DESCARTES (1596-1650) is called the ‘first modern philosopher’ in the tradition of European and ‘Western’ scholarship. He went to law school following his merchant father, but decided to become a mercenary instead and fight in the 30 years war, ‘to seek truth’. It seems he did not find truth in law school. In 1633, Galileo was condemned by the Church for his solar centric theory (which India and Islam had for more than 700 years). Descartes thus decided not to publish his views on physics, but his ‘Discourse on Method’ instead. This is considered the first work of modern European philosophy. However, it was condemned by the pope in 1663, thirty years later, put on the prohibited index of books alongside other authors who are foundational for European scholarship.
Descartes’ death is famous (and unfortunately funny). For the majority of his life, he worked in bed until noon each day (an aristocrat has the time to do this). After he became famous and his works were prohibited by the Catholic Church, the Protestant Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to Stockholm to be her private tutor. Unfortunately for Descartes, she wanted morning lessons, every morning, at 5 am. Between the snow and the early mornings, Descartes was soon sick with pneumonia, and then dead. Maybe we should all work on our problems every day until noon, safe in bed. This is similar to Francis Bacon’s famous death, catching pneumonia and dying after repeatedly stuffing snow into chickens to try to preserve the meat.
We saw last time that Islamic algebra and mechanics show us the development toward modern society and thought. Descartes, in a world of increasing algebra and mechanics, turns from an understanding of causes being up in the heavens to cause being the mechanics of this world. Just like many Islamic and medieval European thinkers, Descartes identifies the mind and heavens with freedom and consciousness while putting the mathematical order of things down in the world. The heavens remain the good and pure, but the order and mathematics becomes a thing of this world and not the other world. This change, which is very much modernity, comes with a world increasingly full of algebra and mechanics. The world we see begins to be the known, and the spiritual begins to be the unknown. This goes in hand with the soul/mind ceasing to be round and made of fire and the heavens and afterlife ceasing to be physically above our heads even for the committed religious.
Best illustration of this is the City of Brass story from the 1001 Nights, also called the Arabian nights. In the story, an exploration party of the Sultan sets off to discover King Solomon’s lost City of Brass, a place where he kept demons in brass bottles and forced them to forge many wonderful pieces of metalwork in furnaces. Solomon uses mysterious forces from below to produce technological wonders in this world, a thing that he can do only because he is very holy and doing it as magic. In the story, there are many evil robots that still kill long after Solomon is dead and gone. This comes from the Islamic tales of Solomon, that when he died he stayed upright for a century and the demons continued to work on their tasks not knowing that he had died. Then a worm ate through Solomon’s staff and he fell over, and the demons realized that they had been working for no purpose and fled. In the City of Brass, a beautiful extension of the story, there are beautiful marionettes that move and beckon in the wind, luring some of the exploration party to their deaths in gorges below. There are other sorts of dangerous automata that are empty bodies still moving from natural forces. Finally, Solomon’s Queen (not Sheba who went to Ethiopia, but another) is stuffed and preserved, sitting on her thrown, with her eyes mechanically blinking every so often. One guy falls in love, approaches, and only realizes when touching her hand that she is dead, and he reels back in horror. Think of this as a medieval Islamic science fiction story.
Remembering the automata in Islamic palaces, Descartes now proceeds to make the natural world, including animals, nothing but mechanics and causation, completely devoid of intention or feelings. Dualism is a position that sees two separate levels in a thing. Descartes argues for a radical dualism between the mechanics of the world below (body) and the consciousness and intention of the world above (mind). Consciousness or mind or spirit is in the upper world, while all in the given world is mindless mechanics. This is what developed into our ‘scientific’, ‘modern’ mentality. The worst of this is that Descartes practiced vivisection, cutting animals apart while alive to learn about anatomy, and helped popularize the practice in Europe, arguing that animals do not have minds and thus do not feel a thing, their behavior being mere automatic reflexes of causal forces.
This is what led in Protestantism to loosing Saints and Angels with functional roles and simply praying directly to Jesus for everything, different from all previous systems (including Catholicism). Now that there is increasingly sophisticated practices of medicine and then veterinarian practice, you no longer take your sick cow to a particular temple and pray to a particular saint. The causal solution is now one of this world, but the ‘evil’ of sickness remains distantly rumbling in the world beyond, not gone but no longer the primary force of the institutional practice. Temples become increasingly research facilities.
Positivists celebrate Descartes as discovering the simple positives of mechanical causes and the existence of self-consciousness or the soul, arguing that there are certain mechanical facts and that each person has a certain personal identity. Skeptics see Descartes as being fooled by his own judgments, and argue that we can never be absolutely certain of mechanical facts nor of the personal or shared identities.
Thus, Descartes is very much part of the frame of European Philosophy to follow.
Not only is he the first to flourish in Europe in an algebraically structured wealthy culture, but his position is the starting positivism which is foundational for positivists and the departure point for skeptics.
Now, first let us remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment. In what some call the first ‘thought experiment’ (the central device of the American tradition of philosophy), he suggests that the reader imagine floating in a void and having all sensation, including of the body or senses, slowly taken away. What are you left with as the essential factor once the accidental sensual factors are removed? Self consciousness, with the awareness of consciousness and mind itself. For Avicenna, as for Descartes, this awareness and self-circling is the small piece of God, the big all awareness, that is one’s soul, humanity and life.
Descartes proposes a very similar thought experiment: he asks the reader to imagine that there is a deceiving demon that is creating an illusion of the world, casting doubt on everything except the essence of the human being and soul, the self-awareness which Descartes believes proves that you must exist. Thus, his famous line: “I think, therefore I am”, a conclusion that has been violently debated back and forth ever since. One’s position is defined, in a sense, by what you think of Descartes simple experiment.
Where does the deceiving demon in Descartes come from? Why the radical psychological skepticism, and then the simple positive (skeptics would say ‘naïve’) affirmation of existence? To see this, we must speak of the Cathars, a Gnostic Christian and Manichean hybrid Heresy that was being persecuted in France in the 1400s. Descartes is writing in France in the late 1600s, two hundred years later. Gnosticism, as we briefly mentioned, spoke of a deceiving demon false God that controls the appearance of this false world below, similar to the Indian doctrine of the world below as not only evil but illusion and false.
Manichaeism was a religion started by a Syrian named Mani (200-276 CE), who claimed to be the final coming of Jesus, the Buddha Amitaba, Buddha of Infinite light who will ferry people to the pure land. This is because Buddhism and Christianity flourished in Syria and Afghanistan as a middle ground of cultures. Then quickly the religion was fused with much Zoroastrian terminology to become what Christians in Europe considered a Christian Heresy. The religion spread up through Europe in 300-500, and the Cathars were an offshoot that survived in France up until the persecutions of 1400s.
Thus, Descartes (the first modern philosopher) is arguing for Christianity and its simple positive faith in the world vs. the Cathar-Manichean-Gnostic deceiving demon. Descartes thought experiment is very much Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment, but notice that it also attacks the idea of the Cathar Satan or King Demon. Notice that Descartes’ thought experiment suggests that a Demon could not keep us in the dark the way the Cathars believe. Instead, because of our self-consciousness/mind/soul that we get from God, and then using this as an anchor of certainty, Descartes argues that God thus does not completely deceive us in this world but shows us many other certainties that we can know with the power and sight of our mind.
I gave you selections of Descartes’ two great works, Discourse on Method and his six Philosophical Meditations. Let us work through the texts.
In his Discourse on Method, he lays out the famous “I think therefore I am” thought experiment, remarkably similar to Avicenna’s Floating Man thought experiment. He says he won’t tell us about his first meditations in hardcore skeptical ‘all is a dream’ mode, “for they are so abstract and unusual that they will probably not be to the taste of everyone”. Wow, keep that to yourself, Descartes.
He starts with the meditations he will tell us about with a thought experiment: assume that all the senses are being tricked, as if by a dream. (This is similar to Zhuang Zi’s Butterfly, and now he doesn’t know what it is- but Descartes ends like Avicenna’s floating man instead).
Everything can be doubted but the self-awareness. He writes that ‘I think therefore I am’ is the first principle of his new philosophy, brought up from the ground of this principle out of total skepticism of certainties. A skeptic here would wonder if this is so skeptical. First, Descartes assumes from self-awareness that he is a mind, a ‘substance of thought’, which is completely distinct from the body, which can be doubted. Already there are grey areas here. Can’t thought be doubted as much as a body part? Aren’t both ‘sensed’?
Now, we move to the Meditations, to the argument laid out step by step. Descartes argues that we all accept things that we believe to be certain, but then turn out to be wrong. Therefore, we cannot use certainty as the sole criterion for truth. We have to separate out the categorically certain from the seemingly certain. The skeptic here questions whether there are categorical certainties that are distinct from our illusions. This remains a central question. Positivists believe in the categorically true, also called ‘fact’, while skeptics tend to disbelieve in this sort of categorical certainty and opt for relative or perspective/subjective certainty.
Descartes says that it seems certain that he is sitting by the fire writing, but we can doubt this and believe that Descartes is simply dreaming that he is Descartes, by the fire. He uses the example of madmen who think that they are kings or that their bodies are made out of glass. Obviously, Descartes had some familiarity with at least literature about types of madness and delusions (also very Avicenna-like, who understood imagination and mental conditions).
There seem to be certain truths that cannot be untrue, like 2 + 3 is equal to 5, a central example he uses, or a square always has 4 sides. However, we can even imagine that this itself is all delusion. Hence, we assume for skepticism’s sake that there could be a deceiving demon (much like the movie The Matrix). He also says it could be someone extremely powerful who could use ‘industry’ to deceive me: this is the ‘brain in a vat’ mad scientist thought experiment. The demon cannot convince me that I do not exist, and so I am an existent thing that thinks. The one point of certainty is self-awareness or consciousness, the one thing that we cannot be fooled about because it is self-evident.
Descartes argues that the mind has no quality and no quantity, no space or time to it at all.
Hence, it is the human immortal soul/mind/awareness. Because we are sure of this, and because we get our truth from something that we are within we are not in the power of something that completely lies to us. Descartes then quickly declares that we can trust that God is good, the world is not an illusion and 2 + 3 is equal to 5. When we aspire to God and truth, using reason correctly, we discover certain truths, such as the truths of mathematics, the existence of the soul, and of God, the certainty that the body is not our true self, and that animals do not have souls or awareness. Note that everyone after Descartes found this reasoning a bit too quick, both those who agreed with him and those who did not.
HUME (1711-1776) did not agree with Descartes on much. Hume’s position is that all of our thinking and truth is induction. This is like the Indian theory of skandas, ‘piles’ of sand, speaking of the mind and how all perceptions in it are just bundles of stuff that accumulate and then dissipate. I gave you Hume’s ‘An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature’ because it is the condensed form of Hume’s first and foremost work which he wrote after critics claimed his original was convoluted and difficult to understand.
Hume starts saying that philosophy has flowered all over Europe in “these last four score years” (80 years, no connection to Lincoln), and that it has occurred in England just as greatly as any other. Notice the recent development for Europe, and England. Hume says that philosophers of ancient times have handled their truths delicately, showing more restraint than full depth of reflection. Remember with Descartes, whose skepticism quickly turns to orthodoxy. Hume is ultimately going to say that all truth is assumption, habit, and prejudice, which opens the gates on any accepted truth as needing to be proved, which opens up potential attacks on all established forms of truth.
Hume says that all mental activity are perceptions. Perceptions are divided into two kinds: impressions of objects that are present, and ideas of objects that are not present.
For example, one has the perception of a red billiard ball on the table. If one turns around and doesn’t look at the ball, one has an idea of the ball and its appearance in one’s head. Likewise, if one looks at the still red ball and imagines it is moving, one has an impression of the ball and has an idea of the ball rolling down the table. Impressions are strong, while ideas are weaker. Hume argues that we derive all of our ideas from our impressions. Hume acknowledges that this is in line with Locke’s Tabula Rasa/Blank Slate idea. It goes directly against Descartes and Kant, who believe we can with the operation of reason, independent of experience, determine several truths that must be certain regardless of experience.
Now, Hume gets to his famous and central billiard ball analogy. Imagine two billiard balls, one red and one blue. There are two events. First, the red ball moves up to the blue ball. Second, the blue ball moves away from the red ball. Naturally, and this is the key word here as we are talking about the habit, we all understand that the red ball struck the blue ball. Notice that we did not see or perceive the conjunction of the two events. We did not perceive the causation. The causation is itself invisible. Then how did we all understand it? The answer is: we have all shared common experience, and so we share ideas and prejudices. We all had an idea or prejudice when we watched the red ball moving toward the blue ball. Our impressions of things knocking into each other, and in particular our impressions of billiard balls and their motions, naturally caused us all to get into the habit of having a preconception, a preconceived idea, that the red ball was going to hit the blue ball and then the blue ball was going to move afterward. Then, when things happened as they usually seem to, we all come to the conclusion, individually and as a group together, that we were right in our preconceptions. Hume believes that this is all one can strictly say about the two events, and that saying anything else, like suspecting that a particular ‘causation’ was there as an invisible presence, may be common perception but it is not in fact perceived or known. Most often, our conclusions are correct, but whenever they are wrong, it shows us that we can have certainty and preconceived ideas, but these do not guarantee that we will be correct. For example, if I made a flash movie of the two billiard balls, it is an illusion that one image is striking the other. Obviously, I want the audience of the film to have this idea, but this does not make it any less of an illusion. In a sense, when we watch animation we know and don’t know that what is going on is ‘real’. We can ‘suspend’ our disbelief, and allow our minds to watch and believe in the animated events, even though any animated even must by its nature be fake caricatures of events.
Hume argues that all of our beliefs and truths are inferences that we draw, not certainties that we can know without qualification. This is true of life, history, and all of philosophy. If this seems hopeless in its skepticism, it is not entirely bad. Remember that most of our preconceptions are quite in accord with how things go, otherwise we would have no reason for forming them in the first place. While nothing can be known for certain, it is giving a different view of meaning. Things accumulate and build up in our ideas, and thus they are real to us. They are not so real that they ensure that nothing could ever contradict them, but they are real to us and we use them in the world. Hume uses the example of Adam in the garden of Eden as a human who learns the motions of things by experience, starting with a blank slate. Hume says that even Adam, “with all his science, would never have been able to demonstrate that the course of nature must continue uniformly the same, and that the future must be conformable to the past.”
“We are determined by custom alone to suppose the future conformable to the past. When I see a billiard ball moving towards another, my mind is immediately carried by habit to the usual effect, and anticipates my sight by conceiving the second ball in motion…It is not, therefore, reason which is the guide of life, but custom That alone determines the mind, in all instances, to suppose the future conformable to the past. However easy this step may seem, reason would never, to all eternity, be able to make it.”
“With regard to any matter of fact, however strong the proof may be from experience, I can always conceive the contrary, though I cannot always believe it…Philosophy would render us entirely skeptical (Pyrrhoian) were not nature too strong for it”.
Hume argues that effect is often variable and uncertain in life. As an example, he argues that thirty grains of opium will kill anyone that is not accustomed to it.
Hume goes on to question the Cartesians’ (followers of Descartes) idea of a supreme being which is wholly without deception, the eternal self, and geometric/mathematical truths (remember 2+3=5). He argues: how can they know this from experience? Our idea of God is a composition of our experience (guy with a beard, in the clouds) that we have not experienced in God so much as in other things. Mathematical and Geometric proofs look nice, but sometimes geometry seems like it is proving something that later is disproved.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Social & Political Philosophy
I am happy to announce that I get to teach a new class at BCC this coming Spring 2011 semester: Social & Political Philosophy. I am still working out the details of the course content, but this political climate has been giving me many ideas.
The idea so far is to cover four topics:
Authority & Law
Democracy & Decision
Communism & Equality
Capitalism & Freedom
For each topic, we will examine texts from many societies to look critically at how humanity understands and lives the ideals of law, decision making, equality and freedom. In particular, we will consider how communism sometimes sacrifices freedom for equality and capitalism sometimes sacrifices equality for freedom.
The idea so far is to cover four topics:
Authority & Law
Democracy & Decision
Communism & Equality
Capitalism & Freedom
For each topic, we will examine texts from many societies to look critically at how humanity understands and lives the ideals of law, decision making, equality and freedom. In particular, we will consider how communism sometimes sacrifices freedom for equality and capitalism sometimes sacrifices equality for freedom.
BCC Philosophy Club
We will be starting up the BCC Philosophy Club again this semester. We will be meeting in room 54 at noon every Friday to hang out and discuss topics.
Please come by! You don't have to attend every meeting, and you are always welcome.
Please come by! You don't have to attend every meeting, and you are always welcome.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Logic: Islam & Early Europe
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 European philosopher/logicians (especially Avicenna and Aquinas).
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are no good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (I have found this is true of Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic religion, literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of technology and study. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has always been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic.
Here are some awesome ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Algebra is possibly the most used device (if it can be called a device) in human history. It is important to consider algebra because in the second half of the course logic becomes an algebraic language (remember, logic used to be about debate in the ancient world, but it gradually became a highly specialized form of math that was intended to ground the foundations of mathematics). Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system and began doing math in the form of equations we are all familiar with today (taught by law to everyone up through college).
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through town with the latest things and systems of thought (books come this way too from China). Castles are Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful.
While it is not central to the study of logic, it is important today to mention that law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, philosophy, logic and science that equations became the language for structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in paragraph form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas but is quite anachronistic and misleading to do this.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosopher/scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language.
Algebraic equations allowed for modern 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? Positivists say that the world is truly mathematical and provides us with true knowledge, while skeptics say that mathematics builds models and remains human perspective and opinion. To see an interesting problem, consider the “proof that one equals two” (found easily online).
ISLAMIC LOGIC AND THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS:
Islam has a long history of debate, called “Qiyas” (translated most often as reasoning or argument). There were three types: Analogy, Induction and Deduction. A big issue for Islamic philosophy was which of these was primary, and which secondary. Ibn Hazm said Inductive is the only one, the others 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)
Pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method,
introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. Wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, argued that time and space were relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later.
Argued that Islam and Philosophy/Logic are completely compatible. Our scholarship says that he mostly merged Neoplatonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian/Buddhist Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950)
Little is known about Farabi’s origins or ethnic background. It is argued by scholars that he was Turkish or Persian. Farabi took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides famously said he could not understand Aristotle at all until he read Al-Farabi’s commentary, and then got it. Paid much attention to Imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and get right, you have visions of the cosmos and its workings. This is close to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments in his later thought.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037)
Foremost doctor of his time. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, neuropsychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), and the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing microscopic organisms as the cause of disease. The first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He learned Indian Arithmetic from and Indian grocer. This is ignored in most. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’.
The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you, was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars. Today, in the wake of Islamic and European civilization, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? This was the big issue. Avicenna asks: Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that a real horse is one thing? Does the horseness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horseness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horseness’ are both mental. Avicenna uses the phoenix and unicorn as imaginary beasts to illustrate.
His floating man thought experiment, showing self-consciousness, shows imagination.
This is considered by some to be a source of Descartes’ ‘I think’ with demon.
After this, there was a split in his followers: which is primary, the essence or existence?
Essentialism (What it is 1st, the thing second) vs. Existentialism (thing first, what 2nd).
MOST IMPORTANT for this class: he pioneered propositional calculus, the medium of logic from here on out in this class (in most logic classes it is the only thing taught).
Al Ghazali (1058-1111), Persian
One of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism. A pioneer of skepticism and doubt.
His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certain human knowledge. When he says ‘The philosophers say’ I have read authors say, ‘this means Plato and Aristotle’, but I trust the scholars who say he means ‘Avicenna says’ as the position he always attacks. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that Atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of Negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) Cordoba, Spain
Wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, thus central for Europe Aristotle.
Wrote ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, arguing against Ghazali and for Farabi etc.
He was another central author in Europe for science and philosophy. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe followed him. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our science is now more like Avicenna, but for the longest time it was Aristotelian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as necessary to be flawed that Europe swung back into a ‘all is contingent’ Avicenna direction.
THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHER/LOGICIANS
Aquinas (1225-1274)
Lived just after Averroes, about 200 years after Avicenna.
Augustine is the bringer of Plato and Aristotle into medieval Europe thanks to his reading of Islamic authors. He studied at the University of Naples until he was 16. Showed he was brilliant, so 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. His brother’s brought him a prostitute, but ‘he drove her away’. Then the Pope intervened, and he went back to being a Dominican.
He seems influenced primarily by Al Ghazali and Averroes, both of whom we said were critics of Avicenna, Averroes a supporter of Aristotle. Three years after his death, Aquinas was excommunicated for heresy due to following Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s works, but then 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 he was pronounced the central thinker of the Church (and thus Europe).
As an Averroist Aristotelian, Aquinas believed that universals are real beings that are even more real than physical objects. Thus, he is an essentialist. 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 European thought, Being is essence of essences (we will see this in Hegel next week). The Superman argument is often used today in philosophy classrooms to shoot this down, along with Descartes who follows Aquinas’ argument for highest, most necessary being as God.
William of Ockham (1288-1348)
An Avicenna style Existentialist: Only objects and individuals are real, all else is mental construction and conception. Often called the first modern thinker, we can see that he is putting forward Avicenna’s ideas. His nominalism says that concepts are just our names for things, our add-ons. Just like Avicenna, only Being (God) is not contingent and custom.
Ockham is also known for ‘Ockham’s razor’: the simplest explanation is often correct.
Notice how this does away with hierarchies of universals as real, to call them simply mental and thus the simplest reasoning is the best.
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are no good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (I have found this is true of Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic religion, literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of technology and study. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has always been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic.
Here are some awesome ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Algebra is possibly the most used device (if it can be called a device) in human history. It is important to consider algebra because in the second half of the course logic becomes an algebraic language (remember, logic used to be about debate in the ancient world, but it gradually became a highly specialized form of math that was intended to ground the foundations of mathematics). Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system and began doing math in the form of equations we are all familiar with today (taught by law to everyone up through college).
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through town with the latest things and systems of thought (books come this way too from China). Castles are Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful.
While it is not central to the study of logic, it is important today to mention that law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, philosophy, logic and science that equations became the language for structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in paragraph form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas but is quite anachronistic and misleading to do this.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosopher/scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language.
Algebraic equations allowed for modern 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? Positivists say that the world is truly mathematical and provides us with true knowledge, while skeptics say that mathematics builds models and remains human perspective and opinion. To see an interesting problem, consider the “proof that one equals two” (found easily online).
ISLAMIC LOGIC AND THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS:
Islam has a long history of debate, called “Qiyas” (translated most often as reasoning or argument). There were three types: Analogy, Induction and Deduction. A big issue for Islamic philosophy was which of these was primary, and which secondary. Ibn Hazm said Inductive is the only one, the others 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)
Pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method,
introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. Wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, argued that time and space were relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later.
Argued that Islam and Philosophy/Logic are completely compatible. Our scholarship says that he mostly merged Neoplatonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian/Buddhist Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950)
Little is known about Farabi’s origins or ethnic background. It is argued by scholars that he was Turkish or Persian. Farabi took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides famously said he could not understand Aristotle at all until he read Al-Farabi’s commentary, and then got it. Paid much attention to Imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and get right, you have visions of the cosmos and its workings. This is close to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments in his later thought.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037)
Foremost doctor of his time. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, neuropsychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), and the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing microscopic organisms as the cause of disease. The first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He learned Indian Arithmetic from and Indian grocer. This is ignored in most. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’.
The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you, was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars. Today, in the wake of Islamic and European civilization, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? This was the big issue. Avicenna asks: Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that a real horse is one thing? Does the horseness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horseness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horseness’ are both mental. Avicenna uses the phoenix and unicorn as imaginary beasts to illustrate.
His floating man thought experiment, showing self-consciousness, shows imagination.
This is considered by some to be a source of Descartes’ ‘I think’ with demon.
After this, there was a split in his followers: which is primary, the essence or existence?
Essentialism (What it is 1st, the thing second) vs. Existentialism (thing first, what 2nd).
MOST IMPORTANT for this class: he pioneered propositional calculus, the medium of logic from here on out in this class (in most logic classes it is the only thing taught).
Al Ghazali (1058-1111), Persian
One of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism. A pioneer of skepticism and doubt.
His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certain human knowledge. When he says ‘The philosophers say’ I have read authors say, ‘this means Plato and Aristotle’, but I trust the scholars who say he means ‘Avicenna says’ as the position he always attacks. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that Atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of Negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) Cordoba, Spain
Wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, thus central for Europe Aristotle.
Wrote ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, arguing against Ghazali and for Farabi etc.
He was another central author in Europe for science and philosophy. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe followed him. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our science is now more like Avicenna, but for the longest time it was Aristotelian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as necessary to be flawed that Europe swung back into a ‘all is contingent’ Avicenna direction.
THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHER/LOGICIANS
Aquinas (1225-1274)
Lived just after Averroes, about 200 years after Avicenna.
Augustine is the bringer of Plato and Aristotle into medieval Europe thanks to his reading of Islamic authors. He studied at the University of Naples until he was 16. Showed he was brilliant, so 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. His brother’s brought him a prostitute, but ‘he drove her away’. Then the Pope intervened, and he went back to being a Dominican.
He seems influenced primarily by Al Ghazali and Averroes, both of whom we said were critics of Avicenna, Averroes a supporter of Aristotle. Three years after his death, Aquinas was excommunicated for heresy due to following Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s works, but then 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 he was pronounced the central thinker of the Church (and thus Europe).
As an Averroist Aristotelian, Aquinas believed that universals are real beings that are even more real than physical objects. Thus, he is an essentialist. 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 European thought, Being is essence of essences (we will see this in Hegel next week). The Superman argument is often used today in philosophy classrooms to shoot this down, along with Descartes who follows Aquinas’ argument for highest, most necessary being as God.
William of Ockham (1288-1348)
An Avicenna style Existentialist: Only objects and individuals are real, all else is mental construction and conception. Often called the first modern thinker, we can see that he is putting forward Avicenna’s ideas. His nominalism says that concepts are just our names for things, our add-ons. Just like Avicenna, only Being (God) is not contingent and custom.
Ockham is also known for ‘Ockham’s razor’: the simplest explanation is often correct.
Notice how this does away with hierarchies of universals as real, to call them simply mental and thus the simplest reasoning is the best.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
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 abuseful) 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 abuseful) 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’.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Intro Philosophy: Islam & Early Europe
First, we look at the rise of Islamic civilization and its relationship to medieval European civilization with regard to philosophy, technology, science and scholarship. This is important to know, especially today. Second, we will look at central Islamic and medieval European philosopher/logicians (especially Avicenna and Aquinas).
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are no good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (I have found this is true of Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic religion, literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of technology and study. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has always been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic.
Here are some awesome ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. 1492 is a good example: it is the year that the Christian Kings of Spain and Portugal retook those lands from Muslims, and the start of the Spanish Inquisition that brutally attacked Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic Christians.
Algebra is possibly the most used device (if it can be called a device) in human history. It is important to consider algebra because in the second half of the course logic becomes an algebraic language (remember, logic used to be about debate in the ancient world, but it gradually became a highly specialized form of math that was intended to ground the foundations of mathematics). Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system and began doing math in the form of equations we are all familiar with today (taught by law to everyone up through college).
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through town with the latest things and systems of thought (books come this way too from China). Castles are Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, philosophy, logic and science that equations became the language for structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in paragraph form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas but is quite anachronistic and misleading to do this.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosopher/scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language.
ISLAMIC JESUS
Jesus is mentioned in the Koran more than anyone, the greatest prophet after Mohammed. He is the patron saint of scholars and wisdom, and he sounds much like Confucius.
The worst man is the scholar who is in error, since many people will err due to him.
The one who has learned and taught is great in the kingdom of heaven.
Stones, mud and gold are equal in my sight.
‘Teacher, who are the people of my race?’ ‘All the children of Adam.’
No one taught me. I saw the ugliness of ignorance and avoided it.
How many fruits, but not all are good! How many sciences, but not all of them useful!
THE MAIN DIVISIONS OF ISLAM
Many are familiar with the Sunni-Shiite split of Islamic cultures without realizing that the central issues between groups are philosophical positions on human reason. The Sunni believe that revelation such as the Koran is the supreme authority, and all else is secondary. The Mutazilites, a smaller sect of Islam and one of the great forces for philosophy and science, believe that God/Being is fully reasonable and human reason and logic are supreme to following tradition or scripture. Mutazilites argued that God can not contradict reason and thus cannot possibly commit error, which became a major theological and philosophical issue in the golden age of Islamic thought and civilization. The Shiites, the second major sect of Islam like the Sunnis, take a middle position between reason and scripture/tradition. Sunnis argued that one must investigate matters when scripture and reason contradict each other. This is important to recognize today, as Muslims are often believed to be unquestioningly traditional and literal in their understanding of the Koran.
THE GREAT ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHERS:
Al Kindi (801-873)
Pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method,
introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. Wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, argued that time and space were relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later.
Argued that Islam and Philosophy/Logic are completely compatible. Our scholarship says that he mostly merged Neoplatonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian/Buddhist Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950)
Little is known about Farabi’s origins or ethnic background. It is argued by scholars that he was Turkish or Persian. Farabi took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides famously said he could not understand Aristotle at all until he read Al-Farabi’s commentary, and then got it. Paid much attention to Imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and get right, you have visions of the cosmos and its workings. This is close to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments in his later thought.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037)
Foremost doctor of his time. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, neuropsychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), and the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing microscopic organisms as the cause of disease. The first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He learned Indian Arithmetic from and Indian grocer. This is ignored in most. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’.
The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you, was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars. Today, in the wake of Islamic and European civilization, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? This was the big issue. Avicenna asks: Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that a real horse is one thing? Does the horseness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horseness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horseness’ are both mental. Avicenna uses the phoenix and unicorn as imaginary beasts to illustrate.
His floating man thought experiment, showing self-consciousness, shows imagination.
This is considered by some to be a source of Descartes’ ‘I think’ with demon.
After this, there was a split in his followers: which is primary, the essence or existence?
Essentialism (What it is 1st, the thing second) vs. Existentialism (thing first, what 2nd).
Al Ghazali (1058-1111), Persian
One of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism. Sufism is Islamic mysticism, who like mystics of other religions and cultures believe that all is a supreme One and judgment and desire obscure this from human vision. Many are familiar with the Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant, a story that Sufis argue is about their practice being the religion of all religions. Ghazali was a pioneer of skepticism and doubt. His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certain human knowledge. When he says ‘The philosophers say’ I have read authors say, ‘this means Plato and Aristotle’, but I trust the scholars who say he means ‘Avicenna says’ as the position he always attacks. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that Atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of Negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) Cordoba, Spain
Wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, thus central for Europe Aristotle.
Wrote ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, arguing against Ghazali and for Farabi etc.
He was another central author in Europe for science and philosophy. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe followed him. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our science is now more like Avicenna, but for the longest time it was Aristotleian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as necessary to be flawed that Europe swung back into a ‘all is contingent’ Avicenna direction.
NEOPLATONISM AND THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS
First, they would have called themselves ‘Platonists’. Neo was added by first translator into English, and the title has been adopted by scholars in Europe and America. The start of the tradition comes from Alexandrian (Egyptian) Greek Platonists who were reading the Timaeus and participating in religious/philosophical debates amongst the many cultures of the trade port, including Egyptians, Nubians, Gnostic Christians, Coptic Christians, Jews, Indians, Persians, Mesopotamia etc.
Two texts that were central to Platonism were the Chaldean Oracles, which were supposed to be the secret teachings of Zarathustra from Persia, and the Hermetic Corpus, the secret teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (Thoth-Tat as a sage) from Egypt. These two sources became very important in the Renaissance, showing us that it was much more than a love of Greece and Rome that artists and scholars celebrated. These two texts actually had just been invented by Greek authors who were clearly using Plato to try to back-form the wisdom of Persia and Egypt that the ancient Greeks themselves praised, but at the time they were believed to be authentic and then well past by European scholars. Thus, they were sources that were believed to be earlier than Plato, which conveyed the wisdom that Plato himself developed and passed on as the true philosophy of all cultures.
Most famous Hermetic text is the Emerald Tablet, a short set of aphorisms. The line most quoted: the world is a sphere in which the center is everywhere and nowhere. Chaldean oracles aphorisms:
Explore the river of the soul, to rise to the order from which you descended.
When you see a formless fire, flashing through the depth of the world, hear the voice of fire.
The intelligible draws open the flower of the mind.
Central teachings of this tradition of Platonism:
The Soul must return to the One, the All (All-Lord or God), which it must do by way of lesser gods or angels and demons. The system is very much psychology of the soul, which is also angelology and demonology in classifying forces of the cosmos.
The macrocosm is the microcosm- small and big, so soul/mind is the universe.
Opening up the mind is returning to the cosmos that produced you.
Theme of the Fall and the Return (later in Christians id with Adam and fall from Eden).
There are two motions of mind to develop:
Kataphania and Apophania, positing and negating, affirming and doubting.
To get to the One, you must move Dialectically, back and forth, to open up and become the whole.
Humans occupy a unique place in the cosmos. They have the ability to subsume all the motions of things low and high, thus are most like the all-motion of the One.
Humans are the One fallen away from itself, journeying back to itself.
Time and space are the eternal moment and unity fallen and fragmented.
This is truly the most beautiful thought of Europe, which most don’t know about because it happened long before the gap of tech and science separated Europe from other cultures.
All the main thinkers of European Christianity were (Neo) Platonists for quite a while, and it thus still held much sway even after things branched out considerably.
Augustine, Pseudo Dionysius, Boethius, Eriugena, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino and Pico of the Ren (we will speak of them in particular), Bruno, Ren artists like Michelangelo, Botticelli, scientists like Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler.
Augustine (300) brought it into Christianity (from ‘Pagan’ authors). One of the most important author and church father, he was North African. He made the gods angels officially (each with an office) and talked about how light into the mind creates visions/theophanies/ideas of the cosmos and its order.
Pseudo-Dionysius (500) was a Syrian Christian who read Augustine and other authors and was big into negative theology, kataphania. He argued that the journey to the One was essentially one of unknowing or kataphania, and the One was the great Unknown, above all qualities or being (just like 99 names of Allah).
Eriugena (800) merged these two, working them together with many other authors, to create an amazing system. The first European Christian Platonist, Hegel wrote about him in his History- ‘With him, true philosophy first begins’, since Hegel is tracing an evolution of all thought up to himself, and Hegel is quite a European Platonist.
Notably, Hegel ignores the Islamic Zoroastrian Platonists who are writing at about the same time we learned about last week. Eriugena was one of the only people who could read a bit of Greek at the time, and so he was protected in the court of Charles the Bald who protected him from the Pope in exchange for translating and commentary on PD.
Basically, Augustine was cannon, and Eriugena was heretically saying that Augustine and PD are two sides of the same coin.
Eriugena saw the One as HyperOusia- the sum of being and non-being, the source of both but neither of the two at the same time. He took the radical unknown One of PD and made it the unknown source of both known and unknown in all levels of the cosmos.
God splits apart into oppositions to then form all the differentiations of the cosmos.
For Eriugena, psychology is physics, as we co-create our world as a product of our vision and the One’s vision. The One is unknown to itself/fully known to itself above human divisions of judgement, and it shares both of these with human beings, the special mediators of the cosmos. Like in Sufism, Humans are unique in potentially being God, encompassing the lowest and highest of all orders (the worm and the angel). Humans have free will thus- it was defending this radically which led to condemn. Authority comes from Reason, not the other way around.
Nicholas of Cusa’s mustard seed thought experiment- the boundless and infinite are present both active/potential, in the mundane of the world, just like the One/Christ.
St. Francis of Assisi (later San Francisco in Spanish) Visited Sultan’s Court, came back with a very Sufi vision. All religion is one brotherhood in God, give all to the poor, contemplate all through radical love. At the end of time, we will be standing side by side, hand in hand with sister death and brother fire.
The Renaissance (1400-1500)
‘Italy’ was not something that Ren people would have known. “Florence”, the city state was their nation. ‘Italy’ had yet to be unified and titled such, so ‘Italian Ren’ is a bit of a mis-title. Central power of the Pope had withered, and now trader city states can create competing cultures (another fall apart, good for thought time).
Vatican Library shows how books and Greeks had yet to be popular in 1400 Europe:
1443- 2 Greek books, 340 books total (that’s it)
1455- 400 Greek, 1200 total
1484- 1000 Greek, 3650 total
Frequently assumed by scholars that Renaissance was celebration of Greeks and Romans, both Philosophy and Art. Taking a close look at Ficino and Pico, the two major Platonists of the Renaissance and thus fathers of all European scholarship to follow, shows that the Egyptian and Persian wisdom was given a higher place than Plato.
Cosimo Medici founded the Platonic Academy of Florence in 1462 (meeting, not building as thought) and Ficino rose quickly to soon lead it, with Pico della Mirandola as student. Cosimo de Medici, when he knew he was dying, ordered Ficino to put aside translating Plato’s complete works and finish translating the Corpus Hermetica, the supposed secret wisdom of Egypt passed to the Hebrews and Greeks. Shows who was important. Plato is a follower of Hermes, and Zarathustra. Ficino translated ‘Maat’ as Logos, which is a bit of a confusion. Ficino finished translating the 17 texts in 1471.
Ficino argued there was one unbroken tradition of wisdom which included the Eyptians, Persians, the Brahmans of India (who he doesn’t go into detail on) and the Greeks.
This is like the Sufis, as well as arguing that Phil and Bible were compatible.
Ficino gave Europe the first Latin trans of Plato’s works, many derived from Arabic sources. Ficino thought that Zarathustra was the first prophet of the one true phil/rel, followed by Hermes from Egypt, then Moses, then Plato, then Jesus.
Pico, his student, thought it was first Hermes of Egypt, then Zarathustra, then Abraham, then Plato, etc. These remained the debated opinions for centuries.
Thus, Bruno and Masons follow Pico in Egypt being lost center of all wisdom.
Ficino repeatedly uses the Zoroastrian oracles to back up his points, and continuously mentions the 3 persian Magi visiting Jesus as infant in the Bible. Ficino writes that Plato had a third eye, which contemplated the union of being and nonbeing (The One), which came from a strange source. Pico was very big on Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, saying it was Egyptian.
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are no good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (I have found this is true of Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic religion, literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of technology and study. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has always been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic.
Here are some awesome ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. 1492 is a good example: it is the year that the Christian Kings of Spain and Portugal retook those lands from Muslims, and the start of the Spanish Inquisition that brutally attacked Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic Christians.
Algebra is possibly the most used device (if it can be called a device) in human history. It is important to consider algebra because in the second half of the course logic becomes an algebraic language (remember, logic used to be about debate in the ancient world, but it gradually became a highly specialized form of math that was intended to ground the foundations of mathematics). Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system and began doing math in the form of equations we are all familiar with today (taught by law to everyone up through college).
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through town with the latest things and systems of thought (books come this way too from China). Castles are Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, philosophy, logic and science that equations became the language for structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in paragraph form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas but is quite anachronistic and misleading to do this.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosopher/scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language.
ISLAMIC JESUS
Jesus is mentioned in the Koran more than anyone, the greatest prophet after Mohammed. He is the patron saint of scholars and wisdom, and he sounds much like Confucius.
The worst man is the scholar who is in error, since many people will err due to him.
The one who has learned and taught is great in the kingdom of heaven.
Stones, mud and gold are equal in my sight.
‘Teacher, who are the people of my race?’ ‘All the children of Adam.’
No one taught me. I saw the ugliness of ignorance and avoided it.
How many fruits, but not all are good! How many sciences, but not all of them useful!
THE MAIN DIVISIONS OF ISLAM
Many are familiar with the Sunni-Shiite split of Islamic cultures without realizing that the central issues between groups are philosophical positions on human reason. The Sunni believe that revelation such as the Koran is the supreme authority, and all else is secondary. The Mutazilites, a smaller sect of Islam and one of the great forces for philosophy and science, believe that God/Being is fully reasonable and human reason and logic are supreme to following tradition or scripture. Mutazilites argued that God can not contradict reason and thus cannot possibly commit error, which became a major theological and philosophical issue in the golden age of Islamic thought and civilization. The Shiites, the second major sect of Islam like the Sunnis, take a middle position between reason and scripture/tradition. Sunnis argued that one must investigate matters when scripture and reason contradict each other. This is important to recognize today, as Muslims are often believed to be unquestioningly traditional and literal in their understanding of the Koran.
THE GREAT ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHERS:
Al Kindi (801-873)
Pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method,
introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. Wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, argued that time and space were relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later.
Argued that Islam and Philosophy/Logic are completely compatible. Our scholarship says that he mostly merged Neoplatonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian/Buddhist Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950)
Little is known about Farabi’s origins or ethnic background. It is argued by scholars that he was Turkish or Persian. Farabi took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides famously said he could not understand Aristotle at all until he read Al-Farabi’s commentary, and then got it. Paid much attention to Imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and get right, you have visions of the cosmos and its workings. This is close to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments in his later thought.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037)
Foremost doctor of his time. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, neuropsychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), and the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing microscopic organisms as the cause of disease. The first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He learned Indian Arithmetic from and Indian grocer. This is ignored in most. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’.
The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you, was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars. Today, in the wake of Islamic and European civilization, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? This was the big issue. Avicenna asks: Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that a real horse is one thing? Does the horseness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horseness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horseness’ are both mental. Avicenna uses the phoenix and unicorn as imaginary beasts to illustrate.
His floating man thought experiment, showing self-consciousness, shows imagination.
This is considered by some to be a source of Descartes’ ‘I think’ with demon.
After this, there was a split in his followers: which is primary, the essence or existence?
Essentialism (What it is 1st, the thing second) vs. Existentialism (thing first, what 2nd).
Al Ghazali (1058-1111), Persian
One of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism. Sufism is Islamic mysticism, who like mystics of other religions and cultures believe that all is a supreme One and judgment and desire obscure this from human vision. Many are familiar with the Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant, a story that Sufis argue is about their practice being the religion of all religions. Ghazali was a pioneer of skepticism and doubt. His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certain human knowledge. When he says ‘The philosophers say’ I have read authors say, ‘this means Plato and Aristotle’, but I trust the scholars who say he means ‘Avicenna says’ as the position he always attacks. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that Atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of Negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) Cordoba, Spain
Wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, thus central for Europe Aristotle.
Wrote ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, arguing against Ghazali and for Farabi etc.
He was another central author in Europe for science and philosophy. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe followed him. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our science is now more like Avicenna, but for the longest time it was Aristotleian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as necessary to be flawed that Europe swung back into a ‘all is contingent’ Avicenna direction.
NEOPLATONISM AND THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS
First, they would have called themselves ‘Platonists’. Neo was added by first translator into English, and the title has been adopted by scholars in Europe and America. The start of the tradition comes from Alexandrian (Egyptian) Greek Platonists who were reading the Timaeus and participating in religious/philosophical debates amongst the many cultures of the trade port, including Egyptians, Nubians, Gnostic Christians, Coptic Christians, Jews, Indians, Persians, Mesopotamia etc.
Two texts that were central to Platonism were the Chaldean Oracles, which were supposed to be the secret teachings of Zarathustra from Persia, and the Hermetic Corpus, the secret teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (Thoth-Tat as a sage) from Egypt. These two sources became very important in the Renaissance, showing us that it was much more than a love of Greece and Rome that artists and scholars celebrated. These two texts actually had just been invented by Greek authors who were clearly using Plato to try to back-form the wisdom of Persia and Egypt that the ancient Greeks themselves praised, but at the time they were believed to be authentic and then well past by European scholars. Thus, they were sources that were believed to be earlier than Plato, which conveyed the wisdom that Plato himself developed and passed on as the true philosophy of all cultures.
Most famous Hermetic text is the Emerald Tablet, a short set of aphorisms. The line most quoted: the world is a sphere in which the center is everywhere and nowhere. Chaldean oracles aphorisms:
Explore the river of the soul, to rise to the order from which you descended.
When you see a formless fire, flashing through the depth of the world, hear the voice of fire.
The intelligible draws open the flower of the mind.
Central teachings of this tradition of Platonism:
The Soul must return to the One, the All (All-Lord or God), which it must do by way of lesser gods or angels and demons. The system is very much psychology of the soul, which is also angelology and demonology in classifying forces of the cosmos.
The macrocosm is the microcosm- small and big, so soul/mind is the universe.
Opening up the mind is returning to the cosmos that produced you.
Theme of the Fall and the Return (later in Christians id with Adam and fall from Eden).
There are two motions of mind to develop:
Kataphania and Apophania, positing and negating, affirming and doubting.
To get to the One, you must move Dialectically, back and forth, to open up and become the whole.
Humans occupy a unique place in the cosmos. They have the ability to subsume all the motions of things low and high, thus are most like the all-motion of the One.
Humans are the One fallen away from itself, journeying back to itself.
Time and space are the eternal moment and unity fallen and fragmented.
This is truly the most beautiful thought of Europe, which most don’t know about because it happened long before the gap of tech and science separated Europe from other cultures.
All the main thinkers of European Christianity were (Neo) Platonists for quite a while, and it thus still held much sway even after things branched out considerably.
Augustine, Pseudo Dionysius, Boethius, Eriugena, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino and Pico of the Ren (we will speak of them in particular), Bruno, Ren artists like Michelangelo, Botticelli, scientists like Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler.
Augustine (300) brought it into Christianity (from ‘Pagan’ authors). One of the most important author and church father, he was North African. He made the gods angels officially (each with an office) and talked about how light into the mind creates visions/theophanies/ideas of the cosmos and its order.
Pseudo-Dionysius (500) was a Syrian Christian who read Augustine and other authors and was big into negative theology, kataphania. He argued that the journey to the One was essentially one of unknowing or kataphania, and the One was the great Unknown, above all qualities or being (just like 99 names of Allah).
Eriugena (800) merged these two, working them together with many other authors, to create an amazing system. The first European Christian Platonist, Hegel wrote about him in his History- ‘With him, true philosophy first begins’, since Hegel is tracing an evolution of all thought up to himself, and Hegel is quite a European Platonist.
Notably, Hegel ignores the Islamic Zoroastrian Platonists who are writing at about the same time we learned about last week. Eriugena was one of the only people who could read a bit of Greek at the time, and so he was protected in the court of Charles the Bald who protected him from the Pope in exchange for translating and commentary on PD.
Basically, Augustine was cannon, and Eriugena was heretically saying that Augustine and PD are two sides of the same coin.
Eriugena saw the One as HyperOusia- the sum of being and non-being, the source of both but neither of the two at the same time. He took the radical unknown One of PD and made it the unknown source of both known and unknown in all levels of the cosmos.
God splits apart into oppositions to then form all the differentiations of the cosmos.
For Eriugena, psychology is physics, as we co-create our world as a product of our vision and the One’s vision. The One is unknown to itself/fully known to itself above human divisions of judgement, and it shares both of these with human beings, the special mediators of the cosmos. Like in Sufism, Humans are unique in potentially being God, encompassing the lowest and highest of all orders (the worm and the angel). Humans have free will thus- it was defending this radically which led to condemn. Authority comes from Reason, not the other way around.
Nicholas of Cusa’s mustard seed thought experiment- the boundless and infinite are present both active/potential, in the mundane of the world, just like the One/Christ.
St. Francis of Assisi (later San Francisco in Spanish) Visited Sultan’s Court, came back with a very Sufi vision. All religion is one brotherhood in God, give all to the poor, contemplate all through radical love. At the end of time, we will be standing side by side, hand in hand with sister death and brother fire.
The Renaissance (1400-1500)
‘Italy’ was not something that Ren people would have known. “Florence”, the city state was their nation. ‘Italy’ had yet to be unified and titled such, so ‘Italian Ren’ is a bit of a mis-title. Central power of the Pope had withered, and now trader city states can create competing cultures (another fall apart, good for thought time).
Vatican Library shows how books and Greeks had yet to be popular in 1400 Europe:
1443- 2 Greek books, 340 books total (that’s it)
1455- 400 Greek, 1200 total
1484- 1000 Greek, 3650 total
Frequently assumed by scholars that Renaissance was celebration of Greeks and Romans, both Philosophy and Art. Taking a close look at Ficino and Pico, the two major Platonists of the Renaissance and thus fathers of all European scholarship to follow, shows that the Egyptian and Persian wisdom was given a higher place than Plato.
Cosimo Medici founded the Platonic Academy of Florence in 1462 (meeting, not building as thought) and Ficino rose quickly to soon lead it, with Pico della Mirandola as student. Cosimo de Medici, when he knew he was dying, ordered Ficino to put aside translating Plato’s complete works and finish translating the Corpus Hermetica, the supposed secret wisdom of Egypt passed to the Hebrews and Greeks. Shows who was important. Plato is a follower of Hermes, and Zarathustra. Ficino translated ‘Maat’ as Logos, which is a bit of a confusion. Ficino finished translating the 17 texts in 1471.
Ficino argued there was one unbroken tradition of wisdom which included the Eyptians, Persians, the Brahmans of India (who he doesn’t go into detail on) and the Greeks.
This is like the Sufis, as well as arguing that Phil and Bible were compatible.
Ficino gave Europe the first Latin trans of Plato’s works, many derived from Arabic sources. Ficino thought that Zarathustra was the first prophet of the one true phil/rel, followed by Hermes from Egypt, then Moses, then Plato, then Jesus.
Pico, his student, thought it was first Hermes of Egypt, then Zarathustra, then Abraham, then Plato, etc. These remained the debated opinions for centuries.
Thus, Bruno and Masons follow Pico in Egypt being lost center of all wisdom.
Ficino repeatedly uses the Zoroastrian oracles to back up his points, and continuously mentions the 3 persian Magi visiting Jesus as infant in the Bible. Ficino writes that Plato had a third eye, which contemplated the union of being and nonbeing (The One), which came from a strange source. Pico was very big on Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, saying it was Egyptian.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Intro Philosophy: Midterm Review
Shamanism: “One who knows”, common world culture of early tribal society, forms that appear in world religions, ecstatic experience as ‘standing outside’, initiation rites and ‘rebirth’, investigating problems and seeking visions of solutions, the All-Tree, the problem of the One and the Many, the problem of destiny after death, stories as transmission of knowledge
City State Priests & Egypt: Societies gather into larger societies and settle, authorities become traditional, specialization of experts and scholars, eternal stars of fire as order above, water as chaos below, air as ordering breath or communication, Egyptian wisdom texts show criticism of society and human behaviors, heart centered individual, warring state periods good for thought, polytheism to monotheism to abstract solar monotheism
Hinduism, Jainism & Buddhism: Three paths of worship (Bhakti devotion, Raja asceticism, Jnana scholarship), trinity of Brahma, Vishnu (salvation) and Shiva (destruction), multitude of gods who are yet are not these three, two types of afterlife (reincarnation and release of Nirvana), Vedas as multiple origin stories, Upanishads as philosophical ‘that is you’ inner meaning, Jain influence on Buddhism and Hinduism, Mahavira and the Tirthankaras, two principles of skepticism (non-one-endedness and postulation), practice of asceticism and austerities (fasting, postures, meditation), Jain all karma as negative and total release as joining the order of the cosmos, the Jain metaphor of the leaky boat (plugging and bailing), Buddhism concepts of Four Noble Truths, Doctrine of the Mean, Codependent Arising
Heraclitus: All is One/Fire/Cosmic Mind, all particular things are impermanent (even gods/planets), experts do not know much more than the common people, we are all apes to the gods, can’t step in the same river twice, perspective changing how things are
Plato: Parmenides over Heraclitus, Forms/Ideas as eternal models of things, the three parts of the soul (appetite, spirit and reason) corresponding to the three classes of the city (workers, police and philosophers), allegory of the cave
Confucianism: Mandate of Heaven as abstract monotheism, social order and rites (Li) as strength of society, study and civil service over meditation and nature of Daoism, criticism of the individual and equating others with oneself, right mind/intention over right body/action, love (Ren) as center of human and system, recognition of the lowest as oneself and self criticism, Neo-Confucianism as blend with Daoism and Buddhism
Daoism: Return to nature and stillness, seeing both sides of judgment, Yin and Yang symbol, influence on Chinese Buddhism and Zen, the great One/Way as nameless above all named 10,000 things, water-like in fluidity and getting everywhere, the wheel as both solid and empty together, Zhuan Zi and perspective, Cook Ting, all humans are ugly to minnows and deer, the Peng bird vs. dove and cicada
City State Priests & Egypt: Societies gather into larger societies and settle, authorities become traditional, specialization of experts and scholars, eternal stars of fire as order above, water as chaos below, air as ordering breath or communication, Egyptian wisdom texts show criticism of society and human behaviors, heart centered individual, warring state periods good for thought, polytheism to monotheism to abstract solar monotheism
Hinduism, Jainism & Buddhism: Three paths of worship (Bhakti devotion, Raja asceticism, Jnana scholarship), trinity of Brahma, Vishnu (salvation) and Shiva (destruction), multitude of gods who are yet are not these three, two types of afterlife (reincarnation and release of Nirvana), Vedas as multiple origin stories, Upanishads as philosophical ‘that is you’ inner meaning, Jain influence on Buddhism and Hinduism, Mahavira and the Tirthankaras, two principles of skepticism (non-one-endedness and postulation), practice of asceticism and austerities (fasting, postures, meditation), Jain all karma as negative and total release as joining the order of the cosmos, the Jain metaphor of the leaky boat (plugging and bailing), Buddhism concepts of Four Noble Truths, Doctrine of the Mean, Codependent Arising
Heraclitus: All is One/Fire/Cosmic Mind, all particular things are impermanent (even gods/planets), experts do not know much more than the common people, we are all apes to the gods, can’t step in the same river twice, perspective changing how things are
Plato: Parmenides over Heraclitus, Forms/Ideas as eternal models of things, the three parts of the soul (appetite, spirit and reason) corresponding to the three classes of the city (workers, police and philosophers), allegory of the cave
Confucianism: Mandate of Heaven as abstract monotheism, social order and rites (Li) as strength of society, study and civil service over meditation and nature of Daoism, criticism of the individual and equating others with oneself, right mind/intention over right body/action, love (Ren) as center of human and system, recognition of the lowest as oneself and self criticism, Neo-Confucianism as blend with Daoism and Buddhism
Daoism: Return to nature and stillness, seeing both sides of judgment, Yin and Yang symbol, influence on Chinese Buddhism and Zen, the great One/Way as nameless above all named 10,000 things, water-like in fluidity and getting everywhere, the wheel as both solid and empty together, Zhuan Zi and perspective, Cook Ting, all humans are ugly to minnows and deer, the Peng bird vs. dove and cicada
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Logic: Chinese Paradox
In China, we find Daoists, Logicians and Chan/Zen Buddhists showing the skeptical side of logic and human thought that we have already seen in India (Jainism & Buddhism) and Greece (Heraclitus, Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus).
DAOISM: LAO ZI & ZHUANG ZI
The Dao De Jing (formerly the Tao Te Ching) is the book by the fist Daoist patriarch Lao Zi (600 BCE) according to tradition. This book and the book of the second Daoist Patriarch Zhuang Zi (370-300 BCE) have many excellent examples of paradox and contradiction. We will consider some of these before the paradoxes of the Chinese logicians Hui Shih and Kung-Sun Lung.
Chapter 11 of the Dao is one of my favorites. It tells us that a wheel is only useful because of the hole in the center. The same is true of a jar made of clay, and the space in a room as well as the doors and windows. We naturally think of things as positives, as beings, but non-being, the holes and emptiness, goes hand in hand with the being. These things (as well as everything else, the text suggests) are and are not in very specific ways. The wheel is both solid and empty at the same time, but not in all of its parts equally. Positive and negative, being and non-being, work together to make things what they are.
If positivism tries for black and white judgments, all yes or all no, and skepticism tries for relative judgments, some yes and some no, this teaching on the wheel and the jar tells us that the solid objects that surround us, the things about which we are most certain, are somewhat and are not somewhat!
There is a Buddhist koan that says at first we see a thing as a thing, then after practice and contemplation we see the thing as a non-thing (a concept, or illusion), and then after further practice and contemplation we again see the thing as a thing (but also, in this third stage, as also a non-thing, our conception). Hegel, whose logic we will learn later, sees this same three-fold process in every stage of individual thought and history of philosophy. At first, if asked, the wheel is a thing, not a nothing or non-thing. Then, we see the hole when it is pointed out to us. Finally, we can see that the solidity and the emptiness of the wheel are both necessary and essential to the wheel being what it is together.
In the Zhuang Zi there are many excellent passages that back up this two-sided view. There are many parts of the text that are almost identical to fragments of Heraclitus. Both Zhuang Zi and Heraclitus say that things can be good to some and bad to others at the same time, dependent on the perspective of the viewer. Heraclitus says that salt water is poisonous for us to drink, but not for the fish who require it to live and breathe. Heraclitus also says that pigs like to bathe in filth. Zhuang Zi asks us which animal knows what tastes good if each eats something different? He says that birds like to sleep in trees, but humans certainly do not. Both thinkers say that humans are ugly to non-humans. Zhuang Zi says that the beautiful women of legend frightened minnows, deer and birds. Clearly, human beauty is of no matter to animals who find us frightening and ugly.
One passage I love asks if words say something or nothing and compares them to the peeps of baby birds. It goes on to say that a sage has a this and a that, but a sage’s this also has a that, and a sage’s that also has a this. Speaking of the Confucians and the Moists (two competing schools of Chinese thought at the time the text is being written) it says that what one calls right the other calls wrong, but we should right their wrongs and wrong their rights. Notice how similar this is to chapter 11 of the Dao. It suggests that a sage would see the wrong to a right and the right to a wrong, would see how something said is both meaningful and meaningless.
Another passage asks if the one who wins an argument is necessarily right, or if there must be one who is right and one who is wrong (remember the Nyaya form of debate and Gotama and Aristotle teaching tactics of debate).
Another passage which is important for the logicians to follow says that among the 10,000 things (the number signifies all, like “a billion” today) there are none that are not big, small, right, wrong, useful and useless. If we consider relativity, any particular thing must be bigger that some other thing and smaller than some other thing. If right and wrong, useful and useless are similarly relative, then the sage should see the back and forth, the some and some not to each of these in considering each individual thing.
THE LOGICIANS: HUI SHIH & KUNG-SUN LUNG
Hui Shih (380-305 BCE) is very similar to the Greek thinker Zeno. Both consider paradoxes of relativity in size, motion and other basic properties of things. When he says that heaven or the sky is as low as the earth, he is pointing out that the two meet in the middle, and so low and high are in a particular place equally low and high. When he says one goes to the state of Yueh today and arrives there yesterday, this is a famous puzzle that is quite like the wisdom tales we read in the beginning of the semester: if one crosses the border of Yueh at the stroke of midnight, then one was in Yueh and not in Yueh both today and yesterday, so one could say that one was going there today and arrived yesterday.
The paradox that is most impressive is the Lesser and Greater Similarity and Difference which many have said is similar to observations made in fractal geometry and chaos theory. He says that a great similarity is different from a small similarity, the lesser similarity and difference, but at the same time all things are similar to one another and different from one another, the greater similarity and difference. Consider a bowl with two apples and two oranges. An apple is quite similar to an orange in many ways but it is also different in many ways (the lesser). Anyone can tell that two apples are more alike than an apple and an orange, just as two oranges are more alike than an orange and an apple (this is the lesser similarity and difference). However, on the other hand, it is also true that any two apples are alike and yet different as any two oranges are alike and yet different (this is the greater similarity and difference). Notice that this means the first apple is similar and different to the second apple as well as to an orange. Viewed in a black or white way, the apples are the same and the apple and orange are different, but it is also true to say that the apples are different and the apple and orange are similar.
Kung-sun Lung (325-250 BCE) gives us the famous A White Horse Is Not A Horse argument. Many say that this argument is faulty, but if we follow the thinking of the Daoists and Hui Shih we can see what Kung-Sun is trying to say. He does not mean that a white horse is not in any way a horse, but that in one particular way “a white horse” is not the same thing as “a horse”. He argues that if one brings us a yellow horse, it would not fit the description “a white horse” but it would do fine for the description “a horse”. The two are thus different sets and are not identical though one set is a subset of the other. This means that “a white horse” is and is not “a horse” (in one way “is” and in another way “is not”), and so he can truly say that “a white horse is not a horse”.
Consider that your finger is you but also is not you. If we use “is” in terms of strict identity (like Clark Kent is Superman) then your finger is not you because you are much more than a finger. However, if we use “is” to mean a part incorporated within a thing (like a tree is green) then your finger is oneself because it is part of you. Bill Clinton famously tried explaining this with his “that depends what your definition of ‘is’ is”. Being an individual human, you are and are not humanity. In fact, you are only one human out of quadrillions so far, so you are very much NOT humanity, but what are you more than a human, thus of humanity?
CHAN (ZEN) BUDDHISM: HUI-NENG & JOSHU
Hui-Neng (683-713 CE) became one of the central patriarchs of the Chan (Zen in Japanese) Buddhist tradition by outdoing his fellow student in a poetry competition to see who had the superior understanding and would succeed the master. The student who everyone expected to be the next master wrote:
The body is the tree of enlightenment, The mind is like a clear mirror-stand.
Polish it diligently time and again, Not letting it gather dust.
Hui-Neng was illiterate as well as a southerner who was considered different and inferior by the other students. After having a boy read the first submitted verse to him, he composed his reply:
Enlightenment originally has no tree, And a clear mirror is not a stand.
Originally there is not a single thing, Where can dust gather?
The master called Hui-Neng and said that this verse showed the superior understanding. Consider the similarity of this exchange to chapter 11 of the Dao and the Zhuang Zi.
Joshu (780 CE) is my favorite Chan/Zen thinker. Many of his short quotes became focal koans for study by students of Zen. I will read passages in class.
(69, 77, 79, 177, 182, 222, 232, 291, 352, 370, 431, 470)
DAOISM: LAO ZI & ZHUANG ZI
The Dao De Jing (formerly the Tao Te Ching) is the book by the fist Daoist patriarch Lao Zi (600 BCE) according to tradition. This book and the book of the second Daoist Patriarch Zhuang Zi (370-300 BCE) have many excellent examples of paradox and contradiction. We will consider some of these before the paradoxes of the Chinese logicians Hui Shih and Kung-Sun Lung.
Chapter 11 of the Dao is one of my favorites. It tells us that a wheel is only useful because of the hole in the center. The same is true of a jar made of clay, and the space in a room as well as the doors and windows. We naturally think of things as positives, as beings, but non-being, the holes and emptiness, goes hand in hand with the being. These things (as well as everything else, the text suggests) are and are not in very specific ways. The wheel is both solid and empty at the same time, but not in all of its parts equally. Positive and negative, being and non-being, work together to make things what they are.
If positivism tries for black and white judgments, all yes or all no, and skepticism tries for relative judgments, some yes and some no, this teaching on the wheel and the jar tells us that the solid objects that surround us, the things about which we are most certain, are somewhat and are not somewhat!
There is a Buddhist koan that says at first we see a thing as a thing, then after practice and contemplation we see the thing as a non-thing (a concept, or illusion), and then after further practice and contemplation we again see the thing as a thing (but also, in this third stage, as also a non-thing, our conception). Hegel, whose logic we will learn later, sees this same three-fold process in every stage of individual thought and history of philosophy. At first, if asked, the wheel is a thing, not a nothing or non-thing. Then, we see the hole when it is pointed out to us. Finally, we can see that the solidity and the emptiness of the wheel are both necessary and essential to the wheel being what it is together.
In the Zhuang Zi there are many excellent passages that back up this two-sided view. There are many parts of the text that are almost identical to fragments of Heraclitus. Both Zhuang Zi and Heraclitus say that things can be good to some and bad to others at the same time, dependent on the perspective of the viewer. Heraclitus says that salt water is poisonous for us to drink, but not for the fish who require it to live and breathe. Heraclitus also says that pigs like to bathe in filth. Zhuang Zi asks us which animal knows what tastes good if each eats something different? He says that birds like to sleep in trees, but humans certainly do not. Both thinkers say that humans are ugly to non-humans. Zhuang Zi says that the beautiful women of legend frightened minnows, deer and birds. Clearly, human beauty is of no matter to animals who find us frightening and ugly.
One passage I love asks if words say something or nothing and compares them to the peeps of baby birds. It goes on to say that a sage has a this and a that, but a sage’s this also has a that, and a sage’s that also has a this. Speaking of the Confucians and the Moists (two competing schools of Chinese thought at the time the text is being written) it says that what one calls right the other calls wrong, but we should right their wrongs and wrong their rights. Notice how similar this is to chapter 11 of the Dao. It suggests that a sage would see the wrong to a right and the right to a wrong, would see how something said is both meaningful and meaningless.
Another passage asks if the one who wins an argument is necessarily right, or if there must be one who is right and one who is wrong (remember the Nyaya form of debate and Gotama and Aristotle teaching tactics of debate).
Another passage which is important for the logicians to follow says that among the 10,000 things (the number signifies all, like “a billion” today) there are none that are not big, small, right, wrong, useful and useless. If we consider relativity, any particular thing must be bigger that some other thing and smaller than some other thing. If right and wrong, useful and useless are similarly relative, then the sage should see the back and forth, the some and some not to each of these in considering each individual thing.
THE LOGICIANS: HUI SHIH & KUNG-SUN LUNG
Hui Shih (380-305 BCE) is very similar to the Greek thinker Zeno. Both consider paradoxes of relativity in size, motion and other basic properties of things. When he says that heaven or the sky is as low as the earth, he is pointing out that the two meet in the middle, and so low and high are in a particular place equally low and high. When he says one goes to the state of Yueh today and arrives there yesterday, this is a famous puzzle that is quite like the wisdom tales we read in the beginning of the semester: if one crosses the border of Yueh at the stroke of midnight, then one was in Yueh and not in Yueh both today and yesterday, so one could say that one was going there today and arrived yesterday.
The paradox that is most impressive is the Lesser and Greater Similarity and Difference which many have said is similar to observations made in fractal geometry and chaos theory. He says that a great similarity is different from a small similarity, the lesser similarity and difference, but at the same time all things are similar to one another and different from one another, the greater similarity and difference. Consider a bowl with two apples and two oranges. An apple is quite similar to an orange in many ways but it is also different in many ways (the lesser). Anyone can tell that two apples are more alike than an apple and an orange, just as two oranges are more alike than an orange and an apple (this is the lesser similarity and difference). However, on the other hand, it is also true that any two apples are alike and yet different as any two oranges are alike and yet different (this is the greater similarity and difference). Notice that this means the first apple is similar and different to the second apple as well as to an orange. Viewed in a black or white way, the apples are the same and the apple and orange are different, but it is also true to say that the apples are different and the apple and orange are similar.
Kung-sun Lung (325-250 BCE) gives us the famous A White Horse Is Not A Horse argument. Many say that this argument is faulty, but if we follow the thinking of the Daoists and Hui Shih we can see what Kung-Sun is trying to say. He does not mean that a white horse is not in any way a horse, but that in one particular way “a white horse” is not the same thing as “a horse”. He argues that if one brings us a yellow horse, it would not fit the description “a white horse” but it would do fine for the description “a horse”. The two are thus different sets and are not identical though one set is a subset of the other. This means that “a white horse” is and is not “a horse” (in one way “is” and in another way “is not”), and so he can truly say that “a white horse is not a horse”.
Consider that your finger is you but also is not you. If we use “is” in terms of strict identity (like Clark Kent is Superman) then your finger is not you because you are much more than a finger. However, if we use “is” to mean a part incorporated within a thing (like a tree is green) then your finger is oneself because it is part of you. Bill Clinton famously tried explaining this with his “that depends what your definition of ‘is’ is”. Being an individual human, you are and are not humanity. In fact, you are only one human out of quadrillions so far, so you are very much NOT humanity, but what are you more than a human, thus of humanity?
CHAN (ZEN) BUDDHISM: HUI-NENG & JOSHU
Hui-Neng (683-713 CE) became one of the central patriarchs of the Chan (Zen in Japanese) Buddhist tradition by outdoing his fellow student in a poetry competition to see who had the superior understanding and would succeed the master. The student who everyone expected to be the next master wrote:
The body is the tree of enlightenment, The mind is like a clear mirror-stand.
Polish it diligently time and again, Not letting it gather dust.
Hui-Neng was illiterate as well as a southerner who was considered different and inferior by the other students. After having a boy read the first submitted verse to him, he composed his reply:
Enlightenment originally has no tree, And a clear mirror is not a stand.
Originally there is not a single thing, Where can dust gather?
The master called Hui-Neng and said that this verse showed the superior understanding. Consider the similarity of this exchange to chapter 11 of the Dao and the Zhuang Zi.
Joshu (780 CE) is my favorite Chan/Zen thinker. Many of his short quotes became focal koans for study by students of Zen. I will read passages in class.
(69, 77, 79, 177, 182, 222, 232, 291, 352, 370, 431, 470)
Logic: Midterm Review
Form of the Midterm: First multiple choice questions about the lectures (ex: Aristotle thinks that skeptics like Heraclitus are no better than PLANTS, Kanada believes there are 6 categories, including KARMA/action, etc). Second short answers that demonstrate your knowledge of the forms that we have learned so far (ex: recreate the square of opposition, the forms of syllogisms, Nyaya proof). No essay.
Logic, Magic and Riddles: We read in Malinowski’s Rational Mastery by Man of His Surroundings that tribes use all of the grammatical forms and pieces of reasoning that we all use. We saw difference of practice and theory, constantly intertwined, in the difference between shallow water fishing and deep sea fishing. We saw in the next article that in baseball, the same sort of split occurs between hitting/pitching and fielding. In wisdom tales, understanding contradiction. Logic switched from the study of debate in early cultures to foundations of mathematics in modern times with the rise of algebra.
Kanada: Karma as action/energy. We saw the basic structure of IF-THEN hypothetical statements. The Modus Tollens transformation: (If p then q), means also (if not q then not p). Ex: If we know “If there are clouds then there is rain”, we know “If there is no rain then there are no clouds”.
Nyaya: We saw the Nyaya form of the two sided debate: (X is Y) vs. (X is not Y). We saw that there are four sources of knowledge: perception, inference, comparison, and testimony.
Inference shows us induction leading to deduction, gathering leading to rules/principles.
The Nyaya proof: Rule, Example, Reason, Conclusion
Wherever there is smoke, there is fire. As in a kitchen.
Because the hill is smoky, therefore the hill is on fire.
Whatever is produced is not eternal, as a pot. (If p, then n, pot is both)
Because it is produced, Sound is not eternal. (Because s is p, s is n)
Note the subtle attack on the older tradition of the Vedas in the last two examples.
While Nyaya scholars believe X is Y or not Y, exclusively, we see that Jains think it must be some Y and some not Y, neither ALL or None. Buddhists argue that X can sometimes and somewhere be Y but also sometimes and somewhere not be Y. Nagarjuna’s Catuskoti.
Aristotle: Genus and Species (ex: animal, human), substances can have contrary qualities but only at different times, “if someone admits contrary qualities, his contention is unsound”, skeptics are destroyers, plants.
Square of opposition, All X is Y, No X is Y, Some X is Y, Some X is not Y as four corners.
Top pair (universals) can’t both be true, bottom pair (particulars) can’t both be false.
If we know All X is Y is true, then we know two things are false: No X is Y & Some X is not Y.
If we know No X is Y, then we know All X is Y and Some X is Y are false.
If we know Some X is Y, then we know No X is Y is false.
If we know Some X is not Y, then we know All X is Y is false.
Exclusive and Inclusive OR:
Inclusive Or: X or Y and you can choose more than one.
Exclusive Or: X or Y but you can only choose one exclusively.
The Four Forms of the Perfect Syllogism:
First, the Positive Universal, ‘Barbara’:
All A are B, All B are C, therefore All A are C.
Example: If it’s a human, animal, living thing.
(Venn diagram of A within B, B within C, or partially/fully collapsed)
Second, the Negative Universal, ‘Celarent’
All A are B, No B are C, therefore No A are C.
Ex: All men are animals, No animals are stone, therefore No men are made of stone.
Third, the Positive Particular, ‘Darii’
Some A are B, All B are C, therefore Some A are C.
Ex: Some animals are humans, All humans are funny, therefore some animals are funny.
Fourth, the Negative Particular, ‘Ferio’:
Some A are B, No B are C, therefore Some A are not C.
Ex: Some animals are humans, No humans are reptiles, therefore Some H are not R.
Greek Skepticism: Heraclitus says do not trust experts, we are all a bunch of apes. Pyrrho argues anything against anybody, then the opposite. Sextus Empiricus says inference can be wrong.
Chinese Paradox: Lao Zi’s Wheel (positive, negative, both), Zhuang Zi’s perspective, sage’s this always has a that, Hui Shih’s left today arrived yesterday and greater and lesser similarity and difference, Kung-Sun Lung’s white horse is not a horse argument and two uses of “is”.
Logic, Magic and Riddles: We read in Malinowski’s Rational Mastery by Man of His Surroundings that tribes use all of the grammatical forms and pieces of reasoning that we all use. We saw difference of practice and theory, constantly intertwined, in the difference between shallow water fishing and deep sea fishing. We saw in the next article that in baseball, the same sort of split occurs between hitting/pitching and fielding. In wisdom tales, understanding contradiction. Logic switched from the study of debate in early cultures to foundations of mathematics in modern times with the rise of algebra.
Kanada: Karma as action/energy. We saw the basic structure of IF-THEN hypothetical statements. The Modus Tollens transformation: (If p then q), means also (if not q then not p). Ex: If we know “If there are clouds then there is rain”, we know “If there is no rain then there are no clouds”.
Nyaya: We saw the Nyaya form of the two sided debate: (X is Y) vs. (X is not Y). We saw that there are four sources of knowledge: perception, inference, comparison, and testimony.
Inference shows us induction leading to deduction, gathering leading to rules/principles.
The Nyaya proof: Rule, Example, Reason, Conclusion
Wherever there is smoke, there is fire. As in a kitchen.
Because the hill is smoky, therefore the hill is on fire.
Whatever is produced is not eternal, as a pot. (If p, then n, pot is both)
Because it is produced, Sound is not eternal. (Because s is p, s is n)
Note the subtle attack on the older tradition of the Vedas in the last two examples.
While Nyaya scholars believe X is Y or not Y, exclusively, we see that Jains think it must be some Y and some not Y, neither ALL or None. Buddhists argue that X can sometimes and somewhere be Y but also sometimes and somewhere not be Y. Nagarjuna’s Catuskoti.
Aristotle: Genus and Species (ex: animal, human), substances can have contrary qualities but only at different times, “if someone admits contrary qualities, his contention is unsound”, skeptics are destroyers, plants.
Square of opposition, All X is Y, No X is Y, Some X is Y, Some X is not Y as four corners.
Top pair (universals) can’t both be true, bottom pair (particulars) can’t both be false.
If we know All X is Y is true, then we know two things are false: No X is Y & Some X is not Y.
If we know No X is Y, then we know All X is Y and Some X is Y are false.
If we know Some X is Y, then we know No X is Y is false.
If we know Some X is not Y, then we know All X is Y is false.
Exclusive and Inclusive OR:
Inclusive Or: X or Y and you can choose more than one.
Exclusive Or: X or Y but you can only choose one exclusively.
The Four Forms of the Perfect Syllogism:
First, the Positive Universal, ‘Barbara’:
All A are B, All B are C, therefore All A are C.
Example: If it’s a human, animal, living thing.
(Venn diagram of A within B, B within C, or partially/fully collapsed)
Second, the Negative Universal, ‘Celarent’
All A are B, No B are C, therefore No A are C.
Ex: All men are animals, No animals are stone, therefore No men are made of stone.
Third, the Positive Particular, ‘Darii’
Some A are B, All B are C, therefore Some A are C.
Ex: Some animals are humans, All humans are funny, therefore some animals are funny.
Fourth, the Negative Particular, ‘Ferio’:
Some A are B, No B are C, therefore Some A are not C.
Ex: Some animals are humans, No humans are reptiles, therefore Some H are not R.
Greek Skepticism: Heraclitus says do not trust experts, we are all a bunch of apes. Pyrrho argues anything against anybody, then the opposite. Sextus Empiricus says inference can be wrong.
Chinese Paradox: Lao Zi’s Wheel (positive, negative, both), Zhuang Zi’s perspective, sage’s this always has a that, Hui Shih’s left today arrived yesterday and greater and lesser similarity and difference, Kung-Sun Lung’s white horse is not a horse argument and two uses of “is”.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Cucumber, Ox, Sign and Substitution
In copying an article for inter-library loan, I stumbled upon a hilarious article.
Here are the first two paragraphs:
* * * * * *
Ralf Norrman:
A Note on the Cucumber-Sacrifice among the Nuer
In Nuer Religion Evans-Pritchard relates in detail how the Nuer, who normally - or at least ideally - sacrifice an ox, will sometimes sacrifice a cucumber instead, if an ox is not available. When a cucumber is substituted for an ox the sacrificial ceremony is nevertheless carried out as if the cucumber were an ox, and the fruit is spoken of as "the ox" (or, strictly speaking, "the cow", yang, which is the standard term on such occasions).
I believe that Evans-Pritchard's analysis of the mechanism of signification involved in the custom gives a valuable insight into this type of phenomenon. I wish to make a further contribution to the picture of Nuer sacrifice by considering briefly one specific detail in the sacrificial ceremony, namely the nature of the cucumber as a sign. My thesis is that the cucumber is an intrinsically appropriate symbol in the context; that it has natural suitability for its role as a sacrificial victim, specifically as a substitute for an ox - and ultimately, above all, as a substitute for the life (or lives) of the sacrificer(s).
* * * * * *
Consider the double substitution going on in these two paragraphs. In the first paragraph, the Nuer substitute a cucumber for an ox. In the second paragraph, a scholar substitutes a sign for a cucumber.
Which substitution is more deceptive? I imagine that the Nuer, a group of tribes from Ethiopia and Sudan, understand that the cucumber is not actually an ox much more than the scholar understands that the cucumber is not in fact an abstract academic conception of signs and signification.
Which substitution helps its own tribe more? The sentence, "I believe that Evans-Pritchard's analysis of the mechanism of signification involved in the custom gives a valuable insight into this type of phenomenon" speaks for itself. I propose that the Nuer have a more immediate grasp of substitution and signification than the scholar, at least in so far as the scholar believes he has offered us new insight while in fact he has translated the Nuer sacrifice into academic-speak and done little else. If everything is a sign (thanks a lot, Saussure) the author is not offering us much of a thesis, signification, or sacrifice.
Here are the first two paragraphs:
* * * * * *
Ralf Norrman:
A Note on the Cucumber-Sacrifice among the Nuer
In Nuer Religion Evans-Pritchard relates in detail how the Nuer, who normally - or at least ideally - sacrifice an ox, will sometimes sacrifice a cucumber instead, if an ox is not available. When a cucumber is substituted for an ox the sacrificial ceremony is nevertheless carried out as if the cucumber were an ox, and the fruit is spoken of as "the ox" (or, strictly speaking, "the cow", yang, which is the standard term on such occasions).
I believe that Evans-Pritchard's analysis of the mechanism of signification involved in the custom gives a valuable insight into this type of phenomenon. I wish to make a further contribution to the picture of Nuer sacrifice by considering briefly one specific detail in the sacrificial ceremony, namely the nature of the cucumber as a sign. My thesis is that the cucumber is an intrinsically appropriate symbol in the context; that it has natural suitability for its role as a sacrificial victim, specifically as a substitute for an ox - and ultimately, above all, as a substitute for the life (or lives) of the sacrificer(s).
* * * * * *
Consider the double substitution going on in these two paragraphs. In the first paragraph, the Nuer substitute a cucumber for an ox. In the second paragraph, a scholar substitutes a sign for a cucumber.
Which substitution is more deceptive? I imagine that the Nuer, a group of tribes from Ethiopia and Sudan, understand that the cucumber is not actually an ox much more than the scholar understands that the cucumber is not in fact an abstract academic conception of signs and signification.
Which substitution helps its own tribe more? The sentence, "I believe that Evans-Pritchard's analysis of the mechanism of signification involved in the custom gives a valuable insight into this type of phenomenon" speaks for itself. I propose that the Nuer have a more immediate grasp of substitution and signification than the scholar, at least in so far as the scholar believes he has offered us new insight while in fact he has translated the Nuer sacrifice into academic-speak and done little else. If everything is a sign (thanks a lot, Saussure) the author is not offering us much of a thesis, signification, or sacrifice.
Ethics: Midterm Review
The Midterm Exam will consist of 20 multiple choice questions, three short answer questions covering central concepts, and an essay.
Principle, Moral & Law: Kant
Kant is a positivist with regard to principle, morals and laws. Kant believes that reason should rule over desire (like the early cosmology above) and principles that are figured out by reason should always be followed regardless of the consequences (note that the opposite position can be found in the Utilitarian/consequentialist position below). Kant believes that one starts with good will (good in itself without question) and reasoned principles follow, and one should use this good beginning regardless of what consequences follow (though he says this naturally aims at and leads to good consequences even if this is secondary). Kant calls this “the categorical imperative” and “unconditional universal law”. The example of this is the guy with the knife who asks you “Where did your friend go?”, to whom one should not lie regardless of how easy a good end can come from lying. One must “Do one’s Duty” even if one goes down with the ship.
Virtue & Merit: Aristotle
Virtue is like principle in being a good beginning, but it is also a state or end to obtain. Also, virtue can be individual in a way that principle is collective and for the group. The idea is that one gains virtue, merit or “goodness”, and one can then use this ability/capacity to do good. A virtue-ethicist believes that becoming good or virtuous is more important than following principles or simply having good consequences. One should be virtuous even if it means breaking principles or bad results in a particular situation. The upside of this is a virtue centered ethic is not slave to principle or always seeking the best consequences. The downside is that one could believe that oneself or one’s group is “the virtuous” and ignore principles and consequences to the degree that it becomes a problem for oneself or others.
Consequence, Utility & End: Mill
Consequentialism or Utilitarianism argues that one should focus completely on the ends or results to determine if an act or person is good or bad. Specifically, one should try to maximize pleasure/happiness and minimize pain/suffering for everyone, taking a long view (not a short, 15 minute view). Epicurus was an early Greek consequentialist, and he is followed by the Utilitarian school of Bentham and Mill. While Bentham leaned towards the positive side of the ‘pleasure principle’, maximizing happiness, Mill leaned towards the negative, minimizing harm. Mill is the best known, and has had an important impact on modern thought and theory of law.
Mill’s Utilitarianism is opposite yet similar in many ways to Kant. Both see their side as fundamental and the other side as a secondary consequence. Kant says always follow principle and you will likely be happy, and Mill says always try for happiness and you will likely be principled. Both see their own primary focus as good in itself without the possibility of proof or question.
Attacks on Utilitarianism include: Paradox of the bad as good example, Marx’s guess who gets to use who for whose happiness (the rich and elite), Happiness as unobtainable ideal, Environmental challenge to using the world for human purposes.
Balance & The Mean: Egyptian Wisdom & Confucius
Meaning and value work through pairs of opposites (good/evil, open/closed, individual/collective). A reoccurring theme of the world’s wisdom is that seeking the mean or middle between opposites is better than clinging to either side of an opposition. We can see some beautiful examples of this thinking in the Egyptian wisdom and Confucius passages. In the Egyptian wisdom, moderation of eating and drinking, luxury, and balancing one’s own interest with others are the clearest examples. Confucius offers particularly insightful sayings that call for a balance of one’s self with others for the cultivation of self and society.
Self Interest, Self Esteem and Drive: Nietzsche & Rand
Self is very much an end, though like Mill it can be phrased as a principle (focus on the ends).
While early ethics (in accord with ancient cosmology above) focused on the collective good, modern society has taken a turn towards the individual good. These two have always been complimentary, but devices and media have allowed us to be more enabled as individuals than ever before. Nietzsche and Rand both focus on individual achievement as the central end of life, but they are completely different as far as trusting judgment and truth. Nietzsche trusts no truth at all, calling all collectivism “slave morality” and performing his own misogyny as “Philosophy is always the personal confession of the author”. Rand believes her opinions to be objective, and calls her school the “Objectivists”. Rand’s idea of believing in yourself was repackaged as “self esteem” in the 1980s. While it is important to have self esteem, problems can arise when one trusts one’s own judgment and rejects all opposing judgments entirely.
Perspective & Intersubjectivity: Heraclitus & Chuang Tzu
A balance between thinking our views are completely right or wrong, truth or illusion, is the concept of perspective. The “objective” is very much the intersubjective, the similarity and difference of a group of subjective perspectives. Heraclitus and Chuang Tzu are both excellent thinkers to read to get good examples of this sort of thought. Both use perspectives of animals to show that collective human opinion is just that (pigs sleep in mud, birds sleep in trees). The concept of perspective is good for showing us that all views count, but they are also each limited and capable of progress and expansion.
Principle, Moral & Law: Kant
Kant is a positivist with regard to principle, morals and laws. Kant believes that reason should rule over desire (like the early cosmology above) and principles that are figured out by reason should always be followed regardless of the consequences (note that the opposite position can be found in the Utilitarian/consequentialist position below). Kant believes that one starts with good will (good in itself without question) and reasoned principles follow, and one should use this good beginning regardless of what consequences follow (though he says this naturally aims at and leads to good consequences even if this is secondary). Kant calls this “the categorical imperative” and “unconditional universal law”. The example of this is the guy with the knife who asks you “Where did your friend go?”, to whom one should not lie regardless of how easy a good end can come from lying. One must “Do one’s Duty” even if one goes down with the ship.
Virtue & Merit: Aristotle
Virtue is like principle in being a good beginning, but it is also a state or end to obtain. Also, virtue can be individual in a way that principle is collective and for the group. The idea is that one gains virtue, merit or “goodness”, and one can then use this ability/capacity to do good. A virtue-ethicist believes that becoming good or virtuous is more important than following principles or simply having good consequences. One should be virtuous even if it means breaking principles or bad results in a particular situation. The upside of this is a virtue centered ethic is not slave to principle or always seeking the best consequences. The downside is that one could believe that oneself or one’s group is “the virtuous” and ignore principles and consequences to the degree that it becomes a problem for oneself or others.
Consequence, Utility & End: Mill
Consequentialism or Utilitarianism argues that one should focus completely on the ends or results to determine if an act or person is good or bad. Specifically, one should try to maximize pleasure/happiness and minimize pain/suffering for everyone, taking a long view (not a short, 15 minute view). Epicurus was an early Greek consequentialist, and he is followed by the Utilitarian school of Bentham and Mill. While Bentham leaned towards the positive side of the ‘pleasure principle’, maximizing happiness, Mill leaned towards the negative, minimizing harm. Mill is the best known, and has had an important impact on modern thought and theory of law.
Mill’s Utilitarianism is opposite yet similar in many ways to Kant. Both see their side as fundamental and the other side as a secondary consequence. Kant says always follow principle and you will likely be happy, and Mill says always try for happiness and you will likely be principled. Both see their own primary focus as good in itself without the possibility of proof or question.
Attacks on Utilitarianism include: Paradox of the bad as good example, Marx’s guess who gets to use who for whose happiness (the rich and elite), Happiness as unobtainable ideal, Environmental challenge to using the world for human purposes.
Balance & The Mean: Egyptian Wisdom & Confucius
Meaning and value work through pairs of opposites (good/evil, open/closed, individual/collective). A reoccurring theme of the world’s wisdom is that seeking the mean or middle between opposites is better than clinging to either side of an opposition. We can see some beautiful examples of this thinking in the Egyptian wisdom and Confucius passages. In the Egyptian wisdom, moderation of eating and drinking, luxury, and balancing one’s own interest with others are the clearest examples. Confucius offers particularly insightful sayings that call for a balance of one’s self with others for the cultivation of self and society.
Self Interest, Self Esteem and Drive: Nietzsche & Rand
Self is very much an end, though like Mill it can be phrased as a principle (focus on the ends).
While early ethics (in accord with ancient cosmology above) focused on the collective good, modern society has taken a turn towards the individual good. These two have always been complimentary, but devices and media have allowed us to be more enabled as individuals than ever before. Nietzsche and Rand both focus on individual achievement as the central end of life, but they are completely different as far as trusting judgment and truth. Nietzsche trusts no truth at all, calling all collectivism “slave morality” and performing his own misogyny as “Philosophy is always the personal confession of the author”. Rand believes her opinions to be objective, and calls her school the “Objectivists”. Rand’s idea of believing in yourself was repackaged as “self esteem” in the 1980s. While it is important to have self esteem, problems can arise when one trusts one’s own judgment and rejects all opposing judgments entirely.
Perspective & Intersubjectivity: Heraclitus & Chuang Tzu
A balance between thinking our views are completely right or wrong, truth or illusion, is the concept of perspective. The “objective” is very much the intersubjective, the similarity and difference of a group of subjective perspectives. Heraclitus and Chuang Tzu are both excellent thinkers to read to get good examples of this sort of thought. Both use perspectives of animals to show that collective human opinion is just that (pigs sleep in mud, birds sleep in trees). The concept of perspective is good for showing us that all views count, but they are also each limited and capable of progress and expansion.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Intro Philosophy: Lecture on Daoism
This week, we will be studying the two most central texts of Chinese Daoism: the Dao De Jing (also ‘Tao’) of Lao Zi, and the book of the ‘second patriarch’ of Daoism, Zhuang Zi. “Zi” used to be “Tzu” until recently. It means “master”, the title added to most Chinese philosophers, and it is pronounced like a cross between “zih” and “tzuh”. Give “zih” a bit of a “t” on the front and change the “ih” a bit to an “uh”.
Daoism has always been dear to my heart, as I have an old printing of the Dao (on the book, the ‘Tao Te Ching’, now typically and more accurately written ‘Dao De Jing’) which I loved when I was a kid. It was only, however, later in my studies that I was able to have a real love of the text, which at first seemed simply mysterious poetry.
Daoism is often opposed to Confucianism as a skeptical school of thought vs. Confucianism which is more a traditionalist or rationalist school. Indeed, Daoism is one of the most powerful skeptical schools of thought in history, and we continue to look to it as a champion of opening the mind. However it is also clear that Confucius was a skeptic of individual judgments and Daoism also became an orthodox religious system.
While Confucianism stands for city life, study, and the structure of the family and state, Daoism advocates returning to nature, meditation, and questioning relationships of power. Whereas Confucianism argues that we should cultivate and civilize ourselves, Daoism believes that we should return to our natural state and let nature run its course, thus reaching a state of completion.
The most important concept for Daoism (and, interestingly, the mystics of most religions) is the Great One, the All. Essentially, Daoism argues that one should remove one-sided judgments and desires from the mind such that harmony with the whole, with the One, is achieved. ‘Dao’ means ‘Way’, and thus ‘Daoism’ is the study of the Way of the All, the source of everything.
It is believed that Lao Zi lived sometime after 600 BCE, and Zhuang Zi, the second patriarch of Daoism, lived sometime about 370-300 BCE. Not much is known about either patriarch, but we do know that Chuang Tzu worked in a lacquer house (a place for mass-producing bento boxes and plates with glazes). The things said of Lao Tzu are considered entirely of legend. The most famous of these is the legend that Master Lao rode off on a water buffalo into the West (the direction of the setting sun, sacred and associated with death and the afterlife in many cultures including Egypt and China) at the end of his life, never heard from again. One tradition holds that he went to India to teach the Buddha, but this is clearly a tale told by Daoists to explain how Daoism is quite close to Buddhism in many ways. Daoism was blended with Buddhism in China, so Chinese Daoists would say this to trump the Chinese Buddhists.
The Dao De Jing of Lao Zi:
The first chapter, opening verse, of the Dao De Jing, famously reads: “The Dao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Dao. Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name. As the origin of heaven and earth, it is nameless.” The All, or the One, includes everything. Thus, there is no proper or particular name. The BIG ALL does not need a particular name, because there is nothing in particular that one can judge about the ALL. It is the source of all things, so it could be called ‘green’, ‘not green’, ‘both’ or ‘neither’, with equal meaning. The same, of course, goes for any adjective. Just as any particular thing has its opposite (hot and cold, good and evil), the One is the source of all opposites, and thus is in fact neither and both of each particular thing. Notice the duality of heaven and earth, of open sky and closed ground. Sometimes we think being solid is good, other times we feel that being free is good. In fact, the All is all solidity (order) and freedom (chaos), so the All is above and the source of all closure and openness. In the first three lines, we have much of Daoist thought already.
In chapter 8 of the Dao, we learn that the Dao is like water. This is a common metaphor that Daoism employs to describe how the way (Dao) of things is fluid, like water, getting down into the lowest and tightest cracks of things. Daoists are quick to point out: the Dao has no status or pride, and so like the Daoist sage the Way is down amongst the poor and the common, together as one with the things people despise as well as the things people desire.
Chapter 9 of the Dao is a classic example of Daoist reasoning by contradiction. All things have contradictory properties, but this is hard for our one sided judgments and views to see. Thus, we are told that if we continue to sharpen a sword it goes dull, and if we store up enough valuables they will surely attract thieves. ‘When you have done your work, retire’ here means: judge and do just enough for the present situation, but do not try to build up merit or riches, for it will only bring you trouble.
Chapter 11 of the Dao is my favorite. I find it very important for understanding the duality of positive and negative, the solid and empty we saw in heaven-and-earth of chapter 1. We are told that a wheel is only useful because of the emptiness at the center. When you first look at a wheel, you see it as a simply solid thing. Then, if you look again with a more skeptical mind, you will see that the emptiness, not just the substance, is important too. Imagine if a house was not mostly empty, but was solid through and through. You would not be able to get inside it! May as well build the house in outer space. Solid and empty get their meanings, their uses, from a mutual relationship, not from one being the only thing and the other merely false. I love this verse, as it is very close to Hegel’s idea of positive, negative, and synthesis. The synthesis here would be seeing not just the solid wheel, nor simply the emptiness, but both working together.
There is a Zen Buddhist Koan which says something very similar: “First practicing (Zen), I saw a rock as a rock…then, I saw it as not a rock…finally, I saw it as truly a rock.” This, like Hegel, refers to seeing the thing and the conception of the thing as one and two at the same time.
Chapter 13 tells us that getting a lowly state, a common position, is a gift, and so is losing it! How can both getting something and loosing something be good? Because there is good and bad in everything. If the sage finds the good in anything, turning the good to their advantage, then the sage can find the good in getting a thing, and then find the good in loosing that thing. Don’t assume that nothing else has changed in the mean time.
Chapter 22 has an ethical ring to it. The sage does not boast, and is admired by everyone. Clearly, this is because there is no end to boasting in human beings! Most people assume that they know what is simply good, and what is simply bad, and they are not afraid to tell you so. Only the sage, the wise person, knows not to boast about anything, and thus the sage is much less annoying than the average person. This takes practice and patience, something the average person does not have time for before making a certain judgment. The idea is that if you desire nothing, ‘everything will flock to you’, and you have whatever you need right at hand in any situation. This is opposite the common understanding, which says that you must want something to have it.
Notice at the end of chapter 42, ‘A man of violence will come to a violent end’. This is quite similar to Jesus saying, ‘those who live by the sword die by the sword’. Try to gain for yourself, and the great balance of all things will cut you down, doing to you what you do to others.
Chapter 71 reads ‘to realize that our knowledge is ignorance, this is a noble insight. To regard our ignorance as knowledge, this is mental sickness’. I love this wisdom. A good example of this is racism. Knowledge is always focusing on one thing. When you focus on one thing, you ignore everything else. This is crucial to seeing how our knowledge is always human perspective, and how it can always be improved.
The Book of Zhuang Zi:
In several places, we see the idea of perspective which we encountered in Heraclitus. Mao Quiang and Lady Li were famous beautiful women, but fish, birds and deer were frightened by them. Heraclitus said that all human beauty and achievement is nothing but apes to the gods as apes are only apes to us. Who knows what is beautiful, humans, birds, fish, or deer? Which of them knows what tastes good? Another great passage is the Peng bird who migrates for the Winter, an act which the dove and the cicada (a large insect) find ridiculous. They have no frame of reference to understand such an act. This suggests that the wisdom of Daoism will sound ridiculous and foolish to those who are not experienced and wise. We read in the text "Truth sounds like its opposite!", just as Heraclitus said "The way forward is the way back".
In the Chapter, The Secret of Caring for Life, we meet Cook Ting and his famous butcher’s knife. Cook Ting tells his master that his blade never goes dull, for he can always find the hidden spaces in things, and then his blade goes right through. This is very much like the reasoning of the wise mind, that can use reason to chop anything up easily and naturally, without striking up against anything in opposition.
Notice that Confucius appears many times in the Chuang Tzu, used to argue AGAINST his own position and in favor of a Daoist position. Many times Confucius says that his own way is inferior to the Daoist way. Clearly, these are texts written by Daoists who appreciate the good in Confucianism but think their own school to be superior. For example, page 65, in the chapter ‘The Sign of Virtue Complete’, Confucius says of Wang T’ai, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall, Ch’u and Yueh (two warring kingdoms in China). But if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one.” I still use this contradiction of one and many to this day. It shows you much about how people make judgments and arguments.
Notice on page 92 and 93 that Hu Tzu trumps a shaman, who tries to read him but Hu Tzu can change how he is read seemingly at will. This seems to suggest that the true sage can identify with everything and everybody, so there is no need to avoid any particular thing or to judge the presence or absence of anything for any situation. Anything desired is always immediately at hand when you have a fluid nature that is the source of all things.
Daoism has always been dear to my heart, as I have an old printing of the Dao (on the book, the ‘Tao Te Ching’, now typically and more accurately written ‘Dao De Jing’) which I loved when I was a kid. It was only, however, later in my studies that I was able to have a real love of the text, which at first seemed simply mysterious poetry.
Daoism is often opposed to Confucianism as a skeptical school of thought vs. Confucianism which is more a traditionalist or rationalist school. Indeed, Daoism is one of the most powerful skeptical schools of thought in history, and we continue to look to it as a champion of opening the mind. However it is also clear that Confucius was a skeptic of individual judgments and Daoism also became an orthodox religious system.
While Confucianism stands for city life, study, and the structure of the family and state, Daoism advocates returning to nature, meditation, and questioning relationships of power. Whereas Confucianism argues that we should cultivate and civilize ourselves, Daoism believes that we should return to our natural state and let nature run its course, thus reaching a state of completion.
The most important concept for Daoism (and, interestingly, the mystics of most religions) is the Great One, the All. Essentially, Daoism argues that one should remove one-sided judgments and desires from the mind such that harmony with the whole, with the One, is achieved. ‘Dao’ means ‘Way’, and thus ‘Daoism’ is the study of the Way of the All, the source of everything.
It is believed that Lao Zi lived sometime after 600 BCE, and Zhuang Zi, the second patriarch of Daoism, lived sometime about 370-300 BCE. Not much is known about either patriarch, but we do know that Chuang Tzu worked in a lacquer house (a place for mass-producing bento boxes and plates with glazes). The things said of Lao Tzu are considered entirely of legend. The most famous of these is the legend that Master Lao rode off on a water buffalo into the West (the direction of the setting sun, sacred and associated with death and the afterlife in many cultures including Egypt and China) at the end of his life, never heard from again. One tradition holds that he went to India to teach the Buddha, but this is clearly a tale told by Daoists to explain how Daoism is quite close to Buddhism in many ways. Daoism was blended with Buddhism in China, so Chinese Daoists would say this to trump the Chinese Buddhists.
The Dao De Jing of Lao Zi:
The first chapter, opening verse, of the Dao De Jing, famously reads: “The Dao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Dao. Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name. As the origin of heaven and earth, it is nameless.” The All, or the One, includes everything. Thus, there is no proper or particular name. The BIG ALL does not need a particular name, because there is nothing in particular that one can judge about the ALL. It is the source of all things, so it could be called ‘green’, ‘not green’, ‘both’ or ‘neither’, with equal meaning. The same, of course, goes for any adjective. Just as any particular thing has its opposite (hot and cold, good and evil), the One is the source of all opposites, and thus is in fact neither and both of each particular thing. Notice the duality of heaven and earth, of open sky and closed ground. Sometimes we think being solid is good, other times we feel that being free is good. In fact, the All is all solidity (order) and freedom (chaos), so the All is above and the source of all closure and openness. In the first three lines, we have much of Daoist thought already.
In chapter 8 of the Dao, we learn that the Dao is like water. This is a common metaphor that Daoism employs to describe how the way (Dao) of things is fluid, like water, getting down into the lowest and tightest cracks of things. Daoists are quick to point out: the Dao has no status or pride, and so like the Daoist sage the Way is down amongst the poor and the common, together as one with the things people despise as well as the things people desire.
Chapter 9 of the Dao is a classic example of Daoist reasoning by contradiction. All things have contradictory properties, but this is hard for our one sided judgments and views to see. Thus, we are told that if we continue to sharpen a sword it goes dull, and if we store up enough valuables they will surely attract thieves. ‘When you have done your work, retire’ here means: judge and do just enough for the present situation, but do not try to build up merit or riches, for it will only bring you trouble.
Chapter 11 of the Dao is my favorite. I find it very important for understanding the duality of positive and negative, the solid and empty we saw in heaven-and-earth of chapter 1. We are told that a wheel is only useful because of the emptiness at the center. When you first look at a wheel, you see it as a simply solid thing. Then, if you look again with a more skeptical mind, you will see that the emptiness, not just the substance, is important too. Imagine if a house was not mostly empty, but was solid through and through. You would not be able to get inside it! May as well build the house in outer space. Solid and empty get their meanings, their uses, from a mutual relationship, not from one being the only thing and the other merely false. I love this verse, as it is very close to Hegel’s idea of positive, negative, and synthesis. The synthesis here would be seeing not just the solid wheel, nor simply the emptiness, but both working together.
There is a Zen Buddhist Koan which says something very similar: “First practicing (Zen), I saw a rock as a rock…then, I saw it as not a rock…finally, I saw it as truly a rock.” This, like Hegel, refers to seeing the thing and the conception of the thing as one and two at the same time.
Chapter 13 tells us that getting a lowly state, a common position, is a gift, and so is losing it! How can both getting something and loosing something be good? Because there is good and bad in everything. If the sage finds the good in anything, turning the good to their advantage, then the sage can find the good in getting a thing, and then find the good in loosing that thing. Don’t assume that nothing else has changed in the mean time.
Chapter 22 has an ethical ring to it. The sage does not boast, and is admired by everyone. Clearly, this is because there is no end to boasting in human beings! Most people assume that they know what is simply good, and what is simply bad, and they are not afraid to tell you so. Only the sage, the wise person, knows not to boast about anything, and thus the sage is much less annoying than the average person. This takes practice and patience, something the average person does not have time for before making a certain judgment. The idea is that if you desire nothing, ‘everything will flock to you’, and you have whatever you need right at hand in any situation. This is opposite the common understanding, which says that you must want something to have it.
Notice at the end of chapter 42, ‘A man of violence will come to a violent end’. This is quite similar to Jesus saying, ‘those who live by the sword die by the sword’. Try to gain for yourself, and the great balance of all things will cut you down, doing to you what you do to others.
Chapter 71 reads ‘to realize that our knowledge is ignorance, this is a noble insight. To regard our ignorance as knowledge, this is mental sickness’. I love this wisdom. A good example of this is racism. Knowledge is always focusing on one thing. When you focus on one thing, you ignore everything else. This is crucial to seeing how our knowledge is always human perspective, and how it can always be improved.
The Book of Zhuang Zi:
In several places, we see the idea of perspective which we encountered in Heraclitus. Mao Quiang and Lady Li were famous beautiful women, but fish, birds and deer were frightened by them. Heraclitus said that all human beauty and achievement is nothing but apes to the gods as apes are only apes to us. Who knows what is beautiful, humans, birds, fish, or deer? Which of them knows what tastes good? Another great passage is the Peng bird who migrates for the Winter, an act which the dove and the cicada (a large insect) find ridiculous. They have no frame of reference to understand such an act. This suggests that the wisdom of Daoism will sound ridiculous and foolish to those who are not experienced and wise. We read in the text "Truth sounds like its opposite!", just as Heraclitus said "The way forward is the way back".
In the Chapter, The Secret of Caring for Life, we meet Cook Ting and his famous butcher’s knife. Cook Ting tells his master that his blade never goes dull, for he can always find the hidden spaces in things, and then his blade goes right through. This is very much like the reasoning of the wise mind, that can use reason to chop anything up easily and naturally, without striking up against anything in opposition.
Notice that Confucius appears many times in the Chuang Tzu, used to argue AGAINST his own position and in favor of a Daoist position. Many times Confucius says that his own way is inferior to the Daoist way. Clearly, these are texts written by Daoists who appreciate the good in Confucianism but think their own school to be superior. For example, page 65, in the chapter ‘The Sign of Virtue Complete’, Confucius says of Wang T’ai, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall, Ch’u and Yueh (two warring kingdoms in China). But if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one.” I still use this contradiction of one and many to this day. It shows you much about how people make judgments and arguments.
Notice on page 92 and 93 that Hu Tzu trumps a shaman, who tries to read him but Hu Tzu can change how he is read seemingly at will. This seems to suggest that the true sage can identify with everything and everybody, so there is no need to avoid any particular thing or to judge the presence or absence of anything for any situation. Anything desired is always immediately at hand when you have a fluid nature that is the source of all things.
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