Schopenhauer and James

Another fundamental error of Christianity is that it has in an unnatural fashion sundered mankind from the animal world to which it essentially belongs and now considers mankind alone as of any account, regarding the animals as no more than things. This error is a consequence of creation out of nothing, after which the Creator, in the first and second chapters of Genesis, takes all the animals as if they were just things, and without so much as the recommendation to kind treatment which even a dog-seller usually adds when he parts with his dogs, hands them over to man for man to rule, that is to do with them as he likes; subsequently, in the second chapter, the Creator goes on to appoint him the first professor of zoology by commissioning him to give the animals the names they shall thenceforth bear, which is once more only a symbol of their total dependence on him, i.e. their total lack of rights.

Arthur Schopenhauer, in The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion

Another in the Penguin Great Thoughts series, and I think Schopenhauer nails the way in which contemporary strong humanists (most of whom are vociferous atheists) owe more to Christian theology than they might like to think (see my post on Lewis Wolpert).

I'm also reading the William James collection, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, and apart from the shared concern for animals, they couldn't be more different. Schopenhauer negative about life (he adopted the worst interpretation of the Buddhist preoccupation with suffering, a "life will always be shitty" fatalism), James positive (you could interpret parts of his philosophy as an early form of cognitive behavioural therapy to treat his own depression). Schopenhauer bracingly right about religion ("The Rationalists say to the supranaturalists: 'Your doctrine isn't true.' The latter retort: 'Your doctrine isn't Christianity.' Both are right."), James still wanting to make the leap of faith in the absence of proof, and remain a Christian while abandoning historical Christianity. James wants to believe, but I'm never quite sure what he left himself to believe in.

Old fashioned theism was bad enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monarch, made up of a lot of unintelligible or preposterous 'attributes'; but, so long as it held strongly by the argument from design, it kept some touch with concrete realities. Since, however, Darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the 'scientific,' theism has lost that foothold...

William James, from Pragmatism

Kant

I've resisted Penguin's Great Ideas series until now, but bought a few last week. They have lovely covers and are an interesting selection of extracts from longer works or short books shorn of introductions and notes. The selection of Kant's political writing, unlike most of the others, isn't based on a Penguin book but on one of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. I don't think it's Kant at his best - he adopts his usual lofty tone of detachment, and argues from pure a priori principles that the best form of government that could possibly exist is an enlightened absolute monarchy. By a remarkable coincidence, Kant was a subject of Frederick the Great. Some interesting thoughts on open government, though (Kant says any policy which has to be kept secret from others - the citizens or foreign governments - has to be wrong). He also quotes Hume at the end of Is the Human Race Continually Improving?, a passage I hadn't come across before:

'When I now see the nations engaged in war', he says, 'it is as if I witnessed two drunken wretches bludgeoning each other in a china-shop. For it is not just that the injuries they inflict on each other will be long in healing; they will also have to pay for all the damage they have caused.'

Elephant souls

...the dissection of an elephant, which led Locke to joke that if this revealed that this huge animal's pineal gland was proportionably large, the Cartesians would have to say it had a large soul: "but if it is true that elephants can write I wouldn't want them to be given paper and ink lest they leave to posterity in their memoirs that we are nothing but machines and that only they have understanding".

Locke is often thought of as rather bloodless and austere, and the biography by Roger Woolhouse doesn't do a lot to dispel that image, but there are occasional flashes of wit.

Locke on conscience

He now thought that a law to which we conscientiously object is an imposition on our conscience and that we should disobey it. At the same time, however, we are bound "quietly to submit to the penalty the law inflicts".

Roger Woolhouse Locke: a Biography, p84

This is what contemporary "martyrs" don't understand, I think. "Quietly" need not mean "without protest", but certainly without the disingenuous claims that it is somehow immoral or outrageous that they should be subject to a law which goes against their conscience.

Yale and Hobbes

I'm listening to Steven B Smith's podcasts from Yale, an introductory course in political philosophy. Good so far (Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli), albeit rather smug and Smith is obviously one of those people who sees the American constitution as the perfect ideal that lesser nations are blindly struggling towards.

However, he has got on to Hobbes now and I'm wincing. A fulsome introduction claiming Leviathan is to English prose as Paradise Lost is to epic poetry, and then some really horrendous errors in the overview of Hobbes's life. Some may seem trivial - Hobbes's father famously disappeared after a fight outside the church where he was vicar, and his uncle paid for his education (Smith says his father was a "pastor" and sent him to Oxford). Hobbes left England in 1640, before the civil war broke out, under threat of imprisonment by parliament for his outspoken royalism, although he did write Leviathan during the war (Smith has him driven out of England by rampaging "republican" armies led by Cromwell, who in fact did not lead the army until well into the civil war). But to say that Leviathan endorses the view that "the sovereign owes his authority to the will or the consent of those he governs"? The sovereign owes his authority to the social contract, and once that contract is in effect, the will and consent of the subjects is completely irrelevant - Hobbes has a lot to say about the transfer of authority in the book. I haven't even started Martinich's biography of Hobbes yet, and all these things are familiar to me, so I would expect a professor at Yale, especially one who spends so much time self-importantly talking about how he's teaching the American elite, to have done his homework a little better.

More podcasts

The OU has also made some of the audio material for A211 Philosophy and the Human Situation available on iTunes. This is the level two course in philosophy which is partly intended as an introduction to the subject proper (it is a component of the level one introductory course in humanities), so some of the audio material covers general guidance on logic, writing philosophy essays, and so on. What's left is a collection of fairly short presentations (20-30 minutes) on a wide range of subjects.

The philosophy department at the University of Bristol has a blog with podcasts (iTunes link) - some lectures (including a public lecture by Dan Dennett), some group discussions.

AA311 Podcast

Via Nigel Warburton - the OU has just released all the audio material associated with the (now defunct) course AA311 Reading Political Philosophy: Machiavelli to Mill as a podcast. It's a while since I listened to these (I did the course in 2007), but my recollection is that some of these were fairly closely tied to issues discussed in the course (Gerry Cohen on Marx), but some were of more general interest (Quentin Skinner is always worth listening to). I hope they are able to put some of the other material on OpenLearn eventually, but as the core of the course was a book which is still on sale (Nigel is one of the authors), maybe that won't be possible.

Behemoth

You know there is nothing that renders human counsels difficult, but the uncertainty of future time; nor that so well directs men in their deliberations, as the foresight of the sequels of their actions; prophecy being many times the principal cause of the event foretold. If, upon some prediction, the people should have been made confident that Oliver Cromwell and his army should be, upon a day to come, utterly defeated; would not every one have endeavoured to assist, and to deserve well of the party that should give him that defeat? Upon this account it was that fortune-tellers and astrologers were so often banished out of Rome.

Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth (p188 of the University of Chicago Press edition).

Premonitions of James again, almost - the will to believe affecting the outcome of events.

Free Libraries

The political philosophy course left me with a love of Thomas Hobbes and an interest in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (which were also a major part of the course on the rise of scientific Europe). I read Leviathan last summer, since then On the Citizen, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, and Behemoth is currently being carried around to read occasionally (including a trip to Hardwick Hall the other weekend). I'm saving Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity for a rainy day. Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment is currently keeping me busy, bought after reading Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic (which also led me to buy Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, edited by Israel and currently sitting on the large pile of books I haven't yet read).

That's a lot of money - upwards of a hundred quid, even before you add in Noel Malcolm's Aspects of Hobbes or the Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's Leviathan. I don't mind that - I can afford it, and I like to have proper books. I occasionally read things on my PDA or iPod Touch, but it isn't a comfortable or convenient way of reading for me.

But increasingly, some of the more unusual writings of this era are available online. Leviathan is the only text by Hobbes available from Project Gutenberg, but the other day I stumbled across the Online Library of Liberty. This has many of Hobbes's works, scanned in from a mid-nineteenth-century edition, including some which I've never seen mentioned before, let alone in print. And that's a drop in the ocean - there's a vast catalogue of good-quality HTML and PDF versions of all sorts of famous works and obscurities. The Liberty Fund is fundamentally about promoting conservative individualist libertarianism, but there's no partiality in the selection of libertarian authors - Shaw is there, Shelley, Hazlitt and Marx (to pick a few names from the nineteenth century).

Nigel Warburton recently tweeted a link to Jonathan F Bennett's collection of Early Modern Texts, annotated and edited versions of some of the major works of the period. I'm not keen (I find his style of annotation obtrusive), but if the OU's discussion forums are any indication, many students would find them helpful when struggling with unfamiliar styles of prose.

And finally, the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, no sign of Hobbes or Spinoza but they do have Samuel Clarke's criticism of both (mentioned in Israel).

Back from the dead, again.

Not quite as large a dead stretch as the gap from 2001 to 2007, but I haven't updated this in a year. Perhaps because I spent late 2007 and most of 2008 studying a couple of general humanities courses where the emphasis was more on history than philosophy - A207 (From Enlightenment to Romanticism 1780-1830), and AS208 (The Rise of Scientific Europe 1500-1800). I'm now doing AA308 (Thought and Experience: Themes in the Philosophy of Mind), the final module for a BA in Humanities with Philosophy. I'm not finding it hugely inspiring (it's not an area of philosophy I find interesting), but it's the only OU philosophy course I haven't done yet.

Friedrich Pecht on Richard Wagner

One day when I called upon him I found him burning with passion for Hegel's Phenomenology, which he was just studying, and which, he told me with typical extravagance, was the best book ever published. To prove it he read me a passage which had particularly impressed him. Since I did not entirely follow it, I asked him to read it again, upon which neither of us could understand it. He read it a third time and a fourth, until at the end we both looked at one another and burst out laughing. And that was the end of phenomenology.

(From Bryan Magee's Wagner and Philosophy)

Morality

I'm in some ways very much against Kant, because I don't think rationality is such a great thing, so to speak. Or let me put it this way: imagine somebody seriously remorseful; there could be hardly a more sober moment in the moral life when someone is lucid, then seriously remorseful, and you imagine that person saying, 'My God, what have I done?' when there's a kind of realisation of the awfulness of what one has done. And then I've felt that if you put into the mouth of that person as an elaboration, what so many official accounts say, it comes out as parody, 'My God, what have I done? I've been a traitor to reason', you know, or 'My God, I've violated the social contract; negotiated behind a veil of ignorance' and so on. It might sound like a cheap shot but I think it's a very serious question as to why, at such a sober moment as in the moral life, the official accounts of what it is to have wronged somebody seem like caricatures.

Raimond Gaita, on The Philosophers Zone.

Pietism

This was a very grand form of sour grapes. If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth, into a kind of inner citadel, in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. The king of my province - the prince - confiscates my land: I do not want to own land. The prince does not wish to give me rank: rank is trivial, unimportant. The king has robbed me of my possessions: possessions are nothing. My children have died of malnutrition and disease: earthly attachments, even love of children, are as nothing before love of God. And so forth. You gradually hedge yourself round with a kind of tight wall by which you seek to reduce your vulnerable surface - you want to be as little wounded as possible. Every kind of wound has been heaped upon you, and therefore you wish to contract yourself into the smallest possible area, so that as little of you as possible is exposed to further wounds.

Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, "The First Attack on Enlightenment". And from later on in that chapter, a description of Johann Georg Hamann's rejection of dualism, which is startlingly modern. In context it is perhaps not quite so modern - it's part of Hamann's rejection of rationalism - although again, there are startling parallels a couple of paragraphs later between Hamann's view of language as defining the world, and Wittgenstein. Difficult to know how much of this is Hamann and how much is Berlin, though.

The idea that there are a soul and a body which can be dissected, that there are spirit and flesh which are different, that the body is one thing, but there is something inside the man, a kind of ghost palpitating inside this machine, which is quite different from what the man is in his totality, in his unity, is a typical dissecting French view.

Man and Superman

Nothing has gone right since that speech that Professor Tyndall made at Belfast.

Mrs Whitefield, in George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. On the one hand I'm thinking "why doesn't this book have footnotes?", on the other hand it's all on the web these days. I'm finding M&S very entertaining - it's Shaw the provocative wit, rather than Shaw the hectoring vegetarian in wooly underpants.

Rousseau as proto-pragmatist?

As for those truths which have no practical or instructive value, how could they be something that is owed to us, since they are not even a valuable possession?
...
whether a piece of futile, unimportant and inconsequential information is true or false can be of interest to no one.
...
Something that is good for nothing cannot be owed to anybody; for something to be owed to somebody, it must be actually or potentially useful. Thus the truth which we owe to one another is that which concerns justice, and it is a profanation of the holy name of truth to apply it to trivial things of which the existence is a matter of general indifference and the knowledge totally useless. Truth without any possible usefulness can therefore never be something we owe to one another; it follows therefore that anyone who conceals or disguises it is not telling a lie.

Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Fourth Walk.

It's Rousseau in paranoid mode, wondering when it's acceptable to tell a lie (prompted by the belief that the Abbé Rozier has stolen his motto and is taunting him by sarcastically writing it on a pamphlet). He's talking about when you are obliged to speak the truth, rather than what the truth is, but there are some interesting similarities with the American pragmatists' thoughts on truth (I'm reading Richard Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope, too).

Dogs Wake

I'm sure John Gray didn't write Straw Dogs with the intention that people would think it was laugh-out-loud funny, but that's how I'm finding it. It's Enlightenment's Wake (which I finished yesterday) rewritten for readers uninterested in structured argument, reasoning or (as Keith Sutherland notes in his review) properly cited sources. Enlightenment's Wake was fascinating (I read it with a pencil in my hand, underlining it in the way I would any philosophy text I am trying to understand, trying to work out how Gray is wrong and why), Straw Dogs is merely entertaining.

Chomsky on games

I'm speculating, obviously, but it seems to me reasonable to suppose that games are designed to be, in a sense, at the outer limits of our cognitive capacities. We don't make up games in which we are as skilled as we are in the normal use of language. That wouldn't be an interesting game. Everybody could do too much! What we do is make up games like chess, which is an extraordinarily simple game - its rule system is utterly trivial. Yet, even so, we're not very good at it. In using language we're all extraordinarily good, and we're essentially undifferentiable one from another over quite a substantial range, but when it comes to something like chess - which I assume is at the borders of our cognitive capacities - individuals of very similar make-up will diverge significantly in their ability to deal with its problems.

Noam Chomsky, interviewed by Bryan Magee in Talking Philosophy, a collection of interviews recorded in the mid seventies for a BBC TV series. I now have to investigate the seventeenth century British neoplatonists.

Warnock and Rousseau

Nigel Warburton is putting up podcasts of himself reading from his own Philosophy: The Classics (not terribly successful I think - he writes very well and he's not a bad reader but the recordings are somehow lifeless) and Philosophy Bites - short interviews with other philosophers conducted by him and David Edmonds. Those are very good so far - Simon Blackburn on Plato, Stephen Law on the weakness of various arguments for the existence of god, and Mary Warnock on philosophy in public life.

Warnock makes a point while discussing attempts to change the law on euthanasia - people who say our lives belong to God, she says, are arguing irrelevantly (her emphasis). Other people don't believe that, and (what I think she's getting at though she doesn't quite put it like this), laws must be based on common ground and reasons we can all agree on rationally, not on reasons which particular groups may feel very strongly about but which aren't universally accepted (so the religious belief is a good reason for the individual who holds the belief, but not for people who don't, so it's not a good reason when it comes to determining public policy).

I've got to write an essay on Rousseau's The Social Contract over the next couple of days, and I'm wondering how I can fit that in - it's a very Rousseauian argument, from a surprising source.

(Edit: Jonathan Derbyshire on the same subject)

William James

To be read later: "The Moral Equivalent of War".

I'm wondering whether this new biography of William James will be coming out in paperback over here, or whether I should just pay Amazon's price for the hardback.

Sceptical Essays

OU tutor is being a bit of a pain about essays - I still haven't received a marked copy of the last-but-one essay, and the one I submitted three weeks ago doesn't have a mark on the website yet, with the fourth due in a couple of weeks. I've got good marks for the two I know about, but if he doesn't improve soon (and start using the electronic system for marking and returning assignments, which he ought to be doing), I'm going to have to start pointing out his obligations. I wouldn't object so much if the two tutorials I've attended hadn't been so awful.

Anyway - Locke was pretty straightforward but not terribly exciting (we are basically living in Locke's ideal world of liberal democracy, and alternatives are always more interesting than the status quo). Rousseau now, who is strange enough to be fascinating (although repellent in many ways).

Re-reading Russell's Sceptical Essays, which I think is the best of his collections of popular essays. "Philosophy in the Twentieth Century" is an interesting overview of the state of things in the twenties, concentrating on the American Pragmatists, Bergson (largely forgotten now, but a bête noire of Russell's), his ambitions for analytic philosopy (or "the new philosophy"), and a discussion of the implications of Einstein's theories for philosophy.

"The Need for Political Scepticism" is a typically provoking discussion of politics. Russell never quite reconciled his liberalism with his enthusiasm for planned economies and world government, and his assessment of human psychology is by turns shrewd and daft.

Unwise people who keep beavers in their libraries find that, when wet weather is coming, the beavers build dams out of books, because they used to live on the banks of streams.

Russell's point is that we're living in a world very different from the one which our habits were formed for (or, as an evolutionary psychologist would put it, the world which we are adapted for). Perhaps not the best story to use to illustrate his idea, though.