Socrates (470-400 BCE) is a very famous yet very controversial and obscure figure. Like many great thinkers, he did not write his own thoughts down but rather Plato (430-350 BCE) and another student named Xenophon wrote about his teachings after his death. Plato was a playwright who wrote dialogues between Socrates and his students after failing at writing plays on other subjects. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (Plato’s student) are the three great Athenian thinkers, and before the rediscovery of the “presocratics” (like Heraclitus) they were considered to be the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece.
It is generally accepted by scholars today that Plato’s early dialogues are one of the best sources for understanding Socrates and his ideas, but in Plato’s later dialogues Socrates is a mouthpiece for Plato’s own ideas. We will consider Socrates and his thought first, then turn to two of Plato’s most important later dialogues, the Republic and the Timaeus, to study Plato’s thought. Socrates and Plato were both influenced by Heraclitus (our subject last week), and while Socrates seemed to have been quite similar to Heraclitus, Plato’s thought changed and he began putting quite different views into Socrates’ mouth.
The Dueling Views of Heraclitus and Parmenides
Consider that there are two polar opposite views one can have of reality and the world. In one view, everything changes constantly and permanence is an illusion. In the other opposite view, everything remains the same and change is the illusion. As we saw last week, Heraclitus was a famous champion of the first view. He argued that only Being, the One and All, the cosmic fire or energy, is eternal and all other beings are temporary in spite of what our judgments tell us. Another presocratic thinker named Parmenides (who lived sometime before 500 BCE) was a famous champion of the second and opposite view. He argued that there is one unchanging reality that is eternal and all change and temporary beings are the illusion in spite of what our judgments tell us.
Socrates and Plato were both influenced by Heraclitus, but in his later dialogues Plato has Socrates argue for views that sound much more like Parmenides. Originally, Socrates questioned everyone to show that we know very little and it is the job of the philosopher to show this to people. In Plato’s later dialogues, Socrates argues that there is one unchanging reality above the temporary perceivable world and it is the job of the philosopher to seek and understand this eternal reality.
Socrates and his Method of Questions
We know very little about Socrates’ early life other than the details supplied in Plato’s works. He mentions several influences, including two women: the witch/shaman Diotima who taught him about love (like Confucius, Socrates identified love with wisdom) and Aspasia, the mistress of the general Pericles, who taught him rhetoric. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle lived at a time when the glory days of Athens were in decline. Eventually, Alexander (Aristotle’s student) would conquer the city and the surrounding city-states. Socrates was a critic of Athenian society, called “the horsefly” because he believed in stinging Athens into action, and he was eventually condemned to commit suicide for corrupting the youth of the city.
Socrates’ career as a philosopher began when his friend Chaerephon went to the oracle of Delphi to ask if anyone was wiser than his friend Socrates. Socrates, with characteristic modesty, protests that this was a very crass question to ask of the great oracle. The oracle replied that no one was wiser than Socrates. This prompted Socrates to go out and seek someone wiser than himself to see if the words of the oracle were in fact true.
Socrates felt that he knew nothing, but as he questioned the experts of Athens he came upon a horrible discovery and paradox. The experts believed themselves to be wise and possess great knowledge, but when questioned it turned out they knew very little. Socrates knew that he himself knew nothing. Therefore, Socrates was wiser than the experts because he knew that he knew nothing, while the experts knew nothing but thought that they knew a great deal. Humble and modest Socrates was aware that mortal humans know nothing, but the politicians, artists and warriors were unaware of this great equality they shared with Socrates. The ignorance of Socrates was thus the greatest wisdom in all of Athens.
Notice the similarities between Socrates and Heraclitus, who argued that the experts believe themselves to know a great deal but do not understand that their knowledge and perspectives are mortal and we are all mere apes to the gods. Socrates argued, like Heraclitus, that the greatest wisdom is found in questioning oneself and others. Remember that great city-states and empires had risen along with increasingly specialized experts. Philosophy questions experts and the basis of our knowledge.
Socrates argued that the individual should accept their own ignorance and the guidance of the world through intuition. He believed that he had a spirit (a daemon in the Greek, a word which became “demon” as Christianity replaced the polytheism and spirits with monotheism and angels). This spirit was much like what we would call a conscience (a word which means “co-seeing”), an intuition that one should or should not do a particular thing. Socrates says that his daemon told him to stay out of politics. Not only did politics get Socrates killed in spite of this, but Plato has Socrates get increasingly political in his later dialogues, particularly in the Republic where Socrates debates the best form of the city. Socrates also praised the divinity of poetry, mysticism, love and getting drunk with friends (as he does at the Symposium, a dialogue about a drinking party that turns into a philosophical discussion about the nature of love).
Plato’s Thought, The Republic and The Timaeus
Plato was long assumed to be a student of Socrates simply because Plato writes as much in many of his dialogues. As Socrates is about to die, Plato has Socrates ask where the young Plato is, to which another student replies that Plato was sick and thus could not be there at the time. Scholars now are critical of this, and think that Plato had a habit of writing himself and his family into Socrates’ circle in his dialogues. Because they are our best sources on Socrates, it is difficult to tell whether or not Plato’s older cousin Critias or Plato himself were actual students of Socrates or whether they were simply influenced by this figure who became quite famous following his trial and death.
Plato’s actual name was Aristocles, but according to the story his wrestling instructor named him Platon or “Broad” because he had a wide figure. This may be merely a story, because Plato was known to have a wide “breadth” of knowledge covering all subjects of ancient thought. Plato’s father died when he was young, and his step-father became the Athenian ambassador to the Persian royal court (remember that Persia was a great source of ancient world cosmology at the time).
Long after his attempts to become an established playwright, after his dialogues about Socrates had gathered some fame, Plato founded his Academy in 385 BCE, an open area near a tree grove where he, his students and other lecturers would teach and debate matters of philosophy and cosmology. Academy in fact means “porch”, an open area in front of a building, a fact it took scholars long to understand for they believed that the Academy must have been a building itself. Scholars made a similar error looking for the famed Library of Alexandria (an Egyptian center of ancient world knowledge), when in fact the Library was a shelf that ran along a hall that connected two buildings.
To examine Plato’s thought (in its later and mature form) we will look at his two most influential dialogues which both come from his later period. By this point, Socrates was no longer sharing much of the conversation with other debaters, but dominates the texts with monologues that are now believed to be Plato’s own Parmenides-like views. Plato believed that Heraclitus was right about the world below, but Parmenides was right about the eternal world above, the unchanging model, form, order and cause of the ever-changing world below. Plato has Socrates argue that those who think they know the world below have mere opinions, but the one who knows the world above, the true eternal pattern of reality, has true knowledge.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates debates with others on justice and the Good. Socrates debunks several common views, then constructs an ideal model of the city. The well ordered city is compared to the well ordered soul (3 layers in their places). Thus, the Good is proper order of the elements (perfectly in accord with ancient cosmology). The Timaeus, which is supposed to be the discussion the day after the Republic, has a student of Socrates named Timaeus lecture on the cosmos, showing Plato’s particular views on cosmology. Just as the individual is a microcosm to the city, the city is a microcosm to the cosmos, and again the elements must be separated and put in their places. The cosmos is ordered in its unfolding, producing the ideal order of the soul and the city.
One should order the self and order the city the way the cosmos are ordered.
Both are supposed to have been written about 360 BCE.
The Republic:
Socrates talks to several “interlocutors” and argues against their concepts of justice.
This is Socrates acting like the original Socrates.
Polemarchus argues that justice is paying debts, helping friends and harming enemies. Socrates argues that in some situations, helping friends and harming enemies are wrong.
Thrasymachus argues that justice is ‘the good of the stronger’.
Glaucon similarly argues that without threat of punishment, no one would do good. Socrates argues that the strong will corrupt themselves if they only act for their own interests and not for the good of the whole. (Remember the politics of the time- Many tyrants came and fell)
Starting with book 2, Socrates now turns into Plato, advocating an eternal form of the Good over the world of many temporary beings and desires. Socrates is challenged to give a positive account of justice, not just defeat opponents. Socrates argues that first they must construct the ideal or just city, and this will show how the ideal or just individual should be. Essentially, the just city is a caste system, with a three fold division. This division corresponds to the physical human being and the cosmic being.
Head is fire/reason/rulers,
Heart/chest is air/spirit/police,
Hands/Stomach is earth/desire/workers.
The individual, city and cosmos form a continuum, a set of Russian dolls.
Notice that authority and the good come from above, evil to be ordered from below.
Socrates argues (in reading) that each person is best suited to one thing, and should be assigned this one job. He argues that we will lie to the people and tell them a Phonecian story, which is that the classes are based on metals. The police and philosophers are made of silver and gold, so they are suited to be put above the others.(Why lie? Because the common will not understand philosophy, Plato’s system…this corresponds to the cave, where most will never leave, and need puppets to see anything).
All is sacrificed for the common good: no private property or partners or children, for any of the three classes. Socrates argues that the ruler who grabs for themselves will not be happy, filled with “horrid pains and pangs”, and will physically and mentally fall apart. This tyrant will never “taste true freedom or friendship”. Because this is not the order of the cosmos, it will not stick and will fall apart.
Socrates argues (and the interlocutors naively agree as simple yes men) that if they separate out the police and educate them as best as can be, and then take the philosophers out of the police and educate them as best as can be, no injustice will be possible. There is the simple belief that the order itself will generate justice throughout the whole. The police and philosophers will thus never be greedy or unjust to the people below.(Plato elsewhere argues that this is how the Egyptians in Thebes did it: elevating priests as a class- he also says to imitate Sparta as well separating out the warriors)
Plato also suggests banning all art (music, poetry and theatre) that is counterproductive, which pretty much means everything that isn’t impressing the highest good and order.
The youth are to be taught that they must improve themselves for the good of the state, and that the gods never to injustice or desire. (Note move to solar monotheism, Heracl.)
The Allegory/Analogy/Story of the Cave:
This describes the masses and the assent of the philosopher beyond opinion of the earthly realm to knowledge of the heavenly and eternal realm, showing why the philosopher alone should have authority. Everyone is chained in a cave, watching shadows of puppets/models carried before a fire at the mouth of the cave. The people think that the shadows are reality, the real things. The one who escapes first sees that the shadows are shadows of puppets, and sees the fire that casts the shadows. Coming out of the cave and past the small fire, the seeker is at first blinded by the sunlight. The seeker first sees real things outside of the cave, and realizes that the puppet/models were just copies of the real things. Then the seeker can get adjusted and see that the sun is the cause of all these things, and that the world of the cave is a poor copy of the world outside the cave. This is the realization of the forms and then the all/light/reason/consciousness that produces the forms which are copied in the cave below. This is opinion to belief (cave) to knowledge to reason (outside). (Models and Puppet theatre and Theatre from Egypt into Greece)
The Timaeus:
(In America, this is almost forgotten: not published by itself, not in spell check- we seem to want to teach the Republic and Aristotle’s ‘science’ texts far more than the Timaeus or Aristotle’s On the Soul, central to Muslims and then Christians)
Socrates the day after says that he would like to talk more about the ideal state.
Then, Critas tells the story of Solon going to Egypt and that the Egyptians told him of the story of Atlantus (Plato made it up himself). The Egyptian Priest tells Solon that the Athenians repelled the Atlantians, who were threatening to take over the world (this today is seen as echo of Persia and Marathon). Notice (read quote) that the Egyptians have the Athenian forgotten history written down, that it is a priest who knows that Athens was the best ordered city.
Timaeus now speaks of the creation of the cosmos out of the all, showing the order already described of the elements and how the individual human was created as a microcosm of the macrocosm. This implies that you get in your proper order to be good, which is the order of the cosmos. The one sprouts the eternal order or model of things, which includes all eternal models or archetypes of things, and the demiurge, the sky father being that is the small fire at the mouth of the cave, then produces copies of the models in the ever changing world of earth below. The whole is a living creature, with the heavens as soul and the all as reason/intellect.
The demiurge fashions reason in soul, and soul in body in individuals. The demiurge then moves everything in a circle, bringing about the life and death in circles of earth beings from planetary orbits and starlight.
This is all done by sameness and difference. Sameness has the higher and encompassing role, difference being proportional downward. The 4 elements have certain shapes, which are then glued together by the fifth element, quintessence or ether. (Note Buddhist Stupa shows same shapes and order in India) This is the cosmology of Christianity and Europe well through the middle ages, up to Newton and Leibniz, who read Islamic scholar’s commentaries on the Timaeus. The Medieval Christians had to retranslate Plato, with central interest in the cosmology of the Timaeus, from Arabic into Latin.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Social & Political Philosophy: Mill, Thoreau & Freedom
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873 CE) was born in London, influenced by Ancient Greek, French, and liberal thought. He is considered the major founder of Utilitarianism and one of the first champions of individual freedom, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. His father wrote a history of India, and Mill was for a time involved with his father in the British East India company, the corporation that helped Britain maintain their hold over India. Mill’s family was friends with the Bentham family, from whom Mill took up his consequentialist, ‘happy principle’ thought.
In fact, Mill’s father had Bentham tutor Mill as a child with the idea that Mill would become a champion of consequentialist thought. However, it was Mill who found the name ‘utilitarian’ in a Christian text that used the term to describe an evil way to strive for good without principles. Mill picked up the name and developed the thinking in line with Bentham, his mentor, becoming its famous spokesman. Mill is a central thinker in Logic, Economics and Ethics. In all of these subjects, he advocated rethinking basic principles and assumptions based on the ongoing experiences of their usefulness. For Mill and Utilitarianism, the true is not true in itself but true because it is useful for creating happiness and avoiding pain. Like Rousseau, Mill does not argue based on natural rights but rather on the natural liberty and freedom of the individual.
We can see two sides to the Utilitarian Principle, maximizing positive and minimizing negative. Bentham argued that one should always act in order to maximize happiness. Mill agrees, but says the MOST important thing is to minimize pain. It is important to add that Mill argues we must look at consequences in terms of the social view (for the most people) and the long view (for the greatest length of time). While Bentham and Mill are two sides of the same coin, they are different in important ways. There are times when striving for maximum happiness can cause much pain (majority happiness at the expense of the minority), and there are times when striving for minimum pain impairs much potential happiness (overprotective parenting, insurance issues, have to break some eggs etc).
Consider that Communism often sacrifices freedom for equality, providing structure for all but imposing this on those who dissent (much like Bentham) while Capitalism often sacrifices equality for freedom, providing little structural support but imposing very little on the lives of the people (much like Mill). Mill is considered one of the big influences on American law, and American Capitalism leans very much towards Mill. Consider also the example of the Dutch house where the socialist state provides allowances and living space for alcoholics to drink themselves to death vs. homeless people (including Vietnam veterans) drinking themselves to death in the streets in America.
Mill admits that there will be continuous problems whichever way we use the principle, but he argues that we must try to evolve in a positive direction and so we should stick to the Utilitarian social & long view even when there are problems if we want the best society. Some problems with Utilitarianism include the paradox of the bad example and the problem of authority.
The paradox of the bad example is used by critics to argue that Utilitarianism/Consequentialism causes contradictions such as the bad being always useful, and thus good. Any bad act is useful as a good example not only to the one who acted but to everyone else. Consider PBS documentaries on the US overcoming slavery as freedom and the average American of South Africa. Consider a prosecuting attorney arguing that an offender is bound to offend again vs. a defense attorney pointing at the same offender and arguing that they had a bad upbringing but are reformed and pulling their life together. Dennett uses three mile island as an example, arguing it caused nuclear standards to follow. Consider that we love villains who go from good to bad and heroes who go from bad to good. We can very easily see bad as good and good as bad. Is this a problem for Utilitarianism, as critics claim, or a problem for Ethics and humanity in general?
Nietzsche and Marx attack Utilitarianism with the problem of authority: guess who are the ones to tell you what is useful or makes us most happy? For Marx, it is the rulers, the privileged, and the upper class, who use the lower class as labor. For Nietzsche, it is the group, the majority, who cow the individual into agreement with the thinking and tastes of the masses. Mill in fact approves of war to advance civilization, and he approves of colonialism as improving the uncivilized.
Mill was a champion against the enslavement of black people and the second class status of women. His wife was brilliant and a significant influence on this thinking as well as On Liberty. He was one of the first passionate voices in philosophy, in fact one of the few, who argued that we must evolve to overcome slavery and second class status for any type of people. He writes, in 1850 on ‘The Negro Question’ words I love: “It is curious, withal, that the earliest known civilization was, we have the strongest reason to believe, a negro civilization. The original Egyptians are inferred, from the evidence of their sculptures, to have been a negro race: it was from negroes, therefore, that the Greeks learnt their first lessons in civilization; and to the records and traditions of these negroes did the Greek Philosophers to the very end of their career resort (I do not say with much fruit) as a treasury of mysterious wisdom.” I must say that we still are not wise to this in many of our texts and museums today.
In his work On Liberty, which I gave you to read, Mill argues that society only has the right to check or limit individual freedom when the individual is harming others or significantly harming themselves. Otherwise, individuals should have the freedom to do anything. If the state destroys life or property, this affects not only the targeted individual but the entire community. Mill argues that failing to act can also be unjust when it causes harm, such as allowing a child to fall into a well (like the child discussed by Mencius). He argues that the Utility principle will not only protect the individual from the state, but also the minority from the majority (useful, considering the problem Rousseau shares with Hobbes as discussed last time). The state must have checks and balances to prevent abuse of the individual and minorities. Interestingly, in his work on economics Mill argued that managers and executives should be voted into positions of power by the laborers or else there will be economic dictatorship.
Unfortunately, Mill does argue that children and the “uncivilized” (read: native populations of Africa, India, and the Americas) can be limited by the family or state because they are not fully developed and so should not be given full freedom to act on their own. In such cases, strict yet loving parenting and benevolent despotism is justified. Sad to say, this is much in line with British and American foreign policy in Mill’s time and still is today.
Mill also argues for radical freedom of speech. Because offense does not constitute harm, the state has no right to regulate offensive speech or arguments. We learn more by hearing arguments we hate rather than prohibiting them, and any argument may contain an element of truth no matter how much we hate it. As a Utilitarian Mill believes in the evolution and progression of truth over dogmatism and tradition, and new truths are often offensive.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was a writer, naturalist, transcendentalist, and abolitionist who is most famous for his proto-environmental and autobiographical book Walden and his political work On Civil Disobedience. He advocated simple and natural living and the right of the individual to nonparticipation with unjust laws and states. Like Rousseau, Thoreau believed that modern society was corrupting and abusive and hoped that people would cease to participate in war, slavery and other brutal practices by returning to nature and simplicity. Like Rousseau, he argued that many comforts and luxuries are not aids but hindrances to the progress of humanity. Like Rousseau, at least one critic wrote that if Thoreau was right we may as well go back to walking on all fours.
Thoreau did not believe in leaving society or rugged naturalism, but balancing modernity and city life with an appreciation of nature and the transcendent unity of existence. He is sometimes called an anarchist, as he wrote, “That government is best which governs least,” in On Civil Disobedience. While Thoreau did love nature and despise much of modern society, he argued for balance and did not believe in leaving civilization or abolishing government. Many know that Thoreau wrote Walden while secluded in a cabin at Walden pond (on land owned by his mentor and fellow transcendentalist Emerson) but few know that Walden pond was not far removed from society and in fact Thoreau had accidentally burned down 300 acres of Walden Wood with the help of a friend several years before staying in the cabin.
In 1846, Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay past taxes on the grounds of opposition to the American slave trade and the Mexican-American War. Moved by the experience, he gave lectures on his experience and how it strengthened his convictions and later reworked these lectures into his famous On Civil Disobedience (published in 1849). Many great leaders have been profoundly influenced by the work, including Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Tolstoy, JFK, Hemingway, and John Muir. MLK wrote in his autobiography that he first found the idea of noncooperation with the unjust system as effective means of protest in On Civil Disobedience while studying at Morehouse College in 1944, and that he became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as important as cooperation with good.
On Civil Disobedience would make Xun Zi scream. Thoreau argues that government is supposed to be an aid but is most often a hindrance. He points to the Mexican-American war and says that a few, not the people, are benefited by using the state as a tool. Even democracies can dominate the minority and individual. The state does not make us more just and often uses us for great injustice such as war and slavery. We often serve the state as machines, not people, and being like a dog or horse is being a “good citizen”. How should we act toward the state today? Thoreau writes he can’t acknowledge his government as the government of the slave too. If the US is invaded, he says, he will take up arms for the US, but it is we who are the invaders!
We should refuse to follow unjust laws and governments, and be friction against the machine. If you live simply, and have less, then you can more easily not participate in the injustices of war and slavery. The rich are always indebted to the system that maintains the riches. Thoreau quotes Jesus: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”, and Confucius, “In an unjust state, riches and honors are shameful”.
Thoreau acknowledges that there has been great progress for individual freedom in the transition from monarchy to democracy, but asks: is democracy the final step of this evolution?
In fact, Mill’s father had Bentham tutor Mill as a child with the idea that Mill would become a champion of consequentialist thought. However, it was Mill who found the name ‘utilitarian’ in a Christian text that used the term to describe an evil way to strive for good without principles. Mill picked up the name and developed the thinking in line with Bentham, his mentor, becoming its famous spokesman. Mill is a central thinker in Logic, Economics and Ethics. In all of these subjects, he advocated rethinking basic principles and assumptions based on the ongoing experiences of their usefulness. For Mill and Utilitarianism, the true is not true in itself but true because it is useful for creating happiness and avoiding pain. Like Rousseau, Mill does not argue based on natural rights but rather on the natural liberty and freedom of the individual.
We can see two sides to the Utilitarian Principle, maximizing positive and minimizing negative. Bentham argued that one should always act in order to maximize happiness. Mill agrees, but says the MOST important thing is to minimize pain. It is important to add that Mill argues we must look at consequences in terms of the social view (for the most people) and the long view (for the greatest length of time). While Bentham and Mill are two sides of the same coin, they are different in important ways. There are times when striving for maximum happiness can cause much pain (majority happiness at the expense of the minority), and there are times when striving for minimum pain impairs much potential happiness (overprotective parenting, insurance issues, have to break some eggs etc).
Consider that Communism often sacrifices freedom for equality, providing structure for all but imposing this on those who dissent (much like Bentham) while Capitalism often sacrifices equality for freedom, providing little structural support but imposing very little on the lives of the people (much like Mill). Mill is considered one of the big influences on American law, and American Capitalism leans very much towards Mill. Consider also the example of the Dutch house where the socialist state provides allowances and living space for alcoholics to drink themselves to death vs. homeless people (including Vietnam veterans) drinking themselves to death in the streets in America.
Mill admits that there will be continuous problems whichever way we use the principle, but he argues that we must try to evolve in a positive direction and so we should stick to the Utilitarian social & long view even when there are problems if we want the best society. Some problems with Utilitarianism include the paradox of the bad example and the problem of authority.
The paradox of the bad example is used by critics to argue that Utilitarianism/Consequentialism causes contradictions such as the bad being always useful, and thus good. Any bad act is useful as a good example not only to the one who acted but to everyone else. Consider PBS documentaries on the US overcoming slavery as freedom and the average American of South Africa. Consider a prosecuting attorney arguing that an offender is bound to offend again vs. a defense attorney pointing at the same offender and arguing that they had a bad upbringing but are reformed and pulling their life together. Dennett uses three mile island as an example, arguing it caused nuclear standards to follow. Consider that we love villains who go from good to bad and heroes who go from bad to good. We can very easily see bad as good and good as bad. Is this a problem for Utilitarianism, as critics claim, or a problem for Ethics and humanity in general?
Nietzsche and Marx attack Utilitarianism with the problem of authority: guess who are the ones to tell you what is useful or makes us most happy? For Marx, it is the rulers, the privileged, and the upper class, who use the lower class as labor. For Nietzsche, it is the group, the majority, who cow the individual into agreement with the thinking and tastes of the masses. Mill in fact approves of war to advance civilization, and he approves of colonialism as improving the uncivilized.
Mill was a champion against the enslavement of black people and the second class status of women. His wife was brilliant and a significant influence on this thinking as well as On Liberty. He was one of the first passionate voices in philosophy, in fact one of the few, who argued that we must evolve to overcome slavery and second class status for any type of people. He writes, in 1850 on ‘The Negro Question’ words I love: “It is curious, withal, that the earliest known civilization was, we have the strongest reason to believe, a negro civilization. The original Egyptians are inferred, from the evidence of their sculptures, to have been a negro race: it was from negroes, therefore, that the Greeks learnt their first lessons in civilization; and to the records and traditions of these negroes did the Greek Philosophers to the very end of their career resort (I do not say with much fruit) as a treasury of mysterious wisdom.” I must say that we still are not wise to this in many of our texts and museums today.
In his work On Liberty, which I gave you to read, Mill argues that society only has the right to check or limit individual freedom when the individual is harming others or significantly harming themselves. Otherwise, individuals should have the freedom to do anything. If the state destroys life or property, this affects not only the targeted individual but the entire community. Mill argues that failing to act can also be unjust when it causes harm, such as allowing a child to fall into a well (like the child discussed by Mencius). He argues that the Utility principle will not only protect the individual from the state, but also the minority from the majority (useful, considering the problem Rousseau shares with Hobbes as discussed last time). The state must have checks and balances to prevent abuse of the individual and minorities. Interestingly, in his work on economics Mill argued that managers and executives should be voted into positions of power by the laborers or else there will be economic dictatorship.
Unfortunately, Mill does argue that children and the “uncivilized” (read: native populations of Africa, India, and the Americas) can be limited by the family or state because they are not fully developed and so should not be given full freedom to act on their own. In such cases, strict yet loving parenting and benevolent despotism is justified. Sad to say, this is much in line with British and American foreign policy in Mill’s time and still is today.
Mill also argues for radical freedom of speech. Because offense does not constitute harm, the state has no right to regulate offensive speech or arguments. We learn more by hearing arguments we hate rather than prohibiting them, and any argument may contain an element of truth no matter how much we hate it. As a Utilitarian Mill believes in the evolution and progression of truth over dogmatism and tradition, and new truths are often offensive.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was a writer, naturalist, transcendentalist, and abolitionist who is most famous for his proto-environmental and autobiographical book Walden and his political work On Civil Disobedience. He advocated simple and natural living and the right of the individual to nonparticipation with unjust laws and states. Like Rousseau, Thoreau believed that modern society was corrupting and abusive and hoped that people would cease to participate in war, slavery and other brutal practices by returning to nature and simplicity. Like Rousseau, he argued that many comforts and luxuries are not aids but hindrances to the progress of humanity. Like Rousseau, at least one critic wrote that if Thoreau was right we may as well go back to walking on all fours.
Thoreau did not believe in leaving society or rugged naturalism, but balancing modernity and city life with an appreciation of nature and the transcendent unity of existence. He is sometimes called an anarchist, as he wrote, “That government is best which governs least,” in On Civil Disobedience. While Thoreau did love nature and despise much of modern society, he argued for balance and did not believe in leaving civilization or abolishing government. Many know that Thoreau wrote Walden while secluded in a cabin at Walden pond (on land owned by his mentor and fellow transcendentalist Emerson) but few know that Walden pond was not far removed from society and in fact Thoreau had accidentally burned down 300 acres of Walden Wood with the help of a friend several years before staying in the cabin.
In 1846, Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay past taxes on the grounds of opposition to the American slave trade and the Mexican-American War. Moved by the experience, he gave lectures on his experience and how it strengthened his convictions and later reworked these lectures into his famous On Civil Disobedience (published in 1849). Many great leaders have been profoundly influenced by the work, including Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Tolstoy, JFK, Hemingway, and John Muir. MLK wrote in his autobiography that he first found the idea of noncooperation with the unjust system as effective means of protest in On Civil Disobedience while studying at Morehouse College in 1944, and that he became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as important as cooperation with good.
On Civil Disobedience would make Xun Zi scream. Thoreau argues that government is supposed to be an aid but is most often a hindrance. He points to the Mexican-American war and says that a few, not the people, are benefited by using the state as a tool. Even democracies can dominate the minority and individual. The state does not make us more just and often uses us for great injustice such as war and slavery. We often serve the state as machines, not people, and being like a dog or horse is being a “good citizen”. How should we act toward the state today? Thoreau writes he can’t acknowledge his government as the government of the slave too. If the US is invaded, he says, he will take up arms for the US, but it is we who are the invaders!
We should refuse to follow unjust laws and governments, and be friction against the machine. If you live simply, and have less, then you can more easily not participate in the injustices of war and slavery. The rich are always indebted to the system that maintains the riches. Thoreau quotes Jesus: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”, and Confucius, “In an unjust state, riches and honors are shameful”.
Thoreau acknowledges that there has been great progress for individual freedom in the transition from monarchy to democracy, but asks: is democracy the final step of this evolution?
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Social & Political Philosophy: Locke, Rousseau & Liberty
John Locke (1632-1704) was an English doctor and philosopher who was very influential on the American Founding Fathers (Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson), the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. One passage of the Declaration of Independence is almost wholesale lifted from Locke’s political work. He is famous for two works, the classic text of Empiricism, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and the political work, Two Treatises of Government. He was friends with scientists such as Boyle and Newton. Like Hobbes, he witnessed the struggle between the English Monarchy and Parliament, and his political writings are deeply influenced by his times. Jefferson considered him one of the greatest thinker who ever lived.
Like Hobbes, Locke believed that human beings have natural rights that they derive from the state of nature and that government gets its power and rights from this and not divine decree of God, but unlike Hobbes, Locke believed that the power of the sovereign must not infringe on the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to property. Like Hobbes, Locke argued that the state of nature is not sufficient for individuals to live as they want and so they establish the state by natural contract, but unlike Hobbes Locke argued that this must be achieved by establishing a separation of powers and a system of checks and balances. While Hobbes argued that the sovereign is transferred the rights of the individual such that the sovereign can take life, restrict liberty and seize property for the good of the people as the people, Locke argues that the people have the right to rebel against the sovereign if the sovereign infringes on these rights. Thus, for Locke, the social contract with the sovereign is not unbreakable and does not fully transfer individual rights to the sovereign. Like Machiavelli and unlike Hobbes, Locke believed in checks and balances to the power of the sovereign to protect the rights of individuals.
As many critics have pointed out, neither Locke nor the American founding fathers believed that these rights extended to all of humanity and there resulted great contradictions between love of individual rights and the brutal practices of slavery and colonialism. Locke was a major investor in the Royal African Company, a secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations and a member of the Board of Trade, all of which were central to the African slave trade that took Africans from Africa to America to benefit the English plantations. While he argued that labor gives the individual a natural right to property, he also argued that the work of servants and slaves rightfully belongs to their master. Marx would later, as could be expected, agree that labor gives a right to ownership but disagree that the master or ruling class have the right to the fruits of the labor of the slaves, servants and lower classes. Like the founding fathers wrote “All men are born equal” but owned slaves themselves, Locke was clearly in agreement with the racism of his times and was writing for the equality of Europeans who owned property, servants and slaves and not of all-inclusive humanity.
Locke argued that money allowed property to be accumulated without injury to anyone. Many, including Marx and Native Americans and Africans, would take exception to this. Locke also writes that government should act such that individuals can accumulate as much wealth as they can but that wealth is distributed to the rest of society. He does not provide many insights as to how to go about this. Locke does argue that one of the major reasons that individuals should seek a social contract in the state of nature is to preserve their property and the fruits of their labor. In this, he is much more like Aristotle than Plato as Aristotle argues the state must draw everyone into a common unity yet preserve the diversity of personal property and ownership. While Hobbes sees preservation of one’s life as the primary reason for the social contract, Locke argues that the preservation of both life and property are the primary reasons and that the sovereign cannot arbitrarily take life or property from the individuals bound together in the social contract.
One last idea of Locke’s that has been very influential on many is the idea of the individual as a blank slate or tabula rasa (“blank slate” in Latin). An Empiricist, Locke believed that there are no innate ideas in the human mind and that all ideas are acquired by experience (unlike Descartes and much like Hume). Locke read a 12th century Arabic novel (translated into Latin) by Ibn Tufail titled Living Son of Wakening which tells the story of a child isolated from human society on a desert island who grows naturally by experience and reason to human adulthood. Another popular novel at the time was Robinson Crusoe which presents a gentleman and native “savage” on an island in the state of nature. Locke believed that education (like Confucius and the Confucians Mencius and Xun Zi) is central to all development and that the mind is an empty cabinet waiting to be filled.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was much influenced by many of the thinkers we have covered including the Confucians. He was particularly concerned with being on the side of individual liberty checking the powers of sovereignty with Locke vs. Hobbes. Unlike Hobbes but somewhat like Locke’s idea of tabula rasa, Rousseau imagined that the state of nature was innocent and pure and that it was society that corrupted the purity of the individual. Like Locke, Rousseau was a major influence on the American as well as French revolution (our topic for next week, after Mill and Thoreau). I gave you selections from his two most famous political works, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and On the Social Contract. Rousseau was not only influenced by many of the thinkers we have read so far, but was also an influence on many of the thinkers we have yet to read, including the founding fathers, Hegel, Nietzsche, Paine, Marx, Engels and Bakunin.
Rousseau was born in Geneva which was governed as a democracy involving a minority of the male property owning class having voting power. He wandered Italy and France for a time as a secretary and tutor to aristocrats. In 1749 he saw an advertisement by the Academy of Dijon in a newspaper which asked for essay submissions in response to the question, “Has the rebirth of the sciences and arts contributed to the improvement or the corruption of manners?”. Rousseau had an awakening experience, and decided that the original human nature is innocent and pure and that it must be society that had brought about corruption and ignorance.
This was in complete disagreement with many of his contemporaries including his close friend Diderot, who were champions of the Enlightenment and science and believed that human nature was being freed by the progress of society. Diderot wrote to Rousseau about his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, “never was so much intelligence used to make us stupid…while reading it, one longs to go on all fours”. Voltaire and Diderot were passionate about science freeing the mind of humanity from primitive superstitions. Rousseau argued that humanity was good in the beginning and that society would ultimately destroy all that was good about humanity. Society makes people take up artificial practices and wear masks (much like those worn to aristocratic parties at the time). Remember that Hobbes argued society was an artificial construction, but Hobbes believed that human beings were naturally selfish, not pure, like Xun Zi. Rousseau argues that the artificial nature of society is corruptive and breeds hypocrisy. Nietzsche would later take up this cynical turn against social progress and argue like Rousseau it chains the individual.
Unlike Locke, Rousseau saw property and the excesses of luxury as evil and destructive to our natural being. Rousseau, unlike Locke and Hobbes, praises the “savage” peoples, using his famous phrase, “the noble savage” and saw them as living a more authentic and peaceful existence than modern “civilized” people. Like Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau believed that human individuals were equal in the state of nature, but he does not see the social contract as helping but rather harming this natural equality. Like Locke, Rousseau believed that humans are a blank slate, but more than Locke he believed that human nature continues to be a free and changeable, determined by the situation in which it lives.
Rousseau avoided arguing about natural laws (key for Hobbes and Locke), preferring human nature as an undefined freedom. While Hobbes believed that the state of nature was brutal, and Locke believed that the state of nature had semi-responsible property retainers who had yet to establish laws for their benefit, Rousseau saw the state of nature as a peaceful and simple time. Society came about through domination and inequality, not natural equality cohering in a social contract of equals (much as Marx and Nietzsche will argue later). Some came to have more than others, and the social contract legitimated these differences (note that Locke would argue the same, but see it as a positive thing). Thus, property is the root cause of social problems because it is an inequality that disrupts the natural equality of humanity such that we have masters and slaves. Later in the class, we will see that Foucault, also influenced by Rousseau (as well as Nietzsche) argues that institutions use binary divisions like knowledge/ignorance and sane/insane to maintain divisions of power and inequality.
While we live in society and enjoy its conveniences, Rousseau argues that we must resist the urge to give up our freedom, our most basic human nature. Because human nature is free and changeable, society can turn us into machines and slaves. To resist this slavery, we must (like Locke argued) be able to overthrow unjust governments and break social contracts (unlike Hobbes who saw the contract as unbreakable). We must also (like Machiavelli and Locke argued) have checks on the power of the sovereign and society such that society preserves the natural freedom of humanity and does not replace it with restrictions and repression. Rousseau turns Hobbes’ sovereign on his head: because the sovereign or government is, in fact, the will and hand of the people, it must be subject to the participation of the people to be authentic. The social contract is founded on mutual agreement, and so it must be maintained by mutual agreement.
Unfortunately, as critics have pointed out, this does not solve all of the problems that many see easily in the theories of Hobbes. Rousseau replaces the sovereign with the general will, which is indeed democratic, but what about the individual or minority group that disagrees with the general will? Both Hobbes and Rousseau argue that those who disagree must be made to agree or they are outside society. Both argue that the individual must be subordinate to the collective for the good of everyone. Rousseau does argue for checks on the power of the state to preserve the liberty of the individual, but the expression of the general will is, for Rousseau, such a check that then overrides the individual who disagrees with the majority. Rousseau does not precisely specify how the general will or government will refrain from dominating the dissenting individual. Rousseau, unlike Marx, was afraid of revolutions because he saw them as domination of the powerless by the powerful and pointed out that they often have terrible consequences. Nevertheless, his ideas were important for both the American and French revolutions. Many have pointed out that Robespierre of the French Revolution referred repeatedly to Rousseau while using the idea of general will to brutally eliminate his opposition. This is very similar to the use of Nietzsche by the Nazis. Others have noted the similarities to the problematic Communist revolutions and their abuses.
In The Social Contract, Rousseau begins famously by writing, “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains”. He goes on to consider the birth of the social contract and how it can be, if balanced properly, an aid to freedom as much as a restriction on it. The birth of society is in the family. The major difference is that the father dominates the children (and wife, unmentioned) but loves the children while the state dominates the individual but does not love the individual. Thus, the father encourages the freedom and life of the children out of love while the later relation of the social-contract state does not necessarily encourage the freedom of the individual.
If Hobbes is right, we are mere herds of cattle to be controlled by the state. If Aristotle is right, some are born superior to others and they should control the subordinates. Rousseau argues that society, like slavery, is not natural and came about by the force of the stronger. If we obey society because of force, then there is no reason for duty. He uses the example of a robber with a gun and argues that one is not bound by duty to tell the robber about hidden valuables. If the sovereign/state is given power by protecting the people, why should the people stand with the state when it persecutes them or needlessly seeks war? This is the major question one likely asks after reading Hobbes.
To renounce one’s liberty is to renounce one’s humanity. Any social contract which makes one side the absolute authority and the other the absolutely obedient contradicts itself such that it is meaningless. If a slave has rights but no power, then it is as if the master has the slave’s rights and these rights contradict the rights that the master has already. In so far as the master gives the slave no power, the slave has no duty to follow the master and follows the master merely by force. If it is not unjust for the master to chain or kill the slave, then it is not unjust for the slave to escape or kill the master when the gun or whip can be grabbed. Rousseau mentions Balboa taking possession of the Pacific Ocean and South America from the natives for Spain. The words “slavery” and “right” are mutually exclusive. In the case of the dissenting minority, if the state gets its power from the agreement of the majority, in what way is it just for the minority to be included in the social contract if they do not agree? The only just state is thus the state which enables individual liberty and is controlled by the people as equals.
Rousseau, as already discussed, does believe that the minority is subject to the general/majority will, but for Rousseau this is only because the state justly protects individual freedoms. Otherwise, without such protections, there is no injustice when the minority refuses to participate in the state. This is particularly interesting issue when one considers America and Jim Crow laws.
Like Hobbes, Locke believed that human beings have natural rights that they derive from the state of nature and that government gets its power and rights from this and not divine decree of God, but unlike Hobbes, Locke believed that the power of the sovereign must not infringe on the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to property. Like Hobbes, Locke argued that the state of nature is not sufficient for individuals to live as they want and so they establish the state by natural contract, but unlike Hobbes Locke argued that this must be achieved by establishing a separation of powers and a system of checks and balances. While Hobbes argued that the sovereign is transferred the rights of the individual such that the sovereign can take life, restrict liberty and seize property for the good of the people as the people, Locke argues that the people have the right to rebel against the sovereign if the sovereign infringes on these rights. Thus, for Locke, the social contract with the sovereign is not unbreakable and does not fully transfer individual rights to the sovereign. Like Machiavelli and unlike Hobbes, Locke believed in checks and balances to the power of the sovereign to protect the rights of individuals.
As many critics have pointed out, neither Locke nor the American founding fathers believed that these rights extended to all of humanity and there resulted great contradictions between love of individual rights and the brutal practices of slavery and colonialism. Locke was a major investor in the Royal African Company, a secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations and a member of the Board of Trade, all of which were central to the African slave trade that took Africans from Africa to America to benefit the English plantations. While he argued that labor gives the individual a natural right to property, he also argued that the work of servants and slaves rightfully belongs to their master. Marx would later, as could be expected, agree that labor gives a right to ownership but disagree that the master or ruling class have the right to the fruits of the labor of the slaves, servants and lower classes. Like the founding fathers wrote “All men are born equal” but owned slaves themselves, Locke was clearly in agreement with the racism of his times and was writing for the equality of Europeans who owned property, servants and slaves and not of all-inclusive humanity.
Locke argued that money allowed property to be accumulated without injury to anyone. Many, including Marx and Native Americans and Africans, would take exception to this. Locke also writes that government should act such that individuals can accumulate as much wealth as they can but that wealth is distributed to the rest of society. He does not provide many insights as to how to go about this. Locke does argue that one of the major reasons that individuals should seek a social contract in the state of nature is to preserve their property and the fruits of their labor. In this, he is much more like Aristotle than Plato as Aristotle argues the state must draw everyone into a common unity yet preserve the diversity of personal property and ownership. While Hobbes sees preservation of one’s life as the primary reason for the social contract, Locke argues that the preservation of both life and property are the primary reasons and that the sovereign cannot arbitrarily take life or property from the individuals bound together in the social contract.
One last idea of Locke’s that has been very influential on many is the idea of the individual as a blank slate or tabula rasa (“blank slate” in Latin). An Empiricist, Locke believed that there are no innate ideas in the human mind and that all ideas are acquired by experience (unlike Descartes and much like Hume). Locke read a 12th century Arabic novel (translated into Latin) by Ibn Tufail titled Living Son of Wakening which tells the story of a child isolated from human society on a desert island who grows naturally by experience and reason to human adulthood. Another popular novel at the time was Robinson Crusoe which presents a gentleman and native “savage” on an island in the state of nature. Locke believed that education (like Confucius and the Confucians Mencius and Xun Zi) is central to all development and that the mind is an empty cabinet waiting to be filled.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was much influenced by many of the thinkers we have covered including the Confucians. He was particularly concerned with being on the side of individual liberty checking the powers of sovereignty with Locke vs. Hobbes. Unlike Hobbes but somewhat like Locke’s idea of tabula rasa, Rousseau imagined that the state of nature was innocent and pure and that it was society that corrupted the purity of the individual. Like Locke, Rousseau was a major influence on the American as well as French revolution (our topic for next week, after Mill and Thoreau). I gave you selections from his two most famous political works, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and On the Social Contract. Rousseau was not only influenced by many of the thinkers we have read so far, but was also an influence on many of the thinkers we have yet to read, including the founding fathers, Hegel, Nietzsche, Paine, Marx, Engels and Bakunin.
Rousseau was born in Geneva which was governed as a democracy involving a minority of the male property owning class having voting power. He wandered Italy and France for a time as a secretary and tutor to aristocrats. In 1749 he saw an advertisement by the Academy of Dijon in a newspaper which asked for essay submissions in response to the question, “Has the rebirth of the sciences and arts contributed to the improvement or the corruption of manners?”. Rousseau had an awakening experience, and decided that the original human nature is innocent and pure and that it must be society that had brought about corruption and ignorance.
This was in complete disagreement with many of his contemporaries including his close friend Diderot, who were champions of the Enlightenment and science and believed that human nature was being freed by the progress of society. Diderot wrote to Rousseau about his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, “never was so much intelligence used to make us stupid…while reading it, one longs to go on all fours”. Voltaire and Diderot were passionate about science freeing the mind of humanity from primitive superstitions. Rousseau argued that humanity was good in the beginning and that society would ultimately destroy all that was good about humanity. Society makes people take up artificial practices and wear masks (much like those worn to aristocratic parties at the time). Remember that Hobbes argued society was an artificial construction, but Hobbes believed that human beings were naturally selfish, not pure, like Xun Zi. Rousseau argues that the artificial nature of society is corruptive and breeds hypocrisy. Nietzsche would later take up this cynical turn against social progress and argue like Rousseau it chains the individual.
Unlike Locke, Rousseau saw property and the excesses of luxury as evil and destructive to our natural being. Rousseau, unlike Locke and Hobbes, praises the “savage” peoples, using his famous phrase, “the noble savage” and saw them as living a more authentic and peaceful existence than modern “civilized” people. Like Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau believed that human individuals were equal in the state of nature, but he does not see the social contract as helping but rather harming this natural equality. Like Locke, Rousseau believed that humans are a blank slate, but more than Locke he believed that human nature continues to be a free and changeable, determined by the situation in which it lives.
Rousseau avoided arguing about natural laws (key for Hobbes and Locke), preferring human nature as an undefined freedom. While Hobbes believed that the state of nature was brutal, and Locke believed that the state of nature had semi-responsible property retainers who had yet to establish laws for their benefit, Rousseau saw the state of nature as a peaceful and simple time. Society came about through domination and inequality, not natural equality cohering in a social contract of equals (much as Marx and Nietzsche will argue later). Some came to have more than others, and the social contract legitimated these differences (note that Locke would argue the same, but see it as a positive thing). Thus, property is the root cause of social problems because it is an inequality that disrupts the natural equality of humanity such that we have masters and slaves. Later in the class, we will see that Foucault, also influenced by Rousseau (as well as Nietzsche) argues that institutions use binary divisions like knowledge/ignorance and sane/insane to maintain divisions of power and inequality.
While we live in society and enjoy its conveniences, Rousseau argues that we must resist the urge to give up our freedom, our most basic human nature. Because human nature is free and changeable, society can turn us into machines and slaves. To resist this slavery, we must (like Locke argued) be able to overthrow unjust governments and break social contracts (unlike Hobbes who saw the contract as unbreakable). We must also (like Machiavelli and Locke argued) have checks on the power of the sovereign and society such that society preserves the natural freedom of humanity and does not replace it with restrictions and repression. Rousseau turns Hobbes’ sovereign on his head: because the sovereign or government is, in fact, the will and hand of the people, it must be subject to the participation of the people to be authentic. The social contract is founded on mutual agreement, and so it must be maintained by mutual agreement.
Unfortunately, as critics have pointed out, this does not solve all of the problems that many see easily in the theories of Hobbes. Rousseau replaces the sovereign with the general will, which is indeed democratic, but what about the individual or minority group that disagrees with the general will? Both Hobbes and Rousseau argue that those who disagree must be made to agree or they are outside society. Both argue that the individual must be subordinate to the collective for the good of everyone. Rousseau does argue for checks on the power of the state to preserve the liberty of the individual, but the expression of the general will is, for Rousseau, such a check that then overrides the individual who disagrees with the majority. Rousseau does not precisely specify how the general will or government will refrain from dominating the dissenting individual. Rousseau, unlike Marx, was afraid of revolutions because he saw them as domination of the powerless by the powerful and pointed out that they often have terrible consequences. Nevertheless, his ideas were important for both the American and French revolutions. Many have pointed out that Robespierre of the French Revolution referred repeatedly to Rousseau while using the idea of general will to brutally eliminate his opposition. This is very similar to the use of Nietzsche by the Nazis. Others have noted the similarities to the problematic Communist revolutions and their abuses.
In The Social Contract, Rousseau begins famously by writing, “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains”. He goes on to consider the birth of the social contract and how it can be, if balanced properly, an aid to freedom as much as a restriction on it. The birth of society is in the family. The major difference is that the father dominates the children (and wife, unmentioned) but loves the children while the state dominates the individual but does not love the individual. Thus, the father encourages the freedom and life of the children out of love while the later relation of the social-contract state does not necessarily encourage the freedom of the individual.
If Hobbes is right, we are mere herds of cattle to be controlled by the state. If Aristotle is right, some are born superior to others and they should control the subordinates. Rousseau argues that society, like slavery, is not natural and came about by the force of the stronger. If we obey society because of force, then there is no reason for duty. He uses the example of a robber with a gun and argues that one is not bound by duty to tell the robber about hidden valuables. If the sovereign/state is given power by protecting the people, why should the people stand with the state when it persecutes them or needlessly seeks war? This is the major question one likely asks after reading Hobbes.
To renounce one’s liberty is to renounce one’s humanity. Any social contract which makes one side the absolute authority and the other the absolutely obedient contradicts itself such that it is meaningless. If a slave has rights but no power, then it is as if the master has the slave’s rights and these rights contradict the rights that the master has already. In so far as the master gives the slave no power, the slave has no duty to follow the master and follows the master merely by force. If it is not unjust for the master to chain or kill the slave, then it is not unjust for the slave to escape or kill the master when the gun or whip can be grabbed. Rousseau mentions Balboa taking possession of the Pacific Ocean and South America from the natives for Spain. The words “slavery” and “right” are mutually exclusive. In the case of the dissenting minority, if the state gets its power from the agreement of the majority, in what way is it just for the minority to be included in the social contract if they do not agree? The only just state is thus the state which enables individual liberty and is controlled by the people as equals.
Rousseau, as already discussed, does believe that the minority is subject to the general/majority will, but for Rousseau this is only because the state justly protects individual freedoms. Otherwise, without such protections, there is no injustice when the minority refuses to participate in the state. This is particularly interesting issue when one considers America and Jim Crow laws.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Ethics: Balance, Egyptian Wisdom & Confucius
In studying balance as an Ethical concept, we will look at Ma’at in the wisdom of ancient Egypt, the doctrine of the middle way in the teachings of the Buddha of India and Aristotle of ancient Greece, and then finish with the Analects of Confucius, one of the great ancient world Ethics texts and a masterwork on the balance of concern for the self and others.
Ma’at and the Wisdom of Ancient Egypt
The idea of balance was identified with the Goddess Ma’at in the early periods of Egyptian history, but just like the sun became the abstract principle of life and the universe Ma’at became the abstract conception of the balance of opposites.
In the Egyptian wisdom quotes, one of my favorite examples of early city-state texts, we can see that the Egyptians were concerned not only with the balance of good and evil that exist in particular desirable things but also in the ethical virtue of the balance of concern for oneself and for others. As many tribes gathered into the earliest city-states and empires, people saw more and more of human behavior and became concerned with balancing excess and lack. People saw that some had much to eat, much money, much power, and others had none. They saw that excess can hurt the individual and society as much as deficiency, power and riches as much as oppression and poverty. In Egypt and many societies that followed, including India, Greece and China, we can see a concern with balance and avoiding both excess and deficiency being praised as wise and ethical.
In the Egyptian texts (as well as Confucius) we can see a heart centered theory of the human being that ties into this concept of balance and wisdom. The heart was thought to be the center of the human being, as ancient people soon learned that the heart is the center of the vessels that branch throughout the body and which are crucial to its health and nourishment. The Egyptians thought that if one was unkind to others it would choke the breath and blood from the heart and hurt one’s physical as well as mental health (remember that in ancient cosmology, physics was identical with psychology and spirituality). Consider that we still wear the wedding ring on the finger next to the pinky, which has a large vein in it and was thought to control love and lust by the ancient Egyptians (the Greeks and Romans picked up much medicine and physiology from the Egyptians, and we keep this custom today). The ancient Israelites, in contrast, had their wives wear a ring on the index finger to keep her from casting spells while pointing.
In the Egyptian wisdom literature, the “heart-guided-individual” (very similar to the language and theories of Confucius) put wisdom over desire, mind over the body, and thus had self-control and the full powers and potential of the human individual. This was seen as putting oneself in-line with the cosmos, as Being, the one eternal way, is the source and guide of the many individual mortal beings.
Read the ancient Egyptian wisdom quotes with this in mind (particularly p. 7, 10, 17, 20, 21, 22, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 44, and 46).
The Buddha and The Middle Way
The Buddha (550 BCE), the founder of one of the largest systems of thought in history, taught moderation between extremes as a fundamental doctrine. Known as “The Middle Way” in both Buddhism and Confucianism, this teaching is quite similar to the ancient Egyptian conception of Ma’at. According to the story of the Buddha’s life he tried extreme practices in the jungle to rid himself of attachment and desire and gain unity of mind and enlightenment as many were doing in his time and still do today, but he found that extreme self denial brought self hatred. Moderation became a core part of the Buddha’s later enlightenment and teaching. Rather than try to rid the self of selfhood or desire, release is found in the moderation between seeking and denying, neither running toward nor away from the self or desirable things. Thus, Buddhist conceptions of ethics often center of moderation between extremes, neither going completely without desirable things nor completely indulging in them.
Aristotle and The Doctrine of The Mean
Aristotle (350 BCE) argues for a very similar concept of moderation in his texts on ethics and health. He associates each virtue with two vices, one more extreme than virtue and the other too deficient. Thus, one should not be afraid of money or family or war but neither should one be a glutton for these things either. He argues that too much drinking and athletics can destroy the body, but no drinking or athletics can make the body and mind weak and deficient.
Confucius and the Golden Rule
Confucius (550 BCE – 480 BCE) was one of the great ethical geniuses of the ancient world. It is worth noting that in Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism we find Jesus, Buddha and Confucius telling us to press ourselves to identify with others, to see things through their eyes and treat them as we wish to be treated. All three were identified with the central gods of the heavens in each tradition. No matter how religious or non-religious one is, this shows us that humans consider love and wisdom to be quite divine and the supreme goal of individual life and activity.
The Golden Rule:
Jesus and Confucius both say almost the same “Golden Rule”: treat others the way one wants to be treated. Sometimes scholars say that Confucius rather says the negative “Silver Rule”: DON’T treat others the way one DOESN’T want to be treated. It is easy to see that these are two sides of the same rule, quite the same but slightly different. We will see almost the same dual sided rule shared between Bentham and Mill next week as we study consequentialism/utilitarianism. Bentham argued that one should act in a way to bring about the maximum happiness, and Mill argued (taking his ethics from Bentham) that one should act in a way to bring about the minimum pain. Consider that communism often idealizes the positive side of each rule (provides structure but little room for choice) and capitalism often idealizes the negative side of each rule (room for choice but provides little structure). Many scholars have noted that American law is quite influenced by Mill, and follows his idea of erring on the side of doing little harm rather than Bentham. Consider that communist countries often put their former rulers on trial for crimes against the people when things go wrong (except for the top cult-figures), while capitalist countries rarely send their rulers to jail even when crimes could be punishable in court (there are severe problems with both methods, of course).
Heart over Ritual, Intention over Action:
Confucius and Confucianism are often identified with ritual and tradition, such as the father ruling over the household. In many places in the Analects, however, Confucius is quite clear that although ritual and tradition are essential for the cultivation of the individual and the maintenance of society, they are secondary to love and having the right intentions. This can be seen as an extension of ancient cosmology placing mind over body. In courts of law today, and individual is only guilty if they intentionally performed an action. Confucius tells us that action and tradition without the right intention and emotion are the worst things imaginable. One would think that if the two elements of an act are the right intention and right action, having the right action would be half good, but this is wrong according to Confucius. He even argues that if a ruler is corrupt, one should overthrow the state and put a proper ruler in place. Strangely, the Analects became the core text of the Confucian state in China which was quite conservative of traditional structures.
Nothing is Perfect, but Everything is Good:
Another beautiful idea that is central to Confucius’ teachings is “Perfection is nowhere, but good is always at hand”. Confucius says several times that he is not perfect, and that he has never met a perfect person (or even, in some passages, an excellent person), but he tells us that we all share the same virtues and vices and we can learn to be good by listening to the lowest of people (just like the first passage of the Egyptian wisdom , which tells us that “Wisdom can be found even among the maidens at the grindstone”). He even says that Yao and Shun, the two legendary emperors and ancestors of China, could not obtain perfection, so how could we? The best quote on this is Analects 7.22:
“Put me in the company of any two people at random – they will invariably have something to teach me…I can take their qualities as a model and their vices as a warning.”
Examine Oneself:
The last ethical point to consider while reading through the Analects is Confucius’ emphasis on modesty and examining the self for fault before one finds fault with others. This certainly fits snuggly with the quote just mentioned. Confucius praises individuals who question themselves rather than others and who display modesty rather than pride. Confucius displays these virtues with regards to himself many times in the Analects. Consider 1.16, “Don’t worry if people don’t recognize your merits; worry that you may not recognize theirs”. Consider 4.17, “When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him; when you see an unworthy man, examine yourself”.
In reading the Analects, pay particular attention to the following passages in light of the above:
1.10, 1.14-16,
2.12-15, 2.17,
3.13, 3.26,
4.6, 4.7, 4.10, 4.11, 4.14, 4.17,
5.5, 5.12, 5.13, 5.18, 5.27,
6.15, 6.17, 6.18, 6.20, 6.29,
7.7, 7.22,
9.8, 9.17, 9.26,
11.17,
12.22,
13.24,
14.22, 14.29,
15.21, 15.23, 15.24, 15.36, 15.39
Ma’at and the Wisdom of Ancient Egypt
The idea of balance was identified with the Goddess Ma’at in the early periods of Egyptian history, but just like the sun became the abstract principle of life and the universe Ma’at became the abstract conception of the balance of opposites.
In the Egyptian wisdom quotes, one of my favorite examples of early city-state texts, we can see that the Egyptians were concerned not only with the balance of good and evil that exist in particular desirable things but also in the ethical virtue of the balance of concern for oneself and for others. As many tribes gathered into the earliest city-states and empires, people saw more and more of human behavior and became concerned with balancing excess and lack. People saw that some had much to eat, much money, much power, and others had none. They saw that excess can hurt the individual and society as much as deficiency, power and riches as much as oppression and poverty. In Egypt and many societies that followed, including India, Greece and China, we can see a concern with balance and avoiding both excess and deficiency being praised as wise and ethical.
In the Egyptian texts (as well as Confucius) we can see a heart centered theory of the human being that ties into this concept of balance and wisdom. The heart was thought to be the center of the human being, as ancient people soon learned that the heart is the center of the vessels that branch throughout the body and which are crucial to its health and nourishment. The Egyptians thought that if one was unkind to others it would choke the breath and blood from the heart and hurt one’s physical as well as mental health (remember that in ancient cosmology, physics was identical with psychology and spirituality). Consider that we still wear the wedding ring on the finger next to the pinky, which has a large vein in it and was thought to control love and lust by the ancient Egyptians (the Greeks and Romans picked up much medicine and physiology from the Egyptians, and we keep this custom today). The ancient Israelites, in contrast, had their wives wear a ring on the index finger to keep her from casting spells while pointing.
In the Egyptian wisdom literature, the “heart-guided-individual” (very similar to the language and theories of Confucius) put wisdom over desire, mind over the body, and thus had self-control and the full powers and potential of the human individual. This was seen as putting oneself in-line with the cosmos, as Being, the one eternal way, is the source and guide of the many individual mortal beings.
Read the ancient Egyptian wisdom quotes with this in mind (particularly p. 7, 10, 17, 20, 21, 22, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 44, and 46).
The Buddha and The Middle Way
The Buddha (550 BCE), the founder of one of the largest systems of thought in history, taught moderation between extremes as a fundamental doctrine. Known as “The Middle Way” in both Buddhism and Confucianism, this teaching is quite similar to the ancient Egyptian conception of Ma’at. According to the story of the Buddha’s life he tried extreme practices in the jungle to rid himself of attachment and desire and gain unity of mind and enlightenment as many were doing in his time and still do today, but he found that extreme self denial brought self hatred. Moderation became a core part of the Buddha’s later enlightenment and teaching. Rather than try to rid the self of selfhood or desire, release is found in the moderation between seeking and denying, neither running toward nor away from the self or desirable things. Thus, Buddhist conceptions of ethics often center of moderation between extremes, neither going completely without desirable things nor completely indulging in them.
Aristotle and The Doctrine of The Mean
Aristotle (350 BCE) argues for a very similar concept of moderation in his texts on ethics and health. He associates each virtue with two vices, one more extreme than virtue and the other too deficient. Thus, one should not be afraid of money or family or war but neither should one be a glutton for these things either. He argues that too much drinking and athletics can destroy the body, but no drinking or athletics can make the body and mind weak and deficient.
Confucius and the Golden Rule
Confucius (550 BCE – 480 BCE) was one of the great ethical geniuses of the ancient world. It is worth noting that in Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism we find Jesus, Buddha and Confucius telling us to press ourselves to identify with others, to see things through their eyes and treat them as we wish to be treated. All three were identified with the central gods of the heavens in each tradition. No matter how religious or non-religious one is, this shows us that humans consider love and wisdom to be quite divine and the supreme goal of individual life and activity.
The Golden Rule:
Jesus and Confucius both say almost the same “Golden Rule”: treat others the way one wants to be treated. Sometimes scholars say that Confucius rather says the negative “Silver Rule”: DON’T treat others the way one DOESN’T want to be treated. It is easy to see that these are two sides of the same rule, quite the same but slightly different. We will see almost the same dual sided rule shared between Bentham and Mill next week as we study consequentialism/utilitarianism. Bentham argued that one should act in a way to bring about the maximum happiness, and Mill argued (taking his ethics from Bentham) that one should act in a way to bring about the minimum pain. Consider that communism often idealizes the positive side of each rule (provides structure but little room for choice) and capitalism often idealizes the negative side of each rule (room for choice but provides little structure). Many scholars have noted that American law is quite influenced by Mill, and follows his idea of erring on the side of doing little harm rather than Bentham. Consider that communist countries often put their former rulers on trial for crimes against the people when things go wrong (except for the top cult-figures), while capitalist countries rarely send their rulers to jail even when crimes could be punishable in court (there are severe problems with both methods, of course).
Heart over Ritual, Intention over Action:
Confucius and Confucianism are often identified with ritual and tradition, such as the father ruling over the household. In many places in the Analects, however, Confucius is quite clear that although ritual and tradition are essential for the cultivation of the individual and the maintenance of society, they are secondary to love and having the right intentions. This can be seen as an extension of ancient cosmology placing mind over body. In courts of law today, and individual is only guilty if they intentionally performed an action. Confucius tells us that action and tradition without the right intention and emotion are the worst things imaginable. One would think that if the two elements of an act are the right intention and right action, having the right action would be half good, but this is wrong according to Confucius. He even argues that if a ruler is corrupt, one should overthrow the state and put a proper ruler in place. Strangely, the Analects became the core text of the Confucian state in China which was quite conservative of traditional structures.
Nothing is Perfect, but Everything is Good:
Another beautiful idea that is central to Confucius’ teachings is “Perfection is nowhere, but good is always at hand”. Confucius says several times that he is not perfect, and that he has never met a perfect person (or even, in some passages, an excellent person), but he tells us that we all share the same virtues and vices and we can learn to be good by listening to the lowest of people (just like the first passage of the Egyptian wisdom , which tells us that “Wisdom can be found even among the maidens at the grindstone”). He even says that Yao and Shun, the two legendary emperors and ancestors of China, could not obtain perfection, so how could we? The best quote on this is Analects 7.22:
“Put me in the company of any two people at random – they will invariably have something to teach me…I can take their qualities as a model and their vices as a warning.”
Examine Oneself:
The last ethical point to consider while reading through the Analects is Confucius’ emphasis on modesty and examining the self for fault before one finds fault with others. This certainly fits snuggly with the quote just mentioned. Confucius praises individuals who question themselves rather than others and who display modesty rather than pride. Confucius displays these virtues with regards to himself many times in the Analects. Consider 1.16, “Don’t worry if people don’t recognize your merits; worry that you may not recognize theirs”. Consider 4.17, “When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him; when you see an unworthy man, examine yourself”.
In reading the Analects, pay particular attention to the following passages in light of the above:
1.10, 1.14-16,
2.12-15, 2.17,
3.13, 3.26,
4.6, 4.7, 4.10, 4.11, 4.14, 4.17,
5.5, 5.12, 5.13, 5.18, 5.27,
6.15, 6.17, 6.18, 6.20, 6.29,
7.7, 7.22,
9.8, 9.17, 9.26,
11.17,
12.22,
13.24,
14.22, 14.29,
15.21, 15.23, 15.24, 15.36, 15.39
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Intro Philosophy: Greek Thought & Heraclitus
We must start with the Greeks the way that we started with Egypt: with modern understandings of race and identity. This is because just like Egypt, the identity of the Greeks is a political problem that must be discussed. The Egyptians were an African people, and although they did not call themselves “black”. Likewise, the Greeks and Romans did not call themselves “white”. The terms “white” and “black” have a complicated history, as both were used by the Chinese and Muslims before Europe rose to power. Indian, Chinese, Persian and then European writers have used the term “white” to describe themselves favorably and have used the term “black” to describe other people unfavorably, but the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans did not use these terms. It is likely that the terms originated in Asia, amongst the Indians and the Chinese, where they are sometimes still used today. In fact, the Chinese portray the Buddha, who was Indian, to be Chinese and sometimes call Indian people “black”. The use of the terms passed through the middle east and the Islamic empires into Europe. Today, Europeans use the term “white” to describe themselves and “black” to describe Africans, though at times the Irish and Russians have been “blacks”. The British also used the term to describe Indians and other peoples.
As Europe rose in the wake of Islamic empire, Renaissance artists presented the Israelites, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to look like themselves. This is very much like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people presenting the Buddha and other Indian figures to look like themselves and not Indian. The Europeans began to refer to themselves, as well as the Greeks and Romans, as “white”. We can see from this complicated history that it is more accurate to describe the Greeks, Romans, and Germanic Europeans as interrelated but distinct ethnicities. The word “white” does not cover the differences. The Greeks and the Romans presented themselves as a bronzed and olive-skinned Mediterranean people, and neither the Greeks nor the Romans identified with the Germanic tribes to the North and West.
During the Renaissance, the Italians in each warring city state (Florence, Venice, and Rome) were convinced that they were each the original Roman Catholic Christian people though they often did not identify with each other. They also read Greek to read the Christian New Testament of the Bible (written in Greek and often translated into and read in Latin). Thus, the Greeks and Romans have been portrayed by Western Germanic Europeans (like myself) as European “white” people from the Renaissance up until the present time.
However, the Greeks were not always considered to be the birth of reason, politics, or science as they often are today, even by the Germanic peoples themselves. Renaissance thinkers, like Ficino and Pico, believed that Greek thinking originated in Egypt and Persia, speaking proudly of standing in the same tradition of philosophy with Zarathustra and Hermes (known to be the Greek version of Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge and scribes).
In Germany during the protestant Reformation there was a rejection of Rome and the Catholic Church and intellectuals of the time turned to Greek sources such as the original Greek New Testament. The Protestant scholars took Greek texts and made leaps in Biblical studies, philosophy, history, science and mathematics. This was not a rediscovery of their own people, as it was often misrepresented, but a rediscovery of the wider Christian tradition that included people of many different ethnicities such as the Greeks and the Romans. This situation rose along with Europe’s wealth and power, such that in the late 1700s, in the time of Hegel and the rise of German thought (archeology, philosophy and theory of history) the Greeks were called the birthplace of civilization. Many scholars even theorized that the Greeks were descended from the North (the Germanic slave peoples who the Greeks called uncivilized and stupid). While many of these scholars’ theories have been debunked, the impact of this theorizing remains with us today. This is the theory that we can disprove but we still believe and enshrine in museums, textbooks and most importantly, fictional and nonfictional cinema.
In this process, the Greeks ceased to be part of Christian heritage and became the birth of secular society, philosophy and science. They became the origin of the modern European nation state as these states ceased to be officially part of Christian empires. After WWII and the horrors of the Holocaust, the ‘’European Race’’ that was spoken of by scholars openly became an eyesore. In academic speak, ancient Greece, ancient Rome and modern Europe ceased to be “the European Race” and became “The West”. This is the story of our identity today. Notice that there is still the understanding of a European race underneath the new vocabulary, but today it is most often spoken of as “Western Culture” and also “the Western Mind”. These terms hide all of the differences between cultures and ethnicities. Notice also that Germanic people, like myself, are in fact the ancestors of the Celts and Germanic tribes, but these cultures are not celebrated as the origins of anything modern or European. The Germanic people, like the Arabs, came to inherit civilization from more ancient peoples and then wrote up the history books as if they themselves were civilization’s origins.
The Beginnings of Greek Philosophy: The Pre-Socratics
Now that we have talked about race, identity and “Western” history, it is time to talk about Heraclitus and the beginnings of Greek thinking which starts in modern day Turkey, the Eastern half of ancient Greece, the half that is not known as Greece today. Like Italy during the Renaissance, Greece was a set of city-states which did not often identify with each other, territories circling the Aegean sea in what is today Greece and Turkey. Athens, the birthplace of Socrates and home to Plato and Aristotle was one of these city-states, and Ephesus, the birthplace of Heraclitus and other thinkers active before Socrates, was another.
We only have fragments of the pre-Socratic (before Socrates) thinkers’ thought and writings. These thinkers were believed to have been active between 600 and 400 BCE. We have no writings of Socrates and only some of the writings of Plato and Aristotle. As best as we know, Greek thought began with Thales, the first thinker/philosopher/scientist of whom we have fragments from other ancient authors who write about him and his theories. Thales and several other early Greek thinkers lived in the ancient city-state of Miletus (in modern day Turkey). Thales believed that the cosmos and all things are made of water. Miletus is quite close to Ephesus, where Heraclitus, who was born just before 500 BCE and shortly after Thales, believed that all things are made of fire. Both cities had been provinces of the Persian empire, and so it was under the influence of Zoroastrianism (developed about 1000 BCE) and the cultures of the Persian empire.
The Skepticism of 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.
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 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.
As Europe rose in the wake of Islamic empire, Renaissance artists presented the Israelites, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to look like themselves. This is very much like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people presenting the Buddha and other Indian figures to look like themselves and not Indian. The Europeans began to refer to themselves, as well as the Greeks and Romans, as “white”. We can see from this complicated history that it is more accurate to describe the Greeks, Romans, and Germanic Europeans as interrelated but distinct ethnicities. The word “white” does not cover the differences. The Greeks and the Romans presented themselves as a bronzed and olive-skinned Mediterranean people, and neither the Greeks nor the Romans identified with the Germanic tribes to the North and West.
During the Renaissance, the Italians in each warring city state (Florence, Venice, and Rome) were convinced that they were each the original Roman Catholic Christian people though they often did not identify with each other. They also read Greek to read the Christian New Testament of the Bible (written in Greek and often translated into and read in Latin). Thus, the Greeks and Romans have been portrayed by Western Germanic Europeans (like myself) as European “white” people from the Renaissance up until the present time.
However, the Greeks were not always considered to be the birth of reason, politics, or science as they often are today, even by the Germanic peoples themselves. Renaissance thinkers, like Ficino and Pico, believed that Greek thinking originated in Egypt and Persia, speaking proudly of standing in the same tradition of philosophy with Zarathustra and Hermes (known to be the Greek version of Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge and scribes).
In Germany during the protestant Reformation there was a rejection of Rome and the Catholic Church and intellectuals of the time turned to Greek sources such as the original Greek New Testament. The Protestant scholars took Greek texts and made leaps in Biblical studies, philosophy, history, science and mathematics. This was not a rediscovery of their own people, as it was often misrepresented, but a rediscovery of the wider Christian tradition that included people of many different ethnicities such as the Greeks and the Romans. This situation rose along with Europe’s wealth and power, such that in the late 1700s, in the time of Hegel and the rise of German thought (archeology, philosophy and theory of history) the Greeks were called the birthplace of civilization. Many scholars even theorized that the Greeks were descended from the North (the Germanic slave peoples who the Greeks called uncivilized and stupid). While many of these scholars’ theories have been debunked, the impact of this theorizing remains with us today. This is the theory that we can disprove but we still believe and enshrine in museums, textbooks and most importantly, fictional and nonfictional cinema.
In this process, the Greeks ceased to be part of Christian heritage and became the birth of secular society, philosophy and science. They became the origin of the modern European nation state as these states ceased to be officially part of Christian empires. After WWII and the horrors of the Holocaust, the ‘’European Race’’ that was spoken of by scholars openly became an eyesore. In academic speak, ancient Greece, ancient Rome and modern Europe ceased to be “the European Race” and became “The West”. This is the story of our identity today. Notice that there is still the understanding of a European race underneath the new vocabulary, but today it is most often spoken of as “Western Culture” and also “the Western Mind”. These terms hide all of the differences between cultures and ethnicities. Notice also that Germanic people, like myself, are in fact the ancestors of the Celts and Germanic tribes, but these cultures are not celebrated as the origins of anything modern or European. The Germanic people, like the Arabs, came to inherit civilization from more ancient peoples and then wrote up the history books as if they themselves were civilization’s origins.
The Beginnings of Greek Philosophy: The Pre-Socratics
Now that we have talked about race, identity and “Western” history, it is time to talk about Heraclitus and the beginnings of Greek thinking which starts in modern day Turkey, the Eastern half of ancient Greece, the half that is not known as Greece today. Like Italy during the Renaissance, Greece was a set of city-states which did not often identify with each other, territories circling the Aegean sea in what is today Greece and Turkey. Athens, the birthplace of Socrates and home to Plato and Aristotle was one of these city-states, and Ephesus, the birthplace of Heraclitus and other thinkers active before Socrates, was another.
We only have fragments of the pre-Socratic (before Socrates) thinkers’ thought and writings. These thinkers were believed to have been active between 600 and 400 BCE. We have no writings of Socrates and only some of the writings of Plato and Aristotle. As best as we know, Greek thought began with Thales, the first thinker/philosopher/scientist of whom we have fragments from other ancient authors who write about him and his theories. Thales and several other early Greek thinkers lived in the ancient city-state of Miletus (in modern day Turkey). Thales believed that the cosmos and all things are made of water. Miletus is quite close to Ephesus, where Heraclitus, who was born just before 500 BCE and shortly after Thales, believed that all things are made of fire. Both cities had been provinces of the Persian empire, and so it was under the influence of Zoroastrianism (developed about 1000 BCE) and the cultures of the Persian empire.
The Skepticism of 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.
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 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.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Social & Political Philosophy: Hobbes & Sovereignty
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is often called the second great philosopher (the first being Descartes) in the modern European philosophical tradition. He is known for his 1651 book Leviathan which argues that the people agree to transfer their rights to a sovereign by social contract, and that this agreement justly allows the sovereign to do whatever is necessary to protect the people including use of brute force and deception. Machiavelli, who influenced Hobbes and was the subject of the last lecture, argued that any sovereign must be good at these two evil but necessary aspects of society. Like Machiavelli, Hobbes was a realist and though he supported the traditional monarchy got in trouble even with the loyal Royalists he was trying to support by arguing that the king/sovereign derives authority not from God but from natural law (the basic way humanity and nature work). Like Machiavelli, Hobbes is infamous for supporting the brute power of the king but he is also famous and influential for his discussion of natural rights (self-evident liberties), the equality of humanity, and social contracts (government as an artificial agreement of individuals that concedes power to authority through consent).
Hobbes was working as a tutor and scholar in Florence and Paris, and had been working on a complete physics of natural motions that built up from inanimate objects to the motions of the body to the motions of society. He returned home to England in 1637, finding a country torn by civil wars and complex politics. While things were quite complicated between England, Scotland and Ireland, the two main sides of the English civil war were the Royalists who supported the rule of King Charles the first and the Parliamentarians who supported the rights of nobles in Parliament to check the powers of the king and guarantee liberties for the nobility. Just as in Florence in Machiavelli’s time, there was a brief period (10 years, 1649-1659) of Parliamentary rule after the execution of Charles the first before England returned to monarchy under Charles the second.
Before the civil war, Parliament was not a permanent body in English government. Parliaments were called at the king’s request to aid the king’s purposes, particularly the collection of taxes and the waging of warfare. Rulers have needed the help of local nobles for these purposes since the earliest city state societies, and so the earliest form of democracy in Sumer was just such a council of nobles as was Athenian democracy (though in Athens there was no ruler for a time above the council). In England before the civil war, Parliament could send bills to be considered as potential laws to the king (like we have in American law still today) as well as petition grievances, but the king had the right to call the council as well as dissolve the council, so it was not a permanent body that held the king’s powers in check.
The king needed the nobility, but could also ignore the needs of the nobles for the sake of the crown (according to both Machiavelli and Hobbes, for the greater good of all embodied in the king). Charles called and dismissed several parliaments that had grievances against him before ruling without a parliament for 11 years. The nobles and later historians called this period the Eleven Years Tyranny, which is ironic if you consider that the nobles held power over the people without any form of representation. Charles was forced to make peace with the kings of France and Spain, to levy great taxes on merchants, and occasionally torture and punish even nobles who rebelled (such as cutting off ears, a punishment common for the commoners but rare for the nobility).
Many in the cities of England and the military favored the parliament, while the rural areas favored the king. Both sides believed that they fought for the traditional English way and wished for Charles to remain on the throne. After several bloody wars and political back-stabbings, the Parliamentarians began to wonder whether Charles should remain king or whether Parliament itself could rule England (much like the brief period of Athenian democracy, a country ruled by a council of the noble families). Captured by the Parliamentarians, Charles was tried and found guilty of high treason against England, and executed in 1649. English Civil War Societies, much like those in America, reenact the wars every year (but with pikes and shields, not muskets as in America).
At this time, Hobbes was completing his book Leviathan, published the next year in 1650. In Paris he had good contact with Royalists in exile who believed, like Hobbes, that a strong central authority prevented injustice and civil war. The brief period of Parliamentary rule was messy and divided, which the Royalists and Hobbes watched from overseas. In 1660 Charles II returned from exile and re-conquered England and restored the monarchy of his father (a period known as the Restoration). Charles II, who had in fact been tutored by Hobbes as a boy, gave Hobbes protection during times of persecution and a pension.
While the Royalists did in this way win the long fight, only some were delighted by Hobbes’ Leviathan. Many Royalists were outraged by Hobbes’ idea that the king derived authority from the natural rights and protection of the people, not by the divine decree of God. Hobbes does mention God and divine covenants as a basic type of contract, but he argues that one can only enter a contract with God by God’s grace and not by natural right, unlike the mortal human contract that supports a human king. This is why Charles II had to offer him protection during purges of atheism and “profanity” when Hobbes’ book Leviathan was targeted openly. Like Machiavelli, Hobbes was intensely loved and hated and his work spread amongst those who hated him as much as anyone. While many today loath the idea of a sovereign without checks and balances, Hobbes is important for his ideas about the natural nature of society, liberty, rights, and equality.
The Leviathan
In the selections I gave you from Leviathan, some of the most famous, Hobbes argues that in the natural condition, the basic state of humanity in nature, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Hobbes argues that human beings are more equal than they are different in strength and intelligence. People think that they are above others but this merely confirms their equality (like the DMV reports that 80% of those questioned say they are an above average driver). Everyone wants to obtain their ends and posses what they desire, but because they desire what others want they make enemies easily. Without power over them, there is little happiness and much grief. Each wants safety, even glory, at the expense of the others. The state of nature is therefore a war of all vs. all, a war against every other person.
Hobbes writes that there may never have been such a pure state of nature for all of humanity, but argues that the “savages of America”, the native Americans, live in such a state in his time and thus have no government at all. Next week, Rousseau will argue the opposite and look to the American tribes as well as others to argue that in the state of nature people were pure and uncorrupted. In the state of nature, when there is no government, nothing is unjust. There is neither justice nor injustice, neither right nor wrong. Force and fraud are cardinal virtues (consider the similarity with Machiavelli’s Prince). There is no permanent property that is rightfully one person’s or another’s (consider Plato & Aristotle arguing whether society provides or prohibits private property). The only reason to seek peace is fear of death, which is ironic considering that we call peace a sort of rest when we say “rest in peace”.
For Hobbes, the basic “right of nature” is self-preservation (much like Darwin’s survival of the fittest as a kind of natural law). Hobbes eventually argues that one can pledge one’s life to society, but one still has the right to defend oneself even when society comes to claim this debt. Hobbes draws the useful distinction between a law (a prohibition) and a right (a prohibition of a prohibition, a freedom or liberty). In the state of nature, everyone has the unchecked right to everything, including the lives of others. People should seek peace and form societies for their own sakes, but before the social contract there is nothing preventing anyone from doing anything. People should treat others the way they want to be treated, but to do this they have to voluntarily give up liberty. They must give up the liberty of harming others to prevent harm from being done to themselves.
Hobbes makes the further distinction that liberties and rights can be renounced or transferred to another, such as an authority. Basically, Hobbes argues through much of the Leviathan that people come to understand that they must transfer the liberty of harming others to the sovereign or state in order to ensure mutual peace and prosperity. Once they have entered into such an agreement, a social contract, they have agreed to a standard of justice and this is what creates justice and injustice. Following in accord with the contract is justice, and breaking the contract is injustice. Following the contract creates duty as well as the difference between right and wrong. A declaration of the contract is made by the participants, and now the participants are bound in duty to the contract and the authority in which the contract is embodied.
People naturally want liberty for themselves, but they also wish to dominate others. Unlike other animals, however, people can create voluntary and artificial structures such as social contracts and nation-states. The only way to do this is to confer/transfer power, strength and liberty to a sovereign. The sovereign is either one person (king, queen, sultan) or a group of people (parliament, congress, pow wow). Later in the text, Hobbes sides with the Royalists vs. the Parliamentarians and argues that it is best to have a single human sovereign (such as Charles the first, or second), because otherwise there will be civil war and strife (like that witnessed in the brief period between Charles the first and Charles the second).
The sovereign, the artificial and mortal God, as Hobbes calls it, is now owed allegiance underneath the authority of the natural and immortal God who only contacts humanity by grace and revelation. When the sovereign acts, it is as if everyone acts. This is famously captured in the image on the front of the publication of Leviathan with a king made out of smaller people, wielding a sword. Because one has pledged one’s strength and life to the sovereign, if you try to rebel the sovereign actually punishes you with your own hand as well as the hand of everyone else. If the sovereign believes you must be killed for the good of everyone else, it is as if you have condemned yourself to death voluntarily. Hobbes argues that you still have the right to try to defend yourself, but the social contract makes it right and legal for the king to have the liberty to end your life and the lives of others, foreign and domestic, if it is in the interest of the sovereign who embodies the interests of the whole populace. Also, Hobbes argues that even if the minority does not voluntarily enter the contract, they are bound to it through the interests of the majority and if they do not agree they can be killed without right to safety as this right only exists within the social contract through participation (consider colonialism, as we will near the end of the class, and how this can be used by foreign powers to set up empires and kill those who disagree in the name of security and liberty).
In the name of the social contract, the sovereign can’t commit injustice. Consider that this was the charge of the Parliamentarians against Charles the first, and the reason Charles was executed while Hobbes is writing the work. The sovereign has the right to censor all works of literature and art, to decide matters of property and war. Hobbes quotes the gospels, “A house divided against itself cannot stand”, arguing that there must be an individual who embodies the whole as king or there will be continuous civil war. The king must be “like the sun to the stars”, eclipsing all other authority by natural right. He writes, “If there had not first been an opinion received of the greatest part of England, that these powers were divided between the King, and the Lords, and the House of Commons, the people had never been divided and fallen into this civil war…and so continue, till their miseries be forgotten”. Consider that Hobbes is arguing against checks and balances to the King’s power, unlike Machiavelli did in his republican works.
Hobbes was working as a tutor and scholar in Florence and Paris, and had been working on a complete physics of natural motions that built up from inanimate objects to the motions of the body to the motions of society. He returned home to England in 1637, finding a country torn by civil wars and complex politics. While things were quite complicated between England, Scotland and Ireland, the two main sides of the English civil war were the Royalists who supported the rule of King Charles the first and the Parliamentarians who supported the rights of nobles in Parliament to check the powers of the king and guarantee liberties for the nobility. Just as in Florence in Machiavelli’s time, there was a brief period (10 years, 1649-1659) of Parliamentary rule after the execution of Charles the first before England returned to monarchy under Charles the second.
Before the civil war, Parliament was not a permanent body in English government. Parliaments were called at the king’s request to aid the king’s purposes, particularly the collection of taxes and the waging of warfare. Rulers have needed the help of local nobles for these purposes since the earliest city state societies, and so the earliest form of democracy in Sumer was just such a council of nobles as was Athenian democracy (though in Athens there was no ruler for a time above the council). In England before the civil war, Parliament could send bills to be considered as potential laws to the king (like we have in American law still today) as well as petition grievances, but the king had the right to call the council as well as dissolve the council, so it was not a permanent body that held the king’s powers in check.
The king needed the nobility, but could also ignore the needs of the nobles for the sake of the crown (according to both Machiavelli and Hobbes, for the greater good of all embodied in the king). Charles called and dismissed several parliaments that had grievances against him before ruling without a parliament for 11 years. The nobles and later historians called this period the Eleven Years Tyranny, which is ironic if you consider that the nobles held power over the people without any form of representation. Charles was forced to make peace with the kings of France and Spain, to levy great taxes on merchants, and occasionally torture and punish even nobles who rebelled (such as cutting off ears, a punishment common for the commoners but rare for the nobility).
Many in the cities of England and the military favored the parliament, while the rural areas favored the king. Both sides believed that they fought for the traditional English way and wished for Charles to remain on the throne. After several bloody wars and political back-stabbings, the Parliamentarians began to wonder whether Charles should remain king or whether Parliament itself could rule England (much like the brief period of Athenian democracy, a country ruled by a council of the noble families). Captured by the Parliamentarians, Charles was tried and found guilty of high treason against England, and executed in 1649. English Civil War Societies, much like those in America, reenact the wars every year (but with pikes and shields, not muskets as in America).
At this time, Hobbes was completing his book Leviathan, published the next year in 1650. In Paris he had good contact with Royalists in exile who believed, like Hobbes, that a strong central authority prevented injustice and civil war. The brief period of Parliamentary rule was messy and divided, which the Royalists and Hobbes watched from overseas. In 1660 Charles II returned from exile and re-conquered England and restored the monarchy of his father (a period known as the Restoration). Charles II, who had in fact been tutored by Hobbes as a boy, gave Hobbes protection during times of persecution and a pension.
While the Royalists did in this way win the long fight, only some were delighted by Hobbes’ Leviathan. Many Royalists were outraged by Hobbes’ idea that the king derived authority from the natural rights and protection of the people, not by the divine decree of God. Hobbes does mention God and divine covenants as a basic type of contract, but he argues that one can only enter a contract with God by God’s grace and not by natural right, unlike the mortal human contract that supports a human king. This is why Charles II had to offer him protection during purges of atheism and “profanity” when Hobbes’ book Leviathan was targeted openly. Like Machiavelli, Hobbes was intensely loved and hated and his work spread amongst those who hated him as much as anyone. While many today loath the idea of a sovereign without checks and balances, Hobbes is important for his ideas about the natural nature of society, liberty, rights, and equality.
The Leviathan
In the selections I gave you from Leviathan, some of the most famous, Hobbes argues that in the natural condition, the basic state of humanity in nature, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Hobbes argues that human beings are more equal than they are different in strength and intelligence. People think that they are above others but this merely confirms their equality (like the DMV reports that 80% of those questioned say they are an above average driver). Everyone wants to obtain their ends and posses what they desire, but because they desire what others want they make enemies easily. Without power over them, there is little happiness and much grief. Each wants safety, even glory, at the expense of the others. The state of nature is therefore a war of all vs. all, a war against every other person.
Hobbes writes that there may never have been such a pure state of nature for all of humanity, but argues that the “savages of America”, the native Americans, live in such a state in his time and thus have no government at all. Next week, Rousseau will argue the opposite and look to the American tribes as well as others to argue that in the state of nature people were pure and uncorrupted. In the state of nature, when there is no government, nothing is unjust. There is neither justice nor injustice, neither right nor wrong. Force and fraud are cardinal virtues (consider the similarity with Machiavelli’s Prince). There is no permanent property that is rightfully one person’s or another’s (consider Plato & Aristotle arguing whether society provides or prohibits private property). The only reason to seek peace is fear of death, which is ironic considering that we call peace a sort of rest when we say “rest in peace”.
For Hobbes, the basic “right of nature” is self-preservation (much like Darwin’s survival of the fittest as a kind of natural law). Hobbes eventually argues that one can pledge one’s life to society, but one still has the right to defend oneself even when society comes to claim this debt. Hobbes draws the useful distinction between a law (a prohibition) and a right (a prohibition of a prohibition, a freedom or liberty). In the state of nature, everyone has the unchecked right to everything, including the lives of others. People should seek peace and form societies for their own sakes, but before the social contract there is nothing preventing anyone from doing anything. People should treat others the way they want to be treated, but to do this they have to voluntarily give up liberty. They must give up the liberty of harming others to prevent harm from being done to themselves.
Hobbes makes the further distinction that liberties and rights can be renounced or transferred to another, such as an authority. Basically, Hobbes argues through much of the Leviathan that people come to understand that they must transfer the liberty of harming others to the sovereign or state in order to ensure mutual peace and prosperity. Once they have entered into such an agreement, a social contract, they have agreed to a standard of justice and this is what creates justice and injustice. Following in accord with the contract is justice, and breaking the contract is injustice. Following the contract creates duty as well as the difference between right and wrong. A declaration of the contract is made by the participants, and now the participants are bound in duty to the contract and the authority in which the contract is embodied.
People naturally want liberty for themselves, but they also wish to dominate others. Unlike other animals, however, people can create voluntary and artificial structures such as social contracts and nation-states. The only way to do this is to confer/transfer power, strength and liberty to a sovereign. The sovereign is either one person (king, queen, sultan) or a group of people (parliament, congress, pow wow). Later in the text, Hobbes sides with the Royalists vs. the Parliamentarians and argues that it is best to have a single human sovereign (such as Charles the first, or second), because otherwise there will be civil war and strife (like that witnessed in the brief period between Charles the first and Charles the second).
The sovereign, the artificial and mortal God, as Hobbes calls it, is now owed allegiance underneath the authority of the natural and immortal God who only contacts humanity by grace and revelation. When the sovereign acts, it is as if everyone acts. This is famously captured in the image on the front of the publication of Leviathan with a king made out of smaller people, wielding a sword. Because one has pledged one’s strength and life to the sovereign, if you try to rebel the sovereign actually punishes you with your own hand as well as the hand of everyone else. If the sovereign believes you must be killed for the good of everyone else, it is as if you have condemned yourself to death voluntarily. Hobbes argues that you still have the right to try to defend yourself, but the social contract makes it right and legal for the king to have the liberty to end your life and the lives of others, foreign and domestic, if it is in the interest of the sovereign who embodies the interests of the whole populace. Also, Hobbes argues that even if the minority does not voluntarily enter the contract, they are bound to it through the interests of the majority and if they do not agree they can be killed without right to safety as this right only exists within the social contract through participation (consider colonialism, as we will near the end of the class, and how this can be used by foreign powers to set up empires and kill those who disagree in the name of security and liberty).
In the name of the social contract, the sovereign can’t commit injustice. Consider that this was the charge of the Parliamentarians against Charles the first, and the reason Charles was executed while Hobbes is writing the work. The sovereign has the right to censor all works of literature and art, to decide matters of property and war. Hobbes quotes the gospels, “A house divided against itself cannot stand”, arguing that there must be an individual who embodies the whole as king or there will be continuous civil war. The king must be “like the sun to the stars”, eclipsing all other authority by natural right. He writes, “If there had not first been an opinion received of the greatest part of England, that these powers were divided between the King, and the Lords, and the House of Commons, the people had never been divided and fallen into this civil war…and so continue, till their miseries be forgotten”. Consider that Hobbes is arguing against checks and balances to the King’s power, unlike Machiavelli did in his republican works.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Intro Philosophy: Indian Philosophy
Early India and Hinduism: The Vedas and Upanishads
‘Hindu’ is the Persian name for India (Persia and India are next door to each other and have traded for thousands of years). Our society borrows the term from the British, who get the term from the Persians. Hinduism may have many gods but there is an understanding that each god is one aspect of the great father and creator God, named by most traditions Brahma. Thus, even though there are many forms of worship that focus on specific gods, there is an understanding that it is all one interrelated tradition.
There are three paths of worship in Hinduism.
First, there is devotional worship, known as Bhakti Yoga (‘Yoga’ means ‘discipline’, or practice). In Bhakti devotional worship, the devotee prays, sings hymns, lights incense, and performs rituals to gain favor with the gods and heavens. It is impossible not to notice that most of what we call ‘religion’ the world over is in fact forms of Bhakti practice, devotion to particular gods and ancestral spirits. The two most populous forms of Bhakti Hinduism are Shaivism, the worship of Shiva (the transformer and destroyer) and his incarnations such as Ganesh (the elephant headed god), and Vaishnavism, the worship of Vishnu (the savior or preserver) and his incarnations (such as Krishna).
Raja yoga, the second path, is worship by meditation and asceticism (living in isolation, standing in place for days, chanting the names of God for hours, sitting on spikes, and other means of hard activity meant to gain a meditative state of insight). Notice that Christian monks could easily be seen as adhering to this ascetic path. If you enjoy jogging, and find it ‘spiritual’, this could be seen as a form of Raja yoga.
Jnana yoga (“zshna-na”), the third path and my personal favorite, is worship by acquiring knowledge and understanding the order of things through study and philosophizing. Notice that Greek philosophers and Christian/deist scientists of Europe like Newton can be seen as following this route. Indeed, Hinduism is so diverse and inter-accepting that it is hard to not see all of the forms of other cultures somewhere in one of its parts. This class itself could be seen as a form of Jnana yoga, designed to bring you closer to the core by studying the ways of the world (namely the religious traditions in their sameness and difference).
All are understood to work towards the same goal: liberation from the bonds of attachment and desire and rising into enlightenment and release.
First, there is hope for a better next life. Many are familiar already with the Hindu idea of reincarnation. This is not, as we learned in Shamanism, a form of afterlife particular to India, but in fact there is evidence that many tribal cultures and early Egypt believed that one’s present life will be reincarnated in another life on earth based on one’s actions and intentions. This interconnection is called ‘Karma’, which simply means ‘action’ in Sanskrit. Interestingly, physical causation is ‘karma’, just as metaphysical causation (next life physics) is ‘karma’, same word and understanding of cause and effect applied to a different sphere of existence. If you punch someone in the head, it is karma that makes their head reel backward, and karma that also weighs down your chance for a favorable life after death in the Hindu tradition.
Second, there is hope for release, for freedom from rounds of rebirth on earth. This can be thought of as dwelling in a heaven with one’s personal or family god, but also as a dwelling with the order of things without residing in any particular place. Bhakti yoga tends to favor the dwelling with a lord, while Raja and Jnana tends to favor the dwelling with the universe as a whole, however it is important to remember that some Hindus believe that both amount to the same exact thing (while others will insist that their school’s truth is ‘more true’, the same variation one finds in any religion and in our own culture). This release is also called Moksha and Samadhi, but in America we know this first and foremost by the same name as the famous grunge band, Nirvana.
The Vedas were oral traditions, huge memorized lengths of stories and doctrines that were spoken and repeated. There are four Vedas, and these form the most ancient and respected source of Hinduism. Our scholars believe the Vedas to have been formed sometime before 1200 BCE, but many Hindu devotees believe that the Vedas are far older. The Rig (or ‘Rg’) Veda is the oldest and most central. The Vedas, compared to the Upanishads, are largely stories of creation and the tales of the gods, explaining how the universe was created and how things got to be the way they are.
The Upanishads (800 BCE) were a later development. These were more ‘philosophical’, teachings about the soul and how to release the soul from desire and merge with the great One and All. The Upanishads frequently interpret the stories of the Vedas as metaphoric teachings, instructions for the truly wise on how to develop the mind or soul. ‘Upanishad’ means “sitting down near and beside”, as these are believed to be the close teachings of the priest, philosopher or master who has taught the Vedas for a long time and thus knows something of their secret ‘inner’ meaning. Greek philosophy, particularly the pre-Socratic thinkers (philosophers before Socrates, of whom we have only fragments), shares an uncanny resemblance to many of the discussions in the Upanishads (all the more reason to see less of a strict separation between ‘West’ and ‘East’).
One of the most famous sayings from the Upanishads is Tat Tvam Asi, “That is you”. No matter what “that” you are looking at, it is in fact your own self because all is one and there are no complete or permanent separations between any two things.
As the Upanishads continued to gain teachers and followers, there was a new flowering of many schools of thought between 700 and 400 BCE that took much from the Vedas and Upanishads but developed the teachings in new directions. These new schools often rejected the caste system (still in place today in spite of these ancient rebellions) and thus gained massive followings among all classes and castes of India. Jainism was one of the first, but it was quickly developed and transformed itself into a religion that is possibly the most popular system of thought in history, Buddhism (Christianity, Islam and Science are contenders for first, second, third and fourth place depending on how and who one counts).
Some scholars today argue that Jainism and Buddhism helped develop Hinduism in response such that Hinduism looks as it does today (with an emphasis on total liberation AS WELL AS the goal of merit and reincarnation). However, Buddhism (which I have personally heard some Hindus describe as ‘Hinduism for Export’) flourished outside of India and thus became a much more international religion for dominating diverse empires, whereas Hinduism and Jainism largely remain confined to India even today (with significant minority populations in Canada, America, South Africa and many other places). Also, of course, Hindu gurus (teachers, sages) have become quite popular in giving religious insight to people in the ‘West’ in recent decades, particularly after the 1960s and the cultural revolution (it could be argued, even more popular than Buddhist or Jain teachers).
Jainism (650 BCE)
Jainism, or “Jain Dharma” (dharma means “teaching/law/order of the universe”) was and is practiced by Jains (not Jainists as some mistakenly say). There are currently 4 Million in India today, with many others in communities around the world including New York and Toronto. Jainism rose just before Buddhism, as Mahavira (650 BCE), the main teacher and founder of Jainism, lived just before the Buddha (550 BCE), though all of these dates are still in debate.
Jainism advocates two principles that are shared with Indian thought but credited to Jain innovation: Anekantavada, the multiplicity of reality or “non-one-ended-ness” and Syadvada, the hypothetical and imperfect nature of perspective and judgment. According to these two principles, all human beliefs and judgments are temporary and partial views of the greater whole.
Jains were also early proponents of the idea that the cosmos works in cycles: like the physical rising and setting of the sun, consciousness rises, then sets. People start to become awakened teachers and develop religion in the rising era, and people lose religion in the setting era. This is endless, like the cosmos. The cosmos becomes enlightened to its own self through us, and then loses consciousness of itself through us. Unfortunately, we currently live in an era of dimming religion and consciousness according to most Jain and Hindu teachers (the Hindus following the Jains in this picture).
Jain teachers and saints are known as Tirthankaras, “one who makes a ford” (cutting through water as order over chaos, as land becoming firmament in the chaotic waters). Mahavira (also Mahavir), the founder of Jainism, is understood by Jains to be the 24th Tirthankara. Like others of his time, Mahavira was a practitioner of austerities that are aimed at detachment from desire and multiplicity of the world: fasting, standing in jungles, going without food or luxuries for extended periods of time. Statues of Mahavira and other Tirthankaras show vines growing up their legs and bodies, as vines grow several feet in the jungle a day and so would grow up your body if you practice standing austerities for days at a time. Jains believe that these practices purify the self/soul/mind.
Here, we come to THE critical difference between Jainism and the other schools of Indian thought. In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin). Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down. For Jains, karma is ALWAYS NEGATIVE, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL. Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated.
Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of karma and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle. Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant.
The best way to understand the dual practice of avoiding karma AND shredding karma is the Metaphor of the Leaky Boat: You ride in a boat across water to a distant shore (Nirvana). Notice that water represents chaos and desire, and the land represents the firm and the enlightened. The boat is leaky, and water is pouring in. You have to BOTH plug the leaks (preventative principles like vegetarianism that prevent bad karma from getting IN you) and bail out the water that has already inside the boat (shredding karma, practicing austerities like fasting or standing in postures to get the karma you already have in this life OUT of you). Jains believe that it is only by this two-pronged strategy that the individual can be fully liberated and join back together with the cosmos and thus gain eternal life rather than round after round of rebirth.
Buddhism (550 BCE)
According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha, the “awakened one”, practiced austerities like Mahavira, but found that this way was not enough. Buddhism is famous for long periods of meditation, and this is quite like Jain austerities of standing in postures, but Buddhism suggests that it is through balance and not extremes that one will be liberated. The Buddha found Jain asceticism to be one sided and promoting of self hatred which is still attachment and duality.
According to the tradition and legend, Buddha’s father was the king of a kingdom in Northern India. When the Buddha was born, the king’s wise men told him that his son would be EITHER a great king OR a great holy man. The king did not want his son to be a holy man, but rather the next king, so to control his son he hid his son away in his palace and gave him all the luxuries in the world, hiding death and pain from him, surrounding him with dancing girls and servants and only healthy, happy, obedient people. At 29, the Buddha had become bored of this, and snuck out to see the city, taking along his trusted servant. In succession, the Buddha the Four Sights (an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a holy man). When he saw the first three, his servant each time told him that this was unfortunately inevitable for everyone, but when he got to the fourth, the holy man (likely a Jain or proto-Jain), his servant told him that the monk was working on the first three (age, sickness, and death).
The Buddha was immediately envious of something more wonderful than he had ever possessed in the palace, and so he escaped into the jungle where he found sages practicing austerities. The Buddha did these Jain (or proto-Jain, depending on the scholar) austere practices in the jungle for six years, but he found that this brought no great enlightenment and in fact brought him self-hatred and self-denial (notice here that this is where Buddhism breaks away from Jainism as a direct criticism of Jain practice, taking much of Jainism with it in the process but seeking a middle way between denial and indulgence, attached to neither). The Buddha left the jungle disappointed. He decided to sit beneath a large tree, the Bodhi Tree (which one can go see in India today, a tree supposed to have been grown from the original in the original spot), and he vowed not to rise until he found complete and total truth or he would give up his life. After 49 days, at the age of 35, he realized complete enlightenment, Nirvana. This is defined in the tradition as the total extinction of greed (raga), hate (dosa), and delusion (moha), obtainable in this life by any being by overcoming duality and desire.
Major philosophical ideas of Buddhism
The Doctrine of the Middle Way: In all things, as the mind splits things into opposites and prefers one while rejecting the other, one should always practice moderation between the extremes. As a criticism of Jainism, this means that one should balance pain and pleasure, being attached to neither, rather than chase pain and difficulty to liberate the self. The Buddha found Jain practice to be immoderate: too much de-emphasis of self is attachment to self hate, not detachment from particular things (as self-hate is particular and bound up with particular things just as much as self-love or pride is). One must love and hate the self, bringing the two together, to find detachment from many and complete identity in the One, the All.
Doctrine of Impermanence: The Buddha taught that all things are impermanent. Thus, everything is constantly evolving, never the same twice. Only the great All is eternal, the One to which we all belong, but as soon as you say this it becomes a conception, a particular being separated from other particular beings, and then is simply a temporary being in your mind.
Codependent Arising (Pratityasamutpada): Another major teaching of Buddhism is codependent arising of all phenomena. While this is a hard thing to grasp or discuss, it means that all things are themselves in so far as they are connected to every other thing. Opposites, such as heat and cold or self and other, do not anchor things in themselves or give things their true meaning, but rather all things exist dependent on all other things. While this may frustrate some, and they would say ‘this tells me nothing’, Buddhists believe that all things are impermanent, and so you should not expect to have final knowledge of any particular thing. Instead, you must investigate each thing you want to describe as best as you can, connected to the things to which you want to connect it.
‘Hindu’ is the Persian name for India (Persia and India are next door to each other and have traded for thousands of years). Our society borrows the term from the British, who get the term from the Persians. Hinduism may have many gods but there is an understanding that each god is one aspect of the great father and creator God, named by most traditions Brahma. Thus, even though there are many forms of worship that focus on specific gods, there is an understanding that it is all one interrelated tradition.
There are three paths of worship in Hinduism.
First, there is devotional worship, known as Bhakti Yoga (‘Yoga’ means ‘discipline’, or practice). In Bhakti devotional worship, the devotee prays, sings hymns, lights incense, and performs rituals to gain favor with the gods and heavens. It is impossible not to notice that most of what we call ‘religion’ the world over is in fact forms of Bhakti practice, devotion to particular gods and ancestral spirits. The two most populous forms of Bhakti Hinduism are Shaivism, the worship of Shiva (the transformer and destroyer) and his incarnations such as Ganesh (the elephant headed god), and Vaishnavism, the worship of Vishnu (the savior or preserver) and his incarnations (such as Krishna).
Raja yoga, the second path, is worship by meditation and asceticism (living in isolation, standing in place for days, chanting the names of God for hours, sitting on spikes, and other means of hard activity meant to gain a meditative state of insight). Notice that Christian monks could easily be seen as adhering to this ascetic path. If you enjoy jogging, and find it ‘spiritual’, this could be seen as a form of Raja yoga.
Jnana yoga (“zshna-na”), the third path and my personal favorite, is worship by acquiring knowledge and understanding the order of things through study and philosophizing. Notice that Greek philosophers and Christian/deist scientists of Europe like Newton can be seen as following this route. Indeed, Hinduism is so diverse and inter-accepting that it is hard to not see all of the forms of other cultures somewhere in one of its parts. This class itself could be seen as a form of Jnana yoga, designed to bring you closer to the core by studying the ways of the world (namely the religious traditions in their sameness and difference).
All are understood to work towards the same goal: liberation from the bonds of attachment and desire and rising into enlightenment and release.
First, there is hope for a better next life. Many are familiar already with the Hindu idea of reincarnation. This is not, as we learned in Shamanism, a form of afterlife particular to India, but in fact there is evidence that many tribal cultures and early Egypt believed that one’s present life will be reincarnated in another life on earth based on one’s actions and intentions. This interconnection is called ‘Karma’, which simply means ‘action’ in Sanskrit. Interestingly, physical causation is ‘karma’, just as metaphysical causation (next life physics) is ‘karma’, same word and understanding of cause and effect applied to a different sphere of existence. If you punch someone in the head, it is karma that makes their head reel backward, and karma that also weighs down your chance for a favorable life after death in the Hindu tradition.
Second, there is hope for release, for freedom from rounds of rebirth on earth. This can be thought of as dwelling in a heaven with one’s personal or family god, but also as a dwelling with the order of things without residing in any particular place. Bhakti yoga tends to favor the dwelling with a lord, while Raja and Jnana tends to favor the dwelling with the universe as a whole, however it is important to remember that some Hindus believe that both amount to the same exact thing (while others will insist that their school’s truth is ‘more true’, the same variation one finds in any religion and in our own culture). This release is also called Moksha and Samadhi, but in America we know this first and foremost by the same name as the famous grunge band, Nirvana.
The Vedas were oral traditions, huge memorized lengths of stories and doctrines that were spoken and repeated. There are four Vedas, and these form the most ancient and respected source of Hinduism. Our scholars believe the Vedas to have been formed sometime before 1200 BCE, but many Hindu devotees believe that the Vedas are far older. The Rig (or ‘Rg’) Veda is the oldest and most central. The Vedas, compared to the Upanishads, are largely stories of creation and the tales of the gods, explaining how the universe was created and how things got to be the way they are.
The Upanishads (800 BCE) were a later development. These were more ‘philosophical’, teachings about the soul and how to release the soul from desire and merge with the great One and All. The Upanishads frequently interpret the stories of the Vedas as metaphoric teachings, instructions for the truly wise on how to develop the mind or soul. ‘Upanishad’ means “sitting down near and beside”, as these are believed to be the close teachings of the priest, philosopher or master who has taught the Vedas for a long time and thus knows something of their secret ‘inner’ meaning. Greek philosophy, particularly the pre-Socratic thinkers (philosophers before Socrates, of whom we have only fragments), shares an uncanny resemblance to many of the discussions in the Upanishads (all the more reason to see less of a strict separation between ‘West’ and ‘East’).
One of the most famous sayings from the Upanishads is Tat Tvam Asi, “That is you”. No matter what “that” you are looking at, it is in fact your own self because all is one and there are no complete or permanent separations between any two things.
As the Upanishads continued to gain teachers and followers, there was a new flowering of many schools of thought between 700 and 400 BCE that took much from the Vedas and Upanishads but developed the teachings in new directions. These new schools often rejected the caste system (still in place today in spite of these ancient rebellions) and thus gained massive followings among all classes and castes of India. Jainism was one of the first, but it was quickly developed and transformed itself into a religion that is possibly the most popular system of thought in history, Buddhism (Christianity, Islam and Science are contenders for first, second, third and fourth place depending on how and who one counts).
Some scholars today argue that Jainism and Buddhism helped develop Hinduism in response such that Hinduism looks as it does today (with an emphasis on total liberation AS WELL AS the goal of merit and reincarnation). However, Buddhism (which I have personally heard some Hindus describe as ‘Hinduism for Export’) flourished outside of India and thus became a much more international religion for dominating diverse empires, whereas Hinduism and Jainism largely remain confined to India even today (with significant minority populations in Canada, America, South Africa and many other places). Also, of course, Hindu gurus (teachers, sages) have become quite popular in giving religious insight to people in the ‘West’ in recent decades, particularly after the 1960s and the cultural revolution (it could be argued, even more popular than Buddhist or Jain teachers).
Jainism (650 BCE)
Jainism, or “Jain Dharma” (dharma means “teaching/law/order of the universe”) was and is practiced by Jains (not Jainists as some mistakenly say). There are currently 4 Million in India today, with many others in communities around the world including New York and Toronto. Jainism rose just before Buddhism, as Mahavira (650 BCE), the main teacher and founder of Jainism, lived just before the Buddha (550 BCE), though all of these dates are still in debate.
Jainism advocates two principles that are shared with Indian thought but credited to Jain innovation: Anekantavada, the multiplicity of reality or “non-one-ended-ness” and Syadvada, the hypothetical and imperfect nature of perspective and judgment. According to these two principles, all human beliefs and judgments are temporary and partial views of the greater whole.
Jains were also early proponents of the idea that the cosmos works in cycles: like the physical rising and setting of the sun, consciousness rises, then sets. People start to become awakened teachers and develop religion in the rising era, and people lose religion in the setting era. This is endless, like the cosmos. The cosmos becomes enlightened to its own self through us, and then loses consciousness of itself through us. Unfortunately, we currently live in an era of dimming religion and consciousness according to most Jain and Hindu teachers (the Hindus following the Jains in this picture).
Jain teachers and saints are known as Tirthankaras, “one who makes a ford” (cutting through water as order over chaos, as land becoming firmament in the chaotic waters). Mahavira (also Mahavir), the founder of Jainism, is understood by Jains to be the 24th Tirthankara. Like others of his time, Mahavira was a practitioner of austerities that are aimed at detachment from desire and multiplicity of the world: fasting, standing in jungles, going without food or luxuries for extended periods of time. Statues of Mahavira and other Tirthankaras show vines growing up their legs and bodies, as vines grow several feet in the jungle a day and so would grow up your body if you practice standing austerities for days at a time. Jains believe that these practices purify the self/soul/mind.
Here, we come to THE critical difference between Jainism and the other schools of Indian thought. In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin). Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down. For Jains, karma is ALWAYS NEGATIVE, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL. Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated.
Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of karma and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle. Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant.
The best way to understand the dual practice of avoiding karma AND shredding karma is the Metaphor of the Leaky Boat: You ride in a boat across water to a distant shore (Nirvana). Notice that water represents chaos and desire, and the land represents the firm and the enlightened. The boat is leaky, and water is pouring in. You have to BOTH plug the leaks (preventative principles like vegetarianism that prevent bad karma from getting IN you) and bail out the water that has already inside the boat (shredding karma, practicing austerities like fasting or standing in postures to get the karma you already have in this life OUT of you). Jains believe that it is only by this two-pronged strategy that the individual can be fully liberated and join back together with the cosmos and thus gain eternal life rather than round after round of rebirth.
Buddhism (550 BCE)
According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha, the “awakened one”, practiced austerities like Mahavira, but found that this way was not enough. Buddhism is famous for long periods of meditation, and this is quite like Jain austerities of standing in postures, but Buddhism suggests that it is through balance and not extremes that one will be liberated. The Buddha found Jain asceticism to be one sided and promoting of self hatred which is still attachment and duality.
According to the tradition and legend, Buddha’s father was the king of a kingdom in Northern India. When the Buddha was born, the king’s wise men told him that his son would be EITHER a great king OR a great holy man. The king did not want his son to be a holy man, but rather the next king, so to control his son he hid his son away in his palace and gave him all the luxuries in the world, hiding death and pain from him, surrounding him with dancing girls and servants and only healthy, happy, obedient people. At 29, the Buddha had become bored of this, and snuck out to see the city, taking along his trusted servant. In succession, the Buddha the Four Sights (an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a holy man). When he saw the first three, his servant each time told him that this was unfortunately inevitable for everyone, but when he got to the fourth, the holy man (likely a Jain or proto-Jain), his servant told him that the monk was working on the first three (age, sickness, and death).
The Buddha was immediately envious of something more wonderful than he had ever possessed in the palace, and so he escaped into the jungle where he found sages practicing austerities. The Buddha did these Jain (or proto-Jain, depending on the scholar) austere practices in the jungle for six years, but he found that this brought no great enlightenment and in fact brought him self-hatred and self-denial (notice here that this is where Buddhism breaks away from Jainism as a direct criticism of Jain practice, taking much of Jainism with it in the process but seeking a middle way between denial and indulgence, attached to neither). The Buddha left the jungle disappointed. He decided to sit beneath a large tree, the Bodhi Tree (which one can go see in India today, a tree supposed to have been grown from the original in the original spot), and he vowed not to rise until he found complete and total truth or he would give up his life. After 49 days, at the age of 35, he realized complete enlightenment, Nirvana. This is defined in the tradition as the total extinction of greed (raga), hate (dosa), and delusion (moha), obtainable in this life by any being by overcoming duality and desire.
Major philosophical ideas of Buddhism
The Doctrine of the Middle Way: In all things, as the mind splits things into opposites and prefers one while rejecting the other, one should always practice moderation between the extremes. As a criticism of Jainism, this means that one should balance pain and pleasure, being attached to neither, rather than chase pain and difficulty to liberate the self. The Buddha found Jain practice to be immoderate: too much de-emphasis of self is attachment to self hate, not detachment from particular things (as self-hate is particular and bound up with particular things just as much as self-love or pride is). One must love and hate the self, bringing the two together, to find detachment from many and complete identity in the One, the All.
Doctrine of Impermanence: The Buddha taught that all things are impermanent. Thus, everything is constantly evolving, never the same twice. Only the great All is eternal, the One to which we all belong, but as soon as you say this it becomes a conception, a particular being separated from other particular beings, and then is simply a temporary being in your mind.
Codependent Arising (Pratityasamutpada): Another major teaching of Buddhism is codependent arising of all phenomena. While this is a hard thing to grasp or discuss, it means that all things are themselves in so far as they are connected to every other thing. Opposites, such as heat and cold or self and other, do not anchor things in themselves or give things their true meaning, but rather all things exist dependent on all other things. While this may frustrate some, and they would say ‘this tells me nothing’, Buddhists believe that all things are impermanent, and so you should not expect to have final knowledge of any particular thing. Instead, you must investigate each thing you want to describe as best as you can, connected to the things to which you want to connect it.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
No Class or Club on Friday Feb 18th or Monday Feb 21
Hey everybody (particularly students in Social & Political Philosophy, students in Ethics and Philosophy club members),
There will be no Ethics class or Philosophy Club on Friday Feb 18th and there will be no Social & Political Philosophy class on Monday Feb 21st for President's day weekend.
Much happiness,
Eric
There will be no Ethics class or Philosophy Club on Friday Feb 18th and there will be no Social & Political Philosophy class on Monday Feb 21st for President's day weekend.
Much happiness,
Eric
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Social & Political Philosophy: Machiavelli & Power
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527 CE) is possibly one of the most misunderstood political philosophers in history. The word Machiavellian was an English word before there was an English translation of The Prince, his most famous work. While he does advocate holding power by ruthless brutality and deception in The Prince, some scholars point out that his other works argue for the very opposite of ruthless dictatorship and Machiavelli held a position in a republic like those he prized. It is still a debate as to whether Machiavelli meant The Prince to be taken as a joke and unmasking of the realities of power or whether he meant it as a work of political realism that is brutally honest about how power must be held. Rousseau, who we will soon study, believed The Prince to be a satire of the powerful Medici family. The Italian Communist Gramsci, who we will study in the second half of the class, believed that Machiavelli was serious but was explaining to the poor how politics work and not the rich who already understand how politics work. Either way, joke or treatise, it is a classic read by many thinkers and leaders we will study in this class because of its insightful descriptions of the reality and brutality of politics.
Machiavelli was not known for his political writings during his lifetime, and The Prince was published years after his death. He was a politician, and ambassador and a writer. While he was alive he was famous for his comic plays (another piece of evidence that may indicate The Prince is a farce). It was only after his death and the infamy of The Prince that he became primarily identified with this text and the word Machiavellian became a new word in several languages.
His political career flourished in the years of the republic that ruled the city of Florence between 1494 and 1512 when the Medici family was briefly out of power. At the time, there was no unified Italy. In fact, many living in Italy at the time would have no idea what Italy was. In addition, none of the great Renaissance artists or thinkers would have heard of the Renaissance, as it is a French word applied by a French historian to the period two hundred years later. Four city states, Florence, Venice, Milan and Naples, were warring powers and were involved against each other with the Catholic Church and the kings of France and Spain. The Medici family were the great patrons of the painters, sculptors and philosophers of the Renaissance and ruled Florence before and after the brief republic. The republic was ruled by nine citizens elected by drawing lots every two months. Citizenship was not common, however, as Machiavelli himself was well off but not high enough in the ranks to have citizenship himself. Nonetheless, he held powerful positions in the republic as chancellor, ambassador to France and Spain, and head of the military. This, and the time of warring states (like China) set the backdrop for The Prince. After the Medici family regained control of Florence and abolished the republic, Machiavelli was accused of conspiracy and tortured. After he was found innocent and released, he withdrew into his estate and spent his time writing the comedies and political works that made him famous in his life and infamous after his death.
Speaking of comedy, here is a wonderfully Machiavellian joke before diving into The Prince.
Two young kids are talking about their families.
“My father is a politician”, says one.
“Really? Honest?”, asks the other.
“No, the regular kind”, replies the first.
The Prince
Machiavelli dedicated his most famous work to Lorenzo de Medici, the great patron of Renaissance art and Neo-Platonism. Was this book making fun of the terrible power of the Medici, or was it a practical guide for maintaining public good in times of great war and terror? Scholars still debate. Either way, the work was privately circulated by Machiavelli amongst his friends and was only published years after his death.
The Prince focuses on “new princes”, leaders who come to power by rising up through the ranks and who do not receive power from a noble lineage. Machiavelli provides several examples from ancient times and his own time of such rulers. When a new ruler comes into power they must stabilize and consolidate their power to maintain it and the security of the public they rule. The main argument of the work is that one should cultivate both love and fear as a ruler, and one must be prepared to act with complete brutality and hypocritical deception. This is done out of necessity at inevitable times when the ruler and ruled are threatened. Like Hobbes, who was influenced by Machiavelli and we will study next time, he argues that a strong king is necessary in the brutal world and so evil is sometimes justified.
Unlike Plato & Aristotle, who were a great influence on Machiavelli as well as most Renaissance thinkers, Machiavelli does not believe in constructing an ideal city as a model and does not believe it to be good to rule people in terms of an ideal. Like Nietzsche, who we will study later and who was influenced by Machiavelli, he was a brute realist who believed in theorizing about how people and power is and not how things ought to be. He believed that people are naturally ambitious and warlike, so we must prepare for this and balance the bad in human nature with the good. Also like Nietzsche, Machiavelli considered religion to be a means of control and that a ruler should not be overly religious or pious because it will make them unable to be brutal when they must be. He does suggest, however, that it is in the ruler’s interests to make the ruled people as religious as possible, and I suggest that this equally applies to idealizing the objectivity of the sciences and the freedom and good will of democracies.
Like John Stuart Mill, who we will study soon, Machiavelli can be called a pragmatist who considers the true to be the useful and practical, not the perfect or immutable. Machiavelli, like Mill, is associated with the principle “the ends justify the means”. Like Mill, Machiavelli argues that sometimes this can result in harm, but if we consider the long view and the social view it is in the interest of everyone overall. Machiavelli argues that if a state is too nice, it will be overrun by conquerors and there will be terrible times for everyone. It is bad to routinely abuse people as this will lead to ruin, but brutality must be used occasionally or the state will be equally ruined. A good ruler must know how and when to be brutal as life is tough and some situations require violence or deception (like Plato suggested last week in the noble lie of The Republic).
Machiavelli argues that one should befriend weak rivals but crush strong ones. He writes that one should wipe out the entire family of those one crushes and completely destroy the lands of those one conquers such that one does not have to fear revenge or counter-attack. Consider the warring families of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as well as modern gang warfare (such as the Black Widow, Griselda Blanca, who murdered entire families along with the children as one of the early cocaine kingpins of Miami in the early 80s).
One should not be brutal casually or needlessly, but if you have to be brutal then you have to go whole hog and ensure that your enemy will not be able to retaliate. When one has to be brutal, one should be brutal all at once such that it does not have to be a daily routine for maintaining authority. Otherwise, he writes, one must “always keep a knife in hand”. In other words, treat people the way you want to be treated unless you absolutely have to kill them and their entire family. He writes that it is best to delegate this task to someone else in the administration such that the ruler can be feared but also appear benevolent and blameless to the greatest extent possible. This was classic politics of middle age Europe, where kings would rely on particular noble houses to commit great atrocities and then condemn them publicly long after agreeing on exchange of favors in private.
Machiavelli famously writes that it is best to be both loved and feared, but if one has to choose between the two one should be feared. It is best to appear liberal to most of the people most of the time but be ruthlessly authoritarian to the individual who steps out of line. One should seek the safety of being feared, but avoid being despised and hated. One should be a patron of the arts, of festivals and spectacles, but prepare for trouble. One should try to keep one’s hands off the property and women of others, but be ready for total war. He refers to the myth of Achilles being nursed by the centaur Chiron of Greek mythology to illustrate how one must learn to be both human and animal to be, like Achilles, a great leader.
Influence and Legacy of The Prince and Machiavelli
The Pope put The Prince on the banned index in 1559, but it spread aided by the new development of the printing press. Block printing had arrived in Europe from China, where it was first used to print Buddhist texts. Interestingly, “humanist” thinkers like Erasmus who resisted Catholic authority equally despised the book. Catholics and Protestant kings read The Prince, while the Catholic kings condemned the work as Protestant rebellion and the Protestant kings condemned them as Catholic authoritarianism. One critic accused Machiavelli of being an atheist while simultaneously calling The Prince “the Koran of the courtiers”.
Hobbes, who we will study next time, was influenced by The Prince and came to similar conclusions about the power of the sovereign. Locke, who we will cover soon and who influenced the American founding fathers on the issue of rights, was influenced by the political writings of Machiavelli.
Hitler claimed he read Machiavelli’s Prince frequently in bed before falling asleep. Mussolini was fond of quoting the book, as is the Italian mafia don John Gotti. Gramsci, the communist opponent to the fascist Mussolini and jailed when Mussolini rose to power, considered The Prince to be a brilliant book that teaches everyone how power operates.
The founders of the American Republic and authors of the Constitution such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison all made use of Machiavelli’s idea of checks and balances between powers as a good way of securing a good republic.
As a final thought, Machiavelli did write in his other political works that the life of the king was a sad life and that the common person was much happier not to have to engage in necessary violence and lies. Perhaps unnecessary violence and lies are much more fun.
Machiavelli was not known for his political writings during his lifetime, and The Prince was published years after his death. He was a politician, and ambassador and a writer. While he was alive he was famous for his comic plays (another piece of evidence that may indicate The Prince is a farce). It was only after his death and the infamy of The Prince that he became primarily identified with this text and the word Machiavellian became a new word in several languages.
His political career flourished in the years of the republic that ruled the city of Florence between 1494 and 1512 when the Medici family was briefly out of power. At the time, there was no unified Italy. In fact, many living in Italy at the time would have no idea what Italy was. In addition, none of the great Renaissance artists or thinkers would have heard of the Renaissance, as it is a French word applied by a French historian to the period two hundred years later. Four city states, Florence, Venice, Milan and Naples, were warring powers and were involved against each other with the Catholic Church and the kings of France and Spain. The Medici family were the great patrons of the painters, sculptors and philosophers of the Renaissance and ruled Florence before and after the brief republic. The republic was ruled by nine citizens elected by drawing lots every two months. Citizenship was not common, however, as Machiavelli himself was well off but not high enough in the ranks to have citizenship himself. Nonetheless, he held powerful positions in the republic as chancellor, ambassador to France and Spain, and head of the military. This, and the time of warring states (like China) set the backdrop for The Prince. After the Medici family regained control of Florence and abolished the republic, Machiavelli was accused of conspiracy and tortured. After he was found innocent and released, he withdrew into his estate and spent his time writing the comedies and political works that made him famous in his life and infamous after his death.
Speaking of comedy, here is a wonderfully Machiavellian joke before diving into The Prince.
Two young kids are talking about their families.
“My father is a politician”, says one.
“Really? Honest?”, asks the other.
“No, the regular kind”, replies the first.
The Prince
Machiavelli dedicated his most famous work to Lorenzo de Medici, the great patron of Renaissance art and Neo-Platonism. Was this book making fun of the terrible power of the Medici, or was it a practical guide for maintaining public good in times of great war and terror? Scholars still debate. Either way, the work was privately circulated by Machiavelli amongst his friends and was only published years after his death.
The Prince focuses on “new princes”, leaders who come to power by rising up through the ranks and who do not receive power from a noble lineage. Machiavelli provides several examples from ancient times and his own time of such rulers. When a new ruler comes into power they must stabilize and consolidate their power to maintain it and the security of the public they rule. The main argument of the work is that one should cultivate both love and fear as a ruler, and one must be prepared to act with complete brutality and hypocritical deception. This is done out of necessity at inevitable times when the ruler and ruled are threatened. Like Hobbes, who was influenced by Machiavelli and we will study next time, he argues that a strong king is necessary in the brutal world and so evil is sometimes justified.
Unlike Plato & Aristotle, who were a great influence on Machiavelli as well as most Renaissance thinkers, Machiavelli does not believe in constructing an ideal city as a model and does not believe it to be good to rule people in terms of an ideal. Like Nietzsche, who we will study later and who was influenced by Machiavelli, he was a brute realist who believed in theorizing about how people and power is and not how things ought to be. He believed that people are naturally ambitious and warlike, so we must prepare for this and balance the bad in human nature with the good. Also like Nietzsche, Machiavelli considered religion to be a means of control and that a ruler should not be overly religious or pious because it will make them unable to be brutal when they must be. He does suggest, however, that it is in the ruler’s interests to make the ruled people as religious as possible, and I suggest that this equally applies to idealizing the objectivity of the sciences and the freedom and good will of democracies.
Like John Stuart Mill, who we will study soon, Machiavelli can be called a pragmatist who considers the true to be the useful and practical, not the perfect or immutable. Machiavelli, like Mill, is associated with the principle “the ends justify the means”. Like Mill, Machiavelli argues that sometimes this can result in harm, but if we consider the long view and the social view it is in the interest of everyone overall. Machiavelli argues that if a state is too nice, it will be overrun by conquerors and there will be terrible times for everyone. It is bad to routinely abuse people as this will lead to ruin, but brutality must be used occasionally or the state will be equally ruined. A good ruler must know how and when to be brutal as life is tough and some situations require violence or deception (like Plato suggested last week in the noble lie of The Republic).
Machiavelli argues that one should befriend weak rivals but crush strong ones. He writes that one should wipe out the entire family of those one crushes and completely destroy the lands of those one conquers such that one does not have to fear revenge or counter-attack. Consider the warring families of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as well as modern gang warfare (such as the Black Widow, Griselda Blanca, who murdered entire families along with the children as one of the early cocaine kingpins of Miami in the early 80s).
One should not be brutal casually or needlessly, but if you have to be brutal then you have to go whole hog and ensure that your enemy will not be able to retaliate. When one has to be brutal, one should be brutal all at once such that it does not have to be a daily routine for maintaining authority. Otherwise, he writes, one must “always keep a knife in hand”. In other words, treat people the way you want to be treated unless you absolutely have to kill them and their entire family. He writes that it is best to delegate this task to someone else in the administration such that the ruler can be feared but also appear benevolent and blameless to the greatest extent possible. This was classic politics of middle age Europe, where kings would rely on particular noble houses to commit great atrocities and then condemn them publicly long after agreeing on exchange of favors in private.
Machiavelli famously writes that it is best to be both loved and feared, but if one has to choose between the two one should be feared. It is best to appear liberal to most of the people most of the time but be ruthlessly authoritarian to the individual who steps out of line. One should seek the safety of being feared, but avoid being despised and hated. One should be a patron of the arts, of festivals and spectacles, but prepare for trouble. One should try to keep one’s hands off the property and women of others, but be ready for total war. He refers to the myth of Achilles being nursed by the centaur Chiron of Greek mythology to illustrate how one must learn to be both human and animal to be, like Achilles, a great leader.
Influence and Legacy of The Prince and Machiavelli
The Pope put The Prince on the banned index in 1559, but it spread aided by the new development of the printing press. Block printing had arrived in Europe from China, where it was first used to print Buddhist texts. Interestingly, “humanist” thinkers like Erasmus who resisted Catholic authority equally despised the book. Catholics and Protestant kings read The Prince, while the Catholic kings condemned the work as Protestant rebellion and the Protestant kings condemned them as Catholic authoritarianism. One critic accused Machiavelli of being an atheist while simultaneously calling The Prince “the Koran of the courtiers”.
Hobbes, who we will study next time, was influenced by The Prince and came to similar conclusions about the power of the sovereign. Locke, who we will cover soon and who influenced the American founding fathers on the issue of rights, was influenced by the political writings of Machiavelli.
Hitler claimed he read Machiavelli’s Prince frequently in bed before falling asleep. Mussolini was fond of quoting the book, as is the Italian mafia don John Gotti. Gramsci, the communist opponent to the fascist Mussolini and jailed when Mussolini rose to power, considered The Prince to be a brilliant book that teaches everyone how power operates.
The founders of the American Republic and authors of the Constitution such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison all made use of Machiavelli’s idea of checks and balances between powers as a good way of securing a good republic.
As a final thought, Machiavelli did write in his other political works that the life of the king was a sad life and that the common person was much happier not to have to engage in necessary violence and lies. Perhaps unnecessary violence and lies are much more fun.
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