Get your own Free Home PageIn about 1920 Jack London wrote a description of an early Metaphysics Anonymous meeting in San Francisco. They didn't call them that at the time, but the worst thing they could call one another was 'metaphysician'.
The story is set around 1910 and is called Martin Eden. From Chapter XXXVI :
"He swiftly saw, no matter upon what they talked, that each man applied the correlation of knowledge and had also a deep-seated and unified conception of society and the Cosmos. Nobody manufactured their opinions for them; they were all rebels of one variety or another, and their lips were strangers to platitudes. Never had Martin, at the Morses', heard so amazing a range of topics discussed. Theer seemed no limit save time to the things they were alive to. The talk wandered from Mrs. Humphrey Ward's new book to Shaw's latest play...the latest plans and scandals in the union labor party administration, and the wires that were pulled to bring about the Coast Seamen's Strike."I read this story first in 1999 after a lawyer named Kendall recommended it. I was struck by the similarity between London's description of some meetings in 1910 to the meetings I remembered in the 1970s.
"Martin was struck by the inside knowledge they possesed. They knew what was never printed in the newspapers - the wires and strings and hidden hands that made the puppets dance. To Martin's suprise, the girl, Mary, joined in the conversation, displaying an intelligence he had never encounterd in the few women he had met. They talked together on Swinburn and Rosetti, after which she led him beyond his depth into the by-paths of French literature."The location London describes in San Francisco is close to a description of meetings I attended 60 years later: "It was impossible that this could be, much less in the labor ghetto south of Market". We were on the way to a meeting south of Market Street, about 1975, when Leigh coined the term "Metaphysics Anonymous".
"The books were alive in these men. They talked with fire and enthusiasm, the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink and anger stirring other men. What he heard was no longer the philosophy of the dry, printed word, written by half-mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer. It was living philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in these two men till its very features worked with excitement. Now and again other men joined in..."The use of "metaphysician" as an insult appears in Martin Eden, Chapter XXXVI, pg 840:
"Idealism had never attracted Martin, but the exposition it now recieved at the hands of Norton was a revelation. The logical plausibility of it, that made an appeal to his intellect, seemed missed by Kreis and Hamilton, who sneered at Norton as a metaphysician, and who, in turn, sneered back at them as metaphysicians."The ideas inportant to Korzybski 50 years later were anticipated in the same passage:
"'Phenomenon' and 'noumenon' were bandied back and forth. They charged him with attempting to explain consciousness by itself. He charged them with word-jugglery, with reasoning from words to theory, instead of from facts to theory. At this they were aghast. It was the cardinal tenet of their mode of reasoning to start with facts and to give names to the facts."In the late seventies, the interpretation of quantum theory was one of our topics. In 1910 the same ideas were seen in terms of realism versus idealism:
"You can know only that much of the play and interplay of force and matter as impinges on your senses. You see, I am willing to admit, for the sake of argument, that matter exists; and what I am about to do is efface you by you own argument. I can't do it any other way, for you are both congenitally unable to understand an abstraction."Then London gives an argument that seems to state Karl Popper's argument against Logical Positivism, although it was probably not written yet by Popper:
"And now, what do you really know of matter according to your own positive science? You know it only by its phenomena, its appearances. You are aware only of its changes, or of such changes in it as cause changes in your consciousness. Positive science deals only with phenomena, yet you are foolish enough to strive to be ontologists and to deal with noumena. Yet by the very definition of positive science, science is concerned with only appearances. As somebody has said, phenomenal knowledge cannot transcend phenomena."In about 1975, I had the choice of attending meetings at "The Institute of Applied Ontology", or Metaphysics Anonymous. My training in physics led me to Metaphysics Anonymous.
I hadn't seen Candace in about thirty years. She has been working as a physician in Mexico City. I mentioned that an early version of Metaphysics Anonymous was written about in a book by Jack London. She said, "Do you mean 'Martin Eden'? I read that in high school. It really brings back memories..."
in Hesperides..... the story continues in a poem by Deric about San Francisco in the seventies.
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