Today in CoPhi, "chalk and cheese" as Matthew Stewart has it. "Locke and Spinoza are the chalk and cheese of the early Enlightenment, or so it has long been maintained. One was moderate in all things; the other a thoroughgoing radical. One was supposedly a devout follower of Jesus; the other was known in his own day as the 'atheist Jew.'" But both had a huge impact on the enlightenment revolutionaries of our patimony. More on them below.*
Today in Fantasyland, Kurt Andersen says professors and college graduates ought to be important fighters defending reason but have instead become enablers of magical thinking. Case in point: Princeton-trained poli-scientist Jodi Dean, author of Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace and enthusiastic defender of "the veracity of people claiming to be not just (UFO) witnesses but abductees."
It's not just Higher Ed that's the problem. The largest charter school operator in Texas, a company called Responsive Ed, issues textbooks presenting Genesis as a scientific theory and dismissing evolutionary biology as "dogma" and "unproved theory." And that was before Betsy DeVoss.
Wonder what Thomas Jefferson would say about that. "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Sure, neighbor, say what you want. But don't compel young students to hear it in their science classrooms unless you want to turn out generations of blathering scientific illiterates. Oh. You do.
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Today in A&P, we meet Epicurus's dangerous idea, "a kind of universal acid [that] dissolves every pretension of religion... top represent the meaning of existence": nature always explains itself. Or will, given time and literacy.
Thomas Hobbes said Epicureanism is truer than Aristotelianism, invested as it is in understanding nature's causes but not positing prior purposes. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility," Einstein agreed, precisely because its causes are discoverable.
Is it better ("less remote from the truth") to believe nothing than to believe what's wrong? Jefferson the Epicurean thought so. That didn't block him from facing the hard but (speaking for myself at least) consoling truth that death redistributes our vital matter and grants our continuation in "a thousand forms" - animal, vegetable, and mineral.
Epicurus tumbled to Darwin's dangerous idea, approximately, that the complexity and diversity of life are due to natural selection and time, which "transforms the nature of the entire world." Nothing stays the same. As Lucretius put it, the pressures of survival, not the decrees of a transcendent authority, are responsible for "the creation of better and more just arrangements of society." May the pressures continue. They must.
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Today in Bioethics, Eula Biss plays some more with the vampire theme and her recognition as both a new mother and a patient that "we feed off of each other, we need each other to live," and that the whole mutual dependency framework of our lives is beautifully "aglow with humanity."
One of the troubling and less lovely expressions of humanity is our tendency to panic in the face of unwarranted and unsubstantiated fears. Such was the "cascade of panic" triggered by Andrew Wakefield's discredited study linking the MMR vaccine to autism. "Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford."
Refusal of immunity "as a form of civil disobedience" is an opportunity of privilege - "a privileged 1% are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99%." The refuseniks who think they're striking a solid blow against inhumane capitalists, especially Big Pharma, are missing a vital point: shared immmunity "is a system in which both the burdens and the benefits are shared across the entire population," hardly standard operating procedure under capitalism. Opting out really looks more like buying in and supporting the status quo, which is to devalue or ignore appeals to ethical principle in favor of (as Susan Sontag said) "the calculus of self-interest and profitability." What an impoverished state of mind and a shrunken state of heart.
And speaking of Dracula, one more time: "medicine sucks the blood out of people in a lot of ways." So maybe Biss's dad was right: "Most problems will get better if left alone." Problems abound, though, if our reason for choosing to leave them alone is an absence of trust in medical practitioners.
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*Spinoza didn't make it easy on himself by affirming pantheism, but perhaps he found the solace of solidarity with nature and the universe sufficiently off-setting and worth the cost in personal terms. He thought he'd touched all the bases: God, nature, freedom, emotion, everything. QED(Not quite easily done.)
He "claimed to demonstrate both the necessary existence and the unitary nature of the unique, single substance that comprises all of reality. Spinoza preferred the designation "Deus sive Natura" ("god or nature") as the most fitting name for this being, and he argued that its infinite attributes account for every feature of the universe."
An infinite God leaves no remainder, but also leaves individuals without a personal savior. He didn't think he needed one, with his rationalist's intellectual love of God. Free will may be an illusion, but a Spinozism of freedom is supposed to free us from reactionary passions like anger and self-pity. He would have been pleased by Einstein's endorsement. “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind..."
But, freedom? "It would be moral bondage if we were motivated only by causes of which we remain unaware, so genuine freedom comes only with knowledge of what it is that necessitates our actions. Recognizing the invariable influence of desire over our passionate natures, we then strive for the peace of mind that comes through an impartial attachment to reason." Much easier said than done. But again, Spinoza wasn't about easy.
Anthony Gottlieb's Spinoza brought "a breeze of the future," a foretaste of our present, with determinism and secularism in the ascendant in the most enlightenend quarters. Was he really "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers," as Bertrand Russell averred? "Those who were acquainted with him," said Bayle in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, called him "social, affable, honest, obliging, and of a well-ordered morality." But they didn't confirm his mythic identity as a humble lens grinder scrabbling to sustain himself for his philosophic labors. "[H]is lens-making was primarily a scientific pursuit rather than a commercial one."
If we "understood clearly the whole order of Nature," according to Spinoza, we'd come to his conclusion that "all things [are] just as necessary" as a true mathematical proposition. "Unfortunately, people did not come to see this at all." Fortunately, I say, lest we stop trying to be the change we want to see in the world. He'd say not to sweat that, if we want change then we necessarily will do what we think we must to achieve it... but we can't bank on making a difference that confounds the "whole order." And I say, again, I'm banking on it.
This God-intoxicated man has many secular and atheistic intellectual descendants, who are tarred by "no stigma in economically developed countries except the United States." Still, "he believed that he believed in God." Maybe Einstein did too, Gottlieb's judgment that he was "probably just being diplomatic" notwithstanding.
John Locke's empiricism overstated the blankness of our slates, and relied too heavily on memory as a guarantor of personal identity. Thomas Reid was not in his league, but may still have had a better idea with his overlapping memories thesis. Until we become cyborg, total recall will not be an option.
"Locke's grand work," said C.S. Peirce, "was substantially this: Men must think for themselves."
Thomas Jefferson may have overstated the case for Locke's influence on the founding generation of the American republic, but if he influenced the sage of Monticello it would seem to follow that in fact his shadow has loomed large. A direct line can be drawn from his social contract to John Rawls's, and from there to the current generation of progressive politics in America... to say nothing of his namesake on Lost. The authority of a rulers derives from the freely-contracted consent of the governed, or from nowhere. It doesn't come down from heaven nor out of the barrel of a gun.
Locke "greatly admired the achievements that his friends in the Royal Society had made in physics, chemistry, and medicine, and he sought to clear the ground for future developments by providing a theory of knowledge compatible with such carefully-conducted study of nature. The goal of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was to establish epistemological foundations for the new science by examining the reliability, scope, and limitations of human knowledge in contrast with with the pretensions of uncritical belief, borrowed opinion, and mere superstition. Since the sciences had already demonstrated their practical success, Locke tried to apply their Baconian methods to the pursuit of his own philosophical aims. In order to discover how the human understanding achieves knowledge, we must trace that knowledge to its origins in our experience."
The Essay Concerning Human Understanding sounded the Enlightenment keynotes: think for yourself, question conventional and inherited wisdom, stop quibbling and splitting hairs about angels on pinheads (etc.)
Samuel Johnson's stone-kicking refutation of Bishop Berkeley's idealism is usually met with derision, but as a practical response I place it in the same category as Diogenes' ambulatory refutation of Zeno's paradoxes. Works for me.
Berkeley's idealistic immaterialism ("in which he employed strictly empiricist principles in defense of the view that only minds or spirits exist") deserves some derision, though it also makes a perverse kind of sense if we don't repudiate Locke's representational realist assumption about ideas and their putative inferential sources. Better to repudiate, and admit that experience gives us the world - not just ideas of a world. But it gives us a world in need of elaboration and refinement, which was always the point of reflecting on experience in the first place.
Better also to repudiate the idea that being and perceiving are one. But, Berkeley's Three Dialogoues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) is still an entertaining read. "Here Berkeley spoke through Philonous ("Mind-lover"), who tries to convince his reluctant friend Hylas ("Woody") that it is only by rejecting the artificial philosophical concept of material substance that skepticism can be finally defeated and the truths of common-sense secured."
He "claimed to demonstrate both the necessary existence and the unitary nature of the unique, single substance that comprises all of reality. Spinoza preferred the designation "Deus sive Natura" ("god or nature") as the most fitting name for this being, and he argued that its infinite attributes account for every feature of the universe."
An infinite God leaves no remainder, but also leaves individuals without a personal savior. He didn't think he needed one, with his rationalist's intellectual love of God. Free will may be an illusion, but a Spinozism of freedom is supposed to free us from reactionary passions like anger and self-pity. He would have been pleased by Einstein's endorsement. “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind..."
But, freedom? "It would be moral bondage if we were motivated only by causes of which we remain unaware, so genuine freedom comes only with knowledge of what it is that necessitates our actions. Recognizing the invariable influence of desire over our passionate natures, we then strive for the peace of mind that comes through an impartial attachment to reason." Much easier said than done. But again, Spinoza wasn't about easy.
Anthony Gottlieb's Spinoza brought "a breeze of the future," a foretaste of our present, with determinism and secularism in the ascendant in the most enlightenend quarters. Was he really "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers," as Bertrand Russell averred? "Those who were acquainted with him," said Bayle in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, called him "social, affable, honest, obliging, and of a well-ordered morality." But they didn't confirm his mythic identity as a humble lens grinder scrabbling to sustain himself for his philosophic labors. "[H]is lens-making was primarily a scientific pursuit rather than a commercial one."
If we "understood clearly the whole order of Nature," according to Spinoza, we'd come to his conclusion that "all things [are] just as necessary" as a true mathematical proposition. "Unfortunately, people did not come to see this at all." Fortunately, I say, lest we stop trying to be the change we want to see in the world. He'd say not to sweat that, if we want change then we necessarily will do what we think we must to achieve it... but we can't bank on making a difference that confounds the "whole order." And I say, again, I'm banking on it.
This God-intoxicated man has many secular and atheistic intellectual descendants, who are tarred by "no stigma in economically developed countries except the United States." Still, "he believed that he believed in God." Maybe Einstein did too, Gottlieb's judgment that he was "probably just being diplomatic" notwithstanding.
John Locke's empiricism overstated the blankness of our slates, and relied too heavily on memory as a guarantor of personal identity. Thomas Reid was not in his league, but may still have had a better idea with his overlapping memories thesis. Until we become cyborg, total recall will not be an option.
"Locke's grand work," said C.S. Peirce, "was substantially this: Men must think for themselves."
Thomas Jefferson may have overstated the case for Locke's influence on the founding generation of the American republic, but if he influenced the sage of Monticello it would seem to follow that in fact his shadow has loomed large. A direct line can be drawn from his social contract to John Rawls's, and from there to the current generation of progressive politics in America... to say nothing of his namesake on Lost. The authority of a rulers derives from the freely-contracted consent of the governed, or from nowhere. It doesn't come down from heaven nor out of the barrel of a gun.
Locke "greatly admired the achievements that his friends in the Royal Society had made in physics, chemistry, and medicine, and he sought to clear the ground for future developments by providing a theory of knowledge compatible with such carefully-conducted study of nature. The goal of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was to establish epistemological foundations for the new science by examining the reliability, scope, and limitations of human knowledge in contrast with with the pretensions of uncritical belief, borrowed opinion, and mere superstition. Since the sciences had already demonstrated their practical success, Locke tried to apply their Baconian methods to the pursuit of his own philosophical aims. In order to discover how the human understanding achieves knowledge, we must trace that knowledge to its origins in our experience."
The Essay Concerning Human Understanding sounded the Enlightenment keynotes: think for yourself, question conventional and inherited wisdom, stop quibbling and splitting hairs about angels on pinheads (etc.)
Samuel Johnson's stone-kicking refutation of Bishop Berkeley's idealism is usually met with derision, but as a practical response I place it in the same category as Diogenes' ambulatory refutation of Zeno's paradoxes. Works for me.
Berkeley's idealistic immaterialism ("in which he employed strictly empiricist principles in defense of the view that only minds or spirits exist") deserves some derision, though it also makes a perverse kind of sense if we don't repudiate Locke's representational realist assumption about ideas and their putative inferential sources. Better to repudiate, and admit that experience gives us the world - not just ideas of a world. But it gives us a world in need of elaboration and refinement, which was always the point of reflecting on experience in the first place.
Better also to repudiate the idea that being and perceiving are one. But, Berkeley's Three Dialogoues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) is still an entertaining read. "Here Berkeley spoke through Philonous ("Mind-lover"), who tries to convince his reluctant friend Hylas ("Woody") that it is only by rejecting the artificial philosophical concept of material substance that skepticism can be finally defeated and the truths of common-sense secured."
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