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Tag Archives: General Philosophy

Existence for Existence’s Sake?: Dostoevsky, Sam Harris, and Others on the Surprising Reason We Want to Stay Alive

09 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

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birth, consciousness, Crime and Punishment, Epicureans, Epicurus, existence, Fyodor Dostoevsky, General Philosophy, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?, Jenny Attiyeh, Jim Holt, Life, literature, Lucretius, Michel de Montaigne, Mortality, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Sam Harris, Saul Frampton, science, To Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die, When I Am Playing with My Cat

Dworkin-Nagel 1

Aggregated here are several attempts to address that simple question. Why do you want to stay alive?

Though they arrive there from different byways, each thinker finally rests on the same idea: the reason why we want to stay alive is, simply, to perpetuate our existence. We want to stay alive to stay alive. Sound absurd, or absurdly tautological? It’s not, at least in my view. The value we place in life has little to do with projected positive experiences — the quivering line graph that registers whether we’re ecstatic one moment, unsatisfied the next. Rather, what we want is to continue the oft-banal experience of merely existing. Read on. See if you agree.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, speaking through the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov in Part II, Chapter 6 of Crime and Punishment:

‘Where is it,’ thought Raskolnikov. ‘Where is it I’ve read that some one condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!… How true it is! Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature!… And vile is he who calls him vile for that,’ he added a moment later.

In a recent interview with Jenny Attiyeh, Jim Holt, author of the existential mystery Why Does the World Exist?, reflected on the question and offered a level-headed and explicit answer:

Interviewer: Jim, in your work there are some themes that keep reappearing, notably religion and mortality… do you think that perhaps you’re getting a little bit worried about death?

Holt: Actually I think in many ways it would be a good career move for me [laughs], and it would solve almost all of my problems.

I think that life is — and I don’t know what your life is like — but mine sort of hovers around the zero point that separates pleasure from pain and happiness from misery. And every once in a while I’ll get a little spike into the happiness region, but then I’ll immediately go back down close to the zero point, or creep below that into the misery region. Yet I fluctuate around that point. And what I really cherish about life is being conscious. And to me that’s the subjective counterpart to the question ‘Why should the universe exist?’: ‘Why should consciousness exist? Why should my self exist?’

And what interests me is the way that philosophers have tried to take the sting out of death by various arguments that go back to the Epicureans. Lucretius and Epicurus himself said, ‘Well, don’t get so worried about death because your nonexistence after you die is just the mirror image of your nonexistence before you were born.’

And you didn’t worry about not existing the centuries before you were born, so why should you worry about not existing after your death?

The great Thomas Nagel rigorously deconstructed the idea in his magisterial book The View from Nowhere:

People are attracted to the possibility of long-term suspended animation or freezing, followed by the resumption of conscious life, because they can regard it from within simply as a continuation of their present life. If these techniques are ever perfected, what from outside appeared as a dormant interval of three hundred years could be experienced by the subject as nothing more than a sharp discontinuity in the character of his experiences. I do not deny, or course, that this has its own disadvantages. Family and friends may have died in the meantime; the language may have changed; the comforts of social, geographical, and cultural familiarity would be lacking. Nevertheless those inconveniences would not obliterate the basic advantage of continued, thought discontinuous, existence.

It is being alive, doing certain things, having certain experiences, that we consider good. But if death is an evil, it is the loss of life, rather than the state of being dead, or nonexistent, or unconscious, that is objectionable. This asymmetry is important. If it is good to be alive, that advantage can be attributed to a person at each point of his life. It is good of which Bach had more than Schubert, simply because he lived longer. Death, however, is not an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust. If death is a disadvantage, it is not easy to say when a man suffers it.

If we are to make sense of the view that to die is bad, it must be on the ground that life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss, bad not because of any positive features but because of the desirability of what it removes.

Saul Frampton reflects on Montaigne and the question of existence for existence’s sake in his book When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?:

Sometime towards the end of the sixteenth century, Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, reached up to the ceiling of his library and scratched off an inscription he had placed there some years before…

The inscription Montaigne erased was a line from the Roman poet Lucretius: Nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas — There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer. It was a sentiment he had previously held dear to. Like most thinkers of his time, Montaigne followed a Christian and a Stoic philosophy, where life was seen as preparation for the afterlife and the task of philosophy was to harden oneself against the vicissitudes of fortune…

But Montaigne’s erasing of the words of Lucretius from the ceiling of his library also marks an amazing reversal in Montaigne’s outlook over the course of his writing – a shift from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life.

And Montaigne’s writing overflows with life. In over a hundred essays and around half a million words he records every thought, every taste and sensation that crosses his mind. He writes essays on sleep and on sadness, on smells and friendship, on children and sex and death. And, as a final testament, he writes an essay on experience, in which he contemplates the wonder of human existence itself.

And, to close, Sam Harris nodded at the significance of life’s most mundane pleasures in a recent online Q&A:

Questioner: Is is not objectively better never to have been? What flaw is there in the nonexistent state?

Harris: It is impossible to eat pancakes there.

__________

Have more to add? Send them my way: john[at]jrbenjamin.com.

The picture is of the headiest pancake breakfast of all time: Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel shooting the breeze at the local diner.

I’ve done this sort of agreement among geniuses thing before:

  • Does the beauty of the Gospels attest to their truth?: Einstein, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Thomas Cahill, and Julian Barnes share a surprising conclusion
  • Science as child’s play: Einstein, Newton, Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson embrace the wonder of the natural world
  • The sovereign subject: Jefferson, Adams, and Charles Krauthammer agree that government is the most important subject
  • Can we just assume god exists?: Updike, C.S. Lewis, Wittgenstein, and Anthony Flew see eye to eye on whether faith can trump reason
  • We don’t march: Orwell, Steinbeck, and Einstein rage against militarism 
  • Is your life valuable? If so, why?: Ronald Dworkin, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Campbell, Michio Kaku, and Vonnegut give a counterintuitive answer

Dworkin-Nagel

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Jefferson on Taking Life as It Comes

05 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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fate, General Philosophy, grief, Jefferson, John Page, letter, Life, Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson “The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us; and, to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes, should be one of the principal studies and endeavours of our lives. The only method of doing this is to assume a perfect resignation to the Divine will, to consider that whatever does happen, must happen; and that by our uneasiness, we cannot prevent the blow before it does fall, but we may add to its force after it has fallen.

These considerations, and others such as these, may enable us in some measure to surmount the difficulties thrown in our way; to bear up with a tolerable degree of patience under this burthen of life; and to proceed with a pious and unshaken resignation, till we arrive at our journey’s end, when we may deliver up our trust into the hands of him who gave it, and receive such reward as to him shall seem proportioned to our merit. Such, dear Page, will be the language of the man who considers his situation in this life, and such should be the language of every man who would wish to render that situation as easy as the nature of it will admit. Few things will disturb him at all: nothing will disturb him much.”

__________

Thomas Jefferson, writing in a letter to his friend John Page on July 15th, 1763.

Jefferson would’ve been twenty when he jotted this down.

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Jerzy Kosiński on How Aging Shapes One’s Outlook on the World

10 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aging, Experience, Gail Sheehy, General Philosophy, happiness, interview, Jerzy Kosiński, joy, Psychology Today, Sentimentality, wealth, Wisdom, Worldview

Jerzy Kosiński

Interviewer: You have looked at the world from both ends of its ideologies — Soviet totalitarianism and American capitalism. Also from both ends of the class ladder. When you first arrived in this country, with no English, you were scraping ships, cleaning bars, parking cars, chauffeuring in Harlem. You were a truck driver and lived in the YMCA. By 1962, in four short years, you became a known author, you met and married a woman who was one of the largest taxpayers in the United States… At which end of your experience of fear or freedom, rich or poor, did you find the greatest sense of being alive?

Jerzy Kosiński: At both ends – and in between. As I have no habits that require maintaining – I don’t even have a favorite menu – the only way for me to live was always to be as close to other people as life allowed. Not much else stimulates me. I have no other passions, no other joys, no other obsessions. The only moment when I feel truly alive is when, in a relationship with other people, I discover how much in common we all share with each other. Money and possessions – I care little for the first, hardly for the second – were never necessary to experience life as I live it. As greatly as my wife, her wealth, and our marriage contributed to my knowledge of myself, of America, and of the world, they contributed just so much – no more, no less – as all other moments have contributed to my curiosity about myself, others, society, art – and to my sense of being alive.

Of course I’ve always known moments of loneliness when I felt abandoned, rejected, unhappy – but in such moments, I also felt alive enough to ponder my own state of mind, my own life, always aware that at any moment this precious gift of awareness of the self might be taken away from me. That state of awareness has always been, to me, less a possession than a mortgage, easily terminable.

Interviewer: Do you find you are becoming less dispassionate as you grow older?

Jerzy Kosiński: More compassionate, more attentive to the voice of life and more forgiving of its various failures, in myself as well as in others, but also more critical of a society so cruel to the old, sick, infirm. And I begin to perceive certain periods of my past, like certain skiing tricks I used to perform, as not available to be reproduced by me anymore. From now on, they will reside in me only as memory – and as a play of my imagination. Nostalgia and sentimentality – this is new.

Interviewer: Sentimentality?

Jerzy Kosiński: Yes. Once, I considered it merely a mood undefined. To be sentimental was not to be clear about oneself or others. Now I feel it as a minor but necessary shade, a mixture of regret and of desire.

__________

From Gail Sheehy’s illuminating 1977 interview with Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosiński.

This piece was originally published in Psychology Today with the heading, “The Psychological Novelist as Portable Man,” a hysterically pretentious title that mischaracterizes what is otherwise a candid and illuminating piece. It’s certainly worth a read, and can be found alongside other insightful discussions in Tom Teicholz’s 1993 collection Conversations with Jerzy Kosiński.

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Tocqueville’s Take on the Nature of Man

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alexis de Tocqueville, Blaise Pascal, Democracy in America, General Philosophy, Human Life, Life, man, Marcus Aurelius, Robert Ingersoll, The Nature of Man, Time, Vladimir Nabokov

Alexis de Tocqueville

“There is no need to traverse earth and sky to find a wondrous object full of contrasts of infinite greatness and littleness, of deep gloom and amazing brightness, capable at the same time of arousing piety, wonder, scorn, and terror. I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.

If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much in impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.”

__________

From Alexis de Tocqueville’s seminal Democracy in America.

Some other writers who grazed these same ideas and used some of these same images (life on the verge of two eternal abysses, etc.):

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).”

Vladimir Nabokov, writing the introduction to his memoir Speak, Memory (1951)

“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, at the seashore… But this is a characteristic of the most common sort of men, for it is in your power whenever you will to choose to retreat into yourself… and I affirm that tranquillity is nothing other than the proper ordering of the mind.”

Marcus Aurelius, reflecting in book four of his Meditations (167)

“Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry…”

Robert Ingersoll, speaking in the eulogy for his brother (1879)

“When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it… I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?”

Blaise Pascal, writing in a section of his Pensées (1662)

More Democracy in America:

American Flag

Tocqueville on Church and State

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The Top 5 Posts from the Greeks and the Romans in 2013

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Philosophy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2013, Ancient Greece, General Philosophy, Greek History, review, Roman History, Rome, The Top 5 Posts from the Greeks and the Romans in 2013, Top 10

Greek Bust

The top 5, in order:

1. Partying with the Greeks by Thomas Cahill (from Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter)

I think any twenty-first century American could be forgiven for reading Cahill’s version of the Greeks and their symposia with a certain amount of identification. On a more personal level, the reflections of Archilochus accord with many of the transient, recurring thoughts and melancholic moods I’ve had while leaving parties in the early hours of the morning.

2. The Odyssey Home by Homer (from The Odyssey)

During a year in which I read heavily about war and its million unseen impacts, especially those which are felt at home, Homer’s Odyssey provided, among other things, insight into some eternal truths about military conflict. While the opening stave is by no means the strongest section of the text, it is probably the best summary of the Odyssey’s basic plot line and themes. It’s also a stark, dramatic introduction to Odysseus, one of the great heroes in fiction.

3. The Discourses of Epictetus by Arrian (from The Handbook of Epictetus)

A stirring argument for two distinctly Aristotelian insights: practice moderation in all things and make the most of your days. These exhortations are especially noteworthy when one considers the guy speaking them was born a slave.

4. Do Not Act as If You Were Going to Live Ten Thousand Years by Marcus Aurelius (from The Meditations)

This is nothing you haven’t read before, though it’s still essential, because in addition to bering one of the first to say it, Marcus Aurelius was also one of the best. It’s especially worth noting his nod to Heraclitus in the image of time as a river that is forever flowing.

5. Friends with Socrates by Xenophon (from Memorabilia)

It’s amusing to read an epistemic breakdown of something as delicate and natural as friendship. Still, Socrates’s voice here is at its most eccentric and convincing, as he explains how exactly relationships with others can come to result in non-zero sum paradigms.

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The Top 10 Philosophy Posts of 2013

02 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

2013, General Philosophy, philosophers, philosophical, Top Philosophy Posts of 2013, Top posts

Bookshelf and Bust

For the deep thinkers, my list of the best philosophical posts of the year.

The top 10, in order:

1. Because the Universe Is Happening to You by Julian Barnes

This excerpt is pulled from Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of, which was probably the most potent book I picked up this year. Barnes’s writing is as cogent as I’ve ever read — the product a voice that quivers with intensity but never stutters or misses a word. This particular section complements well the reflection below from Pollack, and was also part of the inspiration for my speech ‘College, Life’.

2. Define ‘Life’ by Dr. Robert Pollack

Spoken at the Philoctetes panel on Origin, Evolution, and the Future of Life on Earth, Pollack’s opening answer to the prompt “Define ‘Life'” is powerful because it integrates three concepts which are rarely synthesized into the same worldview: a religious impulse, an acceptance of the persuasive findings of modern cosmology, and a recognition that existence is tragic by definition. (I highly encourage you to not just read the text, but listen to Pollack’s coolness as he gives his answer.)

3. What Is Happening When We See Somebody Die? by David Eagleman

My favorite explanation to the vexing (and perhaps unanswerable) question of what happens to consciousness and identity upon the death of the body.

4. If We’re Gong to Waste Our Time Like That by Sam Harris

An ideal statement to supplement your new year’s resolutions.

5. Mere Human Love by Julian Barnes

Here Barnes contemplates the human desire for love and how it is inextricably bound up in our need to judge and be judged. Such an insight has immense religious and interpersonal implications.

6. Why I Lived by Bertrand Russell

From the prologue to Russell’s biography, I especially like the spatial imagery which can be found in the following excerpt (and is implemented effectively by David Horowitz in The End of Time and Barnes in Levels of Life):

“Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth… the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

Side note: I’m extremely surprised Russell would opt to live his life once more. I’m undecided on the question, but know that the only affirmative answer that makes sense would require a caveat — “Only if I did not know I was doing so.”

7. Spending Our Brief Time in the Sun by Richard Dawkins

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.” It’s quite an opening line, and Dawkins justifies it in three powerful, simple paragraphs.

8. Living a Life of Value (But What ‘Value’?) by Ronald Dworkin

This selection from one of the greatest philosophers of the past century has something for everyone, whether you’re a libertarian, a deist, a predeterminist, or just someone who’s interested in the question of what makes your life worthwhile.

9. A Universe from Nothing by Jim Holt

Although I posted several selections from Holt’s fantastic book Why Does the World Exist over the past year, this particular part — with its ridiculously clever opening paragraph and clear analysis — is the one I most enjoyed.

10. Darkness Visible by William Styron

Styron’s intricate prose and steady command of language produce a pang of envy and admiration in this reader; his lacerating descriptions of depression, on the other hand, can stir only emotions of sympathy and understanding. This was one of the most important books I read this year, and for that reason, among others, this excerpt deserves a place on this list. (His evocation of Dante is especially moving.)

Honorable mentions: We Do Not Each Seek God in the Same Way by Jules Renard; It All Adds Up to Happiness… Doesn’t It? by Julian Barnes; Friends by Socrates; If Life Is Finite, Why Does It Matter? by Sam Harris

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How Wittgenstein Found God (and Wrote a Masterpiece) in the Trenches of World War One

13 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, War

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Austria, Austro-Hungary, battle, Christianity, conversion, Descartes, Faith, Friedrich Nietzsche, Galicia, General Philosophy, Georg Henrik von Wright, Gospels in Brief, Italian front, Italy, John Maynard Keynes, Leo Tolstoy, logic, Ludwig Wittgenstein, psychology, religion, Rudolph Carnap, Sir Colin St. John Wilson, Socrates, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Vienna, W.A. Hijab, War, World War I

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Swansea, Wales, September 1947

“At the outbreak of World War I, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army. His friend Pinsent enlisted with the British army and thus was on the opposing side. Wittgenstein volunteered not because he particularly believed in the cause of the German powers but because he felt it was his duty. As a Wittgenstein he could easily have become an officer, but he chose to remain in the ranks – an extremely dangerous decision… Throughout his service Wittgenstein continued to write down his philosophical ideas in notebooks. He was doing original philosophy, but he also remained constantly on the brink of suicide. Despite these distractions, Wittgenstein was an utterly fearless soldier, and his exemplary bravery won him two medals. (Among the soldiering philosophers, his only rival was Socrates.)

Wittgenstein was a parody of the driven personality. Characteristically he saw no reason to try to alleviate this condition by searching for its cause in his own psychological makeup. On the contrary, if only everyone were true to his nature, he thought, everyone could be like this. Wittgenstein rationalized his condition to himself by claiming that life was ‘an intellectual problem and a moral duty.’ The intellectual and moral aspects of his personality had so far remained distinct entities, each spurring the other on. It was only during the war that they fused.

World War One Trenches

Under constant intellectual pressure (from himself) and the persistent threat of death (from both the enemy and himself), Wittgenstein once again found himself in familiar territory, on the brink of insanity. One day, during a lull in the fighting in Galicia, he came across a bookshop. Here he found Tolstoy’s Gospels in Brief, which he bought for the simple reason that there was no other book in the shop. Wittgenstein had been against Christianity – he associated it with Vienna, his family, lack of a logical foundation, meek and mild behavior, and other anathemas. But reading through Tolstoy’s book was to bring the light of religion into Wittgenstein’s life. Within days he had become a convinced Christian – though his conversion had a distinctly Wittgensteinian tenor. With typical rigor he set about integrating his beliefs into his intellectual life.

Religious remarks now began appearing in the pages of his notebooks, alongside those on logic. And it soon becomes clear that these two topics have more than intellectual rigor in common. The spirit of one informs the other in compelling fashion. Even Wittgenstein’s religion had to assume a logical force and clarity: ‘I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like an eye in its visual field.’ There was something problematic about the world, and this we call its meaning. But this meaning did not lie within the world, it lay outside it. ‘The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God.’ According to Wittgenstein, to pray was to think about the meaning of life. (Which meant that he had been praying all his life, even when he didn’t believe there was a God or meaning to life. Wittgenstein couldn’t bear to be wrong – ever.)…

World War: Parade through Ruins

In 1918 Wittgenstein was promoted to officer and transferred to the Italian front…

When Wittgenstein was taken prisoner by the Italians, he had in his rucksack the only manuscript of the philosophical work he had been writing throughout the war. This was eventually to be called Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and is the first great philosophical work of the modern era. Right from its opening sentences it becomes obvious that philosophy has entered a new stage.

‘1 The world is all that is the case’
‘1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’
One clear, ringing assertion follows another, linked by the absolute minimum of justification or argument:
‘1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.’
‘1.2 The world divides into facts.’
The book’s conclusion is even more memorable:
‘7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’

Few others have altered the course of philosophy in quite so striking a fashion. Such succinct perspicacity is surpassed only by Socrates (‘Know thyself’), Descartes (‘I think, therefore I am’), and Nietzsche (‘God is dead’). In those parts where it is not too technical (in the logical sense), Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is the most exciting work of philosophy ever written.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

__________

From Paul Strathern’s entertaining biographical sketch Wittgenstein: Philosophy in an Hour.

On a somewhat random recommendation, I bought this short book ($1.99 on Amazon) and read it two nights ago. I had parsed some of Wittgenstein’s nearly impenetrable philosophy before and knew he’d been a pupil of Bertrand Russell, but my knowledge of the man extended barely beyond that. Now having read Strathern’s introduction to him, I’m convinced Wittgenstein is one of the more singular and compelling people of the 20th century.

Don’t take my word for it…

Russell called Wittgenstein, “The most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating”.

John Maynard Keynes, after meeting with Wittgenstein at his arrival in Cambridge, wrote in a 1929 letter to his wife: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train. He has a plan to stay in Cambridge permanently.”

Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein’s friend and colleague, claimed that, “He was of the opinion… that his ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciples. He doubted he would be better understood in the future. He once said he felt as though he were writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men.”

Rudolph Carnap, the German-born philosopher, noted about Wittgenstein that, “The impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.”

W.A. Hijab, a former pupil of Wittgenstein’s, said, “He was like an atomic bomb, a tornado — people don’t appreciate that.”

Sir Colin St. John Wilson is quoted in Autism and Creativity as saying, “[He was] a magician and had qualities of magic in his relations with people.”

I’ve cited Wittgenstein a half dozen times on this blog, and have directly quoted a passage from his Philosophical Investigations. Find that selection below:

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein on God and Belief

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Know the Tides

13 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Archilochus, Art History, defeat, Dionysus, General Philosophy, Greece, history, Poem, poetry, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, Thomas Cahill, victory, Writing

Archilochus

O heart, my heart, no public leaping when you win;
no solitude nor weeping when you fail to prove.
Rejoice at simple things; and be but vexed by sin
and evil slightly. Know the tides through which we move.

__________

Words by Archilochus, the celebrated Greek poet who wrote and lived in the seventh century BC.

I just came across these lines in Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, and though I’ve tried to track them down on the internet, am still yet to find their original source. Send me a message or post a comment if you happen to know.

The above bust is of Archilochus. It is a first or second century AD marble sculpture based on an original dating from the late third century BC.

The ivy crown adorning his head signifies he is a poet, while the berries symbolize the gifts of Dionysus. Art historians believe this to be Archilochus due to the similarities it shares with four other Roman copies as well as a silver coin from Paros, which shows the poet seated, holding a lyre. Though he began his adult life as a mercenary, Archilochus eventually became one of the most famous lyric poets of Antiquity. His poems, of which only fragments of remnants remain, principally concern love, war, and the revelries of the table.

Sometime this weekend I’ll post the context in which Cahill quotes this verse. It’s pretty unexpected. Pick up the book here if you can’t wait.

*Update: This morning, reader Ted Rey responded to my question and found the source of the above quote from Archilochus. Ted writes:

“It seems to be an alternate translation for Fragment 67, as translated by R. Lattimore

Heart, my heart, so battered with misfortune far beyond your strength,
up, and face the men who hate us. Bare your chest to the assault
of the enemy, and fight them off. Stand fast among the beamlike spears.
Give no ground; and if you beat them, do not brag in open show,
nor, if they beat you, run home and lie down on your bed and cry.
Keep some measure in the joy you take in luck, and the degree you
give way to sorrow. All our life is up-and-down like this.

The war motif has been bypassed. I like the more generalized message that emerges.

Another translation is:

Soul, my soul, don’t let them break you,
all these troubles. Never yield:
though their force is overwhelming,
up! attack them shield to shield…

Take the joy and bear the sorrow,
looking past your hopes and fears:
learn to recognize the measured
dance that orders all our years.

Archilochus: To His Soul : A Fragment, as translated from the Greek by Jon Corelis”

Thanks for that, Ted. Much appreciated.

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Blaise Pascal Approaches His Horizon

11 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Philosophy, Religion

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Atheism, Blaise Pascal, David Horowitz, deism, General Philosophy, memoir, Mortality, Pensées, religion, T.S. Eliot, The End of Time, theism

Blaise Pascal“More than 350 years ago, in the city of Paris, the scientist Blaise Pascal was deathly ill and approaching his horizon. He was still a young man and though wracked with pain was busily taking notes on scraps of paper for what would be his final work…

Pascal was one of the greatest scientific minds that ever lived. Yet, he looked into the eye of the universe and could not find an answer. Without a Creator to make sense of it, Pascal wrote, a human life is ‘intolerable.’

So what are we to do? Although Pascal was able to unlock the mysteries of the physical universe better than almost any man who ever lived, and although he solved mathematical puzzles for all time, it is his attempt to answer this question that we most remember him by.

As a mathematician, Pascal invented the world’s first calculator and was a pioneer of probability theory. Using this theory, he devised formulas for winning games of chance that are still employed today. It was only natural that he should attempt to analyze the spiritual uncertainties that surround us in the same clinical way he went about his scientific studies…

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in the region of Clermont-Ferrand in France… After his mother’s death, Pascal’s family moved to Paris and his father, a learned man, took up the education of his prodigy son. By the time he was twelve years old, Pascal had proved Euclid’s 32nd theorem by himself. By the time he was twenty-eight, he had completed most of the scientific work for which he is remembered. In the same year, his father died and his beloved sister Jacqueline renounced the world and withdrew to a convent.

Three years after his father’s death, Pascal had a religious vision, which is as famous as his scientific laws. He called it his ‘night of fire.’ Between eleven and midnight Pascal encountered, in his words, ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and not of the philosophers.’ No one knows exactly what he meant by this, but it has been assumed ever since that he was referring to the actual presence of God and not just the idea of Him. After this experience, Pascal became even more remote, and wrote of his ‘extreme aversion for the beguilements of the world.’ Unlike his sister, he did not completely retreat from the company of others, but began to focus his genius more and more on religious questions and, in particular, the problem of last things.

Pascal’s body was as weak as his mind was strong. Since infancy, he had been afflicted by poor health and as an adult experienced stomach disorders and migraines that blurred his vision and made it difficult for him to work. By the time he reached his thirty-fifth year, he was in such pain that he had to suspend his intellectual effort. In the midst of this agony, he wrote another literary fragment, which he titled A Prayer to Ask God to Make Good Use of Sickness, and returned to work.

To distract himself from his physical pain, Pascal took up the problem of the cycloid, and wrote a hundred-page paper that made significant contributions to the theory of integral calculus. But his main effort was a book of religious philosophy in which he intended to justify the Christian faith. While pain made him so pitiable that his sister Gilberte wondered if his existence could be truly called a life, he went about jotting down his thoughts on scraps of paper, cutting them with scissors and binding them with thread.

As the days of his sickness gathered, neither his failing condition nor his spiritual intensity showed any signs of abating, while his life became steadily more stoic and austere. He gave away his possessions to the poor, and gradually withdrew from the friends who loved him. ‘It is unjust that men should attach themselves to me,’ he wrote in fragment number 471, ‘even though they do it with pleasure and voluntarily. I should deceive those in whom I had created this desire. For I am not the end of any, and I have not the wherewithal to satisfy them. Am I not about to die?’

He was. In June 1662, Pascal took in a family that was homeless. Soon after their arrival, they developed symptoms that revealed they had smallpox. But rather than put them back on the street, Pascal left his own house and moved in with his brother-in-law. Shortly after the move, he was seized with a violent illness, and on August 19 he died. He was thirty-nine years old.

The last words that Blaise Pascal uttered were these: ‘May God never abandon me.’ They reflect how helpless, uncertain and alone this passionate and brilliant and famous man felt as he passed to his own horizon.”

David Horowitz

__________

From David Horowitz’s philosophical memoir The End of Time.

Into this discussion of Pascal, Horowitz sneaks a candid and poignant appraisal of his own life. It’s one of my favorite paragraphs in the book, and it showcases Horowitz’s adeptness in building historical references into larger reflections on his personal life:

As my own death approaches, I weigh the life I have lived against what it might have been. I ask myself: Could I have been wiser? Could I have done more? When I look at my life this way from the end, I can take satisfaction that I mostly gave it my all and did what I could. Perhaps I might have achieved greater heights; certainly I could have spent fewer days in pain. But I have no cause to think that, given who I was, my life could have turned out much better. Considering the bad choices I sometimes made, it could have been a lot worse. It is the certainty of death that finally makes a life acceptable. When we live as fully as we can, what room is left for regret? The poet Eliot observed that there are no lost causes because there are no won causes. Everything falls to the same imperfection. One day, without exception, we will follow the same arc to earth.

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Sidney Morgenbesser’s Sense of Humor

10 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor, Philosophy, Psychology

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

B.F. Skinner, Categorical Imperative, cleverness, Columbia University, comedic, comedy, epistemology, ethics, General Philosophy, Heidegger, humor, Immanuel Kant, irony, J.L. Austin, jokes, Kant, lecture, Moses, Noam Chomsky, philosophy of science, police, political philosophy, psychology, Robert Nozick, Sidney Morganbesser, wit

Sidney Morgenbesser

Sidney Morgenbesser was a prominent figure at Columbia University throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. As the University’s John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, he taught classes on epistemology and the philosophy of science which were consistently packed with students eager to hear him lecture — but not because of his academic prestige or reputation as a generous grader.

Morgenbesser was widely known as one of the wittiest men of his age. His caustic irreverence and razor-sharp tongue produced an unmistakable — and inimitable — sense of humor. Through freewheeling intellectual banter that could be compared to sportive Socratic dialogues, he influenced generations of students, among them the philosopher Robert Nozick, who once claimed that he “majored in Sidney Morgenbesser.”

Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton, struggled to find the words to describe Morgenbesser, resorting to an image from nature: “You don’t ask what the wind does. It’s just power and self-sustaining energy.”

Noam Chomsky called him, “One of the most knowledgeable and in many ways profound thinkers of the modern period… a philosopher in the old sense — not so much what’s on the printed page, but in debate and inspiring discussion.”

The New York Times called him, “Socrates with a Yiddish accent”; I suggest Groucho Marx with a PhD in philosophy.

Here are some of his most famous rejoinders:

  • In the early 1950′s, the esteemed Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin came to Columbia to present a paper about the structural analysis of language. He pointed out that, in English, although a double negative implies a positive meaning (i.e. “I’m not unlike my father…”), there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. “Yeah, yeah,” scoffed Morgenbesser from the back of the auditorium.
  • In the 1970′s, a student of Maoist inclination asked him if he disagreed with Chairman Mao’s saying that a proposition can be true and false at the same time. Dr. Morgenbesser replied, “I do and I don’t.”
  • Morgenbesser became something of a legend at the time of the 1968 student uprising for being beaten up when he joined a human chain protesting the police. When confronted about the incident, Morgenbesser was asked whether he had been treated unfairly or unjustly. His response: “It was unjust, but not unfair. It’s unjust to hit me over the head, but it’s not unfair because everyone else was hit over the head, too.”
  • Once during a heady philosophy lecture, Morgenbesser was asked to prove a questioner’s existence. He shot back, “Who’s asking?”
  • A colleague once challenged Morgenbesser’s tenure at Columbia, saying he had not published enough material to deserve a tenured position. Morgenbesser responded: “Moses wrote one book. Then what did he do?”
  • Morgenbesser was leaving a subway station in New York City and put his pipe in his mouth as he was ascending the steps. A police officer told him that there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser pointed out that he was leaving the subway, not entering it, and hadn’t lit up yet anyway. The cop again said that smoking was not allowed in the subway, and Morgenbesser repeated his comment. The cop said, “If I let you do it, I’d have to let everyone do it.” Morgenbesser replied, “Who do you think you are, Kant?” Due to his accent, the word “Kant” was mistaken for a vulgar epithet and Morgenbesser was hauled off to the police station. He won his freedom only after a colleague showed up and explained the Categorical Imperative to the unamused cops.
  • In response to Heidegger’s ontological query “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Morgenbesser answered “If there were nothing you’d still be complaining!”
  • A central subject of Morganbesser’s investigations was the independence of irrelevant alternatives. Once while ordering dessert, Morgenbesser was told by the waitress that he could choose between apple pie and blueberry pie. He ordered the apple pie. Shortly thereafter, the waitress came back and said that cherry pie was also an option; Morgenbesser responded: “In that case I’ll have the blueberry pie.”
  • When asked his opinion of the philosophy of pragmatism, Morgenbesser said, “It’s all very well in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.”

__________

I found several of these quips and many other gems in Jim Holt’s stunningly clever and often very funny book Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.

Sidney Morgenbesser

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What Was the American Founders’ View of Human Nature?

03 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Political Philosophy, Politics, Speeches

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Abraham Lincoln, American Government, American Politics, Charles Krauthammer, founding fathers, General Philosophy, Government, human nature, Mark Leibovich, Plato, political philosophy, politics, Robert P. George, Ronald Reagan, Rousseau, Winston Churchill

The American Founding

Robert George:

“The American Founders famously supplied constitutional mechanisms to remedy what they called the darker motives of man. And with their rather Presbyterian view of human nature, the founders’ hope was that we could correct for some of mankind’s defects through principles and institutions that would check the thirst for power, and would prevent government from becoming oppressive or tyrannical.

At the same time, they were under no illusions about the possibility of having a successful scheme of ordered liberty without there being some substantial virtue in the people themselves. And they knew, crucially, that virtue could not be ordered by the government. It couldn’t be produced by the economic system. It couldn’t be dictated by a judge.

They knew that the virtue needed for constitutional government, for ordered liberty, would be provided by individuals themselves, with the assistance of what we call the institutions of civil society — beginning with the family, the marriage-based family, and all the other institutions that are influencers and shapers of people.

Our Founders themselves understood their work, their project, as an experiment. And experiments can fail. And they understood that. Republics, after all, had been tried time and time again throughout the course of history; and they had failed, and most societies had given up on them.

This is why Lincoln, in giving his formal explanation for why he didn’t simply let the South go, famously said that, what is at issue in this contest is not simply whether republican government would last on the North American continent. No, he said, what is at stake is whether government of the people, by the people, and for the people — republican government — would perish from the Earth.

Because if it were tried, and then failed within less than a century, the lesson for all of humanity, at least for the indefinite future, would be that republican freedom simply doesn’t work. We have to go with another theory: some kind of benign authoritarianism is the best that we can do.

Robert P. George

And republican government, as I say, requires a certain kind of virtue in its citizens… The Enlightenment French philosopher Rousseau famously said that, ‘Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.’

Well, is man born free?

There’s a certain profound sense in which we human beings are not born free. We are born into a form of slavery, and the whole project of a life is to liberate oneself from that slavery.

What I have in mind here goes back to a thinker who was not especially friendly to democracy, and depending on how we read his Republic, not especially friendly to freedom. But Plato had something important to say about character and character-formation: that the project of a human life is overcoming what is perhaps the most abject form of slavery — the slavery to one’s own desires, the slavery to one’s self.

As Plato himself put it, the goal is to achieve a proper order in the soul so that the rational element of the self has control over the appetitive element. A good life, in this framework, is one in which wisdom has the whip hand, harnessing reason to bridle desire and control the big I-want.

And our parents, and our religious institutions, and our schools (when they are healthy) are all about the business of soul-shaping. The goal of those institutions is getting the little baby, who is all absorbed in want satisfaction, to grow to be a responsible human being who is master of himself, who has control over his own desires. And when that works, then you have got human beings who are fit for freedom in the full political sense, who can be entrusted to be the guardians of their own liberty, who can be entrusted with republican government, who have the virtues that are necessary for ordered liberty.”

Charles Krauthammer’s response:

“I appreciate what Robbie is saying about the necessity of virtue. But to me, the lesson of the American experiment is precisely the opposite.

The Declaration does not speak about the pursuit of virtue or the exercise of reason. It speaks about the pursuit of happiness.

The premise of our republic is that we would have an economic system based on, essentially, capitalism, as described by Adam Smith, where everybody is pursuing their own ends but the invisible hand works it out. And Madison translated that into a political free market, where he said that the greatest guarantee of liberty would be the multiplication of factions, all of whom will be acting in their own narrow self-interests. And if you could construct a system in which the factions would compete against each other, and prevent coalitions of a majority that would crush the other side, you could then have the same kind of invisible hand working itself out.

So I would say, unlike a lot of other political systems, which are based on the notion of the virtue of the individual, the American system is constructed in a way that it requires it the least. In fact, to me the American system was and is the most realistic in understanding the fallen condition of the human being and expecting very little of the individual, but understanding that if you can construct the system — which they did ex nihilo, and it has endured for a quarter of a millennium — you don’t have to rely on virtue of the individual, because if you did, no republic would ever be possible.”

Charles Krauthammer

__________

My transcription of an exchange between Charles Krauthammer and Princeton law professor Robert P. George on the subject of what was the American founders’ conception of human nature.

Pick up good works from both: George’s Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is and Why It Matters and Krauthammer’s Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics.

This conversation took place in June, at the 2013 Bradley Symposium in Washington, DC. The question considered and debated by the various speakers and panelists was “Are We Freer Than We Were Ten Years Ago?”; Krauthammer, who gave the event’s keynote address, supplied his answer in the form of an autopsy of the GOP’s 2012 bid for the White House. His comments were refreshingly even-handed yet searingly critical of the Right. Although I often disagree with him, Krauthammer has a seriousness, a knack for self-criticism, and an understanding of political philosophy that make him worth listening to each time you hear his papery and discerning voice.

I plan on posting and writing more about his Bradley talk and exchange with George in the future.

In the meantime, read an anecdote Krauthammer cited in his speech, about Winston Churchill talking political philosophy in the restroom. Then check out Ronald Reagan’s letter about what the founders meant to him, or read Mark Leibovich’s recent interview about how their vision has been corrupted by today’s Washington:

Winston Churchill

Churchill in the Restroom

Ronald Reagan

The American Founding according to Reagan

Mark LeibovichA Political Culture that Rewards Cowardice

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