Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is one of the most important thinkers in academics today. His early book, the Tractatus, and his later book, the Philosophical Investigations, are considered two of the most important influences for the American and British Analytic school of philosophy, the dominant school of philosophy in America. In an end of the century poll in 2000, philosophy professors from America and Canada were asked to list the five most important books that influenced their own work. When all of the results were tallied up, the Philosophical Investigations was #1, and the Tractatus was #4. The Philosophical Investigations was cited far more frequently than any other book, was listed first on far more ballots, and crossed over more into many different disciplines and areas of study.
Wittgenstein’s thought can be divided into his early, middle and later work. His early work is the book the Tractatus, the book which gave the world truth table logic. This tool, as Wittgenstein later came to see it, remains the mathematical system taught as logic today. Just as Wittgenstein became famous for his truth tables, he switched positions in his thinking and came to reject his earlier work. He wrote in notebooks that were only published after his death, and the Philosophical Investigations is the most celebrated of these.
Wittgenstein’s Father was the Austrian Carnegie, making a fortune in Steel. Though his father was Protestant, and his mother Jewish, Ludwig was baptized Catholic because of antisemitism at the time. In his early years, Ludwig was a proud atheist but by the time he was working on his Tractatus he had a mystical transcendental outlook which he kept for the rest of his life. Though never religious, and though he had to bribe Nazis later to smuggle his “Jewish” family from Austria, he was buried as a Catholic.
The Wittgenstein family was known for intense criticism, musical talent, depression, and suicide. Three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed suicide, and he himself considered suicide for awhile before launching into his late period. Unfortunately, suicide was considered romantic for Austrian elites at the time.
Wittgenstein was in Hitler’s elementary school, 2 days younger, but because he was put forward a grade and Hitler was held back a grade he was 2 years ahead. Both he and Hitler hated the school and the lessons.
He began studying at university in Berlin to become an engineer with an interest in flight (the Wright Brothers had recently invented the motorized glider, but flew it in France and Germany until 1907 as the US Army did not believe them). After failing in his attempt to build a better propeller, he began studying mathematical theory and philosophy of mathematics, becoming entranced with two thinkers who are along with Wittgenstein foundational for Analytical philosophy and logic: Russell from Britain, and Frege from Germany. Wittgenstein went to see Frege, who did not fully understand his questions and advised him to go see Russell, which he did in 1911.
He showed up unannounced to Russell’s room at Trinity College, impressed him with his intense and brilliant arguments. Russell became convinced that the young Austrian was going to carry his work forward and be his successor, solving the remaining problems of logic that Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics had left open. As mentioned last lecture, Russell had shown there were contradictions unresolved in Frege’s work with set theory, but Russell had become frustrated trying to solve these contradiction with his theory of types.
Wittgenstein, an eccentric and difficult personality, was never fully comfortable at Cambridge, and often got into disagreements with Russell and threatened to leave many times before fleeing to Norway where he believed he could finish his work on Logic. While some still disagree, it is generally accepted that Wittgenstein was gay, developed a relationship with Pinsent, a young graduate student, and some believe that Russell encouraged the relationship if he did not introduce the two with the purpose of keeping the emotional and unstable genius with him at Cambridge.
When WWI broke out, he served for Austria, at the same time as he was developing the material for the Tractatus. Learning of Pinsent’s death in the war in Italy, he became suicidal, moved in with his uncle and finished the Tractatus which he dedicated to his ‘friend’ Pinsent. He tried to get it published, but no one would take it. Remember: this book went on to be the #4 influence in the US and Canada according to the poll, the book that gave modern logic truth tables, the method that replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms.
Russell intervened back in Cambridge, and had it published and wrote and introduction for it. This was the start of the end. Though Russell saw the work as genius, he did not completely understand much of it and his introduction reflected this. Wittgenstein read the introduction and realized Russell had great misunderstandings of his work. Believing that his Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein left Russell and Cambridge again and went to be a school teacher in Austria. He gave away his portion of the family fortune, anonymously to writers but also to his family. Since his family was already wealthy, he wrote in a letter, “they won’t be corrupted by it”. He left the school after a short while (not a good fit, and parents thought he was crazy). He became a gardener’s assistant, and then his sister had him design her a house.
While finishing the house, he was contacted by members of the Vienna Circle, positivists using Hegel’s logic and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to give a solid foundation for science and mathematics. This was what Russell had hoped for, minus the Hegel who Russell hated. While Wittgenstein had been away, the Tractatus had become famous, and central to many already inspired by Frege and Russell. Many came to visit and discus and progressively Witt became disgusted. He began to realize that there were fundamental problems with his Tractatus and truth tables, and got into intense arguments with the Vienna Circle members, at one point turning his back on his guests and reading Tagore, an Indian transcendental poet out loud. For the rest of his life, Wittgenstein thought logical positivism (the analytic school of philosophy) misunderstood his Tractatus.
In his early period, Wittgenstein believed he had fully solved the problems of a complete system of logic. He saw it like Schopenhauer, a big early influence: logic is a perfect crystal tool of analysis, life is a messy chaotic ocean, and so logic is perfect but unfortunately never fits perfectly with life. This is like having the perfect tool for an impossible and continuous job. In conversations with positivists he started to change his thinking around and continued to write until he died. These writings were published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations and other books. In his later thought, Wittgenstein saw logic not as a perfect crystal castle in the sky but as rules and games that are imperfectly lived in the real world imperfectly and without complete definition. He no longer believed that logic could provide a foundation for mathematics, science or philosophy. He denied that contradictions are necessarily false, or disprove a mathematical-logical system.
In 1929, he decided to return to Cambridge to correct his thinking and teach. To his horror, when he arrived at the train station he was greeted by a vast crowd of intellectuals as the new hero, the author of the Tractatus, the work he now thought was exactly wrong.
The famous economist Keynes wrote to his wife: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train’. Wittgenstein continued to lecture at Cambridge, developing his ideas.
In 1934, he defected to Soviet Russia, wanting to be a plumber or work with his hands. When he was told that according to the Soviet system he would be put to work as a philosophy professor in Moscow, he defected back to Britain.
In 1937, Hitler annexed Austria. Wittgenstein had to bribe Nazis to get his Jewish family passage out and spend the equivalent today of $50 million in gold and foreign currency. Since he had given away his own portion of the family fortune, he had to get much of this from his colleagues at Cambridge and other admirers of his work.
THE TRACTATUS
In his early thought, expressed in the pages of the Tractatus, reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world with these atomic facts. The world does not perfectly fit this atomic language, but because it is the way the head makes sense of the world we cannot understand things otherwise. Wittgenstein said that it is the part of the book that is unwritten that is important, the part where life itself goes beyond this logic and makes the world what it is. Of the world beyond logic, he wrote “Of what one cannot speak, one must remain silent”, which is in fact a quote from Confucius. Our logic and the world are two things that do not fit, yet mysteriously (and mystically) the two are one.
If we boil logic with truth tables down to its tautologies, the necessary and basic workings, and leave the rest open as the world which always is beyond our thoughts, we can have the perfect system of logic and grammar that we use to understand things spelled out even if it cannot perfectly predict the world or tell us how the world works. Think of logic as a set of reading glasses, and the world as something one looks at through the glasses. Wittgenstein believed that with the Tractatus he had spelled out the perfect crystal form of the glasses, and beyond this nothing can be said for certain.
When it comes to facts in the world, however, everything is contingent on something else and is neither simply necessary or simply impossible. Logic is the necessary and impossible book-ends with which we interpret the world and its facts, but the world is always between the necessary and the impossible, is always somewhat necessary and somewhat impossible, which creates a gulf between our pure and necessary logic and the unpredictable world. For Wittgenstein, only logic and math can be sets of necessary truths, and this is because (as Avicenna and Mill believe) they are concepts and are ideal, unlike situations of real things in the world. Once we nail down the perfect tool of logic, we can use it to examine the world and all of its messy situations. Our examinations will never be perfect because of the gap between logic and the world, but at least the logic will be necessary and perfect.
The reason’s Wittgenstein’s truth tables were such a success is that they proved, for the first time, that many of the axioms logicians had discovered were necessarily true (tautologies) in a way that is simple to do and easy to see.
THE MIDDLE AND LATER THOUGHT OF WITTGENSTEIN
At first Wittgenstein thought that he had solved all the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus truth table system (we do still use it today to teach formal logic), so he left philosophy and Cambridge behind, went to war, had many experiences, and then later decided that his earlier thinking contained horrible problems. He no longer believed that logic could be crystallized in the head as a truth table matrix, but rather it existed as a complex out in the world, as arrangements of people, thoughts, symbols, and objects. He continued to work on notebooks, progressing in his thought until his death, after which his notebooks were published.
There is an excellent passage from Lectures and Conversations that illustrates the turn nicely. This work was taken not from Wittgenstein’s notebooks but from the notes of his seminar students in the years leading up to his work on the notebooks which would be published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations. At this time Freud’s ideas had stormed onto the academic scene, infuriating Wittgenstein who now had come to hate the idea that things in the world, even logical operators and systems, can be boiled down to a single essential element or factor like sex, power or truth. It is this skepticism, which can be called the “problem of essences”, which marks the turn from his earlier thinking to his more influential later thought.
Wittgenstein attacked Freud’s psychoanalysis and dream interpretation for boiling everything down to sex. In the Lectures and Conversations (20-21), Wittgenstein proposes a thought experiment for consideration. If we cook a human being down to carbon ash in an oven, are we left with the essence of the human being? A human being is a “carbon-based” life form, so carbon is a dominant element. Consider that we could cook a human down to water in the same oven, and claim that because humans are 3/5ths water we have the essence of the person.
Would it be correct to say that humans are essentially ashy, or essentially wet? Why not? We would not say that a human is essentially carbon or water, nor would we say ashy or wet, because the human being is a complex situation that is not reducible to a single element. The properties of carbon or water do not in themselves explain how humans behave or what they mean to us. If we cooked people down to ashes or water, we have destroyed the situation and can no longer investigate how they work. In the same way, a person is not merely their DNA. While carbon, water and DNA have very important, even necessary roles to play in any person, they are not exclusively the essence or meaning of the complex that is a human individual.
In the same way, Wittgenstein had come to believe that neither facts in the world nor logic in the head can be reduced to a single element or necessary structure. Facts and logic are not true in themselves, but true in real situations of the world which are irreducibly complex. Wittgenstein says in the Lectures and Conversations that we have to avoid the “lure of the secret cellar”, the urge to boil situations down to a single element like Freud tried to boil human relations, meaning and the mind down to sex or Wittgenstein himself had tried to boil logic down to its simple structure.
The task of philosophy, logic and science is not to fully or completely explain anything, but to investigate things. Thought never fully defines things but rather describes and re-describes things. If science is thinking about the world, then science has endless work to do describing and re-describing things. Consider whether we fully understand apples, or whether we ever need to entirely understand them in order to continue to understand them and use them a great deal. Likewise, if philosophy and logic are ‘thinking about thinking’, and if thinking is merely a possible description of things, philosophy and logic have endless work to do describing our descriptions, describing and re-describing the ways that we describe things. Much insight can be gained even if no subject is entirely explained or exhausted.
One good way to approach this is to describe how cultures of thought, perspectives, facts and models are gathered together and lived in institutions. Thought ceases to be completely abstract, but is rather a culture and situation in the real world that involves people, buildings and money. The cryptanalysis of algebra worked so well as a modeling language that we came to believe that the mathematics was not in our practices and text books but rather sewn into the fabric of the world itself. As we look over the history of thought in the wake of Wittgenstein’s later work, it becomes evident that mathematics and logic are tools and lenses, not the hidden structures of things operating at secret levels out of our immediate sight. In scholarship today, particularly the history of religion, philosophy and science, it has become popular to consider a system of thought as a real lived situation rather than an abstract set of beliefs and ideas. A religion or science is in fact a situation of human beings who never have to have entirely the same set of beliefs as long as they can generally and relatively cohere as a culture.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
In this monumental work, one of my favorites of modern European thought, Wittgenstein argues for a middle way between two extreme positions, between the position of scientific positivism (objective truth is facts in the world) and the position of psychological skepticism (subjective truth is meanings in the mind). He presents each position in quotes again and again, and then argues against both in a three stage process. First he states a position (either that there are facts given in the world or meaning is all in the head), then shows situations in which the position works, then shows situations in which the position does not work. He shows us that taking either position to extremes would be understandable given particular ways we think and act, but neither position explains all the ways in which we think and act. We live in complex ways that depend both on there being a coherent world and there being human perspectives. Wittgenstein argues that we can take both positions rather than determine one to be the actual and the other to be the illusion.
In his earlier thought, the world and the head are separated by a Kantian gulf between objectivity and subjectivity. In his later thinking, the world and our heads work together seamlessly as a complex situation. One cannot remove either the head or the world to get the bedrock or anchor of meaning and truth without resulting in absurdities. The clean and ideal side of logic, math and grammar mislead us into thinking that meaning must be anchored entirely on one side, either exclusively in the head or exclusively in the world, but we gain much more ability to think and describe our heads and our world if we stop looking for meaning and truth to be entirely in one place rather than the other. In the same way, rather than determine which facts are absolute truths to the exclusion of their opposites, or refuse to identify coherence of belief as it is all ‘mere theory’, we can better understand the facts and theories we can share by recognizing that they are one and the same viewed from opposite sides. If we can continue to determine relative fact from relative fiction, there is no need to entirely separate the two. To use the tool analogy, as long as we have decent tools we do not need perfect or eternal ones.
Games and rules gather people together, but individuals can also variously interpret rules and meanings. ‘Rules can always be variously interpreted’ is a central idea of the Philosophical Investigations. This is not to say that they always are or they should be, but the window remains open (Wittgenstein writes, “It is like locking a man in a room but leaving the window open”). Both are only what they are together as a form of life. Notice that this thinking has much in common with Laozi’s thinking on the wheel as both empty and solid at the same time, and much like the Zen koans of a rock being not a rock and a rock and the sound of one hand clapping.
Consider the ‘child at the blackboard’ metaphor used in the text. It is always possible for a child to misunderstand rules and demonstrate this misunderstanding by making mistakes, even after you show the child and explain. Let us say that you then write a new ‘inner’ set of rules to further explain the rules when the child fails. What if the child does not understand those? Is there a bedrock set of rules that the child can not possibly misunderstand? If the child can misunderstand rules, then no set of rules within rules within rules is ever perfectly airtight. We have an infinite regress unless we can find a set of rules that can never be misinterpreted.
Just like Wittgenstein had been seeking the fundamental inner workings of logic and mathematics, as Frege and Russell had tried to do before him, if people do math decently there need not be any inner rules aside from the explanation and demonstration that, if repeated, children can often follow. Notice we are considering mathematics as a culture, learned by children and taught by adults, not as an abstract set of necessary or immutable rules. It turns out that there are no inner workings to mathematics. Mathematics works as it does openly, on the board in front of one’s face, without the need of a ‘secret cellar’. If mathematics on a board is not entirely secure, then no inner set of rules could or must be either for it to function.
When we try to explain anything, it is not being simplified, being stripped down to its core, at all. It is the opposite: we are making it more complex as we try to simplify and explain it. The rules are not being discovered in the thing, but being added to the thing. When we explain things, we are not whittling away the unnecessary but adding our descriptions to it. In the same way, when we do science to explain apples or human beings, we are adding our descriptions and the situations of our descriptions, not uncovering the simple truth of the thing. The simple truth of a thing is the simple thing itself. The simplest truth of an apple is the single apple. An explanation of where apples come from is very useful, but it puts the apple in a complex with many other things (such as trees, farms, stores, trucks). An apple is not merely its DNA, but is in a infinitely complex situation with its DNA and ourselves attempting to isolate components with the tools and technology we bring into the situation.
We are always essentializing (like when we say, ‘We are always essentializing’). Meaning, grammar and logic do separate things into parts. They are useful for doing so. However, Wittgenstein is arguing something quite revealing: There are no final explanations, only complex descriptions. Any explanation is a partial human description, which can then itself be described and explained. The task of philosophy, science and mathematics is not to reduce things to simple truth, but to generate more meaning and situations.
Let us turn to the text. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that he now sees grave mistakes in his Tractatus. He says that this new book is not to spare thinking, but to stimulate thinking. Notice that the Tractatus had the opposite goal: to put an end to the problems of logic and philosophy. Now Wittgenstein does not believe that anything can or need be fully solved or closed, but should rather be opened up and made complex.
In section 7, Wittgenstein says that language games are actions and language interwoven as forms of life. He considers that words such as ‘this’ and ‘there’ are learned interwoven with gestures such as pointing. ‘This’, ‘now’, and other simple words get their meaning from their use by gesturing human beings. They can not be described fully in language alone, nor do they represent specific objects consistently. Rather, they are demonstrated to children and translated into other languages of cultures that share similar gestures. We know from neuroscience that in the brain the centers of language and control of the hands are next to each other, likely because language developed in apes along with gestures. There are also similarities in the basic gestures of humanity, including extending the arm to indicate the direction of sight and attention. Infants only months old will read eye direction to try to see what others are seeing, and if they can not see what is being looked at they will check the eyes again. The arm, whether a culture uses the index finger or not, provides an extension of the line of sight so that it can be easily recognized and followed by others. Notice that ‘this’ is as simple as it gets in itself, and to further explain it we need to bring arms and neuroscience into the picture.
In section 11, he says language is like toolbox, a complex set of tools that have no absolute necessity but are useful as a set. Consider that a hammer, a screwdriver and glue are a decent set of tools. Are they absolutely right or necessary tools? We could invent others, but they work decently well for putting things together and taking things apart. We do not need an absolute screwdriver any more than we need to completely understand the relationship between the hammer and screwdriver. We need only use them. In the same way, we do not need to understand the word ‘and’ such that it is always used exactly the same way, nor do we need to completely understand its relationship to ‘or’. When we use them relatively, not exclusively, they are interchangeable. At a buffet, I could equally say, “You can have eggs or salad or steak” or “You can have eggs and salad and steak”. The two can sometimes be used differently and sometimes similarly, as long as we are decently consistent in all of our interconnected uses. Indeed, the words, like tools such as hammers and screwdrivers, are more useful being often but not always used in particular and exclusive ways (ex: one can use a screwdriver to open paint cans). ‘And’ and ‘or’ are more useful when we can use them oppositely, but also identically. In his earlier thinking, with the truth tables, Wittgenstein was trying to secure them merely opposite and different meanings, which does not give us their full usage and meaning.
In section 12, Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of a locomotive cabin to further illustrate the same point. There are many levers and switches that function in various ways. Words and language function in various ways that form a complex with their environment. We could always redesign the train cabin, but it works well enough as it is.
In section 15, he uses another simple tool-oriented metaphor to make language and meaning physical rather than ideal: naming is compared to attaching a label (or sticker, with “Hello My Name Is”). The association of a word with a particular thing is like attaching a label for ease of use and identification.
In section 17, he says that we can classify words as we do things, but our classifications will depend on our situation and purposes. He uses the metaphor of chess pieces. If you want to move a great distance, you would classify chess pieces one way, but if you want to break through or jump over the enemy lines (with a knight or a bishop) you would classify them another way. The pieces, like words and other things, do not have classifications and meanings in themselves, but in how they can be used in concrete situations. This is again much like Mill.
In section 18, he says that a language is like an old city, with side streets and squares. It is interesting to compare San Francisco to Salt Lake City here. San Francisco can be a nightmare to drive, while Salt Lake City is almost entirely a perfect grid surrounding the Mormon Temple. In San Francisco, you never know which way a street might turn due to hills or other intersecting streets. European cities are similarly often much older than the automobile, and do not lend themselves to outsiders’ easy navigation. A language, like an old city or old growth forest, is the result of a long process of many layers of evolution and development. We can understand meanings just as we can navigate streets, but things are not always clear cut as Salt Lake City.
In section 57 and 58, he asks about where ‘red’ exists. He suggests that ‘red’ as a color does not exist in itself, but as an association of many red things having been experienced, the word ‘red’ being said by others and oneself associated with these things, as well as the imagination/projection of the color red in the mind. None of these things needs to be exclusively present for there to be red. We could even say the word without any red things or thinking of red, and it still means the color in our language and culture. We could likewise see a red thing, and it is red without using the word or seeing red in the imagination. Thus, the color red is not essentially any red thing, or the word, or the color in the mind, but the complex of all these. The color red is not simply a subjective concept, nor it is an objective fact, but it is a conception and association of many things and words, both in the head and the world together.
In section 65, Wittgenstein argues that there is no form common to language games or forms of life, such as the color red or the use of a tool. The common element is merely form, or association. In the same way that Hegel argues that Being itself can not be qualified (green, good, necessary) or quantified (much, fourteen, half), Wittgenstein argues that there is no common form to meaning. It is a complex association that can take any possible form. This is similar to the organic forms of fractal geometry: No two trees are identical, but they share what Wittgenstein calls a ‘family resemblance’. In the next section (66), he uses the example of games. There is no rule common to all games, but they resemble each other as a family.
In the next section (67), he uses the metaphor of a thread (one could also use a rope). The thread is strong not because there is one underlying strand that runs through its entire length, but because many stands overlap each other. Mathematics and the meaning/use of a word do not need a single inner rule to make them entirely consistent. Rather they are complex networks that are continuously reinforced by our re-inscription as we use them daily. Derrida, the French deconstructionist, argues that there is no language set in stone. Old English, like Old French, drift slowly like tectonic plates. When we use language, we are not using something already set. Rather, we are resetting it, re-associating it, re-gluing it together with the only glue it was ever fashioned from, each and every time we speak or write. Likewise, mathematics such as algebra is not true in itself. We continue to use it consistently, and this rebinds its consistent use. When dividing by zero creates problems, we add additional rules and then continue to lash them together with the system.
In section 83, Wittgenstein gives another metaphor to describe the emergence (a chaos-theory, fractal geometry term) of forms of life. Imagine people in a field, playing with a ball. The ball is tossed about, another person joins and kicks it back to another, who chases it, then pegs the kicker with the ball, and then it is tossed about again. A game has arisen, but it does yet does not seem to have consistent rules. It is being made up as it goes along. Human beings are rule making, association generating beings, who know how to follow and bend rules as they see fit. This means that the only complete consistency is both consistency and inconsistency, the only consistent rule is there are yet there are not consistent rules.
In section 85, he gives another metaphor to back up this conception. A rule is like a signpost, such as a sign that points to the right and reads, ‘San Jose’. Does the sign force you to go to San Jose? No. If you go to the right, will you surely reach San Jose without getting lost or running out of gas? No. We can even imagine that if you go to the left, because you are afraid of San Jose, you could get turned around and end up there anyway. In spite of these loose ends, we find signs quite useful.
In section 99, he comes to the previously mentioned ‘locking a man in a room but leaving the window open’ metaphor. You can not lock someone in a room such that they can never get out. There are no simply solid substances. There are no things without cracks of any kind. Similarly we can not secure meanings such that they will always stay exactly the same, but we can secure them by locking them down repeatedly through use and association. To give an entire account of how a meaning is secured would be like “repairing a torn spider’s web with one’s fingers” (106). Just like an old city, we can use things without ever being able to fully describe them.
Wittgenstein writes, “We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (109)...”What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (116)...”What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand” (118).
Do we base our own behavior, let alone the culture of mathematics, on simple rules? He gives the example of being certain that a table will resist one’s finger, that a fire will hurt one’s hand. It is not that there is a simple rule set in an atomic language that reads, ‘Table is solid’ or ‘Fire hurts hands’. Rather, “a hundred reasons present themselves, each drowning out the voice of the others” (478). Like the thread woven of many strands, our belief and certainty that objects are solid and flame hurts us are woven out of many experiences that are then woven together with the table and flame before us.
Wittgenstein writes, “To say, ‘This combination of words makes no sense’ excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out, but it may also be part of a game and the players be supposed, say, to jump over the boundary” (499). Wittgenstein seems to be thinking specifically of humor and comedy, though it could also apply to modern and conceptual art, forms of culture that break rules on purpose. Comedy and modern art are games where the rule is to break the rules without breaking anyone’s neck. Wittgenstein had an appreciation both for the Alice books of Lewis Carroll as well as American slap-stick comedy which he preferred to opera. At the end of the course, we will study the Alice books, humor and modern art in light of the later work of Wittgenstein.
The last image to examine, near the end of the book, is Jastrow’s duck-rabbit, often called Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit because the psychologist Jastrow is far less famous. One can look at the figure from the left, and it is a duck, and one can look at the figure from the right, and it is a rabbit. Which is the single correct face? Wittgenstein says we may have seen only the rabbit face our entire life, and that does not prevent us or others from seeing the duck when it is pointed out. This is much like the duel between objectivism (truth is in the world) and subjectivism (meaning is in the head).
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Intro Philosophy: Heidegger, Sartre & Foucault
Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976)
For a period of seven years, from 1931 to 1938, Martin Heidegger, one of the most celebrated German philosophers today, was a member and supporter of the fascist Nazi party as it rose to power and took authoritarian control of Germany and Austria. Though he eventually came to doubt the party, spoke critically of its development and was put under surveillance by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), he enthusiastically embraced their rise and seizure of power, spoke at propaganda rallies in several cities, and openly spoke of the Nazis as a rebirth of Western civilization, a return to the revolutionary times of ancient Greece.
Because I myself am influenced by Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, as well as Marcuse and Foucault who have both been influenced by these three, and because Heidegger took the worst of Hegel (eurocentrism, the birth of self-conscious individualism in ancient Greece and the destiny and realization of ancient Greek thought in Germany) and the best of Nietzsche (existentialism, the idea of absolute truth as denial of death, perspective, interpretation and transformation), for me Heidegger’s support of the Nazis is the question we would often prefer to ask our opponent rather than ourselves: how is it that our systems aim for the greatest human fulfillment yet support the worst practices of humankind, including genocide, slavery, and censorship?
Heidegger wrote in his major work Sein und Zeit, ‘Being and Time’ (1927), that authentic being is questioning, that categorical and absolute truth are ignorance of one’s own human nature, and every revealing is a concealing. How is it that he believed the Nazis, a fascist regime enthusiastic about racism, censorship, and brutality were a magnificent chance for questioning, renewal and transformation? Just as Heidegger argues that being is authentic as questioning or inauthentic as a denial of questioning, this is a question that philosophers should ask rather than avoid, particularly as all varieties of philosophy, including the religious and anti-religious, the analytical and existential, joined the Nazi cause.
Let us examine Heidegger’s thought, with a particular focus on his use of Nietzsche. For Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger the beginning of self-conscious questioning that is philosophy began in glorious ancient Greece with Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle. This set the European West apart from other cultures as philosophical. For Hegel and Heidegger, Germany was the natural culmination and destiny of Greek thought and philosophy, while for Nietzsche the Germans were fooling themselves through science, religion, nationalism and antisemitism into thinking they were the great race, and he moved to Switzerland, renounced his German citizenship and declared himself to be a citizen of no country. I myself would have preferred Nietzsche to be as critical of ancient Greek superiority as he was of German nationalism and antisemitism. In the opening paragraphs of Being and Time, Heidegger looks to the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece in the hopes that he can reclaim this glorious past and rebirth of thought. Heidegger believed, like Hitler and Nietzsche (though Nietzsche was far more critical and cynical) that one should look to the Greeks to be German, as the Greeks were the rebellion that gave birth to authentic thinking and learning. Heidegger, as countless other professors and academics, confuses his own self easily with the identity of the ancient Greeks and the Western mind.
The Great Depression, the 1920s and 30s, was the time when Heidegger did his critical writing and gained fame and position, a time when many feared the fall of the West and the death of Christian European civilization. Heidegger, like Rousseau and Nietzsche, was an anti-modernist anti-technology romantic who spoke of Greece as a more glorious and meaningful time. These thinkers in turn influenced Marcuse, Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Later Adorno, Jewish like Marcuse, both having fled the Nazis for Switzerland and then New York, wrote a 1964 pamphlet, The Jargon of Authenticity, criticizing Heidegger for supporting the Nazis while calling for self-questioning, which is ironic given Adorno hated jazz and argued that music was over after Beethoven.
Heidegger originally studied to be a Catholic theologian, but after studying Neo-Platonism he switched his study to philosophy and wrote his thesis on Duns Scotus. Husserl, the phenomenologist, took him under his wing as his star pupil, and as phenomenology (the school of studying the mind by focusing on how we experience the phenomena or things around us) rose to fame and gathered followers Heidegger began to gather fame and followers of his own. Husserl wanted a science of the mind, a radical criticism of all philosophy and psychology up through Kant and Hegel. Husserl is famous for the idea of intentionality, that consciousness is always directed toward something or away from something by intention. Nietzsche similarly believes that thought is always instinct and drive. Wanting, fearing, loving, and assessing objects is never neutral, nor is our own philosophical grasping of our grasping cold or objective.
Husserl studied the various and often subtle ways we are intentional in our world under the banner of phenomenology, a term invented by Hegel but intended as an open speculative psychology by Husserl. The world and subject co-develop together in an evolving symbiotic relationship. Husserl kept writing and expanding his work, but rather than develop a new alphabet for thought as he had originally intended his work snowballed out of control and continued to amass until his death. Heidegger picked up Husserl’s work, but merged this with Nietzsche and took it in an anti-scientific existential direction. Heidegger forms his own insights based on the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl. Husserl’s scientific Freudian ego becomes Hegel’s ‘dasein’, or being-there. Heidegger emphasizes the open-ended multiplicity of being and interpretation romantically like Nietzsche.
What is existentialism? Sartre, who we will study next, coined the term to describe the skeptical school of thought, the deep questioning of human understanding and knowledge, that was initiated by Kierkegaard, a student of Hegel’s, and Nietzsche. Sartre read Heidegger, and applied the label ‘existentialism’ to their own work as well, both quite influenced by Nietzsche. Thus, in some ways Sartre was the first official ‘existentialist’, thought this is often said of Nietzsche with others contending that the first was in fact Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855) was an enthusiastically Christian Dutch thinker who found Hegel’s claim to absolute knowledge and system of thought out of touch with the experience of the individual. Kierkegaard was the Dionysus to Hegel’s Apollo, arguing that the individual was thrown into the world without a chance at reason reaching an absolute understanding, much like Schopenhauer saw things. For Kierkegaard, any human undertaking or belief is a leap of faith, a risk that one individually takes. Nietzsche, as we saw last week, was of a similar mind, arguing that we must have the courage to be individuals in a world that defies reason. Heidegger and Sartre both read Nietzsche and agreed that modern times show us that the human experience, in spite of the rising tide of science and technology, is a dramatic and risky quest for meaning and purpose. One can pair essentialism, that there are given essential meanings and purposes for human life and our world, with existentialism, that we must create meaning and purpose for human life and the world. As Nietzsche warns last week, to be skeptical this way, which Sartre calls ‘existentialism’, one risks nihilism, staring into the void and finding nothing, but only this sort of courage can bring greater meaning and truth to one’s life.
Heidegger argues in Being and Time that philosophy means being a beginning, the way one weighs anchor while setting sail out into the vast ocean. Remember Nietzsche has Zarathustra say to the crowd in the marketplace, “What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and not a goal”. We are thrown into the world, which Heidegger calls “thrownness”, as a being-there, or there-being, in German, “dasein”, a term Heidegger borrows from Hegel. Heidegger is famous, some would say infamous, for inventing his own vocabulary and Heideggerians follow this jargon to an equally infamous extent. Welcome to Heidegger-speak 101. What Heidegger is doing is trying to merge Hegel with Nietzsche, to identify Hegel’s becoming with Nietzsche’s rejection of both dogmatic morals and nihilism. For Heidegger, the goal is not the system of absolute knowledge as it was for Hegel, but attaining an authentic transparency of one’s own self and giving life one’s own purposes, as sought by Nietzsche.
Heidegger asks, how do we experience reality before and as we arrange it? What is the ground of being that supports our views and values? The world is “worlding” around us and as us, and thus we are “being-in-the-world”. We approach the world, each other, and objects either as closed and identified or as mysterious, uncanny and miraculous. Industrialization and technology have disenchanted the world, and so we must question the world and re-enchant it. Mystery and truth appear only in the cracks of our industrialized reality when things break or go missing. My good friend who got me interested in philosophy, who was at the time a Heideggerian, used the example of dropping the soap as you take your morning shower. Objects and persons disappear until they are out of place or misused, and then we become conscious of them. Consider a poster on a wall that we stop seeing after time, which then becomes new again and leaps out if we call attention to it again. Consider Nazis, and times of crisis, which Heidegger unfortunately saw as an opportunity to re-enchant the technological world.
This tendency to box and categorize the world is imperfect, and cracks can become ruptures. This is remarkably similar to ideas in anarchism and among artists such as the Dada who believe we can reanimate and enchant the world to break beyond its boxes. Nietzsche, an existentialist like Heidegger, similarly romanticized ruptures and struggle with the categorical and the dead in thought. We build meaning as individuals, as groups and as cultures in the face of the infinite. While Nietzsche would implore us to strike out on our own here as an individual, and only individuality could give our meaning and perspective authenticity, Heidegger parts ways with Nietzsche and declares that our being-there is always a ‘they’ as much as it is an ‘I’. As with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the individual comes into the world already populated by a “they”, and one is a part of this “them” as much as one is thrown against it. Remember that Hegel speaks of the evolution of stages in history, which is driven by individuals but is always a social expression of the mind and its formation. While I am in favor of this view, balancing the Hegelian group with the Nietzschean individual, Heidegger’s identification with Germany and the Nazis is in stark contrast to Nietzsche’s renunciation of German citizenship and denunciation of German nationalism.
Heidegger argues that every revealing is a concealing, that history both gives us our meanings as it removes others from our sight. This is similar to Nietzsche arguing that every philosophy is a self confession of its author. Consider the statement, “Science is true”, what this reveals as well as what it conceals. We have made great leaps and bounds through technology, but does this always help humanity? To stand for something, one takes a risk. To believe in something, one focuses on what one wants to be true. For both Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is good to stand for things, to create and live, but to do this well is to understand that we must take responsibility for this ourselves and not place its truth on another being such as religion or science. When we say that a system is true, we are individuals taking a gamble. To lose sight of this is to lose one’s freedom and a great deal of one’s power, even though it can be frightening, indeed the most frightening thing, to admit.
For Heidegger, Being and beings withdraw from our grasp as we grasp them. Time continuously gives us the present as it takes the present from us. Meaning is always historical, always has “historicity”. Remember that one of Hegel’s great contributions to philosophy was to understand all thought as historical process. For Heidegger, being is always bound up with time, and thus the title, “Being and Time”. Time is the horizon of being. In this way, time gives us our meanings as it stretches beyond, taking from us any clear view of how long our meanings can be as they are for us. As time and being are seen and unseen, so there can be no absolute judgment, interpretation or meaning. Nietzsche argues for a multiplicity of interpretation and meaning that cannot be reduced to a single objective truth. Care and life are always as much for oneself as much as for something else that never fully arrives, just as we never reach the horizon as we walk.
For Freud, all thought is denial of sex. For Heidegger, all thought is denial of death. Understanding oneself as a simple and singular being, the conception of closed scientific facts and categorical, eternal, absolute truths, is the way we cope with the fear of death. We are in a basic state of anxiety towards our world that extends over the horizon just as we are afraid of particular people and objects. The things in front of our faces distract us from our more basic and fundamental fear of the world. Nietzsche gives Heidegger this picture, arguing that we can inauthentically ignore the void by turning to absolute immutable truths, or we can give up and find no meaning in life, but rather we should authentically give and create our own meaning as life itself, though again Nietzsche sees this as an individual activity that is corrupted by participation in social movements.
Heidegger agrees that we must make our way from absolute being to nihilism and beyond to understand ourselves as essentially becoming and transformation. We imagine we and our truths simply exist as a denial of death and meaninglessness which have just as central a role to play in our questioning, discovery, and living. Out of the basic state of anxiety spring love, fear, rejoicing, suspicion, and a variety of ways we interact with our world. True freedom is realizing this and gaining self-conscious transparency. We must resist reducing ourselves, our truths and even objects as “ready-to-hand” if we wish to truly live. We kill the world and ourselves continuously in the attempt to avoid death, but if we accept death and meaninglessness, we are free to live and give our lives meaning. If we realize we are running off into the woods to avoid being lost, we can learn to dwell comfortably at home.
For Hegel, to recognize being is non-being together as one is to understand becoming. For Nietzsche, all truths are idols to be smashed, such that new truths can freely grow in their place. For Heidegger, to recognize we, our world, and everything and everyone in it both has meaning and is meaningless, is enclosed but remains open and alive, is to live authentically rather than kill to avoid death. To get what one truly wants, one has to accept its opposite.
Jean Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980)
Sartre (pronounced, ‘Sart’, though the British pronounce it ‘Sar-truh’), who coined the term ‘existentialism’, is often known better as an author of novels and plays than as a philosopher in Britain and America, where Nietzsche and Heidegger are not always taught but are much more than Sartre. This is in part political. With Stalin’s brutal dictatorship in Russia, many European intellectuals had to choose whether to continue to be Marxists or to abandon Communism all together (often remaining socialists, but identifying as ‘post-Marxists’ who no longer have faith in the entirely planned economy of Communism). Albert Camus (1913 - 1960), a friend of Sartre, author of The Stranger and The Rebel, chose to abandon Marxism, while Sartre decided to continue to identify with Marxism and Communism, continuing to believe that violent revolution was unfortunately in the interests of the common people. Camus was often called an existentialist, but he rejected the label and called himself an absurdist, like the Dada and Surrealist artists we will look at near the end of the course.
Sartre saw his own philosophy as an extension of the work of Heidegger. In response to Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sartre wrote his Being and Nothingness. In it, he argues like Heidegger that the basic condition of humanity is anxiety, fear in the face of the unknown, and that most of the time we avoid this deeper fear by becoming involved with the world, trying to keep what we like and avoid what we hate. In the process, we become ignorant of ourselves, of the world, and of our relationships with our fellow human beings.
Nietzsche wondered aloud in many of his writings why philosophers, who claim to seek the meaning of life, spend so little time contemplating friendship, laughter, and romance, things which give us great meaning but which are hard to define or understand. He argues that it is just because these things are so meaningful and so alive that makes them hard to pin down, hard to understand consistently. Nietzsche approaches the problem by giving up on consistency and writing his philosophy as a dynamic and contradictory flow. This fits much with the absurdism of Camus and modern artists. Sartre, as a Heideggerian, argues that there is a consistent way that we inauthentically try to avoid the dynamic life of our relationships with others, both those who are intimate (family, friends, partners) and those we pass on the street or encounter in a shop.
Sartre uses his famous example of a waiter in a cafe to illustrate. Sartre did much of his writing in the cafes of Paris, and he describes the scene as if he is witnessing it firsthand. The waiter in a cafe plays his role, overemphasising the rigidity and seriousness of the gestures, the bows, the distribution and collecting of menus, the seriousness with which orders are taken, to define himself as a waiter, as filling his role, his work. We and he come to inauthentically see him as a waiter, and not as a human being. The waiter becomes a robot, and his individuality disappears, both for our and his comfort. We find it easier to interact with a role than with the actor as a person, and the actor finds it easier to lose himself in the role than to try to retain individuality while serving in his position. For Sartre, it becomes easy for us to lose sight of the situation as a whole, that this is not a waiter in essence but a human being playing the role of a waiter. While it would be tiresome to say, “Excuse me, authentic human individual playing the temporary role of a waiter, can I have another espresso?”, our substitution of the word ‘waiter’ for the individual does violence to our awareness of the situation.
Sartre wrote Antisemitism and Jew in 1944, as Paris was liberated from the Nazis. Like Nietzsche, Sartre argues that racism, that the Nazis had for Jews as well as that which the French had for North Africans (Arabs and native Africans), is a similar violent inauthentic effort to box up the other rather than deal with the complexity of dealing with our fellow human beings face to face. In one of his plays, Sartre’s main character famously says, “Hell is other people”. We are constantly faced with others who do and do not know themselves as we do and do not know ourselves. Like the horizon of time for Heidegger, the ‘other’ threatens to give us new meanings while simultaneously take all meaning away. To face this authentically is to have a good and positive faith in life and the generation of meaning. To have what Sartre calls “bad faith” is to trust that meanings are closed and dead, that the waiter is nothing more to oneself than a waiter, that the Jew or African is nothing more to oneself or one’s nation than another who is simply other with no relation.
Sartre, like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, believed that art can liberate us from the common human condition, however, most art for Sartre is inauthentic. Much literature reinforces our prejudices and ideas, giving us a shallow and false substitute for meaning in an increasingly mechanized and commodified world. Sartre sought to write and entertain in ways that opened up audiences to examine themselves, their world, and each other with new possibilities of meaning and activity. This is as true of the individual, who could come to identify with the waiter as a friend, as it is of society, which could come to identify with the marginalized and oppressed. Rather than try to hold up the barriers between self and other, we must, as Hegel argues, seek resolution of contradictions not merely to gain the powers of reason, but to truly be alive.
Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)
Foucault is now a very celebrated and well studied thinker not only in philosophy but also in history, sociology and political science. He also taught briefly at Berkeley. His books are critical historical studies of social institutions and practices such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, science and sexuality. Foucault called himself a Nietzschean and his critical philosophy centers on the idea of the human tendency to privilege what is labeled as good while marginalizing and dominating what is labeled as evil. Foucault went on vacation to the French Riviera and brought Nietzsche, who he had not yet read, with him, and then stayed in his hotel room the entire time reading Nietzsche, overcome with his criticism of all institutions. Foucault, already a psychiatrist, became fascinated with the complexity of good and evil Nietzsche unearthed, not merely as morality but as ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ in the history of psychiatry, of ‘normal’ and ‘perverse’ in the history of sexuality, of ‘law-abiding’ and ‘criminal’ in the history of prisons.
As a Nietzschean, Foucault is deeply critical of any claim to absolute or objective knowledge, distrusts binary dichotomies such as good/bad, true/false, opinion/knowledge or sane/insane, and understands truth as a struggle between competing forces, institutions and interpretations. Institutions must support binary divisions to maintain power and pronounce themselves objective holders of genuine knowledge and truth. This bends our view of reality such that the dominant system (religion, science, politics, etc) is simply identified with truth and the messy historical process and evolution of systems of thought is obscured. On one side, giving an institution the right to distinguish the sane from the insane is quite sane and sober. On the other, when one looks at the complex history of uses and abuses of these categories, one can find much that is outright insanity. Are the institutions sane or insane? How can we know so simply, when these are the complexes that determine their own sanity, their own ability to be good or embody justice and truth?
For Foucault knowledge is always involved with serving power, just as for Nietzsche truth is always involved with serving desire. We have all heard ‘Knowledge is Power!’ as a good thing, but for Foucault knowledge is not only enabling power, it is repressive domination. Truth is not outside power, but is a thing of this world. Just as for Nietzsche, institutions and their systems of thought (Foucault famously held a chair in ‘History of Systems of Thought’) grow and thrive on opposition and problems.
Foucault studies the complicated historical situations when one form of power, knowledge and dominance shifts to become another form as circumstances change. A dominant theme of his work is that with industrialization people have to learn to police and dominate themselves and the authorities have to convince them that it is their own idea and independence. Marcuse describes something similar in One-Dimensional Man. The famous metaphor Foucault uses is the Panopticon, a prison designed by the philosopher Bentham, teacher and friend of the utilitarian John Stuart Mill. The Panopticon is a prison designed so that everyone can see that they are possibly being watched, but they can see little other than this. Never knowing when they are being watched, never seeing their observers, they learn to behave as if they are always being watched, and thus even without any guards they learn to police themselves and be constantly in self-conscious anxiety.
Thus, science such as psychiatry serves powerful interests while baptizing itself as disinterested objective truth, and the average person believes that they are smart and free for believing what they are told in a magazine rather than understanding the complicated and brutal process of various forms of truth that compete with each other. Foucault believes that we should push for what we want and strive for greater understanding while knowing that we are naturally greedy, abusive, marginalizing, and ignorant.
Power is not just a negative thing, but everything, so the form of the bad is the form of the good. One can see the influence of Nietzsche and a philosopher who is “beyond good and evil”. Thus, communists who declare themselves to be liberators are also oppressors, and people who feel oppressed by society are also helping to oppress themselves through their own individual fear and desires. Human nature is neither good nor evil, but the two together. While not openly calling himself an anarchist, Foucault distrusted all forms of authority and became disenchanted with communism and other forms of left wing thought.
Just as we had rationalists and empiricists, and now positivists and existentialists, Foucault was at first understood as a structuralist, but later as a post-structuralist or post-modernist. He is concerned with showing the structures of power as they grow from what he calls the capillary level, the tips of the branches, the experiences of individuals, up through the dominant institutions, cultures and identities. While this is quite structuralist, very much a description of history and sociology that presents itself as the record and truth, Foucault seeks in a Nietzschean fashion to constantly subvert our perspectives and the institutions, to show that what we try to marginalize consequentially becomes quite dominant. The insanity, brutality and evil that we seek to overcome, that we try to lock away in the asylums and prisons, that we try to barricade against through walls and warfare, becomes the new manifestation of contradiction and chaos, the new complex that continuously strives to overcome itself while simultaneously remaining blind to its own actions.
In a debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argues that the very idea that we will achieve a good and just society as opposed to this now or another outside is the domination, oppression and ignorance that characterizes human history. While we should always strive for the best, we should always remain aware that we are always capable of the worst, and that it is the very striving to separate ourselves from the worst that often brings the worst itself about. To truly be aware of our lives and our possibilities, to live responsibly and with greater awareness, means recognizing that there is always risk, that nothing is ever absolutely safe. All we can do is strive as best we can, and this constant becoming. While Foucault focuses on the history of institutions, we can easily see the resemblance of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Foucault in striving for acceptance of change and the need to continuously question and perfect the individual and society.
For a period of seven years, from 1931 to 1938, Martin Heidegger, one of the most celebrated German philosophers today, was a member and supporter of the fascist Nazi party as it rose to power and took authoritarian control of Germany and Austria. Though he eventually came to doubt the party, spoke critically of its development and was put under surveillance by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), he enthusiastically embraced their rise and seizure of power, spoke at propaganda rallies in several cities, and openly spoke of the Nazis as a rebirth of Western civilization, a return to the revolutionary times of ancient Greece.
Because I myself am influenced by Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, as well as Marcuse and Foucault who have both been influenced by these three, and because Heidegger took the worst of Hegel (eurocentrism, the birth of self-conscious individualism in ancient Greece and the destiny and realization of ancient Greek thought in Germany) and the best of Nietzsche (existentialism, the idea of absolute truth as denial of death, perspective, interpretation and transformation), for me Heidegger’s support of the Nazis is the question we would often prefer to ask our opponent rather than ourselves: how is it that our systems aim for the greatest human fulfillment yet support the worst practices of humankind, including genocide, slavery, and censorship?
Heidegger wrote in his major work Sein und Zeit, ‘Being and Time’ (1927), that authentic being is questioning, that categorical and absolute truth are ignorance of one’s own human nature, and every revealing is a concealing. How is it that he believed the Nazis, a fascist regime enthusiastic about racism, censorship, and brutality were a magnificent chance for questioning, renewal and transformation? Just as Heidegger argues that being is authentic as questioning or inauthentic as a denial of questioning, this is a question that philosophers should ask rather than avoid, particularly as all varieties of philosophy, including the religious and anti-religious, the analytical and existential, joined the Nazi cause.
Let us examine Heidegger’s thought, with a particular focus on his use of Nietzsche. For Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger the beginning of self-conscious questioning that is philosophy began in glorious ancient Greece with Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle. This set the European West apart from other cultures as philosophical. For Hegel and Heidegger, Germany was the natural culmination and destiny of Greek thought and philosophy, while for Nietzsche the Germans were fooling themselves through science, religion, nationalism and antisemitism into thinking they were the great race, and he moved to Switzerland, renounced his German citizenship and declared himself to be a citizen of no country. I myself would have preferred Nietzsche to be as critical of ancient Greek superiority as he was of German nationalism and antisemitism. In the opening paragraphs of Being and Time, Heidegger looks to the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece in the hopes that he can reclaim this glorious past and rebirth of thought. Heidegger believed, like Hitler and Nietzsche (though Nietzsche was far more critical and cynical) that one should look to the Greeks to be German, as the Greeks were the rebellion that gave birth to authentic thinking and learning. Heidegger, as countless other professors and academics, confuses his own self easily with the identity of the ancient Greeks and the Western mind.
The Great Depression, the 1920s and 30s, was the time when Heidegger did his critical writing and gained fame and position, a time when many feared the fall of the West and the death of Christian European civilization. Heidegger, like Rousseau and Nietzsche, was an anti-modernist anti-technology romantic who spoke of Greece as a more glorious and meaningful time. These thinkers in turn influenced Marcuse, Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Later Adorno, Jewish like Marcuse, both having fled the Nazis for Switzerland and then New York, wrote a 1964 pamphlet, The Jargon of Authenticity, criticizing Heidegger for supporting the Nazis while calling for self-questioning, which is ironic given Adorno hated jazz and argued that music was over after Beethoven.
Heidegger originally studied to be a Catholic theologian, but after studying Neo-Platonism he switched his study to philosophy and wrote his thesis on Duns Scotus. Husserl, the phenomenologist, took him under his wing as his star pupil, and as phenomenology (the school of studying the mind by focusing on how we experience the phenomena or things around us) rose to fame and gathered followers Heidegger began to gather fame and followers of his own. Husserl wanted a science of the mind, a radical criticism of all philosophy and psychology up through Kant and Hegel. Husserl is famous for the idea of intentionality, that consciousness is always directed toward something or away from something by intention. Nietzsche similarly believes that thought is always instinct and drive. Wanting, fearing, loving, and assessing objects is never neutral, nor is our own philosophical grasping of our grasping cold or objective.
Husserl studied the various and often subtle ways we are intentional in our world under the banner of phenomenology, a term invented by Hegel but intended as an open speculative psychology by Husserl. The world and subject co-develop together in an evolving symbiotic relationship. Husserl kept writing and expanding his work, but rather than develop a new alphabet for thought as he had originally intended his work snowballed out of control and continued to amass until his death. Heidegger picked up Husserl’s work, but merged this with Nietzsche and took it in an anti-scientific existential direction. Heidegger forms his own insights based on the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl. Husserl’s scientific Freudian ego becomes Hegel’s ‘dasein’, or being-there. Heidegger emphasizes the open-ended multiplicity of being and interpretation romantically like Nietzsche.
What is existentialism? Sartre, who we will study next, coined the term to describe the skeptical school of thought, the deep questioning of human understanding and knowledge, that was initiated by Kierkegaard, a student of Hegel’s, and Nietzsche. Sartre read Heidegger, and applied the label ‘existentialism’ to their own work as well, both quite influenced by Nietzsche. Thus, in some ways Sartre was the first official ‘existentialist’, thought this is often said of Nietzsche with others contending that the first was in fact Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855) was an enthusiastically Christian Dutch thinker who found Hegel’s claim to absolute knowledge and system of thought out of touch with the experience of the individual. Kierkegaard was the Dionysus to Hegel’s Apollo, arguing that the individual was thrown into the world without a chance at reason reaching an absolute understanding, much like Schopenhauer saw things. For Kierkegaard, any human undertaking or belief is a leap of faith, a risk that one individually takes. Nietzsche, as we saw last week, was of a similar mind, arguing that we must have the courage to be individuals in a world that defies reason. Heidegger and Sartre both read Nietzsche and agreed that modern times show us that the human experience, in spite of the rising tide of science and technology, is a dramatic and risky quest for meaning and purpose. One can pair essentialism, that there are given essential meanings and purposes for human life and our world, with existentialism, that we must create meaning and purpose for human life and the world. As Nietzsche warns last week, to be skeptical this way, which Sartre calls ‘existentialism’, one risks nihilism, staring into the void and finding nothing, but only this sort of courage can bring greater meaning and truth to one’s life.
Heidegger argues in Being and Time that philosophy means being a beginning, the way one weighs anchor while setting sail out into the vast ocean. Remember Nietzsche has Zarathustra say to the crowd in the marketplace, “What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and not a goal”. We are thrown into the world, which Heidegger calls “thrownness”, as a being-there, or there-being, in German, “dasein”, a term Heidegger borrows from Hegel. Heidegger is famous, some would say infamous, for inventing his own vocabulary and Heideggerians follow this jargon to an equally infamous extent. Welcome to Heidegger-speak 101. What Heidegger is doing is trying to merge Hegel with Nietzsche, to identify Hegel’s becoming with Nietzsche’s rejection of both dogmatic morals and nihilism. For Heidegger, the goal is not the system of absolute knowledge as it was for Hegel, but attaining an authentic transparency of one’s own self and giving life one’s own purposes, as sought by Nietzsche.
Heidegger asks, how do we experience reality before and as we arrange it? What is the ground of being that supports our views and values? The world is “worlding” around us and as us, and thus we are “being-in-the-world”. We approach the world, each other, and objects either as closed and identified or as mysterious, uncanny and miraculous. Industrialization and technology have disenchanted the world, and so we must question the world and re-enchant it. Mystery and truth appear only in the cracks of our industrialized reality when things break or go missing. My good friend who got me interested in philosophy, who was at the time a Heideggerian, used the example of dropping the soap as you take your morning shower. Objects and persons disappear until they are out of place or misused, and then we become conscious of them. Consider a poster on a wall that we stop seeing after time, which then becomes new again and leaps out if we call attention to it again. Consider Nazis, and times of crisis, which Heidegger unfortunately saw as an opportunity to re-enchant the technological world.
This tendency to box and categorize the world is imperfect, and cracks can become ruptures. This is remarkably similar to ideas in anarchism and among artists such as the Dada who believe we can reanimate and enchant the world to break beyond its boxes. Nietzsche, an existentialist like Heidegger, similarly romanticized ruptures and struggle with the categorical and the dead in thought. We build meaning as individuals, as groups and as cultures in the face of the infinite. While Nietzsche would implore us to strike out on our own here as an individual, and only individuality could give our meaning and perspective authenticity, Heidegger parts ways with Nietzsche and declares that our being-there is always a ‘they’ as much as it is an ‘I’. As with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the individual comes into the world already populated by a “they”, and one is a part of this “them” as much as one is thrown against it. Remember that Hegel speaks of the evolution of stages in history, which is driven by individuals but is always a social expression of the mind and its formation. While I am in favor of this view, balancing the Hegelian group with the Nietzschean individual, Heidegger’s identification with Germany and the Nazis is in stark contrast to Nietzsche’s renunciation of German citizenship and denunciation of German nationalism.
Heidegger argues that every revealing is a concealing, that history both gives us our meanings as it removes others from our sight. This is similar to Nietzsche arguing that every philosophy is a self confession of its author. Consider the statement, “Science is true”, what this reveals as well as what it conceals. We have made great leaps and bounds through technology, but does this always help humanity? To stand for something, one takes a risk. To believe in something, one focuses on what one wants to be true. For both Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is good to stand for things, to create and live, but to do this well is to understand that we must take responsibility for this ourselves and not place its truth on another being such as religion or science. When we say that a system is true, we are individuals taking a gamble. To lose sight of this is to lose one’s freedom and a great deal of one’s power, even though it can be frightening, indeed the most frightening thing, to admit.
For Heidegger, Being and beings withdraw from our grasp as we grasp them. Time continuously gives us the present as it takes the present from us. Meaning is always historical, always has “historicity”. Remember that one of Hegel’s great contributions to philosophy was to understand all thought as historical process. For Heidegger, being is always bound up with time, and thus the title, “Being and Time”. Time is the horizon of being. In this way, time gives us our meanings as it stretches beyond, taking from us any clear view of how long our meanings can be as they are for us. As time and being are seen and unseen, so there can be no absolute judgment, interpretation or meaning. Nietzsche argues for a multiplicity of interpretation and meaning that cannot be reduced to a single objective truth. Care and life are always as much for oneself as much as for something else that never fully arrives, just as we never reach the horizon as we walk.
For Freud, all thought is denial of sex. For Heidegger, all thought is denial of death. Understanding oneself as a simple and singular being, the conception of closed scientific facts and categorical, eternal, absolute truths, is the way we cope with the fear of death. We are in a basic state of anxiety towards our world that extends over the horizon just as we are afraid of particular people and objects. The things in front of our faces distract us from our more basic and fundamental fear of the world. Nietzsche gives Heidegger this picture, arguing that we can inauthentically ignore the void by turning to absolute immutable truths, or we can give up and find no meaning in life, but rather we should authentically give and create our own meaning as life itself, though again Nietzsche sees this as an individual activity that is corrupted by participation in social movements.
Heidegger agrees that we must make our way from absolute being to nihilism and beyond to understand ourselves as essentially becoming and transformation. We imagine we and our truths simply exist as a denial of death and meaninglessness which have just as central a role to play in our questioning, discovery, and living. Out of the basic state of anxiety spring love, fear, rejoicing, suspicion, and a variety of ways we interact with our world. True freedom is realizing this and gaining self-conscious transparency. We must resist reducing ourselves, our truths and even objects as “ready-to-hand” if we wish to truly live. We kill the world and ourselves continuously in the attempt to avoid death, but if we accept death and meaninglessness, we are free to live and give our lives meaning. If we realize we are running off into the woods to avoid being lost, we can learn to dwell comfortably at home.
For Hegel, to recognize being is non-being together as one is to understand becoming. For Nietzsche, all truths are idols to be smashed, such that new truths can freely grow in their place. For Heidegger, to recognize we, our world, and everything and everyone in it both has meaning and is meaningless, is enclosed but remains open and alive, is to live authentically rather than kill to avoid death. To get what one truly wants, one has to accept its opposite.
Jean Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980)
Sartre (pronounced, ‘Sart’, though the British pronounce it ‘Sar-truh’), who coined the term ‘existentialism’, is often known better as an author of novels and plays than as a philosopher in Britain and America, where Nietzsche and Heidegger are not always taught but are much more than Sartre. This is in part political. With Stalin’s brutal dictatorship in Russia, many European intellectuals had to choose whether to continue to be Marxists or to abandon Communism all together (often remaining socialists, but identifying as ‘post-Marxists’ who no longer have faith in the entirely planned economy of Communism). Albert Camus (1913 - 1960), a friend of Sartre, author of The Stranger and The Rebel, chose to abandon Marxism, while Sartre decided to continue to identify with Marxism and Communism, continuing to believe that violent revolution was unfortunately in the interests of the common people. Camus was often called an existentialist, but he rejected the label and called himself an absurdist, like the Dada and Surrealist artists we will look at near the end of the course.
Sartre saw his own philosophy as an extension of the work of Heidegger. In response to Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sartre wrote his Being and Nothingness. In it, he argues like Heidegger that the basic condition of humanity is anxiety, fear in the face of the unknown, and that most of the time we avoid this deeper fear by becoming involved with the world, trying to keep what we like and avoid what we hate. In the process, we become ignorant of ourselves, of the world, and of our relationships with our fellow human beings.
Nietzsche wondered aloud in many of his writings why philosophers, who claim to seek the meaning of life, spend so little time contemplating friendship, laughter, and romance, things which give us great meaning but which are hard to define or understand. He argues that it is just because these things are so meaningful and so alive that makes them hard to pin down, hard to understand consistently. Nietzsche approaches the problem by giving up on consistency and writing his philosophy as a dynamic and contradictory flow. This fits much with the absurdism of Camus and modern artists. Sartre, as a Heideggerian, argues that there is a consistent way that we inauthentically try to avoid the dynamic life of our relationships with others, both those who are intimate (family, friends, partners) and those we pass on the street or encounter in a shop.
Sartre uses his famous example of a waiter in a cafe to illustrate. Sartre did much of his writing in the cafes of Paris, and he describes the scene as if he is witnessing it firsthand. The waiter in a cafe plays his role, overemphasising the rigidity and seriousness of the gestures, the bows, the distribution and collecting of menus, the seriousness with which orders are taken, to define himself as a waiter, as filling his role, his work. We and he come to inauthentically see him as a waiter, and not as a human being. The waiter becomes a robot, and his individuality disappears, both for our and his comfort. We find it easier to interact with a role than with the actor as a person, and the actor finds it easier to lose himself in the role than to try to retain individuality while serving in his position. For Sartre, it becomes easy for us to lose sight of the situation as a whole, that this is not a waiter in essence but a human being playing the role of a waiter. While it would be tiresome to say, “Excuse me, authentic human individual playing the temporary role of a waiter, can I have another espresso?”, our substitution of the word ‘waiter’ for the individual does violence to our awareness of the situation.
Sartre wrote Antisemitism and Jew in 1944, as Paris was liberated from the Nazis. Like Nietzsche, Sartre argues that racism, that the Nazis had for Jews as well as that which the French had for North Africans (Arabs and native Africans), is a similar violent inauthentic effort to box up the other rather than deal with the complexity of dealing with our fellow human beings face to face. In one of his plays, Sartre’s main character famously says, “Hell is other people”. We are constantly faced with others who do and do not know themselves as we do and do not know ourselves. Like the horizon of time for Heidegger, the ‘other’ threatens to give us new meanings while simultaneously take all meaning away. To face this authentically is to have a good and positive faith in life and the generation of meaning. To have what Sartre calls “bad faith” is to trust that meanings are closed and dead, that the waiter is nothing more to oneself than a waiter, that the Jew or African is nothing more to oneself or one’s nation than another who is simply other with no relation.
Sartre, like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, believed that art can liberate us from the common human condition, however, most art for Sartre is inauthentic. Much literature reinforces our prejudices and ideas, giving us a shallow and false substitute for meaning in an increasingly mechanized and commodified world. Sartre sought to write and entertain in ways that opened up audiences to examine themselves, their world, and each other with new possibilities of meaning and activity. This is as true of the individual, who could come to identify with the waiter as a friend, as it is of society, which could come to identify with the marginalized and oppressed. Rather than try to hold up the barriers between self and other, we must, as Hegel argues, seek resolution of contradictions not merely to gain the powers of reason, but to truly be alive.
Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)
Foucault is now a very celebrated and well studied thinker not only in philosophy but also in history, sociology and political science. He also taught briefly at Berkeley. His books are critical historical studies of social institutions and practices such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, science and sexuality. Foucault called himself a Nietzschean and his critical philosophy centers on the idea of the human tendency to privilege what is labeled as good while marginalizing and dominating what is labeled as evil. Foucault went on vacation to the French Riviera and brought Nietzsche, who he had not yet read, with him, and then stayed in his hotel room the entire time reading Nietzsche, overcome with his criticism of all institutions. Foucault, already a psychiatrist, became fascinated with the complexity of good and evil Nietzsche unearthed, not merely as morality but as ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ in the history of psychiatry, of ‘normal’ and ‘perverse’ in the history of sexuality, of ‘law-abiding’ and ‘criminal’ in the history of prisons.
As a Nietzschean, Foucault is deeply critical of any claim to absolute or objective knowledge, distrusts binary dichotomies such as good/bad, true/false, opinion/knowledge or sane/insane, and understands truth as a struggle between competing forces, institutions and interpretations. Institutions must support binary divisions to maintain power and pronounce themselves objective holders of genuine knowledge and truth. This bends our view of reality such that the dominant system (religion, science, politics, etc) is simply identified with truth and the messy historical process and evolution of systems of thought is obscured. On one side, giving an institution the right to distinguish the sane from the insane is quite sane and sober. On the other, when one looks at the complex history of uses and abuses of these categories, one can find much that is outright insanity. Are the institutions sane or insane? How can we know so simply, when these are the complexes that determine their own sanity, their own ability to be good or embody justice and truth?
For Foucault knowledge is always involved with serving power, just as for Nietzsche truth is always involved with serving desire. We have all heard ‘Knowledge is Power!’ as a good thing, but for Foucault knowledge is not only enabling power, it is repressive domination. Truth is not outside power, but is a thing of this world. Just as for Nietzsche, institutions and their systems of thought (Foucault famously held a chair in ‘History of Systems of Thought’) grow and thrive on opposition and problems.
Foucault studies the complicated historical situations when one form of power, knowledge and dominance shifts to become another form as circumstances change. A dominant theme of his work is that with industrialization people have to learn to police and dominate themselves and the authorities have to convince them that it is their own idea and independence. Marcuse describes something similar in One-Dimensional Man. The famous metaphor Foucault uses is the Panopticon, a prison designed by the philosopher Bentham, teacher and friend of the utilitarian John Stuart Mill. The Panopticon is a prison designed so that everyone can see that they are possibly being watched, but they can see little other than this. Never knowing when they are being watched, never seeing their observers, they learn to behave as if they are always being watched, and thus even without any guards they learn to police themselves and be constantly in self-conscious anxiety.
Thus, science such as psychiatry serves powerful interests while baptizing itself as disinterested objective truth, and the average person believes that they are smart and free for believing what they are told in a magazine rather than understanding the complicated and brutal process of various forms of truth that compete with each other. Foucault believes that we should push for what we want and strive for greater understanding while knowing that we are naturally greedy, abusive, marginalizing, and ignorant.
Power is not just a negative thing, but everything, so the form of the bad is the form of the good. One can see the influence of Nietzsche and a philosopher who is “beyond good and evil”. Thus, communists who declare themselves to be liberators are also oppressors, and people who feel oppressed by society are also helping to oppress themselves through their own individual fear and desires. Human nature is neither good nor evil, but the two together. While not openly calling himself an anarchist, Foucault distrusted all forms of authority and became disenchanted with communism and other forms of left wing thought.
Just as we had rationalists and empiricists, and now positivists and existentialists, Foucault was at first understood as a structuralist, but later as a post-structuralist or post-modernist. He is concerned with showing the structures of power as they grow from what he calls the capillary level, the tips of the branches, the experiences of individuals, up through the dominant institutions, cultures and identities. While this is quite structuralist, very much a description of history and sociology that presents itself as the record and truth, Foucault seeks in a Nietzschean fashion to constantly subvert our perspectives and the institutions, to show that what we try to marginalize consequentially becomes quite dominant. The insanity, brutality and evil that we seek to overcome, that we try to lock away in the asylums and prisons, that we try to barricade against through walls and warfare, becomes the new manifestation of contradiction and chaos, the new complex that continuously strives to overcome itself while simultaneously remaining blind to its own actions.
In a debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argues that the very idea that we will achieve a good and just society as opposed to this now or another outside is the domination, oppression and ignorance that characterizes human history. While we should always strive for the best, we should always remain aware that we are always capable of the worst, and that it is the very striving to separate ourselves from the worst that often brings the worst itself about. To truly be aware of our lives and our possibilities, to live responsibly and with greater awareness, means recognizing that there is always risk, that nothing is ever absolutely safe. All we can do is strive as best we can, and this constant becoming. While Foucault focuses on the history of institutions, we can easily see the resemblance of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Foucault in striving for acceptance of change and the need to continuously question and perfect the individual and society.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Asian Philosophy: Mozi, Hui Shi & Gongsun Long
Mozi (Master Mo) & Moism
Last time we talked about the debate on human nature between the two most central Confucians after Confucius. Mencius argues that human nature is good (love) while Xun Zi argues that human nature is evil (desire). Today we will focus on Mozi, Master Mo of the Moist School of Chinese Philosophy, and his arguments for universal love against the Confucians, and then the two great masters of the School of Names, Hui Shi and Gongsun Long, who are often called the Sophists or Logicians, the masters of debate and paradox.
Not much is known about Master Mo, founder of Moism, one of the four major schools of the Period of the Hundred Philosophers (along with Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism). His disciples collected his sayings and dialogues to make the Mozi text, just as the disciples of Confucius and Mencius did. It is believed that Mozi lived sometime between the death of Confucius in 479 BCE and the birth of Mencius in 372 BCE and that the Moist school was flourishing around the year 400 BCE (the same time as Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece).
One ancient work says that Mozi studied Confucianism at a Confucian school, but then became disgusted and developed his philosophy in opposition to Confucianism. Mozi does frequently quote the Book of Odes and the Book of History, books that Confucius compiled as textbooks for his students. We know that Confucianism and Moism were both flourishing and in competition at the same time from texts like the Daoist text the Zhuangzi (in which Zhuangzi states that what the Confucians call right the Moists call wrong and vice versa). Like Confucius, Mozi likely traveled to schools and noble courts expounding his philosophy and seeking students and supporters. Nobles and other wealthy individuals would often put on banquets and debates for education and entertainment.
Because Mozi was a great critic of the excesses of the powerful and champion of the common people, some scholars have speculated that Mozi was of the lower classes. He may have been a craftsman, as he often uses metaphors such as a compass, carpenter’s square, and plumb lines. Some even say he could have been an ex-convict and Mo meant tattoo like the sort used to brand ex-cons as a punishment (thus, Mozi would mean ‘Master Tattoo’ or ‘Master Tat’). These scholars are likely thinking of Zhuangzi’s use of ex-con teachers countering Confucius while playing the Moists and Confucians against each other. While Mozi criticized the luxurious excesses of dancing girls and music of the wealthy, particularly in light of the suffering of the poor and oppressed as the wealthy spent vast sums of money on extravagant entertainment, it is unlikely that an ex-con would have access to the noble courts and fine houses that Mozi frequented in seeking to expand the influence and membership of his school of thought. Unlikely, but perhaps his teachings and following were impressive enough to grant him aristocratic audiences.
How could Mozi get away with criticizing the powerful? Mozi argued (as did the Confucians) that it is behavior that makes one a good person and not high birth, arguing for meritocracy over aristocracy like the Confucians. As in ancient India, and common in all human cultures ancient and modern, the top ranks of power are in constant struggle with the up and coming powers. In India, Buddha, Mahavira and other great philosophers were second class educated who were critical of the upper class and older traditions. In ancient China, Moism and Confucianism (as well as other schools) appealed to the newer and lower nobles and wealthy who did not have the finest families but surrounded themselves with the talented and new artists and thinkers. These ‘new rich’ patrons would have found much in Moism, Confucianism, as well as Daoism.
Unfortunately, it may have been the hard-lining Moist stance against the top levels of society that ultimately resulted in the downfall of Moism when the Qin unified China and endorsed the Legalists, followed by the Han who endorsed the Confucians and Daoists. Moism was neglected for 1,500 years afterwards. It was only in the times of Song Neo-Confucianism, ironically, that Mozi was reexamined along with Buddhism and put in a Confucian context.
Like Xunzi, Mozi was exceptional at examining the validity of beliefs. He had a system of three tests. First, one should seek the origin of the belief (remember, the ways of the sage kings were highly valued and used by most schools of ancient Chinese thought, and Confucians, Moists and Daoists each argued that the great Sage Kings such as Yao and Shun had used their own ways in the ancient times of great prosperity and culture).
Second, tone should seek he empirical validity of the belief, or how well the belief corresponds to what we have discovered to be true based on evidence. Interestingly, Mozi argues that there must certainly be ghosts, as so many people have reported seeing them. We do know that a typical symptom of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after engaging in violence is seeing victims in both waking hallucinations and in dreams, being haunted by those one has hurt. While most would today consider this haunting to be psychological, not supernatural, Mozi could certainly have traveled the globe and found much evidence accross all cultures that ghosts exist and punish the wicked, which he argued was the natural morality of the universe.
Third, one should seek the practicality and applicability of the belief, identical to the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. Mozi was quite a Utilitarian, arguing that all things, including beliefs, should be used to maximize happiness and minimize pain for all of society. While he argued that this was the way of the sage kings, Confucians found many sympathetic to the counter-argument that such Utilitarianism threatened to do away with tradition, such as funeral practices and patronizing the arts. Mozi argued that the belief that ghosts punish the wicked is not only true based on the evidence, but on its usefulness. If evil people are afraid of being haunted and persecuted by ghosts for their crimes, it makes them less likely to commit offenses. For example, if you do not turn in all of your response essays, my vengeful spirit will haunt your grade point average until your dying day.
On the issue of spirits and traditional folk belief, remember that Confucius was interested in preserving ritual but had not spoken of the Lord of Heaven but rather the Mandate of Heaven and the Dao, the Way, of Heaven, much like the Daoists, a move toward abstract philosophical monism. Mozi saw this as a dangerous departure from the ways of the ancients, and argued that there was a great and good All God that views all equally as each individual should strive to view others as equal to themselves. In the same way, while Confucius said, “You do not know how to serve humanity, how can you feed ghosts and spirits?”, Mozi argued that the traditional views of ghosts was correct and important for social morality. Mozi believed that the agnosticism and monism of the Confucians was not in line with the practices of the great sage kings, and that it was corruptive, encouraging the individual to be partial to themselves rather than serve others.
The Moists are most famous for their doctrine of universal love, which we discussed last time in dialog with Mencius. Mozi had the hard task of trying to convince rulers and common people alike that they should not only love others as themselves, which the Confucians also teach, but that they should love other families as they love their own families and love people of other countries as they love the people of their own country. Mozi says that universal love was the practice of the sage kings, is the best practice based on evidence of social behaviour, and is practical and could be put into practice within a single generation if enough rulers were convinced that it is in their own best interest as well as in their people’s best interest.
Paradoxically, Mozi argues that when we look at things dispassionately, without the biases of a Confucian for their family or nation, we can see that compassion for all equally is the best strategy for a healthy individual and society. Not only does looking at things objectively and with emotional detachment give us the best mind for seeking truth, it teaches us about proper emotional conduct. Mozi argues that all problems, both of individuals and of society, are caused by bias and partiality. Just as we trust others when we know that they are impartial, judging them by their words and actions when they can benefit themselves more than others but do not, we trust our rulers and ourselves when they and we are impartial. Mozi’s ‘universal love’ is passionate, but it is akin to Buddhist emptiness, which as openness is compassion but also detachment.
Mencius seems terrified by Moism, his major rival in Northeast China at the time, saying, “The ideas of Yang Chu and Mozi fill the world” (Mencius 3B:9). Yang Chu and Mozi were equal opposite extremes which Mencius feared would cause individuals to fall from the middle way and balance of opposites proper to the great cultivated person. Yang Chu, whose school did not survive the Qin and Han unification of China, taught a sort of social Darwinism, that it is everyone for themselves, while Mozi taught universal love, that everyone should care for everyone as they do for themselves. The Confucians’ doctrine of loving all but having particular love for one’s family, friends and country was offered as a middle way between these two extremes. Against Mozi, Mencius argues that loving everyone as one loves one’s own father is like one has no father, that loving everyone as one loves one’s own children is like one has no children. Considering the emphasis that Confucians such as Mencius put on following one’s father, this would be a great evil.
Recall that Mencius argues against the Moist Yi Chih, also known as Yizi, Master Yi, that society began with the burial of the dead. Our early ancestors began to bury the bodies of those who died because they became distressed seeing animals and insects consume the bodies. Yi Chih does not object, and the text seems to present this as Mencius’ argument going unanswered and thus it being a victory for Mencius. However, why should Moist Master Yi object? Mencius is implying that the ancestors buried their family and friends, but it could equally be argued that they buried those of their community, considering that communities were much smaller and more intimate in earlier times. Whether or not Yi Chih is aware of this, he could agree that the ancestors were disturbed at the sight of others and use this as further support that human beings naturally care about others as they do themselves.
The Moists and Confucians seem to be presenting two sides of an issue that touches all cultures. You can find a good example of the conflict in the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone. Antigone’s two brothers fight each other to rule the state, and when one kills the other, he takes the throne and orders that his brother’s body not be buried (clearly, this would creep Mencius out). Antigone is torn between obeying her brother, the state, and burying her other brother as an obligation to her family members. Antigone argues in court that she must bury her brother, as one must serve one’s family over the state, and she is condemned to death. In one passage of Confucius’ Analects (13:18), Confucius sides with Antigone, arguing that a son who testifies against his father for stealing a sheep is wrong for not protecting his family from harm (we can assume that the punishment of the father would injure the family considerably).
Are the Moist and Confucian ideas of love incompatible? Is the love one has for others the origin of the love one has for those one is familiar with, or is the love one has for those one is familiar with the origin of the love one has for everyone? There is evidence that some during the Warring States period regarded them as complementary halves of the same truth. The Confucians such as Mencius argue as if the Moists wish to feed everyone a sandwich when they themselves want to eat a sandwich, which they argue is impractical. The Moists likewise argue as if the Confucians wish to feed only their families and have no obligation to anyone else. As a Moist, it is quite reasonable to believe that universal love allows one to take care of one’s own needs first, as everyone else should do for themselves, while keeping in mind that one must make the effort to ensure that all are cared for equally by society as a whole in addition to attending to one’s own needs. Likewise, as a Confucian, it is quite reasonable to care about everyone in society and the prosperity of society as a whole while taking care of one’s own needs and those of one’s family.
Just like the monks Hui Neng encountered arguing over the flag and the wind, the Moists start with universal love and assume it will compliment the partial, while the Confucians start with partial love and assume it will compliment the universal. Taking care of the self and those close to you and taking care of everyone are complimentary and mutually supportive. It is true, however, that starting with one or leaning towards the other can create great differences in doctrines and policy. For example, Mozi wanted limitations on extravagant funerals and mourning periods (traditionally three years) for family members, as these benefit one’s own family more than they contribute to the good of society as a whole. If money is spent on funerals and time on mourning periods, it can not be spent ensuring the prosperity of everyone. Confucians believe that one should provide decent funerals and mourning for one’s family members, as it is an exercise in devotion to those one shares one’s life with.
The Moists believed in both debate and warfare, and they excelled in both logic and military science, but for the purpose of self defense and defending the weak against the strong. Remember that the period of the Hundred Schools was also the Warring States Period, a time of instability when many who were weak were being abused and killed by local wars and bandits. Today, the Swiss embody this stance on war the best as they spend a decent amount on defense and bases from which they launch jets out of mountains but never go on the offensive, staying neutral in international matters.
Unfortunately for Mozi and the Moist schools, the unification of China was a time of great prosperity for aristocrats, artists, entertainers and merchants. Mozi’s arguments that everyone should share equally and do away with extravagant entertainment cut against all of these rising groups, a likely factor in the Han supporting Confucianism and Daoism, but not Moism. Mozi did believe that art and music were valuable, but denounced the great productions enjoyed by aristocrats and merchants, arguing that they should use the money to feed farmers in times of famine and orphans. While the Confucians and Daoists argue for similar benevolence, the Daoists in particular suggesting that it is better to feed the common people then become attached to luxury, Mozi’s focus on entertainment as a particular target did not win him or his later schools much patronage.
Additionally, Mozi’s insistence on retaining popular theism and folk beliefs did not win him much favor. The philosophical monism of the Confucians and Daoists, while clearly blended with popular theism and spiritualism in the traditions, caught on with rising cultures of scholarship and the new aristocrats who found the new monistic interpretations and discussions attractive at a time when scholarship and culture were progressing in leaps and bounds.
I gave you readings from the Mozi, selections from the chapters Universal Love, Against Offensive Warfare and Against the Confucians, but I will be lecturing on more than these sections. The Mozi text is often edited, as it has three versions of most of the chapters. Scholars believe that this was due to there being three major competing schools of Moism around 400 BCE, which would have been thriving in the time of Mencius as he debates with various Moists. Sometimes the text speaks as if from the mouth or brush of Mozi himself, while at other times quoting him in the third person (“Mozi said...”).
In the section Honoring the Worthy, Mozi argues that the way to lead a people to prosperity and out of poverty is to employ and promote the best people. Interestingly, Mozi later argues that it is improper to take better care of the worthy or to care for them more than the unworthy, and he claims that Confucians, who also believe in meritocracy, make this mistake. Mozi sites the example of the sage emperor Yao selecting Shun as his successor to show that this was the practice of the great ancient patriarchs.
In the section Identifying with One’s Superior, Mozi says that before there were laws and culture in prehistoric times, everyone had different views and the world was a brutal place without regard for family or anyone other than the self. Civilization occurred when people subjected themselves to rulers and their laws. This picture is identical to that of Xunzi as well as Hobbes, the British political philosopher of the 1600s. Mozi says, like Hobbes, that one must subject one’s own will and decisions to that of one’s superior, but unlike Hobbes and like Confucius, Mozi argues that if one’s superior is wrong they should be told by subordinates. The lowest of people should report all good and bad to their superiors, but then do what they are told by their superiors. Mozi argues that the Lord of Heaven (God) will support the good and dethrone the bad, naturally creating a just society. In spite of the fact that Mozi believes in radical and nontraditional reforms (though Mozi argues that they were the ways of the sage kings), he is critical of Confucianism for supporting rebellions against unjust rulers.
There is a bit of a conflict here with his views in Against Offensive Warfare. Mozi argues that self-defense is always preferable to offense, and it would seem this includes mounting an offense against one’s own rulers. However, in order to answer those who say the ancient sage kings went to war, he makes a distinction between offensive warfare for gain and punishing an unjust ruler, which he says is what the sage kings did whenever they went to war. It seems that if you are a ruler it is alright to use war as punishment against a neighboring unjust ruler, but not if you are the subject of an unjust ruler.
In the section Universal Love, Mozi begins by stating that the good person seeks to promote what is good and reduce what is harmful (identical, again, to the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill). He argues that the greatest harm is powerful states and families attacking the weak states and families and the strong oppressing the weak. All this comes about not by love but by hate, not by universality (caring about the whole) but by partiality (caring about part of the whole as opposed to another part). Partiality must be, therefore, replaced with universality.
Mozi uses the example of using a flood to counter a flood (fighting water with water) or putting out a fire with another flame (fighting fire with fire). To fight partiality with partiality (such as fighting one army with another, each wanting exclusive control of a territory) will not work. The only way to defeat partiality is through universality, just as the way to fight fire is with water. If rulers and people saw other cities as they do their own, then they would not attack them but rather give to them and inspire the others to give back. While many in his time as well as today would be skeptical of the practicality of this, Mozi argues that it is not easy but it is the only practical solution to warfare and poverty. If everyone helps others with their talents, caring about others and receiving goods from society equally, it will create the most prosperous society.
Mo Zi argues that this can be put into practice or even he would be critical. We naturally trust the universal person with our family and possessions more than the partial person. He uses the example of a man going to war, who would trust his family to the universal rather than the partial man. Therefore, we naturally love and trust the universal ruler more than the particular ruler. He argues further that if one cares about one’s parents, caring about others as one cares about one’s parents would be the best way to take care of one’s parents, as others would care about one’s parents and provide for them as they do for themselves. Mozi mentions that critics have replied that universal love and a universal society is as impossible as picking up Mount T’ai and leaping over a river with it. Mozi responds that the ancient sage kings practiced universal love, proving it is possible. Whether or not the sage kings did love everyone equally, it may be problematic to insist that their subjects all joined them.
There is, however, a problem with this view that Mencius mentions: we do in fact see people naturally loving their own more than their neighbor, just as we do see people trusting partial rulers rather than universal ones. Mozi says there are no fools in the world like this, that everyone knows a universal person is more trustworthy than a partial person, but experience does show us otherwise. However, he argues that if the people saw rulers that fed and clothed everyone equally, there could be radical change in society within a single generation. He argues that King Ling liked slender waists, so his subjects all went on a one-meal-a-day diet within a single generation, that King Kou-Chien liked bravery, so his subjects became brave warriors within a single generation, and Duke Wen liked course clothes, so his subjects began to wear coarse clothes within a single generation. If people can change these ways within one generation, how much more would they benefit from universal love and care? While it would have problems, it is not necessarily impossible. Confucius did say that no one, including himself, is perfect.
In the section Against Offensive Warfare, Mo Zi says that everyone knows that it is wrong to steal from one’s neighbors, but that when it is called warfare, and a people steal from another people, it is praised. If it is true that killing one person is a crime, then killing a hundred is far more of a crime. People are truly confused about right and wrong if they consider warfare to be justice. Mozi argues this is like calling a large amount of black ‘white’, or calling a large amount of bitter ‘sweet’. Rulers unjustly use people as a beast uses its claws and teeth to attack other people, praising those they use this way. This causes people to lose soldiers who are needed for self-defense, who die not only from combat but from starvation and disease in times of war. It also causes the death of people, who are the ones who tend to the needs of spirits, hurting them as well in the process (Won’t somebody think of the spirits?). Mozi argues that if people want a prosperous society, they would do better to flourish through peace than steal through war.
In the section The Will of Heaven, Mozi says that people can hide from their families in another house or their rulers in another land, but they can not hide from Heaven (the way of things, or reality). If one does good, then one prospers. If one does evil, one perishes. The Will of Heaven, the way of things, is “like a compass to a wheelwright or a square to a carpenter”, giving a model for matching the curved and the straight.
In the section Against Confucians, Mo Zi argues that the Confucians are wrong about degrees and gradations of love based on one’s relationship to one’s other. Mo Zi argues that it is wrong to love one’s family and state more than other families and states. He argues that both Confucius and Confucians are hypocritical and often pay more attention to matters of ritual than to the deeper underlying problems of society. He attacks Confucian practices of mourning, weddings, and fatalism and says they produce contradictions and hypocrisy. He argues that the ancient ways were once new ways, so why should we honor the ancient heroes and sage kings for invention, innovation and change by sticking to the old ways? Mo Zi believes that the Confucians are drawn into caring about the trivial while at other times supporting the substantial revolution that society requires. At times, they believe in silence and deference to authority even when it is wrong, but at other times they endorse rebellion. It seems that Mozi sees the Confucians as destroyers of tradition, the same way the Confucians see the Moists.
The Logicians/Sophists of the School of Names: Hui Shi & Gongsun Long
Hui Shi (380-305 BCE) is famous for his ten paradoxes which are very similar to those of the ancient Greek thinker Zeno, paradoxes of size, location and motion. Xunzi accuses of Hui Shi and his fellow School of Names logician Gongsun Long of abusing names to create chaos throughout the land. Hui Shi was the chief minister of King Hui of the state of Wei, and he appears as a friend and fellow philosopher in the Daoist Zhuangzi text many times, where he is also called Huizi, ‘Master Hui’. In one passage, while passing the grave of Hui Shi’s grave Zhuangzi laments that he has no one he can talk to anymore. In another, the two are walking together by the Hao river dam when Zhuangzi remarks that the fish love to dart back and forth. Hui Shi replies that he can not know that, because he is not a fish. Zhuangzi replies that Hui Shi is not himself, so how does he know he does not know that? Hui Shi maintains that he can’t know about what fish like, so Zhuangzi points out that Hui Shi asked him, “How do you know that?”, so Hui Shi assumed that he knew it already, and as far as ‘how’, he knows it by standing by the Hao river dam. The two disagree, but they are clearly friends who enjoy arguing together.
Hui Shi’s second paradox says that that which has no thickness cannot be piled up but can be a thousand li (measure of distance) in dimension. He seems to have a line or surface in mind, which is one or two dimensional over any length yet lacking second or third dimensional width.
Hui Shi’s third paradox says that the heavens are as low as the earth and mountains and marshes are on the same level. Indeed, at the horizon the heavens are as low as the earth and mountains must meet the marshland to rise above it as they do.
His fourth paradox says that the sun at noon is the sun setting, and the thing born is the thing dying. The sun does begin setting right at noon, and as soon as something is born it is transforming and moving towards its death, thus constantly dying.
His fifth paradox says that the lesser similarity is that great similarity is different from small similarity, but the greater similarity is that all things are similar and different from one another. Consider a bowl of apples and oranges. All are round, all are fruit, and all are edible, yet it is easy to see that the apples are more similar to each other than the oranges. It is easy, and thus it is lesser, to see that apples are not oranges and oranges are not apples. It is difficult, obscured by this easy judgement and thus greater, to see that no two apples or oranges are alike and, at the same time, all contents of the bowl are alike. It is easier to see the categories of apples and oranges than it is to see that similarity and difference do not stop at the categories they create for us, but go clear beyond them to unite everything in similarity and difference.
When his seventh paradox says one goes to the state of Yueh today and arrives there yesterday, this is a famous puzzle that is quite like the wisdom tales we read in the beginning of the semester. If one crosses the border of Yueh at the stroke of midnight, then one was in Yueh and not in Yueh both today and yesterday, so one could say that one was going there today and arrived yesterday. We can also say that we were going to Yueh today and yesterday, and arrived there today and yesterday, but you can select the parts to say that are most paradoxical. This is very similar to Gongsun Long’s ‘A white horse is not a horse’ argument.
His tenth and final paradox reads, “Love all things generously: Heaven and earth are one body”. It serves as a good end to the list, as the paradoxes are all examples of how things that are different are also, at the same time, the same.
Gongsun Long (325-250 BCE) also appears in the Zhuangzi, where he says:
“When I grew up, I understood the practice of kindness and duty. I united the same and different, separated hard from white, made so the not-so and admissible the inadmissible. I confounded the wits of the hundred schools and exhausted the eloquence of countless speakers. I took myself to have reached the ultimate.”
Gongsun’s writings are now lost, but his famous ‘A White Horse Is Not A Horse’ argument lives on. Many say that this argument is faulty, but if we follow the thinking of the Daoists and Hui Shi we can see that they are quibbling, and Gongsun is showing us the two types of ‘is’ we saw earlier in Buddhist Logic and that we will see again with Wittgenstein. Gongsun does not mean that a white horse is not in any way a horse, but that in one particular way “a white horse” is not the same thing as “a horse”. He argues that if one brings a yellow horse, it would not fit the description “a white horse” but it would do fine for the description “a horse”. The two are thus different sets and are not identical though one set is a subset of the other. This means that “a white horse” is and is not “a horse” (in one way “is” and in another way “is not”), and so he can truly say that “a white horse is not a horse”, like Hui Shi saying the parts of the full truth that sound most paradoxical when said side by side.
Consider that your finger is you but also is not you. If we use “is” in terms of strict identity (like Clark Kent is Superman) then your finger is not you because you are much more than a finger. However, if we use “is” to mean a part incorporated within a thing (like a tree is green, or trees are green things) then your finger is you because it is part of you. Bill Clinton famously tried explaining this with his “that depends what your definition of ‘is’ is”, which did not gain him much sympathy. Being an individual human, you are and are not humanity. In fact, you are only one human out of quadrillions so far, so you are not very much of humanity at all, but what are you more than a human?
Last time we talked about the debate on human nature between the two most central Confucians after Confucius. Mencius argues that human nature is good (love) while Xun Zi argues that human nature is evil (desire). Today we will focus on Mozi, Master Mo of the Moist School of Chinese Philosophy, and his arguments for universal love against the Confucians, and then the two great masters of the School of Names, Hui Shi and Gongsun Long, who are often called the Sophists or Logicians, the masters of debate and paradox.
Not much is known about Master Mo, founder of Moism, one of the four major schools of the Period of the Hundred Philosophers (along with Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism). His disciples collected his sayings and dialogues to make the Mozi text, just as the disciples of Confucius and Mencius did. It is believed that Mozi lived sometime between the death of Confucius in 479 BCE and the birth of Mencius in 372 BCE and that the Moist school was flourishing around the year 400 BCE (the same time as Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece).
One ancient work says that Mozi studied Confucianism at a Confucian school, but then became disgusted and developed his philosophy in opposition to Confucianism. Mozi does frequently quote the Book of Odes and the Book of History, books that Confucius compiled as textbooks for his students. We know that Confucianism and Moism were both flourishing and in competition at the same time from texts like the Daoist text the Zhuangzi (in which Zhuangzi states that what the Confucians call right the Moists call wrong and vice versa). Like Confucius, Mozi likely traveled to schools and noble courts expounding his philosophy and seeking students and supporters. Nobles and other wealthy individuals would often put on banquets and debates for education and entertainment.
Because Mozi was a great critic of the excesses of the powerful and champion of the common people, some scholars have speculated that Mozi was of the lower classes. He may have been a craftsman, as he often uses metaphors such as a compass, carpenter’s square, and plumb lines. Some even say he could have been an ex-convict and Mo meant tattoo like the sort used to brand ex-cons as a punishment (thus, Mozi would mean ‘Master Tattoo’ or ‘Master Tat’). These scholars are likely thinking of Zhuangzi’s use of ex-con teachers countering Confucius while playing the Moists and Confucians against each other. While Mozi criticized the luxurious excesses of dancing girls and music of the wealthy, particularly in light of the suffering of the poor and oppressed as the wealthy spent vast sums of money on extravagant entertainment, it is unlikely that an ex-con would have access to the noble courts and fine houses that Mozi frequented in seeking to expand the influence and membership of his school of thought. Unlikely, but perhaps his teachings and following were impressive enough to grant him aristocratic audiences.
How could Mozi get away with criticizing the powerful? Mozi argued (as did the Confucians) that it is behavior that makes one a good person and not high birth, arguing for meritocracy over aristocracy like the Confucians. As in ancient India, and common in all human cultures ancient and modern, the top ranks of power are in constant struggle with the up and coming powers. In India, Buddha, Mahavira and other great philosophers were second class educated who were critical of the upper class and older traditions. In ancient China, Moism and Confucianism (as well as other schools) appealed to the newer and lower nobles and wealthy who did not have the finest families but surrounded themselves with the talented and new artists and thinkers. These ‘new rich’ patrons would have found much in Moism, Confucianism, as well as Daoism.
Unfortunately, it may have been the hard-lining Moist stance against the top levels of society that ultimately resulted in the downfall of Moism when the Qin unified China and endorsed the Legalists, followed by the Han who endorsed the Confucians and Daoists. Moism was neglected for 1,500 years afterwards. It was only in the times of Song Neo-Confucianism, ironically, that Mozi was reexamined along with Buddhism and put in a Confucian context.
Like Xunzi, Mozi was exceptional at examining the validity of beliefs. He had a system of three tests. First, one should seek the origin of the belief (remember, the ways of the sage kings were highly valued and used by most schools of ancient Chinese thought, and Confucians, Moists and Daoists each argued that the great Sage Kings such as Yao and Shun had used their own ways in the ancient times of great prosperity and culture).
Second, tone should seek he empirical validity of the belief, or how well the belief corresponds to what we have discovered to be true based on evidence. Interestingly, Mozi argues that there must certainly be ghosts, as so many people have reported seeing them. We do know that a typical symptom of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after engaging in violence is seeing victims in both waking hallucinations and in dreams, being haunted by those one has hurt. While most would today consider this haunting to be psychological, not supernatural, Mozi could certainly have traveled the globe and found much evidence accross all cultures that ghosts exist and punish the wicked, which he argued was the natural morality of the universe.
Third, one should seek the practicality and applicability of the belief, identical to the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. Mozi was quite a Utilitarian, arguing that all things, including beliefs, should be used to maximize happiness and minimize pain for all of society. While he argued that this was the way of the sage kings, Confucians found many sympathetic to the counter-argument that such Utilitarianism threatened to do away with tradition, such as funeral practices and patronizing the arts. Mozi argued that the belief that ghosts punish the wicked is not only true based on the evidence, but on its usefulness. If evil people are afraid of being haunted and persecuted by ghosts for their crimes, it makes them less likely to commit offenses. For example, if you do not turn in all of your response essays, my vengeful spirit will haunt your grade point average until your dying day.
On the issue of spirits and traditional folk belief, remember that Confucius was interested in preserving ritual but had not spoken of the Lord of Heaven but rather the Mandate of Heaven and the Dao, the Way, of Heaven, much like the Daoists, a move toward abstract philosophical monism. Mozi saw this as a dangerous departure from the ways of the ancients, and argued that there was a great and good All God that views all equally as each individual should strive to view others as equal to themselves. In the same way, while Confucius said, “You do not know how to serve humanity, how can you feed ghosts and spirits?”, Mozi argued that the traditional views of ghosts was correct and important for social morality. Mozi believed that the agnosticism and monism of the Confucians was not in line with the practices of the great sage kings, and that it was corruptive, encouraging the individual to be partial to themselves rather than serve others.
The Moists are most famous for their doctrine of universal love, which we discussed last time in dialog with Mencius. Mozi had the hard task of trying to convince rulers and common people alike that they should not only love others as themselves, which the Confucians also teach, but that they should love other families as they love their own families and love people of other countries as they love the people of their own country. Mozi says that universal love was the practice of the sage kings, is the best practice based on evidence of social behaviour, and is practical and could be put into practice within a single generation if enough rulers were convinced that it is in their own best interest as well as in their people’s best interest.
Paradoxically, Mozi argues that when we look at things dispassionately, without the biases of a Confucian for their family or nation, we can see that compassion for all equally is the best strategy for a healthy individual and society. Not only does looking at things objectively and with emotional detachment give us the best mind for seeking truth, it teaches us about proper emotional conduct. Mozi argues that all problems, both of individuals and of society, are caused by bias and partiality. Just as we trust others when we know that they are impartial, judging them by their words and actions when they can benefit themselves more than others but do not, we trust our rulers and ourselves when they and we are impartial. Mozi’s ‘universal love’ is passionate, but it is akin to Buddhist emptiness, which as openness is compassion but also detachment.
Mencius seems terrified by Moism, his major rival in Northeast China at the time, saying, “The ideas of Yang Chu and Mozi fill the world” (Mencius 3B:9). Yang Chu and Mozi were equal opposite extremes which Mencius feared would cause individuals to fall from the middle way and balance of opposites proper to the great cultivated person. Yang Chu, whose school did not survive the Qin and Han unification of China, taught a sort of social Darwinism, that it is everyone for themselves, while Mozi taught universal love, that everyone should care for everyone as they do for themselves. The Confucians’ doctrine of loving all but having particular love for one’s family, friends and country was offered as a middle way between these two extremes. Against Mozi, Mencius argues that loving everyone as one loves one’s own father is like one has no father, that loving everyone as one loves one’s own children is like one has no children. Considering the emphasis that Confucians such as Mencius put on following one’s father, this would be a great evil.
Recall that Mencius argues against the Moist Yi Chih, also known as Yizi, Master Yi, that society began with the burial of the dead. Our early ancestors began to bury the bodies of those who died because they became distressed seeing animals and insects consume the bodies. Yi Chih does not object, and the text seems to present this as Mencius’ argument going unanswered and thus it being a victory for Mencius. However, why should Moist Master Yi object? Mencius is implying that the ancestors buried their family and friends, but it could equally be argued that they buried those of their community, considering that communities were much smaller and more intimate in earlier times. Whether or not Yi Chih is aware of this, he could agree that the ancestors were disturbed at the sight of others and use this as further support that human beings naturally care about others as they do themselves.
The Moists and Confucians seem to be presenting two sides of an issue that touches all cultures. You can find a good example of the conflict in the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone. Antigone’s two brothers fight each other to rule the state, and when one kills the other, he takes the throne and orders that his brother’s body not be buried (clearly, this would creep Mencius out). Antigone is torn between obeying her brother, the state, and burying her other brother as an obligation to her family members. Antigone argues in court that she must bury her brother, as one must serve one’s family over the state, and she is condemned to death. In one passage of Confucius’ Analects (13:18), Confucius sides with Antigone, arguing that a son who testifies against his father for stealing a sheep is wrong for not protecting his family from harm (we can assume that the punishment of the father would injure the family considerably).
Are the Moist and Confucian ideas of love incompatible? Is the love one has for others the origin of the love one has for those one is familiar with, or is the love one has for those one is familiar with the origin of the love one has for everyone? There is evidence that some during the Warring States period regarded them as complementary halves of the same truth. The Confucians such as Mencius argue as if the Moists wish to feed everyone a sandwich when they themselves want to eat a sandwich, which they argue is impractical. The Moists likewise argue as if the Confucians wish to feed only their families and have no obligation to anyone else. As a Moist, it is quite reasonable to believe that universal love allows one to take care of one’s own needs first, as everyone else should do for themselves, while keeping in mind that one must make the effort to ensure that all are cared for equally by society as a whole in addition to attending to one’s own needs. Likewise, as a Confucian, it is quite reasonable to care about everyone in society and the prosperity of society as a whole while taking care of one’s own needs and those of one’s family.
Just like the monks Hui Neng encountered arguing over the flag and the wind, the Moists start with universal love and assume it will compliment the partial, while the Confucians start with partial love and assume it will compliment the universal. Taking care of the self and those close to you and taking care of everyone are complimentary and mutually supportive. It is true, however, that starting with one or leaning towards the other can create great differences in doctrines and policy. For example, Mozi wanted limitations on extravagant funerals and mourning periods (traditionally three years) for family members, as these benefit one’s own family more than they contribute to the good of society as a whole. If money is spent on funerals and time on mourning periods, it can not be spent ensuring the prosperity of everyone. Confucians believe that one should provide decent funerals and mourning for one’s family members, as it is an exercise in devotion to those one shares one’s life with.
The Moists believed in both debate and warfare, and they excelled in both logic and military science, but for the purpose of self defense and defending the weak against the strong. Remember that the period of the Hundred Schools was also the Warring States Period, a time of instability when many who were weak were being abused and killed by local wars and bandits. Today, the Swiss embody this stance on war the best as they spend a decent amount on defense and bases from which they launch jets out of mountains but never go on the offensive, staying neutral in international matters.
Unfortunately for Mozi and the Moist schools, the unification of China was a time of great prosperity for aristocrats, artists, entertainers and merchants. Mozi’s arguments that everyone should share equally and do away with extravagant entertainment cut against all of these rising groups, a likely factor in the Han supporting Confucianism and Daoism, but not Moism. Mozi did believe that art and music were valuable, but denounced the great productions enjoyed by aristocrats and merchants, arguing that they should use the money to feed farmers in times of famine and orphans. While the Confucians and Daoists argue for similar benevolence, the Daoists in particular suggesting that it is better to feed the common people then become attached to luxury, Mozi’s focus on entertainment as a particular target did not win him or his later schools much patronage.
Additionally, Mozi’s insistence on retaining popular theism and folk beliefs did not win him much favor. The philosophical monism of the Confucians and Daoists, while clearly blended with popular theism and spiritualism in the traditions, caught on with rising cultures of scholarship and the new aristocrats who found the new monistic interpretations and discussions attractive at a time when scholarship and culture were progressing in leaps and bounds.
I gave you readings from the Mozi, selections from the chapters Universal Love, Against Offensive Warfare and Against the Confucians, but I will be lecturing on more than these sections. The Mozi text is often edited, as it has three versions of most of the chapters. Scholars believe that this was due to there being three major competing schools of Moism around 400 BCE, which would have been thriving in the time of Mencius as he debates with various Moists. Sometimes the text speaks as if from the mouth or brush of Mozi himself, while at other times quoting him in the third person (“Mozi said...”).
In the section Honoring the Worthy, Mozi argues that the way to lead a people to prosperity and out of poverty is to employ and promote the best people. Interestingly, Mozi later argues that it is improper to take better care of the worthy or to care for them more than the unworthy, and he claims that Confucians, who also believe in meritocracy, make this mistake. Mozi sites the example of the sage emperor Yao selecting Shun as his successor to show that this was the practice of the great ancient patriarchs.
In the section Identifying with One’s Superior, Mozi says that before there were laws and culture in prehistoric times, everyone had different views and the world was a brutal place without regard for family or anyone other than the self. Civilization occurred when people subjected themselves to rulers and their laws. This picture is identical to that of Xunzi as well as Hobbes, the British political philosopher of the 1600s. Mozi says, like Hobbes, that one must subject one’s own will and decisions to that of one’s superior, but unlike Hobbes and like Confucius, Mozi argues that if one’s superior is wrong they should be told by subordinates. The lowest of people should report all good and bad to their superiors, but then do what they are told by their superiors. Mozi argues that the Lord of Heaven (God) will support the good and dethrone the bad, naturally creating a just society. In spite of the fact that Mozi believes in radical and nontraditional reforms (though Mozi argues that they were the ways of the sage kings), he is critical of Confucianism for supporting rebellions against unjust rulers.
There is a bit of a conflict here with his views in Against Offensive Warfare. Mozi argues that self-defense is always preferable to offense, and it would seem this includes mounting an offense against one’s own rulers. However, in order to answer those who say the ancient sage kings went to war, he makes a distinction between offensive warfare for gain and punishing an unjust ruler, which he says is what the sage kings did whenever they went to war. It seems that if you are a ruler it is alright to use war as punishment against a neighboring unjust ruler, but not if you are the subject of an unjust ruler.
In the section Universal Love, Mozi begins by stating that the good person seeks to promote what is good and reduce what is harmful (identical, again, to the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill). He argues that the greatest harm is powerful states and families attacking the weak states and families and the strong oppressing the weak. All this comes about not by love but by hate, not by universality (caring about the whole) but by partiality (caring about part of the whole as opposed to another part). Partiality must be, therefore, replaced with universality.
Mozi uses the example of using a flood to counter a flood (fighting water with water) or putting out a fire with another flame (fighting fire with fire). To fight partiality with partiality (such as fighting one army with another, each wanting exclusive control of a territory) will not work. The only way to defeat partiality is through universality, just as the way to fight fire is with water. If rulers and people saw other cities as they do their own, then they would not attack them but rather give to them and inspire the others to give back. While many in his time as well as today would be skeptical of the practicality of this, Mozi argues that it is not easy but it is the only practical solution to warfare and poverty. If everyone helps others with their talents, caring about others and receiving goods from society equally, it will create the most prosperous society.
Mo Zi argues that this can be put into practice or even he would be critical. We naturally trust the universal person with our family and possessions more than the partial person. He uses the example of a man going to war, who would trust his family to the universal rather than the partial man. Therefore, we naturally love and trust the universal ruler more than the particular ruler. He argues further that if one cares about one’s parents, caring about others as one cares about one’s parents would be the best way to take care of one’s parents, as others would care about one’s parents and provide for them as they do for themselves. Mozi mentions that critics have replied that universal love and a universal society is as impossible as picking up Mount T’ai and leaping over a river with it. Mozi responds that the ancient sage kings practiced universal love, proving it is possible. Whether or not the sage kings did love everyone equally, it may be problematic to insist that their subjects all joined them.
There is, however, a problem with this view that Mencius mentions: we do in fact see people naturally loving their own more than their neighbor, just as we do see people trusting partial rulers rather than universal ones. Mozi says there are no fools in the world like this, that everyone knows a universal person is more trustworthy than a partial person, but experience does show us otherwise. However, he argues that if the people saw rulers that fed and clothed everyone equally, there could be radical change in society within a single generation. He argues that King Ling liked slender waists, so his subjects all went on a one-meal-a-day diet within a single generation, that King Kou-Chien liked bravery, so his subjects became brave warriors within a single generation, and Duke Wen liked course clothes, so his subjects began to wear coarse clothes within a single generation. If people can change these ways within one generation, how much more would they benefit from universal love and care? While it would have problems, it is not necessarily impossible. Confucius did say that no one, including himself, is perfect.
In the section Against Offensive Warfare, Mo Zi says that everyone knows that it is wrong to steal from one’s neighbors, but that when it is called warfare, and a people steal from another people, it is praised. If it is true that killing one person is a crime, then killing a hundred is far more of a crime. People are truly confused about right and wrong if they consider warfare to be justice. Mozi argues this is like calling a large amount of black ‘white’, or calling a large amount of bitter ‘sweet’. Rulers unjustly use people as a beast uses its claws and teeth to attack other people, praising those they use this way. This causes people to lose soldiers who are needed for self-defense, who die not only from combat but from starvation and disease in times of war. It also causes the death of people, who are the ones who tend to the needs of spirits, hurting them as well in the process (Won’t somebody think of the spirits?). Mozi argues that if people want a prosperous society, they would do better to flourish through peace than steal through war.
In the section The Will of Heaven, Mozi says that people can hide from their families in another house or their rulers in another land, but they can not hide from Heaven (the way of things, or reality). If one does good, then one prospers. If one does evil, one perishes. The Will of Heaven, the way of things, is “like a compass to a wheelwright or a square to a carpenter”, giving a model for matching the curved and the straight.
In the section Against Confucians, Mo Zi argues that the Confucians are wrong about degrees and gradations of love based on one’s relationship to one’s other. Mo Zi argues that it is wrong to love one’s family and state more than other families and states. He argues that both Confucius and Confucians are hypocritical and often pay more attention to matters of ritual than to the deeper underlying problems of society. He attacks Confucian practices of mourning, weddings, and fatalism and says they produce contradictions and hypocrisy. He argues that the ancient ways were once new ways, so why should we honor the ancient heroes and sage kings for invention, innovation and change by sticking to the old ways? Mo Zi believes that the Confucians are drawn into caring about the trivial while at other times supporting the substantial revolution that society requires. At times, they believe in silence and deference to authority even when it is wrong, but at other times they endorse rebellion. It seems that Mozi sees the Confucians as destroyers of tradition, the same way the Confucians see the Moists.
The Logicians/Sophists of the School of Names: Hui Shi & Gongsun Long
Hui Shi (380-305 BCE) is famous for his ten paradoxes which are very similar to those of the ancient Greek thinker Zeno, paradoxes of size, location and motion. Xunzi accuses of Hui Shi and his fellow School of Names logician Gongsun Long of abusing names to create chaos throughout the land. Hui Shi was the chief minister of King Hui of the state of Wei, and he appears as a friend and fellow philosopher in the Daoist Zhuangzi text many times, where he is also called Huizi, ‘Master Hui’. In one passage, while passing the grave of Hui Shi’s grave Zhuangzi laments that he has no one he can talk to anymore. In another, the two are walking together by the Hao river dam when Zhuangzi remarks that the fish love to dart back and forth. Hui Shi replies that he can not know that, because he is not a fish. Zhuangzi replies that Hui Shi is not himself, so how does he know he does not know that? Hui Shi maintains that he can’t know about what fish like, so Zhuangzi points out that Hui Shi asked him, “How do you know that?”, so Hui Shi assumed that he knew it already, and as far as ‘how’, he knows it by standing by the Hao river dam. The two disagree, but they are clearly friends who enjoy arguing together.
Hui Shi’s second paradox says that that which has no thickness cannot be piled up but can be a thousand li (measure of distance) in dimension. He seems to have a line or surface in mind, which is one or two dimensional over any length yet lacking second or third dimensional width.
Hui Shi’s third paradox says that the heavens are as low as the earth and mountains and marshes are on the same level. Indeed, at the horizon the heavens are as low as the earth and mountains must meet the marshland to rise above it as they do.
His fourth paradox says that the sun at noon is the sun setting, and the thing born is the thing dying. The sun does begin setting right at noon, and as soon as something is born it is transforming and moving towards its death, thus constantly dying.
His fifth paradox says that the lesser similarity is that great similarity is different from small similarity, but the greater similarity is that all things are similar and different from one another. Consider a bowl of apples and oranges. All are round, all are fruit, and all are edible, yet it is easy to see that the apples are more similar to each other than the oranges. It is easy, and thus it is lesser, to see that apples are not oranges and oranges are not apples. It is difficult, obscured by this easy judgement and thus greater, to see that no two apples or oranges are alike and, at the same time, all contents of the bowl are alike. It is easier to see the categories of apples and oranges than it is to see that similarity and difference do not stop at the categories they create for us, but go clear beyond them to unite everything in similarity and difference.
When his seventh paradox says one goes to the state of Yueh today and arrives there yesterday, this is a famous puzzle that is quite like the wisdom tales we read in the beginning of the semester. If one crosses the border of Yueh at the stroke of midnight, then one was in Yueh and not in Yueh both today and yesterday, so one could say that one was going there today and arrived yesterday. We can also say that we were going to Yueh today and yesterday, and arrived there today and yesterday, but you can select the parts to say that are most paradoxical. This is very similar to Gongsun Long’s ‘A white horse is not a horse’ argument.
His tenth and final paradox reads, “Love all things generously: Heaven and earth are one body”. It serves as a good end to the list, as the paradoxes are all examples of how things that are different are also, at the same time, the same.
Gongsun Long (325-250 BCE) also appears in the Zhuangzi, where he says:
“When I grew up, I understood the practice of kindness and duty. I united the same and different, separated hard from white, made so the not-so and admissible the inadmissible. I confounded the wits of the hundred schools and exhausted the eloquence of countless speakers. I took myself to have reached the ultimate.”
Gongsun’s writings are now lost, but his famous ‘A White Horse Is Not A Horse’ argument lives on. Many say that this argument is faulty, but if we follow the thinking of the Daoists and Hui Shi we can see that they are quibbling, and Gongsun is showing us the two types of ‘is’ we saw earlier in Buddhist Logic and that we will see again with Wittgenstein. Gongsun does not mean that a white horse is not in any way a horse, but that in one particular way “a white horse” is not the same thing as “a horse”. He argues that if one brings a yellow horse, it would not fit the description “a white horse” but it would do fine for the description “a horse”. The two are thus different sets and are not identical though one set is a subset of the other. This means that “a white horse” is and is not “a horse” (in one way “is” and in another way “is not”), and so he can truly say that “a white horse is not a horse”, like Hui Shi saying the parts of the full truth that sound most paradoxical when said side by side.
Consider that your finger is you but also is not you. If we use “is” in terms of strict identity (like Clark Kent is Superman) then your finger is not you because you are much more than a finger. However, if we use “is” to mean a part incorporated within a thing (like a tree is green, or trees are green things) then your finger is you because it is part of you. Bill Clinton famously tried explaining this with his “that depends what your definition of ‘is’ is”, which did not gain him much sympathy. Being an individual human, you are and are not humanity. In fact, you are only one human out of quadrillions so far, so you are not very much of humanity at all, but what are you more than a human?
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Logic: Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
Last time we talked about Wittgenstein’s early thought, the Tractatus, and proving axioms with Wittgenstein’s truth table method. Now we will look at how Wittgenstein’s thought changed in his later notebooks, the most famous being the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein went from believing logic is an airtight system in his early period to believing logic is a messy incomplete set of games in his later period.
First we will consider how Wittgenstein’s thought changed since he formulated the truth table method in the Tractatus. Second we will read passages of the Philosophical Investigations. Third, we will continue to study truth tables, using them to prove several tautologies that are fundamental rules of substitution in logic (including Modus Tollens).
THE MIDDLE AND LATER THOUGHT OF WITTGENSTEIN
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein put forward a system of tautologies structured by truth tables, arguing that basic elements like ‘true’, ‘and’ and ‘or’ have a necessary structure but do not mean anything in themselves while propositions that have meaning are always contingent, dependent and possible. In this early period, Wittgenstein believed that ‘and’ always has exactly the same structure but no meaning in itself, while a proposition like ‘I have an apple and a pear’ has a meaning but is only true if, and is conditional on, I have both an apple and a pear. This is why Wittgenstein became upset with positivists, like his teacher and friend Russell and the Vienna Circle, who tried to use his system to discover primary and necessary facts in the world.
At first Wittgenstein thought that he had solved all the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus truth table system (we do still use it today to teach formal logic), so he left philosophy and Cambridge behind, went to war, had many experiences, and then later decided that his earlier thinking contained horrible problems. He no longer believed that logic could be crystallized in the head as a truth table matrix, but rather it existed as a complex out in the world, as arrangements of people, thoughts, symbols, and objects. He continued to work on notebooks, progressing in his thought until his death, after which his notebooks were published.
In the early thought of his Tractatus tried to lay the ground for a complete system of logic, such that ‘and’ always has the same, perfectly defined meaning. In his later thought, Wittgenstein argued against this view. Just as he argued against positivists that there are no necessary facts in the world, he came to argue that no individual thing, not even ‘and’ or ‘true’ in logic, can have a single or necessary meaning. He came to see that he had attempted to provide singular meanings for things that merely have common uses. Thus, there is no more a single necessary meaning of ‘and’ or ‘true’ in the head than there is a single correct scientific description or picture of the world. He came to argue that ‘and’ and ‘or’ are not exclusively in the head, but real things involved in the irreducibly complex games we play in the world. He called these situations ‘language games’ and ‘forms of life’.
Consider how we have seen that the IF>THEN operation in logic is capable of working in many different ways, and the truth table method chooses a regular way for it to work. Consider that OR can be inclusive or exclusive, and the truth table method chooses to use OR inclusively. Consider that AND can be used like OR as a general inclusion of several things, but we may agree that the AND is true even if every last thing is not present. Wittgenstein came to argue that any system of logic, like his truth tables, is a tool that is a thing in the world like any other. Because logic is a tool, it does not need to be perfectly defined or entirely consistent any more than an apple needs to be perfectly defined or entirely consistent. What is important is that logic and the world are relatively consistent such that we can use and describe things.
There is an excellent passage from Lectures and Conversations that illustrates the turn nicely. This work was taken not from Wittgenstein’s notebooks but from the notes of his seminar students in the years leading up to his work on the notebooks which would be published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations. At this time Freud’s ideas had stormed onto the academic scene, infuriating Wittgenstein who now had come to hate the idea that things in the world, even logical operators and systems, can be boiled down to a single essential element or factor like sex, power or truth. It is this skepticism, which can be called the “problem of essences”, which marks the turn from his earlier thinking to his more influential later thought.
Wittgenstein attacked Freud’s psychoanalysis and dream interpretation for boiling everything down to sex. In the Lectures and Conversations (20-21), Wittgenstein proposes a thought experiment for consideration. If we cook a human being down to carbon ash in an oven, are we left with the essence of the human being? A human being is a “carbon-based” life form, so carbon is a dominant element. Consider that we could cook a human down to water in the same oven, and claim that because humans are 3/5ths water we have the essence of the person.
Would it be correct to say that humans are essentially ashy, or essentially wet? Why not? We would not say that a human is essentially carbon or water, nor would we say ashy or wet, because the human being is a complex situation that is not reducible to a single element. The properties of carbon or water do not in themselves explain how humans behave or what they mean to us. If we cooked people down to ashes or water, we have destroyed the situation and can no longer investigate how they work. In the same way, a person is not merely their DNA. While carbon, water and DNA have very important, even necessary roles to play in any person, they are not exclusively the essence or meaning of the complex that is a human individual.
In the same way, Wittgenstein had come to believe that neither facts in the world nor logic in the head can be reduced to a single element or necessary structure. Facts and logic are not true in themselves, but true in real situations of the world which are irreducibly complex. Wittgenstein says in the Lectures and Conversations that we have to avoid the “lure of the secret cellar”, the urge to boil situations down to a single element like Freud tried to boil human relations, meaning and the mind down to sex or Wittgenstein himself had tried to boil logic down to its simple structure.
The task of philosophy, logic and science is not to fully or completely explain anything, but to investigate things. Thought never fully defines things but rather describes and re-describes things. If science is thinking about the world, then science has endless work to do describing and re-describing things. Consider whether we fully understand apples, or whether we ever need to entirely understand them in order to continue to understand them and use them a great deal. Likewise, if philosophy and logic are ‘thinking about thinking’, and if thinking is merely a possible description of things, philosophy and logic have endless work to do describing our descriptions, describing and re-describing the ways that we describe things. Much insight can be gained even if no subject is entirely explained or exhausted.
One good way to approach this is to describe how cultures of thought, perspectives, facts and models are gathered together and lived in institutions. Thought ceases to be completely abstract, but is rather a culture and situation in the real world that involves people, buildings and money. The cryptanalysis of algebra worked so well as a modeling language that we came to believe that the mathematics was not in our practices and text books but rather sewn into the fabric of the world itself. As we look over the history of thought in the wake of Wittgenstein’s later work, it becomes evident that mathematics and logic are tools and lenses, not the hidden structures of things operating at secret levels out of our immediate sight. In scholarship today, particularly the history of religion, philosophy and science, it has become popular to consider a system of thought as a real lived situation rather than an abstract set of beliefs and ideas. A religion or science is in fact a situation of human beings who never have to have entirely the same set of beliefs as long as they can generally and relatively cohere as a culture.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
In this monumental work, one of my favorites of modern European thought, Wittgenstein argues for a middle way between two extreme positions, between the position of scientific positivism (objective truth is facts in the world) and the position of psychological skepticism (subjective truth is meanings in the mind). He presents each position in quotes again and again, and then argues against both in a three stage process. First he states a position (either that there are facts given in the world or meaning is all in the head), then shows situations in which the position works, then shows situations in which the position does not work. He shows us that taking either position to extremes would be understandable given particular ways we think and act, but neither position explains all the ways in which we think and act. We live in complex ways that depend both on there being a coherent world and there being human perspectives. Wittgenstein argues that we can take both positions rather than determine one to be the actual and the other to be the illusion.
In his earlier thought, the world and the head are separated by a Kantian gulf between objectivity and subjectivity. In his later thinking, the world and our heads work together seamlessly as a complex situation. One cannot remove either the head or the world to get the bedrock or anchor of meaning and truth without resulting in absurdities. The clean and ideal side of logic, math and grammar mislead us into thinking that meaning must be anchored entirely on one side, either exclusively in the head or exclusively in the world, but we gain much more ability to think and describe our heads and our world if we stop looking for meaning and truth to be entirely in one place rather than the other. In the same way, rather than determine which facts are absolute truths to the exclusion of their opposites, or refuse to identify coherence of belief as it is all ‘mere theory’, we can better understand the facts and theories we can share by recognizing that they are one and the same viewed from opposite sides. If we can continue to determine relative fact from relative fiction, there is no need to entirely separate the two. To use the tool analogy, as long as we have decent tools we do not need perfect or eternal ones. Note that this is very similar to Mill’s Utilitarianism, and a far cry from Russell’s atomic facts which he had hoped Wittgenstein would save from inconsistency.
Games and rules gather people together, but individuals can also variously interpret rules and meanings. ‘Rules can always be variously interpreted’ is a central idea of the Philosophical Investigations. This is not to say that they always are or they should be, but the window remains open (Wittgenstein writes, “It is like locking a man in a room but leaving the window open”). Both are only what they are together as a form of life. Notice that this thinking has much in common with Laozi’s thinking on the wheel as both empty and solid at the same time, and much like the Zen koans of a rock being not a rock and a rock and the sound of one hand clapping.
Consider the ‘child at the blackboard’ metaphor used in the text. It is always possible for a child to misunderstand rules and demonstrate this misunderstanding by making mistakes, even after you show the child and explain. Let us say that you then write a new ‘inner’ set of rules to further explain the rules when the child fails. What if the child does not understand those? Is there a bedrock set of rules that the child can not possibly misunderstand? If the child can misunderstand rules, then no set of rules within rules within rules is ever perfectly airtight. We have an infinite regress unless we can find a set of rules that can never be misinterpreted.
Just like Wittgenstein had been seeking the fundamental inner workings of logic and mathematics, as Frege and Russell had tried to do before him, if people do math decently there need not be any inner rules aside from the explanation and demonstration that, if repeated, children can often follow. Notice we are considering mathematics as a culture, learned by children and taught by adults, not as an abstract set of necessary or immutable rules. It turns out that there are no inner workings to mathematics. Mathematics works as it does openly, on the board in front of one’s face, without the need of a ‘secret cellar’. If mathematics on a board is not entirely secure, then no inner set of rules could or must be either for it to function.
When we try to explain mathematics, as Frege had tried to do with set theory, Russell had tried to do with his theory of types, and Wittgenstein had tried to do with his truth tables, mathematics is not being simplified, being stripped down to its core, at all. It is the opposite: we are making it more complex as we try to simplify and explain it. The rules are not being discovered in the thing, but being added to the thing. When we explain things, we are not whittling away the unnecessary but adding our descriptions to it. In the same way, when we do science to explain apples or human beings, we are adding our descriptions and the situations of our descriptions, not uncovering the simple truth of the thing. The simple truth of a thing is the simple thing itself. The simplest truth of an apple is the single apple. An explanation of where apples come from is very useful, but it puts the apple in a complex with many other things (such as trees, farms, stores, trucks). An apple is not merely its DNA, but is in a infinitely complex situation with its DNA and ourselves attempting to isolate components with the tools and technology we bring into the situation.
We are always essentializing (like when we say, ‘We are always essentializing’). Meaning, grammar and logic do separate things into parts. They are useful for doing so. However, Wittgenstein is arguing something quite revealing: There are no final explanations, only complex descriptions. Any explanation is a partial human description, which can then itself be described and explained. The task of philosophy, science and mathematics is not to reduce things to simple truth, but to generate more meaning and situations.
Let us turn to the text. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that he now sees grave mistakes in his Tractatus. He says that this new book is not to spare thinking, but to stimulate thinking. Notice that the Tractatus had the opposite goal: to put an end to the problems of logic and philosophy. Now Wittgenstein does not believe that anything can or need be fully solved or closed, but should rather be opened up and made complex.
In section 7, Wittgenstein says that language games are actions and language interwoven as forms of life. He considers that words such as ‘this’ and ‘there’ are learned interwoven with gestures such as pointing. ‘This’, ‘now’, and other simple words get their meaning from their use by gesturing human beings. They can not be described fully in language alone, nor do they represent specific objects consistently. Rather, they are demonstrated to children and translated into other languages of cultures that share similar gestures. We know from neuroscience that in the brain the centers of language and control of the hands are next to each other, likely because language developed in apes along with gestures. There are also similarities in the basic gestures of humanity, including extending the arm to indicate the direction of sight and attention. Infants only months old will read eye direction to try to see what others are seeing, and if they can not see what is being looked at they will check the eyes again. The arm, whether a culture uses the index finger or not, provides an extension of the line of sight so that it can be easily recognized and followed by others. Notice that ‘this’ is as simple as it gets in itself, and to further explain it we need to bring arms and neuroscience into the picture.
In section 11, he says language is like toolbox, a complex set of tools that have no absolute necessity but are useful as a set. Consider that a hammer, a screwdriver and glue are a decent set of tools. Are they absolutely right or necessary tools? We could invent others, but they work decently well for putting things together and taking things apart. We do not need an absolute screwdriver any more than we need to completely understand the relationship between the hammer and screwdriver. We need only use them. In the same way, we do not need to understand the word ‘and’ such that it is always used exactly the same way, nor do we need to completely understand its relationship to ‘or’. When we use them relatively, not exclusively, they are interchangeable. At a buffet, I could equally say, “You can have eggs or salad or steak” or “You can have eggs and salad and steak”. The two can sometimes be used differently and sometimes similarly, as long as we are decently consistent in all of our interconnected uses. Indeed, the words, like tools such as hammers and screwdrivers, are more useful being often but not always used in particular and exclusive ways (ex: one can use a screwdriver to open paint cans). ‘And’ and ‘or’ are more useful when we can use them oppositely, but also identically. In his earlier thinking, with the truth tables, Wittgenstein was trying to secure them merely opposite and different meanings, which does not give us their full usage and meaning.
In section 12, Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of a locomotive cabin to further illustrate the same point. There are many levers and switches that function in various ways. Words and language function in various ways that form a complex with their environment. We could always redesign the train cabin, but it works well enough as it is.
In section 15, he uses another simple tool-oriented metaphor to make language and meaning physical rather than ideal: naming is compared to attaching a label (or sticker, with “Hello My Name Is”). The association of a word with a particular thing is like attaching a label for ease of use and identification.
In section 17, he says that we can classify words as we do things, but our classifications will depend on our situation and purposes. He uses the metaphor of chess pieces. If you want to move a great distance, you would classify chess pieces one way, but if you want to break through or jump over the enemy lines (with a knight or a bishop) you would classify them another way. The pieces, like words and other things, do not have classifications and meanings in themselves, but in how they can be used in concrete situations. This is again much like Mill.
In section 18, he says that a language is like an old city, with side streets and squares. It is interesting to compare San Francisco to Salt Lake City here. San Francisco can be a nightmare to drive, while Salt Lake City is almost entirely a perfect grid surrounding the Mormon Temple. In San Francisco, you never know which way a street might turn due to hills or other intersecting streets. European cities are similarly often much older than the automobile, and do not lend themselves to outsiders’ easy navigation. A language, like an old city or old growth forest, is the result of a long process of many layers of evolution and development. We can understand meanings just as we can navigate streets, but things are not always clear cut as Salt Lake City.
In section 57 and 58, he asks about where ‘red’ exists. He suggests that ‘red’ as a color does not exist in itself, but as an association of many red things having been experienced, the word ‘red’ being said by others and oneself associated with these things, as well as the imagination/projection of the color red in the mind. None of these things needs to be exclusively present for there to be red. We could even say the word without any red things or thinking of red, and it still means the color in our language and culture. We could likewise see a red thing, and it is red without using the word or seeing red in the imagination. Thus, the color red is not essentially any red thing, or the word, or the color in the mind, but the complex of all these. The color red is not simply a subjective concept, nor it is an objective fact, but it is a conception and association of many things and words, both in the head and the world together.
In section 65, Wittgenstein argues that there is no form common to language games or forms of life, such as the color red or the use of a tool. The common element is merely form, or association. In the same way that Hegel argues that Being itself can not be qualified (green, good, necessary) or quantified (much, fourteen, half), Wittgenstein argues that there is no common form to meaning. It is a complex association that can take any possible form. This is similar to the organic forms of fractal geometry: No two trees are identical, but they share what Wittgenstein calls a ‘family resemblance’. In the next section (66), he uses the example of games. There is no rule common to all games, but they resemble each other as a family.
In the next section (67), he uses the metaphor of a thread (one could also use a rope). The thread is strong not because there is one underlying strand that runs through its entire length, but because many stands overlap each other. Mathematics and the meaning/use of a word do not need a single inner rule to make them entirely consistent. Rather they are complex networks that are continuously reinforced by our re-inscription as we use them daily. Derrida, the French deconstructionist, argues that there is no language set in stone. Old English, like Old French, drift slowly like tectonic plates. When we use language, we are not using something already set. Rather, we are resetting it, re-associating it, re-gluing it together with the only glue it was ever fashioned from, each and every time we speak or write. Likewise, mathematics such as algebra is not true in itself. We continue to use it consistently, and this rebinds its consistent use. When dividing by zero creates problems, we add additional rules and then continue to lash them together with the system.
In section 83, Wittgenstein gives another metaphor to describe the emergence (a chaos-theory, fractal geometry term) of forms of life. Imagine people in a field, playing with a ball. The ball is tossed about, another person joins and kicks it back to another, who chases it, then pegs the kicker with the ball, and then it is tossed about again. A game has arisen, but it does yet does not seem to have consistent rules. It is being made up as it goes along. Human beings are rule making, association generating beings, who know how to follow and bend rules as they see fit. This means that the only complete consistency is both consistency and inconsistency, the only consistent rule is there are yet there are not consistent rules.
In section 85, he gives another metaphor to back up this conception. A rule is like a signpost, such as a sign that points to the right and reads, ‘San Jose’. Does the sign force you to go to San Jose? No. If you go to the right, will you surely reach San Jose without getting lost or running out of gas? No. We can even imagine that if you go to the left, because you are afraid of San Jose, you could get turned around and end up there anyway. In spite of these loose ends, we find signs quite useful.
In section 90, he again speaks of the human instinct to look for a secret meaning as if it is inside the thing. We open apples to find seeds, and likewise we take the metaphor too literally and think that to know something is to grasp an inner essence. Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein each tried to find the inner essence of mathematics through developments in logic, but this was the development of new things, not the secret inner workings. Logic was a new form of mathematics that made other forms more useful through interconnections. Similarly, a description or explanation of a thing is not the final level within the thing but the creation of a network between the thing, ourselves and other things such that we can get more use out of the thing and its newly complexified situation.
In section 99, he comes to the previously mentioned ‘locking a man in a room but leaving the window open’ metaphor. You can not lock someone in a room such that they can never get out. There are no simply solid substances. There are no things without cracks of any kind. Similarly we can not secure meanings such that they will always stay exactly the same, but we can secure them by locking them down repeatedly through use and association. To give an entire account of how a meaning is secured would be like “repairing a torn spider’s web with one’s fingers” (106). Just like an old city, we can use things without ever being able to fully describe them.
Criticizing his earlier approach (107) he says that a pure crystalline logic would be meaningless. It would be like trying to walk on slippery ice rather than rough ground. If we want to use and describe things, we can not use absolute ideals but rather messy associative concepts. This is very much like Alice and the glass table, which we will look at in a few weeks. We can not grasp things with timeless and space-less universals (the sort Aristotle sought above the lunar sphere). Logic and thought should be used in messy situations for un-guaranteed purposes.
Wittgenstein writes, “We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (109)...”What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (116)...”What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand” (118).
Do we base our own behavior, let alone the culture of mathematics, on simple rules? He gives the example of being certain that a table will resist one’s finger, that a fire will hurt one’s hand. It is not that there is a simple rule set in an atomic language that reads, ‘Table is solid’ or ‘Fire hurts hands’. Rather, “a hundred reasons present themselves, each drowning out the voice of the others” (478). Like the thread woven of many strands, our belief and certainty that objects are solid and flame hurts us are woven out of many experiences that are then woven together with the table and flame before us.
Wittgenstein writes, “To say, ‘This combination of words makes no sense’ excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out, but it may also be part of a game and the players be supposed, say, to jump over the boundary” (499). Wittgenstein seems to be thinking specifically of humor and comedy, though it could also apply to modern and conceptual art, forms of culture that break rules on purpose. Comedy and modern art are games where the rule is to break the rules without breaking anyone’s neck. Wittgenstein had an appreciation both for the Alice books of Lewis Carroll as well as American slap-stick comedy which he preferred to opera. At the end of the course, we will study the Alice books, humor and modern art in light of the later work of Wittgenstein.
The last image to examine, near the end of the book, is Jastrow’s duck-rabbit, often called Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit because the psychologist Jastrow is far less famous. One can look at the figure from the left, and it is a duck, and one can look at the figure from the right, and it is a rabbit. Which is the single correct face? Wittgenstein says we may have seen only the rabbit face our entire life, and that does not prevent us or others from seeing the duck when it is pointed out. This is much like the duel between objectivism (truth is in the world) and subjectivism (meaning is in the head).
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Now let us turn to proving several of the fundamental substitutions of logic with the truth table method. This is the subject of your second assignment. Remember: to prove a tautology, you should get four T’s as your final answer, and to prove something is NOT a tautology, you should get something OTHER than four T’s as your final answer. Each of the expressions below are tautologies, so you should get four T's as the final answer for each using the truth table method.
Transposition (Modus Tollens): (p > q) = (~ q > ~ p)
Implication: (p > q) = (~ p v q)
Disjunction: (p v q) = (~ p > q)
De Morgan’s A: ~ (p ^ q) = (~ p v ~ q)
De Morgan’s B: ~ (p v q) = (~ p ^ ~ q)
First we will consider how Wittgenstein’s thought changed since he formulated the truth table method in the Tractatus. Second we will read passages of the Philosophical Investigations. Third, we will continue to study truth tables, using them to prove several tautologies that are fundamental rules of substitution in logic (including Modus Tollens).
THE MIDDLE AND LATER THOUGHT OF WITTGENSTEIN
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein put forward a system of tautologies structured by truth tables, arguing that basic elements like ‘true’, ‘and’ and ‘or’ have a necessary structure but do not mean anything in themselves while propositions that have meaning are always contingent, dependent and possible. In this early period, Wittgenstein believed that ‘and’ always has exactly the same structure but no meaning in itself, while a proposition like ‘I have an apple and a pear’ has a meaning but is only true if, and is conditional on, I have both an apple and a pear. This is why Wittgenstein became upset with positivists, like his teacher and friend Russell and the Vienna Circle, who tried to use his system to discover primary and necessary facts in the world.
At first Wittgenstein thought that he had solved all the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus truth table system (we do still use it today to teach formal logic), so he left philosophy and Cambridge behind, went to war, had many experiences, and then later decided that his earlier thinking contained horrible problems. He no longer believed that logic could be crystallized in the head as a truth table matrix, but rather it existed as a complex out in the world, as arrangements of people, thoughts, symbols, and objects. He continued to work on notebooks, progressing in his thought until his death, after which his notebooks were published.
In the early thought of his Tractatus tried to lay the ground for a complete system of logic, such that ‘and’ always has the same, perfectly defined meaning. In his later thought, Wittgenstein argued against this view. Just as he argued against positivists that there are no necessary facts in the world, he came to argue that no individual thing, not even ‘and’ or ‘true’ in logic, can have a single or necessary meaning. He came to see that he had attempted to provide singular meanings for things that merely have common uses. Thus, there is no more a single necessary meaning of ‘and’ or ‘true’ in the head than there is a single correct scientific description or picture of the world. He came to argue that ‘and’ and ‘or’ are not exclusively in the head, but real things involved in the irreducibly complex games we play in the world. He called these situations ‘language games’ and ‘forms of life’.
Consider how we have seen that the IF>THEN operation in logic is capable of working in many different ways, and the truth table method chooses a regular way for it to work. Consider that OR can be inclusive or exclusive, and the truth table method chooses to use OR inclusively. Consider that AND can be used like OR as a general inclusion of several things, but we may agree that the AND is true even if every last thing is not present. Wittgenstein came to argue that any system of logic, like his truth tables, is a tool that is a thing in the world like any other. Because logic is a tool, it does not need to be perfectly defined or entirely consistent any more than an apple needs to be perfectly defined or entirely consistent. What is important is that logic and the world are relatively consistent such that we can use and describe things.
There is an excellent passage from Lectures and Conversations that illustrates the turn nicely. This work was taken not from Wittgenstein’s notebooks but from the notes of his seminar students in the years leading up to his work on the notebooks which would be published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations. At this time Freud’s ideas had stormed onto the academic scene, infuriating Wittgenstein who now had come to hate the idea that things in the world, even logical operators and systems, can be boiled down to a single essential element or factor like sex, power or truth. It is this skepticism, which can be called the “problem of essences”, which marks the turn from his earlier thinking to his more influential later thought.
Wittgenstein attacked Freud’s psychoanalysis and dream interpretation for boiling everything down to sex. In the Lectures and Conversations (20-21), Wittgenstein proposes a thought experiment for consideration. If we cook a human being down to carbon ash in an oven, are we left with the essence of the human being? A human being is a “carbon-based” life form, so carbon is a dominant element. Consider that we could cook a human down to water in the same oven, and claim that because humans are 3/5ths water we have the essence of the person.
Would it be correct to say that humans are essentially ashy, or essentially wet? Why not? We would not say that a human is essentially carbon or water, nor would we say ashy or wet, because the human being is a complex situation that is not reducible to a single element. The properties of carbon or water do not in themselves explain how humans behave or what they mean to us. If we cooked people down to ashes or water, we have destroyed the situation and can no longer investigate how they work. In the same way, a person is not merely their DNA. While carbon, water and DNA have very important, even necessary roles to play in any person, they are not exclusively the essence or meaning of the complex that is a human individual.
In the same way, Wittgenstein had come to believe that neither facts in the world nor logic in the head can be reduced to a single element or necessary structure. Facts and logic are not true in themselves, but true in real situations of the world which are irreducibly complex. Wittgenstein says in the Lectures and Conversations that we have to avoid the “lure of the secret cellar”, the urge to boil situations down to a single element like Freud tried to boil human relations, meaning and the mind down to sex or Wittgenstein himself had tried to boil logic down to its simple structure.
The task of philosophy, logic and science is not to fully or completely explain anything, but to investigate things. Thought never fully defines things but rather describes and re-describes things. If science is thinking about the world, then science has endless work to do describing and re-describing things. Consider whether we fully understand apples, or whether we ever need to entirely understand them in order to continue to understand them and use them a great deal. Likewise, if philosophy and logic are ‘thinking about thinking’, and if thinking is merely a possible description of things, philosophy and logic have endless work to do describing our descriptions, describing and re-describing the ways that we describe things. Much insight can be gained even if no subject is entirely explained or exhausted.
One good way to approach this is to describe how cultures of thought, perspectives, facts and models are gathered together and lived in institutions. Thought ceases to be completely abstract, but is rather a culture and situation in the real world that involves people, buildings and money. The cryptanalysis of algebra worked so well as a modeling language that we came to believe that the mathematics was not in our practices and text books but rather sewn into the fabric of the world itself. As we look over the history of thought in the wake of Wittgenstein’s later work, it becomes evident that mathematics and logic are tools and lenses, not the hidden structures of things operating at secret levels out of our immediate sight. In scholarship today, particularly the history of religion, philosophy and science, it has become popular to consider a system of thought as a real lived situation rather than an abstract set of beliefs and ideas. A religion or science is in fact a situation of human beings who never have to have entirely the same set of beliefs as long as they can generally and relatively cohere as a culture.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
In this monumental work, one of my favorites of modern European thought, Wittgenstein argues for a middle way between two extreme positions, between the position of scientific positivism (objective truth is facts in the world) and the position of psychological skepticism (subjective truth is meanings in the mind). He presents each position in quotes again and again, and then argues against both in a three stage process. First he states a position (either that there are facts given in the world or meaning is all in the head), then shows situations in which the position works, then shows situations in which the position does not work. He shows us that taking either position to extremes would be understandable given particular ways we think and act, but neither position explains all the ways in which we think and act. We live in complex ways that depend both on there being a coherent world and there being human perspectives. Wittgenstein argues that we can take both positions rather than determine one to be the actual and the other to be the illusion.
In his earlier thought, the world and the head are separated by a Kantian gulf between objectivity and subjectivity. In his later thinking, the world and our heads work together seamlessly as a complex situation. One cannot remove either the head or the world to get the bedrock or anchor of meaning and truth without resulting in absurdities. The clean and ideal side of logic, math and grammar mislead us into thinking that meaning must be anchored entirely on one side, either exclusively in the head or exclusively in the world, but we gain much more ability to think and describe our heads and our world if we stop looking for meaning and truth to be entirely in one place rather than the other. In the same way, rather than determine which facts are absolute truths to the exclusion of their opposites, or refuse to identify coherence of belief as it is all ‘mere theory’, we can better understand the facts and theories we can share by recognizing that they are one and the same viewed from opposite sides. If we can continue to determine relative fact from relative fiction, there is no need to entirely separate the two. To use the tool analogy, as long as we have decent tools we do not need perfect or eternal ones. Note that this is very similar to Mill’s Utilitarianism, and a far cry from Russell’s atomic facts which he had hoped Wittgenstein would save from inconsistency.
Games and rules gather people together, but individuals can also variously interpret rules and meanings. ‘Rules can always be variously interpreted’ is a central idea of the Philosophical Investigations. This is not to say that they always are or they should be, but the window remains open (Wittgenstein writes, “It is like locking a man in a room but leaving the window open”). Both are only what they are together as a form of life. Notice that this thinking has much in common with Laozi’s thinking on the wheel as both empty and solid at the same time, and much like the Zen koans of a rock being not a rock and a rock and the sound of one hand clapping.
Consider the ‘child at the blackboard’ metaphor used in the text. It is always possible for a child to misunderstand rules and demonstrate this misunderstanding by making mistakes, even after you show the child and explain. Let us say that you then write a new ‘inner’ set of rules to further explain the rules when the child fails. What if the child does not understand those? Is there a bedrock set of rules that the child can not possibly misunderstand? If the child can misunderstand rules, then no set of rules within rules within rules is ever perfectly airtight. We have an infinite regress unless we can find a set of rules that can never be misinterpreted.
Just like Wittgenstein had been seeking the fundamental inner workings of logic and mathematics, as Frege and Russell had tried to do before him, if people do math decently there need not be any inner rules aside from the explanation and demonstration that, if repeated, children can often follow. Notice we are considering mathematics as a culture, learned by children and taught by adults, not as an abstract set of necessary or immutable rules. It turns out that there are no inner workings to mathematics. Mathematics works as it does openly, on the board in front of one’s face, without the need of a ‘secret cellar’. If mathematics on a board is not entirely secure, then no inner set of rules could or must be either for it to function.
When we try to explain mathematics, as Frege had tried to do with set theory, Russell had tried to do with his theory of types, and Wittgenstein had tried to do with his truth tables, mathematics is not being simplified, being stripped down to its core, at all. It is the opposite: we are making it more complex as we try to simplify and explain it. The rules are not being discovered in the thing, but being added to the thing. When we explain things, we are not whittling away the unnecessary but adding our descriptions to it. In the same way, when we do science to explain apples or human beings, we are adding our descriptions and the situations of our descriptions, not uncovering the simple truth of the thing. The simple truth of a thing is the simple thing itself. The simplest truth of an apple is the single apple. An explanation of where apples come from is very useful, but it puts the apple in a complex with many other things (such as trees, farms, stores, trucks). An apple is not merely its DNA, but is in a infinitely complex situation with its DNA and ourselves attempting to isolate components with the tools and technology we bring into the situation.
We are always essentializing (like when we say, ‘We are always essentializing’). Meaning, grammar and logic do separate things into parts. They are useful for doing so. However, Wittgenstein is arguing something quite revealing: There are no final explanations, only complex descriptions. Any explanation is a partial human description, which can then itself be described and explained. The task of philosophy, science and mathematics is not to reduce things to simple truth, but to generate more meaning and situations.
Let us turn to the text. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that he now sees grave mistakes in his Tractatus. He says that this new book is not to spare thinking, but to stimulate thinking. Notice that the Tractatus had the opposite goal: to put an end to the problems of logic and philosophy. Now Wittgenstein does not believe that anything can or need be fully solved or closed, but should rather be opened up and made complex.
In section 7, Wittgenstein says that language games are actions and language interwoven as forms of life. He considers that words such as ‘this’ and ‘there’ are learned interwoven with gestures such as pointing. ‘This’, ‘now’, and other simple words get their meaning from their use by gesturing human beings. They can not be described fully in language alone, nor do they represent specific objects consistently. Rather, they are demonstrated to children and translated into other languages of cultures that share similar gestures. We know from neuroscience that in the brain the centers of language and control of the hands are next to each other, likely because language developed in apes along with gestures. There are also similarities in the basic gestures of humanity, including extending the arm to indicate the direction of sight and attention. Infants only months old will read eye direction to try to see what others are seeing, and if they can not see what is being looked at they will check the eyes again. The arm, whether a culture uses the index finger or not, provides an extension of the line of sight so that it can be easily recognized and followed by others. Notice that ‘this’ is as simple as it gets in itself, and to further explain it we need to bring arms and neuroscience into the picture.
In section 11, he says language is like toolbox, a complex set of tools that have no absolute necessity but are useful as a set. Consider that a hammer, a screwdriver and glue are a decent set of tools. Are they absolutely right or necessary tools? We could invent others, but they work decently well for putting things together and taking things apart. We do not need an absolute screwdriver any more than we need to completely understand the relationship between the hammer and screwdriver. We need only use them. In the same way, we do not need to understand the word ‘and’ such that it is always used exactly the same way, nor do we need to completely understand its relationship to ‘or’. When we use them relatively, not exclusively, they are interchangeable. At a buffet, I could equally say, “You can have eggs or salad or steak” or “You can have eggs and salad and steak”. The two can sometimes be used differently and sometimes similarly, as long as we are decently consistent in all of our interconnected uses. Indeed, the words, like tools such as hammers and screwdrivers, are more useful being often but not always used in particular and exclusive ways (ex: one can use a screwdriver to open paint cans). ‘And’ and ‘or’ are more useful when we can use them oppositely, but also identically. In his earlier thinking, with the truth tables, Wittgenstein was trying to secure them merely opposite and different meanings, which does not give us their full usage and meaning.
In section 12, Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of a locomotive cabin to further illustrate the same point. There are many levers and switches that function in various ways. Words and language function in various ways that form a complex with their environment. We could always redesign the train cabin, but it works well enough as it is.
In section 15, he uses another simple tool-oriented metaphor to make language and meaning physical rather than ideal: naming is compared to attaching a label (or sticker, with “Hello My Name Is”). The association of a word with a particular thing is like attaching a label for ease of use and identification.
In section 17, he says that we can classify words as we do things, but our classifications will depend on our situation and purposes. He uses the metaphor of chess pieces. If you want to move a great distance, you would classify chess pieces one way, but if you want to break through or jump over the enemy lines (with a knight or a bishop) you would classify them another way. The pieces, like words and other things, do not have classifications and meanings in themselves, but in how they can be used in concrete situations. This is again much like Mill.
In section 18, he says that a language is like an old city, with side streets and squares. It is interesting to compare San Francisco to Salt Lake City here. San Francisco can be a nightmare to drive, while Salt Lake City is almost entirely a perfect grid surrounding the Mormon Temple. In San Francisco, you never know which way a street might turn due to hills or other intersecting streets. European cities are similarly often much older than the automobile, and do not lend themselves to outsiders’ easy navigation. A language, like an old city or old growth forest, is the result of a long process of many layers of evolution and development. We can understand meanings just as we can navigate streets, but things are not always clear cut as Salt Lake City.
In section 57 and 58, he asks about where ‘red’ exists. He suggests that ‘red’ as a color does not exist in itself, but as an association of many red things having been experienced, the word ‘red’ being said by others and oneself associated with these things, as well as the imagination/projection of the color red in the mind. None of these things needs to be exclusively present for there to be red. We could even say the word without any red things or thinking of red, and it still means the color in our language and culture. We could likewise see a red thing, and it is red without using the word or seeing red in the imagination. Thus, the color red is not essentially any red thing, or the word, or the color in the mind, but the complex of all these. The color red is not simply a subjective concept, nor it is an objective fact, but it is a conception and association of many things and words, both in the head and the world together.
In section 65, Wittgenstein argues that there is no form common to language games or forms of life, such as the color red or the use of a tool. The common element is merely form, or association. In the same way that Hegel argues that Being itself can not be qualified (green, good, necessary) or quantified (much, fourteen, half), Wittgenstein argues that there is no common form to meaning. It is a complex association that can take any possible form. This is similar to the organic forms of fractal geometry: No two trees are identical, but they share what Wittgenstein calls a ‘family resemblance’. In the next section (66), he uses the example of games. There is no rule common to all games, but they resemble each other as a family.
In the next section (67), he uses the metaphor of a thread (one could also use a rope). The thread is strong not because there is one underlying strand that runs through its entire length, but because many stands overlap each other. Mathematics and the meaning/use of a word do not need a single inner rule to make them entirely consistent. Rather they are complex networks that are continuously reinforced by our re-inscription as we use them daily. Derrida, the French deconstructionist, argues that there is no language set in stone. Old English, like Old French, drift slowly like tectonic plates. When we use language, we are not using something already set. Rather, we are resetting it, re-associating it, re-gluing it together with the only glue it was ever fashioned from, each and every time we speak or write. Likewise, mathematics such as algebra is not true in itself. We continue to use it consistently, and this rebinds its consistent use. When dividing by zero creates problems, we add additional rules and then continue to lash them together with the system.
In section 83, Wittgenstein gives another metaphor to describe the emergence (a chaos-theory, fractal geometry term) of forms of life. Imagine people in a field, playing with a ball. The ball is tossed about, another person joins and kicks it back to another, who chases it, then pegs the kicker with the ball, and then it is tossed about again. A game has arisen, but it does yet does not seem to have consistent rules. It is being made up as it goes along. Human beings are rule making, association generating beings, who know how to follow and bend rules as they see fit. This means that the only complete consistency is both consistency and inconsistency, the only consistent rule is there are yet there are not consistent rules.
In section 85, he gives another metaphor to back up this conception. A rule is like a signpost, such as a sign that points to the right and reads, ‘San Jose’. Does the sign force you to go to San Jose? No. If you go to the right, will you surely reach San Jose without getting lost or running out of gas? No. We can even imagine that if you go to the left, because you are afraid of San Jose, you could get turned around and end up there anyway. In spite of these loose ends, we find signs quite useful.
In section 90, he again speaks of the human instinct to look for a secret meaning as if it is inside the thing. We open apples to find seeds, and likewise we take the metaphor too literally and think that to know something is to grasp an inner essence. Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein each tried to find the inner essence of mathematics through developments in logic, but this was the development of new things, not the secret inner workings. Logic was a new form of mathematics that made other forms more useful through interconnections. Similarly, a description or explanation of a thing is not the final level within the thing but the creation of a network between the thing, ourselves and other things such that we can get more use out of the thing and its newly complexified situation.
In section 99, he comes to the previously mentioned ‘locking a man in a room but leaving the window open’ metaphor. You can not lock someone in a room such that they can never get out. There are no simply solid substances. There are no things without cracks of any kind. Similarly we can not secure meanings such that they will always stay exactly the same, but we can secure them by locking them down repeatedly through use and association. To give an entire account of how a meaning is secured would be like “repairing a torn spider’s web with one’s fingers” (106). Just like an old city, we can use things without ever being able to fully describe them.
Criticizing his earlier approach (107) he says that a pure crystalline logic would be meaningless. It would be like trying to walk on slippery ice rather than rough ground. If we want to use and describe things, we can not use absolute ideals but rather messy associative concepts. This is very much like Alice and the glass table, which we will look at in a few weeks. We can not grasp things with timeless and space-less universals (the sort Aristotle sought above the lunar sphere). Logic and thought should be used in messy situations for un-guaranteed purposes.
Wittgenstein writes, “We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (109)...”What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (116)...”What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand” (118).
Do we base our own behavior, let alone the culture of mathematics, on simple rules? He gives the example of being certain that a table will resist one’s finger, that a fire will hurt one’s hand. It is not that there is a simple rule set in an atomic language that reads, ‘Table is solid’ or ‘Fire hurts hands’. Rather, “a hundred reasons present themselves, each drowning out the voice of the others” (478). Like the thread woven of many strands, our belief and certainty that objects are solid and flame hurts us are woven out of many experiences that are then woven together with the table and flame before us.
Wittgenstein writes, “To say, ‘This combination of words makes no sense’ excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out, but it may also be part of a game and the players be supposed, say, to jump over the boundary” (499). Wittgenstein seems to be thinking specifically of humor and comedy, though it could also apply to modern and conceptual art, forms of culture that break rules on purpose. Comedy and modern art are games where the rule is to break the rules without breaking anyone’s neck. Wittgenstein had an appreciation both for the Alice books of Lewis Carroll as well as American slap-stick comedy which he preferred to opera. At the end of the course, we will study the Alice books, humor and modern art in light of the later work of Wittgenstein.
The last image to examine, near the end of the book, is Jastrow’s duck-rabbit, often called Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit because the psychologist Jastrow is far less famous. One can look at the figure from the left, and it is a duck, and one can look at the figure from the right, and it is a rabbit. Which is the single correct face? Wittgenstein says we may have seen only the rabbit face our entire life, and that does not prevent us or others from seeing the duck when it is pointed out. This is much like the duel between objectivism (truth is in the world) and subjectivism (meaning is in the head).
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Now let us turn to proving several of the fundamental substitutions of logic with the truth table method. This is the subject of your second assignment. Remember: to prove a tautology, you should get four T’s as your final answer, and to prove something is NOT a tautology, you should get something OTHER than four T’s as your final answer. Each of the expressions below are tautologies, so you should get four T's as the final answer for each using the truth table method.
Transposition (Modus Tollens): (p > q) = (~ q > ~ p)
Implication: (p > q) = (~ p v q)
Disjunction: (p v q) = (~ p > q)
De Morgan’s A: ~ (p ^ q) = (~ p v ~ q)
De Morgan’s B: ~ (p v q) = (~ p ^ ~ q)
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