Philosophy Lounge

October 16, 2012

Bertrand Russell on the Budda’s and the Christian’s Ideal, and Nietzsche’s ‘Pathology’

Filed under: philosophy history,Political Philosophy — Tags: , , — jbernal @ 1:38 pm

Juan Bernal

In his book, A History of Western Philosophy,*  Bertrand Russell makes some rather surprising statements about love as definitive of two great religions, Christianity and Buddhism.   It is in the process of contrasting what he sees as advocacy of love by Christianity and the Buddha with what he takes as Friedrich Nietzsche’s ethic, that Russell contrasts the Christianity’s and Buddhists love for humanity with Nietzsche’s complete lack of sympathy for others. In the process Russell effectively misleads us both with regard to the religious ideal and Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Near the end of his section on Nietzsche (** pp. 760-773), Russell takes up what he calls the “ethical, as opposed to the political question.”

“The ethical, as opposed to the political, question is one as to sympathy. Sympathy, in the sense of being made unhappy by the suffering of others, is to some extent natural to human beings; … But the development of this feeling is very different in different people. Some find pleasure in the infliction of torture; others, like Buddha, feel that they cannot be completely happy so long as any living thing is suffering.” (p. 771)

Since he will eventually contrast Buddha’s ethics with Nietzsche’s, Russell here insinuates that the Buddha sought happiness, which he could not realize as long as others were suffering; whereas others –Does he mean to include Nietzsche here? -  find pleasure in the suffering of others.  Why mention this contrast unless it is to insinuate that Nietzsche is one who finds pleasure in the suffering of others?  Where is there any textual basis for this view of Nietzsche?   Moreover, did the Buddha seek complete happiness?

Russell continues:

“Most people divide mankind emotionally into friends and enemies, feeling sympathy for the former, but not for the latter. An ethic such as that of Christianity or Buddhism has its emotional basis in universal sympathy. Nietzsche’s [On the other hand] in a complete absence of sympathy. (He frequently preaches against sympathy, …he has no difficulty in following his own precepts.)” (p. 771)

He imagines an argument in which the Buddha speaks

“..of the lepers, outcast and miserable; the poor, toiling with aching limbs and barely kept alive by scanty nourishment; the wounded in battle dying in slow agony; the orphans, ill-treated by cruel guardians; and even the most successful haunted by the thought of failure and death. From all this load of sorrow, he [Buddha] would say, a way of salvation must be found, and salvation can only come through love.” (p.771)

Russell characterizes Nietzsche in starkly opposing terms:  He sees Nietzsche as disdaining all concern and compassion for the suffering of ordinary people, who only suffer trivially; whereas the suffering and pain endured by great men always serves a higher, artistic purpose. (see page 772)

Russell imagines that Buddha would refer to Jesus as his hero:

“I too have my heroes: my successor Jesus, because he told men to love their enemies, ….”

Furthermore, Russell’s Buddha charges that Nietzsche “loves pain” and that his love of life is a sham.

“But those who really love life would be happy as no one can be happy in the world as it is.” (p. 772)

Russell then states that he “agrees with Buddha as [he] has imagined him” and that he dislikes Nietzsche because he [Nietzsche]

“likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit in to a duty, because the men he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in cause men to die. But I think the ultimate argument against his philosophy … lies not in an appeal to facts, but in an appeal to the emotions.  Nietzsche despises universal love; I feel it the motive power to all that I desire as regards the world.” (p.772)

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In his contrasting the proponents of universal love (Buddhism and Christianity) and Nietzsche’s ‘ethics’ rejecting sympathy for others as desirable,  Russell commits three basic errors.

  •  He greatly oversimplifies the message of the Gospel’s Jesus, ignoring those aspects that do not promote love.
  • He seems to mis-characterize the mission of the Buddha, which does not appear to be one based on love for his fellow human beings.
  • He oversimplifies and distorts one rather minor aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Let’s briefly take each in turn.

Jesus:  Admittedly, there are passages in the Gospels which show Jesus as preaching love for everyone, including one’s adversaries.  Some of this actions and teachings emphasize that one must not only return loving acts with loving acts, but even respond to violence and hatred with love for the perpetrator.  Christians like to emphasize this aspect of Jesus’s teachings.  But if we think that the essential teaching of Jesus is the message of love for humanity, we oversimplify the messages of the Gospel.  For the Gospels also include plenty of passages and utterances which diverge significantly from the message of love for all humans.  Jesus often directs hostility and venom toward the Pharisees, the Scribes, and other Jews who did not accept his message of salvation.  He even spends some time talking about the dire consequences (eternal fires of Hell) awaiting those who reject his doctrine.  This is hardly a message of love.  Furthermore, the main theme of the Gospels is that of salvation; what one must believe and what one must do in order to achieve eternal salvation, that ultimate reward of heaven.  In short, much of the message of the Gospel is one of a prudent ethics: One that teaches that we must change our lives and do what is required in order to be saved. This is more a message of faith in a religious doctrine and obedience to the teachings (of the Christ) than it is a message of love for humanity.

The Buddha:   Did the Gautama Buddha, of the earliest form of Buddhism, Theraveda Buddhism, teach love for humanity?  It is not obvious that he did.  Some people bring up the alleged fact that the Buddha acted out of a great compassion for the suffering humans. But can we equate compassion with love?  Maybe we can at least in the sense of love as agape, which the dictionary characterizes as divine love or God’s love for humanity; and also as a spontaneous, altruistic love.  Supposedly, when the Buddha was exposed to the suffering that most humans experience, he felt great compassion for humanity, and hence took on the task of bringing an end to this suffering.  However, when we read accounts of the Buddha’s path to enlightenment, it is not obvious that love for humanity motivated him to seek enlightenment and eventual release from the cycle of existence (hence, the cycle of suffering).  He associated suffering with attachment to illusion and the things of the material world; and he sought enlightenment and release from material illusion and the endless cycle of suffering, death and reincarnation. To the extent that he taught others or guided others to follow his example, most probably it was because he wanted to put them on a path to freedom from error and illusion, and the consequent suffering, a path that would enable them eventually to realize enlightenment and release from existence.  Along with Russell, one might see the Buddha’s mission as one expressing love for his fellow humans.  But most interpretations of Theravada Buddhism do not so characterize the Buddha’s actions.

Nietzsche:  Even someone who is only moderately familiar with Nietzsche’s work will be skeptical about Russell’s characterization of Nietzsche’s philosophy.  This is not the place to get into much detail, but one could start by noting that Nietzsche does not develop an ethics in which he preaches or teaches a particular view of ethical good or advocates ethical principles.   He does not teach a philosophy of disdain for the ideals of a Buddha or even those of an ethical Jesus.  He does not teach that we should reject sympathy for others, as much express skepticism about those who claim ‘universal love’ as the motive for their actions.   He does not love pain and suffering, as much as try to see pain and suffering as sometimes motivating achievement and artistic excellence.  To the degree that Nietzsche deals with issues that Russell brings up, it is as a social critic, as an advocate of the re-evaluation of traditional values, and a questioner of what he sees as bad faith.  It is false that Nietzsche admires the politically powerful and holds them up as ideals to be followed.  Readers are often misled into this error (Russell’s error) because of Nietzsche’s ironic style and his occasional statement of preference for some powerful villain over a deceptive, dishonest hypocrite who pretends to practice high ideals.

Russell offers a caricature of Nietzsche’s work, which can not at all be accurately characterized as advocating a specific ethical position or political position.   In so characterizing Nietzsche, Russell makes the same mistake that the Nazi did in characterizing Nietzsche as a prophet of totalitarianism.  Both are mere distortions, as can be readily seen from a basic study of man’s work.

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*  Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 1945 (A Clarion Book, by Simon and Schuster,  New York, New York)  -  thirteenth paperback printing 1967

**  page references are  to the Simon and Schuster 1967 paperback printing

 

September 25, 2012

A Brief Statement of the Irony of Early Christian History

Filed under: critique of religion,Irony,philosophy history — Tags: — jbernal @ 11:19 am

Juan Bernal

2010   1/20

It is difficult to overstate this fact: The Christianity that we know today results from the Gentiles’ transformation of what was probably the message of a Jewish Sage from Galilee.  In fact, the Hellenized version of “Jesus” was first developed by Paul of Tarsus and John (of the Fourth Gospel).  This Hellenized philosophy has little or nothing to do with teachings of the person known as Yeshu or Yeshua, the flesh-and-blood person who is likely the basis for the Gospel Jesus, which develops the image of Jesus promoted by the evangelists, who were not the immediate followers of Yeshua.

 

When we try to get to facts concerning Yeshua from Galilee we have to dig through numerous layers of doctrine and popular myth.  Even for the critically-minded, educated historian-scholar, the flesh-and-blood person who walked the hills of Galilee and Judea is lost in the fog of subsequent doctrine, events and political drama (e.g., the need of the early Christians to distance themselves from the Jews and gain the sympathy of the Romans).

 

1/24   Historical Ironies:

Paul’s missionary  work and his teachings were a major factor in the early development of Christian doctrine; yet Paul’s teachings had little to do with the message of Yeshua, the Galilean teaching.

Early in the fourth century AD, the Roman emperor Constantine was primarily responsible for the fact that Christianity became the major religion in the Roman Empire and eventually became a major world religion. Yet, Constantine was not by any measure a Christian man.

The teachings of a Jewish sage are transformed into a Hellenized, somewhat mystical philosophy and eventually Christian doctrine over the course of a few decades.  After a few centuries, the Christian doctrine becomes a Roman institution.

1/27

To say that the Roman Emperor Constantine experienced a religious conversion is to speak in a very misleading way. Did he embrace Christianity as his faith and philosophy of life?  Did he come to accept the teachings in the Gospels and accept the risen Christ as his savior?  Any cursory reading of the history and actions of Constantine, before and after his alleged ‘conversion’ will surely yield an emphatic negative answer to each of those questions.

Yet, Constantine was probably most responsible for the fact that Christianity went from being primarily a minority cult to becoming a religion of universal significance.

 

September 1, 2012

A Strange Philosophical Objection to the Work of Simon Weisenthal

Filed under: ethics,philosophy history,Social Philosophy — Tags: , — jbernal @ 1:32 pm

Juan Bernal

The Holocaust began with Hitler’s rise to power in January of 1933 and ended on VE Day (May 8, 1945). During this time, more than 6 million Jews and millions of other groups that caught the negative attention of Nazi Germany. While all the murders were devastating to native populations, none were so devastating than that of the Jews. During this period, 5,000 Jewish communities were wiped out and the total that died represented 1/3 of all Jewish people alive at that time.

 

The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre said it has provided “new evidence” to authorities in Budapest on its most wanted suspect Laszlo Csatary, believed to be living in Hungary. The centre’s Efraim Zuroff, pictured in 2009, “last week submitted new evidence to the prosecutor in Budapest regarding crimes committed during World War II by its No 1 Most Wanted suspect Laszlo Csatary,” it said. (AFP Photo/Mark Ralston)The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre confirmed Sunday that Laszlo Csatary, accused of complicity in the killings of 15,700 Jews, had been tracked down to the Hungarian capital.  (Press Release, July, 2012)

 The Setting for a Surprising Philosophical Objection:

It is cases like that of Laszlo Csatary, another pathetic example of a human being who likely actively participated in the Nazi wholesale torture and killing of innocent civilians (children, women, old men) during the Nazi period (1930-1945) in twentieth century Europe, that I had in mind some years ago when I praised the work of Simon Weisenthal.

Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, dedicated his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust and to hunting down the perpetrators still at large. “When history looks back,” Wiesenthal explained, “I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it.” His work stands as a reminder and a warning for future generations.

But my philosophy correspondent, Pablo, was not impressed.  “That immoral!” he declared.

“What’s immoral,” I asked?  I thought he meant that the past actions of the old Nazi were immoral.   But, what he meant was that the actions of Simon Weisenthal were immoral.  It turned out that Pablo’s consistent utilitarian judgment told him that those old Nazi were not doing society any harm any more, so going after them was immoral.

“ Leave them alone; they’re just old, harmless men now!  Who cares what they did in the past?”  seemed to be Pablo’s  attitude.

After I recovered from my astonishment, it became clear that Pablo had some reasons (‘philosophical’ reasons) for taking exception to the morality of the work of Simon Weisenthal and others like him who continue to ‘hunt’ old Nazis who escaped justice back in the 1940s as WWII was ending.

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Three reasons given for opposing the prosecution of old Nazi and my responses.

1 -  It is just vengeance or retribution – the old Biblical “eye or an eye” type of thinking which an enlightened society should no longer practice.

Pablo,  argued along these lines:

 “Under Utilitarianism, the purpose of punishment is to rehabilitate those who have committed crimes (and there is little doubt that many of these war ‘criminals’ who escaped to S. America and elsewhere were really criminals). If rehabilitation is the proper goal, then of what purpose is it to punish some one in his 60s or 70s who has led a decent life in his new country? The only purpose for such punishment is purely retributive; the kind of deontological thinking we find in Xtianity and Judaism (and, I suspect, in Islam as well). That’s the old ‘eye for an eye’ thinking about which I will have none of. What’s pathetic is that Juan wants to go along with this ancient retributive thinking. . . Punishment should be metted out only when it can do some good toward rehabilitation or to protect society from criminals who can’t be rehabilitated.”

This is a surprising assertion, since there are ethical and legal retributive theories which are not at all mere expression of the ancient Biblical practice of vengeance and theories which give philosophical grounds for punishment and sanctions whose aim is not to rehabilitate the offender or to “protect society from criminals who cannot be rehabilitated.”  For example, Joel Feinberg writes that  “punishment is a standard vehicle for the expression of resentment of injury received and also .. for the expression of recognition and disapproval of evil.”  (Doing and Deserving, Joel Feinberg)

From other philosophers and legal theorists, we get other statements of punishment as the expression of the community include the “moral condemnation of the whole community,” [1] “the emphatic denunciation by the community of a crime,” [2] “the expression of censure,” [3] and “communal expression of disapproval.” [4]

In short, the idea of punishment as retribution is not equivalent (in any sense) to the old Biblical notion of an “eye for an eye” type of vengeance.  Punishment as retribution can serve as the community’s expression of an emphatic condemnation of certain types of criminal acts, such as the mass killing of innocents.  Nor is there general agreement among philosophers and legal theorists that punishment is justified only when the offender can be rehabilitated or when society must be protected from that offender who cannot be rehabilitated.  Our thinking (legal and moral thinking) does not limit legitimate punishment to cases in which the offender can be rehabilitated.

But the general point concerns our laws and sanctions: Our laws impose penalties for violations of those laws.  The primary purpose of these laws and sanctions is to protect society, not to reform or rehabilitate the offender.

These laws with their sanctions can also be seen as expressing society’s legal and moral commitment.  They say: “We hold the protection and security of people – especially the young and the vulnerable – to be so important that we as a society will impose the appropriate penalty on violators of those laws.”  The laws with their sanctions for violations of those laws express the legal and moral commitment of the community.

Legally, the only relevant question about the appropriateness of the penalty: Did the accused commit the offense?

Morally, a community has the right to bring such violators to justice. This can be seen as an expression of the collective judgment of the community.  With respect to range of gross violations, the penalty can be seen as the community’s condemnation of such action.   We have a collective and emphatic declaration that you will not do ‘S’; but that if you do S you will be hunted down and punished to the fullest extent of the law.  If you do S, you incur a debt to society (primarily to the victims and their families) which you are obligated to repay.

In summary, a retributive theory of justice and punishment merely implies that the offender shall be held accountable for his actions and shall be brought to justice, regardless of any utilitarian concern with his rehabilitation or re-education.  If these can be accomplished, that’s fine.  But the application of justice does not rest on that utilitarian value. A retributive theory of justice and punishment does not at all takes us back to the “ancient Biblical practice” of a violent extraction of an “eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”  

2 – There is no social benefit gained from the “hunting of Nazis.”  In many cases the old Nazi is just a harmless old man who might even be a benefit to the society in which he resides.  Going after him absolutely does not do anybody any good.

Here we have another surprising claim from my correspondent, Pablo.

His idea of the Utilitarian view of arrest & trial long after the offence (only when the offender can be rehabilitated or the action can be seen as protecting society) is a very narrow version of Utilitarianism.  A Rule Utilitarianism can justify laws calling for such arrest and trial of old criminals as laws that society implements for the good of society, e.g., as a way of discouraging and deterring other likely offenders. What is justified on utilitarian grounds is the law with sanctions or general rule that holds an offender responsible for this offense, and not the specific acts of seeking out, arresting and bringing to trial old offenders.  There is absolutely no inconsistency between Utilitarianism in this broader sense and the act of prosecuting old Nazis who have gotten away with their crimes against humanity (done in the 1940s in Nazi Europe).   And there are no grounds for claiming that “there is no social benefit” gotten from searching out and bringing to trial those old Nazis.

3 – The old Nazi is no longer the same person he was when he participated in the Nazi program to exterminate human beings, and should not be punished for what that “other person” did in the past.

Here’s another astounding claim by Pablo.  He writes:

“One of the most important aspects of selfhood, perhaps the most important, are the changes in the brain which are reflected  in memory loss, especially long-term memory. Without those memories, beliefs and  values we once held, we are no longer the same person. This is one of the reasons I suggested to Juan, regarding the prosecution of old war criminals, that the latter may not even be the same person they were 60 years earlier. Thus, since their selves have changed, they may not be the same person at all. Defining the self on a purely genetic basis only, just won’t do.”

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Here Pablo argues that we should not punish old Nazis because they’re no longer the same person who actively took part in the holocaust of the ’40s.  On this reasoning, there isn’t anyone guilty of a crime who should stand trial for this criminal acts, because — as contemporary science tells us (at least on Pablo’s reading) — they are no longer the same person who acted in the past.  Yes, folks, this is where some peoples’ version of philosophy takes them!

Surely, the fact that I have changed in many ways from the person I was in the past (no longer have the same beliefs, values have changed, don’t retain some memory, and so on) does not absolve me of responsibility for what I did in the past.  If I did something good, I can still claim credit (Hey, its been over thirty years since I earned that Ph.D and I still claim credit for it!) ; If I did something bad (Yes, twenty years ago I cheated my partner out of his fair share of the profit; I am still responsible for that shameful act!) , I am still responsible.  Claiming that I have changed as a person won’t do as a reason for concluding that I’m no longer responsible.  The only cases in which the law and our conventional practices allow for this absolution is in the case of insanity, brain injury or acts prior to maturity, as when something I did as an adolescent no longer counts against me as an adult.  But, not so in the case of past actions of an adult under normal circumstances.

Persons are creatures who retain an identity through change.   Sometimes those changes are so drastic that we are inclined to say that he/she is no longer the same person, as in the case of brain injury or serious stroke, for example.  But just because we change in some ordinary ways as we get older does not justify claiming that we’re no longer the same person who committed a crime decades earlier and disclaiming responsibility for what we did.  That the criminal is no longer the “same person” sounds too much like the ploy used by defense lawyers to soften the charges against their client.  And using this “lawyer’s tactic” to excuse the old Nazi who got away will not do, either legally or morally.

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Simon Weisenthal’s Explanation  

But let’s set aside these ‘philosophical’ considerations because the best explanation was given by Mr. Weisenthal himself.  In response to the question -  Why do the Nazi hunters pursue these old, fugitive Nazis long after their crimes?

 

“Wiesenthal was often asked to explain his motives for becoming a Nazi hunter.  According to Clyde Farnsworth in the New York Times Magazine (February 2, 1964), Wiesenthal once spent the Sabbath at the home of a former Mauthausen (a death camp) inmate, now a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer. After dinner his host said, “Simon, if you had gone back to building houses, you’d be a millionaire. Why didn’t you?”

“You’re a religious man,” replied Wiesenthal. “You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, ‘What have you done?,’ there will be many answers. You will say, ‘I became a jeweler,’ Another will say, ‘I have smuggled coffee and American cigarettes,’ Another will say, ‘I built houses,’ But I will say, ‘I did not forget you’.”

He did not forget the victims of the Nazi genocide.  Neither should the rest of us.

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[1] Feinberg also writes that Professor Hart has his definition of punishment as (in part) “a formal and solemn pronouncement of the moral condemnation of the whole community.” (Henry M. Hart, “The Aims of the Criminal Law,” in Law and Contemporary Problems, 23 (1958))

[2] Lord Denning, in the Report of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, speaks of punishment as “the emphatic denunciation by the community of a crime.”

[3] Among .. philosophers in recent decades who have made reprobative expressiveness essential to punishment are E.F. Carritt, who wrote in The Theory of Morals (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 111, that “the essential thing in punishment … is not pain, but the expression of censure, which is necessarily painful.”

[4] Morris R. Cohen, who wrote in Reason and Law (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950), 50, that “we may look upon punishment as a form of communal expression . . By and large such expression of disapproval is deterrent. But deterrence here is secondary.”

{Joel Feinberg,  Doing and Deserving, (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1970)}

 

 

January 17, 2012

An Ancient, Rational, “Scientific,” Perspective on Reality

Filed under: critique of religion,metaphysics,philosophy history — Tags: , — jbernal @ 12:54 pm

By Juan Bernal

Over two thousand years ago the Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretious (99-55 BCE), expressed a surprisingly modern philosophy, one which he got from a more ancient philosopher, the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE).

A recent book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt, recounts how the text of Lucretious’ great poem, “On the Nature of Things,” was discovered at the dawn of the Renaissance (1400s).   In this poem, Lucretious developed an atomistic, materialistic view of reality, one which offers a naturalistic explanation of the world and humanity, and which denies the relevance of the gods and attacks all religions for their superstition and exploitation of fear.

The book recounts the story in which the philosophy of Lucretious was rejected and condemned by the Christian world, but also admired and valued by a few courageous early humanists.  Greenblatt’s work is worth reading and has much to teach us regarding the discovery and reclamation of ancient works by scholars and humanists in the 14th and 15th centuries AD, and the extent to which Christian authorities and their ‘scholars’ repressed the philosophy of Epicurus/Lucretious.

Here I will limit myself to a summary of some of the main ideas that the poem advances.

To those not familiar with the philosophy of Epicurus (341-270 BCE), we can summarize some of it by stating that he  advocated rational living,  pleasure and happiness as the natural ends of life.  His view of ‘pleasure’ was that it should be consistent with intelligence and moderation; he emphasized the joys of the mind over corporeal, material pleasure.   Since, he accepted the atomism of Democritus, he denied the reality of gods, ghosts, and disembodied beings that survived death of the body; and he added the elements of chance, theorizing that atoms swerve into each other to combine into composite things and explain human free will.

This is the philosophy that Lucretious expresses in his poem.  Some of the main points of that philosophy are summarized by Greenblatt in chapter 8, “The Way Things Are.”  Here he writes that

 “a charge frequently leveled against him [Lucretious], when his poem began once again to be read—is atheism. But Lucretius was not in fact an atheist. He believed that the gods existed. But he also believed that, by virtue of being gods, they could not possibly be concerned with human beings or with anything that we do.” 

In short, Lucretious held that the gods were irrelevant to natural and human reality.  They did not explain how the world began nor did they intervene in history and human affairs. Greenblatt also notes that

“…much of what “On the Nature of Things” claims about the universe seems deeply familiar, at least among the circle of people who are likely to be reading these words. After all, many of the work’s core arguments are among the foundations on which modern life has been constructed.”

. The point here is the astonishing extent to which the philosophy of Epicurus and Lucretious anticipates significant aspects of modern science.  Consider some of the elements that constituted the Lucretian challenge (taken from Ch 8 of Greenblatt’s book, The Swerve – How the world became modern):

Everything is made of invisible particles.

The elementary particles of matter—“the seeds of the things”—are eternal. Time is not limited—a discrete substance with a beginning and an end—but infinite. The invisible particles from which the entire universe is made, from the stars to the lowliest insect, are indestructible and immortal, though any particular object in the universe is transitory.

Neither creation nor destruction ever has the upper hand; the sum total of matter remains the same, and the balance between the living and the dead is always restored:

The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.

 All particles are in motion in an infinite void.

Space, like time, is unbounded. There are no fixed points, no beginnings, middles, or ends, and no limits. Matter is not packed together in a solid mass. There is a void in things, allowing the constitutive particles to move, collide, combine, and move apart.  .  .  .

The universe consists then of matter—the primary particles and all those particles come together to form—and space, intangible and empty. Nothing else exists.

The universe has no creator or designer.  The patterns of order and disorder in the world are not the product of any divine scheme. Providence is a fantasy. What exists is not the manifestation of any overarching plan or any intelligent design inherent in matter itself. No supreme choreographer planned their movements, and the seeds of things did not have a meeting in which they decided what would go where.

There is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance.

Nature ceaselessly experiments. There is no single moment of origin, no mythic scene of creation. All living beings, from plants and insects to the higher mammals and man, have evolved through a long, complex process of trial and error. The process involves many false starts and dead ends, monsters, prodigies, mistakes, creatures that were not endowed with all the features that they needed to compete for resources and to create offspring. Creatures whose combination of organs enables them to adapt and to reproduce will succeed in establishing themselves, until changing circumstances make it impossible for them any longer to survive. The successful adaptations, like the failures, are the result of a fantastic number of combinations that are constantly being generated (and reproduced or discarded) over an unlimited expanse of time.

The universe was not created for or about humans. The earth—with its seas and deserts, harsh climate, wild beasts, diseases—was obviously not purpose-built to make our species feel at home.

. . . The fate of the entire species (let alone that of any individual) is not the pole around which everything revolves. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that human beings as a species will last forever. On the contrary, it is clear that, over the infinite expanses of time, some species grow, others disappear, generated and destroyed in the ceaseless process of change. There were other forms of life before us, which no longer exist; there will be other forms of life after us, when our kind has vanished.

Humans are not unique. They are part of a much larger material process that links them not only to all other life forms but to inorganic matter as well. The invisible particles out of which living things, including humans, are composed are not sentient nor do they come from some mysterious source. We are made of the same stuff that everything else is made of. Humans do not occupy the privileged place in existence they imagine for themselves…

Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival. There was no original paradaisal time of plenty, as some have dreamed, in which happy, peaceful men and women, living in security and leisure, enjoyed the fruits of nature’s abundance. Early humans, lacking fire, agriculture, and other means to soften a brutally hard existence, struggled to eat and to avoid being eaten.

There may always have been some rudimentary capacity for social cooperation in the interest of survival, but the ability to form bonds and to live in communities governed by settled customs developed slowly. . .  The idea that language was somehow given to humans, as a miraculous invention, is absurd. Instead, Lucretius wrote, humans, who like other animals used inarticulate cries and gestures in various situations, slowly arrived at shared sounds to designate the same things.  .  .  . . The arts of civilization—not given to man by some divine lawmaker but painstakingly fashioned by the shared talents and mental power of the species—are accomplishments worth celebrating, but they are not unmixed blessings. They arose in tandem with the fear of the gods, the desire for wealth, the pursuit of fame and power. All of these originated in a craving for security, a craving that reaches back the earliest experiences of the human species struggling to master its natural enemies. That violent struggle—against the wild beasts that threatened human survival—was largely successful, but the anxious, acquisitive, aggressive impulses have metastasized. In consequence, human beings characteristically develop weapons that turn against themselves.

The soul dies. The human soul is made of the same material as the human body.

There is no afterlife. Humans have both consoled and tormented themselves with the thought that something awaits them after they have died. … But once you grasp that your soul dies along with your body, you also grasp that there can be no posthumous punishments or rewards. Life on this earth is all that human beings have.

 

Death is nothing to us. When you are dead—when the particles that have been linked together, to create and sustain you, have come apart—there will be neither pleasure nor pain, neither longing nor fear.

All organized religions are superstitious delusions. The delusions are based on deeply rooted longings, fears, and ignorance. Humans project images of the power and beauty and perfect security that they would like to possess. Fashioning their gods accordingly, they become enslaved to their own dreams.

Religions are invariably cruel. Religions always promise hope and love, but their deep, underlying structure is cruelty. This is why they are drawn to fantasies of retribution and why they inevitably stir up anxiety among their adherents. The quintessential emblem of religion—and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies its core—is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.

There are no angels, demons, or ghosts. Immaterial spirits of any kind do not exist.

The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. Life should be organized to serve the pursuit of happiness. There is no ethical purpose higher than facilitating this pursuit for oneself and one’s fellow creatures.

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear.  .  .  .  Why are humans so unhappy? The answer, Lucretius thought, had to do with the power of the imagination. Though they are finite and mortal, humans are gripped by illusions of the infinite—infinite pleasure and infinite pain. The fantasy of infinite pain helps to account for their proneness to religion: in the misguided belief that their souls are immortal and hence potentially subject to an eternity of suffering, humans imagine that they can somehow negotiate with the gods for a better outcome, an eternity of pleasure in paradise. The fantasy of infinite pleasure helps to account for their proneness to romantic love: in the misguided belief that their happiness depends upon the absolute possession of some single object of limitless desire, humans are seized by a feverish, unappeasable hunger and thirst that can only bring anguish instead of happiness.

Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder. The realization that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else, that the world was not made for us by a providential creator, that we are not the center of the universe, that our emotional lives are no more distinct than our physical lives from those of all other creatures, that our souls are as material and as mortal as our bodies—all these things are not the cause for despair. On the contrary, grasping the way things really are is the crucial step toward the possibility of happiness. Human insignificance—the fact that it is not all about us and our fate—is, Lucretius insisted, the good news. It is possible for human beings to live happy lives, but not because they think that they are the center of the universe or because they the gods or because they nobly sacrifice themselves for values that purport to transcend their mortal existence. Unappeasable desire and the fear of death are the principal obstacles to human happiness, but the obstacles can be surmounted through the exercise of reason..  .  .  . What is needed is to refuse the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and calmly at the true nature of things. All speculation—all science, all morality, all attempts to fashion a life worth living—must start and end with a comprehension of the invisible seeds of things: atoms and the void and nothing else.

Obviously, there is much here that anticipates modern thought:  atomic physics, a natural cosmology, biological evolution, a naturalistic, physical explanation of the earth, life, and human culture, anthropological theory, secular humanism and a rejectionl of religious superstition (denial an after-life, denial of the relevance and reality of supernatural beings.)  It is small wonder that Christian authorities did all they could to repress and stop publication of the poem.      As Greenblatt states it:

“On the Nature of Things” is that rarest of accomplishments: a great work of philosophy that is also a great poem.  .  .  .  .  .   Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and that they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives that they have. These lives, like all other existing forms in the universe, are contingent and vulnerable; all things, including the earth itself, will eventually disintegrate and return to the constituent atoms from which they were composed and out of which other things will form in the perpetual dance of matter. But while we are alive, we should be filled with the deepest pleasure, for we are a small part of a vast process of world-making that Lucretius celebrated as essentially erotic.”

 

October 3, 2011

Two General Ideas of ‘Freedom’ from the Philosophers

Filed under: freedom of will,philosophy history — Tags: — jbernal @ 11:03 am

By Juan Bernal

The issue regarding freedom and determinism is among the most challenging and puzzling issues confronting philosophers and others. Often this is stated in terms of the ‘free will’ problem, with some people arguing that a scientific picture of reality denies that humans have a free will. Others try to reconcile human freedom with their version of a scientific, deterministic view of reality.

There are many aspects to this issue which we could delve into; for example, the premise that the world is a deterministic world that rules out free action or choice is a premise that can be challenged. But here I briefly discuss two very different ways of handling the question of freedom (‘free will’) that we find in the history of modern Western philosophy. Versions of these two ideas of freedom are still held by many philosophers today.

Let’s call the first of these the idea of “metaphysical freedom.” This is the notion that freedom or free will, if it is a reality, occurs only in a state completely separate from all causal determinism. Here free will is conceived as a special faculty, distinct from body-brain. My two historical examples for this view of freedom come from Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant. Descartes held that that the mind / free will are a separate reality from material, corporeal reality. Kant postulated a separate noumenal realm to allow for free will unaffected by the deterministic order of the phenomenal realm.

The other set of ideas (of freedom) are those based on philosophical theories which try to explicate a common-sense idea of freedom, a notion of ‘freedom’ which is compatible with materialism and a deterministic order. My historical examples of this general approach are Benedict Spinoza, and David Hume, and brief mention of Thomas Hobbes. Each of these philosophers works with concepts of human existence and human action having their due portion of ‘freedom’ but occurring within the context of a material, corporeal ‘deterministic’ reality.

Aspects of these opposing historical views of human freedom develop into what contemporary philosophers call “indeterminism” and “compatibilism.”

The critical point to draw is that much mystery and paradox could have been avoided had philosophers not been so inclined to accept the validity of the ‘metaphysical freedom’ and opted to develop and refine that more intuitive notion of freedom held by Spinoza and Hume.

Consider the classical dualistic view of Rene Descartes (1596-1650):

Reality is dualistic, with a deterministic material reality (including the body) on one side, and the mental realm (mind, free will) completely separate from matter-body on the other side. Free will is possible only as an aspect of mind, which is undetermined and categorically separate from the body.

Now a very different view of “freedom” by one of his contemporaries: Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677).

Spinoza argued that all reality is one substance, which he called “Nature.” Nature has a material aspect and a mental aspect, but both aspects of one Nature are deterministic. Human mind and human action are part of the deterministic order of Nature, hence both are subject to the universal, deterministic order. There is no freedom if by “freedom” one means undetermined action, i.e., “freedom of indifference.” But there are varying degrees of ‘freedom’ in the sense that one’s actions stem from internal causes and are accompanied by an understanding of the causes and motives that drive those actions. In short, Spinoza tries to account for our sense of freedom within the context of what we would call scientific determinism.

Another 17th Century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), argued that Freedom (‘free will’) is compatible with deterministic, material reality.

In his famous work, The Leviathan, Hobbes tells us that when we use the word free will, we mean nothing more than that action of a person who is not prevented from doing “what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do.” In other words, a person acts freely when he does what he wants to do or acts so as to realize what he sees as being beneficial to him. The fact that all actions “proceed” from some cause does not negate the common-sense notion of free action as unhindered, non-coerced action.
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In the 18th century we had analogous opposition between views by two mainstream philosophers:

David Hume (1711-1776) argued along the lines of Hobbes that although actions are causally determined, they’re not forced actions. We enjoy liberty of spontaneity.
He distinguished between “liberty of indifference” (uncaused action) and “liberty of spontaneity,” doing what one wants to do.

“It is one thing to perform an uncaused action (if one can conceive such a thing), another to do what you want. Conversely, it is one thing to act from intelligible and natural motives, quite another thing to be compelled to do what you do not want to do or prevented from doing what you want. Everyone really agrees that, except for prisoners, men enjoy liberty of spontaneity but not that of indifference, [everyone agrees] that they are subject to the necessity of cause, but not that of constraint.”

In short, there is no theoretical reason for denying that we enjoy some degree of freedom, even if we have to admit that our actions can all be causally explained. On the other hand ….

German philosopher, Immanuel Kant: (1724-1804), postulated a two-world philosophy (“Transcendental Idealism”) and argued that freedom (‘free will’) cannot be found in the phenomenal world, but requires a separate world-in-itself, i.e. a noumenal realm.

Kant locates determinism in the empirical world or world of appearances, and freedom in the world of things-in-themselves, the world of reason. It is important that the latter world is not in time. Kant sees no difficulty in our accepting the postulate of freedom, because there is no contradiction in thinking of the will as free.

“As an object of theoretical scrutiny, I must regard myself as a phenomenon, subject to the deterministic order of all phenomena; as a moral agent possessed of a will, I transfer myself to the intelligible world of noumena. I can be at once under necessity qua phenomenon, and free qua noumenon.”

In short, like Descartes but in a different way, Kant divides the world into two realms and places freedom (free -will) in the realm which is not subject to the deterministic order.
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For Kant as with Descartes, “Freedom” requires a complete break with causal determinism.

In what sense did Spinoza deny free will? Only in the sense of a ‘free will’ which purports to be free of all causal conditions. He affirmed a capacity we could call “creative freedom.”

“… Spinoza was concerned to point the way to human freedom through understanding and natural knowledge.” Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza

Unlike Descartes and Kant, Spinoza does not postulate a dualistic reality, with free will residing in a mental, non-material realm or in a noumenal realm (a realm underlying the phenomenal world; we lack knowledge of this noumenal realm).

Unlike Descartes and Kant, Spinoza does not see free will as a strange, special mental faculty, existing apart from body-brain.

With Descartes and Kant we get the concept of freedom as a category which is either completely present or completely absent. Either we enjoy a pure freedom (not causally conditioned at all), we have no freedom at all.

With Spinoza, Hobbes, and Hume we get a concept of freedom which allows for degrees of freedom. Freedom is not a category whose essence denies possibility of lesser and greater freedom.

In my view, many of the paradoxes associated with the ‘free will / determinism’ problem could have been avoided had philosophers paid more attention to the views of ‘freedom’ articulated by Spinoza, Hobbes, and Hume; and had they been more critical concerning the notion of metaphysical freedom advanced or assumed by Descartes and Kant.

March 23, 2011

Evil and human suffering – Philosophical/theological problem or human tragedy?

Filed under: critique of religion,philosophy history,Problem of Evil — Tags: , — jbernal @ 11:55 am

Many studies of the philosophy of religion include the “problem of evil,” which can be treated either as an intellectual problem, one which raises logical and epistemic issues, or as an existential problem of human tragedy.

Philosophers and theologians take on the challenge of trying to show that one can consistently affirm God’s existence and the fact of evil in the world. Other philosophers argue the contrary thesis. Questions of logical consistency are hashed back and forth; attempts are made to make concepts fit together, while others expose unexamined assumptions and point to implications that follow from propositions affirmed.

But the intellectual problem arises from the “existential problem”, one concerning human experience of suffering and evil, and human attempts to make sense of such suffering and evil. However, unless we have been there, we cannot fully comprehend first-hand experience of suffering and confrontation with evil. Fortunately, great literature, film, art and drama can offer a concrete, real-life expression, and enable us some measure of the experience of human tragedy. Great literature, both religious and secular, effectively portrays humans in confrontation with suffering and moral evil, attempting to find meaning and some redeeming value in tragedy.

In some cases, the message of literature and art implies a rejection of the intellectual “solutions” as mostly ineffective. This is the case in the following three examples, two from world literature and one from a contemporary drama.

Biblical Story of Job: Job suffers overwhelming loss and affliction. Three friends accompany him and offer theological explanations of his situation. Job rejects them all as irrelevant and ineffective. For him nothing about his travail makes any sense (he has been pious and morally upstanding). “The virtuous suffer along with the evil doers. Even worse, the evil doers prosper.” What is God doing??

Dostoevsky – “Rebellion” (1879-80)- In an emotionally wrenching exchange between two Karamozov brothers, Ivan and Alyosha, Ivan takes up the case of the gratuitous suffering of children, something he cannot accept as justifiable or subject to theological, philosophical explanation. He remarks that even if someone were to prove that children’s suffering was a necessary condition for achievement of ultimate harmony, he would reject that ‘truth.’ The suffering of one innocent child cannot be justified by a higher purpose or harmony to be achieved. Alyosha remarks that this is a form of rebellion against God.

PBS Drama: “God on Trial” (2008)- Jewish men imprisoned at Nazi death camp (Auschwitz?) and awaiting execution put God on trail on charge of violating the covenant with the Jewish people. Different witnesses give testimony, some presenting theological and philosophical defenses of God’s inaction and apparent indifference to the plight of Jews at hands of Nazi executioners.
The discussion — sometimes heated, sometimes half- whispered, always charged — went back and forth. If suffering is God’s design, is Hitler a servant of God? Does God want them to suffer and die? Why, as Jews, do they think that they have a monopoly on God? The convicted criminal who oversaw the bunkhouse spat that he just wanted to survive and would do anything to do so. What use is free will? All attempts to defend God are found to be inadequate, not at all justifications for what God has allowed to happen. Ultimately, God was found guilty of a breach of contract, although this verdict was revealed in the present day by an old man.
One of the conclusions: “God is powerful and has been on our side in the past; but is no longer our advocate and protector. God does not represent moral justice.”

The screen play written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and probably inspired by Eli Wiesel’s account of his experience in Nazi concentration camp and his book The Trial of God.

Human existence and evil:

The question is not why do humans commit and suffer evil, but why so much? Why is there so much gratuitous evil and unnecessary suffering? (Gratuitous Evil (suffering) – Suffering which is devoid of reason or justification.) The question is not why isn’t the world one of perfection and pure happiness, but why is the world one in which so much is permeated with intense suffering, evil, and injustice? This question is one which applies even to a secular person, someone who has a non-theistic, naturalistic view of reality. In the face of such overwhelming evil, what meaning and value can we find in human existence? What moral order remains? The question becomes more pressing for the theist who believes in an all-powerful deity who represents the highest moral good.

Some Christians have the image of the God the heavenly shepherd, who cares for his flock. Jews have the idea of a covenant between God and his chosen people. Muslims believe that everything that happens is Allah’s will. In each case, we have the general idea of a deity who controls or oversees all that happens to his creatures. Add to this the idea that the deity is perfectly good and desires that his creatures enjoy their measure of happiness and well-being. Often we apply the analogy of a parent who desires and works to realize the welfare of his children. (Another analogy: we judge the skill of the builder by the strength and integrity of his building. David Hume relies on similar analogies to argue that on basis of his works we could never infer the existence of an all-powerful, perfect Being.)
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There isn’t any need to think in terms of perfection or a world of pure happiness. All we need to envision is a world which is not so full of gratuitous evil, unnecessary suffering, and injustice. The question that both the believer (in a deity) and the non-believer asks: Can’t we imagine a better world? The answer, to anyone who notices what human history and current reality are like, is that obviously one can imagine a better world, for example, one in which children do not suffer unnecessarily. Conscientious people, both believers and non-believers, work to realize such a better world.
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Existential problem: Given human experience of evil, how do we make rational sense of evil? What are the implications for our beliefs, our faith, and our attitude (toward God, with regard to our moral values)? What meaning or value or moral order can we find in human existence?

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The question for theologians and ‘philosophical’ defenders of theism: Given the plausibility of a better world, what are the implications for belief in an omnipotent, perfectly good deity who oversees the human world?

The question for everyone, including nonbelievers in deity, is why does the world show so little moral progress in present so much evil, suffering. This question arises in the context of great progress in the sciences, technologies, engineering, medicine, communication, etc.
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History and news accounts of current world events can be read as horror stories!

War, oppression , slavery of African people, genocide, conquest and destruction of Native American cultures, . . In the 20th century: the Jewish Holocaust, Genocide in Soviet Union, of the Armenian people, in Southeast Asia (Cambodia’s “killing fields), in Africa (Rwanda, Burundi) – Suffering and massive death resulting from two world wars, aerial bombing of cities and civilians seen as acceptable way of doing war, atomic bombing of Japanese cities; from continuing conflict in the Middle East, Iraq, and Afghanistan – September 11, 2001 attack.

Disease, plague, physical and mental afflictions of many kinds, famine, drought, natural disasters (e.g. earthquakes), hurricanes, Flu Epidemic of 1917, Tsunami near Indonesia in 2004, the Haiti earthquake, and the 2011 massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Gross economic inequality and disparity in quality of life around the world.

Any great suffering that we focus on (e.g. genocide, Jewish holocaust, slavery of Africans, conquest and destruction of native Americans, oppression, hunger, death from preventable disease in ‘developing nations’; death and suffering from wars) is but a sampling of the suffering of people throughout history.
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From the PBS dramatization “God on Trial”: “God was not good. He was only on our side.” (Statement by a Jewish man referring to Biblical history of Hebrews. Statement made in context of attempt to make sense of God’s role at time of Nazi genocide perpetrated on Jews, among others.)

“God destroys both the guilty and the innocent. Even worse, He allows the evil doer to prosper, and destroys the righteous.”

Biblical Job: The lesson taught: Might makes right. Job is overwhelmed by the might of the almighty. Question of justice becomes irrelevant.

The lesson of Job is not an intellectual one, but an existential one. Job, the paragon of virtue, has become a man of flesh and blood overcome by suffering. Standard answers (from theology and philosophy) to the problem of evil and suffering are discarded as insufficient, even irrelevant. The questions raised by Job are not intellectual ones. He cries out because, through suffering, he has lost the capacity to trust in life itself. The final point (a religious one) is that meaning in life is not to be found in words (philosophy), but in confrontation with the Almighty himself.
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From Plato: Socrates raises a philosophical dilemma for theists. Either moral good is what God does (i.e., definition of “good” as anything which God does) or God does what is good (meaning, the action of deity is good by some objective standard). If the former is true and good is by definition whatever God does, then there is no problem of evil. But you have bizarre consequences that genocide, murder, and the suffering of innocent children could be morally good. If the latter is true (God’s acts can be evaluated by some standard of good), than we have a problem of evil when the actions of God (and what He allows to happen) are evil by our objective standard and cannot be explained as the acts of benevolent, just Being. .
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Analogy: In life you win some and lose some. But the ‘evil’ does not result from failure to find perfection, from our not having a perfect season. Yes, sometimes good people win (the trapped minors are rescued and all passengers on the down airliner are safe). Evil results when everyday is one of profound suffering and loss, as is the case for the majority of people on the earth. Evil is manifest in the gross injustice and disparity of wealth and standards of life around the world.

“Any talk of a correspondence between moral justice and human destiny is just plain foolishness.”
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From Michael L. Peterson, The Problem of Evil, Selected Readings

“Among various issues in the philosophy of religion, the problem of evil commands much attention. Both the specialized philosopher and the intelligent lay person puzzle over how certain theological concepts fit together, how to evaluate various explanations of why God allows evil, and what personal stance to adopt toward a world such as ours which includes so much evil.”

“From the lament of the ancient patriarch, Job, to Albert Camus’ disturbing tale of about a bubonic plague epidemic in the French town of Oran, we see the horrors of natural evil. Each piece raises in its own way the question of how the God of theism — a being thought to be omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good — could allow undeserved physical suffering. Then, in the exchange between Ivan and Alyosha Karamozov given to us by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and in the chilling account of the Holocaust by Elie Wiesel, we sense the terrible and haunting human capacity for moral evil. Why does God, if he exists, allow human beings to be so inhuman to each other?”

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But the question could also be: Why do humans allow so much injustice and commit so much inhuman evil on others? We don’t need the postulation of a God to pose the problem of evil.

December 19, 2010

Is Philosophy a Footnote to Plato?

Filed under: Critique of philosophy,philosophy history,philosophy quotes — Tags: — jbernal @ 12:03 pm

Spanos states his case:

In your essay, “Is Platonism the model for philosophy?” (in this blog) you put “the question of Platonism”: Is philosophy (in general) a form of Platonism (or as Whitehead said, “a series of footnotes to Plato”)? You also quoted Whitehead’s famous statement in full:

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

You overlooked a few things. First, a characterization of the European philosophical tradition is not necessarily a characterization of philosophy in general. Second, footnotes to Plato do not have to reflect agreement with Plato’s philosophy. Finally, the “safest general characterization” is not necessarily a completely safe general characterization. These oversights could lead to a straw man argument against Whitehead.

I’m not sure what exactly Whitehead had in mind. According to my best guess, he was thinking that the central theme running through the history of European philosophy from Plato to the present is realism. Most European philosophers have assumed one form or another of realism. In other words, they have assumed that reality has a structure that can be captured in language or represented in terms of the categories that form the basic structural units of language. But there have always been dissenters to this view, and it was the central issue throughout the history of medieval philosophy. Duns Scotus was a particularly noteworthy defender of realism, while William of Occam was an extremely influential dissenter. The twentieth century debate between Einstein and Bohr over the interpretation of quantum experiments is one of those footnotes to Plato in which Einstein insisted on a realist position while Bohr took a rather ambiguous position that smacked of anti-realism (e.g. instrumentalism or pragmatism). At the turn of the century, of course, anti-realism was well represented by Richard Rorty and his fellow post-modernists. Meanwhile, realists were spread out over a range that included both transcendental and materialist versions.
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My reply:

I also ask: What exactly did Whitehead mean by his statement that we can characterize European philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato? To me this surely suggests that the old metaphysician, Whitehead, was asserting that we can look at European philosophy as a continuation of Plato’s philosophy. After all, what is a mere footnote to the main thesis? It is just a footnote and does not question or reject the main thesis. So now ask yourself, can we characterize the philosophies of the many ‘philosophers’ who are found in the European stream of philosophy as just elaborations on Plato’s philosophy? I submit that the obvious answer is a negative one. Not even the work Plato’s student, Aristotle, who went on to develop his own philosophy, can meaningfully be characterized as a mere footnote to Plato. The same can be said for a large set of philosophers in the European stream.

The fact that the issue of ‘realism’ (e.g. the issue of the status of universals) is an issue that occupied many of those philosophers does not show that their work is just a “footnote to Plato” or a continuation of Platonism. As I tried to show you in an earlier email, and as you seem to have forgotten, there’s much more to Platonism that just preoccupation with the metaphysical issue of ‘realism.’ Affirming that ” that reality has a structure that can be captured in language or represented in terms of the categories that form the basic structural units of language” does not make one a Platonist and does not affirm Plato’s philosophy. At most it shows one point of similarity in very different philosophies.

At best, Whitehead’s famous remark can be taken as a figurative way of saying that many philosophers in the European tradition proceed in somewhat of a spirit of Plato. But his figurative language is surely more misleading than insightful, even when taken as a metaphor.
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Spanos comes back:

This is a problem in hermeneutics! A key principle of hermeneutics is the principle of charity. It applies to situations where we must choose between different possible interpretations of a text. It requires that we choose the interpretation that seems most reasonable or most defensible. You seem to me to have chosen an interpretation that is not very reasonable and not very defensible. We should always try to give the writer we are interpreting as much credit as we can within the constraints of the language he or she uses.

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My reply:
Principle of charity, huh? Just how charitable do we have to be? Carried far enough, the principle of charity would excuse any foolishness that a writer asserts, especially when the writer is a respected professor of philosophy. And your qualifier surely calls for clarification: “as much credit as we can within the constraints of the language he chose to use.” Exactly how do you determine these “constraints” if you’re not to read what is written as meaning what is written, but go out looking for a charitable interpretation to rescue those writers you favor?

Apparently you were applying this principle of charity when you interpret Whitehead’s remark on “philosophy as a footnote to Plato” as just referring to the fact that a number (and only a minority, really) of European philosophers have been preoccupied with the problem of ‘realism’ (“realism” in the sense that universals and general categories have real, independent existence). You might think this is just the principle of charity (oh, that grand “hermeneutics”!) applied. But it strikes me — as I’m sure it strikes many people — as a case of reading into the text what you want to find there. This is similar to a case of the President’s press secretary telling reporters what the President really meant to say when he committed some blooper or other.

Look man, if I tell you that ‘B’ is just a footnote to ‘A’, I’m surely implying that at best ‘B’ is just commentary or clarification of the main thesis ‘A’; if one is using these words in a figurative sense to say something about how we who indulge in the activity of philosophy are in a sense children of Plato, then one should signal more clearly that this figurative language is not to taken too seriously. But this special interpretation would be just that, a special interpretation. It flies in the face of a fact of our linguistic behavior: we use such expression to elevate the main thesis ‘A’ at the expense of ‘B’.

At any rate, even on your charitable interpretation of the Whitehead statement (philosophers are children of Plato), there are great problems with the amended statement about footnotes and Plato; and it is an amended statement, not a case of charitable interpretation at all.

(When in doubt invoke the principles of textual interpretation and that ugly word, “hermeneutics.”)

November 30, 2010

Questions about the consequences of monotheism

Filed under: critique of religion,philosophy history — Tags: — jbernal @ 8:02 pm

A few years ago Dr. Carol Copp (retired professor of sociology, CSUF) presented an overview of a book Rodney Stark entitled One True God: The Historical Consequences of Monotheism to an audience of humanists.

Stark’s book and Dr. Copp’s lecture raise a number of questions regarding the sociological and historical effects of monotheism, which many of her secular audience tended to see in a negative light. But, of course, a definitive statement on this issue is not easy and maybe not even possible, given that most answers are posed in terms of a religious or a secular bias. Nonetheless, maybe a few things can be said which are not just partisan statements that belief in one god is good for you or the opposite.

Many of us with an interest in the role that religions have played in history often raise the question: Has monotheism resulted in more evil than good for humanity, or on the contrary, more good than evil? This is not an easy question, and reasonable arguments and evidence can be advanced for either answer: more good or more evil. Dr. Coop brought out a number of reasons for saying that belief in one true God has resulted in much evil (war, death, destruction, suffering, etc.). Certainly most secular humanists are inclined to emphasize this negative aspect of monotheism. But in religious history the move from the polytheism of tribal gods to monotheism has often been presented as moral progress, especially when the “one true God” is given moral qualities. Moreover, it is not obvious that the move from polytheism to monotheism has always been accompanied by an increase in religious war and persecution. In some cases it has; but in other cases it has not.

With regard to moral consequences of theism, knowing that a nation or tribe is monotheistic does not tell us much. We also would need to know more specifically about the character of the monotheistic belief(s) and something about the character (or tendencies) of the believers. What kind of god do they hold as their one, true god? Is he a war god, a vengeful god or a morally developed, god of wisdom? What kinds of demands or commandments do they imagine their god to impose on them? Are these people aggressive and war-like, who fashion their one, true god along these lines? Do they see their religious devotion to their god as requiring that all outsiders (all non-believers) be eliminated? Do they have the belief in exclusive salvation (referred to as “particularism” by sociologists) that implies only those who worship their god can be saved, and others are fair targets for their cleansing, military action?

On the other hand, is it possible the nation or tribe in question holds to a different form of monotheism, a benevolent, universal theism that sees all members of the human race as brothers and sisters, children of the one true God? Can we allow that sometimes a nation or tribe can consist of benevolent, progressive-minded believers who fashion a “one, true God” who commands that all people respect and benefit each other, and work to bring about justice for all his “children”? (Here think of the “good works” type of Christianity, in which working to help those in need is seen as showing devotion to God, and which the idea that “Jesus loves you” is emphasized; and the notion that you must “believe as God commands lest you suffer eternal torment in hell” is downplayed or ignored altogether.)

Historically, we would be hard pressed to find a clear case of this form of pure, benevolent monotheism. A peoples’ image of the deity generally reflects that peoples’ moral and intellectual evolution; this has always been a “mixed bag,” with malevolent, destructive tendencies dominating sometimes, and the progressive, morally enlightened tendencies becoming more apparent at other times. In short, the type of monotheism that develops reflects the type of human culture that has evolved. That monotheism will sometimes be “not too bad,” even encouraging for those who look for signs of moral progress. But as the bloody history of Europe and the Americas has shown, too often monotheism has been “bad news” for humanity.

October 18, 2010

More Reflections and Critique of Platonism

Filed under: Critique of philosophy,critique of religion,ethics,philosophy history — Tags: , , — jbernal @ 2:25 pm

Need for Transcendent Justice?

[Here I reply a correspondent who argued that human-based justice is not real justice.]

Your reference to a “higher ideal of justice” suggests that you’re too mired in a Platonist view of reality. Unless you gain vision the form of justice, you only have a poor imitation of justice (or something to that effect).

Contrary to Plato and all other-world doctrines, ‘justice’ is a concept that arose in an earthly, human context. A rough statement of one notion of justice (in a moral context) is simply fairness or fair play. Treating someone fairly implies that her rights are respected and she is treated with the dignity each human deserves. This value is something that can be traced to the type of social beings that we are, social animals who evolved a large brain making a complex culture possible. Some of our moral values can be traced to the family and kin relationships. Justice and other moral values also came about because of the cultures, practices, institutions, education, training, etc. Yes, this is cryptic and incomplete; but we can explore extensive works on this issue, such as that of John Rawls, who offers an interesting theory as to how the concept of justice might have come about. But nothing here demands that in order to have a complete understanding of justice and just treatment of others we must believe in some other world or after life. Nothing demands — pace Plato — that one must have a vision of perfect justice in order to make sense of the down-to-earth value of justice.

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The other point I shall make relates to the disconnect seen by some philosophers between a concern for social justice here on earth and an other worldly religion, such as that taught in the Gospels and in Paul’s writings. If the major concern is with salvation and gaining a position in the eternal realm, working for social justice here on earth may have a lower priority. Walter Kaufmann raises this objection against those liberal Christians who see the Gospel Jesus as working for social justice. (See his book, Faith of a Heretic.) Gospel Jesus is mainly concerned with teaching the message of salvation: how to gain eternal life in heaven.

It seems that Plato’s message in his dialogue, Phaedo, agrees with this general teaching. If the important point is the transcendent destiny of the eternal soul, how much concern does one have for achieving justice in this lower, physical world and reducing suffering of the body, which has little or no value after all.

With respect to your affirming the ideas of reincarnation and Karma as part of your account of justice: Of course, reincarnation is not part of the Christian otherworldly faith, but it is part of the otherworldly faith of several Eastern religions. It is not at all clear that this doctrine contributes positively to a concern with achieving some social justice here on earth. After all, what is happening now — no matter how unjust — is just Karma working itself out; and all things that happen — good or bad — have their just consequences in another existence. I take it this is what you mean by claiming that one will “meet justice in some future life.” Sorry, this just doesn’t do much for me.
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Philosophy and Death:

“Philosophy as a preparation for death?” “Philosophy as the study of death?” Why should we accept such characterizations of philosophy? Maybe I’m being disrespectful to Plato, and his version of the great Socrates, when I say “thanks, but no thanks!”

Plato’s dialogue, Phaedo recounts a conversation that Socrates allegedly had with some of his friends and disciples as he awaited his death by hemlock. Here Plato credits Socrates with giving proofs of the immortality of the soul and with arguing that genuine philosophy is the study of death. Here death is understood as the soul’s separation from the body and from the physical-material world. This is a good thing because at death the soul returns to that eternal, higher reality, the realm of the forms. Given this picture of reality, we can see why, according to Plato, the philosopher should devote himself to a study of death, i.e, to the soul’s preparation for re-entry into the higher ‘divine’ reality.
The dialogue’s arguments only work if you assume, as this group of ancient Athenians did, that the soul is real and if you accept the reality of the realm of forms (an eternal, unchanging, non-physical reality). These are the background for the Socratic arguments that purport to prove that the soul preexisted birth, will survive after death, and is immortal. Also working in the background is Plato’s typical degrading of the physical and material reality, the body, and material values, as being less real and having less value than those ‘objects’ of the higher world. It is easy to see how Plato’s otherworldly philosophy became an inspiration and philosophical ground for some of the mystical, otherworldly philosophies that followed, including Christian other-world religious doctrines and Christian mysticism.

Relevance to contemporary Issues and Philosophies?

Admittedly Plato’s dialogues and his philosophy are very valuable as a piece of intellectual history. But I cannot imagine how his metaphysical philosophy has much relevance today to anyone sensitive to the work of the sciences and of critical, positive philosophies since the time of Spinoza and the Enlightenment. I believe that the biological sciences, neurology, cognitive sciences, linguistic sciences, and linguistic philosophies have shown that ancient arguments for the reality of soul, eternal and separate from the body, do not carry too far; and that the ancient Greek arguments for the realm of forms are no longer very persuasive. (None of this should be understood as discounting the relevance of the more down-to-earth, moral philosophy of Socrates.)

Some of us find more philosophical inspiration in the rational, humanism of an Epicurus (based on the atomistic materialism of Democritus), than we find in Plato’s dialogues. Certainly, as an ancient precursor to modern science and rational secular thought, Epicurus is as good an ancient source as Plato. Plato’s student, Aristotle, develops a philosophy which has more to offer the contemporary student than the other-worldly mysticism of Plato.

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If philosophy retains any relevance and importance for people today [and that’s a big “IF”), it is as an attempt to make sense of life here on earth, not some purported afterlife or other-world — and as an attempt to help people deal with the challenges and problems that life presents. A philosophy obsessed with other worlds or ideal worlds, and which degrades our mortal, material existence on earth (like Plato’s does) or a religion emphasizing the life-to-come (e.g. Christianity) would propose such propositions as “Philosophy is a preparation for death” or “Philosophy is the study of death.”

Don’t we have enough to do just trying to deal intelligently and effectively with this life? Why spend our energies with speculations as to some ideal world (Plato realm of forms)? Why look on life as a preparation for some putative future existence following death? This is Plato’s unfortunate legacy to the Western intellectual world. Of course, the doctrine builders and theologians of Christianity loved him, as do most mathematicians who adopt some of his ideas regarding a higher ideal reality. But for the rest of us, this obsession with an ideal world, an afterlife, or an other-world — along with it’s devaluation of this world — is simply not a path that we wish to take. For many of us, this ‘philosophy of the other-world surely seems to be a premature, sorry resignation from this world, the only reality we can be sure about.

I’m as uncomfortable with this Platonist notion of philosophy as my correspondent is reassured by it. With apologies to all Platonists and spiritualists out there, I shall conclude with some lines of prose on this ever-popular obsession with other-worlds by Friedrich Nietzsche, who had some insight on these things.

“”It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds — this and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer most deeply.
“Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.”

(from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1st part – translation by Walter Kaufmann)

October 6, 2010

Did Darwin Suppress his work in the Face of Religious Opposition?

Filed under: Darwinian philosophy,philosophy history — Tags: — jbernal @ 9:45 am

I appreciate books that argue in favor of Science and the ideals of the Enlightenment against the obstruction of religion and the obscurity of philosophy. Timothy Ferris has written such a book, The Science of Liberty. It promises to be a book well worth our time of close, critical reading. However, Mr. Ferris commits a minor error which I found annoying. In the third chapter of his book, “The Rise of Science,” Ferris refers to Charles Darwin and the delay in publishing his famous work, The Origin of the Species. Ferris classifies Darwin with history’s “martyrs to the cause of science,” such as Galileo, who was coerced by the Inquisition into recanting a few of his early astronomical findings. Ferries writes:

“Every age has produced its own martyrs to science. . . Charles Darwin long suppressed his theory of evolution rather than face the religious indignation that indeed greeted its eventual publication.”

(page 45)

This is a surprising, somewhat annoying statement for some of us who know a little of the history of the writing and publication of Darwin’s great work; taken as an explanation of Darwin’s delay in publishing his great work, it is simply false.

Most students of Darwinian evolutionary theory and the history of science know that Darwin took over twenty years to research, prepare, write, and eventually publish his great work. Students are also aware of the great opposition and hostility that its publication inspired from the religious authorities and from a great part of the intellectual community of the mid-nineteenth century England. Those of us who are familiar with some biographical works, publications and film on Darwin, know that he was aware of, likely apprehensive about, the controversy that his work would trigger. He also lamented that his elimination of a Creator from his account of life’s evolution would have a troubling affect on his wife, Emma, who was a pious Christian. But to my knowledge there is nothing in any reputable biography of Darwin’s life or in any of Darwin’s letters and autobiographical comments for the years leading up to the 1859 publication of the The Origin of the Species which indicates that Darwin suppressed publication of his work because he was reluctant to face the “religious indignation that .. greeted its eventual publication.” The facts, as recounted in such biographies (e.g., The Survival of Charles Darwin, by Ronald W. Clark) and in autobiographical statements and letters by Darwin himself, are that it took over twenty years of intense research and development before he felt he had an adequately grounded theory to present. He did not suppress or delay publication because of religious or political factors; he simply did not feel that his work was ready to do what he hoped to do: make as strong a case as possible for natural evolution of species in the face of centuries of belief in God’s creation of animal and plant species in static, unchanging forms.* As Steve Jones remarks,

“Before Darwin, the great majority of Naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created.”

(page xviii, Introduction to Jones’ book, Darwin’s Ghost).

In short, Darwin faced opposition from variousl camps, not just religious ones; but his delay had nothing to do with his reluctance to fly in the face of such opposition.

Admittedly, Ferris’s remark to the contrary (that Darwin suppressed publication of his work because of religious opposition) is not an important part of the idea that he develops in Chapter 3 (“The Rise of Science”) of his book, namely that science has had its share of “martyrs” and that many significant steps in the development of a naturalistic theories of the world and humans have met with strong opposition from the religious side. But Ferris should have taken more care and not included such a misleading statement about Darwin’s momentous work, and misleading it is, if not outright false.

In his book, Darwin’s Ghost, Steve Jones tells us that in spite of his twenty-year search for evidence, Darwin was so conscious of the gaps in his thesis that he might never have made it public; and that his book is full of apologies:

“To treat this subject at all properly, a long catalogue of dry facts should be given; but these I shall reserve for my future work . . . It is hopeless to attempt to convince any one of the truth of this proposition without giving the long array of facts which I have collected, and which cannot possibly be here introduced . . . I must here treat the subject with extreme brevity, though I have the materials prepared for ample discussion.”

Jones then adds,

“Today’s readers may feel a certain relief that the promised book never appeared. By happy chance, Darwin was stung into publication of a summary of his ideas by an unexpected letter from Alfred Russel Wallace containing the same notion.”

(xxiii-xxiv)

Here Jones refers to a few elements of the long story of how Darwin finally got around to publishing his great work. The facts seem to be that he was developing such a big work that publication seemed a remote event. Eventually he was compelled to put together what he called an abstract of his greater work. Clark writes

“Darwin’s “Abstract” of which he wrote to Spencer in November of 1858 was the result of a series of traumatic events. IN the spring of 1855 he had written to William Darwin Fox: “I am hard at work on my notes, collecting and comparing them, in order in some 2 or 3 years to write a book with all the facts & arguments, which I can collect, for and versus the immutability of species.” The plan then was for something much longer and almost certainly less readable than The Origin turned out to be. At the worst, it could have been a book that would never be finished at all.”

Clark than tells us that

“these prospects were dramatically changed by the appearance on the scene of Alfred Russel Wallace, then in the Far East, to whom “a sudden flash of insight,” as he called it, had revealed a solution to the species problem identical in its main idea to Darwin’s.”

(page 95)

In summary, the story here is not one of delay and suppression because Darwin feared the indignation of religious authorities. The story, rather, is one of a natural scientist who wanted to build the best possible case for his theory of evolution of species, who apparently could not stop accumulating additional evidence for his theory, and who eventually was spurred to publication of an “abstract” of his work by the prospect that Wallace would get priority with his publication of a theory of natural selection. In all works on Darwin which I have studied, including Clark’s very detailed biography ** and account of the events leading up the publication of The Origin of Species, and some autobiographical material and letters by Darwin himself, there is absolutely no reason for concluding that he suppressed publication of his work because he anticipated great religious indignation and opposition.
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*If anyone can find information to the contrary (supporting the Ferris remark) in any reputable work on Darwin, I’ll be glad to look at it.

** more biographical information relevant to the subject from Clark:
Clark: “…Wallace’s book was never written. But in September 1855 issue of the Annals and Magazine of Natural History there appeared his paper “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species.” A cautious argument for the evolution of species, the paper maintained: “The following law may be deduced from these facts: –Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.” . . . Wallace’s paper fell short of the theory on which Darwin was working, but there were sufficient similarities in it to alarm Lyell, who wrote to Darwin urging that he should delay no longer in publishing his own findings. . . . . Darwin still dallied, and it was April 1856 before he revealed to Lyell the position that he had now reached. (97) . . Lyle urged Darwin to publish his theory, and his other scientific friends appear to have agreed . . . Surely now was the time for Darwin to start writing. But he still hesitated. “I hardly know what to think, “ he wrote to Lyell on May 3, “but will reflect on it, but it [publication] goes against my prejudices. To give a fair sketch would be absolutely impossible, for every proposition requires such an array of facts. If I were to do anything, it could only refer to the main agency of change – selection – and perhaps point out a very few of the leading features, .. and some few of the main difficulties. But I don not know what to think; I rather hate the idea of writing for priority, yet I certainly should be vexed if any one were to publish my doctrines before me.” (98) . . . He was still anxious that his theory should be presented to the world only when every detail was buttressed by evidence, when all the questions that he knew would be raised could be countered by satisfactory answers. (98-99) But he was also worried about priority. His ideas were farther ahead, and far more detailed, than those of Wallace. But he was only human. . . (99) . . . On May 14, 1856, he noted in his personal journal: “Began by Lyell’s advice writing species sketch,” and on June 10 he told William Darwin Fox that Lyell was strongly urging him to write a preliminary essay. “This I have begun to do,” he said, “but my work will be horribly imperfect & with many mistakes so that I groan & tremble when I think of it.” Once he had begun, the prospects of a “little volume” quickly vanished. “Sometimes, “ he wrote to Fox, “I fear I shall break down, for my subject gets bigger and bigger with each month’s work.” (99)

References:

The Science of Liberty, by Timothy Ferris (Harper-Collins Publishers, New York, NY, 2010)

The Survival of Charles Darwin, by Ronald W. Clark (Random House, New York, NY, 1984)

Darwin’s Ghost, by Steve Jones (Ballantine Books, New York, NY, 1999)

Charles Darwin- Autobiography and Letters, (Ed. by Francis Darwin, D. Appleton & co. New York, NY, 1893)

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