I wonder, though, is it of any use to reflect on what was said long ago, before you were born (although but an instant in biological time)? Is it but a frivolous and absurd pastime for those afflicted with the philosophical bent? A way for weak souls to avoid the demands of now?
Heinrich Heine, writing some hundred years after Berkely’s time, in the 19th century, tells tales in the “Religion and Philosophy in Germany” of how emperors or kings unearthed the tombs of their predecessors out of curiosity. “Strange and horrible curiosity that often urges men to gaze into the tombs of past!” A kind of intellectual necrophilia. Then he goes on to explain how days long gone (the Middle Ages) somehow still exist (a ghostly kind of existence) in his present “modern” times. How is it that the past is present in the everyday now?
Jumping up a notch, a 100 years later, another German writer, Sigmund Freud, is writing about, how, in mental life, the past is preserved in the present. In “Civilization and Its Discontents,” he says “there is nothing strange in such a phenomenon…. In the animal kingdom we hold to the view that the most highly developed species have proceeded from the lowest; and yet we find all the simple forms still in existence today.”
Yet, Freud asks, what about “preservation in the sphere of the mind?” He then presents an analogy. Consider the history of Rome, the “Eternal City.” Now a busy modern metropolis, but throughout its history it went through many stages of construction, such that nothing remains of its former states. But now imagine the city as a “psychical” entity, “in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away.” Then you would see all its past stages simultaneously with the present. But then he breaks off the analogy, because “it leads to things that are unimaginable and even absurd.” Indeed, it goes against fundamental intuitions: two or more things cannot occupy the same location, nor can one thing be in two or more places at the same time, nor can something be and not be. (It sounds like the world of quantum physics.) Freud thinks the difficulties encountered are due to the attempt to think of the mental in spatial terms.
I span centuries in the seconds it takes to flip the faded pages of Berkeley’s text. Outside the library there is the May Festival. People selling wares, bands playing, crowds dreaming. I mingle with the crowd; for to be is to be perceived…
Puzzle
Suppose you come upon a fork in the road, were the road breaks off in two directions. One direction leads to a village where people only speak falsely, and the other direction leads to a village where people only speak truly. There is a person sitting under a tree from one of the villages, you don’t know which. What is the one question you may ask the person which will give you the knowledge of which road leads to which village?
Answer to last week’s puzzle
1^2 + 1^2 + 2^2 + 3^2 + 5^2 + 8^2 + 13^2 = (13)(21) = 273
