The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  * * *

  KEPLER, BY THE WAY, as the astronomer knew for a fact, according to Leibniz, had eaten a heavy dinner of bread dumplings that night and fallen asleep early, before the new object had even appeared in the sky. By the time he woke up and looked out the window, the Prague Aristotelians were already completely tied in knots; perhaps there were a few stray Aristotelians whom Kepler could claim to have tied in knots with his De Stella Nova, but essentially that book entered a Prague in which the Aristotelians were mostly already totally tied in knots. It was, incidentally, Kepler’s well-known hankering for bread dumplings, and the fatigue those dumplings inevitably induced, that caused him to miss untold astronomical phenomena throughout his life; it is accurate to say that throughout his entire life Kepler never actually saw anything for the first time, he only observed what other people observed first, so filled was he with soporific bread dumplings—the optical nerve, said the astronomer, is directly connected, as Vesalius showed, not only to the brain but also to the stomach and extremities—which is why in place of his eyes, always half-closed in a dumpling-induced stupor, Kepler had to substitute his notorious mathematical prowess. But mathematical reasoning as a means of accessing reality can only go so far in replacing vision. For this reason, “I myself have never eaten a bread dumpling after four o’clock in the afternoon, even though there’s nothing in the world I’d like to eat more in the evening hours, and by the time seven or eight rolls around my mind is often screaming for bread dumplings, just as Kepler’s mind was always screaming for bread dumplings. But unlike Kepler I have always denied myself.” He likewise, unlike Kepler, had always denied himself all goulash and all roasted meats served after the hour of four o’clock in the afternoon, and as a result of this lifelong self-denial was always “preternaturally crisp in the head” by the time the stars began to shine. The astronomer’s firm conviction was that anyone who eats foods like goulash or bread dumplings after about four in the afternoon, or five at the latest, cannot (unless we’re dealing with a ludicrously light dumpling, a dumpling you hardly feel in your belly, the kind of divinely light bread dumpling we could theorize about forever but that in practice we never actually encounter anywhere on Earth, much less in Prague) call himself an “astronomer,” perhaps he can call himself a “mathematician” or a “philosopher,” but he cannot in good faith call himself an “astronomer,” and that includes the gastronome Tycho Brahe. “You simply cannot eat such a meal at such an hour and afterward expect to see,” the astronomer told Leibniz. “I mean truly see.”

  When he said the words “truly see” he pointed at his empty eye sockets.

  As a result of never eating a bread dumpling after four, or even after three, or two, or, if he anticipated a specific astronomical event that night, one, or noon, or even eleven in the morning, or even after ten, the astronomer had seen a great deal of the night sky, “more of the night sky than anyone in history,” though of course seeing so much was a consequence not only of his evening diet but of his instrument, too, the observational instrument that he himself, as he would shortly explain, the old astronomer told Leibniz, all competing priority claims notwithstanding since they were all uniformly lies, pure and utter lies, had conceived, designed, and wrestled into being in the wake of the emergence in the night sky of the new object. “I have seen a great deal with the aid, as I shall explain, of this splendid instrument,” said the astronomer, patting the telescope, in Leibniz’s account, “and I continue to see a great deal.” As if to prove it he peered into his telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote something down in his large ledger.

  * * *

  YES, HE CONTINUED, the astronomer repeated, now putting special stress on that word, or so it seemed to Leibniz, to see a great deal, a repetition and a stress in which Leibniz said he detected for the first time in their conversation a note of provocation: Prove that I cannot see what I claim to see! And, indeed, Leibniz’s inability thus far to prove or disprove the astronomer’s claim was already at this early stage starting to vex or even torment him, since the truth of it resided in a head less than one and a half feet from his own. The problem of entering a human head—a problem that hitherto had not even struck him as a problem at all, and which afterward would never strike him as a problem again, because before that day, and again after that day, but not on that day, Leibniz had absolute faith in the power of rational discourse to lay bare for us the contents of a human head—now struck him, only a few minutes into his exchange with the astronomer, as potentially insoluble, horrifically so. As the astronomer’s head talked, Leibniz half listened to it talk and half tried to figure out how to get inside it. It is rare, Leibniz noted, that we can pinpoint the precise geographical location of a truth, in this case a little less than a foot and a half away, in a quasi sphere (a head) whose circumference was itself a little more than a foot and a half, and yet have no idea what that truth actually is! He could cradle that head in his hands without getting an iota closer to the truth within it, and if, merely as a thought experiment, he were to reach over all of a sudden and crack that head open, the truth, “far from being freed from its shell like a walnut,” would simply perish along with the conditions that gave rise to it, i.e., the astronomer’s head, since we are dealing here with a contingent rather than a necessary truth, the-astronomer-without-eyes-can-see implying perhaps an absurdity but not a contradiction, as it hinges, Leibniz noted, on empirical rather than logical properties of eyes and sight.

  This, incidentally, is the earliest appearance in the Leibniz corpus of the distinction between absurdity and contradiction, which in mature works like his Critical Remarks Concerning the General Part of Descartes’ Principles (1692) would serve to safeguard the possibility of the doubtful and the absurd, not to say the insane, from the Cartesian dictum that “what is doubtful should be considered false.”

  “How can I get in this head?” Leibniz reports thinking over and over again. “How? How? How? How can I get in this head? How can I get in this head? How? How can I get inside this head?” The problem of getting inside another head, and seeing what that head was seeing (or not seeing) and what it was thinking (or not thinking), now struck Leibniz as a profoundly philosophical problem. Neither cradling it nor cracking it open would do it, for the barrier involved not only bone but also a thick layer of philosophy. The human skull consists, one might say, Leibniz wrote, of a quarter-inch-thick layer of bone and a quarter-inch-thick layer of philosophy. Of course the brain is also cushioned by various membranes and fluids. A skilled doctor can penetrate the skull with a drill, and he can cut through the membranes with a knife, and he can drain the cerebral fluids with a pump, but his instruments are utterly useless for penetrating that solid, condensed layer of philosophy. “Even the most state-of-the-art medical instrument wielded by the best doctor in Paris will simply bounce off the cerebral-philosophical membrane,” Leibniz wrote. That left language. “Never had I been so reliant on words to expose to me the innards of another head, and never had words seemed so unequal to the task,” Leibniz wrote, noting that the astronomer, who had never once stopped talking while Leibniz entertained these troubled thoughts, had returned to the topic of Kepler and bread dumplings, and Tycho and meat. “These words were supposed to illuminate for me this old man’s mind? Words like ‘Kepler’ and ‘dumplings’ and ‘four o’clock’ and ‘five o’clock’ and ‘Tycho’ and ‘venison’ and ‘five o’clock’ and ‘six o’clock’ and words like ‘Kepler’ and ‘goulash’ and ‘seven o’clock’ and ‘no astronomer’ and ‘Tycho’ and ‘goose’ and ‘eight o’clock’ and ‘no astronomer,’ and also, for the first time, words like ‘Galileo’ and ‘fettuccine’ and ‘nine o’clock’ and ‘no astronomer’?” From these words was he really supposed to be able to determine what the astronomer saw, and whether he saw, as well as whether and what the astronomer thought?

  Leibniz angled his pocket watch toward the light of the half-melted candle. It was now ten past nine. Through the warped slat he could see a sma
ll slice of the bright blue sky.

  * * *

  THE ASTRAL TUBE, which others call the telescope, was invented not, as is commonly claimed, in 1608, but in 1599, according to the astronomer, by which Leibniz notes he presumably meant 1604, nor was it invented by a Dutch spectacle-maker, nor by a Florentine mathematician, nor again by a Neapolitan magus, to which figures history conspires to give credit because it does not want to admit that the person who first extended one of man’s senses was merely the self-taught son of a Prague sculptor. The astronomer had penetrated the secrets of nature on his own, outside of any institution, e.g., the spectacle-maker guilds, the mathematical faculties, the esoteric circles of magi, and for that reason history had always been suspicious of him and had always conspired against him. “Yet this tube is no more Galileo’s tube than that star is Kepler’s star, and this I shall prove to you, Herr Leibniz,” he said. “You asked how I lost my eyes, and you asked how I can see without my eyes, but you failed to ask, How did you discover your tube? If wisdom consists, as the saying goes, in asking the right questions, it would have been wiser to ask not only the two eye questions but also the one tube question. Yet you shall know the answer to all three before the eclipse plunges us into darkness.

  “And at the moment we are plunged into darkness, you shall see that these three questions are really one question,” he added, peering into the telescope, picking up his quill, and writing something down—a long string of numbers, or so it seemed to Leibniz in the faint flickering candlelight.

  “You because you’re still young probably believe that the things you invent and the things you discover will be named after you, whereas the things invented by others and the things discovered by others will be named after others. It is not so. For example, I had nothing whatsoever to do with a certain mechanism for the very rapid and ostensibly painless plucking of feathers from a duck. And yet it is named after me. There is a contraption for hoisting the curtains of a theater with the press of a pedal not the crank of a winch—I’ve never touched it! But of course they attribute that curtain contraption to me. I did not discover the rodent that bears my name. There is in the Americas a fungus … in short, I have never laid eyes on that fungus. And so on. Yet the telescope, which is mine, they give to others.”

  Then the astronomer said: “Of course, whether the telescope is attributed to me or someone else doesn’t really matter, I’m even a little bit ashamed to harp on it, because when I die, which by my calculations will happen not long after the eclipse that will take place some two and three-quarters hours from now, I will be taking the telescope with me, and I will be taking Galileo and Kepler with me, and I’ll be taking Tycho with me, too, they’re all dead of course but nevertheless I’ll be taking them all with me, and anyone who credits the telescope to anyone else I’ll be taking with me, as well as the people they credit, as well as everyone else, and actually I’ll be taking the whole world with me, and even you, Herr Leibniz, I will be taking you with me, too, you probably didn’t know that! You because you’re young probably think that you’ll take the world with you when you die, deep down every young person thinks that he will take the world with him when he dies, that’s the canonical young person’s belief, because deep down young people don’t really believe in the reality of other people, they haven’t had the sheer reality of other people drummed into them yet by the schools, but what I have discovered through the most rigorous astronomical research is that I will actually take the world with me when I die. As a child I stupidly believed that I would take the world with me when I died, which belief was fortunately drummed out of me during the few years of schooling I had before my father whisked me into his workshop. The reality of other people was drummed into me and my belief that I would take the world with me when I died was accordingly drummed out of me. I learned next to nothing in school, but the sheer reality of other people was drummed into me. Elementary school is mostly useless, of course, but as a social mechanism for drumming into people the sheer reality of other people it is probably unsurpassed. I’m actually grateful for school, because by the time my father yanked me out of it by the ears I genuinely believed in the sheer reality of other people! Which, needless to say, is an extremely useful belief for going about life. There’s no more practical belief for going about life, and through life, than a belief in the reality of other people. Almost no one succeeds in the world without that belief, and all art and science flows out of that extremely expedient and uniquely advantageous belief, without which the stock market, too, would actually immediately shut down. And as a consequence of that belief being drummed into me, my childish, self-indulgent belief that I would take the world with me when I died was, thankfully, drummed out of me. Of course I eventually found my way back to that belief and realized it was perfectly true, but now it was true for the most rigorous and quantitative astronomical reasons,” the astronomer said, patting the telescope. “Every great thinker, by the way, has always without exception found his way back to his earliest childhood beliefs; right at the end he realizes that his whole intellectual life has been nothing more than a putting-on-firm-foundations of what he thought right at the start. Bad thinkers, I include incidentally Kepler and Tycho and Galileo in this category, and also Copernicus, start over here and end up over there, and the farther apart here and there are the better they think they’ve thought, and the louder the world claps, as if they’re children in a jumping competition, because the world thinks thinking is a kind of jumping, and in fact the kind of thinking Kepler did was a kind of jumping, but true thinking is actually an elaborate standing-still, or at most a going-over-there followed by a coming-back-here. While the world applauds the thinkers who choose to participate in the children’s jumping competition, the true thinkers are standing utterly still in a very complicated way. And since nonthinkers also tend to stand quite still, and nonthinkers vastly outnumber true thinkers, the world assumes that anyone standing still is a nonthinker and therefore does not applaud these standing-still types; but if you look very closely at a nonthinker and a true thinker you’ll notice that they’re actually standing still in completely different ways. So I came to realize that I really would take the world with me when I died, the fixed stars and the erratic ones and the Earth and the Sun and everything else, just as I had once thought, I would, not you, and not anyone else, either, but for entirely different reasons than I had once thought,” the astronomer said, patting the telescope. The content of the belief was the same but the armature around it and supporting it from underneath had gone from “pure childishness” to “extreme scientificity.”

  “This probably sounds obscure but what I mean will become perfectly clear,” the astronomer told Leibniz. He pressed an empty socket to his telescope, picked up his quill, and wrote down a long string of numbers.

  Since this belief turned out to be true, it didn’t matter, according to the astronomer, who got credit for inventing the telescope, it was petty and absurd to go on and on about the credit he deserved but did not get, he said. Who cares! Let Galileo have credit, or Lipperhey, or Kepler, or Della Porta, or whomever else, “Seriously, who cares?” cried the astronomer. Who cares! Who cares! Who cares! Who cares! Still, it was slightly better, he supposed, for the last two-odd hours of the world to possess a smidgen more truth and a smidgen less falsity, and, in any case, the young man had asked what happened to his eyes, and how he could see the firmament without them, questions that were of course intimately connected to the question of the development of the telescope, which was of course a variant of the question of who truly invented the telescope, i.e., me, the astronomer said, these three questions are really one question, so here, he said, in Leibniz’s written account, is the fact of the matter.

  TWO

  SHORTLY AFTER THE appearance in the heavens of the new object, the astronomer’s father, who didn’t show the slightest interest in it, because, as he once put it to his son, “that’s up there and we’re down here,” a point of view that wounded the son
but which he could not after all disprove, “I could not tie him in knots as I had the Aristotelians because he simply didn’t care about the twinkling thing, not what it was, not where it was, not even that it was,” decided, in an attempt to reverse his fortunes, which according to the astronomer had plunged from great heights into an abyss, to present Emperor Rudolf, who as it was known had an insatiable appetite for the monstrous and the esoteric and was a fanatical enthusiast of any mechanism that mimicked nature, with a perfect simulacrum of the human head. This mechanical human head would be capable not only of blinking its eyes and chomping its teeth but also of imitating the human voice through an astoundingly intricate system of tubes modeled in part on the apparatus by which the brazen bull of Phalaris had transformed the shrieks of the criminals roasted to death within it into eerily realistic bullish bellowing. For it to be a genuine automaton, the head, of course, could have no one inside it, it had to be void of everything but toothed wheels turning one another, so the initial sound would have to be produced by mechanical means rather than the yelps of the damned, the astronomer told Leibniz; but the apparatus that converted that first sound into something ostensibly human would be based, his father explained, on the principle of Phalaris’s bull. “We shall invent the modern bull of Phalaris!” his father told him. To the son the idea of a mechanical human head was abominable even though it was actually he who, in the course of the furtive studies he pursued each night, had first come across it, in a book called On the Sense of Things and on Magic, written by the heretical Dominican friar Tommaso Campanella just before his arrest by the Inquisition in 1594; in this book, the astronomer told Leibniz (who reported the claim to the Philosophical Transactions “although,” as he noted, “it cannot possibly be true, since that book was not published until 1620,” and suggested that the astronomer may have meant Campanella’s earlier Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses), Campanella writes of coming across a passage in a book by William of Paris in which William claims that Albertus Magnus had built in Cologne around 1250 out of pure matter a mechanical head that could speak in a human voice. Campanella himself did not believe that such a head was possible, in fact he adduced this head precisely as an example of what it was that natural magic could not bring about, “I do not hold to be true that which William of Paris writes,” wrote Campanella, as the astronomer told Leibniz, Leibniz wrote, but the astronomer’s father—who had been racking his brain for a marvel he could make that would astonish the Emperor and thus restore the astronomer’s father to his former stature, even to his former title, for if the astronomer was not lying to Leibniz his father had at one time been the Imperial Sculptor to Rudolf’s father and predecessor, Emperor Maximilian—believed that not only was such a head possible, it would actually be quite simple. “I can make that head!” he cried, according to the astronomer, when the astronomer mentioned the idea to his father as though it had occurred to him ex nihilo. The idea was abominable to the astronomer but he knew that his father, whom besides fearing, admiring, resenting, and loving, he now pitied, would take to it. “Every sentiment a boy can feel toward his father I felt toward my father and every sentiment an artist can feel toward his art my father felt toward that mechanical human head,” the astronomer told Leibniz. He distinctly recalled the first moment of sheer elation, the cries of “I can make that head! I can make that head! I can actually make that head!” He really thought he could make that head! the astronomer recalled. He was confident he could make that head and that that head would flabbergast the Emperor. With a sweep of his arm his father cast into the trash decades of labor, including the almost infinitely mirrored microcosm of the cosmos that had been his first gambit to get into the Emperor’s good graces, but in which his father had quite recently, and rather traumatically, lost faith. For years, indeed for much of the astronomer’s adolescence, his father had been gluing thousands or tens of thousands of tiny mirrors to the inside walls of a box, but one day, not long before that new object appeared in the heavens, “he peered into the peephole of the box and immediately started weeping.” Never before had the astronomer seen his father weep. It was horrible to see, “horrific!” “The cause of his weeping of course was the realization that he had devoted a sizable chunk of his life to a many-mirrored box.” Whenever we devote such a sizable chunk of our lives to such a box, gluing mirrors in it and so forth, and then realize rather far along that it has not magically metamorphosed into a microcosm of the cosmos, we weep—that’s natural. “We weep upon realizing that it has remained a mere box, I understand that now.” At the time, though, it was extremely upsetting, the astronomer said. “I often wish I hadn’t seen it.” To see your father peer into a little box he has made and begin weeping remains upsetting no matter how much you claim to comprehend it in retrospect. Imagine, he put so much faith into that little box, he truly believed in the box, and then one day he peers into the box and begins weeping! He had really believed in that box, but from the moment he peered into the box, he could no longer sustain his belief in the box. “His faith in that box could not withstand what he now saw in it, which was basically just a lot of mirrors.” Though he saw himself as the most practical and skeptical of sculptors, and sculpting as the most practical and skeptical of art forms, he was in truth driven by a faith even more fervent than that which drove penitents to wander the streets of Prague thrashing themselves bloody with iron-studded whips, for he believed without question that the incremental addition of a particular mirror, one of thousands, who knew which one, would suddenly transform that object from a mere many-mirrored box into a microcosm of the cosmos. For years he glued in mirror after mirror, awaiting with a conviction that in retrospect seemed to the astronomer uncanny the marginal mirror that would effect that metamorphosis and give him a box worthy of bestowing on the Emperor. Leibniz comments: “His father seems to have believed that the qualitative problem of transmuting a many-mirrored box into a microcosm of the cosmos could be reduced to the quantitative problem of pasting in, e.g., the three hundred and forty-fourth mirror, or the three hundred and forty-fifth mirror.” The astronomer said: “No one should have to see his father put so much faith in such a small box and then all of a sudden lose that faith in that box.” That day the astronomer wept, too, and so did his mother; the fact of the matter is that they, too, had had faith in that box; they, too, had believed (probably based on the uncanny conviction of their father and husband) that it would at some point transfigure itself from a mere many-mirrored box into a microcosm of the cosmos, rescuing its maker from the commercial, artistic, and psychological abyss into which he’d been plunged when Emperor Rudolf dismissed him as Imperial Sculptor and transferred the imperial capital from Vienna to Prague. “Father begged us, weeping, Look inside, tell me what you see when you look inside! What do you see? What do you see? And Mother peered in and said, I see a microcosm, and I peered in and said, I see a many-mirrored box. And Father knew of course that Mother was lying and that I was telling the truth.”