Friendship between books

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog on choosing books in an eclectic way or rather on “reading broadly”, as I called my blog. I argued that reading broadly lays a better foundation for understanding the specific and maybe narrow topics you are interested in. I had to think of it, when I happened to read a novel by the German author Walter Flex on his friendship with Ernst Wuche during the First World War. I see you thinking already: This is again a case of eclectic reading, for what has a novel on the First World War to do with the themes discussed in these blogs? “Maybe nothing and yet maybe a lot”, is my reply. However, here I don’t want to talk about the direct relevance of these novels for “my” philosophy and philosophy in general but about eclecticism.

Flex’s novel is on friendship and especially on his relation with Ernest Wuche. In a certain sense the book can be compared with Montaigne’s essay “On friendship” dedicated to his friend Étienne de La Boétie, who had died a few years before Montaigne wrote it. Also Flex wrote his novel after his friend’s death. Flex meets Wuche for the first time when they received officer training somewhere in Germany. They clicked immediately with each other, just like Montaigne and La Boétie. And also the friendship between Flex and Wuche was short lasting but intensive. A difference is that Flex wasn’t there when Wuche died, although he was present at his burial. Also Flex, like Montaigne, couldn’t forget his friend and thinking of him made him depressive. This made Montaigne write his Essays and Flex write his novel Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten (The Wanderer between Two Worlds).

On the train to the Eastern Front, Flex and Wuche got into conversation. They talked about books. Wuche is an avid reader, and also in the trenches and behind the frontline he read a lot (as many other soldiers did, on both sides of the front). Flex tells how Wuche gets a few books from his knapsack: An anthology of Goethe, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the New Testament in a special edition for soldiers. “Is this compatible with each other?”, Flex asked. Wuche smiled and said: “In the trenches all sorts of people who do not know each other are forced to comradeship. It’s the same with books as it is with people. They may be very different – they need to be only strong and honest and be able to hold out, this gives the best comradeship.”

Must I add anything to it? Good books do not need to fit objectively, as long as they fit in the mind of the reader.

The power of words (2)

In my blog last week I wrote about Simone Weil’s analysis of the use of empty words in politics. Later this phenomenon has been exposed so well by George Orwell. The slogan “War is Peace” from his novel 1984 is a good example of how meaningless words can be used for manipulation. Weil gives also a few instances of vague words with a baleful influence on the practice of politics, just because of this vagueness: nation, security, democracy … Still today these words are often used for justifying political measures and even war. The problem is not that these words have to be skipped from our vocabulary (I certainly do not want to deny that the idea of democracy is important!). The problem is that, so Weil, “each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean … anything whatsoever” (242). Nevertheless, “we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly be related to one or another or to any concrete facts.” (243) Many fights are fought only in the name of abstract words that haven’t been translated into concrete aims. With right Weil speaks here of “lethal absurdity” (243).

“The prime specimen [of this lethal absurdity] is the antagonism between nations”, Weil continues. Nothing could be more true, if one realizes that the nations that a few years after she had written these words begun to fight against each other in one of the most lethal wars in history, six years after the end of this war concluded a treaty of cooperation transferring powers of these same nations to a supranational organ: The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), one of the foundations of the present European Community. The ECSC exemplifies what Weil writes just after the quotation: that national rivalries are meaningless in the light of many international networks that exist at the same time, and that, for instance, “the German steel industry may be regarded with hostility by producers of steel goods in France; but it makes little difference to the mining companies whether the iron of Lorraine [in France] is worked in France or Germany…” (243). How absurd would the establishment of an organisation like the ECSC would have sounded when Weil wrote this at the end of the 1930s!

In view of the many actual relations in the world between individuals, groups, companies and peoples, the relations between national states is only one way of how we go along with each other globally. The importance of it is simply overstressed. However, the interest of the nation cannot be in the relations with people outside the nation; it would mean that the nation would disaffirm itself. According to Weil, a study of history has shown that its interest is in its capacity to make war. Weil doesn’t say it, but I think that this can be reduced to the sociological phenomenon of ingroup-outgroup, which explains much of the social behaviour of man. Here, I cannot take notice of this complex problem, but in the end it makes that man is prepared to use violence in order to defend its own group, the ingroup, against the outgroup. “Right or wrong my country”, as the British say (and not only they do!). As soon as we see this, much of what happens internationally becomes comprehensible: “What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war; petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict. Thus when war is waged it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one’s capacity to make war.” (244) However, as the singer Country Joe McDonald song in his famous chorus of the “Fish" Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag”: “What are we fighting for?”. What are the real interests of a nation? Again Weil puts the finger on the problem: “If the countries were divided by a real opposition of interests, it would be possible to arrive at satisfactory compromises. But when economic and political interests have no meaning apart from war, how can they peacefully be reconciled? It is the very concept of the nation that needs to be suppressed – or rather, the manner in which the word is used”. (245) That’s what’s done today by the European Union, for instance. The EU has been successful insofar since its foundation no war has been fought anymore between its member countries, although before the history of the relations between these countries has been a history of war (so the Netherlands, “my” country, fought at least four wars against Britain; an eighty years lasting war against Spain; several wars against France; one against Belgium; one against Germany and others against its founding states; etc.). How sad then that the EU meets with so much nationalistic opposition now. “For the word national and the expressions of which it forms part are empty of all meaning; their only content is millions of corpses, and orphans, and disabled men, and tears and despair.” (245)

The quotations are from “The power of words" in Simone Weil, An Anthology, London: Penguin Books, 2005. Here you can listen to the I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Soy3PHV3RiM

The power of words

Actually I didn’t need to write a blog, this week. Instead I could past Simone Weil’s essay “The power of words” here and then I would have a clear political comment on the world events of today. For Weil’s criticism of what was happening in the world around here is eternal. Or must I say, following Nietzsche, that history repeats itself? For, when writing this essay, Weil was not practising futurology but she was disclosing the hidden reality of contemporary political conflicts.

What Simone Weil (1909-1943) saw in many conflicts of her time (she wrote the essay on the eve of World War II) was that they were empty in purpose or rather that they didn’t have a clear purpose at all: “… they are conflicts with no definable objective” (p. 240). But just this kind of conflicts, are the most dangerous, Weil goes on: “The whole of history bears witness that it is precisely such conflicts that are the most bitter”. (ibid.) In a conflict where the stakes are well-defined, each combatant can judge whether the efforts and pains are worth the possible gains, Weil explains. “But when there is no objective there is no longer any common measure or proportion; no balance or comparison of alternatives is possible, and compromise is inconceivable” (241). Then only the past costs, especially the number of victims, count and just this is often a reason to continue. What we see then is that each combatant picks an object from its gamut of possible purposes and writes it with capital letters. Then the combatant says: THIS is our purpose. But often this purpose is empty. It’s just a word. “But when empty words are given capital letters, then, on the slightest pretext, men will begin shedding blood for them and piling up ruins in their name, without effectively grasping anything to which they refer, since what they refer to can never have any reality, for the simple reason that they mean nothing.” (241). Then, the only measure of success is that you are able to bash the brains of your “enemy” in.

The part of the essay I just summarized contains only one aspect of Weil’s comments, but only this analysis is enough to make it a “brilliant essay”, as Siân Miles, who wrote an introduction to it, calls it. Referring to Homer’s Iliad and Early Rome, she wrote an attack on French foreign policy of her time, and without a doubt she was also thinking of the ideological conflicts of her days between nazism, communism and western capitalism c.q. democracy. And she thought of the First World War, of course, which was still fresh in the minds of many Europeans and which might have finished earlier, if the politicians hadn’t been so stubborn. However, it is not difficult to apply Weil’s words to the political events after the Second World War as well. Although the Cold War remained cold between the countries immediately concerned (the western countries versus Russia and Eastern Europe), because of the emptiness of the conflict and its aimlessness it lasted more than forty years. The consequences of this conflict about words, or ideological struggle as it is usually called, were bigger in the regions where the ideological differences led to hot war. Then one has to think of the Vietnam War in the first place, where what was initially a war for independence dragged along so long, because it was reinterpreted in ideological terms.

Weil’s analysis can also easily be applied today when we think of what Samuel Huntington called a clash of civilizations and what can also be seen as a clash of religions. For what is actually the “definable objective” of the attack on the Twin Towers in the sense that if this or that has been reached war is over? It’s also a war that is drags along since then because of the vagueness of the aims of the terrorist attacks. And, by the way, here, too, we see that history repeats itself, as becomes clear when we read Albert Camus’s analysis of anarchistic terrorism around 1900 in his L’homme revolté (translated into English as The Rebel). For although the justifications for terrorism may have changed, its form and dynamics have remained almost exactly the same more than hundred years later. But back to Weil, her analysis is brilliant because she disclosed a phenomenon and laid her finger on a problem that were not only important in her time but that apparently are eternal. “That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

The quotations from “The power of words" have been taken from Simone Weil, An Anthology, London: Penguin Books, 2005.

Reading broadly

Eclectic selection

Once someone told me that my choice of books is quite eclectic. As soon as I had finished Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, I started to read an anthology of Simone Weil, which I happened to find in a book shop when I was on holiday in Estonia this summer. I must admit that Schopenhauer and Weil are very different kinds of philosophers, but does this mean that my choice is really so eclectic? For what kinds of books I read, already since many years the philosophy of mind and action is at the centre of my field of interest; and also a theme that I am concerned with already much longer: non-violence. As I see it now, this will still remain so for the time to come, although you never know what will happen. Alternatively, however, one can say that at the forefront of my philosophical thinking are the questions I have chosen as the subtitle of my most recent book: Who am I? What do I do? (which is expressed also in my blogs here). Seen in that light, books like Schopenhauer’s or Weil’s are not more than side-roads for me.

Be it as it is, I think that actually it would be better if many philosophers would have a wider choice of reading than they have. How often doesn’t it happen that I read a philosophical article or book and I think: What is asserted here is absolutely not according to the facts. This author trusts too much his intuition and if he had read a bit about the theme, he would have known that it is simply not right, what is said here, or at least it is doubtful and needs more discussion or it needs some evidential support instead of relying only on intuition. Often this happens when the philosopher concerned supposes something intuitively about how the mind works or about social behaviour. So many new discoveries have been done in brain research and so much has been discovered about how the minds works in recent years, that the days are gone, I think, that one can philosophize only or mainly on the base of intuition about such themes. And also society is often more complicated than an intuitive feeling can bring to the light. It would be good for philosophy, if it would be more eclectic in a certain sense. How the world is shaped cannot be thought out intuitively, to formulate it succinctly.

Coming back to Simone Weil, hadn’t I seen that anthology of her work in an Estonian book shop, maybe I would never have read a word of her writings, which has yet been so influential, although Weil was philosophically a bit of a loner. Her philosophy touches central themes of life and Weil herself participated in the main events of her time (the labour movement; the resistance against the Nazi occupation of her country France). While reading her work, again and again I discovered insights that I discussed here in my blogs from the viewpoints of other philosophers or researchers. Take for example this. In her “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” Weil writes: “… the conquering soldier is like a scourge of nature. Possessed by war, he … becomes a thing, though his manner of doing is so different – over him, too, words are as powerful as over matter itself. And both, at the touch of force, experience its inevitable effects: they become deaf and dumb.” And a few sentences further, she goes on: “It is not the planning man, the man of strategy, the man acting on the resolution taken, who wins or loses a battle; battles are fought and decided by men deprived of these faculties, men who have undergone a transformation, who have dropped either to the level of inert nature, which is pure passivity, or to the level of blind force, which is pure momentum. Herein lies the last secret of war …”. And I wanted to add: and of much of what we else do in life.

But isn’t this what Hannah Arendt has written down later when she discussed the banality of evil and in fact holds the thesis that what we do is determined to a large extent by the situation we are in? That we are carried away by the dynamics of the situation we are in, which tends to push away our individuality and our faculty of independent thought? Isn’t it the same as what Philip Zimbardo experimentally demonstrated in the famous “Stanford Prison Experiment”? That the situation often makes us do things we would never have done if we would (and could) have taken time for reflection? Reading “broadly” helps you see connections that you otherwise wouldn’t have seen. It helps you also to come into touch with authors who are interesting as such, irrespective of their wider meanings, like Simone Weil.

Note: The quotations are from Simone Weil. An anthology, Penguin Books, London, 2005; pp. 204-5.  What I wrote in my blogs about Arendt and Zimbardo can be found back by using the searching machine on this website.

On rumination

Ruminants

When I stand on the shoulders of other people (see last week) and I am the one at the top, how do I come higher? Once being there I have the risk that I ruminate what those others below me have thought out before and that I see it as something new. If that happens, my thinking has become an obstacle for my thinking. Then, it’s time to spring down and to do something. Act! Gather new experiences! But isn’t this what most of us fear?

Actually, my physical constitution says already so, for why else should I have not only such a big brain (the thinking system in my head) but also such refined hands (typically made for doing)?  Isn’t it so that they represent the two sides of what I am? They express the two aspects of my existence. These aspects are dependent on each other and cannot do without each other. As such they exclude each other but nevertheless they supplement each other, too, and seen that way they are complementary, in the way the German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel has described so well in a different context. Thereby they make up human life, which is made for thinking and acting, anyhow.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/201108/metathinking

More on Apel in my PhD thesis (see left) and in older blogs.

Meta-thinking

Actually what I write down here are mainly thoughts about thoughts, or meta-thoughts. Some time ago, in a blog called “What thinking can” (Jan. 14, 2013), I wrote also about meta-thinking but from another perspective. There I discussed the question whether meta-thinking (and thinking as such) influences our behaviour. I think it does. Even more, it’s an important means for stimulating our basic thinking and that’s what I want to talk about here.

My written work has always been full of quotations. Not only my blogs are but I begun extensively quoting already long ago when I wrote papers as a student. I used citations  as a kind of evidence for my thoughts, but when looking for them and when reading the articles or books where I found them, they stimulated my thoughts as well and they led to new ideas in me. The thoughts of other writers made me think and brought me to new meta-thoughts. Therefore, I do not understand why some authors commit plagiarism. I am happy that I can stand on the shoulders of other people and that I can go to the top by doing so. And also that I can give the opportunity to others to stand on my shoulders. By committing plagiarism you run away for yourself – apart from what is further wrong with it–, for have you ever seen a person who shaped his own world without any help? Once I said to a photographer: “When I make photos, actually I copy what others have already done”. When I photograph a shop-window, for instance, I simply copy the work of the window-dresser. “No”, he said, “you give your own view of it and you put it into your perspective, and just that makes your contribution special”. It’s true, I think. To take another example, there is much misery in the world, but by making pictures of it, the cameraman doesn’t make an objective report but makes other people taking action. So, for philosophy we can say that meta-thinking helps take the best in a person out, and I think the more so if you consciously admit what you are doing.

One of the thinkers who most of all used this method was – my dear readers will have guessed already his name – Montaigne. His works is full of quotations from and references to the works of other authors, especially classical authors. Montaigne did not hesitate to mention those who influenced his thoughts and brought him to the ideas that still make him famous today. There are even some essays in which he mentions this approach explicitly in the title. One is his “Of a saying of Caesar”. Referring to a quotation from Lucretius Montaigne says there: “Whatever it is that falls into our knowledge and possession, we find that it satisfies not, and we still pant after things to come and unknown, inasmuch as those present do not suffice for us; not that, in my judgment, they have not in them wherewith to do it, but because we seize them with an unruly and immoderate haste”. I do not know whether Schopenhauer was aware of this passage, but in his The World as Will and Representation we find it as the idea that man quickly becomes bored and again and again looks for new activities. For Schopenhauer it is an argument that to live is to suffer since man is continuously desiring, without ever being satisfied. For Montaigne this restless searching means, following Epicurus, that we don’t know how to enjoy in the right way. And since we think that it is our own fault, we look for support elsewhere and outside us and give it honour and respect. Or as Caesar formulated it according to Montaigne: “ ‘Tis the common vice of nature, that we at once repose most confidence, and receive the greatest apprehensions, from things unseen, concealed, and unknown.”

Trust yourself and do not only stand on the shoulders of others, but find out also whose shoulders they are. 

Deceiving oneself

In this room, where he used to work in winter, Montaigne wrote on the wall (in Latin):
“In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.”

Wittgenstein says somewhere that nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself. Maybe I walked into this trap, when I wrote at the end of my last blog that “although my body may fail the mind still is as fresh as since I was a child” (but then Schopenhauer walked into the same trap as well). It’s true that I added to this statement “or so I think”. Moreover, since I was talking about a feeling, I couldn’t be wrong. For although a feeling may not be the right one at a certain place or in certain circumstances, it cannot be false. One has a feeling, whether one wants to have it or whether one doesn’t want to have it. In the latter case one can be ashamed about it.

Nevertheless, maybe Montaigne was more to the point when he wrote in the essay “Of age” that the mind does deteriorate, whether one thinks so or whether one doesn’t think so. And he adds “by how much the more it is a disease of no great pain to the sufferer, and of obscure symptoms, so much greater is the danger”. In other words, often you don’t notice it, and then it’s a dangerous phenomenon, like a hidden disease. When one becomes older “[v]ivacity, promptitude, steadiness, and other pieces of us … languish and decay”, so Montaigne. “Anyhow”, I would say. “Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind”, Montaigne rightly states, and in the end it is this process that will make that one doesn’t feel young in the mind anymore and that the mental feelings adapt to the condition of the body.

Until fifty or forty years ago or so most sportsmen stopped being active when they were about thirty years old. The idea was not only that above this age the body was not fit enough for top sport any longer, but also that sport was something for the young and that after this age it was time to build up a career. Sport and career couldn’t go together and sport at a later age was “not done” in a certain sense. In case one did continue doing sport (and in fact, there were still a lot of people who did, although not as many as today), doing sport was something that you had to take not too serious or not serious at all.

How much has changed since then. Sport has not only become an important part of the lives of older people, sport at a later age is also stimulated, and no longer it is seen as an activity that is actually not to be taken seriously and that doesn’t fit with a career. Not only has it become clear that sport at a top level can be done past the age of thirty as well, but also how fanatic older sportsmen can be! As if they were twenty years old. And is there something wrong with it? Is there something wrong with feeling younger than you are? Sometimes and maybe often it is. But as often it isn’t. And then, although the body languishes and decays, there is nothing against doing as if the mind doesn’t, even if you are deceiving yourself (or so I think).

Feeling onself

"... although my body may fail the mind still is as fresh as since I was a child (or so I think)."

The idea that to life is to suffer has a subjective and a objective aspect. Whether my life is miserable or happy depends to a large extent also on the way I, the person who lives the life, see it. Some people are happy and optimistic by nature. Other people have a depressive and pessimistic character. Something can be done about this but not everything. On the other hand, according to Montaigne, whether a life was happy as a whole can be judged only once it has come to an end, for the final part of the drama of life can give yet a turn to the way we judge the life of the person concerned as a whole. The end of a life puts a life into perspective, as we can say. There is some truth in Montaigne’s view and maybe there is much truth in it, but is it the whole truth? I think it is the truth of history but it needs not to be the truth of the carrier of the life. To put it differently, we must make a distinction between the third person’s perspective or objective perspective of man and the first person’s perspective or subjective perspective. Despite what others say about me, during my life or after it, finally it is only the subjective perspective that counts for me. When I feel unhappy it is no help for me that other persons say that I am happy, how much truth there may be in it. And although other people may say that my life is happy as a whole, I (and any person whoever) live from moment to moment. I live in the now. With this I do not mean that I ramble from one subject to another and that I do not make any planning of my activities at all, like that I think only about getting food at the moment that I become hungry, so that I have no food at home just when I need it. But the way I feel, is always in the now. I can try to suppress my “true” feelings; I can try to cheer myself up, if necessary; good memories can make me happy and the future can make me worry; but all this takes always place in the now and is from the perspective of the now.

I wonder what these remarks have all to do with it, but I got these thoughts, when I read an observation by Schopenhauer, which says something that I had noticed already long ago: “… however old we become, we yet feel within that we are entirely the same as we were when we were young, nay, when we were still children”. This is typically a judgment from the first person’s perspective. For whatever other people say of me, and how much younger people (and older people, too) see me as “that old man” with his old-fashioned or weird ideas and habits, for me the present feeling of myself is and has already been during my whole life that I am the same person as I always was, at least mentally, for although my body may fail the mind still is as fresh as since I was a child (or so I think).

Our experiences are rarely pure

When I commented on Schopenhauer’s statement that to life is to suffer, my point was that it is oversimplified. Suffering is not the background noise of everything we do, not to speak of the thread through life. Rather I think that suffering and happiness are personal experiences brought about by the personal and individual happenings of life. In fact, everything is possible and what will be the case depends on where you live and in what circumstances, on your personality type and character, and on much more. There are moments and periods that we are happy and moments and periods that we are unhappy and that we are suffering. For some or maybe many or even most the latter may prevail, for others perhaps the former. This doesn’t imply that happiness or suffering is inherent in life, although one might tend to think that the latter is, if one realizes what is happening in many places in the world. Maybe life was so different in Schopenhauer’s days that for him it was the natural way to think so and maybe it still is in many parts of the present world.

Nevertheless, Montaigne, who lived a few centuries before Schopenhauer, had a more balanced view on life, I think. Montaigne didn’t ask whether the foundation of life is suffering or happiness, or whatever, but he wrote a lot about experiences and facts of life and what they mean for us. While Schopenhauer stressed that actually life is suffering, according to Montaigne pure experiences do not exist, as we can see in his essay “That we taste nothing pure” (Book 2, XX). Both our joys and our sorrows, both our positive experiences and our negative experiences are mixed and contain at least a bit of the opposite. “Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience”, as he says there,  which he illustrates with a quotation from Lucretius: “From the very fountain of our pleasure, something rises that is bitter, which even in flowers destroys”. “Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it…”, so Montaigne.

On the other hand, Montaigne refers to Metrodorus, who remarked “that in sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure”. Although Montaigne seems not to be completely sure what Metrodorus meant by it, he adds that it can be seen that way, for instance, that “there is some shadow of delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very lap of melancholy.” The “confusion” between joy and sadness can be seen well, when painters hold, so Montaigne, “that the same motions and grimaces of the face that serve for weeping; serve for laughter too”. This is actually an exemplification of the fact that both pure delight and pure sorrow do not exist. And I think that for most people it’s the same for suffering and happiness. Schopenhauer interpreted the world that way that everything we do has at least a shade of suffering if it is not suffering in disguise or suffering right away. But wouldn’t a more optimistic mind have said that the reverse is the case and have called happiness the essence of life? But in view of what Montaigne says we can ask whether any pure principle of life exists at all.

Can one desire without suffering?

Despite the remark by Schopenhauer quoted in my last blog and my comment on it, the main function of books remains that they are there for being read. So, I didn’t stop reading Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation after the preface. But when to read such a thick book of nearly thousand pages if one has no special reason for doing it besides simply wanting to take note of its contents? I always read a lot when I am on holiday, so I put it in my luggage for my summer travel and I begun reading it from the first day on. But even then I haven’t finished it yet, also because I have read two other books at the same time (and because I am not on holiday for reading, of course, but for getting new impressions). I still have about half of the book to go. Nevertheless I can give some first thoughts.

What I found most striking in the book till now is what I see as its central theme, namely: Das Leben ist ein Leiden, or, in English: To live is to suffer. For Schopenhauer suffering is part of the human condition. It is the consequence of the fact that we always are busy striving for things. People never do nothing or they become bored. We always have desires, so Schopenhauer, and we want to fulfil them. These desires can be small things or they can be big things, such as wanting to read a book (like the one by Schopenhauer); making a travel; having a special job; and so on (the examples are mine). As long as the desired goals haven’t been attained we are more or less unhappy and we keep looking for ways to achieve them. However, once a wish has been fulfilled, we are happy for only a short moment. In another blog of mine you can read that such “moments of happiness” last three months at most according to present insights in psychology. Then we become bored. We begin looking for other desires and the process starts again, so Schopenhauer. That’s why he says that desiring, and human life in general, is suffering: Life is the striving to fulfil unfulfilled wishes. It is mainly a matter of being dissatisfied with what one has and so of wanting to have it better, but this is basically impossible.

Is it true? When one looks at the portrait of Schopenhauer on the cover of his book, I see a happy man and not someone who is suffering. But maybe it’s merely a pose. Be it as it is, I want to state that by and large Schopenhauer’s thesis is false. I agree that people become bored after some time once a desire has come true, so they start to strive again. It shows that man is made for acting. But does this make suffering the foundation of life? I think that there is much that denies it. When I want to start a new project, once one has finished, this doesn’t mean that I am unhappy because my last project has come to an end; even not after three months. I have done a lot in my life long ago that I still enjoy when thinking of it. The thought of having done it still makes me happy. Moreover, no person is trying to fulfil wishes one after another. One is always trying to do several things at the same time. Career, being a good parent, being a good sportsman, being a good club member, having relations with other people, to mention only a few things, are activities one does simultaneously. Most times moments of happiness and moments of being less happy go together. Life is a stream of concurrent activities, which are often a pleasure to do. And even if these activities are guided by aims, achieving these aims needs not be most important of what one is doing. Often it’s so that going on the road is more important than reaching the end of the road. The desire as such is often less important than Schopenhauer thinks. It is often a guide and not a purpose as such: One can be happy in the doing as such; not only for a moment by the fact that a wish has been fulfilled. All this makes, I think, that suffering is rather an extreme phenomenon of life than a basic fact of life.

But it is true that once I have finished Schopenhauer’s book, I want to read another one (not counting the fact that I am always reading several books at the same time), but it doesn’t involve that I am continuously suffering.

The function of books

Four years ago I posted here a photo of my study by way of illustration of a blog: http://www.philosophybytheway.blogspot.nl/2009/09/reading-book-makes-my-quiet.html. The walls of the room are full of books, as you can see; not only the one in the picture, but also the other walls. Once I have finished reading a book, I put it there. The books yet to be read have a special shelf. Books are the wall paper of my study, so to speak.

I have uploaded the photo of my study also to a social networking website. People there often ask me: Have you read all those books? Actually, I find it a bit a silly question. For why else should I have my books? Okay, I did not read the dictionaries and the atlases, for one doesn’t “read” such books but one uses them. But I have read my books insofar they have been published for reading in the normal sense. All of them? I must admit that the answer is “no”. Indeed, there are a few books that I didn’t read for some reasons, or I did only for a part. Why? Some had been so long on the waiting shelf that I wondered why I had ever bought them. Again and again I postponed reading them, because other books I had bought later looked more attractive and got a preferential treatment. Now I have solved the problem by reading books more or less in the order I have bought them: It has no sense to read a book ten years later when your interest has changed. Another reason why I sometimes postponed reading a book is that it looked so difficult to me that I found it better to read it with extra attention instead of reading it quickly and a bit superficially, as I often do. However, I did not make time for doing it and in the end the book came in the “Why had I ever bought it?” category. And there are also those books that I started to read but I found them so boring or incomprehensible or obscure that I put them aside before having finished reading them. Without a doubt there are other reasons why I didn’t read some books, but these are some of the most important. In fact, it didn’t happen so often so when asked “Have you read all those books?” I can honestly answer: “Yes, I did, or at least, say, 95% of them”.

Nevertheless, I always feel myself a bit ashamed when admitting that I haven’t read all, for in the end that’s why I bought them. But is this feeling right? Maybe my idea that books are there only for being read is too narrow minded. I got the idea that they can have other functions, too, when I read Arthur Schopenhauer’s preface to the first edition of his The World as Will and Representation, where he said:

“The reader … has bought the book for cash, and asks how he is to be indemnified. My last refuge is now to remind him that he knows how to make use of a book in several ways, without exactly reading it. It may fill a gap in his library as well as many another, where, neatly bound, it will certainly look well. Or he can lay it on the toilet-table or the tea-table of some learned lady friend. Or, finally, what certainly is best of all, and I specially advise it, he can review it.”

When writing this blog, I still have to read the rest of Schopenhauer’s book, which will be quite a job, for it has nearly thousand pages. But even if I’ll not succeed to read it till the end, I’ll have learned at least one thing: A book can have many functions. Using it as wall paper is acceptable even if you haven’t read it (so Schopenhauer). Improving the relation with an intelligent lady friend is good, too (how about a gentleman friend? Schopenhauer doesn’t talk about it). Writing about it makes also sense (it seems that Schopenhauer supposes that you do not need to read a book in order to criticise it). And certainly there are more usefull applications for a book as well (like supporting a wobbling table). And in the end a book has another possible function as well, for you can read it, too.

Double truth (2)

In my blog on double truth last week I argued that the truth of a statement must often be put into perspective and that it may depend on the position of the person who utters the statement. I expressed this by saying that truth can be double or even multiple. Is that all there is?

I begun to think about this question, when I heard about a new doping scandal in sport. This time it is not in cycle racing, which gradually seems to become cleaner. No, the present scandal is in athletics, where recently a range of athletes, among them several Olympic gold medal winners, have been exposed as doping users. This raised in me the question: Has there always been doping?

When searching for the answer on the Internet, I discovered that it is yes and no. Since sport in its present manifestation goes back to classical antiquity I wondered how it was in those days and what I found was double: yes, doping existed; no, it did not exist. I’ll not go into the details, but indeed, it was so that in Greece and Rome athletes and their trainers of all kinds of sports had discovered that there are nutrients but also, for example, mushrooms that improved the sporting achievements. The answer is no, since there was no doping in the modern sense for there were no rules that forbade the use of doping. Paraphrasing Feyerabend, it was “everything goes”. Doping as we know it today, so drugs that are explicitly forbidden because they improve the results, is a recent phenomenon. One website says that it was in 1865 that in modern times the positive effects of doping were established for the first time, when Dutch cross-Channel swimmers used caffeine. The first sportsman who died by using doping is said to be Arthur Linton, the 1896 winner of the Bordeaux-Paris cycling race, who died eight weeks after his victory. Since then gradually rules have been made that forbid the use of doping in sport, and now the list of “List of Prohibited Substances and Methods” is long. However, developing rules and adding drugs to the prohibited list is not one-way. Sometimes drugs that were once not allowed have been removed from the list again. Caffeine is a case in point. Until 2004 it was on the list when a certain threshold value had been exceeded. Then it has been dropped from the list, and a sportsman or sportswoman can drink as many cups of coffee and other caffeine containing drinks as s/he likes.

What does this mean for my theory of double or multiple truths? The statement that a range of athletes recently has been exposed as doping users is true from the present perspective: According to the present sport laws they simple are doping offenders. Using oxilofrine and other dope, as they did, is a sports offence today. But if they had used the same drug on, say, the Olympic Games of 676 BC they would have been no more than smart athletes who followed the rules and who would have been honoured as decent winners. Using oxilofrine was no offence at all. Even if the use of dope could and would have been established afterwards then, nobody would have thought of depriving them of their titles. They would have been honest winners.

The upshot is that truth cannot only be double or multiple if we take the perspective of another person or of other persons, it can also be double or multiple from the perspective of time: what is true at one point in time need not be true at another point in time. We can also say: Truth has both a synchronic and a diachronic dimension.

Double truth

In my last blog I criticized Wittgenstein’s remark in On Certainty 80-81 that asserted that whether I understand what I state depends on whether it is true or false what I state. My objection was that it is easy to give examples of false statements that have nevertheless an obviously clear meaning for the speaker, for instance that the earth is the centre of the universe. What I actually want to say in my criticism is that truth, at least empirical truth, is often a matter of perspective and that it is often not possible to say “This statement is true and the opposite statement is false”. It’s a bit surprising for me that two paragraphs later in his On Certainty Wittgenstein actually says the same:

83. The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to our frame of reference.

Without a doubt, it will be possible to give a sound explanation or interpretation of this remark by Wittgenstein in the context of his On Certainty. However, here I’ll leave it as it is.

Probably some readers of my blogs find the remark that truth may be a matter of perspective (or a matter of frame of reference, in Wittgenstein's words) a bit shocking. But is it really so shocking? Isn’t the phenomenon of double or even multiple truths, as I would call it, something that abounds in daily life? Take for instance the caption of the photo in my last blog: Does the sun go down or does the earth come up? The former is true from the perspective of what we see; the latter is true from the perspective of astronomy.

Actually, the perspective or contextual dependence of truth is not limited to such rather trivial examples as the question whether the sun goes down or the earth comes up. It can be a source of serious social and political conflicts. I’ll give two examples:

- Ethiopia has started to construct a barrage in the Nile. Egypt, which is downstream of the new barrage, is afraid that this will be detrimental for the water supply in the Nile and it threats to take measures. It’s a case of double truth, I think, where both countries are right in a certain sense from the perspective of state autonomy and the right to defend its interests.

- Terrorism is a threat for the world, so you are allowed to collect any data that might help to prevent it. Citizens of a state have a right of privacy. Who is right? Obama or Snowden?

Maybe these cases or not well-chosen or not clear-cut enough, and that’s then my fault. Look around and I don’t doubt that you’ll find much better instances. But I think that you’ll understand the idea I want to express: At first sight, what is true is not as plain as you might think but it may depend on where you stand.

On Certainty

Does the sun go down or does the earth come up?

In On Certainty Wittgenstein writes:

80. The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements.

81. That is to say: if I make certain false statements, it becomes uncertain whether I understand them.

Broadly speaking, this is not correct. For example, when the Inquisition sentenced Galileo, because he denied the official doctrine of the roman catholic church that the earth is the centre of the universe, the inquisitors understood and knew exactly what they were talking about, although their doctrine appeared to be false – and was actually already superseded in those days – and Galileo appeared to be right. What is true is often not a matter of yes or no but it must be seen in the perspective of place and time (history). This is for social facts even more so than for physical facts.

And what to think of lies? They are produced with insight and understanding of what’s true.

There are many other instances that speak against the truth of these two combined statements, at least in general.

Double identity

Actually I need not to write about it, for it’s a well-known phenomenon: role playing. No, I don’t mean what actors do on the stage but what we do in everyday life, although in a certain sense it’s a bit like what actors do. At home, we are father, mother or child. On the workplace we are accountant, teacher, manager, or student. On the sports field we are long distance runner, goalkeeper, referee or spectator. And so on. Every position has its rules of what the holder of the position is supposed to do, what s/he is allowed to do and what is forbidden. The accountant registers the money transactions of his or her company but doesn’t take the decisions what to do with the money. That task belongs to the manager or to the director. And the worker on the shop floor is the one who factually makes the products. By analogy of what is happening on a stage such positions are called roles and the position holders are called role players. Since each person always plays several roles, daily life can be quite compartmentalized. Then you have to do this, an hour later (or sometimes a few moments later) you have to play another role and each role has its rules and requirements. This can be quite confusing. The American sociologist Robert Merton has become famous by his social role playing theory (but not only by this) but the idea that we play roles is already much older.

Because role playing is an essential part of our lives and is an essential way of filling in our relations with others, the roles we play are important elements of our personal identities (next to our experiences, for instance). Usually it is so that we not only play our roles but we are our roles. I mean, as a rule we don’t just pretend to be father, teacher or long distance runner. We believe in what we do and we do it with our whole hearts. However, it doesn’t need to be so, as everybody knows. An extreme case of pretending a role is a seeming customer who wants to observe the bank in order to come back next day as a raider. Actually it is so that in most roles we play we always need to pretend a bit as well.

For most people their different roles are well integrated. It’s true, roles can conflict, for instance, when a teacher has her own child in her class, so that the roles of teacher and mother can conflict. But most people can play their different roles openly and they can be tuned to one another, so that role conflicts can be avoided. And normally one doesn’t need to hide particular roles for other people. Nevertheless this can happen, for instance when someone doesn’t dare to say that he is gay to his parents, boss or other relevant people in his environment. If he wants to visit a gay cafe, for instance, this needs to be kept secret. Then such person leads a “double life”: two “lives” strictly kept apart. In a certain sense he has a double identity. In a more innocent way, you can say that someone has a double identity if one of the roles he openly plays actually has nothing to do with his daily life. People have hobbies, and hobbies like playing chess, collecting stamps, voluntary work, or whatever, usually involve roles that are well integrated with the other roles of the role player. But what to think of an actor or a member of a historical re-enactment group? The role as such as a player is well integrated with other social roles, but what about the role played? The actor playing Napoleon is Napoleon at the moment he is playing if he is playing well. The man playing a mediaeval knight is this mediaeval knight at the moment he is playing if he is playing his part well. In this sense we can say that persons playing the role of another have a double identity. This has been shown so well by Wim Piesen in his excellent series of photos (http://www.wimpiesen.be/category.php?catId=64338).

To what extent are double identities kept apart and to what extent can they be kept apart? And to what extent are people pretending playing the role they play not the role player they pretend to be? I think that the cases of the actor or the pretender are not problematic. Even if the actor is playing Napoleon or another role, he is always giving a personal interpretation of the parts being played. This points to an integration of his, what I would call now, “secondary identity” with his “main identity”. And the pretender pretends his role usually in function of the other roles that make up his or her identity (the customer in my example is a raider in disguise). But also the person who keeps one of his identities secret for the daily environment is actually “playing” the person he is for his environment: Much he does in his daily environment is often done  in function of keeping a part of his identity secret. This keeping secret influences the ways the “public” roles are filled in. Therefore, we can say with Montaigne, “Whatsoever personage a man takes upon himself to perform, he ever mixes his own part with it” (from “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die”).

Acting without moving one’s body

My last blog was about the moral relevance of the distinction between doing and allowing. My analysis suggested that the difference between both is not very clear-cut. Nevertheless, there seems to be a basic distinction between the concepts: Doing is making things happen and allowing is letting things happen. The former is usually interpreted that way that the making implies an intention in what we do plus a relevant movement of our body. As a rule we call such a doing an action. Allowing is usually interpreted that way that the letting implies that the things that take place will happen anyway without our intervention. However, as the two cases in my last blog show, the distinction is not as marked as it might look to us on the face of it. In Case 1 the doctor turns off the life-support machine in order to let John die. In Case 2 Bill turns off the life-support machine in order to make John die. The difference is here a matter of interpretation, but just this might cast doubt on the idea that there is a fundamental difference between doing and allowing. This may be even more so, if one realizes that allowing is not merely a matter of letting things happen and that’s it. Many things in the world around us occur and we take hardly any notice of them if we do it at all. Then we don’t say that we allow them. Especially we do not say that if we cannot have any influence on what is going on. Just the fact that we notice what is happening; that we have the possibility to intervene; and that we have a reason to intervene makes that we speak of “allowing”. In other words: Allowing is intentionally not intervening. Seen that way, the difference between doing and allowing tends to fade away, for then allowing is nothing else than a passive doing. It’s a kind of action without moving one’s body, so to speak. If we add to this that allowing is a matter of degree (see my last blog), then it’s only one step to see doing, or better acting, and allowing as extremes on a sliding scale.

Doing and allowing (2): Two cases

Case 1. By a car accident John has got a serious brain damage. He is in coma and there is no chance that he’ll recover. After several years the family and the medical staff see it as the best solution for John to turn off the life-support machine and let him die. So the doctor who is responsible for John’s treatment turns off the machine and John dies. Many people will say that this is a case of allowing (that John dies): The doctor lets John die. If there hadn’t existed a life-supporting machine, John would have died anyway.

Case 2. By a car accident John has got a serious brain damage. He is in coma and there is no chance that he’ll recover. In his active life John was a criminal who has killed a member of another gang. The remaining members want to take revenge. After a few years, Bill, a member of this gang, discovers that John lies in coma in a hospital. He wants to turn off the life-support machine and so kill John. In the meantime, John’s family and the medical staff have decided that it is best for John is to turn off the life-support machine that is keeping John alive and let him die. However, just before the doctor responsible for John’s treatment can carry out the decision, Bills sneaks in the room where John is lying and turns off the machine. When the doctor has entered the room he can only certify John’s death. Many people will say that this is a case of doing, namely murder: Bill made John die, although John would have died a few moments later anyway, if Bill hadn’t turn off the machine.

What’s the difference? Can we say that the difference between Case 1 and Case 2 is basically a matter of intention? Or maybe it is a matter of action and inaction, as some philosophers suggest in other examples?

The problem of the difference between doing and allowing is not new. It has been discussed already by many philosopher. One question is: Is the distinction between doing and allowing morally significant in relevant cases (like mine)? Is this also the case, if, as in Case 2, John would have died also if Bill hadn’t turned off the life-support machine?

In this blog I can pass only a few comments, but the answer seems to depend on many factors and cannot be clear-cut in the sense that allowing is either (morally) different from positive acting (doing) or it isn’t. Some relevant points are:

- What do we mean with “morally”? If you think that lives must be saved anyway under any condition, you might conclude that there is no difference between doing and allowing, at least not in my cases (but what do you mean then with “life”?).

- There are different types of relevance. Maybe the difference between Case 1 and Case 2 is juridically relevant (for instance, because euthanasia is legal if certain procedures have been fulfilled), but at the same time it can also be morally relevant (see the former point; maybe you accept the legality of euthanasia because, as a democrat, you accept that the law on euthanasia has been passed in the right way, but nevertheless you don’t agree with it). This shows that allowing is a multidimensional concept. Maybe there are more dimensions than the two I just mentioned. For instance, allowing can be intentional (Case 1) or unintentional (not knowing what to do) or in between (having to make a choice: see the next point for an example), a matter of unconcern (see also the next point), and so on.

- Allowing can also be a matter of degree. It is a big difference when you see a car accident but you do nothing and the victim dies, because you didn’t care or because you were on the way to the hospital with another person who was in peril of death. Or the person that you brought to the hospital was not in peril of death, but it was your father, so you were very worried, while you didn’t realize that the victim of the car accident needed immediate help. It will not be difficult to find other intermediate cases that exemplify that allowing may be a matter of degree.

There are certainly other points that can be put forward that make it impossible to say in general that the difference between doing and allowing is fundamentally relevant or just that it isn’t, although I personally think that it is not not relevant.

In writing this blog I am greatly indebted to Fiona Woollard, “The doctrine of doing and allowing”, part I and II, in Philosophy Compass, 7/7 (2012), pp. 448-469.

“Equality is the soul of equity”

A reader of this website kindly commented on the passage in my last blog that said that the quotation from Richardson (“killing one man is seen as wicked while killing ten thousand is seen as glorious”) points to a double morality. I thought that it would be a good idea to say something more on the idea of “double morality” and, of course, there is a lot to say about it but I didn’t find anything that was good enough to use for my blog or – from another point of view – I wasn’t inspired enough to use what I found on the Internet and in my books and what popped up in my mind. So, I did what I often do then: I took Montaigne’s Essays from my bookcase and I glanced through it. It was no surprise that I ended up in the essay titled “That to study philosophy is to learn to die”, since it is full of underlines in my paper edition, made when I read this essay (which I did several times). The essay is really a place where the reader can find many interesting and stimulating thoughts, and if you want to read at least one essay by Montaigne in your life before you die, this one is a good choice (another good choice is Montaigne’s essay on friendship). It’s almost sure that I’ll use this essay later again here in my blogs, but now my eye was immediately caught by a statement by Montaigne that seemed to apply exactly to the theme of double moral standards: “Equality is the soul of equity”. For isn’t equality the soul of a moral standard that is the same for all? So I thought that this quotation would be a good starting point for a blog on double morality and I still think it is, but then I realized that Montaigne’s statement is even more important in its historical context. For nowadays, more than two hundred years after the French Revolution and 65 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the idea that rights are the same for everybody, which is what this statement implies, is something that goes without saying, albeit it so that often the practice is still different. But in the age of Montaigne justice wasn’t the same for all but it was based on the estate a person belonged to, although in his time the idea of justice based on estate begun to change, after it had reached its summit in the Middle Ages, namely the idea that there is a different kind of justice depending on whether you are a noble, a clergyman or a commoner. However, in this little remark by Montaigne it can be seen that then not everybody agreed with this idea and it shows that the medieval view already became discredited, although it would still last ages, before the idea had faded away, or at least almost…  

The downward trend of violence

Monument for Roland, commander of the rear guard of
Charlemagne’s army in 778 in the Battle of Roncevaux

In my last blog I mentioned Steven Pinker’s thesis that the world is becoming increasingly peaceful. In fact, this remark was only indirectly connected with what I wanted to say there, but at the moment I am reading his The Better Angels of Our Nature. I have almost finished it and I am impressed, so I couldn’t help referring to it. Pinker’s thesis that the world has become safer and less violent through the years is convincing, although this doesn’t imply (and Pinker doesn’t say so) that this tendency is irreversible. The trend of violence goes down even if one takes into account the effects of two world wars and other carnages in the twentieth century, for violence is more than war and revolution. In the past, violence in daily life was by far more important than it is today. For instance, more people were killed by murder, but also on legal grounds. In 1822 an Englishman could be sentenced to death for 222 reasons, including, so Pinker, poaching, counterfeiting, robbing a rabbit warren or cutting down a tree. By 1861 only four capital offenses remained. The downward trend can be seen in other countries as well and gradually many countries have abolished death sentence. Also if violence does not lead to death there has been a downward trend. Moreover, the way people are punished has been humanized. Punishment in the ages before the French Revolution was heart breaking and cruel in due form. Although torture still exists in this world (but has become illegal in most countries) even here you find a “humanizing” trend, how terrible and intolerable it still is. Even if one doesn’t belief that violence is diminishing worldwide, the book is full of facts and insights on the history of its practice and by that on the social history of man and only that is already a good reason for reading it.

An insight that doesn’t come directly from Pinker himself but that he quotes from L.F. Richardson’s Statistics of deadly quarrels (Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press, 1960) runs: “Does it never strikes you as puzzling that it is wicked to kill one person, but glorious to kill ten thousand?” (p. 243). This quotation refers to one of the myths of history: the idea that maybe it is not good to kill but killing on order of a higher authority is to be honoured. In this case it says that war is allowed for carrying out state policy if other means fail. Isn’t this a double moral standard? But also here we see a downward trend. Killing on order of a higher authority has become less and less acceptable (see for instance the abolishment of capital punishment, a movement that is still going on). But also war has become an increasingly less palatable solution for political quarrels. International institutions have been established for ending international conflicts, like the United Nations and its institutions or the European Union. It’s one of the merits of the latter that it has made war between its members unthinkable (remember how many bloody wars their member states have fought out against each other till 1945). Gradually war is being held in disrespect. In fact it already is, and maybe once we’ll see the day that a country with an army will be treated as an outcast. As Montaigne said: “N’y avoir qu’une justice”, there is only one justice.

The meaning of the present

A time difference of thousand human lives

Of late I read in the science section of a newspaper about the recent discovery that already 25 million years ago apes and monkeys were different species. This means that these creatures have become separated much earlier than thought before. One can wonder then when man became a separate species. I am a layman in paleoanthropology, but one who reads books and articles about it with much interest and I know that at least eight million years ago a kind of “man” existed and, who knows, maybe “man” existed already at least 25 million years ago. This would imply that “we” are already quite a long time present on this earth in some form or another, although it’s nothing in view of the fact that some 200 million years before the first dinosaurs appeared in this world and that planet earth as such is about three billion (three thousand million) years old. If we take a shorter time perspective, I could mention that the homo sapiens, so modern man, came into being some 200,000 years ago, and that modern abstract types of thinking (if one can see the cave paintings as an expression of it) are maybe some 50.000 years old.

Looking to the future, it’s not possible to say much about how this earth and mankind will develop, besides that within x billions of years this planet will be swallowed up by the sun; that within three or four billion years the earth will be so hot that only the most primitive micro-organisms can survive; and that already long before this will happen mankind and its civilization literally will have been scorched. But first, many, many generations will live yet on earth, many wars will be fought, including several world wars – unless the trend seen by Steven Pinker that the world is becoming more and more peaceful will go on – and civilizations will come and go (including my own Western civilization).

These thoughts came up in me when I read that little article on the origin of apes. It made me down, for what is then the worth of a human life in the perspective of eternity? A man or a woman becomes, say, 80 years old and then s/he dies. Some people become older, but 20 or 30 years older at most. Many don’t even reach these 80 years. In the poorest countries of the world the average life expectancy is only 40+. So, roughly speaking, a man or a woman becomes 40 or 80 years old and that’s it. In the perspective of eternity it’s nothing. If we are lucky, we’ll live on for some time after our physical death through the influence we had on other people, through our deeds, and through our children, but soon this influence will fade away with the exception maybe for some “happy” few, whose impact will stay a bit longer. But what then is the meaning of our lives, if nothing remains? Seen that way, I think it can only be in one thing: in the present, in the now. Only the present can count for a human being, for his or her life will be lost in the light of the future, and also in the light of what has been. The upshot is: Live now and enjoy it as it is.

On quality

The French musician Paul Dukas (1865-1935) was not only a talented composer, but also a critic, scholar and teacher, who wrote more than 400 articles. When I listened to the radio programme “Composer of the week” on the Dutch Radio 4, which presented the life and music of Dukas, I heard the following quotation from an article that he had written in the 1920s (the quote was in Dutch, which I have translated here into English):

“Every day the blasé public is surrounded by the sound of telephones and cars that transport them at top speed from one art manifestation to another. They hog the conversation but they don’t want to waste a minute. When this operation has been finished and has already been forgotten again, they do not ventilate an impression but an opinion; especially one that is elegant and that has been provided with a superior smile for the occasion in the midst of all these tortures.”

Dukas went on with some remarks in which he wondered whether music (and art in general) has to be adapted to this rising superficiality and whether society still has a need for a kind of art that follows its own fundamental principles.

When I heard this quotation, I wondered whether much has changed since Dukas wrote these words ninety years ago. Even more, hasn’t the situation become more marked in these days of the Internet, Facebook, Twitter and so on, where everyone has the opportunity and is in the position to express an opinion on who knows what – not only on art – on any moment and to the whole world? Or is this quote simply the thought of a frustrated critic who is himself blasé by thinking that there is some kind of “high culture” that is not reserved for everybody and that has to be admired with awe? For isn’t such a criticism as passed by Dukas of all times? I think it’s double: The quote contains the unreal feeling of a paradise lost but isn’t it so that we need standards of quality and aren’t they always threatened by superficiality and laziness, not only in art but everywhere in life? But what then is quality and who tells us what it is?

Source: http://componistvandeweek.radio4.nl/uitzending/199291/Componist%20van%20de%20week.html (in Dutch)

Will and world

In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein wrote: “The world is independent of my will.” (6.373) And he explains it by saying: “Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connexion between will and world, which would guarantee this, and the assumed physical connexion itself we could not again will.” (6.374) But if this were true, what then is the relation between my will and the world? Is my will then outside the world and is it no part of this world? But this would mean that there is a second world, which contains my will (for my will must exist somewhere). And what is this second world then and what is the relation of my will to it?

Moreover, we can apply Wittgenstein’s reasoning to anything else: the existence of bikes, trees, rocks, and so on. (note the wording, for Wittgenstein says: “The world is everything that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” 1.1.1) But what do we mean then when we ask whether there is a free will? What does it mean then that some say that experiments show that we first start to act and only then develop a will to perform the action concerned? (Libet and Wegner, for instance) Reasoning in Wittgenstein’s way, life would not be a part of the world, or at least not of the “primary world” he talks of. And, whether we have a free will or whether we haven’t (but I think we have, at least in some sense), what does acting then involve if it doesn’t mean performing something in the world? There is only one world, and will and willing are a part of it, as does everything there is.

The other-directed man

Recently I had to think of an article, or rather a book excerpt, that was one of the first pieces I had to read, when I started studying sociology: “The other-directed man” by David Riesman. It had been included in a reader with articles and book extracts and I read it again. It was just as I thought: Although it had been written 60 years ago, it was still very relevant.

Riesman distinguishes three types of persons: the tradition-directed type, the inner-directed type and the other-directed type. The tradition-directed person steers his (or her) life with the help of traditional values, norms and goals, as he learned them in his childhood. These values etc. give him his place in life and society and determine the scope for what he can and cannot do. This type of man is typical for strictly stratified societies where social change is at a minimum, such as the medieval society.

When such a traditional society begins to change more rapidly, as it happened for instance in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, a new type of man comes to the fore: the inner-directed type. Also this type of man learns his values, norms and goals in his childhood from his parents and other influential adults, of course, but the values etc. are no longer those prescribed by society, but they are individual and serve as lifelong orientations that guide the major decisions in life. The person’s internalized goals are very generalized (Riesman mentions wealth, fame, goodness, achievement as instances) and one may fail to reach them, but one never doubts their guiding value. Riesman calls inner-directed people “gyroscopically driven – the gyroscope being implanted by adults and serving to stabilize the young even in voyages occupationally, socially, or geographically far from the ancestral home”.

But today, now that society changes exceedingly quickly, another type of person comes up: the other-directed man. Such a quickly changing society requires a more resilient type of person; one who lets himself be oriented by the opinions of the people around him. His conformity to society is no longer an internally acquired guide of values etc. but a “sensitive attention to the expectations of contemporaries”. Goals have become fluctuating and short-term, and the other-directed person is no longer steered by an internal gyroscope but goals are “picked up … by a [internal] radar.” One gets this radar also in childhood from the parents and influential adults, but now these relevant others “encourage the child to tune in to the people around him and any given time and share his preoccupation with their reactions to him and his to them” (my italics).

Of course, “pure” persons, who belong completely to one type, do not exist, let alone that a whole society of people of one type exists. It’s a matter of degree to which type a person belongs, and he or she is always a mixture of types, as Riesman stresses. However, one type tends to gain the upper hand in a certain society or in a certain period.

Riesman’s analyses of types of persons help me understand what is going on in society today. Although in the days that Riesman wrote his sentences the other-direct man was yet a new type that was not yet very wide spread (Riesman thinks of the USA and parts of Sweden, of Australia and New Zealand), now, 60 years later, one gets the impression that it is becoming the general type of man – anyway in Western society (but certainly not only there) and among the younger generation. It is not difficult to give examples that underline the present other-directedness of modern man: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so on are all expressions of the new type of modern man that is developing and that exists already to a high degree. Just these new media are used for telling your occupations to the world, sharing them with others, encouraging reactions from others, and participating in the occupations of others by giving your reactions. In this way, your internal radar picks up the expectations other people have of you, so that you can adapt your short-term goals and your behaviour to them. It’s what we do in our status updates or tweets and by sending our “likes” (or by our invitations to send them). Or in publishing our most private photos on the Internet, showing what we do to others and hoping that it fits what our relevant others think of us.

Source: David Riesman, “The other-direct man”, in Dennis H. Wrong and Harry L. Gracey, Readings in Introductory Sociology, The Macmillan Cy, 1967, pp. 610-616.