‘Philosophy Now’ – Achilles & Aristotle

Achilles, Ethics, Life, Philosophy, Psychology

Ye gods!

I’m really enjoying Terence Green’s ‘Philosophical Haikus’ in Philosophy Now… Bitesized chunks of wit and wisdom which make you think. This month’s is on the controversial economist Friedrich Hayek.

The full text is down below (and I’m hoping Terence and Philosophy Now will forgive me as I do recommend a subscription to what one of my favourite reads).

But the bits which got me thinking are these:

…humankind is possessed of a singular desire to control: to control our environment, to control society, to control other people (cf Nietzsche’s will-to-power). Control is hoped to be a way of ridding ourselves of uncertainty; and more than anything else, human beings are troubled by uncertainty.

This speaks to the worries and anxieties we all endlessly lock onto: the Existentialist ‘lack’, Buddhist ‘clinging’ and the endless ‘control dramas’ of interpersonal relations. We are both bored by and possessive about what we have, fear what we don’t know and worry constantly about other people and the future.

We’re all about control.. are we beyond help?

But, said Hayek, this belief [in control] is just hubris – the sort of arrogant over-confidence for which the Greek gods were always punishing people. In the absence of the gods, we’re punished by the circumstances we create.

Maybe the answer is, mentally, to bring back those Greek gods – capricious, mercurial, tempters and temptresses, spiteful and unpredictable; but ultimately (kind of) on our side.

If life was unavoidably a rollercoaster ride of being tossed about by Zeus and the others, perhaps we might enjoy it more. Let go of the illusion of control and it’s unalloyed fun when it’s going well and less painful when things go badly; it’s all in the lap of the gods.

After all, chance seems to be beating control hands down in 2020.

Amor fati as Nietzsche said.

Philosophical Haiku

Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992)
by Terence Green

“Reason’s poverty,
Man’s desire to control –
This road walks the serf.”

Hayek’s reputation as an economist and political philosopher has suffered on account of his popular but vitriolic and unbalanced rant against state power, The Road to Serfdom (1944). In it he argued that even mild, well-intentioned attempts at central planning will inevitably slide towards authoritarianism. The book was appropriated by the worst zealots of neoliberalism. But there remains much wisdom in the fundamental points he returned to time and again.

The Enlightenment bequeathed to us a seemingly unshakable confidence in the capacity of human reason. Reason sets us apart from the beasts and gives us the power to shape our world after our own designs. It matters not that history is littered with the burnt-out wrecks of infallible schemes for the creation of the ideal society: we still cling to the belief that by the application of reason we can diagnose the illness and prescribe the cure for the human condition. Indeed, this belief is the very foundation of modern government. Every policy a government introduces is predicated on rational analysis, with the assumption that the policy will produce the desired effects. Along with this faith in reason, Hayek claims, humankind is possessed of a singular desire to control: to control our environment, to control society, to control other people (cf Nietzsche’s will-to-power). Control is hoped to be a way of ridding ourselves of uncertainty; and more than anything else, human beings are troubled by uncertainty. We wish to alleviate the pain of not knowing, and believe we have the ability to do so. But, said Hayek, this belief is just hubris – the sort of arrogant over-confidence for which the Greek gods were always punishing people. In the absence of the gods, we’re punished by the circumstances we create.

For Hayek in 1944 there was a broader context – of fascist and communist totalitarian regimes, that justified their murderous actions on the basis that they knew how to create the perfect society. Even if you start out with impeccably admirable intentions, any government that seeks to reshape society on the basis of some ideal blueprint will risk turning its citizens into slaves in order to realise that ideal. There cannot be a single right way to live or to organise society; and even if there were, we can never know enough or be wise enough to bring it into existence. It’s a thought worth pondering.
© Terence Green 2020

Death, History, Life

No Worries

I took the redoubtable Chris Croft up on his offer of a ‘Year of Happiness’ emails over Christmas. I told a friend, and she did the same.

She emailed me last week as below:

This made me smile – in truth 2020 has been a car-crash from start to finish. And where we are now: locked down and cooped-up – as the economy stops dead and we improvise field hospitals – is simply incredible.

Chris’s advice in this week’s happiness email is to ‘worry less’. For once I very nearly didn’t bother to read on.

But as always he has a point; and a practical suggestion… make a list.

To start with, make a list all of your worries. There’s something very therapeutic about writing things down, because it gives you permission to get them out of your brain, and that takes them further away from you, where they seem less important, and more easy to work on and to kill them off.

Usually, my list of worries would be the same somewhat improbable ‘sum of all fears’ one it’s always been:

Losing my job;
Not having enough money;
Having to sell the house;
The whole family confronting me and saying: ‘Dad, you’ve completely failed us.’

Thanks to Coronavirus though these are bang on the £££money – compounded by the very real fear of the lack of it.

But now I can add:

Facing a riot/riots at work;
Facing a riot in our street;
Having to stop paying people;
Having to furlough people (whole new worry!);
Having to make people redundant;
Having to hold onto people’s money who want it back;
Having to pay other people for things we are no longer sure we can afford;
Loved ones getting ill;
Running out of food;
Not being allowed out to walk the dog;
There never being any jobs of the sort I do ever again
My pension disappearing so I can never escape work I hate.

That about captures it! A proper list of worries.

So what to do? Paraphrasing Chris:

But what if the worry really is about something serious? What can you do about that? And the answer is nothing, there IS nothing you can do. Just tell yourself, it’s going to be fine. Keep saying it till you believe it, and finally, put it into context, it’s not the end of the world if it happens.

Unless of course it is… But I was helped today by some useful historical context; reminded of my old friend Michel de Montaigne by an article in Philosophy Now on his great friend Etienne de la Boétie (1530-1563).

Montaigne’s Essays talk of French life in the sixteenth century, in a way which is accessible, modern and make it seem much like life today. More letters and fewer screens back then; but the same dramas of human affairs.

Except… they were in the middle of a bloody civil war of all-against-all.

As La Boétie describes it:

The result: “almost universal hate and malevolence between the king’s subjects, which in some places feeds secretly, in others declares itself more openly, but everywhere produces sad results… It divides citizens, neighbours, friends, parents, brothers, fathers and children, husband and wife.”

What followed was a series of massacres starting in Paris on St. Bartholomew’s Day, spreading to twelve other cities: Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Bourges, Rouen, Orléans, Meaux, Angers, La Charité, Saumur, Gaillac and Troyes; and killing c10,000 people.

The UK’s WWII ‘Blitz spirit’ and Dunkirk rhetoric is getting more than a bit tired, but I’d rather take Covid-19 than face religious slaughter.

My worries – like everyone’s – are very real; but pretty much every age which precedes us has known worse.

Onwards.

Life, Philosophy, Work

William of Ockham

A nice piece I read this morning in Philosophy Now, contains a quote which largely summarises my endeavours at work this week:

It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer.

Ascribed to William of Ockham, who lived from c1285 to 1348 – it is as true in the modern world of work as it no doubt was in a medieval monastery.

Here’s a little of what writer Terence Green has to say about Ockham in Philosophy Now [which at just £17 for a year’s subscription would comfortably pass Green’s excise the excess Ockham test]:

William from Ockham (or Occam), an otherwise obscure village in Surrey, England, was the greatest philosopher of the fourteenth century. Known as the Doctor Invincibilis, he didn’t care whom he offended, and with his rough and ready style of argument, he offended plenty of people – which eventually got him into big trouble.

He became a Franciscan monk, an order famous for its commitment to poverty. But this meant he was at risk of having idle hands (one of poverty’s unacknowledged benefits), and so doing the Devil’s work. To avoid this calamity, he wrote widely on logic, physics, and theology.

Today he is most often associated with ‘Ockham’s Razor’, his idea that explanations should be as simple as possible; alternative formulations of this principle include ‘Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity’ and ‘It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer’. Frankly, this is a good rule of thumb whatever you’re thinking about.

Having already been condemned as a heretic in 1326 for having unorthodox views, since he argued against Aquinas’s philosophy, he didn’t help himself when in 1328 he sided with those who argued against the Pope that Jesus and his disciples didn’t own any property. This was obviously a matter of considerable importance to the Pope, who owned a lot of property.

Seeing what was coming (imprisonment and execution), William took refuge with the Holy Roman Emperor in Bavaria. Excommunicated, but feeling a bit safer, he wrote polemics against the Pope’s claim to temporal power, thus emulating Dante.

The invincible teacher was finally beaten around 1347/48, probably by the Black Death. The Pope had died earlier, in 1334, still owning lots of property.

© Terence Green 2019

Children, Life, Philosophy, Psychology, Work

Laughter; the best medicine

I’m more a man for observational humour than for jokes; but perhaps the joke has been on me…

British humour tends to the downbeat. Ironic, sarcastic and even cynical – there’s always the risk of us talking everything down. With my new optimistic élan, I’m doing my best to avoid all that.

But if you can’t ‘bitch and moan’, where are the laughs at work? Our place is dead clever, but also dead earnest. I realised the other day I hadn’t laughed all week…

Thank goodness Philosophy Now spurred me into action with their humour edition!

Two strong explanations of humour are the ‘Superiority’ and the ‘Incongruity’ theories.

Anya Steinbeck explains the first:

“The so-called superiority theory is prominent among explanations of humour. In fact, so prominent that it has been championed by philosophical heavyweights such as Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes and Bergson.

Thomas Hobbes’ formulation of the superiority theory is this: “Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own, formerly.”

If Hobbes is right, humour becomes a tool for making ourselves feel better by thinking of others or our own past selves as inferior. So if Ted is a terrible golfer he can overcome the pain of this truth by making fun of Fred who is an even worse golfer.

Plato believes this kind of humour to be damaging: “Taken generally the ridiculous is a certain kind of evil, specifically a vice.” It counts as a vice because it is symptomatic of a lack of critical self-awareness as we ridicule others.

I would suggest that the two most serious problems with hierarchical jokes are these:

1) Firstly, as Plato says, the aesthetic form of a joke form is just so attractive and appealing that we may not pay enough critical attention to the moral content.

2) Secondly, far from having a dialogue function, jokes can be conversation stoppers. As Theodor Adorno says: “He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.”

In other words, humour is, next to its wonderful properties, also a great potential tool for manipulation. Dress them up as a joke and you can get away with outrageous statements.

So what of the ‘Incongruity’ theory? The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy gives us this:

“The first philosopher to use the word incongruous to analyze humor was James Beattie (1779). Our laughter “seems to arise from the view of things incongruous united in the same assemblage.” The cause of humorous laughter is “two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage, as acquiring a sort of mutual relation from the peculiar manner in which the mind takes notice of them.”

Beattie may be right but he’s not exactly got us rolling in the aisles with that description.

And it gets worse… Given his well deserved reputation for seriousness, perhaps not surprising that Kant is stronger on theory than gags…

“In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction).”

“Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment. Therefore its cause must consist in the influence of the representation upon the body, and the reflex effect of this upon the mind.”

Kant illustrates with this story:

“An Indian at the table of an Englishman in Surat, when he saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer turned into froth and overflowing, testified his great astonishment with many exclamations. When the Englishman asked him, “What is there in this to astonish you so much?” he answered, “I am not at all astonished that it should flow out, but I do wonder how you ever got it in.”

Following that cracker he serves up another:

“The heir of a rich relative wished to arrange for an imposing funeral, but he lamented that he could not properly succeed; ‘for’ (said he) ‘the more money I give my mourners to look sad, the more cheerful they look!’”

Whilst I wouldn’t recommend he gives up his day job, I’m with Kant. When it comes to making people laugh, I like incongruity.

Superiority all too easily leads to the worst type of humour – arrogance, trashing others and talking people down. Now I know what I’m looking for, I realise I’ve seen plenty of ‘superiority’ humour about. It’s not pretty.

Keep it incongruous I say. As my boy did with his little joke in the car this morning; it made me laugh out loud:

“What did one rebel sausage say to the other?”

“May the fork be in you!”

Art, Language, Writing

Obscurantism

I congratulated a colleague yesterday on some lovely prose. His concise, interesting and informative writing made me happily read about 80 Moments which changed history – learning a lot in the process.

This morning, I read another piece of quasi-Academic writing; but which was much more of a slog. It was saying some important things, but in a rather portentous – even pretentious style. The few key points, could have been made a lot more simply.

Then, by happenstance I moved onto to a super article on ‘Obscurantism’ in the equally super Philosophy Now magazine. The question it poses is: when is being complex and hard to decode legitimate, useful; even necessary – and when is it plain unhelpful.

Here’s some of what Siobhan Lyons has to say:

‘Obscurantism’ can indeed be an effective manoeuvre, provoking greater thought-processes and intellectual investigation.

This couldn’t be illustrated more clearly than in Rembrandt’s The Holy Family with a Curtain (1646). I am less concerned with the religious meanings of this painting than I am about the curtain itself; a seemingly innocuous, pointless part of the work, and yet it provokes the viewer to wonder what lies behind it.

The curtain, blood red and purposefully pulled partly to the side, teases the viewer, offering not even a partial glimpse of what it completely obscures. The Virgin is plainly seen; and there is Joseph, semi-obscured in the background, near the curtain; but whatever is behind the curtain itself is left unanswered.

The painting thus features three forms of creative depiction: the Virgin’s clear visibility, Joseph’s semi-obscured form, and the curtain itself, a symbol of obscurantism, or rather, of the ability of obscurity to be creative, by emphasising the ambiguity that so often confronts us, which may however be the source of great art, and indeed philosophy.

For the greatest philosophies are aware of their own limits – aware of when they cannot answer the questions their philosophers ask. As Wittgenstein stated, language must be beset by certain limits.

So obscurity in language can be seen as not always self-defeating, but, ironically, as sometimes illuminating. Moreover, if language were a purely functional tool for communication, we would cease to have literature as we understand it.

If all curtains in all art were pulled completely aside to expose what lies behind them, then the need for imagination would deteriorate. This also explains why good writers are those who not only have a masterful grasp of language, but who also know how to pull it apart and put it back together in different ways.

Nicely put. Not everything in life, thought or Art can be expressed simply; and some things can’t be expressed at all. The art is in knowing which. But also, I think, in having a try. Only practice makes more perfect.