Umberto Eco & giant's shoulders

Isaac Newton in 1675 said- "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

According to Umberto Eco, this was an ancient saying first documented in the Latin grammarian Priscian who himself built on authors more ancient yet. 

Conventionally, the phrase is taken to mean 'cumulative progress enables us to advance upon our ancestors'. However 2 points should be noted

1) a bunch of athletes standing on each other's shoulders could see further. The difference is that each could achieve the same vantage point and corroborate each other's account of what they see. Moreover, having different interests, they will each notice something the others did not register. Taking turns standing on each other's shoulders is a win-win, provided each is equally strong and athletic. Every subject and perspective is advanced on the basis of mutuality. 

A giant would kill any dwarf he tried to stand upon. A dwarf standing on a giant's shoulders might see less, because a dwarf's eyesight might be better adapted to seeing what is close at hand whereas the giant, who has little to fear from anything in the vicinity, might be long-sighted so as to spot suitable prey at vast distances. Nietzsche has remarked this.

This suggests another interpretation of this aphorism. Newton had seen further and better than Aristotle- with respect to the narrower and more circumscribed field of Physics- because he had built upon cumulative progress in Physics whereas Aristotle's work may be considered sui generis. Moreover, since Newton was addressing this remark to Hook, with whom he hadn't yet quarreled, he may have been saying that relying upon his contemporaries, standing on their shoulders but also letting them stand on his shoulders, he had the advantage of a peer group which could corroborate and correct his vision. One might say, that Newton had both the acquired advantage of cumulative progress over time as well as comparative advantage arising out of a much wider band of interlocutors and corroborators with different perspectives and areas of expertise. 

But this was only true of what was truly Scientific- a subject fit for humans of average stature but superior strength, athleticism, stamina and esprit de corps.

 Anyone who tried to create a metaphysics by standing on Newton's shoulders- as Kant tries to do in the Critique of Pure Reason- would be like a giant using a man as a step ladder. Kant's system is not obviously ridiculous- a giant remains a giant even if he happens to be standing in the bloody shambles of a man. We may admire Kant's moral nobility while saying 'poor fellow, he thought Newton must have been right about Physics. Thus he set himself the task of asking what must be true of cognition such that Newton's hypothesis could be accepted as irrefragable truth.'

However, that which is 'monstrous' in Kant- viz. what, by its hideous size, destroys the purpose which constitutes the concept of it- i.e. the great disproportion between the hypertrophied means and the utterly trivial ends- startles us into acknowledging that Newton's theory of Absolute Space and Time could not possibly be true because it would license a Kantian moral gigantism. Aristotle may marry Deuteronomy. Their progeny may be of human shape. But Physics married to Ethics is a Nightmare of Reason.

Perhaps, this is always the case. The gigantism of a univocal metaphysics crushes the dwarf that is narrow, protocol bound, Physics- which, no matter how much cumulative progress it makes, or how widely its peer group of researchers extends, remains merely a hypokeimenon- or simple cellular undergirding- upon which the Majesty of Thought supervenes. 

2) Newton lived in the age of the telescope. Scaling a local peak with one such instrument would enable one to survey distant terrain in much greater detail than would be possible for the naked eye of even the tallest giant with sharp eyes. Indeed, the telescope enabled Newton's own theory to be overturned in favor of Einstein's'.

It may be that Newton felt he had also made philosophical, or theological, advances thanks to cumulative progress in the Arts and Moral Sciences at his alma mater. He may also have thought that something like a telescope had become available thanks to the spread of literacy and the profusion of printed texts. However, information aggregation did not have the same effect of sharpening focus and filling out a picture of the non-material 'life-world' or Lebenswelt. 'Totalizing' narratives remained as shitty as ever. 

Umberto Eco gained world wide fame as the author of 'Name of the Rose' which could be said to Lyotard's 'The Post-Modernist Condition' turned into a detective story. Sadly, writing the foreword to Merton's 'On the shoulders of Giants', he doesn't grasp the double edged nature of the aphorism on which he brings his erudition to bear. He was a giant of the Humanities. But Sociology & Semiotics were not as sherpas leading the Masses upwards into the light, but as dwarves trampled in darkness by a herd made restive by rumors of a Dawn before its time.