1/ To begin, from the Gothic du-ginnan – to gin up, to create out of nothing, to create out of whole cloth – is to invent, to make a stir, to set the wheel in motion.
The sense of the term du-ginnan is twofold – someone is trying to make a noise – and
whoever hears it should beware. Your attention is drawn but it may be that nothing at all is happening -- nothing has begun. It is only that someone says it. Talk suggests making a claim -- not the certainty of fact – ‘beginning’ mixes these up.
The earlier Anglo-Saxon term, on-ginnan, earlier Middle English ginnen, be-ginnen – meant to arouse or intensify strong feelings, to generate or increase feelings, particularly by telling lies. To gin up feelings is to engage in specifically dubious conduct -- to arouse fierce reactions by dishonest means -- for example, to bear false witness; to make a false report; to spread a misleading rumor; to slander someone. To begin – historically -- is to offer a strategic lie meant to serve one's purpose. To begin is to try out a ploy, to bait someone, to set a trap – a strategy for manipulating people.
These first ideas about ‘beginning,’ reading back into the history of the common English term, suggest a dispiriting conclusion, that all the blather regarding beginning sports a dubious pedigree. Likely beginning is no beginning at all.
Has anything ever really begun? Is it only that someone has said so?
2/ The enigmatic word ‘beginning’ makes a bold claim and also casts this shadow. The start, origin, creation, birth, launch, source, cause, reason – onset, rise, emergence, unfolding, conception, eruption – inception, debut, kickoff, commencement, opening, unveiling, coming out – development, inauguration, happening – emanation, awakening, entry – event -- all this language, all these and like expressions, raise the issue whether anything is happening at all -- or whether simply someone has said that it is so.
The Latin term eventum, to come, to come out of, derives from ueniire, venire, to come, to go. There is much more force in this later term – much more 'reality' -- the sense is: this is, this took place, this has come, this has come about – not simply that ‘someone said …”
'Event' ties back to the PIE root *gwa, "to go, come." This is the later Sanskrit gamati "he goes," Avestan jamaiti "goes," Tocharian kakmu "come," Lithuanian gemu, Greek bainein, "to go, to walk, move, step," Latin venire "to come," Old English cuman "come, approach," German kommen, Gothic qiman. As an elemental directional orientation, *gwa seems likely to have been preceded by gestural language. This makes it clear why a wave of a hand can make a thing go away, or make a thing come about -- a motion of the hand can be a beginning or make an end.
To call with one's hands, to push away, to put an end to something with a gesture, to conjure up a thing, to gin things up and goose things up or to milk things until they are bone dry -- to trot out the old tricks, to keep beating the same old dead horse -- to make a noise and get a rise out of people -- to gin things up is: to try – to try to make a dent, to get some notice, get heard, make a point, set the wheel turning. A person can do this with a word or a wave of a hand, with an expression, with the wink of an eye – simply with a look.
Perhaps something really has begun – but only if you look, you see it, only if you notice. This suggests Berkeley’s formula esse est percipi: to be is to be perceived.
3/ Has anything really happened? -- Is it really so? -- Perhaps it is only a story. We can distinguish wanting a thing to come – the wish – from the reality – the actual realization of a thing. If the first premise is that the claim of making a beginning also seems to throw up the idea of illusion, then the second step raises the issue of true account, the honest record, what really happened. Does perspective matter? Do you have to take a certain perspective to see the truth? Is there more than one honest account – or is there a preferred frame of reference? What is a straightforward account and what does perspective have to do with it?
4/ To create out of nothing – to deceive or to invent -- to blind or to make visible. Perhaps a thing gets pointed out only to tear something down, to denigrate it -- to lay a thing bare – this could mean to expose, to shine a harsh light on a thing – but to lay a thing bare may also be seeing a thing as it is, warts and all – the true story. When we talk about beginning, there is this ambiguity – we have no clue what the motive is – nothing is a beginning unless we see where it is going. A beginning is like cutting a path through the forest – before you cut it, it was not there.
To begin, then, calls up questions about honesty, about what is objectively real, the difference between a wish and harsh reality, the difference between illusion and truth, about having feelings oneself and creating feelings in another person, about speaking falsely, about creating something new – about the ‘neutral’ account and nature of this characteristic change that we are looking at: beginning – about its minimum conditions; about the connection between recognizing a pattern and setting one down.
5/Aristotle argues that the idea of beginning is not actually a single idea but – as one looks more closely – a set of related ideas. To begin is (minimally) one of three conditions: to be the first point from which a thing is; or the first point from which a thing comes to be; or the first point from which becomes known (Metaphysics V 1). So, a thing in itself – on its own – is a beginning; and the power of a cause is a beginning; and gaining knowledge is a beginning. Heidegger digs into Aristotle’s doctrine in his 1929 study The Essence of Reasons. He argues that we cannot see what Aristotle is up to by looking for a common characteristic between these different ‘kinds’ of beginning. Ultimately, he thinks he has identified the special kernel of this idea – to begin – in the primordial human tendency to create distance from where one is – he calls this “human transcendence” – a human being has an inherent possibility of alienating itself from its immediate environment and looking on things anew. This is what makes ‘beginning’ possible (III).
6/ Let us broaden our vocabulary.
Mandarin: 屯, zhūn, sprouting, 始, shi, beginning, 創, chuang, create
Japanese: 开始, kāishǐ, 开, kai, open
Sanskrit: शरू, shuroo, beginning, stripped down
Hebrew: רֵאשִׁית, beresheet, in beginning
In Mesopotamia, each day was marked from one evening to the next, divided into twelve beru of two hours each. From this term comes the Hebrew ‘beresheet.’
Beresheet -- Babylonian -- translated with Greek term 'genesis' in the Bible – the genesis of a thing, its beginning – its dawn.
The Greek term Αρχή, arche, beginning, origin, first cause, from the beginning, from old, as has always been done, has a mystery of age around it – this is ancient, this is from the misty past, this goes way back – back to the beginning.
Ex archais palin, a frequent expression in the New Testament, meaning: anew, afresh, once again, one more time; the first place, first power, first sovereign, first empire, first in line – by analogy, the reigning power; the realm, dominion, command, magistracy, term of office – the ultimate appeal; in the plural, the archais, i.e. the authorities, officials, magistrates; the rulers.
Archgenus, first beginning, archegenetou, first leader; archegeteo, to make a beginning. Note the powerful history inside the word prince: prince is from the Latin, princeps – taking -- to take first, seize first, to take power; therefore chief, leader, author, doer.
Αρχή – Homer, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Euclid, St. John. l'Arc de Triomphe. In Homer it is the cloudy past – for Heraclitus, the underlying principle – in Euclid the geometric axiom; in the Gospels, the origin before anything takes form.
Aristotle: αρχή, the first point from which a thing either is, or comes to be, or is known. Aristotle explains what ‘grounds’ are: the reason for something; the fact of something; the truth of something. Then he explains what ‘causes’ are – these are material, formal, efficient and final. So arche (principles) are logoi (reasons) and aitia (causes) and hule (stuff of which a thing is made) -- an idea (eide), a use (cresis), a purpose (telos).
Language gets at ‘beginning’ from all these metaphors: the dawn, the sprouting of a plant, stripping bare, taking power, truth, fact, purpose …
7/ In a way there is simply too much here. Language proliferates but we get no closer. Consider Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics as a way of grasping this proliferation and the problems it suggests.
Heidegger explicates the roots of contemporary terms (e.g. “being”) back to their origins -- his immediate thesis is that Western concepts (for the most part) are secularized theological concepts, and that when we examine them closely we see that the basis on which they have evidence (force of argument) has nothing to do with a purely rational knowledge but instead emerges from an earlier epoch in the development of our mentality – the Age of Faith – whose categories are themselves borrowings from earlier epochs – especially from the Greeks – anchoring key ideas from everyday life in a world which no longer exists. For Heidegger, we always come too late. History is not simply a vast array of ideas but very specifically a degradation from a high standard to a lower one. The deep idea here is that the thing we are looking at – beginning – comes from, and only makes sense in, a bygone world. There is a magic in beginning because the whole idea of beginning emerges in a prescientific world.
Einstein’s ideas about errorless translation stand at the opposite end of argument from Heidegger’s “deconstruction” of Western epistemology. Heidegger argues that ideas from time epoch 1 (e.g. the medieval idea of truth as disclosure of God’s purpose) get twisted out of shape and falsified when Descartes recasts truth as certainty emerging out of doubt (in time epoch 2). Einstein argues: The idea that something makes sense is equivalent to the idea that we can unerringly translate between reference frames. If a view cannot survive translation into other categories, into a different vocabulary, there is nothing there.
8/ Euclid is a teacher about beginnings.
Let us study his way of approaching problems.
Euclid, The Elements – τα στοιχεία
Euclid’s vocabulary: There are six parts of an argument: protasis, enunciation; ekthesis, setting-out; diorismos, definition-specification, katakeue, construction-machinery, apodexis, proof, sumperasma, conclusion.
He eis to adunaton apagoge, reduction to the impossible (reductio ad absurdum) and he dia tou adunatu deixis, i.e., proof per impossibile. Reduction, apagoge. Objection, entasis. An unexpected result revealed by the proof – a corollary, a porisma. An assumption – a lemma.
Foundations: horoi, definitions, aitimata, postulates, koini ennoiaiu, common notions, theorem, the thing to be proved –
Euclid writes in the future tense: he says e.g., “as will be proved in due course” (ho exeis deixthesetai).
Euclid’s discussion of first principles in Elements I continues Aristotle’s line of thinking in the Organon. What Aristotle calls “hypotheses of existence” Euclid calls definitions (horoi),
postulates (aitêmata), and common notions (koinai ennoiai). In a sense, Euclid is collecting in one place everything that people had learned about mathematics in all the ancient schools -- the Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, the Academy, the Lyceum – creating a language for stating these results. Euclid sets down the classic example of developing a structure deduced from principles, so much so that for medieval thinkers like John of Salisbury, Walter Burleigh and William of Occam, thinking or logic or mathematics or ‘mind’ is the Euclidean demonstrative method from basic axioms.
What impressed Euclid’s more distant successors was not his demonstrative system but his building process itself -- thinking of reasoning very narrowly as the process Euclid undertakes e.g. in his first proposition: Book I Proposition 1 -- “to construct an equilateral triangle from a given line segment.” Euclid does not say whether or not a triangle exists; he begins talking about points and lines as a matter of course and applies his postulates until the thing is done (hoper edei poiesai, Latin ‘quod fieri’) or until the statement is finally proved (hoper edei deixai, Latin quod erat demonstratum). Thinkers like Brouwer and Heyting developed so-called “intuitionist” mathematics from Euclid’s process of gradually assembling an object of study without explicitly calling attention to doing this. In Euclid’s words, mathematics is a kind of poetry -- poiesai, ‘to make,’ and deixai, ‘to show,’ ‘to bring to light’) -- mathematics brings a thing about and makes use of it -- thus e.g. to show geometrically how to build an equilateral triangle or a geodesic dome -- a view called ‘constructivism’ today.
Geometry becomes a different kind of study after it is established that Euclid’s parallel postulate represents one geometry, one kind of geometry, one topology among all possible spaces. So, to begin with, Euclid – then Lobachevsky, Reimann, Gauss, Bolyai, Hilbert … At some point, we have many geometries.
In each case the foundation step is axiomatic – this is the more geometrico – the geometrical method. The geometrical method rests on the basic human orientation in space and time. Hilbert expresses this general result: “axioms express basic facts related to our intuitions of objects.” Then it occurred to him: there is a difference between an uninterpreted sentence and a given valuation for a sentence. Therefore: Is beginning more like a statement (an assignment of meanings) or a valuation (an assignment of truth values)?
9/ Note Kant’s idea that existence is not a predicate. ‘It is’ is distinct from ‘it begins.’ Existence is more like a valuation – an assignment of values. This leads to the Grothendieck principle: there are no absolute beginnings; parameters always determine a class of objects, not just an ‘object’ per se. There are settings and re-settings, default vs. client-altered base routines – maps and new maps. Topology stays abreast of changes in flow – phase transitions motivate re-mapping. The theory of invariants should be subsumed under the theory of representations. In effect invariants are temporarily flat variables. Maxima, minima – the sector for ‘existence’ is roughly a fuzzy intersection.
In effect: we’re used to thinking that information about an object — say, that a glass is half-full — is somehow contained within that object. The lesson emerging from these studies is – roughly – that this is not the case -- objects do not exist like this – objects do not have an independent existence with definite properties of their own -- instead, objects exist only in relation to other objects.
There is no such thing as a ‘beginning’ per se. One thing can be a beginning in relation to another.
10/ Thinking about the physics of beginning – this gets us to the singularity – the event of events? No – relativity gets rid of the idea of absolute time, therefore also of absolute beginnings. The big bang is a kind of singularity – so is a radiating particle – so is a black hole.
Inflatons, gravitons, photons, gluons, bosons – quantum fluctuations in the ‘condensate’ – massless particles self-organizing into mass – the import of angular velocity and torsion in creating ‘things’ – early steps in a theory of substances. Why is there time? Because the speed of causality is not infinite. C ≠ ∞. Causality takes time. Causality is the only framework that all observers will agree on. This is the physical equivalent of the verifying “same count” principle in mathematics. If the speed of light were not a constant, no time, matter, space, cause, effect … being … would be possible … nothing could be … nothing could congeal together to be and begin. The beginning as the Higgs boson.
The Lorentz Transformation lays out how space and time are connected. It predicts the speed of causality. This is the speed of beginning.
11/ The systemics of beginning -- looking at the synergistic interaction of distinct elements as they reach thresholds – then emergence – then evolution, adaptation, self-organization, homogeneous-unstructured collections -- order emerging from initially disordered states. These are nonlinear processes: thus, the combination of known solutions is unequal to the solution of new problems; every moment is a beginning.
Beginning engages the problems of central control vs. local dynamics, macro vs. micro levels – and numerosity as a factor. E.g., there are ~ 10^16 sodium and chlorine atoms -- 10 million billion atoms -- in a single grain of salt. How can one even begin to think about a universe with this much stuff? – maybe 10^80 elementary particles? – if anything is elementary.
In nonlinear cases, the output is non-proportional to the input. Ulam’s joke is that in talking about linear and nonlinear, our vocabulary is somewhat like the distinction between elephant and nonelephant. This is the joke buried in equation theory. This is the arbitrariness of ‘beginning.’
12/ The neurology-psychiatry-psychology of beginning – another arena for exploration – the Hughlings Jackson evolutionary approach to the development of the nervous system – the nervous system’s gradual evolving from the most primitive reflex levels to consciousness and voluntary control.
In disease this sequence is reversed, so that a dis-evolution, re-gression, dis-solution takes place, with a release of primitive functions normally held in check by higher level processes. The physical condition which represents a pattern for trauma, fixation, and the basic structure of helpless repetition – what Freud grapples with as the “repetition compulsion” – is precisely an inhibition of beginning. Nothing can begin because THE THING is still ongoing.
Then the return to the scene of the crime, the event – the beginning in the sense of the origin of the disorder – we will need to conduct an anamnesis or recollection of this patient’s history.
When did the damage take place? Let us gradually peel back the defenses and – at last – get to the beginning.
We must marvel at the hopefulness in this gesture – the comedy, the poignancy, the beauty – in the model for neurosis. None of the symptoms make sense without the background of the powerful beginning …. Symbiosis, unity, beginninglessness; then separation -individuation – cf. Lacan’s teaching that “I am” means “I have lost.” To begin means to bring the earlier state, the mother-child union, primary narcissism, to an end.
13/ The anthropology of beginning – the naming of the gods -- the mythic narration of the creation. Myth narrates the creation of the world out of nothing.
C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation
Jospeh Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment
Paul Radin, Primitive Man as a Philosopher
14/ How did the world begin? After myth, secular theories emerge – Thales’ ideas about heat, Aristotle’s concept of the entelechy, Epicurus on spontaneous generation, Harvey’s doctrine omnia vivum ex ovo – all life comes from an egg – Lamarck’s “eternal particles,” Needham’s “vital force,” Oparin’s “colloidal systems,” Haldane’s “primordial soup” – Schrodinger’s inquiries regarding life emerging from lifeless matter – What is life?
Note: these changes transpire after the universe itself no longer seems to be alive.
The search for the onset life event – for abiogenesis – does not have to face the problem of what happened before that?, because by hypothesis the contingent transition is conceived as having an absolute beginning in time. The problematic nature of this assumption is almost beyond our capacity to think, as St. Augustine points out in his discussion about time in the Confessions – a thing we understand only if we do not look at it. (Call this the ‘DL’ principle.)
What is our proper beginning? The creation? The asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs? Our first hominid ancestors? The agricultural revolution? The printing press?
These questions raise the new difficulty, what if it happened in some different way? How would we know the difference? E.g., there are at present at least dozen or so viable theories for abiogenesis – the beginning of life on our planet – such as the hydrothermal vent, or heat venting, geologic shelter, direct radiation, alkaloid bath, lipid tissue development,
Cosmic seeding theories …. There is a like variety of cosmological theories – various grand TOEs (Theory of Everything) – such as cosmogenesis, ontologies of nature – random fluctuations in the condensate – inflation, expansion, matter-antimatter, and gravity-dark energy cycling.
This is what Kant referred to as the ‘transcendental dialectic.’ Kant does not locate the beginnings of ideas per se in religious revery or in practical discoveries or look to any hoary origin to begin thinking about human understanding. An idea is never “borrowed” from the senses. Even the simplest idea far surpasses mere concepts of the understanding – the mere forms of experience – since they are “issued by the highest reason” – nothing in experience ever coincides with them in all respects – nor are they “mere capacities” or “keys to possible experience” – they have a completely different significance, and we must go through a process of remembrance to recall them. This process of remembering is called philosophy.
Ideas draw us into contradictions. The assumption of a beginning appears to rest on the foundation of a beginninglessness that preceded it. Arguably, nothing can come from nothing, so that beginning ex hypothesi is impossible.
What is more natural – somethingness or nothingness? -- that everything in time follows from point number 1? This is somewhat like thinking of the earth as the center of the universe.
The assumption that there is no beginning is that the temporal sequence is infinite or that the time illusion is ongoing – just a part of the framework of experience as we develop it. If the temporal sequence is infinite, no point in it is closer to, or any further from, any possible beginning or end. Time emerges from timelessness -- an inexhaustible past -- and passes into an inexhaustible future. It is a passage from the infinite through the infinite to the infinite.
Kant speculates: this may have the consequence of making it impossible for us to locate any moment in finite time.
He recalls Augustine’s point about not looking at a thing. We must police our tendency to fly away from what we know (KRV, Transcendental Dialectic, 2,2, 7). (“DL’)
Hegel’s reformulation: “The battle of reason is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything” (Logic, § 32).
Hegel: “The point of view originally taken on as a posit, must in the course of development be converted into a result. Philosophy turns into itself and reaches the point where it began. Philosophy thus resembles the circle that closes in on itself.
“Thus the main conclusion:
“To speak of a beginning in philosophy only makes sense in relation to a person who begins the study. Philosophy has no beginning” (Logic § 17).
15/ William James – ultimately, to start something, to get something going, to take part and step into life, takes one thing -- one only: “a great heave of will” (Principles of Psychology).
The Kierkegaard-Lessing principle -- that the pursuit of a thing, not the presumption that one has found it, is what matters – is relevant (Concluding Unscientific Postscript).
Jaspers: “Intellect always predicts the negative only. It knows what is doomed. Yet man adds something new to the world, something never adequately comprehensible in terms of what came before, not even in retrospect. No one can foresee what men are capable of.”
Heidegger’s studies on the problem of truth focus on the idea of unveiling – unfolding – as if a thing was hidden somehow, in itself, and now, suddenly, for the first time, it shows itself. Truth is unconcealedness – uncovering – like bringing out of darkness, like bringing to light, exposing, laying bare. Now finally the thing is nakedly here – now we see. Now we know. Knowledge is a kind of desacralization. The Heidegger thesis is that history is a degradation -- that secularization is always a desacralization and de-mythologization -- therefore mere rationalization -- therefore a cheapening and lessening from the ancient foundations. It is almost as if seeing were ashamed of seeing. This dead-end of thinking – thinking that sees itself as superior to and purer than science, drawing back to an ancient and golden past – is stuck in the idea that in order for man to be free, he had to cast God aside. Man could not begin except by eating the apple and betraying God.
This is why Sartre is a healthier thinker – he has escaped this loneliness for the dead God -- the Sartre principle is essentially: cut the crap. Make something of what you’ve been made into. Lose the bellyaching -- you are in charge of you – live your life -- let us live ours.
Camus: “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are born on a street-corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door – it can be anyplace, anytime. So it is with absurdity. The absurd world more than others derives its nobility from its abject birth. What is absurd is the confrontation of this powerful irrational world and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.”
Arendt: “Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est, says Augustine. “That a beginning be made, man was created.” This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is every human being.”
Enough to begin --
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