My last post took a pretty hard swipe at science, so in the interests of balance I want to take hold now of the other horn of the contemporary culture-wars bull.
The term “fundamentalist” was invented by conservative Christians in the late 19th century as a self-description intended to identify themselves as the true bearers of the real principles of the uniquely true religion. Part of their self-conception was the claim that they were merely carrying forward ideas that were “fundamental” to Christianity from its beginning.
This claim is false, of course, because they were parsing their scriptural sources in an anachronistic way to come up with answers to the challenges raised in their own times. The concerns of the people who wrote the Bible were not the same as the concerns of late-19th-century Christian pastors, who were mainly appalled by the then-new doctrine of “Darwinism.”
What the original fundamentalists were responding to, however, was not just Darwinism but “modernism” in general, including especially the text-critical and historical-critical approaches to Bible scholarship. Studies in these disciplines had severely undermined a naïve belief in the Bible as “the Word of God,” and in many ways this was a more exigent challenge to faith than the findings of physical science.
Darwin’s theory, however, hit people on a more emotional level than arguments about source-texts and exogenous influences. On a gut level, many people just didn’t like the idea that they were cousins of chimpanzees. And we are still dealing with that reaction.
Scientists and their groupies are of course endlessly exasperated by all this. As far as they’re concerned, the theory of the origin of species through natural selection is “settled science,” and everyone should just accept it and get over it. And they’re probably right, though some of them seem inclined to extend this hypothesis to cover matters far beyond the biological where its applicability seems very dubious, as in the logically and morally questionable doctrines of Social Darwinism.
However, the ongoing argument over Darwin vs. the Bible or Darwin vs. God, though it seems to provide people on both sides with some sort of pleasure, is ultimately misconceived.
Even the most fundamentalistically inclined televangelist makes use every day of the theories and discoveries of physics: Their pleas for money are beamed to homes around the world by way of radio waves to satellites in Earth orbit and back again to the TV receivers of their fans. And every step of the way, their broadcasts rely on the laws of motion and electromagnetism and relativity and so on that were discovered and described by science.
For anyone with the slightest intellectual integrity, there’s a hair-raising degree of self-contradiction in this: Fundamentalist preachers are taking advantage of the discoveries of physics to broadcast the message that physics is a lie.
All the quibbling about how to interpret the age of bones and why there are seashells on top of the Alps pales into insignificance when someone asks why we’re able to see stars and galaxies that are millions or billions of light-years away.
From Newton to today, science has discovered the laws of motion and gravity, the values of universal constants like the speed of light, the ways in which bits of matter and energy interact, and so on and so on. Even if science hasn’t come up with a convincing explanation of why all these things are what they are, it’s undeniable that it has come up with stuff that works. Any quibbles one might have about the details of quantum theory seem largely irrelevant if you’re talking with a resident of Hiroshima.
Fundamentalists need to forget Darwin and worry instead about Newton and Faraday and Einstein and Niels Bohr and the rest. They need to explain how the very same science that enables them to generate electromagnetic signals and put satellites into Earth orbit and draw electricity from nuclear generators is wrong about the size and age of the universe.
After all, we can see objects in the sky that, based on measurements using the same physics that enable them to broadcast their appeals for money, are millions or billions of light-years away, when, according to their supposedly Bible-based belief, the universe is only several thousand years old.
This leaves us with only two options: One is that every object in the sky is within 6,000 to around 10,000 light years of Earth, and only appears falsely to be farther away. But this means that all the matter in the universe is contained within a space with a radius of roughly 10,000 light years; based on the laws of physics, it all should have collapsed into a black hole long ago.
The other option, and the one that fundamentalists tend to fall back on whenever challenged, is that it’s all a “test of faith.” God created the universe on that fateful day in October of 4004 B.C. (or some other day, but within the past tens of thousands of years), and when he did, he scattered the stars and galaxies across the sky in such a way as to make us believe that they were farther away and older than they really are.
This is the one that really bothers me, because it says that God is a liar and the whole fabric of the universe is a deception. It says that no one who is not a human being on this one planet, Earth, can ever know the truth about existence, because it’s only here that we have this book, this Bible, that explains the hidden truth behind the falsehood that is the universe.
That is the real “fundamental” idea: Challenged by serious and thoughtful investigators of life, the universe and everything, a certain group of Christian pastors decided that the answer was to declare the Bible unarguably true and everything that contradicted it false.
But before conservative Christians invented fundamentalism, even before there was such a thing as Christianity, there were many who understood that the universe was much more “the Word of God” than anything written down in ink. We talk about trees being chopped down to make paper for books; one living tree tells as much truth as all the books ever written.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Thursday, September 2, 2010
2B1
I’ve written a lot in this blog about my belief in the fundamental connectedness of people, of living beings in general, of things in general. And I suspect it has been a waste of time. There are only two likely reactions anyone might have to this notion at this point in history: “Duh, who didn’t know that?” or “Are you insane?”
If you look at the world around us right now, it certainly doesn’t look like what one might call “an organic whole.” The level of social fragmentation and conflict appears to be historically high and increasing, as does the level of conflict between human beings and Nature. No one seems to be able to agree about anything, especially in reference to how we might solve any of these problems –we can’t even agree what the problems are – but everyone seems to be ready to fight to the death to push the solution they like. It’s a situation I’ve taken to summing up like this: Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t.
Philosophically, theologically, ecologically, there’s widespread acknowledgment that everyone and everything is interconnected; that, indeed, all is one. But there’s also widespread antipathy toward that idea, widespread efforts to divide and conquer, to impose some form of absolutism or exclusivism, which means the conversion or eradication of everyone who believes in anything else: My way or the highway.
Even among people who say they believe in the kinship of all humans, the unity of existence, you don’t find many who behave accordingly. On the contrary, mostly they’re just promoting another absolutist/exclusivist ideology and contributing to the general fragmentation.
Now, if I suggest that the real solution to this problem involves each person looking inward and disengaging from mass culture and mass thinking, it might seem as if I’m promoting an even more intense degree of disintegration. After all, everyone else seems to think the answer is for everyone to unite, to join up, to enlist in some movement or other. But that’s just an invitation to choose sides in the war of exclusivisms.
Real unity begins at home, so to speak. People who are fragmented inwardly cannot bring about any kind of world except one that is likewise fragmented. Conversely (contrapositively, actually), a unified world can be brought about only by people who are personally unified.
This is, of course, the overall message of Plato’s Republic (see esp. 443d-444a), and it is a theme that has remained constant in the Western tradition from that time to the present. Plotinus, for example, reiterates:
And of course it’s a basic principle in the synthesis offered in the 20th century by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: “First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable ‘I’ or Ego. He is always different.” (P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, First Lecture.)
The tradition is, of course, full of advice and techniques for the individual to attain self-unification, but the overall idea is presented beautifully in my favorite passage from Plato’s Phaedo:
Strange as it may sound, the cure for this condition – and it is truly a sickness, of the soul – is to care less, to care about fewer things, to stop wasting our attention and our life-energy on things that don’t matter and which we can do nothing to change, and to focus on the one thing that is truly within our power to alter for the good: our own minds.
If you look at the world around us right now, it certainly doesn’t look like what one might call “an organic whole.” The level of social fragmentation and conflict appears to be historically high and increasing, as does the level of conflict between human beings and Nature. No one seems to be able to agree about anything, especially in reference to how we might solve any of these problems –we can’t even agree what the problems are – but everyone seems to be ready to fight to the death to push the solution they like. It’s a situation I’ve taken to summing up like this: Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t.
Philosophically, theologically, ecologically, there’s widespread acknowledgment that everyone and everything is interconnected; that, indeed, all is one. But there’s also widespread antipathy toward that idea, widespread efforts to divide and conquer, to impose some form of absolutism or exclusivism, which means the conversion or eradication of everyone who believes in anything else: My way or the highway.
Even among people who say they believe in the kinship of all humans, the unity of existence, you don’t find many who behave accordingly. On the contrary, mostly they’re just promoting another absolutist/exclusivist ideology and contributing to the general fragmentation.
Now, if I suggest that the real solution to this problem involves each person looking inward and disengaging from mass culture and mass thinking, it might seem as if I’m promoting an even more intense degree of disintegration. After all, everyone else seems to think the answer is for everyone to unite, to join up, to enlist in some movement or other. But that’s just an invitation to choose sides in the war of exclusivisms.
Real unity begins at home, so to speak. People who are fragmented inwardly cannot bring about any kind of world except one that is likewise fragmented. Conversely (contrapositively, actually), a unified world can be brought about only by people who are personally unified.
This is, of course, the overall message of Plato’s Republic (see esp. 443d-444a), and it is a theme that has remained constant in the Western tradition from that time to the present. Plotinus, for example, reiterates:
“Know Thyself” is said to those who, because of their selves’ multiplicity, have the business of counting themselves up and learning that they do not know all of the number and kind of things they are, or do not know any one of them, not what their ruling principle is or by what they are themselves. (Enneads VI.7.41. Trans. A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press.)The message remains fundamental right through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, as evidenced by a statement of the alchemist Gerhard Dorn (quoted several times by Jung): “Thou wilt never make from others the One that thou seekest, except there first be made one thing of thyself.”
And of course it’s a basic principle in the synthesis offered in the 20th century by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: “First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable ‘I’ or Ego. He is always different.” (P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, First Lecture.)
The tradition is, of course, full of advice and techniques for the individual to attain self-unification, but the overall idea is presented beautifully in my favorite passage from Plato’s Phaedo:
Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?
Certainly.
But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom. (Plato, Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.)In today’s world, in which we are barraged 24 hours a day by stimuli from our immediate environment and even more from our expansive electronic environment; in which we imagine ourselves constantly “connected” with our friends, family and business associates by our wireless devices and other kinds of electrical umbilical cords; in which we turn our attention incessantly from one outrage to another, from the latest missing child report to the latest natural disaster to the latest celebrity scandal to the latest political uproar to the latest phony “reality” show development to the most recent “friend” update on our favorite social networking site – each one of our “interests” is just one more fragment of our soul torn off and sucked into the diffuse cloud that constitutes what we imagine to be our identity.
Strange as it may sound, the cure for this condition – and it is truly a sickness, of the soul – is to care less, to care about fewer things, to stop wasting our attention and our life-energy on things that don’t matter and which we can do nothing to change, and to focus on the one thing that is truly within our power to alter for the good: our own minds.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΙΑ
I want to adopt – or probably more accurately, to instigate – a convention for the use of the word “philosophy.” What I’m proposing is to use a capital P to refer to what was discussed and practiced in ancient Greece and successively into the Roman period, and a small p for everything else.
There are, I think, good reasons for doing this. It was after all the Greeks who created and defined the term φιλοσοφια to describe what they were doing. It would be reasonable to reserve the use of the word to references to that particular set of activities and to find some other word to refer to activities that are significantly different, even if the latter are in some way derived from or imitative of the former. However, there is no generic term other than “philosophy” for the numerous schools and tendencies of thought that have arisen since the fall of Rome, so I’m proposing that we recognize the distinction by treating the word as a proper noun for Philosophy properly so-called and not so for everything else.
And there most definitely is a significant distinction between what was practiced and taught in the Hellenic and Hellenistic schools of Philosophy and the so-called philosophy that came to be practiced and taught after and outside them. The two began to diverge even during the heyday of Philosophy when Christian apologists and other religion-focused groups (the so-called Gnostics and Hermetists or Hermeticists, for example) began to appropriate ideas, terms and practices from the Philosophical schools in an attempt to give themselves intellectual respectability.
This disingenuous tendency is apparent already in the writings of Philo of Alexandria, whose project was to allegorize the Hebrew scriptures into an exposition of Platonic doctrine and Moses into a philosopher, and then to claim priority and superiority for the Mosaic writings. The Gospel of John goes Philo one better by rendering the narrative of Jesus’ life as an exemplification of philosophical theology that trumps both the Philosophers and the Jews.
By the third century, this project was in full swing in Alexandria, where Clement and Origen both embraced Philosophy with both arms. If one accepts their self-explanation, Philosophy was true but incomplete, and the Christian revelation was precisely what was needed to complete it. On a somewhat less tendentious reading, Christianity was indeed a “revealed” religion, with all the raw, emotional, even self-contradictory details that accompany any visionary breakthrough. It needed some intellectual reinforcement to make it palatable – indeed, to make it understandable – to a theologically sophisticated audience.
It’s from this point, and for these reasons, that the tendency grew to regard philosophy as “the handmaid of theology,” which prevailed until the Renaissance. The Christian (and later the Muslim) theologians happily pilfered or cherry-picked the findings of a millennium of hard-won Philosophical teaching to augment their own arguments, while denigrating the Philosophers themselves and ultimately shutting down their schools and sending them into exile.
When the grip of the church(es) over intellectual life finally began to ease, a large part of the legacy of the domination of theology over philosophy played out as a rejection of theology in all its forms by the newer thinkers. In particular, the new philosophers from Erasmus and Ficino forward seem to have focused exclusively on the content of philosophical discourse while ignoring or rejecting the Philosophical practices that had formed the basis of monastic life and Medieval mysticism.
That the Philosophical schools were in fact the model for Christian monasticism is at this point undeniable.
The late Pierre Hadot established with impeccable scholarship the fact that Philosophy was at least as much a “way of life” as a project of research into the principles of existence, and that the two were inseparable:
Hadot, as befits an academic scholar, proceeds cautiously in these matters, drawing almost entirely on the writings of the philosophers themselves and rejecting suggestions that Philosophy was in any way a development from, for example, shamanism. (He does, however, accept in a sort of postscript that the Philosophical schools might have received some influence from India, specifically from yoga.) However, with no academic reputation to protect, I can range a bit further.
What I would point out first is that the writings of the “Desert Fathers,” as found in the Philokalia, for example, clearly show that the early Christian monastics’ understanding of “metaphysical anatomy,” so to speak, is precisely that of the Philosophers, and in particular that of the Platonists: the lower, “irrational” soul consisting of a desiring (“appetitive”) and an emotional (“incensive”) component; the rational soul (διανοια, dianoia, or discursive, dualistic reasoning faculty); and the νους (nous, the unitive, intuitive, holistic understanding). Moreover, the goal of monastic practice is precisely the same as that of the Platonist schools: to extricate the practitioner from over-involvement in physical reality and “turn” him or her toward the “higher,” truer reality of Form and, ultimately, God.
As Plotinus states quite specifically (Ennead 1.1.3), one goal of Philosophy is to turn the soul away from its desire for matter and turn it toward reason and the beyond-reason of nous. How is this done? In one important passage (VI.7.36), he writes:
And in another key passage, Plotinus writes:
What we are seeing here are obviously references to some form of what we call meditation today. In Plotinus’ time, the Latin words meditatio and contemplatio referred to two different modes of mental activity, meditatio being “discursive” and dualistic, contemplatio being non-dualistic and unitive. Those terms remained standard in the Western Church until the 20th century. In Greek, the equivalent of contemplatio is θεορια (theoria); various words and phrases (e.g., συννοια, sunnoia) refer to introspection generally and may be translated as “meditation.”
The point, now that I’ve finished with the footnotes and glosses and flourishes, is that a school of Philosophy, in its practices, bore much more resemblance to, for example, a Buddhist monastery than to a modern university’s Department of Philosophy. And not just in its practices, but equally in its goals. No matter how much lip-service modern educators may pay to the idea of turning out “well-rounded” individuals (and in fact they’re advocating that approach much less these days than they did a few decades ago), what they’re really about is preparing people to become cogs in the machinery of the modern global economy.
From that point of view, absolutely the last thing our educational system wants to do is turn people away from physical objects and desires and toward a real, heartfelt understanding of the oneness and wholeness of reality. But that’s the one thing each of us needs if we – and our world – are to be healed and whole.
There are, I think, good reasons for doing this. It was after all the Greeks who created and defined the term φιλοσοφια to describe what they were doing. It would be reasonable to reserve the use of the word to references to that particular set of activities and to find some other word to refer to activities that are significantly different, even if the latter are in some way derived from or imitative of the former. However, there is no generic term other than “philosophy” for the numerous schools and tendencies of thought that have arisen since the fall of Rome, so I’m proposing that we recognize the distinction by treating the word as a proper noun for Philosophy properly so-called and not so for everything else.
And there most definitely is a significant distinction between what was practiced and taught in the Hellenic and Hellenistic schools of Philosophy and the so-called philosophy that came to be practiced and taught after and outside them. The two began to diverge even during the heyday of Philosophy when Christian apologists and other religion-focused groups (the so-called Gnostics and Hermetists or Hermeticists, for example) began to appropriate ideas, terms and practices from the Philosophical schools in an attempt to give themselves intellectual respectability.
This disingenuous tendency is apparent already in the writings of Philo of Alexandria, whose project was to allegorize the Hebrew scriptures into an exposition of Platonic doctrine and Moses into a philosopher, and then to claim priority and superiority for the Mosaic writings. The Gospel of John goes Philo one better by rendering the narrative of Jesus’ life as an exemplification of philosophical theology that trumps both the Philosophers and the Jews.
By the third century, this project was in full swing in Alexandria, where Clement and Origen both embraced Philosophy with both arms. If one accepts their self-explanation, Philosophy was true but incomplete, and the Christian revelation was precisely what was needed to complete it. On a somewhat less tendentious reading, Christianity was indeed a “revealed” religion, with all the raw, emotional, even self-contradictory details that accompany any visionary breakthrough. It needed some intellectual reinforcement to make it palatable – indeed, to make it understandable – to a theologically sophisticated audience.
It’s from this point, and for these reasons, that the tendency grew to regard philosophy as “the handmaid of theology,” which prevailed until the Renaissance. The Christian (and later the Muslim) theologians happily pilfered or cherry-picked the findings of a millennium of hard-won Philosophical teaching to augment their own arguments, while denigrating the Philosophers themselves and ultimately shutting down their schools and sending them into exile.
When the grip of the church(es) over intellectual life finally began to ease, a large part of the legacy of the domination of theology over philosophy played out as a rejection of theology in all its forms by the newer thinkers. In particular, the new philosophers from Erasmus and Ficino forward seem to have focused exclusively on the content of philosophical discourse while ignoring or rejecting the Philosophical practices that had formed the basis of monastic life and Medieval mysticism.
That the Philosophical schools were in fact the model for Christian monasticism is at this point undeniable.
The late Pierre Hadot established with impeccable scholarship the fact that Philosophy was at least as much a “way of life” as a project of research into the principles of existence, and that the two were inseparable:
… there can be no question of denying the extraordinary ability of the ancient philosophers to develop theoretical reflection on the most subtle problems of the theory of knowledge, logic or physics. This theoretical activity, however, must be situated within a perspective which is different from that which corresponds to the idea people usually have of philosophy. In the first place, at least since the time of Socrates, the choice of a way of life has not been located at the end of the process of philosophical activity, like a kind of accessory or appendix. On the contrary, it stands at the beginning … Philosophical discourse, then, originates in a choice of life and an existential option – not vice versa. … The [ancient] philosophical school thus corresponds, above all, to the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and ultimately a certain desire to be and to live in a certain way. This existential option, in turn, implies a certain vision of the world, and the task of philosophical discourse will therefore be to reveal and rationally justify this existential option, as well as this representation of the world. (Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase, p. 3. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2002.)In the same work, Hadot goes on to describe a general curriculum of the Philosophical schools, running from ethics to physics to psychology to theology, which can be found consistently across schools as far apart in their “theoretical” teachings as the Platonists and Stoics. He also enumerates a number of what he calls “spiritual exercises” that likewise are found across the Philosophical spectrum, such as meditating on the inevitability of death and cultivating a “cosmic” view of life. And unsurprisingly, he shows how these exercises continued to be essential in the writings and practices of the early Christian monastics.
Hadot, as befits an academic scholar, proceeds cautiously in these matters, drawing almost entirely on the writings of the philosophers themselves and rejecting suggestions that Philosophy was in any way a development from, for example, shamanism. (He does, however, accept in a sort of postscript that the Philosophical schools might have received some influence from India, specifically from yoga.) However, with no academic reputation to protect, I can range a bit further.
What I would point out first is that the writings of the “Desert Fathers,” as found in the Philokalia, for example, clearly show that the early Christian monastics’ understanding of “metaphysical anatomy,” so to speak, is precisely that of the Philosophers, and in particular that of the Platonists: the lower, “irrational” soul consisting of a desiring (“appetitive”) and an emotional (“incensive”) component; the rational soul (διανοια, dianoia, or discursive, dualistic reasoning faculty); and the νους (nous, the unitive, intuitive, holistic understanding). Moreover, the goal of monastic practice is precisely the same as that of the Platonist schools: to extricate the practitioner from over-involvement in physical reality and “turn” him or her toward the “higher,” truer reality of Form and, ultimately, God.
As Plotinus states quite specifically (Ennead 1.1.3), one goal of Philosophy is to turn the soul away from its desire for matter and turn it toward reason and the beyond-reason of nous. How is this done? In one important passage (VI.7.36), he writes:
We are taught about it by comparisons and negations and knowledge of the things which come from it and certain methods of ascent by degrees, but we are put on the way to it by purifications and virtues and adornings … [emphasis added]
And in another key passage, Plotinus writes:
How can one see the inconceivable beauty which stays within the holy sanctuary and does not come out where the profane may see it? Let him who can, follow and come within, and leave outside the sight of his eyes and not turn back to the bodily splendors which he saw before. … Shut your eyes, and change to, and wake, another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use. (I.6.8; emphasis added. Both translations are by A.H. Armstrong in the Loeb Classical Library edition, published by Harvard University Press.)
What we are seeing here are obviously references to some form of what we call meditation today. In Plotinus’ time, the Latin words meditatio and contemplatio referred to two different modes of mental activity, meditatio being “discursive” and dualistic, contemplatio being non-dualistic and unitive. Those terms remained standard in the Western Church until the 20th century. In Greek, the equivalent of contemplatio is θεορια (theoria); various words and phrases (e.g., συννοια, sunnoia) refer to introspection generally and may be translated as “meditation.”
The point, now that I’ve finished with the footnotes and glosses and flourishes, is that a school of Philosophy, in its practices, bore much more resemblance to, for example, a Buddhist monastery than to a modern university’s Department of Philosophy. And not just in its practices, but equally in its goals. No matter how much lip-service modern educators may pay to the idea of turning out “well-rounded” individuals (and in fact they’re advocating that approach much less these days than they did a few decades ago), what they’re really about is preparing people to become cogs in the machinery of the modern global economy.
From that point of view, absolutely the last thing our educational system wants to do is turn people away from physical objects and desires and toward a real, heartfelt understanding of the oneness and wholeness of reality. But that’s the one thing each of us needs if we – and our world – are to be healed and whole.
Monday, July 19, 2010
A Sense of Proportion
Considering the high value we seem, as a society or culture, to accord rationality as a standard for thinking and behavior, one might expect that we have a very clear understanding of what the word means. But when I started looking into this issue a few years ago, I discovered very quickly that almost no one can give a clear account of what constitutes rationality.
For most people, rationality is one of those “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it” concepts. It floats around in our world, we hear it in various contexts, and we form impressions of it based on how we hear it being used. But no one defines it when they use it, they just assume that everyone knows what they mean, and we who hear them likewise assume that we know what they mean.
When I started asking, “What is rationality?” and “What does it mean to be rational?” naturally the first place I looked was in dictionaries. What I found there was unhelpful. In the first instance, I was told that rationality is “reason” or “reasonableness,” and of course I quickly discovered that “reason” is rationality.
I also learned that both “reasonable” and “rational” are synonyms for “sane,” and obviously that “unreasonable” and “irrational” are synonyms for “insane.” This means the stakes in the game of deciding what’s rational and what isn’t are pretty high: If I can label you and/or your ideas “irrational,” I automatically win, and you go into a padded cell.
Since no one seemed to be interested in defining rationality in a clear and precise way, I turned to the etymology of the word to see if that would offer any clues. And not surprisingly, this led me straight back to ancient philosophy.
The word “rational” obviously derives from the Latin word ratio, originally meaning “reckoning” or “calculating” but also having the same meaning as the mathematical term “ratio,” which refers to a numerical relationship. A month is one-twelfth of a year, for example: 1/12.
The Latin word, in turn, was a translation of a Greek word, because it was the Greeks who first articulated these kinds of relationships. The word that the Greeks used to name a statement about this kind of mathematical relationship is a familiar one: logos.
Modern Christians are familiar with logos because of the famous prologue to the gospel of John. But the standard translation of logos as “word” overlooks the history and wide range of meanings of this multifarious word. At the time John’s gospel was written, logos had a 300-year or more history as a technical philosophical term. It meant, among other things, a saying or aphorism, an axiom, an account or explanation, and most importantly for our present topic, it meant “a proportion” – in other words, the same thing as ratio. And this is why the words “rational” and “logical” are essentially equivalent: because they both refer to proportionality.
Whether you say it in Latin, Greek or English, a ratio or a proportion is a comparison of or relationship between two things: between a month and a year, for example. And this is the root-concept of rationality: the comparison or relating of things to other things.
Under the influence of Aristotle, we have come to understand logic and rationality in terms of statements about reality. Indeed, a significant part of philosophy in the 20th century turned away from attempting to understand reality as such and focused instead on the structure and coherence of statements about reality. But if we look at the fundamental meaning of rationality and logic, we can see that these terms need not apply only to what we say about reality, to “well-formed formulas” about the universe.
On the contrary, any system of comparing and ranking things is, by definition, rational or logical. For example, we can judge our sensory experiences by how pleasant or unpleasant we find them: Getting laid is more fun than a sharp stick in the eye. Or we can rate and rank experiences according to how they affect us emotionally: Praise feels better than criticism.
What we call rationality today, however, focuses exclusively on the kind of verbal formulations I mentioned above. This approach compares statements about reality with each other and ignores the kind of experiential logic we obtain from perceptions and emotions. In general, it labels personal experience as “too subjective” to be worth considering.
I’ve just described, from one point of view, three of the four “psychological types” defined by C.G. Jung: the sensing, feeling and thinking types. Anyone who has taken the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory will have some familiarity with these notions: Some people approach the world primarily through their senses, some through their emotions and some through their verbalized thinking processes.
Anyone who has studied the Jungian types or the Myers-Briggs typology derived from Jung will understand that differences of type can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings and miscommunication. Most obviously in our society, people who overvalue verbalized logic tend to dismiss the “lower” kinds of thinking that are based on sensation or emotion. People who lead with their brains, so to speak, are frequently contemptuous of those who lead with their perceptions or emotions.
But those “intellectuals” are also the ones who are most likely to be surprised when, for example, their spouses desert them or their children hate them because of their emotional sterility, their lack of empathy, their insistence on principles over relationships, or just their lack of a sense of fun.
It’s the hegemony of the “thinking” type, of course, that has put our society in its present position where any plausible-sounding argument must be given consideration, no matter how wrong it feels on other levels.
Jung’s types, I think, correspond quite neatly with the ancient Greek – in particular the Platonist – understanding of the inner human being. Plato and his followers believed that we have an “irrational soul” – consisting of an “appetitive” (sense-desiring) and an “incensive” (emotionally motivating) part – and a “rational soul” focused on the logos. (The Greek word for the reasoning faculty was dianoia, literally “dual mind,” which highlights their understanding of the fundamentally dualistic nature of rationality.)
The fourth of Jung’s types is the “intuitive.” This is a word that is subject to serious misunderstandings, not least because there is a sort of industry that has cropped up in recent years that purports to teach people how to use their intuition. Jung defined intuition as the propensity to understand the wholeness of a situation all at once, without analysis. It’s not “gut feeling,” which is more like the sensing function, nor is it that vague stomach-turning feeling that if I do this, someone who’s important to me might disapprove; that’s emotion.
Intuition, rather, is Jung’s version of what the ancient philosophers called the nous, another untranslatable term. To the ancient philosophers, however, it’s clear that this was the “highest” part of the human being, the direct link to the divine. Unlike the “rational soul,” which must analyze things step-by-step and part-by-part, the nous grasps the whole as a whole, non-dualistically.
And this is the great error of rationalism: It ignores the importance or the meaning or even the existence of the wholeness of anything and everything. And by denying the validity of other kinds of understanding, it obstructs our wholeness as humans. A whole human being has access to all the resources of the soul and spirit, from sense-perception to emotional judgment to verbal analysis to that mysterious opening through which inexplicable insight flows. Closing off any of these ways of understanding reality is an act of self-amputation.
For most people, rationality is one of those “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it” concepts. It floats around in our world, we hear it in various contexts, and we form impressions of it based on how we hear it being used. But no one defines it when they use it, they just assume that everyone knows what they mean, and we who hear them likewise assume that we know what they mean.
When I started asking, “What is rationality?” and “What does it mean to be rational?” naturally the first place I looked was in dictionaries. What I found there was unhelpful. In the first instance, I was told that rationality is “reason” or “reasonableness,” and of course I quickly discovered that “reason” is rationality.
I also learned that both “reasonable” and “rational” are synonyms for “sane,” and obviously that “unreasonable” and “irrational” are synonyms for “insane.” This means the stakes in the game of deciding what’s rational and what isn’t are pretty high: If I can label you and/or your ideas “irrational,” I automatically win, and you go into a padded cell.
Since no one seemed to be interested in defining rationality in a clear and precise way, I turned to the etymology of the word to see if that would offer any clues. And not surprisingly, this led me straight back to ancient philosophy.
The word “rational” obviously derives from the Latin word ratio, originally meaning “reckoning” or “calculating” but also having the same meaning as the mathematical term “ratio,” which refers to a numerical relationship. A month is one-twelfth of a year, for example: 1/12.
The Latin word, in turn, was a translation of a Greek word, because it was the Greeks who first articulated these kinds of relationships. The word that the Greeks used to name a statement about this kind of mathematical relationship is a familiar one: logos.
Modern Christians are familiar with logos because of the famous prologue to the gospel of John. But the standard translation of logos as “word” overlooks the history and wide range of meanings of this multifarious word. At the time John’s gospel was written, logos had a 300-year or more history as a technical philosophical term. It meant, among other things, a saying or aphorism, an axiom, an account or explanation, and most importantly for our present topic, it meant “a proportion” – in other words, the same thing as ratio. And this is why the words “rational” and “logical” are essentially equivalent: because they both refer to proportionality.
Whether you say it in Latin, Greek or English, a ratio or a proportion is a comparison of or relationship between two things: between a month and a year, for example. And this is the root-concept of rationality: the comparison or relating of things to other things.
Under the influence of Aristotle, we have come to understand logic and rationality in terms of statements about reality. Indeed, a significant part of philosophy in the 20th century turned away from attempting to understand reality as such and focused instead on the structure and coherence of statements about reality. But if we look at the fundamental meaning of rationality and logic, we can see that these terms need not apply only to what we say about reality, to “well-formed formulas” about the universe.
On the contrary, any system of comparing and ranking things is, by definition, rational or logical. For example, we can judge our sensory experiences by how pleasant or unpleasant we find them: Getting laid is more fun than a sharp stick in the eye. Or we can rate and rank experiences according to how they affect us emotionally: Praise feels better than criticism.
What we call rationality today, however, focuses exclusively on the kind of verbal formulations I mentioned above. This approach compares statements about reality with each other and ignores the kind of experiential logic we obtain from perceptions and emotions. In general, it labels personal experience as “too subjective” to be worth considering.
I’ve just described, from one point of view, three of the four “psychological types” defined by C.G. Jung: the sensing, feeling and thinking types. Anyone who has taken the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory will have some familiarity with these notions: Some people approach the world primarily through their senses, some through their emotions and some through their verbalized thinking processes.
Anyone who has studied the Jungian types or the Myers-Briggs typology derived from Jung will understand that differences of type can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings and miscommunication. Most obviously in our society, people who overvalue verbalized logic tend to dismiss the “lower” kinds of thinking that are based on sensation or emotion. People who lead with their brains, so to speak, are frequently contemptuous of those who lead with their perceptions or emotions.
But those “intellectuals” are also the ones who are most likely to be surprised when, for example, their spouses desert them or their children hate them because of their emotional sterility, their lack of empathy, their insistence on principles over relationships, or just their lack of a sense of fun.
It’s the hegemony of the “thinking” type, of course, that has put our society in its present position where any plausible-sounding argument must be given consideration, no matter how wrong it feels on other levels.
Jung’s types, I think, correspond quite neatly with the ancient Greek – in particular the Platonist – understanding of the inner human being. Plato and his followers believed that we have an “irrational soul” – consisting of an “appetitive” (sense-desiring) and an “incensive” (emotionally motivating) part – and a “rational soul” focused on the logos. (The Greek word for the reasoning faculty was dianoia, literally “dual mind,” which highlights their understanding of the fundamentally dualistic nature of rationality.)
The fourth of Jung’s types is the “intuitive.” This is a word that is subject to serious misunderstandings, not least because there is a sort of industry that has cropped up in recent years that purports to teach people how to use their intuition. Jung defined intuition as the propensity to understand the wholeness of a situation all at once, without analysis. It’s not “gut feeling,” which is more like the sensing function, nor is it that vague stomach-turning feeling that if I do this, someone who’s important to me might disapprove; that’s emotion.
Intuition, rather, is Jung’s version of what the ancient philosophers called the nous, another untranslatable term. To the ancient philosophers, however, it’s clear that this was the “highest” part of the human being, the direct link to the divine. Unlike the “rational soul,” which must analyze things step-by-step and part-by-part, the nous grasps the whole as a whole, non-dualistically.
And this is the great error of rationalism: It ignores the importance or the meaning or even the existence of the wholeness of anything and everything. And by denying the validity of other kinds of understanding, it obstructs our wholeness as humans. A whole human being has access to all the resources of the soul and spirit, from sense-perception to emotional judgment to verbal analysis to that mysterious opening through which inexplicable insight flows. Closing off any of these ways of understanding reality is an act of self-amputation.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
It's Always Now
I’ve been seeing a lot of news stories lately in which people (or politicians, if they qualify) are claiming that one thing or another is part of “God’s plan.” For example, the oilwell blowout that’s destroying the Gulf of Mexico is part of “God’s plan,” according to some. And various candidates for elected office are claiming that they’re running because it’s part of “God’s plan” for them personally.
Oddly enough, these kinds of statements are being made by self-professed Christians. I had thought Christianity was a monotheistic religion, but apparently I was wrong: According to probably the most rigorous monotheist ever, Plotinus, God doesn’t plan, and saying that He/She/It does plan is saying that God is multiple.
Instead, Plotinus says, God causes reality to exist by a timeless, eternally instantaneous, simultaneous, spontaneous sort of explosion of creative goodwill.
Frankly, the idea of God planning things is pretty silly. First, you have to imagine that God doesn’t know precisely what’s going to happen; instead, the all-knowing deity must form an intention to make something happen, then decide what is going to happen, and only then actually make it happen.
It’s only from the point of view of time- and space-limited beings (e.g., humans) that one thing appears to follow another, and thus that one thing appears to cause another. Through a kind of back-fitting, we thus imagine that an omniscient God knew ahead of time that a given phenomenon was going to be the cause of a certain effect; in other words, that God “planned” it that way.
This way of thinking posits that God has “foreknowledge” of events and thus gives rise to all the arguments about predestination and free will. But it’s actually an act of anthropomorphism: We’re imagining a God who “sees” things from a human-like perspective and needs to control, manipulate and micromanage like a power-drunk CEO.
In fact, there can be no “fore” knowledge if there’s no before or after; as I like to say, “It’s always now.”
One implication of this difference of perspective that I haven’t heard discussed much: From our time- and space-bound point of view, there’s a lot that’s “not here” or “not yet,” and this is precisely what enables humans to practice dishonesty on each other, if they’re so inclined.
For example, I could offer to sell you some shares in a gold mine, promising that there is in fact a mine where I say it is and that it will in fact produce gold when I start digging there. Or I could tell you that nasty little brown-skinned people are tunneling into your garden and planning to steal all your goodies and ravish your wife and children, and you need me to stop them.
From your time- and space-restricted perspective, you might not be able to verify what I’m saying, so you might just take my word for it based on your desires or predispositions. But from the point of view of what Meister Eckhart called the “eternal now,” everything is present. So no one can deceive God.
Plotinus and Plato (and Eckhart and lots of other people) taught that the “highest part,” so to speak, of the human being exists in that “eternal now,” but our fragmented, matter-focused way of life keeps us so distracted that we’re disconnected from it — unaware, in fact, that any such part of ourselves exists.
The whole point of real philosophy (and true religion, which is the same thing) is to transform ourselves so as to (re-)connect with that highest, timeless part, which is in fact the true self and the central unity of the self and the one part of the self capable of knowing God. So to put it bluntly, anyone who claims to know “God’s plan” doesn’t know God.
Oddly enough, these kinds of statements are being made by self-professed Christians. I had thought Christianity was a monotheistic religion, but apparently I was wrong: According to probably the most rigorous monotheist ever, Plotinus, God doesn’t plan, and saying that He/She/It does plan is saying that God is multiple.
Instead, Plotinus says, God causes reality to exist by a timeless, eternally instantaneous, simultaneous, spontaneous sort of explosion of creative goodwill.
Frankly, the idea of God planning things is pretty silly. First, you have to imagine that God doesn’t know precisely what’s going to happen; instead, the all-knowing deity must form an intention to make something happen, then decide what is going to happen, and only then actually make it happen.
It’s only from the point of view of time- and space-limited beings (e.g., humans) that one thing appears to follow another, and thus that one thing appears to cause another. Through a kind of back-fitting, we thus imagine that an omniscient God knew ahead of time that a given phenomenon was going to be the cause of a certain effect; in other words, that God “planned” it that way.
This way of thinking posits that God has “foreknowledge” of events and thus gives rise to all the arguments about predestination and free will. But it’s actually an act of anthropomorphism: We’re imagining a God who “sees” things from a human-like perspective and needs to control, manipulate and micromanage like a power-drunk CEO.
In fact, there can be no “fore” knowledge if there’s no before or after; as I like to say, “It’s always now.”
One implication of this difference of perspective that I haven’t heard discussed much: From our time- and space-bound point of view, there’s a lot that’s “not here” or “not yet,” and this is precisely what enables humans to practice dishonesty on each other, if they’re so inclined.
For example, I could offer to sell you some shares in a gold mine, promising that there is in fact a mine where I say it is and that it will in fact produce gold when I start digging there. Or I could tell you that nasty little brown-skinned people are tunneling into your garden and planning to steal all your goodies and ravish your wife and children, and you need me to stop them.
From your time- and space-restricted perspective, you might not be able to verify what I’m saying, so you might just take my word for it based on your desires or predispositions. But from the point of view of what Meister Eckhart called the “eternal now,” everything is present. So no one can deceive God.
Plotinus and Plato (and Eckhart and lots of other people) taught that the “highest part,” so to speak, of the human being exists in that “eternal now,” but our fragmented, matter-focused way of life keeps us so distracted that we’re disconnected from it — unaware, in fact, that any such part of ourselves exists.
The whole point of real philosophy (and true religion, which is the same thing) is to transform ourselves so as to (re-)connect with that highest, timeless part, which is in fact the true self and the central unity of the self and the one part of the self capable of knowing God. So to put it bluntly, anyone who claims to know “God’s plan” doesn’t know God.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Control Thyself
I don’t know if it has always been this way (I suspect it has), but people today do seem to have a tendency to want to control the world around them by dictating what other people should do.
I’ve spent a lot of time driving, possibly more than average, and I’ve observed myself and others while doing this. We aren’t just driving, we’re also judging every other driver we encounter. Ultimately, each of us is thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?” But the sad fact of the matter is that they are driving the way we drive; they’re driving along thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?”
We bring the same attitude, the same self-justified view of things, to life in general: “Why can’t everyone just live the way I live?” And the problem is the same: Everyone does live the way we live: self-absorbed and thinking we know better than everyone else.
The philosophical attitude is of course somewhat different: We should examine ourselves first, and only when we’re sure we’ve gotten it all figured out (which of course, philosophically speaking, is never) should we turn our attention to telling other people what to do.
This approach tends to strike people as unrealistic, impractical, other-worldly. And those criticisms are true. The truly philosophical life contributes nothing to the growth of the economy, the advance of science and technology, the expansion of human domination over nature. On the contrary, it tends to heap scorn on the pursuit of such things, to call attention to the impermanence, and thus the emptiness, of all achievements along these lines.
This leaves philosophers open to the criticism of being anti-humanistic: Science and medicine and so on have improved the human condition immeasurably over the centuries, and surely no one can claim that there’s no value in this improvement. There’s a certain amount of exaggeration in this claim of progress, but there’s also a certain amount of truth: People do live significantly longer today than they did even a century ago, and anyone who wants to argue that this isn’t an improvement is going to have a hard time convincing anyone.
At the same time, however, we seem to have paid, and are continuing to pay, a steep price: in consumption of the Earth’s resources, destruction of the environment and deterioration in our social, political and spiritual circumstances.
There are lots of rhythms in life. In human life in particular, there’s an upbeat, an inhalation, a rising tide in our youth as we grow and go out into the world to make our mark, raise families, change the institutions and situations into which we’re born. And there’s a downbeat, an exhalation, an ebbing tide in our later years as we seek to preserve and conserve what we’ve learned and what we’ve found worthy of valuing, and to protect what we’ve acquired.
There will always be a tension between these movements, and likely a swinging of the pendulum between one and the other. What seems likely to be most harmful, most likely to render us unable to keep our social world going, is the belief that we can freeze the pendulum at some point in its swing, to believe we can say, “This much freedom, this much exploration, and no more.” And that applies to the carved-in-stone principles of science as much as it does to the conventions of bourgeois society or the commandments of religion.
It’s precisely at the point when we think we have it all figured out that the stuff we don’t know comes up behind us and clubs us on the back of the head.
I’ve spent a lot of time driving, possibly more than average, and I’ve observed myself and others while doing this. We aren’t just driving, we’re also judging every other driver we encounter. Ultimately, each of us is thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?” But the sad fact of the matter is that they are driving the way we drive; they’re driving along thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?”
We bring the same attitude, the same self-justified view of things, to life in general: “Why can’t everyone just live the way I live?” And the problem is the same: Everyone does live the way we live: self-absorbed and thinking we know better than everyone else.
The philosophical attitude is of course somewhat different: We should examine ourselves first, and only when we’re sure we’ve gotten it all figured out (which of course, philosophically speaking, is never) should we turn our attention to telling other people what to do.
This approach tends to strike people as unrealistic, impractical, other-worldly. And those criticisms are true. The truly philosophical life contributes nothing to the growth of the economy, the advance of science and technology, the expansion of human domination over nature. On the contrary, it tends to heap scorn on the pursuit of such things, to call attention to the impermanence, and thus the emptiness, of all achievements along these lines.
This leaves philosophers open to the criticism of being anti-humanistic: Science and medicine and so on have improved the human condition immeasurably over the centuries, and surely no one can claim that there’s no value in this improvement. There’s a certain amount of exaggeration in this claim of progress, but there’s also a certain amount of truth: People do live significantly longer today than they did even a century ago, and anyone who wants to argue that this isn’t an improvement is going to have a hard time convincing anyone.
At the same time, however, we seem to have paid, and are continuing to pay, a steep price: in consumption of the Earth’s resources, destruction of the environment and deterioration in our social, political and spiritual circumstances.
There are lots of rhythms in life. In human life in particular, there’s an upbeat, an inhalation, a rising tide in our youth as we grow and go out into the world to make our mark, raise families, change the institutions and situations into which we’re born. And there’s a downbeat, an exhalation, an ebbing tide in our later years as we seek to preserve and conserve what we’ve learned and what we’ve found worthy of valuing, and to protect what we’ve acquired.
There will always be a tension between these movements, and likely a swinging of the pendulum between one and the other. What seems likely to be most harmful, most likely to render us unable to keep our social world going, is the belief that we can freeze the pendulum at some point in its swing, to believe we can say, “This much freedom, this much exploration, and no more.” And that applies to the carved-in-stone principles of science as much as it does to the conventions of bourgeois society or the commandments of religion.
It’s precisely at the point when we think we have it all figured out that the stuff we don’t know comes up behind us and clubs us on the back of the head.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
The Wall and the Gate
One of the criticisms invoked against philosophers in ancient times (by Christians, for example) was that the very idea of philosophy implied that they could never reach their goal. The word “philosophy” itself suggested this: It means love of or friendship toward wisdom, not the actual possession of wisdom. From at least Socrates on, the philosophers themselves seemed to acknowledge this open-endedness, denying that they themselves were “wise.”
The famous story of the Delphic Oracle’s pronouncement on Socrates, and his interpretation of it (as portrayed by Plato), seems to support this view. On being asked who was the wisest of men, the oracle replied, “None is wiser than Socrates.” This dictum, delivered presumably from the god Apollo, took Socrates by surprise, because he was convinced that he possessed nothing that he could convince himself was real and true knowledge.
And that was precisely the point. All other men thought they knew things that were true and important and wise, but they truly knew nothing. As a result, they didn’t seek to learn, but instead were content to rest in their false certainty.
Socrates, in contrast, understood that he knew nothing true and important and wise, and continuously sought to learn whatever he could of such things. This made him, in the view of Plato and pretty much all subsequent thinkers, the epitome of a philosopher: a seeker of wisdom.
We are accustomed today to thinking of wisdom as knowledge of a certain kind, and this appears also to have been the most widespread view in ancient Greece. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ most implacable opponents were the Sophists, a group of generally itinerant teachers of what we would call today public speaking, persuasion, marketing, personal presentation. Their special forté was teaching the skill of arguing both sides of an issue with equal effectiveness; in other words, how to win an argument, regardless of the truth.
The Sophists’ claim was that they taught wisdom (“sophia” in Greek), and Socrates’ (and Plato’s) counterclaim was that they taught nothing of the sort – and indeed that wisdom could not be taught. But what the philosophers offered in opposition to the Sophists was not a different version of wisdom but instead a different way of thinking about what wisdom is. And their way of thinking about wisdom was in some sense an end in itself: To think about wisdom, what it might be, how to acquire it, is better than to believe one has it.
Then as now, people mostly preferred to believe, or hope, that they could pay a Sophist and in return receive the knowledge they needed to succeed (by whatever yardstick success might be measured). The career of the Roman statesman Cicero provides an object lesson in how the single-minded pursuit of sophistic learning could in fact pay off in the accumulation of wealth and the acquisition of power. But the philosophical question is whether such a life is truly good.
The alternative the philosophers offered was a life of constant self-examination with no tangible reward, and their refusal to admit that wisdom is something definable and teachable continued to be a point of attack by their enemies even after the Sophists had faded from history. Christian apologists took up the argument: The philosophers can only “seek” wisdom, but we know we “have” wisdom because God Himself gave it to us through divine revelation – and we have the divine books to prove it, providing us with a complete and final truth. Our task thus is not to find the truth but just to understand and live according to the wisdom that has been packaged and delivered to us so neatly.
There’s a Sufi story I ran across at some point, I forget exactly where, that seems to me to have some relevance here, though I might be wrong.
Once upon a time, there was a king who ruled over a city where farmers and tradesmen and so on came to sell their goods and services.
This king was genuinely determined to be righteous and virtuous. One day, walking through the marketplace in his city, he heard the sellers of vegetables and livestock and metalware and ceramics and fortune-telling and love potions and so on touting their products and performances, and he was appalled by the dishonesty of it all: Everyone, it seemed, was exaggerating or distorting or otherwise misrepresenting what he or she had to sell.
The king went back to his palace and thought about what he had seen and heard, and he decided that he would find a way to force everyone who came into his city to tell the truth. That night, he sent his soldiers to build a gallows next to the gate by which the farmers and tradesmen entered the city.
At dawn the next day, when all the peddlers and farmers and so on were lined up at the gate to come into the city, the king stood on the wall and addressed them. “All honest men are welcome in my city,” he said, in his archaically gender-specific way. “But dishonest men are never welcome here. So to guarantee the honesty of all who enter here, I have built this gallows. If you want to come into my city, you must answer one question. If you tell the truth, you may come in and do your business. But if you lie, you will be hanged from this gallows. Now, who wants to come in?”
Naturally, everyone hesitated. But after a moment, an old man stepped forward. The king saw him and said, “All right, granddad, where are you going?”
The old man answered, “I’m going to hang on your gallows.”
As far as I know, the king may still be standing on that wall and trying to figure out what he should do with the old man, because whatever he does, he will make himself a liar.
The famous story of the Delphic Oracle’s pronouncement on Socrates, and his interpretation of it (as portrayed by Plato), seems to support this view. On being asked who was the wisest of men, the oracle replied, “None is wiser than Socrates.” This dictum, delivered presumably from the god Apollo, took Socrates by surprise, because he was convinced that he possessed nothing that he could convince himself was real and true knowledge.
And that was precisely the point. All other men thought they knew things that were true and important and wise, but they truly knew nothing. As a result, they didn’t seek to learn, but instead were content to rest in their false certainty.
Socrates, in contrast, understood that he knew nothing true and important and wise, and continuously sought to learn whatever he could of such things. This made him, in the view of Plato and pretty much all subsequent thinkers, the epitome of a philosopher: a seeker of wisdom.
We are accustomed today to thinking of wisdom as knowledge of a certain kind, and this appears also to have been the most widespread view in ancient Greece. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ most implacable opponents were the Sophists, a group of generally itinerant teachers of what we would call today public speaking, persuasion, marketing, personal presentation. Their special forté was teaching the skill of arguing both sides of an issue with equal effectiveness; in other words, how to win an argument, regardless of the truth.
The Sophists’ claim was that they taught wisdom (“sophia” in Greek), and Socrates’ (and Plato’s) counterclaim was that they taught nothing of the sort – and indeed that wisdom could not be taught. But what the philosophers offered in opposition to the Sophists was not a different version of wisdom but instead a different way of thinking about what wisdom is. And their way of thinking about wisdom was in some sense an end in itself: To think about wisdom, what it might be, how to acquire it, is better than to believe one has it.
Then as now, people mostly preferred to believe, or hope, that they could pay a Sophist and in return receive the knowledge they needed to succeed (by whatever yardstick success might be measured). The career of the Roman statesman Cicero provides an object lesson in how the single-minded pursuit of sophistic learning could in fact pay off in the accumulation of wealth and the acquisition of power. But the philosophical question is whether such a life is truly good.
The alternative the philosophers offered was a life of constant self-examination with no tangible reward, and their refusal to admit that wisdom is something definable and teachable continued to be a point of attack by their enemies even after the Sophists had faded from history. Christian apologists took up the argument: The philosophers can only “seek” wisdom, but we know we “have” wisdom because God Himself gave it to us through divine revelation – and we have the divine books to prove it, providing us with a complete and final truth. Our task thus is not to find the truth but just to understand and live according to the wisdom that has been packaged and delivered to us so neatly.
There’s a Sufi story I ran across at some point, I forget exactly where, that seems to me to have some relevance here, though I might be wrong.
Once upon a time, there was a king who ruled over a city where farmers and tradesmen and so on came to sell their goods and services.
This king was genuinely determined to be righteous and virtuous. One day, walking through the marketplace in his city, he heard the sellers of vegetables and livestock and metalware and ceramics and fortune-telling and love potions and so on touting their products and performances, and he was appalled by the dishonesty of it all: Everyone, it seemed, was exaggerating or distorting or otherwise misrepresenting what he or she had to sell.
The king went back to his palace and thought about what he had seen and heard, and he decided that he would find a way to force everyone who came into his city to tell the truth. That night, he sent his soldiers to build a gallows next to the gate by which the farmers and tradesmen entered the city.
At dawn the next day, when all the peddlers and farmers and so on were lined up at the gate to come into the city, the king stood on the wall and addressed them. “All honest men are welcome in my city,” he said, in his archaically gender-specific way. “But dishonest men are never welcome here. So to guarantee the honesty of all who enter here, I have built this gallows. If you want to come into my city, you must answer one question. If you tell the truth, you may come in and do your business. But if you lie, you will be hanged from this gallows. Now, who wants to come in?”
Naturally, everyone hesitated. But after a moment, an old man stepped forward. The king saw him and said, “All right, granddad, where are you going?”
The old man answered, “I’m going to hang on your gallows.”
As far as I know, the king may still be standing on that wall and trying to figure out what he should do with the old man, because whatever he does, he will make himself a liar.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Those Who Can't
Quite a few years ago now, I spent some time as a college philosophy major. I realized pretty quickly that I had seriously misunderstood what that meant. I was a young man looking for answers, trying to understand the core of what life was about so that I could live accordingly. And while the great philosophers – some of them, anyway – offered those answers and attempted to explain that core, the academic approach was to regard all their ideas as if they were merely moves in some endless intellectual game: Plato says this, but Aristotle denies it, Spinoza offers this, but look at what Kant says instead – my rook to your queen’s pawn, my club to your heart.
Worse, as I later learned, the academic teachers of philosophy had for generations misrepresented the teachings of ancient philosophy. Ironically, this misrepresentation arose from the writings of scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries who truly admired Plato and Aristotle, but in an idiosyncratic and conditional way: extolling the philosophers as the originators of rationalism, but condemning them for failing to maintain the kind of hyper-rationalism they themselves wanted to practice and spread.
Another element not to be disregarded was the tendency – and not just among academics – to believe that “newer” automatically means “better.” For teachers of philosophy, this translates into the belief that the speculations of Hegel or Wittgenstein or Heidegger or Foucault must be ever more complete, more scientific, more true, than those of Plato, Aristotle or Epicurus, because we have built upon, we have surpassed, their groping attempts to explain reality. In a word, philosophy, like everything else, has “evolved.”
Finally, and most damagingly, we have the triumph of the belief that “learning” is a noun, not a verb; that knowledge is a sort of commodity to be acquired and traded in measurable chunks. It’s likely that this view was inevitable once the bureaucratization of education began within industrialized society, because it enables the creation of standardized curricula and lesson plans and all the rest of the apparatus required to turn schools into factories (sorry, “manufacturing plants”). What this meant for philosophy departments, as for all others, is that the professors taught the curriculum – in other words, the entrenched misunderstandings, misreadings, biases, tendencies – and not the subject.
The subject of philosophy is, of course, wisdom; or rather, the seeking of wisdom. Not surprisingly, professors of philosophy have for several centuries shied away from attempting to teach such things, perhaps in largest part because they are so open-ended. What they teach is not philosophy, how to “do philosophy,” how to be a philosopher, but what different philosophers have said and how to quibble with it. The measure of how far the professors are removed from the actual doing of philosophy is the fact that while every one of the teachers and textbooks I encountered in my time as a philosophy major happily defined the word “philosophy” as “love of wisdom,” not one ever tried to explain what “wisdom” might be.
What I took away from my experience as a philosophy major was the belief that Western philosophy had absolutely nothing to offer to a seeker of the kind of core understanding of life I mentioned earlier. It took me a lot of years and a long roundabout trip through Eastern religion and Western occultism and mysticism to realize that I had been completely misled. When I finally returned to ancient Western philosophy, to the philosophers themselves and not the professors, I discovered that what I had been looking for in the first place was always there.
Worse, as I later learned, the academic teachers of philosophy had for generations misrepresented the teachings of ancient philosophy. Ironically, this misrepresentation arose from the writings of scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries who truly admired Plato and Aristotle, but in an idiosyncratic and conditional way: extolling the philosophers as the originators of rationalism, but condemning them for failing to maintain the kind of hyper-rationalism they themselves wanted to practice and spread.
Another element not to be disregarded was the tendency – and not just among academics – to believe that “newer” automatically means “better.” For teachers of philosophy, this translates into the belief that the speculations of Hegel or Wittgenstein or Heidegger or Foucault must be ever more complete, more scientific, more true, than those of Plato, Aristotle or Epicurus, because we have built upon, we have surpassed, their groping attempts to explain reality. In a word, philosophy, like everything else, has “evolved.”
Finally, and most damagingly, we have the triumph of the belief that “learning” is a noun, not a verb; that knowledge is a sort of commodity to be acquired and traded in measurable chunks. It’s likely that this view was inevitable once the bureaucratization of education began within industrialized society, because it enables the creation of standardized curricula and lesson plans and all the rest of the apparatus required to turn schools into factories (sorry, “manufacturing plants”). What this meant for philosophy departments, as for all others, is that the professors taught the curriculum – in other words, the entrenched misunderstandings, misreadings, biases, tendencies – and not the subject.
The subject of philosophy is, of course, wisdom; or rather, the seeking of wisdom. Not surprisingly, professors of philosophy have for several centuries shied away from attempting to teach such things, perhaps in largest part because they are so open-ended. What they teach is not philosophy, how to “do philosophy,” how to be a philosopher, but what different philosophers have said and how to quibble with it. The measure of how far the professors are removed from the actual doing of philosophy is the fact that while every one of the teachers and textbooks I encountered in my time as a philosophy major happily defined the word “philosophy” as “love of wisdom,” not one ever tried to explain what “wisdom” might be.
What I took away from my experience as a philosophy major was the belief that Western philosophy had absolutely nothing to offer to a seeker of the kind of core understanding of life I mentioned earlier. It took me a lot of years and a long roundabout trip through Eastern religion and Western occultism and mysticism to realize that I had been completely misled. When I finally returned to ancient Western philosophy, to the philosophers themselves and not the professors, I discovered that what I had been looking for in the first place was always there.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Focus
We’re all familiar with the use of the word “focus” as a sort of psychological term; for example, “You need to stop worrying and focus on getting the job done.” I suspect most people probably understand this usage as a borrowing from photography, which would give “to focus” a meaning something like “to direct one’s attention toward a specific object so as to make that object stand out clearly from all others.”
However, the use of “focus” in photography is itself a borrowing. The word is Latin in origin and originally meant “hearth.” Thus, it referred to the center of the home, around which the life of the family revolved, the source of warmth, of nourishment and, most importantly, of light. On that basis, the term has clear symbolic ramifications; Pythagoras is held to have taught that at the center of the universe is a kind of metaphysical fire which he called Hestia, which of course is the name of the Greek goddess of the hearth.
Pythagoras also was believed by some ancient writers to have been the first person to use the word “kosmos” as a name for the universe. Our modern word “cosmos,” as a term that simply means “the physical universe,” is not at all equivalent to the ancient Greek word, which carries implications of orderliness and beauty (hence the English word “cosmetic”). Thus, some recent translators of ancient Greek writings have taken to using the phrase “world-order” to translate “kosmos.”
The idea that there might be some sort of overall order in the universe has become quite alien over the past couple of centuries as advances in physical science have been interpreted as somehow disproving traditional beliefs about God, creation and the meaning of it all. In the extreme view, we live in a universe of randomness in which any meaning that exists is what we ourselves create by the heroic exercise of individual will.
I think that view is untrue. I also think it’s unscientific. And some scientists these days are starting to recognize at least that it’s inadequate, because if you look around the universe, you find that there is in fact quite a bit of orderliness. So there’s a fair amount of studying going on of “self-organizing systems” and “emergent order.” You can even find reputable scientists discussing our “order-producing universe” – which might be another way of translating “kosmos.”
Still, after decades of repetition by the intellectual elite, the idea of an essentially random, meaningless existence has had a pervasive influence on Western culture. Following Darwin and Nietzsche, and even more after Einstein and Heisenberg and their colleagues, we’ve learned that we live in a universe that has no center, no order, no purpose – the product of an inexplicable cataclysm, and fated merely to collapse back into nothingness or fizzle away into a tepid and inert miasma.
In a kind of parallel development, the centering-point in our lives has gradually disappeared. The hearth gave way first to the radio, then the television, though both could still provide a “focus” for family life. But then we needed personal TVs in every bedroom, and 200 channels to watch instead of just three. Then it was a computer wired to the Intenet, and now a cell phone, an iPhone, a BlackBerry or a PDA. And while the techie fans of such things may claim they’re more “connected” now, it really all tends toward disconnectedness, a decrease in shared experience and an increase in isolation – in other words, a more random and meaningless existence, but self-inflicted.
What I plan to do in this blog is find opportunities to call attention to how the underlying order of reality is reflected even in the seemingly messy and disorderly details of life in today’s world. I’ll probably make fairly frequent reference to the economy and financial markets, because I have professional expertise in those areas and they’re especially interesting these days to a lot of people. But there’s nothing I’ll rule out as a topic of discussion, because everything is connected, nothing in this universe is explainable without reference to everything else, the history of each thing is the history of us all. Or as Tennyson put it:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower; but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
However, the use of “focus” in photography is itself a borrowing. The word is Latin in origin and originally meant “hearth.” Thus, it referred to the center of the home, around which the life of the family revolved, the source of warmth, of nourishment and, most importantly, of light. On that basis, the term has clear symbolic ramifications; Pythagoras is held to have taught that at the center of the universe is a kind of metaphysical fire which he called Hestia, which of course is the name of the Greek goddess of the hearth.
Pythagoras also was believed by some ancient writers to have been the first person to use the word “kosmos” as a name for the universe. Our modern word “cosmos,” as a term that simply means “the physical universe,” is not at all equivalent to the ancient Greek word, which carries implications of orderliness and beauty (hence the English word “cosmetic”). Thus, some recent translators of ancient Greek writings have taken to using the phrase “world-order” to translate “kosmos.”
The idea that there might be some sort of overall order in the universe has become quite alien over the past couple of centuries as advances in physical science have been interpreted as somehow disproving traditional beliefs about God, creation and the meaning of it all. In the extreme view, we live in a universe of randomness in which any meaning that exists is what we ourselves create by the heroic exercise of individual will.
I think that view is untrue. I also think it’s unscientific. And some scientists these days are starting to recognize at least that it’s inadequate, because if you look around the universe, you find that there is in fact quite a bit of orderliness. So there’s a fair amount of studying going on of “self-organizing systems” and “emergent order.” You can even find reputable scientists discussing our “order-producing universe” – which might be another way of translating “kosmos.”
Still, after decades of repetition by the intellectual elite, the idea of an essentially random, meaningless existence has had a pervasive influence on Western culture. Following Darwin and Nietzsche, and even more after Einstein and Heisenberg and their colleagues, we’ve learned that we live in a universe that has no center, no order, no purpose – the product of an inexplicable cataclysm, and fated merely to collapse back into nothingness or fizzle away into a tepid and inert miasma.
In a kind of parallel development, the centering-point in our lives has gradually disappeared. The hearth gave way first to the radio, then the television, though both could still provide a “focus” for family life. But then we needed personal TVs in every bedroom, and 200 channels to watch instead of just three. Then it was a computer wired to the Intenet, and now a cell phone, an iPhone, a BlackBerry or a PDA. And while the techie fans of such things may claim they’re more “connected” now, it really all tends toward disconnectedness, a decrease in shared experience and an increase in isolation – in other words, a more random and meaningless existence, but self-inflicted.
What I plan to do in this blog is find opportunities to call attention to how the underlying order of reality is reflected even in the seemingly messy and disorderly details of life in today’s world. I’ll probably make fairly frequent reference to the economy and financial markets, because I have professional expertise in those areas and they’re especially interesting these days to a lot of people. But there’s nothing I’ll rule out as a topic of discussion, because everything is connected, nothing in this universe is explainable without reference to everything else, the history of each thing is the history of us all. Or as Tennyson put it:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower; but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
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