The Exam will consist of 25 Multiple Choice questions and 5 short answer questions. The Multiple Choice are pulled from the lectures and readings on the topics below.
Shamanism: “One who knows”, common world culture of early tribal society, forms that appear in world religions, ecstatic experience as ‘standing outside’, initiation rites and ‘rebirth’, investigating problems and seeking visions of solutions, the All-Tree, the problem of the One and the Many, the problem of destiny after death, stories as transmission of knowledge
City State Priests & Egypt: Societies gather into larger societies and settle, authorities become traditional, specialization of experts and scholars, eternal stars of fire as order above, water as chaos below, air as ordering breath or communication, Egyptian wisdom texts show criticism of society and human behaviors, heart centered individual, warring state periods good for thought, polytheism to monotheism to abstract solar monotheism
Hinduism, Jainism & Buddhism: Three paths of worship (Bhakti devotion, Raja asceticism, Jnana scholarship), trinity of Brahma, Vishnu (salvation) and Shiva (destruction), multitude of gods who are yet are not these three, two types of afterlife (reincarnation and release of Nirvana), Vedas as multiple origin stories, Upanishads as philosophical ‘that is you’ inner meaning, Jain influence on Buddhism and Hinduism, Mahavira and the Tirthankaras, two principles of skepticism (non-one-endedness and postulation), practice of asceticism and austerities (fasting, postures, meditation), Jain all karma as negative and total release as joining the order of the cosmos, the Jain metaphor of the leaky boat (plugging and bailing), Buddhism concepts of Impermanence, Doctrine of the Mean, Codependent Arising
Heraclitus: All is One/Fire/Cosmic Mind, all particular things are impermanent (even gods/planets), experts do not know much more than the common people, we are all apes to the gods, can’t step in the same river twice, perspective changing how things are
Plato: Parmenides over Heraclitus, Forms/Ideas as eternal models of things, the three parts of the soul (appetite, spirit and reason) corresponding to the three classes of the city (workers, police and philosophers), allegory of the cave
Confucianism: Mandate of Heaven as abstract monotheism, social order and rites as strength of society, study and civil service over meditation and nature of Daoism, criticism of the individual and equating others with oneself, right mind/intention over right body/action, love as center of human and system, recognition of the lowest as oneself and self criticism, Neo-Confucianism as blend with Daoism and Buddhism
Daoism: Return to nature and stillness, seeing both sides, Yin-Yang symbol, influence on Chinese Buddhism and Zen, the great One/Way as nameless above all named 10,000 things, water-like in fluidity and getting everywhere, the wheel as both solid and empty together, Zhuangzi and perspective, Cook Ting, humans ugly to minnows and deer, Peng bird vs. dove and cicada
For the short answers, pick five topics from the list below. For each of your choices, write a third to a half page in each of the spaces provided below. You should demonstrate that you 1) understand the meaning of the concept, 2) that you can connect it to other material from the class, and 3) that you can apply it to examples from your own experience or outside material (print or video, fictional or nonfictional). If you demonstrate each of these three things and complete the required page length, you will get full points for your answer.
Topics:
The Jain metaphor of the Leaky Boat
Jain negative view of karma vs. the Buddha’s middle way
Buddhist Codependent Arising
Heraclitus and Zhuangzi on animals and perspective
Heraclitus and the river ‘never twice’
Plato’s assent out of the cave
Plato’s three parts of the soul and city
Confucius’ right intention over right act
Laozi’s wheel as both solid and empty
Confucian study in the city vs. Daoist meditation in nature
Absolute truth vs. relative truth
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Social & Political Philosophy: Capitalism & Adam Smith
Next week is the review for the midterm on Monday and then the midterm on Wednesday. I will be posting and handing out a study guide that gives a broad overview of what we have studied in the class so far. The midterm will consist of multiple choice questions, short answer questions about key concepts and a short essay that displays your own thinking. Email me or come to office hours with questions.
Today we are studying capitalism, a political form practiced extensively in America (possibly more than anywhere else in history so far). Much of the political movements of the last century, the topics we will study for the second half of the semester, are reactions to capitalism and industrialization (socialism, communism, anarchism, post-colonialism, etc).
Before money, people of course possessed many things and traded them between individuals and groups. This trade was always barter, swapping one sort of thing for another sort of thing without the device of money as swapping medium. As people settled into city states, practices of borrowing and lending became stabilized. The first money was likely tokens indicating amounts of stuff borrowed from the ruler or other wealthy individuals.
The culture which includes the device of money has advantages over the culture of mere barter. Money as a device is very simple, simple the ways that numbers are simple for much the same purpose. Money is good (and bad) because it is very easy to gather/amass and divide/distribute, much more than any other object or substance.
Consider the salmon fisher in a village. She goes down to the water, and scores 20 large salmon. This is far more than she can eat, but she can trade salmon for other things that she needs in the barter culture. However, salmon does not keep for long, even if one knows how to salt and preserve it. What happens if she goes to the market and not many people want or need salmon that day? What if she has enough salmon to get what she wants, but there are not enough people who need salmon to trade with her for what she wants? In a culture where the salmon can be sold for money, you can keep the money for thirty years (even with inflation and other problems, deterioration of coins, etc) but no one can keep salmon for thirty years, even with freezers! In this way, money is much easier to amass and to keep than salmon.
In the same way, money is easier to divide than salmon. Let us say our fisher comes to market with 20 large salmon, and wants to trade for a basket. I, the basket maker, tell her that one third of a salmon is worth one basket, but I want the front half of the salmon. What happens if she wants to leave the salmon uncut, or if she needs four fifths of a salmon later for someone else? What if she wants to keep all the fish heads for herself? Money has no features to it other than quantity, even though the pictures are often very pretty. Fifty dollars is just fifty things, nothing less, so there is no problem with changing it to two twenties and a ten. You cannot make a whole salmon again from twenty salmon heads! In this way, money is much easier to divide and distribute than salmon. If we consider the bustle of a crowded market, it becomes clear why money would be such a useful (and thus abusive) device, and how its invention allowed for the modern merchants and bankers of today. Consider the trillion dollar bailout today, how this is very abstract yet very real for many people. Luck for us we do not need to bail out banks with truckloads of salmon!
Ancient city states carried out extensive long distance trade since the earliest recorded history, long before the rise of Europe. Ancient Assyria had all the siege weapons used in medieval Europe, but gained and controlled empire primarily through trade and taxes. We have seen in this class that much of political theory and events revolves around property and collecting taxes. Capitalism is, of course, very much a continuation of this ancient political arrangement. While there is no universally accepted definition of what capitalism is, it is widely accepted that capitalism is the culture of property, trade and taxation that rose with the industrialization of the 1800s and 1900s. Thus, the movements we will study in the second half of the class are as much reactions to industrialization (think Thoreau and the state as an evil machine) as they are to capitalism.
Remember that Aristotle argued, against Plato, that society should be a balance of public and private property. Locke argued that property is one of the basic rights that should be protected by the state along with life itself. In Capitalism, property is largely owned privately. As many experts argue, there are no perfectly capitalist nor communist countries, but rather most are mixed economies that lean very much toward capitalism and private ownership or toward socialism and public welfare/planned economy. American economics for the last two centuries, with the exception of the New Deal following the Great Depression, leans more toward private ownership than anyone has so far. This has created success as well as problems that define political debates today. While capitalism does dominate the world, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, many advanced and wealthy nations practice mixed economics that is not as pro-business and laissez faire.
The word “capitalism” was used far less frequently than “capitalist” in the 1700s and 1800s. Marx and Engels talk about the “capitalistic system”, “capitalists” and “capitalist mode of production” over two and a half thousand times in Das Kapital, their major work on Marxist economics, but only use the word “capitalism” twice. They were centrally concerned with industrialization and exploitation of labor by capitalists, arguing (as we will expand upon in a few weeks) that just as the French Revolution and other movements had removed the nobility a new revolution was required to remove the neo-nobility, the capitalists.
Capitalist theory revolves around the production of goods and services out of materials and labor. The capitalists (owners, share holders, board members) own the business, materials and land. The workers add/sell their labor to the business/owners, which then produces a product and profit from the sale of the product. The workers are paid wages for their labor, and the remaining profit is taken by the capitalists or reinvested in the business.
Just as Mill argued that there should be voting by the workers for managers and control of the business or there will be economic tyranny, some businesses like Cheeseboard pizza in Berkeley and the bread factory in California we discussed run as co-ops with profit sharing and collective management to counter-act the tyranny Mill argued against and many are upset about concerning corporations today.
It has only been recently in Britain and America that capitalism has been given wider freedom. As we have been studying, the opening of international trade and the Americas meant new opportunities for economic expansion. Remember that Mill’s family was involved with the East India Company. Companies such as this were controlled by the crown/British government, but merchants and the wealthy found it increasingly profitable to invest in these firms. Britain began relaxing restrictions on trade and taxation to encourage business in the 1800s.
Eventually, America took over this role and outdid Britain in leaning far towards privatization and lack of government control to encourage business, growing fantastically wealthy in the process particularly after WWII. Consider that Britain and Australia have 6 or so government TV channels (BBC 1, BBC2, etc), wary of trusting broadcasting to private companies, while America has licensed the airwaves to private companies and has more TV channels than most of the rest of the world combined. In the 80s, under Reagan in America and Thatcher in Britain, business received more relaxation of laws and taxes than ever before. This was increased again in America with George W. Bush. The fall of the Soviet Union encouraged the view that capitalism was and is the triumphant single system of economics, though there has been great backlash against this on the left in America, Britain and across the world.
One of the celebrated voices for the liberation of business from government control was Adam Smith (1723-1790). I gave you a selection from his classic The Wealth of Nations, one of the most influential works on economics in history, published in 1776 (appropriate given America’s role in the history of capitalism). I made sure to give you the passage where he refers to the “invisible hand” of the market, a central guiding concept for pro-capitalist thought. Essentially, Adams argues (as do conservatives today) that government control of markets and market forces is inefficient and clumsy compared to allowing the free exchange of capitalism to take its course, and thus a planned economy (such as that of socialism or communism) is not capable of the same growth and expansion. Just as Gordon Gekko argues “greed is good” in the movie Wall Street, Adam Smith argues that we can rely on everyone following their self interest to improve society much more than we can rely on efforts to help everyone collectively. Socialism and communism are diametrically opposed to this view. It must be said that Smith was afraid of monopolies and the power of business interests, and believed in government checks to this power.
Capitalism ranges in state control, with many if not all places practicing at least some small degree of state control of economics. Social market capitalism has the state run socialist welfare programs and controls such as price control, unemployment pay, social security, prevention of monopolies/cartels, and labor bargaining rights (like those just recently cut in Wisconsin). Anarcho/Free Market Capitalism has the state take as minimal a role as possible, with the extreme of currency, law enforcement and social services competing in the open market. Imagine if there were several currencies available backed not by the government but by the largest banks, and if the cops were private security for those who could afford it. Some (especially on the right) have argued that greater capitalism and democracy go hand in hand, providing class mobility and increased quality of life. Others (particularly on the left) have argued that greater capitalism results in greater exploitation that can be ignored if enough enjoy class mobility and higher quality of life. While the more democratic nations today do practice (in mixed form) capitalism, many dictatorships have been quite open to capitalism and corporations, such as Nazi Germany and Chile under Pinochet.
Today we are studying capitalism, a political form practiced extensively in America (possibly more than anywhere else in history so far). Much of the political movements of the last century, the topics we will study for the second half of the semester, are reactions to capitalism and industrialization (socialism, communism, anarchism, post-colonialism, etc).
Before money, people of course possessed many things and traded them between individuals and groups. This trade was always barter, swapping one sort of thing for another sort of thing without the device of money as swapping medium. As people settled into city states, practices of borrowing and lending became stabilized. The first money was likely tokens indicating amounts of stuff borrowed from the ruler or other wealthy individuals.
The culture which includes the device of money has advantages over the culture of mere barter. Money as a device is very simple, simple the ways that numbers are simple for much the same purpose. Money is good (and bad) because it is very easy to gather/amass and divide/distribute, much more than any other object or substance.
Consider the salmon fisher in a village. She goes down to the water, and scores 20 large salmon. This is far more than she can eat, but she can trade salmon for other things that she needs in the barter culture. However, salmon does not keep for long, even if one knows how to salt and preserve it. What happens if she goes to the market and not many people want or need salmon that day? What if she has enough salmon to get what she wants, but there are not enough people who need salmon to trade with her for what she wants? In a culture where the salmon can be sold for money, you can keep the money for thirty years (even with inflation and other problems, deterioration of coins, etc) but no one can keep salmon for thirty years, even with freezers! In this way, money is much easier to amass and to keep than salmon.
In the same way, money is easier to divide than salmon. Let us say our fisher comes to market with 20 large salmon, and wants to trade for a basket. I, the basket maker, tell her that one third of a salmon is worth one basket, but I want the front half of the salmon. What happens if she wants to leave the salmon uncut, or if she needs four fifths of a salmon later for someone else? What if she wants to keep all the fish heads for herself? Money has no features to it other than quantity, even though the pictures are often very pretty. Fifty dollars is just fifty things, nothing less, so there is no problem with changing it to two twenties and a ten. You cannot make a whole salmon again from twenty salmon heads! In this way, money is much easier to divide and distribute than salmon. If we consider the bustle of a crowded market, it becomes clear why money would be such a useful (and thus abusive) device, and how its invention allowed for the modern merchants and bankers of today. Consider the trillion dollar bailout today, how this is very abstract yet very real for many people. Luck for us we do not need to bail out banks with truckloads of salmon!
Ancient city states carried out extensive long distance trade since the earliest recorded history, long before the rise of Europe. Ancient Assyria had all the siege weapons used in medieval Europe, but gained and controlled empire primarily through trade and taxes. We have seen in this class that much of political theory and events revolves around property and collecting taxes. Capitalism is, of course, very much a continuation of this ancient political arrangement. While there is no universally accepted definition of what capitalism is, it is widely accepted that capitalism is the culture of property, trade and taxation that rose with the industrialization of the 1800s and 1900s. Thus, the movements we will study in the second half of the class are as much reactions to industrialization (think Thoreau and the state as an evil machine) as they are to capitalism.
Remember that Aristotle argued, against Plato, that society should be a balance of public and private property. Locke argued that property is one of the basic rights that should be protected by the state along with life itself. In Capitalism, property is largely owned privately. As many experts argue, there are no perfectly capitalist nor communist countries, but rather most are mixed economies that lean very much toward capitalism and private ownership or toward socialism and public welfare/planned economy. American economics for the last two centuries, with the exception of the New Deal following the Great Depression, leans more toward private ownership than anyone has so far. This has created success as well as problems that define political debates today. While capitalism does dominate the world, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, many advanced and wealthy nations practice mixed economics that is not as pro-business and laissez faire.
The word “capitalism” was used far less frequently than “capitalist” in the 1700s and 1800s. Marx and Engels talk about the “capitalistic system”, “capitalists” and “capitalist mode of production” over two and a half thousand times in Das Kapital, their major work on Marxist economics, but only use the word “capitalism” twice. They were centrally concerned with industrialization and exploitation of labor by capitalists, arguing (as we will expand upon in a few weeks) that just as the French Revolution and other movements had removed the nobility a new revolution was required to remove the neo-nobility, the capitalists.
Capitalist theory revolves around the production of goods and services out of materials and labor. The capitalists (owners, share holders, board members) own the business, materials and land. The workers add/sell their labor to the business/owners, which then produces a product and profit from the sale of the product. The workers are paid wages for their labor, and the remaining profit is taken by the capitalists or reinvested in the business.
Just as Mill argued that there should be voting by the workers for managers and control of the business or there will be economic tyranny, some businesses like Cheeseboard pizza in Berkeley and the bread factory in California we discussed run as co-ops with profit sharing and collective management to counter-act the tyranny Mill argued against and many are upset about concerning corporations today.
It has only been recently in Britain and America that capitalism has been given wider freedom. As we have been studying, the opening of international trade and the Americas meant new opportunities for economic expansion. Remember that Mill’s family was involved with the East India Company. Companies such as this were controlled by the crown/British government, but merchants and the wealthy found it increasingly profitable to invest in these firms. Britain began relaxing restrictions on trade and taxation to encourage business in the 1800s.
Eventually, America took over this role and outdid Britain in leaning far towards privatization and lack of government control to encourage business, growing fantastically wealthy in the process particularly after WWII. Consider that Britain and Australia have 6 or so government TV channels (BBC 1, BBC2, etc), wary of trusting broadcasting to private companies, while America has licensed the airwaves to private companies and has more TV channels than most of the rest of the world combined. In the 80s, under Reagan in America and Thatcher in Britain, business received more relaxation of laws and taxes than ever before. This was increased again in America with George W. Bush. The fall of the Soviet Union encouraged the view that capitalism was and is the triumphant single system of economics, though there has been great backlash against this on the left in America, Britain and across the world.
One of the celebrated voices for the liberation of business from government control was Adam Smith (1723-1790). I gave you a selection from his classic The Wealth of Nations, one of the most influential works on economics in history, published in 1776 (appropriate given America’s role in the history of capitalism). I made sure to give you the passage where he refers to the “invisible hand” of the market, a central guiding concept for pro-capitalist thought. Essentially, Adams argues (as do conservatives today) that government control of markets and market forces is inefficient and clumsy compared to allowing the free exchange of capitalism to take its course, and thus a planned economy (such as that of socialism or communism) is not capable of the same growth and expansion. Just as Gordon Gekko argues “greed is good” in the movie Wall Street, Adam Smith argues that we can rely on everyone following their self interest to improve society much more than we can rely on efforts to help everyone collectively. Socialism and communism are diametrically opposed to this view. It must be said that Smith was afraid of monopolies and the power of business interests, and believed in government checks to this power.
Capitalism ranges in state control, with many if not all places practicing at least some small degree of state control of economics. Social market capitalism has the state run socialist welfare programs and controls such as price control, unemployment pay, social security, prevention of monopolies/cartels, and labor bargaining rights (like those just recently cut in Wisconsin). Anarcho/Free Market Capitalism has the state take as minimal a role as possible, with the extreme of currency, law enforcement and social services competing in the open market. Imagine if there were several currencies available backed not by the government but by the largest banks, and if the cops were private security for those who could afford it. Some (especially on the right) have argued that greater capitalism and democracy go hand in hand, providing class mobility and increased quality of life. Others (particularly on the left) have argued that greater capitalism results in greater exploitation that can be ignored if enough enjoy class mobility and higher quality of life. While the more democratic nations today do practice (in mixed form) capitalism, many dictatorships have been quite open to capitalism and corporations, such as Nazi Germany and Chile under Pinochet.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Ethics: Perspective - Heraclitus, Zhuangzi & Hegel
Perspective is not simply individual, but social. We share reality in so far as we share perspective. This means that we should not only try to see as many perspectives or as much perspective as we can, but also resisting the tendency to accept one’s own perspective as reality or the whole truth. Truth is in each and every perspective, but it is also always beyond and outside of each and every perspective. Focusing on the concept of perspective forces us to affirm our views as truths but also deny our views as the Truth (with a capital T).
Two of the greatest ancient thinkers on perspective are Heraclitus from ancient Greece and Zhuang Zi from ancient China. To consider perspective as an ethical concept we will be looking at the strikingly similar things that these two ancient thinkers say and then end with some insights of the German philosopher Hegel and discoveries of modern psychology.
HERACLITUS
Heraclitus’ most famous idea is a memorable image: you can never step in the same river twice. Just as a river is always flowing and changing, so is reality always flowing and changing, such that nothing stays exactly the same for any two moments. You step in a river, then step out, then step back in the same river, but it is no longer ‘the same river’. Heraclitus says this is also true of himself.
According to one source, Heraclitus was a king who abandoned the title to become a philosopher. This has been identified as a close resemblance to the story of the Buddha in India, and some scholars have argued that Heraclitus was in fact the Buddha from India while others have argued that the Buddha was in fact Heraclitus from Greece. Both thinkers were mythologized as a king who left powerful king position and became a sage, and both believe in the enlightening sun rising above the watery chaos of reality and human perception, but it is quite likely the two were not the same individual.
Heraclitus is a very skeptical thinker. This does not mean he saw all things as negative. He was convinced that wisdom and inquiring within show us that all is one big cosmic fire, and things that unify the community and the individual bring wholeness and true happiness. However, he believed that humans are often foolish and let their minds divide themselves from the whole and from each other such that their understandings are disjointed and ignorant.
This is very typical thinking of skeptics the world over. A positivist would say that there are specific truths that are certain and must be separated from the uncertain, specific goods that must be separated from the evil. A skeptic would say, like Heraclitus and the Daoists from China, that the truth and the good is the whole and the great One, and the tendency of the mind to divide the good and the true from the rest is the opposite of true understanding and wisdom.
Heraclitus was not a fan of experts and specialists, and he ridiculed the cultural leaders of his time. He says that the common people are completely asleep, but far more dangerous are the experts who have a small piece of the puzzle and say that they know the entire truth. He calls the poets (Hesiod and Homer) and the Pythagoreans frauds, and says that there are no permanent truths or laws other than the constant formation of watery chaos by the sun and cosmic fire.
Notice that this does not question the set up of the cosmos as we have studied it everywhere (and what the Persians gave to the Eastern Greek city states). Many often ask, “Why, then, should I listen to Heraclitus, since he is simply an expert?”. Heraclitus replies as most skeptics do: don’t take my word for it, but look into the world and within yourself and you will find that it is true.
The beginning of his book, which we still have, reads:
The word proves those first hearing it as numb to understanding as the ones who have not heard, yet all things follow from the word. Some, blundering with what I set before you, try in vain with empty talk to separate the essences of things and say how each thing truly is, and all the rest make no attempt. They no more see how they behave broad waking than remember clearly what they did asleep.
For wisdom, listen not to me but to the word and know that all is one. Those unmindful when they hear, for all they make of their intelligence, may be regarded as the walking dead. People dull their wits with gibberish, and cannot use their ears and eyes. Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know. Yet they lack the skill to listen or to speak. Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse. Things keep their secrets.
Now that we can travel anywhere, we need no longer take the poets and myth-makers for sure witnesses over disputed facts…If learning were a path of wisdom, those most learned about myth would not believe, with Hesiod, that Pallas in her wisdom gloats over the noise of battle. Pythagoras may well have been the deepest in his learning of all men, and still he claimed to recollect details of former lives, being in one a cucumber and one time a sardine.
Of all the words yet spoken, none comes quite as far as wisdom, which is the action of the mind beyond all things that may be said. Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things.
Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.
Time is a game played beautifully by children. Applicants for wisdom do what I have done: inquire within.
Since mindfulness, of all things, is the ground of being, to speak one’s true mind and to keep things known in common, serves all being, just as laws made clear uphold the city, yet with greater strength. Of all pronouncements of the law the one source is the word whereby we choose what helps true mindfulness prevail. Although we need the word to keep things known in common, people still treat specialists as if their nonsense were a form of wisdom. Fools seek counsel from the ones they doubt. People need not act and speak as if they were asleep. The waking have one world in common. Sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each into a darkness of his own.
Homer I deem worthy, in a trial by combat, of a good cudgeling…They raise their voices at stone idols as a man might argue with his doorpost. They have understood so little of the gods.
This is a psychological skepticism that is criticizing the human ability to know particular things as permanent that are able to be separated from the One and All (the cosmic fire). Only the All is permanent. All the other things are wandering temporal forms. The many beings arise from the energy of Being, and then they fall back into the fire and disappear. The cosmos resembles the chaos yet order of the human community centered on authority by spoken word. The LOGOS, the word/plan/order/command, is the formative force in the cosmos, the force of fire and light in the watery chaotic world. The cosmic fire speaks with its ever-present Logos (fire over air) and this brings about the firmament in the chaos (the earth rising out of the water). This process, however, does not bring about eternal or stable beings, but chains of beings that are in flux and interdependent.
This goes also for laws, which Heraclitus says have to be defended as if they were city walls. This is sometimes read that Heraclitus thought human law was important and had to be defended, which he did, but in fact he is also telling us that human laws are impermanent like walls made out of earth. They may seem eternal and permanent, but as any former citizen or city of the Persian empire knows, empires fall and impressive city states are overthrown and change hands. The eternal word of the fire forever forms the cosmos, but human speech and walls are temporary, and therefore take force and effort to maintain. As a skeptic, Heraclitus believes that the divisions made by the mind are mortal, not eternal, like the human body. Our knowledge and laws are impermanent like mounds of dirt. Heraclitus says many things to humble us, including pointing out our similarity to apes to put our achievements in perspective:
The language of a grown man, to the cosmic powers, sounds like baby-talk to men. To a god the wisdom of the wisest man sounds apish. Beauty in a human face looks apish too. In everything we have attained the excellence of apes. The ape apes find most beautiful looks apish to non-apes.
Heraclitus’ most famous idea is a memorable image: you can never step in the same river twice. Just as a river is always flowing and changing, so is reality always flowing and changing, such that nothing stays exactly the same for any two moments. You step in a river, then step out, then step back in the same river, but it is no longer ‘the same river’. Heraclitus says this is also true of the cosmos and the human individual. Fire also flows, and individual tongues of flame rise out of the fire and then return and integrate with the whole. Fire, like water, flows in a consistent manner that is always self-similar but never exactly the same twice. Heraclitus argued that the world is always in flux, as a single thing stable and eternal but as many things in constant change and tension. Paradoxically, changing constantly in the way that things do is the stability and being of things. Rivers flow, fire burns, life thrives, always in motion to be stable in what it is. He says, “Goat cheese congeals in wine if not well stirred”. It is an example of a motion keeping a mixture what it is. When the motion stops, the elements disintegrate. In the same way that stability is motion, opposites work together:
Heraclitus was one of the most famous thinkers of the Greek and Roman world. He was a big influence on Plato, though Plato is very much opposed to his thinking as we will see next week. Both Heraclitus and Plato were big influences on Christianity which initially flourished not in Israel but in Greece and Syria. If a primal speaking of the Word or Logos sounds familiar, Heraclitus was a central influence on the Greek and Roman stoics, and the author of the Gospel of John was almost certainly a Greek stoic writing in Roman times. The opening of the Gospel of John famously reads: the Logos/Word/Order was with God (Fire/Cosmos), and God spoke (“let there be light”) and light was separated from darkness.
It was only in the late 1700s and 1800s that German scholars rediscovered the presocratics and gave them attention and study. Before this time, Greek Philosophy was considered to have originated with Socrates (hence, “presocratics”) and most scholars were only versed in the surviving writings of Plato and Aristotle. Schleiermacher, one of the most famous and central protestant theologians and an opponent of Hegel, was a major force in bringing popularity to Heraclitus and a major translator of Plato. The philosopher Hegel, who we will study later, saw Heraclitus as a skeptic who is put in balance with Plato and other positivists by the course of history itself. Nietzsche, the great skeptical philosopher who we will also study, wrote that he felt closer to Heraclitus than any other thinker. Nietzsche believed, like Heraclitus, that we are proud of our learning and achievement but we are in fact little better than apes.
ZHUANG ZI
Zhuang Zi, the second patriarch of Daoism, lived from 370 to 301 BCE and worked as a manager in a lacquer warehouse, a large ‘factory’ for making vases, bowls and general wood products (like bento boxes). Other than this, we know little of his life other than his work. Daoist tradition holds that Zhuang Zi wrote the ‘inner chapters’ of his work, and that the anecdotes about him and other stories were added by his disciples, the early proto-Daoists.
In several places of the Zhuangzi, we see the idea of perspective presented the same way as we saw in Heraclitus. We are told that Mao Quiang and Lady Li were legendary beautiful women, but minnows were frightened of them when they gazed into a stream, and birds and deer were frightened by them when they walked through the forest. Heraclitus said that all human beauty and achievement is nothing but apes to the gods. Who knows what is beautiful, humans, birds, fish, or deer? Zhuangzi asks which of them knows what tastes good.
Often, the heroes of Zhuangzi are common people, woodcutters, fishermen, butchers, carpenters, ex-cons, and others of low status. In two places, Zhuangzi seems to exalt while mock Confucius who praises two sages who have had their legs cut off for committing crimes but have flocks of followers. Confucius is made to say that his own teachings are the lowly ways of humans, but these sages know the way of heaven, the Dao, and he would become their student if he only had the time. Confucius says to Wang Dai, who asks about one of the legless sages, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall (two organs in the body), Ch’u and Yueh (two warring kingdoms in China), but if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one.”
We are told that the emperor learns how to rule his kingdom by listening to Cook Ting, who tells the emperor that he has learned over a lifetime how to cut up oxen with his knife that never dulls because he knows instinctively where the spaces are. We hear about the woodcutter scolding his apprentice for saying that an old gnarled tree is useless, replying that what is useless in some ways is useful in others, such as a tree no one will cut down providing a shady spot for centuries.
When Zhuangzi is asked by Dung Kuo where the way of heaven is, Zhuangzi says it is everywhere. Dung Kuo asks him to be more specific, so Zhuangzi says it is in the ant, in grass, in tile shards, in piss and in shit, horrifying Dung Kuo progressively. Like the Laozi text, the Zhuangzi continuously suggests that we see the lowest things as beautiful, and avoid striving for and hoarding the things people desire to be happy and free.
In the first passage of the Zhuangzi, the mythical Peng bird is mocked by the dove and the cicada (a large grasshopper-like insect) for flying high and far in the sky. They have no frame of reference to understand such an act, as they die every winter and do not survive by migrating south. Several times Zhuangzi is told by other sages that his wisdom is foolish and useless, but Zhuangzi replies, much like the Dao text, that there are no things which are not foolish or useless, but this does not stop them from also being serious and useful.
The philosopher and logician Huizi tells Zhuangzi that a king gave him seeds of a huge gourd, but when he planted the seeds and grew huge gourds they were so large that he could not use them as containers so he smashed them. Zhuangzi tells him he should have used them as boats, and “Obviously you still have a lot of underbrush in your head!” Huizi tells Zhuangzi that he has a large gnarled tree, which is as useless as Zhuangzi’s reasoning. Zhuangzi replies that if no ax will cut it down, it makes a great shaded place for taking a nap.
Tzu Ch’i tells Tzu Yu that when the wind blows you can hear many sounds made by many things, including the whistling of trees and the wailing of hollow logs, but there is only one wind. He then says:
Words are not just wind. Words have something to say, but if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something, or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn’t there? What does the Way rely upon, such that we have true and false? What do words rely upon, such that we have right and wrong?...When the Way relies on little accomplishments and words rely on vain show, then we have the rights and wrongs of the Confucians and the Moists. What one calls right the other calls wrong, and what one calls wrong the other calls right, but if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, then the best thing to use is clarity. Everything has its ‘that’, and everything has its ‘this’. From the point of view of ‘that’, you cannot see it, but through understanding you can know it, so I say, ‘that’ comes out of ‘this’ and ‘this’ depends on ‘that’, which is to say ‘this’ and ‘that’ give birth to each other...Therefore the sage does not proceed in such a way, but illuminates all in the light of heaven. A sage too has a ‘this’ and a ‘that’, but a sage’s ‘that’ has a ‘this’, and a sage’s ‘this’ has a ‘that’. A sage’s ‘that’ has both a right and a wrong in it, and a sage’s ‘this’ too has both a right and a wrong in it, so does a sage still have a ‘this’ and ‘that’? A state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites is called the hinge of the Way. When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right then is a single endlessness and its wrong too is a single endlessness, so I say the best thing to use is clarity...
To wear out your brain trying to make things into one without realizing that they are all the same is called “three in the morning”. What do I mean by “three in the morning”? When the monkey trainer was handing out acorns, he said, “You get three in the morning and four at night.” This made all the monkeys furious. “Well then,” he said, “you get four in the morning and three at night.” The monkeys were all delighted. There was no change in the reality behind the words, and yet the monkeys responded with joy and anger. Let them, if they want to. The sage harmonizes with both right and wrong and rests in heaven, the equalizer.
Because right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured, and because the Way was injured, love became complete, but do such things as completion and injury really exist, or do they not?
Those who divide fail to divide. Those who discriminate fail to discriminate. What does this mean, you ask? The sage embraces things. Ordinary people discriminate among things and parade their discriminations in front of others. So I say, those who discriminate fail to see.
Nieh Ch’ueh asks Wang Ni about something everyone can agree to. Wang Ni replies:
If someone sleeps in a damp place, their back aches and he ends up half paralyzed, but is this true of a carp? If someone lives in a tree, they are terrified and shake with fright, but is this true of a monkey? Of these three creatures, which knows the proper place to live? We eat the flesh of grass-fed and grain-fed animals, deer eat grass, centipedes find snakes tasty, and hawks and falcons love mice. Of these four, who knows how food ought to taste? Monkeys pair with monkeys, deer go out with deer, and fish play around with fish. men claim that Mao-Ch’iang and Lady Li were beautiful, but if fish saw them they would dive to the bottom of the stream, if birds saw them they would fly away, and if deer saw them they would break into a run. Of these four, which knows the standard of beauty for the world?
In the most famous passage of the book, Zhuangzi dreamt that he was a butterfly and forgot that he was Zhuangzi. When he woke, he no longer knew whether he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is Zhuangzi.
Another famous metaphor used is that of the praying mantis that waved its arms angrily in front of an approaching carriage, unaware that it is incapable of stopping it. It suggests that we move in response to life rather than hold our ground taking pride in our own abilities.
You hide your boat in the ravine and your fish net in the swamp and tell yourself that they will be safe, but in the middle of the night a strong man shoulders them and carries them off, and in your stupidity you don’t know why it happened. You think you do right to hide little things in big ones, and yet they get away from you, but if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.
Jo of the North Sea said, “You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog. He’s limited by the space he lives in. You can’t discuss ice with a summer insect. He’s bound to a single season. You can’t discuss the Way with a cramped scholar. He’s shackled by his doctrines. Now you have come out beyond your banks and borders and have seen the great sea, so you realize your own insignificance. From now on it will be possible to talk to you about the Great Principle.
Jo of the North Sea said, “From the point of view of the Way, things have no nobility or meanness. From the point of view of things themselves, each regards itself as noble and other things as mean. From the point of view of common opinion, nobility and meanness are not determined by the individual himself. From the point of view of differences, if we regard a thing as big because there is a certain bigness to it, then among all the ten thousand things there are none that are not big. If we regard a thing as small because there is a certain smallness to it, then among the ten thousand things there are none that are not small. If we know that heaven and earth are tiny grains and the tip of a hair is a range of mountains, then we have perceived the law of difference. From the point of view of function, if we regard a thing as useful because there is a certain usefulness to it, then among all the ten thousand things there are none that are not useful. If we regard a thing as useless because there is a certain uselessness to it, then among the ten thousand things none that are not useless. If we know that east and west are mutually opposed but that one cannot do without the other, then we can estimate degree of use.
Notice that Confucius appears many times in the Zhuang Zi, used to argue AGAINST his own position and in favor of a Daoist position. Many times Confucius says that his own way is inferior to the Daoist way. Clearly, these are texts written by Daoists who appreciate the good in Confucianism but think their own school to be superior. For example, page 65, in the chapter ‘The Sign of Virtue Complete’, Confucius says of Wang T’ai, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall, Ch’u and Yueh (two warring kingdoms in China). But if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one.” I still use this contradiction of one and many to this day. It shows you much about how people make judgments and arguments.
HEGEL
Hegel, a German philosopher who lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s, believed that the history of the world and the process of thought in history and the individual was an evolution of perspective that works from opposite sides to bring itself to greater completion. One of the most famous parts of his Phenomenology of Spirit, a history of the evolution of thought, is the Master/Slave dialectic. This concept became very important for anti-sexism (like the feminist De Beauvoir), anti-racism (like Franz Fanon and Angela Davis) and anti-class thinkers (like Hegel’s student Karl Marx). These will be the last three topics for this class, the “Big Three” in universities since the sixties.
Hegel argues that as the self or identity (like a nation) comes into the world, it cannot understand how there can be others like itself that are not itself and so it tries to fight and kill its others. Then the self figures out that it does not have to kill its others and that it is more productive to enslave them (consider that the most selfish individual would tell everyone else “You are wrong” but the slightly smarter but still selfish individual would tell everyone else “That is just what I have been saying”, neither capable of tolerating opinions other than their own).
At first, the master is in the superior position. However, over time, the slave comes to do everything for the master and thus learns through experience while the master grows lazy and ignorant. The slave comes to realize that he can do things he never thought of for someone or something else, comes to grasp subjectivity and perspective, and thus overturns the master and becomes the greater and more highly developed master.
INSIGHTS OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY:
INTERNAL/EXTERNAL ATTRIBUTION & THE HOSTILE MEDIA EFFECT
Modern Psychology has learned much from experiments in recent years about how individuals tend to interpret reality. This teaches us many things about perspective that extend and develop what Heraclitus, Zhuang Zi and Hegel had to say.
Internal vs. External Attribution:
Many experiments have confirmed what is often called the actor/observer bias or internal vs. external attribution. If an individual succeeds at a task, they often attribute the success to themselves or the group to which they belong (internal attribution – “I/We are really good at that”). If an individual fails at a task, they often attribute the failure to the situation (external attribution – “It was because of that thing”). However, if the same individual watches another (especially someone disliked or ‘other’ to the individual) succeed at a task, they often attribute the success to the situation (external attribution – “They just got lucky”, or “It was easier that time”), and when they watch another fail at a task, they often attribute the failure to the other person or the group to which they belong (internal attribution – “That shows they are stupid”).
Notice the complete reversal and the contradiction of opposite perspectives given the same evidence. The attribution and perspective is one way or the complete opposite depending on who does the task and whether or not they succeed.
The Hostile Media Effect:
Other experiments have confirmed that both sides of an issue view media coverage and moderation (judges, referees) as hostile to their side. For example, liberals are angry that the media is conservative, and conservatives are angry that the media is liberal. One study at Stanford showed American media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to pro-Israeli students and pro-Palestinian students, and both sides said the coverage was clearly biased in favor of the other side. Another study had students from Princeton and Dartmouth (a big East Coast rivalry) view a Princeton vs. Dartmouth football game, and each group saw more illegal moves on the other side and each said that the referees missed more of these for the other side.
If we consider perspective, anyone in the middle of an issue is to the opposite side of anyone on the edges. I have a card I like that shows children on a see-saw with one standing on the middle, and it reads “I know I am being fair when both sides accuse me of unfairness”. Unfortunately, this is often true in the world of competing and opposite perspectives.
Two of the greatest ancient thinkers on perspective are Heraclitus from ancient Greece and Zhuang Zi from ancient China. To consider perspective as an ethical concept we will be looking at the strikingly similar things that these two ancient thinkers say and then end with some insights of the German philosopher Hegel and discoveries of modern psychology.
HERACLITUS
Heraclitus’ most famous idea is a memorable image: you can never step in the same river twice. Just as a river is always flowing and changing, so is reality always flowing and changing, such that nothing stays exactly the same for any two moments. You step in a river, then step out, then step back in the same river, but it is no longer ‘the same river’. Heraclitus says this is also true of himself.
According to one source, Heraclitus was a king who abandoned the title to become a philosopher. This has been identified as a close resemblance to the story of the Buddha in India, and some scholars have argued that Heraclitus was in fact the Buddha from India while others have argued that the Buddha was in fact Heraclitus from Greece. Both thinkers were mythologized as a king who left powerful king position and became a sage, and both believe in the enlightening sun rising above the watery chaos of reality and human perception, but it is quite likely the two were not the same individual.
Heraclitus is a very skeptical thinker. This does not mean he saw all things as negative. He was convinced that wisdom and inquiring within show us that all is one big cosmic fire, and things that unify the community and the individual bring wholeness and true happiness. However, he believed that humans are often foolish and let their minds divide themselves from the whole and from each other such that their understandings are disjointed and ignorant.
This is very typical thinking of skeptics the world over. A positivist would say that there are specific truths that are certain and must be separated from the uncertain, specific goods that must be separated from the evil. A skeptic would say, like Heraclitus and the Daoists from China, that the truth and the good is the whole and the great One, and the tendency of the mind to divide the good and the true from the rest is the opposite of true understanding and wisdom.
Heraclitus was not a fan of experts and specialists, and he ridiculed the cultural leaders of his time. He says that the common people are completely asleep, but far more dangerous are the experts who have a small piece of the puzzle and say that they know the entire truth. He calls the poets (Hesiod and Homer) and the Pythagoreans frauds, and says that there are no permanent truths or laws other than the constant formation of watery chaos by the sun and cosmic fire.
Notice that this does not question the set up of the cosmos as we have studied it everywhere (and what the Persians gave to the Eastern Greek city states). Many often ask, “Why, then, should I listen to Heraclitus, since he is simply an expert?”. Heraclitus replies as most skeptics do: don’t take my word for it, but look into the world and within yourself and you will find that it is true.
The beginning of his book, which we still have, reads:
The word proves those first hearing it as numb to understanding as the ones who have not heard, yet all things follow from the word. Some, blundering with what I set before you, try in vain with empty talk to separate the essences of things and say how each thing truly is, and all the rest make no attempt. They no more see how they behave broad waking than remember clearly what they did asleep.
For wisdom, listen not to me but to the word and know that all is one. Those unmindful when they hear, for all they make of their intelligence, may be regarded as the walking dead. People dull their wits with gibberish, and cannot use their ears and eyes. Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know. Yet they lack the skill to listen or to speak. Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse. Things keep their secrets.
Now that we can travel anywhere, we need no longer take the poets and myth-makers for sure witnesses over disputed facts…If learning were a path of wisdom, those most learned about myth would not believe, with Hesiod, that Pallas in her wisdom gloats over the noise of battle. Pythagoras may well have been the deepest in his learning of all men, and still he claimed to recollect details of former lives, being in one a cucumber and one time a sardine.
Of all the words yet spoken, none comes quite as far as wisdom, which is the action of the mind beyond all things that may be said. Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things.
Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.
Time is a game played beautifully by children. Applicants for wisdom do what I have done: inquire within.
Since mindfulness, of all things, is the ground of being, to speak one’s true mind and to keep things known in common, serves all being, just as laws made clear uphold the city, yet with greater strength. Of all pronouncements of the law the one source is the word whereby we choose what helps true mindfulness prevail. Although we need the word to keep things known in common, people still treat specialists as if their nonsense were a form of wisdom. Fools seek counsel from the ones they doubt. People need not act and speak as if they were asleep. The waking have one world in common. Sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each into a darkness of his own.
Homer I deem worthy, in a trial by combat, of a good cudgeling…They raise their voices at stone idols as a man might argue with his doorpost. They have understood so little of the gods.
This is a psychological skepticism that is criticizing the human ability to know particular things as permanent that are able to be separated from the One and All (the cosmic fire). Only the All is permanent. All the other things are wandering temporal forms. The many beings arise from the energy of Being, and then they fall back into the fire and disappear. The cosmos resembles the chaos yet order of the human community centered on authority by spoken word. The LOGOS, the word/plan/order/command, is the formative force in the cosmos, the force of fire and light in the watery chaotic world. The cosmic fire speaks with its ever-present Logos (fire over air) and this brings about the firmament in the chaos (the earth rising out of the water). This process, however, does not bring about eternal or stable beings, but chains of beings that are in flux and interdependent.
This goes also for laws, which Heraclitus says have to be defended as if they were city walls. This is sometimes read that Heraclitus thought human law was important and had to be defended, which he did, but in fact he is also telling us that human laws are impermanent like walls made out of earth. They may seem eternal and permanent, but as any former citizen or city of the Persian empire knows, empires fall and impressive city states are overthrown and change hands. The eternal word of the fire forever forms the cosmos, but human speech and walls are temporary, and therefore take force and effort to maintain. As a skeptic, Heraclitus believes that the divisions made by the mind are mortal, not eternal, like the human body. Our knowledge and laws are impermanent like mounds of dirt. Heraclitus says many things to humble us, including pointing out our similarity to apes to put our achievements in perspective:
The language of a grown man, to the cosmic powers, sounds like baby-talk to men. To a god the wisdom of the wisest man sounds apish. Beauty in a human face looks apish too. In everything we have attained the excellence of apes. The ape apes find most beautiful looks apish to non-apes.
Heraclitus’ most famous idea is a memorable image: you can never step in the same river twice. Just as a river is always flowing and changing, so is reality always flowing and changing, such that nothing stays exactly the same for any two moments. You step in a river, then step out, then step back in the same river, but it is no longer ‘the same river’. Heraclitus says this is also true of the cosmos and the human individual. Fire also flows, and individual tongues of flame rise out of the fire and then return and integrate with the whole. Fire, like water, flows in a consistent manner that is always self-similar but never exactly the same twice. Heraclitus argued that the world is always in flux, as a single thing stable and eternal but as many things in constant change and tension. Paradoxically, changing constantly in the way that things do is the stability and being of things. Rivers flow, fire burns, life thrives, always in motion to be stable in what it is. He says, “Goat cheese congeals in wine if not well stirred”. It is an example of a motion keeping a mixture what it is. When the motion stops, the elements disintegrate. In the same way that stability is motion, opposites work together:
Heraclitus was one of the most famous thinkers of the Greek and Roman world. He was a big influence on Plato, though Plato is very much opposed to his thinking as we will see next week. Both Heraclitus and Plato were big influences on Christianity which initially flourished not in Israel but in Greece and Syria. If a primal speaking of the Word or Logos sounds familiar, Heraclitus was a central influence on the Greek and Roman stoics, and the author of the Gospel of John was almost certainly a Greek stoic writing in Roman times. The opening of the Gospel of John famously reads: the Logos/Word/Order was with God (Fire/Cosmos), and God spoke (“let there be light”) and light was separated from darkness.
It was only in the late 1700s and 1800s that German scholars rediscovered the presocratics and gave them attention and study. Before this time, Greek Philosophy was considered to have originated with Socrates (hence, “presocratics”) and most scholars were only versed in the surviving writings of Plato and Aristotle. Schleiermacher, one of the most famous and central protestant theologians and an opponent of Hegel, was a major force in bringing popularity to Heraclitus and a major translator of Plato. The philosopher Hegel, who we will study later, saw Heraclitus as a skeptic who is put in balance with Plato and other positivists by the course of history itself. Nietzsche, the great skeptical philosopher who we will also study, wrote that he felt closer to Heraclitus than any other thinker. Nietzsche believed, like Heraclitus, that we are proud of our learning and achievement but we are in fact little better than apes.
ZHUANG ZI
Zhuang Zi, the second patriarch of Daoism, lived from 370 to 301 BCE and worked as a manager in a lacquer warehouse, a large ‘factory’ for making vases, bowls and general wood products (like bento boxes). Other than this, we know little of his life other than his work. Daoist tradition holds that Zhuang Zi wrote the ‘inner chapters’ of his work, and that the anecdotes about him and other stories were added by his disciples, the early proto-Daoists.
In several places of the Zhuangzi, we see the idea of perspective presented the same way as we saw in Heraclitus. We are told that Mao Quiang and Lady Li were legendary beautiful women, but minnows were frightened of them when they gazed into a stream, and birds and deer were frightened by them when they walked through the forest. Heraclitus said that all human beauty and achievement is nothing but apes to the gods. Who knows what is beautiful, humans, birds, fish, or deer? Zhuangzi asks which of them knows what tastes good.
Often, the heroes of Zhuangzi are common people, woodcutters, fishermen, butchers, carpenters, ex-cons, and others of low status. In two places, Zhuangzi seems to exalt while mock Confucius who praises two sages who have had their legs cut off for committing crimes but have flocks of followers. Confucius is made to say that his own teachings are the lowly ways of humans, but these sages know the way of heaven, the Dao, and he would become their student if he only had the time. Confucius says to Wang Dai, who asks about one of the legless sages, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall (two organs in the body), Ch’u and Yueh (two warring kingdoms in China), but if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one.”
We are told that the emperor learns how to rule his kingdom by listening to Cook Ting, who tells the emperor that he has learned over a lifetime how to cut up oxen with his knife that never dulls because he knows instinctively where the spaces are. We hear about the woodcutter scolding his apprentice for saying that an old gnarled tree is useless, replying that what is useless in some ways is useful in others, such as a tree no one will cut down providing a shady spot for centuries.
When Zhuangzi is asked by Dung Kuo where the way of heaven is, Zhuangzi says it is everywhere. Dung Kuo asks him to be more specific, so Zhuangzi says it is in the ant, in grass, in tile shards, in piss and in shit, horrifying Dung Kuo progressively. Like the Laozi text, the Zhuangzi continuously suggests that we see the lowest things as beautiful, and avoid striving for and hoarding the things people desire to be happy and free.
In the first passage of the Zhuangzi, the mythical Peng bird is mocked by the dove and the cicada (a large grasshopper-like insect) for flying high and far in the sky. They have no frame of reference to understand such an act, as they die every winter and do not survive by migrating south. Several times Zhuangzi is told by other sages that his wisdom is foolish and useless, but Zhuangzi replies, much like the Dao text, that there are no things which are not foolish or useless, but this does not stop them from also being serious and useful.
The philosopher and logician Huizi tells Zhuangzi that a king gave him seeds of a huge gourd, but when he planted the seeds and grew huge gourds they were so large that he could not use them as containers so he smashed them. Zhuangzi tells him he should have used them as boats, and “Obviously you still have a lot of underbrush in your head!” Huizi tells Zhuangzi that he has a large gnarled tree, which is as useless as Zhuangzi’s reasoning. Zhuangzi replies that if no ax will cut it down, it makes a great shaded place for taking a nap.
Tzu Ch’i tells Tzu Yu that when the wind blows you can hear many sounds made by many things, including the whistling of trees and the wailing of hollow logs, but there is only one wind. He then says:
Words are not just wind. Words have something to say, but if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something, or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn’t there? What does the Way rely upon, such that we have true and false? What do words rely upon, such that we have right and wrong?...When the Way relies on little accomplishments and words rely on vain show, then we have the rights and wrongs of the Confucians and the Moists. What one calls right the other calls wrong, and what one calls wrong the other calls right, but if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, then the best thing to use is clarity. Everything has its ‘that’, and everything has its ‘this’. From the point of view of ‘that’, you cannot see it, but through understanding you can know it, so I say, ‘that’ comes out of ‘this’ and ‘this’ depends on ‘that’, which is to say ‘this’ and ‘that’ give birth to each other...Therefore the sage does not proceed in such a way, but illuminates all in the light of heaven. A sage too has a ‘this’ and a ‘that’, but a sage’s ‘that’ has a ‘this’, and a sage’s ‘this’ has a ‘that’. A sage’s ‘that’ has both a right and a wrong in it, and a sage’s ‘this’ too has both a right and a wrong in it, so does a sage still have a ‘this’ and ‘that’? A state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites is called the hinge of the Way. When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right then is a single endlessness and its wrong too is a single endlessness, so I say the best thing to use is clarity...
To wear out your brain trying to make things into one without realizing that they are all the same is called “three in the morning”. What do I mean by “three in the morning”? When the monkey trainer was handing out acorns, he said, “You get three in the morning and four at night.” This made all the monkeys furious. “Well then,” he said, “you get four in the morning and three at night.” The monkeys were all delighted. There was no change in the reality behind the words, and yet the monkeys responded with joy and anger. Let them, if they want to. The sage harmonizes with both right and wrong and rests in heaven, the equalizer.
Because right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured, and because the Way was injured, love became complete, but do such things as completion and injury really exist, or do they not?
Those who divide fail to divide. Those who discriminate fail to discriminate. What does this mean, you ask? The sage embraces things. Ordinary people discriminate among things and parade their discriminations in front of others. So I say, those who discriminate fail to see.
Nieh Ch’ueh asks Wang Ni about something everyone can agree to. Wang Ni replies:
If someone sleeps in a damp place, their back aches and he ends up half paralyzed, but is this true of a carp? If someone lives in a tree, they are terrified and shake with fright, but is this true of a monkey? Of these three creatures, which knows the proper place to live? We eat the flesh of grass-fed and grain-fed animals, deer eat grass, centipedes find snakes tasty, and hawks and falcons love mice. Of these four, who knows how food ought to taste? Monkeys pair with monkeys, deer go out with deer, and fish play around with fish. men claim that Mao-Ch’iang and Lady Li were beautiful, but if fish saw them they would dive to the bottom of the stream, if birds saw them they would fly away, and if deer saw them they would break into a run. Of these four, which knows the standard of beauty for the world?
In the most famous passage of the book, Zhuangzi dreamt that he was a butterfly and forgot that he was Zhuangzi. When he woke, he no longer knew whether he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is Zhuangzi.
Another famous metaphor used is that of the praying mantis that waved its arms angrily in front of an approaching carriage, unaware that it is incapable of stopping it. It suggests that we move in response to life rather than hold our ground taking pride in our own abilities.
You hide your boat in the ravine and your fish net in the swamp and tell yourself that they will be safe, but in the middle of the night a strong man shoulders them and carries them off, and in your stupidity you don’t know why it happened. You think you do right to hide little things in big ones, and yet they get away from you, but if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.
Jo of the North Sea said, “You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog. He’s limited by the space he lives in. You can’t discuss ice with a summer insect. He’s bound to a single season. You can’t discuss the Way with a cramped scholar. He’s shackled by his doctrines. Now you have come out beyond your banks and borders and have seen the great sea, so you realize your own insignificance. From now on it will be possible to talk to you about the Great Principle.
Jo of the North Sea said, “From the point of view of the Way, things have no nobility or meanness. From the point of view of things themselves, each regards itself as noble and other things as mean. From the point of view of common opinion, nobility and meanness are not determined by the individual himself. From the point of view of differences, if we regard a thing as big because there is a certain bigness to it, then among all the ten thousand things there are none that are not big. If we regard a thing as small because there is a certain smallness to it, then among the ten thousand things there are none that are not small. If we know that heaven and earth are tiny grains and the tip of a hair is a range of mountains, then we have perceived the law of difference. From the point of view of function, if we regard a thing as useful because there is a certain usefulness to it, then among all the ten thousand things there are none that are not useful. If we regard a thing as useless because there is a certain uselessness to it, then among the ten thousand things none that are not useless. If we know that east and west are mutually opposed but that one cannot do without the other, then we can estimate degree of use.
Notice that Confucius appears many times in the Zhuang Zi, used to argue AGAINST his own position and in favor of a Daoist position. Many times Confucius says that his own way is inferior to the Daoist way. Clearly, these are texts written by Daoists who appreciate the good in Confucianism but think their own school to be superior. For example, page 65, in the chapter ‘The Sign of Virtue Complete’, Confucius says of Wang T’ai, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall, Ch’u and Yueh (two warring kingdoms in China). But if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one.” I still use this contradiction of one and many to this day. It shows you much about how people make judgments and arguments.
HEGEL
Hegel, a German philosopher who lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s, believed that the history of the world and the process of thought in history and the individual was an evolution of perspective that works from opposite sides to bring itself to greater completion. One of the most famous parts of his Phenomenology of Spirit, a history of the evolution of thought, is the Master/Slave dialectic. This concept became very important for anti-sexism (like the feminist De Beauvoir), anti-racism (like Franz Fanon and Angela Davis) and anti-class thinkers (like Hegel’s student Karl Marx). These will be the last three topics for this class, the “Big Three” in universities since the sixties.
Hegel argues that as the self or identity (like a nation) comes into the world, it cannot understand how there can be others like itself that are not itself and so it tries to fight and kill its others. Then the self figures out that it does not have to kill its others and that it is more productive to enslave them (consider that the most selfish individual would tell everyone else “You are wrong” but the slightly smarter but still selfish individual would tell everyone else “That is just what I have been saying”, neither capable of tolerating opinions other than their own).
At first, the master is in the superior position. However, over time, the slave comes to do everything for the master and thus learns through experience while the master grows lazy and ignorant. The slave comes to realize that he can do things he never thought of for someone or something else, comes to grasp subjectivity and perspective, and thus overturns the master and becomes the greater and more highly developed master.
INSIGHTS OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY:
INTERNAL/EXTERNAL ATTRIBUTION & THE HOSTILE MEDIA EFFECT
Modern Psychology has learned much from experiments in recent years about how individuals tend to interpret reality. This teaches us many things about perspective that extend and develop what Heraclitus, Zhuang Zi and Hegel had to say.
Internal vs. External Attribution:
Many experiments have confirmed what is often called the actor/observer bias or internal vs. external attribution. If an individual succeeds at a task, they often attribute the success to themselves or the group to which they belong (internal attribution – “I/We are really good at that”). If an individual fails at a task, they often attribute the failure to the situation (external attribution – “It was because of that thing”). However, if the same individual watches another (especially someone disliked or ‘other’ to the individual) succeed at a task, they often attribute the success to the situation (external attribution – “They just got lucky”, or “It was easier that time”), and when they watch another fail at a task, they often attribute the failure to the other person or the group to which they belong (internal attribution – “That shows they are stupid”).
Notice the complete reversal and the contradiction of opposite perspectives given the same evidence. The attribution and perspective is one way or the complete opposite depending on who does the task and whether or not they succeed.
The Hostile Media Effect:
Other experiments have confirmed that both sides of an issue view media coverage and moderation (judges, referees) as hostile to their side. For example, liberals are angry that the media is conservative, and conservatives are angry that the media is liberal. One study at Stanford showed American media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to pro-Israeli students and pro-Palestinian students, and both sides said the coverage was clearly biased in favor of the other side. Another study had students from Princeton and Dartmouth (a big East Coast rivalry) view a Princeton vs. Dartmouth football game, and each group saw more illegal moves on the other side and each said that the referees missed more of these for the other side.
If we consider perspective, anyone in the middle of an issue is to the opposite side of anyone on the edges. I have a card I like that shows children on a see-saw with one standing on the middle, and it reads “I know I am being fair when both sides accuse me of unfairness”. Unfortunately, this is often true in the world of competing and opposite perspectives.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Ethics: Midterm Review
The Midterm Exam will consist of multiple choice questions and short answer questions covering central concepts.
Principle, Moral & Law: Kant
Kant is a positivist with regard to principle, morals and laws. Kant believes that reason should rule over desire (like the early cosmology above) and principles that are figured out by reason should always be followed regardless of the consequences (note that the opposite position can be found in the Utilitarian/consequentialist position below). Kant believes that one starts with good will (good in itself without question) and reasoned principles follow, and one should use this good beginning regardless of what consequences follow (though he says this naturally aims at and leads to good consequences even if this is secondary). Kant calls this “the categorical imperative” and “unconditional universal law”. The example of this is the guy with the knife who asks you “Where did your friend go?”, to whom one should not lie regardless of how easy a good end can come from lying. One must “Do one’s Duty” even if one goes down with the ship.
Virtue & Merit: Aristotle
Virtue is like principle in being a good beginning, but it is also a state or end to obtain. Also, virtue can be individual in a way that principle is collective and for the group. The idea is that one gains virtue, merit or “goodness”, and one can then use this ability/capacity to do good. A virtue-ethicist believes that becoming good or virtuous is more important than following principles or simply having good consequences. One should be virtuous even if it means breaking principles or bad results in a particular situation. The upside of this is a virtue centered ethic is not slave to principle or always seeking the best consequences. The downside is that one could believe that oneself or one’s group is “the virtuous” and ignore principles and consequences to the degree that it becomes a problem for oneself or others.
Consequence, Utility & End: Mill
Consequentialism or Utilitarianism argues that one should focus completely on the ends or results to determine if an act or person is good or bad. Specifically, one should try to maximize pleasure/happiness and minimize pain/suffering for everyone, taking a long view (not a short, 15 minute view). Epicurus was an early Greek consequentialist, and he is followed by the Utilitarian school of Bentham and Mill. While Bentham leaned towards the positive side of the ‘pleasure principle’, maximizing happiness, Mill leaned towards the negative, minimizing harm. Mill is the best known, and has had an important impact on modern thought and theory of law.
Mill’s Utilitarianism is opposite yet similar in many ways to Kant. Both see their side as fundamental and the other side as a secondary consequence. Kant says always follow principle and you will likely be happy, and Mill says always try for happiness and you will likely be principled. Both see their own primary focus as good in itself without the possibility of proof or question. Attacks on Utilitarianism include: Paradox of the bad as good example, Marx’s guess who gets to use who for whose happiness (the rich and elite), Happiness as unobtainable ideal, Environmental challenge to using the world for human purposes.
Balance & The Mean: Egyptian Wisdom & Confucius
Meaning and value work through pairs of opposites (good/evil, open/closed, individual/collective). A reoccurring theme of the world’s wisdom is that seeking the mean or middle between opposites is better than clinging to either side of an opposition. We can see some beautiful examples of this thinking in the Egyptian wisdom and Confucius passages. In the Egyptian wisdom, moderation of eating and drinking, luxury, and balancing one’s own interest with others are the clearest examples. Confucius offers particularly insightful sayings that call for a balance of one’s self with others for the cultivation of self and society.
Self Interest, Self Esteem and Drive: Nietzsche & Rand
Self is very much an end, though like Mill it can be phrased as a principle (focus on the ends).
While early ethics (in accord with ancient cosmology above) focused on the collective good, modern society has taken a turn towards the individual good. These two have always been complimentary, but devices and media have allowed us to be more enabled as individuals than ever before. Nietzsche and Rand both focus on individual achievement as the central end of life, but they are completely different as far as trusting judgment and truth. Nietzsche trusts no truth at all, calling all collectivism “slave morality” and performing his own misogyny as “Philosophy is always the personal confession of the author”. Rand believes her opinions to be objective, and calls her school the “Objectivists”. Rand’s idea of believing in yourself was repackaged as “self esteem” in the 1980s. While it is important to have self esteem, problems can arise when one trusts one’s own judgment and rejects all opposing judgments entirely.
Perspective & Intersubjectivity: Heraclitus & Zhuang Zi
A balance between thinking our views are completely right or wrong, truth or illusion, is the concept of perspective. The “objective” is very much the intersubjective, the similarity and difference of a group of subjective perspectives. Heraclitus and Chuang Tzu are both excellent thinkers to read to get good examples of this sort of thought. Both use perspectives of animals to show that collective human opinion is just that (pigs sleep in mud, birds sleep in trees). The concept of perspective is good for showing us that all views count, but they are also each limited and capable of progress and expansion.
List of Short Answer Concepts:
A) Kant and the guy with the butcher knife
B) Bentham’s maximum happiness vs. Mill’s minimum pain
C) Confucius’ Golden Rule
D) Confucius’ Right Mind over Right Act
E) Nietzsche’s Collective Morality is Slave Morality
F) Heraclitus and Zhuang Zi on Animal Perspectives
Principle, Moral & Law: Kant
Kant is a positivist with regard to principle, morals and laws. Kant believes that reason should rule over desire (like the early cosmology above) and principles that are figured out by reason should always be followed regardless of the consequences (note that the opposite position can be found in the Utilitarian/consequentialist position below). Kant believes that one starts with good will (good in itself without question) and reasoned principles follow, and one should use this good beginning regardless of what consequences follow (though he says this naturally aims at and leads to good consequences even if this is secondary). Kant calls this “the categorical imperative” and “unconditional universal law”. The example of this is the guy with the knife who asks you “Where did your friend go?”, to whom one should not lie regardless of how easy a good end can come from lying. One must “Do one’s Duty” even if one goes down with the ship.
Virtue & Merit: Aristotle
Virtue is like principle in being a good beginning, but it is also a state or end to obtain. Also, virtue can be individual in a way that principle is collective and for the group. The idea is that one gains virtue, merit or “goodness”, and one can then use this ability/capacity to do good. A virtue-ethicist believes that becoming good or virtuous is more important than following principles or simply having good consequences. One should be virtuous even if it means breaking principles or bad results in a particular situation. The upside of this is a virtue centered ethic is not slave to principle or always seeking the best consequences. The downside is that one could believe that oneself or one’s group is “the virtuous” and ignore principles and consequences to the degree that it becomes a problem for oneself or others.
Consequence, Utility & End: Mill
Consequentialism or Utilitarianism argues that one should focus completely on the ends or results to determine if an act or person is good or bad. Specifically, one should try to maximize pleasure/happiness and minimize pain/suffering for everyone, taking a long view (not a short, 15 minute view). Epicurus was an early Greek consequentialist, and he is followed by the Utilitarian school of Bentham and Mill. While Bentham leaned towards the positive side of the ‘pleasure principle’, maximizing happiness, Mill leaned towards the negative, minimizing harm. Mill is the best known, and has had an important impact on modern thought and theory of law.
Mill’s Utilitarianism is opposite yet similar in many ways to Kant. Both see their side as fundamental and the other side as a secondary consequence. Kant says always follow principle and you will likely be happy, and Mill says always try for happiness and you will likely be principled. Both see their own primary focus as good in itself without the possibility of proof or question. Attacks on Utilitarianism include: Paradox of the bad as good example, Marx’s guess who gets to use who for whose happiness (the rich and elite), Happiness as unobtainable ideal, Environmental challenge to using the world for human purposes.
Balance & The Mean: Egyptian Wisdom & Confucius
Meaning and value work through pairs of opposites (good/evil, open/closed, individual/collective). A reoccurring theme of the world’s wisdom is that seeking the mean or middle between opposites is better than clinging to either side of an opposition. We can see some beautiful examples of this thinking in the Egyptian wisdom and Confucius passages. In the Egyptian wisdom, moderation of eating and drinking, luxury, and balancing one’s own interest with others are the clearest examples. Confucius offers particularly insightful sayings that call for a balance of one’s self with others for the cultivation of self and society.
Self Interest, Self Esteem and Drive: Nietzsche & Rand
Self is very much an end, though like Mill it can be phrased as a principle (focus on the ends).
While early ethics (in accord with ancient cosmology above) focused on the collective good, modern society has taken a turn towards the individual good. These two have always been complimentary, but devices and media have allowed us to be more enabled as individuals than ever before. Nietzsche and Rand both focus on individual achievement as the central end of life, but they are completely different as far as trusting judgment and truth. Nietzsche trusts no truth at all, calling all collectivism “slave morality” and performing his own misogyny as “Philosophy is always the personal confession of the author”. Rand believes her opinions to be objective, and calls her school the “Objectivists”. Rand’s idea of believing in yourself was repackaged as “self esteem” in the 1980s. While it is important to have self esteem, problems can arise when one trusts one’s own judgment and rejects all opposing judgments entirely.
Perspective & Intersubjectivity: Heraclitus & Zhuang Zi
A balance between thinking our views are completely right or wrong, truth or illusion, is the concept of perspective. The “objective” is very much the intersubjective, the similarity and difference of a group of subjective perspectives. Heraclitus and Chuang Tzu are both excellent thinkers to read to get good examples of this sort of thought. Both use perspectives of animals to show that collective human opinion is just that (pigs sleep in mud, birds sleep in trees). The concept of perspective is good for showing us that all views count, but they are also each limited and capable of progress and expansion.
List of Short Answer Concepts:
A) Kant and the guy with the butcher knife
B) Bentham’s maximum happiness vs. Mill’s minimum pain
C) Confucius’ Golden Rule
D) Confucius’ Right Mind over Right Act
E) Nietzsche’s Collective Morality is Slave Morality
F) Heraclitus and Zhuang Zi on Animal Perspectives
Intro Philosophy: Confucius
Introduction to Chinese Philosophy
As we have seen in the course so far, systems of thought are not simply dogmatic answers, but cultures of questioning as much as answering. We saw Shamans go on vision quests to learn the sources of problems, and the Egyptian wisdom proverbs question authority, social status, consumption (over eating and drinking), expertise, and other aspects of human life and society. Now, we move to China and examine one of the foremost ethical geniuses of world history: Grand Master Kong, Kong Fu Zi, or as he is known to us, Confucius, the Latinized name transliterated by Catholic Jesuit missionaries who got to China in the 1600s and were astounded to find that the most influential philosopher in thousands of years of Chinese history has teachings very similar to Jesus. Confucius was dedicated to the idea that the individual can obtain fullness and happiness by placing others before oneself and by recognizing the desires of others as equal to the desires one has for oneself.
Before we start in on the schools and sages of the Chinese tradition, first we must cover the shift in transliteration of Chinese into Phoenician/Roman alphabetic characters. Today, we use the Pinyin system, adopted by the People’s Republic of China in 1958, adopted by other countries by the 1980s. It still has problems, but is vastly superior to the Wade-Giles system invented in Britain in the 1800s. When you read books from the 60s and 70s, you find the word Dao spelled ‘Tao’. This is because the Wade-Giles ‘t’ became ‘d’, and so the Daoist classic the ‘Tao Te Ching’ became today the ‘Dao De Jing’. What was once the capital city ‘Peiking’ is now ‘Beijing’. Important for Chinese Philosophy, while the Latinized names ‘Confucius’ and ‘Mencius’ remained the same, all other names changed, particularly the suffix for ‘master’, which was ‘Tzu’ but is today ‘Zi’ (pronounced something like ‘tzih’ with a soft ‘t’ in front). My favorite Chinese philosopher used to be ‘Chuang Tzu’, but is today ‘Zhuangzi’, or Master Zhuang. Similarly ‘Lao Tzu’ is today Laozi, Master Lao, and ‘Mo Tzu’ is Mozi, Master Mo. None of these names unfortunately appear in spell check either way. Luckily, Wikipedia is a good tool for dealing with this annoying situation, for if you search for a name either way, it sends you to the right page with the modern Pinyin name. I use this all the time, even though I have studied these guys for years.
Chinese Philosophy and The Period of the Hundred Philosophers/Schools
One would like to think that times of peace and prosperity are good for systems of thought, but times of civil war and disintegration of empires seems best for thinkers and systems of thought. This was true in ancient Egypt, India, Greece, and true in the golden age of ancient Chinese thought as well. Human beings only rethink problems when they are faced with them, and they are only able to teach new and countercultural solutions when the orthodoxy is weak and failing. In Confucius’ China there were great problems in the Warring States period (500 – 220 BCE) as many kings came and went, each calling themselves ‘mandated by heaven’. Interestingly, this same period is known as the golden age of Chinese thought, the Period of the Hundred Philosophies, also called the Period of the Hundred Schools and Period of the Hundred Sages.
As we have learned with ancient cosmology, the worldview of ancient Egypt and Persia that influenced all three of the axial age powers (ancient India, Greece and China), the world was thought to be built like a person and order was thought to be spoken downward from the heavens to the earth. In ancient China, it was said that if a king was good he would be supported and affirmed by the voice of heaven, which in speaking for a king gave the king the ‘mandate of heaven’ and allow him and the empire to prosper. This is very similar to most other polytheistic and monotheistic cultures of the ancient world. If the king does not follow the way of heaven, the gods or god stops speaking for the king, and someone else comes along and takes the king’s place. Each new king claims that the old king was ‘no longer spoken for’, so the populations of Greece, India etc. find themselves wondering: who or what kind of king exactly does heaven (the heavens) speak for, and why?
The Period of the Hundred Philosophers or Hundred Schools, as it is called, came with the Warring States Period after the Zhou dynasty crumbled and ended with the Han dynasty. While there may not have been a hundred separate schools, there were many schools of thought in this time but many and their teachings did not survive. The four most popular and famous philosophies were Confucianism, Daoism, Moism, and Legalism. The Han did not like the authoritarianism of the Legalists, who believed in harsh punishments and strict laws (likely because the Han were trying to win over the people at a prosperous time with many options), but they also did not like the communalism of the Moists who believed that war should be abolished and, like in Plato’s ideal republic, all property and family shared in common (likely because the Han were trying to hold down a prosperous and diverse empire).
The Han chose, in supporting education, scholarship and the arts, to patronize Confucianism and Daoism. Confucianism included Confucius (550 – 480 BCE), and the two central and early Confucians, Mencius (Men Zi, 370 – 290 BCE) and Xun Zi (312-230 BCE). Daoism included Lao Zi (600 – 500? BCE), supposed author of the Dao De Jing, and Zhuang Zi (370 – 300 BCE), though these two figures would not have known themselves to be ‘Daoists’ any more than Confucius would have known his followers would go on to found the central system of Chinese thought and politics.
Confucius and the Daoists we will examine next week proposed different solutions to this problem. The Daoists believed that going off into nature and rejecting human ways was best for cultivating the individual, while Confucius believed that the city, morality and study were best for cultivating human virtues. Thus, while Confucius and the Daoists were both questioners of individual desires and judgment, Confucius believed we should turn to civilization and cultivation to realize our true nature and the Daoists believed we should turn away from civilization and back to simplicity and the natural to realize our true nature.
Confucius, the Daoists and others speak of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ (Tianming) and the ‘Way’ (Dao) of heaven (Tiandao) but not of the Lord of Heaven. In India, Greece, China, and many other places, we can see that first many tribes and their gods were drawn into polytheistic (many gods) systems (as we focused on last week), and then after this these were drawn into monotheistic (one god) systems. We can see that many gods with human like desires become one god with human like desires, and then this one god becomes more and more abstract. We see the same pattern in China, where polytheism grew into a monotheistic and then abstract monist ‘Way’ or ‘Mandate’. Essentially, the All Lord becomes simply the mind of the universe or the ‘way’ or ‘order’ of things. The Zhou and earlier empires spoke of the Lord of Heaven, but Confucius and the Daoists in the Warring States period do not speak of the Lord of Heaven, but rather the Mandate and Way, showing us that, like the golden age of thought in ancient India and Greece, the revered thinkers were challenging the old tradition with philosophical monism that questioned the very shape of cosmology itself while extending it.
Confucius and his System of Thought
Just like we had with Egypt last week, Confucius (550-480 BCE) believes that the heart is the center of the human being. Notice that this ‘center’ is both mental and physical, fitting with cosmology, psychology and medical practices. Confucius is often understood as a champion of traditional order and ritual, as he is a proponent of civilization and education against the Daoists who are proponents of nature and meditation. However, it is clear from the Analects that Confucius believed it was more important to have right insight rather than right ritual or tradition, to have right intentions than right actions, i.e. ‘one’s heart is in the right place’.
Confucius was a master of ritual, an official position important for civil ceremonies and legal practice as they still are in courts of law and political processes today. Confucius believed that ritual was the strength of a society and one should perform the rituals, but he also believed that the worst thing was to do ritual without the proper intention. Confucius would say to a churchgoer today: it is more important to enjoy your church than to attend your church, for if you do not enjoy it whole heartedly you should not go. Consider the more secular example of giving a gift to a friend. If you give gifts so that you can borrow someone’s car, you corrupt the act of giving gifts, which should be done without expectations of repayment. It would be better, according to Confucius, to not give gifts to friends than to give them expecting repayment. Empty ritual, ritual simply for the motions rather than authentic love for and continuity with one’s society, is the worst thing, and thus it would be better in such a case to avoid false ritual and simply not perform the ritual at all. This point is often lost when people focus on Confucius’ great love of ritual and traditional culture.
A good example of this point is Analects 5.5 (and yes, these are standardized so no matter the translation, ‘5.5’ is always the fifth aphorism of the fifth chapter or book, just like the Bible and Koran are standardized with numbers): Confucius says that Ran Yong does not need eloquence (civilized speech) if he is not good. Another good example is 11.10, where Confucius is grieving ‘inappropriately’ for his favorite student, and tells his students who complain that genuine love and expression of emotion is more important than being polite or pleasant (right intention trumps right outer form). However, the best example is clearly 3.26, “Authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate”.
Because the Han and many later Chinese dynasties used Confucius as a voice supporting subordination to authority, and because Confucius does indeed say to obey the father and obey the chain of command, it is often overlooked that, just as intention is more important than tradition, unjust fathers and unjust states must be corrected. Many times Confucius says that truth must be spoken to power. How will things change if no one complains? In one passage, Confucius tells his students they should rise up and overthrow an unjust local prince. One should be subordinate to authority, but only just and good authority and tradition.
Confucius was a great champion of scholarship. Like Plato, Confucius believed that society should not be an aristocracy but rather a meritocracy. Confucius believed that scholarship was necessary for developing the heart, and the ‘gentleman’, Confucius’ word for the great person, developed love for others and knowledge through study of the classic texts. As scholars have pointed out, while it has often been translated ‘gentleMAN’, the term is gender neutral and Confucius was talking about the righteous rather than the nobly born, though the term was used before Confucius to refer exclusively to nobles before him. When we see the term in the text, it can also be translated as ‘the noble’, meaning anyone of either gender or social status who is an excellent human being.
Needless to say, Confucius’ Analects became one of the central texts for devoted study in Chinese society, and Confucius became an ancestor revered by devotees with ritual. Confucius is credited as the father of China’s civil service system, a system in which anyone who tested well, regardless of their position in society, was given a government position. This is similar to the development of types of scribes in Egypt. It is just such a development that we call ‘the middle class’, the individuals who through study and work can rise or fall in position to fit the many niches required to run large cities and systems. What Plato recognized in Egypt, Confucius was much more successful in implementing in Chinese society, though unfortunately only after his death. Confucius himself always hoped for a good position, but did not succeed in obtaining one during his own life though he did teach many students and was revered by many of them, including powerful nobility.
Just as Confucius taught that intention is more important than action, he hated scholarship for show without genuine love of learning and discovery of human nature. A good example is 4.9, ‘if a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to’. He also taught that we should balance learning with critical reflection, just as Buddha did, though Buddha, like Daoists, argued that study and critical reflection also needed meditation whereas Confucius saw study as superior to meditation. In the analects, Confucius says that studying without thinking is useless, but thinking without studying is dangerous, showing us that he does believe in individual insight but is traditional and believes in studying the traditional classics. He says, “The noble person is not a pot”, meaning that we are not containers for knowledge but should transform and reflect on what we study.
Confucius was a genius at seeing himself as equal to everyone, and he encouraged this attitude as the path to excellence itself. It was this point that the Jesuits found fascinating in comparing Confucianism to Christianity. Most of us have likely heard the ‘Golden Rule’, which is paraphrased from Confucius: ‘treat others the way you want to be treated’. While Jesus says, ‘don’t treat others how you do NOT want to be treated’, we can understand them to be one and the same. My favorite example is 7.22: Confucius says that if you put yourself with any two people at random, you can take their strengths as a model to follow and their faults as a warning. Clearly, Confucius believed that we all share the same set of strengths and faults, no matter how talented (or horrible) we happen to individually be or where our talents are. Confucius taught that NO ONE is perfect, not even himself, but there is good in everyone and everything, and we had best remember that we will never lose any of our connection to our fellow human beings if we only remember to look hard enough for it. Another excellent example from the Analects: “When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him…When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself”.
Mencius & Xunzi
Confucius had two followers who became the famous two poles of interpretation of the Analects. Mencius or Menzi, the second patriarch of Confucianism by popular consent in the tradition, 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, the third patriarch of Confucianism, a cynic and conservative, argued that the human being is essentially evil and without the rituals and tradition to hold our nature back we would be selfish and uncivilized. This remains the major split in Confucian thought, which accommodates both opinions while leaning more toward Menzi.
Menzi uses the famous example of a child about to fall into a well, arguing that anyone watching a child near a well would naturally grow anxious, even the most evil of people. Menzi argues that civilization began when people saw the corpses of relatives being attacked by animals and insects and felt compassion and grief. It is true that burial sites are some of the first archeological finds we have of human culture. Both Menzi and Xunzi, who attacks Menzi’s position later by name, use the example of little children to argue that human beings are good and human beings are evil. Menzi says that we know little children are good, before they are educated and taught manners. Xunzi says we know little children are evil, before they are educated and taught manners. Happy children are indeed lovable, and angry children are indeed immature. Many great thinkers, including Jesus and Nietzsche, teach us ‘be like a little child’, but we often tell others, ‘don’t be like a little child’. Opposite truths are often equally true.
Neo-Confucianism, Zhu Xi & Wang Yang Ming
About 1100 CE, Confucianism merged with Daoist and Buddhist ideas to form a Confucian revival called Neo-Confucianism by scholars today. Buddhist metaphors such as the pearl at the bottom of the muddy lake and the sun emerging from behind the clouds were reinterpreted in light of Confucianism and Daoism. The major figure of this revival was Zhu Xi (1130-1200 CE), who argued that all three traditions were teaching the same truth but that Confucius was the superior and primary teacher. The Neo-Confucians were trying to put Confucianism back into its primary place in Chinese culture after losing much ground to Buddhism over the previous five hundred years.
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. 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. While someone can say that they know something, we can judge whether they truly know or not by how they act. An example he uses is 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. 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.
Confucius’ Analects
Confucius shows us a brilliant development of questioning the individual and state that we have already seen develop elsewhere. When people gather, they can see each other and see groups, and are questioning and skeptical of themselves, other individuals, and group organizations.
First we look at the criticism of the individual, clearing the individual heart and putting oneself in tune with the Way. Then we look at criticism of the state, and see that the same shape applies.
Second, notice the passages where Confucius is criticizing sages who go to nature and do not study. Pay attention to this for next week, as these are early Daoists who have different opinions than Confucius about the cultivation of the human individual.
Criticism of the Individual:
(4.12) He who acts out of self interest arouses much resentment.
(5.5) ‘Ran Yong is good but not eloquent’- I don’t know if he is good, but he certainly does not need eloquence if he isn’t.
(11.10) Yan Hui died. ‘Master, this grief isn’t right’ C; ‘What sort of grief for such a man is right?
Criticism of Luxury:
(5.18) Master said: Zang Sunchen built a house for his tortoise, with pillars in the shape of mountains and rafters decorated with duckweed. Has he lost his mind?
(7.16) Even if you have only coarse grain, water and your arm for a pillow, you may still be happy. Riches and honors without justice are to me as fleeting clouds.
Criticism of Ritual without Virtue:
(3.26) authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate.
(4.13) If one cannot govern by observing ritual and showing compassion, what is the use of ritual?
Scholarship without greed or want of career:
(4.9) If a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to.
Haven’t seen someone who studies without any thought of career.
Good is at Hand (7.30) but no one is perfect (7.26)
Says again and again that he is not perfect, nor has he met perfection…
(7.33) My seal is as strong as anyone’s, but I have not succeeded in living nobly.
yet: ‘Is goodness out of reach? As soon as I long for goodness, goodness is at hand.’
(7.34) I make no claims to wisdom or to human perfection- how would I dare? Yet my aim never flags and I never tire of teaching people.
Disciple: ‘This is what we fail to follow.’
Criticism of Selfishness and Pride:
Whatever one’s position, you always share the faults and talents of everyone.
Thus, you have to work to compare self with others, as not intuitive.
You should compare yourself to others, reflect yourself through others no matter how you judge them to be, and work to get over selfishness and become compassionate and balanced (the way of heaven, opposed to selfish desire for lower).
Confucius values joining all of humanity, not being selfish.
(7.22) Put me with any two people at random- they will invariably have something to teach me. I can take their qualities as a model and their defects as a warning.
(9.8) Am I knowledgeable? No. A Bumpkin asked me a question, and my mind went blank. Still, I hammered at his problem from all sides, till I worked out something.
(1.16) Don’t worry if others don’t recognize your merits: worry that you may not
recognize theirs.
(2.13) Practice what you preach.
(4.17) When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him. When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself.
(5.12) Zigong ‘I do not want to do to others…’ C: you’re not that far yet…
(11.4) Yan Hui is of no help to me: whatever I say pleases him.
(9.28) It is in the cold of winter that you see how green the pines and cypresses are.
(15.23) A gentleman does not approve of a person because he expresses a certain opinion, nor does he reject an opinion because it is expressed by a particular person.
(15.24) ‘Single word to guide one’s life?’ C- Reciprocity: do not do to others…
(19.21) A gentleman’s mistake is like an eclipse of the sun or moon.
When happens, everyone notices, and when corrected everyone looks up in admiration.
Good as Unknown, Beyond Judgment and Opinion:
(9.17) The master stood by a river and said: ‘Everything flows like this, without ceasing’
(note Heraclitus)
(2.17) Master said: Knowledge is to take the known as known and unknown as unknown.
(pre 3.14) (quoted by Wittgenstein) About what we don’t know we must keep silent.
(5.13) Our master’s views on culture can be gathered, but you can’t hear his views on the nature of things or the Way of Heaven.
(7.21) The master never talked of miracles, violence, disorders, spirits.
(7.35) Confucius is ill, student: ‘pray to spirits above & spirits below’
Con: In that case, I have been praying for a long time already.
(note not a rejection of the spiritual, but a knowing unknowing)
(11.12) Asked how to serve spirits, says: You have not yet learned how to serve man, how could you learn to serve the spirits?
Death: You do not yet know life, how can you learn about death?
Middle Way: (Buddha, Heraclitus)
(6.17) Who would leave a house without using the door? Why do people seek to walk outside the way?
(6.29) The power of the middle way is supreme, and yet it is not found among the people anymore. (notice restore the golden age)
Reform the old, bring in the new:
(2.11) He who by revising the old knows the new is fit to be a teacher.
(2.12) A gentleman is not a pot.
(Pre 3.4 cut off) each generation has added and dropped from the ritual, so we know what people will look like 100 generations from now (they will add and drop)
In pursuit of virtue, do not be afraid to outpace your teacher (15.36)
Criticism of the State:
Confucius is not a compliant sheep when it comes to the state.
His criticism of individual judgment and pride is matched by criticism of the state.
(11.17) Rich student tyrant: C- attach him: you have my permission.
Sees private interest trapped in the state (nobles disunifying Zhou court, into warring states).
(13.15) asked by Duke: Is there a single maxim/rule that could ruin a country?
C- The prince should never suffer contradiction. When in error, prince should be told.
(13.24) ‘What if everyone likes a man?’ C- Not enough
‘What if everyone hates him?’ C- Not enough: Good should love, bad should hate.
(13.20) ‘present politicians?’ Those puny creatures are not even worth mentioning.
(9.26) One cannot deny the humblest man his free will.
Criticism of Daoism and its sages retreat into Nature:
Just as Confucius appears in Daoist texts as an ally but inferior rival, so do proto-Daoist sages in the Analects. This is very much like Buddha vs. the Jains, in that other group isn’t mentioned by name, but found not to be in balance but extremists. Daoists wanted to escape into nature, while Confucians believe in the value of the city and embracing not escaping humankind. Believe in balance, like Daoists, but seek to balance the city, not escape into the perfect balance of nature from the city. Daoists are more skeptical of society.
(18.16) One cannot associate with birds and beasts. If the world were following the way, I would not have to reform it.
It is not right to be a hermit, and discard human relationships to preserve one’s purity.
(18.18) I do things differently. I follow no rigid prescriptions on what should or should not be done.
(4.1) It is beautiful to live amidst humanity. It is hardly wise to live in a place destitute of people (don’t be a Daoist hermit).
Criticism of Meditation (D and later B), to Confucians not as good as study:
(15.31) I once to meditate went without food for a day and a night without sleep.
It was no use. It is better to study.
Numerous criticisms of inactivity, inferior to activity, study and effort:
(2.1): At 15, I set my mind upon learning. At 30, I took my stand. At 40 I had no doubts. At 50, I knew the will (mandate) of heaven. At 60, my ear was attuned. At 70, I follow all the desires of my heart without breaking any rule.
(4.2) A good man rests in his humanity. A wise man profits from his humanity.
As we have seen in the course so far, systems of thought are not simply dogmatic answers, but cultures of questioning as much as answering. We saw Shamans go on vision quests to learn the sources of problems, and the Egyptian wisdom proverbs question authority, social status, consumption (over eating and drinking), expertise, and other aspects of human life and society. Now, we move to China and examine one of the foremost ethical geniuses of world history: Grand Master Kong, Kong Fu Zi, or as he is known to us, Confucius, the Latinized name transliterated by Catholic Jesuit missionaries who got to China in the 1600s and were astounded to find that the most influential philosopher in thousands of years of Chinese history has teachings very similar to Jesus. Confucius was dedicated to the idea that the individual can obtain fullness and happiness by placing others before oneself and by recognizing the desires of others as equal to the desires one has for oneself.
Before we start in on the schools and sages of the Chinese tradition, first we must cover the shift in transliteration of Chinese into Phoenician/Roman alphabetic characters. Today, we use the Pinyin system, adopted by the People’s Republic of China in 1958, adopted by other countries by the 1980s. It still has problems, but is vastly superior to the Wade-Giles system invented in Britain in the 1800s. When you read books from the 60s and 70s, you find the word Dao spelled ‘Tao’. This is because the Wade-Giles ‘t’ became ‘d’, and so the Daoist classic the ‘Tao Te Ching’ became today the ‘Dao De Jing’. What was once the capital city ‘Peiking’ is now ‘Beijing’. Important for Chinese Philosophy, while the Latinized names ‘Confucius’ and ‘Mencius’ remained the same, all other names changed, particularly the suffix for ‘master’, which was ‘Tzu’ but is today ‘Zi’ (pronounced something like ‘tzih’ with a soft ‘t’ in front). My favorite Chinese philosopher used to be ‘Chuang Tzu’, but is today ‘Zhuangzi’, or Master Zhuang. Similarly ‘Lao Tzu’ is today Laozi, Master Lao, and ‘Mo Tzu’ is Mozi, Master Mo. None of these names unfortunately appear in spell check either way. Luckily, Wikipedia is a good tool for dealing with this annoying situation, for if you search for a name either way, it sends you to the right page with the modern Pinyin name. I use this all the time, even though I have studied these guys for years.
Chinese Philosophy and The Period of the Hundred Philosophers/Schools
One would like to think that times of peace and prosperity are good for systems of thought, but times of civil war and disintegration of empires seems best for thinkers and systems of thought. This was true in ancient Egypt, India, Greece, and true in the golden age of ancient Chinese thought as well. Human beings only rethink problems when they are faced with them, and they are only able to teach new and countercultural solutions when the orthodoxy is weak and failing. In Confucius’ China there were great problems in the Warring States period (500 – 220 BCE) as many kings came and went, each calling themselves ‘mandated by heaven’. Interestingly, this same period is known as the golden age of Chinese thought, the Period of the Hundred Philosophies, also called the Period of the Hundred Schools and Period of the Hundred Sages.
As we have learned with ancient cosmology, the worldview of ancient Egypt and Persia that influenced all three of the axial age powers (ancient India, Greece and China), the world was thought to be built like a person and order was thought to be spoken downward from the heavens to the earth. In ancient China, it was said that if a king was good he would be supported and affirmed by the voice of heaven, which in speaking for a king gave the king the ‘mandate of heaven’ and allow him and the empire to prosper. This is very similar to most other polytheistic and monotheistic cultures of the ancient world. If the king does not follow the way of heaven, the gods or god stops speaking for the king, and someone else comes along and takes the king’s place. Each new king claims that the old king was ‘no longer spoken for’, so the populations of Greece, India etc. find themselves wondering: who or what kind of king exactly does heaven (the heavens) speak for, and why?
The Period of the Hundred Philosophers or Hundred Schools, as it is called, came with the Warring States Period after the Zhou dynasty crumbled and ended with the Han dynasty. While there may not have been a hundred separate schools, there were many schools of thought in this time but many and their teachings did not survive. The four most popular and famous philosophies were Confucianism, Daoism, Moism, and Legalism. The Han did not like the authoritarianism of the Legalists, who believed in harsh punishments and strict laws (likely because the Han were trying to win over the people at a prosperous time with many options), but they also did not like the communalism of the Moists who believed that war should be abolished and, like in Plato’s ideal republic, all property and family shared in common (likely because the Han were trying to hold down a prosperous and diverse empire).
The Han chose, in supporting education, scholarship and the arts, to patronize Confucianism and Daoism. Confucianism included Confucius (550 – 480 BCE), and the two central and early Confucians, Mencius (Men Zi, 370 – 290 BCE) and Xun Zi (312-230 BCE). Daoism included Lao Zi (600 – 500? BCE), supposed author of the Dao De Jing, and Zhuang Zi (370 – 300 BCE), though these two figures would not have known themselves to be ‘Daoists’ any more than Confucius would have known his followers would go on to found the central system of Chinese thought and politics.
Confucius and the Daoists we will examine next week proposed different solutions to this problem. The Daoists believed that going off into nature and rejecting human ways was best for cultivating the individual, while Confucius believed that the city, morality and study were best for cultivating human virtues. Thus, while Confucius and the Daoists were both questioners of individual desires and judgment, Confucius believed we should turn to civilization and cultivation to realize our true nature and the Daoists believed we should turn away from civilization and back to simplicity and the natural to realize our true nature.
Confucius, the Daoists and others speak of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ (Tianming) and the ‘Way’ (Dao) of heaven (Tiandao) but not of the Lord of Heaven. In India, Greece, China, and many other places, we can see that first many tribes and their gods were drawn into polytheistic (many gods) systems (as we focused on last week), and then after this these were drawn into monotheistic (one god) systems. We can see that many gods with human like desires become one god with human like desires, and then this one god becomes more and more abstract. We see the same pattern in China, where polytheism grew into a monotheistic and then abstract monist ‘Way’ or ‘Mandate’. Essentially, the All Lord becomes simply the mind of the universe or the ‘way’ or ‘order’ of things. The Zhou and earlier empires spoke of the Lord of Heaven, but Confucius and the Daoists in the Warring States period do not speak of the Lord of Heaven, but rather the Mandate and Way, showing us that, like the golden age of thought in ancient India and Greece, the revered thinkers were challenging the old tradition with philosophical monism that questioned the very shape of cosmology itself while extending it.
Confucius and his System of Thought
Just like we had with Egypt last week, Confucius (550-480 BCE) believes that the heart is the center of the human being. Notice that this ‘center’ is both mental and physical, fitting with cosmology, psychology and medical practices. Confucius is often understood as a champion of traditional order and ritual, as he is a proponent of civilization and education against the Daoists who are proponents of nature and meditation. However, it is clear from the Analects that Confucius believed it was more important to have right insight rather than right ritual or tradition, to have right intentions than right actions, i.e. ‘one’s heart is in the right place’.
Confucius was a master of ritual, an official position important for civil ceremonies and legal practice as they still are in courts of law and political processes today. Confucius believed that ritual was the strength of a society and one should perform the rituals, but he also believed that the worst thing was to do ritual without the proper intention. Confucius would say to a churchgoer today: it is more important to enjoy your church than to attend your church, for if you do not enjoy it whole heartedly you should not go. Consider the more secular example of giving a gift to a friend. If you give gifts so that you can borrow someone’s car, you corrupt the act of giving gifts, which should be done without expectations of repayment. It would be better, according to Confucius, to not give gifts to friends than to give them expecting repayment. Empty ritual, ritual simply for the motions rather than authentic love for and continuity with one’s society, is the worst thing, and thus it would be better in such a case to avoid false ritual and simply not perform the ritual at all. This point is often lost when people focus on Confucius’ great love of ritual and traditional culture.
A good example of this point is Analects 5.5 (and yes, these are standardized so no matter the translation, ‘5.5’ is always the fifth aphorism of the fifth chapter or book, just like the Bible and Koran are standardized with numbers): Confucius says that Ran Yong does not need eloquence (civilized speech) if he is not good. Another good example is 11.10, where Confucius is grieving ‘inappropriately’ for his favorite student, and tells his students who complain that genuine love and expression of emotion is more important than being polite or pleasant (right intention trumps right outer form). However, the best example is clearly 3.26, “Authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate”.
Because the Han and many later Chinese dynasties used Confucius as a voice supporting subordination to authority, and because Confucius does indeed say to obey the father and obey the chain of command, it is often overlooked that, just as intention is more important than tradition, unjust fathers and unjust states must be corrected. Many times Confucius says that truth must be spoken to power. How will things change if no one complains? In one passage, Confucius tells his students they should rise up and overthrow an unjust local prince. One should be subordinate to authority, but only just and good authority and tradition.
Confucius was a great champion of scholarship. Like Plato, Confucius believed that society should not be an aristocracy but rather a meritocracy. Confucius believed that scholarship was necessary for developing the heart, and the ‘gentleman’, Confucius’ word for the great person, developed love for others and knowledge through study of the classic texts. As scholars have pointed out, while it has often been translated ‘gentleMAN’, the term is gender neutral and Confucius was talking about the righteous rather than the nobly born, though the term was used before Confucius to refer exclusively to nobles before him. When we see the term in the text, it can also be translated as ‘the noble’, meaning anyone of either gender or social status who is an excellent human being.
Needless to say, Confucius’ Analects became one of the central texts for devoted study in Chinese society, and Confucius became an ancestor revered by devotees with ritual. Confucius is credited as the father of China’s civil service system, a system in which anyone who tested well, regardless of their position in society, was given a government position. This is similar to the development of types of scribes in Egypt. It is just such a development that we call ‘the middle class’, the individuals who through study and work can rise or fall in position to fit the many niches required to run large cities and systems. What Plato recognized in Egypt, Confucius was much more successful in implementing in Chinese society, though unfortunately only after his death. Confucius himself always hoped for a good position, but did not succeed in obtaining one during his own life though he did teach many students and was revered by many of them, including powerful nobility.
Just as Confucius taught that intention is more important than action, he hated scholarship for show without genuine love of learning and discovery of human nature. A good example is 4.9, ‘if a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to’. He also taught that we should balance learning with critical reflection, just as Buddha did, though Buddha, like Daoists, argued that study and critical reflection also needed meditation whereas Confucius saw study as superior to meditation. In the analects, Confucius says that studying without thinking is useless, but thinking without studying is dangerous, showing us that he does believe in individual insight but is traditional and believes in studying the traditional classics. He says, “The noble person is not a pot”, meaning that we are not containers for knowledge but should transform and reflect on what we study.
Confucius was a genius at seeing himself as equal to everyone, and he encouraged this attitude as the path to excellence itself. It was this point that the Jesuits found fascinating in comparing Confucianism to Christianity. Most of us have likely heard the ‘Golden Rule’, which is paraphrased from Confucius: ‘treat others the way you want to be treated’. While Jesus says, ‘don’t treat others how you do NOT want to be treated’, we can understand them to be one and the same. My favorite example is 7.22: Confucius says that if you put yourself with any two people at random, you can take their strengths as a model to follow and their faults as a warning. Clearly, Confucius believed that we all share the same set of strengths and faults, no matter how talented (or horrible) we happen to individually be or where our talents are. Confucius taught that NO ONE is perfect, not even himself, but there is good in everyone and everything, and we had best remember that we will never lose any of our connection to our fellow human beings if we only remember to look hard enough for it. Another excellent example from the Analects: “When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him…When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself”.
Mencius & Xunzi
Confucius had two followers who became the famous two poles of interpretation of the Analects. Mencius or Menzi, the second patriarch of Confucianism by popular consent in the tradition, 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, the third patriarch of Confucianism, a cynic and conservative, argued that the human being is essentially evil and without the rituals and tradition to hold our nature back we would be selfish and uncivilized. This remains the major split in Confucian thought, which accommodates both opinions while leaning more toward Menzi.
Menzi uses the famous example of a child about to fall into a well, arguing that anyone watching a child near a well would naturally grow anxious, even the most evil of people. Menzi argues that civilization began when people saw the corpses of relatives being attacked by animals and insects and felt compassion and grief. It is true that burial sites are some of the first archeological finds we have of human culture. Both Menzi and Xunzi, who attacks Menzi’s position later by name, use the example of little children to argue that human beings are good and human beings are evil. Menzi says that we know little children are good, before they are educated and taught manners. Xunzi says we know little children are evil, before they are educated and taught manners. Happy children are indeed lovable, and angry children are indeed immature. Many great thinkers, including Jesus and Nietzsche, teach us ‘be like a little child’, but we often tell others, ‘don’t be like a little child’. Opposite truths are often equally true.
Neo-Confucianism, Zhu Xi & Wang Yang Ming
About 1100 CE, Confucianism merged with Daoist and Buddhist ideas to form a Confucian revival called Neo-Confucianism by scholars today. Buddhist metaphors such as the pearl at the bottom of the muddy lake and the sun emerging from behind the clouds were reinterpreted in light of Confucianism and Daoism. The major figure of this revival was Zhu Xi (1130-1200 CE), who argued that all three traditions were teaching the same truth but that Confucius was the superior and primary teacher. The Neo-Confucians were trying to put Confucianism back into its primary place in Chinese culture after losing much ground to Buddhism over the previous five hundred years.
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. 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. While someone can say that they know something, we can judge whether they truly know or not by how they act. An example he uses is 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. 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.
Confucius’ Analects
Confucius shows us a brilliant development of questioning the individual and state that we have already seen develop elsewhere. When people gather, they can see each other and see groups, and are questioning and skeptical of themselves, other individuals, and group organizations.
First we look at the criticism of the individual, clearing the individual heart and putting oneself in tune with the Way. Then we look at criticism of the state, and see that the same shape applies.
Second, notice the passages where Confucius is criticizing sages who go to nature and do not study. Pay attention to this for next week, as these are early Daoists who have different opinions than Confucius about the cultivation of the human individual.
Criticism of the Individual:
(4.12) He who acts out of self interest arouses much resentment.
(5.5) ‘Ran Yong is good but not eloquent’- I don’t know if he is good, but he certainly does not need eloquence if he isn’t.
(11.10) Yan Hui died. ‘Master, this grief isn’t right’ C; ‘What sort of grief for such a man is right?
Criticism of Luxury:
(5.18) Master said: Zang Sunchen built a house for his tortoise, with pillars in the shape of mountains and rafters decorated with duckweed. Has he lost his mind?
(7.16) Even if you have only coarse grain, water and your arm for a pillow, you may still be happy. Riches and honors without justice are to me as fleeting clouds.
Criticism of Ritual without Virtue:
(3.26) authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate.
(4.13) If one cannot govern by observing ritual and showing compassion, what is the use of ritual?
Scholarship without greed or want of career:
(4.9) If a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to.
Haven’t seen someone who studies without any thought of career.
Good is at Hand (7.30) but no one is perfect (7.26)
Says again and again that he is not perfect, nor has he met perfection…
(7.33) My seal is as strong as anyone’s, but I have not succeeded in living nobly.
yet: ‘Is goodness out of reach? As soon as I long for goodness, goodness is at hand.’
(7.34) I make no claims to wisdom or to human perfection- how would I dare? Yet my aim never flags and I never tire of teaching people.
Disciple: ‘This is what we fail to follow.’
Criticism of Selfishness and Pride:
Whatever one’s position, you always share the faults and talents of everyone.
Thus, you have to work to compare self with others, as not intuitive.
You should compare yourself to others, reflect yourself through others no matter how you judge them to be, and work to get over selfishness and become compassionate and balanced (the way of heaven, opposed to selfish desire for lower).
Confucius values joining all of humanity, not being selfish.
(7.22) Put me with any two people at random- they will invariably have something to teach me. I can take their qualities as a model and their defects as a warning.
(9.8) Am I knowledgeable? No. A Bumpkin asked me a question, and my mind went blank. Still, I hammered at his problem from all sides, till I worked out something.
(1.16) Don’t worry if others don’t recognize your merits: worry that you may not
recognize theirs.
(2.13) Practice what you preach.
(4.17) When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him. When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself.
(5.12) Zigong ‘I do not want to do to others…’ C: you’re not that far yet…
(11.4) Yan Hui is of no help to me: whatever I say pleases him.
(9.28) It is in the cold of winter that you see how green the pines and cypresses are.
(15.23) A gentleman does not approve of a person because he expresses a certain opinion, nor does he reject an opinion because it is expressed by a particular person.
(15.24) ‘Single word to guide one’s life?’ C- Reciprocity: do not do to others…
(19.21) A gentleman’s mistake is like an eclipse of the sun or moon.
When happens, everyone notices, and when corrected everyone looks up in admiration.
Good as Unknown, Beyond Judgment and Opinion:
(9.17) The master stood by a river and said: ‘Everything flows like this, without ceasing’
(note Heraclitus)
(2.17) Master said: Knowledge is to take the known as known and unknown as unknown.
(pre 3.14) (quoted by Wittgenstein) About what we don’t know we must keep silent.
(5.13) Our master’s views on culture can be gathered, but you can’t hear his views on the nature of things or the Way of Heaven.
(7.21) The master never talked of miracles, violence, disorders, spirits.
(7.35) Confucius is ill, student: ‘pray to spirits above & spirits below’
Con: In that case, I have been praying for a long time already.
(note not a rejection of the spiritual, but a knowing unknowing)
(11.12) Asked how to serve spirits, says: You have not yet learned how to serve man, how could you learn to serve the spirits?
Death: You do not yet know life, how can you learn about death?
Middle Way: (Buddha, Heraclitus)
(6.17) Who would leave a house without using the door? Why do people seek to walk outside the way?
(6.29) The power of the middle way is supreme, and yet it is not found among the people anymore. (notice restore the golden age)
Reform the old, bring in the new:
(2.11) He who by revising the old knows the new is fit to be a teacher.
(2.12) A gentleman is not a pot.
(Pre 3.4 cut off) each generation has added and dropped from the ritual, so we know what people will look like 100 generations from now (they will add and drop)
In pursuit of virtue, do not be afraid to outpace your teacher (15.36)
Criticism of the State:
Confucius is not a compliant sheep when it comes to the state.
His criticism of individual judgment and pride is matched by criticism of the state.
(11.17) Rich student tyrant: C- attach him: you have my permission.
Sees private interest trapped in the state (nobles disunifying Zhou court, into warring states).
(13.15) asked by Duke: Is there a single maxim/rule that could ruin a country?
C- The prince should never suffer contradiction. When in error, prince should be told.
(13.24) ‘What if everyone likes a man?’ C- Not enough
‘What if everyone hates him?’ C- Not enough: Good should love, bad should hate.
(13.20) ‘present politicians?’ Those puny creatures are not even worth mentioning.
(9.26) One cannot deny the humblest man his free will.
Criticism of Daoism and its sages retreat into Nature:
Just as Confucius appears in Daoist texts as an ally but inferior rival, so do proto-Daoist sages in the Analects. This is very much like Buddha vs. the Jains, in that other group isn’t mentioned by name, but found not to be in balance but extremists. Daoists wanted to escape into nature, while Confucians believe in the value of the city and embracing not escaping humankind. Believe in balance, like Daoists, but seek to balance the city, not escape into the perfect balance of nature from the city. Daoists are more skeptical of society.
(18.16) One cannot associate with birds and beasts. If the world were following the way, I would not have to reform it.
It is not right to be a hermit, and discard human relationships to preserve one’s purity.
(18.18) I do things differently. I follow no rigid prescriptions on what should or should not be done.
(4.1) It is beautiful to live amidst humanity. It is hardly wise to live in a place destitute of people (don’t be a Daoist hermit).
Criticism of Meditation (D and later B), to Confucians not as good as study:
(15.31) I once to meditate went without food for a day and a night without sleep.
It was no use. It is better to study.
Numerous criticisms of inactivity, inferior to activity, study and effort:
(2.1): At 15, I set my mind upon learning. At 30, I took my stand. At 40 I had no doubts. At 50, I knew the will (mandate) of heaven. At 60, my ear was attuned. At 70, I follow all the desires of my heart without breaking any rule.
(4.2) A good man rests in his humanity. A wise man profits from his humanity.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Social & Political Philosophy: The American & French Revolutions
Now that we have examined many political philosophers writing on the subjects of government, rights, freedom, and checks and balances, it is time to examine the American Revolution, Thomas Paine and the American Constitution in light of what we have learned so far. Next time we will be looking at the French Revolution which started just as the American Revolution was concluding.
The American Revolution
As we know, in the early 1770s the original thirteen colonies rejected British rule and banded together to fight for independence. At first, the colonies planned to remain independent of each other, but through the process of the revolution and formation of the constitution the thirteen colonies became a federal republic that agreed to a system of checks and balances much like those called for by Machiavelli, Locke and Mill. The British called the colonists terrorists and insurgents, while the colonists called themselves freedom fighters. The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, the British renounced claims to the colonies in 1783, and the Constitution was ratified in 1788 just as the French Revolution was beginning.
While Americans celebrate the Revolution and Constitution as the triumph of freedom, it is important to recognize, as we have all along in the class, that the founding fathers were not in favor of absolute democracy. They were particularly afraid of mob rule, and so like most of the thinkers we have covered so far they wished to maintain aristocratic control of the people not to mention slaves and indentured servants. In the 1940s and 1950s, the John Birch Society (a foremost supporter of McCarthy’s anti-communism hearings) declared openly that America is NOT a democracy, but a republic. Consider that America and the Soviet Union pointed at each other during the cold war and accused the other of deceptively claiming to be a government of the people for the people. Both China and America claim to be republics that represent the people. The words Communism and Democracy mean ‘of the people’, but differences aside, both have had struggles with the age-old problem of authority. The struggles over the American Constitution and its Bill of Rights reflect this.
Because many of the thirteen colonies were afraid of joining a union for the same reasons that they were afraid of British rule, the American Constitution was an exchange of checks and balances. In exchange for the Bill of Rights, which was primarily concerned with the independence and freedom of the colonies and not of individuals as it is understood today, a strong centralized federal government was established. Today, there are still problems with this exchange. Texas, Alaska, Arizona, and other states have active movements for secession from the union due to perceived abuses and excesses of the federal government, just as the thirteen colonies participated in a movement for secession from Britain. Recently, Arizona has considered legislation that would allow the Arizona state assembly to veto federal laws. While supporters have argued that this is in the original spirit of the Constitution (state independence), others argue that this directly violates the Constitution and its imposed exchange of balanced authority (federal law and Bill of Rights trumps state law).
Locke and Rousseau were particularly influential on the American Revolution, the Constitution, and the founding fathers. Locke argued that the state must protect the individual’s right to life, liberty and property. Rousseau argued that the state must preserve the liberty of the individual or the people have a right to rebel and overthrow the government. The Americans who were reading and being influenced by these thinkers applied these ideas to their grievances with Britain and its efforts to use the colonies and its taxes to wage wars in Europe and across the globe. Notice here that right wing Americans will point to the Tea Party (as the Tea Partiers do today) and say that the revolution was about the right to property and fair taxation, while left wing Americans will point out that people today have taxation WITH representation and that the majority of taxes go to military expenses as they did for Britain in the period of the Revolution.
However one interprets it today, Americans felt that Britain was violating the social contract by not preserving the American rights to liberty and property. Remember Rousseau’s metaphor of the bandit with the gun. If someone comes up to you with a gun and demands your property, you have no obligation to tell them the truth about where you are hiding your money or duty to surrender your property. Thus, according to Rousseau’s argument for the Americans, if the British Monarchy was unjustly infringing on the rights of life, liberty and property through the use of force and intimidation, the American rebellion was not unjust in resisting the British monarchy with the use of force and intimidation. This is why the British called the founding fathers terrorists and the Americans called them freedom fighters. Consider that when the Americans defeated the British, they were left, like Britain from previous wars, with substantial war debt, and when the colonies tried to collect taxes to pay the debt there were rebellions by American citizens against the colonial governments.
While the revolution is often pictured as a brilliant transition from monarchy to democracy, it should be remembered that just like the Parliamentarians of Hobbes and Locke’s time, most still wanted a monarch in the arrangement of checks and balances. The conservative British political philosopher Burke argued that America needed a king because a country could not be ruled by a piece of paper. Many Americans agreed because they did not have, as we do today, a tradition of being ruled by a piece of paper, and it was only through the process of negotiations that led to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that America became a constitutional democracy. This then inspired French revolutionaries to cut off the head of the king and renounce monarchy as an institution.
Consider that Canada, Australia, and South Africa still officially recognize the Queen of Britain today as their sovereign, featuring her image as well as that of other British royalty on their money, while having independent parliaments. Many Americans originally hoped for just this sort of relationship with British monarchy, while others wanted to replace the British monarchy with an American monarchy (some suggesting that George Washington was a perfect candidate for the job). With the split between loyalists and patriots of the American Revolution, we see again a similar split to that between the Royalists and Parliamentarians of Hobbes and Locke’s time. This time, however, there was no restoration of monarchy, but those who leaned away from federal power and towards states’ rights like Jefferson would likely say that in part there was a restoration of the same problems and grievances.
Native Americans and African American slaves and freemen were torn in their allegiances. Both sides promised fair treatment and abolition of slavery at various times, especially to those who were enslaved to supporters of the opposite side. Some Natives and Africans felt that they could bargain with the British for greater freedom and security in exchange for support of the loyalists and monarchy against the patriot rebellion. Others felt that the independent colonies would be more favorable to their plight. Most Natives remained neutral, with some (like the Iroquois) fighting for the British with British weapons and supplies. Most free Africans fought for the colonies. The British accused the American patriots of hypocrisy in calling for freedom as a set of slave plantations, and actively encouraged slave rebellions while telling Americans that without British government the slaves would rise up and kill them. Of course, while the patriots won the war, it is certainly true that Natives and Africans did not fare so well after the revolution but it is also true that the British supported the slave trade and would not likely have treated the Natives or Africans much better.
Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man
While Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791) was composed after the revolution, in fact in response to Burke’s conservative criticism of the French Revolution which was in part inspired by the success of the American Revolution, it is an excellent expression of the philosophy behind the American patriot cause. Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809), one of the central founding fathers, was a corset-maker and author was famous during the revolution for his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense which argued that Britain was unjust and rebellion had become necessary. He later became equally famous for his work The Age of Reason which argued for freedom of thought and deism vs. institutional religion.
In The Rights of Man, Paine attacked Edmund Burke, who supported the American Revolution but suggested a king and attacked the French Revolution for beheading the king as well as the nobles. Paine argued that the institution of monarchy was outdated and enabled the violation of rights to life, liberty and property. This is a departure from the thinking of all the thinkers we have discussed so far with the exception of Thoreau who argued for the least government possible. Of course, Thoreau was writing in the mid-1800s, well after Paine. Remember that Mill was British, and stood for checks and balances without the need to renounce or dismantle the monarchy. In spite of this, America has followed Mill’s thinking in the manner of Paine and Thoreau possibly more than any other great power in history. Today, this has become a debate between right and left over social institutions and federal limits on taxes and trade. Hilariously, because of French royal support of the American revolution (to screw the British) and aversion to capital punishment, Paine argued that the French should have exiled Louis the 16th to America rather than behead him, and was later imprisoned by the radical French Revolutionaries led by Robespierre for this support of the institution both Paine and Robespierre despised. I am sure Burke found this hilarious.
One of the central issues of the text is whether or not people should choose their leaders and representatives. The monarchy, of course, is hereditary, so the people can rebel against it but cannot vote a monarch into power. While Americans celebrate the revolution as a clear transition from monarchy to democracy, consider Mill’s argument that people should vote for their bosses in business or there will be economic tyranny. Paine was a supporter of guaranteed income and thus also wealth redistribution and saw land holdings as a great source of injustice and tyranny. Paine argues that authority must arise OUT of the people, not OVER the people.
The United States Constitution
At the conclusion of the American Revolution, the colonies and power holders were fighting amongst themselves. There was massive debt from the war, riots, and armed militia who resisted centralized authority. One of the first and famous phrases from the Constitution, “in order to form a more perfect union”, refers to the fact that the colonies were already unified in their opposition to Britain but had yet to work out the details. It is only much later, with the Pledge of Allegiance, that we hear, “one nation, indivisible”.
One of the central issues was how to divide and check power in the union. Should there be a central figurehead, or not? If so, how would this avoid the problems of monarchy? If not, how would the union be preserved and how would equality amongst the colonies be maintained. How should the power be divided among the states? Should states get equal power, or should the more populated states have more say? As we know, by offering the Bill of Rights to states that feared federal control, the compromise was a bicameral congress with the House of Representatives expressing the popular vote and the Senate expressing the equal voting power of participating states. One of the famous injustices of this overall compromise was the three fifths compromise: African slaves counted as three fifths of a person for calculating the number of house representatives even though they had no right to vote for these representatives.
Another issue: how much should individual liberty be protected? Consider that, even though most of the figures we study were not offended by the institutions of slavery, some Americans wanted Rousseau-like individual freedom while others sought protections for the institutions of slavery and indentured servitude. As the reading points out, the word “democracy” do not appear even once in the constitution (as the John Birch Society was happy to point out, arguing that we are a republic, not an evil communist democracy). America, like other countries in the world, speaks about furthering democracy when in fact it should be speaking about furthering republicanism (such as that of Machiavelli). Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, who were presidents for most of the first four decades of independent America, were all slave owners.
Another interesting problem: the House has the power to bring charges against government officials, called impeachment, and the Senate has the power to convict or acquit the officials. Only seven people, all judges, no representatives, no senators, no presidents, have been convicted by the Senate. This removes the official from office, but does not send them to jail. In fact, while carrying out their duties, officials are shielded from arrest and lawsuits with the occasional exception of arrest for serious criminal acts such as murder. Consider how Rousseau would react to this, or Paine.
A last issue, consider the Bill of Rights and Freedom of Speech. Remember Mill argued that free speech is a strength and does more good than harm. The Bill of Rights says the Federal Government will not infringe on freedoms, but the states can do what they please. While these freedoms are secured at the state level today, speech that is declared a threat is not free, nor is speech on private property.
The French Revolution
Like the American Revolution which we studied last time, the French Revolution (1789 – 1799) was a transition from monarchy to constitutional republic heavily influenced by Locke and Rousseau. It was also, of course, influenced by the American Revolution. Unlike the American Revolution, the republic collapsed and France became a dictatorship under Napoleon and only became a republic again after many years and transition periods. In spite of this, historians and political theorists have recognized the French Revolution as one of the key transitions in modern political history and fought over its significance. As mentioned last time, for Burke and other conservatives the French Revolution was a classic failure of liberalism. For Marxists, who we will study in a few weeks, the French Revolution was an important antecedent to the Communist Revolution in Russia and then in China.
At the end of the 1700s, France was going through rough times. Wars with England had plunged the country into war debt, including French participation in the American Revolution. Remember, the British war debt, from the same wars with France, was also a central cause of the American revolution when the British tried to collect from the colonists. France had lost many of its land claims in the Americas to the British, bringing in less revenue to cover the mounting debt. In addition, many years of bad weather and crops had brought famine and economic hard times, especially to the peasants in the countryside. Just like in the times of Hobbes, Locke and the Royalists vs. Parliamentarians, the French King Louis the 16th started (unwittingly)the long process of the French Revolution by calling together an assembly in 1789 for the purpose of collecting taxes.
At the time, the peasants and lower class were bearing much of the burden of the taxes as there were many exemptions for the nobility and the clergy. Note that a similar situation exists in America today, at least according to the left, but it is the wealthy and corporations that now get the exemptions. Several advisors argued that the exemptions for the nobility and clergy must be reduced as the peasants could not be taxed any more, especially in the harsh times of the day. In spite of this, the nobles and clergy who dominated parliament opposed this advice and so the king called the assembly to try to forge a new consensus amongst the “three estates”, the nobility, the clergy, and the populace or commons (communes in French).
The third estate, the commons and their representation, became outraged at the stalling and blocking of motions by the nobility and clergy. After many failed negotiations, the commons met together and declared themselves to be the National Assembly with full power to decide political matters that involved the common populace. Frightened by this radical move, the king closed the building where they were assembling saying that carpenters had to make repairs and preparations for a royal function. Because of the bad weather, the commons reassembled in a nearby indoor tennis court and swore what was later called the Tennis Court Oath: they would continue to assemble until a workable constitution for France was established. Some clergy and nobility joined their assembly and cause and support poured in from all areas of France, but the majority of the nobility, the clergy, and the military did not. After the king fired advisors who supported the assembly, the situation exploded and France was consumed by rebellion, rioting and looting.
One of the first and most famous events was the storming of the Bastille, a fortress and prison that held a large weapons store. While the prison held only seven prisoners, the prisoners were liberated and the fortress and weapons were taken. It was seen as a great victory for the rebellion. This is still celebrated in France as Bastille day, though today they do not put the governor’s head on a pike and parade it through the streets. The king was afraid and did not know what to do. Many nobles began fleeing France in large numbers for safety. Commoners formed militias and began attacking nobles and their property. The assembly officially abolished feudalism, though it was effectively gone already with the fleeing of the nobility. This simultaneously removed all power and lands from the nobility as well as the clergy (the Catholic Church in France, which owned almost 10% of the country making it the single largest land owner).
The assembly proceeded to publish the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which like the Declaration of Independence was not a constitution but a statement of purpose and intent to write a constitution. Just like in the American Revolution, the assembly still held the idea that the king would play a role in the French government, particularly as a veto check on parliament, and it was only in the process that the king became eliminated and the government became a constitutional republic, not a republican monarchy. The king, afraid of the popular rebellion, moved to Paris from Versailles after it was stormed by the armed Women’s March, effectively confirming the power of the assembly.
It was at this point that factions in the assembly began to emerge, the most important being that between the liberals who sat in the left wing of the assembly and the conservatives who sat in the right wing. This is where we get the names “left wing” and “right wing” as labels for progressive and conservative. Hegel, who we will study in a few weeks, was deeply influenced by this in his thinking as a teenager watching the revolution from Germany with excitement along with his fellow German youth. The right wing wanted to follow the British and establish a constitution that preserved the monarchy, the clergy, and the nobility. The left wing wanted to maintain the complete disenfranchisement of the clergy and nobility, and a radical few wanted abolition of the monarchy. This is similar to issues between left and right today in America. Far on the left was the now infamous Robespierre, who would commit the dictatorial acts that became a symbol of the evils of progressivism for conservative thought up through the present time (though as mentioned everyone is strangely labeled ‘Hitler’ by the popular right in America today).
In 1791, the king and royal family fled Paris wearing servants’ clothes, but they were recognized, arrested, and brought back to Paris. The assembly largely still wanted the king to remain a figurehead, but fighting broke out in the streets over whether the king had acted in a way such that he should be completely deposed. In 1792 the Paris Commune, the government of the city, rose up in insurrection, took over the assembly, slaughtered the Swiss guards who protected the king, and took the king prisoner. With the assembly dominated by the radical left, they officially abolished the monarchy and declared France to be a constitutional republic. Finally in 1793, with foreign governments such as Prussia announcing they would take military action against France if the monarchy was not restored, the king was declared a political enemy of France and beheaded by guillotine.
Widespread gang warfare and chaos broke out under Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in 1793 and 1794. The Revolutionary Dictatorship was established, with brutal suppression of nobility and clergy supporters. One general famously said, “Mercy is not a revolutionary sentiment”. Peasants in the countryside revolted in support of the clergy and religion, which Robespierre and the Jacobin assembly wanted removed from society and replaced with deism and the “cult of reason”. These issues are similar to problems with communist revolutions and winning the population that we will study in coming weeks. There were mass killings on both sides. A major lesson from the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Revolution: if you try to take religion away from the peasants, they will give you much trouble and die for the cause. Robespierre, as Revolutionary Dictator, declared the peasants to be enemies committing “crimes against liberty”, brutally suppressed the resistance, and was eventually beheaded himself by guillotine in 1794 because of it.
After five more years of chaos and gang warfare, Napoleon Bonaparte took over France with a military coup, establishing himself as dictator and then in 1804 Emperor of France. This was the end of the French Revolution, and it was only after several periods of change that France again became a republic as it remains today.
Wide debate remains about the meaning of the revolution and its importance. Conservative thinkers like Burke argue that it was a failed attempt by a few individuals such as Robespierre to establish a radically liberal and unsustainable state. Marxists argue it was a rebellion of the workers and farmers that prefigured the Russian Revolution and later the Chinese Communist Revolution. Other more centrist historians have pointed to the rise of the middle class as a major cause. All agree that it was one of the most important periods in modern European history and that it should be studied to understand the roots of many political struggles that remain with us today.
The American Revolution
As we know, in the early 1770s the original thirteen colonies rejected British rule and banded together to fight for independence. At first, the colonies planned to remain independent of each other, but through the process of the revolution and formation of the constitution the thirteen colonies became a federal republic that agreed to a system of checks and balances much like those called for by Machiavelli, Locke and Mill. The British called the colonists terrorists and insurgents, while the colonists called themselves freedom fighters. The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, the British renounced claims to the colonies in 1783, and the Constitution was ratified in 1788 just as the French Revolution was beginning.
While Americans celebrate the Revolution and Constitution as the triumph of freedom, it is important to recognize, as we have all along in the class, that the founding fathers were not in favor of absolute democracy. They were particularly afraid of mob rule, and so like most of the thinkers we have covered so far they wished to maintain aristocratic control of the people not to mention slaves and indentured servants. In the 1940s and 1950s, the John Birch Society (a foremost supporter of McCarthy’s anti-communism hearings) declared openly that America is NOT a democracy, but a republic. Consider that America and the Soviet Union pointed at each other during the cold war and accused the other of deceptively claiming to be a government of the people for the people. Both China and America claim to be republics that represent the people. The words Communism and Democracy mean ‘of the people’, but differences aside, both have had struggles with the age-old problem of authority. The struggles over the American Constitution and its Bill of Rights reflect this.
Because many of the thirteen colonies were afraid of joining a union for the same reasons that they were afraid of British rule, the American Constitution was an exchange of checks and balances. In exchange for the Bill of Rights, which was primarily concerned with the independence and freedom of the colonies and not of individuals as it is understood today, a strong centralized federal government was established. Today, there are still problems with this exchange. Texas, Alaska, Arizona, and other states have active movements for secession from the union due to perceived abuses and excesses of the federal government, just as the thirteen colonies participated in a movement for secession from Britain. Recently, Arizona has considered legislation that would allow the Arizona state assembly to veto federal laws. While supporters have argued that this is in the original spirit of the Constitution (state independence), others argue that this directly violates the Constitution and its imposed exchange of balanced authority (federal law and Bill of Rights trumps state law).
Locke and Rousseau were particularly influential on the American Revolution, the Constitution, and the founding fathers. Locke argued that the state must protect the individual’s right to life, liberty and property. Rousseau argued that the state must preserve the liberty of the individual or the people have a right to rebel and overthrow the government. The Americans who were reading and being influenced by these thinkers applied these ideas to their grievances with Britain and its efforts to use the colonies and its taxes to wage wars in Europe and across the globe. Notice here that right wing Americans will point to the Tea Party (as the Tea Partiers do today) and say that the revolution was about the right to property and fair taxation, while left wing Americans will point out that people today have taxation WITH representation and that the majority of taxes go to military expenses as they did for Britain in the period of the Revolution.
However one interprets it today, Americans felt that Britain was violating the social contract by not preserving the American rights to liberty and property. Remember Rousseau’s metaphor of the bandit with the gun. If someone comes up to you with a gun and demands your property, you have no obligation to tell them the truth about where you are hiding your money or duty to surrender your property. Thus, according to Rousseau’s argument for the Americans, if the British Monarchy was unjustly infringing on the rights of life, liberty and property through the use of force and intimidation, the American rebellion was not unjust in resisting the British monarchy with the use of force and intimidation. This is why the British called the founding fathers terrorists and the Americans called them freedom fighters. Consider that when the Americans defeated the British, they were left, like Britain from previous wars, with substantial war debt, and when the colonies tried to collect taxes to pay the debt there were rebellions by American citizens against the colonial governments.
While the revolution is often pictured as a brilliant transition from monarchy to democracy, it should be remembered that just like the Parliamentarians of Hobbes and Locke’s time, most still wanted a monarch in the arrangement of checks and balances. The conservative British political philosopher Burke argued that America needed a king because a country could not be ruled by a piece of paper. Many Americans agreed because they did not have, as we do today, a tradition of being ruled by a piece of paper, and it was only through the process of negotiations that led to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that America became a constitutional democracy. This then inspired French revolutionaries to cut off the head of the king and renounce monarchy as an institution.
Consider that Canada, Australia, and South Africa still officially recognize the Queen of Britain today as their sovereign, featuring her image as well as that of other British royalty on their money, while having independent parliaments. Many Americans originally hoped for just this sort of relationship with British monarchy, while others wanted to replace the British monarchy with an American monarchy (some suggesting that George Washington was a perfect candidate for the job). With the split between loyalists and patriots of the American Revolution, we see again a similar split to that between the Royalists and Parliamentarians of Hobbes and Locke’s time. This time, however, there was no restoration of monarchy, but those who leaned away from federal power and towards states’ rights like Jefferson would likely say that in part there was a restoration of the same problems and grievances.
Native Americans and African American slaves and freemen were torn in their allegiances. Both sides promised fair treatment and abolition of slavery at various times, especially to those who were enslaved to supporters of the opposite side. Some Natives and Africans felt that they could bargain with the British for greater freedom and security in exchange for support of the loyalists and monarchy against the patriot rebellion. Others felt that the independent colonies would be more favorable to their plight. Most Natives remained neutral, with some (like the Iroquois) fighting for the British with British weapons and supplies. Most free Africans fought for the colonies. The British accused the American patriots of hypocrisy in calling for freedom as a set of slave plantations, and actively encouraged slave rebellions while telling Americans that without British government the slaves would rise up and kill them. Of course, while the patriots won the war, it is certainly true that Natives and Africans did not fare so well after the revolution but it is also true that the British supported the slave trade and would not likely have treated the Natives or Africans much better.
Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man
While Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791) was composed after the revolution, in fact in response to Burke’s conservative criticism of the French Revolution which was in part inspired by the success of the American Revolution, it is an excellent expression of the philosophy behind the American patriot cause. Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809), one of the central founding fathers, was a corset-maker and author was famous during the revolution for his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense which argued that Britain was unjust and rebellion had become necessary. He later became equally famous for his work The Age of Reason which argued for freedom of thought and deism vs. institutional religion.
In The Rights of Man, Paine attacked Edmund Burke, who supported the American Revolution but suggested a king and attacked the French Revolution for beheading the king as well as the nobles. Paine argued that the institution of monarchy was outdated and enabled the violation of rights to life, liberty and property. This is a departure from the thinking of all the thinkers we have discussed so far with the exception of Thoreau who argued for the least government possible. Of course, Thoreau was writing in the mid-1800s, well after Paine. Remember that Mill was British, and stood for checks and balances without the need to renounce or dismantle the monarchy. In spite of this, America has followed Mill’s thinking in the manner of Paine and Thoreau possibly more than any other great power in history. Today, this has become a debate between right and left over social institutions and federal limits on taxes and trade. Hilariously, because of French royal support of the American revolution (to screw the British) and aversion to capital punishment, Paine argued that the French should have exiled Louis the 16th to America rather than behead him, and was later imprisoned by the radical French Revolutionaries led by Robespierre for this support of the institution both Paine and Robespierre despised. I am sure Burke found this hilarious.
One of the central issues of the text is whether or not people should choose their leaders and representatives. The monarchy, of course, is hereditary, so the people can rebel against it but cannot vote a monarch into power. While Americans celebrate the revolution as a clear transition from monarchy to democracy, consider Mill’s argument that people should vote for their bosses in business or there will be economic tyranny. Paine was a supporter of guaranteed income and thus also wealth redistribution and saw land holdings as a great source of injustice and tyranny. Paine argues that authority must arise OUT of the people, not OVER the people.
The United States Constitution
At the conclusion of the American Revolution, the colonies and power holders were fighting amongst themselves. There was massive debt from the war, riots, and armed militia who resisted centralized authority. One of the first and famous phrases from the Constitution, “in order to form a more perfect union”, refers to the fact that the colonies were already unified in their opposition to Britain but had yet to work out the details. It is only much later, with the Pledge of Allegiance, that we hear, “one nation, indivisible”.
One of the central issues was how to divide and check power in the union. Should there be a central figurehead, or not? If so, how would this avoid the problems of monarchy? If not, how would the union be preserved and how would equality amongst the colonies be maintained. How should the power be divided among the states? Should states get equal power, or should the more populated states have more say? As we know, by offering the Bill of Rights to states that feared federal control, the compromise was a bicameral congress with the House of Representatives expressing the popular vote and the Senate expressing the equal voting power of participating states. One of the famous injustices of this overall compromise was the three fifths compromise: African slaves counted as three fifths of a person for calculating the number of house representatives even though they had no right to vote for these representatives.
Another issue: how much should individual liberty be protected? Consider that, even though most of the figures we study were not offended by the institutions of slavery, some Americans wanted Rousseau-like individual freedom while others sought protections for the institutions of slavery and indentured servitude. As the reading points out, the word “democracy” do not appear even once in the constitution (as the John Birch Society was happy to point out, arguing that we are a republic, not an evil communist democracy). America, like other countries in the world, speaks about furthering democracy when in fact it should be speaking about furthering republicanism (such as that of Machiavelli). Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, who were presidents for most of the first four decades of independent America, were all slave owners.
Another interesting problem: the House has the power to bring charges against government officials, called impeachment, and the Senate has the power to convict or acquit the officials. Only seven people, all judges, no representatives, no senators, no presidents, have been convicted by the Senate. This removes the official from office, but does not send them to jail. In fact, while carrying out their duties, officials are shielded from arrest and lawsuits with the occasional exception of arrest for serious criminal acts such as murder. Consider how Rousseau would react to this, or Paine.
A last issue, consider the Bill of Rights and Freedom of Speech. Remember Mill argued that free speech is a strength and does more good than harm. The Bill of Rights says the Federal Government will not infringe on freedoms, but the states can do what they please. While these freedoms are secured at the state level today, speech that is declared a threat is not free, nor is speech on private property.
The French Revolution
Like the American Revolution which we studied last time, the French Revolution (1789 – 1799) was a transition from monarchy to constitutional republic heavily influenced by Locke and Rousseau. It was also, of course, influenced by the American Revolution. Unlike the American Revolution, the republic collapsed and France became a dictatorship under Napoleon and only became a republic again after many years and transition periods. In spite of this, historians and political theorists have recognized the French Revolution as one of the key transitions in modern political history and fought over its significance. As mentioned last time, for Burke and other conservatives the French Revolution was a classic failure of liberalism. For Marxists, who we will study in a few weeks, the French Revolution was an important antecedent to the Communist Revolution in Russia and then in China.
At the end of the 1700s, France was going through rough times. Wars with England had plunged the country into war debt, including French participation in the American Revolution. Remember, the British war debt, from the same wars with France, was also a central cause of the American revolution when the British tried to collect from the colonists. France had lost many of its land claims in the Americas to the British, bringing in less revenue to cover the mounting debt. In addition, many years of bad weather and crops had brought famine and economic hard times, especially to the peasants in the countryside. Just like in the times of Hobbes, Locke and the Royalists vs. Parliamentarians, the French King Louis the 16th started (unwittingly)the long process of the French Revolution by calling together an assembly in 1789 for the purpose of collecting taxes.
At the time, the peasants and lower class were bearing much of the burden of the taxes as there were many exemptions for the nobility and the clergy. Note that a similar situation exists in America today, at least according to the left, but it is the wealthy and corporations that now get the exemptions. Several advisors argued that the exemptions for the nobility and clergy must be reduced as the peasants could not be taxed any more, especially in the harsh times of the day. In spite of this, the nobles and clergy who dominated parliament opposed this advice and so the king called the assembly to try to forge a new consensus amongst the “three estates”, the nobility, the clergy, and the populace or commons (communes in French).
The third estate, the commons and their representation, became outraged at the stalling and blocking of motions by the nobility and clergy. After many failed negotiations, the commons met together and declared themselves to be the National Assembly with full power to decide political matters that involved the common populace. Frightened by this radical move, the king closed the building where they were assembling saying that carpenters had to make repairs and preparations for a royal function. Because of the bad weather, the commons reassembled in a nearby indoor tennis court and swore what was later called the Tennis Court Oath: they would continue to assemble until a workable constitution for France was established. Some clergy and nobility joined their assembly and cause and support poured in from all areas of France, but the majority of the nobility, the clergy, and the military did not. After the king fired advisors who supported the assembly, the situation exploded and France was consumed by rebellion, rioting and looting.
One of the first and most famous events was the storming of the Bastille, a fortress and prison that held a large weapons store. While the prison held only seven prisoners, the prisoners were liberated and the fortress and weapons were taken. It was seen as a great victory for the rebellion. This is still celebrated in France as Bastille day, though today they do not put the governor’s head on a pike and parade it through the streets. The king was afraid and did not know what to do. Many nobles began fleeing France in large numbers for safety. Commoners formed militias and began attacking nobles and their property. The assembly officially abolished feudalism, though it was effectively gone already with the fleeing of the nobility. This simultaneously removed all power and lands from the nobility as well as the clergy (the Catholic Church in France, which owned almost 10% of the country making it the single largest land owner).
The assembly proceeded to publish the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which like the Declaration of Independence was not a constitution but a statement of purpose and intent to write a constitution. Just like in the American Revolution, the assembly still held the idea that the king would play a role in the French government, particularly as a veto check on parliament, and it was only in the process that the king became eliminated and the government became a constitutional republic, not a republican monarchy. The king, afraid of the popular rebellion, moved to Paris from Versailles after it was stormed by the armed Women’s March, effectively confirming the power of the assembly.
It was at this point that factions in the assembly began to emerge, the most important being that between the liberals who sat in the left wing of the assembly and the conservatives who sat in the right wing. This is where we get the names “left wing” and “right wing” as labels for progressive and conservative. Hegel, who we will study in a few weeks, was deeply influenced by this in his thinking as a teenager watching the revolution from Germany with excitement along with his fellow German youth. The right wing wanted to follow the British and establish a constitution that preserved the monarchy, the clergy, and the nobility. The left wing wanted to maintain the complete disenfranchisement of the clergy and nobility, and a radical few wanted abolition of the monarchy. This is similar to issues between left and right today in America. Far on the left was the now infamous Robespierre, who would commit the dictatorial acts that became a symbol of the evils of progressivism for conservative thought up through the present time (though as mentioned everyone is strangely labeled ‘Hitler’ by the popular right in America today).
In 1791, the king and royal family fled Paris wearing servants’ clothes, but they were recognized, arrested, and brought back to Paris. The assembly largely still wanted the king to remain a figurehead, but fighting broke out in the streets over whether the king had acted in a way such that he should be completely deposed. In 1792 the Paris Commune, the government of the city, rose up in insurrection, took over the assembly, slaughtered the Swiss guards who protected the king, and took the king prisoner. With the assembly dominated by the radical left, they officially abolished the monarchy and declared France to be a constitutional republic. Finally in 1793, with foreign governments such as Prussia announcing they would take military action against France if the monarchy was not restored, the king was declared a political enemy of France and beheaded by guillotine.
Widespread gang warfare and chaos broke out under Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in 1793 and 1794. The Revolutionary Dictatorship was established, with brutal suppression of nobility and clergy supporters. One general famously said, “Mercy is not a revolutionary sentiment”. Peasants in the countryside revolted in support of the clergy and religion, which Robespierre and the Jacobin assembly wanted removed from society and replaced with deism and the “cult of reason”. These issues are similar to problems with communist revolutions and winning the population that we will study in coming weeks. There were mass killings on both sides. A major lesson from the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Revolution: if you try to take religion away from the peasants, they will give you much trouble and die for the cause. Robespierre, as Revolutionary Dictator, declared the peasants to be enemies committing “crimes against liberty”, brutally suppressed the resistance, and was eventually beheaded himself by guillotine in 1794 because of it.
After five more years of chaos and gang warfare, Napoleon Bonaparte took over France with a military coup, establishing himself as dictator and then in 1804 Emperor of France. This was the end of the French Revolution, and it was only after several periods of change that France again became a republic as it remains today.
Wide debate remains about the meaning of the revolution and its importance. Conservative thinkers like Burke argue that it was a failed attempt by a few individuals such as Robespierre to establish a radically liberal and unsustainable state. Marxists argue it was a rebellion of the workers and farmers that prefigured the Russian Revolution and later the Chinese Communist Revolution. Other more centrist historians have pointed to the rise of the middle class as a major cause. All agree that it was one of the most important periods in modern European history and that it should be studied to understand the roots of many political struggles that remain with us today.
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