12 September: an invisible gardener, a thinking ocean and a cave of strangers
John Wisdom was born on this day in 1904, Stanislaw Lem in 1921, and four boys from Montignac walked into Lascaux in 1940. Between them they raise the same awkward question from three directions: how far can we trust the grip we think we have on what is out there?
Three anniversaries fall today, and the accident that joins them is instructive. In 1904, in Leyton, a boy was born who would spend forty years arguing that a good many philosophical quarrels are not quarrels about the facts. In 1921 — or, as we shall see, possibly not — a boy was born in Lwow who would write about what happens when we meet something we cannot construe. And in 1940, above Montignac in the Dordogne, four teenagers widened a hole and climbed into a chamber nobody had entered for some seventeen thousand years.
What links them is a question about the reliability of our grip on things: whether a claim about the unseen means anything at all, whether we could recognise a mind unlike our own, and what to do with images whose makers' reasons are out of reach. None of the three settles anything. There is a small joke in the coincidence, besides: the records are themselves unreliable, and one of today's disputed dates is disputed by the man whose birthday it is.
The chair Wisdom held was Wittgenstein's, but Wittgenstein was not the man he followed#
Arthur John Terence Dibben Wisdom was born on 12 September 1904, according to the Trinity College archive, which holds his papers and where he was a fellow from 1935 until his death. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives his dates as 9 December 1904 to 12 September 1993 — the same pair with the years swapped, since he died on 9 December 1993. For a column about the fragility of records that is almost too convenient.
The professorship is usually got slightly wrong too. Wisdom is routinely called Wittgenstein's successor in the Cambridge chair of philosophy, and loosely he was. But Wittgenstein resigned in 1947, and the chair went in 1948 to Georg Henrik von Wright, who held it until 1951 and then went home to Helsinki. Wisdom was elected in 1952 and stayed until 1968. Second successor, then — which matters, because he was nobody's disciple.
Wisdom's garden is a quarrel in which neither man expects anything the other does not#
His best-known page is in "Gods", read to the Aristotelian Society and printed in its for 1944-45 at pages 185 to 206. It begins with horticulture.
Samuel Clarke, Newton's advocate against Leibniz, was born on 11 October 1675; Hans Kelsen, author of the Pure Theory of Law, on 11 October 1881. Tschirnhaus died on the date in 1708, Zwingli in battle in 1531, and in 1939 Alexander Sachs carried Einstein's letter into the Oval Office. The thread is where reason's reach ends and responsibility begins.
Charles Taylor, Scott J. Shapiro, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Robert Alexy
Two people return to their long-neglected garden and find among the weeds a few of the old plants surprisingly vigorous.
One says it must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these plants. They ask the neighbours; nobody has seen anyone at work. He must have worked while people slept, says the first. Someone would have heard him, says the second, and a gardener who cared would have dealt with the weeds. The first points at the beds: there is purpose and feeling for beauty here. They examine the garden minutely, read up on how untended gardens go to seed, and at the end know exactly the same things. Then one says: "A gardener comes unseen and unheard. He is manifested only in his works with which we are all familiar." And the other says: "There is no gardener."
Wisdom is not accusing the believer of talking nonsense. He is observing that the dispute has changed character: "the gardener hypothesis has ceased to be experimental; the difference between one who accepts and one who rejects is now not a matter of the one expecting something the other does not expect." Their words reflect no difference as to what they have found in the garden, or would find if they looked further. What differs is everything else: "With this difference in what they say about the gardener goes a difference in how they feel toward the garden."
He leaves the ending open: once the expectations have converged, is it still appropriate to ask which man is right? He declines to say. His larger view, worked out in Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis (1953) and Paradox and Discovery (1965), was that a badly framed question still shows you something about the concepts that framed it, and that the philosopher's job, like the analyst's, is to make the confusion visible rather than to answer it.
Flew turned the parable into a demand, and changed what was being argued about#
In 1950 it was borrowed, and altered, by a young Antony Flew, in a piece called "Theology and Falsification" printed as the first item in the first issue of the Oxford undergraduate journal University. Flew credited "a tale told by John Wisdom in his haunting and revelatory article 'Gods'", then rewrote it with a harder edge. Explorers replace the householders, a jungle clearing replaces the garden, and — the decisive addition — there is an escalating experimental programme: barbed wire, an electric fence, bloodhounds. Nothing is caught, and at each failure the believer amends his claim. The gardener is invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, without scent, silent. Then the question: "Just how does what you call an invisible, incorporeal, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?" He named the process the death by a thousand qualifications, and put the challenge that has been set to seminary students ever since: what would have to occur, or to have occurred, to count for you as a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?
The alteration was not innocent. Wisdom's two men stop expecting different things and he finds that interesting; Flew's believer keeps retreating and Flew finds it damning. A description of a disagreement came back as an accusation of vacuity.
The piece was reprinted as the centrepiece of New Essays in Philosophical Theology (SCM Press, 1955), edited by Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, under the heading "Theology and falsification: the university discussion", with replies from R. M. Hare and Basil Mitchell and a rejoinder from Flew.
Hare conceded the point and denied its force. He told a story about a lunatic convinced the dons of his college mean to murder him: introduce him to the mildest dons in Oxford, and he detects deeper cunning. Hare's name for such a frame was a blik, and his claim was that everybody has them, the sane included. "Without a blik there can be no explanation; for it is by our bliks that we decide what is and what is not an explanation." Religious utterances, on this account, are not failed assertions; they are not assertions.
Mitchell refused that escape and attacked Flew's other flank. His parable is set in occupied country. A partisan meets a Stranger who says he is with the resistance, believes him, and thereafter watches him sometimes help the resistance and sometimes hand its members to the police. The partisan counts those episodes against the Stranger and goes on trusting him. Mitchell's believer, unlike Hare's lunatic, is making a claim that evidence can tell against, and knows it; what he declines is to let the evidence be decisive.
These are not three answers to one question but three views about what sort of speech act a religious statement is — a hypothesis with a truth value, a way of taking the world, or a commitment held under strain. Flew replied that Mitchell owed him an account of how much betrayal would be too much. Nobody has produced it.
Lem's ocean answers nothing, and he thought that the honest result#
Stanislaw Lem was born in Lwow, now Lviv, on 12 September 1921 — except that by his own account he was born on the 13th, and the register was falsified out of superstition. Britannica carries it on his own authority, the only authority available. A column that has just spent several hundred words on the unreliability of records can hardly complain.
He read medicine, never practised, and wrote Solaris in 1961. The planet is covered by an ocean that appears to be a single organism, possibly a single mind. A station has hung above it for decades, and Solaristics has acquired a bibliography, a factional history and its own heretics. The ocean responds to none of it. What it does is take material from the visitors' memories and send it back embodied — in Kelvin's case his dead wife, made of neutrinos and his own guilt.
The ocean is neither hostile nor friendly. Lem's point is that the question of what it wants may not be a question. Snow, Kelvin's colleague, puts the case with more bitterness than the Anglophone genre managed at the time: "We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos... We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors."
He made the argument again, colder, in His Master's Voice (1968), where a Pentagon-funded team in the Nevada desert works on a neutrino signal from Canis Minor and cannot establish that it is a signal at all. The narrator, a mathematician named Peter Hogarth, concludes that the findings describe the project's participants more accurately than they describe any sender. Summa Technologiae (1964), his strangest book and his only major work of non-fiction, ran the same scepticism forwards rather than outwards: machine intelligence, and the simulated environments he called phantomatics. No complete English translation appeared until 2013.
Lem disliked what the cinema did to him, and was specific. Of Tarkovsky's 1972 film he said flatly that "he didn't make Solaris at all, he made Crime and Punishment", objecting that the ending betrayed the book: "My Kelvin decides to stay on the planet without any hope whatsoever while Tarkovsky created an image where some kind of an island appears, and on that island a hut." On Soderbergh's 2002 version he was more cautious and more cutting, not having seen it. Reviewers, he noted, were calling it a love story; "to my best knowledge, the book was not dedicated to erotic problems of people in outer space."
Lascaux is where the thread pulls tightest, and also where it nearly snaps#
On 8 September 1940 an eighteen-year-old apprentice named Marcel Ravidat was walking on the hill of Lascaux when his dog Robot went down a hole left by a fallen tree. Ravidat dropped a stone in and listened to it roll a long way. Four days later he came back with Jacques Marsal, Georges Agniel and Simon Coencas, widened the opening and went in. What their lamp found has been dated to roughly seventeen thousand years ago, early Magdalenian: close to six thousand marks and figures, some nine hundred recognisably animals.
Here the thread needs a qualification. Wisdom's gardener and Lem's ocean are cases where the evidence runs out; Lascaux is one where the evidence is overwhelming and the interpretation underdetermined. The images survive in extraordinary quantity, and we have no access to what anybody meant by them. Hunting magic, initiation, star maps, the pleasure of drawing — all have been proposed, and the paintings are mute about their own purpose. Their makers were anatomically, and so far as anyone can tell cognitively, ourselves, which is what makes the silence uncomfortable rather than merely regrettable.
Georges Bataille, who had his own reasons for wanting prehistory to mean something, published Lascaux ou la naissance de l'art with Skira in 1955, arguing that the cave marks the point at which the human animal became capable of expenditure without return. A magnificent overreach; this site looked at Bataille's habit of overreaching two days ago. Instructive anyway: he could not say what the aurochs was for either, but he could see that what it was for may be the wrong question — very nearly Wisdom's move, in another key.
Lascaux was opened to visitors after the war and by the early 1960s was taking some 1,200 people a day. Their carbon dioxide, body heat and humidity were damaging the pigment, and in 1963 the cave was shut. A facsimile of the Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery, Lascaux II, opened two hundred metres away in 1983; a full-scale reproduction of the whole cave, Lascaux IV, in 2016. The original has since had to be defended against Fusarium solani and then black mould. Almost everyone who has looked at Lascaux has looked at a copy.
What the three have in common, and what they do not#
The common element is a gap between what is available and what we should like to know. Wisdom's gardeners have all the evidence there is and cannot agree on its description; Lem's scientists have a signal and cannot establish that it is one; the boys at Montignac found a mass of first-hand testimony from witnesses permanently unavailable for questioning.
Those conclusions do not line up as neatly as that implies. Wisdom thought the gap might dissolve under analysis, which is optimistic; Lem thought it structural, and thought we would go on filling it with our own reflection. The cave suggests something untidier than either — that we can be in unmistakable contact with another mind and still have no idea what it was doing. What the three rule out between them is the comfortable position: that the facts are simply there, and a careful enough observer reads them off.
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873. He made the history of ideas a discipline, traced one idea from Plato to the Romantics in The Great Chain of Being, and helped write the rules of academic freedom he later qualified. The same date, in four Catholic countries, did not exist in 1582.
Jacques Derrida died in Paris on 9 October 2004; Nicolai Hartmann died in Göttingen on 9 October 1950. One spent a career showing that presence never quite arrives, the other rebuilt an ontology of levels in which being does not depend on anyone's knowing it. The date puts the two reflexes of twentieth-century philosophy side by side.
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