Since this is the first lecture of the course, and because we are studying Eastern philosophy rather than Western, it is important to introduce philosophy and why the West does not have a monopoly on it.
Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.
Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location. In many ways, places and times, happiness and solidity are good and in others they are bad. Also, no particular thing is perfectly good or completely solid. We judge the table (and the wheel, as Lao Zi the patriarch of Daoism will explain soon) to be simply solid and the space around it to be simply empty, but no table is immortal or unbreakable, and no space is a perfect vacuum. Even outer space is full of dust, light and everything else in the universe. In the same way, particular things that are good or make us happy do not always make us happy and do not make everyone happy. Often, things that make one person happy continue to make another unhappy because they make the first person happy.
Human belief/judgment has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative). Belief is an answer or answering, and doubt is a question or questioning. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability and consistency of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness and change of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists (also called positivists today) lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between dogmatism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.
When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both dogmatism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.
Many unfortunately believe that philosophy was born in ancient Greece, when in fact wisdom is universal to human kind even though it is difficult to achieve. The wise, though rarer than we would like, have been celebrated in all cultures, and their wisdom has similarity across all cultures even though their beliefs can differ widely. While the word ‘philosophy’ is an ancient Greek word, great thinkers and questioners can be called philosophers and sages in any culture.
Consider the following passage from Euclid in the Rainforest (first published in 2006) by Mazur, a professor of Logic and Mathematics. I like much about this work, which examines how logic and math require not only deductive rule following but individual leaps of intuition and interpretation. Keep in mind that “Western” is a recent word that has replaced “European race” only within the last century:
“Sometime early in the sixth century B.C., two things happened to dramatically alter the way Western civilization explained the world. The first was the use of cause and effect, as opposed to the supernatural in explaining natural phenomena; we might say that nature was first discovered then. The second was the practice of rational criticism and debate. These fresh developments occurred after a time of great political upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean, which led to profound changes in the political structures of Greek cities. Democracy in Athens meant that citizens could participate in government and law, freely debating and questioning political ideas. Before the establishment of the Greek city state, a change in rule usually meant merely a change from one tyrant to another.”
This is the sort of view that is orthodox in academics today, and one I love to hate. Many claim that the Greeks invented or discovered nature, explaining things through material cause and effect, rational criticism and debate, Democracy, and questioning political ideas. This is odd, considering the democratic assembly of Athens, put Socrates to death for encouraging the youth to question truth, tradition and politics.
Let us carefully work through this, point by point. First, cause and effect are basic to human explanation, whether that explanation could be called supernatural or natural. The spirits and gods were thought to cause things, they were considered part of the natural world and made of fire as was the individual soul or mind, and most ancient Greek thinkers, including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all believed in polytheistic gods even as they pushed towards a more monotheistic/monistic cosmos beyond the many gods which is why Plato and Aristotle were, even though polytheists, revered and brought to us by the Islamic and Christian traditions. Doing Logic was largely doing Aristotle to many of the Islamic and Christian logicians we will study in this class, though others questioned Aristotle.
Second, rational criticism and debate are basic to human cultures. Athens was the only temporary democracy in ancient Greece, so it was not a profound change to the structure of the Greek city state nor was it established with the Greek city state, as there were several. During most of ancient Greek history, change in rule was merely a change from one tyrant to another. As far as democracy being invented in Athens, in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh we can see that king Gilgamesh wants a war, so he goes to the higher senate, composed of the rich elites like Athenian democracy, and they reject his proposal, so he then appeals to the lower house composed of lesser but a greater number of elites, who accept and help him to override the consensus of the senate. In African villages, we can see everyone sitting down and men and women standing one at a time and airing their grievances, and then the chief makes a decision based on the debate. The brief period of Athenian democracy was not categorically free debate, nor was previous politics categorical tyranny. Individual and group decision making are found in complex arrangements in all cultures, including the earliest and most primitive, ancient Athens, and our America today.
It should also be mentioned that philosophers were not welcome in ancient Greece as they questioned the ways of things (traditional polytheism) and as such Socrates was put to death for “inciting the youth to riot”, Aristotle was chased out of Athens after the death of his student Alexander (a foreign Macedonian who conquered Athens by the sword, Aristotle being an unwelcome foreigner from Strageira in Athens himself), and Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, complains that his city state Ephesus exiled their best thinker for questioning things and it would be best if all Ephesians went and hanged themselves to leave the city in the abler hands of children.
What is philosophy? Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato) critically examined their own thinking and their traditions of thought and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.
The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom? The German philosophers Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as dogmatism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.
The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and ancient everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions. Systems of thought are always sites of disagreement as much as they are of agreement.
Recently, the Attorney General of Arizona crafted legislation against teachers who provide programs celebrating Latino culture as they are dangerously “anti-Western”, and pointed specifically to teaching that Aztecs and Mayans had philosophers as Leon-Pontilla argues. Apparently, it is biased and thus un-Western to teach that concepts such as “you are my other self” (much like Confucius, who we will study) and “continue to investigate things endlessly” (much like Heraclitus, who we will study) is evidence that the Aztecs and Mayans had philosophy. It is perceived as a threat to American culture to equate the ancient Mayans with the ancient Greeks. It is not just the Attorney General who thinks this, but academics with PhDs who continue to provide the ground for this belief in their publications.
As far as the ancient Greeks or the Attorney General of Arizona being part of a specifically rational culture, let us consider the definition of logical validity. An argument is logically valid if the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. Consider the following argument: “Because all elevators play jazz music, jazz is the Devil’s playground, and one should avoid the Devil, elevators are to be avoided.” You can follow this argument because it is logical. It does not matter whether or not the premises are true, but only that IF they are true so would the conclusion. You can construct logical arguments that include the premise, “All puppies are green”, which is useful to show how logic works. The elevator argument is in the form of Aristotle’s first syllogism, and because human reasoning employs chains so frequently it does not appear that he invented the form but rather examined it critically.
Introducing Indian Thought
Now, on to introducing Indian thought, but first a note on pronouncing Indian (and for later, Japanese) terms correctly for English speakers. In order to pronounce Indian terms correctly, it is important to remember that, just like in Japanese but unlike in English and other European languages, often, but not always, the third to last syllable is accented or stressed (like in the word ‘SYllable’, which is not pronounced ‘sylLAble’), not the second to last (as in ‘disCOvery’, which is not pronounced ‘DIScovery’). English and European speakers often pronounce Indian and Japanese terms wrong because of this difference. For instance, while many say ‘suDOku’ or ‘kaTAna’, in Japanese these are properly pronounced ‘SUdoku’ and ‘KAtana’. In Indian dialects, likewise, the Buddhist movement is pronounced ‘MaHAyana’, not ‘MAhaYAna’, as it is often said, a Jain patriarch is a ‘tirTHANkara’, the Hindu epic is the ‘MAhaBHArata’, not ‘MAhabhaRAta’, and the Buddhist doctrine of codependent arising is ‘praTITyasaMUDpada’. Note that the emphasis is always the third to last syllable as much as possible given the number of syllables in the word.
‘Hindu’ is the Persian name for India (Persia and India are next door to each other and have traded for thousands of years). Our society borrows the term from the British, who get the term from the Persians. As we read in the Vedas, Hinduism brought together many traditions from many regions with many gods, but there are three levels that are equally interchangeable and separable. First, each can have a particular god that is the emphasis of one’s particular branch of the tradition. Second, the many gods are each one aspect of a single god, often the great father and creator, named by most traditions Brahma. Third, there is a philosophical monism that goes beyond god or not god, living or dead, conscious or unconscious, that is the One. Locals practicing devotional worship often operate on the first level, priests who study the Vedas often operate on the second level, while philosophers and unorthodox Indian schools that do not accept the authority of the Vedas such as Jains, Buddhists and the materialist Carvakas operate on the third. As Hinduism was brought together as a tradition that brought together many separate people with separate traditions, first the Vedas spoke largely though not entirely on the first level, then particular passages of the Vedas and the later Upanishads spoke on the second level, and then many schools went beyond the Upanishads and understood a simple, neither theistic nor atheistic One to be the real underlying truth of the first and second levels. Vedanta, literally “Veda’s End”, debated back and forth between the second and third levels in the tradition of the Upanishads.
This came together over many periods in the history of Indian thought. About 2000 BCE, India was invaded by a fire worshiping people who likely came from modern day Iran. This was a big influence on the Vedas and Indian culture, however today scholars are critical of just how influential as it was said only recently that the Aryans civilized India and brought the Vedas with them, but now archeologists have uncovered past civilizations who had incredible bathrooms with complex plumbing and while the Vedas may have been strongly influenced by the Aryans, it is debatable how much is composed of earlier native Indian pre-Aryan traditions. The Nazis, following earlier German historians, believed that the Aryans were Germanic tribes who civilized not only India but Egypt, Greece, and Persia. The swastika, and Indian name for a symbol that can be found in much of the world, including tribal German lands, was thought to be the sun symbol of the Aryans, and so it was used by the Nazis. Unfortunately for this Germanic theory of history, we know that the Aryans were indeed from modern day Iran, what became Persia very soon after the Aryan conquests in India.
Next, in the Vedic period, 1500-800 BCE, the four Vedas were composed as oral traditions that eventually were written down in texts, including the foremost Rg Veda of which there are selections in your reader. The golden age of Indian thought followed from 800-200 BCE, the time when the Upanishads distilled the Vedic hymns to the gods into inner philosophical/psychological teachings, the six orthodox schools that follow the Vedas (Vedanta, Yoga, Mimamsa, Samkhya, Nyaya and Vaisheshika) as well as the unorthodox schools (Carvaka, Jainism and Buddhism) flourished, and the great Hindu epics (the Mahabharata and Ramayana) were written. After this, from 200 BCE – 500 CE is a period when the schools and traditions of the golden age were systematized into sutras or central texts. Finally, after 500 CE and up to the present time, is the period of commentaries written on the earlier systems and their sutras. This persisted through the period of conquest by Muslims of North India in the 1500s and then by the British in the 1800s.
There are three paths of worship in Hinduism. First, there is devotional worship, known as Bhakti Yoga (‘Yoga’ means ‘discipline’, or practice). In Bhakti devotional worship, the devotee prays, sings hymns, lights incense, and performs rituals to gain favor with the gods and heavens. It is impossible not to notice that most of what we call ‘religion’ the world over is in fact forms of Bhakti practice, devotion to particular gods and ancestral spirits. The two most populous forms of Bhakti Hinduism are Shaivism, the worship of Shiva (the transformer and destroyer) and his incarnations such as Ganesh (the elephant headed god), and Vaishnavism, the worship of Vishnu (the savior or preserver) and his incarnations such as Krishna. Worship is often called ‘darshana’, or seeing/experiencing, and Hindus will say, I am going to the seeing, meaning I am going to see and be seen by the god. Another common form of Bhakti devotion is worship of a particular goddess such as Kali. Notice that, like a scientist, Bhakti practitioners also believe in learning by experience and seeing, but their subject matter is quite different.
Raja yoga, the second path, is worship by meditation and asceticism (living in isolation, standing in place for days, fasting chanting the names of gods for hours, sitting on spikes, and other means of hard activity) meant to gain a meditative state of insight. Raja means ‘force’ or ‘effort’, and India is famous for its forest sages practicing these techniques.
Jnana yoga (“zshna-na”), the third path and my personal favorite, is worship by acquiring knowledge, wisdom and understanding the order of things through study and philosophizing. This class itself could be seen as a form of Jnana yoga, designed to bring you closer to the core by studying the ways of the world. All three paths, or any mixture of the three, are understood to work towards the same goal: liberation from the bonds of attachment and desire, rising into enlightenment and release from the constraints of identity to join together with the whole.
There are two ultimate goals to this process. First, there is hope for a better next life. Many are familiar already with the Hindu idea of reincarnation. This is not a form of afterlife particular to India, but in fact there is evidence that many tribal cultures and early Egypt believed that one’s present life will be reincarnated in another life on earth based on one’s actions and intentions. This interconnection is called ‘Karma’, which simply means ‘action’ in Sanskrit. Interestingly, physical causation is ‘karma’, just as metaphysical causation (next life physics) is ‘karma’, same word and understanding of cause and effect applied to a different sphere of existence. If you punch someone in the head, it is karma that makes their head reel backward, and karma that also weighs down your chance for a favorable life after death in the Hindu tradition.
Second, there is hope for release, for freedom from rounds of rebirth on earth. This can be thought of as dwelling in a heaven with one’s personal or family god, but also as a dwelling with the order of things without residing in any particular place. Bhakti yoga tends to favor the dwelling with a lord, while Raja and Jnana tends to favor the dwelling with the universe as a whole, however it is important to remember that some Hindus believe that both amount to the same exact thing (while others will insist that their school’s truth is ‘more true’, the same variation one finds in any religion and in our own culture). This release is also called Moksha and Samadhi, but in America we know this first and foremost by the same name as the famous grunge band, Nirvana.
While moksha is the ultimate goal, via the more immediate goal of positioning oneself favorably for moksha either in this life (dwelling in the forest or a monastery) or in a next life, there are three other goals that Indian philosophy points to as desirable making four in total. In addition to moksha/nirvana, there is law or morality, ‘dharma’ (the term Jains and Buddhists use to describe their traditions and rules), pleasure, ‘kama’ (as from the Kama Sutra), and material wellbeing, ‘artha’. Clearly, the overall idea is that pleasure and comfort (kama and artha) are not in themselves evil, but one should pursue liberation through discipline (moksha through dharma).
Ancient India saw a great deal of development in science and technology. They observed the natural world and put phenomena into families and categories as did the ancient Greeks and as we still do today. The Romans would trade Germanic and Celtic slaves to India in exchange for Indian wootz, the metal most prized for weapons in the ancient world. In mathematics the Indians were unsurpassed by ancient civilizations, developing the base ten system and the Indian-Arabic numerals we use today. They laid down the basics of symbolic equations, the concept and symbolization of zero, and invented the variable (originally a thick dot). All of this got picked up by the Muslims, who turned it into algebra, which then got picked up by the Europeans, who turned it into Calculus. Typically, we learn about Euclid and the Greeks doing geometry as the source of the Western mathematical tradition. Muslims were influenced by the Greeks and Euclid, but Euclid argued about lines drawn in sand and did not use equations. It was the Indians who invented the sorts of mathematical symbolism that the Muslims turned into step by step symbolic mathematics as we know it today and teach it up through high school.
In spite of all of these developments, Indian thought is typically anti-materialistic and concerned with spirituality or psychology depending on one’s vocabulary. Knowing the mind/spirit is knowing the essence of the whole as self-knowledge, or ‘atmavidya’. Hindus believe that one has an eternal self/soul/mind, the ‘atma’, as opposed to Jains and Buddhists who believe in ‘anatma’, or no-self (permanent, anyway).
On a final note, it used to be the opinion not only of most Hindus but also European scholarship until very recently, that Jainism and Buddhism took parts of Hinduism and broke away to form their own traditions. Recently, new studies have shown that Jainism and Buddhism were forming at the same time as Hinduism was becoming an official tradition. The Hindus accepted the Vedas and Upanishads while the Jains and Buddhists broke from the Vedas to follow more Upanishad-like understandings, but Hinduism as a centralized tradition was, in part, a reaction to the development of the Jain and Buddhist traditions. Thus, similar doctrines of reincarnation and psychological skepticism/idealism may have developed at the same time or been borrowed by Hinduism in its fully developed form rather than borrowed from Hinduism as it was previously thought. Even so, there is some truth to the common Hindu understanding that “Buddhism is Hinduism for export”, as Buddhists took the ideas in the Upanishads and Indian tradition, removed the dietary restrictions, caste system and other traditional purity laws, and became possibly the world’s largest system of thought in history, although it is debatable whether Christianity or Buddhism has that title.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Logic: Reason & Wisdom in the Earliest Human Cultures
This lecture covers three things. First, we are going to sketch a broad picture of human thought and its basic dynamics. Second, we are going to consider articles including Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings by Malinowski, Baseball Superstition, and the Shotgun Cult to show that humans had reason and logical thinking in the earliest and most primitive human cultures. The first article shows us that the earliest and most basic human cultures are logical and rational, and the next two articles build on the work of the first. Third and finally, we will look at selections from Riddling Tales from Around the World to show that humans, again in the earliest cultures, question truth and appreciate paradox and contradiction.
The Positives and Negatives of Human Thought
Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.
Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location. In many ways, places and times, happiness and solidity are good and in others they are bad. Also, no particular thing is perfectly good or completely solid. We judge the table (and the wheel, as Lao Zi the patriarch of Daoism will explain soon) to be simply solid and the space around it to be simply empty, but no table is immortal or unbreakable, and no space is a perfect vacuum. Even outer space is full of dust, light and everything else in the universe. In the same way, particular things that are good or make us happy do not always make us happy and do not make everyone happy. Often, things that make one person happy continue to make another unhappy because they make the first person happy.
Human belief/judgment has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative). Belief is an answer or answering, and doubt is a question or questioning. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability and consistency of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness and change of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists (also called positivists today) lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between dogmatism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.
When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both dogmatism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.
In this class, we will see that in the earliest cultures, and then in ancient India, Greece and China, dogmatic logicians tried to demonstrate how to argue rationally for atomic truths (principles of knowledge that are unquestionably certain) while skeptics tried to demonstrate that no truth is unquestionable or absolute.
Many unfortunately believe that philosophy was born in ancient Greece, when in fact wisdom is universal to human kind even though it is difficult to achieve. The wise, though rarer than we would like, have been celebrated in all cultures, and their wisdom has similarity across all cultures even though their beliefs can differ widely. While the word ‘philosophy’ is an ancient Greek word, great thinkers and questioners can be called philosophers and sages in any culture.
Consider the following passage from Euclid in the Rainforest (first published in 2006) by Mazur, a professor of Logic and Mathematics. I like much about this work, which examines how logic and math require not only deductive rule following but individual leaps of intuition and interpretation. Keep in mind that “Western” is a recent word that has replaced “European race” only within the last century:
“Sometime early in the sixth century B.C., two things happened to dramatically alter the way Western civilization explained the world. The first was the use of cause and effect, as opposed to the supernatural in explaining natural phenomena; we might say that nature was first discovered then. The second was the practice of rational criticism and debate. These fresh developments occurred after a time of great political upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean, which led to profound changes in the political structures of Greek cities. Democracy in Athens meant that citizens could participate in government and law, freely debating and questioning political ideas. Before the establishment of the Greek city state, a change in rule usually meant merely a change from one tyrant to another.”
This is the sort of view that is orthodox in academics today, and one I love to hate. Many claim that the Greeks invented or discovered nature, explaining things through material cause and effect, rational criticism and debate, Democracy, and questioning political ideas. This is odd, considering the democratic assembly of Athens, put Socrates to death for encouraging the youth to question truth, tradition and politics.
Let us carefully work through this, point by point. First, cause and effect are basic to human explanation, whether that explanation could be called supernatural or natural. The spirits and gods were thought to cause things, they were considered part of the natural world and made of fire as was the individual soul or mind, and most ancient Greek thinkers, including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all believed in polytheistic gods even as they pushed towards a more monotheistic/monistic cosmos beyond the many gods which is why Plato and Aristotle were, even though polytheists, revered and brought to us by the Islamic and Christian traditions. Doing Logic was largely doing Aristotle to many of the Islamic and Christian logicians we will study in this class, though others questioned Aristotle.
Second, rational criticism and debate are basic to human cultures. Athens was the only temporary democracy in ancient Greece, so it was not a profound change to the structure of the Greek city state nor was it established with the Greek city state, as there were several. During most of ancient Greek history, change in rule was merely a change from one tyrant to another. As far as democracy being invented in Athens, in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh we can see that king Gilgamesh wants a war, so he goes to the higher senate, composed of the rich elites like Athenian democracy, and they reject his proposal, so he then appeals to the lower house composed of lesser but a greater number of elites, who accept and help him to override the consensus of the senate. In African villages, we can see everyone sitting down and men and women standing one at a time and airing their grievances, and then the chief makes a decision based on the debate. The brief period of Athenian democracy was not categorically free debate, nor was previous politics categorical tyranny. Individual and group decision making are found in complex arrangements in all cultures, including the earliest and most primitive, ancient Athens, and our America today.
It should also be mentioned that philosophers were not welcome in ancient Greece as they questioned the ways of things (traditional polytheism) and as such Socrates was put to death for “inciting the youth to riot”, Aristotle was chased out of Athens after the death of his student Alexander (a foreign Macedonian who conquered Athens by the sword, Aristotle being an unwelcome foreigner from Strageira in Athens himself), and Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, complains that his city state Ephesus exiled their best thinker for questioning things and it would be best if all Ephesians went and hanged themselves to leave the city in the abler hands of children.
What is philosophy?
Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato) critically examined their own thinking and their traditions of thought and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.
The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom?
The German philosophers Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as dogmatism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.
The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and ancient everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions. Systems of thought are always sites of disagreement as much as they are of agreement.
Recently, the Attorney General of Arizona crafted legislation against teachers who provide programs celebrating Latino culture as they are dangerously “anti-Western”, and pointed specifically to teaching that Aztecs and Mayans had philosophers as Leon-Pontilla argues. Apparently, it is biased and thus un-Western to teach that concepts such as “you are my other self” (much like Confucius, who we will study) and “continue to investigate things endlessly” (much like Heraclitus, who we will study) is evidence that the Aztecs and Mayans had philosophy. It is perceived as a threat to American culture to equate the ancient Mayans with the ancient Greeks. It is not just the Attorney General who thinks this, but academics with PhDs who continue to provide the ground for this belief in their publications.
As far as the ancient Greeks or the Attorney General of Arizona being part of a specifically rational culture, let us consider the definition of logical validity. An argument is logically valid if the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. Consider the following argument: “Because all elevators play jazz music, jazz is the Devil’s playground, and one should avoid the Devil, elevators are to be avoided.” You can follow this argument because it is logical. It does not matter whether or not the premises are true, but only that IF they are true so would the conclusion. You can construct logical arguments that include the premise, “All puppies are green”, which is useful to show how logic works. The elevator argument is in the form of Aristotle’s first syllogism, and because human reasoning employs chains so frequently it does not appear that he invented the form but rather examined it critically.
Reason in the Earliest Human Cultures
Let us look at Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings by Malinowski, who lived with and studied the tribes of Papua New Guinea as an anthropologist. Unfortunately, he uses the word “savages” throughout the article, as it was written in the 1940s when a primitive and savage tribe known as Americans were just rising to dominance. Thankfully, Malinowski asks if we should continue to assume that primitive tribes are irrational and illogical, and he argues that they are, contrary to popular and academic orthodox opinion, rational and logical. This would mean that they argue systematically amongst themselves, just like the ancient Greeks and ourselves. Malinowski argues this based on three observations.
First, all cultures, including the basic cultures of New Guinea tribes, have words for whole and part (being/existence and substance/attribute/quality), cause and effect, and if and then. These are the terms and concepts of ancient Greek Logic (Aristotle) and modern European Logic (Wittgenstein). This suggests that logic and reason are basic to the human mind, language and culture. While it is often asserted that the ancient Greeks turned toward material causation and hypothesis, these are also basic to humanity. If a bush rustles, one may suspect that there is, hypothetically, an all-too-material tiger lurking behind it. One may investigate, and hopefully one will discover that, contrary to the previous hypothetical theory, it is merely one’s all-too-material fellow tribes-member and friend Bob. If however, hypothetically, one finds a tiger in material fact, aforementioned tiger may cause the effect of one’s death. Whether or not spirits or gods are involved or what materials compose them seems irrelevant to the material matter.
Second, there is a basic difference between the everyday, safe and known practices and the special, dangerous and unknown practices of the tribes people. This can be described as the difference between the practical and the theoretical. Malinowski uses the example of shallow and deep sea fishing. When fishing in shallow seas, or glancing behind bushes for tigers, no theory, ritual or magic is required, but when fishing in deep water the tribe gets theoretical and brings in a system of thought involving rituals and “magic” to influence their outcomes. When one is building a fishhook, one does not call on the gods or spirits. When one is asking for fertile crops for the year, one calls on gods and spirits with ritualized activity. In a similar way, one does not need philosophy, logic or science when one is opening a door. However, if one is designing a door no one has invented before, one needs to bring theoretical systems for understanding the unknown. “Science” literally means “seeing” or “cutting into many” in Latin (Sciencia), a culture of thought and theory that looks into the unknown from the base of the practical. Likewise, “Logic” literally means “speaking” in ancient Greek (Logia), as Logic was the art of debate, speaking and arguing well about the unknown.
If you ask what would happen if one did not use the theory and rituals, no one could tell you because they have never tried it. However, if you suggested that ritual and magic alone will grow crops without farming and practical work the tribes people would laugh at you. Thus, the theoretical is an extension of the practical into the unknown and the two are always building on each other. Tribes people do not believe in magic such that rationality is excluded. Rather, theoretical systems like magic and science are extensions of rationality and logic into the realms of the unknown that concern this life on earth.
Third, tribes people do not all share the same views and beliefs within the cultural system, but rather humans display individual as well as collective thought, just as ancient Greeks shared traditional views but debated amongst themselves rationally. Most think that we are the individualistic and earlier civilizations did not question their systems. This is true to a degree due to technology and new complexes of culture, but tribes people disagree with one another within a cultural system. One good example is a person thinks their failure means they are cursed by an evil spirit, while their neighbor argues with them and says they are just stupid and clumsy. Another is when you bring the elders of a tribe into the same place and ask the meaning of a shared legend, they often get into a debate about it. Thus, a theoretical system allows for debate and progressive understandings, including early “magical” systems and later “scientific” systems.
If all this is true and humans have always been logical and rational, why is science so successful and powerful? What makes science different from earlier systems? In early and ancient cultures, religion, physics and psychology were all one theoretical system (often referred to today as cosmology). Particularly as Islamic and European civilizations rose, technology and education meant many specialized equipment and areas of study. While the theoretical systems have always observed the natural world and this life we live, observation was increasingly supplemented and supported by experimentation. Today, we have many cultures of experimentation that are powerful at expanding and overturning our views. However, as already noted, humans have always been experimenting, changing and evolving.
Gmelch, the author of the article Baseball Superstition, says he is taking Malinowski’s distinction of shallow fishing and deep sea fishing and applying it to superstitions of modern day baseball players. Baseball players are modern day human beings who are raised in a “scientific” culture, but they show the same differences in behavior as the tribes people when it comes to theorizing and the unknown.
In baseball, there is a great difference between fielding and hitting/pitching. Fielding is successful 9 times out of 10, and so it is not dangerous or risky. Hitting and pitching, however, are quite risky. There is far less chance of success, and success does not guarantee winning the game overall. What do we observe? Baseball players come up with superstitious practices that follow basic cause-effect reasoning regarding their pre-game behaviors and their performance in hitting and pitching but not in fielding. A pitcher or slugger will, for instance, eat two chili dogs the night before every big game to pitch or hit well, but fielders do not. While we may not consider these superstitions “scientific”, we can see that theory grows in the gap of the unknown and it follows the basic mechanisms of logic (hypothetical reasoning of cause to effect). Again, it seems that reason and logic are basic to human culture and language, and they extend from the observable and practical into the unknown and theoretical.
In the third article, A new Weapon Stirs Up Old Ghosts by Mitchell, we can see a new growth of theoretical culture that has practical purposes in the Shotgun cult of a tribes people given one shotgun shell at a time to hunt wild boar (guess why the Europeans give them one shell at a time). If a hunter misses a shot, the whole community comes together and they try to figure out where the social issue is in the community that caused the hunter to miss the boar. This brings the community together to solve its problems (created by individual differences of views and opinions) and it is impossible to say this group debate has no positive effect on the hunter or next hunt whatsoever. Again, we see that the practical is extended by the theoretical for figuring out the unknown as a culture.
Wisdom in the Earliest Human Cultures
What is wisdom? Believing and doubting are basic to the human mind. The human mind, like logicians in India (Kanada and Gotama) and Greece (Aristotle) we will be covering in the next few weeks, seeks basic constant truths (or atomic truths) about its world in order to know things that are certain and constant (like “Fire is always hot” or “Water is always wet”). However, the human mind can both believe and doubt its truths. Wisdom is the ability to see beyond knowledge, to know when to question truths that are often true but not always true. Hegel tells us that we start with categorical truths (“Fire is simply hot so it is not cold at all”) and grow in wisdom to understand the relativity and context of our truths (“Fire is quite hot for the human being, but fire is cold relative to a star”).
Consider the story of the man who goes to his rabbi and complains that his house is too noisy. The rabbi is wise, and tells the man to bring his livestock into his house. After the man is at his wits end, the rabbi tells him to remove the livestock, and the man is pleased with how quiet his house has become. The house is just as noisy as it was before, but the rabbi has shown the man how relatively quiet his house is compared to a barnyard.
In myths and riddles from around the world (many often traded between many cultures) we see an appreciation of wisdom and questioning knowledge, assumptions and intuitive understandings. While positivistic thinking seeks constant and necessary truths, skeptical thinking seeks to overturn and find counter examples. We will see this in the skeptical thinkers of India (Jainism and Buddhism), Greece (Heraclitus and Pyrrho) and China (Zhuan Zi and Gong Zi).
Questioning truths is not simply for mysticism or skeptical philosophy. Wisdom and skepticism have real and practical value in science and technology. Consider that a refrigerator cools by heating. The back of a refrigerator heats up, and this draws the heat from the inside of the refrigerator. If you believe that heat does not cool, you would not be able to invent the refrigerator. Consider that the Wright Brothers wrote to the US Army and told them of their glider, but it took the Army three years and the accounts of others to believe it because it was understood that humans could not fly like birds (and the US now has air superiority in the world).
In early human tales, there are often trickster characters who steal, cheat, lie and deceive, and through this bring about the necessary sustenance of life. Crow and Coyote are examples from Native American tales. Lot’s daughters are examples from the Torah or Old Testament of the Bible: by committing incest with their father they keep the Israelites’ line and covenant alive, though the laws in previous Torah books, such as Deuteronomy, explicitly prohibit incest as a crime.
In the readings from Riddling Tales from Around the World, we have several stories that show us the human appreciation of wisdom and seeing the relative rather than the categorical.
In the story of Trousers Mehmet, the sultan asks for someone to bring him a person who hunts, who throws away what he catches and who carries with him what he cannot find. Mehmet brings him a beggar who is scratching himself for fleas. Notice that typically, in the majority of instances, we hunt for something we keep after we catch it and we hunt for something we do not have on our person. This situation is reversed in the case of the beggar, so reversing aspects of the typical situation of hunting is what distinguishes Mehmet’s brilliance. The sultan later asks for a thousand forests in a handkerchief, and Mehmet, who has likely read the Koran, brings an acorn, as a single acorn has, potentially, a thousand forests in it. Hegel, who we will study, talks about how potentiality is a specific sort of non-being, just as the potentially infinite is a specific sort of infinite.
In the story of the Afghani riddling ogre, a brilliant young girl realizes that if she lays across the threshold of the palace doorway, wearing a net after being dragged there by a mountain goat, she is neither inside nor outside, neither clothed nor naked, and neither riding nor on foot. She then kills the ogre by realizing that she is neither man nor beast (as she is a young girl), she presents a bird that flies away which is both a gift and not a gift, and chewing a piece of bark she is neither fasting nor eating.
In the Chinese story of the Thief Who Kept his Hands Clean, Magistrate Chen (one of a long list of Chinese detectives who seek criminals through rational inquiry and evidence) finds a thief by telling everyone that a Buddhist temple bell will ring when the thief touches it in the dark, and because he covered the bell in soot beforehand the thief is the only one who is afraid to touch it and thus has clean hands.
In the final story selected, a king tells his two sons that they should ride to Jerusalem and whoever’s horse arrives last will inherit his kingdom. The two ride, then trot, then get off the horses and stare at each other, but then they each have the same thought and leap on the horses and ride as fast as they can. What did they both realize? That if they take the other horse to Jerusalem first, their own horse will necessarily finish last.
Final Question:
Is following a cultural system more rational or logical than questioning or changing it? Both are in fact reasonable and logical. Belief and doubt, positivism and skepticism, are in constant tension in all societies. If human beings are always rational and logical because this is the way that thinking works naturally, then humans are rational and logical when they conform to their systems and when they question their systems.
The great Dada art movement’s manifesto writer Tzara said that we must have the courage to stand for and against thought. If one loves ancient culture but hates modern culture or loves modern culture and hates ancient culture, one is standing for and against human thinking and logic in either case.
The Positives and Negatives of Human Thought
Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.
Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location. In many ways, places and times, happiness and solidity are good and in others they are bad. Also, no particular thing is perfectly good or completely solid. We judge the table (and the wheel, as Lao Zi the patriarch of Daoism will explain soon) to be simply solid and the space around it to be simply empty, but no table is immortal or unbreakable, and no space is a perfect vacuum. Even outer space is full of dust, light and everything else in the universe. In the same way, particular things that are good or make us happy do not always make us happy and do not make everyone happy. Often, things that make one person happy continue to make another unhappy because they make the first person happy.
Human belief/judgment has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative). Belief is an answer or answering, and doubt is a question or questioning. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability and consistency of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness and change of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists (also called positivists today) lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between dogmatism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.
When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both dogmatism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.
In this class, we will see that in the earliest cultures, and then in ancient India, Greece and China, dogmatic logicians tried to demonstrate how to argue rationally for atomic truths (principles of knowledge that are unquestionably certain) while skeptics tried to demonstrate that no truth is unquestionable or absolute.
Many unfortunately believe that philosophy was born in ancient Greece, when in fact wisdom is universal to human kind even though it is difficult to achieve. The wise, though rarer than we would like, have been celebrated in all cultures, and their wisdom has similarity across all cultures even though their beliefs can differ widely. While the word ‘philosophy’ is an ancient Greek word, great thinkers and questioners can be called philosophers and sages in any culture.
Consider the following passage from Euclid in the Rainforest (first published in 2006) by Mazur, a professor of Logic and Mathematics. I like much about this work, which examines how logic and math require not only deductive rule following but individual leaps of intuition and interpretation. Keep in mind that “Western” is a recent word that has replaced “European race” only within the last century:
“Sometime early in the sixth century B.C., two things happened to dramatically alter the way Western civilization explained the world. The first was the use of cause and effect, as opposed to the supernatural in explaining natural phenomena; we might say that nature was first discovered then. The second was the practice of rational criticism and debate. These fresh developments occurred after a time of great political upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean, which led to profound changes in the political structures of Greek cities. Democracy in Athens meant that citizens could participate in government and law, freely debating and questioning political ideas. Before the establishment of the Greek city state, a change in rule usually meant merely a change from one tyrant to another.”
This is the sort of view that is orthodox in academics today, and one I love to hate. Many claim that the Greeks invented or discovered nature, explaining things through material cause and effect, rational criticism and debate, Democracy, and questioning political ideas. This is odd, considering the democratic assembly of Athens, put Socrates to death for encouraging the youth to question truth, tradition and politics.
Let us carefully work through this, point by point. First, cause and effect are basic to human explanation, whether that explanation could be called supernatural or natural. The spirits and gods were thought to cause things, they were considered part of the natural world and made of fire as was the individual soul or mind, and most ancient Greek thinkers, including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all believed in polytheistic gods even as they pushed towards a more monotheistic/monistic cosmos beyond the many gods which is why Plato and Aristotle were, even though polytheists, revered and brought to us by the Islamic and Christian traditions. Doing Logic was largely doing Aristotle to many of the Islamic and Christian logicians we will study in this class, though others questioned Aristotle.
Second, rational criticism and debate are basic to human cultures. Athens was the only temporary democracy in ancient Greece, so it was not a profound change to the structure of the Greek city state nor was it established with the Greek city state, as there were several. During most of ancient Greek history, change in rule was merely a change from one tyrant to another. As far as democracy being invented in Athens, in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh we can see that king Gilgamesh wants a war, so he goes to the higher senate, composed of the rich elites like Athenian democracy, and they reject his proposal, so he then appeals to the lower house composed of lesser but a greater number of elites, who accept and help him to override the consensus of the senate. In African villages, we can see everyone sitting down and men and women standing one at a time and airing their grievances, and then the chief makes a decision based on the debate. The brief period of Athenian democracy was not categorically free debate, nor was previous politics categorical tyranny. Individual and group decision making are found in complex arrangements in all cultures, including the earliest and most primitive, ancient Athens, and our America today.
It should also be mentioned that philosophers were not welcome in ancient Greece as they questioned the ways of things (traditional polytheism) and as such Socrates was put to death for “inciting the youth to riot”, Aristotle was chased out of Athens after the death of his student Alexander (a foreign Macedonian who conquered Athens by the sword, Aristotle being an unwelcome foreigner from Strageira in Athens himself), and Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, complains that his city state Ephesus exiled their best thinker for questioning things and it would be best if all Ephesians went and hanged themselves to leave the city in the abler hands of children.
What is philosophy?
Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato) critically examined their own thinking and their traditions of thought and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.
The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom?
The German philosophers Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as dogmatism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.
The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and ancient everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions. Systems of thought are always sites of disagreement as much as they are of agreement.
Recently, the Attorney General of Arizona crafted legislation against teachers who provide programs celebrating Latino culture as they are dangerously “anti-Western”, and pointed specifically to teaching that Aztecs and Mayans had philosophers as Leon-Pontilla argues. Apparently, it is biased and thus un-Western to teach that concepts such as “you are my other self” (much like Confucius, who we will study) and “continue to investigate things endlessly” (much like Heraclitus, who we will study) is evidence that the Aztecs and Mayans had philosophy. It is perceived as a threat to American culture to equate the ancient Mayans with the ancient Greeks. It is not just the Attorney General who thinks this, but academics with PhDs who continue to provide the ground for this belief in their publications.
As far as the ancient Greeks or the Attorney General of Arizona being part of a specifically rational culture, let us consider the definition of logical validity. An argument is logically valid if the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. Consider the following argument: “Because all elevators play jazz music, jazz is the Devil’s playground, and one should avoid the Devil, elevators are to be avoided.” You can follow this argument because it is logical. It does not matter whether or not the premises are true, but only that IF they are true so would the conclusion. You can construct logical arguments that include the premise, “All puppies are green”, which is useful to show how logic works. The elevator argument is in the form of Aristotle’s first syllogism, and because human reasoning employs chains so frequently it does not appear that he invented the form but rather examined it critically.
Reason in the Earliest Human Cultures
Let us look at Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings by Malinowski, who lived with and studied the tribes of Papua New Guinea as an anthropologist. Unfortunately, he uses the word “savages” throughout the article, as it was written in the 1940s when a primitive and savage tribe known as Americans were just rising to dominance. Thankfully, Malinowski asks if we should continue to assume that primitive tribes are irrational and illogical, and he argues that they are, contrary to popular and academic orthodox opinion, rational and logical. This would mean that they argue systematically amongst themselves, just like the ancient Greeks and ourselves. Malinowski argues this based on three observations.
First, all cultures, including the basic cultures of New Guinea tribes, have words for whole and part (being/existence and substance/attribute/quality), cause and effect, and if and then. These are the terms and concepts of ancient Greek Logic (Aristotle) and modern European Logic (Wittgenstein). This suggests that logic and reason are basic to the human mind, language and culture. While it is often asserted that the ancient Greeks turned toward material causation and hypothesis, these are also basic to humanity. If a bush rustles, one may suspect that there is, hypothetically, an all-too-material tiger lurking behind it. One may investigate, and hopefully one will discover that, contrary to the previous hypothetical theory, it is merely one’s all-too-material fellow tribes-member and friend Bob. If however, hypothetically, one finds a tiger in material fact, aforementioned tiger may cause the effect of one’s death. Whether or not spirits or gods are involved or what materials compose them seems irrelevant to the material matter.
Second, there is a basic difference between the everyday, safe and known practices and the special, dangerous and unknown practices of the tribes people. This can be described as the difference between the practical and the theoretical. Malinowski uses the example of shallow and deep sea fishing. When fishing in shallow seas, or glancing behind bushes for tigers, no theory, ritual or magic is required, but when fishing in deep water the tribe gets theoretical and brings in a system of thought involving rituals and “magic” to influence their outcomes. When one is building a fishhook, one does not call on the gods or spirits. When one is asking for fertile crops for the year, one calls on gods and spirits with ritualized activity. In a similar way, one does not need philosophy, logic or science when one is opening a door. However, if one is designing a door no one has invented before, one needs to bring theoretical systems for understanding the unknown. “Science” literally means “seeing” or “cutting into many” in Latin (Sciencia), a culture of thought and theory that looks into the unknown from the base of the practical. Likewise, “Logic” literally means “speaking” in ancient Greek (Logia), as Logic was the art of debate, speaking and arguing well about the unknown.
If you ask what would happen if one did not use the theory and rituals, no one could tell you because they have never tried it. However, if you suggested that ritual and magic alone will grow crops without farming and practical work the tribes people would laugh at you. Thus, the theoretical is an extension of the practical into the unknown and the two are always building on each other. Tribes people do not believe in magic such that rationality is excluded. Rather, theoretical systems like magic and science are extensions of rationality and logic into the realms of the unknown that concern this life on earth.
Third, tribes people do not all share the same views and beliefs within the cultural system, but rather humans display individual as well as collective thought, just as ancient Greeks shared traditional views but debated amongst themselves rationally. Most think that we are the individualistic and earlier civilizations did not question their systems. This is true to a degree due to technology and new complexes of culture, but tribes people disagree with one another within a cultural system. One good example is a person thinks their failure means they are cursed by an evil spirit, while their neighbor argues with them and says they are just stupid and clumsy. Another is when you bring the elders of a tribe into the same place and ask the meaning of a shared legend, they often get into a debate about it. Thus, a theoretical system allows for debate and progressive understandings, including early “magical” systems and later “scientific” systems.
If all this is true and humans have always been logical and rational, why is science so successful and powerful? What makes science different from earlier systems? In early and ancient cultures, religion, physics and psychology were all one theoretical system (often referred to today as cosmology). Particularly as Islamic and European civilizations rose, technology and education meant many specialized equipment and areas of study. While the theoretical systems have always observed the natural world and this life we live, observation was increasingly supplemented and supported by experimentation. Today, we have many cultures of experimentation that are powerful at expanding and overturning our views. However, as already noted, humans have always been experimenting, changing and evolving.
Gmelch, the author of the article Baseball Superstition, says he is taking Malinowski’s distinction of shallow fishing and deep sea fishing and applying it to superstitions of modern day baseball players. Baseball players are modern day human beings who are raised in a “scientific” culture, but they show the same differences in behavior as the tribes people when it comes to theorizing and the unknown.
In baseball, there is a great difference between fielding and hitting/pitching. Fielding is successful 9 times out of 10, and so it is not dangerous or risky. Hitting and pitching, however, are quite risky. There is far less chance of success, and success does not guarantee winning the game overall. What do we observe? Baseball players come up with superstitious practices that follow basic cause-effect reasoning regarding their pre-game behaviors and their performance in hitting and pitching but not in fielding. A pitcher or slugger will, for instance, eat two chili dogs the night before every big game to pitch or hit well, but fielders do not. While we may not consider these superstitions “scientific”, we can see that theory grows in the gap of the unknown and it follows the basic mechanisms of logic (hypothetical reasoning of cause to effect). Again, it seems that reason and logic are basic to human culture and language, and they extend from the observable and practical into the unknown and theoretical.
In the third article, A new Weapon Stirs Up Old Ghosts by Mitchell, we can see a new growth of theoretical culture that has practical purposes in the Shotgun cult of a tribes people given one shotgun shell at a time to hunt wild boar (guess why the Europeans give them one shell at a time). If a hunter misses a shot, the whole community comes together and they try to figure out where the social issue is in the community that caused the hunter to miss the boar. This brings the community together to solve its problems (created by individual differences of views and opinions) and it is impossible to say this group debate has no positive effect on the hunter or next hunt whatsoever. Again, we see that the practical is extended by the theoretical for figuring out the unknown as a culture.
Wisdom in the Earliest Human Cultures
What is wisdom? Believing and doubting are basic to the human mind. The human mind, like logicians in India (Kanada and Gotama) and Greece (Aristotle) we will be covering in the next few weeks, seeks basic constant truths (or atomic truths) about its world in order to know things that are certain and constant (like “Fire is always hot” or “Water is always wet”). However, the human mind can both believe and doubt its truths. Wisdom is the ability to see beyond knowledge, to know when to question truths that are often true but not always true. Hegel tells us that we start with categorical truths (“Fire is simply hot so it is not cold at all”) and grow in wisdom to understand the relativity and context of our truths (“Fire is quite hot for the human being, but fire is cold relative to a star”).
Consider the story of the man who goes to his rabbi and complains that his house is too noisy. The rabbi is wise, and tells the man to bring his livestock into his house. After the man is at his wits end, the rabbi tells him to remove the livestock, and the man is pleased with how quiet his house has become. The house is just as noisy as it was before, but the rabbi has shown the man how relatively quiet his house is compared to a barnyard.
In myths and riddles from around the world (many often traded between many cultures) we see an appreciation of wisdom and questioning knowledge, assumptions and intuitive understandings. While positivistic thinking seeks constant and necessary truths, skeptical thinking seeks to overturn and find counter examples. We will see this in the skeptical thinkers of India (Jainism and Buddhism), Greece (Heraclitus and Pyrrho) and China (Zhuan Zi and Gong Zi).
Questioning truths is not simply for mysticism or skeptical philosophy. Wisdom and skepticism have real and practical value in science and technology. Consider that a refrigerator cools by heating. The back of a refrigerator heats up, and this draws the heat from the inside of the refrigerator. If you believe that heat does not cool, you would not be able to invent the refrigerator. Consider that the Wright Brothers wrote to the US Army and told them of their glider, but it took the Army three years and the accounts of others to believe it because it was understood that humans could not fly like birds (and the US now has air superiority in the world).
In early human tales, there are often trickster characters who steal, cheat, lie and deceive, and through this bring about the necessary sustenance of life. Crow and Coyote are examples from Native American tales. Lot’s daughters are examples from the Torah or Old Testament of the Bible: by committing incest with their father they keep the Israelites’ line and covenant alive, though the laws in previous Torah books, such as Deuteronomy, explicitly prohibit incest as a crime.
In the readings from Riddling Tales from Around the World, we have several stories that show us the human appreciation of wisdom and seeing the relative rather than the categorical.
In the story of Trousers Mehmet, the sultan asks for someone to bring him a person who hunts, who throws away what he catches and who carries with him what he cannot find. Mehmet brings him a beggar who is scratching himself for fleas. Notice that typically, in the majority of instances, we hunt for something we keep after we catch it and we hunt for something we do not have on our person. This situation is reversed in the case of the beggar, so reversing aspects of the typical situation of hunting is what distinguishes Mehmet’s brilliance. The sultan later asks for a thousand forests in a handkerchief, and Mehmet, who has likely read the Koran, brings an acorn, as a single acorn has, potentially, a thousand forests in it. Hegel, who we will study, talks about how potentiality is a specific sort of non-being, just as the potentially infinite is a specific sort of infinite.
In the story of the Afghani riddling ogre, a brilliant young girl realizes that if she lays across the threshold of the palace doorway, wearing a net after being dragged there by a mountain goat, she is neither inside nor outside, neither clothed nor naked, and neither riding nor on foot. She then kills the ogre by realizing that she is neither man nor beast (as she is a young girl), she presents a bird that flies away which is both a gift and not a gift, and chewing a piece of bark she is neither fasting nor eating.
In the Chinese story of the Thief Who Kept his Hands Clean, Magistrate Chen (one of a long list of Chinese detectives who seek criminals through rational inquiry and evidence) finds a thief by telling everyone that a Buddhist temple bell will ring when the thief touches it in the dark, and because he covered the bell in soot beforehand the thief is the only one who is afraid to touch it and thus has clean hands.
In the final story selected, a king tells his two sons that they should ride to Jerusalem and whoever’s horse arrives last will inherit his kingdom. The two ride, then trot, then get off the horses and stare at each other, but then they each have the same thought and leap on the horses and ride as fast as they can. What did they both realize? That if they take the other horse to Jerusalem first, their own horse will necessarily finish last.
Final Question:
Is following a cultural system more rational or logical than questioning or changing it? Both are in fact reasonable and logical. Belief and doubt, positivism and skepticism, are in constant tension in all societies. If human beings are always rational and logical because this is the way that thinking works naturally, then humans are rational and logical when they conform to their systems and when they question their systems.
The great Dada art movement’s manifesto writer Tzara said that we must have the courage to stand for and against thought. If one loves ancient culture but hates modern culture or loves modern culture and hates ancient culture, one is standing for and against human thinking and logic in either case.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Intro Philosophy: City States & Egyptian Wisdom
Sumer & the First City States
Last time we considered the shaman as the original keeper of knowledge and seeker of wisdom. As human societies began to leave nomadic life and settle down by building the first city states, they acquired systems of writing that allowed them to communicate knowledge beyond the limits of oral traditions. The earliest scholars in Sumer and Babylon of the Tigris Euphrates valley began collecting knowledge of the world and the histories of its peoples. The early city states were gathering sites for many tribes and peoples, so city life was multicultural from the beginning.
While the shaman of a tribe could know the great deal of a tribe’s oral tradition, in the early city states knowledge grew to the point that specialists were required. Often, centers of knowledge were temples and the texts and study maintained by priests and priestesses ordained in the traditions. Cosmology, remember, was religion, physics, medicine and psychology together, even as it began to specialize. Today, we sit at the result of this process that began almost six thousand years ago.
As we consider the origins of civilization and leave nomadic tribes behind, it is important to remember that the last two powerful civilizations, the Muslims and then Europeans, were themselves quite primitive and nomadic just before gaining power as well as the knowledge and technology of previous civilizations. While European history is often traced to the ancient Greeks, the Germanic and Celtic Europeans (like my ancestors, my father’s side German and my mother’s side Celtic British Isles mixture), were considered barbarians by the ancient Greeks and Romans. They were not thought capable of rational thought and were traded as slaves to Babylon, Egypt, Persia and India for commodities that were the highest valuables of the ancient world. The Romans traded slaves, including blond women, for Indian steel, known as wootz, which was the toughest metal of the ancient world and good for swords and spears.
Later, after the Renaissance as Europeans retold the story of history with the Catholic tradition at the center, the Greeks and Romans became the origin of civilization for the role they played in the texts and philosophy of the Bible’s New Testament. While Renaissance philosophers in Italy still included the Persians and Indians in their timeline of history, the Catholics, and then Protestants, and now modern “Western” scholarship has progressively forgotten even the Romans as they focus on singular events in ancient Greece and then flash forward to Europe in the 1500s and 1600s, just as the tide of trade, gold and silver began to turn along the silk road from most going Eastward to most going Westward. It was only in the early 1700s that Europe had power and wealth beyond what previous civilizations had achieved. The roots of European civilization are in fact bound up with the rise of the Germanic and Celtic peoples, as well as the Arabs, nomadic traders across the Arabian peninsula (modern day Saudi Arabia occupies most of this land today) who ran camel caravans across the desert of goods between African civilizations such as Egypt and Nubia and Middle Eastern civilizations such as Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Persia and India.
An excellent book for appreciating the earliest city state civilizations is History Begins at Sumer by Kramer. Note that the title basically says, “Hey, remember that Sumer happened”. Sumer was not necessarily the first city state (a walled city that ruled the land surrounding it as a single city empire) but because writing was first developed there it is the first civilization on the written record. Sumer was a city state at the mouth of the Tigris Euphrates which was then taken over and incorporated into Babylon, which then was taken over by Assyria, which was then taken over by Persia. At each stage, a city upriver on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers took over a city downriver that had become prosperous through trade with various peoples across the land and sea.
These were progressively multicultural societies in which citizenship did not belong exclusively to one ethnicity. This allowed for diverse marketplaces where goods, cultures and ideas could be exchanged. Cities were centers of trade, such that not only was the city a site for many groups to converge and form a new culture but this culture also traded with other convergent cultures. Many are surprised to learn that ancient Sumer and Egypt traded with India hundreds of years before the Greeks and Israel arose, but archeologists have found stone Buddhas in Alexandria Egypt as early as 300 BCE, likely owned by small communities of Indian merchants living in Egypt. From the earliest times, culture, trade and thought have been international.
Consider the Assyrians. “Assyrian” did not name one ethnicity but rather a citizen of Assyria. Many people of different ethnicities called themselves Assyrians just as many people call themselves Americans. Jesus spoke Aramaic because it was one of the dominant languages of Assyria and the lands they had conquered. Assyria invented all of the siege weapons that were used in feudal Europe (including the battering ram and the siege tower), but the Assyrians conquered others mostly by trade and diplomacy. Princes would be sent to be educated in Assyria, the center of knowledge in its day, and then the Assyrians would make contracts with the prince’s people to put them on the throne to maintain political control. Just like today the primary method of conquest is economic and military solutions are called for only when the economic methods have failed.
In modern times, John Perkin’s famous book Confessions of an Economic Hitman (he came to speak at BCC a few years ago) gives an excellent account of the same strategy of dominance through economics in modern times as it is used by America today. Perkins says that he was a businessman who traveled the world helping other countries get into debt with America such that American corporations could come in and take over. If this fails, Perkins says that the second level is the “CIA Jackals” (his words, not mine) who make a move here and there to smooth things over for the business interests if a politician or people’s movement threatens this. If they fail, Perkins says the third level is “Here come the marines”, and that Iraq is a result of a failure of the first and second stage of this process. The poverty of the third world is, in part, due to this and similar economic strategies by other wealthy countries.
Sumer had some of the first schools, textbooks (in science and the humanities), medical texts, tax reduction, wisdom proverbs, and laments. One excellent proverb is, “You go and carry off the enemy’s land, the enemy comes and carries off your land”. My favorite Sumerian lament is recorded about 3000 BCE, in which an elderly Sumerian complains that in his time, unlike in the glorified past, politicians are corrupt, teenagers are running around and breaking tradition and having sex, and concludes that the world will certainly end soon at the hands of the gods. The prophet laments of the Bible’s Old Testament (the Jewish Torah) are based on this and other laments from the Tigris-Euphrates civilizations.
Often it is stated that the ancient Greeks invented politics and specifically Athenian democracy, but in Sumer we find the first democratic bicameral congress. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first recorded myths in human history, we read that Gilgamesh wants to go to war so he appeals to the elders of the senate. The elders do not want war because they have fragile investments in the situation, so Gilgamesh appeals to the larger and lower house and they enthusiastically accept his proposal, probably because as new money they are seeking new opportunities, unlike the senate who have already secured their investments. Gilgamesh, the king, must seek approval from the community as a whole to go to war with the necessary support and needs the house to override the smaller but higher senate.
As human beings progressed and traded devices and thinking between groups, they gathered into larger groups and settled into cities. The great ancient empires of Egypt and Persia were made of several of these earlier city state empires gathered into larger empires with many powerful cities. Consider that the United States is composed of many states, many of which have only one massive central city. We can see that as many tribes joined together to create city states the number of experts and types of experts multiplied and specialized. The shamans of the tribe became many types of priests and scribes in many temples. We can see that this pattern continued up through the present time. Some priests would specialize in types of math used to chart the stars, others would specialize in healing people and animals. The many hats (or masks, rather) of the shaman became the many types of priests and scribes who recorded knowledge and made new discoveries.
Egyptian Wisdom
Before considering passages of the Egyptian wisdom texts, I want to address two common misconceptions about the Egyptians.
First, the Egyptians are rarely portrayed as an African people but rather museums and text books portray them as a semi-European/Asian people who are quite light in skin color. When we consider that the Egyptians painted all of their statues and carvings (as did the Greeks), and they always painted men as dark red and women as yellow, as well as having black braided hair (Herodotus the Greek historian describes the “wooly” hair of the Egyptians) it seems that the Egyptians were an African people and we are only slowly growing to recognize this. It is a big debate between Eurocentric and Afrocentric scholars today, but the debate is held largely outside of official academia and universities as Afrocentric scholars are perceived as biased, un-academic and unprofessional in their opinions.
Two good books from the Afrocentric side are Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. While these works are well up to academic standards, because some Afrocentric work was done outside academic institutions in unjustifiable ways (one scholar claimed that the ancient Egyptians had batteries and hang gliders), this was used to tarnish all Afrocentric scholarship as dangerously unprofessional. Thus, the universities and academics retain a Eurocentric bias while calling it objectivity in contrast to the Afrocentric bias. I have read one work that called for “Acentrism”, recognizing that the origins of civilization do not come from a single geographic location but rather from a network of the earliest settlements. Hopefully, this perspective can move us beyond the narrow constraints of both Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, though in my opinion it is Eurocentrism that is quite established and this goes unrecognized.
Second, another common misconception of the Egyptians is that they were a slave-driving, brutal people who were all about authority. This is then contrasted with the Greeks, who are considered to be wise and questioning and the birth of civilized politics. In fact, the Egyptians treated foreigners, slaves and women considerably better than the Greeks, and the pyramids were built not by slaves but by conscripted labor. Recently tombs for workers have been discovered, confirming what Egyptologists have thought for several decades. This misconception comes largely from the Bible and movies like the Ten Commandments.
The Egyptians had many types of scribes and genres of texts, including fictional comedies and tragedies, lists of minerals and plants, essays on medicine, ethics and politics, and important to this class, wisdom literature. The Egyptian wisdom proverbs we read come from this last class of Egyptian texts. As many tribes converged to live in city states, people began to see more of people than they had before. Suddenly, obvious truths became questionable. Gathering wealth and power looks good at first, but if one has seen many grab for power over the years, one gets wiser. Rather than never questioning authority, the Egyptians had more variety of authorities and questioning of authority than most cultures before them. They did obey the Pharaoh most of the time, but there were rebellions and civil wars as well. We can see in the wisdom proverbs the questioning of authority, nobility, knowledge, teachers, prediction, wealth, luxury, punishment, and other fundamental aspects of civilization. The Egyptians were not just great builders and rulers, but also wisdom seekers and questioners.
One concept that appears in the texts is the “heart guided individual”. The heart was thought to be the physical and mental center of the human individual. As Egyptian society developed, increasingly being “guided by the king” was replaced with being “guided by the heart”. The heart is the essence of the human and the intention within the action. Repeatedly in the text, individuals are called to listen to their heart rather than build luxury and maintain authority. These are issues that we all struggle with to this day, and so we can learn much about early human experience by reading these proverbs.
Let us turn now to the proverbs themselves, considering the wisdom of specific passages.
Let not your heart be puffed up because of what you know, nor boast that you are a wise man. Consult with the ignorant as well as with the wise, for there is no limit to where wisdom can be found. Good speech lies hidden like a precious stone, yet wisdom is found among maidens at the grindstone.
This passage of Phah-hotep (Vizier to the Pharaoh, 2500 BCE) is similar to some we will read in Confucius of ancient China and it is also similar to Socrates of ancient Greece. We should learn from everyone, and remember that no one is perfect and no one knows everything when we are tempted to put ourselves above others. This questions not only human knowledge, but social inequality. It does not call for getting rid of social divisions (indeed, the last verse is somewhat sexist) but it does ask us to look beyond inequality and identify with others.
More acceptable to (the Father/Highest) God is the virtue of a just man than the ox of one who works iniquity.
In this verse, we see Marikare (a local king offering advice to the crown prince, 1500 BCE) questioning the value of traditional sacrifice. In India, Greece and China, we will see similar thoughts questioning the value of traditional practice over being virtuous. If the wealthy make sacrifices, but rule with cruelty, those who dare to question will ask if performing sacrifices truly gains one merit. Jesus chasing the money changers and sellers of sacrificial animals out of the temple is a similar move.
Rage destroys itself. It damages its own affairs.
Ani (a scribe of the 18th dynasty, 1550-1300 BCE)
Because we refuse to imitate the wicked man, we help him, we offer him a hand…That he may know shame, we fill his belly with bread.
Amen-em-opet (local king, 1800 BCE) is suggesting that we do the opposite of what we typically think to do to those we consider evil. Rather than punish bad with bad, like fighting fire with fire, we can show them the compassion and consideration they lack even if they do not deserve it. This is similar to Jesus saying, “Turn the other cheek”.
Never permit yourself to rob a poor man. Do not oppress the down-trodden, nor thrust aside the elderly, denying them speech.
Amen-em-opet shows not only concern with social justice, but giving freedom of speech to the disempowered.
Who plunders the goods of a poor man takes the very breath of life away from (herself or himself). Such cheating chokes off justice, but a full measure increases its flow.
The Eloquent Peasant or The Complaint of the Peasant is a story about a peasant who has been robbed by a local official and who gives a series of nine arguments to the local magistrate appealing for justice which shows again that the ancient Egyptians were concerned about the poor and social justice, while also having problems with each as we still do today. It also shows ancient Egyptian cosmology holds that the world works like a giant person, and breath and air carry order downward from the fire of the stars, sun and moon. If we do injustice, we not only choke the universe but ourselves as well. The Egyptians were the foremost doctors of the ancient world and were revered by the Romans in the beginning ages of Roman empire, and only in the empire’s later years did the Romans begin turning to Greek doctors, who had learned much from the Egyptians and added to it. Consider that we still practice the Egyptian custom of wearing the wedding ring (originally just worn by women) on the ring finger (which is how it got its name) through the Roman Catholic tradition. There is a large artery running through this finger, which the Egyptians found by doing anatomy, and because it was thought to be associated with lust a man puts a wedding ring on his wife’s finger to serve as a sort of lust collar. We do not practice the Israelite tradition of wearing the wedding ring on the index finger, which a man would put on his wife’s finger to prevent her from casting curses on him.
Honor men of achievement and the people will prosper, but keep your eyes open. Too much trust brings affliction…Exalt no man because of birth. Judge the man by his actions. A man should do that which profits his soul. Let him perform the services of his temple. Let him share in the mysteries of his religion.
Merikare shows great skepticism of authority, not only of political position and noble birth but of a central singular religious tradition. Notice both ritual and mystery being included as religion.
Love the wife who is in your house. Feed her belly, clothe her back. Provide oil and cosmetics for her limbs. Gladden her heart all the days of your life, for she is like a field that will prosper its owner, but do not go into court with her, and never let her get control of your house.
Ptah-hotep is being quite sexist, but shows us that women had the power to speak in court and ruled the home as they often do in Islamic traditional culture and our own today in spite of the sexism. Ptah-hotep is giving this advice to his son.
Provide generously for your mother with double rations, and carry her even as she once carried you. It was a heavy load that she bore, but she did not cast it off, and even after you were born, did she not feed you at the breast for three years? Your dirt was unpleasant, but she did not say, “Why should I bother with him?” It was she who placed you in school. It was she who came daily with food and drink for you.
Ani seems to be giving us the old, “You never call, you never write” routine of ancient Egyptian mother syndrome. It is hilarious how he is not only reminding us to take care of the elderly, but of our own mothers as well.
If you have grown to some account in greatness, do not forget the time when you were small. If you have now become a rich man in your city, do not forget how it was when you were in need.
Ptah-hotep shows us that there was social mobility in ancient Egypt, and one could become wealthy or poor depending upon circumstances. Like the passage that tells us the maidens at the grindstone have wisdom yet no one can obtain it entirely, it suggests we always keep the view of the poor and unfortunate in mind to not only appreciate what we have but prevent ourselves from being unjust.
Boast not how many jars of beer you can drink! Soon your speech turns to babbling nonsense, and you tumble down into the gutter…and when people seek to question you, they find only a helpless child.
Ani shows us that as people gathered into ancient city states, they became critical of human behavior.
Eat no bread while another waits in want, but stretch out your hand to the hungry. One man is rich, another is poor. Yesterday’s master is today’s servant. Don’t be greedy about filling your belly. Where only last year the river ran, this year the course is dry. Great seas have turned to desert wastes, and the sandy shore is now an abyss.
Ani again shows us that one could become rich or poor in society, and it is wise to remember it.
Do not lie down at night being afraid of tomorrow. When day breaks, who knows what it will be like? Surely, no man knows what tomorrow will bring.
Amen-em-opet, like Aztec poets and the Indian Vedas, reminds us that no one can predict the future, either through prophecy or science.
Last time we considered the shaman as the original keeper of knowledge and seeker of wisdom. As human societies began to leave nomadic life and settle down by building the first city states, they acquired systems of writing that allowed them to communicate knowledge beyond the limits of oral traditions. The earliest scholars in Sumer and Babylon of the Tigris Euphrates valley began collecting knowledge of the world and the histories of its peoples. The early city states were gathering sites for many tribes and peoples, so city life was multicultural from the beginning.
While the shaman of a tribe could know the great deal of a tribe’s oral tradition, in the early city states knowledge grew to the point that specialists were required. Often, centers of knowledge were temples and the texts and study maintained by priests and priestesses ordained in the traditions. Cosmology, remember, was religion, physics, medicine and psychology together, even as it began to specialize. Today, we sit at the result of this process that began almost six thousand years ago.
As we consider the origins of civilization and leave nomadic tribes behind, it is important to remember that the last two powerful civilizations, the Muslims and then Europeans, were themselves quite primitive and nomadic just before gaining power as well as the knowledge and technology of previous civilizations. While European history is often traced to the ancient Greeks, the Germanic and Celtic Europeans (like my ancestors, my father’s side German and my mother’s side Celtic British Isles mixture), were considered barbarians by the ancient Greeks and Romans. They were not thought capable of rational thought and were traded as slaves to Babylon, Egypt, Persia and India for commodities that were the highest valuables of the ancient world. The Romans traded slaves, including blond women, for Indian steel, known as wootz, which was the toughest metal of the ancient world and good for swords and spears.
Later, after the Renaissance as Europeans retold the story of history with the Catholic tradition at the center, the Greeks and Romans became the origin of civilization for the role they played in the texts and philosophy of the Bible’s New Testament. While Renaissance philosophers in Italy still included the Persians and Indians in their timeline of history, the Catholics, and then Protestants, and now modern “Western” scholarship has progressively forgotten even the Romans as they focus on singular events in ancient Greece and then flash forward to Europe in the 1500s and 1600s, just as the tide of trade, gold and silver began to turn along the silk road from most going Eastward to most going Westward. It was only in the early 1700s that Europe had power and wealth beyond what previous civilizations had achieved. The roots of European civilization are in fact bound up with the rise of the Germanic and Celtic peoples, as well as the Arabs, nomadic traders across the Arabian peninsula (modern day Saudi Arabia occupies most of this land today) who ran camel caravans across the desert of goods between African civilizations such as Egypt and Nubia and Middle Eastern civilizations such as Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Persia and India.
An excellent book for appreciating the earliest city state civilizations is History Begins at Sumer by Kramer. Note that the title basically says, “Hey, remember that Sumer happened”. Sumer was not necessarily the first city state (a walled city that ruled the land surrounding it as a single city empire) but because writing was first developed there it is the first civilization on the written record. Sumer was a city state at the mouth of the Tigris Euphrates which was then taken over and incorporated into Babylon, which then was taken over by Assyria, which was then taken over by Persia. At each stage, a city upriver on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers took over a city downriver that had become prosperous through trade with various peoples across the land and sea.
These were progressively multicultural societies in which citizenship did not belong exclusively to one ethnicity. This allowed for diverse marketplaces where goods, cultures and ideas could be exchanged. Cities were centers of trade, such that not only was the city a site for many groups to converge and form a new culture but this culture also traded with other convergent cultures. Many are surprised to learn that ancient Sumer and Egypt traded with India hundreds of years before the Greeks and Israel arose, but archeologists have found stone Buddhas in Alexandria Egypt as early as 300 BCE, likely owned by small communities of Indian merchants living in Egypt. From the earliest times, culture, trade and thought have been international.
Consider the Assyrians. “Assyrian” did not name one ethnicity but rather a citizen of Assyria. Many people of different ethnicities called themselves Assyrians just as many people call themselves Americans. Jesus spoke Aramaic because it was one of the dominant languages of Assyria and the lands they had conquered. Assyria invented all of the siege weapons that were used in feudal Europe (including the battering ram and the siege tower), but the Assyrians conquered others mostly by trade and diplomacy. Princes would be sent to be educated in Assyria, the center of knowledge in its day, and then the Assyrians would make contracts with the prince’s people to put them on the throne to maintain political control. Just like today the primary method of conquest is economic and military solutions are called for only when the economic methods have failed.
In modern times, John Perkin’s famous book Confessions of an Economic Hitman (he came to speak at BCC a few years ago) gives an excellent account of the same strategy of dominance through economics in modern times as it is used by America today. Perkins says that he was a businessman who traveled the world helping other countries get into debt with America such that American corporations could come in and take over. If this fails, Perkins says that the second level is the “CIA Jackals” (his words, not mine) who make a move here and there to smooth things over for the business interests if a politician or people’s movement threatens this. If they fail, Perkins says the third level is “Here come the marines”, and that Iraq is a result of a failure of the first and second stage of this process. The poverty of the third world is, in part, due to this and similar economic strategies by other wealthy countries.
Sumer had some of the first schools, textbooks (in science and the humanities), medical texts, tax reduction, wisdom proverbs, and laments. One excellent proverb is, “You go and carry off the enemy’s land, the enemy comes and carries off your land”. My favorite Sumerian lament is recorded about 3000 BCE, in which an elderly Sumerian complains that in his time, unlike in the glorified past, politicians are corrupt, teenagers are running around and breaking tradition and having sex, and concludes that the world will certainly end soon at the hands of the gods. The prophet laments of the Bible’s Old Testament (the Jewish Torah) are based on this and other laments from the Tigris-Euphrates civilizations.
Often it is stated that the ancient Greeks invented politics and specifically Athenian democracy, but in Sumer we find the first democratic bicameral congress. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first recorded myths in human history, we read that Gilgamesh wants to go to war so he appeals to the elders of the senate. The elders do not want war because they have fragile investments in the situation, so Gilgamesh appeals to the larger and lower house and they enthusiastically accept his proposal, probably because as new money they are seeking new opportunities, unlike the senate who have already secured their investments. Gilgamesh, the king, must seek approval from the community as a whole to go to war with the necessary support and needs the house to override the smaller but higher senate.
As human beings progressed and traded devices and thinking between groups, they gathered into larger groups and settled into cities. The great ancient empires of Egypt and Persia were made of several of these earlier city state empires gathered into larger empires with many powerful cities. Consider that the United States is composed of many states, many of which have only one massive central city. We can see that as many tribes joined together to create city states the number of experts and types of experts multiplied and specialized. The shamans of the tribe became many types of priests and scribes in many temples. We can see that this pattern continued up through the present time. Some priests would specialize in types of math used to chart the stars, others would specialize in healing people and animals. The many hats (or masks, rather) of the shaman became the many types of priests and scribes who recorded knowledge and made new discoveries.
Egyptian Wisdom
Before considering passages of the Egyptian wisdom texts, I want to address two common misconceptions about the Egyptians.
First, the Egyptians are rarely portrayed as an African people but rather museums and text books portray them as a semi-European/Asian people who are quite light in skin color. When we consider that the Egyptians painted all of their statues and carvings (as did the Greeks), and they always painted men as dark red and women as yellow, as well as having black braided hair (Herodotus the Greek historian describes the “wooly” hair of the Egyptians) it seems that the Egyptians were an African people and we are only slowly growing to recognize this. It is a big debate between Eurocentric and Afrocentric scholars today, but the debate is held largely outside of official academia and universities as Afrocentric scholars are perceived as biased, un-academic and unprofessional in their opinions.
Two good books from the Afrocentric side are Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. While these works are well up to academic standards, because some Afrocentric work was done outside academic institutions in unjustifiable ways (one scholar claimed that the ancient Egyptians had batteries and hang gliders), this was used to tarnish all Afrocentric scholarship as dangerously unprofessional. Thus, the universities and academics retain a Eurocentric bias while calling it objectivity in contrast to the Afrocentric bias. I have read one work that called for “Acentrism”, recognizing that the origins of civilization do not come from a single geographic location but rather from a network of the earliest settlements. Hopefully, this perspective can move us beyond the narrow constraints of both Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, though in my opinion it is Eurocentrism that is quite established and this goes unrecognized.
Second, another common misconception of the Egyptians is that they were a slave-driving, brutal people who were all about authority. This is then contrasted with the Greeks, who are considered to be wise and questioning and the birth of civilized politics. In fact, the Egyptians treated foreigners, slaves and women considerably better than the Greeks, and the pyramids were built not by slaves but by conscripted labor. Recently tombs for workers have been discovered, confirming what Egyptologists have thought for several decades. This misconception comes largely from the Bible and movies like the Ten Commandments.
The Egyptians had many types of scribes and genres of texts, including fictional comedies and tragedies, lists of minerals and plants, essays on medicine, ethics and politics, and important to this class, wisdom literature. The Egyptian wisdom proverbs we read come from this last class of Egyptian texts. As many tribes converged to live in city states, people began to see more of people than they had before. Suddenly, obvious truths became questionable. Gathering wealth and power looks good at first, but if one has seen many grab for power over the years, one gets wiser. Rather than never questioning authority, the Egyptians had more variety of authorities and questioning of authority than most cultures before them. They did obey the Pharaoh most of the time, but there were rebellions and civil wars as well. We can see in the wisdom proverbs the questioning of authority, nobility, knowledge, teachers, prediction, wealth, luxury, punishment, and other fundamental aspects of civilization. The Egyptians were not just great builders and rulers, but also wisdom seekers and questioners.
One concept that appears in the texts is the “heart guided individual”. The heart was thought to be the physical and mental center of the human individual. As Egyptian society developed, increasingly being “guided by the king” was replaced with being “guided by the heart”. The heart is the essence of the human and the intention within the action. Repeatedly in the text, individuals are called to listen to their heart rather than build luxury and maintain authority. These are issues that we all struggle with to this day, and so we can learn much about early human experience by reading these proverbs.
Let us turn now to the proverbs themselves, considering the wisdom of specific passages.
Let not your heart be puffed up because of what you know, nor boast that you are a wise man. Consult with the ignorant as well as with the wise, for there is no limit to where wisdom can be found. Good speech lies hidden like a precious stone, yet wisdom is found among maidens at the grindstone.
This passage of Phah-hotep (Vizier to the Pharaoh, 2500 BCE) is similar to some we will read in Confucius of ancient China and it is also similar to Socrates of ancient Greece. We should learn from everyone, and remember that no one is perfect and no one knows everything when we are tempted to put ourselves above others. This questions not only human knowledge, but social inequality. It does not call for getting rid of social divisions (indeed, the last verse is somewhat sexist) but it does ask us to look beyond inequality and identify with others.
More acceptable to (the Father/Highest) God is the virtue of a just man than the ox of one who works iniquity.
In this verse, we see Marikare (a local king offering advice to the crown prince, 1500 BCE) questioning the value of traditional sacrifice. In India, Greece and China, we will see similar thoughts questioning the value of traditional practice over being virtuous. If the wealthy make sacrifices, but rule with cruelty, those who dare to question will ask if performing sacrifices truly gains one merit. Jesus chasing the money changers and sellers of sacrificial animals out of the temple is a similar move.
Rage destroys itself. It damages its own affairs.
Ani (a scribe of the 18th dynasty, 1550-1300 BCE)
Because we refuse to imitate the wicked man, we help him, we offer him a hand…That he may know shame, we fill his belly with bread.
Amen-em-opet (local king, 1800 BCE) is suggesting that we do the opposite of what we typically think to do to those we consider evil. Rather than punish bad with bad, like fighting fire with fire, we can show them the compassion and consideration they lack even if they do not deserve it. This is similar to Jesus saying, “Turn the other cheek”.
Never permit yourself to rob a poor man. Do not oppress the down-trodden, nor thrust aside the elderly, denying them speech.
Amen-em-opet shows not only concern with social justice, but giving freedom of speech to the disempowered.
Who plunders the goods of a poor man takes the very breath of life away from (herself or himself). Such cheating chokes off justice, but a full measure increases its flow.
The Eloquent Peasant or The Complaint of the Peasant is a story about a peasant who has been robbed by a local official and who gives a series of nine arguments to the local magistrate appealing for justice which shows again that the ancient Egyptians were concerned about the poor and social justice, while also having problems with each as we still do today. It also shows ancient Egyptian cosmology holds that the world works like a giant person, and breath and air carry order downward from the fire of the stars, sun and moon. If we do injustice, we not only choke the universe but ourselves as well. The Egyptians were the foremost doctors of the ancient world and were revered by the Romans in the beginning ages of Roman empire, and only in the empire’s later years did the Romans begin turning to Greek doctors, who had learned much from the Egyptians and added to it. Consider that we still practice the Egyptian custom of wearing the wedding ring (originally just worn by women) on the ring finger (which is how it got its name) through the Roman Catholic tradition. There is a large artery running through this finger, which the Egyptians found by doing anatomy, and because it was thought to be associated with lust a man puts a wedding ring on his wife’s finger to serve as a sort of lust collar. We do not practice the Israelite tradition of wearing the wedding ring on the index finger, which a man would put on his wife’s finger to prevent her from casting curses on him.
Honor men of achievement and the people will prosper, but keep your eyes open. Too much trust brings affliction…Exalt no man because of birth. Judge the man by his actions. A man should do that which profits his soul. Let him perform the services of his temple. Let him share in the mysteries of his religion.
Merikare shows great skepticism of authority, not only of political position and noble birth but of a central singular religious tradition. Notice both ritual and mystery being included as religion.
Love the wife who is in your house. Feed her belly, clothe her back. Provide oil and cosmetics for her limbs. Gladden her heart all the days of your life, for she is like a field that will prosper its owner, but do not go into court with her, and never let her get control of your house.
Ptah-hotep is being quite sexist, but shows us that women had the power to speak in court and ruled the home as they often do in Islamic traditional culture and our own today in spite of the sexism. Ptah-hotep is giving this advice to his son.
Provide generously for your mother with double rations, and carry her even as she once carried you. It was a heavy load that she bore, but she did not cast it off, and even after you were born, did she not feed you at the breast for three years? Your dirt was unpleasant, but she did not say, “Why should I bother with him?” It was she who placed you in school. It was she who came daily with food and drink for you.
Ani seems to be giving us the old, “You never call, you never write” routine of ancient Egyptian mother syndrome. It is hilarious how he is not only reminding us to take care of the elderly, but of our own mothers as well.
If you have grown to some account in greatness, do not forget the time when you were small. If you have now become a rich man in your city, do not forget how it was when you were in need.
Ptah-hotep shows us that there was social mobility in ancient Egypt, and one could become wealthy or poor depending upon circumstances. Like the passage that tells us the maidens at the grindstone have wisdom yet no one can obtain it entirely, it suggests we always keep the view of the poor and unfortunate in mind to not only appreciate what we have but prevent ourselves from being unjust.
Boast not how many jars of beer you can drink! Soon your speech turns to babbling nonsense, and you tumble down into the gutter…and when people seek to question you, they find only a helpless child.
Ani shows us that as people gathered into ancient city states, they became critical of human behavior.
Eat no bread while another waits in want, but stretch out your hand to the hungry. One man is rich, another is poor. Yesterday’s master is today’s servant. Don’t be greedy about filling your belly. Where only last year the river ran, this year the course is dry. Great seas have turned to desert wastes, and the sandy shore is now an abyss.
Ani again shows us that one could become rich or poor in society, and it is wise to remember it.
Do not lie down at night being afraid of tomorrow. When day breaks, who knows what it will be like? Surely, no man knows what tomorrow will bring.
Amen-em-opet, like Aztec poets and the Indian Vedas, reminds us that no one can predict the future, either through prophecy or science.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Intro Philosophy: Thought, Shamanism & Ancient Cosmology
Before diving into the philosophers of ancient India, Greece and China, we must look at the early stages of human knowledge, wisdom and civilization to understand what philosophy is and where it comes from. First, we will consider the positives and negatives of human thought as a general frame for understanding philosophy and all systems/cultures of thought. Second, we will look at shamanism as the basic worldwide culture out of which all cultures emerged. Third, we will look at early city states (focusing on ancient Egypt and its wisdom) to see how cultures developed as they grouped together in the first empires. This lecture covers our general frame and shamanism.
The Positives and Negatives of Human Thought
Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.
Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location. In many ways, places and times, happiness and solidity are good and in others they are bad. Also, no particular thing is perfectly good or completely solid. We judge the table (and the wheel, as Lao Zi the Daoist will explain soon) to be simply solid and the space around it to be simply empty, but no table is immortal or unbreakable, and no space is a perfect vacuum. Even outer space is full of dust, light and everything else in the universe. In the same way, particular things that are good or make us happy do not always make us happy and do not make everyone happy. Often, things that make one person happy continue to make another unhappy because they make the first person happy.
Human belief/judgment has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative). Belief is an answer or answering, and doubt is a question or questioning. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability and consistency of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness and change of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists (also called positivists today) lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between dogmatism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.
When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both dogmatism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.
Many unfortunately believe that philosophy was born in ancient Greece, when in fact wisdom is universal to human kind even though it is difficult to achieve. The wise, though rarer than we would like, have been celebrated in all cultures, and their wisdom has similarity across all cultures even though their beliefs can differ widely. While the word ‘philosophy’ is an ancient Greek word, great thinkers and questioners can be called philosophers and sages in any culture.
It should also be mentioned that philosophers were not welcome in ancient Greece as they questioned the ways of things (traditional polytheism) and as such Socrates was put to death for “inciting the youth to riot”, Aristotle was chased out of Athens after the death of his student Alexander (a foreign Macedonian who conquered Athens by the sword, Aristotle being an unwelcome foreigner from Strageira in Athens himself), and Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, complains that his city state Ephesus exiled their best thinker for questioning things and it would be best if all Ephesians went and hanged themselves to leave the city in the abler hands of children.
What is philosophy?
Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato, who we will study) critically examined their own thinking and their traditions of thought and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.
The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom?
The German philosophers Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as dogmatism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.
The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and ancient everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions. Systems of thought are always sites of disagreement as much as they are of agreement.
Recently, the Attorney General of Arizona crafted legislation against teachers who provide programs celebrating Latino culture as they are dangerously “anti-Western”, and pointed specifically to teaching that Aztecs and Mayans had philosophers as Leon-Pontilla argues. Apparently, it is biased and thus un-Western to teach that concepts such as “you are my other self” (much like Confucius, who we will study) and “continue to investigate things endlessly” (much like Heraclitus, who we will study) is evidence that the Aztecs and Mayans had philosophy. It is perceived as a threat to American culture to equate the ancient Mayans with the ancient Greeks. It is not just the Attorney General who thinks this, but academics with PhDs who continue to provide the ground for this belief in their publications.
The most primitive societies value individual achievement, which often becomes the subject of legend. It is difficult and frightening to oppose common opinion, but worth it. While many think that Western thought is more individual and free than other traditions, arguments over the meaning of common knowledge and traditions are found everywhere. In the logic class, we read a text by anthropologist Malinowski who studied the tribes of Papua, New Guinea in the 1940s. He asks, “Are primitive people logical?”, and he argues that they are. Human language typically has words for ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if-then’, and all the operations of ancient Greek, ancient Indian, and modern European logic. He gives an excellent example of a tribesman tripping and falling, accusing an evil spirit of causing it, and his fellow tribes-people rebuking him and saying that he is merely clumsy.
I continue to read books that casually state that the ancient Greeks were the first to understand things in terms of cause and effect, which is ludicrous. Demons and spirits were thought to cause things by the ancient Greeks and many ancient cultures long before them. It is also commonly held that the ancient Greeks such as Aristotle invented logic. Not only did ancient India have talented logicians in many schools of thought, but as Malinowski argues you can see people in the most primitive cultures arguing rationally, systematically and hypothetically (“If that were true…”).
Consider the following argument: “Because all elevators play jazz music, jazz is the Devil’s playground, and one should avoid the Devil, elevators are to be avoided.” You can follow this argument because it is logical. As we learn early on in any modern logic course, an argument is logically valid if the conclusion follows from the premises, and it does not matter whether or not the premises are true. You can construct logical arguments that include the premise, “all puppies are green”, which is useful to show how logic works. The elevator argument is Aristotle’s first syllogism, and it does not appear that he invented the form but rather examined it critically.
Tribal Shamans and Ecstatic Quests
Shamanism is the original human culture, found from Africa to Europe to the Americas to small islands in the pacific. While it is always different in each place, the similarities are quite profound. “Shaman” is a word from an old Turkish-Siberian dialect that means “one who knows”. Consider that a “scientist” is “one who sees” and “one who divides” from the Latin root. The Shaman is the expert of the tribe, the one who not only holds the traditions of knowledge but who seeks new answers to problems. The shaman is both the preserver of the old and the seeker of the new. When new situations and things are encountered, we look to the experts to figure things out. Considering that most people in the ancient world were dead by 30, the old wise woman or man of the tribe who lived long enough to have grey hair was wiser and much more experienced than the rest of the community.
In tribal culture, traditional knowledge and wisdom is often kept and passed on in the form of stories or narratives. These stories explain the world and help people with their problems. The wise elder can even tell a story they know to be fiction as if it were true to help others and be passed on to future generations as an answer to a common problem. There are, however, times when the stories do not help and a new answer must be sought for a problem. Guided by the traditions but seeking beyond it, experts and leaders must broaden their horizons and then often become celebrated by new legends. To do this, the shaman goes on a quest (both physical and mental) for the solution and new knowledge needed to solve the problem. Often the shaman is selected by another shaman or shamans as a youth who has gone through a near death experience (sickness, struck by lightning, attacked but survives). The shaman is thought to have an affinity for seeking into the unknown because they are already experienced in the unknown. Near death experiences give new perspective.
To quest for knowledge, the shaman employs techniques of ecstasy known to produce an ecstatic experience. “Ecstasy” comes from ancient Greek and means “standing outside” (ex-stasis) or “outstanding”. It is both a going beyond and going within, beyond common reality by getting deeper into reality. When one is in an ecstatic trance or having an ecstatic vision, one is standing outside normal reality and seeing it from a different place and context. Consider that shamans often go down into a cave or up on a mountain to go to the lower or upper “other world”. Some shamans have been known to climb trees. Consider the common image in cartoons of the sage meditating on a mountain top, with the climber seek wisdom at the sage’s feet by asking deep questions. In a cave, one is removed from reality and in a way returns to the womb. On a mountain or in a tree, one can look down on the world and see the larger patterns of what is going on. One gains perspective and is capable of abstraction when one removes oneself to contemplate reality.
Methods of ecstasy include not only thought itself, but drugs, pain, rhythms (chanting, drumming, rattles) fasting, sleep deprivation, removing oneself from society and meditation (including contemplation and prayer). However, the most basic method of ecstasy is in fact thought. Contemplation is itself a form of standing outside reality, so it makes sense that the shaman is regarded as the original thinker, expert and seeker, as well as the doctor, therapist, biologist, physicist, etc. This is why we are considering shamans as the first philosophers. They not only seek and keep knowledge, but pass on wisdom about the limits of human perception, knowledge and thought to future generations of their tribes.
Ancient World Cosmology
Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.
The world was thought to be shaped like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). Fire moves upward, both as flames and smoke, and water moves downwards, each element seeking its proper place in the cosmos.
When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary. Consider that harmonious elements lead to peaceful and productive seasons of agriculture, and storms and disasters are disorders that can be deadly. Consider also that shamans and sages sit and think about things in contemplation for long periods of time until they uncover underlying truths within things that outlive the individual things themselves.
Fire was often considered the top and most important element, and it was identified both with energy and thought. In ancient Greece, energy (energon, “in-work”) was thought to be the fire within things such as human beings that makes them live, just as in ancient China chi and in ancient India karma were identified with life, energy, and fire. Just as the shaman goes on a quest to have a new vision in the head, and this vision is visible in the mind like fire, prophets, scientists, politicians and everyday people have visions of the past (memory) and future (imagination), and if they are knowledgeable and wise their predictions are more true than the foolish. Some say that our scientists have real visions as opposed to superstitions now, but no one has seen something come from nothing before (a belief found in ancient legends of many people, the Book of Genesis and modern Big Bang theory), and computers failed to predict reality (including the weather two weeks from now) as it was first thought they would before Chaos Theory arrived, aided much by computers. Dogmatists tend to believe that there are eternal truths in the world, while skeptics tend to believe that there are only temporary truths in the mind. At the moment, most physicists believe that gravity is an eternal unchanging being that existed before and as the world was born, much like in ancient legends and in Genesis there is a sea of water, even though no one has seen an unchanging being and it is strange to consider things existing before things exist.
One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction as things are pulled apart. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences. It not only reflects the individual who wants many things but can become disciplined, but the community that wants many things but can be ruled and maintained.
One early philosophical puzzle was the problem of the One and the Many: this reality is one thing, but also many things. Your left hand is also one thing, and many things. Shamans in many different cultures had visions of an All Tree or Tree of Life, the one yet many of all things. All or Being itself is the trunk, and the many things and species of the world are the branches or the fruit. The trunk and branches of a tree outlive the fruit, which returns cyclically each season, just as humanity and reality outlive individual humans, rocks, and trees, just as consciousness outlives particular thoughts and perceptions. The stars rotate overhead, outliving your grandparents who told you about them and your children.
Not only is the brain shaped like a tree, as well as the nervous system and circulation systems, the human body is shaped like a tree with the head and chest as the trunk, the human species and evolution of all species is shaped like a tree. If we remove ourselves from reality, either staring down from a mountain top or sitting in a quiet laboratory, it is easier to see this and the many ways it continues to work. One of the recurrent philosophical insights we will see in India, Greece and China is that it takes wisdom to see that the many things are all one reality and the one reality is seen from many perspectives. This applies to the cosmos, the community, the self, and each passing thought. It continues today to be a simple idea but worth dwelling upon to gain wisdom, and so it is worthwhile studying ancient thought of the world to learn more about our own lives.
The Positives and Negatives of Human Thought
Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.
Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location. In many ways, places and times, happiness and solidity are good and in others they are bad. Also, no particular thing is perfectly good or completely solid. We judge the table (and the wheel, as Lao Zi the Daoist will explain soon) to be simply solid and the space around it to be simply empty, but no table is immortal or unbreakable, and no space is a perfect vacuum. Even outer space is full of dust, light and everything else in the universe. In the same way, particular things that are good or make us happy do not always make us happy and do not make everyone happy. Often, things that make one person happy continue to make another unhappy because they make the first person happy.
Human belief/judgment has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative). Belief is an answer or answering, and doubt is a question or questioning. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability and consistency of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness and change of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists (also called positivists today) lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between dogmatism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.
When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both dogmatism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.
Many unfortunately believe that philosophy was born in ancient Greece, when in fact wisdom is universal to human kind even though it is difficult to achieve. The wise, though rarer than we would like, have been celebrated in all cultures, and their wisdom has similarity across all cultures even though their beliefs can differ widely. While the word ‘philosophy’ is an ancient Greek word, great thinkers and questioners can be called philosophers and sages in any culture.
It should also be mentioned that philosophers were not welcome in ancient Greece as they questioned the ways of things (traditional polytheism) and as such Socrates was put to death for “inciting the youth to riot”, Aristotle was chased out of Athens after the death of his student Alexander (a foreign Macedonian who conquered Athens by the sword, Aristotle being an unwelcome foreigner from Strageira in Athens himself), and Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, complains that his city state Ephesus exiled their best thinker for questioning things and it would be best if all Ephesians went and hanged themselves to leave the city in the abler hands of children.
What is philosophy?
Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato, who we will study) critically examined their own thinking and their traditions of thought and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.
The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom?
The German philosophers Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as dogmatism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.
The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and ancient everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions. Systems of thought are always sites of disagreement as much as they are of agreement.
Recently, the Attorney General of Arizona crafted legislation against teachers who provide programs celebrating Latino culture as they are dangerously “anti-Western”, and pointed specifically to teaching that Aztecs and Mayans had philosophers as Leon-Pontilla argues. Apparently, it is biased and thus un-Western to teach that concepts such as “you are my other self” (much like Confucius, who we will study) and “continue to investigate things endlessly” (much like Heraclitus, who we will study) is evidence that the Aztecs and Mayans had philosophy. It is perceived as a threat to American culture to equate the ancient Mayans with the ancient Greeks. It is not just the Attorney General who thinks this, but academics with PhDs who continue to provide the ground for this belief in their publications.
The most primitive societies value individual achievement, which often becomes the subject of legend. It is difficult and frightening to oppose common opinion, but worth it. While many think that Western thought is more individual and free than other traditions, arguments over the meaning of common knowledge and traditions are found everywhere. In the logic class, we read a text by anthropologist Malinowski who studied the tribes of Papua, New Guinea in the 1940s. He asks, “Are primitive people logical?”, and he argues that they are. Human language typically has words for ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if-then’, and all the operations of ancient Greek, ancient Indian, and modern European logic. He gives an excellent example of a tribesman tripping and falling, accusing an evil spirit of causing it, and his fellow tribes-people rebuking him and saying that he is merely clumsy.
I continue to read books that casually state that the ancient Greeks were the first to understand things in terms of cause and effect, which is ludicrous. Demons and spirits were thought to cause things by the ancient Greeks and many ancient cultures long before them. It is also commonly held that the ancient Greeks such as Aristotle invented logic. Not only did ancient India have talented logicians in many schools of thought, but as Malinowski argues you can see people in the most primitive cultures arguing rationally, systematically and hypothetically (“If that were true…”).
Consider the following argument: “Because all elevators play jazz music, jazz is the Devil’s playground, and one should avoid the Devil, elevators are to be avoided.” You can follow this argument because it is logical. As we learn early on in any modern logic course, an argument is logically valid if the conclusion follows from the premises, and it does not matter whether or not the premises are true. You can construct logical arguments that include the premise, “all puppies are green”, which is useful to show how logic works. The elevator argument is Aristotle’s first syllogism, and it does not appear that he invented the form but rather examined it critically.
Tribal Shamans and Ecstatic Quests
Shamanism is the original human culture, found from Africa to Europe to the Americas to small islands in the pacific. While it is always different in each place, the similarities are quite profound. “Shaman” is a word from an old Turkish-Siberian dialect that means “one who knows”. Consider that a “scientist” is “one who sees” and “one who divides” from the Latin root. The Shaman is the expert of the tribe, the one who not only holds the traditions of knowledge but who seeks new answers to problems. The shaman is both the preserver of the old and the seeker of the new. When new situations and things are encountered, we look to the experts to figure things out. Considering that most people in the ancient world were dead by 30, the old wise woman or man of the tribe who lived long enough to have grey hair was wiser and much more experienced than the rest of the community.
In tribal culture, traditional knowledge and wisdom is often kept and passed on in the form of stories or narratives. These stories explain the world and help people with their problems. The wise elder can even tell a story they know to be fiction as if it were true to help others and be passed on to future generations as an answer to a common problem. There are, however, times when the stories do not help and a new answer must be sought for a problem. Guided by the traditions but seeking beyond it, experts and leaders must broaden their horizons and then often become celebrated by new legends. To do this, the shaman goes on a quest (both physical and mental) for the solution and new knowledge needed to solve the problem. Often the shaman is selected by another shaman or shamans as a youth who has gone through a near death experience (sickness, struck by lightning, attacked but survives). The shaman is thought to have an affinity for seeking into the unknown because they are already experienced in the unknown. Near death experiences give new perspective.
To quest for knowledge, the shaman employs techniques of ecstasy known to produce an ecstatic experience. “Ecstasy” comes from ancient Greek and means “standing outside” (ex-stasis) or “outstanding”. It is both a going beyond and going within, beyond common reality by getting deeper into reality. When one is in an ecstatic trance or having an ecstatic vision, one is standing outside normal reality and seeing it from a different place and context. Consider that shamans often go down into a cave or up on a mountain to go to the lower or upper “other world”. Some shamans have been known to climb trees. Consider the common image in cartoons of the sage meditating on a mountain top, with the climber seek wisdom at the sage’s feet by asking deep questions. In a cave, one is removed from reality and in a way returns to the womb. On a mountain or in a tree, one can look down on the world and see the larger patterns of what is going on. One gains perspective and is capable of abstraction when one removes oneself to contemplate reality.
Methods of ecstasy include not only thought itself, but drugs, pain, rhythms (chanting, drumming, rattles) fasting, sleep deprivation, removing oneself from society and meditation (including contemplation and prayer). However, the most basic method of ecstasy is in fact thought. Contemplation is itself a form of standing outside reality, so it makes sense that the shaman is regarded as the original thinker, expert and seeker, as well as the doctor, therapist, biologist, physicist, etc. This is why we are considering shamans as the first philosophers. They not only seek and keep knowledge, but pass on wisdom about the limits of human perception, knowledge and thought to future generations of their tribes.
Ancient World Cosmology
Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.
The world was thought to be shaped like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). Fire moves upward, both as flames and smoke, and water moves downwards, each element seeking its proper place in the cosmos.
When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary. Consider that harmonious elements lead to peaceful and productive seasons of agriculture, and storms and disasters are disorders that can be deadly. Consider also that shamans and sages sit and think about things in contemplation for long periods of time until they uncover underlying truths within things that outlive the individual things themselves.
Fire was often considered the top and most important element, and it was identified both with energy and thought. In ancient Greece, energy (energon, “in-work”) was thought to be the fire within things such as human beings that makes them live, just as in ancient China chi and in ancient India karma were identified with life, energy, and fire. Just as the shaman goes on a quest to have a new vision in the head, and this vision is visible in the mind like fire, prophets, scientists, politicians and everyday people have visions of the past (memory) and future (imagination), and if they are knowledgeable and wise their predictions are more true than the foolish. Some say that our scientists have real visions as opposed to superstitions now, but no one has seen something come from nothing before (a belief found in ancient legends of many people, the Book of Genesis and modern Big Bang theory), and computers failed to predict reality (including the weather two weeks from now) as it was first thought they would before Chaos Theory arrived, aided much by computers. Dogmatists tend to believe that there are eternal truths in the world, while skeptics tend to believe that there are only temporary truths in the mind. At the moment, most physicists believe that gravity is an eternal unchanging being that existed before and as the world was born, much like in ancient legends and in Genesis there is a sea of water, even though no one has seen an unchanging being and it is strange to consider things existing before things exist.
One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction as things are pulled apart. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences. It not only reflects the individual who wants many things but can become disciplined, but the community that wants many things but can be ruled and maintained.
One early philosophical puzzle was the problem of the One and the Many: this reality is one thing, but also many things. Your left hand is also one thing, and many things. Shamans in many different cultures had visions of an All Tree or Tree of Life, the one yet many of all things. All or Being itself is the trunk, and the many things and species of the world are the branches or the fruit. The trunk and branches of a tree outlive the fruit, which returns cyclically each season, just as humanity and reality outlive individual humans, rocks, and trees, just as consciousness outlives particular thoughts and perceptions. The stars rotate overhead, outliving your grandparents who told you about them and your children.
Not only is the brain shaped like a tree, as well as the nervous system and circulation systems, the human body is shaped like a tree with the head and chest as the trunk, the human species and evolution of all species is shaped like a tree. If we remove ourselves from reality, either staring down from a mountain top or sitting in a quiet laboratory, it is easier to see this and the many ways it continues to work. One of the recurrent philosophical insights we will see in India, Greece and China is that it takes wisdom to see that the many things are all one reality and the one reality is seen from many perspectives. This applies to the cosmos, the community, the self, and each passing thought. It continues today to be a simple idea but worth dwelling upon to gain wisdom, and so it is worthwhile studying ancient thought of the world to learn more about our own lives.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Intro Philosophy Syllabus Fall 2011
PHIL 1 – Intro Philosophy, FALL 2011 Instructor: Eric Gerlach
Mon & Wed 9:30 – 10:50 AM Office Hours: Mondays 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code: 43171 Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Room: BCC 54 Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Introduction to Philosophy Syllabus & Class Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to the history of Philosophy and world thought. We will study ancient Egyptian, Indian, Greek, Chinese and modern European philosophers by focusing on their core influential ideas.
Required Texts:
-The only text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the BCC Library.
Required Assignments:
- Four Response Essays 40%
- MIDTERM Exam 30%
- FINAL Exam 30%
CLASS SCHEDULE
Aug 22 Introduction: What is Philosophy?
Aug 24 & 29 Tribal Shamanism & Ancient Cosmology
Aug 1 & Sept 7 Early City State Priests & Egyptian Thought
Sept 12 & 14 Indian Thought (1st Response)
Sept 19 & 21 Greek Thought: Heraclitus
Sept 26 & 28 Greek Thought: Plato
Oct 3 & 5 Chinese Thought: Confucianism
Oct 10 & 12 Chinese Thought: Daoism (2nd Response)
Oct 17 Review for the Midterm Exam
Oct 19 MIDTERM EXAM
Oct 24 & 26 Islamic & Medieval European Thought
Oct 31 & Nov 2 Descartes & Hume (3rd Response)
Nov 7 & 9 Kant & Hegel
Nov 14 & 16 Schopenhauer & Nietzsche
Nov 21 & 23 Heidegger, Sartre & Foucault
Nov 28 & 30 Wittgenstein
Dec 5 & 7 Lewis Carroll, Humor & Art (4th Response)
Dec 12 Review for the Final Exam
Dec 14 FINAL EXAM
Student Learning Outcomes:
Information Competency: understand philosophical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: evaluate philosophical concepts and argue for and against viewpoints
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand and appreciate diverse cultures of thought
General Student Requirements
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are listed here. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course.
Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). If you miss class, it is strongly advised that you ask a classmate for notes. It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. Please read through the syllabus and plan ahead.
Late assignments will only be excused in cases of well-documented emergencies; in addition, students must have evidence that substantial progress has been made on the assignment before the emergency took place. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.
Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog.
Attendance is mandatory. If you miss more than five classes, you will receive an F in the course. (Note: I do not distinguish between “excused” and “unexcused” absences; if you miss more than five classes, for any reason, you cannot pass the class.)
A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S): DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.
The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.
Mon & Wed 9:30 – 10:50 AM Office Hours: Mondays 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code: 43171 Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Room: BCC 54 Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Introduction to Philosophy Syllabus & Class Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to the history of Philosophy and world thought. We will study ancient Egyptian, Indian, Greek, Chinese and modern European philosophers by focusing on their core influential ideas.
Required Texts:
-The only text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the BCC Library.
Required Assignments:
- Four Response Essays 40%
- MIDTERM Exam 30%
- FINAL Exam 30%
CLASS SCHEDULE
Aug 22 Introduction: What is Philosophy?
Aug 24 & 29 Tribal Shamanism & Ancient Cosmology
Aug 1 & Sept 7 Early City State Priests & Egyptian Thought
Sept 12 & 14 Indian Thought (1st Response)
Sept 19 & 21 Greek Thought: Heraclitus
Sept 26 & 28 Greek Thought: Plato
Oct 3 & 5 Chinese Thought: Confucianism
Oct 10 & 12 Chinese Thought: Daoism (2nd Response)
Oct 17 Review for the Midterm Exam
Oct 19 MIDTERM EXAM
Oct 24 & 26 Islamic & Medieval European Thought
Oct 31 & Nov 2 Descartes & Hume (3rd Response)
Nov 7 & 9 Kant & Hegel
Nov 14 & 16 Schopenhauer & Nietzsche
Nov 21 & 23 Heidegger, Sartre & Foucault
Nov 28 & 30 Wittgenstein
Dec 5 & 7 Lewis Carroll, Humor & Art (4th Response)
Dec 12 Review for the Final Exam
Dec 14 FINAL EXAM
Student Learning Outcomes:
Information Competency: understand philosophical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: evaluate philosophical concepts and argue for and against viewpoints
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand and appreciate diverse cultures of thought
General Student Requirements
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are listed here. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course.
Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). If you miss class, it is strongly advised that you ask a classmate for notes. It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. Please read through the syllabus and plan ahead.
Late assignments will only be excused in cases of well-documented emergencies; in addition, students must have evidence that substantial progress has been made on the assignment before the emergency took place. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.
Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog.
Attendance is mandatory. If you miss more than five classes, you will receive an F in the course. (Note: I do not distinguish between “excused” and “unexcused” absences; if you miss more than five classes, for any reason, you cannot pass the class.)
A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S): DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.
The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.
Logic Fall 2011 Syllabus
PHILOSOPHY 10 - LOGIC, Fall 2011 Instructor: Eric Gerlach
Friday 1 – 3:50 pm Office Hours: Mon 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code 43243 Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Room: BCC 54 Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Logic: Syllabus and Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to the history and practice of Logic in ancient and modern cultures. We will study the human origins of Logic, Indian, Greek, and Chinese Logic texts, and modern European Logic including Wittgenstein’s truth table method.
Required Texts:
The text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be on reserve at BCC Library.
Required Assignments:
- In-class & Homework Assignments 40%
- Midterm Exam 30%
- Final Exam 30%
Class Schedule
Readings (bold) are to be completed for discussion by the date listed
Aug 26 Introduction: What is Logic?
Sept 2 The Human Origins of Logic & Reason: Magic, Witchcraft & Religion
Sept 9 Indian Logic: Kanada’s Vaisheshika Sutra & Gotama’s Nyaya Sutra
Sept 16 Indian Logic: Jainism, Buddhism & Skepticism
Sept 23 Greek Logic: Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, Prior & Posterior An.
Sept 30 Greek Logic: Heraclitus, Sextus Empiricus & Skepticism
Oct 7 Chinese Logic & Paradox: SCP & Review for Midterm
Oct 14 Midterm Exam
Oct 21 Islamic & Medieval European Logic: Avicenna & Aquinas
Oct 28 Medieval to Modern European Logic: Russell & Mill
Nov 4 Truth Tables & Early Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Nov 18 Late Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
Dec 2 Contradiction, Dialectic and Hegel’s Logic
Dec 9 Nonsense, Humor & Art: Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books & Review for Final
Dec 16 Final Exam
Student Learning Outcomes:
Information Competency: understand logical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: apply logical concepts to solve problems
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand and appreciate diverse cultures of logic
General Student Requirements:
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are listed here. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course. Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). If you miss class, it is strongly advised that you ask a classmate for notes. It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. Please read through the syllabus and plan ahead.
Late assignments will only be excused in cases of well-documented emergencies; in addition, students must have evidence that substantial progress has been made on the assignment before the emergency took place. Otherwise, late assignments will be downgraded a letter grade for each class day they are late. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. Keep back-up copies of your work; never hand in the only copy of your work. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.
Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog.
Attendance is mandatory. If you miss more than five classes, you will receive an F in the course. (Note: I do not distinguish between “excused” and “unexcused” absences; if you miss more than five classes, for any reason, you cannot pass the class.) You must be on time and stay the length of class to be given credit for attending.
A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S): DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.
The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.
Friday 1 – 3:50 pm Office Hours: Mon 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code 43243 Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Room: BCC 54 Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Logic: Syllabus and Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to the history and practice of Logic in ancient and modern cultures. We will study the human origins of Logic, Indian, Greek, and Chinese Logic texts, and modern European Logic including Wittgenstein’s truth table method.
Required Texts:
The text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be on reserve at BCC Library.
Required Assignments:
- In-class & Homework Assignments 40%
- Midterm Exam 30%
- Final Exam 30%
Class Schedule
Readings (bold) are to be completed for discussion by the date listed
Aug 26 Introduction: What is Logic?
Sept 2 The Human Origins of Logic & Reason: Magic, Witchcraft & Religion
Sept 9 Indian Logic: Kanada’s Vaisheshika Sutra & Gotama’s Nyaya Sutra
Sept 16 Indian Logic: Jainism, Buddhism & Skepticism
Sept 23 Greek Logic: Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, Prior & Posterior An.
Sept 30 Greek Logic: Heraclitus, Sextus Empiricus & Skepticism
Oct 7 Chinese Logic & Paradox: SCP & Review for Midterm
Oct 14 Midterm Exam
Oct 21 Islamic & Medieval European Logic: Avicenna & Aquinas
Oct 28 Medieval to Modern European Logic: Russell & Mill
Nov 4 Truth Tables & Early Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Nov 18 Late Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
Dec 2 Contradiction, Dialectic and Hegel’s Logic
Dec 9 Nonsense, Humor & Art: Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books & Review for Final
Dec 16 Final Exam
Student Learning Outcomes:
Information Competency: understand logical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: apply logical concepts to solve problems
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand and appreciate diverse cultures of logic
General Student Requirements:
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are listed here. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course. Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). If you miss class, it is strongly advised that you ask a classmate for notes. It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. Please read through the syllabus and plan ahead.
Late assignments will only be excused in cases of well-documented emergencies; in addition, students must have evidence that substantial progress has been made on the assignment before the emergency took place. Otherwise, late assignments will be downgraded a letter grade for each class day they are late. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. Keep back-up copies of your work; never hand in the only copy of your work. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.
Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog.
Attendance is mandatory. If you miss more than five classes, you will receive an F in the course. (Note: I do not distinguish between “excused” and “unexcused” absences; if you miss more than five classes, for any reason, you cannot pass the class.) You must be on time and stay the length of class to be given credit for attending.
A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S): DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.
The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Introduction to Asian Philosophy: Class & Reading Schedule
Aug 26 Introduction to Asian Thought
(No Readings - Buy the reader and do the readings for the next class period)
Sept 2 Indian Thought & Hinduism
A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy – Radhakrishnan & Moore (Princeton 1973): Intro & Vedas
Sept 9 The Upanishads & The Indian Epics
A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy : Upanishads & Epics
Existentialism & Vedanta – Chaudhuri (Philosophy East & West, 1962)
Sept 16 Jainism & other Indian schools
A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy: Jainism – Samkya
Sept 23 Buddhism in India & Tibet
Buddhist Thought – Paul Williams (Routledge 2000)
Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy: Nagarjuna, Buddhist Logic & Tibetan Buddhism
The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz, Oxford 1960)
Sept 30 Buddhism in China & Japan
Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy (Routledge 1997): Buddhism in China & Japan
The Diamond Sutra & Heart Sutra (Iyer, Concord Grove 1983)
The Tannisho (Shin Translation Series, 1995)
Oct 7 Chan/Zen Buddhism & Koans
Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy (Routledge 2003): Zen Buddhism
The Koan: Texts & Contexts in Zen Buddhism – Heine & Wright (Oxford 2000)
The Blue Cliff Record (Cleary, Shambhala 1977)
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones – Reps & Senzaki (Anchor)
The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu (Green, Shambhala 1998)
Oct 14 MIDTERM EXAM
(No Readings – Review for the Midterm Exam)
Oct 21 Chinese Thought & The Period of the Hundred Schools
Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy: The Origins of Chinese Philosophy
Oct 28 Confucianism, Confucius & Mencius
Confucianism – Paul R. Goldin (University of California, 2011): Confucius & Mencius
The Analects of Confucius (Leys, Norton 1997)
Mencius (Lau, Penguin 1970)
Nov 4 Xun Zi, Neo-Confucianism & Wang Yang Ming
Confucianism: Xun Zi & Neo-Confucianism
Hsun Tzu – Basic Writings (Watson, Columbia 1963)
Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy: Confucianism in Japan
Nov 18 Mo Zi & the Sophists
Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy: Mohism
Mo Tzu – Basic Writings (Watson, Columbia 1963)
Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy: Hui Shi & Gongsun Long
Dec 2 Daoism, Lao Zi & Zhuan Zi
Introducing Daoism – Livia Kohn (Routledge 2009)
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching (Richard Wilhelm Edition, Arkana 1985)
Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters (David Hinton, Counterpoint 1998)
Dec 9 Warriors & Strategy: Sun Zi & Bushido
Sun Zi’s Art of War (Mair, Columbia 2007)
Death, Honor & Loyalty: The Bushido Ideal – Hurst (Philosophy East & West 1990)
Dec 16 FINAL EXAM
(No Readings – Review for the Final Exam)
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