughts on the subject of the book. He has more than a few, and if not always convincing, they are usually entertaining. I suppose that a close criticism of Dr. Nares's work would make for much duller reading than Macaulay's harsh account of Lord Burleigh.

Still I wonder that he didn't consider the application his readers might make of

Almost all the distinguished writers who have treated of English history are advocates. Mr. Hallam and Sir James Mackintosh alone are entitled to be called judges. But the extreme austerity of Mr. Hallam takes away something from the pleasure of reading his learned, eloquent, and judicious writings. He is a judge, but a hanging judge, the Page or Buller of the High Court of Literary Justice. His black cap is in constant requisition. In the long calendar of those whom he has tried, there is hardly one who has not, in spite of evidence to character and recommendations to mercy, been sentenced and left for execution.

 

Not In a Post-Modern Era

 Noticed in the essay "Philosophy in a New Century", collected in the book of that name by John Searle:

If by "modernism" is meant the period of systematic rationality and intelligence that began with the Renaissance and reached a high point of self-conscious articulation in the European Enlightenment, then we are not in a post-modern era. On the contrary, modernism has just begun. We are, however, I believe, in a post-skeptical or post-epistemic era. You will not understand what is happening in our intellectual life if you do not see the exponential growth of knowledge as the central intellectual fact. There is something absurd about the post-modern thinker who buys an airplane ticket on the internet, gets on an airplane, works on his laptop computer in the course of the airline flight, gets off of the airplane at his destination, takes a taxicab to a lecture hall, and then gives a lecture claiming that somehow or other there is no certain knowledge, that objectivity is in question, and that all claims to truth and knowledge are really only disguised power grabs.

 

Doing Without

 For the first time in many years, we went on a trip without bringing a computer. We did not have, that is, a computer with a keyboard and a fair-sized display. We did have mobile phones, which have computational power beyond what some of those computers in the past did.

Only a few times did I think that it would have been well to have a computer. Those were times that I wished to write something at length, or to read something in larger increments than will display on a telephone. Yet despite my ineptitude with the iPhone "keyboard", I did get by, and may have managed to send some messages of a couple dozen words or so.

The benefit, apart from sparing a couple of pounds to carry about, was that there was no temptation to linger over the web after waking up. That probably gave me at least another half hour per day out looking around.

Following

At the end of February, the American runner Jess McLain and the two runners behind her followed a lead bike off course at the American half-marathon championship at about mile 13. They turned around to rejoin the course, finishing ninth, twelfth, and thirteenth. They filed protests, of course, but their protests were denied.

About 1985, a leader in the DC Marathon (a much less important race) was led off course with about three miles to go. I think that it was at that race another runner and I were nearly diverted off course by a policeman distracted in a conversation. We were well back from the leaders, and a loss of eight or ten places would have been nothing to garner us sympathy.

In 1980, the lead runners in the Marine Corps Marathon followed a press truck in cutting across above the tip of Hains Point, then were diverted across grass near the Tidal Basin rather than kept on pavement. My recollection is that the race was about 300 yards short of the standard distance. Curiously, the finishers' certificates that went out said that the runner had successfully completed the Marine Corps Marathon "at the Oympic distance of 26 miles 385 yards".  At the bottom of the certificate is the adjusted time.