Berkeley, Voltaire & Leibniz, Hume & Rousseau; and finite time

Today in CoPhi it's Berkeley, Voltaire & Leibniz, Hume, & Rousseau. LISTEN...
U@d: LISTEN (this post)

The English poet Alexander Pope declared that "whatever is, is right." The German polymath and Sufficient Reasoner Leibniz agreed. The French parodist Voltaire, whose sense of justice Pope's and Leibniz's view offended, wrote Candide to ridicule it. All is for the best?  This is the best possible world? Give us a break. Open your eyes. Look at Lisbon, 1755. And don't just pontificate and theorize, do something for suffering humanity. Cultivate your garden. God (whom Voltaire the Deist accepted but did not depend on to fix what's broken) won't do it for you.

David Hume questioned everything, including biological perfection and intelligent design. He said we should resist to call miraculous even the most improbable natural events. As I like to say, he'd have had a quick answer to Al Michael's famous call at the 1980 Olympics, "Do you believe in miracles?" Nope. There's no law against beating the Soviet national hockey team, though of course it's a marvelous achievement nonetheless. Same for most improbable medical recoveries. Same, if we survive the pandemic and the Trump adminisrtation.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau said we're born free but everywhere are in figurative chains of constraining human law and civil authority, but can liberate ourselves by submitting to what's best for the whole community. That's the General Will, which strikes Rousseau's critics as a dangerous blank check for authoritarians who purport to know the public interest better than the public knows itself. That's not really setting the bar very high though, is it? And doesn't J-J R have a point, that I don't want to pay my taxes but the bigger part of me does, and knows that we must.

Bishop George Berkeley the idealist/immaterialist made lexicographer Samuel Johnson angry enough to kick a rock, but that did not effectively "refute" Berkeley's claim that what we know of rocks and feet and pain in toes that impact rocks all exists on an ideal plane. It strikes most everybody nowadays as a ridiculous proposal, but it is more consistent with John Locke's claim that our ideas mediate our world. To be is to be perceived? Well, maybe it's to be perceivable. And maybe it's enough that you and I are the potential percipients. Maybe the quad doesn't depend on God. But maybe it and we do all depend on each other.

In A&P today  we consider "the value of our finite time" and a side of Karl Marx rarely acknowledged by his western critics, his commitment to individual freedom. "'The free development of individualities' is, says Martin Hagglund, the foundation for his critique of capitalism and religion." That squares with young Marx's interest in Epicurean philosophy, though not so much with Soviet Marxist ideology.

We're often instructed to "do what you love," but Hagglund's realm of necessity/realm of freedom discussion raises the question of whether most people in a capitalist society like ours can ever realistically aspire to do the work they love, when leaving a job they despise is too fraught with the risk of destitution, unemployment, loss of health coverage, and so on.

And so, in the context of that question a book called Do the Work You Love -- highlighted in an email from Tom Butler-Bowdon I just opened headlined "What to read in a time of loss and panic" -- takes on particular relevance. If "love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness," and our system boxes too many of us us into settling for work we merely tolerate, are we (even those of us who do love our work) really "spiritually free"?

One of the reasons I like Hagglund's book, as I've indicated, is his fondness for walking illustrations and metaphors. If I have to walk two hours a day to fetch water, I'm stuck in the realm of necessity. But "if I enjoy walking two hours a day as an intrinsic part of a fulfilling life, my activity is in the realm of freedom." And so I do. The nectar is in the journey.  

It is a "fatal philosophical mistake" to conflate the quest for self-satisfaction with egoism, and thus to  subvert and deny our social nature. We then see cooperation and mutual support as possessing merely instrumental value and not something a rational person would naturally embrace. We won't then see helping others, rather than always and only helping ourselves, as humane and normal. But helping one another through crisis, as people keep saying during this execrable pandemic, is precisely what we need to be doing -- not because it gratifies the isolated ego, but because it expresses our deepest identity as social beings.

Marx argued that the core problem of capitalism is not a relative few greed-head monopolists, a few villainous malefactors of great wealth, but "the social form of capitalism itself." If individual capitalists are greedy, blame them for their greediness, sure; but recognize the system as one which encourages and rewards greed.  That's the change of perspective that can foment real reform or even, if we dare say it, revolution.