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 Mo Zi, Master Mo of the Moist School of Chinese Philosophy, and his arguments for universal love against the Confucians.
Not much is known about Master Mo, founder of Moism, one of the schools of the Period of the Hundred Philosophers. His disciples collected his sayings and dialogues to make the Mo Zi text, just as the disciples of Confucius and Mencius did. It is believed that Mo Zi 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 Mo Zi studied under Confucians at a Confucian school, but then became disgusted and developed his philosophy in opposition to Confucianism. We know that Confucianism and Moism were both flourishing and in competition at the same time from texts like the Zhuang Zi (one of my favorites, in which Zhuang Zi states that what the Confucians call right the Moists call wrong and vice versa). Like Confucius, Mo Zi likely traveled to schools and noble courts expounding his philosophy and seeking disciples. Nobles and other wealthy individuals would often put on banquets and debates for education and entertainment.
Because Mo Zi was a great critic of the excesses of the powerful and champion of the common people, some scholars have speculated that Mo Zi was an ex-convict and Mo meant tattoo like the sort used to brand ex-cons (thus, Mo Zi would mean Master Tattoo or Master Tat). These scholars are likely thinking of Zhuang Zi’s use of ex-con teachers countering Confucius while playing the Moists and Confucians against each other. While Mo Zi criticized the luxurious excesses of dancing girls and music of the wealthy, particularly in light of the suffering of the poor and oppressed, it is unlikely that an ex-con would have access to the noble courts and fine houses that Mo Zi frequented in seeking to expand the influence and membership of his school of thought.
How could Mo Zi get away with criticizing the powerful? Like the ancient Egyptian proverb, “Trust no one by birth, judge a person by their actions”, Mo Zi argued (as did the Confucians) that it is behavior that makes one a good person and not high birth. As in ancient Egypt and India, 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. 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 Han unified China and endorsed the Confucians and Daoists but not the Moists. Moism was neglected for 1,500 years afterwards. It was only in the times of Neoconfucianism (1100 CE), ironically, that Mo Zi was reexamined along with Buddhism and put in a Confucian context.
Like Xun Zi, Mo Zi was exceptional at examining the validity of beliefs. He had a system of three tests. First, asking the origin of the belief (remember, the ways of the sage kings were highly valued and used by most schools of ancient Chinese thought). Second, the empirical validity of the belief (how well the belief corresponds to what we have discovered to be true). Third, the practicality and applicability of the belief (identical to the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill).
The Moists are famous for their doctrine of universal love. Mo Zi 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. The Moists believed in both debate and warfare, and they excelled in both logic and military science, but only 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 they never go on the offensive.
Mo Zi says that universal love is practical and could be put into practice if enough rulers are convinced that it is in their own interest as well as in the interest of their people. Mencius seems terrified by Moism, his major rival in Northeast China at the time, writing that the ideas of Mo Zi and other thinkers are found across the countryside (Mencius 3B:9). Mencius argues that loving everyone as one loves one’s own father means that one has no father. Considering the emphasis that Confucians such as Mencius put on following one’s father, this would be a great evil. This is strikingly similar to philosophers who believe in absolute truth and fact saying that if there is no absolute truth but only relative truth then there is no truth whatsoever.
In the section Universal Love of the Mo Zi, he 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. Note that all of this is very similar to the Communism of both Marx and Mao.
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. Therefore, we naturally love and trust the universal ruler more than the particular ruler. 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. Mo Zi says there are no fools in the world like this, 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.
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 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.
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.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Ethics: Aristotle & Virtue, Kant & Morals
Basics of Ancient World Cosmology:
Before getting into Aristotle and his understanding of the virtuous person, it is important to understand the world view of the ancient world. Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.
The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.
One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.
Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
Plato’s student and the tutor of Alexander the Great and Ptolemy, Aristotle is one of the most famous and influential of Greek philosophers. He was primarily interested in biology and speciation, but his works on the soul (mind, self), Logic, Ethics and politics became more important than his works on the animal kingdom. He was a central influence on the origins of Christianity, Islamic thought and European thought in the middle ages. While he is sometimes called the first scientist and the first logician, his views on these subjects expanded ancient world cosmology and were not the birth of these subjects. Aristotle has been claimed by the West as a founder, but the Islamic world also considers him one of their own and he is depicted in different ways depending on who does the illustrating (see the beautiful Islamic image in the Wikipedia article that portrays him as a very dark skinned holy sage for an interesting counter to Renaissance paintings).
Aristotle’s conception of virtue and human purpose is entirely in line with ancient world cosmology. He believes that everything has a single purpose for which it is intended. It is as if the cosmos, Being itself, is a big mind that creates things for particular uses, and individual beings thrive if they are serving their purposes (ergon in the Greek, or “work”, “job”). We are reasonable to the degree that we see the purposes of things, serve our own natural purpose and use things in accord with their natural purposes. This is known as the teleological view, as the study of purpose is called teleology. Notice that teleology is very big with more traditional people today (including evangelical Christians) but modern Philosophy and Science have broken from this view and find it quite antiquated.
For Aristotle, having oneself in the proper stack and order is being in accord with one’s nature, and this means putting theory and soul/intellect on top and putting each lower element of our minds and bodies in the service of the highest part of the mind, the intellect, which corresponds to the highest good of the cosmos itself. Just as the intellect should be pursued because it is the best and highest part, the good itself should be pursued simply in itself and for no other purpose. This is similar to Kant and Moral theory, but absolutely at odds with Mill and consequentialism which believe that good is the end of things but would not say that intellect should be pursued in itself without regards to the consequences and practical ends. Aristotle does believe that the human individual will naturally flourish and be happy if they are stacked up right and in accord with the human purpose of intellectual activity, but this is secondary and the byproduct of serving ones purpose.
Similarly, in matters of politics, Aristotle believes that the city is not primarily a living arrangement but rather for producing the elite and the virtuous. Thus, the city is not for making people happy but having each individual do their natural job. Just like his teacher Plato argues in his Republic, Aristotle argues that each person must have one thing they do best and it is therefore best for them to do that thing and that one thing only. Unfortunately, both Plato and Aristotle argued that slaves and peasants are meant to serve the aristocracy and women are clearly meant to serve men (Mill will strongly criticize these views, one of the first and few outspoken critics of the subjugation of slaves and women).
Modern Virtue Theory
While Aristotle’s virtue ethics and teleological theory were popular in the middle ages in Europe, there was a decline during the 1700s and 1800s as science rose to prominence and questioned teleology. Kant’s laws and Mill’s consequences became the dueling positions of ethics. Recently, however, there has been a revival of virtue theory that rose along with increasing individualism and criticism of positivistic conceptions of science. If we become critical of the idea that there are simple laws that can be known, it opens a space for a return to the idea of the virtuous person beyond airtight moral laws or the complete calculation of consequences.
However, if we do not believe that things have simple and singular purposes just as we have grown critical of laws and calculation, virtue ethics has a problem: what virtues should the virtuous person have? Often these virtues are mental: intellect, wisdom, reason, and understanding. This has been neglectful of the physical body (the home of the physical brain, of course). Another issue that has come to light is the interpersonal aspect of virtue. Virtue has typically been described as personal, but the individual is naturally social (curiously Aristotle argues this when justifying his political views of the city and its proper organization). Confucius, one of the great moral geniuses of the world, has a very interpersonal view of ethics and thus we will consider his views next under the concept of balance (such as the balance of self and other).
As a final note, consider Jain (the ancient Indian forerunner of Buddhism) anti-merit theory:
In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin). Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down. For Jains, karma is ALWAYS NEGATIVE, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL. Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated. Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of karma and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle. Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant. Thus, any accumulation of virtue or merit is distinguishing and distancing oneself from the whole. Sharing much with ancient cosmology and Aristotle, Jains would argue that the purpose of the individual is to join the whole without distinction and therefore we should work to LOSE merit and karma, not gain it. Kant, Principles and
Morals
Kant (1724-1804) was the European philosopher who argued for always following morals and laws universally. His position is opposed by Mill, who believed that morals are only in the service of getting good consequences. This is one of the biggest oppositions of perspectives in ethics. Should we create morals and laws and always stick to them, or should we do whatever results in the best consequences?
Consider the example of lying. The moralist would say that lying is wrong in and of itself, like Kant argues that lying goes against our reason by categorical necessity. The consequentialist would say that lying has bad consequences and results in pain and unhappiness. The virtue theorist, however, would argue that the purpose of the mind and human being is truth in and of itself and so lying is not in accord with human nature (or rather, righteous and proper human nature).
As Europe rose in the 1600s and 1700s, science had begun discovering many new truths about the world. This created an opposition between rationalists who believed that the world has absolute laws that we can know certainly by reason and empiricists who believed that we can only assume what we know and that the rules our reason finds could be wrong. One of the most famous empiricists was Hume, who argued that one can only assume that one billiard ball causes the other billiard ball to move.
Kant was "awoken from his dogmatic slumbers" by Hume. Kant wanted to balance empiricism with rationalism, but he comes down on the rationalist side. In all knowledge, including ethics, Kant believed we must use our reason to figure out the universal laws of our rational and ordered universe. Notice that Kant, as a rationalist, trusts that the world and the mind are reasonable and that there are universal laws out there for us to grasp.
The central example we will consider is the moral "Do Not Lie". Kant believed that one should never lie, and our reason can show us this with certainty. He argued that one is seeking unconditional and universal laws in ethics (as well as every area of human knowledge), which Kant also calls categorical imperatives, and so one should only act in a way that one could expect everyone to always act everywhere at any time. If everyone lied all the time, then society would collapse. Therefore, Kant argued, it is one's duty to not lie and hold to this moral and law.
Consider the "guy with the butcher knife" thought experiment. Let us say you are at home, and the doorbell rings. You answer it, and your friend runs in looking afraid. A minute later the doorbell rings again, you answer it, and a scary guy with a butcher knife asks you where your friend is. Kant would allow one to shut the door and say nothing, but Kant would argue that it is wrong to lie to the scary guy and say you don't know or that your friend took off down the street the other way. Even though we can assume that if you lie it would improve your friend's chances of living, Kant would argue that this would be wrong. We can contrast this with the position of Mill and utilitarianism, which would argue that in some circumstances the lie is the lesser of two evils and one should behave in accord with the ends of ones actions rather than stick rigidly to morals and laws.
An interesting issue here is that rationalists and positivists like Kant believe that one should anchor ethics in good beginnings while empiricists and skeptics believe one should anchor ethics in good ends. Kant believes that one must start with good intentions and principles no matter the consequences, while Mill believes that one should aim at the best consequences no matter the principles or intentions one has. As usual, both sides agree that one should have good intentions, principles and consequences, but they come down on opposite sides when arguing for what is really the essence or importance of the matter.
We will come to Mill's position in the coming weeks. Another contrary position to both Kant and Mill is Nietzsche, who we will also hear from soon. Nietzsche does not trust human reason, so he trusts neither Kant nor Mill. Nietzsche argues that people who believe they know the true morals and people who say they know what led to the best consequences for everyone are capable of deceiving themselves and thinking they know what is best for everyone.
Before getting into Aristotle and his understanding of the virtuous person, it is important to understand the world view of the ancient world. Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.
The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.
One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.
Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
Plato’s student and the tutor of Alexander the Great and Ptolemy, Aristotle is one of the most famous and influential of Greek philosophers. He was primarily interested in biology and speciation, but his works on the soul (mind, self), Logic, Ethics and politics became more important than his works on the animal kingdom. He was a central influence on the origins of Christianity, Islamic thought and European thought in the middle ages. While he is sometimes called the first scientist and the first logician, his views on these subjects expanded ancient world cosmology and were not the birth of these subjects. Aristotle has been claimed by the West as a founder, but the Islamic world also considers him one of their own and he is depicted in different ways depending on who does the illustrating (see the beautiful Islamic image in the Wikipedia article that portrays him as a very dark skinned holy sage for an interesting counter to Renaissance paintings).
Aristotle’s conception of virtue and human purpose is entirely in line with ancient world cosmology. He believes that everything has a single purpose for which it is intended. It is as if the cosmos, Being itself, is a big mind that creates things for particular uses, and individual beings thrive if they are serving their purposes (ergon in the Greek, or “work”, “job”). We are reasonable to the degree that we see the purposes of things, serve our own natural purpose and use things in accord with their natural purposes. This is known as the teleological view, as the study of purpose is called teleology. Notice that teleology is very big with more traditional people today (including evangelical Christians) but modern Philosophy and Science have broken from this view and find it quite antiquated.
For Aristotle, having oneself in the proper stack and order is being in accord with one’s nature, and this means putting theory and soul/intellect on top and putting each lower element of our minds and bodies in the service of the highest part of the mind, the intellect, which corresponds to the highest good of the cosmos itself. Just as the intellect should be pursued because it is the best and highest part, the good itself should be pursued simply in itself and for no other purpose. This is similar to Kant and Moral theory, but absolutely at odds with Mill and consequentialism which believe that good is the end of things but would not say that intellect should be pursued in itself without regards to the consequences and practical ends. Aristotle does believe that the human individual will naturally flourish and be happy if they are stacked up right and in accord with the human purpose of intellectual activity, but this is secondary and the byproduct of serving ones purpose.
Similarly, in matters of politics, Aristotle believes that the city is not primarily a living arrangement but rather for producing the elite and the virtuous. Thus, the city is not for making people happy but having each individual do their natural job. Just like his teacher Plato argues in his Republic, Aristotle argues that each person must have one thing they do best and it is therefore best for them to do that thing and that one thing only. Unfortunately, both Plato and Aristotle argued that slaves and peasants are meant to serve the aristocracy and women are clearly meant to serve men (Mill will strongly criticize these views, one of the first and few outspoken critics of the subjugation of slaves and women).
Modern Virtue Theory
While Aristotle’s virtue ethics and teleological theory were popular in the middle ages in Europe, there was a decline during the 1700s and 1800s as science rose to prominence and questioned teleology. Kant’s laws and Mill’s consequences became the dueling positions of ethics. Recently, however, there has been a revival of virtue theory that rose along with increasing individualism and criticism of positivistic conceptions of science. If we become critical of the idea that there are simple laws that can be known, it opens a space for a return to the idea of the virtuous person beyond airtight moral laws or the complete calculation of consequences.
However, if we do not believe that things have simple and singular purposes just as we have grown critical of laws and calculation, virtue ethics has a problem: what virtues should the virtuous person have? Often these virtues are mental: intellect, wisdom, reason, and understanding. This has been neglectful of the physical body (the home of the physical brain, of course). Another issue that has come to light is the interpersonal aspect of virtue. Virtue has typically been described as personal, but the individual is naturally social (curiously Aristotle argues this when justifying his political views of the city and its proper organization). Confucius, one of the great moral geniuses of the world, has a very interpersonal view of ethics and thus we will consider his views next under the concept of balance (such as the balance of self and other).
As a final note, consider Jain (the ancient Indian forerunner of Buddhism) anti-merit theory:
In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin). Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down. For Jains, karma is ALWAYS NEGATIVE, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL. Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated. Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of karma and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle. Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant. Thus, any accumulation of virtue or merit is distinguishing and distancing oneself from the whole. Sharing much with ancient cosmology and Aristotle, Jains would argue that the purpose of the individual is to join the whole without distinction and therefore we should work to LOSE merit and karma, not gain it. Kant, Principles and
Morals
Kant (1724-1804) was the European philosopher who argued for always following morals and laws universally. His position is opposed by Mill, who believed that morals are only in the service of getting good consequences. This is one of the biggest oppositions of perspectives in ethics. Should we create morals and laws and always stick to them, or should we do whatever results in the best consequences?
Consider the example of lying. The moralist would say that lying is wrong in and of itself, like Kant argues that lying goes against our reason by categorical necessity. The consequentialist would say that lying has bad consequences and results in pain and unhappiness. The virtue theorist, however, would argue that the purpose of the mind and human being is truth in and of itself and so lying is not in accord with human nature (or rather, righteous and proper human nature).
As Europe rose in the 1600s and 1700s, science had begun discovering many new truths about the world. This created an opposition between rationalists who believed that the world has absolute laws that we can know certainly by reason and empiricists who believed that we can only assume what we know and that the rules our reason finds could be wrong. One of the most famous empiricists was Hume, who argued that one can only assume that one billiard ball causes the other billiard ball to move.
Kant was "awoken from his dogmatic slumbers" by Hume. Kant wanted to balance empiricism with rationalism, but he comes down on the rationalist side. In all knowledge, including ethics, Kant believed we must use our reason to figure out the universal laws of our rational and ordered universe. Notice that Kant, as a rationalist, trusts that the world and the mind are reasonable and that there are universal laws out there for us to grasp.
The central example we will consider is the moral "Do Not Lie". Kant believed that one should never lie, and our reason can show us this with certainty. He argued that one is seeking unconditional and universal laws in ethics (as well as every area of human knowledge), which Kant also calls categorical imperatives, and so one should only act in a way that one could expect everyone to always act everywhere at any time. If everyone lied all the time, then society would collapse. Therefore, Kant argued, it is one's duty to not lie and hold to this moral and law.
Consider the "guy with the butcher knife" thought experiment. Let us say you are at home, and the doorbell rings. You answer it, and your friend runs in looking afraid. A minute later the doorbell rings again, you answer it, and a scary guy with a butcher knife asks you where your friend is. Kant would allow one to shut the door and say nothing, but Kant would argue that it is wrong to lie to the scary guy and say you don't know or that your friend took off down the street the other way. Even though we can assume that if you lie it would improve your friend's chances of living, Kant would argue that this would be wrong. We can contrast this with the position of Mill and utilitarianism, which would argue that in some circumstances the lie is the lesser of two evils and one should behave in accord with the ends of ones actions rather than stick rigidly to morals and laws.
An interesting issue here is that rationalists and positivists like Kant believe that one should anchor ethics in good beginnings while empiricists and skeptics believe one should anchor ethics in good ends. Kant believes that one must start with good intentions and principles no matter the consequences, while Mill believes that one should aim at the best consequences no matter the principles or intentions one has. As usual, both sides agree that one should have good intentions, principles and consequences, but they come down on opposite sides when arguing for what is really the essence or importance of the matter.
We will come to Mill's position in the coming weeks. Another contrary position to both Kant and Mill is Nietzsche, who we will also hear from soon. Nietzsche does not trust human reason, so he trusts neither Kant nor Mill. Nietzsche argues that people who believe they know the true morals and people who say they know what led to the best consequences for everyone are capable of deceiving themselves and thinking they know what is best for everyone.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Intro Philosophy: Tribal Shamanism & Ancient World Cosmology
Before diving into the philosophers of ancient India, Greece and China, we must look at the early stages of human knowledge, wisdom and civilization to understand what philosophy is and where it comes from. First, we will consider the positives and negatives of human thought as a general frame for understanding philosophy and all systems of thought. Second, we will look at shamanism as the basic worldwide culture out of which all cultures emerged. Third, we will look at early city states (focusing on ancient Egypt and its wisdom) to see how cultures developed as they grouped together in the first empires. This lecture covers our general frame and shamanism.
The Positives and Negatives of Human Thought:
Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.
Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location.
Human thought has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative). Doubt is a question or questioning, while belief is an answer or answering. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness of the future). In systems of thought, positivists lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between positivism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.
When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both positivism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.
What is philosophy?
Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus and Plato, who we will study later) questioned their traditions and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.
The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom?
Hegel tells us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as positivism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.
The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions.
In the rest of this lecture we will look at shamans as the original keepers of knowledge and seekers of wisdom. In the next lecture, we will look at the development of early city-states and the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians. This will give us the frame we need to study the great philosophers of ancient India, Greece and China.
Tribal Shamans and Ecstatic Quests
“Shaman” is a word from an old Turkish-Siberian dialect that means “one who knows”. Consider that a “scientist” is “one who sees” from the Latin root. The Shaman is the expert of the tribe, the one who not only holds the traditions of knowledge but who seeks new answers to problems. The shaman is both the preserver of the old and the seeker of the new.
It is quite amazing to consider that shamanism is the original human culture, found from Africa to Europe to the Americas to small islands in the pacific. While it is always different in each place, the similarities are quite profound.
In tribal culture, traditional knowledge is often kept and passed on in the form of stories or narratives. These stories explain the world and help people with their problems. There are, however, times when an answer must be sought for a problem. To do this, the shaman goes on a quest (both physical and mental) for the solution and new knowledge needed to solve the problem. Often the shaman is selected as a youth who has gone through a near death experience (sickness, struck by lightning, attacked but survives). The shaman is thought to have an affinity for seeking into the unknown because they are already experienced in the unknown.
To quest for knowledge, the shaman employs techniques of ecstasy known to produce an ecstatic experience. “Ecstasy” comes from the Greek and means “standing outside”. When one is in an ecstatic trance or having an ecstatic vision, one is standing outside normal reality and seeing it from a different place and context. Consider that shamans often go down into a cave or up on a mountain to go to the lower or upper “other world”. Some shamans have been known to climb trees. One gains perspective and is capable of abstraction when one removes oneself to contemplate reality. In fact, thought is itself a form of standing outside reality, so it makes sense that the shaman is regarded as the original thinker, expert and seeker, as well as the doctor, therapist, biologist, physicist, etc.
Methods of ecstasy include not only thought itself, but drugs, pain, rhythms (chanting, drumming, rattles) fasting, sleep deprivation, removing oneself from society and meditation (including contemplation and prayer).
Ancient World Cosmology
Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.
The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.
One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.
One early philosophical puzzle was the problem of the One and the Many: this reality is one thing, but also many things. Shamans in many different cultures had visions of an All Tree or Tree of Life, the one yet many of all things. All or Being itself is the trunk, and the many things and species of the world are the branches or the fruit. One of the recurrent philosophical insights we will see in India, Greece and China is that it takes wisdom to see that the many things are all one reality and the one reality is seen from many perspectives.
The Positives and Negatives of Human Thought:
Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.
Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location.
Human thought has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative). Doubt is a question or questioning, while belief is an answer or answering. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness of the future). In systems of thought, positivists lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between positivism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.
When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both positivism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.
What is philosophy?
Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus and Plato, who we will study later) questioned their traditions and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.
The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom?
Hegel tells us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as positivism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.
The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions.
In the rest of this lecture we will look at shamans as the original keepers of knowledge and seekers of wisdom. In the next lecture, we will look at the development of early city-states and the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians. This will give us the frame we need to study the great philosophers of ancient India, Greece and China.
Tribal Shamans and Ecstatic Quests
“Shaman” is a word from an old Turkish-Siberian dialect that means “one who knows”. Consider that a “scientist” is “one who sees” from the Latin root. The Shaman is the expert of the tribe, the one who not only holds the traditions of knowledge but who seeks new answers to problems. The shaman is both the preserver of the old and the seeker of the new.
It is quite amazing to consider that shamanism is the original human culture, found from Africa to Europe to the Americas to small islands in the pacific. While it is always different in each place, the similarities are quite profound.
In tribal culture, traditional knowledge is often kept and passed on in the form of stories or narratives. These stories explain the world and help people with their problems. There are, however, times when an answer must be sought for a problem. To do this, the shaman goes on a quest (both physical and mental) for the solution and new knowledge needed to solve the problem. Often the shaman is selected as a youth who has gone through a near death experience (sickness, struck by lightning, attacked but survives). The shaman is thought to have an affinity for seeking into the unknown because they are already experienced in the unknown.
To quest for knowledge, the shaman employs techniques of ecstasy known to produce an ecstatic experience. “Ecstasy” comes from the Greek and means “standing outside”. When one is in an ecstatic trance or having an ecstatic vision, one is standing outside normal reality and seeing it from a different place and context. Consider that shamans often go down into a cave or up on a mountain to go to the lower or upper “other world”. Some shamans have been known to climb trees. One gains perspective and is capable of abstraction when one removes oneself to contemplate reality. In fact, thought is itself a form of standing outside reality, so it makes sense that the shaman is regarded as the original thinker, expert and seeker, as well as the doctor, therapist, biologist, physicist, etc.
Methods of ecstasy include not only thought itself, but drugs, pain, rhythms (chanting, drumming, rattles) fasting, sleep deprivation, removing oneself from society and meditation (including contemplation and prayer).
Ancient World Cosmology
Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.
The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.
One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.
One early philosophical puzzle was the problem of the One and the Many: this reality is one thing, but also many things. Shamans in many different cultures had visions of an All Tree or Tree of Life, the one yet many of all things. All or Being itself is the trunk, and the many things and species of the world are the branches or the fruit. One of the recurrent philosophical insights we will see in India, Greece and China is that it takes wisdom to see that the many things are all one reality and the one reality is seen from many perspectives.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Social & Political Philosophy: Mencius, Xun Zi and Human Nature
Chinese Philosophy and The Period of the Hundred Philosophers/Schools:
One would like to think that times of peace and prosperity are good for systems of thought, but in fact we find that times of war and disintegration of empires is best for thinkers and systems of thought. Human beings only rethink problems when they are faced with them, and so in Confucius’ China there were great problems in the ‘Warring States period’ as many kings came and went, each calling themselves ‘mandated by heaven’. If heaven speaks for a king, it was thought the king would prosper. If the king does not follow the way of heaven, heaven or the All Lord stops speaking for the king, and someone else comes along. Each new king then claims that the old king was ‘no longer spoken for’, so the populations of Greece, India etc. find themselves wondering: who exactly does Heaven (the heavens) speak for, and why?
The Period of the Hundred Philosophers or Hundred Schools, as it is called, came with the Warring States Period and ended during the Han dynasty (about 220 BCE) which supported the studies of many of the schools that had their origins during the Warring States Period. This included the teachings of Confucius and the early Confucians such as Mencius and Xun Zi.
Confucius and his System of Thought
Confucius (550-480 BCE) believed that the heart is the center of the human being. Notice that this ‘center’ is both mental and physical, fitting with cosmology, psychology and medical practices (these, of course, not being separated in ancient times and cultures). Confucius is often understood as a champion of order and ritual, as he is a proponent of society against the Daoists. However, it is clear from the Analects that Confucius believed it was more important to have right intentions than right actions, i.e. ‘one’s heart is in the right place’.
Confucius believed that ritual was the strength of a society and so one should perform the rituals to the ancestors, but he also believed that the worst thing was not to simply avoid ritual but to do ritual without the proper intention. We could say that Confucius would say to a churchgoer today: it is more important to enjoy your church than to attend your church, for if you do not enjoy it whole heartedly you should not go. Empty ritual, ritual simply for the motions rather than authentic love for and continuity with one’s society, is the worst thing, and thus it would be better in such a case to avoid false ritual and simply not perform the ritual at all. This point is often lost when people focus on Confucius’ great love of ritual and city culture. The best example is clearly 3.26, “Authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate”.
Confucius is credited as the father of China’s civil service system, a system in which anyone who tested well, regardless of their position in society, was given a government position. This is similar to the development of types of scribes in Egypt. It is just such a development that we call ‘the middle class’, the individuals who through study and work can rise or fall in position to fit the many niches required to run large cities and systems. In combination with the last point, this means that Confucius hates scholarship for show without genuine love of learning and discovery of human nature. A good example is 4.9, ‘if a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to’.
Confucius was a genius at seeing himself as equal to everyone, and he encouraged this attitude as the path to goodness itself. Most of us have likely heard the ‘Golden Rule’, which is paraphrased from Confucius: ‘treat others the way you want to be treated’. My favorite example is 7.22: Confucius says that if you put him with any two people at random, he can take their strengths as a model to follow and their faults as a warning. Clearly, Confucius believed that we all share the same set of strengths and faults, no matter how talented (or horrible) we happen to individually be or where our talents are. Confucius teaches us that NO ONE is perfect, not even himself, but there is good in everyone and everything, and we had best remember that we will never lose any of our connection to our fellow human beings if we only remember to look hard enough for it. Another excellent example from the Analects is, “When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him…When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself”.
Mencius, Xun Zi and the Debate on Human Nature
Confucius had two followers who became the famous two poles of interpretation of the Analects. Mencius (370-290 BCE) or Men Zi, the second in command of Confucianism by popular consent in the tradition, believed that Confucius taught that the human being is basically good and develops the heart, growing and developing the virtues through love. He argued that because the human individual is essentially good, we need ritual to guide our growth but love is the true essence. Xun Zi, the third in command of Confucianism, a cynic and conservative, argued that the human being is essentially evil and without the rituals and tradition to hold our nature back we would be selfish and uncivilized. This remains the major split in Confucian thought. We can see that there are various views and contradicting opinions within the system, and that individuals can draw on Mencius, Xun Zi or both to back up their own interpretations of Confucius.
Mencius and Human Nature as Good
In 2A:6, Mencius states a major thesis of his work: No one is devoid of compassion for others. Mencius argues at several points in the book that we naturally feel for others and their wellbeing as we do for ourselves, and that when we fail to care for others there are other factors involved that block or reverse our natural compassion. Xun Zi, as we will see, is very opposed to this interpretation of Confucius’ thought and argues that compassion must be planted in the human being by society and study because it is alien and opposite to human nature. In coming weeks, we will see similar sides taken between Rousseau and Hobbes.
Mencius is famous for using the young child falling into a well example to back up his argument. He argues that anyone would feel panic and fear if they saw a child in danger, regardless of how evil that individual is or how twisted they have become. This point is excellent for debate.
Mencius believes that there are four parts of the human heart that are developed and cultivated by society and study such that four virtues are grown like plants/germs/sprouts. The heart is a root system which grows the virtues of humanity when properly cultivated.
The four parts of the heart are compassion (ren) which sprouts benevolence, shame which sprouts duty (yi), courtesy/modesty which sprouts observance of ritual (li), and a sense of right and wrong which sprouts wisdom.
In 3A:5, we see Mencius getting into a battle with a Moist over whether one should love one’s own family more than others. While compassion is central to Confucianism, whether or not it is innate like Mencius says or has to be transplanted like Xun Zi says, Confucians believe that one should have more love for one’s parents, children, family, and country and that this is the natural and proper way of things. Moists, who are radical egalitarians, argued against the Confucians that we should love everyone without distinction, as much as we love ourselves, our parents, our children, and our country. Confucians argue that the Moists are breaking with the natural way of the human heart and society, and that proportion in love is proper and best.
Mencius argues that we all do naturally love infants and young children and that this is good. He returns to his well example, and argues that Yi Zi, a Moist, is taking this one case and applying it improperly to everyone. Mencius says that the Moist wants us to deny our natural gradations of love which grow in society while affirming that love is the true nature of humanity, setting love in opposition to itself and making love both natural and unnatural at the same time.
Mencius goes on to presume that love and care for others possibly began with early humans, living before civilization, seeing the decaying bodies of their parents being attacked by animals and because humans naturally care for others, and particularly their parents, they were moved to bury the bodies. Note that this makes proper burial, the topic of the debate with Yi Zi. In the text, Yi Zi concedes the point and accepts that love starts with the love one has for one’s parents and develops from there. In Chinese philosophical texts, often there are instances of a member (sometimes quite famous) of an opposing school conceding in argument (Confucius is made to accept defeat and concede superiority to the Daoists in the great text of Zhuang Zi).
In 4A:12, Mencius elaborates and says that goodness starts with working on the self and love for one’s parents, and moves outward from there to one’s friends and the whole of one’s society.
In 4A:16, Mencius considers another example famous in Confucian scholarship for its implications. A scholar (school unknown) poses a problem to Mencius: it says in the laws that it is improper for men and women to touch hands if they are not married, but if your brother’s sister is drowning, shouldn’t you reach out to save her? Mencius replies that it is proper to save her, and that one must not blindly follow the law but use discretion given the situation. This passage is famous, because Confucians are big on observing law and ritual but sometimes one must break the law. Confucius said in the Analects that even though the rites say to use a silk hat, it is ok to use a hemp hat instead because it is more modest. The scholar debating Mencius says the empire is now drowning, implying that one needs to radically break with the laws and traditions to save society. Mencius replies that upholding law and ritual is the way to save society and so the example of the drowning sister-in-law does not justify a radical break from tradition.
In 4B:12, Mencius says the great person retains the heart of a child. A Moist might point out the previous battle with Yi Zi and say Mencius is going against what he has said before if a child is all loving and completely open. Mencius might counter that retaining the child heart will naturally grow into its arrangements while being pure and absolute.
In 4B:13, Mencius says that following one’s parents when they are alive is good, but following them after they are dead is greater. Xun Zi might be cynical here, because if you applied this to society he would argue that without society one would tend not to be good at all and that the one who follows the ways of one’s parents after they are dead does so only because society still surrounds them.
In 6A:2, as in several other places, Mencius likens love and human nature (which he believes to be identical) to water and argues that just as water naturally moves downward love naturally moves outward. If water does not move downward, it is blocked by something. In the same way, if a human being is not loving towards others and compassionate, it is blocked by something.
In 6A:7, Mencius speaks of sowing barley on various ground (strikingly similar to the parable of Jesus). Just as when barley does not grow, the seeds have fallen on bad soil, when humans are bad it is not because they do not have love and goodness in their nature but because they are put in a bad situation. Reason and goodness are common to all. The sage or great person simply recognizes this and grows what all have to become great.
Xun Zi and Human Nature as Evil
Xun Zi, the third most important Confucian after Confucius and Mencius, argued that human nature is evil because human nature is desire. Without society and laws, people would grab for themselves and do nothing for others. Hobbes, we will see, argues the same thing and believes that this justifies the king acting any way the king sees fit, including killing his subjects.
In Improving Yourself (Section 2 of the Xun Zi), he argues that if we stick to the rituals and laws our behavior will be good and if we abandon the rituals and laws it will be bad. He draws openly on the behavior of civilized gentlemen vs. the behavior of poor country folk to back this up.
He argues that one’s temperament and intelligence need to be in balance and if they get overgrown they will cause ruin. Human abilities need to be reined in by society and customs, or they will cause problems. He argues that only by following laws can one be liberal and compassionate. Compassion is the goal that is possible, but it cannot be achieved without laws and principles. Following one’s parents and teachers is necessary for human development. Confucius says in the Analects that learning without thinking is bad, but thinking without learning is dangerous.
In Man’s Nature is Evil (Section 23 of the Xun Zi), he opens with this thesis and states that all goodness is the result of growth and effort. People naturally desire. They must work and change to understand that they only get what they desire when they put their desires in check, and they only learn this through involvement with society and its laws. Freud argued very similarly about sexual impulse, and that all technology is sexuality denied and deferred into work. The first paragraph lays this out succinctly.
Xun Zi openly refers to Mencius by name and his theory that human nature is good and says that Mencius is wrong. Xun Zi argues that Mencius is confusing human nature with the results of conscious human activity and development. Xun Zi believes that the early legendary sage kings created society because they realized that human nature is corrupt and they created a method for us to grow from our nature and become excellent in spite of it. He argues that the example of child-like love is misleading. Children do not know enough, are not developed enough, to refrain from grabbing for themselves. Good people restrain their own desires to be good to others, unlike the child. Note that we tell people to be like a little child (when happy & loving) and we also tell people to NOT be like a little child (when angry & upset).
Xun Zi argues that greatness IS an object of desire, and the great person realizes/desires to overcome desire and discipline desire to truly fulfill desire. This is very similar to Nietzsche and his conceptions of morality and power which we will touch on in the second half of the class.
He says: “Those who are good at discussing antiquity must demonstrate the validity of what they say in modern times; those who are good at discussing Heaven (the way of things) must show proofs from the human world. In discussions of all kinds, men value what is in accord with the facts and what can be proved to be valid. Hence if a man sits on his mat propounding some theory, he should be able to stand right up and put it into practice, and show that it can be extended over a wide area with equal validity. Now Mencius states that man’s nature is good, but this is neither in accord with the facts, nor can it be proved to be valid.”
If Mencius is right, Xun Zi argues, we could dispense with society and be good in the state of nature. Both the Daoists and Rousseau hold this to be true. Xun Zi is arguing that, if we believe Mencius, we may as well all become Daoists. If we honor the sages and the good over the stupid and the evil, we do so because of how much each has developed and not because of their universal nature. Xun Zi is arguing that, if we believe Mencius, we may as well all become Moists.
Xun Zi argues that all human beings are equal in their capacity to become good and develop, but they do not start out good. The sage is one who has developed, not the one who remains the same as they were in the beginning. Xun Zi argues that because one has two feet, one can theoretically walk to the ends of the earth but no one has so far managed to do so. The famous bows (for arrows), leaders and horses all became famous for how they were cultivated and developed and were not excellent without conscious effort and process.
He ends by saying twice: “Environment is the important thing!” Remember Mencius agrees in speaking of sowing barley. For Confucians, society is essential. The debate is on whether the environment compliments or contradicts human nature.
One would like to think that times of peace and prosperity are good for systems of thought, but in fact we find that times of war and disintegration of empires is best for thinkers and systems of thought. Human beings only rethink problems when they are faced with them, and so in Confucius’ China there were great problems in the ‘Warring States period’ as many kings came and went, each calling themselves ‘mandated by heaven’. If heaven speaks for a king, it was thought the king would prosper. If the king does not follow the way of heaven, heaven or the All Lord stops speaking for the king, and someone else comes along. Each new king then claims that the old king was ‘no longer spoken for’, so the populations of Greece, India etc. find themselves wondering: who exactly does Heaven (the heavens) speak for, and why?
The Period of the Hundred Philosophers or Hundred Schools, as it is called, came with the Warring States Period and ended during the Han dynasty (about 220 BCE) which supported the studies of many of the schools that had their origins during the Warring States Period. This included the teachings of Confucius and the early Confucians such as Mencius and Xun Zi.
Confucius and his System of Thought
Confucius (550-480 BCE) believed that the heart is the center of the human being. Notice that this ‘center’ is both mental and physical, fitting with cosmology, psychology and medical practices (these, of course, not being separated in ancient times and cultures). Confucius is often understood as a champion of order and ritual, as he is a proponent of society against the Daoists. However, it is clear from the Analects that Confucius believed it was more important to have right intentions than right actions, i.e. ‘one’s heart is in the right place’.
Confucius believed that ritual was the strength of a society and so one should perform the rituals to the ancestors, but he also believed that the worst thing was not to simply avoid ritual but to do ritual without the proper intention. We could say that Confucius would say to a churchgoer today: it is more important to enjoy your church than to attend your church, for if you do not enjoy it whole heartedly you should not go. Empty ritual, ritual simply for the motions rather than authentic love for and continuity with one’s society, is the worst thing, and thus it would be better in such a case to avoid false ritual and simply not perform the ritual at all. This point is often lost when people focus on Confucius’ great love of ritual and city culture. The best example is clearly 3.26, “Authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate”.
Confucius is credited as the father of China’s civil service system, a system in which anyone who tested well, regardless of their position in society, was given a government position. This is similar to the development of types of scribes in Egypt. It is just such a development that we call ‘the middle class’, the individuals who through study and work can rise or fall in position to fit the many niches required to run large cities and systems. In combination with the last point, this means that Confucius hates scholarship for show without genuine love of learning and discovery of human nature. A good example is 4.9, ‘if a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to’.
Confucius was a genius at seeing himself as equal to everyone, and he encouraged this attitude as the path to goodness itself. Most of us have likely heard the ‘Golden Rule’, which is paraphrased from Confucius: ‘treat others the way you want to be treated’. My favorite example is 7.22: Confucius says that if you put him with any two people at random, he can take their strengths as a model to follow and their faults as a warning. Clearly, Confucius believed that we all share the same set of strengths and faults, no matter how talented (or horrible) we happen to individually be or where our talents are. Confucius teaches us that NO ONE is perfect, not even himself, but there is good in everyone and everything, and we had best remember that we will never lose any of our connection to our fellow human beings if we only remember to look hard enough for it. Another excellent example from the Analects is, “When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him…When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself”.
Mencius, Xun Zi and the Debate on Human Nature
Confucius had two followers who became the famous two poles of interpretation of the Analects. Mencius (370-290 BCE) or Men Zi, the second in command of Confucianism by popular consent in the tradition, believed that Confucius taught that the human being is basically good and develops the heart, growing and developing the virtues through love. He argued that because the human individual is essentially good, we need ritual to guide our growth but love is the true essence. Xun Zi, the third in command of Confucianism, a cynic and conservative, argued that the human being is essentially evil and without the rituals and tradition to hold our nature back we would be selfish and uncivilized. This remains the major split in Confucian thought. We can see that there are various views and contradicting opinions within the system, and that individuals can draw on Mencius, Xun Zi or both to back up their own interpretations of Confucius.
Mencius and Human Nature as Good
In 2A:6, Mencius states a major thesis of his work: No one is devoid of compassion for others. Mencius argues at several points in the book that we naturally feel for others and their wellbeing as we do for ourselves, and that when we fail to care for others there are other factors involved that block or reverse our natural compassion. Xun Zi, as we will see, is very opposed to this interpretation of Confucius’ thought and argues that compassion must be planted in the human being by society and study because it is alien and opposite to human nature. In coming weeks, we will see similar sides taken between Rousseau and Hobbes.
Mencius is famous for using the young child falling into a well example to back up his argument. He argues that anyone would feel panic and fear if they saw a child in danger, regardless of how evil that individual is or how twisted they have become. This point is excellent for debate.
Mencius believes that there are four parts of the human heart that are developed and cultivated by society and study such that four virtues are grown like plants/germs/sprouts. The heart is a root system which grows the virtues of humanity when properly cultivated.
The four parts of the heart are compassion (ren) which sprouts benevolence, shame which sprouts duty (yi), courtesy/modesty which sprouts observance of ritual (li), and a sense of right and wrong which sprouts wisdom.
In 3A:5, we see Mencius getting into a battle with a Moist over whether one should love one’s own family more than others. While compassion is central to Confucianism, whether or not it is innate like Mencius says or has to be transplanted like Xun Zi says, Confucians believe that one should have more love for one’s parents, children, family, and country and that this is the natural and proper way of things. Moists, who are radical egalitarians, argued against the Confucians that we should love everyone without distinction, as much as we love ourselves, our parents, our children, and our country. Confucians argue that the Moists are breaking with the natural way of the human heart and society, and that proportion in love is proper and best.
Mencius argues that we all do naturally love infants and young children and that this is good. He returns to his well example, and argues that Yi Zi, a Moist, is taking this one case and applying it improperly to everyone. Mencius says that the Moist wants us to deny our natural gradations of love which grow in society while affirming that love is the true nature of humanity, setting love in opposition to itself and making love both natural and unnatural at the same time.
Mencius goes on to presume that love and care for others possibly began with early humans, living before civilization, seeing the decaying bodies of their parents being attacked by animals and because humans naturally care for others, and particularly their parents, they were moved to bury the bodies. Note that this makes proper burial, the topic of the debate with Yi Zi. In the text, Yi Zi concedes the point and accepts that love starts with the love one has for one’s parents and develops from there. In Chinese philosophical texts, often there are instances of a member (sometimes quite famous) of an opposing school conceding in argument (Confucius is made to accept defeat and concede superiority to the Daoists in the great text of Zhuang Zi).
In 4A:12, Mencius elaborates and says that goodness starts with working on the self and love for one’s parents, and moves outward from there to one’s friends and the whole of one’s society.
In 4A:16, Mencius considers another example famous in Confucian scholarship for its implications. A scholar (school unknown) poses a problem to Mencius: it says in the laws that it is improper for men and women to touch hands if they are not married, but if your brother’s sister is drowning, shouldn’t you reach out to save her? Mencius replies that it is proper to save her, and that one must not blindly follow the law but use discretion given the situation. This passage is famous, because Confucians are big on observing law and ritual but sometimes one must break the law. Confucius said in the Analects that even though the rites say to use a silk hat, it is ok to use a hemp hat instead because it is more modest. The scholar debating Mencius says the empire is now drowning, implying that one needs to radically break with the laws and traditions to save society. Mencius replies that upholding law and ritual is the way to save society and so the example of the drowning sister-in-law does not justify a radical break from tradition.
In 4B:12, Mencius says the great person retains the heart of a child. A Moist might point out the previous battle with Yi Zi and say Mencius is going against what he has said before if a child is all loving and completely open. Mencius might counter that retaining the child heart will naturally grow into its arrangements while being pure and absolute.
In 4B:13, Mencius says that following one’s parents when they are alive is good, but following them after they are dead is greater. Xun Zi might be cynical here, because if you applied this to society he would argue that without society one would tend not to be good at all and that the one who follows the ways of one’s parents after they are dead does so only because society still surrounds them.
In 6A:2, as in several other places, Mencius likens love and human nature (which he believes to be identical) to water and argues that just as water naturally moves downward love naturally moves outward. If water does not move downward, it is blocked by something. In the same way, if a human being is not loving towards others and compassionate, it is blocked by something.
In 6A:7, Mencius speaks of sowing barley on various ground (strikingly similar to the parable of Jesus). Just as when barley does not grow, the seeds have fallen on bad soil, when humans are bad it is not because they do not have love and goodness in their nature but because they are put in a bad situation. Reason and goodness are common to all. The sage or great person simply recognizes this and grows what all have to become great.
Xun Zi and Human Nature as Evil
Xun Zi, the third most important Confucian after Confucius and Mencius, argued that human nature is evil because human nature is desire. Without society and laws, people would grab for themselves and do nothing for others. Hobbes, we will see, argues the same thing and believes that this justifies the king acting any way the king sees fit, including killing his subjects.
In Improving Yourself (Section 2 of the Xun Zi), he argues that if we stick to the rituals and laws our behavior will be good and if we abandon the rituals and laws it will be bad. He draws openly on the behavior of civilized gentlemen vs. the behavior of poor country folk to back this up.
He argues that one’s temperament and intelligence need to be in balance and if they get overgrown they will cause ruin. Human abilities need to be reined in by society and customs, or they will cause problems. He argues that only by following laws can one be liberal and compassionate. Compassion is the goal that is possible, but it cannot be achieved without laws and principles. Following one’s parents and teachers is necessary for human development. Confucius says in the Analects that learning without thinking is bad, but thinking without learning is dangerous.
In Man’s Nature is Evil (Section 23 of the Xun Zi), he opens with this thesis and states that all goodness is the result of growth and effort. People naturally desire. They must work and change to understand that they only get what they desire when they put their desires in check, and they only learn this through involvement with society and its laws. Freud argued very similarly about sexual impulse, and that all technology is sexuality denied and deferred into work. The first paragraph lays this out succinctly.
Xun Zi openly refers to Mencius by name and his theory that human nature is good and says that Mencius is wrong. Xun Zi argues that Mencius is confusing human nature with the results of conscious human activity and development. Xun Zi believes that the early legendary sage kings created society because they realized that human nature is corrupt and they created a method for us to grow from our nature and become excellent in spite of it. He argues that the example of child-like love is misleading. Children do not know enough, are not developed enough, to refrain from grabbing for themselves. Good people restrain their own desires to be good to others, unlike the child. Note that we tell people to be like a little child (when happy & loving) and we also tell people to NOT be like a little child (when angry & upset).
Xun Zi argues that greatness IS an object of desire, and the great person realizes/desires to overcome desire and discipline desire to truly fulfill desire. This is very similar to Nietzsche and his conceptions of morality and power which we will touch on in the second half of the class.
He says: “Those who are good at discussing antiquity must demonstrate the validity of what they say in modern times; those who are good at discussing Heaven (the way of things) must show proofs from the human world. In discussions of all kinds, men value what is in accord with the facts and what can be proved to be valid. Hence if a man sits on his mat propounding some theory, he should be able to stand right up and put it into practice, and show that it can be extended over a wide area with equal validity. Now Mencius states that man’s nature is good, but this is neither in accord with the facts, nor can it be proved to be valid.”
If Mencius is right, Xun Zi argues, we could dispense with society and be good in the state of nature. Both the Daoists and Rousseau hold this to be true. Xun Zi is arguing that, if we believe Mencius, we may as well all become Daoists. If we honor the sages and the good over the stupid and the evil, we do so because of how much each has developed and not because of their universal nature. Xun Zi is arguing that, if we believe Mencius, we may as well all become Moists.
Xun Zi argues that all human beings are equal in their capacity to become good and develop, but they do not start out good. The sage is one who has developed, not the one who remains the same as they were in the beginning. Xun Zi argues that because one has two feet, one can theoretically walk to the ends of the earth but no one has so far managed to do so. The famous bows (for arrows), leaders and horses all became famous for how they were cultivated and developed and were not excellent without conscious effort and process.
He ends by saying twice: “Environment is the important thing!” Remember Mencius agrees in speaking of sowing barley. For Confucians, society is essential. The debate is on whether the environment compliments or contradicts human nature.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Social & Political Philosophy: Tribal Society & City State Politics
PRIMITIVE MAN AS PHILOSOPHER by Paul Radin
Modern Historians are supposed to look at societies other than their own free from bias and prejudice. However, historians have so far been prejudiced and assumed that aboriginal/tribal societies are innately inferior. This is due to the profound differences of social customs and because the tribes people could not stick up for themselves against the modern historian. Romanticism also played a part in sustaining the assumption that tribes people are simple children and savages, unintelligent and lacking individuality. The rise of the theory of evolution convinced many that tribes people are pre-logical and pre-individualistic because they have not reached required stages of social development, and this view has gained academic and scientific credibility.
Because of this, the most pressing need in history, sociology, psychology and other fields is to examine and question this prejudice, particularly the convictions that tribal people have a dead level of intelligence, that the individual is always submerged in the group, and that there are no thinkers or philosophers. This book particularly examines the role of intellectuals in the earliest societies.
Every human group has members who are different in their individuality and who examine life and its problems with what we can call philosophy. Languages of tribal peoples are sometimes more complex than our own and their vocabularies are sometimes just as large. Their vocabularies have words with the same abstract connotations as our own, but in spite of this there are many theorists who do not believe tribal people to be capable of abstract thought. They point out the concrete nature of words and expressions while ignoring that our own modern languages use similar concrete terms to express abstract thought.
The complexity of a society has little to do with the existence of philosophy or individual thought. Indeed, complex civilizations can often stifle or even prohibit philosophizing and the asking of deep and abstract questions.
Often, academics has held to the view that the ancient Greeks and their cultural descendents have a special kind of mentality that allowed and still allows them to think individually, critically, and philosophically, but it is not clear what the nature of this special mentality is. The best way to critically examine and correct this error is to provide examples of tribal people indulging in philosophical speculation.
Aristotle and the Greeks are called special for thinking systematically, even though all cultures transmit their thought in whole, unified systems.
Philosophical speculation flourishes most in times of crisis and change, as it did in the greatest periods of Greek and Chinese philosophy.
Throughout this book it is assumed that tribal people have the same distribution of intelligence and ability as do modern societies. This has grown from a hypothesis to a conviction through the direct experience of tribal societies by the author. The object of the book is to describe tribal society from the viewpoint of the intellectuals and thinkers of the tribe.
The intellectual often looks down on the practices of the ordinary people, but the ordinary person also looks with amusement on the distance between the real and practical world and the behavior of the scholar. It is, however, the scholar who writes the history books and so it is this perspective that we often encounter when reading about the past of this and other civilizations.
When looking at isolated practices of “magic” ritual, such as the Winnebago Native American shooting an arrow at a trail to ensure good deer hunting, it is often forgotten that this act does not guarantee success and is interwoven with many practical behaviors. If one asks the tribal individual if magic alone will bring home a deer or grow crops, they are quite amused at the lack of understanding.
Tribal people are in direct contact with their reality, while modern people are removed from many aspects of their own lives. Magic was not a world apart from physical reality, but interwoven with it such that practical and physical situations were recognized while interpreted in traditional ways. One does not ask for rain from a cloudless sky, nor seek protection for actions that are impractical or dangerously stupid. The traditional systems of thought are an aid for dealing with physical and practical reality, not a substitute for reality.
Tribal people, like advanced modern people, do and do not understand reality and the forces behind it, so they work in accord with systems that sometimes do and sometimes do not work so that generally the society and individual will be well and overcome obstacles.
Individuals have relative freedom and individuality in tribal societies. It is possible that we view the tribal individual as an automata, with no freedom or individuality, because modern life saturated with technologies has turned human individuals into automata.
It is a mistake to believe that tribal people do not have variation in ritual and belief but modern people do. There is always variations in ritual and belief amongst any people, and modern life has in fact standardized beliefs more than they ever have been.
When one draws the community together and asks about the reasons behind an aspect of culture, one will find not only variation but contradictions and arguments. This is as true of tribal beliefs as it is of modern academics and science. A community is always an agreement and disagreement of beliefs and perspectives.
All societies, tribal or modern, believe that there are immutable and permanent truths, but there is no complete agreement as to what these truths are or how they are structured or caused. Even if there is a great deal of consensus, this does not prevent radical variation in belief among individuals and minority groups. If this variation is sometimes concealed, this is due to fear of ridicule or rejection by the majority. Individuality that contrasts with the beliefs or behavior of the majority is in danger of being labeled a mistake or deviancy. It is always safer to either conform to the majority or remain silent.
Individual members of any society have to balance and integrate their individuality with society.
Sometimes it is even asserted that tribal people are so varied in belief that they cannot form coherent systems. It is often asserted that the Greeks and Europeans are “systematic thinkers” relative to others, but also that they are also free and various in thinking relative to others.
With the development of writing, a welcome oasis given the dynamic and ever-changing world, beliefs and systems of thought were able to be highly standardized. The written word was deified and identified with the unchanging way of the cosmos.
HISTORY BEGINS AT SUMER by Kramer
Sumer is the birthplace of the written word, one of the earliest city state societies. Sumer was a city state at the mouth of the Tigris Euphrates which was then taken over and incorporated into Babylon, which then was taken over by Assyria, which was then taken over by Persia. These were multicultural societies in which citizenship did not belong exclusively to one ethnicity. The primary way that cultures were dominated was, as it is today, not with war but with trade. War typically means efforts to dominate through economic means have failed.
Sumer had some of the first schools, textbooks (in science and the liberal arts), medical texts, tax reduction, wisdom proverbs, and laments. One excellent proverb is, “You go and carry off the enemy’s land, the enemy comes and carries off your land”. My favorite Sumerian lament is recorded about 3000 BCE, in which an elderly Sumerian complains that teenagers are running around and breaking laws and having sex, concluding that the world will certainly end soon.
Very important for this class, in Sumer we find the first democratic bicameral congress. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first recorded myths in human history, we read that Gilgamesh wants to go to war so he appeals to the elders of the senate. The elders do not want war because they have fragile investments in the situation, so Gilgamesh appeals to the larger and lower house and they enthusiastically accept his proposal. Gilgamesh, the king, must seek approval from the community as a whole and needs the house to override the smaller but higher senate.
MYTH TODAY by Roland Barthes
Barthes, a French thinker and literary critic, argues that any speech can be mythologized and through any medium. He uses the example of roses being given as a gesture of passion to illustrate his concept of a sign, and then describes how signs can serve myths which then become larger signs that signify other things.
At the barbershop one day, he is upset by the cover of Paris-Match (a magazine much like Newsweek & Time in America). On the cover is a young African boy in French military dress saluting. Barthes writes that the boy is clearly being depicted saluting the French flag, and the cover is meant to signify that France is a great empire in which all are equal and love the empire. Barthes writes that this boy is being made to serve his colonialist oppressors and that the image is a sign that serves a modern myth: France stands for freedom. It is a game of hide and seek with meaning. It is an open association or coherence that does not demand what it means but highly suggests what it means. In doing this, it is a deformation and distortion of the realities of French colonial Africa. It is a gesture that is deliberately misleading, alienating the meaning from the situation. It is an alibi for French colonialism.
Consider that, coupled with Radin, we may wonder whether we live in times of less or greater mythology considering the forms of media and the dislocation of modern society.
Modern Historians are supposed to look at societies other than their own free from bias and prejudice. However, historians have so far been prejudiced and assumed that aboriginal/tribal societies are innately inferior. This is due to the profound differences of social customs and because the tribes people could not stick up for themselves against the modern historian. Romanticism also played a part in sustaining the assumption that tribes people are simple children and savages, unintelligent and lacking individuality. The rise of the theory of evolution convinced many that tribes people are pre-logical and pre-individualistic because they have not reached required stages of social development, and this view has gained academic and scientific credibility.
Because of this, the most pressing need in history, sociology, psychology and other fields is to examine and question this prejudice, particularly the convictions that tribal people have a dead level of intelligence, that the individual is always submerged in the group, and that there are no thinkers or philosophers. This book particularly examines the role of intellectuals in the earliest societies.
Every human group has members who are different in their individuality and who examine life and its problems with what we can call philosophy. Languages of tribal peoples are sometimes more complex than our own and their vocabularies are sometimes just as large. Their vocabularies have words with the same abstract connotations as our own, but in spite of this there are many theorists who do not believe tribal people to be capable of abstract thought. They point out the concrete nature of words and expressions while ignoring that our own modern languages use similar concrete terms to express abstract thought.
The complexity of a society has little to do with the existence of philosophy or individual thought. Indeed, complex civilizations can often stifle or even prohibit philosophizing and the asking of deep and abstract questions.
Often, academics has held to the view that the ancient Greeks and their cultural descendents have a special kind of mentality that allowed and still allows them to think individually, critically, and philosophically, but it is not clear what the nature of this special mentality is. The best way to critically examine and correct this error is to provide examples of tribal people indulging in philosophical speculation.
Aristotle and the Greeks are called special for thinking systematically, even though all cultures transmit their thought in whole, unified systems.
Philosophical speculation flourishes most in times of crisis and change, as it did in the greatest periods of Greek and Chinese philosophy.
Throughout this book it is assumed that tribal people have the same distribution of intelligence and ability as do modern societies. This has grown from a hypothesis to a conviction through the direct experience of tribal societies by the author. The object of the book is to describe tribal society from the viewpoint of the intellectuals and thinkers of the tribe.
The intellectual often looks down on the practices of the ordinary people, but the ordinary person also looks with amusement on the distance between the real and practical world and the behavior of the scholar. It is, however, the scholar who writes the history books and so it is this perspective that we often encounter when reading about the past of this and other civilizations.
When looking at isolated practices of “magic” ritual, such as the Winnebago Native American shooting an arrow at a trail to ensure good deer hunting, it is often forgotten that this act does not guarantee success and is interwoven with many practical behaviors. If one asks the tribal individual if magic alone will bring home a deer or grow crops, they are quite amused at the lack of understanding.
Tribal people are in direct contact with their reality, while modern people are removed from many aspects of their own lives. Magic was not a world apart from physical reality, but interwoven with it such that practical and physical situations were recognized while interpreted in traditional ways. One does not ask for rain from a cloudless sky, nor seek protection for actions that are impractical or dangerously stupid. The traditional systems of thought are an aid for dealing with physical and practical reality, not a substitute for reality.
Tribal people, like advanced modern people, do and do not understand reality and the forces behind it, so they work in accord with systems that sometimes do and sometimes do not work so that generally the society and individual will be well and overcome obstacles.
Individuals have relative freedom and individuality in tribal societies. It is possible that we view the tribal individual as an automata, with no freedom or individuality, because modern life saturated with technologies has turned human individuals into automata.
It is a mistake to believe that tribal people do not have variation in ritual and belief but modern people do. There is always variations in ritual and belief amongst any people, and modern life has in fact standardized beliefs more than they ever have been.
When one draws the community together and asks about the reasons behind an aspect of culture, one will find not only variation but contradictions and arguments. This is as true of tribal beliefs as it is of modern academics and science. A community is always an agreement and disagreement of beliefs and perspectives.
All societies, tribal or modern, believe that there are immutable and permanent truths, but there is no complete agreement as to what these truths are or how they are structured or caused. Even if there is a great deal of consensus, this does not prevent radical variation in belief among individuals and minority groups. If this variation is sometimes concealed, this is due to fear of ridicule or rejection by the majority. Individuality that contrasts with the beliefs or behavior of the majority is in danger of being labeled a mistake or deviancy. It is always safer to either conform to the majority or remain silent.
Individual members of any society have to balance and integrate their individuality with society.
Sometimes it is even asserted that tribal people are so varied in belief that they cannot form coherent systems. It is often asserted that the Greeks and Europeans are “systematic thinkers” relative to others, but also that they are also free and various in thinking relative to others.
With the development of writing, a welcome oasis given the dynamic and ever-changing world, beliefs and systems of thought were able to be highly standardized. The written word was deified and identified with the unchanging way of the cosmos.
HISTORY BEGINS AT SUMER by Kramer
Sumer is the birthplace of the written word, one of the earliest city state societies. Sumer was a city state at the mouth of the Tigris Euphrates which was then taken over and incorporated into Babylon, which then was taken over by Assyria, which was then taken over by Persia. These were multicultural societies in which citizenship did not belong exclusively to one ethnicity. The primary way that cultures were dominated was, as it is today, not with war but with trade. War typically means efforts to dominate through economic means have failed.
Sumer had some of the first schools, textbooks (in science and the liberal arts), medical texts, tax reduction, wisdom proverbs, and laments. One excellent proverb is, “You go and carry off the enemy’s land, the enemy comes and carries off your land”. My favorite Sumerian lament is recorded about 3000 BCE, in which an elderly Sumerian complains that teenagers are running around and breaking laws and having sex, concluding that the world will certainly end soon.
Very important for this class, in Sumer we find the first democratic bicameral congress. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first recorded myths in human history, we read that Gilgamesh wants to go to war so he appeals to the elders of the senate. The elders do not want war because they have fragile investments in the situation, so Gilgamesh appeals to the larger and lower house and they enthusiastically accept his proposal. Gilgamesh, the king, must seek approval from the community as a whole and needs the house to override the smaller but higher senate.
MYTH TODAY by Roland Barthes
Barthes, a French thinker and literary critic, argues that any speech can be mythologized and through any medium. He uses the example of roses being given as a gesture of passion to illustrate his concept of a sign, and then describes how signs can serve myths which then become larger signs that signify other things.
At the barbershop one day, he is upset by the cover of Paris-Match (a magazine much like Newsweek & Time in America). On the cover is a young African boy in French military dress saluting. Barthes writes that the boy is clearly being depicted saluting the French flag, and the cover is meant to signify that France is a great empire in which all are equal and love the empire. Barthes writes that this boy is being made to serve his colonialist oppressors and that the image is a sign that serves a modern myth: France stands for freedom. It is a game of hide and seek with meaning. It is an open association or coherence that does not demand what it means but highly suggests what it means. In doing this, it is a deformation and distortion of the realities of French colonial Africa. It is a gesture that is deliberately misleading, alienating the meaning from the situation. It is an alibi for French colonialism.
Consider that, coupled with Radin, we may wonder whether we live in times of less or greater mythology considering the forms of media and the dislocation of modern society.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Social & Political Philosophy: Politics in Apes and Early Humanity
Politics Among the Apes:
Apes have hierarchy, with a tension between authority and individuality. Apes are capable of understanding basic forms of owning. Consider the case (from an old Anthropology class of mine) of the female chimpanzee ignoring another male chimpanzee trying to give her a banana for sex, and how the female only snatches the banana for herself when the male ape gets bored and goes out of sight so that there is no expected reciprocity. Apes are also capable of lying, which is important for politics, of course. In one of the most fascinating stories of ape behavior I have heard, researchers documented that a young male baboon made the mistake of trying to force himself sexually on a high ranking female baboon of his tribe. When the female screeched, the rest of the tribe began chasing the young male along the ground floor. Suddenly, the young male turned and gave the call for leopard. The chasers dashed up into the trees and out of sight, while the young male stood, watching them leave, on the ground in no danger from any leopard. The researchers concluded that they had witnessed and documented an ape lying to save his own skin. Thus, we can assume, humans have been lying since before they were human.
The Positives and Negatives of Human Thought:
Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.
Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location.
Human thought has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative). Doubt is a question or questioning, while belief is an answer or answering. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists or positivists lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between positivism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.
When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both positivism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.
What is philosophy?
Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Plato and Aristotle, who we will study later) questioned their traditions and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.
The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom?
German Philosophers such as Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as positivism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.
The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Radin’s book, Primitive Man as Philosopher, he argues that all societies (paying particular attention to North American tribes and African tribes) have a small number of individuals who are radical questioners and pioneers in innovation and individual thought. In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions.
“Shaman” is a word from an old Turkish-Siberian dialect that means “one who knows”. Consider that a “scientist” is “one who sees” from the Latin root. The Shaman is the expert of the tribe, the one who not only holds the traditions of knowledge but who seeks new answers to problems. The shaman is both the preserver of the old and the seeker of the new.
It is quite amazing to consider that shamanism is the original human culture, found from Africa to Europe to the Americas to small islands in the pacific. While it is always different in each place, the similarities are quite profound.
In tribal culture, traditional knowledge is often kept and passed on in the form of stories or narratives. These stories explain the world and help people with their problems. There are, however, times when an answer must be sought for a problem. To do this, the shaman goes on a quest (both physical and mental) for the solution and new knowledge needed to solve the problem. Often the shaman is selected as a youth who has gone through a near death experience (sickness, struck by lightning, attacked but survives). The shaman is thought to have an affinity for seeking into the unknown because they are already experienced in the unknown.
Ancient World Cosmology
Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.
The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.
One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.
The Problem of the One and the Many
One early philosophical puzzle was the problem of the One and the Many: this reality is one thing, but also many things. Shamans in many different cultures had visions of an All Tree or Tree of Life, the one yet many of all things. All or Being itself is the trunk, and the many things and species of the world are the branches or the fruit. One of the recurrent philosophical insights we will see in India, Greece and China is that it takes wisdom to see that the many things are all one reality and the one reality is seen from many perspectives.
Notice that the problem of the one and the many has political implications. Unity and sameness is privileged over diversity and difference. Early cultures did appreciate, sometimes reluctantly, individual thought and innovation, but it was and still often is subordinated to the good of the whole or unity of a culture. Native American, African, and Celtic European tribes came together for meetings of many individuals and sometimes many tribes in order to come to agreements, and consensus was sought that balanced diverse wants and opinions. When Native Americans took and held Alcatraz in the 60s, and there were differences of opinions among the tribes and individuals, they told the stubborn to be democratic and “stop being like white people”. This shows us that all cultures value heroes and individual achievement, but they also seek to unify the whole of society and come to common agreement and consensus.
Next time, more on Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher, History Begins at Summer and Barthes’ criticism of modern day mythology and how as an expression of culture it serves the state just as mythology has always done.
Apes have hierarchy, with a tension between authority and individuality. Apes are capable of understanding basic forms of owning. Consider the case (from an old Anthropology class of mine) of the female chimpanzee ignoring another male chimpanzee trying to give her a banana for sex, and how the female only snatches the banana for herself when the male ape gets bored and goes out of sight so that there is no expected reciprocity. Apes are also capable of lying, which is important for politics, of course. In one of the most fascinating stories of ape behavior I have heard, researchers documented that a young male baboon made the mistake of trying to force himself sexually on a high ranking female baboon of his tribe. When the female screeched, the rest of the tribe began chasing the young male along the ground floor. Suddenly, the young male turned and gave the call for leopard. The chasers dashed up into the trees and out of sight, while the young male stood, watching them leave, on the ground in no danger from any leopard. The researchers concluded that they had witnessed and documented an ape lying to save his own skin. Thus, we can assume, humans have been lying since before they were human.
The Positives and Negatives of Human Thought:
Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.
Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location.
Human thought has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative). Doubt is a question or questioning, while belief is an answer or answering. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists or positivists lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between positivism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.
When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both positivism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.
What is philosophy?
Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Plato and Aristotle, who we will study later) questioned their traditions and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.
The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom?
German Philosophers such as Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as positivism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.
The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Radin’s book, Primitive Man as Philosopher, he argues that all societies (paying particular attention to North American tribes and African tribes) have a small number of individuals who are radical questioners and pioneers in innovation and individual thought. In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions.
“Shaman” is a word from an old Turkish-Siberian dialect that means “one who knows”. Consider that a “scientist” is “one who sees” from the Latin root. The Shaman is the expert of the tribe, the one who not only holds the traditions of knowledge but who seeks new answers to problems. The shaman is both the preserver of the old and the seeker of the new.
It is quite amazing to consider that shamanism is the original human culture, found from Africa to Europe to the Americas to small islands in the pacific. While it is always different in each place, the similarities are quite profound.
In tribal culture, traditional knowledge is often kept and passed on in the form of stories or narratives. These stories explain the world and help people with their problems. There are, however, times when an answer must be sought for a problem. To do this, the shaman goes on a quest (both physical and mental) for the solution and new knowledge needed to solve the problem. Often the shaman is selected as a youth who has gone through a near death experience (sickness, struck by lightning, attacked but survives). The shaman is thought to have an affinity for seeking into the unknown because they are already experienced in the unknown.
Ancient World Cosmology
Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.
The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.
One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.
The Problem of the One and the Many
One early philosophical puzzle was the problem of the One and the Many: this reality is one thing, but also many things. Shamans in many different cultures had visions of an All Tree or Tree of Life, the one yet many of all things. All or Being itself is the trunk, and the many things and species of the world are the branches or the fruit. One of the recurrent philosophical insights we will see in India, Greece and China is that it takes wisdom to see that the many things are all one reality and the one reality is seen from many perspectives.
Notice that the problem of the one and the many has political implications. Unity and sameness is privileged over diversity and difference. Early cultures did appreciate, sometimes reluctantly, individual thought and innovation, but it was and still often is subordinated to the good of the whole or unity of a culture. Native American, African, and Celtic European tribes came together for meetings of many individuals and sometimes many tribes in order to come to agreements, and consensus was sought that balanced diverse wants and opinions. When Native Americans took and held Alcatraz in the 60s, and there were differences of opinions among the tribes and individuals, they told the stubborn to be democratic and “stop being like white people”. This shows us that all cultures value heroes and individual achievement, but they also seek to unify the whole of society and come to common agreement and consensus.
Next time, more on Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher, History Begins at Summer and Barthes’ criticism of modern day mythology and how as an expression of culture it serves the state just as mythology has always done.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Ethics Syllabus & Schedule Spring 2011
HUMAN 30A – ETHICS Spring 2011 Instructor: Eric Gerlach
FRI 9:00 – 11:50 AM Office Hours: Mon 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code 20740 Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Room: BCC 53 Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Ethics: Syllabus and Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to central concepts and issues of Ethics and systems of human values. We will first study concepts such as principle, virtue, balance, utility, drive, and perspective. We will then study issues such as theft, lies, violence, environment, class, gender and race from an individual and social perspective.
Required Texts:
The text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be held on reserve in the BCC Library.
Required Assignments:
- Four In-class Responses 40%
- Midterm Exam 30%
- Final Exam 30%
Class Schedule
Readings (in bold) are to be completed by the class date for discussion
Jan 28 Introduction: What is Ethics?
Feb 4 Morals & Virtue: Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals & Aristotle’s Ethics
Feb 11 Use & Consequence: Mill’s Utilitarianism (1st Response)
Feb 25 Balance: Egyptian Wisdom & Confucius’ Analects
Mar 4 Drive & Desire: Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil
Mar 11 Perspective: Heraclitus’ Fragments & Chuang Tzu (2nd Response)
Mar 18 Midterm Exam
Mar 25 Theft: Zinn’s People’s History of Am. Empire & Andreas’ Addicted to War
Apr 1 Lies: Herman & Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent
Apr 8 Violence: Lt. Col. Grossman’s On Killing
Apr 15 Life & World: Carson’s Silent Spring & BCEP (3rd Response)
Apr 29 Class & Power: Karp’s Indispensable Enemies & essays from RC&G
May 6 Gender & Sex: De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
May 13 Race & Culture: Hannaford’s Race & more essays from RC&G
May 20 Review for Final Exam (4th Response)
May 27 Final Exam (all work must be in by this day)
Student Learning Outcomes:
Information Competency: understand philosophical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: evaluate philosophical concepts and argue for and against viewpoints
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand and appreciate diverse cultures of thought
General Student Requirements
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are listed here. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course. Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). If you miss class, it is strongly advised that you ask a classmate for notes. It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. Please read through the syllabus and plan ahead.
Late assignments will only be excused in cases of well-documented emergencies; in addition, students must have evidence that substantial progress has been made on the assignment before the emergency took place. Otherwise, late assignments will be downgraded a letter grade for each class day they are late. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. Keep back-up copies of your work; never hand in the only copy of your work. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.
Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog. All out-of-class assignments must be word processed or typewritten—more information will be given out later in the semester.
Attendance is mandatory. If you miss more than five classes, you will receive an F in the course. (Note: I do not distinguish between “excused” and “unexcused” absences; if you miss more than five classes, for any reason, you cannot pass the class.) You must be on time and stay the length of class to be given credit for attending.
A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S): DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.
The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.
FRI 9:00 – 11:50 AM Office Hours: Mon 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code 20740 Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Room: BCC 53 Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Ethics: Syllabus and Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to central concepts and issues of Ethics and systems of human values. We will first study concepts such as principle, virtue, balance, utility, drive, and perspective. We will then study issues such as theft, lies, violence, environment, class, gender and race from an individual and social perspective.
Required Texts:
The text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be held on reserve in the BCC Library.
Required Assignments:
- Four In-class Responses 40%
- Midterm Exam 30%
- Final Exam 30%
Class Schedule
Readings (in bold) are to be completed by the class date for discussion
Jan 28 Introduction: What is Ethics?
Feb 4 Morals & Virtue: Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals & Aristotle’s Ethics
Feb 11 Use & Consequence: Mill’s Utilitarianism (1st Response)
Feb 25 Balance: Egyptian Wisdom & Confucius’ Analects
Mar 4 Drive & Desire: Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil
Mar 11 Perspective: Heraclitus’ Fragments & Chuang Tzu (2nd Response)
Mar 18 Midterm Exam
Mar 25 Theft: Zinn’s People’s History of Am. Empire & Andreas’ Addicted to War
Apr 1 Lies: Herman & Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent
Apr 8 Violence: Lt. Col. Grossman’s On Killing
Apr 15 Life & World: Carson’s Silent Spring & BCEP (3rd Response)
Apr 29 Class & Power: Karp’s Indispensable Enemies & essays from RC&G
May 6 Gender & Sex: De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
May 13 Race & Culture: Hannaford’s Race & more essays from RC&G
May 20 Review for Final Exam (4th Response)
May 27 Final Exam (all work must be in by this day)
Student Learning Outcomes:
Information Competency: understand philosophical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: evaluate philosophical concepts and argue for and against viewpoints
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand and appreciate diverse cultures of thought
General Student Requirements
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are listed here. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course. Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). If you miss class, it is strongly advised that you ask a classmate for notes. It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. Please read through the syllabus and plan ahead.
Late assignments will only be excused in cases of well-documented emergencies; in addition, students must have evidence that substantial progress has been made on the assignment before the emergency took place. Otherwise, late assignments will be downgraded a letter grade for each class day they are late. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. Keep back-up copies of your work; never hand in the only copy of your work. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.
Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog. All out-of-class assignments must be word processed or typewritten—more information will be given out later in the semester.
Attendance is mandatory. If you miss more than five classes, you will receive an F in the course. (Note: I do not distinguish between “excused” and “unexcused” absences; if you miss more than five classes, for any reason, you cannot pass the class.) You must be on time and stay the length of class to be given credit for attending.
A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S): DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.
The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.
Intro Philosophy Syllabus & Schedule Spring 2011
PHIL 1 – Intro Philosophy, Spring 2011 Instructor: Eric Gerlach
Thursday 6:30 - 9:20 pm Office Hours: Mondays 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code: 20934 Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Room: BCC 14 Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Introduction to Philosophy Syllabus & Class Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to the history of Philosophy and world thought. We will study ancient Egyptian, Indian, Greek, Chinese and modern European philosophers.
Required Texts:
-The only text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the BCC Library.
Required Assignments:
- Four In-class Responses 40%
- MIDTERM Exam 30%
- FINAL Exam 30%
CLASS SCHEDULE
Jan 27 Introduction: What is Philosophy?
Feb 3 Tribal Shamanism & Ancient Cosmology
Feb 10 Early City State Priests & Egyptian Thought
Feb 17 Indian Thought (1st In-Class Response)
Feb 24 Greek Thought: Heraclitus
Mar 3 Greek Thought: Plato
Mar 10 Chinese Thought: Confucianism
Mar 17 Chinese Thought: Daoism (2nd In-Class Response & Review)
Mar 24 MIDTERM EXAM
Mar 31 Islamic & Medieval European Thought
Apr 7 Descartes & Hume(3rd In-Class Response)
Apr 14 Kant & Hegel
Apr 21 NO CLASS – SPRING BREAK
Apr 28 Schopenhauer & Nietzsche
May 5 Wittgenstein
May 12 Lewis Carroll, Art, Humor(4th In-Class Response & Review)
May 26 FINAL EXAM
Student Learning Outcomes:
Information Competency: understand philosophical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: evaluate philosophical concepts and argue for and against viewpoints
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand and appreciate diverse cultures of thought
General Student Requirements
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are listed here. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course.
Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). If you miss class, it is strongly advised that you ask a classmate for notes. It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. Please read through the syllabus and plan ahead.
Late assignments will only be excused in cases of well-documented emergencies; in addition, students must have evidence that substantial progress has been made on the assignment before the emergency took place. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.
Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog.
Attendance is mandatory. If you miss more than five classes, you will receive an F in the course. (Note: I do not distinguish between “excused” and “unexcused” absences; if you miss more than five classes, for any reason, you cannot pass the class.)
A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S): DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.
The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.
Thursday 6:30 - 9:20 pm Office Hours: Mondays 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code: 20934 Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Room: BCC 14 Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Introduction to Philosophy Syllabus & Class Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to the history of Philosophy and world thought. We will study ancient Egyptian, Indian, Greek, Chinese and modern European philosophers.
Required Texts:
-The only text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the BCC Library.
Required Assignments:
- Four In-class Responses 40%
- MIDTERM Exam 30%
- FINAL Exam 30%
CLASS SCHEDULE
Jan 27 Introduction: What is Philosophy?
Feb 3 Tribal Shamanism & Ancient Cosmology
Feb 10 Early City State Priests & Egyptian Thought
Feb 17 Indian Thought (1st In-Class Response)
Feb 24 Greek Thought: Heraclitus
Mar 3 Greek Thought: Plato
Mar 10 Chinese Thought: Confucianism
Mar 17 Chinese Thought: Daoism (2nd In-Class Response & Review)
Mar 24 MIDTERM EXAM
Mar 31 Islamic & Medieval European Thought
Apr 7 Descartes & Hume(3rd In-Class Response)
Apr 14 Kant & Hegel
Apr 21 NO CLASS – SPRING BREAK
Apr 28 Schopenhauer & Nietzsche
May 5 Wittgenstein
May 12 Lewis Carroll, Art, Humor(4th In-Class Response & Review)
May 26 FINAL EXAM
Student Learning Outcomes:
Information Competency: understand philosophical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: evaluate philosophical concepts and argue for and against viewpoints
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand and appreciate diverse cultures of thought
General Student Requirements
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are listed here. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course.
Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). If you miss class, it is strongly advised that you ask a classmate for notes. It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. Please read through the syllabus and plan ahead.
Late assignments will only be excused in cases of well-documented emergencies; in addition, students must have evidence that substantial progress has been made on the assignment before the emergency took place. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.
Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog.
Attendance is mandatory. If you miss more than five classes, you will receive an F in the course. (Note: I do not distinguish between “excused” and “unexcused” absences; if you miss more than five classes, for any reason, you cannot pass the class.)
A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S): DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.
The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.
Social & Political Philosophy Syllabus & Schedule Spring 2011
PHIL 2 – Soc/Pol Phil, Spring 2011 Instructor: Eric Gerlach
Mon/Wed 9:30-10:45 am Office Hours: Mondays 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code: 24260 Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Room: BCC 52 Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Social & Political Philosophy Syllabus & Class Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to the history of Social and Political Philosophy. We will study ancient and modern thinkers on the subjects of human nature, social class, authority, liberty, capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, post-colonialism, and feminism.
Required Texts:
-The only text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the BCC Library.
Required Assignments:
- Four In-class Responses 40%
- MIDTERM Exam 30%
- FINAL Exam 30%
CLASS SCHEDULE
Jan 24 Introduction to the class
Jan 26 & 31 Early Civilization (Radin, Kramer, Barthes)
Feb 2 & 7 Human Nature (Mencius, Xun Zi, Mo Zi)
Feb 9 & 14 Social Class/Caste (Plato & Aristotle) (1st Response)
Feb 16 & 23 Authority & Sovereignty (Machiavelli & Hobbes)
Feb 28 & Mar 2 Rights & Liberty (Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Thoreau)
Mar 7 & 9 French & US Revolutions (Paine, US Constitution) (2nd Response)
Mar 14 & 16 Capitalism (Smith, Long)
Mar 21 Review for Midterm Exam
Mar 23 MIDTERM EXAM
Mar 28 & 30 Hegel, Opposition & Revolution (Marcuse, McLellan)
Apr 4 & 6 Socialism (Engels, Marcuse)
Apr 11 & 13 Communism (Marx, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mao) (3rd Response)
Apr 18 & 20 NO CLASSES - SPRING BREAK
Apr 25 & 27 Anarchism (Mayer, Chomsky, Foucault)
May 2 & 4 Fascism (Hitler, Heidegger, Sluga)
May 9 & 11 Post-Colonialism (Fanon, Ayers/Dohrn, West, hooks) (4th Response)
May 16 & 18 Feminism (hooks, Humm, Butler)
May 23 Review for Final Exam
May 25 FINAL EXAM (all work must be turned in by this day)
Student Learning Outcomes:
Information Competency: understand philosophical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: evaluate philosophical concepts and argue for and against viewpoints
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand and appreciate diverse cultures of thought
General Student Requirements
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are listed here. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course.
Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). If you miss class, it is strongly advised that you ask a classmate for notes. It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. Please read through the syllabus and plan ahead.
Late assignments will only be excused in cases of well-documented emergencies; in addition, students must have evidence that substantial progress has been made on the assignment before the emergency took place. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.
Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog.
Attendance is mandatory. If you miss more than five classes, you will receive an F in the course. (Note: I do not distinguish between “excused” and “unexcused” absences; if you miss more than five classes, for any reason, you cannot pass the class.)
A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S): DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.
The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.
Mon/Wed 9:30-10:45 am Office Hours: Mondays 11-12 @ K’s Coffee
Class Code: 24260 Email: ericgerlach@gmail.com
Room: BCC 52 Blog: ericgerlach.blogspot.com
Social & Political Philosophy Syllabus & Class Schedule
Course Description
This course introduces students to the history of Social and Political Philosophy. We will study ancient and modern thinkers on the subjects of human nature, social class, authority, liberty, capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, post-colonialism, and feminism.
Required Texts:
-The only text for the class is the Course Reader, available at Lazer Image, 61 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, (510) 644-3339. A copy of the reader will be put on reserve in the BCC Library.
Required Assignments:
- Four In-class Responses 40%
- MIDTERM Exam 30%
- FINAL Exam 30%
CLASS SCHEDULE
Jan 24 Introduction to the class
Jan 26 & 31 Early Civilization (Radin, Kramer, Barthes)
Feb 2 & 7 Human Nature (Mencius, Xun Zi, Mo Zi)
Feb 9 & 14 Social Class/Caste (Plato & Aristotle) (1st Response)
Feb 16 & 23 Authority & Sovereignty (Machiavelli & Hobbes)
Feb 28 & Mar 2 Rights & Liberty (Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Thoreau)
Mar 7 & 9 French & US Revolutions (Paine, US Constitution) (2nd Response)
Mar 14 & 16 Capitalism (Smith, Long)
Mar 21 Review for Midterm Exam
Mar 23 MIDTERM EXAM
Mar 28 & 30 Hegel, Opposition & Revolution (Marcuse, McLellan)
Apr 4 & 6 Socialism (Engels, Marcuse)
Apr 11 & 13 Communism (Marx, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mao) (3rd Response)
Apr 18 & 20 NO CLASSES - SPRING BREAK
Apr 25 & 27 Anarchism (Mayer, Chomsky, Foucault)
May 2 & 4 Fascism (Hitler, Heidegger, Sluga)
May 9 & 11 Post-Colonialism (Fanon, Ayers/Dohrn, West, hooks) (4th Response)
May 16 & 18 Feminism (hooks, Humm, Butler)
May 23 Review for Final Exam
May 25 FINAL EXAM (all work must be turned in by this day)
Student Learning Outcomes:
Information Competency: understand philosophical concepts and systems
Critical Thinking: evaluate philosophical concepts and argue for and against viewpoints
Global Awareness & Valuing Diversity: understand and appreciate diverse cultures of thought
General Student Requirements
Students are expected to come to class prepared to ask questions and participate in discussions. All readings and assignments should be completed by the beginning of class on the day they are listed here. This class is run as a lecture/discussion course.
Students are responsible for all class material (even if they miss class). If you miss class, it is strongly advised that you ask a classmate for notes. It is your responsibility to ask if you missed something; it is not the instructor’s responsibility to remind you. Please read through the syllabus and plan ahead.
Late assignments will only be excused in cases of well-documented emergencies; in addition, students must have evidence that substantial progress has been made on the assignment before the emergency took place. If a student has any extenuating circumstances which may affect full participation in the class, the student must speak to the instructor as far ahead of any due date as possible. All assignments must be completed and all requirements must be met in order to pass the class. You must turn in all assignments (even if they are late) in order to be eligible to receive a “C” grade or higher. There are no exceptions, under any circumstance.
Plagiarism—“[t]o use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source” (MLA Handbook, 5th ed., §1.8)—will not be tolerated. Plagiarists, intentional or inadvertent, will receive a zero on the assignment in question; repeat offenders will get an F for the course and will be subject to college disciplinary action. Students are encouraged to review plagiarism policies in the current Vista College catalog.
Attendance is mandatory. If you miss more than five classes, you will receive an F in the course. (Note: I do not distinguish between “excused” and “unexcused” absences; if you miss more than five classes, for any reason, you cannot pass the class.)
A Note on Disabled Student Program and Services (DSP&S): DSP&S services are provided for any enrolled student who has a verified disability that creates an educational limitation that prevents the student from fully benefiting from classes without additional support services or instruction. Please let the instructor know if you require any support services or would like more information about DSP&S.
The syllabus is subject to change at the discretion of the instructor. Any changes will be announced in class. Additional handouts of required readings may also be added.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Great Moments in Fallacies Fall 2010
Hey everyone,
I have always enjoyed the student answers to the fallacies assignment because they are often brilliant and funny. I have decided to post some of my favorites (the tasteful ones, anyway) on the blog. Each statement is followed by the fallacy type it falls under.
We should all hop on one foot, because the president says so. (Appeal to Authority)
You are a man, so how can you possibly understand feminism? (Personal Attack)
Because we are at war with Japan, all Japanese Americans must be interned in concentration camps. (Fallacy of Division)
Kittens will cry tears of blood if you do not shop at Walmart. (Appeal to Pity)
The biologist says that all trees are evil. (Appeal to Authority)
If hair is made of dead cells, then you are dead! (Fallacy of Composition)
You must agree that you like my art, or I'll cut off my ear! (Appeal to Pity)
There could be anything behind that door, so it could be a wall of snakes! (Appeal to Ignorance)
I have always enjoyed the student answers to the fallacies assignment because they are often brilliant and funny. I have decided to post some of my favorites (the tasteful ones, anyway) on the blog. Each statement is followed by the fallacy type it falls under.
We should all hop on one foot, because the president says so. (Appeal to Authority)
You are a man, so how can you possibly understand feminism? (Personal Attack)
Because we are at war with Japan, all Japanese Americans must be interned in concentration camps. (Fallacy of Division)
Kittens will cry tears of blood if you do not shop at Walmart. (Appeal to Pity)
The biologist says that all trees are evil. (Appeal to Authority)
If hair is made of dead cells, then you are dead! (Fallacy of Composition)
You must agree that you like my art, or I'll cut off my ear! (Appeal to Pity)
There could be anything behind that door, so it could be a wall of snakes! (Appeal to Ignorance)
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Intro Philosophy: Final Review
The Final Exam will cover the material from the second half of the course: Islam, Europe, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. You may use material from Lewis Carroll, Humor or Art for your essay, but they will not be on the test.
The test will be 15 multiple choice questions (2 points each), 3 short answer questions (10 points each) and an essay (40 points). For each short answer you must write a paragraph explaining a key concept we covered. For the essay you must take two of the thinkers we covered and in two to three pages compare them and argue which one (if either) you support. You may use thinkers for the essay that you cover in the short answers, but do not waste space writing explanations of their key concepts twice. If you have another sort of essay you would like to write, please check with me first and I will likely let you write it.
Islam:
Rise of Islam, systems of scholarship, technology, cryptanalysis (pulling out the essential factors), philosophy and science, Avicenna’s Floating Man thought experiment (and Descartes’ Demon), Sufis and the Blind Men & Elephant.
Descartes:
Descartes deceiving demon, proof of self-consciousness, trustworthy God, world and rational facts (2 + 3 = 5), radical dualism of mind and body, intention and mechanics, animals as bodies without minds that cannot think or feel like machines or robots
Hume:
2 types of perceptions: Impressions vs. Ideas, Ideas always come from Impressions, 2 billiard balls and causation as an idea, not an impression, prejudice, assumption, association, and belief (Indian skandas), no ‘true’ facts, just events that are consistent with belief, Induction and Deduction both based on the leap of assumption.
Hegel:
Historical explanation, picture of history (“Orientals”, Greeks, Germans), Master-Slave dialectic and the constant revolution/evolution of history, Dialectic (positive, negative, synthesis as the next positive), Dialectical logic and contradictions as the tensions that structure things and movements, Dogmatism vs. Skepticism in the mind and in history.
Nietzsche:
German pessimism, turn from Reason to Will as central to world, Opposites work together: truth works with false, reason works with emotion, The True is the Beautiful, Truth and Reason are a drive that work to deceive us, Deception and falsehood are necessary to life and creation, Language, Grammar and Logic as deceptive, not trustable, Creative Individuality over all equalizing, Zarathustra as first dualist, thus first to see the whole beyond dualism.
Wittgenstein:
Language Games and Forms of Life (rule structured when things go wrong), Logic lives in the world, not hidden in logical crystal structures within, Against reduction to a single factor (psychoanalysis and reducing a human to ash), Material metaphors for the mental (toolbox, brake lever, train cabin, sign post), The ‘one-thread’ is in fact the chord of many threads together, Meanings and definitions are simply everyday use, not hidden within this.
The test will be 15 multiple choice questions (2 points each), 3 short answer questions (10 points each) and an essay (40 points). For each short answer you must write a paragraph explaining a key concept we covered. For the essay you must take two of the thinkers we covered and in two to three pages compare them and argue which one (if either) you support. You may use thinkers for the essay that you cover in the short answers, but do not waste space writing explanations of their key concepts twice. If you have another sort of essay you would like to write, please check with me first and I will likely let you write it.
Islam:
Rise of Islam, systems of scholarship, technology, cryptanalysis (pulling out the essential factors), philosophy and science, Avicenna’s Floating Man thought experiment (and Descartes’ Demon), Sufis and the Blind Men & Elephant.
Descartes:
Descartes deceiving demon, proof of self-consciousness, trustworthy God, world and rational facts (2 + 3 = 5), radical dualism of mind and body, intention and mechanics, animals as bodies without minds that cannot think or feel like machines or robots
Hume:
2 types of perceptions: Impressions vs. Ideas, Ideas always come from Impressions, 2 billiard balls and causation as an idea, not an impression, prejudice, assumption, association, and belief (Indian skandas), no ‘true’ facts, just events that are consistent with belief, Induction and Deduction both based on the leap of assumption.
Hegel:
Historical explanation, picture of history (“Orientals”, Greeks, Germans), Master-Slave dialectic and the constant revolution/evolution of history, Dialectic (positive, negative, synthesis as the next positive), Dialectical logic and contradictions as the tensions that structure things and movements, Dogmatism vs. Skepticism in the mind and in history.
Nietzsche:
German pessimism, turn from Reason to Will as central to world, Opposites work together: truth works with false, reason works with emotion, The True is the Beautiful, Truth and Reason are a drive that work to deceive us, Deception and falsehood are necessary to life and creation, Language, Grammar and Logic as deceptive, not trustable, Creative Individuality over all equalizing, Zarathustra as first dualist, thus first to see the whole beyond dualism.
Wittgenstein:
Language Games and Forms of Life (rule structured when things go wrong), Logic lives in the world, not hidden in logical crystal structures within, Against reduction to a single factor (psychoanalysis and reducing a human to ash), Material metaphors for the mental (toolbox, brake lever, train cabin, sign post), The ‘one-thread’ is in fact the chord of many threads together, Meanings and definitions are simply everyday use, not hidden within this.
Logic: Final Exam Review
The Final Exam will cover the material we studied for the second half of the course (Islam, Hegel, Modern Logic, Early and Late Wittgenstein, truth tables and fallacies).
There will be 10 multiple choice questions (1 point each) taken from the lectures and 18 short answer questions (5 points each) largely taken from the weekly assignments (primarily the truth tables and fallacies).
Islam:
Islam as a civilization gave European civilization very much (Math, Logic, trade, technologies) but this is quite underappreciated. Cryptography, algebraic code-breaking, is a key culture related to scientific analysis. Avicenna says that universals are mental conceptions and individual beings are primary existents, while Averroes says that universals are the true essences of things and primary over individuals.
Hegel:
Hegel’s major advancement was historical explanation, explaining the structures of things as arising by process over time and not immediately by type. Hegel’s dialectic is a three stage process as positive, negative and synthesis. First, when the individual or history has an idea, there is an initial stage of positing that stands for the idea and completely opposes skepticism. Second, there is the stage of negation, skepticism and doubting the idea that is completely opposed to the first stage. Third and finally, there is a synthesis between the two positions that becomes the positive for the next cycle.
In Hegel’s Logic, he attempts to trace the entire path of consciousness up through modernity.
Russell & Mill:
Like Gautama (Nyaya Sutra), Aristotle and Averroes, Russell says we must use induction to come up with necessary and basic principles from which we can then deduce certain knowledge. Otherwise, we only have mere opinion. With Frege, Russell believed that there was a inner truth structure hidden within grammatical propositions and mathematics that could be brought out by analysis. Russell at first believed Wittgenstein would complete this project for him and give mathematics a fully clarified foundation, but Wittgenstein eventually abandoned the project to become quite like Mill. Mill, the one to whom Russell was most opposed, believed that the meaning of a thing is its use or positioning in situations. A thing does not have an essence besides its use in its situation. Wittgenstein came to embrace this view in his later thought.
Early Wittgenstein and the Tractatus:
Reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world, thus these facts. These facts must be composed of several tautological structures (p, not, and, or) that in themselves say nothing at all. If a statement is meaningful, it must be possible and contingent, but neither certain nor impossible. Logical structures deal with the certain and impossible, but all propositions they construct are contingent on the situation of the world. Wittgenstein introduced Truth Tables in his Tractatus. We use them to demonstrate tautologies or equivalencies between truth value equations.
Late Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations:
In his later thought, Wittgenstein believed that the meaning of a thing consisted in its use in language games or forms of life. He used many thought experiments to demonstrate that meaning is not contained in mental states or in rules of the world exclusively, but rather in the use of the things (involving both the head and the world inseparably). His metaphors include converting someone to ash in an oven, names as signposts and labels, the game of catch that arises between people in a field, rules as controls in a train cabin, and the child at the blackboard (rules leading to an infinite regress). Wittgenstein argued that we should give complex descriptions of things and resist the urge to essentialize things to a single factor or set of rules.
Truth Tables and Tautologies:
For Truth Tables, we assume BOTH the principle of Non Contradiction (p cannot be both true and false), and the principle of the Excluded Middle (p must be either True or False).
If p is true, then it has T as its truth value. If it is false, it has F as its truth value. We first used truth tables to determine the truth values for propositions. We next used truth tables to prove tautologies, equivalent statements that can then be used in substitution for one another. You know you have proved a tautology right when you have all T’s as the result. In addition, you will be asked to prove that certain functions are NOT tautologies, which simply means you should NOT get 4 T’s as the result.
Fallacies:
Appeal to Authority: Ex: ‘The police chief said that those people are evil’.
Ex: ‘If you brush with whatever toothpaste, 9 out of 10 scientists we gathered into a list to look just that way think you are awesome’.
Straw Man: The ‘Straw Man’ refers to setting up a scarecrow as a fake person. One essentializes the opponent’s position in a bad way, setting up their argument or position in a way that makes it easy to knock down. This is one of the most common fallacies that people accuse each other of doing: ‘My opponent is misrepresenting my position on the issues’. If you pull particular details or properties out of an opponent’s argument to knock it down, it can lead to over-essentializing and simplifying the position to the degree that your opponent will claim that you are not adequately representing their position on the issue.
Slippery Slope: One takes a consequence of the opponent’s position and blows it out of proportion. Example: ‘Well, if you legalize drugs people will try them, see there is no consequences, and then everyone will be doing them and civilization will collapse’.
This person took the consequence of some new users and it slides all the way down the slippery slope of over-simplifying judgment to everyone becoming an addict. Another Example: ‘If you want to legalize homosexuality, then you want to legalize all sexual conduct, including pedophilia. Thus you must be evil and wrong.’
Appeal to Emotion: Many types- one for every sort of emotion or desired goal.
Advertising, of course, appeals to desires for success, for happiness, for respect and status, appealing to both the desire for the positive and fear of the negative.
Appeal to Force: Ex: If you don’t believe me, Islamic extremists will eat your baby.
Ex: If you are wrong about this, everything will unravel and society will collapse.
Appeal to Pity: Ex: ‘If we don’t do it like I say, small children will cry’.
Ex: ‘This particular country has been poor for hundreds of years, so we should totally sell them a bunch of weapons to make them feel better about themselves’.
Appeal to Ignorance: There are things about X we don’t know, so we should assume Y.
Ex: Bush head of AAS on global warming as ‘just a theory’
Red Herring: Also ‘Missing the point’, taking the argument after an issue that does not decide the original issue being argued. One type of Red Herring, certainly the most popular is the Personal Attack.
Personal Attack: When one attacks the opponent and not the opponent’s argument. This also applies to attacking the way the opponent always argues but not the argument itself. Ex: ‘You can not believe a word my opponent says, because she/he is a communist/Mormon/atheist/aquatic fowl etc.’
Fallacy of Composition and Fallacy of Division:
Wrongly attributing property of part to whole, and whole to part.
These are interlaced with the fallacies so far.
Ex of Fallacy of Composition: If water is wet, and water is 3/5ths the human, then the human being is essentially wet. If San Francisco and LA are very liberal, then California is very liberal.
Ex of Fallacy of Division: If water is wet, and water is H2O, then Hydrogen must be wet. If California is very liberal, then Fresno must be rocking liberal.
There will be 10 multiple choice questions (1 point each) taken from the lectures and 18 short answer questions (5 points each) largely taken from the weekly assignments (primarily the truth tables and fallacies).
Islam:
Islam as a civilization gave European civilization very much (Math, Logic, trade, technologies) but this is quite underappreciated. Cryptography, algebraic code-breaking, is a key culture related to scientific analysis. Avicenna says that universals are mental conceptions and individual beings are primary existents, while Averroes says that universals are the true essences of things and primary over individuals.
Hegel:
Hegel’s major advancement was historical explanation, explaining the structures of things as arising by process over time and not immediately by type. Hegel’s dialectic is a three stage process as positive, negative and synthesis. First, when the individual or history has an idea, there is an initial stage of positing that stands for the idea and completely opposes skepticism. Second, there is the stage of negation, skepticism and doubting the idea that is completely opposed to the first stage. Third and finally, there is a synthesis between the two positions that becomes the positive for the next cycle.
In Hegel’s Logic, he attempts to trace the entire path of consciousness up through modernity.
Russell & Mill:
Like Gautama (Nyaya Sutra), Aristotle and Averroes, Russell says we must use induction to come up with necessary and basic principles from which we can then deduce certain knowledge. Otherwise, we only have mere opinion. With Frege, Russell believed that there was a inner truth structure hidden within grammatical propositions and mathematics that could be brought out by analysis. Russell at first believed Wittgenstein would complete this project for him and give mathematics a fully clarified foundation, but Wittgenstein eventually abandoned the project to become quite like Mill. Mill, the one to whom Russell was most opposed, believed that the meaning of a thing is its use or positioning in situations. A thing does not have an essence besides its use in its situation. Wittgenstein came to embrace this view in his later thought.
Early Wittgenstein and the Tractatus:
Reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world, thus these facts. These facts must be composed of several tautological structures (p, not, and, or) that in themselves say nothing at all. If a statement is meaningful, it must be possible and contingent, but neither certain nor impossible. Logical structures deal with the certain and impossible, but all propositions they construct are contingent on the situation of the world. Wittgenstein introduced Truth Tables in his Tractatus. We use them to demonstrate tautologies or equivalencies between truth value equations.
Late Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations:
In his later thought, Wittgenstein believed that the meaning of a thing consisted in its use in language games or forms of life. He used many thought experiments to demonstrate that meaning is not contained in mental states or in rules of the world exclusively, but rather in the use of the things (involving both the head and the world inseparably). His metaphors include converting someone to ash in an oven, names as signposts and labels, the game of catch that arises between people in a field, rules as controls in a train cabin, and the child at the blackboard (rules leading to an infinite regress). Wittgenstein argued that we should give complex descriptions of things and resist the urge to essentialize things to a single factor or set of rules.
Truth Tables and Tautologies:
For Truth Tables, we assume BOTH the principle of Non Contradiction (p cannot be both true and false), and the principle of the Excluded Middle (p must be either True or False).
If p is true, then it has T as its truth value. If it is false, it has F as its truth value. We first used truth tables to determine the truth values for propositions. We next used truth tables to prove tautologies, equivalent statements that can then be used in substitution for one another. You know you have proved a tautology right when you have all T’s as the result. In addition, you will be asked to prove that certain functions are NOT tautologies, which simply means you should NOT get 4 T’s as the result.
Fallacies:
Appeal to Authority: Ex: ‘The police chief said that those people are evil’.
Ex: ‘If you brush with whatever toothpaste, 9 out of 10 scientists we gathered into a list to look just that way think you are awesome’.
Straw Man: The ‘Straw Man’ refers to setting up a scarecrow as a fake person. One essentializes the opponent’s position in a bad way, setting up their argument or position in a way that makes it easy to knock down. This is one of the most common fallacies that people accuse each other of doing: ‘My opponent is misrepresenting my position on the issues’. If you pull particular details or properties out of an opponent’s argument to knock it down, it can lead to over-essentializing and simplifying the position to the degree that your opponent will claim that you are not adequately representing their position on the issue.
Slippery Slope: One takes a consequence of the opponent’s position and blows it out of proportion. Example: ‘Well, if you legalize drugs people will try them, see there is no consequences, and then everyone will be doing them and civilization will collapse’.
This person took the consequence of some new users and it slides all the way down the slippery slope of over-simplifying judgment to everyone becoming an addict. Another Example: ‘If you want to legalize homosexuality, then you want to legalize all sexual conduct, including pedophilia. Thus you must be evil and wrong.’
Appeal to Emotion: Many types- one for every sort of emotion or desired goal.
Advertising, of course, appeals to desires for success, for happiness, for respect and status, appealing to both the desire for the positive and fear of the negative.
Appeal to Force: Ex: If you don’t believe me, Islamic extremists will eat your baby.
Ex: If you are wrong about this, everything will unravel and society will collapse.
Appeal to Pity: Ex: ‘If we don’t do it like I say, small children will cry’.
Ex: ‘This particular country has been poor for hundreds of years, so we should totally sell them a bunch of weapons to make them feel better about themselves’.
Appeal to Ignorance: There are things about X we don’t know, so we should assume Y.
Ex: Bush head of AAS on global warming as ‘just a theory’
Red Herring: Also ‘Missing the point’, taking the argument after an issue that does not decide the original issue being argued. One type of Red Herring, certainly the most popular is the Personal Attack.
Personal Attack: When one attacks the opponent and not the opponent’s argument. This also applies to attacking the way the opponent always argues but not the argument itself. Ex: ‘You can not believe a word my opponent says, because she/he is a communist/Mormon/atheist/aquatic fowl etc.’
Fallacy of Composition and Fallacy of Division:
Wrongly attributing property of part to whole, and whole to part.
These are interlaced with the fallacies so far.
Ex of Fallacy of Composition: If water is wet, and water is 3/5ths the human, then the human being is essentially wet. If San Francisco and LA are very liberal, then California is very liberal.
Ex of Fallacy of Division: If water is wet, and water is H2O, then Hydrogen must be wet. If California is very liberal, then Fresno must be rocking liberal.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Ethics: Review for the Final Exam
The Final Exam will consist of 20 Multiple Choice questions (2 points each) and 2 Short Essays (30 points each) at least two pages each in length. The Multiple Choice questions will cover points in the lectures and readings. The Short Essays are personal responses to and comparisons of the concepts that demonstrate your own thinking. The essay topics are listed at the end of this review. If you wish to write another sort of essay, please tell me and I will likely let you write it.
Theft, Possession & Zinn
We can see that the ape can come to possess as ‘mine not yours’, and come to forget this possessing (‘neither mine nor yours’). Today, we use Chinese style paper bank notes, backed by the government, just like in China after 500 CE or so. The culture which includes the device of money has advantages over the culture of mere barter. Money as a device is very simple, simple the ways that numbers are simple for much the same purpose. Money is good (and bad) because it is very easy to gather/amass and divide/distribute, much more than any other object or substance. There are, however, two great disadvantages to the culture of money use: First, theft, like trade, becomes easier! Second, the desire for money becomes quite intense.
The Ethical question we must ask is: Is theft ever justified? We can use our Ethical concepts we have studied to give various answers to this question. Kant, of course, would say NEVER. According to the concept of virtue, theft is fully justified as long as the individual is virtuous or becomes virtuous through the act of theft. In a very similar way, Utilitarians and Consequentialists would argue that theft is justified if in the long term it results in good and justice, much happiness and prevention of harm (like Robin Hood). The concept of balance draws our attention not only to the duality of stealing and not stealing but also to the duality of possessing and forgetting about possession, grasping and letting go. If one stores up wealth, one brings theft to one’s doorstep. Is it in one’s self interest to steal from everyone? Not if everyone has large sticks and helmets haven’t been invented yet. We watched the first half of the corporation in class, showing us that the corporation is an “externalizing machine” which puts the stock price before all else, and that this device has allowed America to become very rich but at great social costs.
Lies, Propaganda & Chomsky
Individuals and groups manipulate the truth to serve their own ends, in a conscious/unconscious way that often resembles denial. We focused on the historical background of American propaganda and censorship. Recalling the story of the baboon giving the false leopard call, apes have been seen lying to their fellow apes. The Assyrians were masters of propaganda, using the OLD propaganda model: “This is the king/state, we know best”. We have failed to have a real discussion about censorship and bias in America. This means ‘THEY’ are simply biased and put forth propaganda, and WE would never do something like that. This is not only the basic human frame as before, but Americans and British got set in this in a particular way through WWI and II. In WWI, Propaganda is something the Germans do, not the Belgians, British or Americans. In WWII, the Germans and Japanese do propaganda, and in the cold war the Russians. The British and Americans, however, would never do ‘propaganda’ by name, as they are the champions of liberty, democracy and freedom from tyranny (even as Britain and then America plundered and sought empire in the same way that the Germans, Russians did). We do ‘education’, ‘information’, ‘public relations’, ‘human relations’, and in time of war we may engage in psychological warfare, but we never do ‘propaganda’. Bernays invented the committee of Doctors who tell you to eat eggs and bacon for a ‘hearty’ breakfast, saying old way is ‘Eat Bacon!’, new way: ‘Drs say, ‘Eat bacon’’. This is ‘free expert’ style of British/American propaganda.
Post WWII, the French and Russians had largely convinced everyone that America has no culture, only cheap commercialism, and America talks a lot about Freedom, but look at how they treat black people. The US wanted to fight the ‘French Flu’ and push European intellectuals away from Marxism as liberation towards free market capitalism as liberation. Both US and Soviets fought over who liberates and who oppresses. In 1956, the ‘Melting Pot’ became a slogan for the US. In films, token black people began appearing well before the civil rights movement. Documents of agents who worked with studios on scripts say, ‘took out a drunk, added a black person’.
Violence, War & Grossman
Violence, like sex, was a part of life since childhood in the beginning. As Grossman says, in Victorian England sex became something shameful and best kept out of sight, and similarly with the butcher and refrigeration violence became something out of sight. Consider David Foster Wallace’s FX Porn article about T2 and Jurassic park. Sex and killing are specialized spectacles, quite unrealistic and pieced together with bad dialogue. We all have violent thoughts, but very few humans will be violent, no matter what culture or ethnicity or gender. Normally, there is a safety catch in the human mind that prevents us from being violent. However, in certain situations with particular factors, most everyone becomes capable of violence. 2% of the population have an aggressive personality, potentially psychosis (these individuals are often, Grossman says, drafted into the hardcore units, the marine spearhead squads dropped behind enemy lines or the frontal advance groups). American media is quite gifted with the myth of the easy kill, for both the hero and villain. What this myth conceals: there are far greater chance of being a psychological casualty of conflict then there are of being killed or wounded. What factors increase or decrease the justification and the enabling of violence? Absolution by Distance, Absolution by Authority, and Group Absolution. Both soldiers and gang members find themselves having nightmares where those who have been killed come back to haunt them and ask why. It is as if killing a being does not kill the presence, that the negated presence comes back. This is likely why people believed in evil ghosts for so long across all cultures. Stages of Killing: Combat High, Remorse, Rationalization (wrestling with the contradiction of positive/negative, self/other).
Environment, Consumption & Carson
We have done so well as a species that we have become quite unbalanced with nature. While many cultures have spoken of being in balance (Egyptian Wisdom for instance), it was only with the growth of mechanization and technology that Islamic scholars first wrote consciously of the impact that humans had systematically on the environment. As we see in The Corporation, in the 1940s and 1950s, just as US became the wealthiest nation, petroleum products were used to make huge varieties of products. Wood and metal gave way to plastic. What has happened: we are in a culture that can give us immediate things according to our intentions, but such that we ignore the long and complicated process of nature. Nature can sift things out, but not as fast as we can synthesize just what we want while externalizing the unneeded and then ignoring it until it snowballs up into our face. Cancer rates, birth defect rates, and other problems are evidence of the environmental impact. Wilderness: Does one consider best use in the long term to be using everything, or do we leave things unused for long term. Sustainability: Nature and economy must both be preserved, or both will collapse. Environmental Justice: Who gets benefits and who gets harm of processes in the culture? One fifth of world consumes four fifths of resources.
Class, Power & Karp
Class is a very important issue for Americans today. From propaganda week, we know that A, we are systematically taught that ‘there is no class in America because it is a freedom place’, and B, ‘class is something that OTHER cultures are brutal with, but we are free of that problem’. This was what we said about the Soviets, and they said about us. There are two types of class status, ascribed (born with it) and achieved (gained in time). The common indicators of ascribed class status are ethnicity (race and tribe), family (royal lineage), gender (male, female or other), and culture (religion, language). The common indicators of achieved class status are position (job or role in society), wealth (property which includes money), ability (skills, education and experience), and fame (honor, success, celebrity). The two positions are privileged on the top and marginalized on the bottom. On top in society are those who have enough that if they hold on to it they do not need to work. On the bottom are those who have so little that if they do not work then they have nothing at all. In the middle are those who are using all sorts of strategies to get employed and gain property. In America today, in spite of ditching the British noble heraldry, the top 1% are ‘super-rich’ upper class (who earn over $350,000 a year or get that in returns on investments), the next 5% are ‘rich’ upper class (over $100,000 a year), the 44% are middle class (over $40,000), and the remaining 50% are ‘working-class’ and lower class (under $40,000). This means that the lowest upper class members earn just under 9 times what the lowest middle class members earn.
In the first short article I gave you from the Race, Class & Gender reader, Class & Inequality, Sklar puts together interesting statistics on wealth and poverty in America. All gains in household income since 1975 essentially went to the top 20%. Since 2000, the US has gained 76 billionaires (putting the number at 374) and 5 million additional people below the poverty line (to make 37 million, the population of the East Coast). Our infant mortality rates, especially for inner city impoverished people, rival rates in Malaysia and India.
In the second article, Media Magic, Mantsios argues that the media (TV and movies in particular) make class disappear from America. Poverty is increasing at twice the population growth rate, yet less than 1 in 500 articles in the NY Times is on poverty (and ask Chomsky, they set the nations news). Welfare cheats and aggressive pan handlers take up a sizable portion of the space given to the impoverished in print.
In Indispensable Enemies Karp starts by noting that in American politics there is always a powerful ‘other’ to blame for not getting what one’s group wants, but no group seems to be able to get what it wants for itself. Karp argues that the basic assumption that parties are trying to win elections needs to be questioned. We need to rather ask what the two parties have done in the last 150 years (the time in which America has risen to be the wealthiest nation). When you look at it this way, we see that the two parties have controlled 50% of the country split down the middle since the civil war polarized the country. A landslide in American elections is 60-40, and neither party seems to push lasting popular legislation. Most states stay blue or red for decades, if they ever change at all. This means that, through all of the changes that Zinn, Grossman, Chomsky, Carson and the Corporation have been talking about, the two political parties have remained exactly the same. Karp argues that, when we realize that the two parties are trying to maintain control over their 50%, we can see many things. This is the thesis of the book. We can see that anyone too left or right of center is sabotaged by the party. A party would rather see the other side win a district for a while then see someone who is intent on pushing forward real change. You must prove your loyalty and centrality to be big and get elected. If you show any independence or disloyalty the party will kill your campaign with the help of the other party and wait for the next election, concentrating on keeping a tight and simple lock on the 50%, not on pushing forward a program. Thus Karp charges that we have one party, with two wings, not two parties at all. The upper class pay and play for both sides and further the interests of American power (which is held in particular American hands). The common people are set against each other and told that because the other side is as free as they are nothing can get done. In other words, it is all a game of good cop, bad cop, similar also to Operation Margerine.
Sexism, Gender & De Beauvoir
Distinction of overt vs. covert prejudice: explicit vs. hidden.
The myth is that women are docile, non-violent, unconfident, incompetent, and emotional. Women are capable of violence and even rape, though our society does not recognize this yet. Women are not unconfident or emotional compared to men. There are two dynamics of psychology in which women differ from men. First, men tend to seek power through NOT being social, isolating themselves and their opinions, whereas women tend to seek power through BEING social, interacting with others. Second, in sexuality, men like to watch women and women like to be watched, as one author has said, to watch themselves being watched. In apes and the most ancient nomadic and tribal societies, there is evidence that women often had status and leadership positions. As people began to collect into city states, we can see patriarchy increase. When we look at the cultures of the world and their historical development, we can see that all cultures have taken part in a similar oppression of women, but at the same time women have had increasing power in society and new movements have to appeal to women to take off. Women are 51% of the population (technically the MAJORITY of the population), do 66% of the work, get 10% of the income, and worldwide own 1% of the property. Thus, sexism (overt AND covert) is quite alive, in spite of counter claims.
Feminism is the movement in reaction to sexism and prejudice against women. The basic idea is that women should have the same status as men in society, or “women are people too”. The first wave was the women’s suffrage movement of the 1920s in America and Britain. The second wave was the civil rights movement, the late 60s and early 70s which is also called the women’s liberation movement or ‘women’s lib’. Simone De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in France in 1953, arguing that women had been marginalized as ‘The OTHER’ by men using Hegel’s idea of the master-slave dialectic. The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan was another big book of the time (much more published in America than Marxist De Beauvoir’s), arguing that women were not feeling fulfilled as homemakers and mothers, and they needed an identity for themselves as individuals beyond the identity of the family. The third wave was after the 80s backlash against the 60s progressive movements that began in the early 90s and continues today. The third wave tried to not only pay attention to black women, Latina women, third world women, but also to break down the idea of women as essentially different from men but equal. The two big issues, which are still being fought out today, are 1) Is gender a subjective construct (in the mind) or social reality (in the world)? And 2) Did feminism accomplish what it set out to achieve, or did it in part hurt its own efforts in telling women that sex makes them oppressed? (anti-pornography feminism vs. ‘pro-sex’ feminism)
Racism, Ethnicity & Hannaford
If you are marginalized and you point out covert racism, you are often accused of overt racism by privileged people. Great evidence against Racism: Piaget’s studies of Child development stages, and African kids using laptops experiment and the surprise that there is no lag time compared to Western kids. Race seems obvious today, a ‘fact’ of biology. There seem to be distinct ethnic groups that are easily divisible into recognizable races. Hannaford argues that in fact racism rose with science and modernity in the rise of Europe since the 1600s. There was, of course, always ethnocentrism (my tribe is familiar, your tribe over the hill is scary) that correspond to self-centered thinking on an individual level, but ‘black’ and ‘white’ people did not always exist. ‘Race’ comes into European languages by the 1500s. In English, ‘ras’ meant a course or current. The word did not mean a fully separate category of people until after 1700, as Europeans got wealthy beyond everyone and very successful with sciences (phrenology in India example). Today, however, research on genetics shows that there is no definable or divisible races that can be fully separated. Rather, there is a tangle of genetic material that is mostly common to a people.
ESSAY TOPICS:
The short essays are personal responses to and comparisons of the concepts that demonstrate your own thinking. Make sure to write clearly, stick to the subject and use examples from the lectures and readings or your own to support your point. For each of the two essays, write a two page reflection on a topic of your choice. If you prefer, you can select a topic from the options below, but you are also welcome to write on any matter that interests you as long as you focus on the issue, argue well and use good examples. When you are done, it is a good idea to go back over your answer to make sure you have answered the question.
Option 1: What is the ethical conception you think best prevents theft, and why?
Option 2: Must all societies lie? Is the American and British style of propaganda better or worse than the older methods of the past?
Option 3: Are Grossman’s findings on human violence comforting or disturbing? Why?
Option 4: How is environmental sustainability possible in the shadow of the corporation?
Option 5: Karp argues that American two party politics is a deceptive device.
Does he make a good case?
Option 6: Is covert prejudice more or less difficult to fight than overt prejudice?
Option 7: Against some ‘second wave’ feminists, third wave ‘pro-sex’ feminists say that women can be sexy without helping to oppress themselves. What is your thinking?
Option 8: Is racism a permanent condition, or can it be dismantled? How?
Theft, Possession & Zinn
We can see that the ape can come to possess as ‘mine not yours’, and come to forget this possessing (‘neither mine nor yours’). Today, we use Chinese style paper bank notes, backed by the government, just like in China after 500 CE or so. The culture which includes the device of money has advantages over the culture of mere barter. Money as a device is very simple, simple the ways that numbers are simple for much the same purpose. Money is good (and bad) because it is very easy to gather/amass and divide/distribute, much more than any other object or substance. There are, however, two great disadvantages to the culture of money use: First, theft, like trade, becomes easier! Second, the desire for money becomes quite intense.
The Ethical question we must ask is: Is theft ever justified? We can use our Ethical concepts we have studied to give various answers to this question. Kant, of course, would say NEVER. According to the concept of virtue, theft is fully justified as long as the individual is virtuous or becomes virtuous through the act of theft. In a very similar way, Utilitarians and Consequentialists would argue that theft is justified if in the long term it results in good and justice, much happiness and prevention of harm (like Robin Hood). The concept of balance draws our attention not only to the duality of stealing and not stealing but also to the duality of possessing and forgetting about possession, grasping and letting go. If one stores up wealth, one brings theft to one’s doorstep. Is it in one’s self interest to steal from everyone? Not if everyone has large sticks and helmets haven’t been invented yet. We watched the first half of the corporation in class, showing us that the corporation is an “externalizing machine” which puts the stock price before all else, and that this device has allowed America to become very rich but at great social costs.
Lies, Propaganda & Chomsky
Individuals and groups manipulate the truth to serve their own ends, in a conscious/unconscious way that often resembles denial. We focused on the historical background of American propaganda and censorship. Recalling the story of the baboon giving the false leopard call, apes have been seen lying to their fellow apes. The Assyrians were masters of propaganda, using the OLD propaganda model: “This is the king/state, we know best”. We have failed to have a real discussion about censorship and bias in America. This means ‘THEY’ are simply biased and put forth propaganda, and WE would never do something like that. This is not only the basic human frame as before, but Americans and British got set in this in a particular way through WWI and II. In WWI, Propaganda is something the Germans do, not the Belgians, British or Americans. In WWII, the Germans and Japanese do propaganda, and in the cold war the Russians. The British and Americans, however, would never do ‘propaganda’ by name, as they are the champions of liberty, democracy and freedom from tyranny (even as Britain and then America plundered and sought empire in the same way that the Germans, Russians did). We do ‘education’, ‘information’, ‘public relations’, ‘human relations’, and in time of war we may engage in psychological warfare, but we never do ‘propaganda’. Bernays invented the committee of Doctors who tell you to eat eggs and bacon for a ‘hearty’ breakfast, saying old way is ‘Eat Bacon!’, new way: ‘Drs say, ‘Eat bacon’’. This is ‘free expert’ style of British/American propaganda.
Post WWII, the French and Russians had largely convinced everyone that America has no culture, only cheap commercialism, and America talks a lot about Freedom, but look at how they treat black people. The US wanted to fight the ‘French Flu’ and push European intellectuals away from Marxism as liberation towards free market capitalism as liberation. Both US and Soviets fought over who liberates and who oppresses. In 1956, the ‘Melting Pot’ became a slogan for the US. In films, token black people began appearing well before the civil rights movement. Documents of agents who worked with studios on scripts say, ‘took out a drunk, added a black person’.
Violence, War & Grossman
Violence, like sex, was a part of life since childhood in the beginning. As Grossman says, in Victorian England sex became something shameful and best kept out of sight, and similarly with the butcher and refrigeration violence became something out of sight. Consider David Foster Wallace’s FX Porn article about T2 and Jurassic park. Sex and killing are specialized spectacles, quite unrealistic and pieced together with bad dialogue. We all have violent thoughts, but very few humans will be violent, no matter what culture or ethnicity or gender. Normally, there is a safety catch in the human mind that prevents us from being violent. However, in certain situations with particular factors, most everyone becomes capable of violence. 2% of the population have an aggressive personality, potentially psychosis (these individuals are often, Grossman says, drafted into the hardcore units, the marine spearhead squads dropped behind enemy lines or the frontal advance groups). American media is quite gifted with the myth of the easy kill, for both the hero and villain. What this myth conceals: there are far greater chance of being a psychological casualty of conflict then there are of being killed or wounded. What factors increase or decrease the justification and the enabling of violence? Absolution by Distance, Absolution by Authority, and Group Absolution. Both soldiers and gang members find themselves having nightmares where those who have been killed come back to haunt them and ask why. It is as if killing a being does not kill the presence, that the negated presence comes back. This is likely why people believed in evil ghosts for so long across all cultures. Stages of Killing: Combat High, Remorse, Rationalization (wrestling with the contradiction of positive/negative, self/other).
Environment, Consumption & Carson
We have done so well as a species that we have become quite unbalanced with nature. While many cultures have spoken of being in balance (Egyptian Wisdom for instance), it was only with the growth of mechanization and technology that Islamic scholars first wrote consciously of the impact that humans had systematically on the environment. As we see in The Corporation, in the 1940s and 1950s, just as US became the wealthiest nation, petroleum products were used to make huge varieties of products. Wood and metal gave way to plastic. What has happened: we are in a culture that can give us immediate things according to our intentions, but such that we ignore the long and complicated process of nature. Nature can sift things out, but not as fast as we can synthesize just what we want while externalizing the unneeded and then ignoring it until it snowballs up into our face. Cancer rates, birth defect rates, and other problems are evidence of the environmental impact. Wilderness: Does one consider best use in the long term to be using everything, or do we leave things unused for long term. Sustainability: Nature and economy must both be preserved, or both will collapse. Environmental Justice: Who gets benefits and who gets harm of processes in the culture? One fifth of world consumes four fifths of resources.
Class, Power & Karp
Class is a very important issue for Americans today. From propaganda week, we know that A, we are systematically taught that ‘there is no class in America because it is a freedom place’, and B, ‘class is something that OTHER cultures are brutal with, but we are free of that problem’. This was what we said about the Soviets, and they said about us. There are two types of class status, ascribed (born with it) and achieved (gained in time). The common indicators of ascribed class status are ethnicity (race and tribe), family (royal lineage), gender (male, female or other), and culture (religion, language). The common indicators of achieved class status are position (job or role in society), wealth (property which includes money), ability (skills, education and experience), and fame (honor, success, celebrity). The two positions are privileged on the top and marginalized on the bottom. On top in society are those who have enough that if they hold on to it they do not need to work. On the bottom are those who have so little that if they do not work then they have nothing at all. In the middle are those who are using all sorts of strategies to get employed and gain property. In America today, in spite of ditching the British noble heraldry, the top 1% are ‘super-rich’ upper class (who earn over $350,000 a year or get that in returns on investments), the next 5% are ‘rich’ upper class (over $100,000 a year), the 44% are middle class (over $40,000), and the remaining 50% are ‘working-class’ and lower class (under $40,000). This means that the lowest upper class members earn just under 9 times what the lowest middle class members earn.
In the first short article I gave you from the Race, Class & Gender reader, Class & Inequality, Sklar puts together interesting statistics on wealth and poverty in America. All gains in household income since 1975 essentially went to the top 20%. Since 2000, the US has gained 76 billionaires (putting the number at 374) and 5 million additional people below the poverty line (to make 37 million, the population of the East Coast). Our infant mortality rates, especially for inner city impoverished people, rival rates in Malaysia and India.
In the second article, Media Magic, Mantsios argues that the media (TV and movies in particular) make class disappear from America. Poverty is increasing at twice the population growth rate, yet less than 1 in 500 articles in the NY Times is on poverty (and ask Chomsky, they set the nations news). Welfare cheats and aggressive pan handlers take up a sizable portion of the space given to the impoverished in print.
In Indispensable Enemies Karp starts by noting that in American politics there is always a powerful ‘other’ to blame for not getting what one’s group wants, but no group seems to be able to get what it wants for itself. Karp argues that the basic assumption that parties are trying to win elections needs to be questioned. We need to rather ask what the two parties have done in the last 150 years (the time in which America has risen to be the wealthiest nation). When you look at it this way, we see that the two parties have controlled 50% of the country split down the middle since the civil war polarized the country. A landslide in American elections is 60-40, and neither party seems to push lasting popular legislation. Most states stay blue or red for decades, if they ever change at all. This means that, through all of the changes that Zinn, Grossman, Chomsky, Carson and the Corporation have been talking about, the two political parties have remained exactly the same. Karp argues that, when we realize that the two parties are trying to maintain control over their 50%, we can see many things. This is the thesis of the book. We can see that anyone too left or right of center is sabotaged by the party. A party would rather see the other side win a district for a while then see someone who is intent on pushing forward real change. You must prove your loyalty and centrality to be big and get elected. If you show any independence or disloyalty the party will kill your campaign with the help of the other party and wait for the next election, concentrating on keeping a tight and simple lock on the 50%, not on pushing forward a program. Thus Karp charges that we have one party, with two wings, not two parties at all. The upper class pay and play for both sides and further the interests of American power (which is held in particular American hands). The common people are set against each other and told that because the other side is as free as they are nothing can get done. In other words, it is all a game of good cop, bad cop, similar also to Operation Margerine.
Sexism, Gender & De Beauvoir
Distinction of overt vs. covert prejudice: explicit vs. hidden.
The myth is that women are docile, non-violent, unconfident, incompetent, and emotional. Women are capable of violence and even rape, though our society does not recognize this yet. Women are not unconfident or emotional compared to men. There are two dynamics of psychology in which women differ from men. First, men tend to seek power through NOT being social, isolating themselves and their opinions, whereas women tend to seek power through BEING social, interacting with others. Second, in sexuality, men like to watch women and women like to be watched, as one author has said, to watch themselves being watched. In apes and the most ancient nomadic and tribal societies, there is evidence that women often had status and leadership positions. As people began to collect into city states, we can see patriarchy increase. When we look at the cultures of the world and their historical development, we can see that all cultures have taken part in a similar oppression of women, but at the same time women have had increasing power in society and new movements have to appeal to women to take off. Women are 51% of the population (technically the MAJORITY of the population), do 66% of the work, get 10% of the income, and worldwide own 1% of the property. Thus, sexism (overt AND covert) is quite alive, in spite of counter claims.
Feminism is the movement in reaction to sexism and prejudice against women. The basic idea is that women should have the same status as men in society, or “women are people too”. The first wave was the women’s suffrage movement of the 1920s in America and Britain. The second wave was the civil rights movement, the late 60s and early 70s which is also called the women’s liberation movement or ‘women’s lib’. Simone De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in France in 1953, arguing that women had been marginalized as ‘The OTHER’ by men using Hegel’s idea of the master-slave dialectic. The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan was another big book of the time (much more published in America than Marxist De Beauvoir’s), arguing that women were not feeling fulfilled as homemakers and mothers, and they needed an identity for themselves as individuals beyond the identity of the family. The third wave was after the 80s backlash against the 60s progressive movements that began in the early 90s and continues today. The third wave tried to not only pay attention to black women, Latina women, third world women, but also to break down the idea of women as essentially different from men but equal. The two big issues, which are still being fought out today, are 1) Is gender a subjective construct (in the mind) or social reality (in the world)? And 2) Did feminism accomplish what it set out to achieve, or did it in part hurt its own efforts in telling women that sex makes them oppressed? (anti-pornography feminism vs. ‘pro-sex’ feminism)
Racism, Ethnicity & Hannaford
If you are marginalized and you point out covert racism, you are often accused of overt racism by privileged people. Great evidence against Racism: Piaget’s studies of Child development stages, and African kids using laptops experiment and the surprise that there is no lag time compared to Western kids. Race seems obvious today, a ‘fact’ of biology. There seem to be distinct ethnic groups that are easily divisible into recognizable races. Hannaford argues that in fact racism rose with science and modernity in the rise of Europe since the 1600s. There was, of course, always ethnocentrism (my tribe is familiar, your tribe over the hill is scary) that correspond to self-centered thinking on an individual level, but ‘black’ and ‘white’ people did not always exist. ‘Race’ comes into European languages by the 1500s. In English, ‘ras’ meant a course or current. The word did not mean a fully separate category of people until after 1700, as Europeans got wealthy beyond everyone and very successful with sciences (phrenology in India example). Today, however, research on genetics shows that there is no definable or divisible races that can be fully separated. Rather, there is a tangle of genetic material that is mostly common to a people.
ESSAY TOPICS:
The short essays are personal responses to and comparisons of the concepts that demonstrate your own thinking. Make sure to write clearly, stick to the subject and use examples from the lectures and readings or your own to support your point. For each of the two essays, write a two page reflection on a topic of your choice. If you prefer, you can select a topic from the options below, but you are also welcome to write on any matter that interests you as long as you focus on the issue, argue well and use good examples. When you are done, it is a good idea to go back over your answer to make sure you have answered the question.
Option 1: What is the ethical conception you think best prevents theft, and why?
Option 2: Must all societies lie? Is the American and British style of propaganda better or worse than the older methods of the past?
Option 3: Are Grossman’s findings on human violence comforting or disturbing? Why?
Option 4: How is environmental sustainability possible in the shadow of the corporation?
Option 5: Karp argues that American two party politics is a deceptive device.
Does he make a good case?
Option 6: Is covert prejudice more or less difficult to fight than overt prejudice?
Option 7: Against some ‘second wave’ feminists, third wave ‘pro-sex’ feminists say that women can be sexy without helping to oppress themselves. What is your thinking?
Option 8: Is racism a permanent condition, or can it be dismantled? How?
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