Immanent reason
As we read in Plato’s Republic, immanent reason is an expression for the eternal creative power that sustains our existence, and all existence, and is the “unhypothetical principle” (the anhypotheton) needing no more proof than the mathematical axioms. It is thus the starting point for the study of goodness, truth, and beauty; for the dialectical process, as it were.
I learnt of it from Roger Smith, or “Raj,” as I called him, in the mid-‘sixties in Georgetown, Ontario, when and where I was terribly young. Raj would speak to anyone who was interested, and thus to me, even though he was five years older — which, at the time, was a lot. The most intelligent person in the town, quite obviously, he was the valedictorian at our high school. (And got into trouble by telling home truths about our school and education system in the course of his valedictory speech.)
Too, the local weatherman, who taught me about “meteorology,” when I minded his station, and kept the daily record, after he went off to university to study physics. Raj, I continually discovered, was a good and honest person, utterly reliable and incorruptible. I confirmed this when gathering matter for a (controversial) thesis he wrote on “urban heat islands.” His work also prepared me to realize, much later, that our various climate emergencies should be taken with a truckload of salt. Raj was very wittily dismissive of cranks, and the whole meteorological establishment were cranks.
Raj also owned a car, for polite rally driving, and a lovely, albeit fiberglass, canoe. With this we explored many rivers, until we wrecked it approaching Mattawa, Ontario — while attempting some difficult whitewater to avoid a five-mile portage. Typically, Raj was not bothered by the loss (which was my fault, as usual). A fanatic sportsman, through this and many other adventures, he was also the best goalie in pick-up hockey games over Dewdney’s frozen pond in Glen Williams.
But his work in theoretical meteorology, including how the strong magneto-radiation belts around Jupiter and several other planets in our solar system interact with earth’s, and create moving tracks in our upper atmosphere. These are predictable — making it possible to guess weather systems, that consequently proceed through our lower atmosphere, a very long time in advance. But all this got for Raj was into more serious trouble. It put his illustrious thesis adviser’s nose out of joint, because it was too original, and was the first of his many conflicts with scientific orthodoxy. Indeed, it made him, if possible, more rightwing than I am.
Roger Smith died this week, near Trail, B.C., where he had settled into obscurity with a loyal wife and family, after another five decades of being my life-long friend, and much else.
Well, as Raj once said, “You’ve got to die somehow, & shouldn’t be too picky.”