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Lacan, Leibniz, and English as a Programming Language

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.” —Lacan

Author

Justin Murphy
November 11, 2023

In today’s issue of Other Life:

  • On the untapped wealth of the world’s untranslated writings

  • On Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic Catholicism

  • The first hackathon for wordcels

News and Events

  • The video version of The Independent Scholar is now shipped.

  • We are currently reading a selection of Montaigne’s most important essays. You’re warmly invited to join us for a discussion seminar on November 21. All seminars are free for members.

  • Members are also welcome to join Joel’s group writing sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday at 9am-11am Central. Great way to get back into writing if you’ve fallen off! If you’re not already a member, become one today.

On Jacques Lacan’s Psychoanalytic Catholicism

The famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) is often assumed to be just another purveyor of postmodern gobbledegook.

On the contrary he was, and remained all his life, a kind of crypto-Catholic.

Lacan brought French philosophical pomposity to an absurd level, I will admit, but I’ve always found his lectures to be fascinating and generative. There are real ideas there, don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. Reading is better than listening because he spoke so slowly, but the insane pomposity is fun to watch.

Anyway, Lacan believed the Roman Catholic Church was destined to triumph because it "knows where belief resides.” This is not widely known. See M.G. Murphy below.

“I am the product of priests”, Lacan once said of himself... Freud, an old-style Enlightenment optimist, believed religion was merely an illusion that the progress of the scientific spirit would dissipate in the future. Lacan did not share this belief in the slightest: he thought, on the contrary, that the true religion, Roman Catholicism, would take in everyone in the end, pouring bucketsful of meaning over the ever more insistent and unbearable real that we, in our times, owe to science.

Jacques-Alain Miller, Foreword to The Triumph of Religion

The home of architect Peter Cohen, in the coastal forests of Maine.

On the Untapped Value of Untranslated Writings

Leibniz left behind about 15,000 letters to more than 1,000 correspondents, as well as about 40,000 other unpublished items relating to his work on politics, history, law, linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences.

Why do we only have a few books and articles by Leibniz translated into English?

Recall that the Middle Ages never translated Plato. Had they translated Plato a few hundred years earlier, they might have pulled forward the Renaissance by a few hundred years, perhaps thereby pulling up the Industrial Revolution by a few hundred years. Highly conjectural, but not completely implausible!

The reason we don't translate all the work of great thinkers is that it's boring.

A 1904 project by the Royal Society to publish the complete works of Isaac Newton was eventually aborted. Here is what the leader of that project, Astronomer R. A. Sampson, had to say:

"Before anyone undertakes such a project he should see clearly that he is making a voyage into the past, the greater part of it completely dead and obsolete. An editor must allow himself to be absorbed into this defunct world for many years. Probably he would never quite find his way out of it.”

R. A. Sampson

The present discounted value of all the great work we've never bothered to translate must be at least in the billions, if the Plato-Renaissance model is even 10% true.

Obviously, we need to go translate and publish all of this old work using AI. Some scholars will cry about this, insisting they need huge grants to do it properly, but ignore them. Go get it!

The First Hackathon for Wordcels

English is now a programming language.

Learn to use it like one.

Build something cool. Make some friends. In one weekend. For free.

December 9-10. An experiment from the Other Life community.