Epicurus on Happiness

Here’s the first of three videos that show how applicable the Greek philosopher Epicurus still is in our time, particularly when it comes to consumerism and advertising:

The Philosophy of Science

Five excellent videos discussing the philosophy of science. I’d love to have had Richard Dawkins sit in on the conversation and discuss his own philosophical presuppositions that lie behind his science. But the videos are great even without Richard there …

What’s Philosophy Good for?

A good introduction to philosophy’s basic questions …

Puddleglum’s Pessimistic Optimism

As I wrote yesterday, the Queen of Underland in Narnia’s The Silver Chair bears great similarities to the 18th-century philosopher David Hume. Both of them say that any belief in something divine, supernatural, or metaphysical is only a magnified projection of our human experience. Thus the existence of such things has been successfully “explained away.”

Now let us see how the delightfully Eeyore-ish character Puddleglum answers the Queen:

“All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.

“Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours IS the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia…”

Here’s the thing. If this “black pit” of our meaningless world is really all there is, then Reason, too, “is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming.” And in that case, we are asked at the same moment “to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based” (Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?”).

By the way, if you like Narnia, you might also enjoy my book The Crack Beneath the Worlds. One reviewer describes it as “unlike any other” she had ever read and “a magnificent tale full of fascinating surprises and mind-boggling puzzlements.”

Narnia, Hume, and the Queen of Underland

The 18th-century British philosopher David Hume doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with Narnia. However, when I read Hume’s Enquiries concerning Human Understanding, I couldn’t help but notice some very clear parallels between him and the Queen of Underland in Narnia’s The Silver Chair. Whether C.S. Lewis specifically thought of Hume when he wrote to book, I cannot say; but as a professional academic and hobby philosopher, Lewis was certainly aware of the doctrines of empiricism. Let’s compare the two.

Hume writes: “The idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise, and good Being, arises from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness and wisdom. We may prosecute this enquiry to what length we please; where we shall always find, that every idea which we examine is copied from a similar impression.”

In other words, Hume thought that any belief in something divine, supernatural, or metaphysical is only a magnified projection of our human experience. Now this is exactly what Lewis’s Queen of Underland tells Jill, Eustace, Prince Rilian, and Puddleglum, who are caught in an underground world and, under the influence of the Queen’s enchantments, begin to doubt the existence of the upper world:

“You have seen lamps [says the Queen], and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You’ve seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it’s to be called a lion. Well, ’tis a pretty make-believe, though, to say truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world.”

This could have come straight from the mouth of Hume.

Emergent Church

I’ve started to look a bit more at the Emergent Church at the moment. I mean, I did read one of Rob Bell’s books a while ago and I’m vaguely familiar with Brian McLaren etc., but I’ve never given the movement serious thought, partly because I am more interested in literature, history and philosophy rather than current church movements.

But a friend of mine has recently introduced me to the works of Peter Rollins, who is definitely more philosophical than Rob Bell, and it has caused me to give more thought to it. Am currently mulling it over.

Beauty, Narcissism, and the Platonic Disdain for the Body – Part I

The following is an excerpt from my new book Ich, nackt im Universum, which consists of a few philosophical short pieces strung together by an overarching narrative. Though the book is mostly in German, there is one bilingual chapter. This is the English part:

The set of eyes gazing at me are the two loveliest eyes in England, they say. I cannot deny it, so far as I can judge from the multitude of eyes that have looked at me in my life of five and twenty. Never, in truth, have any of them penetrated me with the same charm, the same wholly feminine and secret admiration as these two.

They are mine own.

I let them wander, wander over the light flush of my smooth cheeks – ‘smoother than shells worn down by everlasting waves’, an admirer once pronounced them.

He was quoting Ovid, I believe. Very fitting, too, since the speaker in Ovid was a one-eyed giant, a Cyclops, addressing a young beauty beyond the reach of his lumbering arms.

Are not all men like Cyclopes? one-eyed, simple-minded, easily taken in?

A mere smile of my voluptuous lips lures the members of the clumsy sex into thinking that they had evoked my partiality towards them. And all the while they consider us the weaker, the naïve, sex! It is they who are naïve, they who are taken in by a mere smile, reading into it a meaning which is not there. Little do they know, indeed, that I reserve all my meaningful smiles for myself.

Oh why did Milton’s Eve turn away from the shape that looked up at her from the smooth lake? Sympathy and love had met her in the wat’ry image. A more admirable face she would never again behold in her life. Why did she turn to Adam, who was “less fair, less winning soft, less amiably mild” than herself? If Eve’s staying at the pool and admiring herself had meant mankind’s Fall, what a more glorious Fall it would have been than the mere eating of a Fruit! The heroic pathos of it!

I, however, shall not make the same mistake as the Miltonic Eve. Her smooth lake is hanging here on my wall, and I shall take pleasure in looking at it as often as I desire. The image therein is a reflection of that feminine wholeness in which mankind’s great Matriarch surpassed her male counterpart; it is that femininity that always has and always will surpass masculinity. The gracelessness, the grotesqueness, of the latter! The elegance, the aptness, of the former!

Three knocks on the door.

‘Caroline!’

Again three knocks.

‘Caroline!’ the voice of my father calls me. ‘Are you in there?’

‘Yes, Father, I am here.’

‘People are waiting for you, Caroline. The gentlemen who visit a ball at the Whitrow’s would be very disappointed to have been denied a glance at England’s most beautiful woman.’

‘Yes, of course, Father. I am coming.’

England’s most beautiful woman. Hearing the compliment still produces a rush of warmth in me, as often as I have heard it said before. It makes the image in the mirror all the more admirable.

I turn away from the mirror of my private chambers and move to the door. Upon opening it, the ugly face of my father meets me. I did not get my good looks from him, that is for sure.

‘Why did you not come, Caroline, when I sent your maid to summon you?’

Why not, indeed? because a lowly servant is not fit to summon ‘England’s most beautiful woman’.

Not being able to read my thoughts, my father exerts himself to make his all-too-clear point even clearer: ‘And why do you never attend a ball before being begged to come? Are my balls such a weariness to you that you only condescend to delight us with your presence after repeated petitions?’

Why do I wait? My father probably thinks it is because I get pleasure from being begged. That I relish the experience of waiting for the maid’s knocking on my door, and upon ignoring it, for my father’s coming personally. That I savour the thought of the gentlemen’s eyes darting lustfully but vainly through the ballroom in search for the famous beauty of the house. That I imagine them wondering and whispering where I am, until finally they can bear it no longer and inquire of my family as to my whereabouts.

How very wrong my father is about me. But all I say is, ‘No, Father, they are not a weariness to me,’ which, of course, does not answer his question.

‘Have been admiring yourself in the mirror again, have you not?’ my father asks as we walk down the hallway.

I do not answer.

‘Yes, I know about your habits, I do. I know many things, Caroline – ’

Is he implying something? Does he know –? No, he cannot know. No one knows. It is my secret.

The Happy Life Is No Blind Trust, or: No Man Can Go Wrong to His Own Hurt Only

I read, among other things, Seneca’s On the Happy Life last week. Here’s an excerpt of a passage I particularly liked:

Nothing, therefore, needs to be more emphasized than the warning that we should not, like sheep, follow the lead of the throng in front of us, travelling, thus, the way that all go and not the way that we ought to go.  Yet nothing involves us in greater trouble than the fact that we adapt ourselves to common report in the belief that the best things are those that have met with great approval, – the fact that, having so many to follow, we live after the rule, not of reason, but of imitation.

The result of this is that people are piled high, one above another, as they rush to destruction.  And just as it happens that in a great crush of humanity, when the people push against each other, no one can fall down without drawing along another, and those that are in front cause destruction to those behind – this same thing, You may see happening everywhere in life.

No man can go wrong to his own hurt only, but he will be both the cause and the sponsor of another’s wrongdoing. For it is dangerous to attach one’s self to the crowd in front, and so long as each one of us is more willing to trust another than to judge for himself, we never show any judgement in the matter of living, but always a blind trust, and a mistake that has been passed on from hand to hand finally involves us and works our destruction.

The Legend of the Leap of Faith

I’ve just read Is Religion Dangerous? by Keith Ward and thought it a badly-needed book for our times. There were also several passages that I found personally helpful on my journey of faith and reason, which is certainly not one without tension. Here’s a passage that is one of the best summaries of the issue of God’s existence I’ve ever read (though that might be due to where I’m at in my inner journey at the moment, and I might view the passage differently a few years down the road):

There is a particular view of the history of European philosophy that has almost become standard, but which is a misleading myth. That is that everybody used to accept that there were ‘proofs for God’. The first cause argument (the universe must have a first cause) and the argument from design (design in the universe shows that there must be a designer) were supposed to prove that there must be a God. But then along came Immanuel Kant, who disproved all these proofs. After that, belief in God had no rational basis and had to become a rationally unjustifiable leap of faith (where ‘faith’ means belief without any evidence).

This view of the history of philosophy is skewed in a number of ways. First of all, it was never generally thought that, by starting only with the observable facts of the physical world, anyone could demonstrate that there has to be an intelligent first cause outside of the universe. That would make God little more than an inference from observed facts, an absentee creator who was never actually present or experienced.

As a matter of historical fact, the main philosophical arguments derived largely from Plato and Aristotle, whose concern was not with some sort of inference from observed reality to something else. It was with the question of what the nature and character of observed reality was. In Plato’s case, his arguments (or many of them) were intended to show that the observed world can be seen by reflective enquiry to be a world of appearances. The underlying reality can be known by the mind, by intellectually investigation, and ultimately by a vision of the Good, as the true reality of which the material world is an appearance. Philosophical argument was basically ‘dialectic’ – the presentation and re-presentation of limited perspectives on the world that might lead to distinguishing reality from appearance, and discerning that the inner character of reality is mental or spiritual. Plato does not ask us to infer an unseen designer. He tries to get us, through intense reflective argument, to see the world as appearance, the manifestation, of a deeper spiritual reality that is akin to human consciousness, but of purer and more perfect goodness and beauty.

When Immanuel Kant came along, he did set out to undermine a specific set of rationalistic arguments propounded by the philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff. He did say that he set out to undermine knowledge in order to make room for ‘faith’. But his whole critical philosophy was written as an attempt to set faith a firm intellectual foundation, not to offer it as an alternative to intellectual thought.

A central part of Kant’s philosophy was the attempt to show that reason leads to unavoidable contradictions when it tries to take observed reality as the true reality, as reality-in-itself. Only when you have, in this way, pushed reason to its limits can you see that reality must be something more than the empirical and observable, more than the world of Newtonian physics.

Faith, for Kant, was practical commitment made in areas where theoretical knowledge is impossible, but where there is still a pressure to make a rational choice. To make his case, he had to show that reason has its limits, and that it is necessary to make reasonable decisions in areas that go beyond those limits. For him, faith – faith in God, in moral freedom, and in the possibility of moral fulfillment (‘happiness in accordance with virtue’) – is supremely reasonable. It is not a leap in the dark. It is the use of reason beyond the limits of empirical verification.

Kant was, in fact, not so far from Plato. Kant did not speak of a vision of the Good because he was very suspicious, unduly suspicious perhaps, of claims to personal experience of God. But Kant did say that it was not optional but absolutely necessary to posit a rational and moral basis of the world, to posit the existence of the Supreme Good.

For Kant, all ultimate worldviews (all systems of transcendent metaphysics, as he would have said) are unverifiable. Yet it is supremely reasonable to have one, for we must base our practical life-commitments on something, on the best we can manage as human beings. That best, for Kant, was the postulate of a supremely good and wise God, on whom the rationality of the world and of human thought, and the reasonableness and obligatoriness of morality, could be founded. We have to go beyond the evidence, for reason itself compels us to do so.

You might say that it is deeply rational to have an ultimate worldview, but the fundamental beliefs of a such a view cannot be based on any more basic evidence, for there is nothing more basic. How then can we choose? For Kant, we must choose the view that best supports our basic belief in the importance of reason, truth, and objective standards of beauty and goodness. This is a reasonable faith, but it is founded on a serious moral commitment that it is logically possible to reject.

So the history of European philosophy is not really a story of moving from proofs of God to irrational faith. It is rather a story of clarification of the methods and limits of science (which Plato was unclear about, and Aristotle was partly wrong about); and of the basis of our most general worldviews in the sorts of practical commitment, the ways of life and moral orientation, that make possible distinctive human activities like science, morality and religion.

Whatever all this is, it is not the ending of rational thought by blind acceptance of some absolute authority. When Kant spoke of faith, he was absolutely not thinking of blind acceptance of authority. He called that ‘heteronomy’, subjecting your will to the will of another. In its place he called for ‘autonomy’ – daring to think for yourself, even about matters said to be revealed by God. Faith was in human reason and goodness, seen as founded on an ultimate reason and goodness, rooted in the nature of things.

Another Aphorism …

“A drop of philosophy creates atheism, but a whole bucket full creates piety.”