This
lecture covers three things. First, we are going to sketch a broad
picture of human thought and its basic dynamics. Second, we are going
to consider articles including Rational Mastery by Man of his
Surroundings by Malinowski, Baseball Superstition, and the Shotgun Cult
to show that humans had reason and logical thinking in the earliest and
most primitive human cultures. The first article shows us that the
earliest and most basic human cultures are logical and rational, and the
next two articles build on the work of the first. Third and finally,
we will look at selections from Riddling Tales from Around the World to
show that humans, again in the earliest cultures, question truth and
appreciate paradox and contradiction.
The Positives and Negatives of Human Thought
Human
thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites.
It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and
negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive,
while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative.
Full is positive, while empty is negative.
Notice
that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does
not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure
(stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However,
when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds
good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or
order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and
unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing
can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on
context, position and location. In many ways, places and times,
happiness and solidity are good and in others they are bad. Also, no
particular thing is perfectly good or completely solid. We judge the
table (and the wheel, as Lao Zi the patriarch of Daoism will explain
soon) to be simply solid and the space around it to be simply empty, but
no table is immortal or unbreakable, and no space is a perfect vacuum.
Even outer space is full of dust, light and everything else in the
universe. In the same way, particular things that are good or make us
happy do not always make us happy and do not make everyone happy.
Often, things that make one person happy continue to make another
unhappy because they make the first person happy.
Human
belief/judgment has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic
is belief (positive) and doubt (negative). Belief is an answer or
answering, and doubt is a question or questioning. In politics,
conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution
(often looking to the stability and consistency of the past) while
progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution
(often looking to the openness and change of the future). In systems of
thought, dogmatists (also called positivists today) lean towards answers
and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts,
morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting
the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and
truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human
thought is an endless battle between dogmatism and skepticism. This
battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.
When
we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism
to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and
science, we can see that both dogmatism and skepticism play necessary
roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can
be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the
old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great
thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while
bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and
only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question
the very system that they stand for.
In
this class, we will see that in the earliest cultures, and then in
ancient India, Greece and China, dogmatic logicians tried to demonstrate
how to argue rationally for atomic truths (principles of knowledge that
are unquestionably certain) while skeptics tried to demonstrate that no
truth is unquestionable or absolute.
Many
unfortunately believe that philosophy was born in ancient Greece, when
in fact wisdom is universal to human kind even though it is difficult to
achieve. The wise, though rarer than we would like, have been
celebrated in all cultures, and their wisdom has similarity across all
cultures even though their beliefs can differ widely. While the word
‘philosophy’ is an ancient Greek word, great thinkers and questioners
can be called philosophers and sages in any culture.
Consider
the following passage from Euclid in the Rainforest (first published in
2006) by Mazur, a professor of Logic and Mathematics. I like much
about this work, which examines how logic and math require not only
deductive rule following but individual leaps of intuition and
interpretation. Keep in mind that “Western” is a recent word that has
replaced “European race” only within the last century:
“Sometime
early in the sixth century B.C., two things happened to dramatically
alter the way Western civilization explained the world. The first was
the use of cause and effect, as opposed to the supernatural in
explaining natural phenomena; we might say that nature was first
discovered then. The second was the practice of rational criticism and
debate. These fresh developments occurred after a time of great
political upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean, which led to profound
changes in the political structures of Greek cities. Democracy in
Athens meant that citizens could participate in government and law,
freely debating and questioning political ideas. Before the
establishment of the Greek city state, a change in rule usually meant
merely a change from one tyrant to another.”
This
is the sort of view that is orthodox in academics today, and one I love
to hate. Many claim that the Greeks invented or discovered nature,
explaining things through material cause and effect, rational criticism
and debate, Democracy, and questioning political ideas. This is odd,
considering the democratic assembly of Athens, put Socrates to death for
encouraging the youth to question truth, tradition and politics.
Let
us carefully work through this, point by point. First, cause and
effect are basic to human explanation, whether that explanation could be
called supernatural or natural. The spirits and gods were thought to
cause things, they were considered part of the natural world and made of
fire as was the individual soul or mind, and most ancient Greek
thinkers, including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all believed in
polytheistic gods even as they pushed towards a more
monotheistic/monistic cosmos beyond the many gods which is why Plato and
Aristotle were, even though polytheists, revered and brought to us by
the Islamic and Christian traditions. Doing Logic was largely doing
Aristotle to many of the Islamic and Christian logicians we will study
in this class, though others questioned Aristotle.
Second,
rational criticism and debate are basic to human cultures. Athens was
the only temporary democracy in ancient Greece, so it was not a profound
change to the structure of the Greek city state nor was it established
with the Greek city state, as there were several. During most of
ancient Greek history, change in rule was merely a change from one
tyrant to another. As far as democracy being invented in Athens, in the
Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh we can see that king Gilgamesh wants a war,
so he goes to the higher senate, composed of the rich elites like
Athenian democracy, and they reject his proposal, so he then appeals to
the lower house composed of lesser but a greater number of elites, who
accept and help him to override the consensus of the senate. In African
villages, we can see everyone sitting down and men and women standing
one at a time and airing their grievances, and then the chief makes a
decision based on the debate. The brief period of Athenian democracy
was not categorically free debate, nor was previous politics categorical
tyranny. Individual and group decision making are found in complex
arrangements in all cultures, including the earliest and most primitive,
ancient Athens, and our America today.
It
should also be mentioned that philosophers were not welcome in ancient
Greece as they questioned the ways of things (traditional polytheism)
and as such Socrates was put to death for “inciting the youth to riot”,
Aristotle was chased out of Athens after the death of his student
Alexander (a foreign Macedonian who conquered Athens by the sword,
Aristotle being an unwelcome foreigner from Strageira in Athens
himself), and Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, complains that
his city state Ephesus exiled their best thinker for questioning things
and it would be best if all Ephesians went and hanged themselves to
leave the city in the abler hands of children.
What is philosophy?
Philosophy
has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering
the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek
philosophers (such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato) critically
examined their own thinking and their traditions of thought and brought
new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek
thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only
ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.
The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom?
The
German philosophers Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts
of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level
just as dogmatism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social
level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these
correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things
set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge
and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set
understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of
thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and
wisdom.
The
Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that
individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were
the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In
Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that
the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of
knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods
exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and
"Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient
cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as
wisdom, in ancient Greece and ancient everywhere else. No society would
survive without pushing in both directions. Systems of thought are
always sites of disagreement as much as they are of agreement.
Recently,
the Attorney General of Arizona crafted legislation against teachers
who provide programs celebrating Latino culture as they are dangerously
“anti-Western”, and pointed specifically to teaching that Aztecs and
Mayans had philosophers as Leon-Pontilla argues. Apparently, it is
biased and thus un-Western to teach that concepts such as “you are my
other self” (much like Confucius, who we will study) and “continue to
investigate things endlessly” (much like Heraclitus, who we will study)
is evidence that the Aztecs and Mayans had philosophy. It is perceived
as a threat to American culture to equate the ancient Mayans with the
ancient Greeks. It is not just the Attorney General who thinks this,
but academics with PhDs who continue to provide the ground for this
belief in their publications.
As
far as the ancient Greeks or the Attorney General of Arizona being part
of a specifically rational culture, let us consider the definition of
logical validity. An argument is logically valid if the conclusion
follows necessarily from the premises. Consider the following argument:
“Because all elevators play jazz music, jazz is the Devil’s playground,
and one should avoid the Devil, elevators are to be avoided.” You can
follow this argument because it is logical. It does not matter whether
or not the premises are true, but only that IF they are true so would
the conclusion. You can construct logical arguments that include the
premise, “All puppies are green”, which is useful to show how logic
works. The elevator argument is in the form of Aristotle’s first
syllogism, and because human reasoning employs chains so frequently it
does not appear that he invented the form but rather examined it
critically.
Reason in the Earliest Human Cultures
Let
us look at Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings by Malinowski,
who lived with and studied the tribes of Papua New Guinea as an
anthropologist. Unfortunately, he uses the word “savages” throughout
the article, as it was written in the 1940s when a primitive and savage
tribe known as Americans were just rising to dominance. Thankfully,
Malinowski asks if we should continue to assume that primitive tribes
are irrational and illogical, and he argues that they are, contrary to
popular and academic orthodox opinion, rational and logical. This would
mean that they argue systematically amongst themselves, just like the
ancient Greeks and ourselves. Malinowski argues this based on three
observations.
First,
all cultures, including the basic cultures of New Guinea tribes, have
words for whole and part (being/existence and
substance/attribute/quality), cause and effect, and if and then. These
are the terms and concepts of ancient Greek Logic (Aristotle) and modern
European Logic (Wittgenstein). This suggests that logic and reason are
basic to the human mind, language and culture. While it is often
asserted that the ancient Greeks turned toward material causation and
hypothesis, these are also basic to humanity. If a bush rustles, one
may suspect that there is, hypothetically, an all-too-material tiger
lurking behind it. One may investigate, and hopefully one will discover
that, contrary to the previous hypothetical theory, it is merely one’s
all-too-material fellow tribes-member and friend Bob. If however,
hypothetically, one finds a tiger in material fact, aforementioned tiger
may cause the effect of one’s death. Whether or not spirits or gods
are involved or what materials compose them seems irrelevant to the
material matter.
Second,
there is a basic difference between the everyday, safe and known
practices and the special, dangerous and unknown practices of the tribes
people. This can be described as the difference between the practical
and the theoretical. Malinowski uses the example of shallow and deep
sea fishing. When fishing in shallow seas, or glancing behind bushes
for tigers, no theory, ritual or magic is required, but when fishing in
deep water the tribe gets theoretical and brings in a system of thought
involving rituals and “magic” to influence their outcomes. When one is
building a fishhook, one does not call on the gods or spirits. When one
is asking for fertile crops for the year, one calls on gods and spirits
with ritualized activity. In a similar way, one does not need
philosophy, logic or science when one is opening a door. However, if
one is designing a door no one has invented before, one needs to bring
theoretical systems for understanding the unknown. “Science” literally
means “seeing” or “cutting into many” in Latin (Sciencia), a culture of
thought and theory that looks into the unknown from the base of the
practical. Likewise, “Logic” literally means “speaking” in ancient
Greek (Logia), as Logic was the art of debate, speaking and arguing well
about the unknown.
If
you ask what would happen if one did not use the theory and rituals, no
one could tell you because they have never tried it. However, if you
suggested that ritual and magic alone will grow crops without farming
and practical work the tribes people would laugh at you. Thus, the
theoretical is an extension of the practical into the unknown and the
two are always building on each other. Tribes people do not believe in
magic such that rationality is excluded. Rather, theoretical systems
like magic and science are extensions of rationality and logic into the
realms of the unknown that concern this life on earth.
Third,
tribes people do not all share the same views and beliefs within the
cultural system, but rather humans display individual as well as
collective thought, just as ancient Greeks shared traditional views but
debated amongst themselves rationally. Most think that we are the
individualistic and earlier civilizations did not question their
systems. This is true to a degree due to technology and new complexes
of culture, but tribes people disagree with one another within a
cultural system. One good example is a person thinks their failure
means they are cursed by an evil spirit, while their neighbor argues
with them and says they are just stupid and clumsy. Another is when you
bring the elders of a tribe into the same place and ask the meaning of a
shared legend, they often get into a debate about it. Thus, a
theoretical system allows for debate and progressive understandings,
including early “magical” systems and later “scientific” systems.
If
all this is true and humans have always been logical and rational, why
is science so successful and powerful? What makes science different
from earlier systems? In early and ancient cultures, religion, physics
and psychology were all one theoretical system (often referred to today
as cosmology). Particularly as Islamic and European civilizations rose,
technology and education meant many specialized equipment and areas of
study. While the theoretical systems have always observed the natural
world and this life we live, observation was increasingly supplemented
and supported by experimentation. Today, we have many cultures of
experimentation that are powerful at expanding and overturning our
views. However, as already noted, humans have always been
experimenting, changing and evolving.
Gmelch,
the author of the article Baseball Superstition, says he is taking
Malinowski’s distinction of shallow fishing and deep sea fishing and
applying it to superstitions of modern day baseball players. Baseball
players are modern day human beings who are raised in a “scientific”
culture, but they show the same differences in behavior as the tribes
people when it comes to theorizing and the unknown.
In
baseball, there is a great difference between fielding and
hitting/pitching. Fielding is successful 9 times out of 10, and so it
is not dangerous or risky. Hitting and pitching, however, are quite
risky. There is far less chance of success, and success does not
guarantee winning the game overall. What do we observe? Baseball
players come up with superstitious practices that follow basic
cause-effect reasoning regarding their pre-game behaviors and their
performance in hitting and pitching but not in fielding. A pitcher or
slugger will, for instance, eat two chili dogs the night before every
big game to pitch or hit well, but fielders do not. While we may not
consider these superstitions “scientific”, we can see that theory grows
in the gap of the unknown and it follows the basic mechanisms of logic
(hypothetical reasoning of cause to effect). Again, it seems that
reason and logic are basic to human culture and language, and they
extend from the observable and practical into the unknown and
theoretical.
In
the third article, A new Weapon Stirs Up Old Ghosts by Mitchell, we can
see a new growth of theoretical culture that has practical purposes in
the Shotgun cult of a tribes people given one shotgun shell at a time to
hunt wild boar (guess why the Europeans give them one shell at a time).
If a hunter misses a shot, the whole community comes together and they
try to figure out where the social issue is in the community that
caused the hunter to miss the boar. This brings the community together
to solve its problems (created by individual differences of views and
opinions) and it is impossible to say this group debate has no positive
effect on the hunter or next hunt whatsoever. Again, we see that the
practical is extended by the theoretical for figuring out the unknown as
a culture.
Wisdom in the Earliest Human Cultures
What
is wisdom? Believing and doubting are basic to the human mind. The
human mind, like logicians in India (Kanada and Gotama) and Greece
(Aristotle) we will be covering in the next few weeks, seeks basic
constant truths (or atomic truths) about its world in order to know
things that are certain and constant (like “Fire is always hot” or
“Water is always wet”). However, the human mind can both believe and
doubt its truths. Wisdom is the ability to see beyond knowledge, to
know when to question truths that are often true but not always true.
Hegel tells us that we start with categorical truths (“Fire is simply
hot so it is not cold at all”) and grow in wisdom to understand the
relativity and context of our truths (“Fire is quite hot for the human
being, but fire is cold relative to a star”).
Consider
the story of the man who goes to his rabbi and complains that his house
is too noisy. The rabbi is wise, and tells the man to bring his
livestock into his house. After the man is at his wits end, the rabbi
tells him to remove the livestock, and the man is pleased with how quiet
his house has become. The house is just as noisy as it was before, but
the rabbi has shown the man how relatively quiet his house is compared
to a barnyard.
In
myths and riddles from around the world (many often traded between many
cultures) we see an appreciation of wisdom and questioning knowledge,
assumptions and intuitive understandings. While positivistic thinking
seeks constant and necessary truths, skeptical thinking seeks to
overturn and find counter examples. We will see this in the skeptical
thinkers of India (Jainism and Buddhism), Greece (Heraclitus and Pyrrho)
and China (Zhuan Zi and Gong Zi).
Questioning
truths is not simply for mysticism or skeptical philosophy. Wisdom and
skepticism have real and practical value in science and technology.
Consider that a refrigerator cools by heating. The back of a
refrigerator heats up, and this draws the heat from the inside of the
refrigerator. If you believe that heat does not cool, you would not be
able to invent the refrigerator. Consider that the Wright Brothers
wrote to the US Army and told them of their glider, but it took the Army
three years and the accounts of others to believe it because it was
understood that humans could not fly like birds (and the US now has air
superiority in the world).
In
early human tales, there are often trickster characters who steal,
cheat, lie and deceive, and through this bring about the necessary
sustenance of life. Crow and Coyote are examples from Native American
tales. Lot’s daughters are examples from the Torah or Old Testament of
the Bible: by committing incest with their father they keep the
Israelites’ line and covenant alive, though the laws in previous Torah
books, such as Deuteronomy, explicitly prohibit incest as a crime.
In
the readings from Riddling Tales from Around the World, we have several
stories that show us the human appreciation of wisdom and seeing the
relative rather than the categorical.
In
the story of Trousers Mehmet, the sultan asks for someone to bring him a
person who hunts, who throws away what he catches and who carries with
him what he cannot find. Mehmet brings him a beggar who is scratching
himself for fleas. Notice that typically, in the majority of instances,
we hunt for something we keep after we catch it and we hunt for
something we do not have on our person. This situation is reversed in
the case of the beggar, so reversing aspects of the typical situation of
hunting is what distinguishes Mehmet’s brilliance. The sultan later
asks for a thousand forests in a handkerchief, and Mehmet, who has
likely read the Koran, brings an acorn, as a single acorn has,
potentially, a thousand forests in it. Hegel, who we will study, talks
about how potentiality is a specific sort of non-being, just as the
potentially infinite is a specific sort of infinite.
In
the story of the Afghani riddling ogre, a brilliant young girl realizes
that if she lays across the threshold of the palace doorway, wearing a
net after being dragged there by a mountain goat, she is neither inside
nor outside, neither clothed nor naked, and neither riding nor on foot.
She then kills the ogre by realizing that she is neither man nor beast
(as she is a young girl), she presents a bird that flies away which is
both a gift and not a gift, and chewing a piece of bark she is neither
fasting nor eating.
In
the Chinese story of the Thief Who Kept his Hands Clean, Magistrate
Chen (one of a long list of Chinese detectives who seek criminals
through rational inquiry and evidence) finds a thief by telling everyone
that a Buddhist temple bell will ring when the thief touches it in the
dark, and because he covered the bell in soot beforehand the thief is
the only one who is afraid to touch it and thus has clean hands.
In
the final story selected, a king tells his two sons that they should
ride to Jerusalem and whoever’s horse arrives last will inherit his
kingdom. The two ride, then trot, then get off the horses and stare at
each other, but then they each have the same thought and leap on the
horses and ride as fast as they can. What did they both realize? That
if they take the other horse to Jerusalem first, their own horse will
necessarily finish last.
Final Question:
Is
following a cultural system more rational or logical than questioning
or changing it? Both are in fact reasonable and logical. Belief and
doubt, positivism and skepticism, are in constant tension in all
societies. If human beings are always rational and logical because this
is the way that thinking works naturally, then humans are rational and
logical when they conform to their systems and when they question their
systems.
The
great Dada art movement’s manifesto writer Tzara said that we must have
the courage to stand for and against thought. If one loves ancient
culture but hates modern culture or loves modern culture and hates
ancient culture, one is standing for and against human thinking and
logic in either case.
