Happy New Year to all my readers!
Thursday, December 29, 2022
Monday, December 26, 2022
Who I am as a philosopher
At the end of December many people reflect on the past year; on what they have done then or on what happened in the world. I am not that kind of person. I prefer to reflect, when I feel a need for it; not because it’s a certain date on the calendar. However, if I have the feeling to look back and this happens to be the time that many people do, let it be so. So, after having been busy in philosophy for many years, the question came up in me: Where do I stand now in philosophy? I started as a sociologist. Then I gradually switched to philosophy, to that extent that it became my passion and that I wrote a PhD thesis on a philosophical theme. Initially, my mind was in the grip of the philosophy of action and I was interested in methodology, too. But I have always had a broad interest and my interest in the philosophy of action became an interest in the philosophy of mind and action. In the meantime, also Montaigne had been added to my field of study. So it was for a long time, till more and more themes were added to my mental library. Then little by little my interest in action theory and in some mind themes faded into the background, and other themes came more and more to the fore, so that nowadays I seldom write yet about my old themes. But need I tell you all this? For certainly, as an avid reader of my blogs you’ll have seen this change.
When old interests fade away and new ones come instead, at a certain moment the question arises: Where do I stand as a philosopher? In fact, it is the question: Who am I as a philosopher? This question is not as simple as it looks at first sight. For it is a qualification of the question: Who am I? And there is not a simple I. The I can be looked at from different sides, and different positions will give different replies. For example, George Herbert Mead famously distinguished between the Self, the I and the Me. The Self comprises the attitudes of the group or community a person belongs to towards this person and towards one another in what they do. The I is the response of the person to the attitudes of others leading to a self-image. The Me consists of the attitudes of others towards the person as seen by him or herself. The essence of this theory is the relationship of the person – the I of my question “Who am I as a philosopher?” – towards the other. Especially, it is the place of the person among his or her relevant others. But if this is true, then I can reformulate my question into the question: What is my place among other philosophers? Or: How do I compare with them? However, these are still difficult questions, for there are many philosophers in the world. How to determine then where I stand? Even to determine my place among the most important philosophers would be quite a job.
In order to simplify my task and to find a quick answer, I searched on the internet and I found a website that answers my question, since it gives a Philosopher Personality Test. The test places you between seven very different philosophers: Nietzsche, Kant, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Epicurus and Aristotle. True, this is only a very small selection of the great number of important philosophers in the world. Personally, I would like to know how Wittgensteinian I am or how I compare with Montaigne, but this is what I found. I’ll spare you other details; you can find them on the website just given, but I did the test, which consists of 35 questions, and what did I get? My views are closest to those of Aristotle! See the picture at the top of this blog, which is the result of the test. How happy I am! For Aristotle is one of my favourite philosophers and the Stagirite would have been my first choice from the seven philosophers, would I have been asked whom I most would like to be. I would have been unhappy to be a kind of Nietzsche or Plato and just they were most different from me.
Should I really be happy with the result? People like to develop, but have I developed? Thirty years ago, I wrote my PhD thesis based on the action theory of Georg Henrik von Wright. This theory is fundamentally Aristotelian, as von Wright explains. Does it mean that I haven’t developed since I began to philosophize? You can see it that way, indeed. But to my mind, I have developed, as I explained above. Wasn’t it for that reason that I wanted to do the test? However, there is a hard core within me; it is the philosopher who I fundamentally am. This core is mainly Aristotelian. Yes, it is Epicurean as well, but then not so much philosophically but in my daily life.
And what kind of philosopher are you? Do you want to find out this, too? Maybe the test is a nice play for you to do on New Year’s Eve. For although the makers of the test “have strived to make [it] as reliable and valid as possible by subjecting this test to statistical controls and validation”, as so many internet tests, in the end it is fun (with a serious core).
Happy New Year
Thursday, December 22, 2022
Monday, December 19, 2022
The blog machine
Sometimes I haven’t much time to write a blog, like today. Then I wish that someone else would write it or maybe that I had a machine that could do the job for me. As for today, I had the idea to write about Christmas. But what to write that is a little bit original? So much has been written already about Christmas and each year I have already written a blog about Christmas. But then I remembered that a blog machine really exists. Recently, I had read about it in a newspaper. It is called OpenAI. Why not give it a try?
The website of OpenAI was not difficult to find. Here it is: https://openai.com/ It pretends that it can write articles and essays and also, of course, blogs. So, I made an account and logged in. However, my problem to write a blog quickly was not yet solved, for it is not enough to order the website to write a blog as such but it needs a theme to write about. When I wrote that I wanted to have a blog about Christmas, I got a vague text that everybody could write. I didn’t need a “blog machine” for this. I had to specify my question. Then I got an idea. Now a is war going on between Russia and Ukraine, two nations in which Christianity is an important religion. But Christmas is a feast of peace, which is in contradiction to war, even to that extent that warring nations often organise a truce during Christmas. Now it is so that in Ukraine and Russia not Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are the major religions, but Orthodox Christianity is, and Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas not on the 25th of December but on 7 January. But I needed a blog about Christmas and actually the date it is celebrated is irrelevant. Therefore, I ordered the blog machine:
Write a text about Christmas at the frontline between Ukraine and Russia in the war between both countries.
This is what I got (unchanged):
“Christmas at the frontline between Ukraine and Russia in the war between both countries is a somber affair. The trenches are silent, with the only sound coming from the wind and the occasional distant thud of a mortar or the crackle of rifle fire. The bitter cold of winter has settled in and there is no respite from the harsh conditions. This Christmas, there is no festive cheer to be found at the frontline. Instead, there is a grim reminder of the human cost of the war as soldiers from both sides huddle in their trenches, hoping that the fighting will not resume in earnest. For many, this will be the only chance to rest and reflect on the past year, and the suffering it has brought. Though there is no room for celebration in the trenches, the soldiers of both sides still maintain a fragile respect for each other. Small acts of kindness, such as trading Christmas gifts, have been observed on both sides. This serves as a reminder that, despite the conflict, there is still a common humanity that binds us all. Though Christmas at the frontline between Ukraine and Russia may be a solemn affair, it is also a reminder of the courage and resilience of people on both sides. It is a reminder that, even in the darkest of times, hope and compassion can still exist.”
Not bad, isn’t it? Especially the end is realistic. There the text talks about peaceful contacts between soldiers on both sides of the frontline and about trading gifts. Didn’t this also happen here and there along the front during Christmas 1914 in the First World War? Then soldiers on the allied side heard German soldiers sing “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” (Silent night, holy night), while the Germans heard Christmas carols on the allied side. This made the soldiers realize that their enemies were as human as they themselves were and that they had the same feelings and faith. And so the enemies contacted each other, first hesitatingly, but then they left the trenches and talked with each other, and even exchanged little gifts and played football with each other. It was the beginning of an unofficial truce. The army command tried to stop it, but nevertheless here and there along the front the truce lasted up to two weeks. One year later, strict measures were taken to prevent a new truce and during Christmas 1915 it was war “as usual”.
How nice would it be that now in 2022 there would be such an informal truce in the Ukrainian-Russian War and that now it would lead to a real truce and maybe to the end of the war. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?
But I let my imagination run away and actually I am writing not about a Christmas truce but about a blog machine. As you have seen, now there are machines that can free you from the task to write an article or a blog and maybe even a book. So, in case I have no time to write a blog or want to take a day off, I can simply go to the OpenAI website and let it write my blog. Gradually this blog machine will become better and soon you’ll see no difference any longer between a human-written blog and a machine-written blog. How useful would it be for me! But should I be happy with it? For if this trend will go on, soon the machines will outrun the human beings on this earth. They’ll even need no longer an order that tells them what to do. Machines can live their own lives. Then human beings will be superfluous on this earth. They can die out and nobody will miss them. But aren’t we yet already busy working on our own extinction?
Merry Christmas
Thursday, December 15, 2022
Monday, December 12, 2022
Travelling: “I know what I fly from, but not what I seek”
Sometimes, when reading Montaigne, I think that I simply can quote him in order to describe how I myself think about a certain theme. Just change some words, modernize the situation described a little bit and you get my thought. Take travelling. My wife and I often travel without a real plan what to do and where to go. That is, we have determined a region where to go, a date when to leave and one when to return (and even the return date can change during the trip) and then we go. Usually, we have some vague idea what to visit, but what we’ll really do is usually only determined when we have arrived in our region of destination. Often we don’t know in the morning where’ll we’ll sleep in the evening. We can even change the region where to go during the trip. So on our way to Slovakia we ended in Switzerland, for at the end of our first day we discovered that it wasn’t only hot in Slovakia, but that the heatwave would last at least a week, while in Switzerland the weather was fine and cool. I think that Montaigne was also the kind of person who liked this way of travelling very much. Anyway, when I read his travel diary I got the impression that he let the progress of the trip depend on the quality of the landscape and the cities he passed and on the persons he happened to meet. Of course, much was different for a traveller in Montaigne’s days. Then a traveller had to go by foot, horse, coach or cart, while today people travel by car, train or plane and sometimes by bike and only rarely yet by foot. Montaigne preferred to travel by horse and I am like him in the sense that I made my best trips by bike or car, the modern variations of horse and coach.
Nevertheless, before I leave my mood is always: Why should I go? Why this trouble? Isn’t it good enough here at home? For, as Montaigne tells us in essay III-9 of the Essays, titled “Of Vanity”, “I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek.” The future is uncertain; I don’t know what is waiting me. Therefore, so Montaigne, “I am hard to be got out … I take as much pains in little as in great attempts, and am as solicitous to equip myself for a short journey, if but to visit a neighbor, as for the longest voyage.” Even so, Montaigne doesn’t stay at home, for if others “tell me that there may be as little soundness amongst foreigners, and that their manners are no better than ours: I first reply, that it is hard to be believed: ‘There are so many forms of crime!’; secondly, that it is always gain to change an ill condition for one that is uncertain; and that the ills of others ought not to afflict us so much as our own.” In other words, you think that at home it is best; you think “home sweet home”. But is it really so? There are many ways of life, and maybe we can learn from them. So let’s go. And once my wife and I have closed the door of our house behind us, everything is different. We are on our way and being on the way is a different kind of feeling. “Being once upon the road, I [Montaigne] hold out as well as the best.”
Travelling in the proper sense is not going somewhere but it is pure going. The real travel has no destination. It is moving, even when you stop for a rest, for sightseeing or for the night. “I neither undertake [a travel] to return, nor to finish it: my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me.” Sometimes it happens that you pass a place where you would like to stay longer: “I have seen places enough a great way off, where I could have wished to have stayed.” And sometimes Montaigne really did. For instance, he stayed in Rome for months, though not without a break. Also then he couldn’t withstand the inner pressure to travel. He left Rome for some time for a trip through central Italy. Although my wife and I never made such a long stop during our travels as Montaigne did in Rome, once we see a reason to stay somewhere longer, we do. But each travel has an end, alas. During his famous trip through Europe, Montaigne was called back from Rome by the French King, who had appointed him mayor of Bordeaux. Montaigne left reluctantly. Nevertheless, also his homeward journey was yet a real travel: not a straightforward horse ride to Bordeaux, but staying here, staying there, until he could no longer postpone his return, since the king was calling him. For my wife and I usually the date of return has been planned, for instance, because we had booked a ferry already before our trip. But in the absence of such an urge, also for us the date of return is not really fixed. This return then is always a bit double: a longing to be home again but also a wish to stay on the move. Once at home there is always a nostalgia for the travel that has ended and a reluctance to return to the stream of daily life. It lasts a few days and then the rat race of “real” life appears to have been taken up again. This lasts till we think again: Where shall we go? Where will our next travel be? But also this is double, for then the mind starts to think: Why this trouble? Isn’t it good enough here at home? I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek. But isn’t that the sense of travelling?
Thursday, December 08, 2022
Monday, December 05, 2022
Deleting monuments
Budapest, Hungary: The Memento Park
Recently in the Netherlands, and especially at the Leiden University, a discussion was going on, whether it was allowed to remove a painting because you don’t agree with the representation. Briefly, a painting showing smoking professors of the university board had been removed because some people didn’t agree with its contents: It was not acceptable that a university board existed of only old men who, moreover, were smoking. In other words, the painting was not in agreement with the present values. Note that the painting had been made in 1976 and that it showed the actual board of the Leiden University in that year. Although the painting has been hung back in the meantime, the question remains: Must a piece of art be removed, if you don’t agree anymore with its representation? But actually, the problem is wider than only about art, for also monuments are often under discussion, because people don’t agree any longer with what they express. For instance, in the USA statues of slave holders are under discussion, in the UK the question was raised whether a statue of Cecil Rhodes, a representative of colonialism in Southern Africa, should be removed from the University of Oxford, and in the Netherlands there was a controversy about a statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the founder of Batavia (Jakarta) and former governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, who harshly ruled this colony. And at the moment in the Baltic States monuments are destroyed that had been placed there in Soviet times.
Often there are good reasons to remove a controversial monument – in this blog it includes also a piece of art –or to change its context, but often there is also much against doing so. So let’s see why a monument should be removed:
- The monument is considered to represent a former oppressor or it is not in agreement with the views of the present regime. That’s why Soviet monuments are removed in the Baltic states, but also why in Hong Kong recently monuments have been removed that commemorate the killings on the Tian An Men Square in Beijing in 1989. However, already when the Soviet monuments were placed, many people detested them.
- The view what the monument represents has changed during the years. So, the view on Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Cecil Rhodes and slaveholders have changed through the years and nowadays nobody would make monuments for them anymore. However, also when these monuments were made, they were often already controversial.
- The monument as such is not under discussion but the maker is. I discussed such a case already three years ago in my blog on “degenerate art”: a painting in the room of the former German chancellor Angela Merkel was removed, since the painter appeared to have been a Nazi.
Undoubtedly, there are more reasons that a monument might be removed, but I think that these points make clear that removing a monument, because the idea it represents has changed, is not just a matter of correcting a false point of view. If that were the case, there would be nothing against destroying a “false” monument. However, by destroying a false monument not only a supposedly false point of view is corrected, but also a little bit of a once accepted view on the state of affairs in the world is destroyed, so a part of history. The idea that humans are historically developing beings is denied by cutting off a part of the past. For that’s what actually happens when a monument is removed. One does as if not seeing, is not being; as if it never existed; as if we are not like that. Moreover, a chance to learn from the past is destroyed, with the possibility that mistakes of the past will be repeated again in future. On the other hand, some monuments were already controversial at the moment they were placed, and this makes the question even more complicated, for why should we maintain what was already controversial from the beginning? Another complicating factor is that a monument in my sense can also be a piece of art or have artistic value.
Here I shall not elaborate these points, but I want to propose some possible solutions:
- Monuments can be removed and then destroyed. Sometimes this is the best solution, but in a sense it is destroying history, as I just explained.
- Monuments can be moved to a more appropriate place. This can be a less striking place (so not any longer on a central square but in a park), a museum or other appropriate place. For instance, in Budapest, monuments from Soviet times have been collected somewhere outside the town in an open-air museum where everybody can see them: The Memento Park.
- Monuments can be adapted in some way or a plaquette can be added describing the context of its origin and what’s wrong with it. There are many ways to re-interpret the original representation of a monument.
- A monument can be transformed into a new monument, a “counter-monument”. This is what happened with a monument of the former dictator Alfred Stroessner of Paraguay. The old monument is used as material for a new monument or it is fit in a new monument, while parts of the old monument are still visible.
Removing monuments, including pieces of arts, is re-interpreting and rewriting history. This can be a tricky affair, for what to do with the old monument? Destroy it? But that’s destroying a part of your history with all its dangerous sides. But as I have shown, there are several solutions that do right to both the past and the present. Anyway, monuments are fundamentally political, but society changes and what is “innocent” today may be “unacceptable” tomorrow. However, today re-interpreted monuments may tomorrow again be unacceptable.
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