A Cylinder in a Void

[mtvessel]

Feb 2020
Anaximander - Carlo Rovelli, tr. Marion Lignana Rosenberg – Westholme Publishing, 2011
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The first thing to say is that this is not really a biography because almost nothing is known about Anaximander's life and his writings have been lost. Instead, Rovelli uses his ideas - in particular, his vision of the earth as a cylinder hanging in a void "because of its indifference" - as a starting point for an investigation of what makes scientific thought different from other forms of knowledge. The conclusions he comes to will be familiar to anyone versed in the Western liberal tradition of academic discourse and probably won't do much to persuade those who have already rejected them. But they are worth stating nonetheless.

Rovelli starts by sketching the background from which Anaximander came. He was born in 610 BCE in Miletus, a city that was a nexus for Babylonian, Phoenician, Egyptian and Greek trade and influences thanks to its strategic location on the west coast of Asia Minor. That such a place should produce such a revolutionary thinker is no coincidence, according to Rovelli. True creativity arises from the juxtaposition of ideas and this is far more likely to happen in a culturally heterogenous environment than in a monoculture – witness the fact that the Chinese Imperial Institute of Astronomy never deduced that the earth was spherical, despite millennia of careful observations of the heavens. (An aside: Rovelli states twice that the Chinese never got to Anaximander's idea that the earth floats in a void before the arrival of the Jesuits in the seventeenth century, but this is clearly untrue. One of the ancient schools of Chinese astronomy, the Xuan Ye, posited an infinite heaven, and Zhang Heng's analogy of the world being the (flat) yolk in the spherical egg that is the celestial sphere clearly implies that the Chinese were aware that the heavens continued below the earth.)

Anaximander's ideas are difficult to discuss because the treatise in which he wrote them - On Nature - has been lost, and we only know what they are from comments by doxographers such as Aristotle and Pliny. However it is clear that for their time they were revolutionary. In particular, Anaximander proposed mechanistic rather than divine or mythological explanations for natural phenomena such as rainfall and the seasons. Rovelli points out that in order to get to his ideas, he had to criticise and reject those of his mentor Thales. Respectful but robust criticism of earlier ideas is of course at the core of academic discourse, and science in particular.

Anaximander also had to take on the prevailing mythical-religious explanations for natural phenomena, a foretaste of the long-running and still ongoing war between religious and scientific ways of thinking. In the last part of the book, Rovelli goes into this in depth (despite his claim to be limiting his remarks to reporting some ideas and a few observations and questions). Science is ultimately a system of knowledge that attempts to fix its own mistakes by constant criticism and experimentation. This makes it uncomfortable and subject to change, and many people hate that. But the alternative is to say that humans are capable of perfect knowledge if only they look at the world in the correct way, an approach that Karl Popper elegantly summarised in the phrase "truth is manifest" in his book Conjectures and Refutations. Of course many people do think precisely that, and political and religious leaders have expended enormous amounts of their and other people's time, energy and resources playing whack-a-mole with unhelpful gadflies like Socrates who keep pointing out the imperfections in their "perfect" systems. In fact, if you'll forgive an aphorism (mine, not Rovelli's), the history of the world can be described as an ongoing fight between those who are looking for the truth and those who think they've already found it.

Sadly, we are living through a time when the truth seekers are in retreat and the truth is manifest brigade are making the running, particularly in the political sphere. So I'll close with Rovelli's fine broadside against the identity politics that has disfigured my nation and many others across the western world, from the chapter on writing, democracy, and cultural crossbreeding:

"Each time that we - as a nation, a group, a continent, or a religion - look inward in celebration of our specific identity, we do nothing but lionize our own limits and sing of our own stupidity. Each time we open ourselves to diversity and ponder that which is different from us, we enlarge the richness and intelligence of the human race. A Ministry of National Identity, like those established of late in some Western countries, is nothing more than a ministry of national obtuseness." (p101)