Idleness

The side room of Montaigne’s library in the tower of his castle,
where he wrote his Essays. Left on the wall he wrote that he
resigned from his job on his birthday.

In 1571, Montaigne decided to resign from his job as a counsellor at the Parliament (court of justice) of Bordeaux and to retire to his castle. This was possible because he had become a rich man. After the death of his father in 1568, he had inherited the Castle of Montaigne and the entire estate that belonged to it. Now he could do what he liked and he didn’t need the income of a job any longer; a job that he didn’t like, because of all the scheming and intriguing by the other counsellors. Now he was a free man. Now he had time to read the books that he had inherited from his late friend Étienne de La Boétie. And he had time to manage his estate. But since he didn’t like the latter he left this to others as much as possible. And reading all day, every day, day in day out? To read is a pleasure, but doing nothing else is something different. It’s not what you can do all the time; at least, most of us cannot. Anyway, Montaigne could not. He had thought that “I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full leisure to entertain and divert itself, which I now hoped it might henceforth do, as being by time become more settled and mature…”. However, soon he became bored. He discovered that being too isolated from the world is not good for you. Moreover, he discovered that his mind begun to develop all kinds of strange ideas and fantasies, ideas without coherence and context. Or as Montaigne writes himself: His mind had become “like a horse that has broke from his rider, who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman would put him to…” and it had become full of “chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design”.
Montaigne solved the problem that he lived too isolated by returning to the world, as we know from his life history. Montaigne began to travel again, inside and outside France. And he started to network again, for Montaigne had also political aspirations. Although these political aspirations didn’t materialize in the way he had in his mind (it seems that he wanted to become France’s ambassador in Rome), it made that he became a mediator between Henry, the King of Navarre, (who would later become King Henry IV of France) and the French King Henry III; and it made that he became appointed mayor of Bordeaux (which he accepted reluctantly).
Montaigne solved the problem that his mind began to run away with him in a very different way: He began to reflect on what happened in his mind. Or as Montaigne writes himself: He began to “contemplate [the] strangeness and absurdity [of the ideas that whirled through his mind]”, and to write them down, together with his reflections on these ideas, “hoping in time to make it [=the mind] ashamed of itself.” This resulted in his Essays, which would become one of the most famous and most read books in the history of philosophy, a book that is still widely read, more than 400 years later.
Montaigne tells us what made him write his Essays, in “Of Idleness”, which is the eighth essay in Book I. Actually, it should have been the first essay, for it is a kind of statement why Montaigne began to write his work (beside his “To the reader”, the preface of the Essays). That’s why this essay is so important. But there is more. This essay tells us also something else: Humans cannot live by doing nothing. Humans cannot live isolated from the world. If you didn’t know it yet, you’ll have learned it now, in a time that a pandemic rules the world and one lockdown after the other is proclaimed. Man is a social being and when she or he is isolated from the world or isolates himself from the world, soon the mind begins to behave like a runaway horse and to develop all kinds of strange ideas. Then, as Montaigne made us clear by what he did and what he wrote, there are two things we must do: Go back to the world and bring order again in your mind, for idleness leads to nothing. 

P.S. I had promised myself to avoid writing again on the present pandemic. But what happens? I started writing this blog with a very different idea in my mind, although I did want to write about Montaigne’s essay “Of Idleness”, indeed. But as it often goes, once I had started to write, the writing process pushed me in a direction that I hadn’t planned and hadn’t foreseen, and in the end it moved me towards the covid pandemic again. No help. One cannot live isolated from the world. 

Source

All quotations are from Michel de Montaigne, “Of Idleness”, Essays, Book I, chapter VIII; Gutenberg translation: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#link2HCH0008

Random Note

You are a dictator. You are popular but your popularity is beginning to fade. What to do about it?

– Create an enemy

– Create a problem

– Create a provocation

In short: Create war. 

The Münchhausen Trilemma

You say that you are the King of Babylonia and I ask you “Why do you think so?” Generally then there are three ways to justify that you are, namely:
A) You say that your father was also King of Babylonia, and his father was, and so on, back into the past as far as man can remember.
B) Or you say: “I am the King of Babylonia according to the constitution. I have written the constitution in order to determine who will be the King of Babylonia. The constitution is the legal foundation of the Kingdom of Babylonia. So I am the legal King of Babylonia.”
C) Or you say that you are the King of Babylonia by the grace of God.
Although each of these three justifications that you are the King of Babylonia seems sound, there is a problem with each of them. Answer A has often been applied in history, and it is still valid for several monarchs in the present world, like the Emperor of Japan or (more or less) the King of the Netherlands or the Queen of England. However, maybe, your father was the legal king of Babylonia, and his father was, etc., but at a certain point we must stop going back in history because we don’t know the facts. And maybe there was once a king in the line who didn’t get his power in a legal way. Actually, what we have here is an infinite regression that we must break off at an arbitrary point because of the mystery of history.
On the face of it, Answer B seems sound. For if there is a constitution that appoints you as the King of Babylonia, it must be legal that you are the king. However, it is a circular reasoning, for you, the King of Babylonia, made the constitution and the constitution made you King of Babylonia. The King depends on the constitution and the constitution depends on the King.
Maybe then answer C is a correct justification that you are the King of Babylonia? Perhaps it is, but it’s merely a supposition that it is true, and if I am not religious, I don’t need to accept it. Answer C is a justification based on an axiom.
The trilemma that I have tried to explain here with the help of a fictitious King of Babylonia has first been formulated by a certain Agrippa, a sceptic philosopher who probably lived towards the end of the 1st century. However, nowadays it has especially become known by the work of the German philosopher Hans Albert (1921-) who called it the Münchhausen Trilemma, after the famous story about Baron von Münchhausen who pulled himself out of a mire by his own hair. (see here). According to Albert, in the end no knowledge, no truth or no statement can be established with certainty. For whatever argument or proof we bring forward in order to support a statement, it is always possible to ask further questions that cast doubt on each new argument or proof. In the end, we come into the situation that we have to choose between:
1) An infinite regression, which appears because of the necessity to go ever further back, but is not practically feasible and does not, therefore, provide a certain foundation.
2) A logical circle in the deduction, which is caused by the fact that one, in the need to found, falls back on statements which had already appeared before as requiring a foundation, and which circle does not lead to any certain foundation either.
3) A break of searching at a certain point, which indeed appears principally feasible, but would mean a random suspension of the principle of sufficient reason. (see Source; translation taken from the Wikipedia) We can call this point also dogmatism.
If the trilemma is true, and I think it is, the consequence is that no statement, no piece of knowledge, no assumed truth can be definitively substantiated. In this sense, there is no truth. In the end, we know nothing for certain. The only thing we can do then, so Albert, is to be critical and to make each statement, piece of knowledge, or supposed truth open to criticism, anyhow, for everything can be different from what is seems. Although I fully endorse this idea, there is a problem. For if the Münchhausen trilemma is right, no choice can be justified. Each choice is as good or as bad as any other choice. Then we are in the situation of Buridan’s ass, who now must choose not between two haystacks but between three haystacks. (see here). In such a situation living would be impossible. Then there is only one solution: just do what you think that is reasonable. Act! For action is the foundation of life. 

Source
- Hans Albert, Traktat über kritische Vernunft. Tübingen: J.B.Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1968 (a description of the Münchhausen Trilemma is on p. 13.

Random quote
Looters in normal times are pioneers from a historical perspective.

Peter Sloterdijk (1947-)

The rabbit-duck illusion

“Which animals are most like each other?” The original rabbit-duck illusion,
by an unknown author (see text).

In my blog last week, I used the rabbit-duck illusion, as it is usually called, to explain that there are two ways of looking at. Actually, the figure is not an illusion but an ambiguous image: It doesn’t evoke a false way of seeing but the image can be seen in two different ways that as such are correct. The figure has been made famous by Wittgenstein, who used it for explaining the difference between “seeing” and “seeing as”. When someone shows you the figure, you can say, for example: “I see a rabbit”. However, once you know that the figure is ambiguous and you can switch between the rabbit and the duck, you’ll say: “I see it as a rabbit”. Once we can see an image in different ways, we can notice aspects of the image, so Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, ix). This noticing of aspects is a theme that again and again returns in his later work.
Wittgenstein took the figure from an article by the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow, but the image was first published in 1892 in the German humour magazine Fliegende Blätter, which described it as “Rabbit and Duck” (see picture above). Also Jastrow talked about a rabbit and a duck, but in the original German version of the Philosophical Investigations (PI) Wittgenstein says that the image can be seen either as the head of a hare (Hase) or as the head of a duck (Ente). However, in the English version of PI this is translated as a rabbit-duck distinction. Why this difference? In view of the long ears, I would call the animal in the image a hare rather than a rabbit, and when I am running through the woods and fields around my town I am sure whether I see a hare or a rabbit.
Be it as it may, let me further call the animal in the figure a rabbit in agreement with the present usage. The image is not only philosophically and linguistically but also psychologically interesting. As psychologists know, seeing and watching are not spontaneous and not objective. One has to learn it. So one question is: How do children see the image? Alison Gopnik and her colleagues (source) tried to answer this question, and they found that 3-5 years old children don’t make the reversal between two aspects of an ambiguous image on its own. Others must tell them that it has two aspects. Only later some learn to switch spontaneously. Also the speed of switching between the rabbit and duck aspects is interesting: R. Wiseman and his colleagues found that more creative people find it easier to switch between the rabbit-duck aspects of the image than less creative people do. (source) I wonder whether this result depends on the ambiguous image you take for a study. Personally I find it easy to flip between the rabbit and the duck but difficult to do so in case of the old woman – young woman illusion (see here).
Also when you look at the rabbit-duck image has an impact on what you see. Peter Brugger and Susanne Brugger showed the image to different people, first on an Easter Sunday and later that same year on an October Sunday, and simply asked them to name the animal. This is what they found: “Whereas on Easter the drawing was significantly more often recognized as a bunny, in October it was considered a bird by most subjects…” (some mentioned another animal than a duck, such as a stork, a flamingo, or just “some kind of bird”) (source)
Seeing and watching are not objective, as said. The discussion about the meaning of the rabbit-duck illusion shows that we can see what we see in different ways. Even more, we don’t see only with our eyes but a big part of the process of seeing takes place in the brain. Impressions of light arrive in the brain and with the help of the information already present there, the brain constructs a picture and gives it a meaning at the same time. Actually the interpretation (meaning giving) and the construction of the picture are one process. However, the brain can also make construct pictures without an external input through the eyes, and actually it often happens. Therefore seeing – in the limited sense of receiving input through the eyes – is important, for although the construction of the picture takes place in the brain, what you see does have an impact, and if you cut off your brain from the world, it’s quite well possible that you keep a rabbit for a duck, or the other way round.

Random quote
Movement is … first and foremost the natural mode of being a body.

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1930-)

Two perspectives on “looking at”

At first, I thought it was a rabbit, but because it was

 swimming in the water, I realized that it was a duck.

Look at the figure above. I think that most readers will know that it can be seen either as a rabbit or as a duck but never as a rabbit and a duck at the same time. We can look at the figure either from a subjective point of view, also called the first-person perspective, or from an objective point of view, also called the third-person perspective. In the former case we focus our attention on my looking at the figure, in the latter case we focus our attention on my looking at the figure as such. I want to explain the difference with this figure:

                  

The left oval represents the first-person perspective; the right one represents the third-person perspective. That the words “the figure” are not enclosed by the left oval does not mean that the figure is ignored in the first-person perspective. One cannot “look at” just like that but one can only look at something. The theme of the first-person perspective in this example is, nonetheless, my looking. Likewise, the I as a subject is not covered by the third-person theme, but being the one who looks, I am involved in the analysis from the third-person point of view.
When I am looking at something (to be distinguished from just seeing), implicitly or explicitly I ask questions about what I watch. Such questions can be:
Q. What is the figure like for me?
And a possible answer is:
A. I see a sketch of a rabbit.
And then:
Q: Why does the figure represent a rabbit?
A: The two protrusions at the left are two ears and the little dent at the right is a mouth.
These questions and answers are questions from the first-person perspective, for they concern my subjective view. From the third-person perspective, one would ask questions like:
Q: What kind of figure is that?
A: It is an ambiguous figure representing both a rabbit and a duck, drawn for experimental purposes.
Q: Why do some see the figure as a rabbit and others as a duck?
A: That’s what your brain makes you think, on the basis of the light impulses that it receives from the piece of paper in front of you and your antecedent cognitive state, educational background and frame of mind.
In questions and answers from the third-person perspective my seeing and interpreting the figure as a subject is no longer present, but they concern the objective brain structures and processes and the input of these processes that take place “independent of me” by way of speaking. The first-person perspective is about what the figure means for me and which reasons I have for this interpretation, while the third-person perspective is about the objective causes that determine my perception of the figure as a certain thing and which I normally don’t know about.
It is not so that it is not possible that I, the first person that I am, take a third-person perspective towards myself. Nor is it so that another, a third person, has no access to my first-person perspective, no matter how. For taking a perspective is approaching a general theme in a certain manner by highlighting either the subject or the object, guided by questions of a certain type. And there is no reason why I (the first person) cannot ask the same questions about myself that another (a third person) asks about me or that I ask about another from the third-person perspective. On the other hand, there is also no reason why another cannot ask the same questions about me that I ask about myself. However, unlike me, the other has no direct access to the answers on these questions and therefore his or her knowledge of my first-person perspective can only be found via more or less complicated ways of understanding. Here I can’t elaborate such ways of understanding (see bij de Weg 1996), but what this analysis in terms of questions of the two perspectives makes clear is that these two ways to look at what is around us and to understand and explain what is around us are not contradictory in the sense that only one perspective is correct at the cost of the other, but that the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective are alternative ways of looking at something. The perspectives represent different standpoints characterised by different types of questions. As Karl-Otto Apel worded it in his “complementarity thesis” (1979, pp. 12-13):

1.    The perspectives supplement each other: what is known, experienced or observed from one perspective cannot be known, experienced and observed from the other perspective.
2.    The perspectives exclude each other: they have different intentions, expressed in different types of questions. The first-person perspective is subject directed; the third-person perspective is object directed.
3.    For both reasons, the perspectives cannot be reduced to each other.
It’s already more than forty years ago that Apel developed these ideas and presented his analysis, and both perspectives are still either confused or it is so that one perspective is idolized at the cost of the other (and usually it is, in science at least, that the third-person perspective is seen as the only right method). But is it so difficult to see that different types of questions lead to different types of answers and isn’t it quite authoritarian to forbid some types of questions being asked? 

References
Apel, K-O 1979b, “Types of Social Science in the Light of Human Cognitive Interests”, in: S.C. Brown ed., Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences, Brighton, Sussex etc.: Harvester Press etc., pp. 3-50.
Weg, Henk bij de 1996, De betekenis van zin voor het begrijpen van handelingen, Kampen: Kok Agora.

 

The commonsense fallacy

Get up early, when it is yet dark, and go to a place where you have a wide view. Look to the east, and then, yes, you’ll see the sun rise. Or rather that’s the way it seems to you, for actually it is not so that the sun rises, but it is the earth that goes down. The earth rotates on its axis and every time the point where you are turns to the side where the sun is, the sun comes in your field of view. Then it seems to you as if the sun rises, though in fact the sun doesn’t move, but the point where you are “rises”, so to speak, i.e. it moves so that the sun becomes visible. Nowadays, this is what everybody (or most of us) knows. It’s commonsense. That the sun “rises” is merely an old-fashioned way of speaking. Nonetheless, once there was a time that everybody on earth thought that the sun really rises. That it was not a kind of metaphor but that it was a fact. You could even be killed if you dared to assert that it was not. Then it was commonsense that the sun really rises.
What this case illustrates is that commonsense ideas may not be reliable. They are generally accepted but this doesn’t mean that they are true knowledge. They are just views based on how things appear and on what is commonly accepted. However, it’s often important to have reliable knowledge and that’s why we have developed science: a method to get reliable knowledge based on sound reasoning plus ways to test whether statements about possible facts are true. (As you see here, I think that the essence of science is in the method, not in the facts, as many people think). In spite of this it often happens that people say that a statement is true or that something is a fact, merely because it is “commonsense”, or because “everybody knows”, or, as we say in Dutch, because it is a matter of “healthy reasoning”. Such an appeal to commonsense is called the “commonsense fallacy” (CSF), or, as the case may be, an “appeal to the people fallacy” “argument from popularity”, “argument from tradition”, and the like. Although there are slight differences between these fallacies, I treat them here as if they are all varieties of the commonsense fallacy. Of course, commonsense can be true. For example, the scientific explanation of sunrise has become commonsense, as we have seen. Therefore, I must further explain what the commonsense fallacy involves:
Committing the commonsense fallacy is “asserting that your conclusion or facts are just ‘commonsense’ when, in fact, they are not. We must argue as to why we believe something is commonsense if there is any doubt that the belief is not common, rather than just asserting that it is. This is a more specific version of alleged certainty.” (source) Or let me quote a little bit more from the same source:
The logical form of CSF is:
                                        It’s commonsense that X is true.
                                        Therefore, X is true
Example: It's commonsense that if you smack your children, they will stop the bad behaviour. So don't tell me not to hit my kids.
Explanation: What is often accepted as “commonsense” is factually incorrect or otherwise problematic. While hitting your kids may stop their current bad behaviour, the long-term psychological and behavioural negative effects can far outweigh the temporary benefits. Logically speaking, the example simply appeals to “commonsense” rather than makes an attempt at a strong argument. (more examples in this same source)The source of the idea that commonsense is true because it is something that “everybody” knows is the wrong idea that what seems true to you or true to many must be true just for that reason. However, each person has his or her own individual experiences and beliefs, and, in addition, groups of people, if not whole cultures, have often common or equal experiences and beliefs. So, what seems right to one person may not seem right to everyone, and what seems right to one group or even culture may not seem right to others, who belong to other groups or cultures. When one person, group or culture accepts a view that others don’t, it’s usually due to a difference in their views of the world and internalized ideologies rather than an intellectual deficit or incapacity to reason. But so long as beliefs are based simply on commonsense and aren’t supported by evidence, they aren’t reliable. So if an assertion or statement is not more than that and not (implicitly) based on evidence but merely based on an appeal to commonsense, it’s a case of the commonsense fallacy. Beliefs that rely on the ambiguous concept of something being self-evident can change according to personal, group or cultural experiences. (see also here) However, what once was dubious commonsense can become evidence-based commonsense, as the sunrise example shows.

Random quote
Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen. 

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

 

Philosophical jokes

Philosophy is seen as a serious affair and also my blogs are meant to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, philosophers are as human as humans are and they, too, sometimes make jokes: philosophical jokes. Then I don’t mean philosophical views that are meant seriously but ridiculed by other philosophers. For who isn’t a Heideggerian probably will laugh at Heidegger’s statement that “the nothing nothings”? Indeed, this phrase is enough for some students of philosophy not to bother him or herself with what the master has written, though for others it is a deep philosophical, so serious, remark. The latter apparently believe in what is not, or isn’t it so?
Be that as it may (or may not), what I want to present here are “real” philosophical jokes. Now it is so that you’ll understand a joke only and you can laugh about it only, if you know what it is about. However, if it must be explained, it is not funny any longer. This is the more so for philosophical jokes that often are funny only for philosophical insiders. There is no help for that and here I’ll avoid explanations.
                                                                        ***
Anyway, the first joke is clear without any philosophical knowledge, although I find it a bit unreal, for which philosopher can allow him or herself to have a driver? (Russell could)
– A renowned philosopher was held in high regard by his driver, who listened in awe as his boss lectured and answered difficult questions about the nature of things and the meaning of life.
Then, one day, the driver approached the philosopher and asked if he was willing to switch roles for just one evening. The philosopher agreed, and, for a while, the driver handled himself remarkably well.
However, when the time came for questions, someone at the back of the room asked him, “Is the epistemological meta-narrative that you seem to espouse compatible with a teleological account of the universe?”
“That's an extremely simple question,” he replied. “So simple, in fact, that even my driver could answer it.” (source)

– A methodologist and his wife are out for a drive in the country. The wife says: “Oh look! Those sheep have been shorn.” “Yes,” says the methodologist. “On this side.” (source)

– An angel appears to the head of a Philosophy Department and says, “I'll grant you whichever of three blessings you choose. Wisdom, beauty, or ten million dollars.”
Immediately, the professor chooses wisdom. There is a flash of lightning, the professor is transformed, but then he just sits there, staring down at the table.
One of his colleagues whispers, “You have great wisdom. Say something!” The professor says, “I should have taken the money!” (source)

– A philosopher once had the following dream.
First Aristotle appeared, and the philosopher said to him, “Could you give me a fifteen-minute capsule sketch of your entire philosophy?” To the philosopher's surprise, Aristotle gave him an excellent exposition in which he compressed an enormous amount of material into a mere fifteen minutes. But then the philosopher raised a certain objection which Aristotle couldn’t answer. Confounded, Aristotle disappeared.
Then Plato appeared. The same thing happened again, and the philosophers’ objection to Plato was the same as his objection to Aristotle. Plato also couldn’t answer it and disappeared.
Then all the famous philosophers of history appeared one-by-one and our philosopher refuted every one with the same objection.
After the last philosopher vanished, our philosopher said to himself, “I know I'm asleep and dreaming all this. Yet I've found a universal refutation for all philosophical systems! Tomorrow when I wake up, I will probably have forgotten it, and the world will really miss something!” With an iron effort, the philosopher forced himself to wake up, rush over to his desk, and write down his universal refutation. Then he jumped back into bed with a sigh of relief.
The next morning when he awoke, he went over to the desk to see what he had written. It was, “That’s what you say.”  (source)

– A philosophy professor walks in to give his class their final. Placing his chair on his desk the professor instructs the class, “Using every applicable thing you've learned in this course, prove to me that this chair DOES NOT EXIST.”
So, pencils are writing and erasers are erasing, students are preparing to embark on novels proving that this chair doesn't exist, except for one student. He spends thirty seconds writing his answer, then turns his final in to the astonishment of his peers.
Time goes by, and the day comes when all the students get their final grades...and to the amazement of the class, the student who wrote for thirty seconds gets the highest grade in the class. His answer to the question: “What chair?” (source)

– “I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 467.
                                                   ***
The jokes above may not be the funniest philosophy jokes you can find on the Internet, but I wanted the present here a few that are not only funny but that say also something about philosophy itself. Let me end with a few very short ones:
– How many Marxists does it take to change a lightbulb? None. The lightbulb contains the seed of its own revolution. (many sources)
– “Hello? Zeno taxi service? I called for a cab forever ago...”
“What do you mean he’s half way there?”
– Someone asked me to name a greater philosopher than Nietzsche. …. I. Kant
– What is Mind? No Matter. What is Body? Never Mind.
– “The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” (Bertrand Russell)
                                                   ***
Want to have more philosophy jokes? Just google “philosophical jokes” or visit these websites:
- Neil Burton, “Top 10 Philosophy Jokes. The ten sharpest philosophy jokes.”
- David Calmers, Philosophical Humor.
- Work Joke, Funny philosophical jokes.
- “40+ Philosophy Jokes That We Kant Stop Laughing At” 

Also these websites might be interesting:
- “Joking, and Learning, About Philosophy”
- Scotty Hendricks, “5 philosophy jokes that will actually teach you something”

Random quote
No man can, if he would, conform his faith to the dictates of another.

John Locke (1632-1704)

Are Covid restrictions that bad?

What I am going to write now is not my own idea. I found it on the Facebook page of Emal Roshandel, who lives in Denmark. But I agree with much what he wrote there and I think that it’s so important that I want to share it with others. Moreover, it certainly fits in my blogs, for isn’t it about the question “Who are we?”, which is one of the leading themes of my blogs. However, I’ll not give a literal translation of Roshandel’s Facebook post, but I’ll write my own version. 

Let’s assume that you were born in the year 1900 and that you had a happy childhood. Then in 1914 the First World War broke out. If you were a boy, you were too young for the army, but if you lived in Europe (or in the USA, later) probably your father and uncles had to fight, and maybe your elder brother as well. Many of them didn’t come back from the war and you and those who stayed home suffered from hunger and many goods were in short supply. You were happy when the war ended and your father came back, but then a pandemic broke out, the Spanish flu, which hit especially younger people, like you, now 19 years old. You recovered and gradually times became better. You were in your twenties, maybe married, and faced the future with confidence. Alas, the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange and the economic crisis that followed made you unemployed and your savings soon became worthless by the high inflation. In the end you overcame the difficulties, got a good job again, when – you had become 40 years old – the Second World War broke out. Although you weren’t maybe an immediate victim, these were dark times. There were lockdowns, shortages of food and goods, people you knew disappeared. But also this came to an end.
I can go on, and mention yet the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the oil crisis of the 1970s, or, if you lived in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union, the communist repression. There is certainly much more to mention, and Emal Roshandel mentions on his Facebook page also some other events. If you live outside Europe and the USA, you’ll certainly think of other bad experiences.
Be it as it may, let’s now assume that you were born in, say, 1980. Today, you are 41 years old. If you are one of my readers, probably you didn’t go through even one event of the kind described above. (Note, that I don’t mean personal, private sad experiences, but world experiences like those described above.) However, now you have to go through a pandemic that broke out about almost two years ago. And you complain. Sometimes there are lockdowns; you cannot go to the cinema or to concerts during several months. You cannot always meet your friends; schools are closed. And so on. Moreover, you complain that you have to wear a face mask and that people ask you to be vaccinated. People who say that you must adapt yourself to the situation don’t understand you, you think, for these people don’t know what a difficult life is, you think. However, you have a lot what the generations before you didn’t have: All services, like power, food supply, public transport and whatever function well. Even more: you have the internet and your mobile, which didn’t yet exist when you were born. Must I go on?
I don’t want to say here that you deserve it to suffer what your parents or grandparents have suffered. I hated it when my father said that I had to eat what was on the table, since during the Second World War he couldn’t get to eat what he liked and sometimes he was hungry. And, indeed, probably your grandparents didn’t experience all calamities I mentioned above, or maybe they didn’t personally much suffer from them. I don’t want to say: Once the times were so bad and now they aren’t, so you must be happy (although also today yet many people must flee from war and economic misery). You must live your own life in a situation as it is today for you. You have the right to complain about stupid restrictions. You have also the right to complain because you don’t feel happy. But be real. We live now in a situation of a world pandemic and actually at the moment nobody knows how to stop it. So, adapt yourself. Do what you can and do not complain about what you cannot.
I want to end this blog with a quote from Roshandel’s Facebook post: “Today we live in a new world full of comfort, but unfortunately in the middle of a new pandemic. … But humanity survived these conditions, and they never lost their joy of life.”
It is as it is. 

Random quote
You cannot organise kindness, but you can organise the conditions for it. 

Otto Neurath (1882-1945)

Who do belong to us?

With each other, for each other. Sculpture made by Nicolas Dings

Actually, what I am going to write now is a bit Eurocentric. Or maybe it is not the right word, for the distinctions I am going to make are typical for English, Dutch (my mother tongue) and the other Indo-European languages and these languages are not only spoken in Europe. However, there are many languages in which these distinctions do not apply. Keeping this in mind, let’s start.
Take this case: John says to Anna: “We’re going to the movies.” Question: Does Anna or doesn’t Anna go to the movies with John? Only context can tell. This becomes clear if we add what John also said:
- “We’re going to the movies. My wife is waiting. See you later”. OR
- “We’re going to the movies. Are you ready?”
In the first case John uses a, what linguists call, exclusive we: Anna is not included in (excluded from) the we-group. The speaker or writer refers to him or herself plus his or her associates but not to the person(s) addressed. In the second case John uses an inclusive we: Anna is included in the we-group. When the inclusive we is used, the speaker or writer includes the addressee(s), for example the person(s) s/he is talking with or his or her audience or readers.
In English, Dutch and many other languages, there is only one word for the inclusive and exclusive use of we, but not in all languages this is the case. Some languages use different words for the exclusive and the inclusive we. Click HERE for a map of languages that distinguish or do not distinguish linguistically both types of we.
The inclusive/exclusive distinction of we is not simply a linguistic distinction that makes clear that “we” can have two meanings. It is also practical to know it, for speakers, including politicians, often confuse them or use them intentionally in an ambivalent way in order to build a relationship with their audience. Such a relationship can be built because the inclusive we evokes a sense of commonality and rapport between speaker or writer and audience. So, in order to get support for new covid restrictions, a prime minister can say “We all must tackle the coronavirus. That’s why we have decided to take these measures…”. The first we, which refers to all inhabitants of the country including the government, is used to evoke support for what the second we (the government) has decided. The first inclusive we is used in order to bring about that everybody is behind the measures taken by the second, exclusive, we. Or take the situation that a speaker says that if the government will continue its present policy, many refugees will come to this country, and then he says “It’s that what we want?”, suggesting that the audience agrees with him and doesn’t want this to happen, while actually it is maybe so that only he, the speaker, doesn’t want it. Then saying “we” is a manipulative use of “we" in order to evoke support for his words. Actually, there are countless ways to use “we” in a manipulative manner.
Although the inclusive we and the exclusive we are the main meanings this pronoun has, there are also other ways “we” can be used. For instance:
- The medical or institutional we. Examples: “Have we slept well tonight?”, “Have we opened our bowels?’, “Have we been a good boy today?”
- The royal we: “We” is said while “I” is meant. This is especially used by persons in high office, but also in other contexts like the Bible and the Quran.
- The third person we: Take this sentence: “We in this country should spend more money on social security.” In this sentence, it is meant that the government should do so, but not only. The we refers to a third person, but the speaker feels a kind of responsibility for or involvement with the issue stated.
The upshot is that we must realize well what we mean when we ue we or talk about us, and even more so when others try to involve us in their projects by suggesting that we are involved. 

Sources
- Michael Cysouw, “Chapter Inclusive/Exclusive Distinction in Independent Pronouns”.
- Richard Nordquist, “Exclusive ‘We’: Definition and Examples”.
- Richard Nordquist, “Inclusive ‘We’ (Grammar)”.

Random quote
When he [Einstein] commits a breach of etiquette, it is said that he does so because he is a man of genius. In my case, however, it is attributed to a lack of culture

Mileva Marić (the wife of Albert Einstein) (1875-1948)