Individuals and groups manipulate the truth to serve their own ends, in a conscious/unconscious way that often resembles denial. Speech means that we can tell the truth or tell lies. This has been an issue for humans before they were even human, like theft and violence.
Apes and Lying:
In one of the most fascinating stories of ape behavior I have heard, researchers documented that a young male baboon made the mistake of trying to force himself sexually on a high ranking female baboon of his tribe. When the female screeched, the rest of the tribe began chasing the young male along the ground floor. Suddenly, the young male turned and gave the call for leopard. The chasers dashed up into the trees and out of sight, while the young male stood, watching them leave, on the ground in no danger from any leopard. The researchers concluded that they had witnessed and documented an ape lying to save his own skin. Thus, we can assume, humans have been lying since before they were human.
Children and Lying:
Interestingly, we believe in lying to children as a matter of raising them. Children before the age of seven are quite incapable of telling the difference between fiction and reality or understanding sarcasm. This is why young children believe in Santa and wonder where Thomas the Train Engine lives.
There are two amusing stories I have on this. One of my students in a response paper wrote that as a young girl she had a pet goldfish and accidentally killed the fish by cleaning its bowl with hand soap. When she saw her fish was dead her mother, who did not want to torture the young girl with the truth, told her that the cat had walked by and the fish had a heart attack. Notice the utilitarianism here, and that Kant would be mortified. Secondly, there was a news story last year about a boy in Thailand who was stuck on the roof of a tall building, and he would not climb into the arms of the police who ascended a ladder to rescue him. One of the police dressed up in a Spiderman costume, and the boy threw open his arms and leapt into the waiting embrace of Spiderman, who carried him down to a cheering crowd.
Children believe in superheroes and villains. One would like to think that the use of heroes and myths ends with childhood, but the literature on propaganda tells us that all civilizations make myths that glorify themselves and demonize their enemies, both internal and external. Because children are raised with these myths, they often do not think to question them even when they are quite past the age of seven.
Consider the use of superheroes in comics, fighting criminals at home and enemies of America.
Watchmen is a good look at some of these dynamics. Consider that Iron Man was originally from Korea, then the recent movie puts him in the middle east. We still use superheroes to stand for “truth, justice and the American way”, but we have subtler ways. I think you can look at Iron Man and the new Batman movie and see distortions that we not only pass on to kids and teenagers but the adults in the audience as well.
City States and Rock Edicts:
The Assyrians were masters of propaganda, and they were one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. Most of their conquest was through trade, though they invented all of the siege weapons used through the European middle ages. Rock edicts, tall carvings in cliffs and on monuments, declared glorious meanings for the common people to consume. Interestingly, the common people could not read, and someone who could read and pass the messages to others was called “one who makes the stones speak”. Just like a modern textbook, the human authors are lost and the media simply speaks for itself.
Here we come to the old and the new style of propaganda. The old propaganda model is simple, and it is still in use particularly by traditional and communist countries: We are the King/State, we tell you what you need to know, namely that we look after you and our enemies are evil. WE are the great multicultural empire that looks after everyone (Assyrian did not denote a race, but a citizen of the empire), but our enemies will oppress you and kill you for no good reason. Very little has changed over several thousand years.
The new propaganda is even more effective, and strangely it does not call itself propaganda at all. In China today, the communist government says openly that they use propaganda to educate the people, and the same was admitted in the United States and Britain until just this last century. The government tells you “brush your teeth, it is good for you” and this is acknowledged as a message coming from authorities telling you what you should know and do. Chomsky, who we will study today, is quite clear on this point, as is Bernays. Propaganda only recently became something evil, something that the enemy does.
I am going to focus on American propaganda from WWI through the Cold War, and then talk about Chomsky’s theories on propaganda models and the American media’s role in American empire and economics.
Hegel tells us when we haven’t looked into an issue, perspectives are polarized. Here in America, similarly in Britain, it is thought that we are free and love democracy, but other cultures (especially the Germans in WWI and II, the Russians in the Cold War, and Islamic extremists) are not civilized but rather lie as much as they can because ‘they hate our freedom’.
We have failed to have a real discussion about censorship and bias in America. This means ‘THEY’ are simply biased and put forth propaganda, and WE would never do something like that. This is not only the basic human frame as before, but Americans and British got set in this in a particular way through WWI and II. In WWI, propaganda became something the Germans do, not the Belgians, British or Americans. In WWII, the Germans and Japanese do propaganda, and in the cold war the Russians. The British and Americans, however, would never do ‘propaganda’ by name, as they are the champions of liberty, democracy and freedom from tyranny (even as Britain and then America plundered and sought empire in the same way that the Germans, Russians did). Today, this is ‘Islam and the West’ where we have unbiased journalism while they simply put forward obvious propaganda (watch ‘Control Room’ for the best of this).
What we need? We need to see how people censor and authority is abusive in comparison, and this is what is never done. Rather than hear one line of Chinese media through ours and say “Propaganda!” we need to compare censorship operation by the government in both places and see the complex similarities and differences. I am going to show human overall consistencies while describing the particular way that Americans are involved in the inscription of messages and ideology in our society. That way, we get beyond the strange complex of saying that in America there is no propaganda while living in an America that knows how to sell and spin professionally better than anyone ever has.
WWI (the British/Americans vs. the Germans)
The Germans invade Belgium, and the British make up all sorts of things. The Germans become the evil Hun, and the Belgians the poor victim, even though they had just gotten bad world press by systematically killing 10 million Africans in the Congo.
The British run propaganda in America to get us into the war, and teach us the techniques of British style empire and propaganda. You set up ‘free’ reporters to say your messages, rather than do the old way like Germany and Russia with a Ministry of Propaganda.
Thus, after the horrors of WWI, ‘propaganda’ became a bad word in Britain and America.
Since then, we do not do propaganda at all. We do ‘education’, ‘information’, ‘public relations’, ‘human relations’, and in time of war we may engage in psychological warfare, but we never do ‘propaganda’.
Propaganda is not an evil conspiracy. Consider great example of guy who did ‘Birth of a Nation’, KKK film, being jailed for 10 years for his next movie showing British and Natives committing war crimes against Americans.
Basically, the British and Americans lied as much as possible about German atrocities, the French and British took most of what Germany had after WWI, the Germans fell even lower in the 20s with the market crash, and they came back as the Nazis, NOW as bad as the British and Americans had led others to believe.
Consider that Irish newspapers in NY were shut down for telling people that the British have been evil in Ireland, Scotland, India, Africa, all while calling themselves the defenders of democracy and freedom. At this time, government censorship during time of war was unquestioned (story about Pentagon lifting ban on coffins today).
Bernays book Propaganda:
Chomsky says that Bernays was one of the first propaganda specialists in America and he is quite open about praising the use of propaganda. Bernays says, during WWI, that it is remarkable that the moment America propaganda explodes (advertising, PR), becomes a necessary tool of corporations, it becomes ‘evil’ in name. PR went from being Barnum and Bailey to every corporation running spin and ad campaigns. Bernays invented the committee of Doctors who tell you to eat eggs and bacon for a ‘hearty’ breakfast, saying old way is ‘Eat Bacon!’, new way: ‘Drs say, ‘Eat bacon’’. This is ‘free expert’ style of propaganda.
In 1938, writing his book, Bernays says that half the front page of NYT is identifiably propaganda, stories planted by interested parties. He says the NAACP is a great PR group, and show a strong hand holding their annual conference in Atlanta. He got out of cigarette ads in the 40s, tabloids having picked up on the health risks. It wasn’t till the 1970s that major media carried the story at all. 1953 Bernays helped United Fruit convince everyone that Guatemala was a communist threat, so the US overthrew the elected leader with a CIA coup and we supported dictatorship there for cheap labor to supply Americans with cheaper fruit.
Nazis and WWII:
Hitler says: We did not have as good propaganda as the British and Americans, but next time will be different. Nazi TV, engineering goes to American, America rises above Britain in wake of WWII. During WWII, the Americans and British praised Stalin and his Red Army as they all fought the Nazis. Then, as soon as the war was over, the British led the Americans in the Cold War anti-communism campaign. This is where stuff gets REALLY INTERESTING: US vs. Soviet Union. Both say, ‘THEY do all of this, so WE HAVE TO’, in the official channels, but the story for the masses is: only THEY would do that.
COLD WAR
The following material is drawn largely from the book The Cultural Cold War by Saunders.
Post WWII, the French and Russians had largely convinced everyone that America has no culture, only cheap commercialism, and America talks a lot about Freedom, but look at how they treat black people. US and Soviets started ‘Congresses’, (Soviets for World Peace, US for Cultural Freedom). It is now know that these were the two big umbrella groups for a lot of fronts for propaganda campaigns. These groups used historians, scientists, poets, artists, philosophers, professors, you name it, to give the impression that individuals were lining up against ‘the evil’ of the other. The US wanted to fight the ‘French Flu’ and push European intellectuals away from Marxism as liberation towards free market capitalism as liberation. Ex: US intellectual goes to Paris, gives a talk about the ‘Negro’s progress in America’. Then when he is heckled (“possibly by communists”), brings out black band to do jazz all night.
US used CIA and many fronts to tour black performers through Europe, increase publication of certain books (Camus, not Sartre example, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, introductions written to spin Animal Farm and 1984 by Orwell, who hated both). The idea was to promote the NONCOMMUNIST LEFT. (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty not studied in America, as they boycotted Congress of Cultural Freedom invitations due to US treatment of Black people).
The US had spent $34 million on this by 1950 (also, wealthiest country at this point, passing Britain in financing the rebuilding of Britain, Germany and France). The money quadrupled in rate of expense after 1950, as China became the world’s largest communist country. The CIA set up French literature reviews, toured the Boston symphony orchestra, approached wealthy individuals about setting up art collections that praise US art and European art that honors the US.
Pollock and others (though communists) praised and toured through Europe to show that American has genius painters after all. Agent as director stockpiled abstract minimalist art at the NY Moma (Contemporary Chinese art exhibit in Berkeley today). The Ford and Rockefeller foundations remain serious fronts for money dispensed in America to artists, writers and performers who do work that promotes America even as it is avant-garde art.
At home, Billy Graham got money knowingly from intelligence, toured America telling Christians that ‘Communism is masterminded by Satan’, never mind that the first communes were French Christian communes. John Wayne and Ronald Reagan were promoted as Soldier/Cowboys, both spied for the FBI against communism at home for the house of un-American activities committee of McCarthy. Disney and Warner brothers made cartoons for the US in WWII, then denounced their writers and animators as communists when they went on strike. Disney spied for the FBI, testified for HUAC, while he was doing illegal things to his workers like sending strike breakers to beat people up and the FBI looked the other way.
In films, token black people began appearing well before the civil rights movement. Documents of agents who worked with studios on scripts say, ‘took out a drunk, added a black person’. One of the best examples is a black golfer and caddy added into the background of a scene on a golf course, at a time when white Catholics and Jews had a rough time getting into golf clubs. Consider that the civil rights movement was partly started by seeing token black people in the cinema, like the golfer and caddy, and wondering aloud why this could not become a real lived reality. Both US and Soviets fought over who liberates and who oppresses. In 1956, the ‘Melting Pot’ became a slogan for the US. We can see that many Russian films and Korean propaganda posters deplore the evils that America has done to black people as a simple tactic.
Today, if your movie has anything to do with police or military, they will give you heavy support as long as they go over the script and ok it. Six media owner companies means each needs a cushy relationship with both cops and military. That means: America is well aware of the streamlined view of America put out all over the world in TV and Movies. They are the BEST form of propaganda. There are consulting firms who specialize in getting your script ready for police and military approval, so that you do not get charged extra by the official government representatives who review the scripts for a fee.
Meanwhile, stories pepper the news about how “Iran censors movies” and “China might be censoring the internet”. No further detail is drawn. This is the British/American style: THEY simply censor, without any comparison of us and them. THEY censor (so, we don’t?). Recently the media corporations agreed with the government not to show footage of coffins coming home from the war. Is there ever a need for a conspiracy when power works the way it always has?
Chomsky and Herman’s MANUFACTURING CONSENT:
There is no better book on American propaganda and the stories both promoted and ignored by the American media. The book argues that the mass-media protects the interest of the wealthy and powerful individuals and institutions in America by promoting particular views and filtering out others. This process involves the ownership of media groups, the reliance of media on the government for information and support, the reliance of media on advertising revenue, flak heaped upon dissident views (particularly socialist views and those critical of business interests).
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Intro Philosophy: Islamic & Medieval European Philosophy
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.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Ethics: Theft, Zinn & the Corporation
Theft is a difficult issue, one that has particular implications today. First we will examine the context and history of theft, and then use the Ethical concepts we have studied as lenses
The notion of ‘property’ is bound up with European and Western identity, often seen as a principle of politics particular to Europe or fully realized in full within European historical development. We can easily see, however, that the origins of property, like most human cultures, has its origins in ape social behavior. While Europe has developed cultures of property that are highly sophisticated, these stem from cultural borrowings as much as they do from within Europe itself. Consider Islamic cultures of borrowing with interest, writing and cashing checks, etc.
Turning to ape behavior to see precedents, we can clearly identify with apes both in focusing on and becoming possessive of objects and forgetting this possession and its objects. Consider that an ape will become attached to a banana, fight against other apes that try to take the banana, and then, upon seeing a better banana, the ape will abandon the first and ignore whether or not the first falls into other hands. We can see that the ape can come to possess as ‘mine not yours’, and come to forget this possessing (‘neither mine nor yours’). This is parallel with self-other distinctions already discussed, as with the child psychology that says in the beginning there is neither and both must arise together in tension (codependent arising of Jainism and Buddhism).
There is also evidence that apes can not only fall into a ‘mine vs. everyone’ relation of possession (of objects), but apes can also recognize other apes as possessing objects themselves (selfish as other). Consider the case (from an old Anthropology class of mine) of the female chimpanzee ignoring another male chimpanzee trying to give her a banana for sex, and how the female only snatches the banana for herself when the male ape gets bored and goes out of sight so that there is no expected reciprocity. We should be cautious of the sexism here (females ‘push bananas’ at males too), but also marvel in how familiar this behavior is to humanity (next week, we will see that apes know lying too).
Humans, of course, have taken these impulses and instincts and complexified them with many inter-competing cultures, cultures that are actually capable of stealing from each other as much as they can describe and criminalize stealing themselves! While there are many intellectuals who have defended the view that while trade is universal only the West developed ‘capital’, I am critical of this view (interestingly enough, the one to coin this specialized term was the great opponent of Capitalism, Karl Marx). We have yet to do justice to intercultural borrowings, and ‘The West’ is very proud of its economics today. Is ‘capital’ a new device, particular to Western thought? I think that a study of Islam passing to Europe shows this can only be a partial truth, but we get a better view if we turn back the clock to the origin of the device known as MONEY, capital being one of its distant yet certain relatives.
Where does money come from? Why does it exist? What relationship does money have to theft, and is this different from the relationship between theft and any other object?
Money is a very interesting and unique device. Before wood pulp paper bank notes, the Sumerians and Babylonians get the credit for coining money first, the government controlling the pressing process of coinage. Today, we use Chinese style paper bank notes, backed by the government, just like in China after 500 CE or so. Wood block printing and the block printing press are other devices of Chinese origin that are crucial to this process. These two stages suggest that ‘capital’, though it may have been developed to its extent today in Europe and increasingly in American privatizing economics, cannot possibly have been a ‘inwardly European’ device of the ‘Western mind’. Other cultures of mind have had no problem inventing and using devices that are the ancestors of modern day capital.
But, WHY MONEY?
Before money, people of course possessed many things and traded them between individuals and groups. This trade was always barter, swapping one sort of thing for another sort of thing without the device of money as swapping medium. As people settled into city states, practices of borrowing and lending became stabilized. The first money was likely tokens indicating amounts of stuff borrowed from the ruler or other wealthy individuals.
The culture which includes the device of money has advantages over the culture of mere barter. Money as a device is very simple, simple the ways that numbers are simple for much the same purpose. Money is good (and bad) because it is very easy to gather/amass and divide/distribute, much more than any other object or substance.
Consider the salmon fisher in a village. She goes down to the water, and scores 20 large salmon. This is far more than she can eat, but she can trade salmon for other things that she needs in the barter culture. However, salmon does not keep for long, even if one knows how to salt and preserve it. What happens if she goes to the market and not many people want or need salmon that day? What if she has enough salmon to get what she wants, but there are not enough people who need salmon to trade with her for what she wants? In a culture where the salmon can be sold for money, you can keep the money for thirty years (even with inflation and other problems, deterioration of coins, etc) but no one can keep salmon for thirty years, even with freezers! In this way, money is much easier to amass and to keep than salmon.
In the same way, money is easier to divide than salmon. Let us say our fisher comes to market with 20 large salmon, and wants to trade for a basket. I, the basket maker, tell her that one third of a salmon is worth one basket, but I want the front half of the salmon. What happens if she wants to leave the salmon uncut, or if she needs four fifths of a salmon later for someone else? What if she wants to keep all the fish heads for herself? Money has no features to it other than quantity, even though the pictures are often very pretty. Fifty dollars is just fifty things, nothing less, so there is no problem with changing it to two twenties and a ten. You cannot make a whole salmon again from twenty salmon heads! In this way, money is much easier to divide and distribute than salmon. If we consider the bustle of a crowded market, it becomes clear why money would be such a useful (and thus abusive) device, and how its invention allowed for the modern merchants and bankers of today. Consider the trillion dollar bailout today, how this is very abstract yet very real for many people. Luck for us we do not need to bail out banks with truckloads of salmon!
There are, however, two great disadvantages to the culture of money use:
First, theft, like trade, becomes easier! In fact, money not only creates and supports many types of legal economics, it simultaneously creates and supports many types of illegal economics like paying money for sex or drugs (Derrida and the signature).
Second, the desire for money becomes quite intense. Considering that money, sex and cocaine have been shown to light up similar areas of the human brain, money to barter is like cocaine to chewing coca leaves. Since money can be traded for anything, even ironically illegal things, the draw towards money becomes the draw towards any and everything desired. In this sense, the desire for money is far more intense than the desire for salmon because money can buy salmon, or remain money, or buy anything else if one ceases wanting salmon. Just as having salmon means that the possibility of eating salmon is now practically guaranteed, having money means the possibility of satisfying any desire whatsoever is guaranteed. This ultimately means that there is far more reason to steal money than there is to steal salmon, strange considering that you can eat salmon and live off of it alone!
In terms of world politics, which includes the Zinn reading I gave you, stealing and money are central issues of identity. Communism and Capitalism are divided on the issue of money, even as Communists print government money and Capitalists organize socialist programs (public education like BCC, social welfare, public roads and institutions). The question is: do you trust the government or the corporations more with your money and economics (an instance of the one/many problem again)? America has shown that there are great advantages to privatization, letting corporations control economics rather than the centralized government. Unfortunately, this does not do away with problems of authority and corruption (consider that PG&E is still in charge of California’s power, a pretty plum, in spite of being convicted of stealing from Californians en masse). Truth be told, both America and the Soviet Union told third world countries that they would not steal from them or enslave them like their other surely would, only to both be guilty of similar forms of corrupt authoritarianism.
A great book to read on all of this is John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He actually came to BCC last semester for a reading, but I had my other job. As Perkins says so perfectly, in American foreign relations we try to get people in debt to us because that binds everyone to our economy and our desires. I know firsthand from UCB Hass Business School students that indebting the poor here in America and poor third world countries is an open practice, spoken of openly in instruction. The financial crisis today was clearly caused by irresponsible and predatory lending. Our newspapers never speak of these things, but a piece on NPR my friend gave to me will tell you just as clearly and honestly an economics professor at Hass. CREDIT is itself like money, a device that has its advantages but also its disadvantages, especially for the disadvantaged. If our economy falls far from where it is today, it could very well be due to the disadvantages of credit and capital that we have stalled and distanced from ourselves for the time being as a privileged and advantaged culture. The point is: money helps the advantaged steal from the disadvantaged, even as it helps the disadvantaged gain advantage! This is why Americans are relatively wealthy yet there is an increasing gap between rich and poor here as well as in the third world. While the ‘American way’ sometimes allows the poor to get rich, it also very much allows the rich to get much richer and there is only so much in the pot.
Of course, the rich are also more encouraged than ever to steal from the rich as well as from the poor. Consider in 1996 CIA convicted of manipulating business to favor Americans over Australians. Neither Australians nor Americans can recall this, due to lack of media coverage in both locations. Since America and Australia are both wealthy Capitalist countries, you are only doing the system disservice by making such a scandal public.
Now that we have briefly examined the history of money and advantage, we have set the stage to ask the question of theft. The Ethical question we must ask is: Is theft ever justified?
We can use our Ethical concepts we have studied to give various answers to this question. While I will not say that there is a certain answer here, we can see that there are many ways of answering the question but each has its problems. This is how we know we are investigating the question in matters of real life and not in an ideal construct.
Principle
Kant, of course, would give the first and most positive answer to this question: NO, theft of property is NEVER justified. Notice that Kant, living in the German Enlightenment of the 1700s, is very proud of the culture of property and considers the possession of property to be an entirely reasonable and principled act. This is questionable when we trace its roots all the way back to chimpanzee behavior, of course.
This answer has the obvious advantage of never getting one involved in most questions of stealing, but there remain issues. What if one’s society is stealing from another, and legally one has become wealthy within the stealing society? While we could imagine that one is ignorant of the ongoing theft and therefore not DIRECTLY guilty of theft, one is INDIRECTLY guilty. Societies, especially America, store their wealth in the pockets of the wealthy. America stores its wealth in its millionaires and billionaires primarily, and encourages these individuals economically to siphon money from other economies and put it in their pockets because this is the central way that America gets wealthier. Thus, while one may hold fast to the principle of ‘I shall not steal’, one could be complicit in groups and cultures that are engaged in theft that benefits the individual and the individual actively supports (even in the absence of conscious consent).
Virtue & Consequence
According to the concept of ethical virtue, theft is fully justified as long as the individual is virtuous or becomes virtuous through the act of theft. In a very similar way, Utilitarians and Consequentialists would argue that theft is justified if in the long term it results in good and justice, much happiness and prevention of harm. Seems impossible? Robin Hood is the perfect example for consideration. If I rob the evil rich people and give to poor people who are starving (i.e. if we construct an example in which many would agree), many would say that I am virtuous and that I have acted for the best ends in the long view. I may be hanged for the crimes, but my actions benefit others and can be argued to benefit my own character (though this is debatable).
Balance
The concept of balance draws our attention not only to the duality of stealing and not stealing but also to the duality of possessing and forgetting about possession, grasping and letting go. There is a great passage of the Dao that says, ‘if you want to be free from robbers, do not store up treasure in your house’. If one stores up wealth, one brings theft to one’s doorstep. If one stores up wealth and becomes attached to it, one brings fear of theft to one’s mind (a Zen koan theme is calling intention in the mind a thief, that the grasping of desire in the mind is the real thief). If you do not worry about money, not only do you not have to worry about stealing from others, you do not worry about others stealing from you, no matter how much one has!
Also, consider that if one steals and gets away with it, this makes the compulsion for stealing stronger. One continues to steal, and then gets caught. Getting away with stealing can be a major cause of getting caught stealing, a paradox similar to the bad example attack on Utilitarianism (in this case, ‘good’ examples can lead to bad just as bad examples can lead to good).
One problem with using balance here: should we think that we can do bad as long as we balance it out with good? If we give to charity every time we steal, does this balance things for our own merit or for the shared situation?
Drive and Self Interest
At first, it seems that this concept would tell us, ‘steal to your heart’s content’. This may prove harder than it sounds. Is it in one’s self interest to steal from everyone? Not if everyone has large sticks and helmets haven’t been invented yet. Unfortunately, this concept is best for understanding the international situation and the reading I gave you from Zinn. America today feels that it must indebt the third world to itself to strengthen its capitalist way of life, as it did during the Cold War. Supporters of the Vietnam war as well as the ‘War on Terrorism’ today say openly on the News that we need to ‘defend America’s interests’. Thought the word ‘economic’ is left off the front of ‘interests’ here, this is essentially what is being argued. America is a very fine omelet (a money credit omelet, if you will), and this means eggs need to be stolen from the hen house. Perkins’ book gives us excellent insight into its mechanisms.
Perspective and Intersubjectivity
To repeat what was said at the beginning, we have all had the experience of stealing and having things stolen. Hopefully there is something that moves us towards wisdom in not stealing even though theft seems an inevitable and in fact integral part of our world. Aside from the ‘Golden Rule’, there is likely no other constant source of deterrence from theft considering that the government that prints the money and prosecutes the theft also in some circumstances supports theft between its citizens and steals from other governments in the name of life.
To further show the mechanisms and complexity of theft in the modern world, there is no better nor more relevant documentary than ‘The Corporation’.
The notion of ‘property’ is bound up with European and Western identity, often seen as a principle of politics particular to Europe or fully realized in full within European historical development. We can easily see, however, that the origins of property, like most human cultures, has its origins in ape social behavior. While Europe has developed cultures of property that are highly sophisticated, these stem from cultural borrowings as much as they do from within Europe itself. Consider Islamic cultures of borrowing with interest, writing and cashing checks, etc.
Turning to ape behavior to see precedents, we can clearly identify with apes both in focusing on and becoming possessive of objects and forgetting this possession and its objects. Consider that an ape will become attached to a banana, fight against other apes that try to take the banana, and then, upon seeing a better banana, the ape will abandon the first and ignore whether or not the first falls into other hands. We can see that the ape can come to possess as ‘mine not yours’, and come to forget this possessing (‘neither mine nor yours’). This is parallel with self-other distinctions already discussed, as with the child psychology that says in the beginning there is neither and both must arise together in tension (codependent arising of Jainism and Buddhism).
There is also evidence that apes can not only fall into a ‘mine vs. everyone’ relation of possession (of objects), but apes can also recognize other apes as possessing objects themselves (selfish as other). Consider the case (from an old Anthropology class of mine) of the female chimpanzee ignoring another male chimpanzee trying to give her a banana for sex, and how the female only snatches the banana for herself when the male ape gets bored and goes out of sight so that there is no expected reciprocity. We should be cautious of the sexism here (females ‘push bananas’ at males too), but also marvel in how familiar this behavior is to humanity (next week, we will see that apes know lying too).
Humans, of course, have taken these impulses and instincts and complexified them with many inter-competing cultures, cultures that are actually capable of stealing from each other as much as they can describe and criminalize stealing themselves! While there are many intellectuals who have defended the view that while trade is universal only the West developed ‘capital’, I am critical of this view (interestingly enough, the one to coin this specialized term was the great opponent of Capitalism, Karl Marx). We have yet to do justice to intercultural borrowings, and ‘The West’ is very proud of its economics today. Is ‘capital’ a new device, particular to Western thought? I think that a study of Islam passing to Europe shows this can only be a partial truth, but we get a better view if we turn back the clock to the origin of the device known as MONEY, capital being one of its distant yet certain relatives.
Where does money come from? Why does it exist? What relationship does money have to theft, and is this different from the relationship between theft and any other object?
Money is a very interesting and unique device. Before wood pulp paper bank notes, the Sumerians and Babylonians get the credit for coining money first, the government controlling the pressing process of coinage. Today, we use Chinese style paper bank notes, backed by the government, just like in China after 500 CE or so. Wood block printing and the block printing press are other devices of Chinese origin that are crucial to this process. These two stages suggest that ‘capital’, though it may have been developed to its extent today in Europe and increasingly in American privatizing economics, cannot possibly have been a ‘inwardly European’ device of the ‘Western mind’. Other cultures of mind have had no problem inventing and using devices that are the ancestors of modern day capital.
But, WHY MONEY?
Before money, people of course possessed many things and traded them between individuals and groups. This trade was always barter, swapping one sort of thing for another sort of thing without the device of money as swapping medium. As people settled into city states, practices of borrowing and lending became stabilized. The first money was likely tokens indicating amounts of stuff borrowed from the ruler or other wealthy individuals.
The culture which includes the device of money has advantages over the culture of mere barter. Money as a device is very simple, simple the ways that numbers are simple for much the same purpose. Money is good (and bad) because it is very easy to gather/amass and divide/distribute, much more than any other object or substance.
Consider the salmon fisher in a village. She goes down to the water, and scores 20 large salmon. This is far more than she can eat, but she can trade salmon for other things that she needs in the barter culture. However, salmon does not keep for long, even if one knows how to salt and preserve it. What happens if she goes to the market and not many people want or need salmon that day? What if she has enough salmon to get what she wants, but there are not enough people who need salmon to trade with her for what she wants? In a culture where the salmon can be sold for money, you can keep the money for thirty years (even with inflation and other problems, deterioration of coins, etc) but no one can keep salmon for thirty years, even with freezers! In this way, money is much easier to amass and to keep than salmon.
In the same way, money is easier to divide than salmon. Let us say our fisher comes to market with 20 large salmon, and wants to trade for a basket. I, the basket maker, tell her that one third of a salmon is worth one basket, but I want the front half of the salmon. What happens if she wants to leave the salmon uncut, or if she needs four fifths of a salmon later for someone else? What if she wants to keep all the fish heads for herself? Money has no features to it other than quantity, even though the pictures are often very pretty. Fifty dollars is just fifty things, nothing less, so there is no problem with changing it to two twenties and a ten. You cannot make a whole salmon again from twenty salmon heads! In this way, money is much easier to divide and distribute than salmon. If we consider the bustle of a crowded market, it becomes clear why money would be such a useful (and thus abusive) device, and how its invention allowed for the modern merchants and bankers of today. Consider the trillion dollar bailout today, how this is very abstract yet very real for many people. Luck for us we do not need to bail out banks with truckloads of salmon!
There are, however, two great disadvantages to the culture of money use:
First, theft, like trade, becomes easier! In fact, money not only creates and supports many types of legal economics, it simultaneously creates and supports many types of illegal economics like paying money for sex or drugs (Derrida and the signature).
Second, the desire for money becomes quite intense. Considering that money, sex and cocaine have been shown to light up similar areas of the human brain, money to barter is like cocaine to chewing coca leaves. Since money can be traded for anything, even ironically illegal things, the draw towards money becomes the draw towards any and everything desired. In this sense, the desire for money is far more intense than the desire for salmon because money can buy salmon, or remain money, or buy anything else if one ceases wanting salmon. Just as having salmon means that the possibility of eating salmon is now practically guaranteed, having money means the possibility of satisfying any desire whatsoever is guaranteed. This ultimately means that there is far more reason to steal money than there is to steal salmon, strange considering that you can eat salmon and live off of it alone!
In terms of world politics, which includes the Zinn reading I gave you, stealing and money are central issues of identity. Communism and Capitalism are divided on the issue of money, even as Communists print government money and Capitalists organize socialist programs (public education like BCC, social welfare, public roads and institutions). The question is: do you trust the government or the corporations more with your money and economics (an instance of the one/many problem again)? America has shown that there are great advantages to privatization, letting corporations control economics rather than the centralized government. Unfortunately, this does not do away with problems of authority and corruption (consider that PG&E is still in charge of California’s power, a pretty plum, in spite of being convicted of stealing from Californians en masse). Truth be told, both America and the Soviet Union told third world countries that they would not steal from them or enslave them like their other surely would, only to both be guilty of similar forms of corrupt authoritarianism.
A great book to read on all of this is John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He actually came to BCC last semester for a reading, but I had my other job. As Perkins says so perfectly, in American foreign relations we try to get people in debt to us because that binds everyone to our economy and our desires. I know firsthand from UCB Hass Business School students that indebting the poor here in America and poor third world countries is an open practice, spoken of openly in instruction. The financial crisis today was clearly caused by irresponsible and predatory lending. Our newspapers never speak of these things, but a piece on NPR my friend gave to me will tell you just as clearly and honestly an economics professor at Hass. CREDIT is itself like money, a device that has its advantages but also its disadvantages, especially for the disadvantaged. If our economy falls far from where it is today, it could very well be due to the disadvantages of credit and capital that we have stalled and distanced from ourselves for the time being as a privileged and advantaged culture. The point is: money helps the advantaged steal from the disadvantaged, even as it helps the disadvantaged gain advantage! This is why Americans are relatively wealthy yet there is an increasing gap between rich and poor here as well as in the third world. While the ‘American way’ sometimes allows the poor to get rich, it also very much allows the rich to get much richer and there is only so much in the pot.
Of course, the rich are also more encouraged than ever to steal from the rich as well as from the poor. Consider in 1996 CIA convicted of manipulating business to favor Americans over Australians. Neither Australians nor Americans can recall this, due to lack of media coverage in both locations. Since America and Australia are both wealthy Capitalist countries, you are only doing the system disservice by making such a scandal public.
Now that we have briefly examined the history of money and advantage, we have set the stage to ask the question of theft. The Ethical question we must ask is: Is theft ever justified?
We can use our Ethical concepts we have studied to give various answers to this question. While I will not say that there is a certain answer here, we can see that there are many ways of answering the question but each has its problems. This is how we know we are investigating the question in matters of real life and not in an ideal construct.
Principle
Kant, of course, would give the first and most positive answer to this question: NO, theft of property is NEVER justified. Notice that Kant, living in the German Enlightenment of the 1700s, is very proud of the culture of property and considers the possession of property to be an entirely reasonable and principled act. This is questionable when we trace its roots all the way back to chimpanzee behavior, of course.
This answer has the obvious advantage of never getting one involved in most questions of stealing, but there remain issues. What if one’s society is stealing from another, and legally one has become wealthy within the stealing society? While we could imagine that one is ignorant of the ongoing theft and therefore not DIRECTLY guilty of theft, one is INDIRECTLY guilty. Societies, especially America, store their wealth in the pockets of the wealthy. America stores its wealth in its millionaires and billionaires primarily, and encourages these individuals economically to siphon money from other economies and put it in their pockets because this is the central way that America gets wealthier. Thus, while one may hold fast to the principle of ‘I shall not steal’, one could be complicit in groups and cultures that are engaged in theft that benefits the individual and the individual actively supports (even in the absence of conscious consent).
Virtue & Consequence
According to the concept of ethical virtue, theft is fully justified as long as the individual is virtuous or becomes virtuous through the act of theft. In a very similar way, Utilitarians and Consequentialists would argue that theft is justified if in the long term it results in good and justice, much happiness and prevention of harm. Seems impossible? Robin Hood is the perfect example for consideration. If I rob the evil rich people and give to poor people who are starving (i.e. if we construct an example in which many would agree), many would say that I am virtuous and that I have acted for the best ends in the long view. I may be hanged for the crimes, but my actions benefit others and can be argued to benefit my own character (though this is debatable).
Balance
The concept of balance draws our attention not only to the duality of stealing and not stealing but also to the duality of possessing and forgetting about possession, grasping and letting go. There is a great passage of the Dao that says, ‘if you want to be free from robbers, do not store up treasure in your house’. If one stores up wealth, one brings theft to one’s doorstep. If one stores up wealth and becomes attached to it, one brings fear of theft to one’s mind (a Zen koan theme is calling intention in the mind a thief, that the grasping of desire in the mind is the real thief). If you do not worry about money, not only do you not have to worry about stealing from others, you do not worry about others stealing from you, no matter how much one has!
Also, consider that if one steals and gets away with it, this makes the compulsion for stealing stronger. One continues to steal, and then gets caught. Getting away with stealing can be a major cause of getting caught stealing, a paradox similar to the bad example attack on Utilitarianism (in this case, ‘good’ examples can lead to bad just as bad examples can lead to good).
One problem with using balance here: should we think that we can do bad as long as we balance it out with good? If we give to charity every time we steal, does this balance things for our own merit or for the shared situation?
Drive and Self Interest
At first, it seems that this concept would tell us, ‘steal to your heart’s content’. This may prove harder than it sounds. Is it in one’s self interest to steal from everyone? Not if everyone has large sticks and helmets haven’t been invented yet. Unfortunately, this concept is best for understanding the international situation and the reading I gave you from Zinn. America today feels that it must indebt the third world to itself to strengthen its capitalist way of life, as it did during the Cold War. Supporters of the Vietnam war as well as the ‘War on Terrorism’ today say openly on the News that we need to ‘defend America’s interests’. Thought the word ‘economic’ is left off the front of ‘interests’ here, this is essentially what is being argued. America is a very fine omelet (a money credit omelet, if you will), and this means eggs need to be stolen from the hen house. Perkins’ book gives us excellent insight into its mechanisms.
Perspective and Intersubjectivity
To repeat what was said at the beginning, we have all had the experience of stealing and having things stolen. Hopefully there is something that moves us towards wisdom in not stealing even though theft seems an inevitable and in fact integral part of our world. Aside from the ‘Golden Rule’, there is likely no other constant source of deterrence from theft considering that the government that prints the money and prosecutes the theft also in some circumstances supports theft between its citizens and steals from other governments in the name of life.
To further show the mechanisms and complexity of theft in the modern world, there is no better nor more relevant documentary than ‘The Corporation’.
Social & Political Philosophy: Hegel, Dialectic & Revolution
Hegel (1770-1831) is one of my favorite philosophers. In order to understand Hegel we study Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, the book that got me and others such as Angela Davis into Hegel. In the first part of Marcuse’s book he examines Hegel’s philosophy as it developed through his life (a very Hegelian method), and in the second part he examines Marx’s philosophy and later Marxist theorists building on while transforming Hegel’s philosophy. There will be more on Marcuse and his impact on the 60s next week with Socialism, as he is again one of the central authors we will read on the subject.
In college, I took a class on Hegel from a visiting German professor. I did not understand Hegel reading Hegel, but later in graduate school I read Marcuse’s book and got into a skeptical yet Hegelian view of the mind and reality. American and British schools neglected the study of Hegel until after the fall of the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union promoted the study of both Hegel and Marx as the science of history. Marcuse’s book is in fact a post-Marxist socialist rescuing of Hegel from theorists who argued that Hegel was a fascist and his ideas lead to Stalinist dictatorial communism (such as Popper).
Today we introduce Hegel, his life and important ideas, and finish with Hegel’s Phenomenology (his theory of History) and its master/slave Dialectic. Next time, we will look at Hegel’s Logic (his theory of psychology, his Philosophy of Right (his political theory) and the following of the Young Hegelians (the most famous being Marx). This will set us for studying socialism and communism in the coming weeks.
THE LIFE OF HEGEL
As I mentioned already, Hegel was a teenager during the French Revolution, and like his fellow German and European youth he watched with great anticipation hoping for radical change of tradition in the name of reason and rationality. Recall the Cult of Reason that Robespierre tried to install. Hegel watched the French Revolution and became more cynical and conservative in time. Many scholars have argued that this dialectic in Hegel’s own opinions was formative for his understanding of history and philosophy. By the time Hegel wrote his major work the Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind, he believed that Napoleon was a hero who embodied a new stage of history on horseback, and that Napoleon was a transition to the final form of politics embodied in the German and Prussian state governments that balanced authority with rights and liberties. As we will see when studying communism, Hegel went from believing in continuous revolution like Trotsky to conserving the established state like Lenin, which is also a great continuous change/Reason to supporter of the state/Understanding.
Hegel began his academic career much as Nietzsche, Heidegger and other German philosophers did: studying to be a theologian and Lutheran minister. Nietzsche wrote that one only has to mention the College of Tubingen (where Hegel began study) to know what German philosophy is at bottom: a cunning theology. I myself enjoy pointing out the similarities between Christian Neo-Platonism (the central philosophy of the European middle ages, the material one would study as a German doing theology) and German philosophy and it was the topic of my master’s thesis. Hegel does believe that the process and evolution of history is that of humanity building stage by stage the full understanding and reason of the human mind, which is the mind of God and the universe (similar to the understanding of Newton who was the rage in Hegel’s time). Marx took up this idea but famously “stood Hegel on his head” by taking Hegel’s system of dialectics and arguing that this is not the mind of God but the material science of politics being established according to the necessary process of reason, taking Hegel’s idealistic theism and making it materialistic atheism.
As a youth, Hegel thought that reason and freedom were the true forces of good in the universe, sounding much like a Jacobin. After watching the collapse of the French Revolution, he continued to view reason and freedom as the forerunners of human achievement but came to see understanding and necessity as counterweights that cause history to sway in a back and forth manner that Hegel identified with the Socratic and Platonic method of dialectic, of arguing both sides of an issue back and forth to achieve greater truth.
In 1801, just two years after Napoleon’s coup in France, Hegel began his academic career as a professor of philosophy in Jena. At the time, Kant was the rage in German philosophy, and Hegel’s philosophy developed in dialogue with Kant and others in vogue at the time. Hegel particularly took up Kant’s idea that understanding and reason are oppositional forces of the human mind and conceived of all history, including philosophy and politics, to be a dialectical evolution between these two forces.
HEGEL’S CORE IDEAS AND SYSTEM
Hegel has two major ideas that became very influential for later thinkers. The first is historical explanation or explanation by process. Hegel argues that things are not simply what they are at once, but evolve through stages to become what they are, and the process by which they evolve show us how the things essentially work. Also, things are not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things by which they become what they are. After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Freud were major thinkers who overturned old theories of static order with new theories of process to explain the workings of the mind and society. Consider that Newton thought God made the earth at the very beginning in an instant, while most believe today that there was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy formed. Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin, and how this questions our human-centered understanding of reality.
Hegel’s second major idea, the mechanism or motion of evolution over time, is dialectic. Dialectic is a Greek term for arguing back and forth, for and against a position, to come to greater understanding. Socrates and Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and Plato’s dialogues present Socrates arguing against others and himself in this way. Hegel argues that all things are made of oppositions or contradictions (contra-diction means “arguing against”, like arguing both sides, the pros and cons, of a particular thing). This is similar to Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal but opposite force.
Hegel’s dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and synthesis. Consider the French monarchy and feudalism, the French Revolution, and Napoleon. Consider the hometown conservative, the college liberal, and someone trying to find the overall truth after taking both sides. Hegel presents ideas as starting out positive (dogmatism), flipping and becoming negative (skepticism), and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole which then goes on to become the next positive or dogma for another stage of evolution. Hegel argues that by looking at things as evolving over time in a situation, not immediate and isolated, and looking at things as two sided and in opposition to themselves and others, rather than categorical and without tension, we can come to understand how things actually are, which is a union (while an opposition) of how they are in the mind and world.
In the course of the history and evolution of politics and philosophy, thought has to gather everything into a universal whole while at the same time dividing everything up into their particular parts. It does this with the two opposite forces or faculties of understanding and reason.
Understanding, the anchor and stability of the mind, has two jobs: keeping thought the same and keeping conceptions separate. Reason, the motion and freedom of the mind, also has two jobs, which are naturally opposite those of understanding: continuously changing thought and uniting conceptions together as a whole. This is the reason that dogmatic and conservative thought wants to keep traditions and ideas as they are and prevent them from getting mixed up, while skeptical and liberal thought want to change traditions and ideas and criticize the separate categorical differences of the understanding with inter-relativity. While everyone uses both understanding and reason continuously everyday and at every stage, dogmatists and conservatives prefer set understandings to fluid reasoning while skeptics and liberals prefer fluid reasoning to set understandings.
For Hegel, at each stage in any area of thought (religion, politics, philosophy, science etc) understanding provides the stable ground for the back and forth positions of reason. Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Theologians fight theologians in the name of religion, lawyers fight lawyers in the name of law, philosophers fight philosophers in the name of philosophy, and scientists fight scientists in the name of science. For Hegel there really is only one tree-like being which is mind/spirit, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought. Many have written a good deal about Hegel and Marx each coming to set understandings and then being contradicted and developed by later thinkers in the names of Hegel and Marx themselves.
Remember that Radin argued there are philosophers in all cultures, but they are rare. Hegel argues in his Logic that philosophers are rare because most get stuck in a one-sided understanding either on the side of dogma/understanding or skepticism/reason, and it is only the rare individual who can see the latest stage’s contradiction on both sides and become the understanding of the next stage (just like Napoleon). My own take on Hegel is much like that of Marcuse: dialectic is not giving us the unopposable truth, but powerful new truths (interpretations for Nietzsche, descriptions for Wittgenstein) that will be opposed but also supported by others in the continuous evolution/revolutions of truth and history. Recall Thoreau wondering about American democracy.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT/MIND
I disagree with Hegel’s history because it is quite simplistic and eurocentric, but it is an excellent introduction to Hegel’s thought not only because it was his first major work, after which he wrote the Logic to clarify the inner process of the mind at work in this history. Like the Logic, it shows dialectic working in three stages to complete itself as a union of contradictory sides.
For Hegel, the first stage of history is the Orientals. Hegel uses this term as it was used until recently, before the 1960s, to refer to everyone who is not European. As archeology in Hegel’s time had revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel puts this as the first and basic starting stage in human development. It is good that this is the non-European start, but unfortunate that all further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the development is a course of Europe becoming different from others. The Orientals understand objectivity and the state, two powerful positives. The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not question their society or science. They see the real as real, but do not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned. It is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel argues make this next leap and become the second stage of history.
The Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of objectivity as subjectivity. While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who did this, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the earlier empires as more complex and also that the Greeks were only one civilization of many that made leaps forward like this (Jaspers calls the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese, the three places we studied in the ancient world in depth, the axial age). Just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understand the negative, the temporary, subjective and perspective. Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing Being and Non-Being together as Becoming, and sees Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further development. However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks still put Being off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire or Plato’s static ideal forms.
It is the Germans, and specifically Hegel himself, who see the true unity of objectivity and subjectivity, of state and individual, of necessity and freedom, of science and discovery, to complete the history of thought in three stages. Notice that Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in a page, with no credit at all. The Europeans, are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world. Hegel sees Hume and Kant as the last negative and positive before his own system of unification. Hegel believes that history is almost at its completion in his time with his own philosophy and the politics of the German parliamentary state which balances collective objectivity with individual subjectivity, balancing authority with rights, liberty and property as Locke argued it should. Rights and property are the unity of objective and subjective, the unity of the state and the individual understandings and perspectives.
THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC
One of the main ideas that structures Hegel’s Phenomenology is the Master/Slave dialectic, the continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next in history. It works equally on the level of idea, individual and social movement. At first, the individual goes out into the world and discovers that there are other beings out there with other opinions and views. The individual thus wants to at first kill, later conquer these others, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be objectivity. The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master, and develops understanding with reason while the master deteriorates and grows lazy in a stagnant understanding/political arrangement. The slave comes to realize that one can do things for someone else (doing things for self and other at the same time), overcoming his own desires, and thus develops and triumphs over the master and becomes the next master.
This is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap seeing subjectivity and objectivity as two sides of the same thing. Notice that this tells us the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and the Germans were slaves of the Greeks! This is not often pointed out, but it is implied by Hegel and confirmed by historians today.
The Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Marx. Marx argued that just as the French Revolution threw off the old masters, the clergy and nobility, the coming communist revolutions would throw off the new masters, the industrial capitalists. Feminist Hegelians use the master/slave dialectic for women, like Simone de Beauvoir did in ‘The Second Sex’. Post-Colonialists use the master/slave dialectic for oppressed minorities, such as Franz Fanon did in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as did the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis (who went to Germany to study Hegel before going to jail for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the 60s). Considering that class, race and gender are the ‘big 3’ issues in academia since the 60s, Hegel is quite influential.
HEGEL’S LOGIC
After writing the Phenomenology, Hegel came to realize that he had not described the inner workings of the dialectical process of history to his liking. Hegel believed the world consisted of ideas, so he leaves history behind and turns to the workings of ideas in the mind. To show the inner psychology at work in every stage of historical development, he wrote his Logic which like the Phenomenology unfolds in three stages as positive, negative and synthesis, but instead of Orientals, Greeks and Germans, the three stages of the Logic are Being, Essence, and Concept.
Remember the dialectical process of the opposite yet complementary forces/faculties of understanding and reason. Why is thought opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Hegel writes that we need to start with the “legend” of the fall of man, of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important. This is entirely in the vein of Enlightenment Deists reading the Bible as a work of philosophy and psychology rather than literal history or religious authority. When Adam/consciousness, falls into the divided world and out of the unity of paradise, he/it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can see a similar in physics as the Big Bang and in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget & Vygotsky). Just as Adam and Eve have to toil for food and survival once out of Eden, knowledge and wisdom must be gained by effort and the process of history. Hegel argued that work and labor are a contradiction of subject and object, of ideal and actuality, of the mental and the physical. Marx entirely follows Hegel on this point, and both see the work (modes of production) of each age as a revealing of another level of truth through history.
Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding. However, these are inadequate. First, they are one sided, and so dogmatic, stuck. They are divided from each other and the All, so reason is not satisfied and tries to figure out how all of these separate categories are one in reality, or the big One/All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content. A cow is a cow, and not a horse, but without contradicting the separation of the categories and comparing a cow to a horse such that we can gather the similarities and divide the differences we can’t develop a greater understanding. In the Logic Hegel writes:
That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites… However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.
Hegel writes that the feeling of being alive is to feel contradiction within oneself, at rest in itself but at the same time moving itself beyond itself. It both wants to stay and go at once, and does. Similarly, the Soviet literary critic and thinker Bakhtin said that when we think we are in dialogue with ourselves, are opposed to ourselves on opposite sides.
In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that Heraclitus realized the unity of Being and Non-Being as ceaseless Becoming, as the flux of the cosmic fire. Hegel says that some say no one is capable of understanding contradiction, but Hegel points to Heraclitus and argues that to come to the next level in your understanding your reason has to see both sides and unite them in the cement of the understanding, which is what Heraclitus did for the Greeks such that they could rise beyond the Orientals to the next level. Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and non-being as one like Heraclitus. It is recognizing this with the categories of our understanding (one-sided logic and grammar) that is the hard part. Hegel says that this is the hurdle that prevents the common person from being a philosopher, and the reason that the great thinkers and revolutions in thought are rare.
Once thought realizes becoming as the unity of the being of things and their non-being (their temporary being in time and their not being other things), thought still does not have enough to understand each and every thing or how they fit into the All as one. Thought tries to understand the individual beings of the world and the world itself as constant becoming, like Heraclitus, but this does not show us how things are particularly interrelated. ‘All is one and in flux’ is an excellent truth (one of my favorites), but it tells us nothing of particular beings or stages of history. For this, reason must push towards more contradictions.
Thought must explore two opposite directions to try to find the meaning of individual things. First, it tries to understand things by their qualities (such as green, square, closed), but this moves away from the things themselves towards abstract ideas. Second, thought tries to understand things by their quantities, with each thing being a one itself and being a quantity of many parts and being in a group of many members. Unfortunately, this leaves each being as merely a thing, and tells us nothing about the specific differences between types of things. Notice that quality and quantity are the two opposite sides to our abstractions of things, the two ways we isolate and abstract, through thought, the parts and ways of things. Consider that your hand is not explainable simply by its shape, or color, or texture, any more than its being one hand with five fingers, though all of this together tells me much about my hand. To understand your hand, you have to see it in context, in the world used with other things, as well as understand the qualities and quantities of the hand.
Because thought could not understand things in their qualities and quantities, it tries to understand things by putting them in groups and then understanding the qualities and quantities of these groups. It either puts these essences outside the world (as Plato put them up in the stars), or inside of things as “nature”. It seeks the meaning of the thing in its group because it could not find it completely in ‘All as One’ or in singular things. The problem with this stage is that things are still isolated in groups by type and this prevents the understanding from grasping their interdependence and codependent evolution (much like the Buddhist concept of codependent arising). Hegel is very aware that modern science is often in this mode, isolating things and finding new truths about their exclusive natures. For Hegel, Plato’s forms, Kant’s categories and scientific theories are good but they are not complete because they are not like the world in which everything fits together as one. Hegel says that essences, if they remain many and are not gathered into a trunk of the All, still have contradictions in themselves and against each-other and so they are opposed to unity.
Through further dialectic, the idea and the thing are realized as one in the Concept, which includes the thought and thing. When we see that the world is in our minds and in itself together as one, that things are our ideas about them and themselves for us as one that is also many, this is Actuality, the final stage. Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory and modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle, the final contradiction that reason must push the understanding beyond itself to grasp. To see that no part of reality is absolutely necessary, but no part is absolutely free, and the two hang together as opposites always like light and darkness, this is the final stage that lets us see things as they are. Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and speculation, with a ground to continue to investigate and understand things with all the branching of the Idea by which we could ever understand them to be. All becomes a single Idea, which is in extension with the world.
Marx was deeply influenced by Hegel’s Logic, which gave him a social process of opposites resolving in unity. Marx wrote that Hegel’s Logic is by nature revolutionary and thus a scandal to the well positioned (the middle and upper classes). Marx argued that the bourgeoisie were trapped in their middle-class roles just as understandings are trapped in isolation, and that Hegel’s Logic separated his own thinking from that of other academics who were complicit with the status quo. Just as Hegel said the average person cannot comprehend contradiction and thus remain stuck in their undeveloped understandings, Marx saw the middle and lower classes as stuck because they cannot see the problems and contradictions of their position and labor. However, through a process identical with the master/slave dialectic, Marx believed this would eventually result in a greater understanding by way of reason and the political arrangement of the communist international state. Not only would the contradictions between classes be transcended, but also the contradictions between warring nation-states.
Both Hegel and Marx saw the business class as embodying a new synthesis of laborer and capitalist that creates new contradictions. Hegel was aware of the misery of the working class in Germany and England under rising industrialism and manufacturing, and spoke of these contradictions in his lectures even though he was not arguing for a communist revolution but rather a resolution in the form of the German state.
In 1914, just as WWI was being declared, Lenin (who was in neutral Switzerland along with other influential figures such as the Dada artists who kicked off much of modern art) studied Hegel’s Logic intensely to comprehend Marx. Lenin, like Marx, saw Hegel’s Logic as bringing the abstract and ideal down into unity with the material. For Marx and Lenin, this was a call to materialism and a recognition that ideas exist by way of the historical and material.
Most importantly for this class, Marx and Lenin followed Hegel in his criticism of Rousseau: it is not simply the arbitrary individual will that binds everyone together in the general will and the social contract, but rather the understanding/reasoning of individuals that determines the community and draws individuals together in groups and classes. Thus, Marx and Lenin saw communism as political science, as a result of ages of understandings/classes developed through reason/revolution. Note that this is complimenting Rousseau’s romantic will with rationalistic reason. Nietzsche, who like Hegel was influenced by Rousseau and a fan while critical, pushed back against reason to center on freedom and the will like Rousseau did originally. In the mid 1800s, the German people rose up in revolution to gain rights like the British, French and Americans and were crushed by the princes banding together. Marx wrote his major works in this period for a German revolutionary audience. The failure of the German revolution was the major cause of German pessimism, a turn from reason as the force of history to will as the force of history. We will consider this more we cover Nietzsche, the Nazis and Fascism.
We will cover the Young Hegelians as the first topic of Socialism next week.
In college, I took a class on Hegel from a visiting German professor. I did not understand Hegel reading Hegel, but later in graduate school I read Marcuse’s book and got into a skeptical yet Hegelian view of the mind and reality. American and British schools neglected the study of Hegel until after the fall of the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union promoted the study of both Hegel and Marx as the science of history. Marcuse’s book is in fact a post-Marxist socialist rescuing of Hegel from theorists who argued that Hegel was a fascist and his ideas lead to Stalinist dictatorial communism (such as Popper).
Today we introduce Hegel, his life and important ideas, and finish with Hegel’s Phenomenology (his theory of History) and its master/slave Dialectic. Next time, we will look at Hegel’s Logic (his theory of psychology, his Philosophy of Right (his political theory) and the following of the Young Hegelians (the most famous being Marx). This will set us for studying socialism and communism in the coming weeks.
THE LIFE OF HEGEL
As I mentioned already, Hegel was a teenager during the French Revolution, and like his fellow German and European youth he watched with great anticipation hoping for radical change of tradition in the name of reason and rationality. Recall the Cult of Reason that Robespierre tried to install. Hegel watched the French Revolution and became more cynical and conservative in time. Many scholars have argued that this dialectic in Hegel’s own opinions was formative for his understanding of history and philosophy. By the time Hegel wrote his major work the Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind, he believed that Napoleon was a hero who embodied a new stage of history on horseback, and that Napoleon was a transition to the final form of politics embodied in the German and Prussian state governments that balanced authority with rights and liberties. As we will see when studying communism, Hegel went from believing in continuous revolution like Trotsky to conserving the established state like Lenin, which is also a great continuous change/Reason to supporter of the state/Understanding.
Hegel began his academic career much as Nietzsche, Heidegger and other German philosophers did: studying to be a theologian and Lutheran minister. Nietzsche wrote that one only has to mention the College of Tubingen (where Hegel began study) to know what German philosophy is at bottom: a cunning theology. I myself enjoy pointing out the similarities between Christian Neo-Platonism (the central philosophy of the European middle ages, the material one would study as a German doing theology) and German philosophy and it was the topic of my master’s thesis. Hegel does believe that the process and evolution of history is that of humanity building stage by stage the full understanding and reason of the human mind, which is the mind of God and the universe (similar to the understanding of Newton who was the rage in Hegel’s time). Marx took up this idea but famously “stood Hegel on his head” by taking Hegel’s system of dialectics and arguing that this is not the mind of God but the material science of politics being established according to the necessary process of reason, taking Hegel’s idealistic theism and making it materialistic atheism.
As a youth, Hegel thought that reason and freedom were the true forces of good in the universe, sounding much like a Jacobin. After watching the collapse of the French Revolution, he continued to view reason and freedom as the forerunners of human achievement but came to see understanding and necessity as counterweights that cause history to sway in a back and forth manner that Hegel identified with the Socratic and Platonic method of dialectic, of arguing both sides of an issue back and forth to achieve greater truth.
In 1801, just two years after Napoleon’s coup in France, Hegel began his academic career as a professor of philosophy in Jena. At the time, Kant was the rage in German philosophy, and Hegel’s philosophy developed in dialogue with Kant and others in vogue at the time. Hegel particularly took up Kant’s idea that understanding and reason are oppositional forces of the human mind and conceived of all history, including philosophy and politics, to be a dialectical evolution between these two forces.
HEGEL’S CORE IDEAS AND SYSTEM
Hegel has two major ideas that became very influential for later thinkers. The first is historical explanation or explanation by process. Hegel argues that things are not simply what they are at once, but evolve through stages to become what they are, and the process by which they evolve show us how the things essentially work. Also, things are not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things by which they become what they are. After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Freud were major thinkers who overturned old theories of static order with new theories of process to explain the workings of the mind and society. Consider that Newton thought God made the earth at the very beginning in an instant, while most believe today that there was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy formed. Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin, and how this questions our human-centered understanding of reality.
Hegel’s second major idea, the mechanism or motion of evolution over time, is dialectic. Dialectic is a Greek term for arguing back and forth, for and against a position, to come to greater understanding. Socrates and Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and Plato’s dialogues present Socrates arguing against others and himself in this way. Hegel argues that all things are made of oppositions or contradictions (contra-diction means “arguing against”, like arguing both sides, the pros and cons, of a particular thing). This is similar to Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal but opposite force.
Hegel’s dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and synthesis. Consider the French monarchy and feudalism, the French Revolution, and Napoleon. Consider the hometown conservative, the college liberal, and someone trying to find the overall truth after taking both sides. Hegel presents ideas as starting out positive (dogmatism), flipping and becoming negative (skepticism), and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole which then goes on to become the next positive or dogma for another stage of evolution. Hegel argues that by looking at things as evolving over time in a situation, not immediate and isolated, and looking at things as two sided and in opposition to themselves and others, rather than categorical and without tension, we can come to understand how things actually are, which is a union (while an opposition) of how they are in the mind and world.
In the course of the history and evolution of politics and philosophy, thought has to gather everything into a universal whole while at the same time dividing everything up into their particular parts. It does this with the two opposite forces or faculties of understanding and reason.
Understanding, the anchor and stability of the mind, has two jobs: keeping thought the same and keeping conceptions separate. Reason, the motion and freedom of the mind, also has two jobs, which are naturally opposite those of understanding: continuously changing thought and uniting conceptions together as a whole. This is the reason that dogmatic and conservative thought wants to keep traditions and ideas as they are and prevent them from getting mixed up, while skeptical and liberal thought want to change traditions and ideas and criticize the separate categorical differences of the understanding with inter-relativity. While everyone uses both understanding and reason continuously everyday and at every stage, dogmatists and conservatives prefer set understandings to fluid reasoning while skeptics and liberals prefer fluid reasoning to set understandings.
For Hegel, at each stage in any area of thought (religion, politics, philosophy, science etc) understanding provides the stable ground for the back and forth positions of reason. Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Theologians fight theologians in the name of religion, lawyers fight lawyers in the name of law, philosophers fight philosophers in the name of philosophy, and scientists fight scientists in the name of science. For Hegel there really is only one tree-like being which is mind/spirit, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought. Many have written a good deal about Hegel and Marx each coming to set understandings and then being contradicted and developed by later thinkers in the names of Hegel and Marx themselves.
Remember that Radin argued there are philosophers in all cultures, but they are rare. Hegel argues in his Logic that philosophers are rare because most get stuck in a one-sided understanding either on the side of dogma/understanding or skepticism/reason, and it is only the rare individual who can see the latest stage’s contradiction on both sides and become the understanding of the next stage (just like Napoleon). My own take on Hegel is much like that of Marcuse: dialectic is not giving us the unopposable truth, but powerful new truths (interpretations for Nietzsche, descriptions for Wittgenstein) that will be opposed but also supported by others in the continuous evolution/revolutions of truth and history. Recall Thoreau wondering about American democracy.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT/MIND
I disagree with Hegel’s history because it is quite simplistic and eurocentric, but it is an excellent introduction to Hegel’s thought not only because it was his first major work, after which he wrote the Logic to clarify the inner process of the mind at work in this history. Like the Logic, it shows dialectic working in three stages to complete itself as a union of contradictory sides.
For Hegel, the first stage of history is the Orientals. Hegel uses this term as it was used until recently, before the 1960s, to refer to everyone who is not European. As archeology in Hegel’s time had revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel puts this as the first and basic starting stage in human development. It is good that this is the non-European start, but unfortunate that all further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the development is a course of Europe becoming different from others. The Orientals understand objectivity and the state, two powerful positives. The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not question their society or science. They see the real as real, but do not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned. It is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel argues make this next leap and become the second stage of history.
The Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of objectivity as subjectivity. While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who did this, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the earlier empires as more complex and also that the Greeks were only one civilization of many that made leaps forward like this (Jaspers calls the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese, the three places we studied in the ancient world in depth, the axial age). Just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understand the negative, the temporary, subjective and perspective. Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing Being and Non-Being together as Becoming, and sees Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further development. However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks still put Being off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire or Plato’s static ideal forms.
It is the Germans, and specifically Hegel himself, who see the true unity of objectivity and subjectivity, of state and individual, of necessity and freedom, of science and discovery, to complete the history of thought in three stages. Notice that Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in a page, with no credit at all. The Europeans, are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world. Hegel sees Hume and Kant as the last negative and positive before his own system of unification. Hegel believes that history is almost at its completion in his time with his own philosophy and the politics of the German parliamentary state which balances collective objectivity with individual subjectivity, balancing authority with rights, liberty and property as Locke argued it should. Rights and property are the unity of objective and subjective, the unity of the state and the individual understandings and perspectives.
THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC
One of the main ideas that structures Hegel’s Phenomenology is the Master/Slave dialectic, the continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next in history. It works equally on the level of idea, individual and social movement. At first, the individual goes out into the world and discovers that there are other beings out there with other opinions and views. The individual thus wants to at first kill, later conquer these others, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be objectivity. The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master, and develops understanding with reason while the master deteriorates and grows lazy in a stagnant understanding/political arrangement. The slave comes to realize that one can do things for someone else (doing things for self and other at the same time), overcoming his own desires, and thus develops and triumphs over the master and becomes the next master.
This is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap seeing subjectivity and objectivity as two sides of the same thing. Notice that this tells us the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and the Germans were slaves of the Greeks! This is not often pointed out, but it is implied by Hegel and confirmed by historians today.
The Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Marx. Marx argued that just as the French Revolution threw off the old masters, the clergy and nobility, the coming communist revolutions would throw off the new masters, the industrial capitalists. Feminist Hegelians use the master/slave dialectic for women, like Simone de Beauvoir did in ‘The Second Sex’. Post-Colonialists use the master/slave dialectic for oppressed minorities, such as Franz Fanon did in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as did the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis (who went to Germany to study Hegel before going to jail for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the 60s). Considering that class, race and gender are the ‘big 3’ issues in academia since the 60s, Hegel is quite influential.
HEGEL’S LOGIC
After writing the Phenomenology, Hegel came to realize that he had not described the inner workings of the dialectical process of history to his liking. Hegel believed the world consisted of ideas, so he leaves history behind and turns to the workings of ideas in the mind. To show the inner psychology at work in every stage of historical development, he wrote his Logic which like the Phenomenology unfolds in three stages as positive, negative and synthesis, but instead of Orientals, Greeks and Germans, the three stages of the Logic are Being, Essence, and Concept.
Remember the dialectical process of the opposite yet complementary forces/faculties of understanding and reason. Why is thought opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Hegel writes that we need to start with the “legend” of the fall of man, of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important. This is entirely in the vein of Enlightenment Deists reading the Bible as a work of philosophy and psychology rather than literal history or religious authority. When Adam/consciousness, falls into the divided world and out of the unity of paradise, he/it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can see a similar in physics as the Big Bang and in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget & Vygotsky). Just as Adam and Eve have to toil for food and survival once out of Eden, knowledge and wisdom must be gained by effort and the process of history. Hegel argued that work and labor are a contradiction of subject and object, of ideal and actuality, of the mental and the physical. Marx entirely follows Hegel on this point, and both see the work (modes of production) of each age as a revealing of another level of truth through history.
Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding. However, these are inadequate. First, they are one sided, and so dogmatic, stuck. They are divided from each other and the All, so reason is not satisfied and tries to figure out how all of these separate categories are one in reality, or the big One/All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content. A cow is a cow, and not a horse, but without contradicting the separation of the categories and comparing a cow to a horse such that we can gather the similarities and divide the differences we can’t develop a greater understanding. In the Logic Hegel writes:
That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites… However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.
Hegel writes that the feeling of being alive is to feel contradiction within oneself, at rest in itself but at the same time moving itself beyond itself. It both wants to stay and go at once, and does. Similarly, the Soviet literary critic and thinker Bakhtin said that when we think we are in dialogue with ourselves, are opposed to ourselves on opposite sides.
In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that Heraclitus realized the unity of Being and Non-Being as ceaseless Becoming, as the flux of the cosmic fire. Hegel says that some say no one is capable of understanding contradiction, but Hegel points to Heraclitus and argues that to come to the next level in your understanding your reason has to see both sides and unite them in the cement of the understanding, which is what Heraclitus did for the Greeks such that they could rise beyond the Orientals to the next level. Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and non-being as one like Heraclitus. It is recognizing this with the categories of our understanding (one-sided logic and grammar) that is the hard part. Hegel says that this is the hurdle that prevents the common person from being a philosopher, and the reason that the great thinkers and revolutions in thought are rare.
Once thought realizes becoming as the unity of the being of things and their non-being (their temporary being in time and their not being other things), thought still does not have enough to understand each and every thing or how they fit into the All as one. Thought tries to understand the individual beings of the world and the world itself as constant becoming, like Heraclitus, but this does not show us how things are particularly interrelated. ‘All is one and in flux’ is an excellent truth (one of my favorites), but it tells us nothing of particular beings or stages of history. For this, reason must push towards more contradictions.
Thought must explore two opposite directions to try to find the meaning of individual things. First, it tries to understand things by their qualities (such as green, square, closed), but this moves away from the things themselves towards abstract ideas. Second, thought tries to understand things by their quantities, with each thing being a one itself and being a quantity of many parts and being in a group of many members. Unfortunately, this leaves each being as merely a thing, and tells us nothing about the specific differences between types of things. Notice that quality and quantity are the two opposite sides to our abstractions of things, the two ways we isolate and abstract, through thought, the parts and ways of things. Consider that your hand is not explainable simply by its shape, or color, or texture, any more than its being one hand with five fingers, though all of this together tells me much about my hand. To understand your hand, you have to see it in context, in the world used with other things, as well as understand the qualities and quantities of the hand.
Because thought could not understand things in their qualities and quantities, it tries to understand things by putting them in groups and then understanding the qualities and quantities of these groups. It either puts these essences outside the world (as Plato put them up in the stars), or inside of things as “nature”. It seeks the meaning of the thing in its group because it could not find it completely in ‘All as One’ or in singular things. The problem with this stage is that things are still isolated in groups by type and this prevents the understanding from grasping their interdependence and codependent evolution (much like the Buddhist concept of codependent arising). Hegel is very aware that modern science is often in this mode, isolating things and finding new truths about their exclusive natures. For Hegel, Plato’s forms, Kant’s categories and scientific theories are good but they are not complete because they are not like the world in which everything fits together as one. Hegel says that essences, if they remain many and are not gathered into a trunk of the All, still have contradictions in themselves and against each-other and so they are opposed to unity.
Through further dialectic, the idea and the thing are realized as one in the Concept, which includes the thought and thing. When we see that the world is in our minds and in itself together as one, that things are our ideas about them and themselves for us as one that is also many, this is Actuality, the final stage. Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory and modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle, the final contradiction that reason must push the understanding beyond itself to grasp. To see that no part of reality is absolutely necessary, but no part is absolutely free, and the two hang together as opposites always like light and darkness, this is the final stage that lets us see things as they are. Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and speculation, with a ground to continue to investigate and understand things with all the branching of the Idea by which we could ever understand them to be. All becomes a single Idea, which is in extension with the world.
Marx was deeply influenced by Hegel’s Logic, which gave him a social process of opposites resolving in unity. Marx wrote that Hegel’s Logic is by nature revolutionary and thus a scandal to the well positioned (the middle and upper classes). Marx argued that the bourgeoisie were trapped in their middle-class roles just as understandings are trapped in isolation, and that Hegel’s Logic separated his own thinking from that of other academics who were complicit with the status quo. Just as Hegel said the average person cannot comprehend contradiction and thus remain stuck in their undeveloped understandings, Marx saw the middle and lower classes as stuck because they cannot see the problems and contradictions of their position and labor. However, through a process identical with the master/slave dialectic, Marx believed this would eventually result in a greater understanding by way of reason and the political arrangement of the communist international state. Not only would the contradictions between classes be transcended, but also the contradictions between warring nation-states.
Both Hegel and Marx saw the business class as embodying a new synthesis of laborer and capitalist that creates new contradictions. Hegel was aware of the misery of the working class in Germany and England under rising industrialism and manufacturing, and spoke of these contradictions in his lectures even though he was not arguing for a communist revolution but rather a resolution in the form of the German state.
In 1914, just as WWI was being declared, Lenin (who was in neutral Switzerland along with other influential figures such as the Dada artists who kicked off much of modern art) studied Hegel’s Logic intensely to comprehend Marx. Lenin, like Marx, saw Hegel’s Logic as bringing the abstract and ideal down into unity with the material. For Marx and Lenin, this was a call to materialism and a recognition that ideas exist by way of the historical and material.
Most importantly for this class, Marx and Lenin followed Hegel in his criticism of Rousseau: it is not simply the arbitrary individual will that binds everyone together in the general will and the social contract, but rather the understanding/reasoning of individuals that determines the community and draws individuals together in groups and classes. Thus, Marx and Lenin saw communism as political science, as a result of ages of understandings/classes developed through reason/revolution. Note that this is complimenting Rousseau’s romantic will with rationalistic reason. Nietzsche, who like Hegel was influenced by Rousseau and a fan while critical, pushed back against reason to center on freedom and the will like Rousseau did originally. In the mid 1800s, the German people rose up in revolution to gain rights like the British, French and Americans and were crushed by the princes banding together. Marx wrote his major works in this period for a German revolutionary audience. The failure of the German revolution was the major cause of German pessimism, a turn from reason as the force of history to will as the force of history. We will consider this more we cover Nietzsche, the Nazis and Fascism.
We will cover the Young Hegelians as the first topic of Socialism next week.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Social & Political Philosophy: Midterm Review
Apes, Tribal Culture & Early City States
Ape hierarchy, tension between authority and individuality, owning, lying. Human thought pairs of opposites, belief (positive) and doubt (negative), conservatives believing and affirming the institution (stability of the past), progressives doubting and questioning the institution (openness of the future). Philosophy as "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering. All cultures have philosophers, question and change traditions. Radin argues same distribution of intelligence in all societies, philosophers are rare but in all societies. Individuals relative freedom and individuality, no complete agreement to truths. Sumer has first writing, schools, bicameral congress. Barthes in Myth Today, magazine supports colonial French mythology.
Mencius, Xun Zi, Mo Zi & Human Nature
Times of war good for thought, warring states/hundred philosophers period, mandate of heaven. Confucius, heart center, right mind over right act/ritual/tradition, civil service system, treating others as equal, developing/examining the self. Mencius, human nature is good/compassion, child/well proof of essential goodness, four part heart (compassion, shame, courtesy/modesty, right/wrong), battle with Moists over degrees of love, parental compassion/burial as basis of culture, sister-in-law drowning and discretion, compassion like water, barley on various ground. Xun Zi, human nature is evil/desire, city vs. countryside, compassion can be taught given law, tradition and effort, children as immature, environment important. Mo Zi, universal love, possible if accepted by princes, war as killing and theft, Confucians focus on ritual and support warfare and rebellion.
Plato, Aristotle, Caste & Class
Republic three level city corresponding to head, chest, stomach/hands, caste system very like India, one job per person, noble lie, common property/family, allegory of the cave, republic as meritocracy not democracy. Aristotle, each a single job/ergon, thought/philosophy as highest human activity and goal of society, slaves and women as inferior by nature, human as political animal, balance of common and private property vs. Plato.
Machiavelli & Power
Misunderstood, Republican writings vs. the Prince, possible lesson to ruled not rulers, realism vs. Plato & Aristotle ideal city models, necessity of brutality and deception for despot, completely crush the enemy, better feared than loved, everyone reads but also despise work.
Hobbes & Sovereignty
Supporter of Monarchy vs. Parliamentarians, life “solitary, brutish, short”, all more equal than unequal, state of nature as unhappy war of all vs. all, self-preservation as natural right, declaration of social contract transfers liberty of harming others to sovereign, sovereign acts as everyone, has right to kill anyone in name of everyone, can’t commit injustice, like “sun to the stars”.
Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Thoreau, Liberty & Freedom
Locke influential on American Revolution, sided with Parliamentarians vs. Hobbes’ Royalists, need checks and balances vs. unchecked power of the sovereign, natural rights to life and property, social contract necessary to preserve these satisfactorily, right to fruits of labor (for self and servants/slaves), money accumulation unproblematic, blank slate/tabula rasa. Rousseau for individual liberty, state of nature innocent, noble savage, society and progress/technology a mask that conceals brutality, human nature an undefined freedom that can be corrupted, turned to machines and slaves, society must preserve liberty or social contract not valid, bandit with gun metaphor, social contract founded on general will & agreement, society grows out of family but has no love, problem of minority vs. general will. Tutored by Bentham, Mill the great Utilitarian, rethink principles and assumptions based on usefulness/overall happiness (long view & social view), two sides (max happy, min pain) and capitalism vs. socialism, continuous problems & rethinking, paradox of bad example, problem of authority, egalitarianism for slaves and women, democratic economics vs. economic tyranny, problem of “primitive” societies, freedom of speech as best. Thoreau for simple living and nonparticipation in the corrupt and brutal state, comforts and luxuries as hindrance to humanity, balance of nature and society, jail for tax evasion, nonparticipation with Mexican-American war and slavery, Civil Disobedience as opposing the machine with humanity, American democracy not the final step in political evolution.
American & French Revolutions
American calls for checks on sovereign but fear of mob rule, Bill of Rights as compromise with states for federal government, terrorists vs. freedom fighters, most still wanted a monarch, African and Native between/outside the two sides. Paine’s The Rights of Man attacks Burke, authority must arise out of people not over people. Constitution, checks & balances, impeachment, freedom of speech. French Revolution hard times, third estate declares self National Assembly, throwing off the clergy and nobility, left vs. right wing factions, Assembly goes radical left with Paris Commune, Great Terror atrocities, gang warfare till Napoleon takes over as dictator.
Capitalism & Adam Smith
Practiced most extensively in America with privatization so far, other movements as opposition to industrialization/capitalism and problems. Money as better than barter, device to amass and divide, ancient Assyria ruling empire primarily through trade. With industrialization, owners become capitalists, own business/materials/land and make profits while workers trade labor for wages, profit sharing and co-ops as socialist counter to economic tyranny (Mill). Adam Smith argues invisible hand of markets and everyone acting in self-interest more efficient than government trying to provide a planned economy. Mixed economies lean either way, social market capitalism vs. free market capitalism, debate over democracy hand in hand with capitalism.
Short Answer (Pick 4, ½ Page Each, 15 points each)
A Mencius vs. Xun Zi on Human Nature
B)Mencius vs. Mo Zi on Universal Love
C)Hobbes vs. Locke on the Social Contract
D)Hobbes vs. Rousseau on the State of Nature
E)Bentham vs. Mill on Utilitarianism
F)Locke vs. Thoreau on Property
G)Plato vs. Aristotle on Property
Ape hierarchy, tension between authority and individuality, owning, lying. Human thought pairs of opposites, belief (positive) and doubt (negative), conservatives believing and affirming the institution (stability of the past), progressives doubting and questioning the institution (openness of the future). Philosophy as "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering. All cultures have philosophers, question and change traditions. Radin argues same distribution of intelligence in all societies, philosophers are rare but in all societies. Individuals relative freedom and individuality, no complete agreement to truths. Sumer has first writing, schools, bicameral congress. Barthes in Myth Today, magazine supports colonial French mythology.
Mencius, Xun Zi, Mo Zi & Human Nature
Times of war good for thought, warring states/hundred philosophers period, mandate of heaven. Confucius, heart center, right mind over right act/ritual/tradition, civil service system, treating others as equal, developing/examining the self. Mencius, human nature is good/compassion, child/well proof of essential goodness, four part heart (compassion, shame, courtesy/modesty, right/wrong), battle with Moists over degrees of love, parental compassion/burial as basis of culture, sister-in-law drowning and discretion, compassion like water, barley on various ground. Xun Zi, human nature is evil/desire, city vs. countryside, compassion can be taught given law, tradition and effort, children as immature, environment important. Mo Zi, universal love, possible if accepted by princes, war as killing and theft, Confucians focus on ritual and support warfare and rebellion.
Plato, Aristotle, Caste & Class
Republic three level city corresponding to head, chest, stomach/hands, caste system very like India, one job per person, noble lie, common property/family, allegory of the cave, republic as meritocracy not democracy. Aristotle, each a single job/ergon, thought/philosophy as highest human activity and goal of society, slaves and women as inferior by nature, human as political animal, balance of common and private property vs. Plato.
Machiavelli & Power
Misunderstood, Republican writings vs. the Prince, possible lesson to ruled not rulers, realism vs. Plato & Aristotle ideal city models, necessity of brutality and deception for despot, completely crush the enemy, better feared than loved, everyone reads but also despise work.
Hobbes & Sovereignty
Supporter of Monarchy vs. Parliamentarians, life “solitary, brutish, short”, all more equal than unequal, state of nature as unhappy war of all vs. all, self-preservation as natural right, declaration of social contract transfers liberty of harming others to sovereign, sovereign acts as everyone, has right to kill anyone in name of everyone, can’t commit injustice, like “sun to the stars”.
Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Thoreau, Liberty & Freedom
Locke influential on American Revolution, sided with Parliamentarians vs. Hobbes’ Royalists, need checks and balances vs. unchecked power of the sovereign, natural rights to life and property, social contract necessary to preserve these satisfactorily, right to fruits of labor (for self and servants/slaves), money accumulation unproblematic, blank slate/tabula rasa. Rousseau for individual liberty, state of nature innocent, noble savage, society and progress/technology a mask that conceals brutality, human nature an undefined freedom that can be corrupted, turned to machines and slaves, society must preserve liberty or social contract not valid, bandit with gun metaphor, social contract founded on general will & agreement, society grows out of family but has no love, problem of minority vs. general will. Tutored by Bentham, Mill the great Utilitarian, rethink principles and assumptions based on usefulness/overall happiness (long view & social view), two sides (max happy, min pain) and capitalism vs. socialism, continuous problems & rethinking, paradox of bad example, problem of authority, egalitarianism for slaves and women, democratic economics vs. economic tyranny, problem of “primitive” societies, freedom of speech as best. Thoreau for simple living and nonparticipation in the corrupt and brutal state, comforts and luxuries as hindrance to humanity, balance of nature and society, jail for tax evasion, nonparticipation with Mexican-American war and slavery, Civil Disobedience as opposing the machine with humanity, American democracy not the final step in political evolution.
American & French Revolutions
American calls for checks on sovereign but fear of mob rule, Bill of Rights as compromise with states for federal government, terrorists vs. freedom fighters, most still wanted a monarch, African and Native between/outside the two sides. Paine’s The Rights of Man attacks Burke, authority must arise out of people not over people. Constitution, checks & balances, impeachment, freedom of speech. French Revolution hard times, third estate declares self National Assembly, throwing off the clergy and nobility, left vs. right wing factions, Assembly goes radical left with Paris Commune, Great Terror atrocities, gang warfare till Napoleon takes over as dictator.
Capitalism & Adam Smith
Practiced most extensively in America with privatization so far, other movements as opposition to industrialization/capitalism and problems. Money as better than barter, device to amass and divide, ancient Assyria ruling empire primarily through trade. With industrialization, owners become capitalists, own business/materials/land and make profits while workers trade labor for wages, profit sharing and co-ops as socialist counter to economic tyranny (Mill). Adam Smith argues invisible hand of markets and everyone acting in self-interest more efficient than government trying to provide a planned economy. Mixed economies lean either way, social market capitalism vs. free market capitalism, debate over democracy hand in hand with capitalism.
Short Answer (Pick 4, ½ Page Each, 15 points each)
A Mencius vs. Xun Zi on Human Nature
B)Mencius vs. Mo Zi on Universal Love
C)Hobbes vs. Locke on the Social Contract
D)Hobbes vs. Rousseau on the State of Nature
E)Bentham vs. Mill on Utilitarianism
F)Locke vs. Thoreau on Property
G)Plato vs. Aristotle on Property
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