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> the famous double mouvement that nearly every academic talk ever given in French identifies in whatever matter is at hand: dans la Monadologie de Leibniz il y

> the famous double mouvement that nearly every academic talk ever given in French identifies in whatever matter is at hand: dans la Monadologie de Leibniz il y a un double mouvement; dans Méridien de sang de Cormac McCarthy il y a un double mouvement… Why would someone writing an article in English not include an English translation? I have zero idea what this sentence means.

bombcar 5y ago
Because we’re not special enough (though apparently it’s just that every academic talk in France identifies something called a “double movement”).
notpachet 5y ago
There was a time when French was the lingua franca (literally). Academics are exposed to more of its vestiges than lay people. I didn't mind it. In a way I feel like this is indicative of one of the points of the essay: the expectation that authors today need to dumb down and distill their work into cereal for the lowest common denominators in order to sell more copies. Granted, there's a fine line between gesturing to your intellectual forebears and just being an obnoxious prat, but I don't think the author crossed that line for the worse. Time to brush up on your french?
- mvonballmo 5y ago
  The author has been living and teaching in France for years now. He reads and speaks many languages besides French and English.
brimble 5y ago
Depending on field and author, that's downright common. French is still often untranslated in works that tend toward the literary or philosophical. Before the 70s or so, Latin (usually some unattributed quotation you were expected to recognize) was often untranslated. Before World War I, Greek was like that, too—but that's because both Greek and Latin were studied in primary school, then. In all cases it seems like the British have held on to those a bit longer than Americans. In this instance, you ought to be able to pick it out by context, thanks to cognates and two famous works by two famous figures being included. "Méridien de sang" can only be McCarthy' Blood Meridian; "la Monadologie de Leibniz" can only be Leibniz' Monadology—the philosophy of monads being the thing he's second most famous for in the English world, after co-developing calculus and before noble genealogy. "un double movement" is almost identical to English. From there, your guess at the meaning, given the lead-in to it, will likely be correct. You think this is bad, you should see what they do in math.
- irrational 5y ago
  > two famous works by two famous figures being included I think we run in different circles. Despite having three university degrees and owning thousands of books that I have read, I’ve never heard of either of these books and am just slightly aware of Leibniz, though that might be explained by my never having taken a class on calculus. tLdr; I still don’t have a clue since I don’t possess enough requisite knowledge in the required domain space.
  - brimble 5y ago
    Yeah, McCarthy's one of the (simply the, perhaps?) most famous living English-language "literary" fiction authors around (had a somewhat-popular movie made based on his The Road, even) so if you don't keep up with that sort of thing you might not know him. Leibniz' work on monads[0] would be at least passingly familiar to anyone with even a little philosophy background, but could otherwise have been missed. If it makes you feel any better, I may as well be badly afflicted by dyslexia when I try to read a mathematical statement with more than a couple simple terms. [0] I'm digging way back so this might be a little off, but fundamentally it's a solution to the Problem of Evil[1]: Leibniz puts us each in a "windowless monad" of a universe—sort of individual pocket universes—such that all the people we interact with are actually automatons of a sort. In this way, a person can do evil (i.e. sin still exists), but not actually inflict it on anyone else, if that makes sense. Meanwhile, bad things happening to you in your personal monad aren't actually evil because... I dunno, it's been a while so I don't remember exactly, but I'm guessing it comes down to "God works in mysterious ways". Basically, he replaces true causality with a kind of divine harmonic dance of actually-not-affecting-one-another things and people that make up what we call "reality". Nb. his actual argument is far less dumb than I'm making it seem. [1] The Problem of Evil can be summed up in the child's question: "if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil (apparently—that part will matter a ton for some people who try to address this) exist?" Lots and lots of theologians and philosophers over many centuries took a crack at the seemingly-simple question—and in fact, one of Leibniz' notions, that the world one experiences is "the best of all possible worlds", was famously parodied in Voltaire's Candide, which is another way someone with a humanities background might have become familiar with his philosophy.
auggierose 5y ago
I don't speak French, and I nevertheless understood what he meant by double movement. If you speak French, then you will probably appreciate this passage.
Tao331 5y ago
I was in Paris for 1-1/2 sleep deprived days, so I think I can clarify. See, in much of Europe, the toilets have a little flush button and a big flush button. My understanding is that the big flush button is for le double mouvement.
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  Would double-up-vote this if I could...

bombcar 5y ago

Because we’re not special enough (though apparently it’s just that every academic talk in France identifies something called a “double movement”).

notpachet 5y ago

There was a time when French was the lingua franca (literally). Academics are exposed to more of its vestiges than lay people. I didn't mind it. In a way I feel like this is indicative of one of the points of the essay: the expectation that authors today need to dumb down and distill their work into cereal for the lowest common denominators in order to sell more copies. Granted, there's a fine line between gesturing to your intellectual forebears and just being an obnoxious prat, but I don't think the author crossed that line for the worse. Time to brush up on your french?

mvonballmo 5y ago
The author has been living and teaching in France for years now. He reads and speaks many languages besides French and English.

brimble 5y ago

Depending on field and author, that's downright common. French is still often untranslated in works that tend toward the literary or philosophical. Before the 70s or so, Latin (usually some unattributed quotation you were expected to recognize) was often untranslated. Before World War I, Greek was like that, too—but that's because both Greek and Latin were studied in primary school, then. In all cases it seems like the British have held on to those a bit longer than Americans. In this instance, you ought to be able to pick it out by context, thanks to cognates and two famous works by two famous figures being included. "Méridien de sang" can only be McCarthy' Blood Meridian; "la Monadologie de Leibniz" can only be Leibniz' Monadology—the philosophy of monads being the thing he's second most famous for in the English world, after co-developing calculus and before noble genealogy. "un double movement" is almost identical to English. From there, your guess at the meaning, given the lead-in to it, will likely be correct. You think this is bad, you should see what they do in math.

irrational 5y ago
> two famous works by two famous figures being included I think we run in different circles. Despite having three university degrees and owning thousands of books that I have read, I’ve never heard of either of these books and am just slightly aware of Leibniz, though that might be explained by my never having taken a class on calculus. tLdr; I still don’t have a clue since I don’t possess enough requisite knowledge in the required domain space.
- brimble 5y ago
  Yeah, McCarthy's one of the (simply the, perhaps?) most famous living English-language "literary" fiction authors around (had a somewhat-popular movie made based on his The Road, even) so if you don't keep up with that sort of thing you might not know him. Leibniz' work on monads[0] would be at least passingly familiar to anyone with even a little philosophy background, but could otherwise have been missed. If it makes you feel any better, I may as well be badly afflicted by dyslexia when I try to read a mathematical statement with more than a couple simple terms. [0] I'm digging way back so this might be a little off, but fundamentally it's a solution to the Problem of Evil[1]: Leibniz puts us each in a "windowless monad" of a universe—sort of individual pocket universes—such that all the people we interact with are actually automatons of a sort. In this way, a person can do evil (i.e. sin still exists), but not actually inflict it on anyone else, if that makes sense. Meanwhile, bad things happening to you in your personal monad aren't actually evil because... I dunno, it's been a while so I don't remember exactly, but I'm guessing it comes down to "God works in mysterious ways". Basically, he replaces true causality with a kind of divine harmonic dance of actually-not-affecting-one-another things and people that make up what we call "reality". Nb. his actual argument is far less dumb than I'm making it seem. [1] The Problem of Evil can be summed up in the child's question: "if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil (apparently—that part will matter a ton for some people who try to address this) exist?" Lots and lots of theologians and philosophers over many centuries took a crack at the seemingly-simple question—and in fact, one of Leibniz' notions, that the world one experiences is "the best of all possible worlds", was famously parodied in Voltaire's Candide, which is another way someone with a humanities background might have become familiar with his philosophy.

auggierose 5y ago

I don't speak French, and I nevertheless understood what he meant by double movement. If you speak French, then you will probably appreciate this passage.

Tao331 5y ago

I was in Paris for 1-1/2 sleep deprived days, so I think I can clarify. See, in much of Europe, the toilets have a little flush button and a big flush button. My understanding is that the big flush button is for le double mouvement.

rossdavidh 5y ago
Would double-up-vote this if I could...