For we are all insulted by
The mere suggestion that we die
Each moment and that each great I
Is but a process in a process
Within a field that never closes…
The wisdom part consists of the recognition that everything is impermanent (annica), that I am among the impermanent things (anatman or no-self; annata, Pali), that everything that happens is caused to happen by prior events and processes and will yield other events and processes (dependent origination), and that if you try to find where things bottom out, you will be led, Zen-like, to find that they don’t bottom out, analytic deconstruction never comes to an end (sunyata, emptiness). Buddhist wisdom says that everything is becoming. What there is, and all there is, are events and processes. Things and substances insofar as they exist at all are simply slow-moving events and processes. Compare: many scientists think that glass is a slow-moving liquid.
As you’ve no doubt noticed, the telling reference to liquid betrays the panta rheist origins of this so-called Buddhist wisdom. You see this a lot in other derivative philosophies as well.
At the same time, however, it was perfectly clear that Nietzsche looked to art, religion and philosophy — and not to race — to elevate man above the beasts, and some men above the mass of mankind.
Though Nietzsche may shock us with his elitist and warrior language, the Übermenschen near to his heart are his aesthetic comrades, “philosophers, saints, and artists.” The unspoken but always present thesis is this: It is in the romantic practice of artistic creativity that modern excellence can be achieved and in an exquisite sense of personal taste and experience that it is realized.
A profound contradiction, of which he was well aware, informs Leopardi’s philosophy. Although he saw in the will-to-truth the primary cause of the nihilism that he believed was drawing modern civilisation into its vortex, Leopardi fully embraced reason, logic, science and this will-to-truth. He followed the truth wherever it led him, refusing to shy away from its conclusions or to seek refuge in mystifications and self-deceiving consolations.
Leopardi’s open-eyed, disabused thinking led him ultimately to a monistic view of reality. All that exists is matter, he concluded, and whatever the tradition calls mind, soul or spirit is only in effect matter. Yet Leopardi’s concept of matter was so original, heterogeneous and self-expansive as to have little in common with the inert matter of the dualists who believe that mind is one thing, matter another. Late in the Zibaldone he declares that everything points to the conclusion “that matter can think, that matter thinks and feels”. Like many of the other thoughts that make the Zibaldone an ongoing conversation with the future, Leopardi’s inspirited concept of matter is one that calls on us to take it up and give it new life in our own time.
I’d never heard of Leopardi before reading this fascinating review, and while I hate to think of having missed out on something I might have enjoyed, there’s also a childlike delight to be had in the continued existence of hidden surprises. How many similar intellectual companions do I have yet to encounter?
We learn about it from Plutarch, who tells us that Epicurus was famous for the maxim “live unnoticed”…To “live unnoticed” means to live a completely private life, with no involvement, beyond what might be obligatory for all citizens, in the public life of one’s community or country, and also with no ambitions for making a mark in any other public realm — in any of the arts or professions, for example.
…It seems obvious that the more exposed one’s life is to the attentions of the public, and, in general, to those of any wide circle of nonintimates, the more one risks one runs of potential harmful interference from them. The general run of people are more inclined to envy and ingratitude than honoring honest good service, or simply reciprocating favors…
Thus for Epicurus the default position is to live a life of devotion to one’s private affairs, letting public and political interests take care of themselves, or rather letting them get taken care of by those foolish enough to go in for such things. The hope is that by keeping out of the limelight one can live happily, in peace and quiet, surrounded, and both protected and advanced in one’s pursuit of pleasure, by one’s family, and by a circle of intimate, like-minded friends.
On Friday we posted an excerpt from an interview in which linguist Noam Chomsky (something of a political celebrity himself) excoriates Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, along with Lacan’s superstar disciple, Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek, for using intentionally obscure and inflated language to pull the wool over their admirers’ eyes and make trivial “theories” seem profound. He calls Lacan a “total charlatan.”
Yep. As the pop star Neecha sang, “Those who know they are profound strive for clarity; those who would like to appear profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.” And there was also the philosophy collective, Depeche Mode, whose seminal paper on the political use of language, “Words Are Very Unnecessary: They Can Only Do Harm,” is still influential today.
People like Karen Armstrong have said that religious fundamentalism is a wholly modern movement, not a premodern one, born as a result of feeling threatened by the advance of science and technology. In essence, once fundamentalists accepted the challenge to prove the literal truth of their mythic stories, rather than be content with them as allegories, they stepped onto a playing field they were woefully unprepared for. I recently read someone — I forget who — saying something similar about postmodernism and critical theory. Much of modern science is extremely specialized and incomprehensible to a lay reader. So, in a misguided attempt to compete with science and retain the humanities’ relevance, postmodernism tried to incorporate similar jargon and specialization. But as Chomsky has said before on this topic, the difference is that if he wants to get a layman’s understanding of the latest theories in physics, he can find someone capable of explaining it to him on a level he can understand. With theory, the bafflegab is the point, and it can’t be stripped away without leaving banality standing there, naked and embarrassed.
Perhaps the greatest slur against cynicism is that it nurtures a fatalistic pessimism, a belief that nothing can ever be improved. There are lazy forms of cynicism of which this is certainly true. But at its best, cynicism is a greater force for progress than optimism. The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it’s possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success. Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren’t that bad and are bound to get better anyway.
Didn’t I say something counterintuitive like that once? I think I said something like that. Yeah, I did say something like that. People need to quit ripping me off.
Shhhh. Simon Blackburn and Nigel Warburton are having an interesting conversation on one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume. Let’s eavesdrop on them and see what kinds of fun stuff we learn:
He’s also thought of as a great Enlightenment figure, but the caricature of the Enlightenment is that it put all the weight on human reason: reason is the light that is shone into the darkness.
Yes, it’s a very back-handed compliment to Hume, because he was very doubtful about the powers of human reason. One’s got to be careful here, reasonable is a term of praise, and Hume uses it as such. He doesn’t doubt that there are better and worse ways of conducting our intellectual lives or conducting our scientific enquiries. He’s firmly on the side of the better ways of doing that. But he’s an opponent of the scholastic, quasi-mathematical, logical powers of the mind. Those powers he diminishes. What comes in to take their place is the doctrine of natural belief, of the way our psychologies will end up distributing confidence in things.
Tallis says that humans are special and not just animals. A lot of weight is put in that four letter word “just”. What can he mean? Are humans special and thus apart from animals? The evolutionary view of human capacities is that they have precursors in ancestral traits, and these precursors can be found in other animals. Dogs, corvids, cetaceans, primates, and a host of other animals display moral, cognitive and conscious behaviour. Humans are special indeed in their capacities. But, and this is what what Tallis overlooks, so are all other animals. The word “special” is merely the adjectival form of “species”. To be a species is to be special. Sure, humans are special in their own way. So is a cat, a mole or a mouse. If the target of your explanation was a mouse, then you would explain it having its abilities and social behaviours in terms of evolved dispositions inherited from ancestors. You may as well say a mouse is special in ways other animals (including humans) are not. Otherwise we couldn’t even tell it was a member of a species, by definition. Unless there are properties that mark it out from other species, it would be folded into other species.
So too with humans. If we were not different in our traits from other primate species like chimps, then we would be chimps. But we have our own special traits, and so we and chimps are distinct species. So the argument is a kind of fallacy (affirming the consequent). Humans can be special and yet be animals, just like every other animal species.
He abandoned his faith as a teenager and eventually completed a Ph.D. with Roland Barthes, by which point he’d concluded that Christian concepts of guilt and redemption were inescapable. “Baudelaire said that civilization is the abolition of the original sin,” he told me. “In fact, it’s not true; we haven’t abolished original sin but rather spread it all over.” In Bruckner’s scenario, Marxism transposed the idea of Christ onto the working class; paradise would come after the revolution. Then, with third-worldism, colonized peoples became the embodiment of virtue. Now, he says, it’s Mother Earth: “She is suffering, the metaphor of all victims.” Or, as he writes in The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse, in reference to the ubiquitous phrase “carbon footprint”: “What is it, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of Original Sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing?”
To think rationally means taking the appropriate action given one’s goals and beliefs — what we call instrumental rationality — and holding beliefs that are in synch with available evidence, or epistemic rationality.
Again, the competing definitions of what it means to be rational make this difficult. Instrumental rationality takes the goals and beliefs as givens, and simply seeks the most efficient way of connecting them. A murderer or drug addict could exhibit rationality within those parameters. Epistemic rationality involves more of a value judgment on those goals and beliefs, but as anyone who has ever attempted to argue a friend or relative out of some crazy opinion knows, even available evidence can be undermined by mistrust of the source, or the suspicion/hope that later evidence will contradict what’s now being asserted as fact. Ah, well, I was already pessimistic about human nature anyway.
This seemed kind of interesting:
I coined the term dysrationalia — an analogue of the word dyslexia — in the early-1990’s in order to draw attention to what is missing in IQ tests. I define dysrationalia as the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence. Many people display the systematic inability to think or behave rationally despite the fact that they have more than adequate IQs.
For Dennett there is no hard problem of consciousness at all, and the fact we think so is a consequence of misdirection by philosophers like David Chalmers and illusions created within our own brains – we may think that we are something more than chemicals, and that our mind is not confined inside our skulls, or that we have a soul that transcends the plane of mere matter, but we’d be wrong. “There’s nothing immaterial,” he says; “consciousness isn’t immaterial any more than centres of gravity are immaterial.” Does this include my sense of self?
“Oh, yes, in exactly the same way as the centre of gravity is. The centre of gravity is a nice concept, because it’s physics, it’s not sociology or psychology. It’s a term well regarded in the physical sciences. And yet it’s not an atom, not a particle. It’s a mathematical point, an abstraction. A very, very useful abstraction. And the self is another very, very useful abstraction. It’s not made of anything, any more than the centre of gravity is made of something. But its features are not arbitrary and they are entirely fixed, in the end, by the chemistry of the atoms that compose the phenomenon.”
I think it would be funny to start referring to Dennett as a Taoist sage, though I suspect he might not appreciate being associated with mysticism even in jest.
Fallibilism, correctly understood, implies the possibility, not the impossibility, of knowledge, because the very concept of error, if taken seriously, implies that truth exists and can be found. The inherent limitation on human reason, that it can never find solid foundations for ideas, does not constitute any sort of limit on the creation of objective knowledge nor, therefore, on progress. The absence of foundation, whether infallible or probable, is no loss to anyone except tyrants and charlatans, because what the rest of us want from ideas is their content, not their provenance: If your disease has been cured by medical science, and you then become aware that science never proves anything but only disproves theories (and then only tentatively), you do not respond “oh dear, I’ll just have to die, then.”
The theory of knowledge is a tightrope that is the only path from A to B, with a long, hard drop for anyone who steps off on one side into “knowledge is impossible, progress is an illusion” or on the other side into “I must be right, or at least probably right.” Indeed, infallibilism and nihilism are twins. Both fail to understand that mistakes are not only inevitable, they are correctable (fallibly). Which is why they both abhor institutions of substantive criticism and error correction, and denigrate rational thought as useless or fraudulent. They both justify the same tyrannies. They both justify each other.
As a mere pseudo-philosopher, it pleases me to see recognized thinkers arriving at the same conclusions that I have through my plucky, can-think spirit.
Steven Pinker expresses a well-worn normative suggestion when he says that the world should move away from tribal or group thinking and feeling, and embrace the “rights tradition” of individualism. He argues, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, that violence recedes as individualism rises. The rest of the world could profit from the recognition, Pinker argues, that we are individuals, and individuals are the ones that “really count” (they actually feel the pleasure and pain). “Groups,” he says, “are a kind of abstraction.”
I’m going to disagree here and argue, somewhat counter-intuitively, that Pinker is the abstraction. I am the abstraction. You, gentle reader, are the abstraction.
The independent individual is a hero to WEIRD cultures (Western, Educated Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), and it serves as the starting place for both pessimistic and romantic theories of the social contract. Whether you’re a Hobbesian who thinks the selfish ego must be constrained by the community, or a Rousseauian who laments such constraint (or even a Rawlsian), you still start from a metaphysic of individualism. But what if the individual is actually an ecological, developmental, and political construct?
The argument will be familiar to all those who grew up watching the Saturday morning philosophy roundtables, where Bugs and Daffy enquired into the “true” nature of the famous rabbit/duck illusion (only to have Elmer aggressively advance his Marxist viewpoint that philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it, and that the power to do so grows from the double-barrels of his shotgun; thus always can the rarefied life of the mind be brought low by thuggish violence). There was also the pop star Spinoza who famously encapsulated his theory of modal metaphysics in the whimsical lyric, “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
Me, I’m just a simple farmer, a person of the land, common clay, a fellow who merely knows what he likes, and what I likes is the sort of social arrangement that leaves me be, unmolested and undetained. Like air conditioning, Western individualism may be a highly particular and modern creation which may be unsustainable in the long run, but damned if I’m not going to exult in it regardless.
There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
The same thing occurs when lay audiences read books about thinking errors. They understand the errors, but don’t notice the trick – that simply learning about them is not enough. Too often, readers finish popular books on decision making with the false conviction that they will decide better. They are the equivalent of Edwards’ competition – the so-called best of the best who miss the ruse.
The overlooked reason is that there are two components to each bias. The first is the phenomenon itself. Confirmation bias, for example, is your tendency to seek out confirmation information while ignoring everything else. The second is the belief that everyone else is susceptible to thinking errors, but not you. This itself is a bias – bias blind spot – a “meta bias” inherent in all biases that blinds you from your errors.
I, on the other hand, have recognized that I was born guilty of original bias, and have thus accepted λογική into my heart as my savior, so this doesn’t apply to me anymore. Do you have a few minutes? If I could come in, I’d like to talk to you some more about λογική…
The word rational is widely misused. Scientists often apply it unnaturally, in ways that conflict with our biology. Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Gary Becker, and their respective schools of thought, are on opposite sides of this breach with our nature. They revive an old struggle between prudent empiricism and blinkering “theorism” (an overreliance on idealized models).
…To minimize misuse, consider that the word rational really incorporates three types of assumptions: first, about desirable goals; second, about effective methods of attaining them; and third, about whether agents have the needed skills.
Ahaha, oh yes. One of the most tiring things about fellow atheists is the way they use those assumptions interchangeably, with the result that “rational” ends up, in practice, meaning little more than “anything I approve of and agree with”. It’s becoming one of those words that trigger an, uh, irrational anger in me. As Schopenhauer said about a term often used synonymously with rational:
On the other hand, the epithet reasonable has at all times been applied to the man who does not allow himself to be guided by intuitive impressions, but by thoughts and conceptions, and who therefore always sets to work logically after due reflection and forethought. Conduct of this sort is everywhere known as reasonable. Not that this by any means implies uprightness and love for one’s fellows. On the contrary, it is quite possible to act in the most reasonable way, that is, according to conclusions scientifically deduced, and weighed with the nicest exactitude; and yet to follow the most selfish, unjust, and even iniquitons maxims. So that never before Kant did it occur to any one to identify just, virtuous, and noble conduct with reasonable; the two lines of behaviour have always been completely separated, and kept apart. The one depends on the kind of motivation; the other on the difference in fundamental principles. Only after Kant (because he taught that virtue has its source in Pure Reason) did the virtuous and the reasonable become one and the same thing, despite the usage of these words which all languages have adopted—a usage which is not fortuitous, but the work of universal, and therefore uniform, human judgment. “Reasonable” and “vicious” are terms that go very well together; indeed great, far-reaching crimes are only possible from their union.
Some of the most memorable pages here restate an argument Camus had already developed at length in “The Rebel”: not all means are acceptable, even when employed for noble ends; terrorism and torture destroy the very goals they are supposed to serve. This position was criticized as “idealist” (it was the reason for the famous break with Sartre), but Camus sticks to it — admirably, in my opinion: “Although it is historically true that values such as the nation and humanity cannot survive unless one fights for them, fighting alone cannot justify them (nor can force). The fight must itself be justified, and explained, in terms of values.”
Even more eloquent, perhaps, are his remarks on the responsibility of intellectuals in times of hatred: “It is to explain the meaning of words in such a way as to sober minds and calm fanaticisms.” Great writer that he was, Camus placed hope in the calming power of language carefully used, and of reason; in the preface, he asks his readers to “set their ideological reflexes aside for a moment and just think.”
“Times of hatred” strikes me as an odd designation. Are there ever times when people aren’t hating each other? Anyway, yes, The Rebel is probably my favorite of his books; I remember being puzzled after reading it and learning that intellectual opinion of the time had it that Sartre got the better of their argument with his criticism of the book. Hindsight, I presume, has rectified this and elevated Camus above the overrated, wall-eyed, Stalinist toad-man.
Funny enough, even though I loved philosophy class, the subjects who most impressed me, like Nietzsche, Camus, Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard (whose recent bicentennial has inspired a fewgoodposts), were idiosyncratic philosophers at best, if not better described more generally as writers.
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