Individuals and groups manipulate the truth to serve their own ends, in a conscious/unconscious way that often resembles denial. Speech means that we can tell the truth or tell lies. This has been an issue for humans before they were even human, like theft and violence.
Apes and Lying:
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.
Children and Lying:
Interestingly, we believe in lying to children as a matter of raising them. Children before the age of seven are quite incapable of telling the difference between fiction and reality or understanding sarcasm. This is why young children believe in Santa and wonder where Thomas the Train Engine lives.
There are two amusing stories I have on this. One of my students in a response paper wrote that as a young girl she had a pet goldfish and accidentally killed the fish by cleaning its bowl with hand soap. When she saw her fish was dead her mother, who did not want to torture the young girl with the truth, told her that the cat had walked by and the fish had a heart attack. Notice the utilitarianism here, and that Kant would be mortified. Secondly, there was a news story last year about a boy in Thailand who was stuck on the roof of a tall building, and he would not climb into the arms of the police who ascended a ladder to rescue him. One of the police dressed up in a Spiderman costume, and the boy threw open his arms and leapt into the waiting embrace of Spiderman, who carried him down to a cheering crowd.
Children believe in superheroes and villains. One would like to think that the use of heroes and myths ends with childhood, but the literature on propaganda tells us that all civilizations make myths that glorify themselves and demonize their enemies, both internal and external. Because children are raised with these myths, they often do not think to question them even when they are quite past the age of seven.
Consider the use of superheroes in comics, fighting criminals at home and enemies of America.
Watchmen is a good look at some of these dynamics. Consider that Iron Man was originally from Korea, then the recent movie puts him in the middle east. We still use superheroes to stand for “truth, justice and the American way”, but we have subtler ways. I think you can look at Iron Man and the new Batman movie and see distortions that we not only pass on to kids and teenagers but the adults in the audience as well.
City States and Rock Edicts:
The Assyrians were masters of propaganda, and they were one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. Most of their conquest was through trade, though they invented all of the siege weapons used through the European middle ages. Rock edicts, tall carvings in cliffs and on monuments, declared glorious meanings for the common people to consume. Interestingly, the common people could not read, and someone who could read and pass the messages to others was called “one who makes the stones speak”. Just like a modern textbook, the human authors are lost and the media simply speaks for itself.
Here we come to the old and the new style of propaganda. The old propaganda model is simple, and it is still in use particularly by traditional and communist countries: We are the King/State, we tell you what you need to know, namely that we look after you and our enemies are evil. WE are the great multicultural empire that looks after everyone (Assyrian did not denote a race, but a citizen of the empire), but our enemies will oppress you and kill you for no good reason. Very little has changed over several thousand years.
The new propaganda is even more effective, and strangely it does not call itself propaganda at all. In China today, the communist government says openly that they use propaganda to educate the people, and the same was admitted in the United States and Britain until just this last century. The government tells you “brush your teeth, it is good for you” and this is acknowledged as a message coming from authorities telling you what you should know and do. Chomsky, who we will study today, is quite clear on this point, as is Bernays. Propaganda only recently became something evil, something that the enemy does.
I am going to focus on American propaganda from WWI through the Cold War, and then talk about Chomsky’s theories on propaganda models and the American media’s role in American empire and economics.
Hegel tells us when we haven’t looked into an issue, perspectives are polarized. Here in America, similarly in Britain, it is thought that we are free and love democracy, but other cultures (especially the Germans in WWI and II, the Russians in the Cold War, and Islamic extremists) are not civilized but rather lie as much as they can because ‘they hate our freedom’.
We have failed to have a real discussion about censorship and bias in America. This means ‘THEY’ are simply biased and put forth propaganda, and WE would never do something like that. This is not only the basic human frame as before, but Americans and British got set in this in a particular way through WWI and II. In WWI, propaganda became something the Germans do, not the Belgians, British or Americans. In WWII, the Germans and Japanese do propaganda, and in the cold war the Russians. The British and Americans, however, would never do ‘propaganda’ by name, as they are the champions of liberty, democracy and freedom from tyranny (even as Britain and then America plundered and sought empire in the same way that the Germans, Russians did). Today, this is ‘Islam and the West’ where we have unbiased journalism while they simply put forward obvious propaganda (watch ‘Control Room’ for the best of this).
What we need? We need to see how people censor and authority is abusive in comparison, and this is what is never done. Rather than hear one line of Chinese media through ours and say “Propaganda!” we need to compare censorship operation by the government in both places and see the complex similarities and differences. I am going to show human overall consistencies while describing the particular way that Americans are involved in the inscription of messages and ideology in our society. That way, we get beyond the strange complex of saying that in America there is no propaganda while living in an America that knows how to sell and spin professionally better than anyone ever has.
WWI (the British/Americans vs. the Germans)
The Germans invade Belgium, and the British make up all sorts of things. The Germans become the evil Hun, and the Belgians the poor victim, even though they had just gotten bad world press by systematically killing 10 million Africans in the Congo.
The British run propaganda in America to get us into the war, and teach us the techniques of British style empire and propaganda. You set up ‘free’ reporters to say your messages, rather than do the old way like Germany and Russia with a Ministry of Propaganda.
Thus, after the horrors of WWI, ‘propaganda’ became a bad word in Britain and America.
Since then, we do not do propaganda at all. We do ‘education’, ‘information’, ‘public relations’, ‘human relations’, and in time of war we may engage in psychological warfare, but we never do ‘propaganda’.
Propaganda is not an evil conspiracy. Consider great example of guy who did ‘Birth of a Nation’, KKK film, being jailed for 10 years for his next movie showing British and Natives committing war crimes against Americans.
Basically, the British and Americans lied as much as possible about German atrocities, the French and British took most of what Germany had after WWI, the Germans fell even lower in the 20s with the market crash, and they came back as the Nazis, NOW as bad as the British and Americans had led others to believe.
Consider that Irish newspapers in NY were shut down for telling people that the British have been evil in Ireland, Scotland, India, Africa, all while calling themselves the defenders of democracy and freedom. At this time, government censorship during time of war was unquestioned (story about Pentagon lifting ban on coffins today).
Bernays book Propaganda:
Chomsky says that Bernays was one of the first propaganda specialists in America and he is quite open about praising the use of propaganda. Bernays says, during WWI, that it is remarkable that the moment America propaganda explodes (advertising, PR), becomes a necessary tool of corporations, it becomes ‘evil’ in name. PR went from being Barnum and Bailey to every corporation running spin and ad campaigns. Bernays invented the committee of Doctors who tell you to eat eggs and bacon for a ‘hearty’ breakfast, saying old way is ‘Eat Bacon!’, new way: ‘Drs say, ‘Eat bacon’’. This is ‘free expert’ style of propaganda.
In 1938, writing his book, Bernays says that half the front page of NYT is identifiably propaganda, stories planted by interested parties. He says the NAACP is a great PR group, and show a strong hand holding their annual conference in Atlanta. He got out of cigarette ads in the 40s, tabloids having picked up on the health risks. It wasn’t till the 1970s that major media carried the story at all. 1953 Bernays helped United Fruit convince everyone that Guatemala was a communist threat, so the US overthrew the elected leader with a CIA coup and we supported dictatorship there for cheap labor to supply Americans with cheaper fruit.
Nazis and WWII:
Hitler says: We did not have as good propaganda as the British and Americans, but next time will be different. Nazi TV, engineering goes to American, America rises above Britain in wake of WWII. During WWII, the Americans and British praised Stalin and his Red Army as they all fought the Nazis. Then, as soon as the war was over, the British led the Americans in the Cold War anti-communism campaign. This is where stuff gets REALLY INTERESTING: US vs. Soviet Union. Both say, ‘THEY do all of this, so WE HAVE TO’, in the official channels, but the story for the masses is: only THEY would do that.
COLD WAR
The following material is drawn largely from the book The Cultural Cold War by Saunders.
Post WWII, the French and Russians had largely convinced everyone that America has no culture, only cheap commercialism, and America talks a lot about Freedom, but look at how they treat black people. US and Soviets started ‘Congresses’, (Soviets for World Peace, US for Cultural Freedom). It is now know that these were the two big umbrella groups for a lot of fronts for propaganda campaigns. These groups used historians, scientists, poets, artists, philosophers, professors, you name it, to give the impression that individuals were lining up against ‘the evil’ of the other. The US wanted to fight the ‘French Flu’ and push European intellectuals away from Marxism as liberation towards free market capitalism as liberation. Ex: US intellectual goes to Paris, gives a talk about the ‘Negro’s progress in America’. Then when he is heckled (“possibly by communists”), brings out black band to do jazz all night.
US used CIA and many fronts to tour black performers through Europe, increase publication of certain books (Camus, not Sartre example, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, introductions written to spin Animal Farm and 1984 by Orwell, who hated both). The idea was to promote the NONCOMMUNIST LEFT. (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty not studied in America, as they boycotted Congress of Cultural Freedom invitations due to US treatment of Black people).
The US had spent $34 million on this by 1950 (also, wealthiest country at this point, passing Britain in financing the rebuilding of Britain, Germany and France). The money quadrupled in rate of expense after 1950, as China became the world’s largest communist country. The CIA set up French literature reviews, toured the Boston symphony orchestra, approached wealthy individuals about setting up art collections that praise US art and European art that honors the US.
Pollock and others (though communists) praised and toured through Europe to show that American has genius painters after all. Agent as director stockpiled abstract minimalist art at the NY Moma (Contemporary Chinese art exhibit in Berkeley today). The Ford and Rockefeller foundations remain serious fronts for money dispensed in America to artists, writers and performers who do work that promotes America even as it is avant-garde art.
At home, Billy Graham got money knowingly from intelligence, toured America telling Christians that ‘Communism is masterminded by Satan’, never mind that the first communes were French Christian communes. John Wayne and Ronald Reagan were promoted as Soldier/Cowboys, both spied for the FBI against communism at home for the house of un-American activities committee of McCarthy. Disney and Warner brothers made cartoons for the US in WWII, then denounced their writers and animators as communists when they went on strike. Disney spied for the FBI, testified for HUAC, while he was doing illegal things to his workers like sending strike breakers to beat people up and the FBI looked the other way.
In films, token black people began appearing well before the civil rights movement. Documents of agents who worked with studios on scripts say, ‘took out a drunk, added a black person’. One of the best examples is a black golfer and caddy added into the background of a scene on a golf course, at a time when white Catholics and Jews had a rough time getting into golf clubs. Consider that the civil rights movement was partly started by seeing token black people in the cinema, like the golfer and caddy, and wondering aloud why this could not become a real lived reality. Both US and Soviets fought over who liberates and who oppresses. In 1956, the ‘Melting Pot’ became a slogan for the US. We can see that many Russian films and Korean propaganda posters deplore the evils that America has done to black people as a simple tactic.
Today, if your movie has anything to do with police or military, they will give you heavy support as long as they go over the script and ok it. Six media owner companies means each needs a cushy relationship with both cops and military. That means: America is well aware of the streamlined view of America put out all over the world in TV and Movies. They are the BEST form of propaganda. There are consulting firms who specialize in getting your script ready for police and military approval, so that you do not get charged extra by the official government representatives who review the scripts for a fee.
Meanwhile, stories pepper the news about how “Iran censors movies” and “China might be censoring the internet”. No further detail is drawn. This is the British/American style: THEY simply censor, without any comparison of us and them. THEY censor (so, we don’t?). Recently the media corporations agreed with the government not to show footage of coffins coming home from the war. Is there ever a need for a conspiracy when power works the way it always has?
Chomsky and Herman’s MANUFACTURING CONSENT:
There is no better book on American propaganda and the stories both promoted and ignored by the American media. The book argues that the mass-media protects the interest of the wealthy and powerful individuals and institutions in America by promoting particular views and filtering out others. This process involves the ownership of media groups, the reliance of media on the government for information and support, the reliance of media on advertising revenue, flak heaped upon dissident views (particularly socialist views and those critical of business interests).
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Social & Political Philosophy: Hegel's Logic and its Impact
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.
Remember the dialectical process of the opposite yet complimentary forces/faculties of understanding and reason. Why is thought opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Hegel writes that we need to start with the “legend” of the fall of man, of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important. This is entirely in the vein of Enlightenment Deists reading the Bible as a work of philosophy and psychology rather than literal history or religious authority. When Adam/consciousness, falls into the divided world and out of the unity of paradise, he/it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can see a similar in physics as the Big Bang and in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget & Vygotsky). Just as Adam and Eve have to toil for food and survival once out of Eden, knowledge and wisdom must be gained by effort and the process of history. Hegel argued that work and labor are a contradiction of subject and object, of ideal and actuality, of the mental and the physical. Marx entirely follows Hegel on this point, and both see the work (modes of production) of each age as a revealing of another level of truth through history.
Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding. 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/All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content. A cow is a cow, and not a horse, but without contradicting the separation of the categories and comparing a cow to a horse such that we can gather the similarities and divide the differences we can’t develop a greater understanding. In the Logic Hegel writes:
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… 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, which is what Heraclitus did for the Greeks such that they could rise beyond the Orientals to the next level. Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and nonbeing as one like Heraclitus. It is recognizing this with the categories of our understanding (one-sided logic and grammar) 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.
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 particularly interrelated. ‘All is one and in flux’ is an excellent truth (one of my favorites), but it tells us nothing of particular beings or stages of history. For this, reason must push towards more contradictions.
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.
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 either puts these essences outside the world (as Plato put them up in the stars), or inside of things as “nature”. It seeks the meaning of the thing in its group because it could not find it completely in ‘All as One’ or in singular things. The problem with this stage is that things are still isolated in groups by type and this prevents the understanding from grasping their interdependence and codependent evolution (much like the Buddhist concept of codependent arising). 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 are not like the world in which everything fits together as one. 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.
Through further dialectic, 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 Actuality, the final stage. Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory and modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle, the final contradiction that reason must push the understanding beyond itself to grasp. 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. Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and speculation, 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, which is in extension with the world.
Marx was deeply influenced by Hegel’s Logic, which gave him a social process of opposites resolving in unity. Marx wrote that Hegel’s Logic is by nature revolutionary and thus a scandal to the well positioned (the middle and upper classes). Marx argued that the bourgeoisie were trapped in their middle-class roles just as understandings are trapped in isolation, and that Hegel’s Logic separated his own thinking from that of other academics who were complicit with the status quo. Just as Hegel said the average person cannot comprehend contradiction and thus remain stuck in their undeveloped understandings, Marx saw the middle and lower classes as stuck because they cannot see the problems and contradictions of their position and labor. However, through a process identical with the master/slave dialectic, Marx believed this would eventually result in a greater understanding by way of reason and the political arrangement of the communist international state. Not only would the contradictions between classes be transcended, but also the contradictions between warring nation-states.
Both Hegel and Marx saw the business class as embodying a new synthesis of laborer and capitalist that creates new contradictions. Hegel was aware of the misery of the working class in Germany and England under rising industrialism and manufacturing, and spoke of these contradictions in his lectures even though he was not arguing for a communist revolution but rather a resolution in the form of the German state.
In 1914, just as WWI was being declared, Lenin (who was in neutral Switzerland along with other influential figures such as the Dada artists who kicked off much of modern art) studied Hegel’s Logic intensely to comprehend Marx. Lenin, like Marx, saw Hegel’s Logic as bringing the abstract and ideal down into unity with the material. For Marx and Lenin, this was a call to materialism and a recognition that ideas exist by way of the historical and material.
Most importantly for this class, Marx and Lenin followed Hegel in his criticism of Rousseau: it is not simply the arbitrary individual will that binds everyone together in the general will and the social contract, but rather the understanding/reasoning of individuals that determines the community and draws individuals together in groups and classes. Thus, Marx and Lenin saw communism as political science, as a result of ages of understandings/classes developed through reason/revolution. Note that this is complimenting Rousseau’s romantic will with rationalistic reason. Nietzsche, who like Hegel was influenced by Rousseau and a fan while critical, pushed back against reason to center on freedom and the will like Rousseau did originally. In the mid 1800s, the German people rose up in revolution to gain rights like the British, French and Americans and were crushed by the princes banding together. Marx wrote his major works in this period for a German revolutionary audience. The failure of the German revolution was the major cause of German pessimism, a turn from reason as the force of history to will as the force of history. We will consider this more we cover Nietzsche, the Nazis and Fascism.
We will cover the Young Hegelians as the first topic of Socialism next week.
Remember the dialectical process of the opposite yet complimentary forces/faculties of understanding and reason. Why is thought opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Hegel writes that we need to start with the “legend” of the fall of man, of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important. This is entirely in the vein of Enlightenment Deists reading the Bible as a work of philosophy and psychology rather than literal history or religious authority. When Adam/consciousness, falls into the divided world and out of the unity of paradise, he/it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can see a similar in physics as the Big Bang and in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget & Vygotsky). Just as Adam and Eve have to toil for food and survival once out of Eden, knowledge and wisdom must be gained by effort and the process of history. Hegel argued that work and labor are a contradiction of subject and object, of ideal and actuality, of the mental and the physical. Marx entirely follows Hegel on this point, and both see the work (modes of production) of each age as a revealing of another level of truth through history.
Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding. 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/All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content. A cow is a cow, and not a horse, but without contradicting the separation of the categories and comparing a cow to a horse such that we can gather the similarities and divide the differences we can’t develop a greater understanding. In the Logic Hegel writes:
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… 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, which is what Heraclitus did for the Greeks such that they could rise beyond the Orientals to the next level. Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and nonbeing as one like Heraclitus. It is recognizing this with the categories of our understanding (one-sided logic and grammar) 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.
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 particularly interrelated. ‘All is one and in flux’ is an excellent truth (one of my favorites), but it tells us nothing of particular beings or stages of history. For this, reason must push towards more contradictions.
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.
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 either puts these essences outside the world (as Plato put them up in the stars), or inside of things as “nature”. It seeks the meaning of the thing in its group because it could not find it completely in ‘All as One’ or in singular things. The problem with this stage is that things are still isolated in groups by type and this prevents the understanding from grasping their interdependence and codependent evolution (much like the Buddhist concept of codependent arising). 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 are not like the world in which everything fits together as one. 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.
Through further dialectic, 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 Actuality, the final stage. Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory and modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle, the final contradiction that reason must push the understanding beyond itself to grasp. 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. Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and speculation, 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, which is in extension with the world.
Marx was deeply influenced by Hegel’s Logic, which gave him a social process of opposites resolving in unity. Marx wrote that Hegel’s Logic is by nature revolutionary and thus a scandal to the well positioned (the middle and upper classes). Marx argued that the bourgeoisie were trapped in their middle-class roles just as understandings are trapped in isolation, and that Hegel’s Logic separated his own thinking from that of other academics who were complicit with the status quo. Just as Hegel said the average person cannot comprehend contradiction and thus remain stuck in their undeveloped understandings, Marx saw the middle and lower classes as stuck because they cannot see the problems and contradictions of their position and labor. However, through a process identical with the master/slave dialectic, Marx believed this would eventually result in a greater understanding by way of reason and the political arrangement of the communist international state. Not only would the contradictions between classes be transcended, but also the contradictions between warring nation-states.
Both Hegel and Marx saw the business class as embodying a new synthesis of laborer and capitalist that creates new contradictions. Hegel was aware of the misery of the working class in Germany and England under rising industrialism and manufacturing, and spoke of these contradictions in his lectures even though he was not arguing for a communist revolution but rather a resolution in the form of the German state.
In 1914, just as WWI was being declared, Lenin (who was in neutral Switzerland along with other influential figures such as the Dada artists who kicked off much of modern art) studied Hegel’s Logic intensely to comprehend Marx. Lenin, like Marx, saw Hegel’s Logic as bringing the abstract and ideal down into unity with the material. For Marx and Lenin, this was a call to materialism and a recognition that ideas exist by way of the historical and material.
Most importantly for this class, Marx and Lenin followed Hegel in his criticism of Rousseau: it is not simply the arbitrary individual will that binds everyone together in the general will and the social contract, but rather the understanding/reasoning of individuals that determines the community and draws individuals together in groups and classes. Thus, Marx and Lenin saw communism as political science, as a result of ages of understandings/classes developed through reason/revolution. Note that this is complimenting Rousseau’s romantic will with rationalistic reason. Nietzsche, who like Hegel was influenced by Rousseau and a fan while critical, pushed back against reason to center on freedom and the will like Rousseau did originally. In the mid 1800s, the German people rose up in revolution to gain rights like the British, French and Americans and were crushed by the princes banding together. Marx wrote his major works in this period for a German revolutionary audience. The failure of the German revolution was the major cause of German pessimism, a turn from reason as the force of history to will as the force of history. We will consider this more we cover Nietzsche, the Nazis and Fascism.
We will cover the Young Hegelians as the first topic of Socialism next week.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Intro Philosophy: Islam & Early Europe
First, we look at the rise of Islamic civilization and its relationship to medieval European civilization with regard to philosophy, technology, science and scholarship. This is important to know, especially today. Second, we will look at central Islamic and medieval European philosopher/logicians (especially Avicenna and Aquinas).
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are no good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (I have found this is true of Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic religion, literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of technology and study. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has always been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic.
Here are some awesome ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. 1492 is a good example: it is the year that the Christian Kings of Spain and Portugal retook those lands from Muslims, and the start of the Spanish Inquisition that brutally attacked Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic Christians.
Algebra is possibly the most used device (if it can be called a device) in human history. It is important to consider algebra because in the second half of the course logic becomes an algebraic language (remember, logic used to be about debate in the ancient world, but it gradually became a highly specialized form of math that was intended to ground the foundations of mathematics). Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system and began doing math in the form of equations we are all familiar with today (taught by law to everyone up through college).
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through town with the latest things and systems of thought (books come this way too from China). Castles are Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, philosophy, logic and science that equations became the language for structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in paragraph form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas but is quite anachronistic and misleading to do this.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosopher/scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language.
ISLAMIC JESUS
Jesus is mentioned in the Koran more than anyone, the greatest prophet after Mohammed.
He is the patron saint of scholars and wisdom, and he sounds much like Confucius.
The worst man is the scholar who is in error, since many people will err due to him.
The one who has learned and taught is great in the kingdom of heaven.
Stones, mud and gold are equal in my sight.
‘Teacher, who are the people of my race?’ ‘All the children of Adam.’
No one taught me. I saw the ugliness of ignorance and avoided it.
How many fruits, but not all are good! How many sciences, but not all of them useful!
THE MAIN DIVISIONS OF ISLAM
Many are familiar with the Sunni-Shiite split of Islamic cultures without realizing that the central issues between groups are philosophical positions on human reason. The Sunni believe that revelation such as the Koran is the supreme authority, and all else is secondary. The Mutazilites, a smaller sect of Islam and one of the great forces for philosophy and science, believe that God/Being is fully reasonable and human reason and logic are supreme to following tradition or scripture. Mutazilites argued that God can not contradict reason and thus cannot possibly commit error, which became a major theological and philosophical issue in the golden age of Islamic thought and civilization. The Shiites, the second major sect of Islam like the Sunnis, take a middle position between reason and scripture/tradition. Sunnis argued that one must investigate matters when scripture and reason contradict each other. This is important to recognize today, as Muslims are often believed to be unquestioningly traditional and literal in their understanding of the Koran.
THE GREAT ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHERS:
Al Kindi (801-873)
Pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method,
introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. Wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, argued that time and space were relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later.
Argued that Islam and Philosophy/Logic are completely compatible. Our scholarship says that he mostly merged Neoplatonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian/Buddhist Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950)
Little is known about Farabi’s origins or ethnic background. It is argued by scholars that he was Turkish or Persian. Farabi took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides famously said he could not understand Aristotle at all until he read Al-Farabi’s commentary, and then got it. Paid much attention to Imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and get right, you have visions of the cosmos and its workings. This is close to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments in his later thought.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037)
Foremost doctor of his time. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, neuropsychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), and the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing microscopic organisms as the cause of disease. The first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He learned Indian Arithmetic from and Indian grocer. This is ignored in most. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’.
The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you, was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars. Today, in the wake of Islamic and European civilization, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? This was the big issue. Avicenna asks: Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that a real horse is one thing? Does the horseness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horseness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horseness’ are both mental. Avicenna uses the phoenix and unicorn as imaginary beasts to illustrate.
His floating man thought experiment, showing self-consciousness, shows imagination.
This is considered by some to be a source of Descartes’ ‘I think’ with demon.
After this, there was a split in his followers: which is primary, the essence or existence?
Essentialism (What it is 1st, the thing second) vs. Existentialism (thing first, what 2nd).
Al Ghazali (1058-1111), Persian
One of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism. Sufism is Islamic mysticism, who like mystics of other religions and cultures believe that all is a supreme One and judgment and desire obscure this from human vision. Many are familiar with the Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant, a story that Sufis argue is about their practice being the religion of all religions. Ghazali was a pioneer of skepticism and doubt. His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certain human knowledge. When he says ‘The philosophers say’ I have read authors say, ‘this means Plato and Aristotle’, but I trust the scholars who say he means ‘Avicenna says’ as the position he always attacks. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that Atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of Negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) Cordoba, Spain
Wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, thus central for Europe Aristotle.
Wrote ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, arguing against Ghazali and for Farabi etc.
He was another central author in Europe for science and philosophy. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe followed him. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our science is now more like Avicenna, but for the longest time it was Aristotleian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as necessary to be flawed that Europe swung back into a ‘all is contingent’ Avicenna direction.
NEOPLATONISM AND THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS
First, they would have called themselves ‘Platonists’. Neo was added by first translator into English, and the title has been adopted by scholars in Europe and America. The start of the tradition comes from Alexandrian (Egyptian) Greek Platonists who were reading the Timaeus and participating in religious/philosophical debates amongst the many cultures of the trade port, including Egyptians, Nubians, Gnostic Christians, Coptic Christians, Jews, Indians, Persians, Mesopotamia etc.
Two texts that were central to Platonism were the Chaldean Oracles, which were supposed to be the secret teachings of Zarathustra from Persia, and the Hermetic Corpus, the secret teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (Thoth-Tat as a sage) from Egypt. These two sources became very important in the Renaissance, showing us that it was much more than a love of Greece and Rome that artists and scholars celebrated. These two texts actually had just been invented by Greek authors who were clearly using Plato to try to back-form the wisdom of Persia and Egypt that the ancient Greeks themselves praised, but at the time they were believed to be authentic and then well past by European scholars. Thus, they were sources that were believed to be earlier than Plato, which conveyed the wisdom that Plato himself developed and passed on as the true philosophy of all cultures.
Most famous Hermetic text is the Emerald Tablet, a short set of aphorisms. The line most quoted: the world is a sphere in which the center is everywhere and nowhere. Chaldean oracles aphorisms:
Explore the river of the soul, to rise to the order from which you descended.
When you see a formless fire, flashing through the depth of the world, hear the voice of fire.
The intelligible draws open the flower of the mind.
Central teachings of this tradition of Platonism:
The Soul must return to the One, the All (All-Lord or God), which it must do by way of lesser gods or angels and demons. The system is very much psychology of the soul, which is also angelology and demonology in classifying forces of the cosmos.
The macrocosm is the microcosm- small and big, so soul/mind is the universe.
Opening up the mind is returning to the cosmos that produced you.
Theme of the Fall and the Return (later in Christians id with Adam and fall from Eden).
There are two motions of mind to develop:
Kataphania and Apophania, positing and negating, affirming and doubting.
To get to the One, you must move Dialectically, back and forth, to open up and become the whole.
Humans occupy a unique place in the cosmos. They have the ability to subsume all the motions of things low and high, thus are most like the all-motion of the One.
Humans are the One fallen away from itself, journeying back to itself.
Time and space are the eternal moment and unity fallen and fragmented.
This is truly the most beautiful thought of Europe, which most don’t know about because it happened long before the gap of tech and science separated Europe from other cultures.
All the main thinkers of European Christianity were (Neo) Platonists for quite a while, and it thus still held much sway even after things branched out considerably.
Augustine, Pseudo Dionysius, Boethius, Eriugena, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino and Pico of the Ren (we will speak of them in particular), Bruno, Ren artists like Michelangelo, Botticelli, scientists like Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler.
Augustine (300) brought it into Christianity (from ‘Pagan’ authors). One of the most important author and church father, he was North African. He made the gods angels officially (each with an office) and talked about how light into the mind creates visions/theophanies/ideas of the cosmos and its order.
Pseudo-Dionysius (500) was a Syrian Christian who read Augustine and other authors and was big into negative theology, kataphania. He argued that the journey to the One was essentially one of unknowing or kataphania, and the One was the great Unknown, above all qualities or being (just like 99 names of Allah).
Eriugena (800) merged these two, working them together with many other authors, to create an amazing system. The first European Christian Platonist, Hegel wrote about him in his History- ‘With him, true philosophy first begins’, since Hegel is tracing an evolution of all thought up to himself, and Hegel is quite a European Platonist.
Notably, Hegel ignores the Islamic Zoroastrian Platonists who are writing at about the same time we learned about last week. Eriugena was one of the only people who could read a bit of Greek at the time, and so he was protected in the court of Charles the Bald who protected him from the Pope in exchange for translating and commentary on PD.
Basically, Augustine was cannon, and Eriugena was heretically saying that Augustine and PD are two sides of the same coin.
Eriugena saw the One as HyperOusia- the sum of being and non-being, the source of both but neither of the two at the same time. He took the radical unknown One of PD and made it the unknown source of both known and unknown in all levels of the cosmos.
God splits apart into oppositions to then form all the differentiations of the cosmos.
For Eriugena, psychology is physics, as we co-create our world as a product of our vision and the One’s vision. The One is unknown to itself/fully known to itself above human divisions of judgement, and it shares both of these with human beings, the special mediators of the cosmos. Like in Sufism, Humans are unique in potentially being God, encompassing the lowest and highest of all orders (the worm and the angel). Humans have free will thus- it was defending this radically which led to condemn. Authority comes from Reason, not the other way around.
Nicholas of Cusa’s mustard seed thought experiment- the boundless and infinite are present both active/potential, in the mundane of the world, just like the One/Christ.
St. Francis of Assisi (later San Francisco in Spanish) Visited Sultan’s Court, came back with a very Sufi vision. All religion is one brotherhood in God, give all to the poor, contemplate all through radical love. At the end of time, we will be standing side by side, hand in hand with sister death and brother fire.
The Renaissance (1400-1500)
‘Italy’ was not something that Ren people would have known. “Florence”, the city state was their nation. ‘Italy’ had yet to be unified and titled such, so ‘Italian Ren’ is a bit of a mis-title. Central power of the Pope had withered, and now trader city states can create competing cultures (another fall apart, good for thought time).
Vatican Library shows how books and Greeks had yet to be popular in 1400 Europe:
1443- 2 Greek books, 340 books total (that’s it)
1455- 400 Greek, 1200 total
1484- 1000 Greek, 3650 total
Frequently assumed by scholars that Renaissance was celebration of Greeks and Romans, both Philosophy and Art. Taking a close look at Ficino and Pico, the two major Platonists of the Renaissance and thus fathers of all European scholarship to follow, shows that the Egyptian and Persian wisdom was given a higher place than Plato.
Cosimo Medici founded the Platonic Academy of Florence in 1462 (meeting, not building as thought) and Ficino rose quickly to soon lead it, with Pico della Mirandola as student. Cosimo de Medici, when he knew he was dying, ordered Ficino to put aside translating Plato’s complete works and finish translating the Corpus Hermetica, the supposed secret wisdom of Egypt passed to the Hebrews and Greeks. Shows who was important. Plato is a follower of Hermes, and Zarathustra. Ficino translated ‘Maat’ as Logos, which is a bit of a confusion. Ficino finished translating the 17 texts in 1471.
Ficino argued there was one unbroken tradition of wisdom which included the Eyptians, Persians, the Brahmans of India (who he doesn’t go into detail on) and the Greeks.
This is like the Sufis, as well as arguing that Phil and Bible were compatible.
Ficino gave Europe the first Latin trans of Plato’s works, many derived from Arabic sources. Ficino thought that Zarathustra was the first prophet of the one true phil/rel, followed by Hermes from Egypt, then Moses, then Plato, then Jesus.
Pico, his student, thought it was first Hermes of Egypt, then Zarathustra, then Abraham, then Plato, etc. These remained the debated opinions for centuries.
Thus, Bruno and Masons follow Pico in Egypt being lost center of all wisdom.
Ficino repeatedly uses the Zoroastrian oracles to back up his points, and continuously mentions the 3 persian Magi visiting Jesus as infant in the Bible. Ficino writes that Plato had a third eye, which contemplated the union of being and nonbeing (The One), which came from a strange source. Pico was very big on Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, saying it was Egyptian.
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are no good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (I have found this is true of Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic religion, literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of technology and study. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has always been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic.
Here are some awesome ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. 1492 is a good example: it is the year that the Christian Kings of Spain and Portugal retook those lands from Muslims, and the start of the Spanish Inquisition that brutally attacked Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic Christians.
Algebra is possibly the most used device (if it can be called a device) in human history. It is important to consider algebra because in the second half of the course logic becomes an algebraic language (remember, logic used to be about debate in the ancient world, but it gradually became a highly specialized form of math that was intended to ground the foundations of mathematics). Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system and began doing math in the form of equations we are all familiar with today (taught by law to everyone up through college).
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through town with the latest things and systems of thought (books come this way too from China). Castles are Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, philosophy, logic and science that equations became the language for structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in paragraph form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas but is quite anachronistic and misleading to do this.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosopher/scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language.
ISLAMIC JESUS
Jesus is mentioned in the Koran more than anyone, the greatest prophet after Mohammed.
He is the patron saint of scholars and wisdom, and he sounds much like Confucius.
The worst man is the scholar who is in error, since many people will err due to him.
The one who has learned and taught is great in the kingdom of heaven.
Stones, mud and gold are equal in my sight.
‘Teacher, who are the people of my race?’ ‘All the children of Adam.’
No one taught me. I saw the ugliness of ignorance and avoided it.
How many fruits, but not all are good! How many sciences, but not all of them useful!
THE MAIN DIVISIONS OF ISLAM
Many are familiar with the Sunni-Shiite split of Islamic cultures without realizing that the central issues between groups are philosophical positions on human reason. The Sunni believe that revelation such as the Koran is the supreme authority, and all else is secondary. The Mutazilites, a smaller sect of Islam and one of the great forces for philosophy and science, believe that God/Being is fully reasonable and human reason and logic are supreme to following tradition or scripture. Mutazilites argued that God can not contradict reason and thus cannot possibly commit error, which became a major theological and philosophical issue in the golden age of Islamic thought and civilization. The Shiites, the second major sect of Islam like the Sunnis, take a middle position between reason and scripture/tradition. Sunnis argued that one must investigate matters when scripture and reason contradict each other. This is important to recognize today, as Muslims are often believed to be unquestioningly traditional and literal in their understanding of the Koran.
THE GREAT ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHERS:
Al Kindi (801-873)
Pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method,
introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. Wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, argued that time and space were relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later.
Argued that Islam and Philosophy/Logic are completely compatible. Our scholarship says that he mostly merged Neoplatonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian/Buddhist Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950)
Little is known about Farabi’s origins or ethnic background. It is argued by scholars that he was Turkish or Persian. Farabi took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides famously said he could not understand Aristotle at all until he read Al-Farabi’s commentary, and then got it. Paid much attention to Imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and get right, you have visions of the cosmos and its workings. This is close to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments in his later thought.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037)
Foremost doctor of his time. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, neuropsychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), and the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing microscopic organisms as the cause of disease. The first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He learned Indian Arithmetic from and Indian grocer. This is ignored in most. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’.
The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you, was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars. Today, in the wake of Islamic and European civilization, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? This was the big issue. Avicenna asks: Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that a real horse is one thing? Does the horseness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horseness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horseness’ are both mental. Avicenna uses the phoenix and unicorn as imaginary beasts to illustrate.
His floating man thought experiment, showing self-consciousness, shows imagination.
This is considered by some to be a source of Descartes’ ‘I think’ with demon.
After this, there was a split in his followers: which is primary, the essence or existence?
Essentialism (What it is 1st, the thing second) vs. Existentialism (thing first, what 2nd).
Al Ghazali (1058-1111), Persian
One of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism. Sufism is Islamic mysticism, who like mystics of other religions and cultures believe that all is a supreme One and judgment and desire obscure this from human vision. Many are familiar with the Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant, a story that Sufis argue is about their practice being the religion of all religions. Ghazali was a pioneer of skepticism and doubt. His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certain human knowledge. When he says ‘The philosophers say’ I have read authors say, ‘this means Plato and Aristotle’, but I trust the scholars who say he means ‘Avicenna says’ as the position he always attacks. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that Atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of Negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) Cordoba, Spain
Wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, thus central for Europe Aristotle.
Wrote ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, arguing against Ghazali and for Farabi etc.
He was another central author in Europe for science and philosophy. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe followed him. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our science is now more like Avicenna, but for the longest time it was Aristotleian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as necessary to be flawed that Europe swung back into a ‘all is contingent’ Avicenna direction.
NEOPLATONISM AND THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS
First, they would have called themselves ‘Platonists’. Neo was added by first translator into English, and the title has been adopted by scholars in Europe and America. The start of the tradition comes from Alexandrian (Egyptian) Greek Platonists who were reading the Timaeus and participating in religious/philosophical debates amongst the many cultures of the trade port, including Egyptians, Nubians, Gnostic Christians, Coptic Christians, Jews, Indians, Persians, Mesopotamia etc.
Two texts that were central to Platonism were the Chaldean Oracles, which were supposed to be the secret teachings of Zarathustra from Persia, and the Hermetic Corpus, the secret teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (Thoth-Tat as a sage) from Egypt. These two sources became very important in the Renaissance, showing us that it was much more than a love of Greece and Rome that artists and scholars celebrated. These two texts actually had just been invented by Greek authors who were clearly using Plato to try to back-form the wisdom of Persia and Egypt that the ancient Greeks themselves praised, but at the time they were believed to be authentic and then well past by European scholars. Thus, they were sources that were believed to be earlier than Plato, which conveyed the wisdom that Plato himself developed and passed on as the true philosophy of all cultures.
Most famous Hermetic text is the Emerald Tablet, a short set of aphorisms. The line most quoted: the world is a sphere in which the center is everywhere and nowhere. Chaldean oracles aphorisms:
Explore the river of the soul, to rise to the order from which you descended.
When you see a formless fire, flashing through the depth of the world, hear the voice of fire.
The intelligible draws open the flower of the mind.
Central teachings of this tradition of Platonism:
The Soul must return to the One, the All (All-Lord or God), which it must do by way of lesser gods or angels and demons. The system is very much psychology of the soul, which is also angelology and demonology in classifying forces of the cosmos.
The macrocosm is the microcosm- small and big, so soul/mind is the universe.
Opening up the mind is returning to the cosmos that produced you.
Theme of the Fall and the Return (later in Christians id with Adam and fall from Eden).
There are two motions of mind to develop:
Kataphania and Apophania, positing and negating, affirming and doubting.
To get to the One, you must move Dialectically, back and forth, to open up and become the whole.
Humans occupy a unique place in the cosmos. They have the ability to subsume all the motions of things low and high, thus are most like the all-motion of the One.
Humans are the One fallen away from itself, journeying back to itself.
Time and space are the eternal moment and unity fallen and fragmented.
This is truly the most beautiful thought of Europe, which most don’t know about because it happened long before the gap of tech and science separated Europe from other cultures.
All the main thinkers of European Christianity were (Neo) Platonists for quite a while, and it thus still held much sway even after things branched out considerably.
Augustine, Pseudo Dionysius, Boethius, Eriugena, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino and Pico of the Ren (we will speak of them in particular), Bruno, Ren artists like Michelangelo, Botticelli, scientists like Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler.
Augustine (300) brought it into Christianity (from ‘Pagan’ authors). One of the most important author and church father, he was North African. He made the gods angels officially (each with an office) and talked about how light into the mind creates visions/theophanies/ideas of the cosmos and its order.
Pseudo-Dionysius (500) was a Syrian Christian who read Augustine and other authors and was big into negative theology, kataphania. He argued that the journey to the One was essentially one of unknowing or kataphania, and the One was the great Unknown, above all qualities or being (just like 99 names of Allah).
Eriugena (800) merged these two, working them together with many other authors, to create an amazing system. The first European Christian Platonist, Hegel wrote about him in his History- ‘With him, true philosophy first begins’, since Hegel is tracing an evolution of all thought up to himself, and Hegel is quite a European Platonist.
Notably, Hegel ignores the Islamic Zoroastrian Platonists who are writing at about the same time we learned about last week. Eriugena was one of the only people who could read a bit of Greek at the time, and so he was protected in the court of Charles the Bald who protected him from the Pope in exchange for translating and commentary on PD.
Basically, Augustine was cannon, and Eriugena was heretically saying that Augustine and PD are two sides of the same coin.
Eriugena saw the One as HyperOusia- the sum of being and non-being, the source of both but neither of the two at the same time. He took the radical unknown One of PD and made it the unknown source of both known and unknown in all levels of the cosmos.
God splits apart into oppositions to then form all the differentiations of the cosmos.
For Eriugena, psychology is physics, as we co-create our world as a product of our vision and the One’s vision. The One is unknown to itself/fully known to itself above human divisions of judgement, and it shares both of these with human beings, the special mediators of the cosmos. Like in Sufism, Humans are unique in potentially being God, encompassing the lowest and highest of all orders (the worm and the angel). Humans have free will thus- it was defending this radically which led to condemn. Authority comes from Reason, not the other way around.
Nicholas of Cusa’s mustard seed thought experiment- the boundless and infinite are present both active/potential, in the mundane of the world, just like the One/Christ.
St. Francis of Assisi (later San Francisco in Spanish) Visited Sultan’s Court, came back with a very Sufi vision. All religion is one brotherhood in God, give all to the poor, contemplate all through radical love. At the end of time, we will be standing side by side, hand in hand with sister death and brother fire.
The Renaissance (1400-1500)
‘Italy’ was not something that Ren people would have known. “Florence”, the city state was their nation. ‘Italy’ had yet to be unified and titled such, so ‘Italian Ren’ is a bit of a mis-title. Central power of the Pope had withered, and now trader city states can create competing cultures (another fall apart, good for thought time).
Vatican Library shows how books and Greeks had yet to be popular in 1400 Europe:
1443- 2 Greek books, 340 books total (that’s it)
1455- 400 Greek, 1200 total
1484- 1000 Greek, 3650 total
Frequently assumed by scholars that Renaissance was celebration of Greeks and Romans, both Philosophy and Art. Taking a close look at Ficino and Pico, the two major Platonists of the Renaissance and thus fathers of all European scholarship to follow, shows that the Egyptian and Persian wisdom was given a higher place than Plato.
Cosimo Medici founded the Platonic Academy of Florence in 1462 (meeting, not building as thought) and Ficino rose quickly to soon lead it, with Pico della Mirandola as student. Cosimo de Medici, when he knew he was dying, ordered Ficino to put aside translating Plato’s complete works and finish translating the Corpus Hermetica, the supposed secret wisdom of Egypt passed to the Hebrews and Greeks. Shows who was important. Plato is a follower of Hermes, and Zarathustra. Ficino translated ‘Maat’ as Logos, which is a bit of a confusion. Ficino finished translating the 17 texts in 1471.
Ficino argued there was one unbroken tradition of wisdom which included the Eyptians, Persians, the Brahmans of India (who he doesn’t go into detail on) and the Greeks.
This is like the Sufis, as well as arguing that Phil and Bible were compatible.
Ficino gave Europe the first Latin trans of Plato’s works, many derived from Arabic sources. Ficino thought that Zarathustra was the first prophet of the one true phil/rel, followed by Hermes from Egypt, then Moses, then Plato, then Jesus.
Pico, his student, thought it was first Hermes of Egypt, then Zarathustra, then Abraham, then Plato, etc. These remained the debated opinions for centuries.
Thus, Bruno and Masons follow Pico in Egypt being lost center of all wisdom.
Ficino repeatedly uses the Zoroastrian oracles to back up his points, and continuously mentions the 3 persian Magi visiting Jesus as infant in the Bible. Ficino writes that Plato had a third eye, which contemplated the union of being and nonbeing (The One), which came from a strange source. Pico was very big on Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, saying it was Egyptian.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Social & Political Philosophy: Hegel, Dialectic & Revolution
Hegel (1770-1831) is one of my favorite philosophers. In order to understand Hegel we study Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, the book that got me and others such as Angela Davis into Hegel. In the first part of Marcuse’s book he examines Hegel’s philosophy as it developed through his life (a very Hegelian method), and in the second part he examines Marx’s philosophy and later Marxist theorists building on while transforming Hegel’s philosophy. There will be more on Marcuse and his impact on the 60s next week with Socialism, as he is again one of the central authors we will read on the subject.
In college, I took a class on Hegel from a visiting German professor. I did not understand Hegel reading Hegel, but later in graduate school I read Marcuse’s book and got into a skeptical yet Hegelian view of the mind and reality. American and British schools neglected the study of Hegel until after the fall of the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union promoted the study of both Hegel and Marx as the science of history. Marcuse’s book is in fact a post-Marxist socialist rescuing of Hegel from theorists who argued that Hegel was a fascist and his ideas lead to Stalinist dictatorial communism (such as Popper).
Today we introduce Hegel, his life and important ideas, and finish with Hegel’s Phenomenology (his theory of History) and its master/slave Dialectic. Next time, we will look at Hegel’s Logic (his theory of psychology, his Philosophy of Right (his political theory) and the following of the Young Hegelians (the most famous being Marx). This will set us for studying socialism and communism in the coming weeks.
THE LIFE OF HEGEL
As I mentioned already, Hegel was a teenager during the French Revolution, and like his fellow German and European youth he watched with great anticipation hoping for radical change of tradition in the name of reason and rationality. Recall the Cult of Reason that Robespierre tried to install. Hegel watched the French Revolution and became more cynical and conservative in time. Many scholars have argued that this dialectic in Hegel’s own opinions was formative for his understanding of history and philosophy. By the time Hegel wrote his major work the Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind, he believed that Napoleon was a hero who embodied a new stage of history on horseback, and that Napoleon was a transition to the final form of politics embodied in the German and Prussian state governments that balanced authority with rights and liberties. As we will see when studying communism, Hegel went from believing in continuous revolution like Trotsky to conserving the established state like Lenin, which is also a great continuous change/Reason to supporter of the state/Understanding.
Hegel began his academic career much as Nietzsche, Heidegger and other German philosophers did: studying to be a theologian and Lutheran minister. Nietzsche wrote that one only has to mention the College of Tubingen (where Hegel began study) to know what German philosophy is at bottom: a cunning theology. I myself enjoy pointing out the similarities between Christian Neo-Platonism (the central philosophy of the European middle ages, the material one would study as a German doing theology) and German philosophy and it was the topic of my master’s thesis. Hegel does believe that the process and evolution of history is that of humanity building stage by stage the full understanding and reason of the human mind, which is the mind of God and the universe (similar to the understanding of Newton who was the rage in Hegel’s time). Marx took up this idea but famously “stood Hegel on his head” by taking Hegel’s system of dialectics and arguing that this is not the mind of God but the material science of politics being established according to the necessary process of reason, taking Hegel’s idealistic theism and making it materialistic atheism.
As a youth, Hegel thought that reason and freedom were the true forces of good in the universe, sounding much like a Jacobin. After watching the collapse of the French Revolution, he continued to view reason and freedom as the forerunners of human achievement but came to see understanding and necessity as counterweights that cause history to sway in a back and forth manner that Hegel identified with the Socratic and Platonic method of dialectic, of arguing both sides of an issue back and forth to achieve greater truth.
In 1801, just two years after Napoleon’s coup in France, Hegel began his academic career as a professor of philosophy in Jena. At the time, Kant was the rage in German philosophy, and Hegel’s philosophy developed in dialogue with Kant and others in vogue at the time. Hegel particularly took up Kant’s idea that understanding and reason are oppositional forces of the human mind and conceived of all history, including philosophy and politics, to be a dialectical evolution between these two forces.
HEGEL’S CORE IDEAS AND SYSTEM
Hegel has 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. Also, things are not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things by which they become what they are. After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Freud 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, and how this questions our human-centered understanding of reality.
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. Socrates and Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and Plato’s dialogues present 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 similar to 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. Consider the French monarchy and feudalism, the French Revolution, and Napoleon. Consider the hometown conservative, the college liberal, and someone trying to find the overall truth after taking both sides. Hegel presents ideas as starting out positive (dogmatism), flipping and becoming negative (skepticism), and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole which then goes on to become the next positive or dogma for another stage of evolution. 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 world.
In the course of the history and evolution of politics and philosophy, thought has to gather everything into a universal whole while at the same time dividing everything up into their particular parts. It does this with the two opposite forces or faculties of understanding and reason. Understanding, the anchor and stability of the mind, has two jobs: keeping thought the same and keeping conceptions separate. Reason, the motion and freedom of the mind, also has two jobs, which are naturally opposite those of understanding: continuously changing thought and uniting conceptions together as a whole. This is the reason that dogmatic and conservative thought wants to keep traditions and ideas as they are and prevent them from getting mixed up, while skeptical and liberal thought want to change traditions and ideas and criticize the separate categorical differences of the understanding with inter-relativity. While everyone uses both understanding and reason continuously everyday and at every stage, dogmatists and conservatives prefer set understandings to fluid reasoning while skeptics and liberals prefer fluid reasoning to set understandings.
For Hegel, at each stage in any area of thought (religion, politics, philosophy, science etc) understanding provides the stable ground for the back and forth positions of reason. Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Theologians fight theologians in the name of religion, lawyers fight lawyers in the name of law, philosophers fight philosophers in the name of philosophy, and scientists fight scientists in the name of science. For Hegel there really is only one tree-like being which is mind/spirit, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought. Many have written a good deal about Hegel and Marx each coming to set understandings and then being contradicted and developed by later thinkers in the names of Hegel and Marx themselves.
Remember that Radin argued there are philosophers in all cultures, but they are rare. Hegel argues in his Logic that philosophers are rare because most get stuck in a one-sided understanding either on the side of dogma/understanding or skepticism/reason, and it is only the rare individual who can see the latest stage’s contradiction on both sides and become the understanding of the next stage (just like Napoleon). My own take on Hegel is much like that of Marcuse: dialectic is not giving us the unopposable truth, but powerful new truths (interpretations for Nietzsche, descriptions for Wittgenstein) that will be opposed but also supported by others in the continuous evolution/revolutions of truth and history. Recall Thoreau wondering about American democracy.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT/MIND
I disagree with Hegel’s history because it is quite simplistic and eurocentric, but it is an excellent introduction to Hegel’s thought not only because it was his first major work, after which he wrote the Logic to clarify the inner process of the mind at work in this history. Like the Logic, it shows dialectic working in three stages to complete itself as a union of contradictory sides.
For Hegel, the first stage of history is the Orientals. Hegel uses this term as it was used until recently, before the 1960s, to refer to everyone who is not European. As archeology in Hegel’s time had revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel puts this as the first and basic starting stage in human development. It is good that this is the non-European start, but unfortunate that all further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the development is a course of Europe becoming different from others. The Orientals understand objectivity and the state, two powerful positives. The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not question their society or science. They see the real as real, but do not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned. It is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel argues make this next leap and become the second stage of history.
The Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of objectivity as subjectivity. While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who did this, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the earlier empires as more complex and also that the Greeks were only one civilization of many that made leaps forward like this (Jaspers calls the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese, the three places we studied in the ancient world in depth, the axial age). Just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understand the negative, the temporary, subjective and perspective. Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing Being and Non-Being together as Becoming, and sees Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further development. However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks still put Being off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire or Plato’s static ideal forms.
It is the Germans, and specifically Hegel himself, who see the true unity of objectivity and subjectivity, of state and individual, of necessity and freedom, of science and discovery, to complete the history of thought in three stages. Notice that Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in a page, with no credit at all. The Europeans, are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world. Hegel sees Hume and Kant as the last negative and positive before his own system of unification. Hegel believes that history is almost at its completion in his time with his own philosophy and the politics of the German parliamentary state which balances collective objectivity with individual subjectivity, balancing authority with rights, liberty and property as Locke argued it should. Rights and property are the unity of objective and subjective, the unity of the state and the individual understandings and perspectives.
THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC
One of the main ideas that structures Hegel’s Phenomenology is the Master/Slave dialectic, the continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next in history. It works equally on the level of idea, individual and social movement. At first, the individual goes out into the world and discovers that there are other beings out there with other opinions and views. The individual thus wants to at first kill, later conquer these others, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be objectivity. The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master, and develops understanding with reason while the master deteriorates and grows lazy in a stagnant understanding/political arrangement. The slave comes to realize that one can do things for someone else (doing things for self and other at the same time), overcoming his own desires, and thus develops and triumphs over the master and becomes the next master.
This is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap seeing subjectivity and objectivity as two sides of the same thing. Notice that this tells us the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and the Germans were slaves of the Greeks! This is not often pointed out, but it is implied by Hegel and confirmed by historians today.
The Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Marx. Marx argued that just as the French Revolution threw off the old masters, the clergy and nobility, the coming communist revolutions would throw off the new masters, the industrial capitalists. Feminist Hegelians use the master/slave dialectic for women, like Simone de Beauvoir did in ‘The Second Sex’. Post-Colonialists use the master/slave dialectic for oppressed minorities, such as Franz Fanon did in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as did the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis (who went to Germany to study Hegel before going to jail for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the 60s). Considering that class, race and gender are the ‘big 3’ issues in academia since the 60s, Hegel is quite influential.
In college, I took a class on Hegel from a visiting German professor. I did not understand Hegel reading Hegel, but later in graduate school I read Marcuse’s book and got into a skeptical yet Hegelian view of the mind and reality. American and British schools neglected the study of Hegel until after the fall of the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union promoted the study of both Hegel and Marx as the science of history. Marcuse’s book is in fact a post-Marxist socialist rescuing of Hegel from theorists who argued that Hegel was a fascist and his ideas lead to Stalinist dictatorial communism (such as Popper).
Today we introduce Hegel, his life and important ideas, and finish with Hegel’s Phenomenology (his theory of History) and its master/slave Dialectic. Next time, we will look at Hegel’s Logic (his theory of psychology, his Philosophy of Right (his political theory) and the following of the Young Hegelians (the most famous being Marx). This will set us for studying socialism and communism in the coming weeks.
THE LIFE OF HEGEL
As I mentioned already, Hegel was a teenager during the French Revolution, and like his fellow German and European youth he watched with great anticipation hoping for radical change of tradition in the name of reason and rationality. Recall the Cult of Reason that Robespierre tried to install. Hegel watched the French Revolution and became more cynical and conservative in time. Many scholars have argued that this dialectic in Hegel’s own opinions was formative for his understanding of history and philosophy. By the time Hegel wrote his major work the Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind, he believed that Napoleon was a hero who embodied a new stage of history on horseback, and that Napoleon was a transition to the final form of politics embodied in the German and Prussian state governments that balanced authority with rights and liberties. As we will see when studying communism, Hegel went from believing in continuous revolution like Trotsky to conserving the established state like Lenin, which is also a great continuous change/Reason to supporter of the state/Understanding.
Hegel began his academic career much as Nietzsche, Heidegger and other German philosophers did: studying to be a theologian and Lutheran minister. Nietzsche wrote that one only has to mention the College of Tubingen (where Hegel began study) to know what German philosophy is at bottom: a cunning theology. I myself enjoy pointing out the similarities between Christian Neo-Platonism (the central philosophy of the European middle ages, the material one would study as a German doing theology) and German philosophy and it was the topic of my master’s thesis. Hegel does believe that the process and evolution of history is that of humanity building stage by stage the full understanding and reason of the human mind, which is the mind of God and the universe (similar to the understanding of Newton who was the rage in Hegel’s time). Marx took up this idea but famously “stood Hegel on his head” by taking Hegel’s system of dialectics and arguing that this is not the mind of God but the material science of politics being established according to the necessary process of reason, taking Hegel’s idealistic theism and making it materialistic atheism.
As a youth, Hegel thought that reason and freedom were the true forces of good in the universe, sounding much like a Jacobin. After watching the collapse of the French Revolution, he continued to view reason and freedom as the forerunners of human achievement but came to see understanding and necessity as counterweights that cause history to sway in a back and forth manner that Hegel identified with the Socratic and Platonic method of dialectic, of arguing both sides of an issue back and forth to achieve greater truth.
In 1801, just two years after Napoleon’s coup in France, Hegel began his academic career as a professor of philosophy in Jena. At the time, Kant was the rage in German philosophy, and Hegel’s philosophy developed in dialogue with Kant and others in vogue at the time. Hegel particularly took up Kant’s idea that understanding and reason are oppositional forces of the human mind and conceived of all history, including philosophy and politics, to be a dialectical evolution between these two forces.
HEGEL’S CORE IDEAS AND SYSTEM
Hegel has 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. Also, things are not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things by which they become what they are. After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Freud 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, and how this questions our human-centered understanding of reality.
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. Socrates and Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and Plato’s dialogues present 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 similar to 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. Consider the French monarchy and feudalism, the French Revolution, and Napoleon. Consider the hometown conservative, the college liberal, and someone trying to find the overall truth after taking both sides. Hegel presents ideas as starting out positive (dogmatism), flipping and becoming negative (skepticism), and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole which then goes on to become the next positive or dogma for another stage of evolution. 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 world.
In the course of the history and evolution of politics and philosophy, thought has to gather everything into a universal whole while at the same time dividing everything up into their particular parts. It does this with the two opposite forces or faculties of understanding and reason. Understanding, the anchor and stability of the mind, has two jobs: keeping thought the same and keeping conceptions separate. Reason, the motion and freedom of the mind, also has two jobs, which are naturally opposite those of understanding: continuously changing thought and uniting conceptions together as a whole. This is the reason that dogmatic and conservative thought wants to keep traditions and ideas as they are and prevent them from getting mixed up, while skeptical and liberal thought want to change traditions and ideas and criticize the separate categorical differences of the understanding with inter-relativity. While everyone uses both understanding and reason continuously everyday and at every stage, dogmatists and conservatives prefer set understandings to fluid reasoning while skeptics and liberals prefer fluid reasoning to set understandings.
For Hegel, at each stage in any area of thought (religion, politics, philosophy, science etc) understanding provides the stable ground for the back and forth positions of reason. Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Theologians fight theologians in the name of religion, lawyers fight lawyers in the name of law, philosophers fight philosophers in the name of philosophy, and scientists fight scientists in the name of science. For Hegel there really is only one tree-like being which is mind/spirit, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought. Many have written a good deal about Hegel and Marx each coming to set understandings and then being contradicted and developed by later thinkers in the names of Hegel and Marx themselves.
Remember that Radin argued there are philosophers in all cultures, but they are rare. Hegel argues in his Logic that philosophers are rare because most get stuck in a one-sided understanding either on the side of dogma/understanding or skepticism/reason, and it is only the rare individual who can see the latest stage’s contradiction on both sides and become the understanding of the next stage (just like Napoleon). My own take on Hegel is much like that of Marcuse: dialectic is not giving us the unopposable truth, but powerful new truths (interpretations for Nietzsche, descriptions for Wittgenstein) that will be opposed but also supported by others in the continuous evolution/revolutions of truth and history. Recall Thoreau wondering about American democracy.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT/MIND
I disagree with Hegel’s history because it is quite simplistic and eurocentric, but it is an excellent introduction to Hegel’s thought not only because it was his first major work, after which he wrote the Logic to clarify the inner process of the mind at work in this history. Like the Logic, it shows dialectic working in three stages to complete itself as a union of contradictory sides.
For Hegel, the first stage of history is the Orientals. Hegel uses this term as it was used until recently, before the 1960s, to refer to everyone who is not European. As archeology in Hegel’s time had revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel puts this as the first and basic starting stage in human development. It is good that this is the non-European start, but unfortunate that all further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the development is a course of Europe becoming different from others. The Orientals understand objectivity and the state, two powerful positives. The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not question their society or science. They see the real as real, but do not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned. It is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel argues make this next leap and become the second stage of history.
The Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of objectivity as subjectivity. While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who did this, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the earlier empires as more complex and also that the Greeks were only one civilization of many that made leaps forward like this (Jaspers calls the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese, the three places we studied in the ancient world in depth, the axial age). Just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understand the negative, the temporary, subjective and perspective. Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing Being and Non-Being together as Becoming, and sees Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further development. However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks still put Being off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire or Plato’s static ideal forms.
It is the Germans, and specifically Hegel himself, who see the true unity of objectivity and subjectivity, of state and individual, of necessity and freedom, of science and discovery, to complete the history of thought in three stages. Notice that Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in a page, with no credit at all. The Europeans, are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world. Hegel sees Hume and Kant as the last negative and positive before his own system of unification. Hegel believes that history is almost at its completion in his time with his own philosophy and the politics of the German parliamentary state which balances collective objectivity with individual subjectivity, balancing authority with rights, liberty and property as Locke argued it should. Rights and property are the unity of objective and subjective, the unity of the state and the individual understandings and perspectives.
THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC
One of the main ideas that structures Hegel’s Phenomenology is the Master/Slave dialectic, the continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next in history. It works equally on the level of idea, individual and social movement. At first, the individual goes out into the world and discovers that there are other beings out there with other opinions and views. The individual thus wants to at first kill, later conquer these others, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be objectivity. The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master, and develops understanding with reason while the master deteriorates and grows lazy in a stagnant understanding/political arrangement. The slave comes to realize that one can do things for someone else (doing things for self and other at the same time), overcoming his own desires, and thus develops and triumphs over the master and becomes the next master.
This is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap seeing subjectivity and objectivity as two sides of the same thing. Notice that this tells us the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and the Germans were slaves of the Greeks! This is not often pointed out, but it is implied by Hegel and confirmed by historians today.
The Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Marx. Marx argued that just as the French Revolution threw off the old masters, the clergy and nobility, the coming communist revolutions would throw off the new masters, the industrial capitalists. Feminist Hegelians use the master/slave dialectic for women, like Simone de Beauvoir did in ‘The Second Sex’. Post-Colonialists use the master/slave dialectic for oppressed minorities, such as Franz Fanon did in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as did the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis (who went to Germany to study Hegel before going to jail for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the 60s). Considering that class, race and gender are the ‘big 3’ issues in academia since the 60s, Hegel is quite influential.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Ethics: Theft, Zinn & The Corporation
Theft is a difficult issue, one that has particular implications today. First we will examine the context and history of theft, and then use the Ethical concepts we have studied as lenses
The notion of ‘property’ is bound up with European and Western identity, often seen as a principle of politics particular to Europe or fully realized in full within European historical development. We can easily see, however, that the origins of property, like most human cultures, has its origins in ape social behavior. While Europe has developed cultures of property that are highly sophisticated, these stem from cultural borrowings as much as they do from within Europe itself. Consider Islamic cultures of borrowing with interest, writing and cashing checks, etc.
Turning to ape behavior to see precedents, we can clearly identify with apes both in focusing on and becoming possessive of objects and forgetting this possession and its objects. Consider that an ape will become attached to a banana, fight against other apes that try to take the banana, and then, upon seeing a better banana, the ape will abandon the first and ignore whether or not the first falls into other hands. We can see that the ape can come to possess as ‘mine not yours’, and come to forget this possessing (‘neither mine nor yours’). This is parallel with self-other distinctions already discussed, as with the child psychology that says in the beginning there is neither and both must arise together in tension (codependent arising of Jainism and Buddhism).
There is also evidence that apes can not only fall into a ‘mine vs. everyone’ relation of possession (of objects), but apes can also recognize other apes as possessing objects themselves (selfish as other). 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. We should be cautious of the sexism here (females ‘push bananas’ at males too), but also marvel in how familiar this behavior is to humanity (next week, we will see that apes know lying too).
Humans, of course, have taken these impulses and instincts and complexified them with many inter-competing cultures, cultures that are actually capable of stealing from each other as much as they can describe and criminalize stealing themselves! While there are many intellectuals who have defended the view that while trade is universal only the West developed ‘capital’, I am critical of this view (interestingly enough, the one to coin this specialized term was the great opponent of Capitalism, Karl Marx). We have yet to do justice to intercultural borrowings, and ‘The West’ is very proud of its economics today. Is ‘capital’ a new device, particular to Western thought? I think that a study of Islam passing to Europe shows this can only be a partial truth, but we get a better view if we turn back the clock to the origin of the device known as MONEY, capital being one of its distant yet certain relatives.
Where does money come from? Why does it exist? What relationship does money have to theft, and is this different from the relationship between theft and any other object?
Money is a very interesting and unique device. Before wood pulp paper bank notes, the Sumerians and Babylonians get the credit for coining money first, the government controlling the pressing process of coinage. Today, we use Chinese style paper bank notes, backed by the government, just like in China after 500 CE or so. Wood block printing and the block printing press are other devices of Chinese origin that are crucial to this process. These two stages suggest that ‘capital’, though it may have been developed to its extent today in Europe and increasingly in American privatizing economics, cannot possibly have been a ‘inwardly European’ device of the ‘Western mind’. Other cultures of mind have had no problem inventing and using devices that are the ancestors of modern day capital.
But, WHY MONEY?
Before money, people of course possessed many things and traded them between individuals and groups. This trade was always barter, swapping one sort of thing for another sort of thing without the device of money as swapping medium. As people settled into city states, practices of borrowing and lending became stabilized. The first money was likely tokens indicating amounts of stuff borrowed from the ruler or other wealthy individuals.
The culture which includes the device of money has advantages over the culture of mere barter. Money as a device is very simple, simple the ways that numbers are simple for much the same purpose. Money is good (and bad) because it is very easy to gather/amass and divide/distribute, much more than any other object or substance.
Consider the salmon fisher in a village. She goes down to the water, and scores 20 large salmon. This is far more than she can eat, but she can trade salmon for other things that she needs in the barter culture. However, salmon does not keep for long, even if one knows how to salt and preserve it. What happens if she goes to the market and not many people want or need salmon that day? What if she has enough salmon to get what she wants, but there are not enough people who need salmon to trade with her for what she wants? In a culture where the salmon can be sold for money, you can keep the money for thirty years (even with inflation and other problems, deterioration of coins, etc) but no one can keep salmon for thirty years, even with freezers! In this way, money is much easier to amass and to keep than salmon.
In the same way, money is easier to divide than salmon. Let us say our fisher comes to market with 20 large salmon, and wants to trade for a basket. I, the basket maker, tell her that one third of a salmon is worth one basket, but I want the front half of the salmon. What happens if she wants to leave the salmon uncut, or if she needs four fifths of a salmon later for someone else? What if she wants to keep all the fish heads for herself? Money has no features to it other than quantity, even though the pictures are often very pretty. Fifty dollars is just fifty things, nothing less, so there is no problem with changing it to two twenties and a ten. You cannot make a whole salmon again from twenty salmon heads! In this way, money is much easier to divide and distribute than salmon. If we consider the bustle of a crowded market, it becomes clear why money would be such a useful (and thus abusive) device, and how its invention allowed for the modern merchants and bankers of today. Consider the trillion dollar bailout today, how this is very abstract yet very real for many people. Luck for us we do not need to bail out banks with truckloads of salmon!
There are, however, two great disadvantages to the culture of money use:
First, theft, like trade, becomes easier! In fact, money not only creates and supports many types of legal economics, it simultaneously creates and supports many types of illegal economics like paying money for sex or drugs (Derrida and the signature).
Second, the desire for money becomes quite intense. Considering that money, sex and cocaine have been shown to light up similar areas of the human brain, money to barter is like cocaine to chewing coca leaves. Since money can be traded for anything, even ironically illegal things, the draw towards money becomes the draw towards any and everything desired. In this sense, the desire for money is far more intense than the desire for salmon because money can buy salmon, or remain money, or buy anything else if one ceases wanting salmon. Just as having salmon means that the possibility of eating salmon is now practically guaranteed, having money means the possibility of satisfying any desire whatsoever is guaranteed. This ultimately means that there is far more reason to steal money than there is to steal salmon, strange considering that you can eat salmon and live off of it alone!
In terms of world politics, which includes the Zinn reading I gave you, stealing and money are central issues of identity. Communism and Capitalism are divided on the issue of money, even as Communists print government money and Capitalists organize socialist programs (public education like BCC, social welfare, public roads and institutions). The question is: do you trust the government or the corporations more with your money and economics (an instance of the one/many problem again)? America has shown that there are great advantages to privatization, letting corporations control economics rather than the centralized government. Unfortunately, this does not do away with problems of authority and corruption (consider that PG&E is still in charge of California’s power, a pretty plum, in spite of being convicted of stealing from Californians en masse). Truth be told, both America and the Soviet Union told third world countries that they would not steal from them or enslave them like their other surely would, only to both be guilty of similar forms of corrupt authoritarianism.
A great book to read on all of this is John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He actually came to BCC last semester for a reading, but I had my other job. As Perkins says so perfectly, in American foreign relations we try to get people in debt to us because that binds everyone to our economy and our desires. I know firsthand from UCB Hass Business School students that indebting the poor here in America and poor third world countries is an open practice, spoken of openly in instruction. The financial crisis today was clearly caused by irresponsible and predatory lending. Our newspapers never speak of these things, but a piece on NPR my friend gave to me will tell you just as clearly and honestly an economics professor at Hass. CREDIT is itself like money, a device that has its advantages but also its disadvantages, especially for the disadvantaged. If our economy falls far from where it is today, it could very well be due to the disadvantages of credit and capital that we have stalled and distanced from ourselves for the time being as a privileged and advantaged culture. The point is: money helps the advantaged steal from the disadvantaged, even as it helps the disadvantaged gain advantage! This is why Americans are relatively wealthy yet there is an increasing gap between rich and poor here as well as in the third world. While the ‘American way’ sometimes allows the poor to get rich, it also very much allows the rich to get much richer and there is only so much in the pot.
Of course, the rich are also more encouraged than ever to steal from the rich as well as from the poor. Consider in 1996 CIA convicted of manipulating business to favor Americans over Australians. Neither Australians nor Americans can recall this, due to lack of media coverage in both locations. Since America and Australia are both wealthy Capitalist countries, you are only doing the system disservice by making such a scandal public.
Now that we have briefly examined the history of money and advantage, we have set the stage to ask the question of theft. The Ethical question we must ask is: Is theft ever justified?
We can use our Ethical concepts we have studied to give various answers to this question. While I will not say that there is a certain answer here, we can see that there are many ways of answering the question but each has its problems. This is how we know we are investigating the question in matters of real life and not in an ideal construct.
Principle
Kant, of course, would give the first and most positive answer to this question: NO, theft of property is NEVER justified. Notice that Kant, living in the German Enlightenment of the 1700s, is very proud of the culture of property and considers the possession of property to be an entirely reasonable and principled act. This is questionable when we trace its roots all the way back to chimpanzee behavior, of course.
This answer has the obvious advantage of never getting one involved in most questions of stealing, but there remain issues. What if one’s society is stealing from another, and legally one has become wealthy within the stealing society? While we could imagine that one is ignorant of the ongoing theft and therefore not DIRECTLY guilty of theft, one is INDIRECTLY guilty. Societies, especially America, store their wealth in the pockets of the wealthy. America stores its wealth in its millionaires and billionaires primarily, and encourages these individuals economically to siphon money from other economies and put it in their pockets because this is the central way that America gets wealthier. Thus, while one may hold fast to the principle of ‘I shall not steal’, one could be complicit in groups and cultures that are engaged in theft that benefits the individual and the individual actively supports (even in the absence of conscious consent).
Virtue & Consequence
According to the concept of ethical virtue, theft is fully justified as long as the individual is virtuous or becomes virtuous through the act of theft. In a very similar way, Utilitarians and Consequentialists would argue that theft is justified if in the long term it results in good and justice, much happiness and prevention of harm. Seems impossible? Robin Hood is the perfect example for consideration. If I rob the evil rich people and give to poor people who are starving (i.e. if we construct an example in which many would agree), many would say that I am virtuous and that I have acted for the best ends in the long view. I may be hanged for the crimes, but my actions benefit others and can be argued to benefit my own character (though this is debatable).
Balance
The concept of balance draws our attention not only to the duality of stealing and not stealing but also to the duality of possessing and forgetting about possession, grasping and letting go. There is a great passage of the Dao that says, ‘if you want to be free from robbers, do not store up treasure in your house’. If one stores up wealth, one brings theft to one’s doorstep. If one stores up wealth and becomes attached to it, one brings fear of theft to one’s mind (a Zen koan theme is calling intention in the mind a thief, that the grasping of desire in the mind is the real thief). If you do not worry about money, not only do you not have to worry about stealing from others, you do not worry about others stealing from you, no matter how much one has!
Also, consider that if one steals and gets away with it, this makes the compulsion for stealing stronger. One continues to steal, and then gets caught. Getting away with stealing can be a major cause of getting caught stealing, a paradox similar to the bad example attack on Utilitarianism (in this case, ‘good’ examples can lead to bad just as bad examples can lead to good).
One problem with using balance here: should we think that we can do bad as long as we balance it out with good? If we give to charity every time we steal, does this balance things for our own merit or for the shared situation?
Drive and Self Interest
At first, it seems that this concept would tell us, ‘steal to your heart’s content’. This may prove harder than it sounds. Is it in one’s self interest to steal from everyone? Not if everyone has large sticks and helmets haven’t been invented yet. Unfortunately, this concept is best for understanding the international situation and the reading I gave you from Zinn. America today feels that it must indebt the third world to itself to strengthen its capitalist way of life, as it did during the Cold War. Supporters of the Vietnam war as well as the ‘War on Terrorism’ today say openly on the News that we need to ‘defend America’s interests’. Thought the word ‘economic’ is left off the front of ‘interests’ here, this is essentially what is being argued. America is a very fine omelet (a money credit omelet, if you will), and this means eggs need to be stolen from the hen house. Perkins’ book gives us excellent insight into its mechanisms.
Perspective and Intersubjectivity
To repeat what was said at the beginning, we have all had the experience of stealing and having things stolen. Hopefully there is something that moves us towards wisdom in not stealing even though theft seems an inevitable and in fact integral part of our world. Aside from the ‘Golden Rule’, there is likely no other constant source of deterrence from theft considering that the government that prints the money and prosecutes the theft also in some circumstances supports theft between its citizens and steals from other governments in the name of life.
To further show the mechanisms and complexity of theft in the modern world, there is no better nor more relevant documentary than ‘The Corporation’.
The notion of ‘property’ is bound up with European and Western identity, often seen as a principle of politics particular to Europe or fully realized in full within European historical development. We can easily see, however, that the origins of property, like most human cultures, has its origins in ape social behavior. While Europe has developed cultures of property that are highly sophisticated, these stem from cultural borrowings as much as they do from within Europe itself. Consider Islamic cultures of borrowing with interest, writing and cashing checks, etc.
Turning to ape behavior to see precedents, we can clearly identify with apes both in focusing on and becoming possessive of objects and forgetting this possession and its objects. Consider that an ape will become attached to a banana, fight against other apes that try to take the banana, and then, upon seeing a better banana, the ape will abandon the first and ignore whether or not the first falls into other hands. We can see that the ape can come to possess as ‘mine not yours’, and come to forget this possessing (‘neither mine nor yours’). This is parallel with self-other distinctions already discussed, as with the child psychology that says in the beginning there is neither and both must arise together in tension (codependent arising of Jainism and Buddhism).
There is also evidence that apes can not only fall into a ‘mine vs. everyone’ relation of possession (of objects), but apes can also recognize other apes as possessing objects themselves (selfish as other). 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. We should be cautious of the sexism here (females ‘push bananas’ at males too), but also marvel in how familiar this behavior is to humanity (next week, we will see that apes know lying too).
Humans, of course, have taken these impulses and instincts and complexified them with many inter-competing cultures, cultures that are actually capable of stealing from each other as much as they can describe and criminalize stealing themselves! While there are many intellectuals who have defended the view that while trade is universal only the West developed ‘capital’, I am critical of this view (interestingly enough, the one to coin this specialized term was the great opponent of Capitalism, Karl Marx). We have yet to do justice to intercultural borrowings, and ‘The West’ is very proud of its economics today. Is ‘capital’ a new device, particular to Western thought? I think that a study of Islam passing to Europe shows this can only be a partial truth, but we get a better view if we turn back the clock to the origin of the device known as MONEY, capital being one of its distant yet certain relatives.
Where does money come from? Why does it exist? What relationship does money have to theft, and is this different from the relationship between theft and any other object?
Money is a very interesting and unique device. Before wood pulp paper bank notes, the Sumerians and Babylonians get the credit for coining money first, the government controlling the pressing process of coinage. Today, we use Chinese style paper bank notes, backed by the government, just like in China after 500 CE or so. Wood block printing and the block printing press are other devices of Chinese origin that are crucial to this process. These two stages suggest that ‘capital’, though it may have been developed to its extent today in Europe and increasingly in American privatizing economics, cannot possibly have been a ‘inwardly European’ device of the ‘Western mind’. Other cultures of mind have had no problem inventing and using devices that are the ancestors of modern day capital.
But, WHY MONEY?
Before money, people of course possessed many things and traded them between individuals and groups. This trade was always barter, swapping one sort of thing for another sort of thing without the device of money as swapping medium. As people settled into city states, practices of borrowing and lending became stabilized. The first money was likely tokens indicating amounts of stuff borrowed from the ruler or other wealthy individuals.
The culture which includes the device of money has advantages over the culture of mere barter. Money as a device is very simple, simple the ways that numbers are simple for much the same purpose. Money is good (and bad) because it is very easy to gather/amass and divide/distribute, much more than any other object or substance.
Consider the salmon fisher in a village. She goes down to the water, and scores 20 large salmon. This is far more than she can eat, but she can trade salmon for other things that she needs in the barter culture. However, salmon does not keep for long, even if one knows how to salt and preserve it. What happens if she goes to the market and not many people want or need salmon that day? What if she has enough salmon to get what she wants, but there are not enough people who need salmon to trade with her for what she wants? In a culture where the salmon can be sold for money, you can keep the money for thirty years (even with inflation and other problems, deterioration of coins, etc) but no one can keep salmon for thirty years, even with freezers! In this way, money is much easier to amass and to keep than salmon.
In the same way, money is easier to divide than salmon. Let us say our fisher comes to market with 20 large salmon, and wants to trade for a basket. I, the basket maker, tell her that one third of a salmon is worth one basket, but I want the front half of the salmon. What happens if she wants to leave the salmon uncut, or if she needs four fifths of a salmon later for someone else? What if she wants to keep all the fish heads for herself? Money has no features to it other than quantity, even though the pictures are often very pretty. Fifty dollars is just fifty things, nothing less, so there is no problem with changing it to two twenties and a ten. You cannot make a whole salmon again from twenty salmon heads! In this way, money is much easier to divide and distribute than salmon. If we consider the bustle of a crowded market, it becomes clear why money would be such a useful (and thus abusive) device, and how its invention allowed for the modern merchants and bankers of today. Consider the trillion dollar bailout today, how this is very abstract yet very real for many people. Luck for us we do not need to bail out banks with truckloads of salmon!
There are, however, two great disadvantages to the culture of money use:
First, theft, like trade, becomes easier! In fact, money not only creates and supports many types of legal economics, it simultaneously creates and supports many types of illegal economics like paying money for sex or drugs (Derrida and the signature).
Second, the desire for money becomes quite intense. Considering that money, sex and cocaine have been shown to light up similar areas of the human brain, money to barter is like cocaine to chewing coca leaves. Since money can be traded for anything, even ironically illegal things, the draw towards money becomes the draw towards any and everything desired. In this sense, the desire for money is far more intense than the desire for salmon because money can buy salmon, or remain money, or buy anything else if one ceases wanting salmon. Just as having salmon means that the possibility of eating salmon is now practically guaranteed, having money means the possibility of satisfying any desire whatsoever is guaranteed. This ultimately means that there is far more reason to steal money than there is to steal salmon, strange considering that you can eat salmon and live off of it alone!
In terms of world politics, which includes the Zinn reading I gave you, stealing and money are central issues of identity. Communism and Capitalism are divided on the issue of money, even as Communists print government money and Capitalists organize socialist programs (public education like BCC, social welfare, public roads and institutions). The question is: do you trust the government or the corporations more with your money and economics (an instance of the one/many problem again)? America has shown that there are great advantages to privatization, letting corporations control economics rather than the centralized government. Unfortunately, this does not do away with problems of authority and corruption (consider that PG&E is still in charge of California’s power, a pretty plum, in spite of being convicted of stealing from Californians en masse). Truth be told, both America and the Soviet Union told third world countries that they would not steal from them or enslave them like their other surely would, only to both be guilty of similar forms of corrupt authoritarianism.
A great book to read on all of this is John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He actually came to BCC last semester for a reading, but I had my other job. As Perkins says so perfectly, in American foreign relations we try to get people in debt to us because that binds everyone to our economy and our desires. I know firsthand from UCB Hass Business School students that indebting the poor here in America and poor third world countries is an open practice, spoken of openly in instruction. The financial crisis today was clearly caused by irresponsible and predatory lending. Our newspapers never speak of these things, but a piece on NPR my friend gave to me will tell you just as clearly and honestly an economics professor at Hass. CREDIT is itself like money, a device that has its advantages but also its disadvantages, especially for the disadvantaged. If our economy falls far from where it is today, it could very well be due to the disadvantages of credit and capital that we have stalled and distanced from ourselves for the time being as a privileged and advantaged culture. The point is: money helps the advantaged steal from the disadvantaged, even as it helps the disadvantaged gain advantage! This is why Americans are relatively wealthy yet there is an increasing gap between rich and poor here as well as in the third world. While the ‘American way’ sometimes allows the poor to get rich, it also very much allows the rich to get much richer and there is only so much in the pot.
Of course, the rich are also more encouraged than ever to steal from the rich as well as from the poor. Consider in 1996 CIA convicted of manipulating business to favor Americans over Australians. Neither Australians nor Americans can recall this, due to lack of media coverage in both locations. Since America and Australia are both wealthy Capitalist countries, you are only doing the system disservice by making such a scandal public.
Now that we have briefly examined the history of money and advantage, we have set the stage to ask the question of theft. The Ethical question we must ask is: Is theft ever justified?
We can use our Ethical concepts we have studied to give various answers to this question. While I will not say that there is a certain answer here, we can see that there are many ways of answering the question but each has its problems. This is how we know we are investigating the question in matters of real life and not in an ideal construct.
Principle
Kant, of course, would give the first and most positive answer to this question: NO, theft of property is NEVER justified. Notice that Kant, living in the German Enlightenment of the 1700s, is very proud of the culture of property and considers the possession of property to be an entirely reasonable and principled act. This is questionable when we trace its roots all the way back to chimpanzee behavior, of course.
This answer has the obvious advantage of never getting one involved in most questions of stealing, but there remain issues. What if one’s society is stealing from another, and legally one has become wealthy within the stealing society? While we could imagine that one is ignorant of the ongoing theft and therefore not DIRECTLY guilty of theft, one is INDIRECTLY guilty. Societies, especially America, store their wealth in the pockets of the wealthy. America stores its wealth in its millionaires and billionaires primarily, and encourages these individuals economically to siphon money from other economies and put it in their pockets because this is the central way that America gets wealthier. Thus, while one may hold fast to the principle of ‘I shall not steal’, one could be complicit in groups and cultures that are engaged in theft that benefits the individual and the individual actively supports (even in the absence of conscious consent).
Virtue & Consequence
According to the concept of ethical virtue, theft is fully justified as long as the individual is virtuous or becomes virtuous through the act of theft. In a very similar way, Utilitarians and Consequentialists would argue that theft is justified if in the long term it results in good and justice, much happiness and prevention of harm. Seems impossible? Robin Hood is the perfect example for consideration. If I rob the evil rich people and give to poor people who are starving (i.e. if we construct an example in which many would agree), many would say that I am virtuous and that I have acted for the best ends in the long view. I may be hanged for the crimes, but my actions benefit others and can be argued to benefit my own character (though this is debatable).
Balance
The concept of balance draws our attention not only to the duality of stealing and not stealing but also to the duality of possessing and forgetting about possession, grasping and letting go. There is a great passage of the Dao that says, ‘if you want to be free from robbers, do not store up treasure in your house’. If one stores up wealth, one brings theft to one’s doorstep. If one stores up wealth and becomes attached to it, one brings fear of theft to one’s mind (a Zen koan theme is calling intention in the mind a thief, that the grasping of desire in the mind is the real thief). If you do not worry about money, not only do you not have to worry about stealing from others, you do not worry about others stealing from you, no matter how much one has!
Also, consider that if one steals and gets away with it, this makes the compulsion for stealing stronger. One continues to steal, and then gets caught. Getting away with stealing can be a major cause of getting caught stealing, a paradox similar to the bad example attack on Utilitarianism (in this case, ‘good’ examples can lead to bad just as bad examples can lead to good).
One problem with using balance here: should we think that we can do bad as long as we balance it out with good? If we give to charity every time we steal, does this balance things for our own merit or for the shared situation?
Drive and Self Interest
At first, it seems that this concept would tell us, ‘steal to your heart’s content’. This may prove harder than it sounds. Is it in one’s self interest to steal from everyone? Not if everyone has large sticks and helmets haven’t been invented yet. Unfortunately, this concept is best for understanding the international situation and the reading I gave you from Zinn. America today feels that it must indebt the third world to itself to strengthen its capitalist way of life, as it did during the Cold War. Supporters of the Vietnam war as well as the ‘War on Terrorism’ today say openly on the News that we need to ‘defend America’s interests’. Thought the word ‘economic’ is left off the front of ‘interests’ here, this is essentially what is being argued. America is a very fine omelet (a money credit omelet, if you will), and this means eggs need to be stolen from the hen house. Perkins’ book gives us excellent insight into its mechanisms.
Perspective and Intersubjectivity
To repeat what was said at the beginning, we have all had the experience of stealing and having things stolen. Hopefully there is something that moves us towards wisdom in not stealing even though theft seems an inevitable and in fact integral part of our world. Aside from the ‘Golden Rule’, there is likely no other constant source of deterrence from theft considering that the government that prints the money and prosecutes the theft also in some circumstances supports theft between its citizens and steals from other governments in the name of life.
To further show the mechanisms and complexity of theft in the modern world, there is no better nor more relevant documentary than ‘The Corporation’.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Intro Philosophy: Daoism, Lao Zi & Zhuang Zi
This week, we will be studying the two most central texts of Chinese Daoism: the Dao De Jing (also ‘Tao’) of Lao Zi, and the book of the ‘second patriarch’ of Daoism, Zhuang Zi. “Zi” used to be “Tzu” until recently. It means “master”, the title added to most Chinese philosophers, and it is pronounced like a cross between “zih” and “tzuh”. Give “zih” a bit of a “t” on the front and change the “ih” a bit to an “uh”.
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. It was only, however, 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 school of thought vs. Confucianism which is more a traditionalist or rationalist school. Indeed, Daoism is one of the most powerful skeptical schools of thought in history, and we continue to look to it as a champion of opening the mind. However it is also clear that Confucius was a skeptic of individual judgments and Daoism also became an orthodox religious system.
While Confucianism stands for city life, study, and the structure of the family and state, Daoism advocates returning to nature, meditation, and questioning relationships of power. Whereas Confucianism argues that we should cultivate and civilize ourselves, Daoism believes that we should return to our natural state and let nature run its course, thus reaching a state of completion.
Many are familiar with the Daoist image of the Yin/Yang intertwining light and dark, however only few (scholars of ancient Chinese philosophy) know that the symbol comes from the Yin Yang school, one of the hundred schools of thought from the warring states/hundred schools period of Chinese philosophy. The Daoists got the symbol from the 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 the support.
The most important concept for Daoism (and, interestingly, the mystics of most religions) is the Great One, the All. Essentially, 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. ‘Dao’ means ‘Way’, and thus ‘Daoism’ is the study of the Way of the All, the source of everything. This is similar in many ways to the Indian Jain idea from India of “non-one-sidedness”, and this is strikingly clear in both the Dao De Jing and the Zhuang Zi texts. My favorite quote is from the Zhuang Zi: a sage too has a this and a that, but his that has a this, and his this has a that.
Another key concept for Daoism is WU WEI, or 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-exertive. Those familiar with Aikido, the Japanese martial art, will recognize the physical use of this idea: one throws one’s opponent by moving out of their way, not directly striking them. Patience and awareness are valued over speed and focus.
It is believed that Lao Zi lived sometime after 600 BCE, and Zhuang Zi, the second patriarch of Daoism, lived sometime about 370-300 BCE. Not much is known about either patriarch, but we do know that Chuang Tzu worked in a lacquer house (a place for mass-producing bento boxes and plates with glazes). The things said of Lao Tzu are considered entirely of legend. The most famous of these is the legend that Master Lao rode off on a water buffalo into the West (the direction of the setting sun, sacred and associated with death and the afterlife in many cultures including Egypt and China) at the end of his life, never heard from again. One tradition holds that he went to India to teach the Buddha, but this is clearly a tale told by Daoists to explain how Daoism is quite close to Buddhism in many ways. Daoism was blended with Buddhism in China, so Chinese Daoists would say this to trump the Chinese Buddhists.
The Dao De Jing of Lao Zi:
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 BIG ALL does not need a particular name, because there is nothing in particular that one can judge about the ALL. It is the source of all things, so it could be called ‘green’, ‘not green’, ‘both’ or ‘neither’, with equal 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 in fact 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 is good, other times we feel that being free is good. In fact, the All is all solidity (order) and freedom (chaos), so the All is above and 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 (Dao) of things is fluid, like water, getting down into the lowest and tightest cracks of things. Daoists are quick to point out: 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 despise as well as the things people 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. ‘When you have done your work, retire’ here means: judge and do just enough for the present situation, but do not try to build up merit or riches, for it will only bring you trouble.
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 with a more skeptical mind, 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.
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.” This, like Hegel, refers to seeing the thing and the conception of the thing as one and two at the same time.
Chapter 13 tells us that getting a lowly state, a common position, is a gift, and so is losing it! How can both getting something and loosing something be good? Because there is good and bad in everything. If the sage finds the good in anything, turning the good to their advantage, then the sage can find the good in getting a thing, and then find the good in loosing that thing. Don’t assume that nothing else has changed in the mean time.
Chapter 22 has an ethical ring to it. The sage does not boast, and is admired by everyone. Clearly, this is because there is no end to boasting in human beings! 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, and thus the sage is much less annoying than the average person. This takes practice and patience, something the average person does not have time for before making a certain judgment. The idea is that 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 to have it.
Notice at the end of chapter 42, ‘A man of violence will come to a violent end’. 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.
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’. I love this wisdom. A good example of this is racism. 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.
The Book of Zhuang Zi:
In several places, we see the idea of perspective which we encountered in Heraclitus. Mao Quiang and Lady Li were famous beautiful women, but fish, birds and deer were frightened by them. Heraclitus said that all human beauty and achievement is nothing but apes to the gods as apes are only apes to us. Who knows what is beautiful, humans, birds, fish, or deer? Which of them knows what tastes good? Another great passage is the Peng bird who migrates for the Winter, an act which the dove and the cicada (a large insect) find ridiculous. They have no frame of reference to understand such an act. This suggests that the wisdom of Daoism will sound ridiculous and foolish to those who are not experienced and wise. We read in the text "Truth sounds like its opposite!", just as Heraclitus said "The way forward is the way back".
In the Chapter, The Secret of Caring for Life, we meet Cook Ting and his famous butcher’s knife. Cook Ting tells his master that his blade never goes dull, for he can always find the hidden spaces in things, and then his blade goes right through. This is very much like the reasoning of the wise mind, that can use reason to chop anything up easily and naturally, without striking up against anything in opposition.
Notice that Confucius appears many times in the Chuang Tzu, used to argue AGAINST his own position and in favor of a Daoist position. Many times Confucius says that his own way is inferior to the Daoist way. Clearly, these are texts written by Daoists who appreciate the good in Confucianism but think their own school to be superior. For example, page 65, in the chapter ‘The Sign of Virtue Complete’, Confucius says of Wang T’ai, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall, 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.” I still use this contradiction of one and many to this day. It shows you much about how people make judgments and arguments.
Notice on page 92 and 93 that Hu Tzu trumps a shaman, who tries to read him but Hu Tzu can change how he is read seemingly at will. This seems to suggest that the true sage can identify with everything and everybody, so there is no need to avoid any particular thing or to judge the presence or absence of anything for any situation. Anything desired is always immediately at hand when you have a fluid nature that is the source of all things.
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. It was only, however, 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 school of thought vs. Confucianism which is more a traditionalist or rationalist school. Indeed, Daoism is one of the most powerful skeptical schools of thought in history, and we continue to look to it as a champion of opening the mind. However it is also clear that Confucius was a skeptic of individual judgments and Daoism also became an orthodox religious system.
While Confucianism stands for city life, study, and the structure of the family and state, Daoism advocates returning to nature, meditation, and questioning relationships of power. Whereas Confucianism argues that we should cultivate and civilize ourselves, Daoism believes that we should return to our natural state and let nature run its course, thus reaching a state of completion.
Many are familiar with the Daoist image of the Yin/Yang intertwining light and dark, however only few (scholars of ancient Chinese philosophy) know that the symbol comes from the Yin Yang school, one of the hundred schools of thought from the warring states/hundred schools period of Chinese philosophy. The Daoists got the symbol from the 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 the support.
The most important concept for Daoism (and, interestingly, the mystics of most religions) is the Great One, the All. Essentially, 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. ‘Dao’ means ‘Way’, and thus ‘Daoism’ is the study of the Way of the All, the source of everything. This is similar in many ways to the Indian Jain idea from India of “non-one-sidedness”, and this is strikingly clear in both the Dao De Jing and the Zhuang Zi texts. My favorite quote is from the Zhuang Zi: a sage too has a this and a that, but his that has a this, and his this has a that.
Another key concept for Daoism is WU WEI, or 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-exertive. Those familiar with Aikido, the Japanese martial art, will recognize the physical use of this idea: one throws one’s opponent by moving out of their way, not directly striking them. Patience and awareness are valued over speed and focus.
It is believed that Lao Zi lived sometime after 600 BCE, and Zhuang Zi, the second patriarch of Daoism, lived sometime about 370-300 BCE. Not much is known about either patriarch, but we do know that Chuang Tzu worked in a lacquer house (a place for mass-producing bento boxes and plates with glazes). The things said of Lao Tzu are considered entirely of legend. The most famous of these is the legend that Master Lao rode off on a water buffalo into the West (the direction of the setting sun, sacred and associated with death and the afterlife in many cultures including Egypt and China) at the end of his life, never heard from again. One tradition holds that he went to India to teach the Buddha, but this is clearly a tale told by Daoists to explain how Daoism is quite close to Buddhism in many ways. Daoism was blended with Buddhism in China, so Chinese Daoists would say this to trump the Chinese Buddhists.
The Dao De Jing of Lao Zi:
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 BIG ALL does not need a particular name, because there is nothing in particular that one can judge about the ALL. It is the source of all things, so it could be called ‘green’, ‘not green’, ‘both’ or ‘neither’, with equal 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 in fact 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 is good, other times we feel that being free is good. In fact, the All is all solidity (order) and freedom (chaos), so the All is above and 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 (Dao) of things is fluid, like water, getting down into the lowest and tightest cracks of things. Daoists are quick to point out: 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 despise as well as the things people 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. ‘When you have done your work, retire’ here means: judge and do just enough for the present situation, but do not try to build up merit or riches, for it will only bring you trouble.
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 with a more skeptical mind, 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.
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.” This, like Hegel, refers to seeing the thing and the conception of the thing as one and two at the same time.
Chapter 13 tells us that getting a lowly state, a common position, is a gift, and so is losing it! How can both getting something and loosing something be good? Because there is good and bad in everything. If the sage finds the good in anything, turning the good to their advantage, then the sage can find the good in getting a thing, and then find the good in loosing that thing. Don’t assume that nothing else has changed in the mean time.
Chapter 22 has an ethical ring to it. The sage does not boast, and is admired by everyone. Clearly, this is because there is no end to boasting in human beings! 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, and thus the sage is much less annoying than the average person. This takes practice and patience, something the average person does not have time for before making a certain judgment. The idea is that 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 to have it.
Notice at the end of chapter 42, ‘A man of violence will come to a violent end’. 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.
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’. I love this wisdom. A good example of this is racism. 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.
The Book of Zhuang Zi:
In several places, we see the idea of perspective which we encountered in Heraclitus. Mao Quiang and Lady Li were famous beautiful women, but fish, birds and deer were frightened by them. Heraclitus said that all human beauty and achievement is nothing but apes to the gods as apes are only apes to us. Who knows what is beautiful, humans, birds, fish, or deer? Which of them knows what tastes good? Another great passage is the Peng bird who migrates for the Winter, an act which the dove and the cicada (a large insect) find ridiculous. They have no frame of reference to understand such an act. This suggests that the wisdom of Daoism will sound ridiculous and foolish to those who are not experienced and wise. We read in the text "Truth sounds like its opposite!", just as Heraclitus said "The way forward is the way back".
In the Chapter, The Secret of Caring for Life, we meet Cook Ting and his famous butcher’s knife. Cook Ting tells his master that his blade never goes dull, for he can always find the hidden spaces in things, and then his blade goes right through. This is very much like the reasoning of the wise mind, that can use reason to chop anything up easily and naturally, without striking up against anything in opposition.
Notice that Confucius appears many times in the Chuang Tzu, used to argue AGAINST his own position and in favor of a Daoist position. Many times Confucius says that his own way is inferior to the Daoist way. Clearly, these are texts written by Daoists who appreciate the good in Confucianism but think their own school to be superior. For example, page 65, in the chapter ‘The Sign of Virtue Complete’, Confucius says of Wang T’ai, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall, 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.” I still use this contradiction of one and many to this day. It shows you much about how people make judgments and arguments.
Notice on page 92 and 93 that Hu Tzu trumps a shaman, who tries to read him but Hu Tzu can change how he is read seemingly at will. This seems to suggest that the true sage can identify with everything and everybody, so there is no need to avoid any particular thing or to judge the presence or absence of anything for any situation. Anything desired is always immediately at hand when you have a fluid nature that is the source of all things.
Intro Philosophy: Midterm Review
Shamanism: “One who knows”, common world culture of early tribal society, forms that appear in world religions, ecstatic experience as ‘standing outside’, initiation rites and ‘rebirth’, investigating problems and seeking visions of solutions, the All-Tree, the problem of the One and the Many, the problem of destiny after death, stories as transmission of knowledge
City State Priests & Egypt: Societies gather into larger societies and settle, authorities become traditional, specialization of experts and scholars, eternal stars of fire as order above, water as chaos below, air as ordering breath or communication, Egyptian wisdom texts show criticism of society and human behaviors, heart centered individual, warring state periods good for thought, polytheism to monotheism to abstract solar monotheism
Hinduism, Jainism & Buddhism: Three paths of worship (Bhakti devotion, Raja asceticism, Jnana scholarship), trinity of Brahma, Vishnu (salvation) and Shiva (destruction), multitude of gods who are yet are not these three, two types of afterlife (reincarnation and release of Nirvana), Vedas as multiple origin stories, Upanishads as philosophical ‘that is you’ inner meaning, Jain influence on Buddhism and Hinduism, Mahavira and the Tirthankaras, two principles of skepticism (non-one-endedness and postulation), practice of asceticism and austerities (fasting, postures, meditation), Jain all karma as negative and total release as joining the order of the cosmos, the Jain metaphor of the leaky boat (plugging and bailing), Buddhism concepts of Four Noble Truths, Doctrine of the Mean, Codependent Arising
Heraclitus: All is One/Fire/Cosmic Mind, all particular things are impermanent (even gods/planets), experts do not know much more than the common people, we are all apes to the gods, can’t step in the same river twice, perspective changing how things are
Plato: Parmenides over Heraclitus, Forms/Ideas as eternal models of things, the three parts of the soul (appetite, spirit and reason) corresponding to the three classes of the city (workers, police and philosophers), allegory of the cave
Confucianism: Mandate of Heaven as abstract monotheism, social order and rites (Li) as strength of society, study and civil service over meditation and nature of Daoism, criticism of the individual and equating others with oneself, right mind/intention over right body/action, love (Ren) as center of human and system, recognition of the lowest as oneself and self criticism, Neo-Confucianism as blend with Daoism and Buddhism
Daoism: Return to nature and stillness, seeing both sides of judgment, Yin and Yang symbol, influence on Chinese Buddhism and Zen, the great One/Way as nameless above all named 10,000 things, water-like in fluidity and getting everywhere, the wheel as both solid and empty together, Zhuan Zi and perspective, Cook Ting, all humans are ugly to minnows and deer, the Peng bird vs. dove and cicada
City State Priests & Egypt: Societies gather into larger societies and settle, authorities become traditional, specialization of experts and scholars, eternal stars of fire as order above, water as chaos below, air as ordering breath or communication, Egyptian wisdom texts show criticism of society and human behaviors, heart centered individual, warring state periods good for thought, polytheism to monotheism to abstract solar monotheism
Hinduism, Jainism & Buddhism: Three paths of worship (Bhakti devotion, Raja asceticism, Jnana scholarship), trinity of Brahma, Vishnu (salvation) and Shiva (destruction), multitude of gods who are yet are not these three, two types of afterlife (reincarnation and release of Nirvana), Vedas as multiple origin stories, Upanishads as philosophical ‘that is you’ inner meaning, Jain influence on Buddhism and Hinduism, Mahavira and the Tirthankaras, two principles of skepticism (non-one-endedness and postulation), practice of asceticism and austerities (fasting, postures, meditation), Jain all karma as negative and total release as joining the order of the cosmos, the Jain metaphor of the leaky boat (plugging and bailing), Buddhism concepts of Four Noble Truths, Doctrine of the Mean, Codependent Arising
Heraclitus: All is One/Fire/Cosmic Mind, all particular things are impermanent (even gods/planets), experts do not know much more than the common people, we are all apes to the gods, can’t step in the same river twice, perspective changing how things are
Plato: Parmenides over Heraclitus, Forms/Ideas as eternal models of things, the three parts of the soul (appetite, spirit and reason) corresponding to the three classes of the city (workers, police and philosophers), allegory of the cave
Confucianism: Mandate of Heaven as abstract monotheism, social order and rites (Li) as strength of society, study and civil service over meditation and nature of Daoism, criticism of the individual and equating others with oneself, right mind/intention over right body/action, love (Ren) as center of human and system, recognition of the lowest as oneself and self criticism, Neo-Confucianism as blend with Daoism and Buddhism
Daoism: Return to nature and stillness, seeing both sides of judgment, Yin and Yang symbol, influence on Chinese Buddhism and Zen, the great One/Way as nameless above all named 10,000 things, water-like in fluidity and getting everywhere, the wheel as both solid and empty together, Zhuan Zi and perspective, Cook Ting, all humans are ugly to minnows and deer, the Peng bird vs. dove and cicada
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