Heideggers Lunettes

Heidegger without spectacles might not have noted that it was high thin cirrus obscuring the quartered moon as it neared meridian at sunset this evening.

From spectacles came the spyglass of Galileo - but this was not the inverting telescope of Kepler.

Leibniz was called upon for pumping aqua from mines, but the well at Todtnauberg had no need of Archimedes.

Heidegger on Richard Feynman's 1965 Nobel ?

Man sagt, die moderne Technik sei eine unvergleichbar andere genenüber aller früheren, weil sie auf der neuzeitlichen exakten Naturwissenschaft beruhe. Inzwischen hat man deutlicher erkannt, daß auch das Umgekehrte gilt: die neuzeitliche Physik ist als experimentelle auf technische Apparaturen und auf den Fortschritt des Apparatebaues angewiesen.

Arendt (who may have had no science other than Heidegger's smattering)

"[...] that we deal only with the patterns of our own mind, the mind which designed the instruments and put nature under its conditions in the experiment — prescribed its laws to nature [...]" 

But the rising and setting star is displaced by the same refraction as the canoe paddle in the stream, Herr Doktor Professor ... ah, yes, but we spoilt it by making a measurement with sticks and notches in wanting to mark the seasons, the floods, the great squalls at sea ... that arising from the activity of mind within nature with culture, with language, with social tasks (objectives.)

Valéry and distance: the absence of Weil and Noether in Arendt

Given the curious role of Antigone in Heidegger, I thought a note on Valéry was in order.

Arendt in Chapter VI of The human Condition makes a great deal of distance and size.  Like Arendt in Heidegger and Heidegger in Arendt, Antigone in Heidegger is notable for her absence.

In Valéry's "On Speaking Verse" you will find a remark on distance and theatre.

At what point does a huan figure appear insignificant?  Imagine a small boat on a river with the boatman poling along.  Imagine the boat seen arriving at a small pier in the morning - and later that afternoon you look down on the river from a great height at such a distance that you even wonder - could that be the boat on its way yet again?  You take out your spyglass.

If you view a man beating a donkey from a distance, is it less vile and wrong than if you are there within reach of his arm?  Fallacious notions that the size of the universe or the age of the planet or the size of the population affect human values have been popular among journalists for some time.

A murder occurs at a country fair.  A murder occurs in the crowded stands of a great stadium.  A murder occurs yesterday.  Or we discover the body of a victim a week later or a year later.  Suppose for a moment  that lack of regard for the value of human life can be seen as a characteristic of the Eastern Front of World War II.  It may have bearing on the need to revise and enforce international law, but it is not clear that mass slaughter affects our pursuit of a single heinous murderer in an otherwise civil setting.  No more than if the murderer be tall or short or the victom slight or heavy.

If we  had learned that the sun was twice as large and that we are four-times as far away - or if the earth were twice as large or twice as old - would any recent single act of deliberate murder be the less or the more wrong?

What Arendt may not have understood was that although we do not add Kilograms to Meters we can multiply Kilograms by Meters.  One way to approach this - if the issue arouse your wonder - is to start with recent Category Theory.  And here again is a connection missing in Arendt: to Emmy Noether.  Structure-preserving functions might have been off-putting to Arendt as she held to Heidegger's opinion of what happened to geometry in a collision with algebra.  Was the 1950's work of René Thom in any way accessible to Arendt? Yes: André Weil, who, like Arendt, was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation (see my page on the Acknowledgements in The Human Condition at aule-browser.com)

For the poverty of Arendt on wrong doing, see Heidegger on Heraclitus and her Gifford Lectures.

note: this copy of The Art of Poetry was loaned to me by Walter Bruce Sinclair in 74 or 75 at a time when he was preoccupied with Wheeler on Gravitation and other matters. Mea culpa.
note: I was in a small room with Thom in 1980: Arthur Fine was in discussion with Abner Shimony, but I do not now recall Thom's remarks.  Weil was no less accessible to Arendt.  I, for one, had the good fortune to sit and chat with 3 affable persons active in Category Theory by the time I was age 30 - and not even in New York or Chicago - and with no great effort on my part.