I like abstract visual art, poetry, and modern prose literature, but I'm fairly unsophisticated musically
This is an all too common pattern. Music appears to be the most difficult, most abstract art form (evidently that is part of its attraction for me). This is evidenced not only by the numerous cases I have encountered of otherwise intellectually sophisticated people being musically unsophisticated, but also by the historical development of music, which has tended to lag behind the other arts. (For example, for musicians the "Romantic period" refers to the period from about 1820 to 1910; I remember being shocked to learn that the early 19th century was the tail end of romanticism in other arts, such as literature.)
Related to: Little Johnny Bayesian, Savanna Poets
There are certain stereotypes about what rationalists can talk about versus what's really beyond the pale. So far, Less Wrong has pretty consistently exploded those stereotypes. In the past three weeks, we've discussed everything from Atlantis to chaos magick to "9-11 Truth". But I don't think anything surprised me quite as much as learning that there are a couple of rationalists here with a genuine interest in poetry.
Poetry has not been very friendly to the rational worldview over the past few centuries. What with all the 19th century's talk of unweaving rainbows and the 20th century's talk of quadrupeds swooning into billiard balls, it's tempting to think it reflects some natural order of things, some eternal conflict between Art and Science.
But for most of human history, science and art were considered natural allies. Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, an argument for atheism and atomic theory famous for being the ancient Roman equivalent of The God Delusion, was written in poetry. All through the Middle Ages, artists worked to a philosophy of trying to depict and celebrate natural truth. And the eighteenth century saw a golden age of what was sometimes called "rationalist poetry", a versified celebration of Enlightenment principles.
When William Wordsworth launched his poetic jihad against rationalism, he called his declaration of war The Tables Turned. On a mundane level, the title referred to an argument he was having with his friend, but on a grander scale he was consciously inverting the previous order of Reason as the virtue of poetry. Thus:
Over the next few years, he and fellow jihadis John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley were wildly successful in completely changing the poetic ideal. I can't begrudge them their little movement; their poetry ranks among the greatest art ever produced by humankind. But it bears repeating that there was a strong rationalist tradition in poetry before, during, and after the Romantic Era. In its honor, I thought I would share some of my favorite rationalist poems. I make no claims that this is exhaustive, representative, or anything else besides my personal choices.
The most famous rationalist poet is probably Alexander Pope (1688-1744), perhaps best known for writing Isaac Newton's epitaph:
Indeed, Pope spent much of his career praising science and human reason, while also simultaneously lampooning human stupidity:
I can't claim this as a complete victory for rationalism, since it was in the context of Essay on Man, a mysterianist work declaring that humans should never overreach their pathetic mental powers and question God's supremacy. Even the quoted passage is a little ironic, intended to convey that humankind, with such amazing science, had a tendency to shoot itself in the foot when it tried to overstep its bounds.
But Pope's appreciation for scientific progress was genuine, and he was also deeply interested in overcoming bias (which he, in his pre-Samuel Johnson way, called "byass"). His Essay on Criticism sometimes reads like a strangely spelled, classical-allusion-laden rationalists' manual:
He exhorts us to think for ourselves, rather than take things on faith or blindly accept authority:
But equally he reminds us that reversed stupidity is not intelligence:
And tells us to admit our errors, learn from them, and move on:
At the end, he describes the person he wants judging his poetry: someone who sounds rather like the ideal rationalist.
Pope came from a time when any person of good breeding was expected to be learned and able to converse about the scientific discoveries going on around them; an age when reason was actually trendy. There have been few such ages, and hence few such poets as Pope. But other rationalist poetry has come from people who were mathematicians or scientists in their day jobs, and poets only in their spare time.
Such a man was Omar Khayyam, the eleventh century Persian mathematician and astronomer. He did some work on cubic equations, wrote the Islamic world's most influential treatise on algebra, reformed the Persian calendar, and developed a partial heliocentric theory centuries before Copernicus. But he is most beloved for his rubaiyat, or quatrains, which recommend ignoring religion, accepting the deterministic material universe, and abandoning moral prudery in favor of having fun.
There are some beautiful translations and some accurate translations of Khayyam's works, but the rumor among those who speak Persian is that the beautiful translations are not accurate and the accurate translations are not beautiful, and that capturing the true spirit of the original may be hopeless. FitzGerald in particular, the most famous English translator, is accused of playing up the hedonism and playing down the rationalism. I've tried to select from a few different translations for this essay.
On determinism:
On atheism:
On Joy in the Merely Real:
And unlike Alexander Pope, who is horrified, HORRIFIED at the thought that mankind might challenge God's divine plan, Omar Khayyam thinks he could do better:
Needless to say, his contemporaries shunned him for such blasphemies. What would he say, they ask, when called before the throne of Allah to account for his beliefs? Well, he told them, he would say this:
Compare the clarity of Khayyam, who is prepared to stand before God and justify himself without fear, to Pascal, who insists that we abandon our own intellectual integrity on the imperceptibly tiny chance that we might accrue some material gain. I find this quatrain - "in thy eternal justice I confide, as one who ever sought to follow Truth" - the only fully satisfying answer to Pascal's Wager.
Piet Hein (whom I've quoted here before) was another scientist who turned to poetry. During his career as a theoretical physicist and mathematician, he developed the superellipse and the game Hex (later studied by John Nash). His career as a poet began when the Nazis invaded his native Denmark. The censors would have prohibited any obviously rebellious literature, so he turned to writing odd little poems that seemed innocuous until you thought about them long enough, at which point they became obvious critiques of dictatorship. He continued writing after the war, usually on the theme of keeping things simple and avoiding stupidity.
This, for example, seems appropriate to a site called Less Wrong:
If you've read Are You A Solar Deity or Schools Proliferating Without Evidence, you may see the humor in this quatrain about fitting the data to the theory:
On the first virtue:
On the fifth virtue:
On making an extraordinary effort:
On fake justifications:
Appropriate to the Singularity or to any of a number of fields:
On reversed stupidity:
On shutting up and doing the impossible:
And even some poets who had no such formal acquaintance with science considered their poetry allied with its goals: an attempt to explore the universe and celebrate its wonders. This one's from Don Juan by Lord Byron, commonly (but, according to his own protestations, erroneously) classed with Wordsworth as a Romantic. I won't say there's not sarcasm in there, but Byron has a way of being sarcastic even when saying things he believes:
There's no sarcasm at all in this next declaration of Byron's, where he vows hostility to everything from despotism to religion to mob rule to fuzzy thinking to the Blue vs. Green two-party swindle:
Byron on the progress of science, and on rejecting disproven theories:
Again on the same topic (and some thoughts on the "wisdom of crowds"):
This is Byron at his sarcastic best on the value accorded truth in society:
I can't help ending this by saying a word in praise of the Romantics. Yes, they may have gotten their rainbows in a tangle, and they may have hurled every curse they could at "Reason", but I think they were less opposed than they let on. Consider as anecdotal evidence Percy Shelley, who was expelled from Oxford after refusing to recant his atheism. What the Romantics hated was anyone telling them how to think, and their quarrel with a science they did not understand was less with its methods and more that it seemed an authority. Thus John Keats, in the same year he wrote Lamia, also penned perhaps the greatest statement of the Joy in the Merely Real ideal ever, writing:
I think given an hour to talk to him and set him straight I could've convinced him there is no loss of beauty in accepting Newton's optics. It is true, after all.
I end with Shelley's description from Mont Blanc of the godless yet ordered essence of the universe that he worshipped:
The laws that govern our own thought processes are the same laws that bind the infinite dome of Heaven. What better statement of the rationalist worldview could you ask for?
Now, what are your favorite rationalist poems?
Footnotes:
1: I have since spotted the following addition to Pope's couplet: