To Err Is Human More Than Ever Suspected

Zarathustra (the First Prophet): “The Lie.”

Zarathustra corrected: The Lie/theTruth (and that needs what may itself be a further correction).

Heraclitus (missing an immediate corollary of his own thought): “You can’t step into the same river twice.”

Heraclitus corrected: You can’t step into the same river even once.

The Sower (irked, to a cluster of co-religionists): “You are the children of the Devil.”

The Sower corrected: You are the children of the Devil and of God (consult Zarathustra, above).

Newton (third law of motion): “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Newton corrected: Action and reaction are not the discrete, independent phenomena, numerically two, that to all appearances Newton believes. They are rather constituents of an indissoluble contrast, action/reaction, which is numerically one.  And the moment Sir Isaac takes two phenomena to be two in number, he acknowledges–axiomatically and against himself without realizing it–the inequality of the two. (Consult Sartre and Einstein, below.)

Nietzsche: “Anywhere I looked I saw will to power.”

Nietzsche corrected: Anywhere I looked I saw a reaching for peak aliveness.

Wittgenstein: “The world is all that is the case.”

Wittgenstein corrected: If the world is all that is the case, then the world is also all that is not the case. (Consult, above and below: Zarathustra, the Sower, Heidegger. Even though that sentence is an oft-remembered Wittgensteinian thought, I remember a glancing reference in him that is perhaps to the effect of my objection, yet for that possibly contrary view I expect not a whisper of a sustained argument in all of Wittgenstein. Then, also, the principle that the correction is anchored in must encompass more than a few of Wittgenstein’s linguistic-philosophical judgments, both early and late.)

Heidegger (asking what has been called “the fundamental question of philosophy”): “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Heidegger informed: Wrong question out of an elemental misunderstanding.

Heidegger corrected: There are both something and nothing, in an indissoluble embrace. (Consult, above: Zarathustra, the Sower, Newton.)

Sartre (establishing perhaps the canon of existentialism): “Existence precedes essence.”

Sartre corrected: Existence has no temporal priority over essence, nor does essence over existence. That means the two are not sequential.  They are, instead, coexistents: and that means that existence and essence are simultaneous.  (Consult Newton, above.)

Einstein (special theory of relativity): “E=mc^2.”

First, asserted equation corrected for dystress: “E equals mc to the second power.”

Einstein corrected: Everything in the universe exists by virtue of its inequality, and by that virtue alone. Two equal things—that is, with zero difference–by definition cannot exist for us, for we would then be unable to tell them apart, to discern them as two—we don’t have the faculty for that discernment, which is impossible even in theory. Hence all assertions of equality are false, hence all equations are false. There are only approximations in the universe, never (absolute) equality.

(Consult Newton, above.  Since it is reasonable to believe that Einstein and the thousands of physicists after him, some princes of the field, could not possibly have missed the inequality point above, we are left with what seems the only explanation: that practical equations, virtual equations, pseudo-equations have been presented to us as (absolute) equations. You’ll see that even on paper Einstein’s is no equation: its two terms take up different spaces (spacetimes?), contain different characters, in length are unequal, and more.

This curiosity of asserted equality extends far past Einstein et al. Einstein learned from Newton, who in turn learned from his predecessors including Hipparchus (second century BC), who learned from his predecessors … to the first stone carving of “equality.”)

The corrections above, if they are indeed corrections, have been made with respect or with reverence.