Fragments #4 – The History of Time; Usher, St. Augustine & The Nazis; Alan Turing - Gay Cracker; Moses, Jesus, And Mohammed The Atheists; Dipset & The Protestant Reformation
Thoughts and links from this week
Below is the fourth installment of a new format I am trying out of shorter-form content to come out weekly. Here are installments #1, #2, & #3.Hopefully, this will break up the extended interregnums between my long-form pieces (I know you have been begging for more). If you like it: good; if you hate it: even better.
Ptolemy was an Alexandrian mathematician from the 1st Century AD who made massive headways into geography. While mapping out the earth, he divided out the radius into 60 partes minutae primae (“first small parts”) and subdivided each part into 60 further partes minutae secundae (“second small parts”). From these came our words: minute and second, referring to time.
16 Centuries before Usher, St. Augustine wrote his autobiographical masterpiece The Confessions, largely a meditation on time and its effects. Modeled on the Parable of the Prodigal Son – Augustine reflects on how “man comes late to himself” and the rhythmic drumbeat of “then…. now” echoes throughout the text as he contrasts his sybaritic past and pious present. In chapter 11 he lays the basis for phenomenology – stating that time exists within the mind in three ways: the present past (memory), the present-present (contemplation), and the present-future (or expectation).
Phenomenology is a school of philosophical thought that attempts to describe existence from the first-person view, i.e. existence as one experiences it: the phenomena of being. Hegel was the first to use the term, Edmund Husserl was the first named Phenomenologist, and it found its zenith in Martin Heidegger who considered The Confessions to be “the most serious book ever written.” Heidegger’s three claims to fame are:
His magnum opus Being and Time, where he builds off Augustine’s temporal conception to describe man’s or Dasein’s thrownness in the world. (Dasein is German for “there-being”).
His critiques of technology in which he posits technology as constantly running up against man’s unpassable epistemic limits.
His being a card-carrying member of the Nazi party while also a lover of Jewish Philosopher Hannah Arendt who later wrote on the Eichmann trials in Jerusalem.
Phenomenology at its core is about man as he relates to the world. However, that is subject to change. In You Are Not A Gadget, the author Jaron Lanier, a silicon valley big-wig, and Neanderthal lookalike, describes Alan Turing, the father of computer science, as the first “cracker” because he used computers to crack enemy codes during WW2. He also describes how Turing was injected with female hormones in hopes of curing his homosexuality because the doctors believed that female energy would relieve pent-up sexual pressure. The common model and metaphor for the human body then was the steam engine – which balanced pressures, torques, and forces. This was prior to our current computer age where people describe themselves as processing and downloading information, think of human memory analogous to computer files, and their body as hardware with genes and thoughts as software. The term “cracker” and hormone therapy live on, albeit in different forms, and Turing wound up killing himself. I wonder where the next major model/metaphor for the human body will take us.
How we relate to nature also changes. The first and only known culture to come up with a conception of “nature” were the Ancient Greeks; across civilizations all conceptions of nature can be drawn back to contact with Greek culture. Their word for nature, φύσις, or physis is a derivative of their word to grow, to develop, or to become and was rooted in the idea that nature was that which had its own fecundity and self-generative property in-itself.
This Greek conception of nature highlighted their worldview of animism. Gods were ever present in all things, not only on Mount Olympus – but local streams, meadows, and hills had their own deities. This animism is contrasted with the monotheism of Abrahamic religions, where, even though there is evidence of polytheism in The Old Testament, the core tenant of Judaism and its offshoots are that The One True G-d created the world ex-nihilo – out of nothing. While in the Athenian pantheon the gods were very much of this world, a part of the physis. This contrast was highlighted by early church father Tertullianin in 240 AD. “So what has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the Church with the Academy, the Christian with the heretic?” The irony being that because the Abrahamic religions eschewed all natural divinities to make way for Yahweh, the ancient Greeks and Romans considered them atheists, to them monotheism = atheism + 1. Once you whittle down all of existence to a single actor it is simple enough to dismiss even Him. In this light were Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed atheists?
These theological reflections seem hair-splitting now, but in the moment they can be all important. A hallmark of the Protestant Reformation was the Anabaptist Munster Rebellion whose early spark-point was an argument over Transubstantiation - whether accepting communion is the same as imbibing the physical flesh and blood of Jesus. Hundreds of people were killed in the Rebellion – it’s early leader, Jan Matthias of Haarlem (from which the Manhattan neighborhood would later take its name), believing himself to be the second Gideon, rode with a band of 12 followers to fight an army of hundreds besieging the city - Dipset would be proud. Shortly after his head was stuck on a pike and his genitals were nailed to the doors of the city. When Munster was finally taken, the other Anabaptist leaders were tortured, and their corpses were displayed in cages from the cathedral’s walls that are still hanging to this day.
The Anabaptists survive present day as the Amish of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and are known more for their fresh foods and confectionary treats than theological rabblerousing. Every other week I get 50lbs of grass-fed beef and raw dairy delivered from an Amish farm. In Philadelphia, the Amish have a farmstand in Reading Terminal Market with the best marzipan I have ever had. While I wouldn’t fight over whether a cracker was God’s flesh, I would go to war with anybody who doesn’t describe those almond confections as heavenly. We may laugh (or cry) that in the past blood was spilled over such trifles – but we should pause and think about the battles now fought over our current day myths: democracy, equality, and human rights…
That’s all for this week and thanks for reading,
Zay
The cages ... imagining seeing that moment in real life just gives me the heebie-jeebies.