Several years ago I agreed to join a small non-profit press, Éditions Lpb, because a friend asked me to. I knew from the beginning that there would be a risk of extraction and blurred credit, but I felt I owed that friend a solid and accepted. What followed was a long experiment in trust: my ideas were praised and mocked, borrowed and delayed, published and quietly rewritten by others. This piece is not an attack; it is my attempt to describe, as plainly as I can, why I eventually withdrew my book from Lpb and chose to return to the work of my own two hands.
I accepted the association because I cared about the people involved and because I believed small volunteer structures could still do honest work. Early on there were signs of the pattern to come: one day I was “brilliant,” the next my work was “a nursery rhyme.” I watched friends and colleagues take inspiration from my texts, sometimes openly, sometimes by quietly rephrasing them, while my own manuscripts waited in the queue. I did befriend Pierre, and some of my pieces found a home through him. But slowly the relationship shifted: he began using AI to transform essays from my blog into different words so they could be claimed as his, (another colleague reported the same pattern) and a curated book of mine was delayed three or four times at the moment it was about to become real, with the argument that it “wasn’t ready.” The carrot hung in front of me again and again, while others moved ahead.
In the end I withdrew my book, not because I dismissed the volunteer time given to it, but because the pattern of extraction, delay, and sharp swings in how my work was treated became unsustainable for my health. I am mentally disabled, and living on that rollercoaster—being dangled three or four times at the brink of publication—was more than I could carry. When I later pointed out that another book had been publicly announced before the committee’s work was respected, internal emails framed this as me “creating a difficult situation.” This piece is simply my way of setting down, for myself and my readers, what actually happened.
If other writers read this and recognize something in it, I’d be glad if you shared your own experiences in the comments. I want to learn more about how publishing venues behave toward writers.
I wrote this seven years ago. I still believe it. I also still fail at it.
The essay is about presence. About tasting the honey instead of thinking about honey. About noticing what’s already here instead of departing into abstraction or memory or the next thing.
I wrote it then. I’m still learning it now. I still leave my palm tree garden while standing in it. I still wander into thought when I could be here.
But the problem the essay describes has only become more urgent. We have more tools for departure now. More permission to never arrive.
What follows is what I was trying to say—and why it matters that someone keeps saying it.
Science and Happiness
There is a strange problem with ancient Skepticism, or Pyrrhonism, as it is described by the best authority, Sextus Empiricus.
I have to confess that several features of this account of how the Skeptic will achieve ataraxia and happiness through epoche [suspension of judgement] are very puzzling…Now the so-called “Modes of Epoche” give us an overview of the kinds of considerations that supposedly lead the Skeptics to adopt a pattern of life in which they live by the appearances and do not believe any assertions or theories about an external world. But it is striking that all but one of these Modes are concerned with questions having no immediate relevance to the domain of values; instead they have to do with such questions as whether the honey is really sweet, whether there really are invisible pores in the skin, whether things really have the shapes they appear to have, and so on. Only Aensidemus’s tenth Mode offers the sort of considerations that presumably bring the Skeptics to epoche as to whether things or actions are good, bad, or indifferent. Yet when (at PH 1.27f. and much more fully in M 11) Sextus gets down to the business of explaining in detail how epoche about the external world leads to ataraxia and happiness, he considers only value judgements. The Skeptic gives up any belief that judgements about good and evil have objective validity, and through his epoche in this limited area he achieves his ataraxia. Not even a hint is given of how the state of epoche on such matters as are considered in most of the Modes contributes to peace of mind. For these kinds of case we are left to conjecture that the relevant discomfort is perhaps the kind of frustration a biological scientist might feel at being unable to find the cause of cancer, or a physicist might feel at being unable to find a unified theory for all types of force.”
p75-76 Mates 1996
Sextus Empiricus neglected to explain how scientific knowledge seems to be opposed to rest and peace of mind. I have already discussed that “science” (which has become too general and ambitious a word) uses as its ultimate concept that of work. Heidegger argues that it is work that prevents questioners from getting a word in edgewise. They are always “working on it” and, for now, we should content ourselves with the marvelous achievements we have, and not ask so many questions that they stop working.
It is exactly the Skeptic’s situation that asking questions has won out as the dominant attitude over any entrenched scientific doctrine. There are some opponents of Skepticism that say such an attitude amounts to paralysis, and if not paralysis then to behaving eccentrically, and if not that then at least a Skeptic would speak strangely. Sextus deals admirably with these objections in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism.
Further, we are told in several places (e.g., PH 1.191, 194, 207) that the Skeptic uses language (katachrestikos) “loosely” and does not join the Dogmatists in fighting over words or in seeking to use them with philosophic precision (kurios). In view of this we may conjecture that a sophisticated Pyrrhonist, following the ancient maxim of lathe biosas (“live in such a way as to escape notice”), would also be inclined to follow the advice to “think with the learned, but speak with the vulgar.””p72 Mates 1996
The way the Skeptic uses language is related to the problem at hand: how to show that scientific work is not conducive to rest and peace of mind, or of leading a happy life. How? Sextus says at the beginning of his Outlines that
if the theory is so deceptive as to all but snatch away the appearances from under our very eyes, should we not distrust it in regard to the non-evident, and thus avoid being led by it into precipitate judgements?” p92 Sextus in Mates 1996
The Skeptic takes appearances as not open to question, so they are not nihilists. And they question doctrines that attempt to undermine appearances. Take the famous example of Sir Arthur Eddington (1928) on the term “solid.” As a scientist, he argued that a common table is not actually solid, because it is mainly made up of empty space. This goes against the table’s appearance of solidity, and was famously rebuked by Susan Stebbing (1937), who said that tables are things that help us know what we mean by “solid.” From a pragmatic point of view, a table is solid,
but Mates points out a problem with Skeptics in siding somewhat with the pragmatic use of words. He points out that at first we learn to say “the honey is sweet” and that is the correct and normal way of using language, while the Pyrrhonist would, at least a little later, assert that it merely appears to be sweet, and since this is not the way a child would normally use language immediately, it is a kind of abuse of language. To be more precise, Mates’ problem is that he thinks “the honey is sweet” and “it appears that the honey is sweet” are meant differently by a child. What exactly does a child means when she says honey is sweet? I would bet that the child is referring to an appearance, not a property of an external reality beyond such appearance, independent of a perceiving mind. The added word appears is merely a clarification for realists, not a modification of what a child means or how she uses language.
In other words, we were not born with the distinction between Berkleyan idealism and naive realism, and both suffice for the purposes of the child saying the honey is sweet. Indeed, that is the only way to really “go by appearances” as a child does, by experiencing the sweetness of honey without bothering about the realism or idealism (or both, or neither) of its appearance.
This leads directly to the central point that a scientific attitude is not a way that leads to very much happiness. When we study honey with a microscope so that we “know” things with the eye or with the mind about honey, so much that when we taste honey all we think about are these concepts and sights, not the taste, we miss the enjoyment in knowing the truth of this appearance of sweetness. Applied to our lives in general, the scientific attitude will quickly make us miserable. The way to know about the sweetness of honey is not any other way than to taste it yourself. Maybe an equivalent to a microscope can be invented for the tongue, and that would yield interesting, if warped, results, but is the world more enjoyable if we walk around with telescopes attached to our eyes?
Also maybe the difference between a scientist and a happy person is not so clear as this example, for take a wine connoisseur who can identify all the qualities of all the flavors of any particular wine. The question then becomes: does a wine connoisseur enjoy wine better than someone who is just really good at paying attention to taste and doesn’t know anything about wine or its ingredients? The answer, under the economic principle of diminishing returns, is a resounding no. The wine connoisseur has tasted so many wines and has remembered and analyzed it so well that they do not enjoy it as much as they used to. In effect, they get burnt out, and the pleasure diminishes. The pleasure diminishes for the Pyrrhonist too, (it is doubtful she will taste wine as many times as a connoisseur) and she may learn to taste wine better, but the pleasure diminishes in a different way: the Pyrrhonist returns to ataraxia or dispassion and peace of mind because there is no identifying with or grasping for any “being,” there are only appearances. Without their external reality appearances are like water flowing through your fingers. Grasping after it is obviously futile. The Skeptic believes appearances are states of their soul, not external objects. So there is nothing to know more about, no endless searching to know and enjoy a tiny new thing about wine.
But this is the same with language use. The person who really enjoys language is not the analyzer-knower type, but the one who can appreciate vagueness. The person who enjoys the word solid uses it for a table, not a tiny particle. Not that particle is any less poetic than table: particle is still infinitely large compared to the infinitessimal, and the infinitessimal, which may escape being poetic, emerges as a piece of mysticism.
I hope this clears up Mates exasperation about Sextus not going into detail on why a scientist trying to cure cancer would not be as happy or have as much peace of mind as a Skeptic who has cancer. If the scientist didn’t have at least some skeptical approaches to life he would not taste honey, or feel the solidity of the world around him. The appearances of art would not be felt by him. Would you rather be him or the skeptic?
Of course, the idealized scientist doesn’t usually happen, and most scientists and other specialists move from their work to a more skeptical attitude at home or outside work. With a very flexible mind, a scientist could still be mostly a happy person. So this message is more for science education and communication. I had to argue with my mom that the things she sees in day to day life were more real than invisible particles. Sometimes people can’t live the skeptical life until they have reached the forefront of research in an area, just to confirm that appearances are just as good or better than the truths found in research. (example: me) I have to argue with my students to see the world of appearances. There have been projects such as logical positivism with a goal to make general language use more analytical and scientific. So the relevance of this argument has more to do with taking away the authority of the scientist to “discover” things that don’t appear to us, and giving appearances back to regular people, even if that makes the job of the scientist less valued and harder to communicate. We should educate and communicate with science in a way that empowers regular people and makes them happy, that is more important that the work of science.
1) let the horizon guide you, not knowing which comes first 1) The nameless nameless namelessness, on and on, (threes cannot be unsaid), ... ... ...— 1) They follow each other, an open circle with no line 1) A wandering path wanders for you, 1) do the wandering 1) The dying sun bleeds into the sky. 1) there is an end, and the end is an end to burning
Alina asks “what is that?” expecting a name — Northern Cardinal. I usually give her the name and then more: people call it a Northern Cardinal, but this particular cardinal’s left leg is a little longer than the right, and there is no name for that. Thich Nhat Hanh, asked by a child what color a tree was, answered “the color you see.” He didn’t want to replace the child’s tree with a word. The bird in your yard is not a Northern Cardinal. It is the bird you see.
Now: identity is important for logical reasoning. The laws have to be about something. So they are taught to us as if the something comes first and the law follows — here is the object, here is the law, apply the law to the object. The Law of Excluded Middle (either p or not p) is about a proposition; the proposition is about an object; the object is given.
Strangely, the laws themselves create the identities the laws are to be about. Not the other way around.
Take male/female under LEM. Either a human is male or not male. For this to be a usable proposition, “male” has to be the kind of predicate LEM can take — sharp, exhaustive, with a clean boundary. But humans are not delivered to logic that way. The sharpness is a demand the law makes on us. It is not a feature it finds. The category is constituted by the requirement that a category exist for the law to apply to. We did not go out and ask people what they were; we asked the law what it needed, and we called the answer “what people are.”
The same move runs through mathematics. The real number system was painstakingly built so that any point on the line could be named — if not by “1/3” or “0.2145…” then by some other body noise, some other designation. The axiom of completeness, Dedekind cuts, Cauchy sequences — all of this is the demand that the line behave like a set of objects, each available to a name. See Many Roads from the Axiom of Completeness for how the demand fails. But the demand persists, because the laws need it.
This is the inversion. Logic presents itself as descriptive — these are the laws, this is how things must be reasoned about. But the laws are first prescriptive. They say: let there be objects of this form. What we then call “objects” are what survives the prescription. The cost is everything that doesn’t survive. The bird’s slightly longer left leg. The person who doesn’t fit a binary. The point on the line that no Cauchy sequence converges to. These are not exceptions to the laws. They are what the laws had to push out of view to be laws at all.
What the philosopher calls identity, then, is the residue of a procedure. We treat it as a starting point because the procedure has already happened by the time we arrive at the proposition. By the time we are asked “is this human male?”, the work of constitution is done, and we are asked only to confirm it.
The identities are tools, not findings. To mistake them for findings is to take the shadow of the procedure for its object — and to inherit, along with the mistake, every cost the procedure had to extract. This investigation has freedom in it. Do we need the name Northern Cardinal before we notice the variations the name cannot hold? Or can we experience a bird and its leg with no names in mind? Like Bertrand and his peach: he thinks he is enjoying the peach more because he knows things about the peach.
The world we inherit is made very much of previous alterations using minds and words, and we need those names to recognize a bird, or a cardinal, or ourselves. But the ungoverned experience of the cardinal after all the names we treasure is just like where we were from the beginning. The same freedom is on both ends of our time together. This makes things cyclical. It makes science a mere entertainment while we are here — before the wave breaks free, and before it returns to the ocean.
Shrine
I have something to say
And the old words show a way
But the way I am bound
There are no words to be found.
Gotta unthink the unthinkable
A hope, another lie
It’s a different point of view
The liar said he would fly, and then he flew.
Hard bind like a railroad line
Face the race and step out of place, yeah
Hear the bell rhyme
In the middle of your mind
Our poem crows a broken joy
That’s changed all its lines
So I built this shrine with the help of Father Time
I don’t know what it means For a man to cross a great expanse of water
A timeless song there once was Always forgotten:
the demons may thunder with cold and the kingdom made hunger with gold
Echoing over a mountain where every drama is washed away by streams of twilight sun, Sung by an enthroned girl shining with sun-drenched hair.
Her power is not in her untroubled mind, but in the minds of others.
The potency of untested youth, the long adventure into the depths of her pure, virtuous heart. The man looks past her golden adornments, her revealing cobweb dress, her alluring form. He sees all this, and knows her.
Having traveled far across an ever-expanding flood. Worthy, dauntless, and endowed with the cunning to do good, He may only witness the Mountain and its pleasure, for he misses the last treachery at the edge of the sea.
As the shoals lay destruction to his ship and he lies dying between waves and shore. The sun still dwindles its rays on his heart, and he smiles at his vision and his own misfortune, recalling this song, which he had heard before:
the demons may thunder with cold and the kingdom made hunger with gold
Words are pomegranates with growing pains from green to ripe red,
juice runs thicker than blood and seeds are born from yearning
overreaching with dreams, opening words, soiled words, like durian, the stench and the desire, like a stone-fruit, for the pit to emerge, it is the lack that dreams
Names broken out of thick skin, only to be planted again even my name is a misdemeanor
my heart spills after long, long divisions, remainders of blood there is nothing but thick red juice
dense, radiant fruits run through me bathing in rivers staining rocks darker red
under cool green-filtered light, the love from my heart, full, hanging heavy on the branch. pain reverberates, wind-flung like the seeds of words,
between human and animal, my body, like my name, is not for me to judge
in this written wood my lamp falters before these dreams were broken I was in the dark comfort of wombs
A foothold I can call my own, a place that would forever accept my step I wander on blank sheets of paper,
I wanted to write about that piece of empty space that is home to all
Dip the page in water, they say, and let the ink run by itself. A paper vase with animals primitively drawn Turning the vase in my hands, the animals run, bleeding, until the vase contains something. (Write something into the vase) writing curled round its inner walls, saying “The truth is no-w-here.”
now I etch it in wood carvings
the medium of the woods I wandered
on blank sheets of paper until I was accepted into the Hall of Trees.
Mathematics proposes numbers to measure real things. There are notches corresponding to numbers on the measuring tape, but even if the notches succeed in referring to that real position. (although they remain a sign of the real object), gaps are still on the measuring tape with no notch and no number to describe the intermediate positions.The real number system attempts to fill the gaps that most numbers leave when describing something real, removing the need for metaphor. “Metaphorical language is language proper to the extent that it is related to the need for making up for gaps of language”(Giuliani, 1972, p. 131). The system “covers the gaps” and does the job of describing physical reality (and more) without metaphor. But how do real numbers go about covering the gaps?
The work of covering the gaps and freeing real numbers from metaphor is done with The Axiom of Completeness:
A bounded increasing sequence has a least upper bound (that is a real number)
Why would the axiom of completeness cover all the gaps of a real line?
A good example is in the act of measuring a plank with a straight-looking side. One compares the plank with a measuring tape and measures the whole meters, but there is still some plank left to measure. (The number of whole meters is the first number (position)in the sequence.) So one counts the number of decimeters left (the resulting position is the second number in the sequence), but there still remains more plank after the largest marker for decimeters. The process continues until the precision of the measuring tape is exhausted, eyesight fails, or the measurer loses interest. Even though one must fail in measuring the exact length of the plank, the axiom of completeness provides assurances that there exists a real number for the “actual” length of the plank (and that there is an “actual” length of the plank). But the process cannot take the full measure of the plank, and so we remain in the poetic world of metaphor, “a process, not a definitive act; it is an inquiry, a thinking on” (Hejinian, 2000).
We want to talk about something real, something as simple and straightforward as the length of a plank. We have an apparatus of controlled inquiry, tools and will-more than the casual use of words, but we still fail.
We must admit that the measurements (words) we have used remain metaphorical and the actual measure of the plank (object) ultimately falls into the gaps of language. The words (measurements) we started with in our task of measuring the plank are no less metaphorical than the measurement we have when we stop. How can we wake up from metaphor?
