Spurious - Lars Iyer [40]
‘How depressed are you?’, W. asks me on the phone. Very, I tell him. W.’s in his office in the southwest of the country, and I am in mine in the northeast. W. says he’s looking out of the window and thinking of his failure. How has it come to this?, he thinks to himself over and over again.
Unopened parcels of review copies of books surround him, W. says. His office is thick with them. What can he do? I am the only person who would be interested in such books, W. says. They sicken him. They’re like the ballast attached to a body to make sure it sinks, he says. And he is sinking.
It’s different for me, W. acknowledges. I get some satisfaction from office work. It makes me think I’ve done something with my miserable life. It makes me feel my life is justified. W. can’t bear it, though. Why does he go into work, then? What’s the point? He could take a few days leave. But W. feels something significant might happen in the office at any moment. He has to be there, W. says. Why? What will happen? He doesn’t know, says W. Something momentous.
We’re bottom feeders, W. says as he often does. We live on scraps. Soon there will be nothing for us, and then what? Well, the apocalypse will decide it all. It’s coming, we agree. Our second leader told us so. In eight years time, wasn’t it?, W. asks. Four years, I tell him. He’s revised his estimate.—‘Four years’, says W. ‘How will we survive until then? What will we do?’ W. will be waiting in his office, the rain falling.
W. is still lost in Cohen, he says on the phone. What’s it all about? He could be reading in Dutch for all he knows. Nevertheless, he sends me some notes for my edification, he says. This is what real scholarship is all about, he says.
I read. Not the apparatus of knowledge itself, but in its outcomes, Ergebnis. Namely, science. And a little later, Unlike all the other fundamental concepts of Erkenntnistheorie, the concept of the infinitesimal does not have its roots in ancient thought.
I’m impressed, I tell W.—‘You’re always impressed!’, W. says. ‘Anything could impress you, monkey boy’.
W. says he can only stand reading Cohen for two hours a day. Two hours, from dawn to six A.M, then up for breakfast and into the office. He never understands a word, not really.
W.’s come to the chapter on conic sections, he says. Do you know what a conic section is?, he asks me. It’s a transverse section through a cone, I tell him. It’s something to do with Kepler. Now it’s W.’s turn to be impressed. I have odd corners of knowledge, he says. Like the German for badger, for example—what was it? Der Dachs, I told him, that’s why you get dachshunds.
Anyway, W. says, there are three types of conic section: hyperbolic, parabolic and the other one—it isn’t anything-bolic, it’s just normal.—‘I think that’s what it’s called: normal’, W. says. ‘Anyway, which one are you: hyperbolic or parabolic? Do you view yourself as a hyperbolic man or a parabolic man?’
Sometimes, W. dreams we will become mathematical thinkers, I the philosopher of infinitesimal calculus, he the philosopher of conic sections.
Mathematics is the organon, says W. pedagogically. Do you know what organon means? He didn’t know himself, W. says. It comes from Aristotle, and refers to an overall conceptual system—the categories and so on.
W. is growing increasingly certain that the route to religion is a mathematical one. Maths, that’s what it’s all about. Take Cohen, for example. And Rosenzweig. Of course no one can understand Rosenzweig on mathematics and religion, W. says.
For his part, W.’s been reading his Hebrew Bible again, and wondering how to mathematise it. He’s quite serious, he says. He is currently in an email exchange on the topic with one of his cleverer friends, he says.
The infinitesimally small is not a concept of thought, but of science, and the science of magnitudes, Groessen. But does not the idea of magnitude presuppose intuition? Thus