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.

Gutenberg and Spectacles

Arendt in The Human Condition, Chapter VI, singles out the Reformation, global navigation and the combination of the telescope as technical instrument and astrophysics as "universal" science.

Any reader might ask why not spectacles and the printing press?  When the early phenomenologists adopted the slogan "To the things themselves!", no one was expected to be excluded by having to rely on spectacles: phenomenology was not exclusively or primarily focused on perception and appearances.

In one early text, "Phenomena" are roughly what we would call the constellations visible in the Mediterranean sky - a sky somewhat different from ours as the northern celestial pole was not Polaris as it is today, some two millenia later.

A more important phenomenon is the "moon illusion" as it is not dependent on either telescope or spectacles. This illusion need not be subsumed under issues of apparent numerical measure.  It is quite possible that Arendt was not aware of the illusion and how it was resolved - the nature of this appearance, if you will - by science and critical dialogue.

In the arc of the sky, the full moon, high in a winter sky, subtends less than a single degree of arc - about the width of your little pinkie extended above you at arms length.  Call this by some neologism such as "lunar-spatial-form-in-high-sky-hand" for some non-numerical astronomy.  The rising full moon at the horizon appears to be - is said to be - much larger. If the high moon is a "dime-size" then the rising moon is a "nickel-size" - or sleeve-button-sized versus front-button-sized, to address Heidegger's numeric phobia.  Pupil-of-lion versus iris-of-lion.  What you will.

The telescope is another matter: the "sickle" Venus is larger in the field of a given telescope than the "full" Venus.

At the time Arendt was writing - during the 1950's - there was no star that appeared larger when in focus at high-magnification within a given star-pattern or asterism than when at low magnification in that same field.  This is not so for a planet, a cluster or a nebula.  With allowance for the distinct differences between the resolved image at optical limit in a refractor and in a reflector telescope, stars remain "points" of light.  Only recently has the "surface of a star" been explored - other than the sun.

What was critical was the discovery that so many stars are in fact double stars and some even triple.  To Herschel we owe the confirmation that true binary stars - not virtual or "optical" apparent doubles (one star appearing near another (only due to our relative alignment of star-A and star-B from earth at some point in her orbit) - obeyed Newtonian mechanics (to a good approximation given his instruments.)

Our understanding of our solar system is that it might more readily have been a binary arrangement of a yellow star with a smaller star - perhaps a brown dwarf comprised of what today are our four gas-giant planets.  Our sun likely began in a cluster of stars: the fate of the solar dust ring was to be a mix of rocky planets, asteroids, gas planets, icy debris and residual dust.

It is not an illusion that Venus appears larger in one phase than in another.  Nor does it require Arendt's "Archimedean" standpoint to think about this. Insight alone will not resolve this - did not resolve this.

The moon illusion is a critical absence in Chapter VI of Arendt's book - as much are the concepts of acceleration, limit, group and symmetry - not to mention the orbit of Mercury.

If only Arendt had written a book on Emmy Noether, Edith Stein and the destiny of the thinking woman at Goettingen!

see: Dorian Cairns recall of Husserl on near, far and astronomy.
also see: Sonja Kovalevsly (Sofia Kovalevskaya); Sophie Germain
more recently: Maria Skłodowska, Julia Robinson, Louise Volders
among philosophers: Susanne Langer, Susan Stebbing, E. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch