<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;">It’s funny; <div><br></div><div>Not to fail to be grateful for F’s several very nice observations below, and some vivacious prose, but it is good that he started his tirade with quantum mechanics and general relativity. </div><div><br></div><div>Reading them brought to mind a passage late in Kawabata’s Master of Go. I went looking for it online, but couldn’t find it. My memory won’t be quite right, as it is decades since I read it. But:</div><div><br></div><div>The journalist meets an American Go enthusiast on the train. The American plays, and loses game after game, and happily claps his hands, eager to play another. The reporter says, in trying to capture what bothered him in the American’s play, something like: that there was a lack of muscularity in his play. </div><div><br></div><div>We beat it to death a few years ago on the list, but there is something about modesty in how to read or to listen. F certainly asserts in style, if he doesn’t say it outright, that physics floats on a web of metaphor as if on a mirage. As if F has the metaphors and knows what they “are” and that they are like a mirage, and that when they break down the physics that floats on them will fall. Since there could be no reason to check that there might be something to _understand_, only on the far side of working and living, and the metaphors are an effort to be helpful if one wants to try. (Nowadays, of course, I would not use those metaphors, because we have much better ways to talk; and I understand that the people in those days, with whom F could speak directly, _did_ use those, and worse. Especially Bohr. So one must make allowances.)</div><div><br></div><div>There was some of GPTs text about “position and momentum’s being intertwined in quantum mechanics” that landed about the same way. </div><div><br></div><div>As Churchill said: But it was after dinner, and I let it go.</div><div><br></div><div>Eric</div><div><br></div><div><br id="lineBreakAtBeginningOfMessage"><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Jan 22, 2025, at 14:30, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2@gmail.com> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>I am curious how many of you on the list know or could guess at the author of the following quote: <br></div><div><br></div><div>I am interested in your guesses; if you know it for SURE, please hold off guessing.</div><div><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif"><br></span></div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">I would be willing to throw away everything else but that:
enthusiasm tamed by metaphor. Let me rest the case there. Enthusiasm tamed to
metaphor, tamed to that much of it. I do not think anybody ever knows the
discreet use of metaphor, his own and other people’s, the discreet handling of
metaphor, unless he has been properly educated in poetry.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors,
“grace” metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry
provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.
People say, “Why don’t you say what you mean?” We never do that, do we, being
all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in
indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">I have wanted in late years to go further and further in
making metaphor the whole of thinking. I find someone now and then to agree
with me that all thinking, except mathematical thinking, is metaphorical, or
all thinking except scientific thinking. The mathematical might be difficult
for me to bring in, but the scientific is easy enough.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">Once on a time all the Greeks were busy telling each other
what the All was—or was like unto. All was three elements, air, earth, and
water (we once thought it was ninety elements; now we think it is only one).
All was substance, said another. All was change, said a third. But best and
most fruitful was Pythagoras’ comparison of the universe with number. Number of
what? number of feet, pounds, and seconds was the answer, and we had science
and all that has followed in science. The metaphor has held and held, breaking
down only when it came to the spiritual and psychological or the out of the way
places of the physical.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">The other day we had a visitor here, a noted scientist,
whose latest word to the world has been that the more accurately you know where
a thing is, the less accurately you are able to state how fast it is moving.
You can see why that would be so, without going back to Zeno’s problem of the
arrow’s flight. In carrying numbers into the realm of space and at the same
time into the realm of time you are mixing metaphors, that is all, and you are
in trouble. They won’t mix. The two don’t go together.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">Let’s take two or three more of the metaphors now in use to
live by. I have just spoken of one of the new ones, a charming mixed metaphor
right in the realm of higher mathematics and higher physics: that the more
accurately you state where a thing is, the less accurately you will be able to
tell how fast it is moving. And, of course, everything is moving. Everything is
an event now. Another metaphor. A thing, they say, is all event. Do you believe
it is? Not quite. I believe it is almost all event. But I like the comparison
of a thing with an event.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">I notice another from the same quarter. “In the neighborhood
of matter space is something like curved.” Isn’t that a good one! It seems to
me that that is simply and utterly charming—to say that space is something like
curved in the neighborhood of matter. “Something like.”<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">Another amusing one is from—what is the book?—I can’t say it
now; but here is the metaphor. Its aim is to restore you to your ideas of free
will. It wants to give you back your freedom of will. All right, here it is on
a platter. You know that you can’t tell by name what persons in a certain class
will be dead ten years after graduation, but you can tell actuarially how many
will be dead. Now, just so this scientist says of the particles of matter
flying at a screen, striking a screen; you can’t tell what individual particles
will collide, but you can say in general that a certain number will strike in a
given time. It shows, you see, that the individual particle can come freely. I
asked Bohr about that particularly, and he said, “Yes , It is so. It can come
when it wills and as it wills; and the action of the individual particle is
unpredictable. But it is not so of the action of the mass. There you can
predict.” He says, “That gives the individual atom its freedom, but the mass
its necessity.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">Another metaphor that has interested us in our time and has
done all our thinking for us is the metaphor of evolution. Never mind going
into the Latin word. The metaphor is simply the metaphor of the growing plant
or of the growing thing. And somebody very brilliantly, quite a while ago, said
that the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto a growing
thing. That is all. I know the metaphor will break down at some point, but it
has not failed everywhere. It is a very brilliant metaphor, I acknowledge,
though I myself get too tired of the kind of essay that talks about the
evolution of candy, we will say, or the evolution of elevators—the evolution of
this, that, and the other. Everything is evolution. I emancipate myself by
simply saying that I didn’t get up the metaphor and so am not much interested
in it.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">What I am pointing out is that unless you are at home in the
metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor,
you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values:
you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know
how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are
not safe with science; you are not safe in history. In history, for instance—to
show that [it] is the same in history as elsewhere—I heard somebody say
yesterday that Aeneas was to be likened unto (those words, “likened unto”!)
George Washington. He was that type of national hero, the middle-class man, not
thinking of being a hero at all, bent on building the future, bent on his
children, his descendents. A good metaphor, as far as it goes, and you must
know how far. And then he added that Odysseus should be likened unto Theodore
Roosevelt. I don’t think that is so good. Someone visiting Gibbon at the point
of death, said he was the same Gibbon as of old, still at his parallels.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">Take the way we have been led into our present position
morally, the world over. It is by a sort of metaphorical gradient. There is a
kind of thinking—to speak metaphorically—there is a kind of thinking you might
say was endemic in the brothel. It was always there. And every now and then in
some mysterious way it becomes epidemic in the world. And how does it do so? By
using all the good words that virtue has invented to maintain virtue. It uses
honesty, first,—frankness, sincerity—those words; picks them up, uses them. “In
the name of honesty, let us see what we are.” You know. And then it picks up
the word joy. “Let us in the name of joy, which is the enemy of our ancestors,
the Puritans….Let us in the name of joy, which is the enemy of the kill-joy
Puritan…” You see. “Let us,” and so on. And then, “In the name of health….”
Health is another good word. And that is the metaphor Freudianism trades on,
mental health. And the first thing we know, it has us all in up to the top
knot. I suppose we may blame the artists a good deal, because they are great
people to spread by metaphor. The stage too—the stage is always a good
intermediary between the two worlds, the under and the upper,—if I may say so
without personal prejudice to the stage.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">In all this I have only been saying that the devil can quote
Scripture, which simply means that the good words you have lying around the
devil can use for his purposes as well as anybody else. Never mind about my
morality. I am not here to urge anything. I don’t care whether the world is
good or bad—not on any particular day.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">Let me ask you to watch a metaphor breaking down here before
you.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">Somebody said to me a little while ago, “It is easy enough
for me to think of the universe as a machine, as a mechanism.”<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">I said, “You mean the universe is like a machine?”<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">He said, “No. I think it is one . . . Well, it is like . .
.”<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">“I think you mean the universe is like a machine.”<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">“All right. Let it go at that.”<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">I asked him, “Did you ever see a machine without a pedal for
the foot, or a lever for the hand, or a button for the finger?”<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">He said, “No—no.”<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">I said, “All right. Is the universe like that?”<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">And he said, “No. I mean it is like a machine, only . . .”<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">“. . . it is different from a machine,” I said.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">He wanted to go just that far with that metaphor and no
further. And so do we all. All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the
beauty of it. It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived
with it long enough you don’t know when it is going. You don’t know how much
you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living
thing. It is as life itself.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">I have heard this ever since I can remember , and ever since
I have taught: the teacher must teach the pupil to think. I saw a teacher once
going around in a great school and snapping pupils’ heads with thumb and finger
and saying, “Think.” That was when thinking was becoming the fashion. The
fashion hasn’t yet quite gone out.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">We still ask boys in college to think, as in the nineties,
but we seldom tell them what thinking means; we seldom tell them it is just
putting this and that together; it is just saying one thing in terms of
another. To tell them is to set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the
top of which sticks through the sky.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">Greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of
another is the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or
spirit in terms of matter, to make the final unity. That is the greatest
attempt that ever failed. We stop just short there. But it is the height of
poetry, the height of all thinking, the height of all poetic thinking, that
attempt to say matter in terms of spirit and spirit in terms of matter. It is
wrong to anybody a materialist simply because he tries to say spirit in terms
of matter, as if that were a sin. Materialism is not the attempt to say all in
terms of matter. The only materialist—be he poet, teacher, scientist,
politician, or statesman—is the man who gets lost in his material without a
gathering metaphor to throw it into shape and order. He is the lost soul.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">We ask people to think, and we don’t show them what thinking
is. Somebody says we don’t need to show them how to think; bye and bye they
will think. We will give them the forms of sentences and, if they have any
ideas, then they will know how to write them. But that is preposterous. All
there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have
ideas.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">The first little metaphor….Take some of the trivial ones. I
would rather have trivial ones of my own to live by than the big ones of other
people.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">I remember a boy saying, “He is the kind of person that
wounds with his shield.” That may be a slender one, of course. It goes a good
way in character description. It has poetic grace. “He is the kind that wounds
with his shield.”<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">The shield reminds me—just to linger a minute—the shield
reminds me of the inverted shield spoken of in one of the books of the
“Odyssey,” the book that tells about the longest swim on record. I forget how
long it lasted—several days, was it?—but at last as Odysseus came near the
coast of Phaneacia, he saw it on the horizon “like an inverted shield.”<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">There is a better metaphor in the same book. In the end
Odysseus comes ashore and crawls up the beach to spend the night under a double
olive tree, and it says, as in a lonely farmhouse where it is hard to get
fire—I am not quoting exactly—where it is hard to start the fire again if it
goes out, they cover the seeds of fire with ashes to preserve it for the night,
so Odysseus covered himself with the leaves around him and went to sleep. There
you have something that gives you character, something of Odysseus himself.
“Seeds of fire.” So Odysseus covered the seeds of fire in himself. You get the
greatness of his nature.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">But these are slighter metaphors than the ones we live by.
They have their charm, their passing charm. They are as it were the first steps
toward the great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.<span></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif"><b><span style="font-family:garamond,times new roman,serif">The metaphor whose manage we are best taught in poetry—that
is all there is of thinking. It may not seem far for the mind to go but it is
the mind’s furthest. The richest accumulation of the ages is the noble
metaphors we have rolled up.</span></b><span></span></p>
</div><br><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>Nicholas S. Thompson</div><div>Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology</div><div>Clark University</div><div><a href="mailto:nthompson@clarku.edu" target="_blank">nthompson@clarku.edu</a></div><a href="https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson&c=E,1,mUETcFUMcZ3hrxFN6e47iyYwN-lJIt1nXPuZ4nd-rPFFXAZT0PZiAMlH4fVPBIRGVQlUQBfU1OojLA9GEMICO4s6bFBClaHjSs1hcfJfO4tkM1_HkRbVpRE4dsw,&typo=1" target="_blank">https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson</a></div></div></div>
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