GERMAN PESSIMISM (aka ‘Happy Times’)
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the time of Schopenhauer and just before Nietzsche’s birth, Germany and German thought had been going through a great period of pessimism. Just like in ancient Egypt, Greece and China, human thought often flourishes in periods of tragedy and war as people are forced to turn critically to old conceptions and institutions and ask hard questions about what works and does not for the individual and the community. In the late 1700s, the American and French revolutions, along with developments in England, had brought new rights to common people. When the German people rose up to fight for rights similar to their neighbors, several German princes came together to crush the popular people’s movement. Germany was at this time a lose confederate of regional principalities, ruled locally. Hegel’s student Marx, German though writing much of his work in England, was writing for this discouraged audience, arguing that the people would rise up and overcome oppression.
Recall that Descartes, Kant and other rationalists argued that the world (Descartes) and/or the mind (Kant) worked like a clock that provides us with mathematical and deductive certainties. When the political tide turned against the German people, who sought a more reasonable society like the American and French revolutions, the people began to wonder: Is the world, society or mind run by reason? This created a tide of pessimistic popular and intellectual culture. Remember that Socrates (as Plato’s mouthpiece) in the Republic argued that the world is true and created by ideal forms that can be known by the just and wise, but Thrasymachus argued that justice was merely the will of the stronger who could impose their ‘order’ on others. German thought likewise turned from the reason of Kant towards the will of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as the ordering force in the world. Since reason failed in the world, the world is not a reasonable place but a tough place in which it is hard to push for what one sees as beautiful and true. Life, at its best, is romantic and dramatic, not rational or mathematical.
German pessimism, including its famous thinkers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, flourished in popularity during two more recent periods of pessimism: WWI for Europe (producing the Dada modern art movement we will study soon) and post-WWII through the Vietnam War for America (producing the counter-culture of first the beatniks and then hippies, particularly thriving in the Bay Area). Nietzsche has been celebrated by counter-cultural thinkers and artists as a pessimist who trashed his own country, culture and people as prideful and ignorant sheep who would rather seek pride in being a member of a group than be excellent as individuals.
SCHOPENHAUER (1788 - 1860)
Arthur Schopenhauer, who looks something like a cross between a cranky grandfather and Wolverine of the X Men, was a follower of Kant, unlike his own follower Nietzsche who despised Kant and argued against him frequently. Kant and Schopenhauer were both great influences on Wittgenstein, who we will study next. Remember that Kant conceded to Hume that the world is unknown and all we can have about it are assumptions, but the mind works mathematically and so we can know the categories of the mind with deductive certainty. Schopenhauer, more pessimistic than Kant, saw the gulf and gap between the world and our ideas as a stormy abyss that forever frustrates our idealizations. He agreed with Kant that the mind works categorically and mathematically, but the gap between our conceptions and the ‘thing-in-itself’ turned Schopenhauer from Rationalism and mathematical science to Buddhism and ecstatic art.
Remember that Hegel disliked Kant’s gap between our ideas and the ‘thing-in-itself’ and believed that it could be overcome by reason through dialectic. Schopenhauer disagreed with Hegel and argued that reason could not overcome the gap. In fact, Schopenhauer and Hegel both taught at the University of Berlin as philosophical rivals. As Hegel became increasingly popular, Schopenhauer scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel’s to try to combat his philosophy, but when this backfired and more students attended Hegel’s lectures Schopenhauer resigned in disgust. Schopenhauer openly called Hegel a charlatan who tricks people into believing reason completely fleshes the world out, and wrote that when he read Hegel’s central Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind he felt as if he were in a madhouse.
Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by Indian thought, specifically the Upanishads, Vedanta and Buddhism. Of the Upanishads, he wrote that they were the most sublime philosophy of world history, and that, “it has been the consolation of my life and will be the consolation of my death”. Schopenhauer saw parallels between the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha and his own philosophy of existence as will and suffering. He wrote that, if his own philosophy is correct, it is expected that it agrees with the most popular system of thought in human history. He received instruction in meditation, though it is unknown whether he practiced with any regularity. Like much of Indian thought and Hume, who himself may very well have been influenced by Indian sources, Schopenhauer argued that thought is caused by will and desire, the fundamental essence of all things.
Schopenhauer’s great work is The World as Will and Representation. The mind represents and idealizes the world, which is essentially will. All things, including the self and conceptions, are manifestations of will. Recall that Buddha taught that existence is suffering and the cause of suffering is desire and attachment. For Schopenhauer, the world is full of perpetual striving for ideals that never come to perfection. The classic metaphor he uses is the ship bobbing on a stormy sea, a ship build of ideals as straight boards on a sea of chaotic desires. One must recognize one’s condition, and have the courage and will to hold one’s course in spite of the endless hardship. Developing sea legs and a tough stomach, to recognize oneself and one’s world as striving without hope for a Hegelian resolution by reason, is virtue and true strength.
There is for Schopenhauer one escape from will and the self. Through art, which can include philosophy, we can temporarily escape ourselves and our desires through ecstasy and identification with others and the whole. Nietzsche similarly argued that creativity was the highest form of life, but he argued that it was not the loss of self and escape from will but rather the highest activity of the individual, expressing power and accomplishment. For Schopenhauer, it is not standing out as an individual but identification with the world beyond representation, feeling unity with the other that transcends conceptualization.
Schopenhauer considered music the highest form of art, the form that embodies pure will itself, because unlike visual arts it represents and copies no particular things or ideas. In this way it is similar to American Abstract Minimalist painting and sculpture that became popular in the wake of WWII and with the beatniks, art which goes beyond Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism in representing no particular things but striving to give shape to pure emotion and sensation.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are quite similar to Darwin. Like Jains, but unlike Descartes, Schopenhauer saw animals as intimately related to human beings, both being similar manifestations of will, striving and suffering. In one passage near the end of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer speaks of sea-lions and the way that they form a circle around their young. Whenever a pup tries to escape the circle, it gets a bite from the elders to teach it to stay where it is safe. Clearly he is drawing a comparison between the way sea-lions and humans learn through suffering and overcoming of will in themselves and others. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both influences on Freud, who saw civilization and human behaviors as repression of desire and will, as the super-ego putting the ego’s endless search for pleasure in check. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were critical of philosophy for avoiding subjects such as sex, laughter and friendship because this raw material of life, the most vibrant forms of will, defies most powerfully conceptualization and categorization.
NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)
Nietzsche is often called the first modern thinker. In fact, depending on whether you say we live in modern or post-modern times, he is called the first modern OR post-modern thinker. Descartes is also called the first modern thinker, but truthfully he was the first modern European thinker, and Europe is being identified with modernity. Nietzsche is without doubt one of the most influential philosophers of modern Europe, and most skeptical thought is now deeply in his debt. He argued, like Descartes, that everything must be questioned, but unlike Descartes he argued against the certainty of religion, science and politics. For Nietzsche, truth is an individual quest that should not be put in servitude to an institution. Because human beings are easily made into sheep, the excellent must strive to overcome both themselves and institutions to bring greater truth to the world and greater meaning to their own lives.
Nietzsche came from a long line of protestant Lutheran preachers, five generations deep (following his great-great-great-grandfather, thrice times great like Hermes Trismegistus, the author of the Hermetic Corpus of Neo-Platonism). Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s father died when he was very little, suffering both physically and mentally. Nietzsche as a boy wondered why both his father, a passionate preacher, and older brother died in spite of being Christian. Though his family sent the boy to school to become a preacher and theologian, like Hegel, Heidegger and many other German thinkers Nietzsche rebelled and turned to philosophy (after a brief period of turning to mathematics). It seems that many great philosophers of Europe begin by studying religion or science (particularly mathematics) and then turning to philosophy to seek the rules of the rules, the deeper understanding of human understandings.
Nietzsche’s first book was The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the ancient Greeks were not simply rationalists as was often said in Nietzsche’s time and still is today. He argued that there were two opposite strains in Greek society, the Apollonian (order, reason and law) and the Dionysian (chaos, emotion and revolt). Apollo was the ancient Greek god of knowledge, and Dionysus was the god of ecstasy, intoxication and transformation. Nietzsche suggests that this is quite human, and societies that develop do not simply become reasonable but struggle to both restrain and escape restraint, to categorically understand and transcend categorical understanding, engaging in both science and art. This is very similar to Hegel’s dialectic of understanding versus reason and culture versus counter-culture we studied last time. However, unlike Hegel and following Schopenhauer’s criticism of Hegel, Nietzsche identifies the opposite of understanding not as reason but will, not as mathematical science but as creative expression.
Nietzsche versus Morality
The text I gave you to read is ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, in which Nietzsche asks us to look at humanity and systems of thought critically and see that following the rules (the rationalist morality of Kant) or ‘the greater common good’ (the utilitarian morality of Mill) is for sheep and not for the genuine individual. The individual rises above the masses and sees things in a new way. Nietzsche came up with these ideas reading Kant and Mill, reacting against their overall goods for everyone evenly. For Nietzsche, inequality and individuality is the beautiful mountain range for each individual to climb and conquer.
Nietzsche was a staunch individualist, believing that ANY group morality is a slave morality that limits the individual, and he called Christianity, scientific ‘objectivity’, German nationalism and German racism (very much centered in anti-semitism) out on this vocally. These are all the systems that Germans of his day identified with. Nietzsche was possibly the first to openly call all the group identities and institutions of his day foolish. He is seen as a hero by many for this. Consider that in one place he wrote, “When we create the master race, we will have to mix in a lot of Jews to get their good qualities”, a joke considering that Nietzsche would never advise creating a master race of equals, a growing subject of his day that reached its peak in the Nazi regime, but rather loves the individual who stands above the race as a herd.
Nietzsche argued that in any system, the revered leaders always have the strength and individuality to criticize the system. Unfortunately, then the individual’s thought becomes canon and dogma, and the process repeats as Hegel recognized in each stage of history. Nietzsche praised Jesus as an individual who criticized the religious and political system of his day, standing up to the Pharisees and the Romans, but Nietzsche bashes Paul and Christianity for systematizing Jesus’ thought and actions, making them constraints on the individual. In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche calls Paul the penultimate priest, the individual who takes their own inability and imposes it on others.
It is often noted that Nietzsche was a critic of religion and Christianity. In two places, he famously says that God is dead, and you and I have killed him. This is not, however, confined to religion. By the ‘death of God’, Nietzsche was equally critical of any authority, of any singular interpretation of truth, whether in the name of religion, science, philosophy, race or politics (the first four often serving the last). One of the fundamental thoughts of Nietzsche is that truth is always individual interpretation, and that all philosophy and thought are a self-confession of their author. To accept any human truth passively, whether religious, scientific, academic, or political, is to compromise one’s individuality, one’s ability to create greater meaning and truth.
Like Heraclitus, the ancient Greek thinker Nietzsche loved most, the world is unknown beyond any human attempt to understand it by experts, making us little more than apes (a metaphor used by both Heraclitus and Nietzsche). The great individuals, those who form the systems themselves, are those who both support and oppose the system to create something new. Consider that if you believe Newton and his ‘laws’ are entirely correct and certain fact, you would not be Einstein and invent the Theory of Relativity. In one passage I take dear to heart, Nietzsche warns us: If you thought religion created problems and mislead people by offering them an identity that embraces some while rejecting others, wait until you see how this can be done in the name of science and the modern nation-state.
It was a shame that Nietzsche was censored and used by the Nazis, thanks to the efforts of Nietzsche’s sister, to support their ideas of the rising German will of the master race, taking Nietzsche’s individualism and twisting it into a racial and social doctrine. Nietzsche intended his words for individualists, as he says over and over again, and he attacked both nationalism and racism as poisons that intoxicate the weak-minded. Nietzsche does speak of the superman, the ‘ubermensch’, much as the Nazis called themselves the supermen and other races the inferior, the under-men or sub-human (‘untermensch’). When Nietzsche uses the term ‘ubermensch’, he means the one who overcomes both themselves and their own culture, not those who embrace group identity to give meaning to their lives. Nietzsche’s superior person is the visionary thinker or artist, not a nation or race. Nietzsche called himself an ‘anti-anti-semite’, and moved to Switzerland and renounced his German citizenship to walk alone in the mountains.
Nietzsche versus Nihilism
While many would say ‘Nietzsche believes in nothing, then”, this would not be true. Nietzsche was just as vocal about believing in something as he was about not believing the herd mentality. Nietzsche saw himself as a new sort of thinker who would be followed and imitated by many. Indeed, he predicted excellent individual thinkers (such as Bataille, Foucault, Derrida) as well as corrupters (such as the Nazis) following in his wake. Because of this, he warns over and over again NOT to make his thought into a school or a system. However, he did not believe like Schopenhauer that one could escape individuality and will. Nietzsche believed that the whole worth of the individual is that, in the face of nothing being absolutely true, staring into the void of being, you create something and stand for something in a beautiful way, creating your own meaning in life. He was very critical of ‘Nihilism’, believing in nothing, though this is just what his critics, religious and not, have often called him.
Nietzsche believes in Heraclitus and Hegel’s Becoming between Being and Non-Being. He avoids believing in eternal positives, but also avoids believing in nothing whatsoever. It is the overturning of the old into the new by the true individual who wills something created beyond themselves and the world that stands in the face of nihilism, the nihilism that Nietzsche sees as modernity’s greatest threat. He fears a world where everyone sits on their couch, believes in nothing but is afraid to contradict the state or church and do SOMETHING other than sit there. Thus, Nietzsche relentlessly bashes reason and judgment in himself and in others, but he believes that you must have the courage to create. As the Nietzschean founder of the Dada art movement Tristan Tzara wrote, “One must have the courage to be both for and against thought”.
Nietzsche versus Women
One of the most beautiful and deep parts of Nietzsche’s writings, a particularly interesting example of his philosophical method, is his sudden and unexpected turn in his book Human All Too Human from bashing Kant and others for believing in objective truth to saying, “Here are some of my truths”, and without warning begin trashing women, including the famous line, “When you go to woman, do not forget your whip”. Why is Nietzsche suddenly misogynistic? He has told us that philosophy is a self-confession of the author, and that truth is always open to interpretation. Nietzsche is putting on a self-conscious philosophical performance, inspiring to many including Bataille and Derrida. Nietzsche here is showing us both sides of himself at once, both his hatred of women and his understanding that this is merely his own twisted perspective. Unlike other philosophers, who write what they hope can be consistent and clear truth, Nietzsche knows the truth is psychological, contradictory and complex, and that beauty and achievement come from tension and pain. Thus, even in his bashing he knows he is a human being and flawed.
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
In this book, Nietzsche attempts to push thought beyond categorical understandings of good and evil and of true and false to show the complexity of human meaning and life. He starts this work asking: Why do we want simple truth or suppose we can simply get truth? Philosophy seems like it has barely started, but it has been assumed that something in us wants absolute truth and can acquire it. Nietzsche says that asking this question is perhaps the greatest risk. If we question our ability to gain truth, it becomes possible that we will lose all hope for truth and turn to nihilism, which Nietzsche argues later is equally as dangerous to human creativity and the process of life as the belief in objectivity. Typically, thinkers have assumed that there must be absolute pure truth apart from or hidden within the messy world and various human opinions. He writes:
“This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudgment and prejudice which gives away the metaphysicians of all ages; this kind of valuation looms in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this ‘faith’ that they trouble themselves about ‘knowledge’, about something that is finally baptized solemnly as ‘the truth’. The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values. It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them that one might have a doubt right here at the threshold where it was surely most necessary...For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and secondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression painters use. For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things, maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe!”
(BGE 2)
Note the ‘frog perspectives’ in their nooks, used by painters, is possibly from the Daoist Zhuangzi. Later, Nietzsche uses the term ‘well-frogs’ similarly. European painting was influenced in the Renaissance and later Enlightenment by Chinese landscape paintings.
“After having looked long enough between the philosopher’s lines and fingers, I say to myself: by far the greater part of conscious thinking must still be included among instinctive activities, and that goes even for philosophical thinking...most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts. Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life, for example, that the definite should be worth more than the indefinite, and mere appearance worth less than ‘truth’... (BGE 3)
“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment. In this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent is it life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating, and we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include the synthetic judgments apriori) are the most indispensable for us, that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live, that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life, that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way, and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.” (BGE 4)
Notice Nietzsche calling Kant out on apriori truth as a fiction, as well as the title of the work stated here.
“What provokes one to look at all philosophers half suspiciously, half mockingly, is not that one discovers again and again how innocent they are, how often and how easily they make mistakes and go astray, in short, their childishness and childlikeness, but that they are not honest enough in their work, although they all make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic (as opposed to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and doltish, and talk of ‘inspiration’), while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of ‘inspiration’, most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract, that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. They are all advocates who resent that name, and for the most part even wily spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize ‘truths’, and very far from having the courage of the conscience that admits this, precisely this, to itself, very far from having the good taste of the courage which also lets this be known, whether to warn an enemy or friend, or, from exuberance, to mock itself. The equally stiff and decorous tartuffery of the old Kant as he lures us on the dialectical bypaths that lead to his ‘categorical imperative’ really lead astray and seduce, this spectacle makes us smile, as we are fastidious and finds it quite amusing to watch closely the subtle tricks of old moralists...” (BGE 5)
Notice Nietzsche calling the dialectic of Kant and Hegel, the two big names in German thought in Nietzsche’s time, a sham that parades itself as pure cold truth. Nietzsche argues that truth is seduction, we believe what we want to believe and project it through abstraction into the places we can not see or are afraid to look. Baudrillard, another French Nietzschean philosopher, took ‘Truth is Seduction’ as the starting point of his philosophy, wandering in Vegas and marvelling at the seduction of consumerism and the spectacles we can create through technology.
“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir...Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a ‘drive to knowledge’ is the father of philosophy, but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as a mere instrument. But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see what extent they may have been at play just here as inspiring spirits (or demons and kobolds) will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time, and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives.” (BGE 6)
“It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.” (BGE 14)
“There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are ‘immediate certainties’, for example, ‘I think’, or as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, ‘I will’, as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as ‘the thing in itself’, without falsification on the part of either the subject or the object...I shall repeat a hundred times, we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!” (BGE 16)
“With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede: namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’. IT thinks...The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek and German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar, I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions, that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.” (BGE 17)
“O holy simplicity! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering once one has acquired eyes for this marvel! How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! How we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a divine desire for wanton leaps and wrong inferences! How from the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance...and only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far, the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue, not as its opposite, but as its refinement! Even if language, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation...here and there we understand it and laugh at the way in which precisely science at its best seeks most to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitable constructed and suitable falsified world, at the way in which, willy-nilly, it loves error, because, being alive, it loves life.” (BGE 24)
“Take care, philosophers and friends, of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom, of suffering ‘for truth’s sake’, even of defending yourselves...as though ‘the truth’ were such an innocuous and incompetent creature as to require protectors!” (BGE 25)
“In all seriousness, the innocence of our thinkers is somehow touching and evokes reverence, when today they still step before consciousness with the request that it should please give them honest answers...A philosopher has nothing less than a right to ‘bad character’, as the being who has so far always been fooled best on earth. He has a duty to suspicion today, to squint maliciously out of every abyss of suspicion...Why couldn’t the world that concerns us, be a fiction? And if somebody asked, ‘but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?’, couldn’t one answer simply: Why? Doesn’t this ‘belongs’ perhaps belong to the fiction too?...Shouldn’t philosophers be permitted to rise above faith in grammar?” (BGE 34)
“One should not dodge one’s tests, though they may be the most dangerous.” (BGE 41)
“Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.” (BGE 76)
“Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” (BGE 78)
“A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child at play.” (BGE 94)
“A people is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men. Yes, and then to get around them.” (BGE 126)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
This is one of the most famous of Nietzsche’s books. The opening passages are quite famous and are quoted often. The prose is intentionally mocking the Bible, Plato and other classics.
Nietzsche believed that the Persian prophet Zarathustra, one of the first monotheists, was also the first dualist to separate good from evil, so Nietzsche has Zarathustra become the first to go ‘beyond’ good and evil, to recognize the error of his dualism, and see the interdependence and totality of the whole. Zarathustra starts in his cave, then ‘goes down’, a theme that recurs.
Zarathustra first encounters after going down out of cave a forest dweller (very Indian), who is avoiding people and loving god as people are too imperfect. This sage in the woods is what Zarathustra has overcome. He gets to town, and addresses the people, who have gathered to watch a tightrope walker. Note that the superman is one who the people watch and love, who straddles an abyss and creates and dances like the tightrope walker, but in this scene the tightrope walker is a mere spectacle and the people are not supposed to do the same. Some of the most quoted lines of the text come from this scene, as Zarathustra addresses the crowd.
“I teach you the superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him? All beings have so far created something beyond themselves, and you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame, and just the same shall man be to the superman. You have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even yet man is more of an ape that any of the apes. Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom...Truly, man is a polluted stream. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.” (TSZ 3)
“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman, a rope over an abyss, a dangerous crossing...What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.” (TSZ 4)
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Intro Philosophy: Kant & Hegel
Last time we ended with Hume and his very skeptical philosophy. Hume argues that we have impressions and ideas, and because all of our ideas come from our impressions, our ideas are assumptions rather than deductive certainties as Descartes and the rationalists were after. The famous example Hume uses is the billiard table, arguing that we have an idea or assumption of a cause when ball A hits ball B.
This total skepticism is quite welcome to some, but dogmatic and positivist leaning thinkers are not happy with cause being an assumption in the head and not a fact in the world. Another problem is that Hume does not tell us where our idea of cause comes from or how it is related to our other ideas. How is it that human beings in ancient and modern times understand things in terms of cause and effect, or bad and good? Hume does not give us any way to understand the types of our ideas other than that they are all assumptions that spring from impressions.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) read Hume and famously wrote that Hume awakened him from his “dogmatic slumbers”. Kant is one of the biggest philosophers in the modern European cannon, loved by dogmatic positivists and hated by skeptical relativists. He was a big influence on Schopenhauer (who was a big influence on Nietzsche, the focus of next week), and a big influence on the early thought of Wittgenstein (who we focus on the week after next).
Kant as a rationalist believes very much in the aim of Descartes, arguing that the world does contain certainties and facts such as 2 + 3 = 5, but Descartes as we saw did not spend much time proving this. Kant’s major work, A Critique of Pure Reason, tries to bridge this gap with an air tight argument for true positive knowledge in the face of Hume’s skeptical challenge that all we know is merely assumption.
Kant argues that Hume is correct that we learn the world through the senses and this is how we acquire our ideas. However, even though we do not experience the world directly but rather through our experience and ideas, we can construct true positive knowledge of the world and our ideas through reason which can reveal new certain truths by reasoning from our initial ideas, just as mathematics can derive additional propositions from beginning propositions. Remember that in the 1700s algebraic science had come to question many traditional truths and give new positive answers. Kant studied and wrote in the time when Newton’s laws of physics had risen to fame. Remember also that Descartes started with the certainty of awareness and thought and hoped to derive further certainties from this starting certainty.
Kant argues that the world, the ‘thing-in-itself’ (or in German, the ‘Ding-an-sich’) as he calls it, we cannot know, but our ideas about it have a structure and order to them. Kant believed that there are twelve categories of ideas and cause is one of these categories. If we start from these basic categories, we can learn additional certain truths about science and the world in the same way that if we start with 2 + 3 = 5 we can come to additional certain propositions of mathematics. Kant calls this the synthetic apriori, a fancy term for what we can discover we know deductively and categorically prior to or regardless of our experience in the world. The metaphor often used is our ideas are the eyeglasses through which we see the world. Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein in his early period both agreed with this conception. We can know the categorical frame of our lens through which we view the world, even if the world remains always unknown and chaotic beyond the frame of our understanding. We can know how grammar, logic and mathematics must work even if we can not guarantee that anything said or calculated is certain next Tuesday.
Georg Hegel (1770-1831) was as upset with Kant as Kant was upset with Hume. Like Kant thought of Hume, and Hume thought of Descartes, Hegel did not think that Kant gave much of an explanation or exploration of our ideas. It is one thing to say we have an idea of cause as a category for our experiences, but it is another to explain how cause functions, both in itself and together with the other ideas that we have. Hegel thought that Kant declares that we have twelve categories, including causation, but Kant did not show why we have this category or how it fits together with the other eleven categories.
Also, just as Kant was critical of Hume for putting the facts of the world out of reach by declaring everything to be an assumption, Hegel was critical of Kant for putting the world beyond our ideas as the “thing-in-itself”. Do we experience our ideas as separate from the world in this way, like a pair of eyeglasses, or are our ideas experienced in and as the world itself? If cause is a lens through which we view the world, then the world itself remains something unknown and my certain knowledge of causation is still quite useless for practical knowledge of the world. Why should we know nothing of our experience of the world, but be certain of our experience of the mind?
Hegel has two major ideas that became very influential for later thinkers. The first is historical explanation or explanation by process. Hegel argues that things are not simply what they are at once, but evolve through stages to become what they are, and the process by which they evolve show us how the things essentially work. Also, things are not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things in which they become what they are (very like the Buddhist concept of co-dependent arising). After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Weber and Feuerbach were major thinkers who overturned old theories of static order with new theories of process to explain the workings of the mind and society. Consider that Newton thought God made the earth at the very beginning in an instant, while scientists today that there was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy formed. Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin.
Hegel’s second major idea, the mechanism or motion of evolution over time, is dialectic. Dialectic is a Greek term for arguing back and forth, for and against a position, to come to greater understanding. Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and his dialogue plays show Socrates arguing against others and himself in this way. Hegel argues that all things are made of oppositions or contradictions (contra-diction means “arguing against”, like arguing both sides, the pros and cons, of a particular thing). This is not only similar to Lao Zi’s wheel (made of both solid and empty together), but Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal but opposite force.
While this has become controversial, many believe that Hegel’s dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and synthesis. Hegel often presents our ideas (which live in the world as politics and our shared expectations) as starting out positive, flipping and becoming negative, and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole. Remember Lao Zi’s wheel leads us through this three stage process (solid at first, then empty, then both), as does the famous Zen quote that first a rock is a rock, then a rock isn’t a rock (it is in the mind, as a concept) and then a rock is a rock (real rock and concept together as the rock).
Hegel argues that by looking at things as evolving over time in a situation, not immediate and isolated, and looking at things as two sided and in opposition to themselves and others, rather than categorical and without tension, we can come to understand how things actually are, which is a union (while an opposition) of how they are in the mind and how they are in the world.
In his first major work, The Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit (1806), Hegel gives us his social history of society and philosophy evolving by stages to the present day. In his second major work, The Science of Logic (1816), Hegel gives us his psychology. We will look at the overall structure and some key ideas of each, spending more time on the Logic which has become one of my favorites. Americans have only begun studying Hegel, because Hegel had a student named Marx who took Hegel’s concept of dialectic and used it to father communism. Communists like Hegel’s Logic very much, and so American and British universities did not teach much Hegel and when they do they often teach the Phenomenology but not the Logic. This is unfortunate, because while Hegel’s ideas about history in the Phenomenology are quite antiquated today I have great hope that there is more to be discovered by looking at the Logic in the light of the discoveries of modern psychology, especially the work of Piaget the child psychologist.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY
I disagree with Hegel’s history because it is quite simplistic and eurocentric, but it is an excellent introduction to Hegel’s thought not only because it was his first major work, after which he wrote the Logic to clarify the inner process of the mind at work in this history, but it shows dialectic working in three stages to complete itself as a union of contradictory sides.
For Hegel, the first stage of history is the Orientals. Hegel uses this term as it was used until recently, before the 1960s, to refer to everyone who is not European. In the 60s, 70s and 80s this term was still used by many to refer to East Asian people such as the Chinese. As archeology in Hegel’s time had revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel puts this as the first and basic starting stage in human development. It is good that this is the non-European start, but unfortunate that all further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the development is a course of Europe becoming different from others (again, this is overly simplistic and quite racist and eurocentric, but funny enough this is still largely the view preached on campuses today).
The Orientals understand objectivity and the state, two powerful positives. The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not question their society or science. They see the real as real, but do not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned. In some cases, such as Buddhism in India, Hegel believes that they realized skepticism but did not develop it further, turning the world into a simple void or nothing. Thus the Orientals get simple one-sided Being or Non-Being, but do not put these two together to see the unity of the opposition. It is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel argues make this next leap and become the second stage of history.
The Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of objectivity as subjectivity. While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who did this, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the earlier empires as more complex and also that the Greeks were only one civilization of many that made leaps forward like this (Jaspers calls the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese, the three places we studied in the ancient world in depth, the axial age).
Just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understand the negative, the temporary and perspective. Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing Being and Non-Being together as Becoming, and sees Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further development. However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks still put Being off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire or Plato’s static ideal forms. It is the Germans, and specifically Hegel himself, who see the true unity of objectivity and subjectivity, of state and individual, of necessity and freedom, of science and discovery, to complete the history of thought in three stages. Notice that Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in a page, with no credit at all.
The Europeans, but specifically the Germans who are in Hegel’s time becoming the foremost champions of philosophy, history, science, and politics are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world. Hegel sees Hume and Kant as the last negative and positive before his own system of unification. Also, as a teenager Hegel heard about the French Revolution and was, like many youth, an enthusiastic supporter of the left-wing progressive removal of the aristocrats and traditional ways. We get our terms left-wing and right-wing from the French Revolution, as liberals and conservatives sat on opposite sides of the congress hall. Unfortunately for the French, and for young Hegel, the revolution collapsed and Napoleon, a dictator, took over. Hegel developed his ideas about ideas working in the real world as oppositions watching the French Revolution.
Hegel believes that history is almost at its completion in his time with his own philosophy and the politics of the German parliamentary state which balances collective objectivity with individual subjectivity. He also believes that religion evolves exactly as philosophy and politics does, and that German Lutheran Christianity is the final form of religion that unites the individual directly with God (living objectivity) because each man is the priest of his household.
THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC
The Master/Slave dialectic is the continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next. It works on the level of idea, individual and social movement.
At first, the individual goes out into the world and discovers that there are other beings out there with other opinions and views. The individual thus wants to at first kill, later conquer these others, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be objectivity. The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master, and develops while the master deteriorates and grows lazy. The slave comes to realize that he can do things he never thought of for someone else, so he can do things no one has thought up yet for himself, and thus triumphs over the master and becomes the next master.
This is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap seeing subjectivity and objectivity as two sides of the same thing. Notice that this tells us the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and the Germans were slaves of the Greeks! This is not often pointed out, but it is implied by Hegel and confirmed by historians today. While Hegel is quite eurocentric, he is right to this extent.
The Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Marx. Feminist Hegelians, like Simone de Beauvoir, uses it for women in ‘The Second Sex’, Franz Fanon uses it for black people in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as does the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis (who went to Germany to study Hegel before going to jail for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the 60s).
HEGEL’S LOGIC
After writing the Phenomenology, Hegel came to realize that he had not described the inner workings of the dialectical process of history to his liking. Hegel believed the world consisted of ideas, so he leaves history behind and turns to the workings of ideas in the mind. To show the inner psychology at work in every stage of historical development, he wrote his Logic which like the Phenomenology unfolds in three stages as positive, negative and synthesis, but instead of Orientals, Greeks and Germans, the three stages of the Logic are Being, Essence, and Concept.
Like Neo-Platonism, thought has to gather everything up such that all categories become modes or branches of the same thing. It does this with Understanding which holds things fast in sameness and Reason which divides things against each other and against themselves, opposing the Understanding. Understanding wants to keep ideas as they are and separate from each other, while Reason wants to change ideas and unite them all together as a whole. The mind craves unity, objectivity as the all-view, which pulls it in two directions. First, it wants to hold on to the unities of the understanding and keep them away from reason tearing them apart. However, reason wants to dissolve everything and return it all to the Absolute, or the undivided One. Thus, the motions rock back and forth in stages. It would thus be correct to say that, the way Hegel describes it, conservatives would rather understand than reason and liberals would rather reason than understand.
At each stage, the Understanding comes to change its shape and provide the ground for the back and forth positions of reason which share the same understanding(s). Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Thus, Hegel says there really is only one philosophy which is ‘thought’ itself, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought.
Why is it opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Interestingly, Hegel writes that we need to start with ‘legend’ of the fall of man, of Adam falling out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important (a similar reading to Deists of his time in Europe, who see the bible as true psychologically but not literal). When Adam, or consciousness, falls into the world out of unity with all, it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can describe the fall from unity either in physics as the Big Bang or in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget).
Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding. (God)(IS), (You)(Are), (this)(is), the anchor points of Descartes. However, these are inadequate. First, they are one sided, and so dogmatic, stuck. They are divided from each other and the All, so reason is not satisfied and tries to figure out how all of these separate categories are one in reality, or the big One or All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content, making them almost no different from empty. This is exactly how Hegel is critical of Kant’s categories and the gap he leaves between mind and world.
(68) “Kant, it is well known, did not put himself to much trouble in discovering the categories.”
“Kant, as we must add, never got beyond the negative result that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, and never penetrated to the discovery of what the antinomies really and positively mean. That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites.”
(118) “However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.”
Hegel writes that the feeling of being alive is to feel contradiction within oneself, at rest in itself but at the same time moving itself beyond itself. It both wants to stay and go at once, and does. Similarly, the Soviet literary critic and thinker Bakhtin said that when we think we are in dialogue with ourselves, are opposed to ourselves on opposite sides.
BEING, NOTHING AND BECOMING
In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that Heraclitus realized the unity of Being and Non-Being as ceaseless Becoming, as the flux of the cosmic fire. Hegel says that some say no one is capable of understanding contradiction, but Hegel points to Heraclitus and argues that to come to the next level in your understanding your reason has to see both sides and unite them in the cement of the understanding, which is what Heraclitus did for the Greeks such that they could rise beyond the Orientals to the next level. Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and nonbeing as one like Heraclitus. It is merely recognizing it that is the hard part. Hegel says that this is the hurdle that prevents the common person from being a philosopher, and the reason that the great thinkers and revolutions in thought are rare. In fact, often it takes decades after the thinker’s death for their ideas to become accepted, further proof that the great thinker must unite the old with the opposite direction of the new and this is the barrier between the new idea and the common understanding of the people.
Once thought realizes becoming as the unity of the being of things and their non-being (their temporary being in time and their not being other things), thought still does not have enough to understand each and every thing or how they fit into the All as one. Thought tries to understand the individual beings of the world and the world itself as constant becoming, like Heraclitus, but this does not show us how things are interrelated. This is exactly how Kant was frustrated with Hume, because everything being an assumption does not tell us what things are specifically.
Thought must explore two opposite directions to try to find the meaning of individual things. First, it tries to understand things by their qualities (such as green, square, closed), but this moves away from the things themselves towards abstract ideas. Second, thought tries to understand things by their quantities, with each thing being a one itself and being a quantity of many parts and being in a group of many members. Unfortunately, this leaves each being as merely a thing, and tells us nothing about the specific differences between types of things. Notice that quality and quantity are the two opposite sides to our abstractions of things, the two ways we isolate and abstract, through thought, the parts and ways of things. Consider that your hand is not explainable simply by its shape, or color, or texture, any more than its being one hand with five fingers, though all of this together tells me much about my hand. To understand your hand, you have to see it in context, in the world used with other things, as well as understand the qualities and quantities of the hand.
Thought now tries to understand things in terms of essences, and these essences in terms of their qualities and quantities. Remember that Hegel in his Phenomenology saw Plato as the union of Heraclitus and Parmenides, that Plato thought things have ideal essences in the stars that cause them to be what they are, and that Platonism was the major school of thought in middle-age Europe to which Hegel acknowledges he owes many insights.
Because thought could not understand things in their qualities and quantities, it tries to understand things by putting them in groups and then understanding the qualities and quantities of these groups. It puts these as essences outside the world as Plato put them up in the stars, in another more modern way “in” things and their groups as their “nature”. The problem with this stage is that this still puts things as isolated and does not understand them in a situation as mutually interdependent. It seeks the meaning of the thing in the group where it could not find it in the individual, but this still isolates things even as it puts them in groups. Hegel is very aware that modern science is often in this mode, isolating things and finding new truths about their exclusive natures. For Hegel, Plato’s forms, Kant’s categories and scientific theories are good but they are not complete because they do not understand how things cannot be separate from each other if we want our knowledge to be like the world, in which everything fits together.
Just as qualities are non-beings within beings, essences are also non-beings within beings, but a core is sought beyond and opposed to outer qualities or bunches of quantities. Thought has turned on itself yet preserved itself, trying to understand the real as merely the idea. It would be like saying that the hand is really the ideal hand, rather than a hand in the real world which we idealize. Thought is struggling to grasp the unity of the mind and the world, of our ideas of things and the real things themselves. Remember Kant left a complete gap between the fully certain categories of the mind and the unknown world-in-itself. Just as beings were opposed to themselves and others, Hegel says that essences, if they remain many and are not gathered into a trunk of the All still have contradictions in themselves and against each-other and so they are opposed to unity.
What, then, moves us beyond Kant’s categories and isolated essences? The process of dialectic, which grasps the unity of sameness and difference, of one and many, and of necessity and freedom, as it did with Being and Non-Being before at the first stage. The idea and the thing are realized as one in the Concept, which includes the thought and thing. When we see that the world is in our minds and in itself together as one, that things are our ideas about them and themselves for us as one that is also many, this is for Hegel Actuality, the final stage. It is grasped by the mind, but in extension is the view of the real world and all that it is or could be.
Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory and more modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle. To see that no part of reality is absolutely necessary, but no part is absolutely free, and the two hang together as opposites always like light and darkness, this is the final stage that lets us see things as they are. This would be the final and total grasp of the wheel as solid and empty, or the rock as thing and perception/assumption.
Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and simply Nature itself, with a ground to continue to investigate and understand things with all the branching of the Idea by which we could ever understand them to be. All becomes a single Idea, that is one with the world.
Unlike Hegel and Right wing Hegelians, who believe that the system has been achieved, Left Hegelians (most famously Marx) believe that evolution is constant and unending for the system, not just the knowledge it acquires and that we are constantly taking positions that are one-sided that need to be complimented by the opposite perspective. Many of the latest European thinkers have been powerfully affected by this leftist Hegelian view.
This total skepticism is quite welcome to some, but dogmatic and positivist leaning thinkers are not happy with cause being an assumption in the head and not a fact in the world. Another problem is that Hume does not tell us where our idea of cause comes from or how it is related to our other ideas. How is it that human beings in ancient and modern times understand things in terms of cause and effect, or bad and good? Hume does not give us any way to understand the types of our ideas other than that they are all assumptions that spring from impressions.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) read Hume and famously wrote that Hume awakened him from his “dogmatic slumbers”. Kant is one of the biggest philosophers in the modern European cannon, loved by dogmatic positivists and hated by skeptical relativists. He was a big influence on Schopenhauer (who was a big influence on Nietzsche, the focus of next week), and a big influence on the early thought of Wittgenstein (who we focus on the week after next).
Kant as a rationalist believes very much in the aim of Descartes, arguing that the world does contain certainties and facts such as 2 + 3 = 5, but Descartes as we saw did not spend much time proving this. Kant’s major work, A Critique of Pure Reason, tries to bridge this gap with an air tight argument for true positive knowledge in the face of Hume’s skeptical challenge that all we know is merely assumption.
Kant argues that Hume is correct that we learn the world through the senses and this is how we acquire our ideas. However, even though we do not experience the world directly but rather through our experience and ideas, we can construct true positive knowledge of the world and our ideas through reason which can reveal new certain truths by reasoning from our initial ideas, just as mathematics can derive additional propositions from beginning propositions. Remember that in the 1700s algebraic science had come to question many traditional truths and give new positive answers. Kant studied and wrote in the time when Newton’s laws of physics had risen to fame. Remember also that Descartes started with the certainty of awareness and thought and hoped to derive further certainties from this starting certainty.
Kant argues that the world, the ‘thing-in-itself’ (or in German, the ‘Ding-an-sich’) as he calls it, we cannot know, but our ideas about it have a structure and order to them. Kant believed that there are twelve categories of ideas and cause is one of these categories. If we start from these basic categories, we can learn additional certain truths about science and the world in the same way that if we start with 2 + 3 = 5 we can come to additional certain propositions of mathematics. Kant calls this the synthetic apriori, a fancy term for what we can discover we know deductively and categorically prior to or regardless of our experience in the world. The metaphor often used is our ideas are the eyeglasses through which we see the world. Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein in his early period both agreed with this conception. We can know the categorical frame of our lens through which we view the world, even if the world remains always unknown and chaotic beyond the frame of our understanding. We can know how grammar, logic and mathematics must work even if we can not guarantee that anything said or calculated is certain next Tuesday.
Georg Hegel (1770-1831) was as upset with Kant as Kant was upset with Hume. Like Kant thought of Hume, and Hume thought of Descartes, Hegel did not think that Kant gave much of an explanation or exploration of our ideas. It is one thing to say we have an idea of cause as a category for our experiences, but it is another to explain how cause functions, both in itself and together with the other ideas that we have. Hegel thought that Kant declares that we have twelve categories, including causation, but Kant did not show why we have this category or how it fits together with the other eleven categories.
Also, just as Kant was critical of Hume for putting the facts of the world out of reach by declaring everything to be an assumption, Hegel was critical of Kant for putting the world beyond our ideas as the “thing-in-itself”. Do we experience our ideas as separate from the world in this way, like a pair of eyeglasses, or are our ideas experienced in and as the world itself? If cause is a lens through which we view the world, then the world itself remains something unknown and my certain knowledge of causation is still quite useless for practical knowledge of the world. Why should we know nothing of our experience of the world, but be certain of our experience of the mind?
Hegel has two major ideas that became very influential for later thinkers. The first is historical explanation or explanation by process. Hegel argues that things are not simply what they are at once, but evolve through stages to become what they are, and the process by which they evolve show us how the things essentially work. Also, things are not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things in which they become what they are (very like the Buddhist concept of co-dependent arising). After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Weber and Feuerbach were major thinkers who overturned old theories of static order with new theories of process to explain the workings of the mind and society. Consider that Newton thought God made the earth at the very beginning in an instant, while scientists today that there was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy formed. Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin.
Hegel’s second major idea, the mechanism or motion of evolution over time, is dialectic. Dialectic is a Greek term for arguing back and forth, for and against a position, to come to greater understanding. Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and his dialogue plays show Socrates arguing against others and himself in this way. Hegel argues that all things are made of oppositions or contradictions (contra-diction means “arguing against”, like arguing both sides, the pros and cons, of a particular thing). This is not only similar to Lao Zi’s wheel (made of both solid and empty together), but Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal but opposite force.
While this has become controversial, many believe that Hegel’s dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and synthesis. Hegel often presents our ideas (which live in the world as politics and our shared expectations) as starting out positive, flipping and becoming negative, and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole. Remember Lao Zi’s wheel leads us through this three stage process (solid at first, then empty, then both), as does the famous Zen quote that first a rock is a rock, then a rock isn’t a rock (it is in the mind, as a concept) and then a rock is a rock (real rock and concept together as the rock).
Hegel argues that by looking at things as evolving over time in a situation, not immediate and isolated, and looking at things as two sided and in opposition to themselves and others, rather than categorical and without tension, we can come to understand how things actually are, which is a union (while an opposition) of how they are in the mind and how they are in the world.
In his first major work, The Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit (1806), Hegel gives us his social history of society and philosophy evolving by stages to the present day. In his second major work, The Science of Logic (1816), Hegel gives us his psychology. We will look at the overall structure and some key ideas of each, spending more time on the Logic which has become one of my favorites. Americans have only begun studying Hegel, because Hegel had a student named Marx who took Hegel’s concept of dialectic and used it to father communism. Communists like Hegel’s Logic very much, and so American and British universities did not teach much Hegel and when they do they often teach the Phenomenology but not the Logic. This is unfortunate, because while Hegel’s ideas about history in the Phenomenology are quite antiquated today I have great hope that there is more to be discovered by looking at the Logic in the light of the discoveries of modern psychology, especially the work of Piaget the child psychologist.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY
I disagree with Hegel’s history because it is quite simplistic and eurocentric, but it is an excellent introduction to Hegel’s thought not only because it was his first major work, after which he wrote the Logic to clarify the inner process of the mind at work in this history, but it shows dialectic working in three stages to complete itself as a union of contradictory sides.
For Hegel, the first stage of history is the Orientals. Hegel uses this term as it was used until recently, before the 1960s, to refer to everyone who is not European. In the 60s, 70s and 80s this term was still used by many to refer to East Asian people such as the Chinese. As archeology in Hegel’s time had revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel puts this as the first and basic starting stage in human development. It is good that this is the non-European start, but unfortunate that all further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the development is a course of Europe becoming different from others (again, this is overly simplistic and quite racist and eurocentric, but funny enough this is still largely the view preached on campuses today).
The Orientals understand objectivity and the state, two powerful positives. The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not question their society or science. They see the real as real, but do not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned. In some cases, such as Buddhism in India, Hegel believes that they realized skepticism but did not develop it further, turning the world into a simple void or nothing. Thus the Orientals get simple one-sided Being or Non-Being, but do not put these two together to see the unity of the opposition. It is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel argues make this next leap and become the second stage of history.
The Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of objectivity as subjectivity. While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who did this, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the earlier empires as more complex and also that the Greeks were only one civilization of many that made leaps forward like this (Jaspers calls the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese, the three places we studied in the ancient world in depth, the axial age).
Just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understand the negative, the temporary and perspective. Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing Being and Non-Being together as Becoming, and sees Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further development. However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks still put Being off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire or Plato’s static ideal forms. It is the Germans, and specifically Hegel himself, who see the true unity of objectivity and subjectivity, of state and individual, of necessity and freedom, of science and discovery, to complete the history of thought in three stages. Notice that Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in a page, with no credit at all.
The Europeans, but specifically the Germans who are in Hegel’s time becoming the foremost champions of philosophy, history, science, and politics are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world. Hegel sees Hume and Kant as the last negative and positive before his own system of unification. Also, as a teenager Hegel heard about the French Revolution and was, like many youth, an enthusiastic supporter of the left-wing progressive removal of the aristocrats and traditional ways. We get our terms left-wing and right-wing from the French Revolution, as liberals and conservatives sat on opposite sides of the congress hall. Unfortunately for the French, and for young Hegel, the revolution collapsed and Napoleon, a dictator, took over. Hegel developed his ideas about ideas working in the real world as oppositions watching the French Revolution.
Hegel believes that history is almost at its completion in his time with his own philosophy and the politics of the German parliamentary state which balances collective objectivity with individual subjectivity. He also believes that religion evolves exactly as philosophy and politics does, and that German Lutheran Christianity is the final form of religion that unites the individual directly with God (living objectivity) because each man is the priest of his household.
THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC
The Master/Slave dialectic is the continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next. It works on the level of idea, individual and social movement.
At first, the individual goes out into the world and discovers that there are other beings out there with other opinions and views. The individual thus wants to at first kill, later conquer these others, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be objectivity. The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master, and develops while the master deteriorates and grows lazy. The slave comes to realize that he can do things he never thought of for someone else, so he can do things no one has thought up yet for himself, and thus triumphs over the master and becomes the next master.
This is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap seeing subjectivity and objectivity as two sides of the same thing. Notice that this tells us the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and the Germans were slaves of the Greeks! This is not often pointed out, but it is implied by Hegel and confirmed by historians today. While Hegel is quite eurocentric, he is right to this extent.
The Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Marx. Feminist Hegelians, like Simone de Beauvoir, uses it for women in ‘The Second Sex’, Franz Fanon uses it for black people in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as does the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis (who went to Germany to study Hegel before going to jail for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the 60s).
HEGEL’S LOGIC
After writing the Phenomenology, Hegel came to realize that he had not described the inner workings of the dialectical process of history to his liking. Hegel believed the world consisted of ideas, so he leaves history behind and turns to the workings of ideas in the mind. To show the inner psychology at work in every stage of historical development, he wrote his Logic which like the Phenomenology unfolds in three stages as positive, negative and synthesis, but instead of Orientals, Greeks and Germans, the three stages of the Logic are Being, Essence, and Concept.
Like Neo-Platonism, thought has to gather everything up such that all categories become modes or branches of the same thing. It does this with Understanding which holds things fast in sameness and Reason which divides things against each other and against themselves, opposing the Understanding. Understanding wants to keep ideas as they are and separate from each other, while Reason wants to change ideas and unite them all together as a whole. The mind craves unity, objectivity as the all-view, which pulls it in two directions. First, it wants to hold on to the unities of the understanding and keep them away from reason tearing them apart. However, reason wants to dissolve everything and return it all to the Absolute, or the undivided One. Thus, the motions rock back and forth in stages. It would thus be correct to say that, the way Hegel describes it, conservatives would rather understand than reason and liberals would rather reason than understand.
At each stage, the Understanding comes to change its shape and provide the ground for the back and forth positions of reason which share the same understanding(s). Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Thus, Hegel says there really is only one philosophy which is ‘thought’ itself, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought.
Why is it opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Interestingly, Hegel writes that we need to start with ‘legend’ of the fall of man, of Adam falling out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important (a similar reading to Deists of his time in Europe, who see the bible as true psychologically but not literal). When Adam, or consciousness, falls into the world out of unity with all, it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can describe the fall from unity either in physics as the Big Bang or in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget).
Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding. (God)(IS), (You)(Are), (this)(is), the anchor points of Descartes. However, these are inadequate. First, they are one sided, and so dogmatic, stuck. They are divided from each other and the All, so reason is not satisfied and tries to figure out how all of these separate categories are one in reality, or the big One or All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content, making them almost no different from empty. This is exactly how Hegel is critical of Kant’s categories and the gap he leaves between mind and world.
(68) “Kant, it is well known, did not put himself to much trouble in discovering the categories.”
“Kant, as we must add, never got beyond the negative result that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, and never penetrated to the discovery of what the antinomies really and positively mean. That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites.”
(118) “However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.”
Hegel writes that the feeling of being alive is to feel contradiction within oneself, at rest in itself but at the same time moving itself beyond itself. It both wants to stay and go at once, and does. Similarly, the Soviet literary critic and thinker Bakhtin said that when we think we are in dialogue with ourselves, are opposed to ourselves on opposite sides.
BEING, NOTHING AND BECOMING
In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that Heraclitus realized the unity of Being and Non-Being as ceaseless Becoming, as the flux of the cosmic fire. Hegel says that some say no one is capable of understanding contradiction, but Hegel points to Heraclitus and argues that to come to the next level in your understanding your reason has to see both sides and unite them in the cement of the understanding, which is what Heraclitus did for the Greeks such that they could rise beyond the Orientals to the next level. Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and nonbeing as one like Heraclitus. It is merely recognizing it that is the hard part. Hegel says that this is the hurdle that prevents the common person from being a philosopher, and the reason that the great thinkers and revolutions in thought are rare. In fact, often it takes decades after the thinker’s death for their ideas to become accepted, further proof that the great thinker must unite the old with the opposite direction of the new and this is the barrier between the new idea and the common understanding of the people.
Once thought realizes becoming as the unity of the being of things and their non-being (their temporary being in time and their not being other things), thought still does not have enough to understand each and every thing or how they fit into the All as one. Thought tries to understand the individual beings of the world and the world itself as constant becoming, like Heraclitus, but this does not show us how things are interrelated. This is exactly how Kant was frustrated with Hume, because everything being an assumption does not tell us what things are specifically.
Thought must explore two opposite directions to try to find the meaning of individual things. First, it tries to understand things by their qualities (such as green, square, closed), but this moves away from the things themselves towards abstract ideas. Second, thought tries to understand things by their quantities, with each thing being a one itself and being a quantity of many parts and being in a group of many members. Unfortunately, this leaves each being as merely a thing, and tells us nothing about the specific differences between types of things. Notice that quality and quantity are the two opposite sides to our abstractions of things, the two ways we isolate and abstract, through thought, the parts and ways of things. Consider that your hand is not explainable simply by its shape, or color, or texture, any more than its being one hand with five fingers, though all of this together tells me much about my hand. To understand your hand, you have to see it in context, in the world used with other things, as well as understand the qualities and quantities of the hand.
Thought now tries to understand things in terms of essences, and these essences in terms of their qualities and quantities. Remember that Hegel in his Phenomenology saw Plato as the union of Heraclitus and Parmenides, that Plato thought things have ideal essences in the stars that cause them to be what they are, and that Platonism was the major school of thought in middle-age Europe to which Hegel acknowledges he owes many insights.
Because thought could not understand things in their qualities and quantities, it tries to understand things by putting them in groups and then understanding the qualities and quantities of these groups. It puts these as essences outside the world as Plato put them up in the stars, in another more modern way “in” things and their groups as their “nature”. The problem with this stage is that this still puts things as isolated and does not understand them in a situation as mutually interdependent. It seeks the meaning of the thing in the group where it could not find it in the individual, but this still isolates things even as it puts them in groups. Hegel is very aware that modern science is often in this mode, isolating things and finding new truths about their exclusive natures. For Hegel, Plato’s forms, Kant’s categories and scientific theories are good but they are not complete because they do not understand how things cannot be separate from each other if we want our knowledge to be like the world, in which everything fits together.
Just as qualities are non-beings within beings, essences are also non-beings within beings, but a core is sought beyond and opposed to outer qualities or bunches of quantities. Thought has turned on itself yet preserved itself, trying to understand the real as merely the idea. It would be like saying that the hand is really the ideal hand, rather than a hand in the real world which we idealize. Thought is struggling to grasp the unity of the mind and the world, of our ideas of things and the real things themselves. Remember Kant left a complete gap between the fully certain categories of the mind and the unknown world-in-itself. Just as beings were opposed to themselves and others, Hegel says that essences, if they remain many and are not gathered into a trunk of the All still have contradictions in themselves and against each-other and so they are opposed to unity.
What, then, moves us beyond Kant’s categories and isolated essences? The process of dialectic, which grasps the unity of sameness and difference, of one and many, and of necessity and freedom, as it did with Being and Non-Being before at the first stage. The idea and the thing are realized as one in the Concept, which includes the thought and thing. When we see that the world is in our minds and in itself together as one, that things are our ideas about them and themselves for us as one that is also many, this is for Hegel Actuality, the final stage. It is grasped by the mind, but in extension is the view of the real world and all that it is or could be.
Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory and more modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle. To see that no part of reality is absolutely necessary, but no part is absolutely free, and the two hang together as opposites always like light and darkness, this is the final stage that lets us see things as they are. This would be the final and total grasp of the wheel as solid and empty, or the rock as thing and perception/assumption.
Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and simply Nature itself, with a ground to continue to investigate and understand things with all the branching of the Idea by which we could ever understand them to be. All becomes a single Idea, that is one with the world.
Unlike Hegel and Right wing Hegelians, who believe that the system has been achieved, Left Hegelians (most famously Marx) believe that evolution is constant and unending for the system, not just the knowledge it acquires and that we are constantly taking positions that are one-sided that need to be complimented by the opposite perspective. Many of the latest European thinkers have been powerfully affected by this leftist Hegelian view.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Asian Philosophy: Mencius, Xunzi & the Neo-Confucians
The Great Learning & Doctrine of the Mean
Before covering Mencius, Xunzi and the Neo-Confucians, it is important to cover two short texts that became very important for the early and late Confucians. Both the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean were chapters of the Book of Rites, one of the five classics Confucius compiled to be the curriculum of his education system. Zhu Xi, the central Neo-Confucian who lived 1600 years after Confucius, similarly created a new four book canon to be used for Confucian education: the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean. While the other texts Confucius compiled were studied, these four formed the new core that would remain the central subject mater of the government exams in China for 800 years until 1905.
The Great Learning is a short text attributed in the tradition to Confucius, followed by commentary attributed to Zengzi, one of Confucius’ students. Both Mencius and Xunzi were influenced by the text and its teachings, as both were familiar with not only the Analects but the five classics Confucius compiled. Wang Yangming, the second most famous Neo-Confucian who disagreed with Zhu Xi and argued that practice is essential to and one and the same as learning, did not like Zhu Xi’s pulling of the Great Learning out of the Book of Rites and giving it special emphasis.
The most famous quote from the work, the central of three sections, reads:
“The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the world, first ordered well their own States. Wishing to order well their States, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost of their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.
Things being investigated, knowledge became complete.
Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere.
Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified.
Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated.
Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated.
Their families being regulated, their States were rightly governed.
Their States being rightly governed, the entire world was at peace.”
The Doctrine of the Mean, also translated as the ‘Middle Way’, is another short chapter of the Book of Rites that teaches to never act in excess to either side of an opposition but always practice moderation. Remember that Confucius in the Analects wondered if no one would leave a room without using the door (with the possible exception of the Incredible Hulk or the Kool-Aid guy), why people “walk outside the middle way” in their life practices.
The text says that the noble, the great person, embodies the course of the mean, while the crude person acts against the course of the mean, acting out of balance and ‘to the extreme’. An old translation of the text I have reads, “The mean (lowercase: hateful) man acts against the course of the Mean (uppercase: balance), which is needlessly confusing. The noble are cautious and thus stay balanced, while the crude are hasty and thus overact. As we will see with Daoism, this is quite in accord with the Daoist concept of wu-wei, acting less to stay in accord with the way of things.
Speaking of the sage-king Shun: “There was Shun. He indeed was truly wise! Shun loved to question others, and to study their words, though they might be shallow. he concealed what was bad in them, and displayed what was good. he took hold of their two extremes, determined the mean, and employed it in his government of the people. It was by this that he was Shun!”
The superior person “cultivates a friendly harmony without being weak”, and thus is firmly energetic without being overbearing. This is associated with the principle of reciprocity, which is repeated in the text. It is then extended to the five relationships, telling us to treat those above us as we would have those beneath us treat us. We should refrain both from treating those beneath us with contempt as well as court favor with those above us. The noble quietly work with their situation, while the crude look for lucky breaks.
Another metaphor used is the noble archer, who after missing the target turns around and examines himself (rather than turning around and saying, “Somebody coughed” we assume). Psychology experiments have found that in competition with others when we succeed at tasks we credit ourselves (internal attribution, looking to the self), and when we fail at tasks we blame the situation (external attribution, looking outside the self), but when others succeed at tasks we credit the situation, and when they fail we blame them. Clearly, the noble have the wisdom to reverse this initial bias and work on themselves rather than blaming others.
Mencius & Human Nature as Good
Mencius (370-290 BCE) or Menzi, the second patriarch of Confucianism, believed that Confucius taught that the human being is basically good and develops the heart, growing and developing the virtues through love. He argued that because the human individual is essentially good, we need ritual to guide our growth but love is the true essence. Xunzi (312 - 230 BCE), the third patriarch of Confucianism, argued against Mencius by name that the human being is essentially evil and without the rituals and tradition to hold our nature back and transform us through education we would be selfish and uncivilized. This remains the major split in Confucian thought. We can see that there are various views and contradicting opinions within the system, and that individuals can draw on Mencius, Xunzi or both to back up their own interpretations of Confucius.
Mencius was born in the small warring state of Zou, near to where Confucius was born and taught. He is sometimes said to have founded Confucianism as an official school, but like with so many cultural movements there were followers of Confucius who compiled the Analects before Mencius, and certainly there were strands of schools that followed Confucius earlier. Mencius was, however, the primary interpreter of the themes of the Analects for the Confucian tradition to follow.
A thousand years later, with Neo-Confucianism, Zhu Xi taught that Mencius was the last great thinker of the Period of the Hundred Schools and the patriarch of Confucianism, made the Mencius one of the four books of Confucian education along with the Analects, and declared Xunzi to be a heretic for arguing against Mencius. This is the reason that when the Jesuits got to China 700 years after Zhu Xi and the Neo-Confucian revival, they latinized Kong Fu Zi as Confucius and Menzi as Mencius but did not latinize Xunzi. Strangely, though the Jesuits did argue that Confucius and Mencius were akin to Christianity, they also believed in the sinful nature of humanity after the Fall of Adam, which is closer to Xunzi then Mencius.
Like Confucius, Mencius’ father died when he was very young. Mencius’ mother, who is revered as an ideal example of nurturing motherhood, famously moved three times with Mencius (known as “Mencius’ mother’s three moves”) to ensure that her son would be raised in the right environment. At first they lived near a cemetery, but young Mencius began impersonating the funeral mourners who were often paid to pretend to cry and wail. Remember, Confucius thought mourning without grief, ritual without intent, is the worst thing possible. She moved near a marketplace, but the boy began imitating the cries of the merchants who were known as swindlers and deceivers. Confucius was said to have tried being a merchant, but became disgusted at other merchants who suggested he fix the balances to make extra money off of rice, beans and other goods. Finally, she moved near a university so that Mencius would imitate the scholars and teachers, which he continued to do for the rest of his life. Also like Confucius, Mencius held moderate government positions for a short period of time, but became discouraged by the politics of the time and resumed teaching instead.
Mencius argued that qi (“chi”, energy) is cultivated through moral practice, that compassion like any exercise is good for your health. In 2A:6, Mencius states a major thesis of his work: No one is devoid of compassion for others. Mencius argues at several points in the book that we naturally feel for others and their well-being as we do for ourselves, and that when we fail to care for others there are other factors involved that block or reverse our natural compassion. Xunzi, as we will see, is very opposed to this interpretation of Confucius’ thought and argues that compassion must be planted in the human being by society and study because it is alien and opposite to human nature. Both agree that when we care for others, we cultivate ourselves (as we read in the Analects). Mencius believes that compassion is our nature and just as water naturally goes downward unless it is obstructed by something humans are naturally compassionate unless matters are complicated by obstructions. For Xunzi, humans are originally evil and desirous by nature and require society, education, and the experience of caring for others to learn to be compassionate.
Mencius is famous for using the young child falling into a well example to back up his argument. He argues that anyone would feel panic and fear if they saw a child in danger, regardless of how evil that individual is or how twisted they have become. This point is excellent for debate. We can all imagine someone who is so evil or sociopathic that they would not care watching a child in serious danger or coming to harm, but is this common? If it is possible, is it due to obstructions to original nature, to isolated psychological situations?
Mencius believes that there are four parts of the human heart that are developed and cultivated by society and study such that four virtues are grown like plants, germs or sprouts. The heart is a root system which grows the virtues of humanity when properly cultivated through education and practice. The four parts of the heart are compassion (ren) which sprouts benevolence, shame which sprouts duty and righteousness (yi), courtesy/modesty which sprouts observance of ritual and principle (li), and a sense of right and wrong (chih) which sprouts wisdom.
In 3A:5, we see Mencius getting into a battle with a Moist over whether one should love one’s own family more than others. While compassion is central to Confucianism, whether or not it is innate like Mencius says or has to be transplanted like Xunzi says, Confucians believe that one should have more love for one’s parents, children, family, and country and that this is the natural and proper way of things. Moists, who are radical egalitarians, argued against the Confucians that we should love everyone without distinction, as much as we love ourselves, our parents, our children, and our country. Confucians argue that the Moists are breaking with the natural way of the human heart and society, and that proportion in love is proper and best.
Mencius argues that we all do naturally love infants and young children and that this is good. He returns to his well example, and argues that Yi Zi, a Moist, is taking this one case and applying it improperly to everyone. Mencius says that the Moist wants us to deny our natural gradations of love which grow in society while affirming that love is the true nature of humanity, setting love in opposition to itself and making love both natural and unnatural at the same time. Mencius argues that it is both our nature to love everyone and our nature to love those we are close to more than others, balancing empathy and transformation with duty and tradition.
Mencius argues that love and care for others began with early humans, living before civilization, seeing the decaying bodies of their parents being attacked by animals. Because humans naturally care for others, and particularly their parents, they were moved at the sight to bury the bodies. Note that this makes for proper burial, the topic of the debate with Yi Zi. Indeed, archeology today recognizes the birth of culture and civilization in the increasingly ritualized burial of the dead, who are increasingly ornamented and buried with items which were precious to the individual and possibly useful in the afterlife or next life. Yi Zi concedes the point and accepts that love starts with the love one has for one’s parents and develops from there, but presumably still believes that this initial love for family should be cultivated into caring equally for all humanity. In Chinese philosophical texts, there are often instances of a member of an opposing school (sometimes quite famous) conceding in argument to the author of the text, showing us the rich tradition of debate between various schools in Chinese thought. With Daoism, we will see that even Confucius is made to accept defeat and concede superiority to the Daoists several times in the text of Zhuang Zi.
In 4A:12, Mencius elaborates and says that goodness starts with working on the self and love for one’s parents, and moves outward from there to one’s friends and the whole of one’s society. Thus, he agrees with Yi Zi the Moist that one should cultivate a love for all of humanity, but still thinks it improper to lose all reverence and distinction particular to one’s family, friends, and culture.
In 4A:16, Mencius considers another example famous in Confucian scholarship for its implications. A scholar (school unknown) poses a problem to Mencius: it says in the laws that it is improper for men and women to touch hands if they are not married, but if your brother’s sister is drowning, shouldn’t you reach out to save her? Mencius replies that it is proper to save her, and that one must not blindly follow the law but use discretion given the situation. This passage is famous, because Confucians are big on observing law and ritual but sometimes one must break the law. Confucius said in the Analects that even though the rites say to use a silk hat, it is OK to use a hemp hat instead because it is more modest. He also tells his students to rise up and overthrow an unjust tyrant. The scholar debating Mencius says the empire is now drowning, implying that they should radically break with the laws, traditions and government to save society. Mencius replies that upholding law and ritual is the way to save society and so the example of the drowning sister-in-law does not justify a radical break from tradition. Remember that this was during the Warring States Period. Mencius is arguing that restoring the old Zhou ways would be the solution, like Confucius believed, while the scholar seems to suggest a radical change in social structure, like the Moists argued. As we will see soon Moists believed that all property should be used in common and everyone live in common as one family.
In 4B:12, Mencius says the great person retains the heart of a child. A Moist might point out the previous battle with Yi Zi and say Mencius is going against what he has said before if a child is all loving and completely open. Mencius might counter that retaining the child heart will naturally grow into its arrangements while being pure and absolute, in the same way that children naturally love their parents and those with whom they are familiar.
In 4B:13, Mencius says that following one’s parents when they are alive is good, but following them after they are dead is greater and shows that one is truly cultivated and a noble person. Xun Zi might be cynical here, because if you applied this to society he would argue that without society one would tend not to be good at all and that the one who follows the ways of one’s parents after they are dead does so only because society still surrounds them. He would likely agree with Mencius, however, that this would demonstrate one was truly cultivated and transformed by society.
In 6A:2, as in several other places, Mencius likens love and human nature (which he believes to be identical) to water and argues that just as water naturally moves downward love naturally moves outward. If water does not move downward, it is blocked by something. In the same way, if a human being is not loving towards others and compassionate, it is blocked by something. As seen, this love would grow outward naturally but equally would radiate in differentiated levels. Love for those close would be greater then love for those far, but love for those close and love for those far would mutually support and increase each other.
In 6A:7, Mencius speaks of sowing barley on various ground (strikingly similar to the parable of Jesus, which must have astounded the Jesuits along with the Gold and Silver rules of reciprocity). Just as when barley does not grow the seeds have fallen on bad soil, when humans are bad it is not because they do not have love and goodness in their nature but because they are put in a bad situation. Recall Mencius’ mother repeatedly seeking a better environment for the cultivation of her child. Reason and goodness are common to all. The sage or great person simply recognizes this and grows what all have to become great.
Xun Zi & Human Nature as Evil
Xunzi (in the older Wade-Giles, Hsun Tzu), the third most important Confucian after Confucius and Mencius, studied and taught at a university in the state of Chi. Like Confucius and Mencius, he briefly held a government position until his patron was assassinated, then returned to teaching. He had many followers in his day, some of whom are said to have used his teachings in the service of Legalism, which strangely sought to have Confucianism banned when supported by the Chin and then was banned by the Confucian supporting Han in turn. Unlike Confucius and Mencius, he did not travel widely. Also, unlike the Analects and Mencius, his text is his own, not a set of anecdotes and sayings collected by followers. Thus it is more systematic and contains entire arguments at length.
Xunzi argued that human nature is evil because human nature is desire. Common to human thought accross all cultures is the frame of desire and hate as the lower selfish part of our nature and reason and love as the higher compassionate part of our nature. While Mencius argues that we naturally are the upper and it is merely obstructed by the lower when we are evil, Xunzi argues that we naturally are the lower and it is only through cultivation that we develop the upper. Are either singularly human nature? Regardless, there is a common theme that we only come to be fulfilled in the way desire tries through developing reason and love, which truly satisfy.
Like Mencius, Xunzi argued that anyone in the street can become a sage, but it depends on environment and effort. If one hangs out with foolish people, one will be foolish, and likewise if you stick to the wise and read the wisdom of great books you will become wise. While we are not originally good according to Xunzi, we have the capacity to become good even when it does not yet exist. Much like Mencius’ barley sewing analogy but distinct, Xunzi would see the seed sewed not as the original heart and nature but as external education and civilization, while the original nature would be the soil, devoid of the seed but capable of sustaining growth.
Xunzi argues that without society and laws people would grab for themselves and do nothing for others. Like Hobbes, the English political philosopher, argues that this justifies the king acting any way the king sees fit, including killing his subjects, in the name of the good and safety of the entire people. He was also a pragmatist, arguing that laws, morals and rulers are tools to be used for the cultivation and happiness of people. It is this part of his philosophy which may well have been supported by the Legalists.
In Improving Yourself (Section 2 of the Xunzi), he argues that if we stick to the rituals and laws our behavior will be good and if we abandon the rituals and laws it will be bad. He draws openly on the behavior of civilized nobles vs. the behavior of poor country folk to back this up. He will draw a similar distinction between children and adults. Clearly, Xunzi is a city boy. While Daoists saw the common country people as exemplary of virtue, Xunzi sees them as course and uncultured. As an aside, this is strangely like the civilized vs. barbarian view many Chinese have had for thousands of years of South East Asian people, as well as Cantonese Chinese from Hong Kong have of the Mandarin Chinese from mainland China today. Clearly this is a very human problem.
Xunzi argues that one’s temperament and intelligence need to be in balance and if they get overgrown they will cause ruin. This is very much in line with the Doctrine of the Mean or Middle Way found in the Analects and the text. Human abilities need to be reined in by society and customs, or they will cause problems. He argues that only by following laws can one be liberal and compassionate. Compassion is the goal that is possible, but it cannot be achieved without laws and principles. Following one’s parents and teachers is necessary for human development. Confucius says in the Analects that learning without thinking is bad, but thinking without learning is dangerous. Xunzi is likely thinking of this very passage.
In Man’s Nature is Evil (Section 23 of the Xunzi), he opens with this thesis and states that all goodness is the result of growth and effort. People naturally desire. They must work and change to understand that they only get what they desire when they put their desires in check, and they only learn this through involvement with society and its laws. Freud argued very similarly about sexual impulse, and that all technology is sexuality denied and deferred into work. The first paragraph lays this out succinctly.
Xunzi openly refers to Mencius by name and his theory that human nature is good and says that Mencius is wrong. Xunzi argues that Mencius is confusing human nature with the results of conscious human activity and development. Xunzi believes that the early legendary sage kings created society because they realized that human nature is corrupt and they created a method for us to grow from our nature and become excellent in spite of it. Some argued against this by asking how the great sage kings could have created a just society if one did not yet exist, to which Xunzi replied that they had reached a level of cultivation such that they could then transform society profoundly.
While Mencius teaches to look inside ourselves to find morality, Xunzi teaches to look outside ourselves, to both society and the cosmos. The sage kings looked outside of themselves not only to great texts and social arrangements, but to the order of the universe to develop themselves. Xunzi is more cosmological than both Confucius and Mencius, speaking of the orders of nature and base but can potentially develop to be great like a society or the cosmos. In one passage, Xunzi argues that fire and water have energy but no awareness, and that animals have energy and awareness but no morality, but humans have energy, awareness and the capacity to develop discrimination of right from wrong and morality. They develop this by looking outward and learning, not by looking inward which will only stunt growth and keep us in an immature and desirous state. It is making distinctions that makes us greater than beasts, and the rituals and traditions that are the greatest distinctions passed down from the sage kings.
Xunzi argues that the example of child-like love Mencius employs is misleading. Children do not know enough, are not developed enough, to refrain from grabbing for themselves. Good people restrain their own desires to be good to others, unlike the child. Note that we tell people to be like a little child (when happy & loving) and we also tell people to NOT be like a little child (when angry & upset). While children are innocent, and when happy adorable, it is true that they do not have the ability to care for others and support others that the developed adult has, and if a desire or negativity gets in their way they quickly lose all focus.
Xunzi argues that greatness IS an object of desire, and the great person realizes/desires to overcome desire and discipline desire to truly fulfill desire. This seems paradoxical, but true to life. Modern psychology experiments have shown that children who learn to control their desires and defer pleasure with patience are more successful later in life in their achievements. The achievements satisfy the person more than the initial lesser things desired.
If Mencius is right, Xun Zi argues, we could dispense with society and be good in the state of nature. Both the Daoists and Rousseau the European political philosopher hold this to be true. Xun Zi is arguing that, if we believe Mencius, we may as well all become Daoists. If we honor the sages and the good over the stupid and the evil, we do so because of how much each has developed and not because of their universal nature. Xun Zi is arguing that, if we believe Mencius, we may as well all become Moists.
Xun Zi argues that all human beings are equal in their capacity to become good and develop, but they do not start out good. The sage is one who has developed, not the one who remains the same as they were in the beginning. Xun Zi argues that because one has two feet, one can theoretically walk to the ends of the earth but no one has so far managed to do so. The famous bows (for arrows), leaders and horses all became famous for how they were cultivated and developed and were not excellent without conscious effort and process.
He ends by saying twice: “Environment is the important thing!” Remember Mencius agrees in speaking of sowing barley. For Confucians, society is essential. The debate is on whether the environment compliments or contradicts human nature.
One last passage I want to site, particularly to fight against the view that ancient Greek and modern European thought is distinctly scientific or rational, says: “Those who are good at discussing antiquity must demonstrate the validity of what they say in modern times; those who are good at discussing Heaven (the way of things) must show proofs from the human world. In discussions of all kinds, men value what is in accord with the facts and what can be proved to be valid. Hence if a man sits on his mat propounding some theory, he should be able to stand right up and put it into practice, and show that it can be extended over a wide area with equal validity. Now Mencius states that man’s nature is good, but this is neither in accord with the facts, nor can it be proved to be valid.”
Neo-Confucianism, Zhu Xi & Wang Yang Ming
About 1100 CE, during the Sung Dynasty (960 - 1279 CE), Confucianism merged with Daoist and Buddhist ideas to form a Confucian revival called Neo-Confucianism by scholars today. Buddhism, including both Chan and Pure Land schools, had flourished during the Tang (618 - 907 CE). Most of the great masters and their koan encounters had happened during this period, and then the koan collections such as the Blue Cliff Record were collected and codified during the Sung. The Neo-Confucians sought to take the flagging Confucian orthodoxy and put it once again at the center of education and society after losing ground to Buddhism for five hundred years. Buddhist metaphors such as the pearl at the bottom of the muddy lake and the sun emerging from behind the clouds, as well as Daoist concepts, were reinterpreted in light of Confucianism, giving them an active educational and moral interpretation.
The Cheng Brothers, Cheng Hao (1032 - 1085 CE) and Cheng Yi (1033 - 1107) were two philosophers, teachers and officials whose work and schools led to the Neo-Confucian revival. Together with Zhu Xi, the central systematiser of Neo-Confucianism who was deeply influenced by and indebted to the Cheng brothers’ work, the three are considered the founders of Neo-Confucianism in the Sung. Their father was a county detective in Huangpi of central-east China. The two brothers were known also as Cheng the Elder and Chang the Younger, even though Cheng Hao was only one year older than Cheng Yi. Cheng Hao was known for being happy and laid back, while Cheng Yi was strict and uptight.
Both brothers believed in Li, which as mentioned in Chinese Buddhism was now not simply tradition, principle and ritual but cosmic and identified and equated with the Dharma of Buddhism and the Dao of Daoism. Both identified Li with physical form and purpose, beyond ritual and tradition, just as the Buddha’s teaching and Daoist sage’s way of living were identified with the law of the universe. The elder laid back Cheng Hao founded the School of Mind, arguing that Li was psychological, while the younger uptight Cheng Yi founded the School of Law, arguing that Li was physical. This split is along the classic lines of dogmatism, truth as objective, and skepticism, truth as subjective. Much like in the work of Plato and Neo-Platonism of medieval Europe, the Cheng Brothers saw Li, form, combined with Qi (“chi”), energy, as the composition of all things. The noble and the sages seek the forms of things,
Zhu Xi (1130-1200 CE), also known as Zhuzi or Master Zhu, was the systematiser who took the work of the Cheng Brothers and others and created the educational system of China that lasted almost 600 years from 1313 to 1905. He was taught in the lineage of Cheng Yi and the School of Law, and argued that Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, the three great Chinese traditions, were teaching the same truth but that Confucius was the superior and primary teacher. Like Confucius, he gathered a small canon of four books to be the foundation of education: the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Great Learning. Zhu Xi put a very heavy emphasis on reading and study, particularly re-reading the right books again and again to understand the essence of morality and principle.
Wang Yang Ming (1470 – 1530 CE) one of the most revered Neo-Confucians, was famous for the idea of the unity of knowledge and action. He was opposed to Zhu Xi, who he argued put too much emphasis on study and not enough on integrating knowledge with action and practice, without which it is not genuine knowledge. While Confucius taught that intention and action are distinct things, Wang Yang Ming taught the complementary truth that the two are interactive as one whole. It is true that they are different, but this should not distract from their unity and complementary nature.
While someone can say that they know something, we can judge whether they truly know or not by how they act. Two examples he uses are knowing that a color is beautiful and knowing that a smell is bad. To see a beautiful color and to feel pleasure are one and the same, the seeing corresponding to mind and investigation and the feeling corresponding to body and action. If someone says they know that a smell is bad, but they do not act like it is bad (gagging, opening a window, pointing at their younger sibling), we could say that they do not really know that the smell is bad but only saying the smell is bad. Wang Yangming argues that if someone’s nose is stuffed up, they can be told there is a bad smell but they do not know there is unless they react to it. In the same way, if we know someone is a good person we do not get nervous around them or hide our valuables when they come over. If we did, it could be said that we do not truly know they are good because we do not act like they are trustworthy.
Wang Yangming is arguing against Zhu Xi’s teaching that reading and study are central. If one does not act well and put morality into practice, mere reading and recitation is not true knowledge but nothing more than “ghosts and shadows”. Notice how similar this is to Buddhist metaphors. Wang Yangming, unlike Zhu Xi, is closer to Cheng Hao than Cheng Yi, arguing that all things are mind, also similar to Buddhism. In his day, Wang Yangming was accused of being a crypto-Buddhist and corrupting Confucianism, though in fact Zhu Xi and others were borrowing from Buddhism and Daoism, if less overtly.
Before covering Mencius, Xunzi and the Neo-Confucians, it is important to cover two short texts that became very important for the early and late Confucians. Both the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean were chapters of the Book of Rites, one of the five classics Confucius compiled to be the curriculum of his education system. Zhu Xi, the central Neo-Confucian who lived 1600 years after Confucius, similarly created a new four book canon to be used for Confucian education: the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean. While the other texts Confucius compiled were studied, these four formed the new core that would remain the central subject mater of the government exams in China for 800 years until 1905.
The Great Learning is a short text attributed in the tradition to Confucius, followed by commentary attributed to Zengzi, one of Confucius’ students. Both Mencius and Xunzi were influenced by the text and its teachings, as both were familiar with not only the Analects but the five classics Confucius compiled. Wang Yangming, the second most famous Neo-Confucian who disagreed with Zhu Xi and argued that practice is essential to and one and the same as learning, did not like Zhu Xi’s pulling of the Great Learning out of the Book of Rites and giving it special emphasis.
The most famous quote from the work, the central of three sections, reads:
“The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the world, first ordered well their own States. Wishing to order well their States, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost of their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.
Things being investigated, knowledge became complete.
Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere.
Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified.
Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated.
Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated.
Their families being regulated, their States were rightly governed.
Their States being rightly governed, the entire world was at peace.”
The Doctrine of the Mean, also translated as the ‘Middle Way’, is another short chapter of the Book of Rites that teaches to never act in excess to either side of an opposition but always practice moderation. Remember that Confucius in the Analects wondered if no one would leave a room without using the door (with the possible exception of the Incredible Hulk or the Kool-Aid guy), why people “walk outside the middle way” in their life practices.
The text says that the noble, the great person, embodies the course of the mean, while the crude person acts against the course of the mean, acting out of balance and ‘to the extreme’. An old translation of the text I have reads, “The mean (lowercase: hateful) man acts against the course of the Mean (uppercase: balance), which is needlessly confusing. The noble are cautious and thus stay balanced, while the crude are hasty and thus overact. As we will see with Daoism, this is quite in accord with the Daoist concept of wu-wei, acting less to stay in accord with the way of things.
Speaking of the sage-king Shun: “There was Shun. He indeed was truly wise! Shun loved to question others, and to study their words, though they might be shallow. he concealed what was bad in them, and displayed what was good. he took hold of their two extremes, determined the mean, and employed it in his government of the people. It was by this that he was Shun!”
The superior person “cultivates a friendly harmony without being weak”, and thus is firmly energetic without being overbearing. This is associated with the principle of reciprocity, which is repeated in the text. It is then extended to the five relationships, telling us to treat those above us as we would have those beneath us treat us. We should refrain both from treating those beneath us with contempt as well as court favor with those above us. The noble quietly work with their situation, while the crude look for lucky breaks.
Another metaphor used is the noble archer, who after missing the target turns around and examines himself (rather than turning around and saying, “Somebody coughed” we assume). Psychology experiments have found that in competition with others when we succeed at tasks we credit ourselves (internal attribution, looking to the self), and when we fail at tasks we blame the situation (external attribution, looking outside the self), but when others succeed at tasks we credit the situation, and when they fail we blame them. Clearly, the noble have the wisdom to reverse this initial bias and work on themselves rather than blaming others.
Mencius & Human Nature as Good
Mencius (370-290 BCE) or Menzi, the second patriarch of Confucianism, believed that Confucius taught that the human being is basically good and develops the heart, growing and developing the virtues through love. He argued that because the human individual is essentially good, we need ritual to guide our growth but love is the true essence. Xunzi (312 - 230 BCE), the third patriarch of Confucianism, argued against Mencius by name that the human being is essentially evil and without the rituals and tradition to hold our nature back and transform us through education we would be selfish and uncivilized. This remains the major split in Confucian thought. We can see that there are various views and contradicting opinions within the system, and that individuals can draw on Mencius, Xunzi or both to back up their own interpretations of Confucius.
Mencius was born in the small warring state of Zou, near to where Confucius was born and taught. He is sometimes said to have founded Confucianism as an official school, but like with so many cultural movements there were followers of Confucius who compiled the Analects before Mencius, and certainly there were strands of schools that followed Confucius earlier. Mencius was, however, the primary interpreter of the themes of the Analects for the Confucian tradition to follow.
A thousand years later, with Neo-Confucianism, Zhu Xi taught that Mencius was the last great thinker of the Period of the Hundred Schools and the patriarch of Confucianism, made the Mencius one of the four books of Confucian education along with the Analects, and declared Xunzi to be a heretic for arguing against Mencius. This is the reason that when the Jesuits got to China 700 years after Zhu Xi and the Neo-Confucian revival, they latinized Kong Fu Zi as Confucius and Menzi as Mencius but did not latinize Xunzi. Strangely, though the Jesuits did argue that Confucius and Mencius were akin to Christianity, they also believed in the sinful nature of humanity after the Fall of Adam, which is closer to Xunzi then Mencius.
Like Confucius, Mencius’ father died when he was very young. Mencius’ mother, who is revered as an ideal example of nurturing motherhood, famously moved three times with Mencius (known as “Mencius’ mother’s three moves”) to ensure that her son would be raised in the right environment. At first they lived near a cemetery, but young Mencius began impersonating the funeral mourners who were often paid to pretend to cry and wail. Remember, Confucius thought mourning without grief, ritual without intent, is the worst thing possible. She moved near a marketplace, but the boy began imitating the cries of the merchants who were known as swindlers and deceivers. Confucius was said to have tried being a merchant, but became disgusted at other merchants who suggested he fix the balances to make extra money off of rice, beans and other goods. Finally, she moved near a university so that Mencius would imitate the scholars and teachers, which he continued to do for the rest of his life. Also like Confucius, Mencius held moderate government positions for a short period of time, but became discouraged by the politics of the time and resumed teaching instead.
Mencius argued that qi (“chi”, energy) is cultivated through moral practice, that compassion like any exercise is good for your health. In 2A:6, Mencius states a major thesis of his work: No one is devoid of compassion for others. Mencius argues at several points in the book that we naturally feel for others and their well-being as we do for ourselves, and that when we fail to care for others there are other factors involved that block or reverse our natural compassion. Xunzi, as we will see, is very opposed to this interpretation of Confucius’ thought and argues that compassion must be planted in the human being by society and study because it is alien and opposite to human nature. Both agree that when we care for others, we cultivate ourselves (as we read in the Analects). Mencius believes that compassion is our nature and just as water naturally goes downward unless it is obstructed by something humans are naturally compassionate unless matters are complicated by obstructions. For Xunzi, humans are originally evil and desirous by nature and require society, education, and the experience of caring for others to learn to be compassionate.
Mencius is famous for using the young child falling into a well example to back up his argument. He argues that anyone would feel panic and fear if they saw a child in danger, regardless of how evil that individual is or how twisted they have become. This point is excellent for debate. We can all imagine someone who is so evil or sociopathic that they would not care watching a child in serious danger or coming to harm, but is this common? If it is possible, is it due to obstructions to original nature, to isolated psychological situations?
Mencius believes that there are four parts of the human heart that are developed and cultivated by society and study such that four virtues are grown like plants, germs or sprouts. The heart is a root system which grows the virtues of humanity when properly cultivated through education and practice. The four parts of the heart are compassion (ren) which sprouts benevolence, shame which sprouts duty and righteousness (yi), courtesy/modesty which sprouts observance of ritual and principle (li), and a sense of right and wrong (chih) which sprouts wisdom.
In 3A:5, we see Mencius getting into a battle with a Moist over whether one should love one’s own family more than others. While compassion is central to Confucianism, whether or not it is innate like Mencius says or has to be transplanted like Xunzi says, Confucians believe that one should have more love for one’s parents, children, family, and country and that this is the natural and proper way of things. Moists, who are radical egalitarians, argued against the Confucians that we should love everyone without distinction, as much as we love ourselves, our parents, our children, and our country. Confucians argue that the Moists are breaking with the natural way of the human heart and society, and that proportion in love is proper and best.
Mencius argues that we all do naturally love infants and young children and that this is good. He returns to his well example, and argues that Yi Zi, a Moist, is taking this one case and applying it improperly to everyone. Mencius says that the Moist wants us to deny our natural gradations of love which grow in society while affirming that love is the true nature of humanity, setting love in opposition to itself and making love both natural and unnatural at the same time. Mencius argues that it is both our nature to love everyone and our nature to love those we are close to more than others, balancing empathy and transformation with duty and tradition.
Mencius argues that love and care for others began with early humans, living before civilization, seeing the decaying bodies of their parents being attacked by animals. Because humans naturally care for others, and particularly their parents, they were moved at the sight to bury the bodies. Note that this makes for proper burial, the topic of the debate with Yi Zi. Indeed, archeology today recognizes the birth of culture and civilization in the increasingly ritualized burial of the dead, who are increasingly ornamented and buried with items which were precious to the individual and possibly useful in the afterlife or next life. Yi Zi concedes the point and accepts that love starts with the love one has for one’s parents and develops from there, but presumably still believes that this initial love for family should be cultivated into caring equally for all humanity. In Chinese philosophical texts, there are often instances of a member of an opposing school (sometimes quite famous) conceding in argument to the author of the text, showing us the rich tradition of debate between various schools in Chinese thought. With Daoism, we will see that even Confucius is made to accept defeat and concede superiority to the Daoists several times in the text of Zhuang Zi.
In 4A:12, Mencius elaborates and says that goodness starts with working on the self and love for one’s parents, and moves outward from there to one’s friends and the whole of one’s society. Thus, he agrees with Yi Zi the Moist that one should cultivate a love for all of humanity, but still thinks it improper to lose all reverence and distinction particular to one’s family, friends, and culture.
In 4A:16, Mencius considers another example famous in Confucian scholarship for its implications. A scholar (school unknown) poses a problem to Mencius: it says in the laws that it is improper for men and women to touch hands if they are not married, but if your brother’s sister is drowning, shouldn’t you reach out to save her? Mencius replies that it is proper to save her, and that one must not blindly follow the law but use discretion given the situation. This passage is famous, because Confucians are big on observing law and ritual but sometimes one must break the law. Confucius said in the Analects that even though the rites say to use a silk hat, it is OK to use a hemp hat instead because it is more modest. He also tells his students to rise up and overthrow an unjust tyrant. The scholar debating Mencius says the empire is now drowning, implying that they should radically break with the laws, traditions and government to save society. Mencius replies that upholding law and ritual is the way to save society and so the example of the drowning sister-in-law does not justify a radical break from tradition. Remember that this was during the Warring States Period. Mencius is arguing that restoring the old Zhou ways would be the solution, like Confucius believed, while the scholar seems to suggest a radical change in social structure, like the Moists argued. As we will see soon Moists believed that all property should be used in common and everyone live in common as one family.
In 4B:12, Mencius says the great person retains the heart of a child. A Moist might point out the previous battle with Yi Zi and say Mencius is going against what he has said before if a child is all loving and completely open. Mencius might counter that retaining the child heart will naturally grow into its arrangements while being pure and absolute, in the same way that children naturally love their parents and those with whom they are familiar.
In 4B:13, Mencius says that following one’s parents when they are alive is good, but following them after they are dead is greater and shows that one is truly cultivated and a noble person. Xun Zi might be cynical here, because if you applied this to society he would argue that without society one would tend not to be good at all and that the one who follows the ways of one’s parents after they are dead does so only because society still surrounds them. He would likely agree with Mencius, however, that this would demonstrate one was truly cultivated and transformed by society.
In 6A:2, as in several other places, Mencius likens love and human nature (which he believes to be identical) to water and argues that just as water naturally moves downward love naturally moves outward. If water does not move downward, it is blocked by something. In the same way, if a human being is not loving towards others and compassionate, it is blocked by something. As seen, this love would grow outward naturally but equally would radiate in differentiated levels. Love for those close would be greater then love for those far, but love for those close and love for those far would mutually support and increase each other.
In 6A:7, Mencius speaks of sowing barley on various ground (strikingly similar to the parable of Jesus, which must have astounded the Jesuits along with the Gold and Silver rules of reciprocity). Just as when barley does not grow the seeds have fallen on bad soil, when humans are bad it is not because they do not have love and goodness in their nature but because they are put in a bad situation. Recall Mencius’ mother repeatedly seeking a better environment for the cultivation of her child. Reason and goodness are common to all. The sage or great person simply recognizes this and grows what all have to become great.
Xun Zi & Human Nature as Evil
Xunzi (in the older Wade-Giles, Hsun Tzu), the third most important Confucian after Confucius and Mencius, studied and taught at a university in the state of Chi. Like Confucius and Mencius, he briefly held a government position until his patron was assassinated, then returned to teaching. He had many followers in his day, some of whom are said to have used his teachings in the service of Legalism, which strangely sought to have Confucianism banned when supported by the Chin and then was banned by the Confucian supporting Han in turn. Unlike Confucius and Mencius, he did not travel widely. Also, unlike the Analects and Mencius, his text is his own, not a set of anecdotes and sayings collected by followers. Thus it is more systematic and contains entire arguments at length.
Xunzi argued that human nature is evil because human nature is desire. Common to human thought accross all cultures is the frame of desire and hate as the lower selfish part of our nature and reason and love as the higher compassionate part of our nature. While Mencius argues that we naturally are the upper and it is merely obstructed by the lower when we are evil, Xunzi argues that we naturally are the lower and it is only through cultivation that we develop the upper. Are either singularly human nature? Regardless, there is a common theme that we only come to be fulfilled in the way desire tries through developing reason and love, which truly satisfy.
Like Mencius, Xunzi argued that anyone in the street can become a sage, but it depends on environment and effort. If one hangs out with foolish people, one will be foolish, and likewise if you stick to the wise and read the wisdom of great books you will become wise. While we are not originally good according to Xunzi, we have the capacity to become good even when it does not yet exist. Much like Mencius’ barley sewing analogy but distinct, Xunzi would see the seed sewed not as the original heart and nature but as external education and civilization, while the original nature would be the soil, devoid of the seed but capable of sustaining growth.
Xunzi argues that without society and laws people would grab for themselves and do nothing for others. Like Hobbes, the English political philosopher, argues that this justifies the king acting any way the king sees fit, including killing his subjects, in the name of the good and safety of the entire people. He was also a pragmatist, arguing that laws, morals and rulers are tools to be used for the cultivation and happiness of people. It is this part of his philosophy which may well have been supported by the Legalists.
In Improving Yourself (Section 2 of the Xunzi), he argues that if we stick to the rituals and laws our behavior will be good and if we abandon the rituals and laws it will be bad. He draws openly on the behavior of civilized nobles vs. the behavior of poor country folk to back this up. He will draw a similar distinction between children and adults. Clearly, Xunzi is a city boy. While Daoists saw the common country people as exemplary of virtue, Xunzi sees them as course and uncultured. As an aside, this is strangely like the civilized vs. barbarian view many Chinese have had for thousands of years of South East Asian people, as well as Cantonese Chinese from Hong Kong have of the Mandarin Chinese from mainland China today. Clearly this is a very human problem.
Xunzi argues that one’s temperament and intelligence need to be in balance and if they get overgrown they will cause ruin. This is very much in line with the Doctrine of the Mean or Middle Way found in the Analects and the text. Human abilities need to be reined in by society and customs, or they will cause problems. He argues that only by following laws can one be liberal and compassionate. Compassion is the goal that is possible, but it cannot be achieved without laws and principles. Following one’s parents and teachers is necessary for human development. Confucius says in the Analects that learning without thinking is bad, but thinking without learning is dangerous. Xunzi is likely thinking of this very passage.
In Man’s Nature is Evil (Section 23 of the Xunzi), he opens with this thesis and states that all goodness is the result of growth and effort. People naturally desire. They must work and change to understand that they only get what they desire when they put their desires in check, and they only learn this through involvement with society and its laws. Freud argued very similarly about sexual impulse, and that all technology is sexuality denied and deferred into work. The first paragraph lays this out succinctly.
Xunzi openly refers to Mencius by name and his theory that human nature is good and says that Mencius is wrong. Xunzi argues that Mencius is confusing human nature with the results of conscious human activity and development. Xunzi believes that the early legendary sage kings created society because they realized that human nature is corrupt and they created a method for us to grow from our nature and become excellent in spite of it. Some argued against this by asking how the great sage kings could have created a just society if one did not yet exist, to which Xunzi replied that they had reached a level of cultivation such that they could then transform society profoundly.
While Mencius teaches to look inside ourselves to find morality, Xunzi teaches to look outside ourselves, to both society and the cosmos. The sage kings looked outside of themselves not only to great texts and social arrangements, but to the order of the universe to develop themselves. Xunzi is more cosmological than both Confucius and Mencius, speaking of the orders of nature and base but can potentially develop to be great like a society or the cosmos. In one passage, Xunzi argues that fire and water have energy but no awareness, and that animals have energy and awareness but no morality, but humans have energy, awareness and the capacity to develop discrimination of right from wrong and morality. They develop this by looking outward and learning, not by looking inward which will only stunt growth and keep us in an immature and desirous state. It is making distinctions that makes us greater than beasts, and the rituals and traditions that are the greatest distinctions passed down from the sage kings.
Xunzi argues that the example of child-like love Mencius employs is misleading. Children do not know enough, are not developed enough, to refrain from grabbing for themselves. Good people restrain their own desires to be good to others, unlike the child. Note that we tell people to be like a little child (when happy & loving) and we also tell people to NOT be like a little child (when angry & upset). While children are innocent, and when happy adorable, it is true that they do not have the ability to care for others and support others that the developed adult has, and if a desire or negativity gets in their way they quickly lose all focus.
Xunzi argues that greatness IS an object of desire, and the great person realizes/desires to overcome desire and discipline desire to truly fulfill desire. This seems paradoxical, but true to life. Modern psychology experiments have shown that children who learn to control their desires and defer pleasure with patience are more successful later in life in their achievements. The achievements satisfy the person more than the initial lesser things desired.
If Mencius is right, Xun Zi argues, we could dispense with society and be good in the state of nature. Both the Daoists and Rousseau the European political philosopher hold this to be true. Xun Zi is arguing that, if we believe Mencius, we may as well all become Daoists. If we honor the sages and the good over the stupid and the evil, we do so because of how much each has developed and not because of their universal nature. Xun Zi is arguing that, if we believe Mencius, we may as well all become Moists.
Xun Zi argues that all human beings are equal in their capacity to become good and develop, but they do not start out good. The sage is one who has developed, not the one who remains the same as they were in the beginning. Xun Zi argues that because one has two feet, one can theoretically walk to the ends of the earth but no one has so far managed to do so. The famous bows (for arrows), leaders and horses all became famous for how they were cultivated and developed and were not excellent without conscious effort and process.
He ends by saying twice: “Environment is the important thing!” Remember Mencius agrees in speaking of sowing barley. For Confucians, society is essential. The debate is on whether the environment compliments or contradicts human nature.
One last passage I want to site, particularly to fight against the view that ancient Greek and modern European thought is distinctly scientific or rational, says: “Those who are good at discussing antiquity must demonstrate the validity of what they say in modern times; those who are good at discussing Heaven (the way of things) must show proofs from the human world. In discussions of all kinds, men value what is in accord with the facts and what can be proved to be valid. Hence if a man sits on his mat propounding some theory, he should be able to stand right up and put it into practice, and show that it can be extended over a wide area with equal validity. Now Mencius states that man’s nature is good, but this is neither in accord with the facts, nor can it be proved to be valid.”
Neo-Confucianism, Zhu Xi & Wang Yang Ming
About 1100 CE, during the Sung Dynasty (960 - 1279 CE), Confucianism merged with Daoist and Buddhist ideas to form a Confucian revival called Neo-Confucianism by scholars today. Buddhism, including both Chan and Pure Land schools, had flourished during the Tang (618 - 907 CE). Most of the great masters and their koan encounters had happened during this period, and then the koan collections such as the Blue Cliff Record were collected and codified during the Sung. The Neo-Confucians sought to take the flagging Confucian orthodoxy and put it once again at the center of education and society after losing ground to Buddhism for five hundred years. Buddhist metaphors such as the pearl at the bottom of the muddy lake and the sun emerging from behind the clouds, as well as Daoist concepts, were reinterpreted in light of Confucianism, giving them an active educational and moral interpretation.
The Cheng Brothers, Cheng Hao (1032 - 1085 CE) and Cheng Yi (1033 - 1107) were two philosophers, teachers and officials whose work and schools led to the Neo-Confucian revival. Together with Zhu Xi, the central systematiser of Neo-Confucianism who was deeply influenced by and indebted to the Cheng brothers’ work, the three are considered the founders of Neo-Confucianism in the Sung. Their father was a county detective in Huangpi of central-east China. The two brothers were known also as Cheng the Elder and Chang the Younger, even though Cheng Hao was only one year older than Cheng Yi. Cheng Hao was known for being happy and laid back, while Cheng Yi was strict and uptight.
Both brothers believed in Li, which as mentioned in Chinese Buddhism was now not simply tradition, principle and ritual but cosmic and identified and equated with the Dharma of Buddhism and the Dao of Daoism. Both identified Li with physical form and purpose, beyond ritual and tradition, just as the Buddha’s teaching and Daoist sage’s way of living were identified with the law of the universe. The elder laid back Cheng Hao founded the School of Mind, arguing that Li was psychological, while the younger uptight Cheng Yi founded the School of Law, arguing that Li was physical. This split is along the classic lines of dogmatism, truth as objective, and skepticism, truth as subjective. Much like in the work of Plato and Neo-Platonism of medieval Europe, the Cheng Brothers saw Li, form, combined with Qi (“chi”), energy, as the composition of all things. The noble and the sages seek the forms of things,
Zhu Xi (1130-1200 CE), also known as Zhuzi or Master Zhu, was the systematiser who took the work of the Cheng Brothers and others and created the educational system of China that lasted almost 600 years from 1313 to 1905. He was taught in the lineage of Cheng Yi and the School of Law, and argued that Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, the three great Chinese traditions, were teaching the same truth but that Confucius was the superior and primary teacher. Like Confucius, he gathered a small canon of four books to be the foundation of education: the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Great Learning. Zhu Xi put a very heavy emphasis on reading and study, particularly re-reading the right books again and again to understand the essence of morality and principle.
Wang Yang Ming (1470 – 1530 CE) one of the most revered Neo-Confucians, was famous for the idea of the unity of knowledge and action. He was opposed to Zhu Xi, who he argued put too much emphasis on study and not enough on integrating knowledge with action and practice, without which it is not genuine knowledge. While Confucius taught that intention and action are distinct things, Wang Yang Ming taught the complementary truth that the two are interactive as one whole. It is true that they are different, but this should not distract from their unity and complementary nature.
While someone can say that they know something, we can judge whether they truly know or not by how they act. Two examples he uses are knowing that a color is beautiful and knowing that a smell is bad. To see a beautiful color and to feel pleasure are one and the same, the seeing corresponding to mind and investigation and the feeling corresponding to body and action. If someone says they know that a smell is bad, but they do not act like it is bad (gagging, opening a window, pointing at their younger sibling), we could say that they do not really know that the smell is bad but only saying the smell is bad. Wang Yangming argues that if someone’s nose is stuffed up, they can be told there is a bad smell but they do not know there is unless they react to it. In the same way, if we know someone is a good person we do not get nervous around them or hide our valuables when they come over. If we did, it could be said that we do not truly know they are good because we do not act like they are trustworthy.
Wang Yangming is arguing against Zhu Xi’s teaching that reading and study are central. If one does not act well and put morality into practice, mere reading and recitation is not true knowledge but nothing more than “ghosts and shadows”. Notice how similar this is to Buddhist metaphors. Wang Yangming, unlike Zhu Xi, is closer to Cheng Hao than Cheng Yi, arguing that all things are mind, also similar to Buddhism. In his day, Wang Yangming was accused of being a crypto-Buddhist and corrupting Confucianism, though in fact Zhu Xi and others were borrowing from Buddhism and Daoism, if less overtly.
Intro Philosophy: Third Response Essay
For the third paper, you should discuss in at least two typed double-spaced pages whether there are absolute certainties (the position of Descartes) or if all truth is assumption (the position of Hume). A good example is 2 + 3 = 5, about which Descartes says we could not possibly be deceived. Do we know this truth by deduction to be absolutely certain, or do we assume this by induction to be decently useful?
If you are co-enrolled in the history class, there is a different assignment. Instead of the third and fourth two page papers, you are to write a single essay about a philosopher of your choice and how their time and situation in history helped shape their ideas. It should be at least eight pages, and will also count for your project in the history class. It will be due in your History class on December 7th.
If you are co-enrolled in the history class, there is a different assignment. Instead of the third and fourth two page papers, you are to write a single essay about a philosopher of your choice and how their time and situation in history helped shape their ideas. It should be at least eight pages, and will also count for your project in the history class. It will be due in your History class on December 7th.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Logic: Wittgenstein's Tractatus & Truth Tables
Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is one of the most important thinkers in academics today. His early book, the Tractatus, and his later book, the Philosophical Investigations, are considered two of the most important influences for the American and British Analytic school of philosophy, the dominant school of philosophy in America.
In an end of the century poll in 2000, philosophy professors from America and Canada were asked to list the five most important books that influenced their own work. When all of the results were tallied up, the Philosophical Investigations was #1, and the Tractatus was #4. The Philosophical Investigations was cited far more frequently than any other book, was listed first on far more ballots, and crossed over more into many different disciplines and areas of study.
Wittgenstein’s thought can be divided into his early, middle and later work. His early work is the book the Tractatus, the book which gave the world truth table logic. This tool, as Wittgenstein later came to see it, remains the mathematical system taught as logic today. Just as Wittgenstein became famous for his truth tables, he switched positions in his thinking and came to reject his earlier work. He wrote in notebooks that were only published after his death, and the Philosophical Investigations is the most celebrated of these.
First, we will look at the life of Wittgenstein. Second, we will consider some of the important ideas in the Tractatus and Wittgenstein’s early thought. Third, we will begin learning the truth table method of logic Wittgenstein introduced in the Tractatus.
The Life and Thought of Wittgenstein:
Wittgenstein’s Father was the Austrian Carnegie, making a fortune in Steel. Though his father was Protestant, and his mother Jewish, Ludwig was baptized Catholic because of antisemitism at the time. In his early years, Ludwig was a proud atheist but by the time he was working on his Tractatus he had a mystical transcendental outlook which he kept for the rest of his life. Though never religious, and though he had to bribe Nazis later to smuggle his “Jewish” family from Austria, he was buried as a Catholic.
The Wittgenstein family was known for intense criticism, musical talent, depression, and suicide. Three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed suicide, and he himself considered suicide for awhile before launching into his late period. Unfortunately, suicide was considered romantic for Austrian elites at the time.
Wittgenstein was in Hitler’s elementary school, 2 days younger, but because he was put forward a grade and Hitler was held back a grade he was 2 years ahead. Both he and Hitler hated the school and the lessons.
He began studying at university in Berlin to become an engineer with an interest in flight (the Wright Brothers had recently invented the motorized glider, but flew it in France and Germany until 1907 as the US Army did not believe them). After failing in his attempt to build a better propeller, he began studying mathematical theory and philosophy of mathematics, becoming entranced with two thinkers who are along with Wittgenstein foundational for Analytical philosophy and logic: Russell from Britain, and Frege from Germany. Wittgenstein went to see Frege, who did not fully understand his questions and advised him to go see Russell, which he did in 1911.
He showed up unannounced to Russell’s room at Trinity College, impressed him with his intense and brilliant arguments. Russell became convinced that the young Austrian was going to carry his work forward and be his successor, solving the remaining problems of logic that Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics had left open. As mentioned last lecture, Russell had shown there were contradictions unresolved in Frege’s work with set theory, but Russell had become frustrated trying to solve these contradiction with his theory of types.
Wittgenstein, an eccentric and difficult personality, was never fully comfortable at Cambridge, and often got into disagreements with Russell and threatened to leave many times before fleeing to Norway where he believed he could finish his work on Logic. While some still disagree, it is generally accepted that Wittgenstein was gay, developed a relationship with Pinsent, a young graduate student, and some believe that Russell encouraged the relationship if he did not introduce the two with the purpose of keeping the emotional and unstable genius with him at Cambridge.
When WWI broke out, he served for Austria, at the same time as he was developing the material for the Tractatus. Learning of Pinsent’s death in the war in Italy, he became suicidal, moved in with his uncle and finished the Tractatus which he dedicated to his ‘friend’ Pinsent. He tried to get it published, but no one would take it. Remember: this book went on to be the #4 influence in the US and Canada according to the poll, the book that gave modern logic truth tables, the method that replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms.
Russell intervened back in Cambridge, and had it published and wrote and introduction for it. This was the start of the end. Though Russell saw the work as genius, he did not completely understand much of it and his introduction reflected this. Wittgenstein read the introduction and realized Russell had great misunderstandings of his work. Believing that his Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein left Russell and Cambridge again and went to be a school teacher in Austria. He gave away his portion of the family fortune, anonymously to writers but also to his family. Since his family was already wealthy, he wrote in a letter, “they won’t be corrupted by it”. He left the school after a short while (not a good fit, and parents thought he was crazy). He became a gardener’s assistant, and then his sister had him design her a house.
While finishing the house, he was contacted by members of the Vienna Circle, positivists using Hegel’s logic and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to give a solid foundation for science and mathematics. This was what Russell had hoped for, minus the Hegel who Russell hated. While Wittgenstein had been away, the Tractatus had become famous, and central to many already inspired by Frege and Russell. Many came to visit and discus and progressively Witt became disgusted. He began to realize that there were fundamental problems with his Tractatus and truth tables, and got into intense arguments with the Vienna Circle members, at one point turning his back on his guests and reading Tagore, an Indian transcendental poet out loud. For the rest of his life, Wittgenstein thought logical positivism (the analytic school of philosophy) misunderstood his Tractatus.
In his early period, Wittgenstein believed he had fully solved the problems of a complete system of logic. He saw it like Schopenhauer, a big early influence: logic is a perfect crystal tool of analysis, life is a messy chaotic ocean, and so logic is perfect but unfortunately never fits perfectly with life. This is like having the perfect tool for an impossible and continuous job. In conversations with positivists he started to change his thinking around and continued to write until he died. These writings were published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations and other books. In his later thought, Wittgenstein saw logic not as a perfect crystal castle in the sky but as rules and games that are imperfectly lived in the real world imperfectly and without complete definition. He no longer believed that logic could provide a foundation for mathematics, science or philosophy. He denied that contradictions are necessarily false, or disprove a mathematical-logical system.
In 1929, he decided to return to Cambridge to correct his thinking and teach. To his horror, when he arrived at the train station he was greeted by a vast crowd of intellectuals as the new hero, the author of the Tractatus, the work he now thought was exactly wrong.
The famous economist Keynes wrote to his wife: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train’. Wittgenstein continued to lecture at Cambridge, developing his ideas.
In 1934, he defected to Soviet Russia, wanting to be a plumber or work with his hands. When he was told that according to the Soviet system he would be put to work as a philosophy professor in Moscow, he defected back to Britain.
In 1937, Hitler annexed Austria. Wittgenstein had to bribe Nazis to get his Jewish family passage out and spend the equivalent today of $50 million in gold and foreign currency. Since he had given away his own portion of the family fortune, he had to get much of this from his collegues at Cambridge and other admirers of his work.
THE TRACTATUS
In his early thought, expressed in the pages of the Tractatus, reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world with these atomic facts. The world does not perfectly fit this atomic language, but because it is the way the head makes sense of the world we cannot understand things otherwise. Wittgenstein said that it is the part of the book that is unwritten that is important, the part where life itself goes beyond this logic and makes the world what it is. Of the world beyond logic, he wrote “Of what one cannot speak, one must remain silent”, which is in fact a quote from Confucius. Our logic and the world are two things that do not fit, yet mysteriously (and mystically) the two are one.
If we boil logic with truth tables down to its tautologies, the necessary and basic workings, and leave the rest open as the world which always is beyond our thoughts, we can have the perfect system of logic and grammar that we use to understand things spelled out even if it cannot perfectly predict the world or tell us how the world works. Think of logic as a set of reading glasses, and the world as something one looks at through the glasses. Wittgenstein believed that with the Tractatus he had spelled out the perfect crystal form of the glasses, and beyond this nothing can be said for certain.
Logic consists of things that are always necessary or impossible. For instance, if one knows A is necessarily true, then one also knows that it is impossible that A is false. Notice that in his early thought Wittgenstein follows Russell and Frege in believing the principles of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, and from these alone we can build the perfect interlocking system of necessary truths that is logic.
When it comes to facts in the world, however, everything is contingent on something else and is neither simply necessary or simply impossible. Logic is the necessary and impossible book-ends with which we interpret the world and its facts, but the world is always between the necessary and the impossible, is always somewhat necessary and somewhat impossible, which creates a gulf between our pure and necessary logic and the unpredictable world. This is a very similar position to Avicenna, and quite different from Aristotle, Averroes and Russell who want some facts in the world to be necessary truths themselves. For Wittgenstein, only logic and math can be sets of necessary truths, and this is because (as Avicenna and Mill believe) they are concepts and are ideal, unlike situations of real things in the world. Once we nail down the perfect tool of logic, we can use it to examine the world and all of its messy situations. Our examinations will never be perfect because of the gap between logic and the world, but at least the logic will be necessary and perfect.
WITTGENSTEIN’S TRUTH TABLE METHOD
The genius of Wittgenstein’s truth table method is it turns mathematics on its head. Normally, mathematics starts with something given as true, and then deduces additional necessary truths. This is the deduction that Aristotle and Russell believed was the true and sure method of logic, science and mathematics. Wittgenstein, however, did not believe that there are ever necessary truths in the world, because necessity is only in the head as thought and logic.
The truth tables do not assume that the beginning proposition (in the atomic mathematical form) is true. Rather, truth tables evaluate the proposition by giving us all possible states of the statement being true and false, and then determine if anything is additionally true given these possibilities. It is assumed that any element of the proposition could be true or false, and all of the possible combinations are given and then one looks for anything being always true given each and every possibility. Truth tables do not just show us what follows if the proposition is true (how mathematics typically works), but also shows us what follows if the proposition is false, or if some of it is true and the rest false.
For Truth Tables, we assume both the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of the excluded middle. This means that there are two truth values used, True (T) and False (F). Typically, p q and r are the three variables used in symbolic logic (possibly because ‘p’ is the first letter of ‘proposition’). These variables stand for atomic facts, so ‘p’ could mean, “The dog is green” or ‘q’ could mean, “Steve is a jerk”. So, if “The dog is green”, is either true or false this means that p has the value T or F.
There are five operations or operators used in symbolic logic:
NOT, AND, OR, IF-THEN and EQUIVALENT (or TAUTOLOGY)
Each of these has a basic truth table we construct that shows how these operations work. These basic truth tables are then the rules or “moves” which we use to solve more complicated truth tables.
In this class, we will only be working with two variable propositions. I will provide you with an additional print out and post on the truth tables and how they operate, as well as demonstrate these in class. The truth values for each operator are:
NOT (FT) ~
AND (TFFF) ^
OR (TTTF) v
IF-THEN (TFTT) >
TAUTOLOGY (TFFT) =
Remember that OR is always used inclusively, so if p and q are both true, the whole statement is true. Remember also to watch out for IF-THEN, because it is the hardest one and trips people up a lot. In truth table logic, if a statement cannot be proved false then it is considered true, which is why the last two values are T. This could work the other way (if it is not proved true, it is considered false) but this is not the way it is done.
Once you learn how to construct the basic tables, then you can construct more complicated tables. If you construct a truth table for the following propositions, you should get the values listed to the right:
If (p and q) then (p or q) TTTT
If (p or q) then (p and q) TTFF
The reason’s Wittgenstein’s truth tables were such a success is that they proved, for the first time, that many of the axioms logicians had discovered were necessarily true (tautologies) in a way that is simple to do and easy to see. Remember Modus Tollens from Kanada? Wittgenstein’s truth tables can demonstrate why it is always true!
Once you learn how to construct the more complicated truth tables, you should be able to prove each of the tautologies below by getting TTTT (true in all four cases) underneath the equals sign.
Transposition (Modus Tollens): (p > q) = (~ q > ~ p)
Implication: (p > q) = (~ p v q)
Disjunction: (p v q) = (~ p > q)
De Morgan’s A: ~ (p ^ q) = (~ p v ~ q)
De Morgan’s B: ~ (p v q) = (~ p ^ ~ q)
In an end of the century poll in 2000, philosophy professors from America and Canada were asked to list the five most important books that influenced their own work. When all of the results were tallied up, the Philosophical Investigations was #1, and the Tractatus was #4. The Philosophical Investigations was cited far more frequently than any other book, was listed first on far more ballots, and crossed over more into many different disciplines and areas of study.
Wittgenstein’s thought can be divided into his early, middle and later work. His early work is the book the Tractatus, the book which gave the world truth table logic. This tool, as Wittgenstein later came to see it, remains the mathematical system taught as logic today. Just as Wittgenstein became famous for his truth tables, he switched positions in his thinking and came to reject his earlier work. He wrote in notebooks that were only published after his death, and the Philosophical Investigations is the most celebrated of these.
First, we will look at the life of Wittgenstein. Second, we will consider some of the important ideas in the Tractatus and Wittgenstein’s early thought. Third, we will begin learning the truth table method of logic Wittgenstein introduced in the Tractatus.
The Life and Thought of Wittgenstein:
Wittgenstein’s Father was the Austrian Carnegie, making a fortune in Steel. Though his father was Protestant, and his mother Jewish, Ludwig was baptized Catholic because of antisemitism at the time. In his early years, Ludwig was a proud atheist but by the time he was working on his Tractatus he had a mystical transcendental outlook which he kept for the rest of his life. Though never religious, and though he had to bribe Nazis later to smuggle his “Jewish” family from Austria, he was buried as a Catholic.
The Wittgenstein family was known for intense criticism, musical talent, depression, and suicide. Three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed suicide, and he himself considered suicide for awhile before launching into his late period. Unfortunately, suicide was considered romantic for Austrian elites at the time.
Wittgenstein was in Hitler’s elementary school, 2 days younger, but because he was put forward a grade and Hitler was held back a grade he was 2 years ahead. Both he and Hitler hated the school and the lessons.
He began studying at university in Berlin to become an engineer with an interest in flight (the Wright Brothers had recently invented the motorized glider, but flew it in France and Germany until 1907 as the US Army did not believe them). After failing in his attempt to build a better propeller, he began studying mathematical theory and philosophy of mathematics, becoming entranced with two thinkers who are along with Wittgenstein foundational for Analytical philosophy and logic: Russell from Britain, and Frege from Germany. Wittgenstein went to see Frege, who did not fully understand his questions and advised him to go see Russell, which he did in 1911.
He showed up unannounced to Russell’s room at Trinity College, impressed him with his intense and brilliant arguments. Russell became convinced that the young Austrian was going to carry his work forward and be his successor, solving the remaining problems of logic that Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics had left open. As mentioned last lecture, Russell had shown there were contradictions unresolved in Frege’s work with set theory, but Russell had become frustrated trying to solve these contradiction with his theory of types.
Wittgenstein, an eccentric and difficult personality, was never fully comfortable at Cambridge, and often got into disagreements with Russell and threatened to leave many times before fleeing to Norway where he believed he could finish his work on Logic. While some still disagree, it is generally accepted that Wittgenstein was gay, developed a relationship with Pinsent, a young graduate student, and some believe that Russell encouraged the relationship if he did not introduce the two with the purpose of keeping the emotional and unstable genius with him at Cambridge.
When WWI broke out, he served for Austria, at the same time as he was developing the material for the Tractatus. Learning of Pinsent’s death in the war in Italy, he became suicidal, moved in with his uncle and finished the Tractatus which he dedicated to his ‘friend’ Pinsent. He tried to get it published, but no one would take it. Remember: this book went on to be the #4 influence in the US and Canada according to the poll, the book that gave modern logic truth tables, the method that replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms.
Russell intervened back in Cambridge, and had it published and wrote and introduction for it. This was the start of the end. Though Russell saw the work as genius, he did not completely understand much of it and his introduction reflected this. Wittgenstein read the introduction and realized Russell had great misunderstandings of his work. Believing that his Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein left Russell and Cambridge again and went to be a school teacher in Austria. He gave away his portion of the family fortune, anonymously to writers but also to his family. Since his family was already wealthy, he wrote in a letter, “they won’t be corrupted by it”. He left the school after a short while (not a good fit, and parents thought he was crazy). He became a gardener’s assistant, and then his sister had him design her a house.
While finishing the house, he was contacted by members of the Vienna Circle, positivists using Hegel’s logic and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to give a solid foundation for science and mathematics. This was what Russell had hoped for, minus the Hegel who Russell hated. While Wittgenstein had been away, the Tractatus had become famous, and central to many already inspired by Frege and Russell. Many came to visit and discus and progressively Witt became disgusted. He began to realize that there were fundamental problems with his Tractatus and truth tables, and got into intense arguments with the Vienna Circle members, at one point turning his back on his guests and reading Tagore, an Indian transcendental poet out loud. For the rest of his life, Wittgenstein thought logical positivism (the analytic school of philosophy) misunderstood his Tractatus.
In his early period, Wittgenstein believed he had fully solved the problems of a complete system of logic. He saw it like Schopenhauer, a big early influence: logic is a perfect crystal tool of analysis, life is a messy chaotic ocean, and so logic is perfect but unfortunately never fits perfectly with life. This is like having the perfect tool for an impossible and continuous job. In conversations with positivists he started to change his thinking around and continued to write until he died. These writings were published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations and other books. In his later thought, Wittgenstein saw logic not as a perfect crystal castle in the sky but as rules and games that are imperfectly lived in the real world imperfectly and without complete definition. He no longer believed that logic could provide a foundation for mathematics, science or philosophy. He denied that contradictions are necessarily false, or disprove a mathematical-logical system.
In 1929, he decided to return to Cambridge to correct his thinking and teach. To his horror, when he arrived at the train station he was greeted by a vast crowd of intellectuals as the new hero, the author of the Tractatus, the work he now thought was exactly wrong.
The famous economist Keynes wrote to his wife: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train’. Wittgenstein continued to lecture at Cambridge, developing his ideas.
In 1934, he defected to Soviet Russia, wanting to be a plumber or work with his hands. When he was told that according to the Soviet system he would be put to work as a philosophy professor in Moscow, he defected back to Britain.
In 1937, Hitler annexed Austria. Wittgenstein had to bribe Nazis to get his Jewish family passage out and spend the equivalent today of $50 million in gold and foreign currency. Since he had given away his own portion of the family fortune, he had to get much of this from his collegues at Cambridge and other admirers of his work.
THE TRACTATUS
In his early thought, expressed in the pages of the Tractatus, reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world with these atomic facts. The world does not perfectly fit this atomic language, but because it is the way the head makes sense of the world we cannot understand things otherwise. Wittgenstein said that it is the part of the book that is unwritten that is important, the part where life itself goes beyond this logic and makes the world what it is. Of the world beyond logic, he wrote “Of what one cannot speak, one must remain silent”, which is in fact a quote from Confucius. Our logic and the world are two things that do not fit, yet mysteriously (and mystically) the two are one.
If we boil logic with truth tables down to its tautologies, the necessary and basic workings, and leave the rest open as the world which always is beyond our thoughts, we can have the perfect system of logic and grammar that we use to understand things spelled out even if it cannot perfectly predict the world or tell us how the world works. Think of logic as a set of reading glasses, and the world as something one looks at through the glasses. Wittgenstein believed that with the Tractatus he had spelled out the perfect crystal form of the glasses, and beyond this nothing can be said for certain.
Logic consists of things that are always necessary or impossible. For instance, if one knows A is necessarily true, then one also knows that it is impossible that A is false. Notice that in his early thought Wittgenstein follows Russell and Frege in believing the principles of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, and from these alone we can build the perfect interlocking system of necessary truths that is logic.
When it comes to facts in the world, however, everything is contingent on something else and is neither simply necessary or simply impossible. Logic is the necessary and impossible book-ends with which we interpret the world and its facts, but the world is always between the necessary and the impossible, is always somewhat necessary and somewhat impossible, which creates a gulf between our pure and necessary logic and the unpredictable world. This is a very similar position to Avicenna, and quite different from Aristotle, Averroes and Russell who want some facts in the world to be necessary truths themselves. For Wittgenstein, only logic and math can be sets of necessary truths, and this is because (as Avicenna and Mill believe) they are concepts and are ideal, unlike situations of real things in the world. Once we nail down the perfect tool of logic, we can use it to examine the world and all of its messy situations. Our examinations will never be perfect because of the gap between logic and the world, but at least the logic will be necessary and perfect.
WITTGENSTEIN’S TRUTH TABLE METHOD
The genius of Wittgenstein’s truth table method is it turns mathematics on its head. Normally, mathematics starts with something given as true, and then deduces additional necessary truths. This is the deduction that Aristotle and Russell believed was the true and sure method of logic, science and mathematics. Wittgenstein, however, did not believe that there are ever necessary truths in the world, because necessity is only in the head as thought and logic.
The truth tables do not assume that the beginning proposition (in the atomic mathematical form) is true. Rather, truth tables evaluate the proposition by giving us all possible states of the statement being true and false, and then determine if anything is additionally true given these possibilities. It is assumed that any element of the proposition could be true or false, and all of the possible combinations are given and then one looks for anything being always true given each and every possibility. Truth tables do not just show us what follows if the proposition is true (how mathematics typically works), but also shows us what follows if the proposition is false, or if some of it is true and the rest false.
For Truth Tables, we assume both the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of the excluded middle. This means that there are two truth values used, True (T) and False (F). Typically, p q and r are the three variables used in symbolic logic (possibly because ‘p’ is the first letter of ‘proposition’). These variables stand for atomic facts, so ‘p’ could mean, “The dog is green” or ‘q’ could mean, “Steve is a jerk”. So, if “The dog is green”, is either true or false this means that p has the value T or F.
There are five operations or operators used in symbolic logic:
NOT, AND, OR, IF-THEN and EQUIVALENT (or TAUTOLOGY)
Each of these has a basic truth table we construct that shows how these operations work. These basic truth tables are then the rules or “moves” which we use to solve more complicated truth tables.
In this class, we will only be working with two variable propositions. I will provide you with an additional print out and post on the truth tables and how they operate, as well as demonstrate these in class. The truth values for each operator are:
NOT (FT) ~
AND (TFFF) ^
OR (TTTF) v
IF-THEN (TFTT) >
TAUTOLOGY (TFFT) =
Remember that OR is always used inclusively, so if p and q are both true, the whole statement is true. Remember also to watch out for IF-THEN, because it is the hardest one and trips people up a lot. In truth table logic, if a statement cannot be proved false then it is considered true, which is why the last two values are T. This could work the other way (if it is not proved true, it is considered false) but this is not the way it is done.
Once you learn how to construct the basic tables, then you can construct more complicated tables. If you construct a truth table for the following propositions, you should get the values listed to the right:
If (p and q) then (p or q) TTTT
If (p or q) then (p and q) TTFF
The reason’s Wittgenstein’s truth tables were such a success is that they proved, for the first time, that many of the axioms logicians had discovered were necessarily true (tautologies) in a way that is simple to do and easy to see. Remember Modus Tollens from Kanada? Wittgenstein’s truth tables can demonstrate why it is always true!
Once you learn how to construct the more complicated truth tables, you should be able to prove each of the tautologies below by getting TTTT (true in all four cases) underneath the equals sign.
Transposition (Modus Tollens): (p > q) = (~ q > ~ p)
Implication: (p > q) = (~ p v q)
Disjunction: (p v q) = (~ p > q)
De Morgan’s A: ~ (p ^ q) = (~ p v ~ q)
De Morgan’s B: ~ (p v q) = (~ p ^ ~ q)
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