Neil Longenbaugh: Socrates knows he is wiser than the common man because he does not profess to know what he does not. This creates a few problems for me. How can Socrates know for sure that he doesn’t know something? I think the only thing he can be certain of is that he knows nothing for certain, and if this is true then how can someone be wiser than another person if both know equally nothing? This idea is a paradox that can’t be clearly answered unless Socrates is claiming that the craftsman and poets claim to know something and he nothing.

Mr. Himwich: Problem is that the craftsmen and especially those muse-inspired poets think that they do in fact know – but, of course, they don’t, as is revealed under Socratic questioning. You do touch on a difficult issue: Does knowledge require that we know that we know and perhaps even to be able to articulate what we know and be able to teach it to someone else. Absent this kind of knowledge we might categorize our “knowledge” as belief, hypothesis, intuition, educated guess, etc.

Mr. Longenbaugh: I think that knowing something for certain is an impossibility. We can know that we can think, and articulate this to other people, but we cannot know that we know something as it truly is. I agree that we can classify our knowledge as hypothesis, intuition, etc… What is truth though? If it is impossible to know for certain then can we find truth in our educated guesses and such?

Mr. Himwich: So much depends on what one means by "truth," as you well know. For me, the truth is paradoxically the very activity of a mind that searches for understanding. This activity of mind is the very truth it searches for. It is always thus, e.g. we create the very world that we seek to understand as if it were separate from us. The truth is as close as thought itself. I know this will sound mystical or worse -- plain nonsense. What is your idea of truth?

Mr. Longenbaugh: I feel that truth is something sought after. I think that there are elements that we must find within ourselves, but I think that the physical world also contains truth. I think one can find a balance between retrospection and examining the world they live in for truth. I think that truth is perhaps what you do not know, even if what you think is the truth is not really how it is. Since you believe truth to be activity of mind, do you believe that everything we perceive and experience is some sort of dream or separate experience or reality based on your mind’s bias towards the world?

Mr. Himwich: I think your understanding of truth is sound. I must admit that mine is a work in progress. When I say 'activity of the mind', I mean just that: not the products of that activity, just the pure activity itself. That activity is the existential answer to the mind/body question (how the brain and consciousness relate). If we thereby solve the mind/body question, then we will also solve the mind's relationship to the external world. I know this sounds weird. Truth for me is not this and that bit of knowledge or even the collection of such bits into a whole. It is what actually happens. Again, not what physics tells us about the nature of the universe, but the universe itself as it happens. If we could understand our own activity (our own happening), then we could understand everything else. We are part of the happening of things. Again, I admit I am exploring ideas here. Let me try one more time: we are already what we seek to understand. In our very attempt to understand what we already are is the Truth. (I am laughing at myself. Feel free to laugh at me as well.)

Mr. Longenbaugh: I can accept your argument (for lack of a better word), but it does bring about a few more questions. These examples seem to be contradictory or perhaps by the nature of the activity itself they aren’t. Take someone who is in a coma for example or a dream that persists indefinitely, is their understanding subconscious because dreams to me seem to be more of a ride than activity. Should we try to understand these, knowing we can’t control them, or should we try to learn to control them? What about out of body experiences while awake? (I won’t give any examples) These provide a little trouble for me and I’m sure for you too. I think that I can understand what I believe to be awake reality and activity.

Mr. Himwich: This is becoming more about my wayward ideas than yours (not to say yours are wayward). But I am happy to continue. It seems to me that the Truth only appears when we are actively in search for it, but it remains paradoxically and necessarily elusive. The search and Truth are like the sun and the moon, the moon’s reflected light derives from the sunlike mind. (I am expressing ideas here I have never expressed before.) What we want to understand is not the moon itself but the light that illuminates it, yet we fail to recognize the source of the light comes from our own consciousness. This little analogy must be read allegorically.

Mr. Longenbaugh: That is a good analogy. This raises an interesting question. Is the moon necessary? Can we simply look straight into the sun and try and find Truth? I think that before we can journey to the sun, we must first understand the moon, or start searching. It seems maybe that the moon is more tangible than the sun. We can travel, and search for what the moon and its light mean, but I don’t think its ever possible to make it to the sun. In the context of this analogy, we can keep getting closer to the sun or Truth, but the closer we are, the hotter it is. This slows us down and eventually burns us before we can ever get there.

Mr. Himwich: I think that consciousness, before it is consciousness of something, is nonexistent, or rather exists as a potentiality only. This goes back to that question in class: if you stop thinking, i.e. stop being conscious, do you cease to exist. That is a very live question. I would hasten to add that in the mystic traditions, especially with respect to meditation practice, there is a possible turning away from the object to consciousness itself. The reported experience is the usual wonderful mystic nonsense (of which I have a great share): a sense of unity with all things and then joy.

Mr. Longenbaugh: I’m turned toward thinking that consciousness is existence. And going away from this consciousness I think is a good thing, because I’m not sure even if there is necessarily one direction that you must head. Turning away could very well be just as real as going in the “normal” direction if we have to call it that. I can’t say I’ve experienced many of these traditions but I have a basic understanding. Do you believe that there is a certain direction, or is there a possibility or two, even an infinite amount of suns, or levels of consciousness?

Mr. Himwich: I am thunderstruck by your statement that consciousness is existence. I have made that very same statement on another occasion. First, there are some esoteric eastern philosophies that do in fact speak of levels, e.g. personal consciousness and transcendental consciousness, in which one experiences the loss of the self that the personal consciousness has constructed. I hardly know what to say about such things. I would rather discuss this "turning away" that you speak of. Speaking for myself, the "turning away" is the journey that, through experience, leads back to the sun. This means that only by going away from the sun can we ever really know it as the source of our being. Thus, the journey, as in epic journeys, always leads through the Underworld where there is little or no light at all. That may sound poetic, but it involves real suffering. Is such a journey the good? Yes, but I speak only for myself here.

Mr. Longenbaugh: I think that 'the turning away' is a perspective. If you turn away from the sun, you can see how far you have come and what you have experienced. I think it can help you appreciate the sun more. I am concerned whether it is possible to turn away and never go back? Hopefully, death doesn’t bring this but I think that a loss of consciousness means that there is no more journey.

Mr. Himwich: Just to sum up: There is both an objective and subjective aspect to this: reality is and is not what we are aware of: there must be something that is apart from consciousness itself and yet that there is anything at all, existence itself, is due to consciousness. This is why we both search for truth/reality as something external to our consciousness and why we keep returning to consciousness as the ground of being. It is the paradox upon which the journey hinges. The journey is the effort to return to oneself. It gives meaning to our life, precisely because we never arrive.

Philosophical Journal Entry 1

“Others give you the appearance of happiness, but I give you the reality.” (Socrates, Apology)

What is the difference between seeming to be happy and actually being so? How can it be that I am not actually happy when I think I am? Does this correspond with my own experience? And if it does, what does Socrates offer in place of the “appearance of happiness”? What good to me is Socrates’ dictum that the “unexamined life” is not worth living? Is that dictum not some sort of self-torture? I certainly acknowledge that I often feel that there is something lacking in my life, that there should be something more in the daily round of my activities. But what is this “something more”? What for me is happiness? It is sustained activity in accordance with my basic being. What do I mean by “basic being”? Though there are many possible answers, the one that comes to me again and again is that my “basic being” is ethical – that is, I want most deeply to be a good human being. I believe no harm can come to me if I am actively living in accordance with my own ethical intuitions. I don’t mean that I would not suffer but that whatever suffering I experience would not be able to touch me. The happiness I experience when I do live “from the inside out,” acting out of that ethical core, makes me inviolable.. Not even death can harm me. So what about what Socrates offers, the examined life? Is that not precisely what I am doing here and now in this journal entry. It is. His dictum recalls me to myself, my basic being, my ethical core.

Illusionism: Keith Frankish

Edward Frenkel: The Rites of Love and Math

http://www.edwardfrenkel.com/film/

"Immortality at Midnight" by Susan Gubar

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/well/live/immortality-at-midnight.html

Some excerpts:

There I am, then, my body seeded with cancer that has recurred and may return, whereas now the air is sweet and quiet, with only me conscious, and I can inch forward into futures I weave for the ones I must leave behind. May they prosper and thrive through a series of tomorrows I will not experience but cherish envisioning. For they need to find—oh, please let them find!—love elsewhere and abundantly.

Alone but not lonely, I creep down the dim hall to study photos on a shelf: friends, children, cousins, grandchildren. All of them at various stages of evolution with their unique expressions of expectation or anxiety, curiosity or self-consciousness—standing still for the intrusive camera. Each requires a long stare. Where are they going? Will they be happy? Each elicits a smile; tears flow, but tears of joy.

What is this inebriated euphoria? Immortality at midnight! An intuition of the rightness and beauty and uniqueness of those I know and those I do not know but reverence from afar in my singular ecstasy of simply feeling fine, feeling good staying in what sense that here is the genius of truth and the truth of genius because pleasure and exultation pulse now in this contingent place, inside just this illumined moment of being.

A comment:

Our consciousness of anything points two ways: one toward the things of this world and one toward Being itself. We usually neglect the latter for the former, but in such extremity as Susan experiences or in moments of poetic reverie Being makes itself known and when that happens, all that we are consciousness of, every little bit of all that, is endowed with beauty and meaning and love and truth. It is a kind of existential proof that there is a reality that is more than what we think of as this world. It would be easy to extend this idea to that of God but that would be a falsification of what I am speaking of. It would make of Being one thing among others. If the experience of Being is anything more than an illusion, it is that we are one with a reality that will never die.

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This I Believe

I believe in the Road.

When I was a sophomore at Brown University, I returned home for spring break and asked my father to read some of my own poems and others by Rilke. My father, a pioneer in the study of the biochemical basis of mental illness, told me that my poems and those of Rilke revealed schizophrenia. I left home within the hour, on foot, never to truly return again. Before my father died, I had forgiven him and loved him as a father should be loved. Now, I am grateful to him. Grateful for endowing me with the same passion with which he lived his life, however imperfectly. My own life has been no less imperfect. That night, as I walked down a dark highway, singing to myself the Woody Guthrie song “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” I vowed never to allow another person’s assessment of me to determine how I felt about myself, my ideas or my poetry. I did not then return to Brown. When I did, I was married and a father.

That first long night on the road lead to two years of aimless but purposeful hitchhiking. There were others on that road. One bad man, the owner of an art gallery in Austin, Texas, lured me out to his ranch and tried to force me to have sex with him. I refused. Quietly but definitely. His hired man pulled out a knife. I said, “I will not.” Quietly but definitely. I was not afraid. He did not touch me. In that precarious moment, I knew myself. It was as if life had asked me a question and I had answered.

Since that time, I have found myself in other precarious situations, as I do even today. I will not chronicle these critical moments here except to say they put the integrity of my life in question. Each of these situations required of me an answer beyond any philosophy I had ever read. Philosophy does indeed ask essential questions, but it is only with our actual lives that we answer those questions. Such philosophical questions as Do we have free will? What is truth? Or Justice? are all too often illusions like the paradoxes propounded by Zeno. The illusion comes when we mistake the arena in which these questions are to be answered. What is truth? Observe how I live, not what I say. I necessarily live out my answers to what is true and good. I am my philosophy and all that I have suffered I own.

I am always on the road, aimless but purposeful, knowing that the road is where my true self is revealed. For me the literal and metaphorical road have become one. I know I have at least one great road trip still in me. We may pass by each other in the East Mountains or between here and there. Know all is well even if I look sad, ragged and tired. Pass on. All is well.

Umwelt: Jakob von Uexkull

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Father Zosima from "The Brothers Karamazov"

http://www.bluffton.edu/homepages/facstaff/bergerd/classes/las400/handouts/karamazov/book6chapter03p.html

An excerpt:

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side--a little happier, anyway--and children and all animals, if you were nobler than you are now. It's all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love, in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to men.
Translation by Constance Garnett

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Pythagorean implications of the Slave-boy episode in Plato's Meno

If the slave-boy had some inkling of Pythagorean doctrine, it may be that he could not only have learned to make a square double the area of an original square of 4, i.e. a square of 8, but he could also have glimpsed the Pythagorean theorem itself, for it turns out that the square built upon the diagonal of the original square of 4, i.e. the hypotenuse of the isosceles right triangles formed by that diagonal, is the side of the desired square that is twice the area of the original. The square of each of the other two sides of the isosceles triangle added together are 8, the same as the square built upon the hypotenuse, i.e. the diagonal. A more knowledgeable witness might have made a connection here between this unspoken reference to Pythagoras and the theory of the transmigration of souls and the theory of recollection that Socrates is supposedly demonstrating. That the length of the diagonal turns out to be 2 x square root of 2 suggests that Socrates is additionally hinting at an esoteric Pythagorean discovery, the existence of an irrational number, i.e. the square of 2, a real number that cannot be expressed as a ratio of integers. This perhaps relates by analogy to Meno's paradox and the difference between true opinion and actual knowledge that is discussed in the remainder of the Meno.

See related posts: Meno's Paradox and A Classroom Version of the Slave Boy Scene in Plato's A classroom version of the slave boy scene in Plato's Meno

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Not Much Time Left: A Talk with Socrates

Himwich: Socrates, when Meletus initially responded to your question about who improves the citizens of Athens, his answer was the Laws. You countered that that was not what you meant: you wanted to know who was the person who knows the laws. Yet later, in your conversation with Crito, you yourself made the Laws speak as if they were a person. I can’t help but wonder what you would have said if Meletus had insisted on his first answer and responded in the following way: No, Socrates, it IS the Laws. They live inside each citizen and warn us when our actions are detrimental to the State, much like you say your daimon warns you not to do perform certain actions. Whatever voice you are listening to is not the same voice that the rest of the citizens hear. The voice you hear speaks only to you about your own personal well-being but neglects that of your fellow citizens.

Socrates: If Meletus could have answered in this way, he would never have charged me with corrupting the young because he would have known that putting me to death would surely be detrimental to the State, as in fact it proved to be. But be that as it may, if he had answered in the way you propose, I would have responded that the moral health of the state depends on that of each individual and that it is precisely the moral health of each individual that is my paramount concern. I would ask him how it could be subversive to urge young people to prefer virtue to the obtainment of worldly goods and honor. Does not that voice speak to him and every other citizen as well?

Himwich: As unlikely as it is that Meletus has ever thought about such questions, let us give him his best arguments. Let us imagine Meletus responding: Of course, every citizen hears that voice, but each citizen also knows that when private morality takes precedence over public morality, the result is inherently subversive. You apparently believe that the State is the reflection of the souls of individual citizens writ large. That’s nonsense. Of course, virtue is to be preferred to worldly goods, but each citizen also knows that public morality requires citizens to accommodate their private morality to the public good. If the health of the State is not given priority to that of individuals, then individuals will fall prey to whatever private morality proves to be the strongest and risk the loss of any opportunity to seek their individual good at all. This is how tyranny comes about. That is why you are such a dangerous person: you promote private morality in opposition to the good of the State.

Socrates: There is much that could be said in response to Meletus’ arguments. For instance, I would argue that there is basic agreement about what he calls private morality and, indeed, that it is my mission to help individuals recognize that there is really no such thing as “private” morality and that your good and mine are, if we but had the courage to acknowledge it, one and the same. But since we cannot question everyone about this now, I ask you, Himwich: Do you prefer worldly goods to the exercise of virtue?

Himwich: I could complicate our discussion by asking you what you mean by virtue, but I acknowledge that I often do not live in accordance with my own notion of virtue and that the pursuit of worldly goods often causes me to violate my own principles.

Socrates: Do you believe that necessities of state or family in any way relieve you of your personal responsibility to live up to your idea of virtue?

Himwich: No.

Socrates: How old are you?

Himwich: 68

Socrates: Not much time left.

Unamuno: the intimate point of departure for all human philosophy

"The longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortality, the effort by which we strive to persevere in our own being, this is the emotional basis for all knowledge and the intimate point of departure for all human philosophy."

Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life

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Conversation on the Good Life

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Conversation on the Good Life:

HH: Martha Nussbaum's central capabilities approach offers a broader approach than either DWF or AQ. DWF's perspective in "This is Water" remains very much within his own head and both his and Anne's proposals have a kind of built-in elitism -- that is, their point of view requires individualistic privilege that for most folks around the world is simply superfluous to the exigencies of their daily lives. Martha's list of ten central capabilities (and her book on same) would a good place to begin a discussion of the good life:

Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one's life is so reduced as to be not worth living.
Bodily Health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter.
Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.
Senses, Imagination, and Thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason—and to do these things in a "truly human" way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one's own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one's mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid non-beneficial pain.
Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having one's emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.)
Practical Reason.Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one's life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.)
Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other humans, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. (Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedom of assembly and political speech.)
Having the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This entails provisions of non-discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion, national origin and species.
Other Species.Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.
Play.Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.
Control over one's Environment.
Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one's life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association.
Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as human, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.

SL: It’s true, Hugh, there is an assumption of privilege in both Quinlan and Wallace’s approach. Our students are in possession of that privilege, so, I think, that it really speaks to them in a way that is very real for them. I was hoping to make a series of posters to articulate different takes on the meaning of a good life—the Holstee Manifesto, for example, is one that I want to use. Martha’s is one that we should also use.

HH: It is not accurate, Stu, to say our students as a whole are in possession of "that privilege". Additionally, I don't think that such an assumption is one that the school would want to project. I thought the ethos of our school was the recognition that our individual well-being is intimately connected to that of others, especially to those who do not have the privilege of an Albuquerque Academy education. My concern is not that Martha's point of view would not be included, but that given your presentation the answer to the question of the good life is already strongly biased toward the individualistic and subjective. For many of the students, this approach will certainly be appealing. It has the feel of pandering to the audience. Is it, however, the direction we should be guiding our students?

As I mentioned in my previous note to you, Martha's perspective offers a much broader perspective. She challenges us to question whether any life can be considered good (no matter the subjective feeling) that is dependent on a privilege that is denied to others. We should face that challenge together with the students. Martha's perspective does recognize the individual search for the good as one of the central capabilities (#6), but it takes place within a framework of our responsibilities to others. Martha's list is not the Decalogue, but it is a good place to start our discussion. It would be wonderful if we could arrange for Martha to speak to our school community.

SL: Actually, our students live in America, go to the Academy, have houses, shoes, and clothing, do not carry AK47s. They are, by definition, privileged.

I think that you are right-- the discussion begins in the subjective and individualistic, which is, I think, the right place to begin. It is where our students live. But David Foster Wallace’s piece and Anna Quinlan’s piece both ask us to look beyond ourselves for meaning. Wallace wants us to not be lords of our “skull sized kingdoms,” but to look to others for true meaning in our lives.

The main point of the pieces that I used was to provide a starting point that was accessible to all grades, parents, staff, and teachers. I think that Martha’s is too imposing for that starting point. When I brought her last time, she didn’t want to talk to 6/7; she wanted to only deal with 12th grade. Still, I will look into bringing her again. She was great with 12th.

HH: What I am urging is that the yearlong theme begin with a broader perspective within which DFW and AQ may be viewed as possibilities. The importance of the broader perspective that Martha or others offer is that our thinking about the good life would then take its starting point within our shared human existence and outside of our private and subjective and 'privileged' existence. Another time we can and should sort through the different meanings of 'privileged'. Whatever we may understand that word to mean, it implies separateness from others.

Starting with what I would call a more substantive description of the good life leads to the possibility that there are at least some objective elements that any worthwhile theory would need to include even at the cost of our own subjective sense of well-being -- e.g. moral courage. Once our thinking about the good life is placed within our shared human existence and not primarily inside our heads there are important questions that arise: Can any life be called good that lacks moral virtue? Can any life be called good when we participate in practices that deny the possibility of that life to others? Of course, concern for others also appears in DWF's perspective. If, however we begin by 'worshipping" the subjective, we will never arrive at the objective elements of our shared human existence. Those objective elements do not depend primarily upon our being moment by moment 'attentive' to our own thinking. DWF himself was 'hosed' by this very ideal. By focusing on 'attentiveness to our own thinking' he leaves us, despite his words to the contrary, within the very skull that he warns us about.

SL: Actually, I don’t think that our disagreement is fundamental. We both want students, and others in our community, to engage in complex ways with the question of what makes for a good life. Certainly, neither of us wants to suggest that the shallow pursuit of wealth or “personal fulfillment” is the ultimate and most cherished goal of that pursuit. I think that we disagree over pedagogy; you would like the complexities put front and center. I want to draw folks in with what they most keenly feel in their own lives. Beyond that, however, I think that we are striving for the same things.

HH: I do think we agree on the overall goal: "We both want students, and others in our community, to engage in complex ways with the question of what makes for a good life." Though I understand how you could see my suggested approach as presenting the complexities of the question front and center, my suggestion is really to begin simply with our common humanity, our feeling for others, rather than for ourselves. The better question from my perspective is "What constitutes human dignity?" That is a question that is less likely to end up in self-justifying egoism.

Conversation on Justice: Hugh Himwich and Jordan Fleischer

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Hugh Himwich: Justice exists from the moment we search for it and while we never arrive at an objective account, still it is justice that catches us as though by surprise, from behind, and winds itself through our existence. Or in less poetic terms, the search for justice changes neural arrangements. We seek justice and thereby become just. Originally, there was only the desire to know.

Jordan Fleischer: I am having a bit of trouble following this. You are saying that by searching for justice, we create it? If we never arrive at any sort of conclusion, how is it possible to act justly? "We seek justice and thereby become just." What if our search leads us in the wrong direction, and we do the wrong thing? Or is there perhaps no wrong direction? This would seem to imply that justice is subjective. I think this is what I tend to believe, that we create our own definition of justice, whether it be through our own journey or through the teachings of our mentors. Either way, justice is defined by the individual. You say that "we never arrive at an objective account," but what I am more curious about is whether an objective account of justice exists. Forgive me if some of what I have said doesn't make sense, I'm still struggling through this one!

Hugh Himwich: The key thing is that we remain open about a possible objective basis of justice. This active openness with respect to a matter of ultimate importance shapes and molds us in the very image of the thing we seek. This is an understanding that transcends subjective and objective.

Jordan Fleischer: How do you conclude that being open shapes us into what we seek? I think if you could provide some sort of example it might help me understand. I'm not sure how being open guides us in the right direction. If this is the case, how do we know that we are doing the just thing?

Hugh Himwich: First, being open is a kind of non-action whereby I take care to do no harm. Second, being open allows for my natural desire to understand to emerge unattached to any notion of any specific notion of what justice is. The result is I am tolerant where another might be judgmental. I grow gentle, kind, and generous towards others. I think we would all agree that this is what it is to be a good person, and it does not come simply from parents or anyone else telling us what justice or goodness is -- rather it results from the search for justice itself. I do not claim this is an objective concept of justice, but it is not subjective either in the sense that it is whatever I want it to be. Rather, it is something that happens to an individual without the individual intending it to happen. That's why I say it transcends objective and subjective concepts. You are yourself proof of its validity. Yes, you are!!

Jordan Fleischer: It seems to me that rather than searching for justice you are simply accepting that there is no justice. You do not claim to know what it is, but do you claim that it exists? I had a long discussion with my mother about this and some very interesting things were said. I argued that our notion of justice is based upon what has been taught to us, either through experience or from mentors, but one way or another we have learned it. So, as you suggested, knowing that it has all been taught to me, perhaps I can set it all aside and now think for myself as to what justice is. Now I wonder, forgetting all of the things I have been previously taught, how can I try to determine what is just? I would now look at myself almost as an animal, acting according to instinct and nature. Now, if I were not part of society, I would likely do what is best for me. For example, stealing would seem perfectly acceptable. This can be seen in animals; for example, a dog taking another dog's bone. This would certainly be viewed as unjust in today's society, yet it is entirely natural. This brought me to the realization that justice (or what we consider to be justice) is NOT natural. Think of the countless acts of injustice that occur each day around the world. To me, that seems to prove the idea that we create justice. One of the questions I wished I could have asked David Eagleman when he came to our class is if acting justly is one of those instinctual parts of the brain, similar to sexual attraction. I am almost certain it is not. I feel that the society as a whole creates a justice in order to preserve itself. So for me to act justly is really to act in accordance to what society requires. If you are outside of society, I'm not sure there is a justice. For example, would someone living in solitude even consider justice? I don't think so. Therefore, justice only exists when there is more than one person involved (also known as society). Now of course the question comes to mind what if you do not agree with what society considers just? In this case, you have your own opinion of what is just within society. Yet, it still depends upon the existence of society.

I'm not exactly sure how to conclude this idea. To connect my ideas to yours, it seems as if the "non-action" you speak of, is essentially the act of removing oneself from society. Following from my ideas, one who lives outside of society has no need of justice.

Hugh Himwich: I would argue that our sense of justice is not simply natural but the very ground of our being. The notion of the lone one, the self, is not our original experience of the world. Our first human relationship is our bond with our mothers and all that this bond biologically and psychologically implies, and we come equipped with mirror neurons and the capacity for language, suggesting that the very design of our brains binds us to others. We come into the world by, for and with others. I suggest that our yearning for justice expresses this deep bond we feel emotionally from the maternal-child bond and from the very design of our brains. We seek to be at one with each other and with the universe itself. It is also true that we are different from each other and from the universe, and so the journey -- the hero's journey, I would suggest -- is to know ourselves at once as separate and at one with our fellow man. Life makes this journey inevitable and necessary. When we say that justice is just subjective, we are making a judgment on one set of facts alone. It is true that we can choose not to acknowledge our bond with others, even though by nature it plainly exists. We do so at the cost of our humanity.

Jordan Fleischer: Certainly one's bond with their mother does naturally exist. However, I find this bond to be very different than the relationships one has with other people. Regardless, being part of society is natural, because the majority of people are part of society. You claim that our sense of justice is natural. If so, how do you explain all of the injustice that exists in our world? This question obviously can only be asked assuming society’s definition of justice is true. Notice that what most people consider justice has only taken place in certain parts of the world for a very short period of time. These undeniable facts prove that there is no sense of justice that comes to us by nature. Additionally, it seems to me that your argument has now contradicted itself. You previously stated that we must search for justice in order to become just, yet now you say that our sense of justice is natural. If a natural sense of justice exists, there would be no need to search for it; we would simply know by nature what is just. That both you and I do not claim to know what justice is proves that there is no natural sense of justice. We may search for what justice is... yet, we do not know what it is we are searching for. Our last resort is to define justice in the way that we BELIEVE is what is best for society. In my opinion, this is how justice comes about. It for this reason that when you tell me to set aside what society has taught me, and think for myself, I conclude there is no justice.

Hugh Himwich: I will do my best to respond to all your challenges. When I say that our sense of justice is natural, I do not thereby mean that this sense compels our actions. We are so designed so as not just to know what it is like to be “me” but also to understand what it is like to be someone else. Indeed, we intuitively and spontaneously experience a fundamental equality with others. Justice is trying to work out the implications of that intuition. There is no natural imperative that requires us to act in any particular way – thus, it is possible that we could see others as a threat. What the mother-child relationship establishes within us is a profound and positive experience of reciprocity. Sadly, for some this experience does not occur or does so only briefly. Ultimately, as we grow in our experience of the world, we have to make a choice about how we are going to respond to the reality of others. Our upbringing surely influences this choice, but it is not determinative. Our choice is also based on our rational understanding of how it is best for all of us to live together. But it is a choice and by that choice we fundamentally shape the world in which we live. So justice presents itself as a choice -- that it does so is the result of our biological design and the mother-child relationship. Our two positions are not that far apart. What I do claim is that there is an intuitive sense of the fundamental equality among all human beings. When I tell you to set aside what society has taught you, I am telling you to base your understanding of justice on this intuitive sense and on your rational understanding (thinking for yourself!). Society may very well seek to contradict the intuitive sense and urge you to consider some other human beings as inferior. Remaining open (re: my previous comments) allows for the full exercise of that intuitive sense and keeps the contradictory counsels of society at bay.

Jordan Fleischer: As for the “fundamental equality” you speak of... I think that is debatable. After all, look at the nature and history of human beings. Self-preservation is the central goal of humans. Ultimately, our natural instinct is to put ourselves first. Equality seems to be a relatively new idea to humans, and appears to be something that we must be taught. That being said, I think where we differ in how we look at our rational thinking. When someone applies reason to something, they are using their previous knowledge and experiences. Now, if we "think for ourselves," there is no way to know if whatever conclusion we come to is right unless we compare it to what we have previously learned. It is in that way that our past influences how we think. If "thinking for ourselves" is what we call justice, and therefore we make decisions regardless of what we have learned, then justice would not be defined as any action, but rather the thought before an action. Consequently, any action could be just, provided that one applied reason before acting. Now I would suppose you would suggest that this idea is correct, only to act justly we most reason in conformity with those natural ideas of equality in mind. Perhaps this is where our differences lay. You say there is no imperative that requires us to act a certain way, but do you claim just actions are those that strive to preserve the equality you speak of? In that case, your definition of justice would emerge. You seem to have a definition of justice in mind. Please elaborate. Bear in mind, however, that if your definition depends on equality being a natural instinct then we may have much more to discuss.

Hugh Himwich: I don't know that I can answer all your concerns and questions in a single response. I think you and I have somehow left out the most important element: choice, whereby we create the very justice we seek. I would agree that there are competing motives within every human soul (I use that word with some trepidation): self-preservation being among them -- but it remains for us to chose among those competing motives and decide for ourselves what self we find most worthy of preservation. We certainly have aggressive and narrowly selfish motives, but there is also our intuitive knowledge of the reality of other people and of our fundamental equality and there is also our reason, which causes us to judge the consequences of our actions both with respect to others and ourselves. Out of this mix, we make a choice for which we are solely responsible and thereby create our world. You may respond: then justice is a completely arbitrary choice. I would respond that the choice is not made in a vacuum -- we make choices given the relationships and experiences we necessarily have, our generous and narrowly selfish impulses, and our reason. It is true that these given conditions will vary with individual experience and so will our choices. But what remains the same is that we understand ourselves as responsible for the world our choices create. We can, of course, choose to ignore all of this and just flip a coin or act completely in accordance with our narrowly selfish impulses -- but if we do so, we lose our humanity and thereby will an inhuman world. I repeat: everything depends upon the self we choose to preserve. Let me ask you directly: What is the self you choose to preserve? I ask this not to be argumentative, but because I believe that it is not just choice that has been missing from our discussion, but "your choice." There is, of course, another discussion to be had concerning whether this choice I am speaking of is illusory. It may very well be so, but what remains true is that we cannot dispel that illusion by any act of will. Any such act of will would itself experience itself as free and so confirm the very thing it seeks to deny. We are not free not to experience ourselves as not free. And so we have moved into existentialism.

Jordan Fleischer: It surprised me to hear you say, “We create the very justice we seek.” I am confused as to how this coincides with your idea of justice being natural. However, you seem to be speaking of a personal justice. Suppose your previously presented idea is true. We have all these things weighing upon us when we have to make a decision. Now, how can one tell if you made the right decision? I do not see how being responsible for a decision correlates to making a just decision. Yes, one is responsible for whatever choices they make; yet, I do not see how one can be considered right or wrong. I think the reason why this debate is so difficult is because we have been unable to set a definition of what justice is. At the beginning of our conversation, neither of us claimed to know what justice was. Do you feel that you can now give it a definition? If so, please put it in as explicit terms as you can. Or possibly you could explain how making choices creates justice. Are you saying that making a choice using reason makes the decision just? This makes me think of the discussion in class today of the artist. How does the artist know the meaning of his work? If you say that “he just knows” or “he sees it,” I’m sorry but that is not enough of an explanation for me to be convinced that it is true. It is the same when it comes to creating morals. I do not understand how one could know that they are right.

Hugh Himwich: This is an excellent response, Jordan Fleischer. Good, straightforward questions. I think we may soon be able to come to some agreement. I think we agree that there is no standard by which we can know that what we choose is right. Justice is a choice. Speaking for myself, Justice is the fundamental right of all human beings to have the same opportunity to lead a fulfilling life. This right does not exist in nature. It exists only by the creative act of my choice. It is natural justice in the sense that it is not created ex nihilo, but based upon all that it is to be human. Once again, you are free to choose against this, but only at the cost of your humanity. It is never a question of knowing whether your choice is right -- it is a question only of what kind of world you choose to live in. So again, Jordan Fleischer, tell me what kind of world do you choose to live in. You make choices everyday that create a world of fair play, truthfulness and compassion. You cannot help but make choices. Even if you define justice differently, it will still partake of values that are inherent in the one I offered. Of course, you can choose to live in accordance with your narrow self-interest. Is that your choice? Is that the world you want to create? Or do you choose to act upon that which is just as natural -- your compassion? That we can so choose against our own deepest feelings only argues our freedom; that there are a few who appear to have no conscience at all argues for validity of the general rule. Finally, your choices create a world by the simple fact that they take place within a community who are witness to and affected by your choices.

Jordan Fleischer: I am trying to grasp this idea. Let me start with what we agree on. There is no way to know if what we do is right. Now, you clearly define what justice is in your opinion. Can we conclude that you do not know that acting in accordance with this standard is right? I sense a contradiction here. How can we define justice if we know that we cannot be sure that we are right? I see how our choices create justice; yet, the fact that we are creating it makes it seem very unreal. You have mentioned several times now what our humanity is, and what it means to be human. It seems to be a large part of your argument. I wonder if you could go a bit further into this discussion. I will now answer your question about the world I choose to live in. I too choose to live in the world as you do. I value others and equality. I strive for truthfulness and compassion. Where we seem to differ is in our motives. I do not believe that the characteristics of the world you and I create are inherent to humanity. I agree that there are many sides of us, for example the compassionate side and the self-preserving side. I think those facets can be seen in nature. If someone or something does not pose a threat to us, we naturally respond with a sort of peace. However, if we do feel threatened, we naturally do whatever it takes to preserve ourselves. It seems to me that both of these sides have a reason for existing, and thus neither one is just or unjust. In my personal experiences, I think my upbringing has guided me towards the compassionate side. In other words, I feel that I have been taught that one side is just, and the other is not. The reason behind being taught this goes back to preservation of society. Without this education, I cannot say I would know which side was the right one. I sense that you recognize that the compassionate side is the right one, by means other than education. Yet, you have stated that we can't know. This is where my confusion lays. After writing this response, I have realized that we have approached this question beginning with something that we do not know. Perhaps we need to start with something we know to be true? This is a difficult question for me. What is there that we can truly be certain of? Perhaps that method will allow me to know that justice exists.

Hugh Himwich: I am reluctant at this time to go off on another tack (What, if anything, we can know for certain?) since I believe we are close to agreement. Let's wait and see. You say that you see how our choices create justice, but that fact makes it seem unreal. I agree -- that is all there is. Your argument, however, goes further -- you want to say that your choices are really determined by your upbringing, etc. I would argue, however, that you have chosen to allow your upbringing, education, etc. to so determine your choices. There is prior, fundamental choice that one makes about how one is going to live in this world and that choice involves accepting, rejecting or otherwise revising what you have been taught. It may seem to you that you have never made such a choice, but I would argue that it seems that way because life has not yet directly challenged you in a way that requires you to make that choice explicit. Or it may have . . . . but that choice may be experienced as something so internal that you didn't recognize it because its nature is so different from the usual choices we make.

Jordan Fleischer: We often hear that someone is "too young or naive to make choices for themselves." Is it possible that this is the case when it comes to choosing to allow society to impact the choices we make? Perhaps as a child, I did not have the capability to make my own choices. I had no option to do anything other than what society required of me. As a result, that became the norm for me. Knowing this, I have the ability, as you say, to accept, reject, or revise everything that I have been taught. I recognize that whichever I choose to do, I will be responsible for that action. However, I see no way of determining if my choice is just or not. Given that we do not know what justice is, how could we possibly know if our decision was just, other than by defining justice by the action we choose? Suppose you decide you want to live in a kind and peaceful world. Consequently, kind and peaceful actions would seem just. However, those actions only seem just because of the way you defined justice. Perhaps we need to discuss how you decide the type of world you want to live in. If the world of equality is an innate desire for you, that may be your justice. Yet, if someone's nature promotes violence and a desire to dominate others, would that not be their justice? It seems that justice only exists as we define it.

Hugh Himwich: I thought that we had agreed that there is no objective standard by which one can decide whether any action or choice can be said to be just. It is a choice, as I have said repeatedly. My definition of justice is a choice based upon experience, rational thought, intuition, desire, and most importantly on the recognition that others exist for themselves as I do for myself. It is not correct to say simply that "justice only exists as we define it." You need to add: and we stake our entire lives on that definition. That others choose otherwise relieves me not one whit from the responsibility for my own choices. My life is a witness to that responsibility.

Jordan Fleischer: Yes, we have agreed that there is no objective standard by which one can decide whether any action or choice can be said to be just, which is exactly why it seems foolish of us to go ahead and define justice as we have. It is essential to remember that justice itself is only an experience. If someone makes a choice based on the parameters you have provided, they will indeed experience an act as if it is just. However, when it comes to determining if there is any truth behind that experience, there is simply no way to know. It reminds me of the phenomenon of color; it exists in our consciousness as something undeniably real, yet, the truth is that color is simply created by our brain and truly only exists as waves of light. No one can say what the truth is about justice. Yet, I think we can agree that living as if justice existed is the best way to live a fulfilling life. We must not forget that our guidelines for justice will create a different justice for everyone. As you stated, "we stake our entire lives on that decision." For that reason, we must rely on our individual experience to discover what justice is.

Debate on Consciousness and Information Theory

John Searle: Download Can Information Theory Explain Consciousness

Excchange between Koch and Searle: Download Can a Photodiode Be Conscious

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Nozick: the experience machine

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What it means to be conscious . . .

What it means to be conscious is that the world is meaningful to us. Consciousness is as little able to be found in the brain as is the value of a precious family keepsake to be found in its physical construction. Meaning is what the brain does in its interaction with the external world. When we are aware, when there is something it is like to be us, when the world is accessible to us, there exists a meaningful relationship between our neural activity and the outside world. Even in its most elementary openings, meaning is present. Of course, there is some neural correlate for this meaning-making, but meaning itself is not contained in this neural correlate. Rather, the meaning is present only in the activity of our full bodied, exploratory interaction with the world. Dreaming, which seems to be an experience that brain originates on its own, is founded upon our interaction with the external world. When we dream, it is as though we are seeking that original foundation. That is why we ask what a dream means, not in terms of the dream itself, but in terms of the life we live when we are awake. It is as if dreaming is a kind of searching for something that is missing, our presence in the world.

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Comments on Wittgenstein's PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS: journal 26-29: the unsayable

26. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein manages, as Russell quips, to say a great deal about what cannot be spoken of. In the Philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein appears to acknowledge Russell's point by truly remaining silent on matters that language cannot speak of. The question remains, however, whether W's new beginning in the PI results in the same sort of line to be drawn between what can and cannot be spoken of. Questions of value, for instance, are part of our everyday use of language and as such are meaningful. It therefore appears that what could not be spoken of in the Tractatus can be meaningfully spoken of in the Philosophical Investigations. Indeed, it appears everything relevant to our human form of life can be spoken of meaningfully. We are sometimes silent not because we cannot say what we mean but because we have nothing relevant to say.

27. It has been suggested that the appearance of something new within our established forms of life and the language games that depend on these forms is evidence for the efficacy of that of which language cannot speak. Such an assertion is but a disguised attempt to say the unsayable. It contradicts itself. Accordingly, Wittgenstein has nothing to say about this. Something new appears in language not out of some silent resource but from within the activities of language itself, activities that include empirical investigation, the asking of questions as well as the imaginative use of language. This last includes the activity of drawing analogies, an activity in which W is very skilled and one that allowed him to say something new about philosophy. There is an openness to our language activities that is not bound by rules, just as in tennis, there is no rule on how high to throw the ball or on the spin that is put on a ball. Such openness is not silence and certainly not the unsayable but rather the possibility of saying something that has not been said before but remains meaningful within our human form of life.

28. In what sense are language activities games? 'Game' was first introduced as an analogy to the plurality of speech acts that, like games, are rule-governed activities that share affinities but no essential attribute. However, Wittgenstein appears at times to use 'language-game' as if it were a 'game' like chess or patience. Are speech act games or simply analogous to games? My tentative conclusion is that speech acts are only analogous to games and that to include language activities in the same category as chess or patience is misleading. Language activities do share affinities with games such as chess but the 'form of life' in which most language activities occur is different from that of chess, though speech and debate competitions and crossword puzzles are particular language-activities that would certainly count as games in its customary sense. Our everyday use of language is not just a game. It is in fact no game at all

29. A similar problem develops as to what counts as a language-game. Does 'language-game' refer only to the plurality of everyday speech acts (commands, requests, prayers, confessions, etc.) or are we to include theology, aesthetics, sociology, etc. as well? These later appear to belong to what Wittgenstein would call grammatical fictions because their use of words seeks to be denotative where no denotation is possible. Beauty, truth and virtue are words that acquire meaning from their use within a community and not from supposed mental objects that bear their names. It is as if we mistake the shape of the container of gas for the gas itself or rather we mistake the picture for what the picture is supposed to represent. In the case of virtue, what is to be represented is how we use the word in our everyday speech not in some fictitious realm of the mind.

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Comments on Wittgenstein's PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS: journal 21-25: Not a something, but not a nothing

21. What do we mean when we call something private? It may mean something that I have chosen not to speak of or it may mean something of which I claim ownership as a product of my physical or intellectual work or it may mean something that only I can know. It is only the third of these senses that Wittgenstein questions:

In what sense are my sensations private? Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. -- in one way this is false, and in another nonsense. If we are using the word "know" as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know I'm in pain. -- Yes, but all the same, not with the certainty with which I know it myself! -- It can't be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I'm in pain. What is it supposed to mean -- except perhaps that I am in pain? (PI 246)

The sentence "Sensations are private" is comparable to "One plays patience by oneself." (PI 248)

What can it mean to play patience by oneself but to play patience? What can it mean that sensations are private but that there are sensations?

22. What then are sensations?

"And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a Nothing." -- Not at all. It's not a Something, but not a Nothing either! The conclusion was only that a Nothing would render the same service as a Something about which nothing could be said. We've only rejected the grammar which tends to force itself on us here. (PI 293)

There is a temptation here to use the phrase "a Something, but not a Nothing" as though referring denotatively to sensation. But Wittgenstein makes clear that he is talking here specifically about the "service" that such phrases as "not a Nothing" and "a something about which nothing can be said" to perform. What service do such phrases serve? They serve to draw the line between what can be spoken of and what cannot. It is necessary to reject the grammar which tends to force a denotative sense on us. As denotative phrases, ‘Not A Something’ and ‘Not a Nothing’ cancel out. And yet, we would make it into a something. Just so language bewitches us. This way leads to mysticism.

23. Can we use "private" as equivalent with "that which cannot be said" as pertains to experience or sensation? Wittgenstein himself never himself does. And if we did, it would serve no purpose. The word "my" has meaning only in what can be talked about and what is therefore potentially accessible to others.

"Another person can't have my pain." -- My pains -- what pains are they? . . . In so far as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his, it is also possible for us both to have the same pain. (PI 253).

24. As Wittgenstein says in his discussion of the 'Beetle in the Box', "If we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and name', the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant" (PI 293). It does not belong to the language-game at all. Can 'sensation' be construed otherwise than on the model of 'object and name'? Of course. It acquires meaning by its use in what it is our shared form of life. When you say "I have a toothache", I understand what you mean, not because "toothache" denotes something we can both privately observe in our experience and then conclude our experiences are similar -- rather, that the possibility of recognizing my toothache as a toothache in the first place depends upon a form of life in which what I call a toothache is what everyone else calls a toothache. That is the language-game!

25. It is certainly true that I cannot be conscious of your pain as you are. This is to say no more than you are in pain and I am not. This fact, however, does not imply that your pain is thereby private such that your experience is essentially hidden from me. Your experience of pain is hidden from me only if you choose to hide it.

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The Problem of Meaning in Neuroscience

Neural activity has no meaning except in the context of our projects and activities. Of itself brain function is as meaningless as the fall of rain or the tides of the sea or the rotation of the earth apart from our witness. When something in the biochemistry of the brain changes and leaves a person impaired, the meaning of that impairment is founded upon the life denied, though human projects are such that impairment itself is often experienced not as tragic or even debilitating but as occasion for courage and love. The meaning of life lies not in the circuits of the brain but in forms of life in which we participate and in the language we use. It is a mistake to believe that such words as love, envy, or courage must point to something other than the structure of our activities. What we hear when we speak of soul or the meaning of life is the poetry and music of our lives. What is most astonishing is that there is any meaning at all. That the meaning of life dies with us testifies to that meaning. Consciousness can not be found in the brain because apart from our language and our projects consciousness is nothing but a wind that is not even that.

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Comment on Wittgenstein's PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS: 14-20, What a 'picture' does and does not do

14. Wittgenstein’s method:

The great difficulty here is not to present the matter as if there were something one couldn’t do. As if there really were an object, from which I extract a description, which I am not in a position to show anyone. – And the best that I can propose is that we yield to the temptation to use this picture, then investigate what the application of the picture looks like. (PI 374)

A picture held us captive. And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably. (PI 115)

When philosophers use a word –- “knowledge”, “being”, “object”, “I”, “proposition/sentence”, “name” – and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language in which it is at home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

When I say I want to investigate ‘consciousness’, it appears to me that I am investigating something’. Is consciousness, for instance, some inner mental state that can be observed only from within and is, therefore, private to each of us? Whenever we use the sentence “I am conscious” in everyday speech, it is either a needless affirmation of what is obvious to the person I am addressing or it is bound up in a particular event where I had been temporarily ‘unconscious’. e.g. in a coma. In any case, the meaning of the word is immediately and easily understood by the person with whom I am speaking. Why then does ‘consciousness’ present a problem? Is it not because I think that a word is a name for something somehow inside me? But isn’t the expression ‘inside me’ a metaphor that we are here mistaking for some actual location? But how am I to find that ‘inside’? But, if it is not ‘inside’, where is it? It is neither ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, neither here or there. When I use the word ‘conscious’ in an everyday context it never occurs to ask myself “Where am I conscious?” It is simply a fact of my existence. The word ‘conscious’ only becomes problematic when we take the word out of its everyday usage and ask “But what is this thing called consciousness?” and then seek an answer as if it were the same sort of question as “What is an aardvark?

15. We commit the same error when we attempt to define consciousness as what it is like to be me or a bat or what it is like to be another person.

“You don’t know what it like to be me” as an expressive statement in an everyday situation is significant but to turn it into an argument for solipsism is a mistake. As an expressive statement in the course of our everyday life, it is an appeal to another person. To turn it into a statement of existential isolation is to lift the statement out of that situation and create an illusion of the ‘self’.

16. “Are you saying there is no ‘self’?” Yes and no. “Either there is a ‘self’ or there is not!” Wittgenstein:

At this point, our thinking plays us a strange trick. That is, we want to quote the law of excluded middle and say: ”Either such a an image floats before his mind, or it does not; there is no third. . possibility!” . . . And problem is now supposed to be: does reality accord with the picture or not? And this picture seems to determine what we have to do, what to look for, and how – but it does not, precisely because we do not know how it is to be applied. Here, saying “There is no third possibility” . . . expresses our inability to urn our eyes away from the this picture – a picture which looks as if it must already contain both the problem and its solution . . . Similarly, when it is said “Either he has this sensation, or he doesn’t”, what primarily occurs to us is a picture which already seems to determine the sense of the statements unequivocally: “Now you know hat sin question”, one would like to say. And what’s just what it does not tell you. (PI 352)

When we create a picture of the ‘self’, the rules for its application are not given. The meaning of ‘self’ as used in our everyday language (“I am not myself today.”) is immediately understood in the context in which it is spoken.

17. “Are then the pictures we create inconsequential?” On the contrary! If we but step away from application and see the creating of such pictures as a primary activity, they become important experiences unto themselves and, along with other language activities, provide our life with meaning. No longer are such pictures illusions because no longer do we treat them as pointing beyond themselves.

“A picture tells me itself” is what I’d like to say. That is, it's telling me something consists in its own structure, in its own forms and colours. (PI 523)

Don’t take it as a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact, that pictures and fictitious narratives give us pleasure, absorb us. (PI 524)

We create our images for their own sake; they do their own work within the activities of which they are a part. To seek ‘application’ is actually to reduce their significance. It is application that turns ‘image’ into illusion.

18. The way out of the “bottle” is to find meaning in each language activity in terms of its own structure and rules. “Does this mean that there is no priority among such activities or no judgment to be made among them as to their value?” It is difficult to know where to begin to respond to such questions? It is as though somehow were to ask “Do Hamlet and right triangles exist along with aardvarks and civil liberties?”-- as if one could somehow apply the rules of one language game to those of another. “But what then, are they all equal.” But that statement assumes terms of comparison! Where are we to find them?

19. “Can we make no judgments?” Only this: some language activities create problems where none need be. They do so because they seek to apply the rules of their activity to those of another. Such applications lead, as Wittgenstein tells us, to “deep disquietudes”. It may be that if we gave up ‘application, some of these language activities would no longer trouble us or would lose their interest, much as childhood games like “Go Fish” become vapid. Perhaps not. Perhaps they would take on a new vitality!

20. In the Preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein invites readers to think for themselves:

I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.

Indeed, Wittgenstein’s style requires the reader to think for himself:

Consider two language games:

(a) Someone gives someone else the order to make particular movements with his arm, or to assume particular bodily positions (gymnastic instructor and pupil). And a variant of this language-game is this: the pupil gives himself orders and then carries them out.

(b) Someone observes certain regular processes – for example, the reactions of different metals to acids – and thereupon makes predictions about the reactions that will occur in certain cases.

There is an evident kinship between these two language-games, and also a fundamental difference. In both, one might call the spoken words “predictions”. But compare the training which leads to the first technique with the training for the second one! (PI 630)

Here Wittgenstein does not tell the reader what the difference in training is between his two examples nor does he comment on the significance of this difference. The reader is left to think this out for himself.

To what ‘training’ is Wittgenstein referring in the first instance (a), that of the one who gives the order or the one who receives it? That there is such a question reveals a significant disparity with the second instance (b). In (a), the one who gives the order and the one who receives the order participate in a common form of life that gives the order its meaning. To speak of ‘prediction’ in this instance (a) is to turn it into an object of thought that is foreign to the activity itself, thereby creating a picture whose application leads us to believe that the action performed is similar to “the reactions of different metals to acid” and that now we better understand the first instance because he have made it ‘objective’. The achievement of this objectivity, however, is illusory, as it has been accomplished by conflating wholly different activities that have wholly different rules of language by which they are played. We have ‘reduced’ one activity to another by subjecting it to the rules of another. If we miss that we have confused the use of ‘prediction’ in (a) and (b) or miss that it is how we use words in particular activities that determine their meanings, we end up bedeviling ourselves with questions like those that the debate over free will provoke.

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Comments on Wittgenstein's PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS: journal 7-13: No Game Theory?

7. “We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand.” (PI 89)

“Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language.” (PI 109)

“The philosopher treats a question; like an illness.” (PI 255)

What was said in Nos.1-6 is symptomatic of the very illness that Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity endeavors to cure: the will to theorize, to look away from what is in plain sight, from everyday use of language, and to seek logical connections among analogous forms of expressions. Everywhere in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein is trying to eliminate “misunderstandings concerning the use of words, brought about, among other things by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of our language” (PI 90).

8. Or to put it as Wittgenstein does early on in the Philosophical Investigations, such discussions as Nos. 1-6 are what happen “when language goes on holiday” (PI 38). The particular fault of Nos. 1-6 is the arbitrary use made of the blurriness of the idea of a ‘language-game’, a blurriness that allows us free rein to theorize. Wittgenstein speaks directly to this problem:

But if the colors in the original shade into one another without a hint of any boundary, won’t it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? Won’t you then have to say: “Here I might just as well draw a circle as a rectangle or a heart, for all the colors merge. Anything – and nothing – is right.” – And is the position in which for example, someone finds himself in ethics or aesthetics when he looks for definitions that correspond to our concepts. (PI 77)

9. It may be that Wittgenstein is responsible for such misunderstandings. He himself strays on occasion into “theorizing” (e.g. PI 7:“I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven, a ‘language-game’.”) The problem is further compounded by the style of the fragments themselves which require careful reading to avoid mistaking a statement that Wittgenstein wants to challenge with one that he is affirming (e.g. see discussion below of the ‘Beetle in the Box’ PI 293).

10. What does Wittgenstein want us to understand as a ‘language game’? He lists examples for us in PI 15, among which are “requesting, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.” The illness that Wittgenstein is so energetically trying to combat arises when a philosopher attempts to generalize from what are plainly everyday, ordinary speech acts and interpret, for instance, his reference to “praying” as a reference to ‘theology’ as a word game unto itself.

11. For Wittgenstein not all uses of language qualify for what he means by a ‘language game’:

Other illusions come from various quarters to join the particular one spoken of here. Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts: proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each. (But what are these words to be used for now? The language-game in which they are to be applied is missing. ) (PI 96)

Though it may be that Wittgenstein is himself responsible for confusion over what counts as a language-game, it is nevertheless clear that he directs our attention over and over again to everyday usage, warning us as he goes against the will to theorize, systematize or mistake analogies for logical equivalencies.

12. How easily Wittgenstein’s aphoristic style leads to confusion can be seen in his discussion of the ‘beetle-in-the-box’: (PI 293):

If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word ‘pain’ means – must I not say that of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly.

Well, everyone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! – Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle”. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. – But what if these people’s word “beetle” had a use nonetheless? – If so, it would not be as the name of a thing. The Thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty. – No, one can ‘divide thought’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

Here Wittgenstein is using the language of ‘privacy’ to debunk that very language. His discussion amounts to a reductio ad absurdum, as his conclusion to his aphorism makes clear:

That is to say, if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and name’, the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. (PI 293)

It would be a serious error here to suppose that Wittgenstein is arguing for some mystical notion of the ineffable: To do so is to mistake the purpose of his analogy.

13. What Wittgenstein is arguing against in his discussion of ‘privacy’ is the mistake he is everywhere warning us against: of supposing that words are essentially denotative, so that the “I” in “I think” denotes an “I” that exists as some kind of object. We understand the first person pronoun in its everyday usage readily enough: “I am going to the store.”; “I am in pain.”; “I am your friend.” The meaning of “I” only becomes problematical when we want to sever the pronoun from its ordinary use. That is the bewitchment of language about which Wittgenstein is warning us. It leads to entanglements that are the origin of “disquietudes” that he would dispel:

The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes.. . (PI 111)

Here is the fundamental fact is that we lay down rules, a technique, for playing a game, and that then, when we follow the rules, things don’t turn out as we had assumed. So that we are, as it wee entangled in our own rules. This entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand: that is, to survey. (PI 125)

It may be that Wittgenstein would allow that metaphysical languages do count as ‘language-games’. If so, they would be games whose rules end up being self-defeating, creating entanglements such as Descartes cogito, ergo sum in which the “I”, under Wittgenstein’s critique, “drops out of consideration as irrelevant” (PI 293 supra). (There is more to be said on Descartes’ cogito.)

(to be continued)

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Comments on Wittgenstein's PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS: journal 1-6: Game Theory?

(These comments represent a journey in my undertstanding of Wittgenstein's Philosophical investigations. As I read Wittgenstein more closely, I have sometimes discovered certain preconceived ideas that had to be revised or discarded. 1-6 may sound like a plausible reading of Wittgenstein.but as I pay closer attention to the actual text and am able toI set aside my previous ideas about Wittgenstein, the more mistaken these early comments appear to be. Still, they seem to have some value -- at least, as a caution to those who think they know what Wittgenstein is about in his Philosophical Investigations without close reading of the actual text in its entirety.)

1. “I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven, a ‘language-game’.” (PI, 7)

Is not Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity also one of the many language activities (games) that are woven into the whole (game)? How could it not be? Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity clearly involves techniques or skills that can be mastered and, like other games, can be played at different levels of sophistication. An example of such a skill in Wittgenstein’s game is what he calls a “grammatical investigation”:

“Understanding a world”: a state. But a mental state? – We call dejection, excitement, pain, mental states. Carry out a grammatical investigation as follows: we say

‘He felt dejected the whole day'

‘He was in great excitement the whole day’

‘He has been in pain uninterruptedly since yesterday’. –

We also say, ‘Since yesterday I have understood this word.’ ‘Uninterruptedly’, though? – To be sure, one can speak of an interruption of understanding. But in what cases? Compare: ‘When did your pains get less?’ and ‘When did you stop understanding that word?’ (PI, 149)

This manner of looking at our actual use of words like ‘pain’ is repeated over and over again throughout the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein’s game, of course, is not restricted to one such gambit. There are many others that must be mastered. It is perhaps enough to say here that even the formatting of this critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity is to play the Wittgensteinian game. Of course, it is a poor attempt, but like any game, Wittgenstein’s can be played on all levels of mastery.

2. But even if this critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity is correct, what has been achieved? Does it invalidate or weaken Wittgenstein’s work? Of course not. For what is good or useful or true or well done has only relevance within the game that is being play. And certainly the fact that we have identified Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity as one language-game among others does not mean that it is frivolous, trivial or merely diverting. (Here it is important to remember that W explicitly states that he intends his use of “game” to be not a definition of anything or a valuation but rather an analogy that will help us understand how we use words. Further discussion of this ‘analogy’ is required.)

3. One consequence of identifying Wittgenstein’s philosophical activity as a “game” is that we are able to recognize that it has “affinities” and “family resemblances” with other philosophical activities, such as Plato’s or Aristotle’s. There are a great many of these “affinities” to be explored, but for now, it is enough to recognize how familiar Wittgenstein’s resort to everyday usage is to Aristotle’s discussion of happiness or how familiar Wittgenstein’s use of analogy is to Plato’s.

4. But on what ground can Wittgenstein’s “game” be considered superior to those of other philosophers who appear, despite their “affinities”, to be playing games as different as checkers, chess, ring-around-a-rosy, poker, or GO. The play in each of these can only be evaluated within the individual games themselves. The one fault we might find with Wittgenstein’s game is the same one we find in those of other philosophers: that their game is presented as the game, the one by which all others are to be measured.

5. That Plato is playing a different game from that of Wittgenstein can be demonstrated by an investigation into the former’s use of analogy. Plato uses his analogies (the cave, the divided line, the chariot, the theory of recollection which leads to the further analogy of the slave-boy) to bump up against the barriers of language: an attempt to say the unsayable. To turn any one of these analogies into Platonic doctrine is to forget the purpose within any given dialogue that these analogies serve. In the case of recollection and the slave-boy episode, Plato employs these analogies to help us move beyond Meno’s paradox that it is senseless to search for what one does not know. Indeed, at the end of the slave-boy analogy, Socrates offers this qualification:

I shouldn’t like to take my oath on the whole story, but one thing I am ready to fight for as long as I can, in word and act – that is, that we shall be better, braver and more active men if we believe it is right to look for what we don’t know than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don’t know can never be discovered."

We may say something similar in response to Wittgenstein: the attempt to say what cannot be said about truth, beauty and virtue is not a futile activity even though it will render up only what is nonsense from Wittgenstein’s perspective. The attempt itself has the effect of creating a life that is experienced as deeply meaningful. In playing Plato’s game, we discover that what is of most value is not the answer to the question, What is virtue?, but the kind of life that silently, invisibly comes about as a consequence of earnestly asking the question.

6. Wittgenstein himself seems to be alive to and find personal value in those games that involve bumping one’s head against the barrier of language. See his “A Lecture on Ethics” as well as the later part of the Tractatus. It may be that Wittgenstein’s problem with Plato and other philosophers is really the problem that has developed with respect to his own philosophical activity: the philosophical activity has become hardened into doctrine, or even worse, dogma. (It is all too often forgotten that Wittgenstein used "game" as an analogy, which like all analogies must eventually fall away.) Socrates is all about the activity itself of philosophy, as is Wittgenstein. As with any game, the value is in the play itself.

(See Journal 7-13 where the above critique is understood as flawed.)

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Wittgensten: A Lecture on Ethics

LECTURE ON ETHICS

My subject, as you know, is Ethics and I will adopt the explanation of that term which Professor Moore has given in his book Principia Ethica. He says: "Ethics is the general enquiry into what is good." Now I am going to use the term Ethics in a slightly wider sense, in a sense in fact which includes what I believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called Aesthetics.

And to make you see as clearly as possible what I take to be the subject matter of Ethics I will put before you a number of more or less synonymous expressions each of which could be substituted for the above definition, and by enumerating them I want to produce the same sort of effect which Galton produced when he took a number of photos of different faces on the same photographic plate in order to get the picture of the typical features they all had in common. And as by showing to you such a collective photo I could make you see what is the typical--say--Chinese face; so if you look through the row of synonyms which I will put before you, you will, I hope, be able to see the characteristic features they all have in common and these are the characteristic features of Ethics.

Now instead of saying "Ethics is the enquiry into what is good" I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living. I believe if you look at all these phrases you will get a rough idea as to what it is that Ethics is concerned with.  Now the first thing that strikes one about all these expressions is that each of them is actually used in two very different senses. I will call them the trivial or relative sense on the one hand and the ethical or absolute sense on the other. If for instance I say that this is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word good here has only meaning so far as this purpose has been previously fixed upon. In fact the word good in the relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined standard. Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity. And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right road I mean that it's the right road relative to a certain goal.

Used in this way these expressions don't present any difficult or deep problems. But this is not how Ethics uses them. Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said "Well, you play pretty badly" and suppose I answered "I know, I'm playing pretty badly but I don't want to play any better," all the other man could say would be "Ah, then that's all right." But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said, "You're behaving like a beast" and then I were to say "I know I behave badly, but then I don't want to behave any better," could he then say "Ah, then that's all right"? Certainly not; he would say "Well, you ought to want to behave better." Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas the first instance was one of relative judgment.

The essence of this difference seems to be obviously this: Every judgment of relative value is a mere statement of facts and can therefore be put in such a form that it loses all the appearance of a judgment of value: Instead of saying "This is the right way to Granchester," I could equally well have said, "This is the right way you have to go if you want to get to Granchester in the shortest time"; "This man is a good runner" simply means that he runs a certain number of miles in a certain number of minutes, etc.

Now what I wish to contend is that, although all judgments of relative value can be shown to be mere statement of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.

Let me explain this: Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment. It would of course contain all relative judgments of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. But all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level.

There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial.  Now perhaps some of you will agree to that and be reminded of Hamlet's words: "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." But this again could lead to a misunderstanding. What Hamlet says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us, are attributes to our states of mind. But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad.

If for instance in our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition. The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone. Certainly the reading of description might cause us pain or rage or any other emotion, or we might read about the pain or rage caused by this murder in other people when they have heard of it, but there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics.

And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water and if I were to pour out a gallon over it.

I said that so far as facts and propositions are concerned there is only relative value and relative good, right, etc. And let me, before I go on, illustrate this by a rather obvious example. The right road is the road which leads to an arbitrarily predetermined end and it is quite clear to us all that there is no sense in talking about the right road apart from such a predetermined goal. Now let us see what we could possibly mean by the expression, 'the absolutely right road.' I think it would be the road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go,or be ashamed for not going.

And similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs, would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about. And I want to say that such a state of affairs is a chimera. No state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge.

Then what have all of us who, like myself, are still tempted to use such expressions as 'absolute good,' 'absolute value,' etc., what have we in mind and what do we try to express? Now whenever I try to make this clear to myself it is natural that I should recall cases in which I would certainly use these expressions and I am then in the situation in which you would be if, for instance, I were to give you a lecture on the psychology of pleasure. What you would do then would be to try and recall some typical situation in which you always felt pleasure. For, bearing this situation in mind, all I should say to you would become concrete and, as it were, controllable. One man would perhaps choose as stock example the sensation when taking a walk on a fine summer's day. Now in this situation I am, if I want to fix my mind on what I mean by absolute or ethical value.

And there, in my case, it always happens that the idea of one particular experience presents itself to me which therefore is, in a sense, my experience par excellence and this is the reason why, in talking to you now, I will use this experience as my first and foremost example. (As I have said before, this is an entirely personal matter and others would find other examples more striking.) I will describe this experience in order, if possible, to make you recall the same or similar experiences, so that we may have a common ground for our investigation.

I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as 'how extraordinary that anything should exist' or 'how extraordinary that the world should exist.'  I will mention another experience straight away which I also know and which others of you might be acquainted with: it is, what one might call, the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say 'I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.'  Now let me consider these experiences, for, I believe, they exhibit the very characteristics we try to get clear about. And there the first thing I have to say is, that the verbal expression which we give to these experiences is nonsense!

If I say 'I wonder at the existence of the world' I am misusing language. Let me explain this: It has a perfectly good and clear sense to say that I wonder at something being the case, we all understand what it means to say that I wonder at the size of a dog which is bigger than any one I have ever seen before or at any thing which, in the common sense of the word, is extraordinary. In every such case I wonder at something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case. I wonder at the size of this dog because I could conceive of a dog of another, namely the ordinary size, at which I should not wonder. To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case.  In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.

I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

Now the same applies to the other experience which I have mentioned, the experience of absolute safety. We all know what it means in ordinary life to be safe. I am safe in my room, when I cannot be run over by an omnibus. I am safe if I have had whooping cough and cannot therefore get it again. To be safe essentially means that it is physically impossible that certain things should happen to me and therefore it is nonsense to say that I am safewhatever happens. Again this is a misuse of the word 'safe' as the other example was of a misuse of the word 'existence' or 'wondering.'

Now I want to impress on you that a certain characteristic misuse of our language runs through all ethical and religious expressions. All these expressions seem, prima facie, to be just similes. Thus it seems that when we are using the word right in an ethical sense, although, what we mean, is not right in its trivial sense, it's something similar, and when we say 'This is a good fellow,' although the word good here doesn't mean what it means in the sentence 'This is a good football player' there seems to be some similarity. And when we say 'This man's life was valuable' we don't mean it in the same sense in which we would speak of some valuable jewelry but there seems to be some sort of analogy.

Now all religious terms seem in this sense to be used as similes or allegorically. For when we speak of God and that he sees everything and when we kneel and pray to him all our terms and actions seem to be parts of a great and elaborate allegory which represents him as a human being of great power whose grace we try to win etc.

But this allegory also describes the experience which I have just referred to. For the first of them is, I believe, exactly what people were referring to when they said that God had created the world; and the experience of absolute safety has been described by saying that we feel safe in the hands of God. Third experience of the same kind is that of feeling guilty and again this was described by the phrase that God disapproves of our conduct.

Thus in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a simile must be the simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And so, what at first appeared to be simile now seems to be mere nonsense.  Now the three experiences which I have mentioned to you (and I could have added others) seem to those who have experienced them, for instance to me, to have in some sense an intrinsic, absolute value. But when I say they are experiences, surely, they are facts; they have taken place then and there, lasted a certain definite time and consequently are describable. And so from what I have said some minutes ago I must admit it is nonsense to say that they have absolute value. And I will make my point still more acute by saying 'It is the paradox that an experience, a fact, should seem to have supernatural value.'

Now there is a way in which I would be tempted to meet this paradox. Let me first consider, again, our first experience of wondering at the existence of the world and let me describe it in a slightly different way; we all know the like of which we have never yet seen. Now suppose such an event happened. Take the case that one of you suddenly grew a lion's head and began to roar. Certainly that would be as extraordinary a thing as I can imagine. Now whenever we should have recovered from our surprise, what I would suggest would be to fetch a doctor and have the case scientifically investigated and if it were not for hurting him I would have him vivisected. And where would the miracle have got to?  For it is clear that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science which again means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system. This shows that it is absurd to say 'Science has proved that there are no miracles.'

The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle. For imagine whatever fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that term. For we see now that we have been using it to describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle.

Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we can say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense.  Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. You will say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we don't mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance.  That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language.

This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.  -

By Ludwig Wittgenstein (1929)

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Wittgenstein's Preface to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Preface

This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it -- or similar thoughts. it is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if it afforded pleasure to one who read it with understanding.

The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language. Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather -- not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to thnk both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.

How far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I will not decide. Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before my by another.

I will only mention that to the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Bertrand Russell I owe in large measure the stimulation of my thoughts.

If this work has a value it consists in two things. First that in it thoughts are expressed, and this value will be the greater the better the thoughts are expressed. the more the nail has been hit on the heard. -- Here I am conscious that I have fallen far short of the possible. Simply because my powers are insufficient to cope with the task. -- May others come and do it better.

On the other hand the truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.

L. W.

Vienna, 1918

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Two Important Sources for Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Download Undifferentiated aesthetic continuum an essay by N.S.C. Northrup

Download Principles of Research-2 an address by Albert Einstein

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"Straight from the heart"

Principles of Research

address by Albert Einstein (1918)

(Physical Society, Berlin, for Max Planck's sixtieth birtday)

IN the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.

I am quite aware that we have just now lightheartedly expelled in imagination many excellent men who are largely, perhaps chiefly, responsible for the buildings of the temple of science; and in many cases our angel would find it a pretty ticklish job to decide. But of one thing I feel sure: if the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have come to be, any more than a forest can grow which consists of nothing but creepers. For these people any sphere of human activity will do, if it comes to a point; whether they become engineers, officers, tradesmen, or scientists depends on circumstances. Now let us have another look at those who have found favor with the angel. Most of them are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other, in spite of these common characteristics, than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple? That is a difficult question and no single answer will cover it. To begin with, I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

With this negative motive there goes a positive one. Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in tbe narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

What place does the theoretical physicist's picture of the world occupy among all these possible pictures? It demands the highest possible standard of rigorous precision in the description of relations, such as only the use of mathematical language can give. In regard to his subject matter, on the other hand, the physicist has to limit himself very severely: he must content himself with describing the most simple events which can be brought within the domain of our experience; all events of a more complex order are beyond the power of the human intellect to reconstruct with the subtle accuracy and logical perfection which the theoretical physicist demands. Supreme purity, clarity, and certainty at the cost of completeness. But what can be the attraction of getting to know such a tiny section of nature thoroughly, while one leaves everything subtler and more complex shyly and timidly alone? Does the product of such a modest effort deserve to be called by the proud name of a theory of the universe?

In my belief the name is justified; for the general laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory, of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that process of deduction were not far beyond the capacity of the human intellect. The physicist's renunciation of completeness for his cosmos is therefore not a matter of fundamental principle.

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest. Nobody who has really gone deeply into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles; this is what Leibnitz described so happily as a "pre-established harmony." Physicists often accuse epistemologists of not paying sufficient attention to this fact. Here, it seems to me, lie the roots of the controversy carried on some years ago between Mach and Planck.

The longing to behold this pre-established harmony is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which Planck has devoted himself, as we see, to the most general problems of our science, refusing to let himself be diverted to more grateful and more easily attained ends. I have often heard colleagues try to attribute this attitude of his to extraordinary will-power and discipline -- wrongly, in my opinion. The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart. There he sits, our beloved Planck, and smiles inside himself at my childish playing-about with the lantern of Diogenes. Our affection for him needs no threadbare explanation. May the love of science continue to illumine his path in the future and lead him to the solution of the most important problem in present-day physics, which he has himself posed and done so much to solve. May he succeed in uniting quantum theory with electrodynamics and mechanics in a single logical system.

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Man's Disproportion (Pascal) French/English

For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing compared
to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle
point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from
an understanding of the extremes; and the end of things
and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in
impenetrable secrecy. Equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which
he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed. . .

Because they failed to contemplate these infinites, men
have rashly undertaken to probe into nature as if there were
some proportion between themselves and her.
Strangely enough they wanted to know the principles of
things and go on from there to know everything, inspired
by a presumption as infinite as their object (p. 199).

Car enfin qu’est-ce que l’homme dans la nature? Un néant `a
l’égard de l’infini, un tout `a l’égard du néant, un milieu entre rien et
tout. Infiniment eloigné de comprendre les extrêmes, la fin des choses
et leur principe sont pour lui invinciblement cachés dans un secret
impénétrable, également incapable de voir le néant d’o`u il est tiré, et
l’infini o`u il englouti. . .

Manque d’avoir contemplé ces infinis, les hommes ne sont portés
témérairement `a la recherche de la nature, comme s’ils avaient quelque
proportion avec elle. C’est une chose étrange qu’ils ont voulu comprendre
les principes des choses, et de l`a arriver jusqu’`a connaître tout, par
une présomption aussi infinie que leur objet. Car il est sans doute qu’on
ne peut dormer ce dessein sans une presomption ou sans une capacité
infinie, comme la nature. Blaise Pascal, Pensees (72)

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Swordplay

In the evening, all the cats who had participated in the rat-catching had a grand session at the Swordsman's house, and respectfully asked the great Cat to take the seat of honor. They made profound bows before her and said: "We all wish you to divulge your secrets for our benefit." The grand old cat answered: "Teaching is not difficult, listening is not difficult either, but what is truly difficult is to become conscious of what you have in yourself and be able to use it as your own."

From a 17th century master's book on swordplay, The Swordsman and the Cat

For more, see http://www.rubinghscience.org/zen/cat1.html

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Kierkegaard: Aphorism 1

The majority of men are subjective towards themselves and objective towards all others, terribly objective sometimes -- but the real task is in fact to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others.

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Meno's Paradox

Meno:

καὶ τίνα τρόπον ζητήσεις, ὦ Σώκρατες, τοῦτο ὃ μὴ οἶσθα τὸ παράπαν ὅτι ἐστίν; ποῖον γὰρ ὧν οὐκ οἶσθα προθέμενος ζητήσεις; ἢ εἰ καὶ ὅτι μάλιστα ἐντύχοις αὐτῷ, πῶς εἴσῃ ὅτι τοῦτό ἐστιν ὃ σὺ οὐκ ᾔδησθα;

Socrates:

μανθάνω οἷον βούλει λέγειν, ὦ Μένων. ὁρᾷς τοῦτον ὡς ἐριστικὸν λόγον κατάγεις, ὡς οὐκ ἄρα ἔστιν ζητεῖν ἀνθρώπῳ οὔτε ὃ οἶδε οὔτε ὃ μὴ οἶδε; οὔτε γὰρ ἂν ὅ γε οἶδεν ζητοῖ—οἶδεν γάρ, καὶ οὐδὲν δεῖ τῷ γε τοιούτῳ ζητήσεως—οὔτε ὃ μὴ οἶδεν—οὐδὲ γὰρ οἶδεν ὅτι ζητήσει.

TRANSLATION:

Meno:

And in what way, Socrates, will you seek that which you do not at all know what it is? For having proposed it, what sort of thing of the things you do not know will you seek? Even if, in the best case, you should happen upon it, how would you know that it is that which you had not known?

Socrates:

I understand what you want to say, Meno. Do you see that you are bringing to shore (spinning, drawing out, landing, conjuring, launching) an eristic argument, that it is consequently not possible for a man to seek for what he knows, nor for what he does not? He would not seek for what he knows -- for he knows it, and there is no need at all to such a one for searching -- nor for what he does not know -- for he does not know what he will be looking for.

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Reality Is not what we think it is

Philosophers, theologians, mystics, and even physicists are wont to return to the etymological background of certain key words to garner support for their theories de rerum natura. It is as if the root meanings of words like “reality,” “truth or “sin” provide a kind of archeological record of the mind, revealing profound insights based on a primordial and pristine perception of things. We can briefly observe how this etymological digging works in the excavation of that most controversial word, “reality.” “Reality” derives from the Latin noun res: thing, circumstance, condition, affair, etc. Res itself is cognate with the Latin verb reor, reri: to think. A philosopher who gets a hold of this last root meaning may suggest that “reality” is what you are able to think about. He may go on to argue that reality is a concept that mediates between the known and the unknown and, indeed, points beyond itself since what can be thought about and what is known are on principle always limited. Some Zeno, delighting in paradox, may argue that reality is precisely not what we think it is.

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Excerpt from Wittgenstein's Notes for Lectures on "Private Experience" and "Sense Data"

"I say 'I have toothache' because I feel it" contrasts this case with, say, the case of acting on the stage, but can't explain what 'having toothache' means because having toothache = feeling toothache, and the explanation would come to: "I say I have it because I have it" = I say I have it because it is true = I say I have it because I don't lie. One wishes to say: In order to be able to say that I have toothache I don't observe my behavior, say in the mirror. And this is correct, but it doesn'tfollow that you describe an observation of any other kind. Moaning is not the description of an observation.That is, you can't be said to derive your expression from what you observe. Just as you can't be said to derive the word 'green' from your visual impression but only from a sample. Now against this one is inclined to say: "Surely if I call a color green I don't just say that word, but the word comes in a particular way," or "if I say 'I have toothache' I don't just use this phrase but it must come in a particular way!" Now this means nothing, for, if you like, it always comes in a particular way.

"But surely seeing and saying something can't be all!" Here we make the confusion that there is still an object we haven't mentioned. You imagine that there is a pure seeing and saying, and one + something else. Therefore you imagine all distinctions to be made as between a, a + b, a + c, etc. The idea of this addition is mostly derived from consideration of our bodily organs. All that ought to interest you is whether I make all the distinctions that you make: whether, e.g., I distinguish between cheating and telling the truth.-"There is something else!"-"There is nothing else!"- "But what else is there?"-"Well, this / !" "But surely I know that I am not a mere automaton!"-What would it be like if I were?-"How is it that I can't imagine myself not experiencing seeing, hearing etc.?"-We constantly confuse and change about the commonsense use and the metaphysical use.

"I know that I see."-

"I see."-you seem to read this off some fact; as though you said: "There is a chair in this corner." "But if in an experiment, e.g., I say 'I see,' why do I say so? surely because I see!" It is as though our expressions of personal experience needn't even spring from regularly recurrent inner experiences but just from something.

Confusion of description and samples. The idea of the 'realm of consciousness.'

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The Debate Over Mirror Neurons: Ramachandran, Gernsbacher et alii

Against:

Download What the myth of mirror neurons gets wrong about the human brain

For: Ramachandran

Against: Gernsbacher

Mirror Neurons in Humans? from Morton Ann Gernsbacher on Vimeo.

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Does Consciousness Exist? William James

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/consciousness.htm

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David Chalmers on Emergence

Here is an online paper by Chalmers that expands upon the video:

http://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf

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Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Gospel in Brief

http://www.the-philosopher.co.uk/witty.htm

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The Creative Moral Act

There is a veritable constellation of motives and impulses behind every choice we make. There is never a time when we do something "only" out of compassion or, for that matter, "only" for selfish reasons. Sometimes decision making is like making sausage, other times it is more like art, even creative. It is certainly not true that because negative factors are present in our decision making, thereby our decisions are "solely" determined by those negative factors. Indeed, in what I call the creative moral act, our decisions are something more than simply balancing competing factors, but something that truly, fully and beautifully expresses who we are -- beyond good and evil, but yet made possible by our desire for the good. In such a creative moral act, the negative factors contribute positively to the whole. Such a creative choice is an act of our whole being and is as such beyond notions of free will and determinism. The marks of such a creative moral act are that we not only are at peace with our decision but there is also joy in the actions that follow from it.

The choice comes to one like an inspiration. We stand somewhat like an artist before a blank canvas. What matters most is the intention of artist to create something beautiful. What matters most for us is the intention to be a good person. It is not for nothing that the true, the good and the beautiful are considered by many philosophers (Plato especially) to be different aspects of one reality. Yet for all that, the artist fails more often than not. Just like us.

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A classroom version of the slave boy scene in Plato's Meno

Socrates: Boy, you see this square, 2 ft by 2 ft.

Boy: Yes.

Socrates: Do you know its area?

Boy: It is a 4 ft. square, Socrates.

Socrates: Very good. Can you draw the side of a square that would be double the area of this one?

Boy: Yes.

(Boy draws out one side of the square so that it is 4 ft. long.)

Socrates: I see you have made your side double the side of the original square. Now draw the new square that can be constructed on the side you have drawn.

(Boy draws a square that is 4 ft. by 4 ft.)

Socrates: What is the area of this square?

Boy: 16 ft. square.

Socrates: That’s four times the area of the first square, not double. We need a square that is half of this one. Let’s go back to the original 2 foot square and try again. (Socrates erases the 16 ft. square and redraws the original one.)

(Boy thinks for a moment and then draws a length that is 3 feet)

Socrates: The side of your square is now 3ft?

Boy: Yes, Socrates.

Socrates: Now draw a square on this new side and tell me the area of the new square.

Boy: It is 9 ft. square, Socrates. Still too big.

Socrates: Well, let’s go back to the original square and try yet again. (Socrates erases the 9 ft. square and redraws the original one.) What will be side of a square that is double in area of this one?

Boy: (looking puzzled, hesitates, scratches his head, etc and says in bewilderment): I don’t know, Socrates.

Socrates: We can at least say that you are better off than before when you thought that you knew the answer, but now at least you know that you don’t.

Boy: Yes, Socrates. You are right. I am better off.

Socrates: Let’s go back to your 16 ft. square and think.

(Socrates draws the 16 ft. square and divides the square into fourths.)

Socrates: We want a square that is half the area of 16 ft. square and equal to the sum of two of these inner squares.

Boy: Yes.

Socrates: Well, what should we do?

Boy: (he thinks, puzzled, and says) I told you, Socrates, I don’t know.

Socrates: I think you do. Draw the diagonal of one of the inner squares, Boy, and see if you see anything.

Boy: Like this?

Socrates: Yes. What do you see?

(Boy looks, deep in thought, thinks and then with a rush of pleasure and delight says)

Boy: O Socrates, I know, I know. (And he draws the other three diagonals.)

Socrates: Explain, Boy!

Boy: Yes. (With some excitement) The diagonals must all be the same length because the squares are the same and each diagonal cuts its own square in half, so the resulting square must be half the size the of the 16 ft. square and therefore is that very 8 ft. square we have been searching for.

Socrates: Well done!

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Reading Spinoza's Ethics in Latin: An Invitation

You are invited to join Mr. Himwich in a reading of the Latin text of Spinoza's Ethics. Mr. Himwich is working on an ancillary textbook that will help students learn the Latin fundamentals necessary to read Spinoza's text in the original. Chapter I will provide the necessary grammatical and vocabulary background to read the Title Page below and the Schema or Table of Contents. Subsequent chapters will proceed methodically through the text and become increasingly comprehensive in its explanations of how the Latin language works. It is not necessary for you to know any Latin; those who do, however, can be especially helpful. All that is required is an abiding interest in Spinoza's philosophy. Whether new to Latin or an old hand, you will help Mr. Himwich think through this project, critique the instructional materials, and develop philosophical commentary. And best of all, you will read Spinoza slowly and thoughtfully. Mr. Himwich expects the project will last for the rest of his days.

Why Spinoza? Why is he relevant today? The short answer is that his conception of a single substance that expresses itself in two ways, mind and body, may provide an explanatory apparatus that allows for a fully neurological explanation of consciousness that is not simply reductive.

BENEDICTI DE SPINOZA

E T H I C A

ORDINE GEOMETRICO DEMONSTRATA

ET

IN QUINQUE PARTES DISTINCTA

IN QUIBUS AGITUR

I.	DE DEO.
II.	DE NATURA ET ORIGINE MENTIS.
III.	DE ORIGINE ET NATURA AFFECTUUM.
IV.	DE SERVITUTE HUMANA SEU DE AFFECTUUM VIRIBUS.
V.	DE POTENTIA INTELLECTUS SEU DE LIBERTATE HUMANA.

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In the beginning was the word

For consciousness to be what it is the brain must be able to take its own activity as an object. The brain must have a meta-mechanism by which it partially re-represents its interaction with its environment. This re-representation creates a feedback loop to the original activity. It is this feedback loop that makes possible the experience, if not the reality, of free will. The re-representation is accomplished through language, such that if there is no language there is no consciousness -- as the split-brain research reveals. Language in its re-representation creates a self to whom the activity of the brain belongs. It is that creation of the self that makes us feel that there is something it is like to be me because that is the story that the brain tells itself. Consciousness itself is that story. There may also a proto-consciousness, a potentiality or readiness state, anticipatory of the word, a state of simple synchrony between the original brain activity and its re-representation.

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"Despisers of the Body" -- Nietzsche

TO THE despisers of the body will I speak my word. I wish them

neither to learn afresh, nor teach anew, but only to bid farewell to

their own bodies,- and thus be dumb.

"Body am I, and soul"- so saith the child. And why should one not

speak like children?

But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: "Body am I entirely,

and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body."

The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and

a peace, a flock and a shepherd.

An instrument of thy body is also thy little sagacity, my brother,

which thou callest "spirit"- a little instrument and plaything of

thy big sagacity.

"Ego," sayest thou, and art proud of that word. But the greater

thing- in which thou art unwilling to believe- is thy body with its

big sagacity; it saith not "ego," but doeth it.

What the sense feeleth, what the spirit discerneth, hath never its

end in itself. But sense and spirit would fain persuade thee that they

are the end of all things: so vain are they.

Instruments and playthings are sense and spirit: behind them there

is still the Self. The Self seeketh with the eyes of the senses, it

hearkeneth also with the ears of the spirit.

Ever hearkeneth the Self, and seeketh; it compareth, mastereth,

conquereth, and destroyeth. It ruleth, and is also the ego's ruler.

Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty

lord, an unknown sage- it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body,

it is thy body.

There is more sagacity in thy body than in thy best wisdom. And

who then knoweth why thy body requireth just thy best wisdom?

Thy Self laugheth at thine ego, and its proud prancings. "What are

these prancings and flights of thought unto me?" it saith to itself.

"A by-way to my purpose. I am the leading-string of the ego, and the

prompter of its notions."

The Self saith unto the ego: "Feel pain!" And thereupon it

suffereth, and thinketh how it may put an end thereto- and for that

very purpose it is meant to think.

The Self saith unto the ego: "Feel pleasure!" Thereupon it

rejoiceth, and thinketh how it may ofttimes rejoice- and for that very

purpose it is meant to think.

To the despisers of the body will I speak a word. That they

despise is caused by their esteem. What is it that created esteeming

and despising and worth and will?

The creating Self created for itself esteeming and despising, it

created for itself joy and woe. The creating body created for itself

spirit, as a hand to its will.

Even in your folly and despising ye each serve your Self, ye

despisers of the body. I tell you, your very Self wanteth to die,

and turneth away from life.

No longer can your Self do that which it desireth most:- create

beyond itself. That is what it desireth most; that is all its fervour.

But it is now too late to do so:- so your Self wisheth to succumb,

ye despisers of the body.

To succumb- so wisheth your Self; and therefore have ye become

despisers of the body. For ye can no longer create beyond yourselves.

And therefore are ye now angry with life and with the earth. And

unconscious envy is in the sidelong look of your contempt.

I go not your way, ye despisers of the body! Ye are no bridges for

me to the Superman!-

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Harvard Implicit Bias Test

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/

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On justice: an invitation

A conversation between a student and a teacher at Albuquerque Academy.

Excerpts:

The Teacher: Hugh Himwich

Justice is the fundamental right of all human beings to have the same opportunity to lead a fulfilling life. This right does not exist in nature. It exists only by the creative act of my choice. It is natural justice in the sense that it is not created ex nihilo, but based upon all that it is to be human. Once again, you are free to choose against this, but only at the cost of your humanity. It is never a question of knowing whether your choice is right -- it is a question only of what kind of world you choose to live in.

The Student: Jordan Fleischer

We have agreed that there is no objective standard by which one can decide whether any action or choice can be said to be just, which is exactly why it seems foolish of us to go ahead and define justice as we have. It is essential to remember that justice itself is only an experience. If someone makes a choice based on the parameters you have provided, they will indeed experience an act as if it is just. However, when it comes to determining if there is any truth behind that experience, there is simply no way to know. It reminds me of the phenomenon of color; it exists in our consciousness as something undeniably real, yet, the truth is that color is simply created by our brain and truly only exists as waves of light. No one can say what the truth is about justice.

The Invitation: Join the conversation by sending your

thoughts on justice to Jordan Fleischer ([email protected]) or Mr. Himwich

([email protected]).

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Introduction to Aristotle

1. The Best Sort of Student

We should think of Aristotle as the very best sort of student who regards his teacher Plato with respect and affection but has a still higher regard for the truth. This is certainly how Aristotle saw himself.

It is, therefore, ironic that it was the reverence for Aristotle himself, upheld by the Church, that impeded progress in the sciences for almost two thousand years. When the sciences made progress again, it returned to Plato and Plato’s Pythagorean mathematics. It is interesting in this regard that the Copernican ideas that the earth was in motion and not at the center of the universe were already to be found in Plato. Aristotle had wrongly held that the earth was motionless and at the center of the universe.

Again, Plato and many others before him knew that the brain was the seat of thought while Aristotle and his followers believed that the seat of thought was the heart. In other areas, Aristotle’s ideas also proved retrograde. For instance, Aristotle believed that a woman’s body demonstrated arrested development and that her soul reflected this imperfection, particularly with regard to the exercise of her rational faculty. Plato believed that soul was sexless and though he was hardly a feminist he at least did not see the deficit in woman as a flaw of her soul.

2. Are you an Aristotelian or a Platonist?

It is customary to think of Aristotle as a scientist and a man of common sense and of Plato as someone with his head in the clouds.

Aristotle was certainly a great observer of the natural world whose descriptions and conjectures concerning the natural world are approvingly cited by Darwin and by naturalists today but he was not a scientist in the modern sense of one who tests hypotheses through experimentation while controlling for variables nor did he use mathematics as you do in your physics and chemistry classes to understand the underlying organization of the natural world.

Aristotle’s reputation for common sense derives partly from his well-known curiosity about the natural world, partly from his judicious method of sifting through the conflicting opinions of others, but mainly this reputation derives from his dismissal of Plato’s forms as empty names.

Plato’s conception of forms had lead to the notion of two worlds. Plato believed, or so the story goes, that things like chairs are chairs not because of any inherent organization in the material of the chair but because they participate somehow in the form or essence of a chair, a form conceived as something that stands somehow outside the physical world and is considered more real than any particular chair.

The same is true of qualities like beauty, whose form is responsible for the beauty of individual things but itself stands apart from these things.

For Aristotle, an ardent observer of nature, there are no forms but in the things themselves. While the form of the thing and its material can be separated in thought, the form has no actual existence apart from the material in which it expresses itself. What does remain problematic for Aristotle is the status of the form of a thing as it exists in the mind of the human observer. Does Aristotle's philosophy like Plato's result in two worlds, one in nature and another in the human soul?

3. Matter and Form

Consider any completely developed thing whether it be a product of human manufacture like a copper pot or a product of reproduction like an oak tree.

Copper is the material out of which the pot is made and we easily see that the copper could have been formed otherwise into a bowl or cup or candleholder. What makes the pot a pot is not the material but the form of the material.

In the case of an oak, the organic material of the tree is basically the same as the organic material from which an ash or laurel tree is made. What makes the oak an oak is the form or organization that the constituent materials take on.

We can, as an exercise of thought, reason back to some prime matter, what Aristotle calls hyle, the common undifferentiated stuff or gunk or simple atom that is the common material out of which the copper pot and the oak tree and all things are formed. This prime matter is never itself to be found. Whenever something is produced by manufacture or by nature, the material out which of which the new thing comes about was already matter differentiated by some form. Thus the cooper of the pot is not original matter but is itself already an expression of form and matter.

To the idea that matter is never found without form in nature, Aristotle adds the idea that there never was a moment of creation in which matter for the first time took on form. The kosmos, which means in Greek the arrangement of the world, is for Aristotle eternal. Without beginning or end.

4. Potential and Actual

The relation of matter and form can also be view dynamically as the relation of potential to actual.

Thus, copper may be said to have the potential to be a bowl or cup or pot. And the germ or seed of an oak is only potentially an adult, parent oak. Thus, the form of an oak exists first as the tendency to become an actual oak.

Aristotle further observes that in nature each living thing has some final stage of development that is the aim or telos of the organism and in the case of man this final stage is under his rational, conscious direction.

5. The Four Causes

Aristotle’s notions of matter and form, potentiality and actuality find their fullest expression in his doctrine of the four causes or aitia.

Aitia is he word in Greek for causes and refers to the attribution of responsibility in a court of law. The notion of a mechanical cause or of some uniform event causing another event which in turns causes another event is foreign to Aristotle. Rather, for Aristotle the four causes provide common sense explanations for how the world is the way it is. To avoid confusion about this you may want to use the Greek terms: aition for a singular cause and aitia for the plural.

First there must be some material out of which something is made: that is the material cause or aition; second, there must be some form or organizational principle that expresses itself in that material and makes the material some actual thing, that is the formal aition; 3^rd there must be an agent that is responsible for bringing about the presence of form in the material – that is the efficient cause; and finally, there must be some final stage of completion toward which the whole process aims: that is the final cause or aition.

In the case of an oak, the seed or germ is the material cause, the formal cause is its principle of organization and growth, the parent oak is the efficient cause, and the final cause is the fully formed oak tree capable of now engendering its form in matter.

In the case of a copper bowl, the copper is the material cause, the formal cause is the shape of the bowl, the efficient cause is the craftsman, and the final cause is the conception of the completed bowl in the mind of the craftsman.

It would be wrong to think of these four causes as natural forces, rather they are simply four different ways of understanding why any particular thing in the world is the way it is.

Nor are these causes to be seen as rigid or absolute: We will see in the case of man that his soul functions as the efficient, formal and final cause of his being. The causes are distinctions of emphasis or perspective.

6. Theos or God

Let’s take a brief look at the kosmos itself in terms of these four causes and ask what is the efficient cause of the universe: the answer is God or the unmoved mover. God is an individual being that stands outside of time, space and is complete unto itself, it is without motion, is imperishable, immaterial etc., etc. etc. It is pure form, pure actuality.

Here we have an obvious violation of Aristotle own dictum there are to be no forms except in things.

The activity of God is thought and the object of its thought is thought alone. Its activity is pleasant and brings continuous happiness to itself. The world as we know it is of no concern to God. Rather, God moves the universe by being the object of the world’s desire. Form in the universe is the response of matter to the presence of this unmoved mover. God and matter stand as the indispensable conditions of the kosmos. This conception of God is very far from the God who cares for the fall of the sparrow or the God who so loved the world that he gave his only son for our salvation.

Here we find Aristotle out Platonizing Plato in his conception of God as pure cold form. Plato’s conception of God at least has the virtue of being more friendly to man, as Plato’s God cares for man and makes the world as best he can given the limitations of the material with which he was forced to work.

7. Psyche or Soul

The soul (psyche) for Aristotle is the formal cause of any living thing. The soul is the very life of any body that is so internally organized as to have an inbuilt aim. Aristotle tells us that if the eye were animal, its soul would be sight.

The soul then is not something separate from the body or something that interacts with the body.

Aristotle is quite prepared to say that plants as well as animals and human beings have souls, though the internal organization of each, or formal cause, is different. Plants are so organized that they can grow and reproduce, animals can sense, move and have emotions, and humans, in addition to these things, can think, plan, and choose.

8. Eudaimonia

The well being of organisms depends upon the integrated exercise of their respective capacities. This state of well-being is their telos or inbuilt aim. and is referred to by Aristotle as eudaimonia, which has been translated variously as happiness or a fulfilled life. Thus, according to Aristotle, we do not decide for ourselves what a fulfilled life is, rather that is determined by the nature and capacities of our souls.

9. Arete or human excellence

The good for man is what is good for his soul and what is good for man’s soul is the efficient exercise of reason.

Our rational capacity is what makes each of us a human being; it is the distinguishing form of our being. Its proper and efficient exercise is man’s arête or excellence.

10. Practical wisdom and theoria

As it turns out, there are two applications of our rational capacity: one practical and the other theoretical. By the practical exercise of reason we attain wisdom by directing our lives in accordance with a principle or rule of conduct, what Aristotle calls the mean, and thereby achieve a fulfilled and virtuous life; by the theoretical exercise we seek understanding of the kosmos and achieve perhaps divine thought.

It has always been a question in the study of Aristotle whether the theoretical exercise of reason is required for a fulfilled life. I think it is safe to say that for Aristotle and perhaps for any man that a complete life, a truly happy life, requires sustained reflection on the ultimate nature of things whether or not such reflection culminates in knowledge.

Question for Aristotle: Is there really a defining function of man?

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Emergence

If we apply Schrodinger's concept of objectification to emergence theory, the consequence profoundly shifts the nature of the problem that emergence was intended to solve. Emergence always occurs to an observer and the observer therefore must be included in the matrix of the event. Once the observer is included, the phenomen of emergence is at once more complex and less magical. My suspicion is that emergence theory has become a backdoor for spiritualists.

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David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

Tonight I am leading a seminar on Eagleman's book. I found it devilishly hard to keep the stories straight, so I made the following list of chapters and their ideas and a few possible avenues for our discussion. The first statement, I think therefore SUM, is not part of the book, but is a notion that "I think" is in play throughout the book.

I think therefore SUM

1 Sum: 14 minutes of pure joy? In a whole lifetime?

2. Egalitaire: Do we really want true equality?

3. Circle of Friends: How having friends can make us lonely?

4. Descent of Species: What is it like to be a horse?

5. Giantess: Meaning depends on scale

6. Mary: Has Dr. God lost control of his creation

7. The Cast: You never catch up with your dreaming

8. Metamorphosis: When your name is spoken for the last time

9. Missing: God is a couple in need of marriage counseling

10. Spirals: Do you have answer?

11. Scales: Man, a cancerous growth in the divine being

12. Adhesion: Can we quantify relationships?

13. Angst: A quest for meaninglessness

14. Oz: Who is brave enough to see the face behind the face?

15. Great Expectations: Will an exact replica of your brain reproduce what it like to be you?

16. Mirrors: What finally kills you

17. Perpetuity: Only the good die, the rest of us live on in perpetuity

18. The Unnatural: A cure for death

19. Distance: God keeps his distance from us for our own benefit – otherwise . . . .

20. Reins: God’s obsolescence

21. Microbe: God is unaware of our existence.

22. Absence: New religious wars

23. Will-o’-the-Wisp: Blessed ignorance of the future

24. Incentive: The best actors play the role of the uninitiated beneficiary

25. Death Switch: Virtual life after life

26. Encore: Am I a simulation?

27. Prism: Self Reunions

28. Ineffable: emergent afterlives

29. Pantheon: The gods love us because we are as self-involved as they are

30. Impulse: an anomalous algorithm

31. Quantum: all possibilities exist at once sort of like when . . . . . .

32. Conservation: A tale told by a lonely quark

33. Narcissus: A device that only takes pictures of itself

34. Seed: Accidents happen all the time

35. Graveyard of the Gods: a fellowship of abandonment

36. Apostasy: a heaven of unbelieving believers

37. Blueprints: Knowledge never substitutes for experience

38. Subjunctive: your would haves, should have beens come back to haunt you

39. Search: The atoms that once were me search for meaning in limitlessness

40. Reversal: Living your life backwards undermines the narrative of your life

Notes:

Do not these stories lead to the conclusion we are already dead?

Is eternal boredom worse than death?

It’s not so great to be God.

Consciousness is a narrative.

All reality is virtual.

Don’t we know that there is no afterlife, all other alternatives being (just) stories?

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Ghost of Parmenides

I wrote this over four years ago. Reading it now it is as if someone else wrote these words. What remains the same, however, is that I find the reasoning compelling. Do you find any flaw in the reasoning?

Help out an old man on the precipice. How is it that there is to us an external world? I am not doubting that there is an external world. We would agree, I think, that we are only speaking metaphorically when we speak of experiencing ourselves from the inside. Why is it not equally metaphorical to speak of experiencing an outside. Space after all is not a sense perception. Isn't it a construction of the brain? A part of that construction is that we experience the world as something apart from the very brain that constructed it. O ghost of Parmenides!! There must be some simple answer for this question. You are all sensible, smart, sane folk. Help out a simple-minded old man! I have not yet leaped to the conclusion that there is no external world at all. I know you have papers to write or grade and a multitude of mundane matters to attend to and your share of sisyphean labor as well. And surely more worthwhile things to think about. As do I, except I can't shake this sense of the unreality of reality. Perhaps over the weekend. Or direct me to a wise man who can explain this to me, other than a psychotherapist.

Day Two: No help has arrived. So I'll try again.

I am arguing that all input from the external world is translated into the binary system of the neuronal process. The brain then recreates the external world as a hypothesis that it is continuously testing. The recreation is, however, never the world as it is. Even the externality of the world is a creation of the brain, not just colors or any other qualities. There is, so to speak, no transparency between our experience and the objects of that experience. Our experience is always hypothetical; we walk through our world through our own internal projection of it. It is unnerving to me.

Day Three: Help has come from my old dialogue partner, Jordan Fleischer.

Jordan Fleisher: I definitely agree with your ideas about our internal world. One thing I think we must consider though is that there is a definite connection between the external and internal world. Although our experience is only a hypothesis of the external world, our experience only exists because of the external world. After all, our brains create our experience, and our brains are part of that external world. Does this make sense? So while our experience is just an internal projection, I think that necessary connection is what enables us to feel as if the external world must also exist.

Hugh Himwich: I agree that the external world must exist, but radically and perhaps necessarily other than we can ever possibly know. (Reminds me here of some statements about God.) We are caught up in existence and are part of what we speak of as external-- but what really exists is neither external nor internal.

Jordan Fleischer: If what really exists is neither external nor internal, what really exists?

Hugh Himwich: There is no way of knowing. The external exists only from our perspective. The most we could say is: Not This. We are always and everywhere a negation of being. This does not mean that science cannot discover aspects of reality that are useful, but we often mistake our ability to make nature work for us for knowledge of existence itself. It may be existence is so radically different from our understanding -- no matter how efficacious that understanding may be -- that to talk about advancement in knowledge is like talking about progress in our understanding of what it is like to be another person. We may be able to seize upon patterns and even make predictions, we may even discover the neurological correlate for consciousness, but what it is like to be that other person necessarily eludes us. So too existence.

Jordan Fleischer: I think I understand your argument. If I'm not mistaken, we can never trust our perception of the external world to be an accurate reflection of the external world as it really is. However, would you agree that by the simple fact that we do perceive an external world, an external world of some sort necessarily exists? I agree that all we know is the external world from our perspective, but I feel that because our perception exists, some sort of external world must be causing our perception.

Hugh Himwich: I agree that the external world exists as a kind of mode of being, the other mode being the internal. Shades of Spinoza here. I think I am proposing something more radical, however, than that our perceptions of the external world are merely hypothetical. I am arguing that externality itself is a construction as well as the internal and that two really are one. This "one" is inaccessible from the internal side (1st person) or the external (3rd person). The mind/body problem results from this dual inaccessibility with the result that this problem is not resolvable from either the 1st person or 3rd person perspective. Consequently, I argue that the external world is an illusion (as is the internal), not in the sense that the external world is nothing but that it does not exist as we suppose it to be, that is external. Reality is not out there or in my mind. It transcends both objectivity and subjectivity. We know this because of the failure of either to account for what we are. We ourselves are the proof that the two are one. We just can't get to it other than by being. I am proposing a different kind of existential philosophy.

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The Illegible Letter by Soren Kierkegaard

The Illegible Letter

To what shall we compare the pathos
of grieving loneliness?

If a man possessed a letter which he knew, or believed, contained information bearing upon what he must regard as his life’s happiness, but the writing was pale and thin, almost illegible—then would he read it with restless anxiety and with all possible passion, in one moment getting one meaning, in the next another, depending on his belief that, having made out one word with certainty, he could interpret the rest thereby; but he would never arrive at anything except the same uncertainty with which he began. He would stare more and more anxiously, but the more he stared, the less he would see. His eyes would sometimes fill with tears, but the oftener this happened the less he would see. In the course of time, the writing would become fainter and more illegible, until at last the paper itself would crumble away, and nothing would be left to him except the tears in his eyes.

“A” in Either/Or, I, p. 188, (SVII, 176)

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hhimwich is the author of all poems and other writing unless indicated otherwise.

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4. Potential and Actual

5. The Four Causes

6. Theos or God

7. Psyche or Soul

9. Arete or human excellence

10. Practical wisdom and theoria

Question for Aristotle: Is there really a defining function of man?