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Friday, May 27, 2011

Do Fish See the Water?

The words, 'The birds don't see the sky, the fish don't see the water and the human don't see the Earth' do suggest to me deeply philosophical ideas.
What I see are in fact two fundamentally different approaches to the branch of philosophy that Aristotle called 'First Philosophy', which came to be known as Metaphysics.

What does it mean to say that the fish doesn't see the water? We know that water is only a part of the world. For the fish, however, the world is the water it swims in. The analogy suggested here is that human beings believe that the world in which they live, the world of Earth, water and air — or planets, solar systems and galaxies — is 'all there is'. Metaphysicians from Parmenides and Plato onwards have argued that this belief is wrong. There is another 'world', outside space and time, which is in some sense the 'ultimate reality'. A well known example of this view is the belief that there exists a God who views the universe 'under the aspect of eternity'.

Friday, May 20, 2011

What is Political Philosophy’s View of Globalization?

One of the most pressing political issues today is globalism. It touches many other issues including freedom of the individual, the nature of the state, sovereignty, authority and obedience. But let's concentrate on how the life of an individual would be impacted by globalism.

For the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, a person achieved the "Good Life" — the best possible life for mankind in accordance with his nature as a uniquely rational creature — only as part of a political state. Part of the good life was being a good citizen and one could only be a good citizen by actively participating in the goings on of the state. For Aristotle, this meant that the state or "polis" should be small enough to allow citizens a say in the life of the polis (this does not mean that democracy is the ideal of the good state or the good life since Aristotle restricted citizenship to those who were free of the need to produce in order to survive, so slaves and women were not citizens of the polis.)

So for Aristotle the idea of a global social order or even a modern nation state would be an anti-human way of life and a corruption of our aim for the good life.

However Aristotle was living in ancient Greece. Today, what with near instantaneous media coverage and technology with the potential for making participation in the political life open to all, globalism would perhaps be achievable. And given the horrors of nationalism and fanaticism we see in today's world a one global society may even be desirable.

Karl Marx too sought a global community. Marx thought that nation states were organized and controlled by a certain economic and social class; those that controlled the means of production in society. He thought that the workers would establish an all-encompassing and long lasting global community, where once again the best possible life for man would be found.

However there is another form of globalism which would not perhaps be the most desirable state of affairs. This is the consumer globalism that creeps into our lives through the work of multinational companies. Manufacturing products around the world and gaining such power that even the national governments bend to their will. This is not only a danger to individual lives but even political structures. Needless to say neither Aristotle or Marx would be happy with this form of globalization.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Where and Why do Eastern and Western Schools of Thought Diverge?

Roughly speaking, in the West, the tradition, really from Socrates on (with some problems in the Middle Ages) has been to question pretty much everything. Socrates sacrificed his life to start that tradition, and it has more-or-less stuck. That is, the Western traditions of philosophy, leading to the scientific revolution, have fairly explicitly included the idea that one must not take any explanation, nor its assumptions, for granted. Overthrowing schools of thought, replacing them with syntheses, with deeper analyses, or with simply radically different schools is, overtly at least, encouraged.

This, in the main, is not true in traditional Eastern thought. That latter is for the most part religiously motivated, in the following sense. While various schools of "philosophy" may elaborate greatly on some tradition, questioning the bases of that tradition is almost always forbidden. Thus one may work within a particular school of Buddhism, try to understand and elaborate on it, but to attempt to go to its roots with the idea of altering, improving, destroying, or in any way radically changing them is just not (traditionally) done. There is almost always a "dogma", a set of underlying assumptions, which practitioners of a particular school must follow. Since I follow the Western tradition, and indeed believe it is better, in that sense at least, I do not consider traditions which discourage that type of ultimate questioning as philosophy, but as dogmas, usually religious. Inasmuch as that is changing, and allowing that kind of questioning, as it is in many places, it is indeed philosophy. Now if you want the difference there between Eastern and Western thinking, I would be much harder put to characterize it, except to say that much of Eastern philosophy is heavily influenced by the religious roots it now questions. Thus, in Japan, for example, phenomenology is extremely popular, because of its natural fit with Zen practices and the Japanese meditative traditions. Inasmuch as it may question those traditions, it is philosophy. Inasmuch as it is adapted only to further those traditions, it is not, in my opinion, philosophy.

Friday, May 6, 2011

What’s Wrong With Basing Your Life on a Lie?

As in the science fiction film ‘The Matrix,’ let’s say I discover that my familiar world, the whole of my life, has been a dream produced by an evil scientist. My body which has been asleep since birth awakes to a world reduced to a post-apocalyptic wasteland. A mysterious stranger offers me two pills. The blue pill will let me return to my comfortable world of illusion, eliminating all knowledge of the choice I have made. The red pill will allow me to remain awake to face the awful truth.

I would take the red pill, without hesitation. As a (armchair) philosopher, I feel obliged to say that. But what's so wrong with taking the blue pill? Taking the blue pill means choosing a life 'based on a lie'. But at least I will have the complete confidence that the deception will never be uncovered. I will never live to regret my decision.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Were Socrates, Plato and Aristotle Gay?

We are asking, from the point of view of modern culture and ideas about sexuality, about a culture 3000 years in the past and their ideas about sexuality, and we want their ideas translated into modern ideas. "Gay" is a word we use now to describe certain types of male homosexuality, right? Well, what is male homosexuality? Is it the case that if a male person has one sexual experience, sometime in his life, with another male, he is homosexual? What if he has two... three... what would you take as a dividing line? What if a male desires other males, but not usually as much as he desires females, and never has a sexual encounter with another male; is he homosexual? What if he desires other males more than females, but never has a sexual encounter with another male? What if he desires other males less than females, but lives in a culture in which male-male sex is preferred, and has that kind of sex; is he homosexual? You can create a few more combinations here and puzzle over them if you want.

The latter case was, as far as we know, more-or-less the case in ancient Athens. Male/male sex was considered preferable to male/female sex as being an encounter between equals, and sex between an older man and a younger man was the most preferred, for a variety of reasons. Were the ancient Greeks homosexuals? From what we see in the Dialogues, Socrates actually seems, relatively, pretty "hetero", in that in at least one or two cases he refused offers of sex with other men. But there's no indication that he always refused it. He was married and had children, but that was the obligation they all had, otherwise the state would disappear.

As far as Aristotle goes, he and Plato probably had a lot of sex with men... were they "gay"? "Homosexual"? By their standards, our terms would have made no sense. Their culture preferred the opposite of what our culture prefers; how do you compare them, then? If you're evaluating it in terms of personal preferences, we have no idea at all of those; but we do know that one's preferences are due to some degree on one's culture and upbringing... but not entirely... so we're back to ground zero in terms of saying what, sexually, Plato and Aristotle, for example, "were" by modern standards. They were almost certainly men who had sex primarily with other men and probably preferred it that way, for some reasons quite dissimilar to, and probably other reasons quite similar to, the reasons men today have sex with other men.