RENE DESCARTES (1596-1650) is called the ‘first modern philosopher’ in the tradition of European ‘Western’ scholarship. He is known both for the first canonical modern European philosophy texts, his Discourse on Method and Meditations, and also in mathematics for the Cartesian coordinate system (X and Y as two dimensions), a device useful for algebra and critical for the later European development of calculus by Newton and another early modern European philosopher acquainted with Descartes’ thought, Leibniz. While Newton is far more famous as a scientist, we use Leibniz’s mathematical notation system in calculus because Newton named everything after himself, creating a system that was not only vain but needlessly confusing.
Descartes’ philosophical writings, particularly the Meditations, drew the reactions of several philosophers who themselves went on to become famous, particularly Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Leibniz, and Locke. In the Meditations, of which I gave you central selections, Descartes asks: What we can know for certain if it is possible that everything is an illusion of the mind? Like Avicenna, Descartes concludes that we can be certain that we are aware and conscious. From this, he proceeds to conclude that we can be certain that our thoughts are our own, that the world is real, that there are regularities in the world that we can know for certain, and that there is a good and loving monotheistic god who would not deceive us about these things.
Some philosophers agreed with this very much, but did not find Descartes’ argument convincing and tried to come up with more satisfying proofs. Other philosophers who were more skeptical, such as Hume, did not buy it and argued that human truth and certainty is always, in some way, an assumption. The two sides of the debate were known as Rationalism and Empiricism. Rationalists, like Descartes, believe that facts and certainties can be acquired by deduction from other facts and certainties, much like Descartes proceeds from awareness to a world with consistent, knowable and deducible facts. Empiricists, like Hume, believe that all human conceptions are acquired by induction, gathered perceptions of regularities and patterns, and that while deduction and certainty are useful it is always possible for them to be wrong. Both sides agree that the world is quite regular in many ways, and that science should continue to examine and learn from the world, however the two see the success of science in opposite ways. Rationalists see science as proof that humans can acquire certain and true knowledge, while Empiricists see science as proof that humans can never be absolutely certain of their theories, conceptions, and understandings.
Descartes was born in Touraine, France, a town which has since been renamed ‘Descartes’ after its most famous citizen. Descartes’ father was a member of parliament, though his mother died when he was very young. He went to law school to follow his father and become a merchant, but decided to become a mercenary instead travel and fight in the 30 years war, ‘to seek truth’. It seems he did not find truth in law school. As a soldier, he had much time waiting for battle, and studied mathematics and science in his spare time. On the night of November 10th, 1619, Descartes had a series of visions that convinced him that the world is a rational and mechanical system profoundly in tune with the rationality of the human mind.
At first, he intended on writing books on physics, but in 1633 Galileo was condemned by the Church for his solar-centric theory, the idea that the earth moves around the sun, which India and Islam had for more than 700 years. Interestingly, many put the sun at the center of the universe, replacing the earth as center. Because of Galileo’s troubles, Descartes decided not to publish his views on physics, his Treatise on the World, but his ‘Discourse on Method’, his philosophy text, instead, and it is today considered the first work of modern European philosophy. This caution did not spare Descartes however, as the work was condemned by the Pope in 1663, thirty years after Galileo’s work was condemned and after Descartes’ death, put on the prohibited index of books alongside other authors who are foundational for European scholarship. Like Aquinas, even though Descartes argued that reason teaches us that the Catholic Church is the one true religion and there is a monotheistic god, his heresy was teaching that it is reason that shows us this, not faith or the will of the heavens. Descartes remained a practicing Catholic until his death.
Descartes’ death is famous and unfortunately funny. For the majority of his life, he worked in bed until noon each day, an aristocrat who had the time and leisure to do this. After he became famous and his works were prohibited by the Catholic Church, the Protestant Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to Stockholm to be her private tutor. Unfortunately for Descartes, she wanted morning lessons, every morning, at 5 am. Between the snow and the early mornings, Descartes was soon sick with pneumonia, and died. Maybe we should all work on our problems every day until noon, safe in bed. This is similar to Francis Bacon’s famous death, catching pneumonia after repeatedly stuffing snow into chickens to try to preserve the meat and keep it from rotting. Some have argued that Descartes was killed with a poisoned communion wafer given by a priest who feared Descartes’ rationalism, but this is questionable.
We saw last time that Islamic algebra and mechanics show us the development toward modern society and thought. Descartes, in a world of increasing algebra and mechanics, turns from an understanding of causes up in the heavens to cause as the mechanics of this world. Just like many Islamic and medieval European thinkers, Descartes identifies the mind and heavens with freedom and consciousness while putting the mathematical order of things down in the world. The heavens remain the good and pure, but the order and mathematics becomes a thing of this world and not the other world. This change, which is very much modernity, comes with a world increasingly full of algebra and mechanics. The world we see begins to be the known, and the spiritual begins to be the unknown. This goes in hand with the soul/mind ceasing to be round and made of fire and the heavens and afterlife ceasing to be physically above our heads even for the committed religious. While Descartes argued that a monotheistic god clearly created the world, as reason tells us all things have causes, he was condemned like Hobbes, Newton and others for arguing that nature works like a machine, and once caused proceeds largely on its own.
An excellent illustration of the world becoming mechanical and life as the unknown ‘ghost in the shell’ is the City of Brass story from the 1001 Nights, also called the Arabian nights. In the story, an exploration party of the Sultan sets off to discover King Solomon’s lost City of Brass, a place where he kept demons in brass bottles, forced them to forge many wonderful pieces of metalwork in furnaces and used mysterious forces from below to produce technological wonders in this world, a thing that he can do only because he is very holy and wise. In the story, there are many evil robots that still kill long after Solomon is dead and gone. This comes from the Islamic tales of Solomon, that say when he died he stayed upright for a century and the demons continued to work on their tasks not knowing that their master was dead. Then a worm ate through Solomon’s staff and he fell over, and the demons realized that they had been working for no purpose and fled. In the City of Brass, a beautiful extension of the story, there are beautiful marionettes that move and beckon in the wind, luring some of the exploration party to their deaths in gorges below. There are other sorts of dangerous automata that are empty bodies still moving from natural forces. Finally, Solomon’s Queen (not Sheba who went to Ethiopia, but another) is stuffed and preserved, sitting on her thrown, with her eyes mechanically blinking every so often. One of the party falls in love, approaches, and only realizes when touching her hand that she is dead, and he reels back in horror. Think of this as a medieval Islamic science fiction story, similar to killer robots and zombie flash mobs of today.
Descartes now proceeds to make the natural world, including animals, nothing but mechanics and causation, completely devoid of intention or feelings. Dualism is a position that sees two separate levels in a thing. Descartes argues for a radical dualism between the mechanics of the world below (body) and the consciousness and intention of the world above (mind). Consciousness or mind or spirit is in the upper world, while all in the given world is mindless mechanics. The worst of this is that Descartes practiced vivisection, cutting animals apart while alive to learn about anatomy, and helped popularize the practice in Europe, arguing that animals do not have minds and thus do not feel a thing, their behavior being mere automatic reflexes of causal forces.
This same cultural current is what led Protestantism to lose saints and angels with functional roles and simply pray directly to Jesus for everything, different from all previous world religious systems (including Catholicism). In early Europe, Jesus was busy battling the dragon Satan. If your cow got sick, there was a specific saint or angel to petition. Asking Jesus for small favors is like calling the president about a stop sign in your neighborhood. With increasingly sophisticated practices of medicine and then veterinarian practice, you no longer take your sick cow to a particular temple and pray to a particular saint as a particular priest uses medicine as well as prayer and ritual to heal your cow. The causal solution is now one of this world, but the ‘evil’ of sickness remains distantly rumbling in the world beyond, not gone but no longer the primary force of the institutional practice. Temples become increasingly research facilities, science and religion specialize and part ways.
Those who are bent toward dogmatism celebrate Descartes as discovering the simple positives of mechanical causes and the existence of self-consciousness or the soul, arguing that there are certain mechanical facts and that each person has a certain personal identity. Skeptics see Descartes as being fooled by his own judgments, and argue that we can never be absolutely certain of mechanical facts nor of the personal or shared identities. Thus, Descartes is very much part of the frame of European Philosophy to follow. Not only is he the first to flourish in Europe in an algebraically structured wealthy culture, but his position is the starting dogmatism which is foundational for dogmatic rationalists and the departure point for skeptical empiricists.
Let us remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment. In what some call the first ‘thought experiment’ (the central device of the American tradition of philosophy), he suggests that the reader imagine floating in a void and having all sensation, including of the body or senses, slowly taken away. What are you left with as the essential factor once the accidental sensual factors are removed? Self consciousness, with the awareness of consciousness and mind itself. For Avicenna, as for Descartes, this awareness and self-circling is the small piece of God, the big all awareness, that is one’s soul, humanity and life.
Descartes proposes a very similar thought experiment. He asks the reader to imagine that there is a deceiving demon that is creating an illusion of the world, casting doubt on everything except the essence of the human being and soul, the self-awareness which Descartes believes proves that you must exist. Thus, his famous line: “I think, therefore I am”, a conclusion that has been violently debated back and forth ever since. One’s position is defined, in a sense, by what one thinks of Descartes’ simple experiment.
Where does the deceiving demon in Descartes come from? Why the radical psychological skepticism, and then the simple positive (skeptics would say ‘naive’) affirmation of existence? To see this, we must speak of the Cathars, a Gnostic Christian and Manichean hybrid Heresy that was being persecuted in France in the 1400s. Descartes is writing in France in the late 1600s, two hundred years later. Gnosticism spoke of a deceiving demon false god, the devil, that controls the appearance of this false world below, similar to the Indian doctrine of the world below as not only evil but illusion and false.
Manichaeism was a religion started by a Syrian named Mani (200-276 CE), who claimed to be the final coming of Jesus, the Jewish messiah, the third saoshyant, the Persian Zoroastrian messiah, and the Buddha Amitaba, Buddha of Infinite light who will ferry people to the pure land. This is because Buddhism and Christianity flourished in Syria and Afghanistan as a middle ground of cultures. Then the religion was fused with much Zoroastrian terminology to become what Christians in Europe considered a Christian Heresy. The religion spread up through Europe in 300-500, and the Cathars were an offshoot that survived in France up until the persecutions of 1400s.
Thus, Descartes (the first modern philosopher) is arguing for Christianity and its simple positive faith in the world vs. the Cathar-Manichean-Gnostic deceiving demon. Descartes thought experiment is very much Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment, but notice that it also attacks the idea of the Cathar Satan or King Demon. Notice that Descartes’ thought experiment suggests that a Demon could not keep us in the dark the way the Cathars believe. Instead, because of our self-consciousness/mind/soul that we get from God, and then using this as an anchor of certainty, Descartes argues that God thus does not completely deceive us in this world but shows us many other certainties that we can know with the power and sight of our mind.
I gave you selections of Descartes’ two great works, Discourse on Method and his six Philosophical Meditations. Let us work through the texts.
In his Discourse on Method, he lays out the famous “I think therefore I am” thought experiment, remarkably similar to Avicenna’s Floating Man thought experiment. He says he won’t tell us about his first meditations in hardcore skeptical ‘all is a dream’ mode, “for they are so abstract and unusual that they will probably not be to the taste of everyone”. Wow, keep that to yourself, Descartes. He starts with the meditations he will tell us about with a thought experiment: assume that all the senses are being tricked, as if by a dream. (This is similar to Zhuangzi’s Butterfly, and now he doesn’t know what it is- but Descartes ends like Avicenna’s floating man).
Everything can be doubted but the self-awareness. He writes that ‘I think therefore I am’ is the first principle of his new philosophy, brought up from the ground of this principle out of total skepticism of certainties. A skeptic here would wonder if this is so skeptical. First, Descartes assumes from self-awareness that he is a mind, a ‘substance of thought’, which is completely distinct from the body, which can be doubted. Already there are grey areas here. Can’t thought be doubted as much as a body part? Aren’t both ‘sensed’?
Now, we move to the Meditations, to the argument laid out step by step. Descartes argues that we all accept things that we believe to be certain, but then turn out to be wrong. Therefore, we cannot use certainty as the sole criterion for truth. We have to separate out the categorically certain from the seemingly certain. The skeptic here questions whether there are categorical certainties that are distinct from our illusions. This remains a central question. Dogmatists believe in the categorically true, also called ‘fact’, while skeptics tend to disbelieve in this sort of categorical certainty and opt for relative or perspective/subjective certainty.
Descartes says that it seems certain that he is sitting by the fire writing, but we can doubt this and believe that Descartes is simply dreaming that he is Descartes, by the fire. He uses the example of madmen who think that they are kings or that their bodies are made out of glass. Obviously, Descartes had some familiarity with at least literature about types of madness and delusions (also very Avicenna-like, who understood imagination and mental conditions such as hysteria and halucinations).
There seem to be certain truths that cannot be untrue, like 2 + 3 is equal to 5, a central example he uses, or a square always has 4 sides. Notice that both of these are mathematical examples. However, we can even imagine that this itself is all delusion. Hence, we assume for skepticism’s sake that there could be a deceiving demon (much like in the movie The Matrix). He also says it could be someone extremely powerful who could use ‘industry’ to deceive me: this is the ‘brain in a vat’ mad scientist thought experiment used today rather than a demon in philosophy classrooms. The demon cannot convince me that I do not exist, and so I am an existent thing that thinks. The one point of certainty is self-awareness or consciousness, the one thing that we cannot be fooled about because it is self-evident.
Descartes argues that the mind has no quality and no quantity, no space or time to it at all.
Hence, it is the human immortal soul/mind/awareness. Because we are sure of this, and because we get our truth from something that we are within we are not in the power of something that completely lies to us. Descartes then quickly declares that we can trust that God is good, the world is not an illusion and 2 + 3 is equal to 5. When we aspire to God and truth, using reason correctly, we discover certain truths, such as the truths of mathematics, the existence of the soul, and of God, the certainty that the body is not our true self, and that animals do not have souls or awareness. Note that everyone after Descartes found this reasoning a bit too quick and slim, both those who agreed with him and those who did not.
DAVID HUME (1711-1776) did not agree with Descartes on much. Hume’s position is that all of our thinking, our identity and truth is induction and assumption. This is like the Indian theory of skandas, ‘piles’ of sand, speaking of the mind and how all perceptions in it are just bundles of stuff that accumulate and then dissipate. Interestingly also like Indian thought, particularly Buddism, Hume argued that human thought, identity and behavior are ruled by the passions, not reason which serves as a tool for desires. With Locke and Berkeley, the Berkeley for which the town and university get their name, Hume is one of the three British Empiricists.
Hume was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. His name was originally ‘Home’, but Hume changed it because the British and others kept mispronouncing it. Like Descartes, he originally planned to study law but came to a fascination with philosophy and devoted himself to it instead. During his lifetime his works on philosophy were condemned both by professors as unintelligible and priests as atheist, but his six volume History of England gained fame and was printed numerous times. While Hume was called an atheist by friends and foes, he was critical of religion but silent about his own beliefs. It is likely he was an agnostic, as he argued in various places that reason could neither prove nor disprove the religious beliefs of the world’s cultures. Like Nietzsche, whom Hume influenced in matters of desire as user of reason, Hume saw religion not as objectively true or false but as useful to a culture in a time and place, and in his History of England he argues that humans are creatures of habit who are often only moved to political revolution over matters of religion.
Hume’s ‘An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature’ is the condensed form of Hume’s first and foremost work which he wrote after critics claimed his original Treatise of Human Nature was convoluted and difficult to understand. Hume starts saying that philosophy has flowered all over Europe in “these last four score years” (80 years, no connection to Lincoln or Gettysburg), and that it has occurred in England just as greatly as any other. Notice that philosophy is a recent development for Europe, as well as England. Hume says that philosophers of ancient times have handled their truths delicately, showing more restraint than full depth of reflection. Remember with Descartes, skepticism and critical reflection can quickly turn to orthodoxy. Hume is ultimately going to say that all truth is assumption, habit, and prejudice, which opens the gates on any accepted truth as needing to be continuously justified rather than simply proved, as well as opens up potential attacks on all established forms of truth.
Hume says that all mental activity are perceptions. Perceptions are divided into two kinds: impressions and ideas. Impressions are perceptions of objects that are present, and ideas are perceptions of objects that are not present or not directly percieved. For example, one has the perception of a red billiard ball on the table. If one turns around and doesn’t look at the ball, one has an idea of the ball and its appearance in one’s head. Likewise, if one looks at the still red ball and imagines it is moving, one has an impression of the ball and has an idea of the ball rolling down the table. Likewise, if one looks at a moving red ball and imagines it is going to continue moving or hit another ball, one has many impressions of the ball as it moves that one gathers together with an idea of its continued future movement. Impressions are strong, while ideas are weaker. Hume argues that we derive all of our ideas from our impressions. Hume acknowledges that this is in line with Locke’s Tabula Rasa (Blank Slate in Latin). It goes directly against Descartes and Kant, who believe we can with the operation of reason, independent of experience, determine several truths that are correctly understood to be certain regardless of experience.
Hume presents us with his famous and central billiard ball analogy. Imagine two billiard balls, one red and one blue. There are three events. First, the red ball moves up to the blue ball. Second, there is the sound of a ‘clack’. Third, the blue ball moves away from the red ball. Naturally, and this is the key word here as we are talking about the habit, we all understand that the red ball struck the blue ball. Notice that we did not see or perceive the conjunction of the two events. We did not perceive the causation. The causation is itself invisible. Then how did we all understand it? The answer is: we have all shared common experience, and so we share ideas and prejudices. We all had an idea or prejudice when we watched the red ball moving toward the blue ball. Our impressions of things knocking into each other, and in particular our impressions of billiard balls and their motions, naturally caused us all to get into the habit of having a preconception, a preconceived idea, that the red ball was going to hit the blue ball and then the blue ball was going to move afterward. Then, when things happened as they usually seem to, we all come to the conclusion, individually and as a group together, that we were right in our preconceptions.
Hume believes that this is all one can strictly say about the events, and that saying anything else, like suspecting that a particular ‘causation’ was there as an invisible presence, may be common perception but it is not in fact directly perceived or known. Most often, our conclusions are correct, but whenever they are wrong, it shows us that we can have certainty and preconceived ideas, but these do not guarantee that we will be correct. For example, if I made a movie of the two billiard balls, it is an illusion that one image is striking the other. Obviously, I want the audience of the film to have this idea, but this does not make it any less of an illusion, whether the balls are filmed or animated. In a sense, when we watch animation we know and don’t know that what is going on is ‘real’. We can ‘suspend’ our disbelief, and allow our minds to watch and believe in the animated events, even though any animated even must by its nature be fake caricatures of events. Likewise, we can construct an animatronic billiard table, like at a ride in Disneyland, that looks like objects are hitting each other over and over again even if the sound is artificial and the objects never touch. Roland Barthes, the French philosopher and literary critic, said that now that we have built Disneyland, maybe we will be more critical of the nonsense of politics.
Hume argues that all of our beliefs and truths are inferences that we draw, not certainties that we can know without qualification. This is true of life, history, and all of philosophy. If this seems hopeless in its skepticism, it is not entirely bad. Remember that most of our preconceptions are quite in accord with how things go, otherwise we would have no reason for forming them in the first place. While nothing can be known for certain, it is giving a different view of meaning. Things accumulate and build up in our ideas, and thus they are real to us. They are not so real that they ensure that nothing could ever contradict them, but they are real to us and we use them in the world. Hume uses the example of Adam in the garden of Eden as a human who learns the motions of things by experience, starting with a blank slate. Hume says that even Adam, “with all his science, would never have been able to demonstrate that the course of nature must continue uniformly the same, and that the future must be conformable to the past.”
“We are determined by custom alone to suppose the future conformable to the past. When I see a billiard ball moving towards another, my mind is immediately carried by habit to the usual effect, and anticipates my sight by conceiving the second ball in motion…It is not, therefore, reason which is the guide of life, but custom That alone determines the mind, in all instances, to suppose the future conformable to the past. However easy this step may seem, reason would never, to all eternity, be able to make it.”
“With regard to any matter of fact, however strong the proof may be from experience, I can always conceive the contrary, though I cannot always believe it…Philosophy would render us entirely skeptical (Pyrrhoian) were not nature too strong for it”.
Hume argues that effect is often variable and uncertain in life. As an example, he argues that thirty grains of opium will kill anyone that is not accustomed to it. Hume goes on to question the Cartesians’ (followers of Descartes) idea of a supreme being which is wholly without deception, the eternal self, and geometric/mathematical truths (2 + 3 = 5). He argues: how can they know this from experience? Our idea of God is a composition of our experience (guy with a beard, in the clouds) that we have not experienced directly so much as in other things. Mathematical and geometric proofs look nice, but sometimes geometry seems like it is proving something that later is disproved.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Logic: Russell vs. Mill
From here on out in the course, we will be studying modern European logic. Today we will examine the positivist position of Bertrand Russell and the skeptical position of John Stuart Mill, putting the positivist vs. skeptic duel into modern European times. I gave you several texts from Russell and Mill in your reader to give you the debate in the author’s words. Next class, we will begin studying Ludwig Wittgenstein and his truth table method.
As we have noted, in the ancient world logic was about the foundations of debate. In the modern world, particularly fueled by the success of algebraic code-breaking of nature (cryptography from Islamic civilization, discussed last time) logic became a mathematical language that many hoped would provide and prove the foundations of algebraic mathematics. As physicists used mathematics to uncover the mechanics of the universe, mathematicians used logic to uncover the mechanics of mathematics. Unfortunately for Newton’s laws and Wittgenstein’s truth tables, both of these searches uncovered much and produced many useful systems and tools, but neither succeeded in uncovering the full and final mechanisms.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was born into one of the most prominent aristocratic families of Britain, and retained the title ‘Lord’ even when arrested for demonstrating as a pacifist against World War One and dabbling in socialism. With Frege and Wittgenstein, Russell is one of the founders of the anti-idealist Analytic school of Philosophy, the school which broke from the European Continental tradition and became the philosophical tradition of Britain and America. As one author put it, on the European continent, philosophy wants to be art, and in the island of Britain and in America, philosophy wants to be science. Just as Russell was very influential in Britain and America, on the continent, in Germany and France particularly, the German philosophers Hegel, who argued that reality is contradiction, and Nietzsche, who was deeply influenced by Heraclitus, took philosophy in a romantic and skeptical direction.
Russell is a highly influential rationalist philosopher of the Anglo-American Analytic tradition, a tradition that believes in doing the groundwork for scientific facts. Russell often argues against skepticism and instrumentalism (or Utilitarianism, the position of Mill next) by name as he does in the text I gave you. He also argues against Hegel and the Hegelians, who we will study in the coming weeks, who argue that reality is composed of contradictions and oppositional tensions. Analytical positivism assumes that there are underlying facts that are absolutely and universally true, much like the atomic truths of the Vaisheshika and Nyaya schools of ancient India and Aristotle of ancient Greece.
In the first of Russell’s texts that I gave you, The Problem of Induction, Russell says that we know the self and sense data exist. Interestingly, Descartes started modern European philosophy with a very similar position, though Descartes was certain of a good and just God whereas Russell is a staunch atheist who believes in the positive truth of science, not religion. On a side note, philosophy in the middle ages and up through the European Enlightenment of the 1600s and 1700s was almost entirely supportive and uncritical of Christianity, and with the Enlightenment and through modern times in the English and American Analytic tradition been almost entirely supportive and uncritical of science, in spite of the fact that philosophy is the deep questioning of assumptions and traditions. Apparently, one can be uncritical of assumptions and traditions while being critical of assumptions and traditions in the name of religion or science equally. But let us return to Russell, my skepticism aside.
Russell argues that if we want to know anything other than the obvious and immediate, we need to gather things in our conceptions into general principles. We can perceive lightning following thunder again and again, but we must draw a general principle from this if we want to know the relationship between the two. Notice this is exactly what the Nyaya sutra said about the relationship between induction and deduction, and what the Charvakas called illusion. Two questions can be asked here. First, how do we know even the obvious or immediate without drawing generalities? If I see an apple, don’t I have to draw generalities about the parts to see it as a whole, and don’t I have to draw generalities about apples to see it as an apple? Second, why do we need to gather things into concepts or general principles? Russell wants to argue against Mill and ‘Instrumentalism’ which argues that our concepts are not absolute truth but merely truth as it is useful. Is Russell’s necessity different from utility?
Russell admits that this creates a problem (the central issue between positivism and skepticism, in fact): if we only know general principles by induction, then how can we know anything for certain? Russell takes the same position as Aristotle, and argues that we cannot be satisfied with mere opinion, but need knowledge of certain principles that are always true in order to have knowledge. It is true that we seek certainty, but if the skeptic is right and there is only more or less certain opinion, the relatively more certain being what we often call objective knowledge, then we are satisfied with mere opinion, even if it is only the relatively certain opinions that satisfy us. Is any situation of knowledge/opinion entirely satisfactory? Russell argues that we need a founding principle, a starting point of certainty, or otherwise all of our sciences, including mathematics, are mere opinions. We must believe that there are certainties out there, and that our induction sometimes leads us to certain truth.
Russell says that science finds the laws of uniformity in nature, and thus gives us knowledge of certainties. Remember, science in Russell’s time has made major advances since algebraic code-breaking, and is not simply the observation of nature as it was in Gotama and Aristotle’s time, but Russell’s position is identical to that of Gotama in ancient India and Aristotle in ancient Greece. While in ancient times science was largely observation of nature, with Islamic algebra and the increasing levels of mechanics infused into daily life science became not just passive observation but active experimentation.
Unfortunately for Russell, he was writing the piece before the work of Einstein, when Newton’s laws of nature were the dominant model of science and physics. Einstein’s work did much to swing scientists away from the use of the word “law” and toward use of the word “theory” to describe proposed conceptions of the regularities of nature, humanity and the universe. Another philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, would use the term “paradigm” to describe scientific conceptions in a similarly relativistic and hypothetical light. As we will see, Mill would be quite happy by this change of language. It is also similar to the Jain principle of sayadvada, that all human truth is put forward as a best guess, as a hypothetical proposition or theory.
In the second text I gave you, The Empiricist Answer to Skepticism, Russell calls out Hegelians and skeptics by name and says we cannot get the sort of independent certainties we want to call facts or laws by these methods. He says we can indeed whittle away at our theories to get to the pure data, the facts without interpretation but as they must be. Wittgenstein will later use the metaphor of bedrock (like Russell uses the metaphor or analogy of whittling).
Russell has faith in a ‘minimal theory’, what people are trying to find with string theory in physics today. He concedes to the Hegelians and skeptics that there is always SOME uncertainty in truth, some relations of views institutions, room for error, but Russell argues that some data has “independent credibility”, meaning we know its ‘just true’, ‘right there’, and we can assume correctly that this is true data or fact.
Russell argues that some things must be more than opinion, as opinions can contradict each other but the true fact never contradicts itself or other things. This is diametrically opposite Hegel, who argues that contradictions are what compose all things and their situations. Russell argues we should give the greatest weight (note the use of metaphor and analogy, again) to that which is most regular and most certain, and in this way form our principles and propositions. This is the method which Russell believes answers the skeptic. Interestingly, the examples Russell uses suffer from the same problems that Aristotle had before, arguing that what is red cannot be blue. The Jains, Buddhists, and Sextus Empiricus would argue that things can be red and blue at different times, parts, together as the color purple, etc.
Russell is a big believer in the Principle of Non-Contradiction (a statement must be true or false, but not both) and the Principle of the Excluded Middle or alternatively titled Principle of Bivalence (a statement must be either true or false, but not neither). These two principles are, as we have seen in the ancient world and we will continue to see in modern thought, the central issue dividing dogmatic/positivist and skeptical/relativist thought.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873 CE) was born in London, influenced by Ancient Greek, French, and liberal thought. He is considered the major founder of Utilitarianism and one of the first champions of individual freedom, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. His father wrote a history of India, and Mill was for a time involved with his father in the British East India company, the corporation that helped Britain maintain their economic hold over India.
Mill’s family was friends with the Bentham family, from whom Mill took up his consequentialist, ‘happy principle’ thought. Mill’s father had Bentham tutor Mill as a child with the idea that Mill would become a champion of consequentialist thought. However, it was Mill who found the name ‘utilitarian’ in a Christian text that used the term to describe an evil way to strive for good without principles. Mill picked up the name and developed the thinking in line with Bentham, his mentor, becoming its famous spokesman. Mill is a central thinker in Logic, Economics and Ethics. In all of these subjects, he advocated rethinking basic principles and assumptions based on the ongoing experiences of their usefulness. For Mill and Utilitarianism, the true is not true in itself but true because it is useful for creating happiness and avoiding pain.
Political laws, ethical morals, mathematical rules, and scientific understandings are to be continuously examined and developed such that they are best for A) the greatest number of people, and B) over the longest period of time. Apart from this practical value, Mill argues there is no objective truth to things. Rather, the objective of truth is its beneficial use. If a certain logic or form of mathematics is useful, proving itself a valuable tool that can be put to good work, then this is the only proof that it is solid and sure.
Utilitarianism, which Russell attacks as ‘Instrumentalism’ says that there is no truth to things other than how they are used and for whom they are used. This is a very similar position to the “existentialism” of Avicenna and Ockham, with a social bent. Both Russell and Mill agree that the world has regular patterns, and that we use our minds to form concepts of these regularities. However, Mill and utilitarians argue that we are often fooled by our use and concepts of things into thinking that we grasp the essence of the thing when in fact all we are doing is using and grasping. What is useful to some may not be useful to others, and what is useful for many years may not be useful years later.
As algebraic science made many new discoveries, it is interesting that human beings again split along positivist and skeptic lines. Does science show us that the truth is out there and can be discovered, or that we should always be suspicious of our certain truths because new truths can overturn the old truths?
Utilitarianism was a powerful force in Britain against more traditional thinkers like Russell, who is fighting back against Hegelian process theory and Utilitarian ‘its whatever we want to do with it or make of it’ theory. Russell believes that things are factually as they are, and we should be objective to have true knowledge. A Utilitarian would say we can arrange situations such that we have knowledge, but there is no ‘true view’, purpose or nature of things. For instance, Utilitarianism was very useful for feminism, that there is no ‘true position’ of women but it is however we position things such that they are most useful.
In the text Logic and Mathematics, Mill asks: if we admit that all is induction (British Empiricism, which Russell embraces) then why do we say there are “exact sciences”? We also similarly say that there are ‘hard sciences’. He argues that this is an illusion due to the fact that objects of math are conceptions and thus imaginary, hence they have perfect straight edges like an ideally straight line. A perfectly straight line, the example he uses, with no width, like a point, cannot exist outside of the imagination. It is a real being of the world, but imaginary and not physical. Some (Russell) say without perfection of a sort there is no math, science or knowledge possible (eternal facts as well), but Mill argues this is silly as we have these things yet do not have an instance of a perfectly straight line in the real world.
Russell argued that we can strip down or “whittle” to the pure straight edged truth, but Mill argues that this helps us to focus our observation and thinking but it does nothing to guarantee that our knowledge is certain at all. We can ignore aspects of a thing to focus on particular aspects or parts, but this does not successfully or completely take these factors out of the picture, even as far as relevance to the parts that are in focus. This is a very important ground for the positivist/skeptic debate today. If we take a banana and put it in a lab, are we more or less capable of seeing its truths there? If we create abstractions about bananas with our minds, are these getting into the thing or away from it?
Russell wanted a first certain principle of non-contradiction to give us certainty. Mill argues that there are no first principles of geometry, mathematics or anything else. Mill argues that the ‘first principles’ are in fact simply generalized observations of real world situations. Mill turns specifically to the two principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle with this skepticism. These principles are in fact observation in practice. We can see that belief and disbelief oppose one another, that they are “oppositional mental states” just as we can see that opposing stories tend to mean that someone is somewhat mistaken. This is the simple contrast between any two opposites. Mill argues that the two principles are merely useful generalizations, as are all “true” concepts used by human beings whether scientists, philosophers or common folk.
The Problem of Self Referentially is one of the most famous and interesting problems with the principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle. This problem was very important for Russell’s career, and it brought him both great success and frustration.
The classic example is the liar’s paradox. Consider the sentence, “This sentence is false”. According to non-contradiction, this must be either true or false but not both, but if it is true then it is false and if it is false then it is true. It cannot be fully resolved either way.
Russell pointed out a similar paradox in the work of Frege, the German analytic philosopher who was central in trying to turn Logic towards founding arithmetic, who Russell and then Wittgenstein followed and overturned (as Wittgenstein later did to his teacher Russell). Frege thought he could prove that mathematics is simply a system of non-contradictory sets, which he called Set Theory. Russell realized, however, that there are still contradictions possible in this system of mere sets. He asked, “Is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves a member of itself?” Just like the liar paradox, if it is, then it isn’t, and vice-versa.
Russell’s point is that there is a paradox that results from self-reference (‘this sentence’ or ‘this set’). Russell tried to use Frege’s work to finish a foundation of math, which he never completed to his own satisfaction. He thought that he could come up with a ‘theory of types’ that would prevent the paradox (so a ‘set’ is of objects but a ‘type’ is a group of sets, not objects), but it lead to further paradoxes. At this time, he discovered a young Austrian genius who showed up at his office hours one day simply to argue endlessly against everything Russell said, who Russell believed would finish his work but in the end came to stand completely against proof theory: Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Recently, a different version of the liar’s paradox has been proposed that supposedly does not suffer from self-reference: consider two people standing next to each other, one with a sign that reads “Her sign is false” and another with a sign that reads, “His sign is true”. Like Russell’s theory of types, this version of the paradox tries to eliminate self-reference to tidy up the problem, but the paradox remains.
As we have noted, in the ancient world logic was about the foundations of debate. In the modern world, particularly fueled by the success of algebraic code-breaking of nature (cryptography from Islamic civilization, discussed last time) logic became a mathematical language that many hoped would provide and prove the foundations of algebraic mathematics. As physicists used mathematics to uncover the mechanics of the universe, mathematicians used logic to uncover the mechanics of mathematics. Unfortunately for Newton’s laws and Wittgenstein’s truth tables, both of these searches uncovered much and produced many useful systems and tools, but neither succeeded in uncovering the full and final mechanisms.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was born into one of the most prominent aristocratic families of Britain, and retained the title ‘Lord’ even when arrested for demonstrating as a pacifist against World War One and dabbling in socialism. With Frege and Wittgenstein, Russell is one of the founders of the anti-idealist Analytic school of Philosophy, the school which broke from the European Continental tradition and became the philosophical tradition of Britain and America. As one author put it, on the European continent, philosophy wants to be art, and in the island of Britain and in America, philosophy wants to be science. Just as Russell was very influential in Britain and America, on the continent, in Germany and France particularly, the German philosophers Hegel, who argued that reality is contradiction, and Nietzsche, who was deeply influenced by Heraclitus, took philosophy in a romantic and skeptical direction.
Russell is a highly influential rationalist philosopher of the Anglo-American Analytic tradition, a tradition that believes in doing the groundwork for scientific facts. Russell often argues against skepticism and instrumentalism (or Utilitarianism, the position of Mill next) by name as he does in the text I gave you. He also argues against Hegel and the Hegelians, who we will study in the coming weeks, who argue that reality is composed of contradictions and oppositional tensions. Analytical positivism assumes that there are underlying facts that are absolutely and universally true, much like the atomic truths of the Vaisheshika and Nyaya schools of ancient India and Aristotle of ancient Greece.
In the first of Russell’s texts that I gave you, The Problem of Induction, Russell says that we know the self and sense data exist. Interestingly, Descartes started modern European philosophy with a very similar position, though Descartes was certain of a good and just God whereas Russell is a staunch atheist who believes in the positive truth of science, not religion. On a side note, philosophy in the middle ages and up through the European Enlightenment of the 1600s and 1700s was almost entirely supportive and uncritical of Christianity, and with the Enlightenment and through modern times in the English and American Analytic tradition been almost entirely supportive and uncritical of science, in spite of the fact that philosophy is the deep questioning of assumptions and traditions. Apparently, one can be uncritical of assumptions and traditions while being critical of assumptions and traditions in the name of religion or science equally. But let us return to Russell, my skepticism aside.
Russell argues that if we want to know anything other than the obvious and immediate, we need to gather things in our conceptions into general principles. We can perceive lightning following thunder again and again, but we must draw a general principle from this if we want to know the relationship between the two. Notice this is exactly what the Nyaya sutra said about the relationship between induction and deduction, and what the Charvakas called illusion. Two questions can be asked here. First, how do we know even the obvious or immediate without drawing generalities? If I see an apple, don’t I have to draw generalities about the parts to see it as a whole, and don’t I have to draw generalities about apples to see it as an apple? Second, why do we need to gather things into concepts or general principles? Russell wants to argue against Mill and ‘Instrumentalism’ which argues that our concepts are not absolute truth but merely truth as it is useful. Is Russell’s necessity different from utility?
Russell admits that this creates a problem (the central issue between positivism and skepticism, in fact): if we only know general principles by induction, then how can we know anything for certain? Russell takes the same position as Aristotle, and argues that we cannot be satisfied with mere opinion, but need knowledge of certain principles that are always true in order to have knowledge. It is true that we seek certainty, but if the skeptic is right and there is only more or less certain opinion, the relatively more certain being what we often call objective knowledge, then we are satisfied with mere opinion, even if it is only the relatively certain opinions that satisfy us. Is any situation of knowledge/opinion entirely satisfactory? Russell argues that we need a founding principle, a starting point of certainty, or otherwise all of our sciences, including mathematics, are mere opinions. We must believe that there are certainties out there, and that our induction sometimes leads us to certain truth.
Russell says that science finds the laws of uniformity in nature, and thus gives us knowledge of certainties. Remember, science in Russell’s time has made major advances since algebraic code-breaking, and is not simply the observation of nature as it was in Gotama and Aristotle’s time, but Russell’s position is identical to that of Gotama in ancient India and Aristotle in ancient Greece. While in ancient times science was largely observation of nature, with Islamic algebra and the increasing levels of mechanics infused into daily life science became not just passive observation but active experimentation.
Unfortunately for Russell, he was writing the piece before the work of Einstein, when Newton’s laws of nature were the dominant model of science and physics. Einstein’s work did much to swing scientists away from the use of the word “law” and toward use of the word “theory” to describe proposed conceptions of the regularities of nature, humanity and the universe. Another philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, would use the term “paradigm” to describe scientific conceptions in a similarly relativistic and hypothetical light. As we will see, Mill would be quite happy by this change of language. It is also similar to the Jain principle of sayadvada, that all human truth is put forward as a best guess, as a hypothetical proposition or theory.
In the second text I gave you, The Empiricist Answer to Skepticism, Russell calls out Hegelians and skeptics by name and says we cannot get the sort of independent certainties we want to call facts or laws by these methods. He says we can indeed whittle away at our theories to get to the pure data, the facts without interpretation but as they must be. Wittgenstein will later use the metaphor of bedrock (like Russell uses the metaphor or analogy of whittling).
Russell has faith in a ‘minimal theory’, what people are trying to find with string theory in physics today. He concedes to the Hegelians and skeptics that there is always SOME uncertainty in truth, some relations of views institutions, room for error, but Russell argues that some data has “independent credibility”, meaning we know its ‘just true’, ‘right there’, and we can assume correctly that this is true data or fact.
Russell argues that some things must be more than opinion, as opinions can contradict each other but the true fact never contradicts itself or other things. This is diametrically opposite Hegel, who argues that contradictions are what compose all things and their situations. Russell argues we should give the greatest weight (note the use of metaphor and analogy, again) to that which is most regular and most certain, and in this way form our principles and propositions. This is the method which Russell believes answers the skeptic. Interestingly, the examples Russell uses suffer from the same problems that Aristotle had before, arguing that what is red cannot be blue. The Jains, Buddhists, and Sextus Empiricus would argue that things can be red and blue at different times, parts, together as the color purple, etc.
Russell is a big believer in the Principle of Non-Contradiction (a statement must be true or false, but not both) and the Principle of the Excluded Middle or alternatively titled Principle of Bivalence (a statement must be either true or false, but not neither). These two principles are, as we have seen in the ancient world and we will continue to see in modern thought, the central issue dividing dogmatic/positivist and skeptical/relativist thought.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873 CE) was born in London, influenced by Ancient Greek, French, and liberal thought. He is considered the major founder of Utilitarianism and one of the first champions of individual freedom, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. His father wrote a history of India, and Mill was for a time involved with his father in the British East India company, the corporation that helped Britain maintain their economic hold over India.
Mill’s family was friends with the Bentham family, from whom Mill took up his consequentialist, ‘happy principle’ thought. Mill’s father had Bentham tutor Mill as a child with the idea that Mill would become a champion of consequentialist thought. However, it was Mill who found the name ‘utilitarian’ in a Christian text that used the term to describe an evil way to strive for good without principles. Mill picked up the name and developed the thinking in line with Bentham, his mentor, becoming its famous spokesman. Mill is a central thinker in Logic, Economics and Ethics. In all of these subjects, he advocated rethinking basic principles and assumptions based on the ongoing experiences of their usefulness. For Mill and Utilitarianism, the true is not true in itself but true because it is useful for creating happiness and avoiding pain.
Political laws, ethical morals, mathematical rules, and scientific understandings are to be continuously examined and developed such that they are best for A) the greatest number of people, and B) over the longest period of time. Apart from this practical value, Mill argues there is no objective truth to things. Rather, the objective of truth is its beneficial use. If a certain logic or form of mathematics is useful, proving itself a valuable tool that can be put to good work, then this is the only proof that it is solid and sure.
Utilitarianism, which Russell attacks as ‘Instrumentalism’ says that there is no truth to things other than how they are used and for whom they are used. This is a very similar position to the “existentialism” of Avicenna and Ockham, with a social bent. Both Russell and Mill agree that the world has regular patterns, and that we use our minds to form concepts of these regularities. However, Mill and utilitarians argue that we are often fooled by our use and concepts of things into thinking that we grasp the essence of the thing when in fact all we are doing is using and grasping. What is useful to some may not be useful to others, and what is useful for many years may not be useful years later.
As algebraic science made many new discoveries, it is interesting that human beings again split along positivist and skeptic lines. Does science show us that the truth is out there and can be discovered, or that we should always be suspicious of our certain truths because new truths can overturn the old truths?
Utilitarianism was a powerful force in Britain against more traditional thinkers like Russell, who is fighting back against Hegelian process theory and Utilitarian ‘its whatever we want to do with it or make of it’ theory. Russell believes that things are factually as they are, and we should be objective to have true knowledge. A Utilitarian would say we can arrange situations such that we have knowledge, but there is no ‘true view’, purpose or nature of things. For instance, Utilitarianism was very useful for feminism, that there is no ‘true position’ of women but it is however we position things such that they are most useful.
In the text Logic and Mathematics, Mill asks: if we admit that all is induction (British Empiricism, which Russell embraces) then why do we say there are “exact sciences”? We also similarly say that there are ‘hard sciences’. He argues that this is an illusion due to the fact that objects of math are conceptions and thus imaginary, hence they have perfect straight edges like an ideally straight line. A perfectly straight line, the example he uses, with no width, like a point, cannot exist outside of the imagination. It is a real being of the world, but imaginary and not physical. Some (Russell) say without perfection of a sort there is no math, science or knowledge possible (eternal facts as well), but Mill argues this is silly as we have these things yet do not have an instance of a perfectly straight line in the real world.
Russell argued that we can strip down or “whittle” to the pure straight edged truth, but Mill argues that this helps us to focus our observation and thinking but it does nothing to guarantee that our knowledge is certain at all. We can ignore aspects of a thing to focus on particular aspects or parts, but this does not successfully or completely take these factors out of the picture, even as far as relevance to the parts that are in focus. This is a very important ground for the positivist/skeptic debate today. If we take a banana and put it in a lab, are we more or less capable of seeing its truths there? If we create abstractions about bananas with our minds, are these getting into the thing or away from it?
Russell wanted a first certain principle of non-contradiction to give us certainty. Mill argues that there are no first principles of geometry, mathematics or anything else. Mill argues that the ‘first principles’ are in fact simply generalized observations of real world situations. Mill turns specifically to the two principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle with this skepticism. These principles are in fact observation in practice. We can see that belief and disbelief oppose one another, that they are “oppositional mental states” just as we can see that opposing stories tend to mean that someone is somewhat mistaken. This is the simple contrast between any two opposites. Mill argues that the two principles are merely useful generalizations, as are all “true” concepts used by human beings whether scientists, philosophers or common folk.
The Problem of Self Referentially is one of the most famous and interesting problems with the principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle. This problem was very important for Russell’s career, and it brought him both great success and frustration.
The classic example is the liar’s paradox. Consider the sentence, “This sentence is false”. According to non-contradiction, this must be either true or false but not both, but if it is true then it is false and if it is false then it is true. It cannot be fully resolved either way.
Russell pointed out a similar paradox in the work of Frege, the German analytic philosopher who was central in trying to turn Logic towards founding arithmetic, who Russell and then Wittgenstein followed and overturned (as Wittgenstein later did to his teacher Russell). Frege thought he could prove that mathematics is simply a system of non-contradictory sets, which he called Set Theory. Russell realized, however, that there are still contradictions possible in this system of mere sets. He asked, “Is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves a member of itself?” Just like the liar paradox, if it is, then it isn’t, and vice-versa.
Russell’s point is that there is a paradox that results from self-reference (‘this sentence’ or ‘this set’). Russell tried to use Frege’s work to finish a foundation of math, which he never completed to his own satisfaction. He thought that he could come up with a ‘theory of types’ that would prevent the paradox (so a ‘set’ is of objects but a ‘type’ is a group of sets, not objects), but it lead to further paradoxes. At this time, he discovered a young Austrian genius who showed up at his office hours one day simply to argue endlessly against everything Russell said, who Russell believed would finish his work but in the end came to stand completely against proof theory: Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Recently, a different version of the liar’s paradox has been proposed that supposedly does not suffer from self-reference: consider two people standing next to each other, one with a sign that reads “Her sign is false” and another with a sign that reads, “His sign is true”. Like Russell’s theory of types, this version of the paradox tries to eliminate self-reference to tidy up the problem, but the paradox remains.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Asian Philosophy: Confucius & The Analects
Today we examine one of the foremost ethical geniuses of world history: Grand Master Kong, Kong Fu Zi, or as he is known to us, Confucius (550-480 BCE), the Latinized name transliterated by Catholic Jesuit missionaries who got to China in the 1600s and were astounded to find that the most influential philosopher in thousands of years of Chinese history has teachings very similar to Jesus. Confucius was dedicated to the idea that the individual can obtain fullness and happiness by placing others before oneself and by recognizing the desires of others as equal to the desires one has for oneself.
The Life of Confucius
About a hundred years before the birth of Confucius, the political philosopher Guan Zhong became prime minister of the state of Chi (Qi) in 685 BCE. Due to his benevolence and wise leadership, the state temporarily stabilized the neighboring states as the Zhou Dynasty was crumbling during the Spring and Autumn period. When Guan Zhong died forty years later in 642 BCE, Chi was attacked and the region again became destabilized.
Confucius was born 90 years later in the neighboring state of Lu, where like in Chi Guan Zhong was praised as a wise philosopher-king whose ways led to peace and harmony. Confucius’ father, a soldier, died when Confucius was very young, presumably in combat. Confucius was alive as the Zhou disintegrated during the Spring and Autumn period, though he did not see things deteriorate further as they did in the Warring State Period, the time when Confucius’ teachings were taken up by Mencius, Xunzi and others as the way to cultivate and restore both society and the self. Later, the Han would patronize Confucianism as the way to restore order without the need for the authoritarianism of the Legalists.
Confucius’ family were nobles, but they were lower level aristocrats, ‘shi’, sometimes translated into English as ‘knights’, and they had fallen on hard times. They had left the state of Song to the South after political infighting and assassinations. By the age of fifteen Confucius had decided that he wanted to study the classics, which fortunately were better kept and studied in Lu than in other states. When he was twenty three, he began teaching publicly and privately. By thirty, he was studying ancient government in the court of Lu with other scholars and had a position as overseer of public fields and the state granary.
Legend has it that early in his life Confucius opened a school for children and would charge parents of children what he thought they could afford. When the rich complained that their children were being taught for great sums and the poor children were being taught for next to nothing, Confucius replied that the rich were welcome to take their children to any teacher they saw fit, and he would keep his prices as they were. Another story tells of Confucius putting an apple in a vase, and telling the children that the first to get the apple out could eat it. The largest boy in the class shoved in front of the others and reached in to grasp the apple, but he could not pull it out as the apple was nearly the size of the opening. Confucius took the vase, turned it over, and the apple fell out into his hand. The story illustrates a basic lesson of Confucianism: study is central to self-development, but critical reflection (turning things over in the mind) is equally valuable.
After briefly fleeing to Chi during a time of unrest, and refusing to participate in the government of a tyrant who had taken control of Lu, in his fifties he joined the court of rulers who overthrew the tyrant and became Chief of Justice of Lu. Later in life, after teaching and participating in local government, Confucius left Lu in 479 BCE and traveled with many followers from local court to regional kingdom attempting to teach rulers his ways and find patronage.
In one story of his travels, Confucius came upon a woman weeping over the body of her son as a tiger disappeared into the forest. Confucius asked her why she chose to live where there are tigers, and she replied that the local rulers were corrupt and it was better to live with the tigers. Confucius turned to his followers and told them to remember her words. In another story, Confucius leaves a local Duke after he spends all of his time with dancing girls. The duke, enraged, sends an army after Confucius, who tells his students to abandon him to save their own lives, and sits happily playing a lute waiting for his death. Fortunately, another local ruler comes to his rescue, having heard of his teachings and his plight.
Confucius is said to have visited at least nine states of the old Zhou empire attempting to bring the rulers together in a new confederation that would restore the ancient order. Unfortunately the political tide was not in his favor, and just less than ten years before the Warring States Period (475 BCE) Confucius returned to Lu in 484 BCE, dying five years later at the age of seventy three in 479 BCE. His travels, while they did not restore the Zhou as he had hoped, surely helped spread his reputation and teachings such that his school flourished in the Warring States Period and was later patronized by the Han as they attempted to hold on to the disparate states.
The Teachings of Confucius
Confucius believes that the heart is the center of the human being, and compassion (ren) is the central thread running through his system according to a famous passage of the Analects. Notice that heart as ‘center’ is both mental and physical, fitting with cosmology, psychology and medical practices. The term ‘ren’, often translated as love or compassion, is literally, ‘humanity’. Loving others and being compassionate for others is to be more human and humane.
Confucius is often understood as a champion of tradition, principle and ritual (li), as he is a proponent of civilization and education against the Daoists who are proponents of nature and meditation. However, it is clear from the Analects that Confucius believed it was more important to have right insight rather than right ritual or tradition, to have right intentions than right actions, i.e. ‘one’s heart is in the right place’. In other words, while one should have both compassion and tradition, it is most important to have compassion, and without it tradition is corrupting the best things.
Confucius was a master of ritual, an official position important for civil ceremonies and legal practice as they still are in courts of law and political processes today. Confucius believed that ritual was the strength of a society and one should perform the rituals, but he also believed that the worst thing was to do ritual without the proper intention. Confucius would say to a churchgoer or student of any subject today: it is more important to enjoy your church or study, and to do it for your and other’s benefit, than to attend your church for show or study for a good paying career, for if you do not enjoy it whole-heartedly and do it for the right reasons you should not do it.
Consider the example of giving a gift to a friend. If you give gifts so that you can borrow someone’s car, you corrupt the act of giving gifts, which should be done without expectations of repayment. It would be better, according to Confucius, to not give gifts to friends than to give them expecting repayment. Empty ritual, ritual simply for the motions rather than authentic love for and continuity with one’s society, is the worst thing, and thus it would be better in such a case to avoid false ritual and simply not perform the ritual at all. This point is often lost when people focus on Confucius’ great love of ritual and traditional culture.
A good example of this point is Analects 5.5 (and yes, these are standardized so no matter the translation, ‘5.5’ is always the fifth aphorism of the fifth chapter or book, just like the Bible and Koran are standardized with numbers): Confucius says that Ran Yong does not need eloquence (civilized speech) if he is not good. Another good example is 11.10, where Confucius is grieving ‘inappropriately’ for his favorite student, and tells his students who complain that genuine love and expression of emotion is more important than being polite or pleasant (right intention trumps right outer form). However, the best example is clearly 3.26, “Authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate”.
Confucius did believe in the Five Relationships: Son obeys father, younger brother respects older brother, wife obeys husband, younger defers to elder, and subject is loyal to ruler. It is also true, however, that this is not absolute authoritarianism in Confucius’ teachings. While many today would immediately see problems with wife obeying husband and subject loyal to ruler, putting each on equal terms in the name of feminism and democracy, Confucius teaches that if authority is unjust it should be mentioned and if the injustice persists it should be fought. In East Asia, including China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, most champions of democracy and social welfare associate their ideas and goals with Confucius and speak of Confucian revival, in spite of the fact that he has also been vilified by both capitalists and communists as symbolic of feudalism.
While Confucius was from a low level noble family, like Plato in the Republic of ancient Athens Confucius argued for a meritocracy rather than an aristocracy, for merit through education rather than position by birth. Confucius and others believed that the great sage kings Yao and Shun ruled not by birthright but because they rose through the ranks by their noble actions and compassion for the people. According to tradition, Yao and Shun were so benevolent and righteous that they were able to maintain the state simply by sitting facing south, as everything had been set in its proper place and nothing improper was added. Confucius believed that education should be available to as wide a range of society as possible and encouraged local rulers to cultivate the people through education and the arts. In one passage, he says, “Where there is education, there are no classes”. (Perhaps if Confucius could see our public education system in America, he would have said, ‘Where there should be education, there are fewer classes’.) In another passage, he says, “As for the humane (ren), when they want to establish themselves they establish others, and when they want to succeed they help others to succeed”.
Because the Han and many later Chinese dynasties used Confucius as a voice supporting subordination to authority, and because Confucius does indeed say to obey the father and obey the chain of command, it is often overlooked that, just as intention is more important than tradition, unjust fathers and unjust states must be corrected. Many times Confucius says that truth must be spoken to power. How will things change if no one complains? In one passage, Confucius tells his students they should rise up and overthrow an unjust local prince. One should be subordinate to authority, but only just and good authority and tradition.
Another central term used by Confucius is ‘yi’, justice, courage and duty in so far as it is one’s basic duty to humanity to be just and do what is right. Together with righteousness, a sense of right and wrong (‘chih’), compassion (‘ren’), principle (‘li’) and justice (‘yi’) became the four virtues that Mencius (Menzi) believed grew out of the heart and formed the core of Confucius’ teaching. Because Confucianism followed Mencius’ system, these became the four traditional virtues of the noble person. Also important are the complimentary sides of reciprocity or the ‘Golden Rule’: one should do for others what one wants for oneself (‘chung’) and not do to others what one does not want for oneself (‘shu’).
The ideal for the individual repeated throughout the Analects is the ‘great person’, literally the ‘master person’ (‘chun-zi’, strangely like Nietzsche’s ‘ubermench’), who develops love for others and knowledge through study. While it has often been translated in English as ‘gentleman’, this is problematic in two ways. First, the term is gender neutral, in the same way that ‘mankind’ and ‘man’ were recently used to mean ‘humankind’ and ‘person’. Second, Confucius was talking about the righteous rather than the nobly born, though the term was used before Confucius to refer exclusively to nobles of aristocratic birth. While it is also translated as ‘the noble’, which is gender neutral, Confucius’ great person should be understood as anyone of either gender or any social status who is an excellent human being.
Confucius was a great champion of scholarship. Like Plato, Confucius believed that society should not be an aristocracy but rather a meritocracy. Confucius believed that scholarship was necessary for developing the heart, and the noble person should devote themselves to a lifetime of learning and critical thinking. Confucius taught that six classics should be used for a classical education: the Book of Changes (which we studied last class), The Book of Music, The Book of History, The Book of Odes, The Book of Rites, and The Spring and Summer Record. There has been much debate over how much Confucius was the author of these, whether the texts existed before, or whether Confucius redacted them from earlier sources. The modern consensus is that Confucius was not the author, but he borrowed much from earlier sources to create texts for teaching his students. In a sense, they are ancient Chinese course readers.
Needless to say, Confucius’ Analects became one of the central texts for devoted study in Chinese society, and Confucius became an ancestor revered by devotees with ritual. Confucius is credited as the father of China’s civil service system, a system in which anyone who tested well, regardless of their position in society, was given a government position. This is similar to the development of types of scribes in Egypt. It is just such a development that we call ‘the middle class’, the individuals who through study and work can rise or fall in position to fit the many niches required to run large cities and systems. What Plato recognized in Egypt, Confucius was much more successful in implementing in Chinese society, though unfortunately only after his death. Confucius himself always hoped for a good position, but did not succeed in obtaining one during his own life though he did teach many students and was revered by many of them, including powerful nobility.
Just as Confucius taught that intention is more important than action, he hated scholarship for show without genuine love of learning and discovery of human nature. A good example is 4.9, ‘if a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to’. He also taught that we should balance learning with critical reflection, just as Buddha did, though Buddha, like Daoists, argued that study and critical reflection also needed meditation whereas Confucius saw study as superior to meditation. In the Analects, Confucius says that studying without thinking is useless, but thinking without studying is dangerous, showing us that he does believe in individual insight but is traditional and believes in studying the traditional classics. He says, “The noble person is not a pot”, meaning that we are not containers for knowledge but should transform and reflect on what we study.
Confucius was a genius at seeing himself as equal to everyone, and he encouraged this attitude as the path to excellence itself. It was this point that the Jesuits found fascinating in comparing Confucianism to Christianity. Most of us have likely heard the ‘Golden Rule’, which is paraphrased from Confucius: ‘treat others the way you want to be treated’. While Jesus says, ‘don’t treat others how you do NOT want to be treated’, we can understand them to be one and the same.
My favorite example is 7.22: Confucius says that if you put yourself with any two people at random, you can take their strengths as a model to follow and their faults as a warning. Clearly, Confucius believed that we all share the same set of strengths and faults, no matter how talented (or horrible) we happen to individually be or where our talents are. Confucius taught that NO ONE is perfect, not even himself, but there is good in everyone and everything, and we had best remember that we will never lose any of our connection to our fellow human beings if we only remember to look hard enough for it. Another excellent example from the Analects: “When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him…When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself”.
The Analects of Confucius
The Analects or Sayings of Confucius is the book compiled by his students and followers of things said by Confucius and short interactions between Confucius and others, including students, government officials, and scholars.
First we look at the criticism of the individual, clearing the individual heart and putting oneself in tune with the Way. Then we look at criticism of the state, and see that the same shape applies.
Second, notice the passages where Confucius is criticizing sages who go to nature and do not study. Pay attention to this for next week, as these are early Daoists who have different opinions than Confucius about the cultivation of the human individual.
Criticism of the Individual:
(4.12) He who acts out of self interest arouses much resentment.
(5.5) ‘Ran Yong is good but not eloquent’- I don’t know if he is good, but he certainly does not need eloquence if he isn’t.
(11.10) Yan Hui died. ‘Master, this grief isn’t right’ C; ‘What sort of grief for such a man is right?
Criticism of Luxury:
(5.18) Master said: Zang Sunchen built a house for his tortoise, with pillars in the shape of mountains and rafters decorated with duckweed. Has he lost his mind?
(7.16) Even if you have only coarse grain, water and your arm for a pillow, you may still be happy. Riches and honors without justice are to me as fleeting clouds.
Criticism of Ritual without Virtue:
(3.26) authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate.
(4.13) If one cannot govern by observing ritual and showing compassion, what is the use of ritual?
Scholarship without greed or want of career:
(4.9) If a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to.
Haven’t seen someone who studies without any thought of career.
Good is at Hand (7.30) but no one is perfect (7.26)
Says again and again that he is not perfect, nor has he met perfection…
(7.33) My seal is as strong as anyone, but I have not succeeded in living nobly.
yet: ‘Is goodness out of reach? As soon as I long for goodness, goodness is at hand.’
(7.34) I make no claims to wisdom or to human perfection- how would I dare? Yet my aim never flags and I never tire of teaching people.
Disciple: ‘This is what we fail to follow.’
Criticism of Selfishness and Pride:
Whatever one’s position, you always share the faults and talents of everyone.
Thus, you have to work to compare self with others, as not intuitive.
You should compare yourself to others, reflect yourself through others no matter how you judge them to be, and work to get over selfishness and become compassionate and balanced (the way of heaven, opposed to selfish desire for lower).
Confucius values joining all of humanity, not being selfish.
(7.22) Put me with any two people at random- they will invariably have something to teach me. I can take their qualities as a model and their defects as a warning.
(9.8) Am I knowledgeable? No. A Bumpkin asked me a question, and my mind went blank. Still, I hammered at his problem from all sides, till I worked out something.
(1.16) Don’t worry if others don’t recognize your merits: worry that you may not
recognize theirs.
(2.13) Practice what you preach.
(4.17) When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him. When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself.
(5.12) Zigong ‘I do not want to do to others…’ C: you’re not that far yet…
(11.4) Yan Hui is of no help to me: whatever I say pleases him.
(9.28) It is in the cold of winter that you see how green the pines and cypresses are.
(15.23) A gentleman does not approve of a person because he expresses a certain opinion, nor does he reject an opinion because it is expressed by a particular person.
(15.24) ‘Single word to guide one’s life?’ C- Reciprocity: do not do to others…
(19.21) A gentleman’s mistake is like an eclipse of the sun or moon.
When happens, everyone notices, and when corrected everyone looks up in admiration.
Good as Unknown, Beyond Judgment and Opinion:
(9.17) The master stood by a river and said: ‘Everything flows like this, without ceasing’
(note Heraclitus)
(2.17) Master said: Knowledge is to take the known as known and unknown as unknown.
(pre 3.14) (quoted by Wittgenstein) About what we don’t know we must keep silent.
(5.13) Our master’s views on culture can be gathered, but you can’t hear his views on the nature of things or the Way of Heaven.
(7.21) The master never talked of miracles, violence, disorders, spirits.
(7.35) Confucius is ill, student: ‘pray to spirits above & spirits below’
Con: In that case, I have been praying for a long time already.
(note not a rejection of the spiritual, but a knowing unknowing)
(11.12) Asked how to serve spirits, says: You have not yet learned how to serve man, how could you learn to serve the spirits?
Death: You do not yet know life, how can you learn about death?
Middle Way: (much like Buddha, Heraclitus & Aristotle)
(6.17) Who would leave a house without using the door? Why do people seek to walk outside the way?
(6.29) The power of the middle way is supreme, and yet it is not found among the people anymore. (notice restore the golden age)
Reform the old, bring in the new:
(2.11) He who by revising the old knows the new is fit to be a teacher.
(2.12) A gentleman is not a pot.
(Pre 3.4 cut off) each generation has added and dropped from the ritual, so we know what people will look like 100 generations from now (they will add and drop)
In pursuit of virtue, do not be afraid to outpace your teacher (15.36)
Criticism of the State:
Confucius is not a compliant sheep when it comes to the state.
His criticism of individual judgment and pride is matched by criticism of the state.
(11.17) to student regarding a tyrant: C- attack him: you have my permission.
Sees private interest trapped in the state (nobles dissolving Zhou court, into warring states)
(13.15) asked by Duke: Is there a single maxim/rule that could ruin a country?
C- The prince should never suffer contradiction. When in error, prince should be told.
(13.24) ‘What if everyone likes a man?’ C- Not enough
‘What if everyone hates him?’ C- Not enough: Good should love, bad should hate.
(13.20) ‘present politicians?’ Those puny creatures are not even worth mentioning.
(9.26) One cannot deny the humblest man his free will.
(18.18) I do things differently. I follow no rigid prescriptions on what should or should not be done.
Criticism of Daoism and its sages retreat into Nature:
Just as Confucius appears in Daoist texts as an ally but inferior rival, so do proto-Daoist sages in the Analects. This is very much like Buddha vs. the Jains, in that other group isn’t mentioned by name, but found not to be in balance but extremists. Daoists wanted to escape into nature, while Confucians believe in the value of the city and embracing not escaping humankind. Believe in balance, like Daoists, but seek to balance the city, not escape into the perfect balance of nature from the city. Daoists are more skeptical of society.
(18.16) One cannot associate with birds and beasts. If the world were following the way, I would not have to reform it.
It is not right to be a hermit, and discard human relationships to preserve one’s purity.
(4.1) It is beautiful to live amidst humanity. It is hardly wise to live in a place destitute of people (don’t be a Daoist hermit).
Criticism of Meditation (D and later B), to Confucians not as good as study:
(15.31) I once to meditate went without food for a day and a night without sleep.
It was no use. It is better to study.
(4.2) A good man rests in his humanity. A wise man profits from his humanity.
Finally, Confucius describing his own lifetime of learning and development:
(2.1): At 15, I set my mind upon learning. At 30, I took my stand. At 40 I had no doubts. At 50, I knew the will (mandate) of heaven. At 60, my ear was attuned. At 70, I follow all the desires of my heart without breaking any rule.
The Life of Confucius
About a hundred years before the birth of Confucius, the political philosopher Guan Zhong became prime minister of the state of Chi (Qi) in 685 BCE. Due to his benevolence and wise leadership, the state temporarily stabilized the neighboring states as the Zhou Dynasty was crumbling during the Spring and Autumn period. When Guan Zhong died forty years later in 642 BCE, Chi was attacked and the region again became destabilized.
Confucius was born 90 years later in the neighboring state of Lu, where like in Chi Guan Zhong was praised as a wise philosopher-king whose ways led to peace and harmony. Confucius’ father, a soldier, died when Confucius was very young, presumably in combat. Confucius was alive as the Zhou disintegrated during the Spring and Autumn period, though he did not see things deteriorate further as they did in the Warring State Period, the time when Confucius’ teachings were taken up by Mencius, Xunzi and others as the way to cultivate and restore both society and the self. Later, the Han would patronize Confucianism as the way to restore order without the need for the authoritarianism of the Legalists.
Confucius’ family were nobles, but they were lower level aristocrats, ‘shi’, sometimes translated into English as ‘knights’, and they had fallen on hard times. They had left the state of Song to the South after political infighting and assassinations. By the age of fifteen Confucius had decided that he wanted to study the classics, which fortunately were better kept and studied in Lu than in other states. When he was twenty three, he began teaching publicly and privately. By thirty, he was studying ancient government in the court of Lu with other scholars and had a position as overseer of public fields and the state granary.
Legend has it that early in his life Confucius opened a school for children and would charge parents of children what he thought they could afford. When the rich complained that their children were being taught for great sums and the poor children were being taught for next to nothing, Confucius replied that the rich were welcome to take their children to any teacher they saw fit, and he would keep his prices as they were. Another story tells of Confucius putting an apple in a vase, and telling the children that the first to get the apple out could eat it. The largest boy in the class shoved in front of the others and reached in to grasp the apple, but he could not pull it out as the apple was nearly the size of the opening. Confucius took the vase, turned it over, and the apple fell out into his hand. The story illustrates a basic lesson of Confucianism: study is central to self-development, but critical reflection (turning things over in the mind) is equally valuable.
After briefly fleeing to Chi during a time of unrest, and refusing to participate in the government of a tyrant who had taken control of Lu, in his fifties he joined the court of rulers who overthrew the tyrant and became Chief of Justice of Lu. Later in life, after teaching and participating in local government, Confucius left Lu in 479 BCE and traveled with many followers from local court to regional kingdom attempting to teach rulers his ways and find patronage.
In one story of his travels, Confucius came upon a woman weeping over the body of her son as a tiger disappeared into the forest. Confucius asked her why she chose to live where there are tigers, and she replied that the local rulers were corrupt and it was better to live with the tigers. Confucius turned to his followers and told them to remember her words. In another story, Confucius leaves a local Duke after he spends all of his time with dancing girls. The duke, enraged, sends an army after Confucius, who tells his students to abandon him to save their own lives, and sits happily playing a lute waiting for his death. Fortunately, another local ruler comes to his rescue, having heard of his teachings and his plight.
Confucius is said to have visited at least nine states of the old Zhou empire attempting to bring the rulers together in a new confederation that would restore the ancient order. Unfortunately the political tide was not in his favor, and just less than ten years before the Warring States Period (475 BCE) Confucius returned to Lu in 484 BCE, dying five years later at the age of seventy three in 479 BCE. His travels, while they did not restore the Zhou as he had hoped, surely helped spread his reputation and teachings such that his school flourished in the Warring States Period and was later patronized by the Han as they attempted to hold on to the disparate states.
The Teachings of Confucius
Confucius believes that the heart is the center of the human being, and compassion (ren) is the central thread running through his system according to a famous passage of the Analects. Notice that heart as ‘center’ is both mental and physical, fitting with cosmology, psychology and medical practices. The term ‘ren’, often translated as love or compassion, is literally, ‘humanity’. Loving others and being compassionate for others is to be more human and humane.
Confucius is often understood as a champion of tradition, principle and ritual (li), as he is a proponent of civilization and education against the Daoists who are proponents of nature and meditation. However, it is clear from the Analects that Confucius believed it was more important to have right insight rather than right ritual or tradition, to have right intentions than right actions, i.e. ‘one’s heart is in the right place’. In other words, while one should have both compassion and tradition, it is most important to have compassion, and without it tradition is corrupting the best things.
Confucius was a master of ritual, an official position important for civil ceremonies and legal practice as they still are in courts of law and political processes today. Confucius believed that ritual was the strength of a society and one should perform the rituals, but he also believed that the worst thing was to do ritual without the proper intention. Confucius would say to a churchgoer or student of any subject today: it is more important to enjoy your church or study, and to do it for your and other’s benefit, than to attend your church for show or study for a good paying career, for if you do not enjoy it whole-heartedly and do it for the right reasons you should not do it.
Consider the example of giving a gift to a friend. If you give gifts so that you can borrow someone’s car, you corrupt the act of giving gifts, which should be done without expectations of repayment. It would be better, according to Confucius, to not give gifts to friends than to give them expecting repayment. Empty ritual, ritual simply for the motions rather than authentic love for and continuity with one’s society, is the worst thing, and thus it would be better in such a case to avoid false ritual and simply not perform the ritual at all. This point is often lost when people focus on Confucius’ great love of ritual and traditional culture.
A good example of this point is Analects 5.5 (and yes, these are standardized so no matter the translation, ‘5.5’ is always the fifth aphorism of the fifth chapter or book, just like the Bible and Koran are standardized with numbers): Confucius says that Ran Yong does not need eloquence (civilized speech) if he is not good. Another good example is 11.10, where Confucius is grieving ‘inappropriately’ for his favorite student, and tells his students who complain that genuine love and expression of emotion is more important than being polite or pleasant (right intention trumps right outer form). However, the best example is clearly 3.26, “Authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate”.
Confucius did believe in the Five Relationships: Son obeys father, younger brother respects older brother, wife obeys husband, younger defers to elder, and subject is loyal to ruler. It is also true, however, that this is not absolute authoritarianism in Confucius’ teachings. While many today would immediately see problems with wife obeying husband and subject loyal to ruler, putting each on equal terms in the name of feminism and democracy, Confucius teaches that if authority is unjust it should be mentioned and if the injustice persists it should be fought. In East Asia, including China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, most champions of democracy and social welfare associate their ideas and goals with Confucius and speak of Confucian revival, in spite of the fact that he has also been vilified by both capitalists and communists as symbolic of feudalism.
While Confucius was from a low level noble family, like Plato in the Republic of ancient Athens Confucius argued for a meritocracy rather than an aristocracy, for merit through education rather than position by birth. Confucius and others believed that the great sage kings Yao and Shun ruled not by birthright but because they rose through the ranks by their noble actions and compassion for the people. According to tradition, Yao and Shun were so benevolent and righteous that they were able to maintain the state simply by sitting facing south, as everything had been set in its proper place and nothing improper was added. Confucius believed that education should be available to as wide a range of society as possible and encouraged local rulers to cultivate the people through education and the arts. In one passage, he says, “Where there is education, there are no classes”. (Perhaps if Confucius could see our public education system in America, he would have said, ‘Where there should be education, there are fewer classes’.) In another passage, he says, “As for the humane (ren), when they want to establish themselves they establish others, and when they want to succeed they help others to succeed”.
Because the Han and many later Chinese dynasties used Confucius as a voice supporting subordination to authority, and because Confucius does indeed say to obey the father and obey the chain of command, it is often overlooked that, just as intention is more important than tradition, unjust fathers and unjust states must be corrected. Many times Confucius says that truth must be spoken to power. How will things change if no one complains? In one passage, Confucius tells his students they should rise up and overthrow an unjust local prince. One should be subordinate to authority, but only just and good authority and tradition.
Another central term used by Confucius is ‘yi’, justice, courage and duty in so far as it is one’s basic duty to humanity to be just and do what is right. Together with righteousness, a sense of right and wrong (‘chih’), compassion (‘ren’), principle (‘li’) and justice (‘yi’) became the four virtues that Mencius (Menzi) believed grew out of the heart and formed the core of Confucius’ teaching. Because Confucianism followed Mencius’ system, these became the four traditional virtues of the noble person. Also important are the complimentary sides of reciprocity or the ‘Golden Rule’: one should do for others what one wants for oneself (‘chung’) and not do to others what one does not want for oneself (‘shu’).
The ideal for the individual repeated throughout the Analects is the ‘great person’, literally the ‘master person’ (‘chun-zi’, strangely like Nietzsche’s ‘ubermench’), who develops love for others and knowledge through study. While it has often been translated in English as ‘gentleman’, this is problematic in two ways. First, the term is gender neutral, in the same way that ‘mankind’ and ‘man’ were recently used to mean ‘humankind’ and ‘person’. Second, Confucius was talking about the righteous rather than the nobly born, though the term was used before Confucius to refer exclusively to nobles of aristocratic birth. While it is also translated as ‘the noble’, which is gender neutral, Confucius’ great person should be understood as anyone of either gender or any social status who is an excellent human being.
Confucius was a great champion of scholarship. Like Plato, Confucius believed that society should not be an aristocracy but rather a meritocracy. Confucius believed that scholarship was necessary for developing the heart, and the noble person should devote themselves to a lifetime of learning and critical thinking. Confucius taught that six classics should be used for a classical education: the Book of Changes (which we studied last class), The Book of Music, The Book of History, The Book of Odes, The Book of Rites, and The Spring and Summer Record. There has been much debate over how much Confucius was the author of these, whether the texts existed before, or whether Confucius redacted them from earlier sources. The modern consensus is that Confucius was not the author, but he borrowed much from earlier sources to create texts for teaching his students. In a sense, they are ancient Chinese course readers.
Needless to say, Confucius’ Analects became one of the central texts for devoted study in Chinese society, and Confucius became an ancestor revered by devotees with ritual. Confucius is credited as the father of China’s civil service system, a system in which anyone who tested well, regardless of their position in society, was given a government position. This is similar to the development of types of scribes in Egypt. It is just such a development that we call ‘the middle class’, the individuals who through study and work can rise or fall in position to fit the many niches required to run large cities and systems. What Plato recognized in Egypt, Confucius was much more successful in implementing in Chinese society, though unfortunately only after his death. Confucius himself always hoped for a good position, but did not succeed in obtaining one during his own life though he did teach many students and was revered by many of them, including powerful nobility.
Just as Confucius taught that intention is more important than action, he hated scholarship for show without genuine love of learning and discovery of human nature. A good example is 4.9, ‘if a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to’. He also taught that we should balance learning with critical reflection, just as Buddha did, though Buddha, like Daoists, argued that study and critical reflection also needed meditation whereas Confucius saw study as superior to meditation. In the Analects, Confucius says that studying without thinking is useless, but thinking without studying is dangerous, showing us that he does believe in individual insight but is traditional and believes in studying the traditional classics. He says, “The noble person is not a pot”, meaning that we are not containers for knowledge but should transform and reflect on what we study.
Confucius was a genius at seeing himself as equal to everyone, and he encouraged this attitude as the path to excellence itself. It was this point that the Jesuits found fascinating in comparing Confucianism to Christianity. Most of us have likely heard the ‘Golden Rule’, which is paraphrased from Confucius: ‘treat others the way you want to be treated’. While Jesus says, ‘don’t treat others how you do NOT want to be treated’, we can understand them to be one and the same.
My favorite example is 7.22: Confucius says that if you put yourself with any two people at random, you can take their strengths as a model to follow and their faults as a warning. Clearly, Confucius believed that we all share the same set of strengths and faults, no matter how talented (or horrible) we happen to individually be or where our talents are. Confucius taught that NO ONE is perfect, not even himself, but there is good in everyone and everything, and we had best remember that we will never lose any of our connection to our fellow human beings if we only remember to look hard enough for it. Another excellent example from the Analects: “When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him…When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself”.
The Analects of Confucius
The Analects or Sayings of Confucius is the book compiled by his students and followers of things said by Confucius and short interactions between Confucius and others, including students, government officials, and scholars.
First we look at the criticism of the individual, clearing the individual heart and putting oneself in tune with the Way. Then we look at criticism of the state, and see that the same shape applies.
Second, notice the passages where Confucius is criticizing sages who go to nature and do not study. Pay attention to this for next week, as these are early Daoists who have different opinions than Confucius about the cultivation of the human individual.
Criticism of the Individual:
(4.12) He who acts out of self interest arouses much resentment.
(5.5) ‘Ran Yong is good but not eloquent’- I don’t know if he is good, but he certainly does not need eloquence if he isn’t.
(11.10) Yan Hui died. ‘Master, this grief isn’t right’ C; ‘What sort of grief for such a man is right?
Criticism of Luxury:
(5.18) Master said: Zang Sunchen built a house for his tortoise, with pillars in the shape of mountains and rafters decorated with duckweed. Has he lost his mind?
(7.16) Even if you have only coarse grain, water and your arm for a pillow, you may still be happy. Riches and honors without justice are to me as fleeting clouds.
Criticism of Ritual without Virtue:
(3.26) authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate.
(4.13) If one cannot govern by observing ritual and showing compassion, what is the use of ritual?
Scholarship without greed or want of career:
(4.9) If a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to.
Haven’t seen someone who studies without any thought of career.
Good is at Hand (7.30) but no one is perfect (7.26)
Says again and again that he is not perfect, nor has he met perfection…
(7.33) My seal is as strong as anyone, but I have not succeeded in living nobly.
yet: ‘Is goodness out of reach? As soon as I long for goodness, goodness is at hand.’
(7.34) I make no claims to wisdom or to human perfection- how would I dare? Yet my aim never flags and I never tire of teaching people.
Disciple: ‘This is what we fail to follow.’
Criticism of Selfishness and Pride:
Whatever one’s position, you always share the faults and talents of everyone.
Thus, you have to work to compare self with others, as not intuitive.
You should compare yourself to others, reflect yourself through others no matter how you judge them to be, and work to get over selfishness and become compassionate and balanced (the way of heaven, opposed to selfish desire for lower).
Confucius values joining all of humanity, not being selfish.
(7.22) Put me with any two people at random- they will invariably have something to teach me. I can take their qualities as a model and their defects as a warning.
(9.8) Am I knowledgeable? No. A Bumpkin asked me a question, and my mind went blank. Still, I hammered at his problem from all sides, till I worked out something.
(1.16) Don’t worry if others don’t recognize your merits: worry that you may not
recognize theirs.
(2.13) Practice what you preach.
(4.17) When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him. When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself.
(5.12) Zigong ‘I do not want to do to others…’ C: you’re not that far yet…
(11.4) Yan Hui is of no help to me: whatever I say pleases him.
(9.28) It is in the cold of winter that you see how green the pines and cypresses are.
(15.23) A gentleman does not approve of a person because he expresses a certain opinion, nor does he reject an opinion because it is expressed by a particular person.
(15.24) ‘Single word to guide one’s life?’ C- Reciprocity: do not do to others…
(19.21) A gentleman’s mistake is like an eclipse of the sun or moon.
When happens, everyone notices, and when corrected everyone looks up in admiration.
Good as Unknown, Beyond Judgment and Opinion:
(9.17) The master stood by a river and said: ‘Everything flows like this, without ceasing’
(note Heraclitus)
(2.17) Master said: Knowledge is to take the known as known and unknown as unknown.
(pre 3.14) (quoted by Wittgenstein) About what we don’t know we must keep silent.
(5.13) Our master’s views on culture can be gathered, but you can’t hear his views on the nature of things or the Way of Heaven.
(7.21) The master never talked of miracles, violence, disorders, spirits.
(7.35) Confucius is ill, student: ‘pray to spirits above & spirits below’
Con: In that case, I have been praying for a long time already.
(note not a rejection of the spiritual, but a knowing unknowing)
(11.12) Asked how to serve spirits, says: You have not yet learned how to serve man, how could you learn to serve the spirits?
Death: You do not yet know life, how can you learn about death?
Middle Way: (much like Buddha, Heraclitus & Aristotle)
(6.17) Who would leave a house without using the door? Why do people seek to walk outside the way?
(6.29) The power of the middle way is supreme, and yet it is not found among the people anymore. (notice restore the golden age)
Reform the old, bring in the new:
(2.11) He who by revising the old knows the new is fit to be a teacher.
(2.12) A gentleman is not a pot.
(Pre 3.4 cut off) each generation has added and dropped from the ritual, so we know what people will look like 100 generations from now (they will add and drop)
In pursuit of virtue, do not be afraid to outpace your teacher (15.36)
Criticism of the State:
Confucius is not a compliant sheep when it comes to the state.
His criticism of individual judgment and pride is matched by criticism of the state.
(11.17) to student regarding a tyrant: C- attack him: you have my permission.
Sees private interest trapped in the state (nobles dissolving Zhou court, into warring states)
(13.15) asked by Duke: Is there a single maxim/rule that could ruin a country?
C- The prince should never suffer contradiction. When in error, prince should be told.
(13.24) ‘What if everyone likes a man?’ C- Not enough
‘What if everyone hates him?’ C- Not enough: Good should love, bad should hate.
(13.20) ‘present politicians?’ Those puny creatures are not even worth mentioning.
(9.26) One cannot deny the humblest man his free will.
(18.18) I do things differently. I follow no rigid prescriptions on what should or should not be done.
Criticism of Daoism and its sages retreat into Nature:
Just as Confucius appears in Daoist texts as an ally but inferior rival, so do proto-Daoist sages in the Analects. This is very much like Buddha vs. the Jains, in that other group isn’t mentioned by name, but found not to be in balance but extremists. Daoists wanted to escape into nature, while Confucians believe in the value of the city and embracing not escaping humankind. Believe in balance, like Daoists, but seek to balance the city, not escape into the perfect balance of nature from the city. Daoists are more skeptical of society.
(18.16) One cannot associate with birds and beasts. If the world were following the way, I would not have to reform it.
It is not right to be a hermit, and discard human relationships to preserve one’s purity.
(4.1) It is beautiful to live amidst humanity. It is hardly wise to live in a place destitute of people (don’t be a Daoist hermit).
Criticism of Meditation (D and later B), to Confucians not as good as study:
(15.31) I once to meditate went without food for a day and a night without sleep.
It was no use. It is better to study.
(4.2) A good man rests in his humanity. A wise man profits from his humanity.
Finally, Confucius describing his own lifetime of learning and development:
(2.1): At 15, I set my mind upon learning. At 30, I took my stand. At 40 I had no doubts. At 50, I knew the will (mandate) of heaven. At 60, my ear was attuned. At 70, I follow all the desires of my heart without breaking any rule.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Intro Philosophy: Islamic & Medieval European Thought
First, we look at the rise of Islamic civilization and its relationship to medieval European civilization with regard to logic, technology, science and scholarship. This is important to know, especially today. Second, we will look at central Islamic and medieval Neo-Platonist and Renaissance European philosophers.
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 few good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (this is true of ancient 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 for the American student 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 literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s most powerful and advanced 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 great multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of education and technology. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on European and 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 been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic. This is not because Muslims and Middle Eastern people are illogical, violent or authoritarian compared to Christians and Western people, but because Christian Europe viewed Islam as the enemy.
Here are some excellent ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran, which compliment this one-sided view.
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.
Many times after quoting lines such as these, I have been asked by students, and even some of my professors, how it is that Muslims can say such things if they also behave in such violent and authoritarian ways. The unfortunate truth is that this paradox makes Muslims our close relatives more than either the intelligence of these verses or the brutality of warfare alone. Humanity is always capable, and in each civilization openly displays, both intelligence and ignorance, both discovery and brutality. We should use the best and the worst of Islamic civilization to better understand the best and the worst of our own.
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 and wealth. Jews and Christians who were not Catholic such as Nestorians fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thrived as a multicultural and cosmopolitan society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. Consider that the year 1492 was not simply the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but the year that Spain and Portugal were reconquered from Muslims by Christian kings, as well as the first year of the Spanish Inquisition, the infamous persecution of Jews and other groups deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Jews went from thriving and contributing much scholarship in Islamic Spain to outright persecution and secrecy underground in a year’s time. Maimonides (1135 - 1204 CE), the most famous Jewish medieval philosopher who lived much of his life in Cordoba, Spain, wrote that he read Aristotle but could not understand him until he read Al-Farabi.
ALGEBRA
Algebra is possibly the most useful device (if it can be called a device, though it is part device and part language) in human history. It is important for us to examine algebra because in the second half of the course logic like mathematics becomes an algebraic language of equations. In the ancient world, logic was intended to reveal the foundations of debate, but with Islamic and European developments it gradually became a specialized form of mathematics that was intended to reveal the foundations of not debate but mathematics itself.
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, along with the Indian numerals that became our Indian-Arabic numerals we use today, and began doing math in the form of equations we are all taught by law.
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 cities and towns with the latest things and systems of thought (books and printing come this way too into Europe from China). European Castles are modeled on Islamic Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian and Turkish 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. Europe owes very much to Islamic mechanics and mathematics.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, logic and science that equations became the language for mathematical structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in long spoken form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas, but it can be quite anachronistic and misleading to do this without acknowledging Islamic contributions. For instance, the syllogisms of Aristotle seem much clearer and cleaner when presented in variables and equations of first India and then Islamic algebra.
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 philosophers and 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. Remember that in ancient cosmology, as well as medieval Islamic and European thought, the order of things was thought to be spoken downwards from the heavens. As Islamic scientists began using algebra to crack the codes of nature, they believed that they were finding the numbers that were the thoughts and speech of God. Islamic art, which makes much use of geometric patterns, reflects this too.
Algebraic equations allowed for Wittgenstein’s later truth table logic and other forms that we study as Logic today. However, equations present us with a new problem that was recognized by the central philosophers of the golden age of Islamic civilization: Is the world truly structured by equations, or are they a model in the human mind? Dogmatists and positivists say that the world is truly mathematical and we can acquire true knowledge of it, while skeptics and relativists say that mathematics is human modeling and it remains human perspective and opinion. Consider again the One Equals Two example, and how equations seem to function on their own until we find cases in which they break down.
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.
When asked how he could perform miracles such as walking on water, he asked in return, “Are Stone, mud and gold all equal in your sight?”
When asked, “Teacher, who are the people of my race?”, Jesus replied, “All the children of Adam, and that which you would not have done to yourself, do not do to others”.
When asked “Who was your teacher?”, Jesus replied, “No one taught me, I saw the ugliness of ignorance and avoided it”.
On scholarship and science, Jesus remarks, “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.
ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
Islam has a long history of debate, called ‘Qiyas’ (translated most often as reasoning or argument). There were three types of reasoning debated in the Islamic world: Analogy, Induction and Deduction. Notice that the Nyaya of India use all three in their proofs, and that Islamic thought and mathematics gathered much from India. A big issue for Islamic philosophy was which of these three was primary, and which secondary. Ibn Hazm said inductive is the only one, rather skeptical of deduction and analogy as misleading, arguing the other two are illusions of the mind, while Al Ghazali (Aquinas’ favorite author and source) says Analogy is first, then Deductive second. We will see more of analogy as central to analysis today with Avicenna, and near the end of the course in the later thinking of Wittgenstein.
Al Kindi (801-873) was a pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method. He was also one of the scholars that introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. He wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, he argued that time and space are relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later. Modern scholarship often says that he merged Neo-platonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian 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), who was either Turkish or Persian, took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides was much indebted to his work, and read his commentaries to understand Aristotle. Farabi paid much attention to imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and think critically, you can have greater and greater visions of the cosmos and its workings.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037) was the foremost doctor of his time. As a boy he learned Indian Arithmetic from an Indian grocer in his neighborhood. 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, psychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing that microscopic organisms are the cause of disease. He was the first to correctly show the workings of the eye. 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’. He was also a pioneer of equations and propositional algebra, which would be developed later by Europeans into calculus.
Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars, so the universal group ‘cows’ or ‘numbers’ is up in the sky and is embodied in substances on the earth. Islamic philosophers increasingly turned to the human mind and imagination as the source of universals, though this was highly debated. Today, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical, but it is still highly debatable. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? Does the group ‘cows’ exist primarily in the physical set of animals, or in the line we draw around several animals in our heads? This was the big issue, and it still is.
Avicenna asks about unicorns and the phoenix, which he knows to be fictional animals made by the imagination out of the parts of real animals. He asks many probing questions about the reality of imagination, concepts and universals. Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that an imaginary horse does? Does the horse-ness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horse-ness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real and physical, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horse-ness’ are mental.
Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment is important for any Intro Philosophy class because it is strikingly similar to Descartes’ Deceiving Demon, one of the first major concepts of modern European philosophy. Avicenna, who worked with anesthetics in hospitals, asks us to imagine that we are slowly unable to feel our feet, then body, then sight and sensation, then memory and imagination. What is left, the last and most essential thing that is ourselves? Avicenna replies that it is consciousness, or awareness. With that, we still can be said to exist as self-aware. Without that, it can be said that we are no longer. Descartes, who we will study next week, has us imagine that there is a demon who is deceiving us and creating the world as an illusion, but the one thing the demon can not trick us about is that we are as we are aware of ourselves. Descartes concludes with his famous, “I think, therefore I am”.
Al Ghazali (1058-1111) was Persian and one of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism, Islamic mysticism. Like Heraclitus and Pyrrho, he was skeptical of human expertise and the ability to acquire absolute knowledge. His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certainty. 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 the 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), like Maimonides lived in Cordoba, Spain. he wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, and like Avicenna (notice that their two names are rendered in Latin) was central for Europe’s understanding of Aristotle. Against Ghazali, he wrote The Incoherence of the Incoherence, arguing against skepticism for the pursuit of universal knowledge. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe largely followed him, arguing that universals are physical and not mental. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our understanding and science is today more like Avicenna and conceives of the universal as a mental and psychological phenomena, but for the longest time it was Aristotelian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as uselessly rigid that Europe turned from Averroism.
NEO-PLATONISM AND MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
First, Neo-Platonists would have called themselves ‘Platonists’. ‘Neo’ was adopted by modern scholarship to describe the later tradition following Plato’s thought just like the Neo-Confucianism of China. The tradition comes from Alexandria, Egypt where Greek Platonists were reading the Timaeus and participating in cosmological, religious and philosophical debates amongst the many cultures of the trade port, including Egyptians, Nubians, Gnostic Christians, Coptic Christians, Jews, Indians, Turks and Persians. While the first Neo-Platonists were polytheists, it became with Aristotelianism the dominant philosophy of the three Abrahamic religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
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, identified with Thoth, from Egypt. These two sources became very important in the Renaissance. We know today that these two texts were written or invented by Greek authors who were 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 the critical sources that Plato drew from to convey the wisdom and universal philosophy of all cultures.
Most famous Hermetic text is the Emerald Tablet, a short set of aphorisms. The line most quoted (as it is in the movie I Heart Huckabees is, “The world is a sphere in which the circumference is everywhere and the center is nowhere. The Chaldean Oracles include many beautiful aphorisms, including:
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 include the Fall and the Return, that 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. In the Abrahamic tradition, this became identified with the fall of Adam and Eve from the primordial Garden of Eden. The cosmos, humanity, and the individual have to fall from grace and the whole such that things can be redeemed and made whole again. The system is a physics of the cosmos and psychology of the soul, an angelology and demonology classifying forces of the cosmos and the mind. The macrocosm is the cosmos, the microcosm the human scaled world. This was the vehicle for much of the ancient cosmology we discussed in the beginning of class and saw again with Plato. The small resembles the large. Opening up the mind and acquiring knowledge and wisdom is returning to the cosmos that produced you.
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, understand, 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, which in human fallen perspective is fragmented.
All the main thinkers of European Christianity were Neo-Platonists for quite a while, including Augustine, Dionysius, Boethius, Eriugena, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino, Pico di Mirandola, Bruno, Michelangelo, Botticelli, as well as scientists like Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler.
Augustine (354 - 430 CE) brought it into Christianity from earlier polytheist authors. One of the most important authors, philosophers and church fathers of Catholicism, he was North African. He made the gods of the polytheistic Platonists angels (each with a job in the cosmos) and talked about how light into the mind creates visions/theophanies/ideas of the cosmos and its order.
Pseudo-Dionysius (about 500 CE), or ‘Fake Dennis’, was a Syrian Christian who read Augustine and other authors and was big into negative theology and kataphania. He was thought to have been the original Dionysius, the first Catholic Bishop of Athens, but modern scholarship has shown that he could not have been based on his texts. He argued that the journey to the One was essentially one of unknowing and the One was the great Unknown, above all qualities or being (just like 99 names of Allah). He was also the central angelologist of the Christian tradition in the Middle East and Europe.
Eriugena (815 - 877 CE) was Irish and was called to the French court of Charles the Bald to translate Plato and Dionysius. He merged the work of Augustine and Dionysius, working them together with many other authors, to create a dialectical system of kataphania and apophania. The first European Christian Platonist, Hegel wrote about him in his History of Philosophy, “With him, true philosophy first begins”, tracing the evolution of philosophy up to himself. I wrote about the similarities of Eriugena and Hegel for my master’s thesis. Eriugena was one of the only people in Europe who could read Greek at the time, and so he was protected in the court of Charles from the Pope, who charged him with heresy and pantheism, in exchange for translating and commentary. Augustine was cannon for the Church, and Eriugena argued that the ecstatic unknowing of Dionysius and Augustine are two sides of the same coin.
Eriugena saw the One as Hyper-Ousia, Super-Being, the sum of all being and non-being, the source of both but neither of the two at the same time. He took the radical unknown One of Dionysius and made it the unknown source of both known and unknown in all levels 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 and 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 (which Eriugena refers to as the worm and the angel). He also, like some Muslim philosophers, argued that authority comes from reason, not the other way around.
Aquinas (1225-1274) lived just after Averroes, about 200 years after Avicenna. Augustine was the bringer of Plato back into Christian Europe, and Aquinas was the bringer of Aristotle into medieval Europe thanks to his reading of Islamic authors. He studied at the University of Naples until he was 16. Because he was brilliant, the Dominican order offered to support his scholarship. He became a Dominican, then was kidnapped by his parents who wanted him to come back home. According to the legend his brother’s brought him a prostitute, but he drove her away. Then the Pope intervened, and he went back to being a Dominican.
Aquinas was primarily influenced by Ghazali and Averroes, both of whom were critics of Avicenna. Three years after his death, Aquinas was excommunicated for heresy due to following Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s works, but later the Church reversed its position. This is after Aquinas defended the Church again and again as the only source of true authority and knowledge. 50 years after his death, he was pronounced a Saint. Later, at the First Vatican Council (1868) he was pronounced the central thinker of the Catholic Church.
As an Averroist Aristotelian, Aquinas believed that universals are real beings that are even more real than physical objects. His argument for the existence of God shows this. He argues that all things are dependent on, possible because of, and less than a highest thing, which must be God, Being itself. Thus, like later European thought, Being is essence of essences (we will see this in Hegel later). Descartes follows Aquinas’ argument for a highest, most necessary being.
William of Ockham (1288-1348), unlike Aquinas, followed Avicenna and argued that only objects and individuals are real, all else is mental construction and conception. He is sometimes called the first modern thinker because of this, but Avicenna put this idea forward centuries earlier. His nominalism says that concepts are just our names for things, our labels. Just like Avicenna, he argued that only Being (God) is not contingent, not dependent on other things. Ockham is also known for ‘Ockham’s razor’: the simplest explanation is often correct. This fits with his Avicenna-like position: if how a thing works is a conception in our heads, then the simplest conception will often be the most useful.
St. Francis of Assisi (1181 - 1226 CE), later San Francisco in Spanish, wanted to join the crusades to help convert Muslims to Christianity, but after spending time at a Sultan’s Court, came back with a very Sufi-like vision of the brotherhood of all of humanity: All religion is one brotherhood in God, give all to the poor, and contemplate all through radical love. At the end of time, he said, we will be standing side by side, hand in hand with sister death and brother fire.
Nicholas of Cusa (1401 - 1464 CE) was a philosopher and mystic who read and supported Eriugena. He argued that the known and unknown, the finite and infinite, dwell together in the forms of this world, using the example of a circle which is endless right in front of our eyes. He also, like Jesus, used the example of a mustard seed. Imagine a mustard seed, and that we have unlimited water, earth, space and light to give it to grow. One seed is potentially infinite, with no limit to its growth through the number of new plants and seeds that it spawns. Cusa argues that not only is the physical seed infinite, but so is the seed in our minds, in our imagination, showing that the mind is potentially infinite as well.
The Renaissance (1400s -1500s CE)
‘Italy’ was not something that Renaissance people would have known, and neither would they have heard the French word ‘Renaissance’, given to the period hundreds of years later by a French historian. Florence, the city state, was their nation. ‘Italy’ had yet to be unified and titled such. The central power of the Pope had withered, and city state trade created competing cultures. The Florentines imported Islamic merchandise, including the texts of Greek thinkers such as the Neo-Platonists and Aristotelians. The Vatican Library catalog shows how books and Greeks had yet to be popular in 1400 but quickly caught on. In 1443, the library, the most impressive and extensive in Europe, had 2 Greek books out of 340 books total. In 1455, twelve years later, there were 400 Greek books out of 1200 total. In 1484, forty years later, there were 1000 Greek books out of 3650 total. In forty years the library grew ten times in size.
It is frequently assumed by scholars that the Renaissance was a celebration of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and art. Taking a close look at Ficino and Pico, the two major philosophers of the Renaissance and thus patriarchs of all European scholarship to follow, shows that the Egyptian and Persian wisdom texts were given a higher place than Plato.
Cosimo Medici founded the Platonic Academy of Florence in 1462. It was not a building but a regular meeting of scholars and Ficino soon rose through the ranks to 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. Plato was thought to be a follower of Hermes and Zarathustra, and this wisdom was one and the same as the teachings of Jesus. Ficino translated ‘Maat’ as Logos, which is a bit of a confusion between balance and order, but it is similar to the Dao in China as the principle of balance and order of the cosmos.
Ficino argued there was one unbroken tradition of wisdom which included the Egyptians, Persians, the Brahmans of India (who he doesn’t go into detail on) and the Greeks. Ficino gave Europe the first Latin translations of Plato’s works, many derived from Arabic sources. Ficino thought that Zarathustra was the first prophet of the one true philosophy, 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, placing the Egyptians first, not the Persians. These remained the debated opinions for centuries. Bruno and Masons follow Pico in upholding Egypt as fountain of all the world’s wisdom. Ficino repeatedly uses the Zoroastrian oracles to back up his points, and continuously mentions the three Persian Magi visiting Jesus as infant in the Bible. Ficino writes that Plato had a third eye, which contemplated the union of being and non-being. Pico was very big on Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, saying it was based on earlier Egyptian sources.
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 few good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (this is true of ancient 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 for the American student 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 literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s most powerful and advanced 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 great multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of education and technology. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on European and 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 been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic. This is not because Muslims and Middle Eastern people are illogical, violent or authoritarian compared to Christians and Western people, but because Christian Europe viewed Islam as the enemy.
Here are some excellent ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran, which compliment this one-sided view.
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.
Many times after quoting lines such as these, I have been asked by students, and even some of my professors, how it is that Muslims can say such things if they also behave in such violent and authoritarian ways. The unfortunate truth is that this paradox makes Muslims our close relatives more than either the intelligence of these verses or the brutality of warfare alone. Humanity is always capable, and in each civilization openly displays, both intelligence and ignorance, both discovery and brutality. We should use the best and the worst of Islamic civilization to better understand the best and the worst of our own.
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 and wealth. Jews and Christians who were not Catholic such as Nestorians fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thrived as a multicultural and cosmopolitan society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. Consider that the year 1492 was not simply the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but the year that Spain and Portugal were reconquered from Muslims by Christian kings, as well as the first year of the Spanish Inquisition, the infamous persecution of Jews and other groups deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Jews went from thriving and contributing much scholarship in Islamic Spain to outright persecution and secrecy underground in a year’s time. Maimonides (1135 - 1204 CE), the most famous Jewish medieval philosopher who lived much of his life in Cordoba, Spain, wrote that he read Aristotle but could not understand him until he read Al-Farabi.
ALGEBRA
Algebra is possibly the most useful device (if it can be called a device, though it is part device and part language) in human history. It is important for us to examine algebra because in the second half of the course logic like mathematics becomes an algebraic language of equations. In the ancient world, logic was intended to reveal the foundations of debate, but with Islamic and European developments it gradually became a specialized form of mathematics that was intended to reveal the foundations of not debate but mathematics itself.
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, along with the Indian numerals that became our Indian-Arabic numerals we use today, and began doing math in the form of equations we are all taught by law.
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 cities and towns with the latest things and systems of thought (books and printing come this way too into Europe from China). European Castles are modeled on Islamic Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian and Turkish 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. Europe owes very much to Islamic mechanics and mathematics.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, logic and science that equations became the language for mathematical structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in long spoken form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas, but it can be quite anachronistic and misleading to do this without acknowledging Islamic contributions. For instance, the syllogisms of Aristotle seem much clearer and cleaner when presented in variables and equations of first India and then Islamic algebra.
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 philosophers and 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. Remember that in ancient cosmology, as well as medieval Islamic and European thought, the order of things was thought to be spoken downwards from the heavens. As Islamic scientists began using algebra to crack the codes of nature, they believed that they were finding the numbers that were the thoughts and speech of God. Islamic art, which makes much use of geometric patterns, reflects this too.
Algebraic equations allowed for Wittgenstein’s later truth table logic and other forms that we study as Logic today. However, equations present us with a new problem that was recognized by the central philosophers of the golden age of Islamic civilization: Is the world truly structured by equations, or are they a model in the human mind? Dogmatists and positivists say that the world is truly mathematical and we can acquire true knowledge of it, while skeptics and relativists say that mathematics is human modeling and it remains human perspective and opinion. Consider again the One Equals Two example, and how equations seem to function on their own until we find cases in which they break down.
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.
When asked how he could perform miracles such as walking on water, he asked in return, “Are Stone, mud and gold all equal in your sight?”
When asked, “Teacher, who are the people of my race?”, Jesus replied, “All the children of Adam, and that which you would not have done to yourself, do not do to others”.
When asked “Who was your teacher?”, Jesus replied, “No one taught me, I saw the ugliness of ignorance and avoided it”.
On scholarship and science, Jesus remarks, “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.
ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
Islam has a long history of debate, called ‘Qiyas’ (translated most often as reasoning or argument). There were three types of reasoning debated in the Islamic world: Analogy, Induction and Deduction. Notice that the Nyaya of India use all three in their proofs, and that Islamic thought and mathematics gathered much from India. A big issue for Islamic philosophy was which of these three was primary, and which secondary. Ibn Hazm said inductive is the only one, rather skeptical of deduction and analogy as misleading, arguing the other two are illusions of the mind, while Al Ghazali (Aquinas’ favorite author and source) says Analogy is first, then Deductive second. We will see more of analogy as central to analysis today with Avicenna, and near the end of the course in the later thinking of Wittgenstein.
Al Kindi (801-873) was a pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method. He was also one of the scholars that introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. He wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, he argued that time and space are relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later. Modern scholarship often says that he merged Neo-platonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian 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), who was either Turkish or Persian, took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides was much indebted to his work, and read his commentaries to understand Aristotle. Farabi paid much attention to imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and think critically, you can have greater and greater visions of the cosmos and its workings.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037) was the foremost doctor of his time. As a boy he learned Indian Arithmetic from an Indian grocer in his neighborhood. 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, psychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing that microscopic organisms are the cause of disease. He was the first to correctly show the workings of the eye. 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’. He was also a pioneer of equations and propositional algebra, which would be developed later by Europeans into calculus.
Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars, so the universal group ‘cows’ or ‘numbers’ is up in the sky and is embodied in substances on the earth. Islamic philosophers increasingly turned to the human mind and imagination as the source of universals, though this was highly debated. Today, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical, but it is still highly debatable. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? Does the group ‘cows’ exist primarily in the physical set of animals, or in the line we draw around several animals in our heads? This was the big issue, and it still is.
Avicenna asks about unicorns and the phoenix, which he knows to be fictional animals made by the imagination out of the parts of real animals. He asks many probing questions about the reality of imagination, concepts and universals. Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that an imaginary horse does? Does the horse-ness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horse-ness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real and physical, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horse-ness’ are mental.
Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment is important for any Intro Philosophy class because it is strikingly similar to Descartes’ Deceiving Demon, one of the first major concepts of modern European philosophy. Avicenna, who worked with anesthetics in hospitals, asks us to imagine that we are slowly unable to feel our feet, then body, then sight and sensation, then memory and imagination. What is left, the last and most essential thing that is ourselves? Avicenna replies that it is consciousness, or awareness. With that, we still can be said to exist as self-aware. Without that, it can be said that we are no longer. Descartes, who we will study next week, has us imagine that there is a demon who is deceiving us and creating the world as an illusion, but the one thing the demon can not trick us about is that we are as we are aware of ourselves. Descartes concludes with his famous, “I think, therefore I am”.
Al Ghazali (1058-1111) was Persian and one of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism, Islamic mysticism. Like Heraclitus and Pyrrho, he was skeptical of human expertise and the ability to acquire absolute knowledge. His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certainty. 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 the 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), like Maimonides lived in Cordoba, Spain. he wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, and like Avicenna (notice that their two names are rendered in Latin) was central for Europe’s understanding of Aristotle. Against Ghazali, he wrote The Incoherence of the Incoherence, arguing against skepticism for the pursuit of universal knowledge. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe largely followed him, arguing that universals are physical and not mental. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our understanding and science is today more like Avicenna and conceives of the universal as a mental and psychological phenomena, but for the longest time it was Aristotelian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as uselessly rigid that Europe turned from Averroism.
NEO-PLATONISM AND MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
First, Neo-Platonists would have called themselves ‘Platonists’. ‘Neo’ was adopted by modern scholarship to describe the later tradition following Plato’s thought just like the Neo-Confucianism of China. The tradition comes from Alexandria, Egypt where Greek Platonists were reading the Timaeus and participating in cosmological, religious and philosophical debates amongst the many cultures of the trade port, including Egyptians, Nubians, Gnostic Christians, Coptic Christians, Jews, Indians, Turks and Persians. While the first Neo-Platonists were polytheists, it became with Aristotelianism the dominant philosophy of the three Abrahamic religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
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, identified with Thoth, from Egypt. These two sources became very important in the Renaissance. We know today that these two texts were written or invented by Greek authors who were 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 the critical sources that Plato drew from to convey the wisdom and universal philosophy of all cultures.
Most famous Hermetic text is the Emerald Tablet, a short set of aphorisms. The line most quoted (as it is in the movie I Heart Huckabees is, “The world is a sphere in which the circumference is everywhere and the center is nowhere. The Chaldean Oracles include many beautiful aphorisms, including:
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 include the Fall and the Return, that 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. In the Abrahamic tradition, this became identified with the fall of Adam and Eve from the primordial Garden of Eden. The cosmos, humanity, and the individual have to fall from grace and the whole such that things can be redeemed and made whole again. The system is a physics of the cosmos and psychology of the soul, an angelology and demonology classifying forces of the cosmos and the mind. The macrocosm is the cosmos, the microcosm the human scaled world. This was the vehicle for much of the ancient cosmology we discussed in the beginning of class and saw again with Plato. The small resembles the large. Opening up the mind and acquiring knowledge and wisdom is returning to the cosmos that produced you.
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, understand, 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, which in human fallen perspective is fragmented.
All the main thinkers of European Christianity were Neo-Platonists for quite a while, including Augustine, Dionysius, Boethius, Eriugena, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino, Pico di Mirandola, Bruno, Michelangelo, Botticelli, as well as scientists like Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler.
Augustine (354 - 430 CE) brought it into Christianity from earlier polytheist authors. One of the most important authors, philosophers and church fathers of Catholicism, he was North African. He made the gods of the polytheistic Platonists angels (each with a job in the cosmos) and talked about how light into the mind creates visions/theophanies/ideas of the cosmos and its order.
Pseudo-Dionysius (about 500 CE), or ‘Fake Dennis’, was a Syrian Christian who read Augustine and other authors and was big into negative theology and kataphania. He was thought to have been the original Dionysius, the first Catholic Bishop of Athens, but modern scholarship has shown that he could not have been based on his texts. He argued that the journey to the One was essentially one of unknowing and the One was the great Unknown, above all qualities or being (just like 99 names of Allah). He was also the central angelologist of the Christian tradition in the Middle East and Europe.
Eriugena (815 - 877 CE) was Irish and was called to the French court of Charles the Bald to translate Plato and Dionysius. He merged the work of Augustine and Dionysius, working them together with many other authors, to create a dialectical system of kataphania and apophania. The first European Christian Platonist, Hegel wrote about him in his History of Philosophy, “With him, true philosophy first begins”, tracing the evolution of philosophy up to himself. I wrote about the similarities of Eriugena and Hegel for my master’s thesis. Eriugena was one of the only people in Europe who could read Greek at the time, and so he was protected in the court of Charles from the Pope, who charged him with heresy and pantheism, in exchange for translating and commentary. Augustine was cannon for the Church, and Eriugena argued that the ecstatic unknowing of Dionysius and Augustine are two sides of the same coin.
Eriugena saw the One as Hyper-Ousia, Super-Being, the sum of all being and non-being, the source of both but neither of the two at the same time. He took the radical unknown One of Dionysius and made it the unknown source of both known and unknown in all levels 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 and 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 (which Eriugena refers to as the worm and the angel). He also, like some Muslim philosophers, argued that authority comes from reason, not the other way around.
Aquinas (1225-1274) lived just after Averroes, about 200 years after Avicenna. Augustine was the bringer of Plato back into Christian Europe, and Aquinas was the bringer of Aristotle into medieval Europe thanks to his reading of Islamic authors. He studied at the University of Naples until he was 16. Because he was brilliant, the Dominican order offered to support his scholarship. He became a Dominican, then was kidnapped by his parents who wanted him to come back home. According to the legend his brother’s brought him a prostitute, but he drove her away. Then the Pope intervened, and he went back to being a Dominican.
Aquinas was primarily influenced by Ghazali and Averroes, both of whom were critics of Avicenna. Three years after his death, Aquinas was excommunicated for heresy due to following Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s works, but later the Church reversed its position. This is after Aquinas defended the Church again and again as the only source of true authority and knowledge. 50 years after his death, he was pronounced a Saint. Later, at the First Vatican Council (1868) he was pronounced the central thinker of the Catholic Church.
As an Averroist Aristotelian, Aquinas believed that universals are real beings that are even more real than physical objects. His argument for the existence of God shows this. He argues that all things are dependent on, possible because of, and less than a highest thing, which must be God, Being itself. Thus, like later European thought, Being is essence of essences (we will see this in Hegel later). Descartes follows Aquinas’ argument for a highest, most necessary being.
William of Ockham (1288-1348), unlike Aquinas, followed Avicenna and argued that only objects and individuals are real, all else is mental construction and conception. He is sometimes called the first modern thinker because of this, but Avicenna put this idea forward centuries earlier. His nominalism says that concepts are just our names for things, our labels. Just like Avicenna, he argued that only Being (God) is not contingent, not dependent on other things. Ockham is also known for ‘Ockham’s razor’: the simplest explanation is often correct. This fits with his Avicenna-like position: if how a thing works is a conception in our heads, then the simplest conception will often be the most useful.
St. Francis of Assisi (1181 - 1226 CE), later San Francisco in Spanish, wanted to join the crusades to help convert Muslims to Christianity, but after spending time at a Sultan’s Court, came back with a very Sufi-like vision of the brotherhood of all of humanity: All religion is one brotherhood in God, give all to the poor, and contemplate all through radical love. At the end of time, he said, we will be standing side by side, hand in hand with sister death and brother fire.
Nicholas of Cusa (1401 - 1464 CE) was a philosopher and mystic who read and supported Eriugena. He argued that the known and unknown, the finite and infinite, dwell together in the forms of this world, using the example of a circle which is endless right in front of our eyes. He also, like Jesus, used the example of a mustard seed. Imagine a mustard seed, and that we have unlimited water, earth, space and light to give it to grow. One seed is potentially infinite, with no limit to its growth through the number of new plants and seeds that it spawns. Cusa argues that not only is the physical seed infinite, but so is the seed in our minds, in our imagination, showing that the mind is potentially infinite as well.
The Renaissance (1400s -1500s CE)
‘Italy’ was not something that Renaissance people would have known, and neither would they have heard the French word ‘Renaissance’, given to the period hundreds of years later by a French historian. Florence, the city state, was their nation. ‘Italy’ had yet to be unified and titled such. The central power of the Pope had withered, and city state trade created competing cultures. The Florentines imported Islamic merchandise, including the texts of Greek thinkers such as the Neo-Platonists and Aristotelians. The Vatican Library catalog shows how books and Greeks had yet to be popular in 1400 but quickly caught on. In 1443, the library, the most impressive and extensive in Europe, had 2 Greek books out of 340 books total. In 1455, twelve years later, there were 400 Greek books out of 1200 total. In 1484, forty years later, there were 1000 Greek books out of 3650 total. In forty years the library grew ten times in size.
It is frequently assumed by scholars that the Renaissance was a celebration of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and art. Taking a close look at Ficino and Pico, the two major philosophers of the Renaissance and thus patriarchs of all European scholarship to follow, shows that the Egyptian and Persian wisdom texts were given a higher place than Plato.
Cosimo Medici founded the Platonic Academy of Florence in 1462. It was not a building but a regular meeting of scholars and Ficino soon rose through the ranks to 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. Plato was thought to be a follower of Hermes and Zarathustra, and this wisdom was one and the same as the teachings of Jesus. Ficino translated ‘Maat’ as Logos, which is a bit of a confusion between balance and order, but it is similar to the Dao in China as the principle of balance and order of the cosmos.
Ficino argued there was one unbroken tradition of wisdom which included the Egyptians, Persians, the Brahmans of India (who he doesn’t go into detail on) and the Greeks. Ficino gave Europe the first Latin translations of Plato’s works, many derived from Arabic sources. Ficino thought that Zarathustra was the first prophet of the one true philosophy, 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, placing the Egyptians first, not the Persians. These remained the debated opinions for centuries. Bruno and Masons follow Pico in upholding Egypt as fountain of all the world’s wisdom. Ficino repeatedly uses the Zoroastrian oracles to back up his points, and continuously mentions the three Persian Magi visiting Jesus as infant in the Bible. Ficino writes that Plato had a third eye, which contemplated the union of being and non-being. Pico was very big on Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, saying it was based on earlier Egyptian sources.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)