Eric Gerlach's Blog for Thought

Intro Philosophy: No Class This Week

2012-02-13T14:44:00.001-08:00

There will be no class for Intro Philosophy this Thursday, the 16th of February. I will be out of town. Your paper is due next week when we meet again on the 23rd of February. I will be checking my gmail account, though not as frequently.

Social & Political Philosophy: Machiavelli & Hobbes on the Sovereign

2012-02-13T14:43:00.001-08:00

Machiavelli (1469 – 1527 CE) & The Prince

Niccolo Machiavelli is possibly one of the most misunderstood political philosophers in history. The word Machiavellian was an English word before there was an English translation of The Prince, his most famous work. While he does advocate holding power by ruthless brutality and deception in The Prince, some scholars point out that his other works argue for the very opposite of ruthless dictatorship and Machiavelli held a position in a republic like those he prized. It is still a debate as to whether Machiavelli meant The Prince to be taken as a joke and unmasking of the realities of power or whether he meant it as a work of political realism that is brutally honest about how power must be held. Rousseau, who we will soon study, believed The Prince to be a satire of the powerful Medici family. The Italian Communist Gramsci, who we will study in the second half of the class, believed that Machiavelli was serious but was explaining to the poor how politics work and not the rich who already understand how politics work. Either way, joke or treatise, it is a classic read by many thinkers and leaders we will study in this class because of its insightful descriptions of the reality and brutality of politics.

Machiavelli was not known for his political writings during his lifetime, and The Prince was published years after his death. He was a politician, and ambassador and a writer. While he was alive he was famous for his comic plays (another piece of evidence that may indicate The Prince is a farce). It was only after his death and the infamy of The Prince that he became primarily identified with this text and the word Machiavellian became a new word in several languages.

His political career flourished in the years of the republic that ruled the city of Florence between 1494 and 1512 when the Medici family was briefly out of power. At the time, there was no unified Italy. In fact, many living in Italy at the time would have no idea what Italy was. In addition, none of the great Renaissance artists or thinkers would have heard of the Renaissance, as it is a French word applied by a French historian to the period two hundred years later. Four city states, Florence, Venice, Milan and Naples, were warring powers and were involved against each other with the Catholic Church and the kings of France and Spain. The Medici family were the great patrons of the painters, sculptors and philosophers of the Renaissance and ruled Florence before and after the brief republic. The republic was ruled by nine citizens elected by drawing lots every two months. Citizenship was not common, however, as Machiavelli himself was well off but not high enough in the ranks to have citizenship himself. Nonetheless, he held powerful positions in the republic as chancellor, ambassador to France and Spain, and head of the military. This, and the time of warring states (like China) set the backdrop for The Prince.

After the Medici family regained control of Florence and abolished the republic, Machiavelli was accused of conspiracy and tortured. After he was found innocent and released, he withdrew into his estate and spent his time writing the comedies and political works that made him famous in his life and infamous after his death.

Speaking of comedy, here is a wonderfully Machiavellian joke before diving into The Prince.
Two young kids are talking about their families.
“My father is a politician”, says one.
“Really? Honest?”, asks the other.
“No, the regular kind”, replies the first.

The Prince

Machiavelli dedicated his most famous work to Lorenzo de Medici, the great patron of Renaissance art and Neo-Platonism. Was this book making fun of the terrible power of the Medici, or was it a practical guide for maintaining public good in times of great war and terror? Scholars still debate. Either way, the work was privately circulated by Machiavelli amongst his friends and was only published years after his death.

The Prince focuses on “new princes”, leaders who come to power by rising up through the ranks and who do not receive power from a noble lineage. Machiavelli provides several examples from ancient times and his own time of such rulers. When a new ruler comes into power they must stabilize and consolidate their power to maintain it and the security of the public they rule. The main argument of the work is that one should cultivate both love and fear as a ruler, and one must be prepared to act with complete brutality and hypocritical deception. This is done out of necessity at inevitable times when the ruler and ruled are threatened. Like Hobbes, who was influenced by Machiavelli and we will study next time, he argues that a strong king is necessary in the brutal world and so evil is sometimes justified.

Unlike Plato & Aristotle, who were a great influence on Machiavelli as well as most Renaissance thinkers, Machiavelli does not believe in constructing an ideal city as a model and does not believe it to be good to rule people in terms of an ideal. Like Nietzsche, who we will study later and who was influenced by Machiavelli, he was a brute realist who believed in theorizing about how people and power is and not how things ought to be. He believed that people are naturally ambitious and warlike, so we must prepare for this and balance the bad in human nature with the good. Also like Nietzsche, Machiavelli considered religion to be a means of control and that a ruler should not be overly religious or pious because it will make them unable to be brutal when they must be. He does suggest, however, that it is in the ruler’s interests to make the ruled people as religious as possible, and I suggest that this equally applies to idealizing the objectivity of the sciences and the freedom and good will of democracies.

Like John Stuart Mill, who we will study soon, Machiavelli can be called a pragmatist who considers the true to be the useful and practical, not the perfect or immutable. Machiavelli, like Mill, is associated with the principle “the ends justify the means”. Like Mill, Machiavelli argues that sometimes this can result in harm, but if we consider the long view and the social view it is in the interest of everyone overall. Machiavelli argues that if a state is too nice, it will be overrun by conquerors and there will be terrible times for everyone. It is bad to routinely abuse people as this will lead to ruin, but brutality must be used occasionally or the state will be equally ruined. A good ruler must know how and when to be brutal as life is tough and some situations require violence or deception (like Plato suggested last week in the noble lie of The Republic).

Machiavelli argues that one should befriend weak rivals but crush strong ones. He writes that one should wipe out the entire family of those one crushes and completely destroy the lands of those one conquers such that one does not have to fear revenge or counter-attack. Consider the warring families of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as well as modern gang warfare (such as the Black Widow, Griselda Blanca, who murdered entire families along with the children as one of the early cocaine kingpins of Miami in the early 80s).

One should not be brutal casually or needlessly, but if you have to be brutal then you have to go whole hog and ensure that your enemy will not be able to retaliate. When one has to be brutal, one should be brutal all at once such that it does not have to be a daily routine for maintaining authority. Otherwise, he writes, one must “always keep a knife in hand”. In other words, treat people the way you want to be treated unless you absolutely have to kill them and their entire family. He writes that it is best to delegate this task to someone else in the administration such that the ruler can be feared but also appear benevolent and blameless to the greatest extent possible. This was classic politics of middle age Europe, where kings would rely on particular noble houses to commit great atrocities and then condemn them publicly long after agreeing on exchange of favors in private.

Machiavelli famously writes that it is best to be both loved and feared, but if one has to choose between the two one should be feared. It is best to appear liberal to most of the people most of the time but be ruthlessly authoritarian to the individual who steps out of line. One should seek the safety of being feared, but avoid being despised and hated. One should be a patron of the arts, of festivals and spectacles, but prepare for trouble. One should try to keep one’s hands off the property and women of others, but be ready for total war. He refers to the myth of Achilles being nursed by the centaur Chiron of Greek mythology to illustrate how one must learn to be both human and animal to be, like Achilles, a great leader.

Influence and Legacy of The Prince and Machiavelli

The Pope put The Prince on the banned index in 1559, but it spread aided by the new development of the printing press. Block printing had arrived in Europe from China, where it was first used to print Buddhist texts. Interestingly, “humanist” thinkers like Erasmus who resisted Catholic authority equally despised the book. Catholics and Protestant kings read The Prince, while the Catholic kings condemned the work as Protestant rebellion and the Protestant kings condemned them as Catholic authoritarianism. One critic accused Machiavelli of being an atheist while simultaneously calling The Prince “the Koran of the courtiers”.
Hobbes, who we will study next time, was influenced by The Prince and came to similar conclusions about the power of the sovereign. Locke, who we will cover soon and who influenced the American founding fathers on the issue of rights, was influenced by the political writings of Machiavelli.

Hitler claimed he read Machiavelli’s Prince frequently in bed before falling asleep. Mussolini was fond of quoting the book, as is the Italian mafia don John Gotti. Gramsci, the communist opponent to the fascist Mussolini and jailed when Mussolini rose to power, considered The Prince to be a brilliant book that teaches everyone how power operates.

The founders of the American Republic and authors of the Constitution such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison all made use of Machiavelli’s idea of checks and balances between powers as a good way of securing a good republic.
As a final thought, Machiavelli did write in his other political works that the life of the king was a sad life and that the common person was much happier not to have to engage in necessary violence and lies. Perhaps unnecessary violence and lies are much more fun.

Hobbes and Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is often called the second great philosopher (the first being Descartes) in the modern European philosophical tradition. He is known for his 1651 book Leviathan which argues that the people agree to transfer their rights to a sovereign by social contract, and that this agreement justly allows the sovereign to do whatever is necessary to protect the people including use of brute force and deception. Machiavelli, who influenced Hobbes and was the subject of the last lecture, argued that any sovereign must be good at these two evil but necessary aspects of society. Like Machiavelli, Hobbes was a realist and though he supported the traditional monarchy got in trouble even with the loyal Royalists he was trying to support by arguing that the king/sovereign derives authority not from God but from natural law (the basic way humanity and nature work). Like Machiavelli, Hobbes is infamous for supporting the brute power of the king but he is also famous and influential for his discussion of natural rights (self-evident liberties), the equality of humanity, and social contracts (government as an artificial agreement of individuals that concedes power to authority through consent).

Hobbes was working as a tutor and scholar in Florence and Paris, and had been working on a complete physics of natural motions that built up from inanimate objects to the motions of the body to the motions of society. He returned home to England in 1637, finding a country torn by civil wars and complex politics. While things were quite complicated between England, Scotland and Ireland, the two main sides of the English civil war were the Royalists who supported the rule of King Charles the first and the Parliamentarians who supported the rights of nobles in Parliament to check the powers of the king and guarantee liberties for the nobility. Just as in Florence in Machiavelli’s time, there was a brief period (10 years, 1649-1659) of Parliamentary rule after the execution of Charles the first before England returned to monarchy under Charles the second.

Before the civil war, Parliament was not a permanent body in English government. Parliaments were called at the king’s request to aid the king’s purposes, particularly the collection of taxes and the waging of warfare. Rulers have needed the help of local nobles for these purposes since the earliest city state societies, and so the earliest form of democracy in Sumer was just such a council of nobles as was Athenian democracy (though in Athens there was no ruler for a time above the council). In England before the civil war, Parliament could send bills to be considered as potential laws to the king (like we have in American law still today) as well as petition grievances, but the king had the right to call the council as well as dissolve the council, so it was not a permanent body that held the king’s powers in check.

The king needed the nobility, but could also ignore the needs of the nobles for the sake of the crown (according to both Machiavelli and Hobbes, for the greater good of all embodied in the king). Charles called and dismissed several parliaments that had grievances against him before ruling without a parliament for 11 years. The nobles and later historians called this period the Eleven Years Tyranny, which is ironic if you consider that the nobles held power over the people without any form of representation. Charles was forced to make peace with the kings of France and Spain, to levy great taxes on merchants, and occasionally torture and punish even nobles who rebelled (such as cutting off ears, a punishment common for the commoners but rare for the nobility).

Many in the cities of England and the military favored the parliament, while the rural areas favored the king. Both sides believed that they fought for the traditional English way and wished for Charles to remain on the throne. After several bloody wars and political back-stabbings, the Parliamentarians began to wonder whether Charles should remain king or whether Parliament itself could rule England (much like the brief period of Athenian democracy, a country ruled by a council of the noble families). Captured by the Parliamentarians, Charles was tried and found guilty of high treason against England, and executed in 1649. English Civil War Societies, much like those in America, reenact the wars every year (but with pikes and shields, not muskets as in America).

At this time, Hobbes was completing his book Leviathan, published the next year in 1650. In Paris he had good contact with Royalists in exile who believed, like Hobbes, that a strong central authority prevented injustice and civil war. The brief period of Parliamentary rule was messy and divided, which the Royalists and Hobbes watched from overseas. In 1660 Charles II returned from exile and re-conquered England and restored the monarchy of his father (a period known as the Restoration). Charles II, who had in fact been tutored by Hobbes as a boy, gave Hobbes protection during times of persecution and a pension.

While the Royalists did in this way win the long fight, only some were delighted by Hobbes’ Leviathan. Many Royalists were outraged by Hobbes’ idea that the king derived authority from the natural rights and protection of the people, not by the divine decree of God. Hobbes does mention God and divine covenants as a basic type of contract, but he argues that one can only enter a contract with God by God’s grace and not by natural right, unlike the mortal human contract that supports a human king. This is why Charles II had to offer him protection during purges of atheism and “profanity” when Hobbes’ book Leviathan was targeted openly. Like Machiavelli, Hobbes was intensely loved and hated and his work spread amongst those who hated him as much as anyone. While many today loath the idea of a sovereign without checks and balances, Hobbes is important for his ideas about the natural nature of society, liberty, rights, and equality.

The Leviathan

In the selections I gave you from Leviathan, some of the most famous, Hobbes argues that in the natural condition, the basic state of humanity in nature, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Hobbes argues that human beings are more equal than they are different in strength and intelligence. People think that they are above others but this merely confirms their equality (like the DMV reports that 80% of those questioned say they are an above average driver). Everyone wants to obtain their ends and posses what they desire, but because they desire what others want they make enemies easily. Without power over them, there is little happiness and much grief. Each wants safety, even glory, at the expense of the others. The state of nature is therefore a war of all vs. all, a war against every other person.

Hobbes writes that there may never have been such a pure state of nature for all of humanity, but argues that the “savages of America”, the native Americans, live in such a state in his time and thus have no government at all. Next week, Rousseau will argue the opposite and look to the American tribes as well as others to argue that in the state of nature people were pure and uncorrupted. In the state of nature, when there is no government, nothing is unjust. There is neither justice nor injustice, neither right nor wrong. Force and fraud are cardinal virtues (consider the similarity with Machiavelli’s Prince). There is no permanent property that is rightfully one person’s or another’s (consider Plato & Aristotle arguing whether society provides or prohibits private property). The only reason to seek peace is fear of death, which is ironic considering that we call peace a sort of rest when we say “rest in peace”.

For Hobbes, the basic “right of nature” is self-preservation (much like Darwin’s survival of the fittest as a kind of natural law). Hobbes eventually argues that one can pledge one’s life to society, but one still has the right to defend oneself even when society comes to claim this debt. Hobbes draws the useful distinction between a law (a prohibition) and a right (a prohibition of a prohibition, a freedom or liberty). In the state of nature, everyone has the unchecked right to everything, including the lives of others. People should seek peace and form societies for their own sakes, but before the social contract there is nothing preventing anyone from doing anything. People should treat others the way they want to be treated, but to do this they have to voluntarily give up liberty. They must give up the liberty of harming others to prevent harm from being done to themselves.

Hobbes makes the further distinction that liberties and rights can be renounced or transferred to another, such as an authority. Basically, Hobbes argues through much of the Leviathan that people come to understand that they must transfer the liberty of harming others to the sovereign or state in order to ensure mutual peace and prosperity. Once they have entered into such an agreement, a social contract, they have agreed to a standard of justice and this is what creates justice and injustice. Following in accord with the contract is justice, and breaking the contract is injustice. Following the contract creates duty as well as the difference between right and wrong. A declaration of the contract is made by the participants, and now the participants are bound in duty to the contract and the authority in which the contract is embodied.

People naturally want liberty for themselves, but they also wish to dominate others. Unlike other animals, however, people can create voluntary and artificial structures such as social contracts and nation-states. The only way to do this is to confer/transfer power, strength and liberty to a sovereign. The sovereign is either one person (king, queen, sultan) or a group of people (parliament, congress, pow wow). Later in the text, Hobbes sides with the Royalists vs. the Parliamentarians and argues that it is best to have a single human sovereign (such as Charles the first, or second), because otherwise there will be civil war and strife (like that witnessed in the brief period between Charles the first and Charles the second).

The sovereign, the artificial and mortal God, as Hobbes calls it, is now owed allegiance underneath the authority of the natural and immortal God who only contacts humanity by grace and revelation. When the sovereign acts, it is as if everyone acts. This is famously captured in the image on the front of the publication of Leviathan with a king made out of smaller people, wielding a sword. Because one has pledged one’s strength and life to the sovereign, if you try to rebel the sovereign actually punishes you with your own hand as well as the hand of everyone else. If the sovereign believes you must be killed for the good of everyone else, it is as if you have condemned yourself to death voluntarily. Hobbes argues that you still have the right to try to defend yourself, but the social contract makes it right and legal for the king to have the liberty to end your life and the lives of others, foreign and domestic, if it is in the interest of the sovereign who embodies the interests of the whole populace. Also, Hobbes argues that even if the minority does not voluntarily enter the contract, they are bound to it through the interests of the majority and if they do not agree they can be killed without right to safety as this right only exists within the social contract through participation (consider colonialism, as we will near the end of the class, and how this can be used by foreign powers to set up empires and kill those who disagree in the name of security and liberty).

In the name of the social contract, the sovereign can’t commit injustice. Consider that this was the charge of the Parliamentarians against Charles the first, and the reason Charles was executed while Hobbes is writing the work. The sovereign has the right to censor all works of literature and art, to decide matters of property and war. Hobbes quotes the gospels, “A house divided against itself cannot stand”, arguing that there must be an individual who embodies the whole as king or there will be continuous civil war. The king must be “like the sun to the stars”, eclipsing all other authority by natural right. He writes, “If there had not first been an opinion received of the greatest part of England, that these powers were divided between the King, and the Lords, and the House of Commons, the people had never been divided and fallen into this civil war…and so continue, till their miseries be forgotten”. Consider that Hobbes is arguing against checks and balances to the King’s power, unlike Machiavelli did in his republican works.

Intro Philosophy: First Response Essay Topics

2012-02-07T20:07:00.001-08:00

Please read the post, "How to Write a Philosophy Essay". Remember that the essays are to be at least two double spaced typed pages or two single spaced handwritten (and legible) pages. The essays are due the class period after they are assigned, the date that they appear on the syllabus. You are welcome to email the papers to me at ericgerlach@gmail.com. You are also welcome to use your life experience or outside sources as evidence for your argument, but make sure to focus on your argument.

So far in the class, we have focused on the general frame of human thought, as well as the wisdom of shamans, ancient Egypt, and ancient India. Some topics one can consider and argue about that we have discussed so far are:

1) Is there absolute truth, or is all truth relative and perspective?

2) Is academic and scientific truth now objective, factual, and observable, or is it simply the latest human myths and models?

3) Does human perspective evolve and change, or is it largely the same as it has always been?

4) Should all truth be questioned and re-reasoned, or are there understandings and dogmas that are true enough to be decent certainties?

5) Do all cultures share similar views, or are there some cultures that are incompatible with others?

Ethics: Bentham, Mill & Consequentialism

2012-02-07T20:01:00.000-08:00

The last class focused on ethical concepts that focus on the beginning or cause of an action rather than the end or consequence (with the possible exception of balance, which suggests a medium of the two). Today, we focus on consequentialism and its foremost school, Utilitarianism. Thus, I had you read the first two chapters of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism. In this work, Mill argues that we should always look at our actions and ask if the consequences are ethical (do good/make people happy and reduce harm/pain). He specifically mentions Kant as wrong about principle and mentions virtue ethics as well, claiming that these two conceptions ignore how we use principle and virtue for happiness and reduction of harm by taking each as a good in itself out of context.

Mill notes: if you call it Utilitarianism, people think it is dry and boring.
If you call it Principle of Happiness or Pleasure first, people think its decadent.
This is why people called Epicurus decadent.

Brief Tradition of Consequentialism (included in Mill’s own text)

Epicurus (340-270 BCE)

Greek philosopher who believed that happiness was the most important thing, and all virtues, purposes and ends are subordinate to it. From him we get the word ‘Epicurean’ as in ‘Gourmet’, one who appreciates the finer more pleasant tastes of things. As Mill notes, Epicurus was attacked as a glutton in his time, but he actually had a taste for thought, civilization, and what Mill calls the ‘higher virtues’, mental pleasures in giving to others rather than physical selfish pleasures of drinking every night. Mill argues that Epicurus took the long view just as he did, so his opponents are wrong to call happy principle people “swine”.

Jeremy Bentham (1750-1830 CE)

The first to come up with Utilitarianism, but Mill gave it the name.
Bentham believed in max happiness, while Mill complimented this with min pain.
Bentham also believed that simple and common pleasures are just as good as sophisticated, saying the common plays are just as good as fine opera.
Mill rejected this, believing that fine society was of a higher happiness than common culture, as mental pleasure is superior to physical, as selfless pleasures (giving to others) makes one happier than selfish pleasures (receiving from others).

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873 CE)

Born in London, Mill was influenced by Ancient Greek, French, and liberal thought.
His father wrote a history of India, and Mill was for a time involved with his father in the British East India company, the corporation that helped Britain maintain their hold over India. Mill’s family was friends with the Bentham family, from whom Mill took up his consequentialist, ‘happy principle’ thought. However, it was Mill who found the name ‘utilitarian’ in a Christian text talking about how evil it was to fall into it rather than believe in the principle as good, and he added the name and developed the thinking, becoming its famous spokesman.

Mill is a central thinker in Logic, Economics and Ethics.
His liberal social thought is his most famous. He argued for equal rights for all, the end to the subjugation of women and slavery.

Mill’s text: Utilitarianism

Mill’s harm principle as the principle to end principles, putting all focus on harmful consequences. This is not simply ease or expediency in limited personal vision, but the long view over time of what makes people happy and saves them from pain.

Notice: Mill completely agrees with Kant, we need a test for principles and an overall principle to serve as this text. For Kant, this test is ‘can it always be followed?’, while for Mill the test is ‘does following the principle make people happy as a consequence?’. Both come up with a supreme principle. Thus, for Kant, one should never lie because the principle is most important as beginning or all good action, while for Mill, one should never lie as long as this has good consequences because this is the most important as end of all good action.

Kant says: Always follow principle, and you will likely be happy.
Mill says: Always follow happiness (self and others), and you will likely be principled.

Both also come up with a pure ‘good in itself’: Kant’s is intention (the good-in-itself beginning of an act) and Mill’s is happiness (the good-in-itself end of an act). Both say that it is impossible to argue for this good-in-itself, but it simply shows itself in us.

We can see two sides to the Utilitarian Principle, maximizing positive and minimizing negative. Bentham says: Always act to maximize happiness. Mill agrees, but says the MOST important thing is to minimize the negative (at least, this is what scholars concur in reading his writings and comparing them to Bentham’s today). Thus, we see the whole principle is ‘max happy and min pain’, but one can lean either way on it. There are times when maximum happiness can cause much pain (majority over the minority, which Mill speaks about vs. Bentham), and there are times when minimum pain hurts maximum happiness (overprotective parenting, insurance issues, have to break some eggs etc).

Mill admits that there will be continuous problems whichever way we use the principle, but we are evolving in a positive direction slowly and we should stick to the Utilitarian view even when there are problems if we truly (and he thinks we do) desire good consequences basically as human beings.

Attacks on Utilitarianism:

Mill addresses many of these directly in the text.

Interesting Paradox/Problem for Utilitarianism: the Good of the Bad as Example
Mill notes this, as do other modern writers on Utilitarianism noting as Mill does that this is a common attack against the Utilitarian principle as ethical conception/system. COMPARE: PBS documentaries all the time on slavery and the US overcoming slavery as freedom and our view as Americans of the type of place South Africa is. COMPARE: Prosecuting Attorney arguing that someone is a habitual criminal so latest normal behavior is prime for relapse vs. Defense Attorney pointing at the same evidence as reform and pulling one’s life together as normal from bad upbringing and environment. Dennett uses three mile island as ex: this caused good nuclear standards to follow, so we could say as a utilitarian that the catastrophe was just as good as people simply coming up with the standards without the disaster. Consider that we love villains who go from good to bad and heroes who go from bad to good. We can very easily see bad as good and good as bad. The attack on Utilitarianism says that it is prone to confusing bad with good especially compared to systems of principles or rights that are given, not based on their consequences

Marx attacks Utilitarianism with a common argument today: guess who are the ones to tell you what is useful or makes us happy? Yes: the upper class, who use the lower class as labor. Obviously, it is the task master or overseer and not the worker who gets to say who is useful in their place and how happy the system is overall.

Mill in fact approves of war to advance civilization, and he approves of colonialism as improving the uncivilized. Marx and us could criticize him for this short sightedness.

HOWEVER, Mill was a champion against the enslavement of Black people and the second class status of women. He was an early champion of both, so this is mixed.
He writes, in 1850 on ‘The Negro Question’ words I love:

“It is curious, withal, that the earliest known civilization was, we have the strongest reason to believe, a negro civilization. The original Egyptians are inferred, from the evidence of their sculptures, to have been a negro race: it was from negroes, therefore, that the Greeks learnt their first lessons in civilization; and to the records and traditions of these negroes did the Greek Philosophers to the very end of their career resort (I do not say with much fruit) as a treasury of mysterious wisdom.”

Defense against anti-environment challenge:

Many could say that ‘use’ and ‘happy’ can easily lead to how we abuse the environment.

More relevant today, Mill loved deep forests and argued that wilderness was necessary in the long view of use and happiness. We will read on wilderness for environmental week. This poses us an interesting question: when utilitarianism asks us to take the long view, how long a view can we take? If we pollute the earth and ignore it for hundreds of years, our long view can still be too short.

Intro Philosophy: Ancient Indian Philosophy

2012-02-07T19:50:00.001-08:00

Hinduism & The Upanishads

‘Hindu’ is the Persian name for India (Persia and India are next door to each other and have traded for thousands of years). Our society borrows the term from the British, who get the term from the Persians. As we read in the Vedas, Hinduism brought together many traditions from many regions with many gods, but there are three levels that are equally interchangeable and separable. First, each can have a particular god that is the emphasis of one’s particular branch of the tradition. Second, the many gods are each one aspect of a single god, often the great father and creator, named by most traditions Brahma. Third, there is a philosophical monism that goes beyond god or not god, living or dead, conscious or unconscious, that is the One, called Brahman, different from the personified Brahma.

There are three paths of worship in Hinduism. First, there is devotional worship, known as Bhakti Yoga (‘Yoga’ means ‘discipline’, or practice). In Bhakti devotional worship, the devotee prays, sings hymns, lights incense, and performs rituals to gain favor with the gods and heavens. It is impossible not to notice that most of what we call ‘religion’ the world over is in fact forms of Bhakti practice, devotion to particular gods and ancestral spirits. The two most populous forms of Bhakti Hinduism are Shaivism, the worship of Shiva (the transformer and destroyer) and his incarnations such as Ganesh (the elephant headed god), and Vaishnavism, the worship of Vishnu (the savior or preserver) and his incarnations such as Krishna. Worship is often called ‘darshana’, or seeing/experiencing, and Hindus will say, I am going to the seeing, meaning I am going to see and be seen by the god. Another common form of Bhakti devotion is worship of a particular goddess such as Kali. Notice that, like a scientist, Bhakti practitioners also believe in learning by experience and seeing, but their subject matter is quite different.

Raja yoga, the second path, is worship by meditation and asceticism (living in isolation, standing in place for days, fasting chanting the names of gods for hours, sitting on spikes, and other means of hard activity) meant to gain a meditative state of insight. Raja means ‘force’ or ‘effort’, and India is famous for its forest sages practicing these techniques.

Jnana yoga (“zshna-na”), the third path and my personal favorite, is worship by acquiring knowledge, wisdom and understanding the order of things through study and philosophizing. This class itself could be seen as a form of Jnana yoga, designed to bring you closer to the core by studying the ways of the world. All three paths, or any mixture of the three, are understood to work towards the same goal: liberation from the bonds of attachment and desire, rising into enlightenment and release from the constraints of identity to join together with the whole.

There is an ultimate goal to this process. Initially, there is hope for a better next life. Many are familiar already with the Hindu idea of reincarnation. This is not a form of afterlife particular to India, but in fact there is evidence that many tribal cultures and early Egypt believed that one’s present life will be reincarnated in another life on earth based on one’s actions and intentions. This interconnection is called ‘Karma’, which simply means ‘action’ in Sanskrit. Interestingly, physical causation is ‘karma’, just as metaphysical causation (next life physics) is ‘karma’, same word and understanding of cause and effect applied to a different sphere of existence. If you punch someone in the head, it is karma that makes their head reel backward, and karma that also weighs down your chance for a favorable life after death in the Hindu tradition.

Beyond better lives, there is hope for release, for freedom from rounds of rebirth on earth. This can be thought of as dwelling in a heaven with one’s personal or family god, but also as a dwelling with the order of things without residing in any particular place. Bhakti yoga tends to favor the dwelling with a lord, while Raja and Jnana tends to favor the dwelling with the universe as a whole, however it is important to remember that some Hindus believe that both amount to the same exact thing (while others will insist that their school’s truth is ‘more true’, the same variation one finds in any religion and in our own culture). This release is also called Moksha and Samadhi, but in America we know this first and foremost by the same name as the famous grunge band, Nirvana.

While moksha is the ultimate goal, via the more immediate goal of positioning oneself favorably for moksha either in this life (dwelling in the forest or a monastery) or in a next life, there are three other goals that Indian philosophy points to as desirable making four in total. In addition to moksha/nirvana, there is law or morality, ‘dharma’ (the term Jains and Buddhists use to describe their traditions and rules), pleasure, ‘kama’ (as from the Kama Sutra), and material wellbeing, ‘artha’. Clearly, the overall idea is that pleasure and comfort (kama and artha) are not in themselves evil, but one should pursue liberation through discipline (moksha through dharma).

Ancient India saw a great deal of development in science and technology. They observed the natural world and put phenomena into families and categories as did the ancient Greeks and as we still do today. The Romans would trade Germanic and Celtic slaves to India in exchange for Indian wootz, the metal most prized for weapons in the ancient world. In mathematics the Indians were unsurpassed by ancient civilizations, developing the base ten system and the Indian-Arabic numerals we use today. They laid down the basics of symbolic equations, the concept and symbolization of zero, and invented the variable (originally a thick dot). All of this got picked up by the Muslims, who turned it into algebra, which then got picked up by the Europeans, who turned it into Calculus. Typically, we learn about Euclid and the Greeks doing geometry as the source of the Western mathematical tradition. Muslims were influenced by the Greeks and Euclid, but Euclid argued about lines drawn in sand and did not use equations. It was the Indians who invented the sorts of mathematical symbolism that the Muslims turned into step by step symbolic mathematics as we know it today and teach it up through high school.

The Upanishads (beginning in 800 BCE, most having been written by 600 BCE) were philosophical teachings about the soul/self (atman) and how to release the soul from desire and identity to merge with the great One and All (the goal of moksha or nirvana, discussed last time). The Upanishads frequently interpret the stories of the Vedas as metaphoric teachings, instructions for the truly wise on how to develop the mind/soul/self. The self (atman) was to be united with the supreme reality, oneness, and spirit of all, Brahman. ‘Upanishad’ means “sitting down near/beside”, (upa, ‘near’, ni, ‘down’, sad, ‘sit’) as these are the close teachings of the priest, philosopher or master who has taught the Vedas for a long time and knows their secret and hidden ‘inner’ meaning. The students who were talented and advanced would sit down beside the teacher after the normal lecture to get the advanced, inner teaching that the normal students were not ready to hear. Unfortunately, there are no authors to which the texts are ascribed, having been lost to history. Perhaps some of these teachings are as old as the Vedas, and were only written down after 800 BCE. There are over 200 Upanishad texts, though there are 10 central Upanishads.

One of the most famous sayings from the Upanishads is Tat Tvam Asi, “That is you”. No matter what “that” you are looking at, it is in fact your own self because all is one and there are no complete or permanent separations between any two things. This means there is no complete distinction between any ‘this’ or ‘that’, and thus no complete distinction between atman and Brahman, or between any of the gods and Brahman. This is similar to another passage of Zhuang Zi the Daoist, one of my favorite skeptical passages of philosophy, which says, “A sage too has a this and a that, but his that has a this, and his this has a that”. Notice the monism that unites all connecting not only the various Hindu gods together but all individuals in the singular One of reality.

Just like the unorthodox systems of Jainism and Buddhism would do later, the Upanishads point beyond particular duties to ritual, sacrifice, caste or class to the supreme goal of self-liberation. This had a great appeal to those who were not Brahmins, the priests who formed the top level of the caste system. While the Upanishads did not say to abandon the caste system, the teachings were applicable to all. As we will see, Mahavira who founded Jainism and the Buddha both had great appeal as they openly said that one did not need to be reborn as a priest to have a shot at nirvana. Rather, one could have it in this very life and not need to reposition oneself for a better life through karma. Both Mahavira and Buddha were warrior’s sons and so were second class themselves. We can see that, as the Upanishads caught on and became one of if not the most influential source in the further developments of Indian thought, people increasingly questioned the Vedas and the caste system even as they continued to retain them as many still do today.

In the Katha Upanishad, a dialog between the sage Naciketas and Yama, god of death, the good is praised above the pleasant. As the sourcebook points out, this is very similar to what Socrates argues in dialogues written by Plato. The highest mind is to be pursued, rather than the simple passing pleasures. Naciketas says to Death, after being taught: “Ephemeral things! That which is a mortal’s, O End-maker, even the vigor of all the powers, they wear away. Even a whole life is slight indeed. Yours are the vehicles! Yours is the dance and the song!”. This passage uses ‘vehicles’ as vessels or individual things that convey pleasure or anything else. The vehicle is a popular metaphor for teaching or school in Indian thought, and as we will see the various schools of Buddhism are known as vehicles.

Yama replies that those who teach that reality is some part rather than the whole are blind men led by a blind man. This is, in fact, the origin of the phrase, “blind leading the blind”. Yama says, “Him who is the bodiless among bodies, stable among the unstable, the great, all-pervading self, on recognizing him, the wise man sorrows not”. Yama uses a metaphor used by Plato through the mouth of Socrates, the self as charioteer, the body as a chariot, and the senses and passions as the horses. Yama tells of a complex stack of higher and truer selves: “Higher than the senses are the objects of sense. Higher than the objects of sense is the mind, and higher than the mind is the intellect (buddhi, also ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’, just as the Buddha is the ‘awakened one’). Higher than the intellect is the great self. Higher than the great is the un-manifest. Higher than the un-manifest is the great person. Higher than the person is nothing at all. That is the goal. That is the highest course.”

In a hilarious passage of the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, a student questions that master about how many gods there are repeatedly, and the master keeps changing his answer. At first, he says that the Vedic hymn to all the gods says there are 303 and 3003, which would be 3306 all together. Then he says there are 33, then 6, then 3 (likely Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma), then 2, then one and a half, and finally one, which is breath and Brahman.

In the Maitri Upanishad, we read, “In this cycle of existence I am like a frog in a waterless well…In thinking ‘This is I’, and ‘That is mine’, one binds oneself with oneself, as does a bird with a snare…Therefore, by knowledge (vidya), by austerity (tapas), and by meditation (cinta), Brahman is apprehended…For thus has it been said: He who is in the fire, and he who is here in the heart, and he who is yonder in the sun – he is one”. This is again very similar to things we will read in the Daoist Zhuang Zi.

Next class, we will study Jainism and Buddhism, two of the non-Hindu unorthodox schools of Indian thought.

Intro Philosophy Lecture 4: Jainism & Buddhism

Jainism, or “Jain Dharma” is still practiced today by four million Jains (not Jainists as some mistakenly say). There are currently 4 Million in India today, with many others in communities around the world including New York and Toronto. Jainism rose just before Buddhism, as Mahavira (650 BCE), the main teacher and founder of Jainism, lived just before the Buddha (550 BCE), though all of these dates are still in debate.

Jainism advocates two principles that are shared with Indian thought but credited to Jain innovation: anekantavada, the multiplicity and relativity of reality or “non-one-endedness” and syadvada, the hypothetical and imperfect nature of perspective and judgment that is always the fiber of human truth. According to these two principles, all human beliefs and judgments are temporary and partial views of each particular thing, including the self, and the cosmos, the greater whole. Jains, like Buddhists, believe that things may or may not be as they seem and may or may not be expressible as they are. Jains believe that there are seven points of view of each and every thing. Each thing, including the cosmos and the self:

somehow is in a way that is describable
somehow is not in a way that is describable
somehow simultaneously is and is not in a way that is describable
somehow is indescribable
somehow is in a way that is indescribable
somehow is not in a way that is indescribable
somehow is and is not in a way that is indescribable

While other schools, including Nyaya logician/debaters, claimed that Jains and Buddhists are at fault for contradicting themselves and seeing contradicting views in things, the Jains and Buddhists argue that one only falls into problematic contradiction if one makes one-sided claims. This is a classic duel between all/none logic and some/some-not logic, between the absolutist and the relativist. The absolutist says the relativist does not have certain truth and contradicts themselves because they are on all sides of the issue, and the relativist replies that the absolutist does not have the full truth and contradicts themselves because they are NOT on all sides of the issue.

Jain texts use the example of hot and cold. An absolutist would argue that a thing cannot be both hot and cold at the same time, but a relativist would argue that a thing is always somewhat relatively hot and somewhat relatively cold. To say a thing is simply hot ignores how cold it is, and to say it is simply cold is to ignore how hot it is. We could supply the example of a refrigerator, which cools on the inside by heating up in back and drawing the heat out of the inside. A refrigerator is simultaneously hot and cold, and it could not be cold in one part unless it is hot in another.

Jains also, much like the wheel of Lao Zi in chapter 11 of the founding Daoist text, the Dao De Jing, use the example of a pot being solid and empty, there and not there. In one part, it is, and in another part, it is not. They use another example of a multicolored cloth, which is and is not many colors all over. Notice that each thing one can say about anything is true in some ways, but false in others, a very critical way that things are and are not as they are described yet are never fully describable. Jains argue that one sees and argues for the side of things that one wants to see, that one wants to be true. This is yet another example of attachment and desire carving the One into many, shining light on some and plunging others into darkness and ignorance.

Jains note that, because human views and descriptions are always one-sided, it is perfectly alright to understand the whole yet lead people in one direction as opposed to another, just as ignorant arguers do, if one sees all of what one is doing. Jains and Buddhists would see Jain and Buddhist teachers and saints in this light, as always telling what cannot be fully told, as leading us towards what is in all directions to begin with. It is only a low and ignorant mind that thinks such leading is impossible because it is contradictory.

Jains use the image of a tree, with the absolute view (naya) as the trunk, what one joins after being fully liberated, and the particular view as the branches and twigs. Notice that the trunk is and is not the twigs, just as the absolute and all-encompassing view is each particular view as a sum of them all but is not each particular view in that it is everything opposed to each particular view as well.

Similarly, Jains argue (like Hegel, who considers seeing being, non-being and becoming simultaneously in things as the first leap of philosophy and associates it with the ancient Greek skeptic Heraclitus) that things simultaneously are and are not because they are being birthed/generated, stable/still, and decaying/transforming at the same time at all times that they are. Each of these views are false if they are considered independently true as opposed to their opposite, but in conjunction with their opposites they are the whole truth of each particular thing and of truth as a whole. Notice that the union of stability with transformation as a single whole view is entirely similar to the orthodox Hindu union of Vishnu, the preserver/savior, and Shiva, the destroyer/transformer, in Brahma, the personification of all.

Jains were also early proponents of the idea that the cosmos works in cycles: like the physical rising and setting of the sun, consciousness rises, then sets. People start to become awakened teachers and develop religion in the rising era, and people lose religion in the setting era. This is endless, like the cosmos. The cosmos becomes enlightened to its own self through us, and then loses consciousness of itself through us. The Hindus and Buddhists share a similar picture of the cosmos, and the Indian golden age of philosophy, which includes the birth and teaching period of Mahavira and the Buddha, is seen as the apex, the high noon, of this current cycle. Unfortunately, we currently live in an era of dimming religion and consciousness according to most Jain and Hindu teachers (the Hindus following the Jains in this picture).

Jain teachers and saints are known as Tirthankaras, “one who makes a ford” (cutting through water as order over chaos, as land becoming firmament in the chaotic waters). Mahavira (also Mahavir), the founder of Jainism, is understood by Jains to be the 24th Tirthankara. Like others of his time, Mahavira was a practitioner of austerities that are aimed at detachment from desire and multiplicity of the world: fasting, standing in jungles, going without food or luxuries for extended periods of time. Statues of Mahavira and other Tirthankaras show vines growing up their legs and bodies, as vines grow several feet in the jungle a day and so would grow up your body if you practice standing austerities for days at a time. Jains believe that these practices purify the self/soul/mind.

Here, we come to THE critical difference between Jainism and the other schools of Indian thought. In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin). Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down. For Jains, karma is always bondage, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL. Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated.

While there are kinds of karma and attachment that make ourselves and others happy which the Jains call good, they are hindrances to be overcome if final liberation is to be obtained. If you really, really like waffles, this is fine but to become one with all you must be as indifferent to waffles, neither loving nor hating waffles, as the cosmos. Jains believe that “good” karma, such as that which causes pleasure when helping others out of compassion, matures and falls off naturally along with the body. It is easier to get rid of “good” karma which only affects the body, but it is still to be left behind.

Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of attachment and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle. Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant. Like Buddhists, Jains believe that one should be disciplined and practice austerities and meditation not just for one’s own salvation, but for compassion and salvation for all living beings.

The best way to understand the dual practice of avoiding karma AND shredding karma is the Metaphor of the Leaky Boat: You ride in a boat across water to a distant shore (Nirvana). Notice that water represents chaos and desire, and the land represents the firm and the enlightened. The boat is leaky, and water is pouring in. You have to BOTH plug the leaks (preventative principles like vegetarianism that prevent bad karma from getting IN you) and bail out the water that has already inside the boat (shedding karma, practicing austerities like fasting or standing in postures to get the karma you already have in this life OUT of you). Jains believe that it is only by this two-pronged strategy that the individual can be fully liberated and join back together with the cosmos and thus gain eternal life rather than round after round of rebirth.

From the Tattvarthadhigama Sutra, a central Jain text:

“There is a stoppage of inflow of karmic matter into the soul. It is produced by preservation, carefulness, observances, meditation, conquest of sufferings, and good conduct. By austerities is caused the shedding of karmic matter…Liberation is the freedom from all karmic matter, owing to the non-existence of the cause of bondage and to the shedding of the karmas. After the soul is released, there remain perfect right-belief, perfect right-knowledge, perfect perception, and the state of having accomplished all.”

Buddhism

According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha, the “awakened one”, practiced austerities like Mahavira, but found that this way was not enough. Buddhism is famous for long periods of meditation, and this is quite like Jain austerities of standing in postures, but Buddhism suggests that it is through balance and not extremes that one will be liberated. The Buddha found Jain asceticism to be one sided and promoting of self hatred which is still attachment and duality.
According to the tradition and legend, Buddha’s father was the king of a kingdom in Northern India. When the Buddha was born, the king’s wise men told him that his son would be EITHER a great king OR a great holy man. The king did not want his son to be a holy man, but rather the next king, so to control his son he hid his son away in his palace and gave him all the luxuries in the world, hiding death and pain from him, surrounding him with dancing girls and servants and only healthy, happy, obedient people. At 29, the Buddha had become bored of this, and snuck out to see the city, taking along his trusted servant. In succession, the Buddha the Four Sights (an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a holy man). When he saw the first three, his servant each time told him that this was unfortunately inevitable for everyone, but when he got to the fourth, the holy man (likely a Jain or proto-Jain), his servant told him that the monk was working on the first three (age, sickness, and death).

The Buddha was immediately envious of something more wonderful than he had ever possessed in the palace, and so he escaped into the jungle where he found sages practicing austerities. The Buddha did these Jain (or proto-Jain, depending on the scholar) austere practices in the jungle for six years, but he found that this brought no great enlightenment and in fact brought him self-hatred and self-denial (notice here that this is where Buddhism breaks away from Jainism as a direct criticism of Jain practice, taking much of Jainism with it in the process but seeking a middle way between denial and indulgence, attached to neither). The Buddha left the jungle disappointed. He decided to sit beneath a large tree, the Bodhi Tree (which one can go see in India today, a tree supposed to have been grown from the original in the original spot), and he vowed not to rise until he found complete and total truth or he would give up his life. After 49 days, at the age of 35, he realized complete enlightenment, the goal of moksha and nirvana that the Hindus and Jains also revere. This is defined in the tradition as the total extinction of greed (raga), hate (dosa), and delusion (moha), obtainable in this life by any being by overcoming duality and desire.

Philosophical Ideas of Buddhism

The Doctrine of the Middle Way: In all things, as the mind splits things into opposites and prefers one while rejecting the other, one should always practice moderation between the extremes. As a criticism of Jainism, this means that one should balance pain and pleasure, being attached to neither, rather than chase pain and difficulty to liberate the self. The Buddha found Jain practice to be immoderate: too much de-emphasis of self is attachment to self hate, not detachment from particular things (as self-hate is particular and bound up with particular things just as much as self-love or pride is). One must love and hate the self, bringing the two together, to find detachment from many and complete identity in the One, the All.

Doctrine of Impermanence: The Buddha taught that all things are impermanent. Thus, everything is constantly evolving, never the same twice. Only the great All is eternal, the One to which we all belong, but as soon as you say this it becomes a conception, a particular being separated from other particular beings, and then is simply a temporary being in your mind.

Codependent Arising (Pratityasamutpada): Another major teaching of Buddhism is codependent arising of all phenomena. All things are themselves in so far as they are connected to every other thing. Opposites, such as heat and cold or self and other, do not anchor things in themselves or give things their true meaning, but rather all things exist dependent on all other things. Just like Jains, Buddhists believe that because of suffering there is attachment and bondage to particular things, to “this versus that”, such that we come to have one-sided views of ourselves, of particular things, and of the cosmos as a whole. Growing in wisdom and enlightenment is growing into identity with the whole, with all the sides that human minds can cling to out of despair, anger and fear. The Buddhists, like the Jains, believe that one does not have a permanent self, and this constant transformation is a central cause of the fear and clinging of the mind to something opposed to an opposite in order to seek stability. However, because the things and views are not themselves permanent, the mind must jump from one thing to another, seeking ideal stability in each thing and then leaping to the next with the same hope, endlessly without rest unless wisdom is developed and liberation achieved. The Buddhists use the metaphor of the monkey mind, of a monkey leaping from branch to branch in a frenzy.

How to Write a Philosophy Essay

2012-02-07T19:30:00.000-08:00

To write a focused paper that argues for a particular point of view, we must pick an issue and take a position on that issue. While we could invent an issue and position out of the blue, if we pick an issue already discussed it is easier to stay focused and relevant to the subject matter.

Let us say that a thinker or school of thought has taken a position on an issue, and we want to argue for or against this position. Let us assume that there are rival thinkers with opposite positions on the issue. Let us call the first position A, and the opposite position B. While A and B can agree on any unlimited number of points, they must disagree on at least one point. To begin an essay, we briefly state the two positions before we take a position ourselves.

Example 1: Kant argues that morality is anchored in good beginnings (intent, morals, duty) Mill argues that morality is anchored in good ends (happiness, utility, consequences). Both Kant and Mill believe one should use rules and act for the good of society, but Kant believes that one should never break rules while Mill believes rules only serve as tools to achieve good consequences.

Example 2: Mencius argues that human nature is essentially good, while Xunzi argues that human nature is essentially evil. Both agree that society is necessary for self improvement, but Mencius argues that society is rooted in human nature while Hsun Zi argues that society is corrective to human nature.

Example 3: Hindus argue that the self/mind/soul is eternal, while Buddhists argue that the self/mind/soul is temporary/mortal. Both agree that karma determines rebirth, but Hindus argue that we always retain our particular individual self while Buddhists argue that extinction of the self and identity with the whole can be achieved through effort and practice.

Now that we have stated the issue and the two opposite positions, we can take a position or stand on it ourselves. There are five possible positions to take between positions A and B.

The first position is ‘All A, no B’. This is an ‘all and none’,‘absolute’, ‘categorical’, or ‘black and white’ position.

The second position is ‘Mostly A, but also some B’. This is a ‘some and some not’, relative, ‘grey’ or ‘grey area’ position, yet it still gives dominance to one side versus the other.

The third position is ‘Some A and also some B’. This is a ‘some/some not’, relative and ‘grey area’ position that gives dominance to neither side.

The fourth position is ‘Mostly B and also some A’. It is the second position, but favors B.

The fifth position is ‘All B, no A’. This is the first position, but entirely for B.

If we examine the issue and find ourselves agreeing with position A, we need only consider the first three. We must choose one of the three based on how much we agree or disagree with the opposite position B. In a debate with an answering opponent, we must also judge based on how effectively and in what position our opponent will argue for B.

If we believe that there is no argument or evidence for B, we can argue ‘All A, no B’. The advantage is that this is the most forceful and least conceding position to take. The disadvantage is that any effective argument for any B, even some little B, makes this position seem ignorant and overly generalizing.

Ex: “Mill is entirely correct. Rules, morals and laws exist simply for the good of humanity.”

If we believe that there is some argument or evidence for B, but there is more argument and evidence for A, we can argue ‘Mostly A but also some B’. The advantage is that any argument for B can be incorporated into our argument and the position still maintained. The disadvantage is that we must concede from the start to ‘some B’, which gives the opponent a foothold. We are still putting our money on A, but we are hedging our bets.

Ex: “I side with Mill, but Kant also has a point. While rules, morals and laws exist for the good of humanity, it is also true that they must be upheld in many situations where there will be bad consequences.”

If we believe that there is equal argument and evidence for A and B, we can argue ‘Some A and also some B’. The advantage of being on both sides is that any argument or evidence can be incorporated into our argument. The disadvantage is that this does not forcefully argue for any particular position, and our opponent can argue we are not taking a stand on the issue. The counter to this is we are taking all sides and viewing the issue as a whole.

Ex: “Kant and Mill are two sides of the same coin. We should equally uphold rules, morals and laws while also questioning their effectiveness when we repeatedly fail to achieve good ends.”

To write an effective essay, pick an issue from the material and argue for one side ‘all and none’ (position 1), for one side ‘some and some not’ (position 2) or both sides equally (position 3).

Remember to use examples from the lectures, reading and your life experience, but also remember to focus on developing your own thought and argument rather than taking time and space repeating what has already been argued and written by others.

The goal of the paper is not to simply take a position, but to take a position effectively. If you take positions 1 or 2, demonstrate why your are taking position A over B. If you take position 3, argue why neither A nor B is sufficient without its complimentary opposite.

Social & Political Philosophy: Plato & Aristotle on Caste & Class

2012-02-07T16:30:00.000-08:00

Plato (427-347 BCE) & The Republic

Plato was long assumed to be a student of Socrates simply because Plato writes as much in many of his dialogues. As Socrates is about to die, Plato has Socrates ask where the young Plato is, to which another student replies that Plato was sick and thus could not be there at the time. Scholars now are critical of this, and think that Plato had a habit of writing himself and his family into Socrates’ circle in his dialogues. Because they are our best sources on Socrates, it is difficult to tell whether or not Plato’s older cousin Critias or Plato himself were actual students of Socrates or whether they were simply influenced by this figure who became quite famous following his trial and death.

Plato’s actual name was Aristocles, but according to the story his wrestling instructor named him Platon or “Broad” because he had a wide figure. This may be merely a story, because Plato was known to have a wide “breadth” of knowledge covering all subjects of ancient thought. Plato’s father died when he was young, and his step-father became the Athenian ambassador to the Persian royal court (remember that Persia was a great source of ancient world cosmology at the time).

Long after his attempts to become an established playwright, after his dialogues about Socrates had gathered some fame, Plato founded his Academy in 385 BCE, an open area near a tree grove where he, his students and other lecturers would teach and debate matters of philosophy and cosmology. Academy in fact means “porch”, an open area in front of a building, a fact it took scholars long to understand for they believed that the Academy must have been a building itself. Scholars made a similar error looking for the famed Library of Alexandria (an Egyptian center of ancient world knowledge), when in fact the Library was a shelf that ran along a hall that connected two buildings.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates debates with others on justice and the Good. Socrates debunks several common views, then constructs an ideal model of the city. The well ordered city is compared to the well ordered soul (3 layers in their places). Thus, the Good is proper order of the elements (perfectly in accord with ancient cosmology). The Timaeus, which is supposed to be the discussion the day after the Republic, has a student of Socrates named Timaeus lecture on the cosmos, showing Plato’s particular views on cosmology. Just as the individual is a microcosm to the city, the city is a microcosm to the cosmos, and again the elements must be separated and put in their places. The cosmos is ordered in its unfolding, producing the ideal order of the soul and the city. One should order the self and order the city the way the cosmos are ordered. Both are supposed to have been written about 360 BCE.

As the Republic opens, Socrates talks to several “interlocutors” and argues against their concepts of justice at a social gathering (read: wine party). Polemarchus argues that justice is paying debts, helping friends and harming enemies. Socrates argues that in some situations, helping friends and harming enemies are wrong. Thrasymachus argues that justice is ‘the good of the stronger’. Glaucon similarly argues that without threat of punishment, no one would do good. Socrates argues that the strong will corrupt themselves if they only act for their own interests and not for the good of the whole. Remember the politics of the time- Many tyrants came and fell, one by one.

Socrates is challenged to give a positive account of justice, not just defeat opponents. Socrates argues that first they must construct the ideal or just city, and this will show how the ideal or just individual should be. Essentially, the just city is a caste system, with a three-fold division. This division corresponds to the physical human being and the cosmic being.

Head is fire/reason/rulers,
Heart/chest is air/spirit/police,
Hands/Stomach is earth/desire/workers.

The individual, city and cosmos form a continuum, a set of Russian dolls. Notice that authority and the good come from above, evil to be ordered from below.

Socrates argues (in reading) that each person is best suited to one thing, and should be assigned this one job. He argues that we will lie to the people and tell them a Phoenician story, which is that the classes are based on metals. The police and philosophers are made of silver and gold, so they are suited to be put above the others.(Why lie? Because the common will not understand philosophy, Plato’s system…this corresponds to the cave, where most will never leave, and need puppets to see anything).

All is sacrificed for the common good: no private property or partners or children, for any of the three classes. Socrates argues that the ruler who grabs for themselves will not be happy, filled with “horrid pains and pangs”, and will physically and mentally fall apart. This tyrant will never “taste true freedom or friendship”. Because this is not the order of the cosmos, it will not stick and will fall apart.

Socrates argues (and the interlocutors naively agree as simple yes men) that if they separate out the police and educate them as best as can be, and then take the philosophers out of the police and educate them as best as can be, no injustice will be possible. There is the simple belief that the order itself will generate justice throughout the whole. The police and philosophers will thus never be greedy or unjust to the people below. Plato elsewhere argues that this is how the Egyptians in Thebes did it: elevating priests as a class- he also says to imitate Sparta as well separating out the warriors.

Plato also suggests banning all art (music, poetry and theatre) that is counterproductive, which pretty much means everything that isn’t impressing the highest good and order. The youth are to be taught that they must improve themselves for the good of the state, and that the gods never to injustice or desire.

The Allegory/Analogy/Story of the Cave describes the masses and the assent of the philosopher/king beyond opinion of the earthly realm to knowledge of the heavenly and eternal realm, showing why the philosopher alone should have authority. Everyone is chained in a cave, watching shadows of puppets/models carried before a fire at the mouth of the cave. The people think that the shadows are reality, the real things. The one who escapes first sees that the shadows are shadows of puppets, and sees the fire that casts the shadows. Coming out of the cave and past the small fire, the seeker is at first blinded by the sunlight. The seeker first sees real things outside of the cave, and realizes that the puppet/models were just copies of the real things. Then the seeker can get adjusted and see that the sun is the cause of all these things, and that the world of the cave is a poor copy of the world outside the cave. This is the realization of the forms and then the all/light/reason/consciousness that produces the forms which are copied in the cave below. This is opinion to belief (cave) to knowledge to reason (outside). Notice that the city is a device for creating philosophers who comprehend the true forms of things for the benefit of all below, and that the body is similarly a device for creating thought in the head for the benefit of the body below.

As a final thought, note that Plato’s republic is nothing like what we consider a republic to be today. People rise based on intelligence and merit, not by voting. Plato was quite opposed to having the people aka “the mob” elect leaders based on popularity. Like Confucius, Plato believed that a system of dictatorship downwards based on merit and achievement was best.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) & The Politics

Plato’s student and the tutor of Alexander the Great and Ptolemy, Aristotle is one of the most famous and influential of Greek philosophers. He was primarily interested in biology and speciation, but his works on the soul (mind, self), Logic, Ethics and politics became more important than his works on the animal kingdom. He was a central influence on the origins of Christianity, Islamic thought and European thought in the middle ages. While he is sometimes called the first scientist and the first logician, his views on these subjects expanded ancient world cosmology and were not the birth of these subjects. Aristotle has been claimed by the West as a founder, but the Islamic world also considers him one of their own and he is depicted in different ways depending on who does the illustrating (see the beautiful Islamic image in the Wikipedia article that portrays him as a very dark skinned holy sage for an interesting counter to Renaissance paintings).

Aristotle’s conception of virtue and human purpose is entirely in line with ancient world cosmology. He believes that everything has a single purpose for which it is intended. It is as if the cosmos, Being itself, is a big mind that creates things for particular uses, and individual beings thrive if they are serving their purposes (ergon in the Greek, or “work”, “job”). We are reasonable to the degree that we see the purposes of things, serve our own natural purpose and use things in accord with their natural purposes. This is known as the teleological view, as the study of purpose is called teleology. Notice that teleology is very big with more traditional people today (including evangelical Christians) but modern Philosophy and Science have broken from this view and find it quite antiquated.

For Aristotle, having oneself in the proper stack and order is being in accord with one’s nature, and this means putting theory and soul/intellect on top and putting each lower element of our minds and bodies in the service of the highest part of the mind, the intellect, which corresponds to the highest good of the cosmos itself. Just as the intellect should be pursued because it is the best and highest part, the good itself should be pursued simply in itself and for no other purpose. Aristotle does believe that the human individual will naturally flourish and be happy if they are stacked up right and in accord with the human purpose of intellectual activity, but this is secondary and the byproduct of serving ones purpose.

Similarly, in matters of politics, Aristotle believes that the city is not primarily a living arrangement but rather for producing the elite and the virtuous. Thus, the city is not for making people happy but having each individual do their natural job. Just like his teacher Plato argues in his Republic, Aristotle argues that each person must have one thing they do best and it is therefore best for them to do that thing and that one thing only. Unfortunately, both Plato and Aristotle argued that slaves and peasants are meant to serve the aristocracy and women are clearly meant to serve men (Mill will strongly criticize these views, one of the first and few outspoken critics of the subjugation of slaves and women).

Aristotle argues that the ruler/ruled pairing is natural to society and best for preservation. He identifies the ruler with the head and male, and the ruled with the body and female. He says that the subjugation of the woman and slave is in everyone’s best and natural interests. Because a thing is best if it serves one purpose, its natural purpose, there are some who naturally should rule and others who naturally should be ruled. The man rules the wife and children, and the king rules the country. When he says that non-Greeks are natural slaves, keep in mind he had the future Europeans to the North and West in mind far more than the Persians and Egyptians, who he openly admired. He also says that we imagine the gods to have a king and live in similar ways to human beings. Note that he is not arguing that the gods are imaginary (Aristotle was a polytheist) but he is critical, as were many of the great Greek philosophers) of the gods having human form or human passions. Later in this section he says that gods are by nature entirely self-sufficient as they are immortal and do not need to eat.

He says that several people (in ruler/ruled pairings) make up the village, and several villages make up the state. This allows people to do far more than survive. It allows people to live the good life and maximize the following of their natural purposes. They can be self-sufficient as a whole. He famously says, “man is by nature a political animal”. This does not mean that people collect into villages and cities to be happy, but rather that they collect because it is natural and best for them to do so to be what they are. Happiness is not the purpose of human life for Aristotle. Rather, truth (figuring out the way things are) is the purpose of human life and the city as a whole.

Aristotle believes that humans alone have speech and therefore are the only animal that can know truth and justice. Elsewhere he argues that this is because humans (more specifically, the males of the superior peoples) have the highest level of mind/soul and other animals (including women and slaves) do not possess this potential/faculty. The human alone can see that the whole is more than the part, and so the city matters more than the village, the village matters more than the family, and the family matters more than the individual.

In book 2, Aristotle says we must examine the constitutions of many sorts of states to see which one is the most just. Note that when Aristotle says “constitution” he is not referring to a document but to the structure or form of the state. The name of the American document follows this language, but we think of a document today when we hear the word, unlike Aristotle who did not live in a time when societies were based on rule by document. British Conservatives like Burke argued that America would fail if it did not have a king because a state could not be ruled by a piece of paper.

Aristotle criticizes his teacher Plato for arguing that property and family should be held in common. As the translator correctly points out, Plato only suggests this for the guardians and philosophers, not necessarily for the common people (though he does not proscribe it for them either). He argues that people should not share property or family in common. Very similar to the Confucians such as Mencius arguing against the Moists and universal love, Aristotle argues that if we shared everything and everyone in common people would not care about anything in particular and this would lead to the ruin of the state, and that we see people naturally caring about their own family and possessions than they do about things shared in common. This is odd, because he is also arguing that the state is superior to the village etc. precisely because it is the whole and the common.

For property, Aristotle believes that generosity and sharing should be voluntary and not forced. This means that Plato is wrong to suggest the guardians share everything by law. He argues that the present way of practice, holding property and family privately, is natural and beneficial compared to Plato’s radical and revolutionary suggestions in the republic. Note that Plato is very similar to communism in this regard as we will see with the Communist Manifesto, and Aristotle’s objections are very similar to objections to Communism today. Aristotle argues that there must be a balance of plurality and unity such that unity does not eradicate plurality.

Ethics: Aristotle & Virtue, Kant & Morality

2012-02-01T16:31:00.000-08:00

Ancient World Cosmology

Before getting into Aristotle and his understanding of the virtuous person, it is important to understand the world view of the ancient world. Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.

The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.

One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

Plato’s student and the tutor of Alexander the Great and Ptolemy, Aristotle is one of the most famous and influential of Greek philosophers. He was primarily interested in biology and speciation, but his works on the soul (mind, self), Logic, Ethics and politics became more important than his works on the animal kingdom. He was a central influence on the origins of Christianity, Islamic thought and European thought in the middle ages. While he is sometimes called the first scientist and the first logician, his views on these subjects expanded ancient world cosmology and were not the birth of these subjects. Aristotle has been claimed by the West as a founder, but the Islamic world also considers him one of their own and he is depicted in different ways depending on who does the illustrating (see the beautiful Islamic image in the Wikipedia article that portrays him as a very dark skinned holy sage for an interesting counter to Renaissance paintings).

Aristotle’s conception of virtue and human purpose is entirely in line with ancient world cosmology. He believes that everything has a single purpose for which it is intended. It is as if the cosmos, Being itself, is a big mind that creates things for particular uses, and individual beings thrive if they are serving their purposes (ergon in the Greek, or “work”, “job”). We are reasonable to the degree that we see the purposes of things, serve our own natural purpose and use things in accord with their natural purposes. This is known as the teleological view, as the study of purpose is called teleology. Notice that teleology is very big with more traditional people today (including evangelical Christians) but modern Philosophy and Science have broken from this view and find it quite antiquated.

For Aristotle, having oneself in the proper stack and order is being in accord with one’s nature, and this means putting theory and soul/intellect on top and putting each lower element of our minds and bodies in the service of the highest part of the mind, the intellect, which corresponds to the highest good of the cosmos itself. Just as the intellect should be pursued because it is the best and highest part, the good itself should be pursued simply in itself and for no other purpose. This is similar to Kant and Moral theory, but absolutely at odds with Mill and consequentialism which believe that good is the end of things but would not say that intellect should be pursued in itself without regards to the consequences and practical ends. Aristotle does believe that the human individual will naturally flourish and be happy if they are stacked up right and in accord with the human purpose of intellectual activity, but this is secondary and the byproduct of serving ones purpose.

Similarly, in matters of politics, Aristotle believes that the city is not primarily a living arrangement but rather for producing the elite and the virtuous. Thus, the city is not for making people happy but having each individual do their natural job. Just like his teacher Plato argues in his Republic, Aristotle argues that each person must have one thing they do best and it is therefore best for them to do that thing and that one thing only. Unfortunately, both Plato and Aristotle argued that slaves and peasants are meant to serve the aristocracy and women are clearly meant to serve men (Mill will strongly criticize these views, one of the first and few outspoken critics of the subjugation of slaves and women).

Consider the example of lying. The moralist would say that lying is wrong in and of itself, like Kant argues that lying goes against our reason by categorical necessity. The consequentialist would say that lying has bad consequences and results in pain and unhappiness. The virtue theorist, however, would argue that the purpose of the mind and human being is truth in and of itself and so lying is not in accord with righteous and propper human nature.

Modern Virtue Theory

While Aristotle’s virtue ethics and teleological theory were popular in the middle ages in Europe, there was a decline during the 1700s and 1800s as science rose to prominence and questioned teleology. Kant’s laws and Mill’s consequences became the dueling positions of ethics. Recently, however, there has been a revival of virtue theory that rose along with increasing individualism and criticism of positivistic conceptions of science. If we become critical of the idea that there are simple laws that can be known, it opens a space for a return to the idea of the virtuous person beyond airtight moral laws or the complete calculation of consequences.

However, if we do not believe that things have simple and singular purposes just as we have grown critical of laws and calculation, virtue ethics has a problem: what virtues should the virtuous person have? Often these virtues are mental: intellect, wisdom, reason, and understanding. This has been neglectful of the physical body (the home of the physical brain, of course). Another issue that has come to light is the interpersonal aspect of virtue. Virtue has typically been described as personal, but the individual is naturally social (curiously Aristotle argues this when justifying his political views of the city and its proper organization). Confucius, one of the great moral geniuses of the world, has a very interpersonal view of ethics and thus we will consider his views next under the concept of balance (such as the balance of self and other).

As a final note, consider Jain (the ancient Indian forerunner of Buddhism) anti-merit theory:

In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin). Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down. For Jains, karma is ALWAYS NEGATIVE, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL. Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated. Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of karma and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle. Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant. Thus, any accumulation of virtue or merit is distinguishing and distancing oneself from the whole. Sharing much with ancient cosmology and Aristotle, Jains would argue that the purpose of the individual is to join the whole without distinction and therefore we should work to LOSE merit and karma, not gain it.

Kant, Principles & Morals

Kant (1724-1804) was the European philosopher who argued for always following morals and laws universally. His position is opposed by Mill, who believed that morals are only in the service of getting good consequences. This is one of the biggest oppositions of perspectives in ethics. Should we create morals and laws and always stick to them, or should we do whatever results in the best consequences?

As Europe rose in the 1600s and 1700s, science had begun discovering many new truths about the world. This created an opposition between rationalists who believed that the world has absolute laws that we can know certainly by reason and empiricists who believed that we can only assume what we know and that the rules our reason finds could be wrong. One of the most famous empiricists was Hume, who argued that one can only assume that one billiard ball causes the other billiard ball to move.

Kant was "awoken from his dogmatic slumbers" by Hume. Kant wanted to balance empiricism with rationalism, but he comes down on the rationalist side. In all knowledge, including ethics, Kant believed we must use our reason to figure out the universal laws of our rational and ordered universe. Notice that Kant, as a rationalist, trusts that the world and the mind are reasonable and that there are universal laws out there for us to grasp.

The central example we will consider is the moral "Do Not Lie". Kant believed that one should never lie, and our reason can show us this with certainty. He argued that one is seeking unconditional and universal laws in ethics (as well as every area of human knowledge), which Kant also calls categorical imperatives, and so one should only act in a way that one could expect everyone to always act everywhere at any time. If everyone lied all the time, then society would collapse. Therefore, Kant argued, it is one's duty to not lie and hold to this moral and law.

Consider the "guy with the butcher knife" thought experiment. Let us say you are at home, and the doorbell rings. You answer it, and your friend runs in looking afraid. A minute later the doorbell rings again, you answer it, and a scary guy with a butcher knife asks you where your friend is. Kant would allow one to shut the door and say nothing, but Kant would argue that it is wrong to lie to the scary guy and say you don't know or that your friend took off down the street the other way. Even though we can assume that if you lie it would improve your friend's chances of living, Kant would argue that this would be wrong. We can contrast this with the position of Mill and utilitarianism, which would argue that in some circumstances the lie is the lesser of two evils and one should behave in accord with the ends of ones actions rather than stick rigidly to morals and laws.

An interesting issue here is that rationalists and positivists like Kant believe that one should anchor ethics in good beginnings while empiricists and skeptics believe one should anchor ethics in good ends. Kant believes that one must start with good intentions and principles no matter the consequences, while Mill believes that one should aim at the best consequences no matter the principles or intentions one has. As usual, both sides agree that one should have good intentions, principles and consequences, but they come down on opposite sides when arguing for what is really the essence or importance of the matter.

We will come to Mill's position in the coming weeks. Another contrary position to both Kant and Mill is Nietzsche, who we will also hear from soon. Nietzsche does not trust human reason, so he trusts neither Kant nor Mill. Nietzsche argues that people who believe they know the true morals and people who say they know what led to the best consequences for everyone are capable of deceiving themselves and thinking they know what is best for everyone.

Intro Philosophy: City States & Egyptian Wisdom

2012-02-01T16:29:00.000-08:00

Sumer & the First City States

Last time we considered the shaman as the original keeper of knowledge and seeker of wisdom. As human societies began to leave nomadic life and settle down by building the first city states, they acquired systems of writing that allowed them to communicate knowledge beyond the limits of oral traditions. The earliest scholars in Sumer and Babylon of the Tigris Euphrates valley began collecting knowledge of the world and the histories of its peoples. The early city states were gathering sites for many tribes and peoples, so city life was multicultural from the beginning.

While the shaman of a tribe could know the great deal of a tribe’s oral tradition, in the early city states knowledge grew to the point that specialists were required. Often, centers of knowledge were temples and the texts and study maintained by priests and priestesses ordained in the traditions. Cosmology, remember, was religion, physics, medicine and psychology together, even as it began to specialize. Today, we sit at the result of this process that began almost six thousand years ago.

As we consider the origins of civilization and leave nomadic tribes behind, it is important to remember that the last two powerful civilizations, the Muslims and then Europeans, were themselves quite primitive and nomadic just before gaining power as well as the knowledge and technology of previous civilizations. While European history is often traced to the ancient Greeks, the Germanic and Celtic Europeans (like my ancestors, my father’s side German and my mother’s side Celtic British Isles mixture), were considered barbarians by the ancient Greeks and Romans. They were not thought capable of rational thought and were traded as slaves to Babylon, Egypt, Persia and India for commodities that were the highest valuables of the ancient world. The Romans traded slaves, including blond women, for Indian steel, known as wootz, which was the toughest metal of the ancient world and good for swords and spears.

Later, after the Renaissance as Europeans retold the story of history with the Catholic tradition at the center, the Greeks and Romans became the origin of civilization for the role they played in the texts and philosophy of the Bible’s New Testament. While Renaissance philosophers in Italy still included the Persians and Indians in their timeline of history, the Catholics, and then Protestants, and now modern “Western” scholarship has progressively forgotten even the Romans as they focus on singular events in ancient Greece and then flash forward to Europe in the 1500s and 1600s, just as the tide of trade, gold and silver began to turn along the silk road from most going Eastward to most going Westward. It was only in the early 1700s that Europe had power and wealth beyond what previous civilizations had achieved. The roots of European civilization are in fact bound up with the rise of the Germanic and Celtic peoples, as well as the Arabs, nomadic traders across the Arabian peninsula (modern day Saudi Arabia occupies most of this land today) who ran camel caravans across the desert of goods between African civilizations such as Egypt and Nubia and Middle Eastern civilizations such as Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Persia and India.

An excellent book for appreciating the earliest city state civilizations is History Begins at Sumer by Kramer. Note that the title basically says, “Hey, remember that Sumer happened”. Sumer was not necessarily the first city state (a walled city that ruled the land surrounding it as a single city empire) but because writing was first developed there it is the first civilization on the written record. Sumer was a city state at the mouth of the Tigris Euphrates which was then taken over and incorporated into Babylon, which then was taken over by Assyria, which was then taken over by Persia. At each stage, a city upriver on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers took over a city downriver that had become prosperous through trade with various peoples across the land and sea.

These were progressively multicultural societies in which citizenship did not belong exclusively to one ethnicity. This allowed for diverse marketplaces where goods, cultures and ideas could be exchanged. Cities were centers of trade, such that not only was the city a site for many groups to converge and form a new culture but this culture also traded with other convergent cultures. Many are surprised to learn that ancient Sumer and Egypt traded with India hundreds of years before the Greeks and Israel arose, but archeologists have found stone Buddhas in Alexandria Egypt as early as 300 BCE, likely owned by small communities of Indian merchants living in Egypt. From the earliest times, culture, trade and thought have been international.

Consider the Assyrians. “Assyrian” did not name one ethnicity but rather a citizen of Assyria. Many people of different ethnicities called themselves Assyrians just as many people call themselves Americans. Jesus spoke Aramaic because it was one of the dominant languages of Assyria and the lands they had conquered. Assyria invented all of the siege weapons that were used in feudal Europe (including the battering ram and the siege tower), but the Assyrians conquered others mostly by trade and diplomacy. Princes would be sent to be educated in Assyria, the center of knowledge in its day, and then the Assyrians would make contracts with the prince’s people to put them on the throne to maintain political control. Just like today the primary method of conquest is economic and military solutions are called for only when the economic methods have failed.

In modern times, John Perkin’s famous book Confessions of an Economic Hitman (he came to speak at BCC a few years ago) gives an excellent account of the same strategy of dominance through economics in modern times as it is used by America today. Perkins says that he was a businessman who traveled the world helping other countries get into debt with America such that American corporations could come in and take over. If this fails, Perkins says that the second level is the “CIA Jackals” (his words, not mine) who make a move here and there to smooth things over for the business interests if a politician or people’s movement threatens this. If they fail, Perkins says the third level is “Here come the marines”, and that Iraq is a result of a failure of the first and second stage of this process. The poverty of the third world is, in part, due to this and similar economic strategies by other wealthy countries.
Sumer had some of the first schools, textbooks (in science and the humanities), medical texts, tax reduction, wisdom proverbs, and laments. One excellent proverb is, “You go and carry off the enemy’s land, the enemy comes and carries off your land”. My favorite Sumerian lament is recorded about 3000 BCE, in which an elderly Sumerian complains that in his time, unlike in the glorified past, politicians are corrupt, teenagers are running around and breaking tradition and having sex, and concludes that the world will certainly end soon at the hands of the gods. The prophet laments of the Bible’s Old Testament (the Jewish Torah) are based on this and other laments from the Tigris-Euphrates civilizations.

Often it is stated that the ancient Greeks invented politics and specifically Athenian democracy, but in Sumer we find the first democratic bicameral congress. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first recorded myths in human history, we read that Gilgamesh wants to go to war so he appeals to the elders of the senate. The elders do not want war because they have fragile investments in the situation, so Gilgamesh appeals to the larger and lower house and they enthusiastically accept his proposal, probably because as new money they are seeking new opportunities, unlike the senate who have already secured their investments. Gilgamesh, the king, must seek approval from the community as a whole to go to war with the necessary support and needs the house to override the smaller but higher senate.

As human beings progressed and traded devices and thinking between groups, they gathered into larger groups and settled into cities. The great ancient empires of Egypt and Persia were made of several of these earlier city state empires gathered into larger empires with many powerful cities. Consider that the United States is composed of many states, many of which have only one massive central city. We can see that as many tribes joined together to create city states the number of experts and types of experts multiplied and specialized. The shamans of the tribe became many types of priests and scribes in many temples. We can see that this pattern continued up through the present time. Some priests would specialize in types of math used to chart the stars, others would specialize in healing people and animals. The many hats (or masks, rather) of the shaman became the many types of priests and scribes who recorded knowledge and made new discoveries.

Egyptian Wisdom

Before considering passages of the Egyptian wisdom texts, I want to address two common misconceptions about the Egyptians.

First, the Egyptians are rarely portrayed as an African people but rather museums and text books portray them as a semi-European/Asian people who are quite light in skin color. When we consider that the Egyptians painted all of their statues and carvings (as did the Greeks), and they always painted men as dark red and women as yellow, as well as having black braided hair (Herodotus the Greek historian describes the “wooly” hair of the Egyptians) it seems that the Egyptians were an African people and we are only slowly growing to recognize this. It is a big debate between Eurocentric and Afrocentric scholars today, but the debate is held largely outside of official academia and universities as Afrocentric scholars are perceived as biased, un-academic and unprofessional in their opinions.

Two good books from the Afrocentric side are Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. While these works are well up to academic standards, because some Afrocentric work was done outside academic institutions in unjustifiable ways (one scholar claimed that the ancient Egyptians had batteries and hang gliders), this was used to tarnish all Afrocentric scholarship as dangerously unprofessional. Thus, the universities and academics retain a Eurocentric bias while calling it objectivity in contrast to the Afrocentric bias. I have read one work that called for “Acentrism”, recognizing that the origins of civilization do not come from a single geographic location but rather from a network of the earliest settlements. Hopefully, this perspective can move us beyond the narrow constraints of both Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, though in my opinion it is Eurocentrism that is quite established and this goes unrecognized.

Second, another common misconception of the Egyptians is that they were a slave-driving, brutal people who were all about authority. This is then contrasted with the Greeks, who are considered to be wise and questioning and the birth of civilized politics. In fact, the Egyptians treated foreigners, slaves and women considerably better than the Greeks, and the pyramids were built not by slaves but by conscripted labor. Recently tombs for workers have been discovered, confirming what Egyptologists have thought for several decades. This misconception comes largely from the Bible and movies like the Ten Commandments.

The Egyptians had many types of scribes and genres of texts, including fictional comedies and tragedies, lists of minerals and plants, essays on medicine, ethics and politics, and important to this class, wisdom literature. The Egyptian wisdom proverbs we read come from this last class of Egyptian texts. As many tribes converged to live in city states, people began to see more of people than they had before. Suddenly, obvious truths became questionable. Gathering wealth and power looks good at first, but if one has seen many grab for power over the years, one gets wiser. Rather than never questioning authority, the Egyptians had more variety of authorities and questioning of authority than most cultures before them. They did obey the Pharaoh most of the time, but there were rebellions and civil wars as well. We can see in the wisdom proverbs the questioning of authority, nobility, knowledge, teachers, prediction, wealth, luxury, punishment, and other fundamental aspects of civilization. The Egyptians were not just great builders and rulers, but also wisdom seekers and questioners.

One concept that appears in the texts is the “heart guided individual”. The heart was thought to be the physical and mental center of the human individual. As Egyptian society developed, increasingly being “guided by the king” was replaced with being “guided by the heart”. The heart is the essence of the human and the intention within the action. Repeatedly in the text, individuals are called to listen to their heart rather than build luxury and maintain authority. These are issues that we all struggle with to this day, and so we can learn much about early human experience by reading these proverbs.

Let us turn now to the proverbs themselves, considering the wisdom of specific passages.

Let not your heart be puffed up because of what you know, nor boast that you are a wise man.
Consult with the ignorant as well as with the wise, for there is no limit to where wisdom can be found. Good speech lies hidden like a precious stone, yet wisdom is found among maidens at the grindstone.

This passage of Phah-hotep (Vizier to the Pharaoh, 2500 BCE) is similar to some we will read in Confucius of ancient China and it is also similar to Socrates of ancient Greece. We should learn from everyone, and remember that no one is perfect and no one knows everything when we are tempted to put ourselves above others. This questions not only human knowledge, but social inequality. It does not call for getting rid of social divisions (indeed, the last verse is somewhat sexist) but it does ask us to look beyond inequality and identify with others.

More acceptable to (the Father/Highest) God is the virtue of a just man than the ox of one who works iniquity.

In this verse, we see Marikare (a local king offering advice to the crown prince, 1500 BCE) questioning the value of traditional sacrifice. In India, Greece and China, we will see similar thoughts questioning the value of traditional practice over being virtuous. If the wealthy make sacrifices, but rule with cruelty, those who dare to question will ask if performing sacrifices truly gains one merit. Jesus chasing the money changers and sellers of sacrificial animals out of the temple is a similar move.

Rage destroys itself. It damages its own affairs.

Ani (a scribe of the 18th dynasty, 1550-1300 BCE)

Because we refuse to imitate the wicked man, we help him, we offer him a hand…That he may know shame, we fill his belly with bread.

Amen-em-opet (local king, 1800 BCE) is suggesting that we do the opposite of what we typically think to do to those we consider evil. Rather than punish bad with bad, like fighting fire with fire, we can show them the compassion and consideration they lack even if they do not deserve it. This is similar to Jesus saying, “Turn the other cheek”.

Never permit yourself to rob a poor man. Do not oppress the down-trodden, nor thrust aside the elderly, denying them speech.

Amen-em-opet shows not only concern with social justice, but giving freedom of speech to the disempowered.

Who plunders the goods of a poor man takes the very breath of life away from (herself or himself). Such cheating chokes off justice, but a full measure increases its flow.

The Eloquent Peasant or The Complaint of the Peasant is a story about a peasant who has been robbed by a local official and who gives a series of nine arguments to the local magistrate appealing for justice which shows again that the ancient Egyptians were concerned about the poor and social justice, while also having problems with each as we still do today. It also shows ancient Egyptian cosmology holds that the world works like a giant person, and breath and air carry order downward from the fire of the stars, sun and moon. If we do injustice, we not only choke the universe but ourselves as well. The Egyptians were the foremost doctors of the ancient world and were revered by the Romans in the beginning ages of Roman empire, and only in the empire’s later years did the Romans begin turning to Greek doctors, who had learned much from the Egyptians and added to it. Consider that we still practice the Egyptian custom of wearing the wedding ring (originally just worn by women) on the ring finger (which is how it got its name) through the Roman Catholic tradition. There is a large artery running through this finger, which the Egyptians found by doing anatomy, and because it was thought to be associated with lust a man puts a wedding ring on his wife’s finger to serve as a sort of lust collar. We do not practice the Israelite tradition of wearing the wedding ring on the index finger, which a man would put on his wife’s finger to prevent her from casting curses on him.

Honor men of achievement and the people will prosper, but keep your eyes open. Too much trust brings affliction…Exalt no man because of birth. Judge the man by his actions. A man should do that which profits his soul. Let him perform the services of his temple. Let him share in the mysteries of his religion.

Merikare shows great skepticism of authority, not only of political position and noble birth but of a central singular religious tradition. Notice both ritual and mystery being included as religion.

Love the wife who is in your house. Feed her belly, clothe her back. Provide oil and cosmetics for her limbs. Gladden her heart all the days of your life, for she is like a field that will prosper its owner, but do not go into court with her, and never let her get control of your house.

Ptah-hotep is being quite sexist, but shows us that women had the power to speak in court and ruled the home as they often do in Islamic traditional culture and our own today in spite of the sexism. Ptah-hotep is giving this advice to his son.

Provide generously for your mother with double rations, and carry her even as she once carried you. It was a heavy load that she bore, but she did not cast it off, and even after you were born, did she not feed you at the breast for three years? Your dirt was unpleasant, but she did not say, “Why should I bother with him?” It was she who placed you in school. It was she who came daily with food and drink for you.

Ani seems to be giving us the old, “You never call, you never write” routine of ancient Egyptian mother syndrome. It is hilarious how he is not only reminding us to take care of the elderly, but of our own mothers as well.

If you have grown to some account in greatness, do not forget the time when you were small. If you have now become a rich man in your city, do not forget how it was when you were in need.

Ptah-hotep shows us that there was social mobility in ancient Egypt, and one could become wealthy or poor depending upon circumstances. Like the passage that tells us the maidens at the grindstone have wisdom yet no one can obtain it entirely, it suggests we always keep the view of the poor and unfortunate in mind to not only appreciate what we have but prevent ourselves from being unjust.

Boast not how many jars of beer you can drink! Soon your speech turns to babbling nonsense, and you tumble down into the gutter…and when people seek to question you, they find only a helpless child.

Ani shows us that as people gathered into ancient city states, they became critical of human behavior.

Eat no bread while another waits in want, but stretch out your hand to the hungry. One man is rich, another is poor. Yesterday’s master is today’s servant. Don’t be greedy about filling your belly. Where only last year the river ran, this year the course is dry. Great seas have turned to desert wastes, and the sandy shore is now an abyss.

Ani again shows us that one could become rich or poor in society, and it is wise to remember it.

Do not lie down at night being afraid of tomorrow. When day breaks, who knows what it will be like? Surely, no man knows what tomorrow will bring.

Amen-em-opet, like Aztec poets and the Indian Vedas, reminds us that no one can predict the future, either through prophecy or science.

Social & Political Philosophy: Menzi, Xunzi & Mozi on Human Nature

2012-01-31T16:04:00.000-08:00

Chinese Philosophy and The Period of the Hundred Philosophers/Schools

One would like to think that times of peace and prosperity are good for systems of thought, but in fact we find that times of war and disintegration of empires is best for thinkers and systems of thought. Human beings only rethink problems when they are faced with them, and so in Confucius’ China there were great problems in the ‘Warring States period’ as many kings came and went, each calling themselves ‘mandated by heaven’. If heaven speaks for a king, it was thought the king would prosper. If the king does not follow the way of heaven, heaven or the All Lord stops speaking for the king, and someone else comes along. Each new king then claims that the old king was ‘no longer spoken for’, so the populations of Greece, India etc. find themselves wondering: who exactly does Heaven (the heavens) speak for, and why?

The Period of the Hundred Philosophers or Hundred Schools, as it is called, came with the Warring States Period and ended during the Han dynasty (about 220 BCE) which supported the studies of many of the schools that had their origins during the Warring States Period. This included the teachings of Confucius and the early Confucians such as Mencius and Xun Zi.

Confucius and his System of Thought

Confucius (550-480 BCE) believed that the heart is the center of the human being. Notice that this ‘center’ is both mental and physical, fitting with cosmology, psychology and medical practices (these, of course, not being separated in ancient times and cultures). Confucius is often understood as a champion of order and ritual, as he is a proponent of society against the Daoists. However, it is clear from the Analects that Confucius believed it was more important to have right intentions than right actions, i.e. ‘one’s heart is in the right place’.

Confucius believed that ritual was the strength of a society and so one should perform the rituals to the ancestors, but he also believed that the worst thing was not to simply avoid ritual but to do ritual without the proper intention. We could say that Confucius would say to a churchgoer today: it is more important to enjoy your church than to attend your church, for if you do not enjoy it whole heartedly you should not go. Empty ritual, ritual simply for the motions rather than authentic love for and continuity with one’s society, is the worst thing, and thus it would be better in such a case to avoid false ritual and simply not perform the ritual at all. This point is often lost when people focus on Confucius’ great love of ritual and city culture. The best example is clearly 3.26, “Authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate”.

Confucius is credited as the father of China’s civil service system, a system in which anyone who tested well, regardless of their position in society, was given a government position. This is similar to the development of types of scribes in Egypt. It is just such a development that we call ‘the middle class’, the individuals who through study and work can rise or fall in position to fit the many niches required to run large cities and systems. In combination with the last point, this means that Confucius hates scholarship for show without genuine love of learning and discovery of human nature. A good example is 4.9, ‘if a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to’.

Confucius was a genius at seeing himself as equal to everyone, and he encouraged this attitude as the path to goodness itself. Most of us have likely heard the ‘Golden Rule’, which is paraphrased from Confucius: ‘treat others the way you want to be treated’. My favorite example is 7.22: Confucius says that if you put him with any two people at random, he can take their strengths as a model to follow and their faults as a warning. Clearly, Confucius believed that we all share the same set of strengths and faults, no matter how talented (or horrible) we happen to individually be or where our talents are. Confucius teaches us that NO ONE is perfect, not even himself, but there is good in everyone and everything, and we had best remember that we will never lose any of our connection to our fellow human beings if we only remember to look hard enough for it. Another excellent example from the Analects is, “When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him…When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself”.

Mencius, Xun Zi and the Debate on Human Nature

Confucius had two followers who became the famous two poles of interpretation of the Analects. Mencius (370-290 BCE) or Men Zi, the second in command of Confucianism by popular consent in the tradition, believed that Confucius taught that the human being is basically good and develops the heart, growing and developing the virtues through love. He argued that because the human individual is essentially good, we need ritual to guide our growth but love is the true essence. Xun Zi, the third in command of Confucianism, a cynic and conservative, argued that the human being is essentially evil and without the rituals and tradition to hold our nature back we would be selfish and uncivilized. This remains the major split in Confucian thought. We can see that there are various views and contradicting opinions within the system, and that individuals can draw on Mencius, Xun Zi or both to back up their own interpretations of Confucius.

Mencius and Human Nature as Good

In 2A:6, Mencius states a major thesis of his work: No one is devoid of compassion for others. Mencius argues at several points in the book that we naturally feel for others and their wellbeing as we do for ourselves, and that when we fail to care for others there are other factors involved that block or reverse our natural compassion. Xun Zi, as we will see, is very opposed to this interpretation of Confucius’ thought and argues that compassion must be planted in the human being by society and study because it is alien and opposite to human nature. In coming weeks, we will see similar sides taken between Rousseau and Hobbes.

Mencius is famous for using the young child falling into a well example to back up his argument. He argues that anyone would feel panic and fear if they saw a child in danger, regardless of how evil that individual is or how twisted they have become. This point is excellent for debate.

Mencius believes that there are four parts of the human heart that are developed and cultivated by society and study such that four virtues are grown like plants/germs/sprouts. The heart is a root system which grows the virtues of humanity when properly cultivated.

The four parts of the heart are compassion (ren) which sprouts benevolence, shame which sprouts duty (yi), courtesy/modesty which sprouts observance of ritual (li), and a sense of right and wrong which sprouts wisdom.

In 3A:5, we see Mencius getting into a battle with a Moist over whether one should love one’s own family more than others. While compassion is central to Confucianism, whether or not it is innate like Mencius says or has to be transplanted like Xun Zi says, Confucians believe that one should have more love for one’s parents, children, family, and country and that this is the natural and proper way of things. Moists, who are radical egalitarians, argued against the Confucians that we should love everyone without distinction, as much as we love ourselves, our parents, our children, and our country. Confucians argue that the Moists are breaking with the natural way of the human heart and society, and that proportion in love is proper and best.

Mencius argues that we all do naturally love infants and young children and that this is good. He returns to his well example, and argues that Yi Zi, a Moist, is taking this one case and applying it improperly to everyone. Mencius says that the Moist wants us to deny our natural gradations of love which grow in society while affirming that love is the true nature of humanity, setting love in opposition to itself and making love both natural and unnatural at the same time.

Mencius goes on to presume that love and care for others possibly began with early humans, living before civilization, seeing the decaying bodies of their parents being attacked by animals and because humans naturally care for others, and particularly their parents, they were moved to bury the bodies. Note that this makes proper burial, the topic of the debate with Yi Zi. In the text, Yi Zi concedes the point and accepts that love starts with the love one has for one’s parents and develops from there. In Chinese philosophical texts, often there are instances of a member (sometimes quite famous) of an opposing school conceding in argument (Confucius is made to accept defeat and concede superiority to the Daoists in the great text of Zhuang Zi).

In 4A:12, Mencius elaborates and says that goodness starts with working on the self and love for one’s parents, and moves outward from there to one’s friends and the whole of one’s society.

In 4A:16, Mencius considers another example famous in Confucian scholarship for its implications. A scholar (school unknown) poses a problem to Mencius: it says in the laws that it is improper for men and women to touch hands if they are not married, but if your brother’s sister is drowning, shouldn’t you reach out to save her? Mencius replies that it is proper to save her, and that one must not blindly follow the law but use discretion given the situation. This passage is famous, because Confucians are big on observing law and ritual but sometimes one must break the law. Confucius said in the Analects that even though the rites say to use a silk hat, it is ok to use a hemp hat instead because it is more modest. The scholar debating Mencius says the empire is now drowning, implying that one needs to radically break with the laws and traditions to save society. Mencius replies that upholding law and ritual is the way to save society and so the example of the drowning sister-in-law does not justify a radical break from tradition.

In 4B:12, Mencius says the great person retains the heart of a child. A Moist might point out the previous battle with Yi Zi and say Mencius is going against what he has said before if a child is all loving and completely open. Mencius might counter that retaining the child heart will naturally grow into its arrangements while being pure and absolute.

In 4B:13, Mencius says that following one’s parents when they are alive is good, but following them after they are dead is greater. Xun Zi might be cynical here, because if you applied this to society he would argue that without society one would tend not to be good at all and that the one who follows the ways of one’s parents after they are dead does so only because society still surrounds them.

In 6A:2, as in several other places, Mencius likens love and human nature (which he believes to be identical) to water and argues that just as water naturally moves downward love naturally moves outward. If water does not move downward, it is blocked by something. In the same way, if a human being is not loving towards others and compassionate, it is blocked by something.

In 6A:7, Mencius speaks of sowing barley on various ground (strikingly similar to the parable of Jesus). Just as when barley does not grow, the seeds have fallen on bad soil, when humans are bad it is not because they do not have love and goodness in their nature but because they are put in a bad situation. Reason and goodness are common to all. The sage or great person simply recognizes this and grows what all have to become great.

Xun Zi and Human Nature as Evil

Xun Zi, the third most important Confucian after Confucius and Mencius, argued that human nature is evil because human nature is desire. Without society and laws, people would grab for themselves and do nothing for others. Hobbes, we will see, argues the same thing and believes that this justifies the king acting any way the king sees fit, including killing his subjects.

In Improving Yourself (Section 2 of the Xun Zi), he argues that if we stick to the rituals and laws our behavior will be good and if we abandon the rituals and laws it will be bad. He draws openly on the behavior of civilized gentlemen vs. the behavior of poor country folk to back this up.

He argues that one’s temperament and intelligence need to be in balance and if they get overgrown they will cause ruin. Human abilities need to be reined in by society and customs, or they will cause problems. He argues that only by following laws can one be liberal and compassionate. Compassion is the goal that is possible, but it cannot be achieved without laws and principles. Following one’s parents and teachers is necessary for human development. Confucius says in the Analects that learning without thinking is bad, but thinking without learning is dangerous.

In Man’s Nature is Evil (Section 23 of the Xun Zi), he opens with this thesis and states that all goodness is the result of growth and effort. People naturally desire. They must work and change to understand that they only get what they desire when they put their desires in check, and they only learn this through involvement with society and its laws. Freud argued very similarly about sexual impulse, and that all technology is sexuality denied and deferred into work. The first paragraph lays this out succinctly.

Xun Zi openly refers to Mencius by name and his theory that human nature is good and says that Mencius is wrong. Xun Zi argues that Mencius is confusing human nature with the results of conscious human activity and development. Xun Zi believes that the early legendary sage kings created society because they realized that human nature is corrupt and they created a method for us to grow from our nature and become excellent in spite of it. He argues that the example of child-like love is misleading. Children do not know enough, are not developed enough, to refrain from grabbing for themselves. Good people restrain their own desires to be good to others, unlike the child. Note that we tell people to be like a little child (when happy & loving) and we also tell people to NOT be like a little child (when angry & upset).

Xun Zi argues that greatness IS an object of desire, and the great person realizes/desires to overcome desire and discipline desire to truly fulfill desire. This is very similar to Nietzsche and his conceptions of morality and power which we will touch on in the second half of the class.

He says: “Those who are good at discussing antiquity must demonstrate the validity of what they say in modern times; those who are good at discussing Heaven (the way of things) must show proofs from the human world. In discussions of all kinds, men value what is in accord with the facts and what can be proved to be valid. Hence if a man sits on his mat propounding some theory, he should be able to stand right up and put it into practice, and show that it can be extended over a wide area with equal validity. Now Mencius states that man’s nature is good, but this is neither in accord with the facts, nor can it be proved to be valid.”

If Mencius is right, Xun Zi argues, we could dispense with society and be good in the state of nature. Both the Daoists and Rousseau hold this to be true. Xun Zi is arguing that, if we believe Mencius, we may as well all become Daoists. If we honor the sages and the good over the stupid and the evil, we do so because of how much each has developed and not because of their universal nature. Xun Zi is arguing that, if we believe Mencius, we may as well all become Moists.

Xun Zi argues that all human beings are equal in their capacity to become good and develop, but they do not start out good. The sage is one who has developed, not the one who remains the same as they were in the beginning. Xun Zi argues that because one has two feet, one can theoretically walk to the ends of the earth but no one has so far managed to do so. The famous bows (for arrows), leaders and horses all became famous for how they were cultivated and developed and were not excellent without conscious effort and process.

He ends by saying twice: “Environment is the important thing!” Remember Mencius agrees in speaking of sowing barley. For Confucians, society is essential. The debate is on whether the environment compliments or contradicts human nature.

Mo Zi and Universal Love

Last time we talked about the debate on human nature between the two most central Confucians after Confucius. Mencius argues that human nature is good (love) while Xun Zi argues that human nature is evil (desire). Today we will focus on Mo Zi, Master Mo of the Moist School of Chinese Philosophy, and his arguments for universal love against the Confucians.

Not much is known about Master Mo, founder of Moism, one of the schools of the Period of the Hundred Philosophers. His disciples collected his sayings and dialogues to make the Mo Zi text, just as the disciples of Confucius and Mencius did. It is believed that Mo Zi lived sometime between the death of Confucius in 479 BCE and the birth of Mencius in 372 BCE and that the Moist school was flourishing around the year 400 BCE (the same time as Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece).

One ancient work says that Mo Zi studied under Confucians at a Confucian school, but then became disgusted and developed his philosophy in opposition to Confucianism. We know that Confucianism and Moism were both flourishing and in competition at the same time from texts like the Zhuang Zi (one of my favorites, in which Zhuang Zi states that what the Confucians call right the Moists call wrong and vice versa). Like Confucius, Mo Zi likely traveled to schools and noble courts expounding his philosophy and seeking disciples. Nobles and other wealthy individuals would often put on banquets and debates for education and entertainment.

Because Mo Zi was a great critic of the excesses of the powerful and champion of the common people, some scholars have speculated that Mo Zi was an ex-convict and Mo meant tattoo like the sort used to brand ex-cons (thus, Mo Zi would mean Master Tattoo or Master Tat). These scholars are likely thinking of Zhuang Zi’s use of ex-con teachers countering Confucius while playing the Moists and Confucians against each other. While Mo Zi criticized the luxurious excesses of dancing girls and music of the wealthy, particularly in light of the suffering of the poor and oppressed, it is unlikely that an ex-con would have access to the noble courts and fine houses that Mo Zi frequented in seeking to expand the influence and membership of his school of thought.

How could Mo Zi get away with criticizing the powerful? Like the ancient Egyptian proverb, “Trust no one by birth, judge a person by their actions”, Mo Zi argued (as did the Confucians) that it is behavior that makes one a good person and not high birth. As in ancient Egypt and India, the top ranks of power are in constant struggle with the up and coming powers. In India, Buddha, Mahavira and other great philosophers were second class educated who were critical of the upper class and older traditions. In ancient China, Moism and Confucianism (as well as other schools) appealed to the newer and lower nobles and wealthy who did not have the finest families but surrounded themselves with the talented and new artists and thinkers.

Unfortunately, it may have been the hard-lining Moist stance against the top levels of society that ultimately resulted in the downfall of Moism when the Han unified China and endorsed the Confucians and Daoists but not the Moists. Moism was neglected for 1,500 years afterwards. It was only in the times of Neoconfucianism (1100 CE), ironically, that Mo Zi was reexamined along with Buddhism and put in a Confucian context.

Like Xun Zi, Mo Zi was exceptional at examining the validity of beliefs. He had a system of three tests. First, asking the origin of the belief (remember, the ways of the sage kings were highly valued and used by most schools of ancient Chinese thought). Second, the empirical validity of the belief (how well the belief corresponds to what we have discovered to be true). Third, the practicality and applicability of the belief (identical to the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill).

The Moists are famous for their doctrine of universal love. Mo Zi had the hard task of trying to convince rulers and common people alike that they should not only love others as themselves, which the Confucians also teach, but that they should love other families as they love their own families and love people of other countries as they love the people of their own country. The Moists believed in both debate and warfare, and they excelled in both logic and military science, but only for the purpose of self defense and defending the weak against the strong. Remember that the period of the Hundred Schools was also the warring states period, a time of instability when many who were weak were being abused and killed by local wars and bandits. Today, the Swiss embody this stance on war the best as they spend a decent amount on defense and bases from which they launch jets out of mountains but they never go on the offensive.

Mo Zi says that universal love is practical and could be put into practice if enough rulers are convinced that it is in their own interest as well as in the interest of their people. Mencius seems terrified by Moism, his major rival in Northeast China at the time, writing that the ideas of Mo Zi and other thinkers are found across the countryside (Mencius 3B:9). Mencius argues that loving everyone as one loves one’s own father means that one has no father. Considering the emphasis that Confucians such as Mencius put on following one’s father, this would be a great evil. This is strikingly similar to philosophers who believe in absolute truth and fact saying that if there is no absolute truth but only relative truth then there is no truth whatsoever.

In the section Universal Love of the Mo Zi, he begins by stating that the good person seeks to promote what is good and reduce what is harmful (identical, again, to the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill). He argues that the greatest harm is powerful states and families attacking the weak states and families and the strong oppressing the weak. All this comes about not by love but by hate, not by universality (caring about the whole) but by partiality (caring about part of the whole as opposed to another part). Partiality must be, therefore, replaced with universality. Note that all of this is very similar to the Communism of both Marx and Mao.

Mo Zi argues that this can be put into practice or even he would be critical. We naturally trust the universal person with our family and possessions more than the partial person. Therefore, we naturally love and trust the universal ruler more than the particular ruler. There is, however, a problem with this view that Mencius mentions: we do in fact see people naturally loving their own more than their neighbor, just as we do see people trusting partial rulers rather than universal ones. Mo Zi says there are no fools in the world like this, but experience does show us otherwise. However, he argues that if the people saw rulers that fed and clothed everyone equally, there could be radical change in society within a single generation.

In the section Against Offensive Warfare, Mo Zi says that everyone knows that it is wrong to steal from one’s neighbors, but that when it is called warfare it is praised. If it is true that killing one person is a crime, then killing a hundred is far more of a crime. People are truly confused about right and wrong if they consider warfare to be justice.

In the section Against Confucians, Mo Zi argues that the Confucians are wrong about degrees and gradations of love based on one’s relationship to one’s other. Mo Zi argues that it is wrong to love one’s family and state more than other families and states. He argues that both Confucius and Confucians are hypocritical and often pay more attention to matters of ritual than to the deeper underlying problems of society. He attacks Confucian practices of mourning, weddings, and fatalism and says they produce contradictions and hypocrisy. He argues that the ancient ways were once new ways, so why should we honor the ancient heroes and sage kings for invention, innovation and change by sticking to the old ways? Mo Zi believes that the Confucians are drawn into caring about the trivial while at other times supporting the substantial revolution that society requires. At times, they believe in silence and deference to authority even when it is wrong, but at other times they endorse rebellion.

Intro Philosophy: Human Thought, Shamanism & Ancient World Cosmology

2012-01-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

Before diving into the philosophers of ancient India, Greece and China, we must look at the early stages of human knowledge, wisdom and civilization to understand what philosophy is and where it comes from. First, we will consider the positives and negatives of human thought as a general frame for understanding philosophy and all systems/cultures of thought. Second, we will look at shamanism as the basic worldwide culture out of which all cultures emerged. Third, we will look at early city states (focusing on ancient Egypt and its wisdom) to see how cultures developed as they grouped together in the first empires. This lecture covers our general frame and shamanism.

The Positives and Negatives of Human Thought

Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.

Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location. In many ways, places and times, happiness and solidity are good and in others they are bad. Also, no particular thing is perfectly good or completely solid. We judge the table (and the wheel, as Lao Zi the Daoist will explain soon) to be simply solid and the space around it to be simply empty, but no table is immortal or unbreakable, and no space is a perfect vacuum. Even outer space is full of dust, light and everything else in the universe. In the same way, particular things that are good or make us happy do not always make us happy and do not make everyone happy. Often, things that make one person happy continue to make another unhappy because they make the first person happy.

Human belief/judgment has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative). Belief is an answer or answering, and doubt is a question or questioning. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability and consistency of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness and change of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists (also called positivists today) lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between dogmatism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.

When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both dogmatism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.

Many unfortunately believe that philosophy was born in ancient Greece, when in fact wisdom is universal to human kind even though it is difficult to achieve. The wise, though rarer than we would like, have been celebrated in all cultures, and their wisdom has similarity across all cultures even though their beliefs can differ widely. While the word ‘philosophy’ is an ancient Greek word, great thinkers and questioners can be called philosophers and sages in any culture.

It should also be mentioned that philosophers were not welcome in ancient Greece as they questioned the ways of things (traditional polytheism) and as such Socrates was put to death for “inciting the youth to riot”, Aristotle was chased out of Athens after the death of his student Alexander (a foreign Macedonian who conquered Athens by the sword, Aristotle being an unwelcome foreigner from Strageira in Athens himself), and Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, complains that his city state Ephesus exiled their best thinker for questioning things and it would be best if all Ephesians went and hanged themselves to leave the city in the abler hands of children.

What is philosophy?

Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato, who we will study) critically examined their own thinking and their traditions of thought and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.

The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom?

The German philosophers Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as dogmatism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.

The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and ancient everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions. Systems of thought are always sites of disagreement as much as they are of agreement.

Recently, the Attorney General of Arizona crafted legislation against teachers who provide programs celebrating Latino culture as they are dangerously “anti-Western”, and pointed specifically to teaching that Aztecs and Mayans had philosophers as Leon-Pontilla argues. Apparently, it is biased and thus un-Western to teach that concepts such as “you are my other self” (much like Confucius, who we will study) and “continue to investigate things endlessly” (much like Heraclitus, who we will study) is evidence that the Aztecs and Mayans had philosophy. It is perceived as a threat to American culture to equate the ancient Mayans with the ancient Greeks. It is not just the Attorney General who thinks this, but academics with PhDs who continue to provide the ground for this belief in their publications.

The most primitive societies value individual achievement, which often becomes the subject of legend. It is difficult and frightening to oppose common opinion, but worth it. While many think that Western thought is more individual and free than other traditions, arguments over the meaning of common knowledge and traditions are found everywhere. In the logic class, we read a text by anthropologist Malinowski who studied the tribes of Papua, New Guinea in the 1940s. He asks, “Are primitive people logical?”, and he argues that they are. Human language typically has words for ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if-then’, and all the operations of ancient Greek, ancient Indian, and modern European logic. He gives an excellent example of a tribesman tripping and falling, accusing an evil spirit of causing it, and his fellow tribes-people rebuking him and saying that he is merely clumsy.

I continue to read books that casually state that the ancient Greeks were the first to understand things in terms of cause and effect, which is ludicrous. Demons and spirits were thought to cause things by the ancient Greeks and many ancient cultures long before them. It is also commonly held that the ancient Greeks such as Aristotle invented logic. Not only did ancient India have talented logicians in many schools of thought, but as Malinowski argues you can see people in the most primitive cultures arguing rationally, systematically and hypothetically (“If that were true…”).

Consider the following argument: “Because all elevators play jazz music, jazz is the Devil’s playground, and one should avoid the Devil, elevators are to be avoided.” You can follow this argument because it is logical. As we learn early on in any modern logic course, an argument is logically valid if the conclusion follows from the premises, and it does not matter whether or not the premises are true. You can construct logical arguments that include the premise, “all puppies are green”, which is useful to show how logic works. The elevator argument is Aristotle’s first syllogism, and it does not appear that he invented the form but rather examined it critically.

Tribal Shamans and Ecstatic Quests

Shamanism is the original human culture, found from Africa to Europe to the Americas to small islands in the pacific. While it is always different in each place, the similarities are quite profound. “Shaman” is a word from an old Turkish-Siberian dialect that means “one who knows”. Consider that a “scientist” is “one who sees” and “one who divides” from the Latin root. The Shaman is the expert of the tribe, the one who not only holds the traditions of knowledge but who seeks new answers to problems. The shaman is both the preserver of the old and the seeker of the new. When new situations and things are encountered, we look to the experts to figure things out. Considering that most people in the ancient world were dead by 30, the old wise woman or man of the tribe who lived long enough to have grey hair was wiser and much more experienced than the rest of the community.

In tribal culture, traditional knowledge and wisdom is often kept and passed on in the form of stories or narratives. These stories explain the world and help people with their problems. The wise elder can even tell a story they know to be fiction as if it were true to help others and be passed on to future generations as an answer to a common problem. There are, however, times when the stories do not help and a new answer must be sought for a problem. Guided by the traditions but seeking beyond it, experts and leaders must broaden their horizons and then often become celebrated by new legends. To do this, the shaman goes on a quest (both physical and mental) for the solution and new knowledge needed to solve the problem. Often the shaman is selected by another shaman or shamans as a youth who has gone through a near death experience (sickness, struck by lightning, attacked but survives). The shaman is thought to have an affinity for seeking into the unknown because they are already experienced in the unknown. Near death experiences give new perspective.

To quest for knowledge, the shaman employs techniques of ecstasy known to produce an ecstatic experience. “Ecstasy” comes from ancient Greek and means “standing outside” (ex-stasis) or “outstanding”. It is both a going beyond and going within, beyond common reality by getting deeper into reality. When one is in an ecstatic trance or having an ecstatic vision, one is standing outside normal reality and seeing it from a different place and context. Consider that shamans often go down into a cave or up on a mountain to go to the lower or upper “other world”. Some shamans have been known to climb trees. Consider the common image in cartoons of the sage meditating on a mountain top, with the climber seek wisdom at the sage’s feet by asking deep questions. In a cave, one is removed from reality and in a way returns to the womb. On a mountain or in a tree, one can look down on the world and see the larger patterns of what is going on. One gains perspective and is capable of abstraction when one removes oneself to contemplate reality.

Methods of ecstasy include not only thought itself, but drugs, pain, rhythms (chanting, drumming, rattles) fasting, sleep deprivation, removing oneself from society and meditation (including contemplation and prayer). However, the most basic method of ecstasy is in fact thought. Contemplation is itself a form of standing outside reality, so it makes sense that the shaman is regarded as the original thinker, expert and seeker, as well as the doctor, therapist, biologist, physicist, etc. This is why we are considering shamans as the first philosophers. They not only seek and keep knowledge, but pass on wisdom about the limits of human perception, knowledge and thought to future generations of their tribes.

Ancient World Cosmology

Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.

The world was thought to be shaped like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). Fire moves upward, both as flames and smoke, and water moves downwards, each element seeking its proper place in the cosmos.

When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary. Consider that harmonious elements lead to peaceful and productive seasons of agriculture, and storms and disasters are disorders that can be deadly. Consider also that shamans and sages sit and think about things in contemplation for long periods of time until they uncover underlying truths within things that outlive the individual things themselves.

Fire was often considered the top and most important element, and it was identified both with energy and thought. In ancient Greece, energy (energon, “in-work”) was thought to be the fire within things such as human beings that makes them live, just as in ancient China chi and in ancient India karma were identified with life, energy, and fire. Just as the shaman goes on a quest to have a new vision in the head, and this vision is visible in the mind like fire, prophets, scientists, politicians and everyday people have visions of the past (memory) and future (imagination), and if they are knowledgeable and wise their predictions are more true than the foolish. Some say that our scientists have real visions as opposed to superstitions now, but no one has seen something come from nothing before (a belief found in ancient legends of many people, the Book of Genesis and modern Big Bang theory), and computers failed to predict reality (including the weather two weeks from now) as it was first thought they would before Chaos Theory arrived, aided much by computers. Dogmatists tend to believe that there are eternal truths in the world, while skeptics tend to believe that there are only temporary truths in the mind. At the moment, most physicists believe that gravity is an eternal unchanging being that existed before and as the world was born, much like in ancient legends and in Genesis there is a sea of water, even though no one has seen an unchanging being and it is strange to consider things existing before things exist.

One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction as things are pulled apart. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences. It not only reflects the individual who wants many things but can become disciplined, but the community that wants many things but can be ruled and maintained.

One early philosophical puzzle was the problem of the One and the Many: this reality is one thing, but also many things. Your left hand is also one thing, and many things. Shamans in many different cultures had visions of an All Tree or Tree of Life, the one yet many of all things. All or Being itself is the trunk, and the many things and species of the world are the branches or the fruit. The trunk and branches of a tree outlive the fruit, which returns cyclically each season, just as humanity and reality outlive individual humans, rocks, and trees, just as consciousness outlives particular thoughts and perceptions. The stars rotate overhead, outliving your grandparents who told you about them and your children.

Not only is the brain shaped like a tree, as well as the nervous system and circulation systems, the human body is shaped like a tree with the head and chest as the trunk, the human species and evolution of all species is shaped like a tree. If we remove ourselves from reality, either staring down from a mountain top or sitting in a quiet laboratory, it is easier to see this and the many ways it continues to work. One of the recurrent philosophical insights we will see in India, Greece and China is that it takes wisdom to see that the many things are all one reality and the one reality is seen from many perspectives. This applies to the cosmos, the community, the self, and each passing thought. It continues today to be a simple idea but worth dwelling upon to gain wisdom, and so it is worthwhile studying ancient thought of the world to learn more about our own lives.

Social & Political Philosophy: Tribal & City State Politics

2012-01-24T09:15:00.000-08:00

Politics Among the Apes

Apes have hierarchy, with a tension between authority and individuality. Apes are capable of understanding basic forms of owning. Consider the case (from an old Anthropology class of mine) of the female chimpanzee ignoring another male chimpanzee trying to give her a banana for sex, and how the female only snatches the banana for herself when the male ape gets bored and goes out of sight so that there is no expected reciprocity. Apes are also capable of lying, which is important for politics, of course. In one of the most fascinating stories of ape behavior I have heard, researchers documented that a young male baboon made the mistake of trying to force himself sexually on a high ranking female baboon of his tribe. When the female screeched, the rest of the tribe began chasing the young male along the ground floor. Suddenly, the young male turned and gave the call for leopard. The chasers dashed up into the trees and out of sight, while the young male stood, watching them leave, on the ground in no danger from any leopard. The researchers concluded that they had witnessed and documented an ape lying to save his own skin. Thus, we can assume, humans have been lying since before they were human.

The Positives and Negatives of Human Thought

Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.

Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location.

Human thought has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative). Doubt is a question or questioning, while belief is an answer or answering. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists or positivists lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between positivism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.

When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both positivism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.

What is philosophy?

Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Plato and Aristotle, who we will study later) questioned their traditions and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.

The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom?

German Philosophers such as Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as positivism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.

The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Radin’s book, Primitive Man as Philosopher, he argues that all societies (paying particular attention to North American tribes and African tribes) have a small number of individuals who are radical questioners and pioneers in innovation and individual thought. In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions.

“Shaman” is a word from an old Turkish-Siberian dialect that means “one who knows”. Consider that a “scientist” is “one who sees” from the Latin root. The Shaman is the expert of the tribe, the one who not only holds the traditions of knowledge but who seeks new answers to problems. The shaman is both the preserver of the old and the seeker of the new.

It is quite amazing to consider that shamanism is the original human culture, found from Africa to Europe to the Americas to small islands in the pacific. While it is always different in each place, the similarities are quite profound.

In tribal culture, traditional knowledge is often kept and passed on in the form of stories or narratives. These stories explain the world and help people with their problems. There are, however, times when an answer must be sought for a problem. To do this, the shaman goes on a quest (both physical and mental) for the solution and new knowledge needed to solve the problem. Often the shaman is selected as a youth who has gone through a near death experience (sickness, struck by lightning, attacked but survives). The shaman is thought to have an affinity for seeking into the unknown because they are already experienced in the unknown.

Ancient World Cosmology

Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.

The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.

One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.

The Problem of the One and the Many

One early philosophical puzzle was the problem of the One and the Many: this reality is one thing, but also many things. Shamans in many different cultures had visions of an All Tree or Tree of Life, the one yet many of all things. All or Being itself is the trunk, and the many things and species of the world are the branches or the fruit. One of the recurrent philosophical insights we will see in India, Greece and China is that it takes wisdom to see that the many things are all one reality and the one reality is seen from many perspectives.

Notice that the problem of the one and the many has political implications. Unity and sameness is privileged over diversity and difference. Early cultures did appreciate, sometimes reluctantly, individual thought and innovation, but it was and still often is subordinated to the good of the whole or unity of a culture. Native American, African, and Celtic European tribes came together for meetings of many individuals and sometimes many tribes in order to come to agreements, and consensus was sought that balanced diverse wants and opinions. When Native Americans took and held Alcatraz in the 60s, and there were differences of opinions among the tribes and individuals, they told the stubborn to be democratic and “stop being like white people”. This shows us that all cultures value heroes and individual achievement, but they also seek to unify the whole of society and come to common agreement and consensus.

PRIMITIVE MAN AS PHILOSOPHER by Paul Radin

Modern Historians are supposed to look at societies other than their own free from bias and prejudice. However, historians have so far been prejudiced and assumed that aboriginal/tribal societies are innately inferior. This is due to the profound differences of social customs and because the tribes people could not stick up for themselves against the modern historian. Romanticism also played a part in sustaining the assumption that tribes people are simple children and savages, unintelligent and lacking individuality. The rise of the theory of evolution convinced many that tribes people are pre-logical and pre-individualistic because they have not reached required stages of social development, and this view has gained academic and scientific credibility.

Because of this, the most pressing need in history, sociology, psychology and other fields is to examine and question this prejudice, particularly the convictions that tribal people have a dead level of intelligence, that the individual is always submerged in the group, and that there are no thinkers or philosophers. This book particularly examines the role of intellectuals in the earliest societies.

Every human group has members who are different in their individuality and who examine life and its problems with what we can call philosophy. Languages of tribal peoples are sometimes more complex than our own and their vocabularies are sometimes just as large. Their vocabularies have words with the same abstract connotations as our own, but in spite of this there are many theorists who do not believe tribal people to be capable of abstract thought. They point out the concrete nature of words and expressions while ignoring that our own modern languages use similar concrete terms to express abstract thought.

The complexity of a society has little to do with the existence of philosophy or individual thought. Indeed, complex civilizations can often stifle or even prohibit philosophizing and the asking of deep and abstract questions.

Often, academics has held to the view that the ancient Greeks and their cultural descendants have a special kind of mentality that allowed and still allows them to think individually, critically, and philosophically, but it is not clear what the nature of this special mentality is. The best way to critically examine and correct this error is to provide examples of tribal people indulging in philosophical speculation. Aristotle and the Greeks are called special for thinking systematically, even though all cultures transmit their thought in whole, unified systems. Philosophical speculation flourishes most in times of crisis and change, as it did in the greatest periods of Greek and Chinese philosophy.

Throughout this book it is assumed that tribal people have the same distribution of intelligence and ability as do modern societies. This has grown from a hypothesis to a conviction through the direct experience of tribal societies by the author. The object of the book is to describe tribal society from the viewpoint of the intellectuals and thinkers of the tribe.

The intellectual often looks down on the practices of the ordinary people, but the ordinary person also looks with amusement on the distance between the real and practical world and the behavior of the scholar. It is, however, the scholar who writes the history books and so it is this perspective that we often encounter when reading about the past of this and other civilizations.

When looking at isolated practices of “magic” ritual, such as the Winnebago Native American shooting an arrow at a trail to ensure good deer hunting, it is often forgotten that this act does not guarantee success and is interwoven with many practical behaviors. If one asks the tribal individual if magic alone will bring home a deer or grow crops, they are quite amused at the lack of understanding.

Tribal people are in direct contact with their reality, while modern people are removed from many aspects of their own lives. Magic was not a world apart from physical reality, but interwoven with it such that practical and physical situations were recognized while interpreted in traditional ways. One does not ask for rain from a cloudless sky, nor seek protection for actions that are impractical or dangerously stupid. The traditional systems of thought are an aid for dealing with physical and practical reality, not a substitute for reality. Tribal people, like advanced modern people, do and do not understand reality and the forces behind it, so they work in accord with systems that sometimes do and sometimes do not work so that generally the society and individual will be well and overcome obstacles.

Individuals have relative freedom and individuality in tribal societies. It is possible that we view the tribal individual as an automata, with no freedom or individuality, because modern life saturated with technologies has turned human individuals into automata. It is a mistake to believe that tribal people do not have variation in ritual and belief but modern people do. There is always variations in ritual and belief amongst any people, and modern life has in fact standardized beliefs more than they ever have been.

When one draws the community together and asks about the reasons behind an aspect of culture, one will find not only variation but contradictions and arguments. This is as true of tribal beliefs as it is of modern academics and science. A community is always an agreement and disagreement of beliefs and perspectives. All societies, tribal or modern, believe that there are immutable and permanent truths, but there is no complete agreement as to what these truths are or how they are structured or caused. Even if there is a great deal of consensus, this does not prevent radical variation in belief among individuals and minority groups. If this variation is sometimes concealed, this is due to fear of ridicule or rejection by the majority. Individuality that contrasts with the beliefs or behavior of the majority is in danger of being labeled a mistake or deviancy. It is always safer to either conform to the majority or remain silent.
Individual members of any society have to balance and integrate their individuality with society.
Sometimes it is even asserted that tribal people are so varied in belief that they cannot form coherent systems. It is often asserted that the Greeks and Europeans are “systematic thinkers” relative to others, but also that they are also free and various in thinking relative to others.

With the development of writing, a welcome oasis given the dynamic and ever-changing world, beliefs and systems of thought were able to be highly standardized. The written word was deified and identified with the unchanging way of the cosmos.

HISTORY BEGINS AT SUMER by Kramer

Sumer is the birthplace of the written word, one of the earliest city state societies. Sumer was a city state at the mouth of the Tigris Euphrates which was then taken over and incorporated into Babylon, which then was taken over by Assyria, which was then taken over by Persia. These were multicultural societies in which citizenship did not belong exclusively to one ethnicity. The primary way that cultures were dominated was, as it is today, not with war but with trade. War typically means efforts to dominate through economic means have failed.

Sumer had some of the first schools, textbooks (in science and the liberal arts), medical texts, tax reduction, wisdom proverbs, and laments. One excellent proverb is, “You go and carry off the enemy’s land, the enemy comes and carries off your land”. My favorite Sumerian lament is recorded about 3000 BCE, in which an elderly Sumerian complains that teenagers are running around and breaking laws and having sex, concluding that the world will certainly end soon.

Very important for this class, in Sumer we find the first democratic bicameral congress. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first recorded myths in human history, we read that Gilgamesh wants to go to war so he appeals to the elders of the senate. The elders do not want war because they have fragile investments in the situation, so Gilgamesh appeals to the larger and lower house and they enthusiastically accept his proposal. Gilgamesh, the king, must seek approval from the community as a whole and needs the house to override the smaller but higher senate.

MYTH TODAY by Roland Barthes

Barthes, a French thinker and literary critic, argues that any speech can be mythologized and through any medium. He uses the example of roses being given as a gesture of passion to illustrate his concept of a sign, and then describes how signs can serve myths which then become larger signs that signify other things.

At the barbershop one day, he is upset by the cover of Paris-Match (a magazine much like Newsweek & Time in America). On the cover is a young African boy in French military dress saluting. Barthes writes that the boy is clearly being depicted saluting the French flag, and the cover is meant to signify that France is a great empire in which all are equal and love the empire. Barthes writes that this boy is being made to serve his colonialist oppressors and that the image is a sign that serves a modern myth: France stands for freedom. It is a game of hide and seek with meaning. It is an open association or coherence that does not demand what it means but highly suggests what it means. In doing this, it is a deformation and distortion of the realities of French colonial Africa. It is a gesture that is deliberately misleading, alienating the meaning from the situation. It is an alibi for French colonialism.
Consider that, coupled with Radin, we may wonder whether we live in times of less or greater mythology considering the forms of media and the dislocation of modern society.

Social & Political Philosophy Syllabus Spring 2012

2012-01-04T16:04:00.000-08:00

PHIL 2: Soc/Pol Phil, Spring 2012
Instructor: Eric Gerlach
Mon/Wed 9:30-10:45 am
Office Hours: Mondays 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code: 23602
Room: BCC 52
Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com

Course Description
This course introduces students to the history of Social and Political Philosophy. We will study ancient and modern thinkers on the subjects of human nature, social class, authority, liberty, capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, post-colonialism, and feminism.

Required Texts
The only text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the BCC Library.

Required Assignments
Four In-class Responses 40%
MIDTERM Exam 30%
FINAL Exam 30%

CLASS SCHEDULE
Jan 23 Introduction to the class
Jan 25 & 30 Early Civilization (Radin, Kramer, Barthes)
Feb 1 & 6 Human Nature (Mencius, Xun Zi, Mo Zi)
Feb 8 & 13 Social Class/Caste (Plato & Aristotle)
Feb 15 & 22 Authority & Sovereignty (Machiavelli & Hobbes)
Feb 27 & 29 Rights & Liberty (Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Thoreau) (1st Response Due)
Mar 5 & 7 French & US Revolutions (Paine, US Constitution)
Mar 12 & 14 Capitalism (Smith, Long) + Midterm Review
Mar 19 Midterm Review
Mar 21 MIDTERM EXAM (2nd Response Due)
Mar 26 & 28 Hegel, Opposition & Revolution (Marcuse, McLellan)
Apr 2 & 4 NO CLASSES - SPRING BREAK
Apr 9 & 11 Socialism (Engels, Marcuse)
Apr 16 & 18 Communism (Marx, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mao)
Apr 23 & 25 Anarchism (Mayer, Chomsky, Foucault)
Apr 30 & May 2 Fascism (Hitler, Heidegger, Sluga) (3rd Response Due)
May 7 & 9 Post-Colonialism (Fanon, Ayers/Dohrn, West, hooks)
May 14 & 16 Feminism (hooks, Humm, Butler)
May 21 Final Review
May 23 FINAL EXAM (4th Response Due)

This class is acceptable for credit at UC and CSU. It counts towards GE AA/AS area 3; CSU area C2; and IGETC area 3. It can be used as an elective for the Liberal Arts with an Emphasis in Arts and Humanities, Associate in Arts Degree Program and the Liberal Arts: Intersegmental General Education Transfer (IGETC) Certificate of Achievement and the Global Studies AA Degree.

Student Learning Outcomes
Information Competency: understand philosophical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: evaluate concepts and argue for and against viewpoints
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand diverse cultures of thought

General Student Requirements
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are discussed. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course. Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.

Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog.

A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S)
DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.

The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.

Ethics Syllabus Spring 2012

2012-01-04T15:33:00.001-08:00

HUMAN 30A: ETHICS Spring 2012
Instructor: Eric Gerlach
FRI 9:00 – 11:50 AM
Office Hours: Mon 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code 22946
Room: BCC 52
Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com

Course Description

This course introduces students to central concepts and issues of Ethics and systems of human values. We will first study concepts such as principle, virtue, balance, utility, drive, and perspective. We will then study issues such as theft, lies, violence, environment, class, gender and race from an individual and social perspective.

Required Texts

The text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be held on reserve in the BCC Library.

Required Assignments

Four In-class Responses 40%
Midterm Exam 30%
Final Exam 30%

Class Schedule

Jan 27 Introduction: What is Ethics?
Feb 3 Morals & Virtue: Kant’s Morals & Aristotle’s Ethics
Feb 10 Use & Consequence: Mill’s Utilitarianism
Feb 24 Balance: Egyptian Wisdom & Confucius’ Analects (1st Response Due)
Mar 2 Drive & Desire: Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil
Mar 9 Perspective: Heraclitus’ Fragments & Chuang Tzu
Mar 16 Midterm Exam (2nd Response Due)
Mar 23 Theft: Zinn’s US Empire & Andreas’ Addicted to War
Mar 30 Lies: Herman & Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent
Apr 13 Violence: Lt. Col. Grossman’s On Killing
Apr 20 Life & World: Carson’s Silent Spring & BCEP (3rd Response Due)
Apr 27 Class & Power: Karp’s Indispensable Enemies & essays from RC&G
May 4 Gender & Sex: De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
May 11 Race & Culture: Hannaford’s Race & more essays from RC&G
May 25 Final Exam (4th Response Due)

This class is acceptable for credit at UC and CSU. It counts towards GE AA/AS area 3; CSU area C2; and IGETC area 3. It can be used as an elective for the Liberal Arts with an Emphasis in Arts and Humanities, Associate in Arts Degree Program and the Liberal Arts: Intersegmental General Education Transfer (IGETC) Certificate of Achievement and the Global Studies AA Degree.

Student Learning Outcomes
Information Competency: understand philosophical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: evaluate concepts and argue for and against viewpoints
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand diverse cultures of thought

General Student Requirements
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are discussed. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course. Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.

Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog.

A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S)
DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.

The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.

Intro Philosophy Syllabus Spring 2012

2012-01-04T15:23:00.000-08:00

PHIL 1: Intro Philosophy
Instructor: Eric Gerlach
Thursdays 6:30 – 9:20 PM
Office Hours: Mondays 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code: 23128
Room: BCC 14
Email:ericgerlach@gmail.com
Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com

Course Description

This course introduces students to the history of philosophy and world thought. We will study ancient Egyptian, Indian, Greek, Chinese and modern European philosophers by focusing on their core influential ideas.

Required Texts

The only text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the BCC Library.

Required Assignments

- Four Response Essays 40%
- MIDTERM Exam 30%
- FINAL Exam 30%

CLASS SCHEDULE

Jan 26 Introduction, Tribal Shamanism & Ancient Cosmology
Feb 2 Early City State Priests & Egyptian Thought
Feb 9 Indian Thought
Feb 23 Greek Thought: Heraclitus (1st Response Due)
Mar 1 Greek Thought: Plato
Mar 8 Chinese Thought: Confucianism
Mar 15 Chinese Thought: Daoism + Midterm Review(2nd Response Due)
Mar 22 MIDTERM EXAM
Mar 29 Islamic & Medieval European Thought
Apr 12 Descartes & Hume
Apr 19 Kant & Hegel
Apr 26 Schopenhauer & Nietzsche (3rd Response Due)
May 3 Heidegger, Sartre & Foucault
May 10 Wittgenstein
May 17 Lewis Carroll, Humor & Art + Review (4th Response)
May 24 FINAL EXAM

This class is acceptable for credit at UC and CSU. It counts towards GE AA/AS area 3; CSU area C2; and IGETC area 3. It can be used as an elective for the Liberal Arts with an Emphasis in Arts and Humanities, Associate in Arts Degree Program and the Liberal Arts: Intersegmental General Education Transfer (IGETC) Certificate of Achievement and the Global Studies AA Degree.

Student Learning Outcomes
Information Competency: understand philosophical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: evaluate concepts and argue for and against viewpoints
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand diverse cultures of thought

General Student Requirements
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are discussed. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course. Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.

Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog.

A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S)
DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.

The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.

Asian Philosophy: Fourth Paper Topics

2011-12-11T13:48:00.001-08:00

You are welcome to write a two to three page typed double spaced paper on any topic you choose concerning Mozi, Hui Shi, Gongsun Long, the Daoists (Laozi, Zhuangzi & Liezi), and the strategists (Sunzi, Musashi & Tsunetomo). Possible topics include:

1) Mozi argues for universal love versus the Confucians such as Mencius who argue that love is naturally varied depending on familiarity. Are the two positions compatible? Is one more favorable than the other?

2) Hui Shi and Gongsun Long use paradoxes to show the complexity of human grammar and meaning. Are they successful? What do these paradoxes show us?

3) The Daoists use metaphors to show that "a sage's that has a this". Pick a metaphor from the three texts and show how it illustrates this and applies to life.

4) Much of the advice of the strategists fits together with teachings of Daoism. What does it mean that these teachings can be applied to war as well as peace of mind?

Intro Philosophy: Review for the Final Exam

2011-12-11T13:46:00.000-08:00

The Final Exam will cover the material from the second half of the course, including Islam, Europe, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault and Wittgenstein. You may use material from Lewis Carroll, Humor or Art for your essays, but they will not be on the test. The test will be multiple choice questions (2 points each), and four half page short answer questions explaining a key concept we covered, connecting it to other class material and outside examples (life experience, nonfiction or fiction all acceptable).

Islam: Rise of Islam, systems of scholarship, technology, cryptanalysis (pulling out the essential factors), Avicenna’s Floating Man thought experiment (and Descartes’ Demon)

Descartes: Deceiving demon, proof of self-consciousness, trustworthy world and rational facts (2 + 3 = 5), dualism of mind and body, animals as machines

Hume: 2 types of perceptions, impressions & ideas, 2nd always come from 1st, billiard balls and causation as an idea, prejudice, assumption, association, events consistent with belief

Hegel: Historical explanation & dialectic (positive, negative, synthesis as the next positive), three stages of history, master-slave dialectic, dogmatism vs. skepticism in the mind and in history, being & non-being as becoming

Nietzsche: German pessimism, turn from reason to will, Dionysian vs. Apollonian, opposites work together, truth with false, reason with emotion, truth as seduction, falsehood necessary to life and creation, language, grammar and logic as deceptive, creative individuality, stand between morality and nihilism, Zarathustra as first dualist and beyond dualism

Heidegger, Sartre & Foucault: Existentialism, (H) time as horizon of being/meaning, authenticity as accepting becoming, closed understanding and death, modernity & the ready-at-hand, (S) waiter in the cafe, criticism of racism, “Hell is other people”, authentic art & literature, (F) institutions & power/knowledge, privileged & marginalised terms, debate with Chomsky

Wittgenstein: Language games & forms of life, logic in the world, not within, against reduction to a single factor (psychoanalysis and the oven), material metaphors for the mental (toolbox, brake lever, train cabin, sign post), ‘one-thread’ is a chord of many, meanings as everyday use, child at the blackboard, game of catch in a field

Concepts for the half page short answers include:

Descartes’ deceiving Demon, Hume’s billiard table, Hegel’s dialectical stages, Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, Nietzsche’s individual stand, Nietzsche’s Dionysian vs. Apollonian, Nietzsche’s truth as seduction, Heidegger’s authenticity, Sartre’s cafe waiter, Sartre’s “Hell is other people, Foucault’s power/knowledge, Foucault’s debate with Chomsky, Wittgenstein’s oven, Wittgenstein’s child at the blackboard, Wittgenstein’s chord of many threads

Asian Philosophy: Review for the Final Exam

2011-12-08T20:12:00.000-08:00

Like the midterm, the final exam will have three types of questions testing your knowledge of the material from the readings and lectures. First, there will be multiple choice questions. Second, there will be fill-in-the-blank questions. Third, there will be short answer questions. For the short answer questions, you will be given a list of central concepts we have studied from which you must select four and write a comprehensive third to a half page explanation for each you select. You should demonstrate that you understand the meaning of the concept, that you can connect it to other material from the class, and that you can apply it to examples from your own experience or outside material (print or video, fictional or nonfictional).

Chinese Thought & The Hundred Schools Period

Hundred Schools same as Warring States, bad times good for thought, mandate of heaven and way of heaven as philosophical monism, ancient sage kings as examples, yin and yang composing all things, Yi Jing divination system, Legalism and Moism large but not supported by Han, Confucianism and Daoism supported by Han, also three Confucian and two Daoist texts

Confucius & the Analects

Zhou turns to Spring and Autumn period, apple in the vase as critical reflection, compassion as the thread running through the system, right act without right intent as the worst thing, meritocracy over aristocracy, speaking truth to power, the great or noble person, the six classics, golden rule, sharing the same strengths and faults as everyone, good is always at hand but nothing is perfect, reforming while preserving the old, criticism of Daoism and meditation rather than study

Mencius, Xunzi & Neo-Confucianism

Great Learning and small to largest level, Doctrine of the Mean and cautious balance, the noble archer who examines themselves and internal vs. external attribution, Mencius as second famous Confucian, human nature essentially good, support by Neo-Confucianism, mother’s three moves and environment, compassion is like water, child at the well, four seeds of the heart and four virtues, argument with Moists about natural levels of love, burial of elders as origin of culture and ritual, sister-in-law drowning and discretion, barley on various ground, Xunzi and human nature as evil and desire, city vs. country folk, children vs. adults, looking outward to society and nature, subduing desire to get the truly desirable, Neo-Confucianism merging with Buddhism and Daoism, the Cheng brothers and cosmic li, Hao’s School of Mind vs. Yi’s School of Law, Zhu Xi and studying classics as central, four books, Wang Yangming and unity of knowledge and action, bad smells and beautiful colors, study without practice as chasing ghosts and shadows

Mozi, Hui Shi & Gongsun Long

Mozi vs. Confucianism, three tests of belief ( source, evidence & practical), extreme utilitarianism in funerals and the arts, universal love, value of folk traditions and spirits, martial arts and logic for defense, warfare as crime, partiality as fighting fire with fire, natural trust of the impartial, Yang Chu’s social darwinism, Hui Shi’s ten paradoxes, greater and lesser similarity and difference, Gongsun Long’s white horse is not a horse

Daoism: Laozi, Zhuangzi & Liezi

Return to the natural, skepticism of one-sided conceptions and words, the Way as all and one, wu-wei and relative non-action, Laozi the old master, over-sharpening a sword, mind of a child, the wheel as solid and empty, knowing and conquering oneself, the old gnarled tree, Zhuangzi and story of Laozi and the mental crowd, perspective and minnows, a sage’s that has a this, three in the morning and the monkeys, butterfly dream, well frog, desire upsetting the archer, Liezi and accepting death, Yellow Emperor’s dream, taming the tiger, Yin of Chou’s slave’s dreams, Pang seeing white as black, old man moving the mountain, man misplacing the ax, Zhang Daoling and religious Daoism

Strategy: Sunzi, Musashi & the Hagakure

Sunzi’s Art of War and its wide influence, training the concubines, deception, intelligence and counter-intelligence, mental superior to physical and strategy superior to numbers, one mind with the people as most important, being like water, appearing to be the opposite, using the enemy’s stuff, spies and double agents, myth of Bushido, Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, being late as timing, being well-rounded, Tsunetomo’s Hagakure, self-mastery, making mistakes, learning from the rainstorm

Asian Philosophy: Strategy - Sunzi, Musashi & Tsunetomo

2011-12-08T18:57:00.000-08:00

Today we will be covering famous classics of Chinese and Japanese martial arts. The first is the Chinese Art of War of Sunzi. The second and third are the two most revered books of samurai self-discipline, Musashi’s Book of Five Rings and Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure.

Sunzi & The Art of War

Sunzi (Master Sun, ‘Sun Tzu’ in the old Wade-Giles), also known as Sun Wu, is the great ancient master of strategy and the philosophy of warfare. Based on the types of warfare described in his Art of War, he is thought to have lived during the late Spring and Autumn period or early Warring States period around 500 BCE, but his dates are unknown and his life made into legend. It is also possible that Sunzi’s descendant Sun Bin, himself a military strategist, may have been mixed together with the life and legend of Sunzi.

One story often told, which modern historians consider to be pure legend, goes that the King of Wu decided to test Sunzi before accepting him as general of his armies, asking him to train his concubines in military drill with spears to show his efficiency. Sunzi appointed the king’s two most favorite as officers, and gave the order to face right. The concubines all giggled. Sunzi told the king that the officers were at fault, and ordered them executed. The king protested, but Sunzi argued that this was the only way in war to ensure complete discipline. After that, the concubines learned with remarkable speed and skill.

During the Warring States/Hundred Philosophers period, The Art of War became the most widely read work on military strategy in the seven states who sought control of what is today Eastern China. The Qin considered the work critical in the ending of the Warring States period and the unification of China. As with the Confucian and Daoist classics, the book had reached its final form by the time of the Han dynasty. The Art of War covers not simply just maneuvers in war, but also methods of propaganda, deceit, and political control. Like Confucius’ four books and the later Neo-Confucian classics, it was required reading for obtaining a government position, particularly for a position in the military.

The Art of War has had a wide influence on warfare, both ancient and modern. Introduced in Japan in 760 CE, it was a favorite of shoguns and samurai long before the unification of Japan. Napoleon read and used the work, as did Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh. It is today required reading for US Military Intelligence and CIA officers.

Some of Sunzi’s central teachings are focused on gathering intelligence and practicing deceit (or counter-intelligence), knowing everything about the enemy but preventing the enemy from knowing anything about yourself. He argues that sheer numbers give no advantage, and it is far better to out-think than to out-fight. Ho Chi Minh’s use of the Art of War in repelling the far superior American soldiers and firepower during the Vietnam War brought the book into use by the US military and intelligence services. One tactic specifically used was staying close and inter-meshed with the enemy when the enemy has superior firepower. This works just as well against bows and crossbows as it does against cluster bombs and napalm, as the enemy can not fire on you without hitting their own troops as well.

In the first verses of the text, Sunzi says that the first rule of warfare, to be at one with the way of warfare, is for the leaders and people to be of one mind. This has two implications. First, keeping one’s own troops and civilians believing in the leaders is first and foremost, in times of peace and war through aid and propaganda. Second, in war one should work thought deceit, propaganda and any other means to disenchant the enemy troops and civilians. The psychological game is more important than the physical fight. You should not only know how to boost morale and engage in psychological warfare, you should learn to judge your enemy’s ability to boost morale and engage in psychological warfare, for if they are superior at the psychological game you will likely not withstand a physical fight.

One tactic Sunzi taught to win the psychological game was moving troops after every assault, commonly employed in guerrilla warfare such as that employed by the Southern Confederate army against the Northern Union army, as well as the Vietcong against the United States. For much of European history, this tactic was considered dishonorable and armies would march in plain sight toward each other, but today it is standard practice accross the world. The change was particularly motivated by the invention of the rifle during the American Civil War and the invention of the machine gun used in WWI. If the enemy launches a full assault against a specific area, it is often wise to let them advance, move, and then attack from the sides or from behind. This is similar to the idea behind Aikido, discussed with Daoism. If the enemy has superior strength or striking power, you move out of the way to keep them off balance.

Not only should you change position, but continuously change tactics as well. Unconventional tactics that continue to shift situation by situation may make for difficult planning, but they keep the enemy guessing. Sunzi says, “I never repeat the means whereby I achieve victory, but responsively adjust my positions continuously”. He employs the Daoist metaphor of being like water, saying that just as water produces currents according to the terrain it crosses, an army must respond fluidly to the enemy to be victorious.

Another psychological tactic that meshes well with Daoist teachings is to appear to be the opposite of what you are. If you are strong, appear weak. If you are far, appear near. If you are active, appear to be inactive. This will not only cause the enemy to put ineffective actions and strategies into play, but in the long run keep them guessing and always confused. Equally and oppositely, one should encourage the enemy to be as one-sided as possible. If the enemy is greedy, tempt them so they act on it and are drawn out. if the enemy is angry, provoke them to make them even angrier. If the enemy is strong, avoid them and allow them to wear themselves down through continuous advancement. In the Dao De Jing of Laozi, it says what one wants to defeat one should allow to grow strong.

Another teaching of Sunzi that fits well with the Daoist teaching of wu-wei (non-action) is that one should always attempt to win with the least amount of fighting possible, and the best way to win is to win without fighting at all. This boosts morale and spares wasting resources. If you are more efficient at this than your enemy, you can outlast their strength. While one should allow one’s enemy to grow strong to wear them down, one should wait for a moment of weakness to attack, and then gain the upper hand as quickly as possible so that strength and resources are not wasted. A prolonged war wears down your troops as well as the morale of the citizens. Long periods of warfare lead to poverty among the citizens and inflation for the economy, which can not long endure before rebellions divide one’s lands from within.

Sunzi says it is wise to eat the enemy’s food and use the enemy’s resources, and that one bushel of the enemy’s grain is equivalent to twenty of one’s own. One famous example from Chinese warfare is found in the Battle of Red Cliffs at the end of the Han Dynasty. Zhuge Liang told his superior that he could provide ten thousand arrows in three days, a task that seemed impossible. He used the three days to attach bundles of straw to a fleet of ships, and then he sailed these ships toward the enemy with a small armored crew. The enemy, believing the boasts to be full of troops, fired barrage after barrage of arrows at the boats, which were then recalled, along with the arrows stuck in the straw. These arrows were now used against the enemy themselves, who had far fewer arrows then they had before. Sunzi argued that using the enemy’s troops was also wise, enticing them to change sides and then treating them well. It is also wise to defeat the enemy without destroying them, keeping their armies, population and lands intact. This not only allows for more spoils, but breeds less resentment in the population one has conquered.

A big fan of using spies, as well as paying the enemy’s spies well to become double agents, Sunzi says that foreknowledge, knowing what will happen before it happens, cannot be learned from ghosts and spirits, but from spies, who are clearly worth their pay given what an army costs and the value of psychology over strength. Double agents, enemy spies discovered and then used to give false information back to the enemy who does not know the spies have been discovered and turned, should be paid the most, as they are the most valuable.

The Cultural Myth of Bushido

In the article (the last selection in your reader) Death and Bushido, Hurst argues that a modern mythology has grown since World War II in Japan, America and elsewhere about bushido, the supposedly suicidal samurai code. Nitobe Inazo (1862 - 1933), who was educated by Americans and had a very poor understanding of Japanese history and culture, wrote the international best-seller Bushido: The Soul of Japan in 1899 to introduce Americans to the culture he was actively abandoning. Nitobe believed that he was coining a new word, ‘bushido’, for the code of the medieval samurai. The word does appear in the Hagakure, but this is rare. Unfortunately, Nitobe was very inaccurate and overly romantic in emphasizing a culture of honor, death and suicide as distinctly Japanese.

The Hagakure of Yamamoto Tsunetomo, which we will turn to shortly, was held up by Nitobe as the samurai classic, the book that tells us “the way of the samurai is found in death”, and that samurai live to serve their master and commit suicide whenever this becomes impossible. Unfortunately for Nitobe, Tsunetomo was an eccentric who was describing his personal philosophy and teachings he hoped to pass on to his clan, not the common culture of feudal Japan. Courage in the face of death and loyalty are prized in warriors the world over, and they were values highly prized in Neo-Confucianism, but recklessly accepting death was not. Tsunetomo himself wished to commit suicide after the death of his lord but he was ordered not to by the Shogun. Retiring as a Buddhist priest, he then wrote the Hagakure. After the death of a lord, it was far more common for samurai to become ronin, wandering master-less samurai, until finding employment with another lord. Tsunetomo says becoming a ronin is despicable, and is a practice that has unfortunately become common in his own time unlike in the glorious past, but he is likely mistaken and projecting his own views.

There was no common Japanese code for samurai, and the cultural coherence they shared was a mixture of Neo-Confucianism and Zen Buddhism, along with an appreciation of Daoism. There were samurai who were devoted to Zen, both the Soto and Rinzai traditions, to Pure Land Buddhist traditions, as well as to orthodox Neo-Confucianism and the unorthodox Wang Yangming school, but there were none who were devoted to a tradition known as “Bushido”.

When Japanese Nationalism surged between WWI and WWII, when Japan was fighting wars with China and Russia, Nitobe’s book became popular with Nationalists who embraced bushido as a new religion. This reached its peak in WWII, when Japan was fighting America in the Pacific, sometimes using suicidal kamikaze pilots to take out battleships and aircraft carriers. This encouraged the belief in America that the Japanese are a culture obsessed with death and willing to commit suicide at the drop of a hat, views that fit nicely with a racist understanding that Asian culture, unlike Western culture, finds the individual entirely dispensable. This is found in James Clavell’s novel Shogun, where many samurai characters kill cruelly with little emotion and often see suicide as an honorable solution to political problems. In the documentary Hearts and Minds, a film about American propaganda during the Vietnam war, a general tells the television camera that in the Orient, life is cheap and not valued as in the West, which is why bombing villages of women and children is unfortunate but necessary in a battle against Asian people. There are similar things being said about Muslims by generals and pro-war pundits in America today. One news anchor said that suicide bombers show us that Muslims do not care about their children the way that Western people do, and so they are unfortunately put in war’s way and become casualties of bombing runs.

As Hurst points out, many of the most famous battles of feudal Japan were decided by a defection, of a major player switching allegiances. Just as Sunzi says, in war defectors, especially nobles and their houses, are highly prized, encouraged and rewarded. It appears that the medieval Japanese valued both loyalty and abandoning loyalty for personal gain, just like the rest of humanity. It is often forgotten that when particular values such as loyalty are highly praised it is precisely because their opposite vices are all too common.

Seppuku, Japanese ritual suicide, did exist but was uncommon. It was not a solution to political disgrace, but typically practiced as a way of avoiding enemy capture, torture and execution. Some samurai did practice junshi, committing suicide to follow their lord in death, but this was also rare. Seppuku was a punishment in the Tokugawa period, and samurai who had or were suspected of committed crimes were sometimes ordered to commit suicide, but this was hardly embraced by the samurai. Similarly, much has been made of kirisute gomen in Tokugawa times, the practice of testing a blade on a random peasant passing by as if samurai had this common privilege, but historians today find almost no credible instances of this practice.

Musashi’s Book of Five Rings

Miyamoto Musashi (1584 - 1645) is possibly the most famous samurai in Japanese and world history. He is famous for his dueling record (supposedly only losing once), his invention of a two sword fighting style, and as the author of his strategy guide The Book of Five Rings. A follower of Zen Buddhism, he practiced zazen sitting meditation for decades. His life was celebrated in the famous but somewhat fictional 1935 novel Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa. My father had a copy of this gigantic book (three inches thick) when I was growing up and he would tell me stories of Musashi’s duels. In WWII, the Japanese named one of their most powerful battleships the Musashi, and today there is a Playstation game by the same name.

Musashi’s two sword style was invented as he was fleeing a fortress and fighting off a crowd, as he was forced to draw his second sword to defend himself. Traditionally, the second sword would only be drawn if the first sword was lost.

Musashi was known to keep his opponents waiting and arrive late to make them upset and give them time to be unsettled by the thought of possible death. Duels were fought with a variety of weapons, but Musashi always chose the sword. Several of his duels were fought in front of the Shogun. Most duels would not be fought to the death but ended after the first blow was successfully struck, unless a duel to the death was agreed upon by both opponents.

Musashi’s most famous duel was with Sasaki Kojiro, known as the demon of the western provinces, on Funajima Island. There are conflicting stories about the duel, much which may be myth. Today there is a statue on the island commemorating the duel, as well as a statue of a boat at the place Musashi set sail for the island. According to the legend, Musashi agreed to duel Kojiro to the death, and the duel preoccupied him so much that he hopped in the boat without his swords. As he was rowed to the island, he carved a wooden sword out of a spare oar. He arrived late, as usual, infuriating the comrades of Kojiro. According to one account, Musashi stepped of the boat, wordlessly charged at Kojiro, struck him in the head with a single blow, killing him, then stepped back onto the boat and left with the turning tide to avoid Kojiro’s comrades. In the novel, Kojiro throws his sheath away into the surf as Musashi steps off the boat. Musashi says, “Kojiro, you’ve already lost”. Kojiro, perplexed, asks why. Musashi replies that Kojiro must not think he has any more use for his sword. Clearly, Kojiro meant to intimidate Musashi with his show of total disregard, but Musashi, playing the mental game as Sunzi recommends, turns this confidence into doubt to use his opponent’s show against him.

In his Book of Five Rings, Musashi says that a great warrior is a well rounded person who studies the arts and tea ceremony as well as a wide variety of martial arts. Musashi was himself a painter, and there are several of his works that remain today including his famous Kingfisher Perched in a Dead Tree. He argues that learning many things enriches and compliments each particular skill. There is the Buddha’s way of salvation, Confucius’ way of learning, and the many ways of the arts and the martial arts. Each individual practices the ways that they find pleasing.

Musashi writes that the way of the warrior is the way of both the pen and the sword, of studying strategy as well as physical fighting. The warrior uses the pen and sword to gain resolute acceptance of death, to be able to die for the cause. Anyone of any station in life can die for a cause, but it is the warrior’s profession. Musashi compares a master carpenter planning and building a house to a warrior who strategically plans and physically fights battles and duels.

The five rings, each a chapter of the work, are the five elements of Buddhist cosmology. Earth concerns strategy, like a map of the terrain. Water concerns spirit, to become fluid to react to the situation. Fire concerns fighting, having the courage and skill to win. Wind concerns the past traditions and schools of strategy, the things said by those of the past. Finally, Void, the fifth element that binds the others together as particular things, the highest element, is the eternal way of things, what one must become like to act naturally.

Musashi says that timing is critical to everything, and that all five books are chiefly concerned with timing. Learning and training allows one to gain the ability to win with the eye as well as the arm. This is interesting advice from a guy who purposefully arrives late. Opponents, like Kojiro’s comrades, would say Musashi is dishonorable and irresponsible, a poor teacher of timing, but Musashi would say that using lateness as a strategy, developing patience and using inaction (a good example of Daoist wu-wei) is mastery of timing.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure

In the Hagakure (In the Shadow of the Leaves) of Yamamoto Tsunetomo, there are many lessons to be learned. Like Musashi, he repeatedly references Confucius and the Buddha. Unlike Musashi, Tsunetomo repeatedly argues that a warrior should not be an artist or waste time rounding themselves out, but rather focus on virtue and martial arts. Virtue includes not only courage, but also compassion for all people and being in harmony with the way of all things.

In the opening passages, Tsunetomo writes, “The Way of the samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance. To say that dying without reaching one’s aim is to die a dog’s death is the frivolous way of the sophisticated. When pressed with the choice of life or death, it is not necessary to gain one’s aim...To die without gaining one’s aim IS a dog’s death and fanaticism, but there is no shame in this. This is the substance of the way of the samurai.”

Tsunetomo argues that a warrior should devote himself to his lord and lose all self-interest. This seems unobtainable, but it is “right before your eyes” and anyone can become excellent the very moment it is completely accepted. He claims that with only two or three such devoted, an entire state can be protected.

He says that it is bad to yawn in front of others, and to stop oneself from yawning one should rub one’s forehead upwards or lick one’s lips while keeping one’s mouth closed.

In an interesting passage, he says that fish will not live in water that is too clear and prefer to hide under duckweed. In the same way, the population will “live in tranquility if certain matters are a bit overlooked or left unheard”.

He quotes Master Yagyu, saying, “I do not know the way to defeat others, but the way to defeat myself”. In an almost direct quote from Laozi’s Dao De Jing, he says that matters of great concern should be taken lightly, and matters of little concern should be treated seriously. If one takes small things seriously, then everything will be in order when disaster strikes and one will be at peace and have the patience and skill one needs.

He argues that one should not promote those who have not committed mistakes, but promote those who have made and corrected their mistakes. Those who have never made mistakes are dangerous, while those who have corrected their mistakes show repentance and have gained valuable experience.

Tsunetomo says there is something to be learned in a rainstorm that applies to everything in life. If a person doesn’t want to get wet, they hurry and try to walk under shelter but get soaked anyway. The person who knows and accepts they are going to get soaked gets just as wet, but walks without fear and concern. Accepting the inevitability of mistakes, pain and betrayal frees the mind to see the immediate. This is a wonderful mix of Buddhist tranquility and Daoist non-action.

He argues that when something strange happens, it is ridiculous to say that it is a mystery or an omen of something to come. All things, including solar eclipses, are simply the natural activities of Yin and Yang, so an eclipse happening every one hundred years is no more mysterious or ominous than the sun rising and setting every day. A sunrise would seem strange and mysterious if it happened only every hundred years. Mystery is created in the mind.

He argues that calculating people are contemptible, and all decisions should be made within the space of seven breaths. In the most trivial matters one’s heart can be clearly seen, and the way to handle anything is found in the smallest of things.

Logic: Review for the Final Exam

2011-12-07T14:23:00.000-08:00

The final exam will cover the material we studied for the second half of the course (Islam, Hegel, Modern Logic, Early and Late Wittgenstein, truth tables and fallacies). Just like the midterm exam, There will be multiple choice questions taken from the lectures and 18 short answer questions (5 points each) largely taken from the weekly assignments (primarily the truth tables and fallacies).

Islam
Islam as a civilization gave European civilization very much (Math, Logic, trade, technologies) but this is quite under-appreciated. Cryptography, algebraic code-breaking, is a key culture related to scientific analysis. Avicenna says that universals are mental conceptions, while Averroes says that universals are the true essences of things.

Hegel
Hegel’s major advancement was historical explanation, explaining the structures of things as arising by process over time. Hegel’s dialectic is a three stage process as positive, negative and synthesis. First, when the individual or history has an idea, there is an initial stage of positing that stands for the idea and completely opposes skepticism. Second, there is the stage of negation, skepticism and doubting the idea that is completely opposed to the first stage. Third and finally, there is a synthesis between the two positions that becomes the positive for the next cycle. In Hegel’s Logic, he attempts to trace the entire path of consciousness up through modernity.

Russell & Mill
Like Gautama (Nyaya Sutra), Aristotle and Averroes, Russell says we must use induction to come up with necessary and basic principles from which we can then deduce certain knowledge. Otherwise, we only have mere opinion. With Frege, Russell believed that there was a inner truth structure hidden within grammatical propositions and mathematics that could be brought out by analysis. Russell at first believed Wittgenstein would complete this project for him and give mathematics a fully clarified foundation, but Wittgenstein eventually abandoned the project to become quite like Mill. Mill, the one to whom Russell was most opposed, believed that the meaning of a thing is its use or positioning in situations. A thing does not have an essence besides its use in its situation. Wittgenstein came to embrace this view in his later thought.

Early Wittgenstein & the Tractatus
Reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world, thus these facts. These facts must be composed of several tautological structures (p, not, and, or) that in themselves say nothing at all. If a statement is meaningful, it must be possible and contingent, but neither certain nor impossible. Wittgenstein introduced Truth Tables in his Tractatus.

Late Wittgenstein & the Philosophical Investigations
In his later thought, Wittgenstein believed that the meaning of a thing consisted in its use in language games or forms of life. He used many thought experiments to demonstrate that meaning is not contained in mental states or in rules of the world exclusively, but rather in the use of the things (involving both the head and the world inseparably). His metaphors include converting someone to ash in an oven, names as signposts and labels, the game of catch that arises between people in a field, rules as controls in a train cabin, and the child at the blackboard. Wittgenstein argued that we should give complex descriptions of things and resist the urge to explain things in terms of a single factor or set of rules.

Truth Tables & Tautologies
For Truth Tables, we assume BOTH the principle of Non Contradiction (p cannot be both true and false), and the principle of the Excluded Middle (p must be either True or False).
If p is true, then it has T as its truth value. If it is false, it has F as its truth value. We first used truth tables to determine the truth values for propositions. We next used truth tables to prove tautologies, equivalent statements that can then be used in substitution for one another. You know you have proved a tautology right when you have all T’s as the result. In addition, you will be asked to prove that certain functions are NOT tautologies, which simply means you should NOT get 4 T’s as the result.

Fallacies
You should understand and be able to give examples of appeals to emotion (including appeals to authority, force, pity, and ignorance), straw men, slippery slopes, red herrings, personal attacks, and the fallacies of composition and division.

Logic: Nonsense, Humor & Art

2011-12-07T14:01:00.001-08:00

LEWIS CARROLL & THE ALICE BOOKS

Born 1832, Lewis Carroll taught mathematics and logic at Christ Church College at Oxford from college there (1851) to his death (1898). He wrote the Alice books for Alice and her sisters as well as other children who he enjoyed playing with and having conversations. He liked to try to teach kids, especially girls, math and chess. He hated children growing up, because they stopped being innocent and started being deceitful and hypocritical like the adults they imitated.

He was especially fond of children, particularly little girls (which doesn’t come out right no matter how you say it). This became an issue in the 1930s, where in America in anti-pornography by mail conservative moral craze he was labeled a pedophile. Freudian readings of the texts had flourished by this time, and Carroll did not help himself with his photography of children or his relationship to the real Alice, Alice Liddell (the daughter of the dean of Christ Church College). It is thought today by scholars that the family broke contact because Carroll asked for Alice’s hand but he was not noble enough.

Many have tried to crack his books for their symbolism, trying to find the essential meaning underneath. Some have said that his books are merely political commentary, some say it is making fun of the history of mathematics and logic. Others say that there is no meaning at all, but it is simply nonsense. There are things there that are still hiding, and today we look for logic and its puzzles in his nonsensical humor, but listening to late Wittgenstein we likely will not find some particular rule or essential symbolism underneath that solves the text.

There are repeated themes of nonsense, dream, and parody in the Alice books. Carroll took Logic, Nursery Rhymes, Lessons, Hierarchies and he warped and reversed them in conversations between Alice and her dream companions with hilarious consequences. Alice is constantly reciting her rhymes she is taught, hands folded, but strange tales come out. This is paralleled by having ideals and rules but living in the all too human world. It mocks the way that we are hypocritical and irrational while following rules, standards and ideals while we are in conversation and games of life with others.

Carroll was fascinated by reversals, playing music boxes backwards to hear “music standing on its head”. Scholars have noted that he was fascinated not by what worked but the puzzle cases, the problems and mysteries. The best political example: Carroll fascinated by elite kids speaking to servants as kids. An example from Looking Glass: Tweedledee tells Alice she is just a dream character, then stop crying as those tears aren’t real…but then he is a dream and his being upset with her is not real either. Alice in beginning of LG says that she could only tell if lg world has a fire if there is smoke, but it could be deceptive set up. If we are kind to someone else who we get something from, we see it as genuine, but if that person is nice to us before getting something we could see it as a smoke screen, as not genuine but deception. Is this real or not? Likely it is both mixed together, seen from two different and opposite perspectives.

In many ways, the imagination is the same as yet opposite to reality. For example, consider the horse, unicorn example we had with Avicenna, marking the turn to modern thought considering mental objects and consciousness. The being of a unicorn is the same as the being of a real horse in the sense that each is one thing, really so. However, one can always have a unicorn whenever one wants. One starts thinking, an activity, and there is a unicorn, whereas if there is not a horse you have to go find one so you can passively just have it whether you are thinking about it or not. (Consider the red queen, who Alice has to approach going backward and running as fast as they can just to stay in place). Mental objects are ideal, just what they are, while real objects are always imperfect and temporary. Remember that in ancient world cosmology, the real world is often the fake and temporary world compared to the hidden world, and in modern science and logic the things themselves are imperfect compared to the rules and patterns of behavior.

There are many quotes from the books on logic that Lewis Carroll wrote that support a cynical view of logic, philosophy and science as little more than a dream, a dream which makes life itself less than the ideal:

Studying Logic, “will give you clearness of thought – the ability to see your way through a puzzle – the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form – and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments which you will so continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art”. (p xvii)

“And so you think, do you, that the chief use of Logic in real life is to deduce Conclusions from workable Premises, and to satisfy yourself that the Conclusions deduced by other people are correct? I only wish it were! Society would be much less liable to panics and other delusions and political life especially would be a totally different thing, if even a majority of the arguments that are scattered broadcast over the world were correct! But it is all the other way , I fear. For one workable pair of premises (I mean a pair that lead to a logical conclusion) that you meet with in reading your newspaper or magazine, you will probably find five that lead to no Conclusion at all; and, even when the Premises are workable, for one instance, where the writer draws a correct conclusion, there are probably ten where he draws an incorrect one.” (p 32)

“The Logicians…speak of the Copula of a Proposition ‘with bated breath’, almost as if it were a living, conscious entity, capable of declaring for itself what it chose to mean, and that we, poor human creatures, had nothing to do but to ascertain what was its sovereign will and pleasure, and submit to it…If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, ‘Let it be understood that by the word ‘black’ I shall always mean ‘white’ and that by the word ‘white’ I shall always mean ‘black’, I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I may think it.” (p 165-166)

“You will find these seven words – proposition, attribute, term, subject, predicate, particular, universal – charmingly useful, if any friend should happen to ask if you have ever studied Logic. Mind you bring all seven words into your answer, and your friend will go away deeply impressed – ‘a sadder and a wiser man’.”

If you go through the answers to his syllogism puzzles, you find strange final answers:
“No riddles that interest me can be solved”…“No lobsters are unreasonable”…”No Act of Parliament is amusing”…”Some caterpillars are not eloquent”…”Generals do not write poetry”…”Some savage animals do not drink coffee”…and, the only genuine drug reference I have found in spite of the 60s and 70s counter-cultural claims, “Opium eaters do not wear white kid gloves”.

Sylvie and Bruno Limerick (note the many types of non-being)

He thought he saw a rattlesnake that spoke to him in Greek.
He looked again and found it was the middle of next week.
What a pity it is, he sighed and said, that it can hardly speak.

THE ALICE BOOKS

Alice travels to wonderland and through the looking glass by dreaming. In both places she encounters characters that are trapped in their own perspectives/reasoning such that they are nonsensical to Alice and Alice is nonsensical to them. The Cheshire cat explains this with his comparison of cats and dogs. We have to focus on particular parts due to time, but we will go in order that they appear in the two books.

Alice in Wonderland

This was first called Alice’s Adventures Underground, but Carroll changed the title. In this book Alice falls into a dream and believes she is going underground. In the second book she falls into a dream and thinks she is going through the mirror. Both these are metaphors for going into the mind, logical reasoning and imagination together as thought.
Alice is thinking about whether or not to make a daisy chain when she (unknown to her or the reader until the end) falls asleep. She then sees the white rabbit, fascinating because he is both animal and human, like the human being as both animal body and human mind with reason, imagination, and memory. She follows the white rabbit until she falls down the rabbit hole, just like she followed her thought until she fell asleep and into a dream world.

Alice passes all sorts of empty shelves with jars and labels, passing pictures and maps on the walls. All of these things are containers and images, the abstractions of reason and memory but not real things that they hold and represent. Alice thinks that she will fall through the earth and meet people called Antipathies who walk on their hands upside-down. Notice the reversal of the real by reason and imagination.

She falls into an underground place that becomes a formal banquet hall. Here we have the small door to the garden, and the golden key on the glass table. This is somewhat like the square of opposition, the relationship between universal and particular. When Alice is big, she can reach the key on the table. When we are in the mind universalizing things and saying ‘All xs are ys’ we have the key to judging things and thinking about them in the abstract, but when we are faced with the particular things of the real world, and we only have x is some y and some not y, we no longer can reach the golden key on the slippery glass table (like Early Witt’s truth tables and Later criticism of these as slippery ice). When we think about someone or ourselves, it is easy to say totally bad or good, but when we are faced with the person or being ourselves it is hard to have total ‘All or None’ judgments . Alice will get to this garden later, but she will find it is filled with the Queen who keeps screaming for executions and a bunch of animals being used in a court game of croquet.

Throughout this, Alice is questioning whether or not she is Mabel because she no longer knows the things she does. This is the classic paradox of identity that philosophers today in American Analytics argue about. Remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment and Descartes’ deceiving demon thought experiment. Both said that all the qualities and limbs can be denied, but self-consciousness, the oneness of the presence of the self and whole, can’t be denied. While we think it is absurd that Alice could suspect she is Mabel now, soon after this she is called ‘Mary Ann’ by the white Rabbit, who thinks that she is her servant (Mary Ann was a common name for maids in Victorian England), and Alice responds as if she is Mary Ann. When she enters the house on the white rabbit’s orders, she is worried that she will meet the real Mary Ann. So maybe she was not so crazy in wondering if she was Mabel.

When she encounters the Pigeon, the Pigeon says that if Alice has a long neck, and has eaten eggs, then she must be a serpent and therefore a threat to the eggs in her nest. Alice replies, ‘I am not a serpent, I am a little girl’ (sic) to which the Pigeon replies that if little girls eat eggs like serpents, then they must be some kind of serpent. Notice that the Pigeon is using syllogistic, deductive reasoning here. The problem is that the world is complex and simple rules like ‘if it eats eggs (x) then it is a serpent (y)’ both make sense to the pigeon, and we can understand how and follow the reasoning, but at the same time are nonsense and simply wrong to Alice and the reader.

Meeting the Duchess in her house, Alice is horrified to see the baby she is holding crying and sneezing while the Duchess calls it ‘pig’ and beats it. Then Alice takes the baby and flees with it outside, where it transforms into a pig and Alice says ‘if you are going to turn into a pig, I will have nothing more to do with you’, sets it down and it runs off into the woods.

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Alice at the Mad Tea Party and Wittgenstein’s Later Thought

There is an interesting bridge between Carroll and Wittgenstein in the figure of Bertrand Russell, a bridge which serves as a perfect illustration for our analysis of the Mad Tea Party. Carroll, Russell and Wittgenstein were all logicians who did their teaching and publishing in England. Russell met Wittgenstein in 1911, and for a while believed that Wittgenstein would be his successor. Wittgenstein however came to disprove of Russell’s theory of types in moving to his later views. Russell’s close circle of Trinity college at Cambridge was in fact dubbed “the Mad Tea Party of Trinity” in fun by many contemporaries. In his autobiography, Norbert Wiener wrote that it was impossible to describe Russell’s likeness except by identifying him with the classic illustration of the Mad Hatter by Tenniel. Wiener also pointed out G.E. Moore’s likeness to the March Hare and J.M.E. Taggart’s likeness to the Dormouse. Thus, many in Russell’s heyday thought his trio resembled Carroll’s Mad Tea Party in more ways than one.

Russell famously stated: “Mathematics is that science in which we do not know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true”. There is no better statement to illustrate the Hatter’s confusion of particular case with abstract form. The number three can designate three mountains, zebras, or logicians, but it does not refer in itself to any particular situation of three things. Wittgenstein, in rebelling against Russell and abstract analysis, in advocating analysis of particular use in situations, indeed came to take a position similar to that of Alice with respect to the Hatter in our dialogue. The Hatter’s argument does seem at first to make logical sense, but a close look at the uses of the character’s expressions reveals a confusion that lurks between abstraction and the events of the Mad Tea Party.

Among scholars there is consensus that Wittgenstein had a great appreciation of Carroll, but there is a debate as to how much Wittgenstein’s philosophy was indebted to Carroll’s nonsense play. Carroll’s name appears in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Discussing the difficulty of comprehending reversed writing, Wittgenstein notes: “Compare a remark of Lewis Carroll’s” (II xi). Unfortunately there is no citation to locate this remark in Carroll’s work, but it seems clearly related to the reverse writing of Jabberwocky. Leila S. May states “we know Alice in Wonderland was one of (Wittgenstein’s) favorite books in English”. Warren Shibles includes a philosophical analysis of Alice in Wonderland in his collection of essays, Wittgenstein, Language and Philosophy (1969). In Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll, George Pitcher argues that Wittgenstein and Carroll investigate nonsensical situations to use nonsense as a vaccine against itself, as an exercise for the strengthening of reason and the development of insight. In his essay Pitcher sets out to show the “remarkable extent and depth of the affinity between these two great writers with respect to nonsense”, adding:

I shall try to show that the very same confusions with which Wittgenstein charges philosophers were deliberately employed by Carroll for comic effect. Second, I want to show that some quite specific philosophical doctrines that the later Wittgenstein attacks are ridiculed also by Carroll.

Pitcher presents several points of contact between Carroll and Wittgenstein: Both authors are preoccupied with the phenomena of games and rules (for example, both make use of chess and chess pieces). Both make use of utterances that “sound like English” but do not have a use and thus do not make sense. Both discuss giving gifts to one’s own limbs as a type of absurdity. Both repeatedly demonstrate that definitions and rules can be variously interpreted. Both play with the boundary between quality and identity. Both show the incomprehensibility of private language and definitions. Both pose alternate situations, imaginary worlds, that are bound by different rules than our own to show the particular difficulties we have in using language.

Now a forgotten psychiatric practice, mock tea parties were used to teach rules and manners to inmates of insane asylums in Victorian England. In Alice and Wonderland, Carroll uses a ‘mad tea party’ to make fun of the way we learn and follow rules of behavior and language. When Alice arrives at the Mad Tea Party of Wonderland, she decides to join the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse even though she is explicitly not invited. In response to Alice’s intrusion, the Hatter and Hare become combative. When Alice responds in turn by calling the Hatter rude, he presents Alice with a riddle, a riddle which we later learn has no answer: Why is a raven like a writing desk? The passage we analyze begins here, with Alice considering the Hatter’s riddle.

“…I believe I can guess that,” (Alice) added aloud.
“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.
“Exactly so,” said Alice.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied, “at least – at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing to you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.

This dialogue is short, but it is quite complex. Let us divide it into its seven stages, and then show how one stage leads to another. Each stage signifies a character’s turn in the dialogue, a move they make in the game of the Tea Party. The dialogue consists of an initial assertion, followed by several plays of substitution.

Alice guesses that she can guess “that”. Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to the riddle itself but to the answer to the riddle. We learn later that this answer does not exist, so Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to any actual thing. Wittgenstein notes that we can look for someone who is not there but we cannot hang him when he is not there (§462). Alice’s ‘that’ is used correctly, even if it is a signifier that does not specify an existent object.

Substituting his own expression for Alice’s, The March Hare makes three verbal substitutions. He substitutes ‘think’ for ‘believe’, ‘find out’ for ‘guess’, and ‘the answer to the riddle’ for ‘that’. The March Hare does not say exactly what Alice said, but the only significant difference is exchanging Alice’s ‘that’ for the object it designates. Based on this change, the March Hare acts as if Alice has misspoken and he is offering a correction, a more detailed expression. Alice takes the March Hare’s substitution as an equivalence, such that Alice meant something by her expression and the March Hare meant the same thing, grasping her meaning and also expressing it, thus putting two expressions to work for the same meaning. Violating Alice’s perception, the March Hare replies to Alice as if she has accepted a correction to her expression, not an equivalent substitution.

This reveals something interesting about a bifurcation in our use of ‘you mean’ in conversation with others. We use the expression ‘you mean’ together with a substitution in both a positive and negative way: positively as equivalences, negatively as corrections. We say ‘you mean x’ to translate other’s thoughts into our own words, seeking their approval in doing so (as Alice takes the March Hare to be doing by substituting his own expression for hers), but we also say ‘you mean x’ to correct the expressions of others, attempting to express what we believe they mean but they have failed to express (as the March Hare takes his substitution for Alice’s expression). Wittgenstein speaks of a fuzzy picture, and how often a fuzzy picture is just what we mean by our expression. Alice’s ‘that’ was correct even if it was fuzzy. This view supports Alice’s side, that Alice did not misspeak and the March Hare did not correct Alice’s ‘that’.

It is important to note for what follows that the March Hare has brought the word ‘should’ into the conversation. In replacing Alice’s ‘that’ with ‘the answer’ he is still discussing the particular expression of Alice, but in moralizing he is abstracting meaning from the situation and presenting Alice with a normative substitute for what he perceives as her behavior in this particular instance. The March Hare is subtly leading away from the situation towards generalization.

Now Alice becomes the one making a substitution for the March Hare’s speech. Alice insists that, ‘at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know’. What does Alice mean by ‘same’ here? How does Alice use the word ‘same’ in this instance? When Alice agrees that she ‘means what she says’ and also asserts that she ‘says what she means’, she is not moralizing or providing us with a general rule that applies to all of her expressions. She is not indicating that she always means what she says or says what she means, but rather that she meant what she said and said what she meant in the particular instance when she said “I believe that I can guess that”. Because Alice is only discussing one instance, and because in this instance Alice meant and expressed one thing, the two propositions ‘I meant the thing I said’ and ‘I said the thing I meant’ can have the same use in this case. Thus Alice substitutes one for the other, and pronounces the two to be ‘the same’. Wittgenstein writes:

The use of the word “rule” and the use of the word “same” are interwoven. (As are the use of “proposition” and the use of “true”. (§225)

If we agree with Wittgenstein that the March Hare did not significantly correct Alice, we can agree with Alice that the coincidence of meaning and saying are mutually supportive when she equates the two expressions.

These two expressions do not always coincide. There are cases which we call misspeaking, when one fails to say what one means. There are also cases which we call lying, when one fails to mean what one says. Typically, but not always, it is up to others to tell when we misspeak, and up to us to tell when we are lying. Alice’s substitution is aimed at deferring to the March Hare his typically right as a listener to correct Alice when she does not say what she means, but she insists that “at least, I mean what I say”, which is her typical right as a speaker to confirm.

The Mad Hatter disagrees with Alice, but he does not do several things. He does not argue against Alice having meant what she said, does not argue against Alice having said what she meant like the Hare, nor does the Hatter argue against the idea that ‘meaning what one says’ and ‘saying what one means’ can be ‘the same thing’ in Alice’s case or in any case. What does the Hatter attack? The Mad Hatter attacks the general form of Alice’s expression. He is arguing that ‘If x then y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘If y then x’. He does this by offering a counter example to this general form: ‘I see what I eat’ is not the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’. This is generally true, but we can construct cases in which the set of things one eats is exactly the set of things one sees and vice versa.

Alice started towards generality and abstraction with her guess that she could guess, and the Hare lead the dialogue in this direction with his moralizing about what Alice should do based on her particular case. Thus when Alice defends herself in her particular case she is already speaking in terms that have been generalized by the Hare. The Hatter slips in at this point with a valid formal argument that is not in fact talking about Alice’s particular case. Because our expressions refer to both generalities and particularities with the same terms, it is easy to miss the Hatter’s confusion of the subject.

The Hatter gives us an excellent and subtle example of confusing the subject of conversation by generalizing with abstractions. He does not realize that he has failed to argue against the possibility of Alice’s case, but is rather arguing that many things do not share the relationship that meaning and saying do when we express ourselves adequately.

Regardless of this confusion, The March Hare backs the Hatter’s attack and produces another counter example: ‘I like what I get’ is not (in most cases) the same as ‘I get what I like’. The Hare does for the Hatter what he refused to do for Alice: he substitutes his expression as an equivalent expression. The Dormouse, following the Hatter and Hare adds a further counter example of the same general form: ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is not the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’. The three of them are in agreement against the universal validity of the general form of Alice’s substitution. The three argue by presenting cases where ‘I x what I y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘I y what I x’.

If we wanted to attack Alice’s substitution, we would have to show that ‘I mean what I say’ and ‘I say what I mean’ have different uses and are thus not the same. The Hatter does not attempt to do this, and neither he nor his two cohorts use examples that include either meaning or saying. Instead, they provide disparate examples that show there are many cases when ‘I x what I y’ is not the same as ‘I y what I x’. The Mad Tea Party trio seems to be performing a formal analysis of Alice’s expression, but they are in fact confusing an abstracted form for the situation of the case present at hand. We can ourselves witness this sort of confusion in everyday arguments.

The Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse all form a chord of replies (a very small school of thought) that is in agreement amongst its members in disagreement with Alice, but the Hatter violates this accord. He disrupts the agreement of the series by turning on the Dormouse. The Hatter here reverses his position against Alice, arguing that since the Dormouse sleeps all the time, ‘sleeping when breathing’ and ‘breathing when sleeping’ are ‘the same thing’ in its case. Thus the Hatter has provided a particular case where ‘I x what I y’ and ‘I y what I x’ have the same use and he uses the word ‘same’ the way that Alice does. The Hatter not only has failed to lock Alice in the room, but he himself walks right out the door he unknowingly left open as if he knew it was open all the while.

The dialogue presents us with both a convergence of meaning and saying (Alice’s defense) and a contradiction of meaning and saying (the Hatter’s attack of Alice and then the Dormouse). This mirrors the divergence of supplementation and correction found earlier. In argument, one says things that both agree and disagree with one’s opponent. In the course of an argument, one can find oneself getting into contradictions the farther one gets from particular cases, but one can only examine particular cases by drawing similarities across groups of cases by generalizing. The Hatter is unknowingly demonstrating to Alice that while she may be correct that meaning and saying converge in her expression, meaning and saying can also diverge to the point of contradiction through the course of an argument.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Alice leaves the Tea Party and finds a door in a tree that leads to the garden she wanted to get to from the banquet hall she fell into through the rabbit hole, but now she finds that the garden is inhabited by the angry and vengeful Queen of Hearts playing a game of croquet with animals (flamingos and groundhogs) as the game pieces (like Looking Glass game of chess involving characters, Witt and life as games).

Cheshire cat shows up, causes a commotion. King and executioner get into an argument about whether the head of the Cheshire cat can be beheaded. This parallels the ‘grin without the cat’ earlier (Math and Logic as head/mind without body, effect without substance). The executioner argues that the cat can’t be beheaded without a body to separate from the head, and the king argues that anything with a head can be beheaded.

The Duchess is now nice to Alice, angry in her own house the way Queen is angry in her garden. This is like the pig switch earlier. Alice is delighted, and decides that pepper made the Duchess angry. She begins to devise (too) simple rules for causes of emotions (Witt and oven vs. simple essences and causes), ex: sugar makes people sweet. The Duchess now approaches Alice and begins coming up with an absurd moral for everything Alice says, which annoys Alice (notice that the Duchess is showing Alice her own absurdity).

Now, Alice attends the trial where the King is prosecuting the Jack for eating tarts (notice rhyme setting up the scene). Alice begins to grow into a giant at the trial, which no one notices until she is called as a witness which is her final act in the dream of Wonderland. Alice accidentally knocks over the jury box, and puts a lizard back upside down, reasoning that a lizard is just as good a juror either way up (this is similar to some/some not vs. All or None). Alice tells the king she knows nothing about the case, and the king says this is very important to the jury. Alice says it is not important at all, and the king goes ‘important, unimportant’, like he is trying to decide which sounds best. Some of the jury write down important, some unimportant. Giant Alice finds all of this absurd. She declares that the evidence is meaningless, the jurors write down that she thinks this as if it is thus true, and she ‘pack of cards’ destroys trial and dream.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Through the Looking Glass

In the beginning, Alice is playing with her cat and cat’s kittens, blaming the black kitten for trying to take milk from the white kitten. Alice says she should put the kitten out in the snow as a punishment for its mischief, then forgets this as she thinks of how horrible her punishment for all of her mischief would be. Later, we find the black kitten is the Red Queen, who takes on Alice’s vindictive and judgmental side while the White Queen takes on her forgetful and forgiving side. Alice is a pawn, making her way across the chessboard to be queen, and at the ending banquet the two queens still are confusing her but they are sitting at her sides.

Alice passes through the mirror and into the Looking Glass world (again, like rabbit hole, falling into a dream). She finds herself in a garden with flowers that interpret her to be a flower (like pigeon thinking she must be a serpent or duck saying ‘it’ is most often a rock or a worm). They tell her about the Red Queen, who they also assume to be a flower, one very much like Alice. The Red Queen now meets Alice, who says she has lost her way, to which the Red Queen replies ‘all these ways are mine’ (like Humpty Dumpty thinking he can mean what he wants regardless of what others think AND tell Alice what she should mean).

Alice points to a hill, and the Red Queen says, ‘I could show you hills compared to which that is a valley’. Alice replies that a hill can’t be a valley, no matter how small, for this is nonsense. The queen replies, ‘I have heard nonsense compared to which that is as sensible as a dictionary’.

The Red Queen tells Alice she is a pawn in a chess game being played all over the world. To get going, they both run, but end up not moving. The queen remarks, “Here, we have to run as fast as we can just to stay in place”.

Much later, Alice meets the White Queen, who lives and remembers backwards and finds this best (mind vs. world). She tells Alice she is 101, and Alice replies that she can’t believe that. The White Queen says close your eyes and try very hard. Alice says this won’t work, as one can’t believe impossible things. The queen replies, ‘You need practice…when I was your age, I sometimes believed 6 impossible things before breakfast’ (Logic as imaginary abstraction, thus impossible ideals). The White Queen turns into a sheep knitting with seven pairs of needles (sheep is woolly, knitting wool). They are now in a shop, and Alice is told to take something. She tries, but reaching for things they seem to slide out of reach and up into the ceiling (abstractions again). Then they are suddenly in a boat, and Alice is reaching for the prettiest rushes but they are always out of reach, the one’s she can get wilting in her hands.

Humpty Dumpty – Read pg 168-169, ‘knockdown’ (straw man), who is master of meaning? Many have noted that Humpty Dumpty is the perfect illustration of Wittgenstein’s argument for the impossibility of a private language. Meaning is not simply what the individual wants it to be. Humpty Dumpty gives himself the right to mean whatever he wants, but he is critical of Alice and gives himself the right to tell her what she should have meant. There are two privileged positions in communication: sender and receiver. Which one has the true right to say what something meant? The answer seems to be that both have overlapping rights that can eclipse each other.

Alice meets the White Knight, who has stuff from the whole book on his horse. He falls off on either side of his horse like human judgement falling to one side or the other on an issue. He invents things when he is upside down, saying the blood rushes to his head and helps him to think. His song, “A Sittin’ on a Gate”, refers to a suspension of judgement and logic, being undecided with one’s feet in both worlds.

HUMOR AND MODERN ART

Philosophy can and is used for creativity, using the doubts and insights to create, playing with the boundaries and tensions of the most important things. Humor and Art are two ways of using one’s insights from Philosophy to do this. Humor and art are of course ancient, but modern art and humor are very advanced. Last time, we saw Lewis Carroll was reacting against society and Victorian strict discipline of children, showing the contradictions of authority and the assumptions we make in reasoning that are dependent upon our position in the situation.

HUMOR AS SKEPTICISM

Two early American masters of humor are Ambrose Bierce and Groucho Marx, both of whom were reacting to the horror and absurdity of the times (Bierce to the Civil War, and the Marx Brothers to WWI).

Ambrose Bierce: (1842-1914?) His Devil’s Dictionary was an early rebellious attack on society.
A San Franciscan (since 1866), he wrote bitterly about the Civil War and the corruption on both sides (Union and Confederacy) then disappeared in Mexico seeking the revolution. He had a brilliant gift with pointing out how we are all selfish and ignorant (one-sided judgments) with humor, attacking the politicians, the military, the rich, slavery, and American society.
Some Entries from his Devil’s Dictionary (1906 ‘Cynic’s Word Book’):

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.
Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Conservative - a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Egotist: a person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Hashish: there is no definition of this word. No one knows what this word means.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

The Marx Brothers (comedians of the 20s and 30s) were early absurdists, formative for US comedy. Groucho Marx was amazing with one liners that show a beautifully complex understanding of contradictions involving human pride and judgment, very much like Bierce:

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
There is one way to find out if a man is honest; ask him! If he says yes you know he's crooked.
Why a four-year old child could understand this. Somebody find a four-year old child.
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats.
I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
I've got the brain of a four year old. I'll bet he was glad to be rid of it.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Well, Art is Art, isn't it? …And east is east and west is west… and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

MODERN ART AS SKEPTICISM

With WWI and modern warfare, there were new human horrors on previously unseen levels. Similar to the German Pessimism that influenced Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the horrors of WWI brought great disillusionment with reason, science and society to European intellectuals, particularly for German and French youth who would have a huge impact on modern culture. Here in the Bay Area, a very similar movement happened in reaction to the Vietnam War. WWI used more machines and propaganda than ever before, and for this is often called the first modern war. Oil became the fuel of war and vehicles, planes, jeeps (and after WWI, the Middle East was carved up by European powers as the source of oil). This was the beginning of machine guns and air warfare, bombing runs, tanks.

Newspapers all became mouthpieces of the government in times of war. To European intellectuals who conversed across national lines, this showed logic and language being used for authority and empire in the name of reason. The dominant scholars often sang nationalistic praise, particularly in Philosophy departments. The students and others came together to doubt and be skeptical of the powers that be on a level that had a new intensity (fueled on Nietzsche, Marx and others).
Modern art and humor start from this point. They shatter and destroy, ‘ripping’ on the powers that be and the truths we are told by authorities. Modern art and humor put things out of joint, not resolving contradictions but bringing them explicitly out, possibly more than any culture yet. They help to simplify and focus work which is abstract and disconnected on purpose as a revolt against the positive collective power of the traditional.

DADA: “guerilla warfare against the Establishment”

During WWI (1915-1917) young intellectuals from all over Europe converged in Zurich, Switzerland. They shared an opposition to the war and traditional values. To these thinkers, the stupidity and brutality of the modern age was clearly being sold to the masses through appeals to ‘reason’, ‘order’, ‘logic’, and ‘spirit’. They found these terms to be hypocritical on a societal level, and declared a crisis of meaning: European civilization, and human reason, the new modern values, are a farce. Thus, use absurdity to bring out the contradictions in the ‘reason’ and the ‘reasonable’.

Some of these similarly minded youth converged on the Cabaret Voltaire, a beer parlor run by Hugo Ball. Jazz music was the new rage, violating old traditional standards. Ball and his friend Huelsenbeck were looking for a fake French name for a dancer in a French dictionary when they found the word dada: ‘baby talk for horse, a child’s rocking horse’. They decided that this word fit the movement that they felt was going on in Zurich. The parlor became the first home and center. Much art that was brutal and bizarre appeared here, a new turn that is critical for modern art and humor.

Dada’s two celebrated themes are brutalism and simultaneity. Their brutalism, being obscene (sex, swearing, being intoxicated, making no sense on purpose) spoke against society, violating cultural norms using absurdity and obscenity (much like later Hunter S. Thompson, South Park).

Simultaneity is the occurrence of many disconnected elements within a work, a resistance polarized against making the whole coherent. Collage involves using many different types of media blended together to create (the Dadaists were famous for using newspaper type and pictures in collage, unseen before their time). Simultaneity and collage in the hands of the Dadaists were used to portray disconnected life, impossible to know as a complete and finished system. This is both a celebration and a protest, loving yet fearing the contradictions of the world. The Dadaists invented an impressive set of ‘new’ art forms, including abstract sound poems, abstract (mechanical) music, found art (garbage collage), simultaneous poetry (the reading of many poems at once), and abstract painting.

Out of Zurich, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany, the Dada movement began and quickly spread to Paris, New York, Moscow, Tokyo, and across the whole world. Our modern culture, which is not simply Western but global, includes the deep and playful skepticism of DADA. The Beatniks and Hippies of the Bay picked up the Motherwell anthology as a major source.

Great DADA Moments & Quotes:

In one of the first shows at the Cabaret Voltaire, Schwitters showed the audience a one letter poem, a card with a large ‘W’. He then started to recite the poem, starting with a whisper and ending in a loud wailing siren.

In April of 1920, Orp, Baargeld and Ernst put on an infamous Dada show in Cologne, France. Sitting next to a tank of red tinted water with an alarm clock submerged at the bottom, Ernst had created a wooden sculpture with an axe chained to it. A sign invited anyone who wished to use the axe to help destroy the sculpture. In a Paris exhibit of Ernst’s work, invitations read: “at 22 o’clock the kangaroo, at 22:30 high frequency, at 23 o’clock distribution of surprises, after 23:30 intimacies.” The exhibit itself was a Dada performance. Breton munched matches, Ribemont-Dessaignes kept shouting, ‘It is raining on a skull’, Soupault and Tzara played a game of hide and seek, while Peret and Charchoune continuously shook hands. These performances are early precursors to performance art (which culminated in Situationalism and Fluxus, of which Yoko Ono was a prominent figure).

Huelsenbeck

“It’s a fucked-up foolish world. You walk aimlessly along, fixing up a philosophy for supper. But before you have it ready, the mailman brings you the first telegram, announcing that all your pigs have died of rabies, your dinner jacket has been thrown off the Eiffel Tower, your housekeeper has come down with the epizootic. You give a startled look at the moon, which seems to you like a good investment, and the same postman brings you a telegram announcing that all your chickens have died of hoof and mouth disease, your father has fallen on a pitchfork and frozen to death, your mother has burst with sorrow on the occasion of her silver wedding (maybe the frying pan stuck to her ears, how do I know?). That’s life, dear fellow.”

“The Germans are the masters of dissembling, they are unquestionably the magicians (in the vaudeville sense) among nations, in every moment of their life they conjure up a culture, a spirit, a superiority which they can hold as a shield in front of their endangered bellies.”

“The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousand-fold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.”

Tristan Tzara

The foremost Dada manifesto writer, Tzara was famous for reading his manifestoes interspersed in Dada performances. He was a leader of the movement in Zurich, and then later in Paris, where the European scene is considered to have migrated with him.

From Tzara’s Dada Manifestos:

“Dada remains within the European frame of weakness it’s shit after all but from now on we mean to shit in assorted colors and bedeck the artistic zoo with the flags of every consulate.”

“Dada exists for no one and we want everybody to understand this because it is the balcony of Dada, I assure you.”

“I love you so I swear I do adore you.”

“If I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal, Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,” I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality, and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity; a private bell for inexplicable needs…”

“I am against all systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one’s own littleness, to fill the vessel with one’s individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies…”

“Here is the great secret: The thought is made in the mouth.
I still consider myself very charming.”

“A great Canadian philosopher has said: thought and the past are also very charming.”
(Here, the genders on ‘thought’ and ‘past’ are reversed, a common way of mocking Americans speaking French.)

From Tzara’s Lecture on Dada (1922)

“I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don’t expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you exist. You haven’t the faintest idea…You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life.”

“Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference….Dada is immobility and does not comprehend the passions…But with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.”

“Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people…The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their income, their dog…If one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that cannot be shaken… Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks. Then you will be able to understand many things. You are not more intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.”

We are well aware that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi (Zhuang Zi, Second Patriarch of Daoism) was just as Dada as we are.”

Tzara’s invention of the Automism method of Surrealism painters and art long after.

To make a Dadaist poem
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will resemble you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.”

Surrealism:

Gets its heritage from DADA, but had to develop beyond Nonsense as target. Still hazy in complexity, many things coming together strangely, but now with subtle underlying tensions, often of sex, danger, power, and death underlie the work. Today pop-surrealism is thriving in the Bay, LA & NY.

The surrealist poem Fable of Jarry:

A can of corned beef, on a chain like opera glasses,
Saw a lobster pass by which resembled it like a brother.
It was protected by a thick shell
On which it was written that inside,
like the can of corned beef,
it was boneless,
(Boneless and economical);
And underneath its curled-up tail
It apparently was hiding a key to open it.
Smitten with love, the sedentary corned beef
Declared to the little live self-propelling can
That if it were willing to acclimate itself
Next to it in earthly shop windows,
It would be decorated with a number of gold medals.

Conceptual Art is a development from Duchamp and other Dada & Surreal artists. It hit its heyday in the late 60s and early 70s. Now, one cannot go through a museum without seeing much of its influence. Following pieces are from Tony Godfrey’s book Conceptual Art.

Dada Duchamp’s Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity:
A sparkplug that reads ‘for-ever’

Later, after joining the Surrealists, Duchamp wound string through the gallery of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibit, connecting everything such that no one could get through the gallery.

Rauschenberg’s contribution to Iris Clert Gallery’s exhibit of Readymades: postcard that says, “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so”.

Rauschenberg’s erased De Kooning Drawing, framed and exhibited as a new work.

Manzoni drew lines of certain lengths, rolled up the paper strips, put them in boxes labeled with date and line length, sold as artwork. Also sold balloons of ‘artist’s breath’, and his own shit in cans for their weight in gold. He signed people as if they were his art.

Warhol Soup Cans & Marilyn silk screen prints: “a hundred Marilyns are better than one”, soup cans put on shelves like canned goods. Movies ‘Empire’ and ‘Sleep’, as critic Koch said, better to hear about than see.

La Monte Young composed a poem for tables, a performance piece of dragging furniture around on stage to make noises. He was one of the early performance artists who created ‘happenings’, often including audience members to take down the “fourth wall”.

Simone Forti Fluxus performance: one man try to lie down, the other try to tie first to the wall.

Morris’ Box with sound of own making: wooden box containing a tape recorder w/ loop.

Nauman read Wittgenstein passage from PI reasoning that ‘A Rose Has no Teeth” can make sense if you include the thorns or a cow in the process of rose regeneration or something else, and so he made a plaque for a tree knowing that the tree slowly grows over the plaque.

Baldessari (1971) has students cover an exhibit room with “I will not make any boring art” like students writing as punishment over and over (is this boring?).

Arnatt’s mirror boxes: positive mirror out box next to box-like hole lined with inward mirrors.

Ruppersberg’s Homage to Houdini: set of photographs documenting sinking brick chained in a suitcase of a NY pier (as Godfrey says, ‘Surprisingly, the brick did not escape’).

Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree, a glass of water on a glass shelf installed. In a dialogue posted next to the work, the artist claims that the glass of water is, in fact, now an oak tree.

The Nest Group (1978) had a piece called Let’s Come One Meter Closer, where several of the group’s artists in various places around world each dug a meter deep hole and stood in it.

Mendieta’s Rape performance: after a woman was raped and killed on campus, she recreated the scene in her apartment with herself as victim and invited friends and associates over (hopefully giving them some kind of warning, though this is not said).

Wilke’s What does this represent? What do YOU represent? A photo of a naked woman surrounded by toy guns, with two phrases above and below.

Almeida’s Inhabited painting: several photos of artist obscuring self with blue paint, then final shot takes glass she has painted and shifts it to peek out from behind it at the viewer.

For great short surreal films, watch Svankmajer

Intro Philosophy: 4th Paper Topics

2011-12-06T15:48:00.000-08:00

Here are some possible topics for the fourth reflection essay, though you are welcome to come up with your own topic on anything we studied between Hegel. It is due on the day of the final exam, on paper or by email, two to three typed double-spaced pages as always.

1) Hegel's idea of dialectic is that everything in history forms in three-fold stages. How much does reality reflect this? Is it too simple or too complex to describe how individual ideas and social movements work?

2) Nietzsche argues that we must have the courage to take an individual stand between and against both absolute truth and nihilism. Is such a stand possible or desirable?

3) For Heidegger and Sartre, the horizon of time and being gives us our truths but simultaneously threatens to take them away. How should one face this situation to live authentically? Do either Heidegger or Sartre give us a sufficient strategy?

4) Wittgenstein argues that we do not give things explanations, but rather add descriptions. Is this true, and if so what does it mean for our ability to have knowledge?

Intro Philosophy: Humor & Modern Art

2011-12-05T19:40:00.000-08:00

Philosophy can and is used for creativity, using the doubts and insights to create, playing with the boundaries and tensions of the most important things. Humor and Art are two ways of using one’s insights from Philosophy to do this. Humor and art are of course ancient, but modern art and humor are very advanced. Last time, we saw Lewis Carroll was reacting against society and Victorian strict discipline of children, showing the contradictions of authority and the assumptions we make in reasoning that are dependent upon our position in the situation.

HUMOR AS SKEPTICISM

Two early American masters of humor are Ambrose Bierce and Groucho Marx, both of whom were reacting to the horror and absurdity of the times (Bierce to the Civil War, and the Marx Brothers to WWI).

Ambrose Bierce: (1842-1914?) His Devil’s Dictionary was an early rebellious attack on society.
A San Franciscan (since 1866), he wrote bitterly about the Civil War and the corruption on both sides (Union and Confederacy) then disappeared in Mexico seeking the revolution. He had a brilliant gift with pointing out how we are all selfish and ignorant (one-sided judgments) with humor, attacking the politicians, the military, the rich, slavery, and American society.
Some Entries from his Devil’s Dictionary (1906 ‘Cynic’s Word Book’):

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.
Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Conservative - a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Egotist: a person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Hashish: there is no definition of this word. No one knows what this word means.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

The Marx Brothers (comedians of the 20s and 30s) were early absurdists, formative for US comedy. Groucho Marx was amazing with one liners that show a beautifully complex understanding of contradictions involving human pride and judgment, very much like Bierce:

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
There is one way to find out if a man is honest; ask him! If he says yes you know he's crooked.
Why a four-year old child could understand this. Somebody find a four-year old child.
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats.
I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
I've got the brain of a four year old. I'll bet he was glad to be rid of it.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Well, Art is Art, isn't it? …And east is east and west is west… and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

MODERN ART AS SKEPTICISM

With WWI and modern warfare, there were new human horrors on previously unseen levels. Similar to the German Pessimism that influenced Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the horrors of WWI brought great disillusionment with reason, science and society to European intellectuals, particularly for German and French youth who would have a huge impact on modern culture. Here in the Bay Area, a very similar movement happened in reaction to the Vietnam War. WWI used more machines and propaganda than ever before, and for this is often called the first modern war. Oil became the fuel of war and vehicles, planes, jeeps (and after WWI, the Middle East was carved up by European powers as the source of oil). This was the beginning of machine guns and air warfare, bombing runs, tanks.

Newspapers all became mouthpieces of the government in times of war. To European intellectuals who conversed across national lines, this showed logic and language being used for authority and empire in the name of reason. The dominant scholars often sang nationalistic praise, particularly in Philosophy departments. The students and others came together to doubt and be skeptical of the powers that be on a level that had a new intensity (fueled on Nietzsche, Marx and others).
Modern art and humor start from this point. They shatter and destroy, ‘ripping’ on the powers that be and the truths we are told by authorities. Modern art and humor put things out of joint, not resolving contradictions but bringing them explicitly out, possibly more than any culture yet. They help to simplify and focus work which is abstract and disconnected on purpose as a revolt against the positive collective power of the traditional.

DADA: “guerilla warfare against the Establishment”

During WWI (1915-1917) young intellectuals from all over Europe converged in Zurich, Switzerland. They shared an opposition to the war and traditional values. To these thinkers, the stupidity and brutality of the modern age was clearly being sold to the masses through appeals to ‘reason’, ‘order’, ‘logic’, and ‘spirit’. They found these terms to be hypocritical on a societal level, and declared a crisis of meaning: European civilization, and human reason, the new modern values, are a farce. Thus, use absurdity to bring out the contradictions in the ‘reason’ and the ‘reasonable’.

Some of these similarly minded youth converged on the Cabaret Voltaire, a beer parlor run by Hugo Ball. Jazz music was the new rage, violating old traditional standards. Ball and his friend Huelsenbeck were looking for a fake French name for a dancer in a French dictionary when they found the word dada: ‘baby talk for horse, a child’s rocking horse’. They decided that this word fit the movement that they felt was going on in Zurich. The parlor became the first home and center. Much art that was brutal and bizarre appeared here, a new turn that is critical for modern art and humor.

Dada’s two celebrated themes are brutalism and simultaneity. Their brutalism, being obscene (sex, swearing, being intoxicated, making no sense on purpose) spoke against society, violating cultural norms using absurdity and obscenity (much like later Hunter S. Thompson, South Park).

Simultaneity is the occurrence of many disconnected elements within a work, a resistance polarized against making the whole coherent. Collage involves using many different types of media blended together to create (the Dadaists were famous for using newspaper type and pictures in collage, unseen before their time). Simultaneity and collage in the hands of the Dadaists were used to portray disconnected life, impossible to know as a complete and finished system. This is both a celebration and a protest, loving yet fearing the contradictions of the world. The Dadaists invented an impressive set of ‘new’ art forms, including abstract sound poems, abstract (mechanical) music, found art (garbage collage), simultaneous poetry (the reading of many poems at once), and abstract painting.

Out of Zurich, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany, the Dada movement began and quickly spread to Paris, New York, Moscow, Tokyo, and across the whole world. Our modern culture, which is not simply Western but global, includes the deep and playful skepticism of DADA. The Beatniks and Hippies of the Bay picked up the Motherwell anthology as a major source.

Great DADA Moments & Quotes:

In one of the first shows at the Cabaret Voltaire, Schwitters showed the audience a one letter poem, a card with a large ‘W’. He then started to recite the poem, starting with a whisper and ending in a loud wailing siren.

In April of 1920, Orp, Baargeld and Ernst put on an infamous Dada show in Cologne, France. Sitting next to a tank of red tinted water with an alarm clock submerged at the bottom, Ernst had created a wooden sculpture with an axe chained to it. A sign invited anyone who wished to use the axe to help destroy the sculpture. In a Paris exhibit of Ernst’s work, invitations read: “at 22 o’clock the kangaroo, at 22:30 high frequency, at 23 o’clock distribution of surprises, after 23:30 intimacies.” The exhibit itself was a Dada performance. Breton munched matches, Ribemont-Dessaignes kept shouting, ‘It is raining on a skull’, Soupault and Tzara played a game of hide and seek, while Peret and Charchoune continuously shook hands. These performances are early precursors to performance art (which culminated in Situationalism and Fluxus, of which Yoko Ono was a prominent figure).

Huelsenbeck

“It’s a fucked-up foolish world. You walk aimlessly along, fixing up a philosophy for supper. But before you have it ready, the mailman brings you the first telegram, announcing that all your pigs have died of rabies, your dinner jacket has been thrown off the Eiffel Tower, your housekeeper has come down with the epizootic. You give a startled look at the moon, which seems to you like a good investment, and the same postman brings you a telegram announcing that all your chickens have died of hoof and mouth disease, your father has fallen on a pitchfork and frozen to death, your mother has burst with sorrow on the occasion of her silver wedding (maybe the frying pan stuck to her ears, how do I know?). That’s life, dear fellow.”

“The Germans are the masters of dissembling, they are unquestionably the magicians (in the vaudeville sense) among nations, in every moment of their life they conjure up a culture, a spirit, a superiority which they can hold as a shield in front of their endangered bellies.”

“The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousand-fold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.”

Tristan Tzara

The foremost Dada manifesto writer, Tzara was famous for reading his manifestoes interspersed in Dada performances. He was a leader of the movement in Zurich, and then later in Paris, where the European scene is considered to have migrated with him.

From Tzara’s Dada Manifestos:

“Dada remains within the European frame of weakness it’s shit after all but from now on we mean to shit in assorted colors and bedeck the artistic zoo with the flags of every consulate.”

“Dada exists for no one and we want everybody to understand this because it is the balcony of Dada, I assure you.”

“I love you so I swear I do adore you.”

“If I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal, Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,” I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality, and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity; a private bell for inexplicable needs…”

“I am against all systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one’s own littleness, to fill the vessel with one’s individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies…”

“Here is the great secret: The thought is made in the mouth.
I still consider myself very charming.”

“A great Canadian philosopher has said: thought and the past are also very charming.”
(Here, the genders on ‘thought’ and ‘past’ are reversed, a common way of mocking Americans speaking French.)

From Tzara’s Lecture on Dada (1922)

“I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don’t expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you exist. You haven’t the faintest idea…You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life.”

“Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference….Dada is immobility and does not comprehend the passions…But with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.”

“Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people…The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their income, their dog…If one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that cannot be shaken… Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks. Then you will be able to understand many things. You are not more intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.”

We are well aware that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi (Zhuang Zi, Second Patriarch of Daoism) was just as Dada as we are.”

Tzara’s invention of the Automism method of Surrealism painters and art long after.

To make a Dadaist poem
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will resemble you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.”

Surrealism:

Gets its heritage from DADA, but had to develop beyond Nonsense as target. Still hazy in complexity, many things coming together strangely, but now with subtle underlying tensions, often of sex, danger, power, and death underlie the work. Today pop-surrealism is thriving in the Bay, LA & NY.

The surrealist poem Fable of Jarry:

A can of corned beef, on a chain like opera glasses,
Saw a lobster pass by which resembled it like a brother.
It was protected by a thick shell
On which it was written that inside,
like the can of corned beef,
it was boneless,
(Boneless and economical);
And underneath its curled-up tail
It apparently was hiding a key to open it.
Smitten with love, the sedentary corned beef
Declared to the little live self-propelling can
That if it were willing to acclimate itself
Next to it in earthly shop windows,
It would be decorated with a number of gold medals.

Conceptual Art is a development from Duchamp and other Dada & Surreal artists. It hit its heyday in the late 60s and early 70s. Now, one cannot go through a museum without seeing much of its influence. Following pieces are from Tony Godfrey’s book Conceptual Art.

Dada Duchamp’s Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity:
A sparkplug that reads ‘for-ever’

Later, after joining the Surrealists, Duchamp wound string through the gallery of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibit, connecting everything such that no one could get through the gallery.

Rauschenberg’s contribution to Iris Clert Gallery’s exhibit of Readymades: postcard that says, “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so”.

Rauschenberg’s erased De Kooning Drawing, framed and exhibited as a new work.

Manzoni drew lines of certain lengths, rolled up the paper strips, put them in boxes labeled with date and line length, sold as artwork. Also sold balloons of ‘artist’s breath’, and his own shit in cans for their weight in gold. He signed people as if they were his art.

Warhol Soup Cans & Marilyn silk screen prints: “a hundred Marilyns are better than one”, soup cans put on shelves like canned goods. Movies ‘Empire’ and ‘Sleep’, as critic Koch said, better to hear about than see.

La Monte Young composed a poem for tables, a performance piece of dragging furniture around on stage to make noises. He was one of the early performance artists who created ‘happenings’, often including audience members to take down the “fourth wall”.

Simone Forti Fluxus performance: one man try to lie down, the other try to tie first to the wall.

Morris’ Box with sound of own making: wooden box containing a tape recorder w/ loop.

Nauman read Wittgenstein passage from PI reasoning that ‘A Rose Has no Teeth” can make sense if you include the thorns or a cow in the process of rose regeneration or something else, and so he made a plaque for a tree knowing that the tree slowly grows over the plaque.

Baldessari (1971) has students cover an exhibit room with “I will not make any boring art” like students writing as punishment over and over (is this boring?).

Arnatt’s mirror boxes: positive mirror out box next to box-like hole lined with inward mirrors.

Ruppersberg’s Homage to Houdini: set of photographs documenting sinking brick chained in a suitcase of a NY pier (as Godfrey says, ‘Surprisingly, the brick did not escape’).

Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree, a glass of water on a glass shelf installed. In a dialogue posted next to the work, the artist claims that the glass of water is, in fact, now an oak tree.

The Nest Group (1978) had a piece called Let’s Come One Meter Closer, where several of the group’s artists in various places around world each dug a meter deep hole and stood in it.

Mendieta’s Rape performance: after a woman was raped and killed on campus, she recreated the scene in her apartment with herself as victim and invited friends and associates over (hopefully giving them some kind of warning, though this is not said).

Wilke’s What does this represent? What do YOU represent? A photo of a naked woman surrounded by toy guns, with two phrases above and below.

Almeida’s Inhabited painting: several photos of artist obscuring self with blue paint, then final shot takes glass she has painted and shifts it to peek out from behind it at the viewer.

For great short surreal films, watch Svankmajer

Intro Philosophy: Lewis Carroll & the Alice Books

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Born 1832, Lewis Carroll taught at Christ Church College at Oxford from college there (1851) to his death (1898). He lectured on logic and math. He wrote the Alice books for Alice and her sisters as well as other children who he enjoyed playing with and having conversations. He liked to try to teach kids, especially girls, math and chess. He hated children growing up, because they stopped being innocent and started being deceitful and hypocritical like the adults they imitated.

He was especially fond of children, particularly little girls (which doesn’t come out right no matter how you say it). This became an issue in the 1930s, where in America in anti-pornography by mail conservative moral craze he was labeled a pedophile. Freudian readings of the texts had flourished by this time, and Carroll did not help himself with his photography of children or his relationship to the real Alice, Alice Liddell (the daughter of the dean of Christ Church College). It is thought today by scholars that the family broke contact because Carroll asked for Alice’s hand but he was not noble enough.

Many have tried to crack his books for their symbolism, trying to find the essential meaning underneath. Some have said that his books are merely political commentary, some say it is making fun of the history of mathematics and logic. Others say that there is no meaning at all, but it is simply nonsense. There are things there that are still hiding, and today we look for logic and its puzzles in his nonsensical humor, but listening to late Wittgenstein we likely will not find some particular rule or essential symbolism underneath that solves the text.

There are repeated themes of nonsense, dream, and parody in the Alice books. Carroll took Logic, Nursery Rhymes, Lessons, Hierarchies and he warped and reversed them in conversations between Alice and her dream companions with hilarious consequences. Alice is constantly reciting her rhymes she is taught, hands folded, but strange tales come out. This is paralleled by having ideals and rules but living in the all too human world. It mocks the way that we are hypocritical and irrational while following rules, standards and ideals while we are in conversation and games of life with others.

Carroll was fascinated by reversals, playing music boxes backwards to hear “music standing on its head”. Scholars have noted that he was fascinated not by what worked but the puzzle cases, the problems and mysteries. The best political example: Carroll fascinated by elite kids speaking to servants as kids. An example from Looking Glass: Tweedledee tells Alice she is just a dream character, then stop crying as those tears aren’t real…but then he is a dream and his being upset with her is not real either. Alice in beginning of LG says that she could only tell if lg world has a fire if there is smoke, but it could be deceptive set up. If we are kind to someone else who we get something from, we see it as genuine, but if that person is nice to us before getting something we could see it as a smoke screen, as not genuine but deception. Is this real or not? Likely it is both mixed together, seen from two different and opposite perspectives.

In many ways, the imagination is the same as yet opposite to reality. For example, consider the horse, unicorn example we had with Avicenna, marking the turn to modern thought considering mental objects and consciousness. The being of a unicorn is the same as the being of a real horse in the sense that each is one thing, really so. However, one can always have a unicorn whenever one wants. One starts thinking, an activity, and there is a unicorn, whereas if there is not a horse you have to go find one so you can passively just have it whether you are thinking about it or not. (Consider the red queen, who Alice has to approach going backward and running as fast as they can just to stay in place). Mental objects are ideal, just what they are, while real objects are always imperfect and temporary. Remember that in ancient world cosmology, the real world is often the fake and temporary world compared to the hidden world, and in modern science and logic the things themselves are imperfect compared to the rules and patterns of behavior.

There are many quotes from the books on logic that Lewis Carroll wrote that support a cynical view of logic, philosophy and science as little more than a dream, a dream which makes life itself less than the ideal:

Studying Logic, “will give you clearness of thought – the ability to see your way through a puzzle – the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form – and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments which you will so continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art”. (p xvii)

“And so you think, do you, that the chief use of Logic in real life is to deduce Conclusions from workable Premises, and to satisfy yourself that the Conclusions deduced by other people are correct? I only wish it were! Society would be much less liable to panics and other delusions and political life especially would be a totally different thing, if even a majority of the arguments that are scattered broadcast over the world were correct! But it is all the other way , I fear. For one workable pair of premises (I mean a pair that lead to a logical conclusion) that you meet with in reading your newspaper or magazine, you will probably find five that lead to no Conclusion at all; and, even when the Premises are workable, for one instance, where the writer draws a correct conclusion, there are probably ten where he draws an incorrect one.” (p 32)

“The Logicians…speak of the Copula of a Proposition ‘with bated breath’, almost as if it were a living, conscious entity, capable of declaring for itself what it chose to mean, and that we, poor human creatures, had nothing to do but to ascertain what was its sovereign will and pleasure, and submit to it…If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, ‘Let it be understood that by the word ‘black’ I shall always mean ‘white’ and that by the word ‘white’ I shall always mean ‘black’, I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I may think it.” (p 165-166)

“You will find these seven words – proposition, attribute, term, subject, predicate, particular, universal – charmingly useful, if any friend should happen to ask if you have ever studied Logic. Mind you bring all seven words into your answer, and your friend will go away deeply impressed – ‘a sadder and a wiser man’.”

If you go through the answers to his syllogism puzzles, you find strange final answers:
“No riddles that interest me can be solved”…“No lobsters are unreasonable”…”No Act of Parliament is amusing”…”Some caterpillars are not eloquent”…”Generals do not write poetry”…”Some savage animals do not drink coffee”…and, the only genuine drug reference I have found in spite of the 60s and 70s counter-cultural claims, “Opium eaters do not wear white kid gloves”.

Sylvie and Bruno Limerick (note the many types of non-being)

He thought he saw a rattlesnake that spoke to him in Greek.
He looked again and found it was the middle of next week.
What a pity it is, he sighed and said, that it can hardly speak.

THE ALICE BOOKS

Alice travels to wonderland and through the looking glass by dreaming. In both places she encounters characters that are trapped in their own perspectives/reasoning such that they are nonsensical to Alice and Alice is nonsensical to them. The Cheshire cat explains this with his comparison of cats and dogs. We have to focus on particular parts due to time, but we will go in order that they appear in the two books.

Alice in Wonderland

This was first called Alice’s Adventures Underground, but Carroll changed the title. In this book Alice falls into a dream and believes she is going underground. In the second book she falls into a dream and thinks she is going through the mirror. Both these are metaphors for going into the mind, logical reasoning and imagination together as thought.
Alice is thinking about whether or not to make a daisy chain when she (unknown to her or the reader until the end) falls asleep. She then sees the white rabbit, fascinating because he is both animal and human, like the human being as both animal body and human mind with reason, imagination, and memory. She follows the white rabbit until she falls down the rabbit hole, just like she followed her thought until she fell asleep and into a dream world.

Alice passes all sorts of empty shelves with jars and labels, passing pictures and maps on the walls. All of these things are containers and images, the abstractions of reason and memory but not real things that they hold and represent. Alice thinks that she will fall through the earth and meet people called Antipathies who walk on their hands upside-down. Notice the reversal of the real by reason and imagination.

She falls into an underground place that becomes a formal banquet hall. Here we have the small door to the garden, and the golden key on the glass table. This is somewhat like the square of opposition, the relationship between universal and particular. When Alice is big, she can reach the key on the table. When we are in the mind universalizing things and saying ‘All xs are ys’ we have the key to judging things and thinking about them in the abstract, but when we are faced with the particular things of the real world, and we only have x is some y and some not y, we no longer can reach the golden key on the slippery glass table (like Early Witt’s truth tables and Later criticism of these as slippery ice). When we think about someone or ourselves, it is easy to say totally bad or good, but when we are faced with the person or being ourselves it is hard to have total ‘All or None’ judgments . Alice will get to this garden later, but she will find it is filled with the Queen who keeps screaming for executions and a bunch of animals being used in a court game of croquet.

Throughout this, Alice is questioning whether or not she is Mabel because she no longer knows the things she does. This is the classic paradox of identity that philosophers today in American Analytics argue about. Remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment and Descartes’ deceiving demon thought experiment. Both said that all the qualities and limbs can be denied, but self-consciousness, the oneness of the presence of the self and whole, can’t be denied. While we think it is absurd that Alice could suspect she is Mabel now, soon after this she is called ‘Mary Ann’ by the white Rabbit, who thinks that she is her servant (Mary Ann was a common name for maids in Victorian England), and Alice responds as if she is Mary Ann. When she enters the house on the white rabbit’s orders, she is worried that she will meet the real Mary Ann. So maybe she was not so crazy in wondering if she was Mabel.

When she encounters the Pigeon, the Pigeon says that if Alice has a long neck, and has eaten eggs, then she must be a serpent and therefore a threat to the eggs in her nest. Alice replies, ‘I am not a serpent, I am a little girl’ (sic) to which the Pigeon replies that if little girls eat eggs like serpents, then they must be some kind of serpent. Notice that the Pigeon is using syllogistic, deductive reasoning here. The problem is that the world is complex and simple rules like ‘if it eats eggs (x) then it is a serpent (y)’ both make sense to the pigeon, and we can understand how and follow the reasoning, but at the same time are nonsense and simply wrong to Alice and the reader.

Meeting the Duchess in her house, Alice is horrified to see the baby she is holding crying and sneezing while the Duchess calls it ‘pig’ and beats it. Then Alice takes the baby and flees with it outside, where it transforms into a pig and Alice says ‘if you are going to turn into a pig, I will have nothing more to do with you’, sets it down and it runs off into the woods.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alice at the Mad Tea Party and Wittgenstein’s Later Thought

There is an interesting bridge between Carroll and Wittgenstein in the figure of Bertrand Russell, a bridge which serves as a perfect illustration for our analysis of the Mad Tea Party. Carroll, Russell and Wittgenstein were all logicians who did their teaching and publishing in England. Russell met Wittgenstein in 1911, and for a while believed that Wittgenstein would be his successor. Wittgenstein however came to disprove of Russell’s theory of types in moving to his later views. Russell’s close circle of Trinity college at Cambridge was in fact dubbed “the Mad Tea Party of Trinity” in fun by many contemporaries. In his autobiography, Norbert Wiener wrote that it was impossible to describe Russell’s likeness except by identifying him with the classic illustration of the Mad Hatter by Tenniel. Wiener also pointed out G.E. Moore’s likeness to the March Hare and J.M.E. Taggart’s likeness to the Dormouse. Thus, many in Russell’s heyday thought his trio resembled Carroll’s Mad Tea Party in more ways than one.

Russell famously stated: “Mathematics is that science in which we do not know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true”. There is no better statement to illustrate the Hatter’s confusion of particular case with abstract form. The number three can designate three mountains, zebras, or logicians, but it does not refer in itself to any particular situation of three things. Wittgenstein, in rebelling against Russell and abstract analysis, in advocating analysis of particular use in situations, indeed came to take a position similar to that of Alice with respect to the Hatter in our dialogue. The Hatter’s argument does seem at first to make logical sense, but a close look at the uses of the character’s expressions reveals a confusion that lurks between abstraction and the events of the Mad Tea Party.

Among scholars there is consensus that Wittgenstein had a great appreciation of Carroll, but there is a debate as to how much Wittgenstein’s philosophy was indebted to Carroll’s nonsense play. Carroll’s name appears in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Discussing the difficulty of comprehending reversed writing, Wittgenstein notes: “Compare a remark of Lewis Carroll’s” (II xi). Unfortunately there is no citation to locate this remark in Carroll’s work, but it seems clearly related to the reverse writing of Jabberwocky. Leila S. May states “we know Alice in Wonderland was one of (Wittgenstein’s) favorite books in English”. Warren Shibles includes a philosophical analysis of Alice in Wonderland in his collection of essays, Wittgenstein, Language and Philosophy (1969). In Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll, George Pitcher argues that Wittgenstein and Carroll investigate nonsensical situations to use nonsense as a vaccine against itself, as an exercise for the strengthening of reason and the development of insight. In his essay Pitcher sets out to show the “remarkable extent and depth of the affinity between these two great writers with respect to nonsense”, adding:

I shall try to show that the very same confusions with which Wittgenstein charges philosophers were deliberately employed by Carroll for comic effect. Second, I want to show that some quite specific philosophical doctrines that the later Wittgenstein attacks are ridiculed also by Carroll.

Pitcher presents several points of contact between Carroll and Wittgenstein: Both authors are preoccupied with the phenomena of games and rules (for example, both make use of chess and chess pieces). Both make use of utterances that “sound like English” but do not have a use and thus do not make sense. Both discuss giving gifts to one’s own limbs as a type of absurdity. Both repeatedly demonstrate that definitions and rules can be variously interpreted. Both play with the boundary between quality and identity. Both show the incomprehensibility of private language and definitions. Both pose alternate situations, imaginary worlds, that are bound by different rules than our own to show the particular difficulties we have in using language.

Now a forgotten psychiatric practice, mock tea parties were used to teach rules and manners to inmates of insane asylums in Victorian England. In Alice and Wonderland, Carroll uses a ‘mad tea party’ to make fun of the way we learn and follow rules of behavior and language. When Alice arrives at the Mad Tea Party of Wonderland, she decides to join the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse even though she is explicitly not invited. In response to Alice’s intrusion, the Hatter and Hare become combative. When Alice responds in turn by calling the Hatter rude, he presents Alice with a riddle, a riddle which we later learn has no answer: Why is a raven like a writing desk? The passage we analyze begins here, with Alice considering the Hatter’s riddle.

“…I believe I can guess that,” (Alice) added aloud.
“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.
“Exactly so,” said Alice.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied, “at least – at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing to you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.

This dialogue is short, but it is quite complex. Let us divide it into its seven stages, and then show how one stage leads to another. Each stage signifies a character’s turn in the dialogue, a move they make in the game of the Tea Party. The dialogue consists of an initial assertion, followed by several plays of substitution.

Alice guesses that she can guess “that”. Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to the riddle itself but to the answer to the riddle. We learn later that this answer does not exist, so Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to any actual thing. Wittgenstein notes that we can look for someone who is not there but we cannot hang him when he is not there (§462). Alice’s ‘that’ is used correctly, even if it is a signifier that does not specify an existent object.

Substituting his own expression for Alice’s, The March Hare makes three verbal substitutions. He substitutes ‘think’ for ‘believe’, ‘find out’ for ‘guess’, and ‘the answer to the riddle’ for ‘that’. The March Hare does not say exactly what Alice said, but the only significant difference is exchanging Alice’s ‘that’ for the object it designates. Based on this change, the March Hare acts as if Alice has misspoken and he is offering a correction, a more detailed expression. Alice takes the March Hare’s substitution as an equivalence, such that Alice meant something by her expression and the March Hare meant the same thing, grasping her meaning and also expressing it, thus putting two expressions to work for the same meaning. Violating Alice’s perception, the March Hare replies to Alice as if she has accepted a correction to her expression, not an equivalent substitution.

This reveals something interesting about a bifurcation in our use of ‘you mean’ in conversation with others. We use the expression ‘you mean’ together with a substitution in both a positive and negative way: positively as equivalences, negatively as corrections. We say ‘you mean x’ to translate other’s thoughts into our own words, seeking their approval in doing so (as Alice takes the March Hare to be doing by substituting his own expression for hers), but we also say ‘you mean x’ to correct the expressions of others, attempting to express what we believe they mean but they have failed to express (as the March Hare takes his substitution for Alice’s expression). Wittgenstein speaks of a fuzzy picture, and how often a fuzzy picture is just what we mean by our expression. Alice’s ‘that’ was correct even if it was fuzzy. This view supports Alice’s side, that Alice did not misspeak and the March Hare did not correct Alice’s ‘that’.

It is important to note for what follows that the March Hare has brought the word ‘should’ into the conversation. In replacing Alice’s ‘that’ with ‘the answer’ he is still discussing the particular expression of Alice, but in moralizing he is abstracting meaning from the situation and presenting Alice with a normative substitute for what he perceives as her behavior in this particular instance. The March Hare is subtly leading away from the situation towards generalization.

Now Alice becomes the one making a substitution for the March Hare’s speech. Alice insists that, ‘at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know’. What does Alice mean by ‘same’ here? How does Alice use the word ‘same’ in this instance? When Alice agrees that she ‘means what she says’ and also asserts that she ‘says what she means’, she is not moralizing or providing us with a general rule that applies to all of her expressions. She is not indicating that she always means what she says or says what she means, but rather that she meant what she said and said what she meant in the particular instance when she said “I believe that I can guess that”. Because Alice is only discussing one instance, and because in this instance Alice meant and expressed one thing, the two propositions ‘I meant the thing I said’ and ‘I said the thing I meant’ can have the same use in this case. Thus Alice substitutes one for the other, and pronounces the two to be ‘the same’. Wittgenstein writes:

The use of the word “rule” and the use of the word “same” are interwoven. (As are the use of “proposition” and the use of “true”. (§225)

If we agree with Wittgenstein that the March Hare did not significantly correct Alice, we can agree with Alice that the coincidence of meaning and saying are mutually supportive when she equates the two expressions.

These two expressions do not always coincide. There are cases which we call misspeaking, when one fails to say what one means. There are also cases which we call lying, when one fails to mean what one says. Typically, but not always, it is up to others to tell when we misspeak, and up to us to tell when we are lying. Alice’s substitution is aimed at deferring to the March Hare his typically right as a listener to correct Alice when she does not say what she means, but she insists that “at least, I mean what I say”, which is her typical right as a speaker to confirm.

The Mad Hatter disagrees with Alice, but he does not do several things. He does not argue against Alice having meant what she said, does not argue against Alice having said what she meant like the Hare, nor does the Hatter argue against the idea that ‘meaning what one says’ and ‘saying what one means’ can be ‘the same thing’ in Alice’s case or in any case. What does the Hatter attack? The Mad Hatter attacks the general form of Alice’s expression. He is arguing that ‘If x then y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘If y then x’. He does this by offering a counter example to this general form: ‘I see what I eat’ is not the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’. This is generally true, but we can construct cases in which the set of things one eats is exactly the set of things one sees and vice versa.

Alice started towards generality and abstraction with her guess that she could guess, and the Hare lead the dialogue in this direction with his moralizing about what Alice should do based on her particular case. Thus when Alice defends herself in her particular case she is already speaking in terms that have been generalized by the Hare. The Hatter slips in at this point with a valid formal argument that is not in fact talking about Alice’s particular case. Because our expressions refer to both generalities and particularities with the same terms, it is easy to miss the Hatter’s confusion of the subject.

The Hatter gives us an excellent and subtle example of confusing the subject of conversation by generalizing with abstractions. He does not realize that he has failed to argue against the possibility of Alice’s case, but is rather arguing that many things do not share the relationship that meaning and saying do when we express ourselves adequately.

Regardless of this confusion, The March Hare backs the Hatter’s attack and produces another counter example: ‘I like what I get’ is not (in most cases) the same as ‘I get what I like’. The Hare does for the Hatter what he refused to do for Alice: he substitutes his expression as an equivalent expression. The Dormouse, following the Hatter and Hare adds a further counter example of the same general form: ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is not the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’. The three of them are in agreement against the universal validity of the general form of Alice’s substitution. The three argue by presenting cases where ‘I x what I y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘I y what I x’.

If we wanted to attack Alice’s substitution, we would have to show that ‘I mean what I say’ and ‘I say what I mean’ have different uses and are thus not the same. The Hatter does not attempt to do this, and neither he nor his two cohorts use examples that include either meaning or saying. Instead, they provide disparate examples that show there are many cases when ‘I x what I y’ is not the same as ‘I y what I x’. The Mad Tea Party trio seems to be performing a formal analysis of Alice’s expression, but they are in fact confusing an abstracted form for the situation of the case present at hand. We can ourselves witness this sort of confusion in everyday arguments.

The Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse all form a chord of replies (a very small school of thought) that is in agreement amongst its members in disagreement with Alice, but the Hatter violates this accord. He disrupts the agreement of the series by turning on the Dormouse. The Hatter here reverses his position against Alice, arguing that since the Dormouse sleeps all the time, ‘sleeping when breathing’ and ‘breathing when sleeping’ are ‘the same thing’ in its case. Thus the Hatter has provided a particular case where ‘I x what I y’ and ‘I y what I x’ have the same use and he uses the word ‘same’ the way that Alice does. The Hatter not only has failed to lock Alice in the room, but he himself walks right out the door he unknowingly left open as if he knew it was open all the while.

The dialogue presents us with both a convergence of meaning and saying (Alice’s defense) and a contradiction of meaning and saying (the Hatter’s attack of Alice and then the Dormouse). This mirrors the divergence of supplementation and correction found earlier. In argument, one says things that both agree and disagree with one’s opponent. In the course of an argument, one can find oneself getting into contradictions the farther one gets from particular cases, but one can only examine particular cases by drawing similarities across groups of cases by generalizing. The Hatter is unknowingly demonstrating to Alice that while she may be correct that meaning and saying converge in her expression, meaning and saying can also diverge to the point of contradiction through the course of an argument.

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Alice leaves the Tea Party and finds a door in a tree that leads to the garden she wanted to get to from the banquet hall she fell into through the rabbit hole, but now she finds that the garden is inhabited by the angry and vengeful Queen of Hearts playing a game of croquet with animals (flamingos and groundhogs) as the game pieces (like Looking Glass game of chess involving characters, Witt and life as games).

Cheshire cat shows up, causes a commotion. King and executioner get into an argument about whether the head of the Cheshire cat can be beheaded. This parallels the ‘grin without the cat’ earlier (Math and Logic as head/mind without body, effect without substance). The executioner argues that the cat can’t be beheaded without a body to separate from the head, and the king argues that anything with a head can be beheaded.

The Duchess is now nice to Alice, angry in her own house the way Queen is angry in her garden. This is like the pig switch earlier. Alice is delighted, and decides that pepper made the Duchess angry. She begins to devise (too) simple rules for causes of emotions (Witt and oven vs. simple essences and causes), ex: sugar makes people sweet. The Duchess now approaches Alice and begins coming up with an absurd moral for everything Alice says, which annoys Alice (notice that the Duchess is showing Alice her own absurdity).

Now, Alice attends the trial where the King is prosecuting the Jack for eating tarts (notice rhyme setting up the scene). Alice begins to grow into a giant at the trial, which no one notices until she is called as a witness which is her final act in the dream of Wonderland. Alice accidentally knocks over the jury box, and puts a lizard back upside down, reasoning that a lizard is just as good a juror either way up (this is similar to some/some not vs. All or None). Alice tells the king she knows nothing about the case, and the king says this is very important to the jury. Alice says it is not important at all, and the king goes ‘important, unimportant’, like he is trying to decide which sounds best. Some of the jury write down important, some unimportant. Giant Alice finds all of this absurd. She declares that the evidence is meaningless, the jurors write down that she thinks this as if it is thus true, and she ‘pack of cards’ destroys trial and dream.

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Through the Looking Glass

In the beginning, Alice is playing with her cat and cat’s kittens, blaming the black kitten for trying to take milk from the white kitten. Alice says she should put the kitten out in the snow as a punishment for its mischief, then forgets this as she thinks of how horrible her punishment for all of her mischief would be. Later, we find the black kitten is the Red Queen, who takes on Alice’s vindictive and judgmental side while the White Queen takes on her forgetful and forgiving side. Alice is a pawn, making her way across the chessboard to be queen, and at the ending banquet the two queens still are confusing her but they are sitting at her sides.

Alice passes through the mirror and into the Looking Glass world (again, like rabbit hole, falling into a dream). She finds herself in a garden with flowers that interpret her to be a flower (like pigeon thinking she must be a serpent or duck saying ‘it’ is most often a rock or a worm). They tell her about the Red Queen, who they also assume to be a flower, one very much like Alice. The Red Queen now meets Alice, who says she has lost her way, to which the Red Queen replies ‘all these ways are mine’ (like Humpty Dumpty thinking he can mean what he wants regardless of what others think AND tell Alice what she should mean).

Alice points to a hill, and the Red Queen says, ‘I could show you hills compared to which that is a valley’. Alice replies that a hill can’t be a valley, no matter how small, for this is nonsense. The queen replies, ‘I have heard nonsense compared to which that is as sensible as a dictionary’.

The Red Queen tells Alice she is a pawn in a chess game being played all over the world. To get going, they both run, but end up not moving. The queen remarks, “Here, we have to run as fast as we can just to stay in place”.

Much later, Alice meets the White Queen, who lives and remembers backwards and finds this best (mind vs. world). She tells Alice she is 101, and Alice replies that she can’t believe that. The White Queen says close your eyes and try very hard. Alice says this won’t work, as one can’t believe impossible things. The queen replies, ‘You need practice…when I was your age, I sometimes believed 6 impossible things before breakfast’ (Logic as imaginary abstraction, thus impossible ideals). The White Queen turns into a sheep knitting with seven pairs of needles (sheep is woolly, knitting wool). They are now in a shop, and Alice is told to take something. She tries, but reaching for things they seem to slide out of reach and up into the ceiling (abstractions again). Then they are suddenly in a boat, and Alice is reaching for the prettiest rushes but they are always out of reach, the one’s she can get wilting in her hands.

Humpty Dumpty – Read pg 168-169, ‘knockdown’ (straw man), who is master of meaning? Many have noted that Humpty Dumpty is the perfect illustration of Wittgenstein’s argument for the impossibility of a private language. Meaning is not simply what the individual wants it to be. Humpty Dumpty gives himself the right to mean whatever he wants, but he is critical of Alice and gives himself the right to tell her what she should have meant. There are two privileged positions in communication: sender and receiver. Which one has the true right to say what something meant? The answer seems to be that both have overlapping rights that can eclipse each other.

Alice meets the White Knight, who has stuff from the whole book on his horse. He falls off on either side of his horse like human judgement falling to one side or the other on an issue. He invents things when he is upside down, saying the blood rushes to his head and helps him to think. His song, “A Sittin’ on a Gate”, refers to a suspension of judgement and logic, being undecided with one’s feet in both worlds.

Logic: Hegel, Contradiction & Fallacies

2011-11-30T17:17:00.000-08:00

Georg Hegel (1770-1831) had two major ideas that became very influential for later thinkers. The first is historical explanation or explanation by process. Hegel argues that things are not simply what they are at once, but evolve through stages to become what they are, and the process by which they evolve show us how the things essentially work. Things are also not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things in which they become what they are (very like the Buddhist concept of co-dependent arising). After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Weber and Feuerbach were major thinkers who overturned old theories of static order with new theories of process to explain the workings of the mind and society. Consider that Newton thought God made the earth at the very beginning in an instant, while most believe today that there was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy formed. Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin.

Hegel’s second major idea, the mechanism or motion of evolution over time, is dialectic. Dialectic is a Greek term for arguing back and forth, for and against a position, to come to greater understanding. Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and his dialogue plays show Socrates arguing against others and himself in this way. Hegel argues that all things are made of oppositions or contradictions (contra-diction means “arguing against”, like arguing both sides, the pros and cons, of a particular thing). This is not only similar to Laozi’s wheel (made of both solid and empty together), but Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal but opposite force.

Hegel’s dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and synthesis. Hegel often presents our ideas (which live in the world as politics and our shared expectations) as starting out positive, flipping and becoming negative, and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole. Remember Laozi’s wheel leads us through this three stage process (solid at first, then empty, then both), as does the famous Zen quote that first a rock is a rock, then a rock isn’t a rock (it is in the mind, as a concept) and then a rock is a rock (real rock and concept together as the rock).

Hegel argues that by looking at things as evolving over time in a situation, not immediate and isolated, and looking at things as two sided and in opposition to themselves and others, rather than categorical and without tension, we can come to understand how things actually are, which is a union (while an opposition) of how they are in the mind and how they are in the world.

In his first major work, The Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit (1806), Hegel gives us his social history of society and philosophy evolving by stages to the present day. In his second major work, The Science of Logic (1816), Hegel gives us his psychology. We will look at the overall structure and some key ideas of each, spending more time on the Logic which has become one of my favorites. Americans have only begun studying Hegel, because Hegel had a student named Marx who took Hegel’s concept of dialectic and used it to father communism. Communists like Hegel’s Logic very much, and so American and British universities did not teach much Hegel and when they do they often teach the Phenomenology but not the Logic. This is unfortunate, because while Hegel’s ideas about history in the Phenomenology are quite antiquated today I have great hope that there is more to be discovered by looking at the Logic in the light of the discoveries of modern psychology, especially the work of Piaget the child psychologist.

After writing the Phenomenology, Hegel came to realize that he had not described the inner workings of the dialectical process of history to his liking. Hegel believed the world consisted of ideas, so he leaves history behind and turns to the workings of ideas in the mind. To show the inner psychology at work in every stage of historical development, he wrote his Logic which like the Phenomenology unfolds in three stages as positive, negative and synthesis, but instead of Orientals, Greeks and Germans, the three stages of the Logic are Being, Essence, and Concept.

Thought has to gather everything up such that all categories become modes or branches of the same thing. It does this with Understanding which holds things fast in sameness and Reason which divides things against each other and against themselves, opposing the Understanding. Understanding wants to keep ideas as they are and separate from each other, while Reason wants to change ideas and unite them all together as a whole. The mind craves unity, objectivity as the all-view, which pulls it in two directions. First, it wants to hold on to the unities of the understanding and keep them away from reason tearing them apart. However, reason wants to dissolve everything and return it all to the Absolute, or the undivided One. Thus, the motions rock back and forth in stages. It would thus be correct to say that, the way Hegel describes it, conservatives would rather understand than reason and liberals would rather reason than understand.

At each stage, the Understanding comes to change its shape and provide the ground for the back and forth positions of reason which share the same understanding(s). Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Thus, Hegel says there really is only one philosophy which is ‘thought’ itself, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought.

Why is it opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Interestingly, Hegel writes that we need to start with ‘legend’ of the fall of man, of Adam falling out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important (a similar reading to Deists of his time in Europe, who see the bible as true psychologically but not literal). When Adam, or consciousness, falls into the world out of unity with all, it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can describe the fall from unity either in physics as the Big Bang or in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget).

Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding: (Being)(Is), (You)(Are), (This)(Is). However, these are inadequate. First, they are one sided, and so dogmatic, stuck. They are divided from each other and the All, so reason is not satisfied and tries to figure out how all of these separate categories are one in reality, or the big One or All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content, making them almost no different from empty. This is exactly how Hegel is critical of Kant’s categories and the gap he leaves between mind and world.

(68) “That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites.”

(118) “However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.”

Hegel writes that the feeling of being alive is to feel contradiction within oneself, at rest in itself but at the same time moving itself beyond itself. It both wants to stay and go at once, and does. Similarly, the Soviet literary critic and thinker Bakhtin said that when we think we are in dialogue with ourselves, are opposed to ourselves on opposite sides.

In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that Heraclitus realized the unity of Being and Non-Being as ceaseless Becoming, as the flux of the cosmic fire. Hegel says that some say no one is capable of understanding contradiction, but Hegel points to Heraclitus and argues that to come to the next level in your understanding your reason has to see both sides and unite them in the cement of the understanding. Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and non-being as one like Heraclitus. It is merely recognizing it that is the hard part. Hegel says that this is the hurdle that prevents the common person from being a philosopher, and the reason that the great thinkers and revolutions in thought are rare. In fact, often it takes decades after the thinker’s death for their ideas to become accepted, further proof that the great thinker must unite the old with the opposite direction of the new and this is the barrier between the new idea and the common understanding of the people.

Once thought realizes becoming as the unity of the being of things and their non-being (their temporary being in time and their not being other things), thought still does not have enough to understand each and every thing or how they fit into the All as one. Thought tries to understand the individual beings of the world and the world itself as constant becoming, like Heraclitus, but this does not show us how things are interrelated. This is exactly how Kant was frustrated with Hume, because everything being an assumption does not tell us what things are specifically.

Thought must explore two opposite directions to try to find the meaning of individual things. First, it tries to understand things by their qualities (such as green, square, closed), but this moves away from the things themselves towards abstract ideas. Second, thought tries to understand things by their quantities, with each thing being a one itself and being a quantity of many parts and being in a group of many members. Unfortunately, this leaves each being as merely a thing, and tells us nothing about the specific differences between types of things. Notice that quality and quantity are the two opposite sides to our abstractions of things, the two ways we isolate and abstract, through thought, the parts and ways of things. Consider that your hand is not explainable simply by its shape, or color, or texture, any more than its being one hand with five fingers, though all of this together tells me much about my hand. To understand your hand, you have to see it in context, in the world used with other things, as well as understand the qualities and quantities of the hand.

Thought now tries to understand things in terms of essences, and these essences in terms of their qualities and quantities. Hegel in his Phenomenology saw Plato as the union of Heraclitus and Parmenides, that Plato thought things have ideal essences in the stars that cause them to be what they are, and that Platonism was the major school of thought in middle-age Europe to which Hegel acknowledges he owes many insights.

Because thought could not understand things in their qualities and quantities, it tries to understand things by putting them in groups and then understanding the qualities and quantities of these groups. It puts these as essences outside the world as Plato put them up in the stars, in another more modern way “in” things and their groups as their “nature”. The problem with this stage is that this still puts things as isolated and does not understand them in a situation as mutually interdependent. It seeks the meaning of the thing in the group where it could not find it in the individual, but this still isolates things even as it puts them in groups. Hegel is very aware that modern science is often in this mode, isolating things and finding new truths about their exclusive natures. For Hegel, Plato’s forms, Kant’s categories and scientific theories are good but they are not complete because they do not understand how things cannot be separate from each other if we want our knowledge to be like the world, in which everything fits together.

Just as qualities are non-beings within beings, essences are also non-beings within beings, but a core is sought beyond and opposed to outer qualities or bunches of quantities. Thought has turned on itself yet preserved itself, trying to understand the real as merely the idea. It would be like saying that the hand is really the ideal hand, rather than a hand in the real world which we idealize. Thought is struggling to grasp the unity of the mind and the world, of our ideas of things and the real things themselves. Just as beings were opposed to themselves and others, Hegel says that essences, if they remain many and are not gathered into a trunk of the All still have contradictions in themselves and against each-other and so they are opposed to unity.

The idea and the thing are realized as one in the Concept, which includes the thought and thing. When we see that the world is in our minds and in itself together as one, that things are our ideas about them and themselves for us as one that is also many, this is for Hegel Actuality, the final stage. It is grasped by the mind, but in extension is the view of the real world and all that it is or could be. Interesting for Chaos Theory and Quantum Theory, the most recent developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle. To see that no part of reality is absolutely necessary, but no part is absolutely free, and the two hang together as opposites always like light and darkness, this is the final stage that lets us see things as they are. This would be the final and total grasp of the wheel as solid and empty, or the rock as thing and perception/assumption. Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and simply Nature itself, with a ground to continue to investigate and understand things with all the branching of the Idea by which we could ever understand them to be. All becomes a single Idea, that is one with the world.

FALLACIES

Fallacies are common errors or problems in reasoning, like those we studied in the Indian Nyaya Sutra. There is no set list of fallacies, nor is there a complete understanding of how they relate to logical or correct reasoning. The more dogmatic believe that truth and false are exclusively separated, while the more skeptical believe that the reasonable and the unreasonable, the rational and the irrational, are interrelated. Myself, being skeptically inclined, believe that fallacies occur when reason and rationality do not fit or overshoot their particular situation. The rationality of an argument and its component pieces depends on how it is used or abused in context, not abstractly with regard to its form. We are going to talk about some of the common fallacies that logic texts discuss, even though there is not one set list of these fallacies nor a system of their structures. I found three different but overlapping lists in the three texts I reviewed for the class.

Appeal to Emotion

There are many types of appeals that cater to positive emotions we wish to sustain such as happiness and status, and negative emotions we wish to avoid such as pain, fear, pity, and ignorance. Advertising, of course, appeals to both desires and insecurities frequently. The recent khaki pants ad that says, “Wear the pants”, is appealing to male desires for dominance and status as a strong and respected man.

An Appeal to Authority is repeating something said while citing its source, either an individual, an institution or a culture, to support an argument by appealing to a sense of security and trust. For example, “The chief of police said crime is up”, “9 out of 10 scientists (that we hand picked) say you should brush your teeth with Happy Time Toothpaste”, or “Native American Shamans used tobacco to cure diseases”. Notice that an appeal to authority is a fallacy if it is misleading, and whether or not it is misleading or informative is debatable. For example, if the chief of police is untrustworthy or there is good evidence that she wants to increase her budget this year, we may argue that the first example is a fallacy, an improper appeal to authority, but if we trust her then her testimony could be valid and it is not a fallacy but a proper and justified appeal to authority.

An Appeal to Force is threatening that if a position is not supported there will be harmful and dangerous consequences. For example, “If you don’t believe me and build a giant wall, Islamic extremists will eat your baby”, or “If I am wrong about this, may God help us all”. Notice that an appeal to force is a fallacy if the threat is unjustified, but perfectly reasonable if the threat is justified, and that this is often debatable.

An Appeal to Pity is like an appeal to force, but emphasizing sadness and pain inflicted on the poor, unfortunate and defenseless. For example, “If we don’t do it like I say, small children will cry”, or “This particular country has been poor for hundreds of years, so we should totally sell them a bunch of weapons to make them feel better about themselves”. Like other appeals, it can be debatable whether or not an opponents position will hurt the unfortunate, as well as whether or not the harm is an unfortunate but necessary consequence.

An Appeal to Ignorance is a special kind of ‘sharing the fault’, one of the fallacies of the Nyaya school of India. When we argue, “There are things about X we don’t know, so my opponent can’t be sure”, we are saying something that is true about every human position, including our own. For example, during Bush Jr.’s presidency the head of the American Academy of Sciences said, “Global warming is just a theory”, which is true but does not say anything about how justified a theory it is compared to any other alternative. For the skeptically inclined like myself and the Jains, all human truth is “just a theory”, so it is improper to use this against an opponent in argument to try to particularly associate their position with ignorance.

Straw Man

The ‘straw man’ refers to setting up a scarecrow as a fake person. In debate, we say, “That is a straw man” when our opponent presents our own position in an oversimplified way to make it easy to argue against, like setting up a straw dummy to knock down. This is one of the most common fallacies that people accuse each other of doing: “My opponent is misrepresenting my position on the issues”. Wittgenstein says that this is what both sides of the objective truth versus subjective truth do too often to each other. For example, if I am arguing against a war, and I say that my opponent always loves each and every war and blood thirsty people are untrustworthy, I can be accused of setting up a straw man. My opponent need only site one example when they disapproved of a war to show that I have oversimplified their position. In debate, we are often arguing to convince not our radical opponents but moderates who are on the fence. While it is useful to simplify an opponent’s position to highlight its faults, it carries the risk of being accused of oversimplification.

Slippery Slope

The slippery slope is a particular kind of overly simple straw man which involves a domino effect over time, taking a consequence of the opponent’s position and blowing it out of proportion over the course of several steps. For example, “If we legalize marijuana, more people will try it, then more drugs will be legalized, and then everyone will be shooting heroin and civilization will collapse”. It is most likely true that if marijuana were legalized, then more people would do it, but it is doubtful that the majority of the population would end up heroin addicts as a consequence regardless of whether marijuana should be legalized or not. This person took the consequence of some new users and it slides all the way down the slippery slope of over-simplifying judgment to everyone becoming an addict. Another example: “If we to legalize homosexual marriage, then people will want to marry their family members, and then marry animals and clock radios”. Because my examples are quite progressively biased, we can give another: “If we let people own concealable hand guns, people will develop a taste for heavy artillery and begin stock piling their own personal arsenals”.

Red Herring

To say, “That’s a red herring” is to say that an opponent has missed the point by focusing too much on an insignificant detail. There are two competing explanations of the origin of this expression. The first is that hunting dogs were trained by dragging a fish behind a horse to see if they would be easily thrown off the true prey’s trail. The second is that a food scare occurred in the 1920s just after the Russian Revolution when a company spraying red dye into sardine cans to make them look fresh sometimes made one sardine dark red, starting rumors that Communists were secretly poisoning Americans. I found a good example of red herrings in an article about fallacies that examined child custody court transcripts. A parent would often accuse the other of being irresponsible in general, and then site a particular example (such as a time when they were too busy to pick up a child). The parents would then argue about the single event and lose sight of the overall issue of irresponsibility. If there are examples and counter examples for many things, sometimes we argue particular examples are marginal and other times that they are critical. If the example is marginal and insignificant, focusing on it could bring the charge of misleading oneself and others with a red herring.

Personal Attack

One particular type of red herring, certainly the most popular, is the personal attack, when one attacks the opponent and not the opponent’s argument. In a way, it is the opposite of an appeal to authority. For example, “You cannot believe a word my opponent says, because she is a communist, Mormon, atheist, aquatic bird, etc”, or “His scientific theory is questionable, because he is a gambler”. Like with any red herring, it can be debatable whether or not a person’s character has any relationship to their argument, but a genuine and fallacious personal attack occurs when there is an unjustifiable appeal to fear based on the distrust of the group a person belongs to or a particular trait of the person.

Fallacy of Composition & Fallacy of Division

The fallacy of composition is wrongly attributing the property of a part to a greater whole. For example, “If water is wet, and humans are three fifths water, then humans are wet”, or “If San Francisco is progressive, then all of California is progressive”. Notice that this fits with Wittgenstein’s analogy of the oven and how it is always ignorant of the complex situation to simplify things into a single component or essence.

The fallacy of division is wrongly attributing the property of the greater whole to a particular part, the fallacy of composition in reverse. For example, “If water is wet, and water has two hydrogen molecules, then hydrogen is wet”, or “If San Francisco is progressive, then my conservative uncle who lives there must be progressive”.

Notice that bigotry and prejudice are types of fallacious composition and division. If I say, “He is a Hindu, and he is a jerk, so all Hindus are jerks”, I have committed the fallacy of composition. Likewise, if I say, “All atheists are immoral, she is an atheist, so she is immoral”, I have committed the fallacy of division.

Asian Philosophy: Daoism - Laozi, Zhuangzi & Liezi

2011-11-29T22:16:00.000-08:00

This week, we will be studying the three most central texts of Chinese Daoism: the Dao De Jing of Laozi, the book of the ‘second patriarch’, Zhuangzi, and the book of Liezi. Daoism has always been dear to my heart, as I have an old printing of the Dao (on the book, the ‘Tao Te Ching’, now typically and more accurately written ‘Dao De Jing’) which I loved when I was a kid with black and white photos of beaches and sea gulls in fog accompanying the text. It was only later in my studies that I was able to have a real love of the text, which at first seemed simply mysterious poetry.

Daoism is often opposed to Confucianism as a skeptical and mystical school of thought vs. Confucianism which is a more traditionalist and dogmatic school. Indeed, Daoism is one of the most powerful skeptical schools of thought in history, and during the later years of the Han dynasty peasants and scholars turned from Confucianism to Daoism in support of innovation and revolution (such as the famous Yellow turban rebellions of 184 and 187 CE). Daoist sages are often ordinary men and women. However it is also clear that Confucius was critical of tradition, politics, knowledge and judgement, and Daoism became an orthodox religious system that was used by the Han and later dynasties to control and pacify the people.

While Confucianism advocates city life, study, and the structure of the family and state, Daoism advocates returning to nature and the natural (ziran), simplicity, meditation, and questioning all human understanding. Confucianism argues that we should cultivate and civilize ourselves through education and tradition, Daoism argues that we should return to our natural state and let nature run its course, thus reaching a state of completion. Rather than study harder to understand more distinctions between things, Daoism argues we should work hard to forget the understandings and distinctions we have stored up in ourselves already. Daoists would agree with Confucius that “a noble person is not a pot”, but rather than add and stir they would have us empty it out.

Many are familiar with the Daoist image of the Yin and Yang intertwining female earth energy of darkness and male sky energy of light, however only few know that the symbol originally comes from the Yin Yang school, one of the hundred schools of thought from the warring states and hundred schools period of Chinese philosophy. The Daoists got the symbol from this school, and followed similar ideas about things being constituted by opposing forces. The symbol has also been identified as a solar calendar that charts daylight hours over the course of a year, important for farmers who were supporters and sources of both the Yin Yang and Daoist schools of thought. When the Han unified China, they patronized Confucianism and Daoism but not the Yin Yang school and others that disappeared without their support.

The most important concept for Daoism (and, interestingly, the mystics of most religions) is the Great One, the All. Like Confucius and Confucianism, Daoism followed the Zhou Dynasty before the Han in speaking about the Way (Dao) of heaven and the mandate of heaven but less about the ‘Lord of Heaven’, showing us the same abstraction and evolution from polytheism to monotheism to philosophical monism we found in ancient Egypt, India and Greece. Like in ancient Egypt and India, but unlike ancient Greece after the spread of Christianity, ancient China kept traditional polytheism as their philosophers moved toward monism. In Daoism, you can find many gods and the Dao, the Way, being praised and venerated beyond all particular beings.

Daoism argues that one should remove one-sided judgments and desires from the mind such that harmony with the whole, with the One, is achieved. This is similar in many ways to the Indian Jain idea of anekantavada, ‘non-one-sidedness’. My favorite quote from the Zhuang Zi, which can serve as a great slogan for skepticism and relativism is, “A sage too has a this and a that, but his that has a this, and his this has a that”. We also find in the Zhuangzi accusations that other schools are one-sided in their theories and thus not clear on the whole.

With regard to the Confucians and the Moists, what one calls right the other calls wrong, but if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, the best thing to use is clarity.

A key concept for Daoism is wu-wei, ‘non-action’. The idea is to get what you want by being patient and doing less, not more, to see results. This increases one’s ability to perceive changing circumstances and opportunities in the situation that one would miss if hurried or over-exerting. The idea is to act less but still act, not to simply not act at all. Acting with moderation and simplicity in mind conserves energy and prevents mistakes that can be avoided. Patience and awareness are valued over speed and focus.

There is a medieval Japanese story that illustrates wu-wei well. A local lord has three sons, and must decide who should inherit his position. He tests them by placing a pillow on the sliding door to his room and calling them one at a time. The eldest son enters and annihilates the pillow in a frenzy of skilled sword strikes. The middle son draws his sword but sees the pillow in midair and catches it. The youngest son sees the pillow on the door, tucks it under his arm and enters the room to the joy of his father. Those familiar with Aikido, the Japanese martial art, will recognize the concept of wu-wei as it is physically used: one defeats one’s opponent by moving out of their way and allowing the situation to take its course, not by directly striking them.

It is traditionally held that Laozi, whose name simply means ‘Old Master’, lived sometime around 600 BCE, and Zhuangzi, the second patriarch of Daoism, lived from 370-290 BCE. Not much is known about either patriarch. Zhuangzi’s life and dates are better known. He worked as a overseer of a lacquer warehouse, a place for mass-producing bento boxes, vases and plates with glazes. According to his text, written by his students and followers, he was a friend of many philosophers including the Logicians Hui Shi and Gongsun Long. Laozi was traditionally said to have been an archivist of the Imperial library who Confucius wanted to study under but was rejected. Modern scholarship considers Laozi to be a combination of at least three old masters whose life stories were mixed together as the tradition settled.

The Dao De Jing of Lao Zi

Laozi is said to have given up on life in politically turbulent China and rode a water buffalo west to live as a hermit. As he was about to leave the state, he was recognized by the border guard Yin Xi who pleaded with him to leave his teachings for the people before leaving society. Laozi consented and in the dirt road wrote the 81 passages of the Dao De Jing (a sacred number, 9 times 9, each of which is 3 times 3) before disappearing forever. Because no one witnessed his death, he is considered an immortal like other Daoist sages.

The first chapter, opening verse, of the Dao De Jing, famously reads:

The Dao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Dao. Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name. As the origin of heaven and earth, it is nameless.

The All, or the One, includes everything. Thus, there is no proper or particular name. The All does not need a particular name, because there is nothing in particular that one can judge about it. It is the source of all things, so it could be called ‘green’, ‘not green’, ‘life’, ‘death’,‘both’ or ‘neither’, with equal but equally incomplete meaning. The same, of course, goes for any adjective. Just as any particular thing has its opposite (hot and cold, good and evil), the One is the source of all opposites, and thus is neither and both of each particular thing. Notice the duality of heaven and earth, of open sky and closed ground. Sometimes we think being solid and limited is good, other times we feel that being open and free is good. In fact, the All is all solidity (order) and freedom (chaos), so it is the source of all closure and openness. In the first three lines, we have much of Daoist thought already.

In chapter 8 of the Dao, we learn that the Dao is like water. This is a common metaphor that Daoism employs to describe how the way and nature of things is fluid, like water, getting down into the lowest and tightest cracks and divisions. The Dao has no status or pride, and so like the Daoist sage the Way is down amongst the poor and the common, together as one with the things people avoid and despise as well as the things people exalt and desire.

Chapter 9 of the Dao is a classic example of Daoist reasoning by contradiction. All things have contradictory properties, but this is hard for our one sided judgments and views to see. Thus, we are told that if we continue to sharpen a sword it goes dull, and if we store up enough valuables they will surely attract thieves, and so no one can fully protect a palace of gold and diamonds. “When you have done your work, retire” means to do just enough for the present situation, but not build up merit or riches, for they will bring you trouble.

Chapter 10 asks if we can make our strength united with softness like a little child. It says that growing while refraining from dominating is the secret to life.

Chapter 11 of the Dao is my favorite. I find it very important for understanding the duality of positive and negative, the solid and empty we saw in heaven-and-earth of chapter 1. We are told that a wheel is only useful because of the emptiness at the center. When you first look at a wheel, you see it as a simply solid thing. Then, if you look again, you will see that the emptiness, not just the substance, is important too. Imagine if a house was not mostly empty, but was solid through and through. You would not be able to get inside it! May as well build the house in outer space. Solid and empty get their meanings, their uses, from a mutual relationship, not from one being the only thing and the other merely false. I love this verse, as it is very close to Hegel’s idea of positive, negative, and synthesis. The synthesis here would be seeing not just the solid wheel, nor simply the emptiness, but both working together.

Human truth is quite relative. At first, one believes particular things are absolute. After negative experiences, it is easy to be discouraged and only see the limitations and emptiness of beliefs. This would be like focusing on first the solidity and then the emptiness of the wheel exclusively. The point is not to stop at the emptiness however, but to see that both sides work together to make the wheel, all things, and life itself, what it is. There is a Zen Buddhist Koan which says something very similar: “First practicing (Zen), I saw a rock as a rock…then, I saw it as not a rock…finally, I saw it as truly a rock.”

In Chapter 22, we read that the sage does not boast, and is thus admired by everyone, that he does not want to shine, and is thus will be enlightened, that he does not seek excellence, and is thus exalted, that because he does not argue, no one can argue with him. Most people assume that they know what is simply good, and what is simply bad, and they are not afraid to tell you so. Only the sage, the wise person, knows not to boast about anything but to enjoy and appreciate things just as they are, and thus the sage is far less annoying than the average person. This takes practice and patience, something the average person does not have the patience for before making a quick and certain judgment leading to action. If you desire nothing, “everything will flock to you”, and you have whatever you need right at hand in any situation. This is opposite the common understanding, which says that you must want something and relentlessly seek it in order to have it. Patient action is often more fruitful then strenuous action.

In Chapter 25, we read that there is only one thing that is complete and turns in a perfect circle without endangering itself, the “Mother of All”. The texts says, “I call the Dao...Painfully giving it a name, I call it great”.

Chapter 33 reads, “Whoever knows others is clever. Whoever knows himself is wise. Whoever conquers others has force. Whoever conquers themselves is truly strong.”

Chapter 36 reads, “What you want to weaken you must first allow to grow strong. What you want to destroy, you must first allow to flourish. From whomever you want to take away, to him you must first give.

In Chapter 42 we read, “The strong do not die a natural death”, or “The violent die a violent death”. This is quite similar to Jesus saying, ‘those who live by the sword die by the sword’. Try to gain for yourself, and the great balance of all things will cut you down, doing to you what you do to others. In the Zhuangzi, twice there appears the example of a gnarled old tree which outlives other trees because it does not grow powerful and strong and is thus not cut down and used to build other things by woodcutters and carpenters.

In Chapter 43, we read, “The softest thing on earth overtakes the hardest thing...From this one recognizes the value of non-action (wu-wei).” This calls to mind a seashore, with the waves of soft fluid water battering the hard rock cliffs to make sand where the water and land meet.

Chapter 46 reads, “When the Dao rules on earth, racehorses are used to pull dung carts. When the Dao has been lost on earth, warhorses are raised on green fields. There is no greater defect than many desires. There is no greater evil than to not know sufficiency...Therefore, the sufficiency of sufficiency is lasting sufficiency.”

Chapter 56 reads, “Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”

Chapter 60 reads, “A great nation must be led the way one fries a small fish. If one administers the world according to the Dao, then the ancestors do not swarm about as spirits. Not that the ancestors are not spirits, but their spirits do not harm humanity.”

Chapter 63 reads, “Whoever practices non-action occupies themselves with not being occupied, finds taste in what is tasteless, sees the great in the small and the much in the little...Plan what is difficult while it is still easy. Do the hard thing while it is still small. Everything heavy on earth begins as something light. Everything on earth begins as something small.”

Chapter 64 reads, “The tallest tree trunk grows from a sprout as thin as a hair. A tower nine stories high is built from a small pile of earth. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single footstep in front of your feet.”

Chapter 67 reads, “I have three treasures that I treasure an guard. The first is called ‘love’. The second is called ‘sufficiency’. The third is called ‘not daring to lead the world’.

Chapter 68 reads, “Whoever knows how to lead well is not warlike. Whoever knows how to fight well is not angry. Whoever knows how to conquer enemies does not fight them. Whoever knows how to use men well keeps themselves low.”

Chapter 71 reads “To realize that our knowledge is ignorance, this is a noble insight. To regard our ignorance as knowledge, this is mental sickness”. Knowledge is always focusing on one thing. When you focus on one thing, you ignore everything else. This is crucial to seeing how our knowledge is always human perspective, and how it can always be improved and extended.

Chapter 76 reads, “When we enter life we are soft and weak. When we die we are hard and strong. Plants when they enter life are soft and tender. When they die they are dry and stiff. Therefore the hard and strong are companions of death, and the soft and weak are companions of life. Therefore, when weapons are strong they are not victorious. When trees are strong they are cut down.”

The last Chapter, 81, reads, “True words are not beautiful. Beautiful words are not true...The more the sages do for others, the more they possess. The more they give to others, the more they have.”

The Book of Zhuang Zi

While Laozi’s Dao De Jing is concerned with how to properly live as a community and sounds like political advice to rulers and officials in many places, Zhuangzi’s text, known under his name as ‘The Zhuangzi’, is concerned with the individual mind, with human judgements and attitude. It argues that individuals should seek freedom and happiness through simplicity and open-mindedness. Zhuangzi may have been from the Sung region of ancient China, a place torn apart by political conflicts from within and conquered repeatedly by neighboring regions. Zhuangzi repeatedly suggests that if one takes the long view over many lifetimes, the bad comes with the good and it is all part of one process and whole. While other Chinese masters suggested various ways one could structure the state, as Laozi does in places, Zhuangzi is entirely concerned with liberating the individual mind in a chaotic and close-minded world.

Zhuangzi does speak of Laozi in several places in the text, as he does of many other sages and masters drawing from their teachings as well as being critical of some. In one passage, he tells us that Nan-jung Chu went to see Laozi for advice, who asked him as he entered, “Why have you brought this crowd of people with you?”. Nan-jung spun around, to find no one behind him, as Laozi was referring to the attachments and memories Nan-jung carried with him. Many assumed along with the Daoist tradition that Zhuangzi was familiar with Laozi’s Dao De Jing because both are considered the patriarchs of Daoism and Zhuangzi seems to quote the Dao De Jing in places, however modern scholarship does not know whether Zhuangzi had ever read Laozi’s work or whether both texts are drawing from the same sources. Both patriarch’s books were likely added to by other authors, and it was only by the time of the Han dynasty around 200 BCE that the two texts were set as they remain today.

The Zhuangzi was a major influence on Zen Buddhism, which unlike other Buddhist schools was a native Chinese tradition that was cross-pollinated with Daoism from its beginning. Many Zen koan stories contain lines that are similar if not identical to the Zhuangzi. Joshu, my favorite Zen master who lived about 700 CE, quotes the Zhuangzi to a monk in training, “Ships can not sail where the water is too shallow”. Like Joshu and Zen, Zhuangzi enjoyed using humor (as did Heraclitus) much more than other philosophers, using it to shock and free people from their judgements, understandings and limitations.

In several places of the Zhuangzi, we see the idea of perspective presented the same way as we saw in Heraclitus. We are told that Mao Quiang and Lady Li were legendary beautiful women, but minnows were frightened of them when they gazed into a stream, and birds and deer were frightened by them when they walked through the forest. Heraclitus said that all human beauty and achievement is nothing but apes to the gods. Who knows what is beautiful, humans, birds, fish, or deer? Zhuangzi asks which of them knows what tastes good.

Often, the heroes of Zhuangzi are common people, woodcutters, fishermen, butchers, carpenters, ex-cons, and others of low status. In two places, Zhuangzi seems to exalt while mock Confucius who praises two sages who have had their legs cut off for committing crimes but have flocks of followers. Confucius is made to say that his own teachings are the lowly ways of humans, but these sages know the way of heaven, the Dao, and he would become their student if he only had the time. Confucius says to Wang Dai, who asks about one of the legless sages, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall (two organs in the body), Ch’u and Yueh (two warring kingdoms in China), but if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one.”

We are told that the emperor learns how to rule his kingdom by listening to Cook Ting, who tells the emperor that he has learned over a lifetime how to cut up oxen with his knife that never dulls because he knows instinctively where the spaces are. We hear about the woodcutter scolding his apprentice for saying that an old gnarled tree is useless, replying that what is useless in some ways is useful in others, such as a tree no one will cut down providing a shady spot for centuries.

When Zhuangzi is asked by Dung Kuo where the way of heaven is, Zhuangzi says it is everywhere. Dung Kuo asks him to be more specific, so Zhuangzi says it is in the ant, in grass, in tile shards, in piss and in shit, horrifying Dung Kuo progressively. Like the Laozi text, the Zhuangzi continuously suggests that we see the lowest things as beautiful, and avoid striving for and hoarding the things people desire to be happy and free.

In the first passage of the Zhuangzi, the mythical Peng bird is mocked by the dove and the cicada (a large grasshopper-like insect) for flying high and far in the sky. They have no frame of reference to understand such an act, as they die every winter and do not survive by migrating south. Several times Zhuangzi is told by other sages that his wisdom is foolish and useless, but Zhuangzi replies, much like the Dao text, that there are no things which are not foolish or useless, but this does not stop them from also being serious and useful.

In another passage, Chien Wu tells Lien Shu that he has heard talk of a holy sage living on a mountain top who is gentle and shy like a young girl, does not eat anything but drinks dew, rides a dragon through they sky and can protect people and animals from illness. Chien Wu says this is clearly insane and he refuses to believe it. Lien Shu replies:

We can’t expect a blind man to appreciate beautiful patterns or a deaf man to listen to bells and drums, and blindness and deafness are not confined to the body alone. The understanding has them too, as your words have just now shown. This man, with his virtue, is about to embrace the ten thousand things and roll them all into one.

The philosopher and logician Huizi tells Zhuangzi that a king gave him seeds of a huge gourd, but when he planted the seeds and grew huge gourds they were so large that he could not use them as containers so he smashed them. Zhuangzi tells him he should have used them as boats, and “Obviously you still have a lot of underbrush in your head!” Huizi tells Zhuangzi that he has a large gnarled tree, which is as useless as Zhuangzi’s reasoning. Zhuangzi replies that if no ax will cut it down, it makes a great shaded place for taking a nap.

Tzu Ch’i tells Tzu Yu that when the wind blows you can hear many sounds made by many things, including the whistling of trees and the wailing of hollow logs, but there is only one wind. He then says:

Words are not just wind. Words have something to say, but if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something, or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn’t there? What does the Way rely upon, such that we have true and false? What do words rely upon, such that we have right and wrong?...When the Way relies on little accomplishments and words rely on vain show, then we have the rights and wrongs of the Confucians and the Moists. What one calls right the other calls wrong, and what one calls wrong the other calls right, but if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, then the best thing to use is clarity. Everything has its ‘that’, and everything has its ‘this’. From the point of view of ‘that’, you cannot see it, but through understanding you can know it, so I say, ‘that’ comes out of ‘this’ and ‘this’ depends on ‘that’, which is to say ‘this’ and ‘that’ give birth to each other...Therefore the sage does not proceed in such a way, but illuminates all in the light of heaven. A sage too has a ‘this’ and a ‘that’, but a sage’s ‘that’ has a ‘this’, and a sage’s ‘this’ has a ‘that’. A sage’s ‘that’ has both a right and a wrong in it, and a sage’s ‘this’ too has both a right and a wrong in it, so does a sage still have a ‘this’ and ‘that’? A state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites is called the hinge of the Way. When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right then is a single endlessness and its wrong too is a single endlessness, so I say the best thing to use is clarity...

To wear out your brain trying to make things into one without realizing that they are all the same is called “three in the morning”. What do I mean by “three in the morning”? When the monkey trainer was handing out acorns, he said, “You get three in the morning and four at night.” This made all the monkeys furious. “Well then,” he said, “you get four in the morning and three at night.” The monkeys were all delighted. There was no change in the reality behind the words, and yet the monkeys responded with joy and anger. Let them, if they want to. The sage harmonizes with both right and wrong and rests in heaven, the equalizer.

Because right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured, and because the Way was injured, love became complete, but do such things as completion and injury really exist, or do they not?

Those who divide fail to divide. Those who discriminate fail to discriminate. What does this mean, you ask? The sage embraces things. Ordinary people discriminate among things and parade their discriminations in front of others. So I say, those who discriminate fail to see.

Nieh Ch’ueh asks Wang Ni about something everyone can agree to. Wang Ni replies:

If someone sleeps in a damp place, their back aches and he ends up half paralyzed, but is this true of a carp? If someone lives in a tree, they are terrified and shake with fright, but is this true of a monkey? Of these three creatures, which knows the proper place to live? We eat the flesh of grass-fed and grain-fed animals, deer eat grass, centipedes find snakes tasty, and hawks and falcons love mice. Of these four, who knows how food ought to taste? Monkeys pair with monkeys, deer go out with deer, and fish play around with fish. men claim that Mao-Ch’iang and Lady Li were beautiful, but if fish saw them they would dive to the bottom of the stream, if birds saw them they would fly away, and if deer saw them they would break into a run. Of these four, which knows the standard of beauty for the world?

Chuchuehzi said to Changwuzi, “I have heard Confucius say that the sage does not work at anything, does not pursue profit, does not dodge harm, does not enjoy being sought after, does not follow the Way, says nothing yet says something, says something yet says nothing, and wanders beyond the dust and grime. Confucius himself regarded these as wild and flippant words, though I believe they describe the working of the mysterious Way. What do you think of them?” Changwuzi said, “Even the Yellow Emperor would be confused if he heard such words, so how could you expect Confucius to understand them? Whats more, you’re too hasty in your own appraisal. You see an egg and demand a crowing rooster, see a crossbow pellet and demand a roast dove. I’m going to try speaking some reckless words and I want you to listen to them recklessly. How will that be? The sage leans on the sun and the moon, tucks the universe under his arm, merges himself with things, leaves the confusion and muddle as it is, and looks on slaves as exalted. Ordinary people strain and struggle. The sage is stupid and blockish. The sage takes part in ten thousand ages and achieves simplicity in oneness...Confucius and you are both dreaming, and when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.

In the most famous passage of the book, Zhuangzi dreamt that he was a butterfly and forgot that he was Zhuangzi. When he woke, he no longer knew whether he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is Zhuangzi.

Another famous metaphor used is that of the praying mantis that waved its arms angrily in front of an approaching carriage, unaware that it is incapable of stopping it. It suggests that we move in response to life rather than hold our ground taking pride in our own abilities.

We read in one passage about the True Man, who sounds quite similar to Nietzsche’s Super Man (Ubermensch) who understands the world and himself to be beyond good and evil:

What do I mean by a True Man? The True Man of ancient times did not rebel against want, did not grow proud in plenty, and did not plan his affairs. A man like this could commit and error and not regret it, could meet with success and not make a show. A man like this could climb the high places and not be frightened...He didn’t forget where he began. He didn’t try to find out where he would end. He received something and took pleasure in it. he forgot about it and handed it back again. This is what I call not using the mind to repel the Way, not using man to help out Heaven.

You hide your boat in the ravine and your fish net in the swamp and tell yourself that they will be safe, but in the middle of the night a strong man shoulders them and carries them off, and in your stupidity you don’t know why it happened. You think you do right to hide little things in big ones, and yet they get away from you, but if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.

That which kills life does not die. That which gives life does not live. This is the kind of thing it is. There’s nothing it doesn’t send off, nothing it doesn’t welcome, nothing it doesn’t destroy, nothing it doesn’t complete.

Jo of the North Sea said, “You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog. He’s limited by the space he lives in. You can’t discuss ice with a summer insect. He’s bound to a single season. You can’t discuss the Way with a cramped scholar. He’s shackled by his doctrines. Now you have come out beyond your banks and borders and have seen the great sea, so you realize your own insignificance. From now on it will be possible to talk to you about the Great Principle.

Jo of the North Sea said, “From the point of view of the Way, things have no nobility or meanness. From the point of view of things themselves, each regards itself as noble and other things as mean. From the point of view of common opinion, nobility and meanness are not determined by the individual himself. From the point of view of differences, if we regard a thing as big because there is a certain bigness to it, then among all the ten thousand things there are none that are not big. If we regard a thing as small because there is a certain smallness to it, then among the ten thousand things there are none that are not small. If we know that heaven and earth are tiny grains and the tip of a hair is a range of mountains, then we have perceived the law of difference. From the point of view of function, if we regard a thing as useful because there s a certain usefulness to it, then among all the ten thousand things there are none that are not useful. If we regard a thing as useless because there is a certain uselessness to it, then among the ten thousand things none that are not useless. If we know that east and west are mutually opposed but that one cannot do without the other, then we can estimate degree of use.

If someone can swim underwater, they may never have seen a boat before and still they’ll know how to handle it. That’s because they see the water as so much dry land, and regards the capsizing of a boat as they would the overturning of a cart. The ten thousand things may all be capsizing and turning over at the same time right in from of them and it can’t get at them and affect what’s inside, so where could they go and not be at ease? When you’re betting for tiles in an archery contest, you shoot with skill. When you’re betting for fancy belt buckles, you worry about your aim, and when you’re betting for real gold, you’re a nervous wreck. Your skill is the same in all three cases, but because one prize means more to you than another, you let outside considerations weigh on your mind. They who look too hard on the outside get clumsy on the inside.

This passage reminds me of a metaphor used by the psychotherapist Milton Erickson. If you put a board on the ground, everyone can walk across it with confidence. If you put the same board three hundred feet up in the air, most people would be terrified, even though walking across the board is the same set of physical motions. Erickson is thinking of clients petrified by fear, such as codependents who can’t leave their abusive partner by taking several steps to the door and then several more out it.

Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “Your words are useless!” Zhuangzi replied, “A man has to understand the useless before you can talk to him about the useful. The earth is certainly vast and broad, though a man uses no more of it than the area he puts his feet on. If, however, you were to dig away all the earth from around his feet until you reach the Yellow Springs, then would the man still be able to make use of it?” “No, it would be useless,” said Huizi. “It is obvious, then,” said Zhuangzi, that the useless has its use.”

The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so that I can have a word with him?

The Book of Liezi

Liezi is the third patriarch of Daoism, and his text, known by his name just like the Zhuangzi, is the third classic of the Daoist tradition. In the Zhuangzi, Liezi is mentioned as a powerful sage who could travel by riding the wind. Liezi likely lived around 400 BCE, putting him between Laozi and Zhuangzi. While Zhuangzi mentions Liezi in the Zhuangzi text, establishing that there was a Master Lie who was active earlier than the Zhuangzi was written and compiled, it has long been known to Chinese scholars that much of the Liezi text was written far later than the Dao De Jing and Zhuangzi, likely some time between 200 and 300 CE. Because it was written much later, the Liezi may very well be the only one of the three Daoist classics written by an author or authors who identified with an official Daoist tradition. Some of the Liezi text may indeed be from the earlier period when Liezi and Zhuangzi were alive, and many passages are identical to some and likely borrowed from the Zhuangzi, but it is still disputed and unknown as to which sections were written when. There are some scholars who argue a Buddhist influence on some passages certainly pushes these back to a later date when Buddhism was flourishing, competing and mixing with Daoism.

In suggesting simplicity and nature as the way to properly live, some have called Laozi and other Daoists early Chinese anarchists. The Liezi cautiously suggests that when things are properly working, there is no need for the distinction of ruler and subject and each individual can pursue what they want for themselves without harming or crossing anyone else. In addition, while Daoism later became a religion transfixed on the idea of immortality, and in the Liezi there are references to immortals in the heavens, the text argues several times that to accept death is to accept the fullness of life, as one must accept both sides of oppositions to be in balance with the way of things that is never entirely one-sided. Liezi says, “to wish to live forever, and have no more of ending, is to be deluded about our lot”.

Liezi teaches that all things are interdependent with their opposites, like Yin and Yang working with each other while opposing one another. From this, “Consequently, there are ways in which earth excels heaven, and ways in which each thing is more intelligent than the sage” (p. 19). Heaven shapes but can not support. When the sage is kind, other things must be strong, and when the sage is just, other things must be passive.

Let us examine several passages of the Liezi.

The Yellow Emperor is said to have spent fifteen years pleasing only himself, and the next fifteen years trying to please everyone in the empire, but both wore him out and his health deteriorated. After meditating for three years, he fell asleep and in a dreamed of a land where there were no rulers or subjects, where everything naturally followed its course and did not try for anything else. After he wakes, he calls his ministers and tells them that he has found the way, but he can not tell them about it.

Liang Yang, a slave and royal tamer of wild beasts, says that to tame a tiger you must neither please it with a live rabbit nor anger it by withholding food, but rather feed it bits at a time so it neither gets overly excited nor wrathful. Because he neither gives them what they want nor withholds what they want, they regard him as one of their own.

Yin of Chou is a rich man who works his servants hard, including an old slave who every night falls deep asleep and dreams he is a rich king without a care in the world. When asked if his life is hard, he says he can’t complain. Yin of Chou, however, constantly worries about losing his fortune, and every night dreams he is a slave. When he asks a friend about this, the friend tells him he has too much more than others, and Yin decides to demand far less of his servants. This is an interesting variant on Zhuangzi dreaming about being a butterfly.

Huazi completely loses his long term memory in middle age, forgetting everything at night by morning and everything in the morning by nightfall. His family hires many to cure him, and all fail except a Confucian who locks himself in a room with Huazi for seven days. When he wakes up, Huazi chases the Confucian off with a spear. When asked why by his family, he says that he now remembers his past.

Pang of Qin had a son who saw white as black, tasted sweet as bitter and smelled the fragrant as foul. Seeking a doctor for a cure, Pang happens upon Laozi and asks him what he should do. Laozi replies that the world and all its inhabitants are just as deluded, that he himself does not know whether these words he speaks are meaningful or nonsense, and that Pang should keep his money.

Liezi had many students who he argued with day and night, but lived next to Nan Guozi, whom he never spoke with. His students asked him if he was an enemy, to which Liezi replies that there is simply no speaking with him. Liezi suggests they all go to see what he is about. When they enter, Nan Guozi is like a statue with no recognition of Liezi, but then suddenly he points at the last student in the back of the crowd and begins heckling him, “like a bigot who is always determined to be in the right”. They return to Liezi’s house perplexed, but Liezi tells them that this is a man who truly knows how to say nothing. This story is much like a Zen koan encounter, and predates these.

After Liezi had studied with Old Shang (Liezi’s original master) for three years, he ceased to think of right and wrong and Shang gave him a passing glance for the first time. After five years, Liezi began thinking of right and wrong, benefit and harm, and Shang smiled at him. After seven years, Liezi thought without distinction, and Shang had Liezi sit with him on the same mat. This story is much like the Zen story of ‘rock is a rock’, ‘not a rock’, ‘is a rock’, but it begins in the negative.

Prince Mou is an enthusiastic follower of Gongsun Long, and he is ridiculed for this by Ziyu. The two go back and forth with Ziyu stating the paradoxes and Prince Mou explaining the answers. Included is ‘A white horse is not a horse’. Ziyu ridicules Gongsun Long for saying, “An orphan calf never had a mother”, to which Prince Mou replies, “When it had a mother, it was not an orphan calf”. In the end Ziyu says if Gongsun Long blew it all out another hole the Prince would still believe all this nonsense, and the Prince goes silent, saying he will speak of this another day. This is in some way a recognition, and in another a condemnation of Gongsun Long. The Prince seems beaten in the end, even though he gives what seem to be the answers to each riddle. Like the Zhuangzi, the Liezi seems to acknowledge Gongsun Long’s skill but suggest that there is an understanding beyond it that is not mere play with opposites.

An old man wishes to move a seven thousand foot tall set of mountains, and begins digging with his sons. His wife ridicules him, saying that he will clearly die before he puts a small dent in even one of them. He replies that this is true, but his sons will have sons, and they will have sons, and the mountain isn’t getting any bigger.

The Duke of Qi was looking down from Ox Mountain on his capital city, when he began to weep, wondering why if his land was so beautiful he must one day leave it in death. His servants began to cry, replying that they had far less than the duke but they also feared death. Yenzi alone was smiling, and the duke asked him why. Yenzi replied that if we could hold on to life by merit, then the duke’s great ancestors would be immortal, they would still be sitting on the throne, and the duke would be wading in a rice paddy with a bamboo hat on. The duke was ashamed of himself.

A man lost his ax, and suspected a boy who lived next door of stealing it. Everything about the boy’s behavior, the way he talked, his expressions, betrayed that he had stolen the ax. Then the man found the ax buried in his cellar. When he saw the boy again, nothing in his behavior suggested that he would ever steal an ax.

A man wanted gold more than anything else. One morning, he walked to the market, found a gold dealer, grabbed much of his gold and fled. When the police caught him, they asked him why he had stolen in front of so many people. He replied that at the time he had not seen the people, only the gold.

Daoist Religious Practice

In addition to its philosophy, Daoism is practiced as a religion which worships Laozi and other patriarchs as sages who acquired the immortality of gods through wisdom and discipline. The religious tradition was founded by Zhang Daoling in 142 CE, 750 years after Laozi was to have lived and 500 years after Zhuangzi and Liezi. This was right around the time when Buddhism was settling into China, and just before the Yellow Turban rebellion and other popular rebellions that were mobilized by growing Daoist temples and communities.

Zhang Daoling, who is pictured riding a tiger much like Laozi is pictured riding a water buffalo, was a local magistrate near the end of the Han dynasty. Although he studied Confucianism to obtain his position, he is said to have studied the Dao De Jing from a very young age and later wrote a twenty four volume commentary on the work after founding the first Daoist community. According to tradition, Laozi appeared to Zhang Daoling in 142 CE, telling him that the Han dynasty would come to an end but a Daoist community must be founded to help human beings through the crisis and to immortality beyond this world. Zhang Daoling became one of the four celestial masters in the tradition, ascending from a mountaintop to immortality at the age of 123 (a nice auspicious number). The Daoist community rapidly expanded through the leadership of Zhang Daoling’s son and grandson.

Intro Philosophy: Wittgenstein

2011-11-22T21:19:00.000-08:00

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is one of the most important thinkers in academics today. His early book, the Tractatus, and his later book, the Philosophical Investigations, are considered two of the most important influences for the American and British Analytic school of philosophy, the dominant school of philosophy in America. In an end of the century poll in 2000, philosophy professors from America and Canada were asked to list the five most important books that influenced their own work. When all of the results were tallied up, the Philosophical Investigations was #1, and the Tractatus was #4. The Philosophical Investigations was cited far more frequently than any other book, was listed first on far more ballots, and crossed over more into many different disciplines and areas of study.

Wittgenstein’s thought can be divided into his early, middle and later work. His early work is the book the Tractatus, the book which gave the world truth table logic. This tool, as Wittgenstein later came to see it, remains the mathematical system taught as logic today. Just as Wittgenstein became famous for his truth tables, he switched positions in his thinking and came to reject his earlier work. He wrote in notebooks that were only published after his death, and the Philosophical Investigations is the most celebrated of these.

Wittgenstein’s Father was the Austrian Carnegie, making a fortune in Steel. Though his father was Protestant, and his mother Jewish, Ludwig was baptized Catholic because of antisemitism at the time. In his early years, Ludwig was a proud atheist but by the time he was working on his Tractatus he had a mystical transcendental outlook which he kept for the rest of his life. Though never religious, and though he had to bribe Nazis later to smuggle his “Jewish” family from Austria, he was buried as a Catholic.

The Wittgenstein family was known for intense criticism, musical talent, depression, and suicide. Three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed suicide, and he himself considered suicide for awhile before launching into his late period. Unfortunately, suicide was considered romantic for Austrian elites at the time.

Wittgenstein was in Hitler’s elementary school, 2 days younger, but because he was put forward a grade and Hitler was held back a grade he was 2 years ahead. Both he and Hitler hated the school and the lessons.

He began studying at university in Berlin to become an engineer with an interest in flight (the Wright Brothers had recently invented the motorized glider, but flew it in France and Germany until 1907 as the US Army did not believe them). After failing in his attempt to build a better propeller, he began studying mathematical theory and philosophy of mathematics, becoming entranced with two thinkers who are along with Wittgenstein foundational for Analytical philosophy and logic: Russell from Britain, and Frege from Germany. Wittgenstein went to see Frege, who did not fully understand his questions and advised him to go see Russell, which he did in 1911.

He showed up unannounced to Russell’s room at Trinity College, impressed him with his intense and brilliant arguments. Russell became convinced that the young Austrian was going to carry his work forward and be his successor, solving the remaining problems of logic that Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics had left open. As mentioned last lecture, Russell had shown there were contradictions unresolved in Frege’s work with set theory, but Russell had become frustrated trying to solve these contradiction with his theory of types.

Wittgenstein, an eccentric and difficult personality, was never fully comfortable at Cambridge, and often got into disagreements with Russell and threatened to leave many times before fleeing to Norway where he believed he could finish his work on Logic. While some still disagree, it is generally accepted that Wittgenstein was gay, developed a relationship with Pinsent, a young graduate student, and some believe that Russell encouraged the relationship if he did not introduce the two with the purpose of keeping the emotional and unstable genius with him at Cambridge.

When WWI broke out, he served for Austria, at the same time as he was developing the material for the Tractatus. Learning of Pinsent’s death in the war in Italy, he became suicidal, moved in with his uncle and finished the Tractatus which he dedicated to his ‘friend’ Pinsent. He tried to get it published, but no one would take it. Remember: this book went on to be the #4 influence in the US and Canada according to the poll, the book that gave modern logic truth tables, the method that replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms.

Russell intervened back in Cambridge, and had it published and wrote and introduction for it. This was the start of the end. Though Russell saw the work as genius, he did not completely understand much of it and his introduction reflected this. Wittgenstein read the introduction and realized Russell had great misunderstandings of his work. Believing that his Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein left Russell and Cambridge again and went to be a school teacher in Austria. He gave away his portion of the family fortune, anonymously to writers but also to his family. Since his family was already wealthy, he wrote in a letter, “they won’t be corrupted by it”. He left the school after a short while (not a good fit, and parents thought he was crazy). He became a gardener’s assistant, and then his sister had him design her a house.

While finishing the house, he was contacted by members of the Vienna Circle, positivists using Hegel’s logic and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to give a solid foundation for science and mathematics. This was what Russell had hoped for, minus the Hegel who Russell hated. While Wittgenstein had been away, the Tractatus had become famous, and central to many already inspired by Frege and Russell. Many came to visit and discus and progressively Witt became disgusted. He began to realize that there were fundamental problems with his Tractatus and truth tables, and got into intense arguments with the Vienna Circle members, at one point turning his back on his guests and reading Tagore, an Indian transcendental poet out loud. For the rest of his life, Wittgenstein thought logical positivism (the analytic school of philosophy) misunderstood his Tractatus.

In his early period, Wittgenstein believed he had fully solved the problems of a complete system of logic. He saw it like Schopenhauer, a big early influence: logic is a perfect crystal tool of analysis, life is a messy chaotic ocean, and so logic is perfect but unfortunately never fits perfectly with life. This is like having the perfect tool for an impossible and continuous job. In conversations with positivists he started to change his thinking around and continued to write until he died. These writings were published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations and other books. In his later thought, Wittgenstein saw logic not as a perfect crystal castle in the sky but as rules and games that are imperfectly lived in the real world imperfectly and without complete definition. He no longer believed that logic could provide a foundation for mathematics, science or philosophy. He denied that contradictions are necessarily false, or disprove a mathematical-logical system.

In 1929, he decided to return to Cambridge to correct his thinking and teach. To his horror, when he arrived at the train station he was greeted by a vast crowd of intellectuals as the new hero, the author of the Tractatus, the work he now thought was exactly wrong.
The famous economist Keynes wrote to his wife: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train’. Wittgenstein continued to lecture at Cambridge, developing his ideas.

In 1934, he defected to Soviet Russia, wanting to be a plumber or work with his hands. When he was told that according to the Soviet system he would be put to work as a philosophy professor in Moscow, he defected back to Britain.

In 1937, Hitler annexed Austria. Wittgenstein had to bribe Nazis to get his Jewish family passage out and spend the equivalent today of $50 million in gold and foreign currency. Since he had given away his own portion of the family fortune, he had to get much of this from his colleagues at Cambridge and other admirers of his work.

THE TRACTATUS

In his early thought, expressed in the pages of the Tractatus, reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world with these atomic facts. The world does not perfectly fit this atomic language, but because it is the way the head makes sense of the world we cannot understand things otherwise. Wittgenstein said that it is the part of the book that is unwritten that is important, the part where life itself goes beyond this logic and makes the world what it is. Of the world beyond logic, he wrote “Of what one cannot speak, one must remain silent”, which is in fact a quote from Confucius. Our logic and the world are two things that do not fit, yet mysteriously (and mystically) the two are one.

If we boil logic with truth tables down to its tautologies, the necessary and basic workings, and leave the rest open as the world which always is beyond our thoughts, we can have the perfect system of logic and grammar that we use to understand things spelled out even if it cannot perfectly predict the world or tell us how the world works. Think of logic as a set of reading glasses, and the world as something one looks at through the glasses. Wittgenstein believed that with the Tractatus he had spelled out the perfect crystal form of the glasses, and beyond this nothing can be said for certain.

When it comes to facts in the world, however, everything is contingent on something else and is neither simply necessary or simply impossible. Logic is the necessary and impossible book-ends with which we interpret the world and its facts, but the world is always between the necessary and the impossible, is always somewhat necessary and somewhat impossible, which creates a gulf between our pure and necessary logic and the unpredictable world. For Wittgenstein, only logic and math can be sets of necessary truths, and this is because (as Avicenna and Mill believe) they are concepts and are ideal, unlike situations of real things in the world. Once we nail down the perfect tool of logic, we can use it to examine the world and all of its messy situations. Our examinations will never be perfect because of the gap between logic and the world, but at least the logic will be necessary and perfect.

The reason’s Wittgenstein’s truth tables were such a success is that they proved, for the first time, that many of the axioms logicians had discovered were necessarily true (tautologies) in a way that is simple to do and easy to see.

THE MIDDLE AND LATER THOUGHT OF WITTGENSTEIN

At first Wittgenstein thought that he had solved all the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus truth table system (we do still use it today to teach formal logic), so he left philosophy and Cambridge behind, went to war, had many experiences, and then later decided that his earlier thinking contained horrible problems. He no longer believed that logic could be crystallized in the head as a truth table matrix, but rather it existed as a complex out in the world, as arrangements of people, thoughts, symbols, and objects. He continued to work on notebooks, progressing in his thought until his death, after which his notebooks were published.

There is an excellent passage from Lectures and Conversations that illustrates the turn nicely. This work was taken not from Wittgenstein’s notebooks but from the notes of his seminar students in the years leading up to his work on the notebooks which would be published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations. At this time Freud’s ideas had stormed onto the academic scene, infuriating Wittgenstein who now had come to hate the idea that things in the world, even logical operators and systems, can be boiled down to a single essential element or factor like sex, power or truth. It is this skepticism, which can be called the “problem of essences”, which marks the turn from his earlier thinking to his more influential later thought.

Wittgenstein attacked Freud’s psychoanalysis and dream interpretation for boiling everything down to sex. In the Lectures and Conversations (20-21), Wittgenstein proposes a thought experiment for consideration. If we cook a human being down to carbon ash in an oven, are we left with the essence of the human being? A human being is a “carbon-based” life form, so carbon is a dominant element. Consider that we could cook a human down to water in the same oven, and claim that because humans are 3/5ths water we have the essence of the person.

Would it be correct to say that humans are essentially ashy, or essentially wet? Why not? We would not say that a human is essentially carbon or water, nor would we say ashy or wet, because the human being is a complex situation that is not reducible to a single element. The properties of carbon or water do not in themselves explain how humans behave or what they mean to us. If we cooked people down to ashes or water, we have destroyed the situation and can no longer investigate how they work. In the same way, a person is not merely their DNA. While carbon, water and DNA have very important, even necessary roles to play in any person, they are not exclusively the essence or meaning of the complex that is a human individual.

In the same way, Wittgenstein had come to believe that neither facts in the world nor logic in the head can be reduced to a single element or necessary structure. Facts and logic are not true in themselves, but true in real situations of the world which are irreducibly complex. Wittgenstein says in the Lectures and Conversations that we have to avoid the “lure of the secret cellar”, the urge to boil situations down to a single element like Freud tried to boil human relations, meaning and the mind down to sex or Wittgenstein himself had tried to boil logic down to its simple structure.

The task of philosophy, logic and science is not to fully or completely explain anything, but to investigate things. Thought never fully defines things but rather describes and re-describes things. If science is thinking about the world, then science has endless work to do describing and re-describing things. Consider whether we fully understand apples, or whether we ever need to entirely understand them in order to continue to understand them and use them a great deal. Likewise, if philosophy and logic are ‘thinking about thinking’, and if thinking is merely a possible description of things, philosophy and logic have endless work to do describing our descriptions, describing and re-describing the ways that we describe things. Much insight can be gained even if no subject is entirely explained or exhausted.

One good way to approach this is to describe how cultures of thought, perspectives, facts and models are gathered together and lived in institutions. Thought ceases to be completely abstract, but is rather a culture and situation in the real world that involves people, buildings and money. The cryptanalysis of algebra worked so well as a modeling language that we came to believe that the mathematics was not in our practices and text books but rather sewn into the fabric of the world itself. As we look over the history of thought in the wake of Wittgenstein’s later work, it becomes evident that mathematics and logic are tools and lenses, not the hidden structures of things operating at secret levels out of our immediate sight. In scholarship today, particularly the history of religion, philosophy and science, it has become popular to consider a system of thought as a real lived situation rather than an abstract set of beliefs and ideas. A religion or science is in fact a situation of human beings who never have to have entirely the same set of beliefs as long as they can generally and relatively cohere as a culture.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

In this monumental work, one of my favorites of modern European thought, Wittgenstein argues for a middle way between two extreme positions, between the position of scientific positivism (objective truth is facts in the world) and the position of psychological skepticism (subjective truth is meanings in the mind). He presents each position in quotes again and again, and then argues against both in a three stage process. First he states a position (either that there are facts given in the world or meaning is all in the head), then shows situations in which the position works, then shows situations in which the position does not work. He shows us that taking either position to extremes would be understandable given particular ways we think and act, but neither position explains all the ways in which we think and act. We live in complex ways that depend both on there being a coherent world and there being human perspectives. Wittgenstein argues that we can take both positions rather than determine one to be the actual and the other to be the illusion.

In his earlier thought, the world and the head are separated by a Kantian gulf between objectivity and subjectivity. In his later thinking, the world and our heads work together seamlessly as a complex situation. One cannot remove either the head or the world to get the bedrock or anchor of meaning and truth without resulting in absurdities. The clean and ideal side of logic, math and grammar mislead us into thinking that meaning must be anchored entirely on one side, either exclusively in the head or exclusively in the world, but we gain much more ability to think and describe our heads and our world if we stop looking for meaning and truth to be entirely in one place rather than the other. In the same way, rather than determine which facts are absolute truths to the exclusion of their opposites, or refuse to identify coherence of belief as it is all ‘mere theory’, we can better understand the facts and theories we can share by recognizing that they are one and the same viewed from opposite sides. If we can continue to determine relative fact from relative fiction, there is no need to entirely separate the two. To use the tool analogy, as long as we have decent tools we do not need perfect or eternal ones.

Games and rules gather people together, but individuals can also variously interpret rules and meanings. ‘Rules can always be variously interpreted’ is a central idea of the Philosophical Investigations. This is not to say that they always are or they should be, but the window remains open (Wittgenstein writes, “It is like locking a man in a room but leaving the window open”). Both are only what they are together as a form of life. Notice that this thinking has much in common with Laozi’s thinking on the wheel as both empty and solid at the same time, and much like the Zen koans of a rock being not a rock and a rock and the sound of one hand clapping.

Consider the ‘child at the blackboard’ metaphor used in the text. It is always possible for a child to misunderstand rules and demonstrate this misunderstanding by making mistakes, even after you show the child and explain. Let us say that you then write a new ‘inner’ set of rules to further explain the rules when the child fails. What if the child does not understand those? Is there a bedrock set of rules that the child can not possibly misunderstand? If the child can misunderstand rules, then no set of rules within rules within rules is ever perfectly airtight. We have an infinite regress unless we can find a set of rules that can never be misinterpreted.

Just like Wittgenstein had been seeking the fundamental inner workings of logic and mathematics, as Frege and Russell had tried to do before him, if people do math decently there need not be any inner rules aside from the explanation and demonstration that, if repeated, children can often follow. Notice we are considering mathematics as a culture, learned by children and taught by adults, not as an abstract set of necessary or immutable rules. It turns out that there are no inner workings to mathematics. Mathematics works as it does openly, on the board in front of one’s face, without the need of a ‘secret cellar’. If mathematics on a board is not entirely secure, then no inner set of rules could or must be either for it to function.

When we try to explain anything, it is not being simplified, being stripped down to its core, at all. It is the opposite: we are making it more complex as we try to simplify and explain it. The rules are not being discovered in the thing, but being added to the thing. When we explain things, we are not whittling away the unnecessary but adding our descriptions to it. In the same way, when we do science to explain apples or human beings, we are adding our descriptions and the situations of our descriptions, not uncovering the simple truth of the thing. The simple truth of a thing is the simple thing itself. The simplest truth of an apple is the single apple. An explanation of where apples come from is very useful, but it puts the apple in a complex with many other things (such as trees, farms, stores, trucks). An apple is not merely its DNA, but is in a infinitely complex situation with its DNA and ourselves attempting to isolate components with the tools and technology we bring into the situation.

We are always essentializing (like when we say, ‘We are always essentializing’). Meaning, grammar and logic do separate things into parts. They are useful for doing so. However, Wittgenstein is arguing something quite revealing: There are no final explanations, only complex descriptions. Any explanation is a partial human description, which can then itself be described and explained. The task of philosophy, science and mathematics is not to reduce things to simple truth, but to generate more meaning and situations.

Let us turn to the text. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that he now sees grave mistakes in his Tractatus. He says that this new book is not to spare thinking, but to stimulate thinking. Notice that the Tractatus had the opposite goal: to put an end to the problems of logic and philosophy. Now Wittgenstein does not believe that anything can or need be fully solved or closed, but should rather be opened up and made complex.

In section 7, Wittgenstein says that language games are actions and language interwoven as forms of life. He considers that words such as ‘this’ and ‘there’ are learned interwoven with gestures such as pointing. ‘This’, ‘now’, and other simple words get their meaning from their use by gesturing human beings. They can not be described fully in language alone, nor do they represent specific objects consistently. Rather, they are demonstrated to children and translated into other languages of cultures that share similar gestures. We know from neuroscience that in the brain the centers of language and control of the hands are next to each other, likely because language developed in apes along with gestures. There are also similarities in the basic gestures of humanity, including extending the arm to indicate the direction of sight and attention. Infants only months old will read eye direction to try to see what others are seeing, and if they can not see what is being looked at they will check the eyes again. The arm, whether a culture uses the index finger or not, provides an extension of the line of sight so that it can be easily recognized and followed by others. Notice that ‘this’ is as simple as it gets in itself, and to further explain it we need to bring arms and neuroscience into the picture.

In section 11, he says language is like toolbox, a complex set of tools that have no absolute necessity but are useful as a set. Consider that a hammer, a screwdriver and glue are a decent set of tools. Are they absolutely right or necessary tools? We could invent others, but they work decently well for putting things together and taking things apart. We do not need an absolute screwdriver any more than we need to completely understand the relationship between the hammer and screwdriver. We need only use them. In the same way, we do not need to understand the word ‘and’ such that it is always used exactly the same way, nor do we need to completely understand its relationship to ‘or’. When we use them relatively, not exclusively, they are interchangeable. At a buffet, I could equally say, “You can have eggs or salad or steak” or “You can have eggs and salad and steak”. The two can sometimes be used differently and sometimes similarly, as long as we are decently consistent in all of our interconnected uses. Indeed, the words, like tools such as hammers and screwdrivers, are more useful being often but not always used in particular and exclusive ways (ex: one can use a screwdriver to open paint cans). ‘And’ and ‘or’ are more useful when we can use them oppositely, but also identically. In his earlier thinking, with the truth tables, Wittgenstein was trying to secure them merely opposite and different meanings, which does not give us their full usage and meaning.

In section 12, Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of a locomotive cabin to further illustrate the same point. There are many levers and switches that function in various ways. Words and language function in various ways that form a complex with their environment. We could always redesign the train cabin, but it works well enough as it is.

In section 15, he uses another simple tool-oriented metaphor to make language and meaning physical rather than ideal: naming is compared to attaching a label (or sticker, with “Hello My Name Is”). The association of a word with a particular thing is like attaching a label for ease of use and identification.

In section 17, he says that we can classify words as we do things, but our classifications will depend on our situation and purposes. He uses the metaphor of chess pieces. If you want to move a great distance, you would classify chess pieces one way, but if you want to break through or jump over the enemy lines (with a knight or a bishop) you would classify them another way. The pieces, like words and other things, do not have classifications and meanings in themselves, but in how they can be used in concrete situations. This is again much like Mill.

In section 18, he says that a language is like an old city, with side streets and squares. It is interesting to compare San Francisco to Salt Lake City here. San Francisco can be a nightmare to drive, while Salt Lake City is almost entirely a perfect grid surrounding the Mormon Temple. In San Francisco, you never know which way a street might turn due to hills or other intersecting streets. European cities are similarly often much older than the automobile, and do not lend themselves to outsiders’ easy navigation. A language, like an old city or old growth forest, is the result of a long process of many layers of evolution and development. We can understand meanings just as we can navigate streets, but things are not always clear cut as Salt Lake City.

In section 57 and 58, he asks about where ‘red’ exists. He suggests that ‘red’ as a color does not exist in itself, but as an association of many red things having been experienced, the word ‘red’ being said by others and oneself associated with these things, as well as the imagination/projection of the color red in the mind. None of these things needs to be exclusively present for there to be red. We could even say the word without any red things or thinking of red, and it still means the color in our language and culture. We could likewise see a red thing, and it is red without using the word or seeing red in the imagination. Thus, the color red is not essentially any red thing, or the word, or the color in the mind, but the complex of all these. The color red is not simply a subjective concept, nor it is an objective fact, but it is a conception and association of many things and words, both in the head and the world together.

In section 65, Wittgenstein argues that there is no form common to language games or forms of life, such as the color red or the use of a tool. The common element is merely form, or association. In the same way that Hegel argues that Being itself can not be qualified (green, good, necessary) or quantified (much, fourteen, half), Wittgenstein argues that there is no common form to meaning. It is a complex association that can take any possible form. This is similar to the organic forms of fractal geometry: No two trees are identical, but they share what Wittgenstein calls a ‘family resemblance’. In the next section (66), he uses the example of games. There is no rule common to all games, but they resemble each other as a family.

In the next section (67), he uses the metaphor of a thread (one could also use a rope). The thread is strong not because there is one underlying strand that runs through its entire length, but because many stands overlap each other. Mathematics and the meaning/use of a word do not need a single inner rule to make them entirely consistent. Rather they are complex networks that are continuously reinforced by our re-inscription as we use them daily. Derrida, the French deconstructionist, argues that there is no language set in stone. Old English, like Old French, drift slowly like tectonic plates. When we use language, we are not using something already set. Rather, we are resetting it, re-associating it, re-gluing it together with the only glue it was ever fashioned from, each and every time we speak or write. Likewise, mathematics such as algebra is not true in itself. We continue to use it consistently, and this rebinds its consistent use. When dividing by zero creates problems, we add additional rules and then continue to lash them together with the system.

In section 83, Wittgenstein gives another metaphor to describe the emergence (a chaos-theory, fractal geometry term) of forms of life. Imagine people in a field, playing with a ball. The ball is tossed about, another person joins and kicks it back to another, who chases it, then pegs the kicker with the ball, and then it is tossed about again. A game has arisen, but it does yet does not seem to have consistent rules. It is being made up as it goes along. Human beings are rule making, association generating beings, who know how to follow and bend rules as they see fit. This means that the only complete consistency is both consistency and inconsistency, the only consistent rule is there are yet there are not consistent rules.

In section 85, he gives another metaphor to back up this conception. A rule is like a signpost, such as a sign that points to the right and reads, ‘San Jose’. Does the sign force you to go to San Jose? No. If you go to the right, will you surely reach San Jose without getting lost or running out of gas? No. We can even imagine that if you go to the left, because you are afraid of San Jose, you could get turned around and end up there anyway. In spite of these loose ends, we find signs quite useful.

In section 99, he comes to the previously mentioned ‘locking a man in a room but leaving the window open’ metaphor. You can not lock someone in a room such that they can never get out. There are no simply solid substances. There are no things without cracks of any kind. Similarly we can not secure meanings such that they will always stay exactly the same, but we can secure them by locking them down repeatedly through use and association. To give an entire account of how a meaning is secured would be like “repairing a torn spider’s web with one’s fingers” (106). Just like an old city, we can use things without ever being able to fully describe them.

Wittgenstein writes, “We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (109)...”What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (116)...”What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand” (118).

Do we base our own behavior, let alone the culture of mathematics, on simple rules? He gives the example of being certain that a table will resist one’s finger, that a fire will hurt one’s hand. It is not that there is a simple rule set in an atomic language that reads, ‘Table is solid’ or ‘Fire hurts hands’. Rather, “a hundred reasons present themselves, each drowning out the voice of the others” (478). Like the thread woven of many strands, our belief and certainty that objects are solid and flame hurts us are woven out of many experiences that are then woven together with the table and flame before us.

Wittgenstein writes, “To say, ‘This combination of words makes no sense’ excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out, but it may also be part of a game and the players be supposed, say, to jump over the boundary” (499). Wittgenstein seems to be thinking specifically of humor and comedy, though it could also apply to modern and conceptual art, forms of culture that break rules on purpose. Comedy and modern art are games where the rule is to break the rules without breaking anyone’s neck. Wittgenstein had an appreciation both for the Alice books of Lewis Carroll as well as American slap-stick comedy which he preferred to opera. At the end of the course, we will study the Alice books, humor and modern art in light of the later work of Wittgenstein.

The last image to examine, near the end of the book, is Jastrow’s duck-rabbit, often called Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit because the psychologist Jastrow is far less famous. One can look at the figure from the left, and it is a duck, and one can look at the figure from the right, and it is a rabbit. Which is the single correct face? Wittgenstein says we may have seen only the rabbit face our entire life, and that does not prevent us or others from seeing the duck when it is pointed out. This is much like the duel between objectivism (truth is in the world) and subjectivism (meaning is in the head).