Too late
Cool stuff, though. I initially read it simply because there's
a famous picture of Bruce Lee reading from it in his study, but you'd like Wing-tsit Chan's 1963 book
A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy if you haven't read it. It's both a selection of bits from various Chinese texts from the ancient to the contemporary and a contextualization of/commentary on the texts, the authors, and the various intellectual/political contexts.
Wittgenstein showed up almost as much as Aristotle in what I was reading about philosophy between East and West. Aristotle was almost always brought up against Confucian backdrops, but Wittgenstein was everywhere. There's even a cool book on the Confucian side called
Whose Tradition? Which Dao? Confucius and Wittgenstein on Moral Learning and Reflection.
Wittgenstein's one of my main men, so you know I like that reference
On the list now.
It's rigid in its standards - part and parcel of perfectionist philosophies like Aristotle's and Emerson's, it's unmistakably elitist even if its elitism is an elitism of character as opposed to an elitism of birth/blood - but flexible in its application.
Of all the explicitly theological thinkers I've read, Descartes is by far my favorite. He's one of the sharpest people out there IMO, and the exchanges in the Objections and Replies are fascinating.
Plus - and this is pure, unadulterated, unverifiable speculation if not sheer wishful thinking on my part - I have this theory that Descartes is the inverse of Kant: Whereas Kant is known as the Supremely Rational philosopher when really he was just another religious dude, Descartes is known as this devout philosopher who tried to reconcile reason and religion yet I suspect that Descartes was so traumatized by what happened to Galileo that his religion stuff is just him covering his ass. No clue how that could be proven, but I like to think that it's true.
Anyway, he's sharp as hell, the
Meditations are a great (and, by philosophy standards, also an easy) read, and seeing the give-and-take between him and his contemporaries is like reading a 17th Century version of a forum debate
I'm with
Caveat. There is truth in the idea that's behind a joke once made by the film scholar David Bordwell at the expense of cultural studies scholars - that in response to an argument instead of coming back at you with a counterargument they come back at you with a Bibliography
- but those people suck. You can tell when someone is vomiting up a Bibliography and when someone is genuinely engaging with ideas and thinking their own way through the thoughts of others.
I explained Wittgenstein's position in
On Certainty with respect to the nonsensical behavior patterns implied by the "logic" of skepticism with
Family Guy
On this point, the coolest thing that I've found in teaching kids (by "kids" I mean 18-20 year olds) is that they're WAY more receptive to "high philosophy" than you'd think. It's all a matter of how you present it. The younger you are, and the farther outside of academia you are, the lower your bullshit threshold is, so you have to be able to give it to them straight. And, if you can, then their minds open up and expand right in front of you and it's not a big stretch to then introduce a specialized term here or there to nail down some ideas.
From what I was Googling, I thought that panpsychism is an alternative to dualism. Can you be in favor of both?
My answer to your question is: "Yes, but..." As I read it, Confucianism, like Platonism and Aristotelianism, isn't trying to be
systematic like Kantianism or Objectivism, but it is trying to be
comprehensive in the sense that it's meant to cover all the bases from the personal to the interpersonal to the social. So, yes, one's relationships to/in society and to/in the family are crucial, but not over and above or at the expense of the cultivation of character on the level of the individual. It starts from within the family and then you (are supposed to) become an individual. And a lot of the emphasis on family has been critiqued from the perspective of virtue ethics. But it all-too-often and all-too-easily gets reduced to a collectivist philosophy that's all about the family and about society and in which the individual is lost or nonexistent. It
is about those things, but not
only about those things.
Welcome,
Pupi, aka
Rimbaud's new best friend
This is also Confucianism 101. The difference, at least as I see it, is that
Daoism leaves the relation between individual and world as some mystical "thing" that just "should be" and can "become" harmonious, whereas, in Confucianism, how to be in harmony with oneself and with the world is the explicit point of discussion. In his commentary on his translation of the
Analects, Edward Slingerland describes this as "the paradox of
wu-wei":
"
The Master said, 'Is Goodness really so far away? If I simply desire Goodness, I will find that it is already here.'
Bao Xian elaborates, 'The Way of Goodness is not far – simply walk it and you will arrive there' [...] The purpose of this passage is to emphasize the importance of sincere commitment to the Way, but it seems to conflict with passages such as 8.7 ('the burden is heavy and the Way is long'), and is thus symptomatic of the so-called 'paradox of wu-wei' mentioned in the commentary to 4.6. For Confucius, the virtue of Goodness, as well as the power of Virtue that comes with it, can only be realized by one who truly loves them for their own sake. The point here in 7.30, however, seems to be that if one truly does love them, then one already has them – were a person to truly love Goodness in the same way that he loves to eat and drink, then the battle would be already won. This is no doubt the source of much of Confucius’ frustration with his current age (9.18, 9.24, 15.13), as well as with disciples such as Zai Wo, who presumably gives assent to the Confucian project but nonetheless lies sleeping in bed all day (5.10). The student cannot learn from the teacher unless he is passionately committed to learning, and this requires possessing a genuine love for the Confucian Way. The problem is that it is hard to see how the teacher can engender this sort of love in a student who lacks it."
Regarding the commentary to 4.6 to which he refers:
"
The Master said, 'I have yet to meet a person who truly loved Goodness or hated a lack of Goodness. One who truly loved Goodness could not be surpassed, while one who truly hated a lack of Goodness would at least be able to act in a Good fashion, as he would not tolerate that which is not Good being associated with his person. Is there a person who can, for the space of a single day, simply devote his efforts to Goodness? I have never met anyone whose strength was insufficient for this task. Perhaps such a person exists, but I have yet to meet him.'
In 7.30 we read, 'Is Goodness really so far away? If I merely desire Goodness, I will find that Goodness is already here,' and in 9.30, 'I have yet to meet a man who loves Virtue as much as the pleasures of the flesh.' A bit of frustration is apparent in all of these passages: we all have the ability to be Good if we would simply love it as we should, but how can one instill this love in someone who does not already have it (or who loves the wrong things)? This problem comes again in 6.12, when the disappointing disciple Ran Qiu claims to love the Way but complains that he lacks the strength to pursue it. Confucius sharply rebukes him in words that echo 4.6: 'Those for whom it is genuinely a problem of insufficient strength end up collapsing somewhere along the Way. As for you, you deliberately draw the line.' This is the heart of a paradox that Confucius faced - we might refer to it as the 'paradox of wu-wei,' or the problem of how to consciously develop in oneself or instill in others genuine unselfconscious spontaneity - that will come up again and again in the Analects (cf. 5.10,7.34, 16.5)."
Confucianism basically takes the standpoint: In order to
be good, one must
do good, and it's by
doing good that one
becomes good, and the cultivation of character is the bulwark. How does
Daoism account for harmonization, how does the individual "attain"
wu-wei? Do they, in fact, leave it as an inexplicable mystery, or am I missing something?
Have you not seen this? Granted, I'm not immortal and haven't lived through the entire history of the university, but if there's an era where academia was at a lower point, then, while I hesitate to ask, I will still ask you to prove it.
Good point. This is the point on which Benjamin Constant tripped up Kant and his "it is a duty to tell the truth" bit and which necessitated Kant's writing his "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy." This is also the problem with conceiving of ethics along the lines of rules and duties: It endeavors, implicitly or explicitly, to make ethics non-human, to remove from the equation choice and responsibility and to "relieve" us of the "burden" of thinking.
This is a tension that I think Rand resolved quite nicely in her writings on the meaning of the concept of "value," that it presupposes answers to the questions "Of value
to whom and
for what?" You're right, it's "relative," but in the sense that life isn't lived in a changeless and contextless vacuum. This is where the postmoderny notion of the "undecidable" runs off the rails: The fact that it's not
always the case, across
all contexts, that
everything is
identical does
not mean that it's
impossible to decide what
one case is in
one context. That's not how reality works - for as easy as it is these days to analogize minds and computers, if we were merely data processors then AI research would never have encountered the "frame" problem. Or is there a tech nerd reading this who can tell me what I'm missing here?
Yay, another thumbs-up for Emerson! I fucking
love that dude. If you haven't read Stanley Cavell, particularly his book
Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, then you're in for a treat.
Descartes rules. The Cambridge volumes of
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes are great if you can get your hands on them, but the
Discourse on the Method and the
Meditations are great reads by themselves.
Nietzsche is a great critic of religion but his epistemology and his ethics are wonky (to put it kindly). I've said this before and I'll say it again, especially because of your fondness for Emerson: Everything good in Nietzsche was ripped off from, and is worse than what he ripped off from, Emerson, and nothing that's bad in Nietzsche is in Emerson.
Here's a post of mine from a while back elaborating on the Emerson/Nietzsche bit:
"Legal reasoning," you say? Please give me a moment while I summon
@jei so you two can nerd out on legal shit
Hmm. I'm hearing something of an echo of this in Rand's line from
Atlas Shrugged about how "love is a response to our highest values."
This is a cool quote.
Shit, I didn't have time for this today when I created this thread and spent all day posting in it. Where are your priorities? Sherdog should always come first
Ok. Here's your "homework" for this thread:
1) You said that Hicks' discussion of Medieval philosophy was "complete horseshit." We went back-and-forth and seemed to reach the following point: I say that Hicks' book isn't - and never purports to be - a nuanced history of Medieval philosophy which burrows into all the nooks and crannies of ten centuries of thinking; rather, I say that he looks merely to set up a general context that hits the major points. I'm not asking if you think that he thoroughly articulates all the nuances of this or that philosopher/philosophy to your satisfaction. My question is much simpler: Do you wish to deny even that the general context that he sets up is accurate and maintain that it is "complete horseshit"?
2) You said that his characterization of Kant as being "anti-reason" was in error. I explained in great detail with lots of references and quotes why it's not. If you maintain that it is, then, since I already made my argument, it's now your turn to make a counterargument if you feel like it.
The postmodernism stuff will probably just lead to needless bickering. You don't mind it; I hate it. We're going to clash. But, as far as our respective "positive projects" go, I don't think it's presumptuous to say that postmodernism isn't a big deal to either one of us, so we don't need to keep going down that road.
My thoughts exactly. As Rand once expressed: "When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter. If I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will. One of us will win, but both will profit."
Whenever you have time to spar, I'll be here. And I'm sure we'll both profit.
This is why my favorite definition ever given of philosophy is Stanley Cavell's. He defined philosophy as "a willingness to think not about things other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them."
Oh, dude, we could go
deep on the opinions previous thinkers would have of what passes for thinking today. My personal favorite is Descartes. He had absolutely
zero patience for idiots and for bullshit. In his book
On Deconstruction, Jonathan Culler wrote the following:
"[Deconstruction] cannot be brought together in a coherent synthesis. For this reason, it may not seem [valid] to many, who would argue that logic forbids [contradiction] ... The objection to this double procedure [invokes] ... physical and empirical inappropriateness. Deconstruction’s procedure is called 'sawing off the branch on which one is sitting.' This may be, in fact, an apt description of the activity, for though it is unusual and somewhat risky, it is manifestly something one can attempt. One can and may continue to sit on a branch while sawing it ... The question then becomes whether one will succeed in sawing it clear through, and where and how one might land ... If 'sawing off the branch on which one is sitting' seems foolhardy to men of common sense, it is not so for Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Derrida, for they suspect that if they fall there is no 'ground' to hit."
Centuries earlier, Descartes replied to Antoine Arnauld's objection that people "of only moderate intelligence" could do serious harm to themselves and others if they tried to adopt Descartes’ "free style of philosophizing which calls everything into doubt" by pointing out that "although fire and knives cannot be safely handled by careless people and children, no one thinks that this is a reason for doing without them." The "careless people and children" bit always gets me.
Pierre Gassendi raised a similar objection, to which Descartes replied more elaborately:
"When I said [in the
Meditations] that the entire testimony of the senses should be regarded as uncertain and even as false, I was quite serious [...] When it is a question of organizing our life, [however], it would, of course, be foolish not to trust the senses, and the skeptics who neglected human affairs to the point where friends had to stop them falling off precipices deserved to be laughed at."
In short: Culler and his postmodern buddies deserve to be laughed at <45>
