Reading Hippocrates

Today I read Hippocrates' piece on how the environment creates health or illness. The core idea is that a harsh, dry, mountainous, unfriendly environement gives rise to a courageous and strong people, while a soft, swampy, luxurious environment gives rise to weak and soft people.

Hippocrates tries his hand at some ethnology too. He compares the Scythians, Persians, and Europeans. His views don't seem very cogent. But the most interesting part about his opinions is his views on the causes of the impotence of the Scythians. His diagnosis of the Scythian's commonplace impotence is fascinating. I have to wonder if he borrowed it from someone who had lived among them, though. Hippocrates does not seem much like a travelling man.

The piece is called 'Airs, Waters, Places'. It's quite a sensible paper when you read it in historical context. Hippocrates apprehends the malleable nature of humans, and tries to grasp how humans fit the environment without recourse to myth or religion. In that light, his first efforts are very good indeed.

How To Get Unstruck When Writing a Story: Michael Swanwick on Character Triangles:

Just in case you weren't aware, Michael Swanwick is a genius and writes science fiction. These are his words:

"A story requires at least three characters. So the triangle a useful tool when analyzing why a story-in-progress doesn’t work. Make a diagram of all the characters and who they interact with. Look for triangles. If there are none, then you’ve identified the problem:

"A protagonist needs to be pulled in two different directions, so there can be a resolution that is a synthesis of interpersonal forces. A protagonist and an antagonist (who would be represented by two dots connected by a line) don’t enact a story – they’re just playing tug-of-war. Which is no more a story than is a football game.

"So a man falls in love with a woman. Either it takes or it doesn’t. No story. A woman has to choose between two men. This might be a story. Draw the triangle.

"There’s a line from her to Man A and another to Man B. But is there a line between the two men? What is their relationship to each other? Usually when such a story isn’t working – when it doesn’t feel like a story – it’s because the two men have no direct relationship with each other, but only interact through the woman. Ask yourself how you can make their relationship interesting. Are they best friends? Father and son? Astronauts competing for a place on the first rocket to Mars?

"The insight can be extended to ask related questions. Is the relationship on one side of the triangle significantly weaker than the other two? Are there more than one triangle in the story, and if not should there be?

"As you can see, the utility of this is extremely dependent on the specifics of the story in question. The one universal that I insist upon is that the triangle is descriptive rather than prescriptive. We can all think of perfectly valid stories that don’t have character triangles in them.

"And it does no good to start with a triangle. Let your story find its natural shape. If you get stuck, diagram it out and look for the triangles. If the story doesn’t get stuck, don’t give it a second thought."

Asimov's Foundation and the Great Books of the Western World

The Foundation Series and Great Books of the Western World have many common points. Both Foundation and GBWW are concerned with the preservation of the civilizing influence of reason and Western culture. Both address theories of knowledge and power. Both attack ethics and the sentiments with great feeling and strong views.

But as the Great Books of the Western World is a real life conversation spanning the ages, it is about true things and actual stories, which even though fiction are based in true cultures and times. The Foundation Series is fiction through and through, fiction in the best, the Aesopian, sense of the word. The world of Foundation cannot and could not ever exist.

But in a deeper sense Asimov's Foundation is poetry; it is a fiction that shows more truth than a history can.

The underlying context of Foundation occupies the same epistemic space as Plato's ideal republic. Socrates insists that reality can be measured; how much more does the fictional Hari Seldon force nature to yield up her secrets through psychohistory! The Encyclopaedists of the Foundation represent the Platonic educational ideal, and the various scurrilous derring-do of the first book of Foundation represent symbolically much of the political dialog that followed in the wake of Plato's work these last few thousand years.

Finally, in the annoyingly analytical smugness of the psychohistorians, starting with Hari Seldon himself, we can see Aristotle's rational and dry wisdom at work.

The key point of dissimilarity between the Great Books and Asimov's Foundation is simply that Asimov has a far more narrow view of knowledge than the Great Books. Asimov's Foundation, when exposed to the harsh, humane, realistic light of the Great Books, reveals itself to be marred by a narrow scientism and cramped by reductionistic cliches.

Nevertheless, as Harold Bloom would put it, the Foundation Series expresses considerable anxiety towards the centralized authority of the Western tradition. The Empire is doomed, but the Foundation will endure through the dark age of irrational faith and mystical, magical thinking. Asimov's effort to assert reductionist scientism makes the Foundation Series (at least in the first three books) vital and genuine.

Finally, comparison with the Great Books casts a new light on the latter books - ie, 'Foundation's Edge', 'Foundation and Earth'. If the heroic effort to ward off the forces of gaian wholism in the latter books of the Foundation Series is not entirely convincing, then the fault is perhaps not in the vitality of the writer but in the weakness of the material.