Review of Voltaire’s Micromegas — Confluence of Aristotle’s Entelechy and Energeia
Micromegas is a short story. It seems that the level of science fiction comes out of a 1950s era pulp fiction.
It follows the stories of two extraterrestrial giants who can walk in the Mediterranean with only getting their ankles wet.
The following passage describes them flying without saying what contraption or mechanism — if any at all — they used to fly:
“Our two explorers left all the same; they alighted first on the ring, which they found to be fairly flat, as conjectured by an illustrious inhabitant of our little sphere; from there they went easily from moon to moon. A comet passed by the last; they flew onto it with their servants and their instruments. When they had traveled about one hundred fifty million leagues, they met with the satellites of Jupiter. They stopped at Jupiter and stayed for a week, during which time they learned some very wonderful secrets that would have been forthcoming in print if not for the inquisition, which found some of the propositions to be a little harsh. But I have read the manuscript in the library of the illustrious archbishop of…., who with a generosity and goodness that is impossible to praise allowed me to see his books. I promised him a long article in the first edition of Moréri, and I will not forget his children, who give such a great hope of perpetuating the race of their illustrious father.”
They travel from Saturn and other astronomical bodies rotating around the sun. The story even brings ideas from beyond as well. What exists beyond our local “system.” The origins of the giants reminds me of Hamlet’s potentially rhetorical question here:
“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I’ll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn’d,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous; and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?”
Indeed, “with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?” But were these thoughts beyond the reaches of Voltaire’s mind? Or as Hamlet described it “In my mind’s eye, Horatio,” was this within Voltaire’s mind’s eye?
Indeed, one of the most vivid visions is the visitors to Earth describing the Mediterranean as a “pond”
“Since our strangers moved fairly rapidly, they circumnavigated the globe in 36 hours. The sun, in truth, or rather the Earth, makes a similar voyage in a day; but you have to imagine that the going is much easier when one turns on one’s axis instead of walking on one’s feet. So there they were, back where they started, after having seen the nearly imperceptible pond we call the Mediterranean, and the other little pool that, under the name Ocean, encircles the molehill. The dwarf never got in over his knees, and the other hardly wet his heels. On their way they did all they could to see whether the planet was inhabited or not. They crouched, laid down, felt around everywhere; but their eyes and their hands were not proportionate to the little beings that crawl here, they could not feel in the least any sensation that might lead them to suspect that we and our associates, the other inhabitants of this planet, have the honor of existing.”
In another example, the extraterrestrials put a ship of voyagers in the Baltic Sea returning to France from the North Pole on their thumb. Here the voyagers look like a spec:
“The Saturnian responded to all these points. The dispute might never have finished if it were not for Micromegas who, getting worked up, had the good luck to break the thread of his diamond necklace. The diamonds fell; they were pretty little carats of fairly irregular size, of which the largest weighed four hundred pounds and the smallest fifty. The dwarf recaptured some of them; bending down for a better look, he perceived that these diamonds were cut with the help of an excellent microscope. So he took out a small microscope of 160 feet in diameter and put it up to his eye; and Micromegas took up one of 2,005 feet in diameter. They were excellent; but neither one of them could see anything right away and had to adjust them. Finally the Saturnian saw something elusive that moved in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea; it was a whale. He carefully picked it up with his little finger and, resting it on the nail of his thumb, showed it to the Sirian, who began laughing for a second time at the ludicrously small scale of the things on our planet. The Saturnian, persuaded that our world was inhabited, figured very quickly that it was inhabited only by whales; and as he was very good at reasoning, he was determined to infer the origin and evolution of such a small atom; whether it had ideas, a will, liberty. Micromegas was confused. He examined the animal very patiently and found no reason to believe that a soul was lodged in it. The two voyagers were therefore inclined to believe that there is no spirit in our home, when with the help of the microscope they perceived something as large as a whale floating on the Baltic Sea. We know that a flock of philosophers was at this time returning from the Arctic Circle, where they had made some observations, which no one had dared make up to then. The gazettes claimed that their vessel ran aground on the coast of Bothnia, and that they were having a lot of difficulty setting things straight; but the world never shows its cards. I am going to tell how it really happened, artlessly and without bias; which is no small thing for an historian.”
Micromegas, one of the two eponymous travelers, uses his nail as a sort of horn hearing device to listen and learn the language of the humans:
“”That is very well said,” echoed Micromegas, and he briskly took out a pair of scissors with which he cut his fingernails, and from the parings of his thumbnail he improvised a kind of speaking-trumpet, like a vast funnel, and put the end up to his ear.”
The most evident irony is that of the giants saying that such “insignificant” and small beings must have no worries and must live such pleasurable lives. The parallel is that no matter how big we think we are, we all suffer and have the trials and tribulations. It seems this much is conspicuous.
My favorite passage is that of a discussion of Aristotle’s concept of entelechy:
“Finally Micromegas said to them, “Since you know what is exterior to you so well, you must know what is interior even better. Tell me what your soul is, and how you form ideas.” The philosophers spoke all at once as before, but they were of different views. The oldest cited Aristotle, another pronounced the name of Descartes; this one here, Malebranche; another Leibnitz; another Locke. An old peripatetic spoke up with confidence: “The soul is an entelechy, and a reason gives it the power to be what it is.” This is what Aristotle expressly declares, page 633 of the Louvre edition. He cited the passage.”
The section goes on to state:
This passage of Aristotle, On the Soul, book II, chapter II, is translated thusly by Casaubon: Anima quaedam perfectio et actus ac ratio est quod potentiam habet ut ejusmodi sit. B.
“I do not understand Greek very well,” said the giant.
“Neither do I,” said the philosophical mite.
“Why then,” the Sirian retorted, “are you citing some man named Aristotle in the Greek?”
“Because,” replied the savant, “one should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least.”
The Cartesian took the floor and said: “The soul is a pure spirit that has received in the belly of its mother all metaphysical ideas, and which, leaving that place, is obliged to go to school, and to learn all over again what it already knew, and will not know again.”
“It is not worth the trouble,” responded the animal with the height of eight leagues, “for your soul to be so knowledgeable in its mother’s stomach, only to be so ignorant when you have hair on your chin. But what do you understand by the mind?”
“You are asking me?” said the reasoner. “I have no idea. We say that it is not matter — “
“But do you at least know what matter is?”
“Certainly,” replied the man. “For example this stone is grey, has such and such a form, has three dimensions, is heavy and divisible.”
“Well!” said the Sirian, “this thing that appears to you to be divisible, heavy, and grey, will you tell me what it is? You see some attributes, but behind those, are you familiar with that?
“No,” said the other.
“ — So you do not know what matter is.”
So Micromegas, addressing another sage that he held on a thumb, asked what his soul was, and what it did.
“Nothing at all,” said the Malebranchist philosopher[5]. “God does everything for me. I see everything in him, I do everything in him; it is he who does everything that I get mixed up in.”
[5] See the opuscule entitled “All in God” in Miscellaneous (1796).
“It would be just as well not to exist,” retorted the sage of Sirius. “And you, my friend,” he said to a Leibnitzian who was there, “what is your soul?”
“It is,” answered the Leibnitzian, “the hand of a clock that tells the time while my body rings out. Or, if you like, it is my soul that rings out while my body tells the time, or my soul is the mirror of the universe, and my body is the border of the mirror. All that is clear.”
—
The concept of entelechy is deeply embodied in Aristotle’s thought of potentiality and actuality. Aristotle writes rather clearly in his Metaphysics 1047a30:
“ἐλήλυθε δ᾽ ἡ ἐνέργεια τοὔνομα, ἡ πρὸς τὴν ἐντελέχειαν συντιθεμένη.” This relates the concept of energia and entelechy.
Further, Aristotle further connects the concept of energia, working, and entelechy in his Metaphysics050a21–23:
“τὸ γὰρ ἔργον τέλος, ἡ δὲ ἐνέργεια τὸ ἔργον, διὸ καὶ τοὔνομα ἐνέργεια λέγεται κατὰ τὸ ἔργον καὶ συντείνει πρὸς τὴν ἐντελέχειαν.”
Leibniz wrote:
“…the entelechy of Aristotle, which has made so much noise, is nothing else but force or activity ; that is, a state from which action naturally flows if nothing hinders it. But matter, primary and pure, taken without the souls or lives which are united to it, is purely passive ; properly speaking also it is not a substance, but something incomplete.”
IS the phrase from Voltaire correct? “The soul is an entelechy, and a reason gives it the power to be what it is.” Is that accurate?
© Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln IV
