How to Watch an Eclipse
On predictions and obsessions
Working in a college or university means being surrounded by those who have dedicated their lives to niches and to teaching everyone about them. Colleges are essentially communities of obsessives, carving and building new structures of and for knowledge, wearing new paths across fields of our ignorance that will ultimately be taken by very few. But every now and then, one of these obsessions breaks through to the public.
The scientists at my college have been hyping the solar eclipse for weeks. Emails and slacks had been arriving daily with links to timelines and maps, likely weather forecasts, TV segments on local morning shows with faculty giving viewing and safety tips and generally being exuberant in their odd but charming ways about a rare celestial event that won’t reoccur in our area until 2045. An active marketplace of eclipse glasses sprang up with daily stock tracking, latest locations, opinions about which to get and which to avoid.
I tend to work from home on Mondays, including Solar Eclipse Monday, and I left my eclipse glasses (given to me by our resident astronomer) on my office desk. My son M had a pair, but he had work at 3 pm, around the time when the moon would begin barging in front of the sun. Our new apartment has some outdoor space, and before he left, he and I took turns looking at the sun through the nearly black lenses. We could see the star being eaten away into a sharpening crescent.
My daughter Q is a freshman in college, and she’s taking her first philosophy class this semester. It turns out that I’ve taught versions of her current class many times (a fairly common introduction to the history of ideas via some of philosophy’s marquee names), and I’m familiar with how even the most capable students have to tune their ears to this kind of reading and writing. I’m also extremely familiar with how students usually struggle to see the problems that Descartes or Locke push and pull on as problems, weird questions worth thinking about at all. I’m always happy to participate in this project, and Q and I have had some lovely recent conversations about texts that I haven’t thought about professionally for a few years. She attends a small liberal arts college in the Northeast, and the weekend before the eclipse, she called me while walking a trail in the woods to talk about the great Scottish philosopher David Hume. I suggested that we could wait until she returned to campus, but Q said that she found a nice rock to sit on and that we could talk now.
Hume has long been one of my obscure academic preoccupations, particularly the way he followed skepticism about as far as one could until he seemed to have nothing left to believe in but writing itself. Q wanted to talk about Hume’s theory of causation. Hume is a hard-core empiricist, which means that he believes that all knowledge comes from experience. What, he asks, is our experience of cause and effect? At best, we see one thing happen followed by another thing happening. We don’t directly experience the first thing causing the second; we just tend to associate happenings because of repetition (what he calls “constant conjunction”). Our concluding that one thing causes another is not a claim to knowledge but is instead an expression of a feeling of certainty that arises out of custom or habit.
(This argument can be pretty powerful, especially once you dig into it and its implications, as it threatens pretty much all of science. Kant is famous for saying that Hume awoke him from his “dogmatic slumber” in large part because of it.)
Q and I talked through the argument and came up with our own examples that squared with Hume’s conclusion. Her professor asked her to critique Hume’s argument as well, always a tough thing for students to do, and we ruminated about that too. Thinkers have been crafting all sorts of responses over the past three centuries, some of professional-grade sophistication and nuance (including Kant’s), more than she needs for her paper. We instead talked about our ability to predict the weather or the when sunrise will arrive tomorrow. Say what you want about astrology, but that whole business assumes that we can know where the moon and stars were on the day of your birth, that the heavens’ opinions about our personalities are regular and recurring.
And we can predict, down to the minute and meter, where and when the moon will eclipse the sun. How could we do that if we didn’t have a somewhat decent understanding of cause and effect, of how the universe works?
Evening was coming on, and Q headed back to campus to finish her laundry. I slid my worn copy of the Enquiries back on the bookshelf and started on dinner. Philosophy almost always gives way to life (another great Hume revelation).
The scientists had convincingly cautioned against looking at the eclipse without the right glasses, and I went with the pinhole method instead. (Apparently Google searches for “hurt eyes” skyrocketed right after the eclipse, so please listen to your local scientists.) I punched a hole in a card and went out on the terrace at 3:15 to see what I could. The day had definitely dimmed and yellowed, and a cool wind picked up. My makeshift camera threw a small but bright thumbnail on the ground. There it was, the heavens in action, just like they said it would be.
Since I couldn’t look at the sun, I decided to look at everything else. Traffic on the long-legged avenue near us had slowed somewhat, though the food-delivery workers continued zipping down their lane on electric bikes. Rooftops across the neighborhood were full of people watching the eclipse, clustering on fire escapes, crowding on the sidewalks sharing pairs of cardboard glasses. Everyone turned, smiling, toward the same point in the sky.
After about 15 minutes, the day brightened back up and the breeze shifted warm. I went back to email, inevitable and predictable in its own right. My son’s manager let the staff go outside for a few minutes, and he sent the family group chat a little video from Fifth Avenue near Union Square in Manhattan.
It’s hard to leave a niche, which is why I still have so many difficult books on my shelves, why I continue wondering whether the world and ourselves will be there as we think they are when we go looking for them.
The beauty of M’s video, of course, is that what looks to be a record of him experiencing the eclipse instead captures a far more interesting moment of shared looking, a community participating in a human obsession.
Who could have predicted it?
Wonderful observations from a life rich in connections and thinking. Lead on.