A Bit of Email

Spinoza, Anselm and the “I”

Below is my portion of an email exchange I had with a friend who is investigating a priori, indoubitable cogito foundations for presuppositionless thought, a notable endeavour. I thought my answers present a confluence of thoughts that may be interesting to others. They touch on correspondences that may be found betweeen later Wittgenstein, Anselm and Spinoza’s use of the Ontological Arugument, and the notion of the “I”:

Hmmm. I don’t find that Spinoza privileges thought over extension. I have seen that assumed but I have found no convincing arguments for it, so I can’t really answer that part of the question. As to what I think of Spinoza’s ontological argument and its validity, I don’t really favor his presentation of it. I am more in favor of Anselm’s original version, of which I talk about here, as it trades on the nature of the word “understands”:

“Anselm’s Proof of God, Wittgenstein’s Lion, Davidson’s Belief”

If one considers the original Anselm notion of “understands” and applies this within Spinoza’s vectoral conception of power as agentizing action, then I think that the Ontological argument comes clear. I wrote once, a long time ago off the cuff that God is simply the Principle of Coherence and it is silly to try to prove coherence. That is somewhat close to how I understand Anselm’s argument.

As for trying to attribute the “cogito” to Spinoza you are going to have the trouble with the “I” of “I think…”. It is not even Lacan’s alienating “It thinks”, but simply “thinking” as a totalizing action or expression. This ontological center of the “I”, as a center, really does not exist for Spinoza whose definitions of a body are fluctuating ratios of movement and rest, and whose notion of reflective thought is merely that of ideas of ideas, all expressions of the body being in various states. The “I” just has no real footing in Spinoza:

Every particular corporeal thing [lichaamelijk ding] is nothing other than a certain ratio [zeekere proportie] of motion and rest.

– A Short Treatise of God, Man and His Well Being

As for immediate transparency or intuition, I think things get muddled when issues of justification (which refer to criteria which are shared and historically contingent) are projected back onto experiences that are taken to be sure. As Wittgenstein helped point out, questions of doubtability are only germane to contexts of criteria use. In a certain sense, talking about the doubtablility of whether I am in pain is a nonstarter, using one kind of language game where it isn’t meant to be used, creating a confusion as one seeks to crawl up under the rug of language. I don’t think though that this is the end of the discussion, because questioning whether one is actually in pain, or just in discomfort for instance, can be a informative self-criticism, and is not the case simply of using the wrong word; criteria is used, and reflexively so, but to locate the surety of a perception within an incorrigibility and to attach that incorrigibility categorically to a subject is an unwarranted leap, at least in my opinion.

What a failure of subjective incorrigibility does for Spinoza’s argument for the direct experience of our immortality (E5p23s) is that once we let go of the necessity of a “subject”, direct experiences become more expressive facts of power and affect. If nothing is the authority of the claim, then the intuition becomes what it was in the first place, the coherence of power and affect itself, without need for an ultimate recourse to criteria. Criteria become what they are for someone like Vico, the historical circumstances and means of assembled power.

 

A Touch More On Žižek

I was reading over at No Useless Leniency and it got me thinking about the “use” of Žižek, the place for his revelations. This was my response to these thoughts, which flowed from yesterday’s post, and the comments that followed; this a product of his thinking sitting within me for some time now, for much more than a decade. Unfortunately this sounds more bloggish than my usual entries, but it is worth posting:

I have to say that the “There is no Other of the Other” as a teaspoon of medicine works quite well, helping one see the nature of any manifestation of The Great Oz, but when you realize that the Other of the suturing Other is a necessary illusionary fold in a social field, the full weight of this critique becomes difficult to balance. As someone strummed and banged, “Meet the new boss…”

What concerns me is that such King-stripping contains its own satisfactions, its own perverse little joy of “ah ha!” or “gotcha!” which is one of the immense pleasures of reading Zizek as he performs his psychoanalytic Judo again again and again like a sociological master. We see the flips, but what about his ground-game, who is going to tap-out from the ideological arm-bar?

Don’t get me wrong, Zizek is a sheer pleasure for the contemplating, but I think I can sense of what makes him perpetually disappointed with his followers (without analyzing him). There is indeed the pleasure of interpretation, which makes his readings of films most satisfying, setting the battlefield upon every aesthetic surface. This is a good thing. But it seems that Zizek feels a vital connection to his conclusions, his opera, that has an immediacy that others simply cannot match.

This makes me feel that the path to “genuine” revolution, even that advocated by Zizek, is of the microscopic kind, the affective body-building of organizing powers which do not benefit so much from the Oz-defying adage “There is no Other of the Other” or even more enjoyably, “(M)Other”. One wonders if the phenomena of Zizek itself is best understood within a communitarian sense of constructive values, rather than in the ultimate satisfactions of the interpretive revelations that he champions. This is not to say that tracing the reservoirs of “enjoyment” cannot be a very good means of measuring social discourse and construction. Every objection to the claims of others seems to contain some element of an unstated objection to their hidden enjoyments. I think it wise to see that the organization of enjoyment is a primary guide to organizations of shared perceptions and actions. But dunotarian proclivities, it seems, could be folded into larger conceptions of constructive agency and action. Is our fundamental realization supposed to be that we are locked in a red room? Is this the limits of our discursive and bodily imagination?

 

Slavoj Žižek: A “Human” Example

If any are unfamiliar (and we must assume that some are not swept up in the Academio-acculturation of a protesting Self) or simply have lost track of him under some characterization, I encourage those who have a love of philosophy to consider the “human” example of Slavoj Zizek, a Lacanian philosopher and sociologist.

A wonderful documentary that focuses not only on his ideas, but his extraordinary personage.

A recent, September 9th lecture given in Oregon, on the nature of politeness.

Or, this prospective examination of the film Children of Men.

Zizeks early books definitely made an impression on me, opening the door to Lacanian thinking and cultural analysis, the melding of philosophy to the matters of social concern. I remember attending one of his lectures a decade ago and asking a question on Israel whose premise horrified him. What I suggest is that more than the ultimate validity of his synthesis of Hegel, Kant and Lacan, which can be of interest, it is his lived experience of the significance of philosophy that perhaps gives its most compelling argument for its relevance. As much as Zizek is at pains to not be “human” just like all of “us”, subsumed in the ideology of normalcy, it really is the affective example of his experience of alienation and his thought-out articulation in response to it which allows us to embrace his very sincerity of project, if not his conclusions.

If there were any intellectual I would like to sit down to dinner with, it would be this man.

 

 

Spinoza’s Circle and the Interior

Some Ruminations on Spinoza’s “Simplest” Thought

A single figure keeps returning to me as I contemplate Spinoza’s optical concepts and metaphysics, in view of the prevailing Cartesian science of the age, that elementary figure that Spinoza provides to help explain how he conceives of the reality of the modes, even the modes of ideas for non-existent things, in relationship to the ultimate reality of Substance, God or Nature. As Spinoza explains, the figure stands for something that has not parallel, not example, because it is a fundamental relationship which is unique and totalizing.

Ethics part 2, prop 8 schol. — The nature of a circle is such that if any number of straight lines intersect within it, the rectangles formed by their segments will be equal to one another; thus, infinite equal rectangles are contained in a circle. Yet none of these rectangles can be said to exist, except in so far as the circle exists; nor can the idea of any of these rectangles be said to exist, except in so far as they are comprehended in the idea of the circle. Let us grant that, from this infinite number of rectangles, two only exist. The ideas of these two not only exist, in so far as they are contained in the idea of the circle, but also as they involve the existence of those rectangles; wherefore they are distinguished from the remaining ideas of the remaining rectangles. (Elwes trans)

This has always been a convenient image for the explanation how the modes dependently are an expression of the totality which is all of what there is. One practically sees how the modes, while causally interacting with each other to produce current states of being, immanently rely upon a larger comprehesivity. And if one wants to even leave off from the narrowness of Spinoza’s explicit thought, the chords D and E could be read as vectors which produce an intersecting point (unlabeled), the modal expression of two lines of force, a point of focus, this seems at least arguable when considering much of the rest of Spinoza’s view.

But two other realizations come to me as well. The first is that the rectilinearitythat Spinoza presents within the borders of the circle very well may for Spinoza have represented the linear analyses of motion provided by Descartes. Part of the challenge presented to Spinoza, as he tried to heal a perceived breech between Body and Soul, Thought and Extension, was how to bridge mathematical descriptions with affective realities. In a certain sense the rectilinearity with the circle of Substance for Spinoza represents the ideational crispness of mathematical description understood as a partial, yet sufficient expression of substance. The mathematics is to some degree subsumed. Just as Huygens and others struggled to assume the advantages of the Perspectiva  tradition in optics, yet still fully explain the properties of light’s propagation (which Huygens would show to be that of a wave or a pulse), Spinoza too sought to preserve the mechanized sureties of Descartes mathematizations, yet with a view that could account for the affective propagations living bodies (as early as Kepler’s Paralipomena light is described as an “affectus”).

Secondly though is the realization that the circle does not only represent Substance as a whole, but also any conatus expression of Body (defined by Spinoza as a preservation of a ratio of motion and rest over time). The circle above can also be read as the recursive coherence of a body, and the internal causal relationships of which it is composed, immanent to its essence. 

In other words, a body, in the ordinary as well as in the Cartesian sense, preserves its physical integrity in just the same way the whole universe preserves it: they differ only with regard to the degree of probability that each can ‘survive’ externally caused modifications. Only the unique individual of level-ω can be modified in infinite ways without giving up its identity.

The Physics of Spinoza’s Ethics, David Lachterman

What level-ω is in Lachterman’s nicely conceived reduction is the last border of an entire body. Level-2 is the most elementary kind of body for Spinoza, a hypothetical composition of what one supposes is at least two of the most simple bodies “corpora simplicissima”. The human body, and all such bodies we regularly recognize as such are what Lachterman regards as level-k bodies (2 < k < ω). Following these descriptions, the circle above from the Ethics could be read not only as the schema of the level-ω Body, but also of any typical level-k Body. It is only the degree of power, freedom and being that preserves such a circle (ratio) that distinguishes it from the ultimate whole. Spinoza world can be seen as one of circles within such circles. The modal causal interactions are immanent expressions not only the totality of Substance or Nature, but also are expressions of the ratio of motion and rest of which a said body (level-k) is composed. The existential modality of ideas and extensions which is interior to the circle (level-k) can be read as contingent to the essence of that Body taken as a whole, as it is determined to exist.

While it is fair and best to understand the diagram exactly in the way that Spinoza meant it, I think it is important to realize that in a figure such as this, representing something for which Spinoza says there is no parallel, the image is likely overdetermined by several other Spinoza concerns and conceptions. The circle and its interior floats through Spinoza’s thinking process (additionally). The diagram can be read across at least these two layers: the affective subsumption of Cartesian mathematicization of Nature in terms of propogating, interacting bodies; and, the immanence of constituent modes of bodies under gradations of Being and power. And I would end that the suggestive recursivity of this body (level-k) opens itself perhaps to Autopoietic descriptions, at least for those bodies considered to be alive, and Autopoiesis itself to Spinozist re-description.

Illustrated Deleuze and Guattari

Seeing What is Said

In love for the pictured, yet still methodological investigation of ideas, I would want to direct you to Marc Ngui’s illustrative study of the first two chapters of Deleuze and Guattari’s (I really do want to write “Guattari and Deleuze” each time I see that coupling) a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia.

Spread the affects of ideas:

click: Marc Ngui (2005)

 

Grasp and Appreciation

One cannot promise you that Guatarri and Deleuze’s dense, remarkable writings will be more understandable upon viewing these drawings, but they very well may be more enjoyable. And one really does need to reconsider any strict dichotomy which separates understanding from enjoyment. Inspiring.

Davidson’s Triangulation and the Swarm

Quorum Sensing

wiki; microbiology bites

These bacteria certainly are not “triangulating” in any conscious sense (that is, as Davidson sees it: not conceptually reading states of the world through an assumed causal relationship of the beliefs of others to the same world); but they are affectively reponding to a shared environment, and their communally shared excited states probably cause them to react to that environment in specific, categorical ways, i.e. the responses of others to the environment are informing a bacteria about that environment. At least that is what it seems to be, however mechanically we want to describe the molecular causes and effects that produce the phenomena. What is interesting to me is that the assumed cognitive isolation of a single bacteria as an “individual”, that conceptual, really philosophical notion that a simple bodied thing forms an essential cognitive binary of a “world” and an “individual” is what probably long delayed the discovery of the phenomena of “quorum sensing”. The most elemental cognitions that occur in a bacteria (however slight) simply could not part of a communal organization of perceptions, and certainly could not be triangulating in any sense of the word. Now there certainly are attempts to still explain the phenomena just in this way, along the binary of self/world, or bacteria/environment, usually along the lines of collapsing any consciousness into its explanatory mechanism, but it is interesting that the behaviour of these quorum’d bacteria expresses dynamics to those that higher animals do, such as ants and bees; and these social animals in many ways are of a kind that we as humans identify with them meaningfully, seeing in them something essential to our sociability. The comparisons to bees and ants are quite numerous, but it sufficies to give a most ancient example, as Homer echously tells us of the movements of the Hellenic soldiers peacably gathering themselves to leave the shore of Troy, like:

“bees that sally from some hollow cave and flit in countless throng among the spring flowers, bunched in knots and clusters…” – Iliad, Book ii

Marc Ngui's Illustration from a thousand plateaus

Putting aside the sheer epistemic issue of the power of this brief description thousands of years old (how does it “work”), when conceiving the nature of bodied and cognitive social organization across species, how categorically far is, let us say, a mob panic from a quorum sensing bacteria? And relatedly, as a scientific question, how much of social sharing, across bodies, in humans, is lost by the assumptions of an unbreakable and overriding individualism? This is what I find interesting here, the notion that our very traditioned conceptions of identity and binary relations occlude us to very real alternate factors of organization. And, flipping the question back onto signficance of philosophy, how deep down into the root of our affects does Davidson’s conceptual triangulation go? It would seem to me that Spinoza’s principle of shared affects, the “affectuum imitatio” (E3p27s), provides the reasonable ground upon which to measure these observations, (those of science and philosophy alike), a knotting place where biological mutual expression causally foregrounds our rational capacities for coherent reasoning and action.

The point of course is not to say in one grand thought that we are just like bees, or ants or any other social animal for that matter, in a general sense of connectedness, though admittedly such a thought works to cohere many of the individual arguments along this line (arguments for which a more Spinozist, or Autopoietic account may give strong analytical framework). No, the point is to realize within the necessary conditions for shared affect as a principle of epistemological structures that by tracing the transmission of affect we might identify the paricular conditions that mould our capacity to think, feel and organize ourselves meaningfully. If in some sense we are like bacteria, or ants or wildebeest, the specfic historical and mechanistic vectors of our sharing (as expressed in our knowing), should be made delineatable, against the grain from any preconceived notions essential self/world orientations

Spinoza’s “Spring Pole” Lathe: Experience to Metaphysics and Back

Spinoza’s Practiced Knowing

I mentioned in my recent post on the likely design of Spinoza’s grinding lathe that the dynamics of the Hevelius’ spring pole lathe may be tied to Spinoza’s ideas of Substance and the modes, such that one would be able to see how the epistemo-kinetic experiences Spinoza had during his many hours, days and years of lens grinding on such a lathe may have bore influence upon his metaphysical conceptions.

Here I want to take up this intuition, and perform the appropriate visualizations that would allow us, if for a moment, to picture what Spinoza’s body went through in communications with his device. In this way we might place ourselves, materially and affectively, in a relationship to his ideas, such that reading them alone in text would not allow (even if this goes against what one could argue is Spinoza’s rationalist program of understanding). That is, in short, one hopes to understand through body and affect what ideas Spinoza thought at the most abstract of levels, through their causal origins; for we can follow what Spinoza wrote, “experience can determine our mind to think…of certain essences of things” (Ep. 10), and assume that a similiarity of experiences may determine us to think of a similarity of essences. If we attain the experiences Spinoza underwent which determined him to think of certain essences (in his terms), this I believe can provide clarification to the same thoughts reached through his geometric pedogogy alone. 

The Horizontal and the Vertical: An Initial Philosophical Platform

Further below is an illustration of the tension dynamic of a spring pole lathe, as taken from Hevelius (second diagram). But first in order to follow my thinking here I want to insert a most revealing point made by Gatens and Lloyd in their critique of Hegel’s critique of Spinoza. As they point out, Hegel, while in great praise of Spinoza, felt that he did not embrace the full reality of the “negation”, Hegel’s personal contribution to the progress of philosophy and mankind. Spinoza’s description from Hegel’s point of view simply collapses into an acosmism, an undifferentitated whole of Substance, leaving no specific reality for either rocks, lakes or most importantly Man. In examining Hegel’s objection, Gatens and Lloyd introduce the vectoral notion of verticality and horizontality. It is suggested that Hegel’s problem is that he is only thinking of the “vertical” relationship of the modes to Substance, their individual, expressive relationship to the Totalizing whole. I quote at length here from the two authors because it is a very good paragraph, as they make an extremely important point:

Hegel’s critique of Spinoza thus focuses on the relation between individual mode and Substance. His complaint is that Spinoza cannot coherently articulate that relation without collapsing the infinite mode back into Substance; Substance remains undetermined, undifferentiated, while the individual mode is merely negative. But this is to miss the other dimension of Spinoza’s treatment of the finite modes -their mutual interaction, in which the determining force of Substance is mediated through the whole interconnected network of modes. Hegel’s critique of Spinoza is oriented, as it were, to the vertical relation between Substance and individual mode, rather than to the horizontal relation in which finite modes act on and are acted on by one another. Here, along the horizontal axis of finite modes, the claim that determination involves negation can be seen not as a repudiation of finite individuals but as an insight into their interdependence (71)

– Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings, chapter 3 “Re-imagining Responsibility”

Gatens and Lloyd are making clear the a key emphasis Spinoza places on modal expressions, as real, when included in our own constructive and immanent projects of freedom. I would graph out the differentiation that they find in Spinoza in this way:

I would parenthetically add to Gatens and Lloyd’s point that the reason why Hegel is thinking solely about the verticality of the modes is that the binary of individual/God, (or individual/world) is one of the primary schemas of the intersubjective investigations and inculcations of European Christianity. The salvation of the soul, through its relationship to an all-encompassing God, (via various institutional mediations), was the essential dogmatic concern, and this lengthy heritage necessarily brings the philosophical focus back to this binary difficulty: how does the individual soul return to God. Hegel, because he sees man at the apex of history, primarily must read the problematic in terms of a vertical dynamic, the individual vs. the whole. But Spinoza, because he is not burdened by the primacy of man or his reflective powers, allows another dimension of analysis which Hegel cannot see: that of the horizontal. The institutional mediations of the State, Church, Family and their imaginary relationswhich simply interpose themselves as aids to an essential verticality, are by Spinoza exploded out to the ultimate horizontal limit: the infinite expression of the modes. And the imaginary status of their mediating ideas become proliferate and constitutive vectors of power, degrees of freedom, across the field of Being (if one could put it that way without too much obfuscation).

Spinoza’s Lathe

I want to return to the assumed spring pole, foot pedal lathe (pictured above), to get a much more concrete, affective sense of the vertical and the horizontal in Spinoza, and how the practices of Spinoza’a lens grinding may have helped construct his metaphysical conceptions. One must recall that Spinoza spent hours upon hours at such work lens work. To grind, polish and re-polish a lens could take several days, much of it in non-stop and highly repetitive, one might even say meditative, action (Auzout in 1664 records a time of 15 days for a single objective lens). So let our attention be called to the internal dynamics depicted above, found in focus of the dotted yellow frame. Here one should picture Spinoza seated or standing at length, his foot rhythmically pushing down a vertical tension from the spring pole at the ceiling. The vertical rising and falling motion forms a kinetic warp which not only works to orient the body spatially to the height of the room, connecting consciousness from the floor boards to the ceiling, but also creates and punctuated temporality, a timed ratio to the work. Transverse to this warp is the weft of horizontal action. The oscillations of the grinding form are pulled across the body by the push and pull connectionsof the foot the ceiling pole, and distinctly lateral to the focus of concentration. Again and again for hours these up-down, left-right actions literally weave a room of fluctuating conscious attentions, in which the craftsman necessarily embraces the lived experiences of the space, aware that whatever precise spotlight of focus he may have, it is merely a part of much larger, wider degrees of perception. Against Hegel’s fear of an individual’s collapse into the undifferentiated, the agentized craftsman becomes the draw-string of every quarter of the room, a focal point of at least two vectors action, from which and to which he is a differentiated, yet interconnected and expressive part. The melding of the craftsman and his tool is more than a metaphor. It is an experiential and metaphysical certainty.

Within this dotted frame of loomed space, at its center is a rotating circle. It whips at varying speeds in response to both the intensities of the leg, and the limits of the spring pole above, in a concentric motion. It is no secret that Spinoza had great love for the circle as a diagramed exemplar of the relationship between the modes and Substance (Ethics 2p8s, pictured below), but also as an ideal of vision and the actions of optical focus (Letter 39 to Jelles, March 3rd 1667). Here, for hours on end Spinoza would stare determinitively as a rotating circular form which remained both fixed (stable in its ratio), and changing, expressing in both the consummation of the vectors of the room’s actions. One cannot help but think that such concentrated attention upon the spinning form would leave at least a conceptual imprint upon the philosophical craftsman, especially as he considered the modal expressions to be causal interactions immanent to the whole, just as internal rectangles can be considered immanent to the properties of a circle (his diagram below). It is most suggestive to see that the rotating circular form becomes a bed of friction and idea, producing realized changes in the material of glass held in Spinoza’s sensing hand.

from Ethics 2p8s

The Turning Lap

To carry our instructive analogizing further, one must look closer at the actions immediate to Spinoza’s attention as he worked his glass into the required shape.

In the scalloped metal form likely an abrasive would be applied to aid in the grinding, the light blue arrow above represents the hand’s actions upon the circular rotation. The horizontal and vertical tensions are vortexed into an oscillating circularity. There a recipe of frictions and intelligenced experiences interact to bring about an ideal result. What Antonio Negri calls the “concrete…unique terrain of reality, [the] fruit of the paradoxical determination [a metaphysical dilation of unity and multiplicity]” (The Savage Anomaly, 127), the modal “surface of the sea”, occurs here, in the turning scalloped dish, a product of the cybernetic expressions of a room, a mechanism, and man, in which the craftsman’s hand performs a living shore of perceptual action.

The Sublime Tool

If this notional leap from mechanism to conceptual metaphysics seems too great, too fantastic, I believe that this is because we do not have a strong enough sense of the bodily, affective, imaginary foundational means of immanent abstract thought, something that Spinoza’s own metaphysics works to make more clear. Further I believe we must adjust ourselves from thinking of Spinoza merely in terms of propositions and proofs, though the rhetorical form of his work certainly at first or even second glance invites us to think of him in this way. Richard Sennett for instance in his recent pragmatic and near-poetic book, The Craftsman (2008), perhaps gives us a bridge for thinking about craft and abstraction as part of one constitutive process. He invites us to understand how human progress and freedom comes by thinking through one’s tools, how tools help frame our questions and solutions. In fact this is very much how Spinoza has conceived of abstract thinking itself, as he followed Descartes’ analogy found in the 8th rule of the Regulae : just as how a blacksmith’s tools had to be originally made by simpler tools themselves, so too simple tools of the intellect are needed to make other, more complex tools of the intellect (On the Emendation of the Intellect ). In a certain sense, one needs something that hammers in order to make a hammer:

The matter stands on the same footing as the making of material tools, which might be argued about in a similar way. For, in order to work iron, a hammer is needed, and the hammer cannot be forthcoming unless it has been made; but, in order to make it, there was need of another hammer and other tools, and so on to infinity. We might thus vainly endeavor to prove that men have no power of working iron. But as men at first made use of the instruments supplied by nature to accomplish very easy pieces of workmanship, laboriously and imperfectly, and then, when these were finished, wrought other things more difficult with less labor and greater perfection; and so gradually mounted from the simplest operations to the making of tools, and from the making of tools to the making of more complex tools, and fresh feats of workmanship, till they arrived at making, with small expenditure of labor, the vast number of complicated mechanisms which they now possess. So, in like manner, the intellect, by its native strength, makes for itself intellectual instruments, whereby it acquires strength for performing other intellectual operations, and from these operations gets again fresh instruments, or the power of pushing its investigations further, and thus gradually proceeds till it reaches the summit of wisdom.

But is our reading of Spinoza’s metaphysics anything more than simply a coincidence of horizontal and vertical vectors in the lens-grinding lathe, and Gatens and Lloyd’s horizontal and vertical spatialization of his metaphysics in defense against Hegel? Is this conflation merely accidentally bolstered by the analogy of ideas to be taken read tools in Spinoza’s very early work? I think there is much more to this than that, and that aside from the notion of the horizontal and the vertical there is a multiplicity of core principles that seem to stem from Spinoza’s unique, and one must say classed, artisan experiences. In particular we must understand that Spinoza, unlike Descartes, was through and through a practiced craftsman, an artisan by trade and value, who repetitious and refining practices which he took rather seriously must have influenced his guiding conceptions of Mind, Body, Idea and Power. In fact, it seems that it is a tooled notion of idea and body that I believe informs his vital definition of the power of the body, a defintion which will reconceptualize any of our instrumental approaches to material augment of the human body or mind:

Whatever so disposes the human Body that it can be affected in a great many ways, or renders it capable of affecting external Bodies in a great many ways, is useful to man; the more it renders the Body capable of being affected in a great many ways, or of affecting other Bodies, the more useful it is; on the other hand, what renders the Body less capable of these things is harmful.

– E4p38

Think on how this expressive yet instrumental numerical notion of power can be found within the most elementary experiences of tool use, as Richard Sennett tells us about the wonders of the flat-edged screwdriver:

…in its sheer variety this all-purpose tool admits all manner of unfathomed possibilities: it, too, can expand our skills if only our imagination rises to the occasion. Without hesitation, the flat-edged screwdriver can be described as sublime – the word sublime standing, as it does in philosophy and the arts, for the potentially strange. In craftwork, that sentiment focuses especially on objects very simple in form that seemingly can do anything (195)

– The Craftsman, Chapter Six “Arousing Tools”

I believe that Spinoza’s lifelong craft experiences with the lens-grinding lathe (among so many other simple tools) had a lasting effect on his conceptions of Mind and Body, and their necessary unification. The grinding lathe, with its intimate, indeed cybernetic, interweave of body, mind and material construction, its concentric use of the spinning semi-sphere, must have struck Spinoza as sublime in the sense that Sennett tells us. There is the evidence of Spinoza’s resistance to the sophisticated, semi-automated designs of his brilliant and wealthy neighbors the brothers Huygens ( EP 15/32 ) which tells us that Spinoza was quite hesitant to leave behind the interface of the machine with the understanding and felt hand. But it is more than this. It seems that the grinding lathe leaves its conceptual, kinetic trace all the way up through to the most abstract, and most radical of conceptions. In fact there is the very real sense in which we may read Spinoza’s Ethics (as it exists both in idea and extension) as a tool which can affect and be affected in the greatest number of ways. 

Picturing Work and the Work of Picturing

Once we have a vivid sense of the kinds of material engagements Spinoza had concerned himself with, his bodily practices of concentrated creation and refinement, we get a better sense of how Spinoza conceived of his own Rationalist, propositioned philosophical aims. From there we can place ourselves with the lived historical space of the man who lived at the cusp of our modernity, and feel something of the material and pragmatic focus of his articulations of freedom. Below is Spinoza’s rented room in Rijnsburg where he lived roughly from age 29 to 31 having fled the upheavals of Amsterdam, perhaps with concern for the return of his tuberculosis from remission. It is today’s Spinozahuis museum. As mentioned before the wood turners lathe depicted there is NOT the kind of lathe Spinoza would have used, but if you look to the upper center left of the photo you can see a hypothesized spring pole, the vertical vector of his practice. It is not known if Spinoza’s later rooms in the village of Voorburg, where it is thought that he did his most concentrated grinding work, were of this size, but the combination of the Rijnsburg room and Hevelius’s illustration gives us I believe some determinative sense of the internal dynamics of Spinoza’s lived experiences as a craftsman and thus as a thinker; they directs us to the material and conceptual causes that may have privileged Spinoza treatment of the Mind and Body over his predecessor, Descartes. There is much that divided these two thinkers from each other, but perhaps even more than joined them. Each was concerned with lens-grinding, optics and the improvement of the telescope, but only one of them was a practiced maker of lenses and instruments. Only one of them touched the glass.

The Rijnsburg Wood-turners Lathe, Spinozahuis

Hevelius's Spring Pole Lathe, from the Selenographia (1647)

 

The Rijnsburg Wood-turners Lathe, another angle

Why Spinoza? A Historical, Sociological Argument

Why Study Spinoza? …

The question may arise when considering the work of a philosopher, why should we study him, particularly for those outside of the discipline of philosophy. In the case of Spinoza there are some who have suggested that his importance has lain in his proximity to Descartes both in time and in concept. Under this idea, at least philosophically, we have been living in a largely Cartesian age, one that descends from Descartes’ fundamental dichotomy of Substances – Mind and Body – and has been attempting to heal the respective gap between subject and object ever since. This has been reflected in two main offspring-lines passing through the intermediary bridge of Frege/Brentano, those that wrestled with the problems of reference in the Analytic School, and those that articulated philosophies of Presence in the Continental School. These differences are seen to reflect, or express, large-scale sociological facts, the manner in which we in the West conceptualized and utilized objects of industry, and conditioned ourselves in our bodies in a detached and extra-mental way. In this lineage of thought and action Spinoza can be seen to stand, conceptually, as the path not taken. If we were to allow an analogy from biology, Spinoza’s thinking, born in the generation just after Descartes, represents a species of thought which for a variety of reasons did not come to proliferate here. Spinoza’s is a continent of life unto itself whose capacities for coherence and analysis express powers that Descartes’ and his descendants do not.

Related to this conceptual importance of Spinoza is the quality of the time in which he lived. Spinoza lived at the cusp of modernity. In Amsterdam, as an ostracized member of a marginalized group of Jewish merchants and religious believers, Spinoza witnessed and debated some of the most remarkable human leaps in social growth in the history of the West. During the decades of Spinoza’s life the fledgling Dutch Republic posed experiments in early capitalism, democracy and social tolerance (attended by the shadows and dangers of each), such that the core of his thinking can be regarded as something of a stem-cell of modern capitalist and democratic logic, one that, when examined, may provide us with a grammar of analysis for our own times insofar as they have been long delayed in the development of what remarkably was given birth in mid-17th century Netherlands. Within this notion of Spinoza as a divergent line of conceptual branching are the hopes and possibilities for what is possible to think, and in thinking, do. While Descartes’ division between Mind and Body may have served the human West well for several centuries, Spinoza’s unification of the two, formulated radically as a correction to Descartes, may provide an even more significant capacity, given our place and time. In short, we may be ready for Spinoza.

human stem cell

Spinoza’s Grinding Lathe: An Extended Hypothesis

Johannes Hevelius, also, Johannes Hewel, Johann Hewelke, Johannes Höwelcke or Jan Heweliusz (January 28, 1611 - January 28, 1687)

A Proposed Homologue to Spinoza’s Grinding Lathe

It has been revealed by some digging into the record by Stan Verdult that indeed the lathe that occupies the Rijnsburg Spinoza museum is not of the sort Spinoza would have used (though it may give us a sense of the size of his lathe). [Written about here: The Rijnsburg Lathe: Like the Sun, not 200 Feet Away .] But if we are to come close to understanding the near-daily physical practices Spinoza had engaged in as a lens-grinder and maker of both telescopes and microscopes, we need to narrow the view to the design parameters his grinding lathe likely exhibited. I have mentioned in the past that the foot-driven lathe of Hevelius, as published in his astronomical study of the moon, Selenographia (1647), provides us perhaps of the most revealing illustration of the elements that would have been involved.

We know from Spinoza’s comments on the semi-automated designs of Christiaan Huygens whose home in Voorburghe certainly seems to have visited multiple times, that Spinoza favored a simple grinding mechanism, one in which the glass to be ground was held freely in the hand (affixed to a handle). The general disposition among mid-century savants to further automate the grinding process and remove the human element from the process as much as possible seems to have been looked on withextreme doubt by Spinoza. This does not mean that there was no automated aspects to Spinoza’s lens-lathe, for the lathe itself is a machined dynamic which transfers motions by the hand or the foot to a concentric movement put upon the glass blank. It is only that Spinoza preferred the moment-to-moment, lived craft judgments that came from an artisan’s practice through the encounter withthe machine. In this way our focus should be upon the nature of the machine/human interfaces used by Spinoza, and therefore a central question is whether Spinoza used a hand-driven or foot-driven lathe, with a view to visualizing each as vividly as possible.

Foot-driven lathes were not uncommon in the era, in fact Hevelius’ Illustration of his lathe was published when Spinoza was 15 years old, perhaps a decade before his reported lens-grinding days, and likely was not seen as an innovation then. I suggest that it is to this illustration we must turn if we are to get a clear picture of the kind of physical actions Spinoza trained his eye upon.

the lathe as it appears in Hevelius's Selenographia

In the labeled illustration below, one can see the general action of the foot pedal transfer of power to a concentric motion, and the orientation Spinoza may have had, and the pole that may have been fixed to the ceiling of his room:

Here are various details so as to better see the composition of components:

Here one can see the transfer of the cord to a grinding form’s modular base. It would not be necessary, or even likely that this modularity would be a feature of Spinoza’s lathe, but the horizontal orientation of the grinding dish (as opposed to the vertical angle shown in designs from earlier in the century) would be the preferred design, for this would allow gravity to act as ally in abrasive control and arm fatigue. (We do not know how intermittent Spinoza’s tuberculosis was, a disease that he, by Colerus’s account, suffered from since about the age of 24, but the question of endurance could have been a singificant factor in the kind of lathe Spinoza used.)

In this close-up to the foot pedal one can see the simple nature of the drive mechanism. A foot pedal allows of course one to use the larger leg muscles, a benefit for more arduous projects; but it also informs a vertical tension from the floor to the ceiling. There is a cross dynamic between the communications of the foot to the spring pole high above, which is then read in the relative speeds and intensities by the hand pressing its material downward. The oscillations of upward and downward, a horizontal, yet fixed, stable circular whirrings do suggest a grid of complex physical actions and interface. One may be tempted to see in this cross-dynamic the metaphysics of the verticality of Substanced expression, and the horizontality of modal causations. In any case, the foot pedal lathe leaves a distinct epistemo-kinetic imprint upon the craftsman that engages it, something that surely would have informed Spinoza’s thinking about material and its formation. 

Yet on the level of information on technique, perhaps even of more interest in this close up of the Hevelius drawing is the shape of the grinding forms discs placed haphazardly on the floor. They are not the hollowed-out concave metal forms like those, let us say, Hieronymus Sirturus wrote about in his influential book on technique Telescopium, siue Ars perficiendi nouum illud Galilaei visorium instrumentum ad sydera (1618), (whose spherical perfection was created by being ground against a matching convex iron casting). They appear instead concavely beveled, on the inner slope of which a lens can be angled to be ground (if I read the illustration correctly).

One can see each of these types of grinding forms (a beveled inner edge, and the scalloped dish) in van Gutschoven’s 1663 letter to Christian Huygens which had answered Christiaan’s question as to how to grind smaller objective lenses [comments on: A Method of Grinding Small, Spherical Lenses: Spinoza ]:

Here in the van Gutschoven illustraton a narrow canal (vertically aligned) serves as the grinding surface just inside the lip.

And here is a concave finishing form, in whose center a small lens would be placed for polishing. The two illustrations above simply show that both form designs were employed, and we cannot be sure if Spinoza would have used one or the other, or both (though the degree of curvature shown above would be wholly inappropriate for telescope lenses for which only a slight curvature was needed). One might add, by Spinoza’s use of the terms “dishes” or “plates” for his metal laps, the scalloped spherical form, hollow at the center, one could presume was a main metal form that he used.

To return to the Hevelius example, if we can seriously entertained the prospect that Spinoza used a foot-pedal grinding lathe, I would want to point out the thorough and bodily engagement that grinding would have involved. Not only were the powers of close-eyed concentration, and precise fingered and armed exertions involved, but also a co-ordinated rhythm between the actions of the foot that from a distance below swiveled the grinding form back and forth, reversing itself, restrained from high above, bringing fortha total read of machine tensions which completed a lived circuit between the human body and its attentive results. Spinoza’s entire body would be in play in the workings of the glass, from head to toe. And if one superimposes the requirements of his metaphysics (his equivocal treatment of Thought and Extension, and his definitions of a body and power) upon this organization of machine, idea and flesh, one may see with growing clarity how his crafted practices informed his most abstract thinking.

This is the case found in the Hevelius example, which forms one end in the spectrum of the possible machine designs Spinoza likely used. There is of course a much simpler design, the hand-driven lathe, which Spinoza may have also worked from. The nature of this lathe can be seen in the 1660 Manzini manuscript, and the expert mock up made by the 400th Anniversary of the Telescope team:

 

 

One can see the typical concave metal dish (to the left) and the hand-drive of the form. In terms of dynamics instead of a swivel motion to the form, a repeated back and forth oscillation driven by the foot co-ordinated from high above, here the form can be spun in continuing circles in close proximity to the chest. Evidence that Spinoza used just such a design perhaps can be seen in the list of things sold from his estate in November of 1672.

and various instruments for grinding (‘en verscheidene slypgereedschap’) like mills (‘molens’, also plural!) and great and small metal dishes serving for them (‘groote en kleine metale schotels daartoe dienende’) and so on” (en so voort).

That there were multiple mills sold (not a complete list of what he owned one might assume) suggests a variety of more specialized devices, instead of one large workbench as that shown in the Hevelius example. But this is not at all a clear, or exclusive conclusion. Small hand-driven grinding lathes may have been employed for small microscope objectives (which Spinoza favored) or telescope eye-pieces, whereas a foot pedaled, spring pole machine could have been used for larger telescope glasses which could reach nearly 1/2 a foot in diameter.

In digression, there is evidence that Spinoza collaborated with the respected optical mathematician and amateur scientist Johannes Hudde on calculations for a 40 ft lens. To give a sense of it, such a lens would have been approximately 5 inches in diameter, of very slight curvature and only 5 – 8 mm thick: Huygens’s letter to his brother 23 Sept 1667:“Ie voudrois scavoir quelle grandeur d’ouuerture Spinosa et Monsieur Hudde determinent pour les 40 pieds” (See “The Lens Production of Christiaan and Constantijn Huygens” , 1998, by van Helden and van Gent, for the dimensions of similar lenses). Whether Spinoza was in the practice of grinding such lenses, which at the time would have been among the most powerful telescope lenses in Europe, we cannot know. But it seems he was involved in their calculation.

To return, if we are to imagine a hand-driven lathe’s effect upon Spinoza’s rational conception of Mind and Body relations, the form’s spinning, instead of oscillating, motion, may involve less of the entire body than a foot pedal lathe would; the head, the shoulders, the hands would form a frame of power and sensitivity, withthe shoulders acting as fulcrum points of stability and the hands as reading extensions. The cybernetic feedback between the hands, one holding the glass blank, the other whirling in circles would seem to be even more involved, more kinetically woven than that of the foot pedal lathe. The power transfer is more direct the thus the communication between hands more intimate. And one sees how the manifestations of concentric stability and change, eternity and flux, expressed in two respondent revolving discs, certainly could present itself as significant to the circle-loving craftsman as he sought to perfect his lens under physical pressure and frictions of grit.

By my view it seems most likely that Spinoza employed both kinds of lathes, the foot and the hand driven, perhaps at different points in his life, in a process of a refining of techniques. What really is at stake in this analysis I would contend is that one must be able to SEE what Spinoza did during a preponderance of his days, picture it physically, in an affective projection, to fully conceive what he thought. The machine and the human, that mind in the device and the matter of the idea understood to be in mutual conjunction.

The 1661 Technique of “Glass Drops”, a Possible Link to Bead Lens Microscopes

Robert Hooke published a very brief account of the technique for the making of bead lenses, by melting little threads of glass until they balled up. Such minute glass balls could then be ground into spherical lenses which required very short focal lengths, but in the hands of a master such as van Leeuwenhoek, produced tremendous magnification and clarity. This is what Hooke wrote in his Micrographia (1665):

And hence it is, that if you take a very clear a broken Venice Glas, and in a Lamp draw it out into very small hairs or threads, then holding the ends of these threads in the flame, till they melt and run into a small round Globul, or drop, which will hang at the end of a thread; and further if you stick several of these upon the end of a stick with a little sealing Wax, so that the threads stand upwards, and then on a Whetstone first grind off a good part of them, and afterward on a smooth Metal plate, with a little Tripoly, rub them till they come to be very smooth; if one of these be fixt with a little soft Wax against a small needle hole, prick’d through a thin plate of Bras, Lead, Pewter, or any other Metal, and an Object placed very near, be look’d at through it, it will both magnifie and make some Objects more distinct then any of the great Microscopes. But because these, though exceedingly easily made, are yet very troublesome to be us’d, because of their smallness, and the nearness of the Object; therefore to prevent both these, and yet have only two Refractions, I provided me a tube of Bras…

When tracking down the possible techniques in microscope construction Spinoza may have pursued, it seems that such tiny spherical lenses may have a possible design that Spinoza used. In support of this a Spinoza correspondent and, it seems, collaborator, Johannes Hudde had practiced the single lens, bead technique as early as 1663, and was an advocate to the technique to Moncoyns and then Huygens. It would seem certainly that Spinoza had heard of it, and because of its ease, one may surmise that he at least tried it out. And given Spinoza’s championing of smaller objective lenses for microscopes in his informal debates with Huygens, one would think that he had some experimental success.

As far as I can tell little is known of how this technique came to Western Europe, one supposed from Italy. Robert Hooke had it by 1664 and Hudde and Vossius had something like it in 1663. A piece in this development may though have been published in 1662, in an English translation of selections of Antonio Neri’s L’Arte Vetraria, The Art of Glass. (Interestingly Spinoza died with a 1668 edition of Neri’s book.) Published in the 1662 English edition is an account of the Royal Society experiments with &quot;Glass Drops&quot;, a technique brought to Charles II after the Restoration by the excentric and sometimes brilliant German prince Rupert who became a member of Charles’s privy council.

As one can see from the below, the method of forming drops straight from the pot to be cooled in various liquids was NOT the one used by Robert Hooke a couple of years later, but one can perhaps consider that the production of these very fine threads at the end of small dollops of glass may be related to the development of the single lens thread-melting technique (perhaps in conjunction with other sources). I post below a transcription of the original text as a resource for the study of the development of the bead lens technique. I have not read further accounts of this testing, nor have I invested the time to look at other Royal Society experiments during this time.

An Account of the Glass Drops.

Here Drops were first brought into England by his Highness Prince Rupert out of Germany and shewed to his Majesty, who communicated them to His Society at Gresham College. A Committee was appointed by the Society, who gave this following Account of them, as ’tis Registred in the Book appointed for that purpose, and thence transcribed by their permission, and there published. The which I the rather desired, that this might be a pattern for experiments to be made in any kinde whatsoever, as being done with exceeding exactness.

This account was given to the Society by Sir Robert Morray. MDCLXI.

A B the thread, B C the body, B the neck, A the point or end of the thread.

They are made of Green-glass well-refined; til the Metall (as they call it) be well refined, they do not at all succeed, but crack and break, soon after they are drop’t into the water.

The best way of making them, is to take up some of the Metall out of the pot upon the end of an Iron rod, and immediately let it drop into cool water, and there lye till it cool.

If the Metall be too hot when it drops into the water, the Glass drop certainly frosts and cracks all over, and falls to pieces in the water.

Every one that Cracks not in the water, and lies in it, till it be quite cold, is sure to be good.

The most expert Workmen, know not the just temper of the heat, that is the requisite, and therefore cannot promise before hand to make one that shall prove good, and many of them miscarry in the making, sometimes two or three or more for one that hits.

Some of them frost, but the body falls not into pieces; others break into pieces before the red heat be quite over, and with a small noise; other soon after the red heat is over, and with a great noise; some neither break nor crack, till they seem to be quite cold; other keep whole whilest they are in the water, and fly to pieces of themselves with a smart noise as soon as they are taken out of the water; some an hour after, others keep whole some days or weeks, and then break without being touched.

If one of them be snatched out of the water whilst it is red hot, the small part of the neck, and so much of the thred or string it hangs by, as has been in the water, will upon breaking fall into small parts, but not the Body, although it have as large cavities in it, as those that fly in pieces.

If one of them be cooled in the air, hanging at a thread, or on the ground, it becomes like other Glass, in all respects, as solidity, &c.

When a Glass drop falls into the water, it makes a little hissing noise, the body of it continues red a pretty while, and and [sic] there proceed from it many eruptions like sparkles, that crack, and make it leap up and move, and many bubbles do arise from it in the water, every where about it, till it cool: but if the water be ten or twelve Inches deep, these bubles diminish so in the ascending, that they vanish before they attain the superficies of the water; where nothing is to be observed, but a little thin steam.

The outside of the Glass drop is close and smooth like other Glass, but within it is spungious, and full of Cavities or Blebs.

The figure of it is roundish at the bottom for the most part, not unlike a pear pearl, it terminates in a long neck, so that never any of them are straight, and most of them are Crooked and bowed into small folds and wreaths from the beginning of the neck till it end in a small point.

Almost all those that are made in water have a little protuberance or knob a little above the largest part of the body, and most commonly placed on the side towards which the neck ends, although sometimes it be upon that side that lies uppermost in the vessel where it is made.

If a Glass drop be let to fall into water scalding hot, it will be sure to crack and break in the water either before the red heat be over, or soon after.

In Sallet Oyl they do not miscarry so frequently as in cold water.

In oyl they produce a greater number of bubbles, and larger ones, and they bubble in oyl longer than in water.

Thsoe that are made in oyl have not so many, nor so large blebs in them, as those made in water, and divers of them are smooth all over, adn want those little knobs that the others have.

Some part of the neck of those that are made in oyl, & that part of the small thread that is quenched in it cool’d, breaks like common Glass. But if the neck be broken neer the body, and the body held close in ones hand, it will crack and break all over: but flies not into so small parts, not with so smart a force and noise as those made in water, and the pieces will hold together till they be parted: and then there appears long freaks or rays upon them, pointing towards the center or middle of the body, and thwarting the little blebs or cavities of it, whereof the number is not so great, nor the size to large as in those made in water; if the Glass drops be dropt into vineger, they frost and crack, so as they are sure to fall to pieces before they be cold, the noise of falling in is more hissing than in water, but the bubbles not so remarkable.

In milk they make no noise, nor any bubbles that can be perceived, adn never miss to frost and crack, adn fall in pieces before they be cold.

In spirit of wine they bubble more than in any of the other liquors, and while they remain entire, tumble too and fro, and are more agitated than in other liquors, and never fail to crack adn fall in pieces.

By that time five or six are dropt into the spirit of wine, it will be set on flame: but receive, no particular taste from them.

In water wherein Nitre or Sal Armoniack hath been dissolved, they succeed no better than in vineger.

In oyl of Turpentine one of them broke as in the spirit of wine, but the second set it on fire, so as it could no more be used.

In Quick-silver, being forced to sink with a stick, it grew flat and rouch on the upper side: but the experiment could not be perfected, because it could not be kept under till it cool’d.

In an experiment made in a Cylindrical Glass, like a beaker filled with cold water of seven or eight onely one suceeded, the rest all cracking and breaking into pieces, onely some of the company, who taking the Glass in their hand, assoon as the drop was let fall into it, observed that at the first falling in, and for some time after, whilst the red heat lasted, red sparks were shot forth from the drops into the water, and that at the instant of the eruption of those particles, and of the bubbles which manifestly break out of it into the water, it not only cracks and sometimes with considerable noise, but the body moves and leaps, as well of those that remain whole in the water, as those that break.

A blow with a small happer, or other hard tool will not break one of the Glass Drops made in water, if it be touched no where but on the body.

Break of the tip of it, and it will fly immediately into very minuted parts with a smart force adn noise, and these parts will easily crumble into a coarse dust.

If it be broken, so that the sparks of it may have liberty to fly every way, they will disperse themselves in an orb with violence like a little Granado.

Some being rubed upon a dry tyle, fly into pieces by that time the bottom is a little flatted others not till half the rub’d off. One being rub’d till about half was ground away, and then layed aside, did a little while after fly in pieces without being touched. Another rub’d almost to the very neck on a stone with water and Emery did not fly at all.

If one of them be broken in ones hand under water, it strikes the hand more smartly, and with a more brisk noise than in the air: yeah, though it be held near the superficies none of the small parts will fly out of it but all fall down without dispersing as they do in the Air. One of them borken in Master Boyles Engine, when the Receiver is well Evacuated will fly in pieces as in the open air.

Anneal one of them in the fire, and it will become like ordinary Glass, onely the spring of it is so weakned, that it will not bend so much without breaking as before.

A Glass drop being fastned into a cement all but a part of the neck and then the tip of it broken off it made a pretty smart noise but not so great as those use to do that are broken in the hand, and though it clearly appears ot be all shiver’d within, and the colours turned grayish, the outside remained smooth, though cracked, and being taken in pieces, the parts of it rise in flakes, some Conical in shape, and so crack all over that it easily crumbled to dust.

One fastned in a ball of cement some half an Inch in thickness, upon the breaking off the tip of it, it broke the ball in pieces like a Granado.

Two or three of them sent to a Lapidary to peirce them thorow, as they do Pearls, no sooner had the tool entred into them, but they flew in pieces as the use to do when the tip of them is broken off.

Title Page For the 1662 English Translation of Antonio Neri's The Art of Glass