Just a Thought

Philosophy as we know it began in Greece about 2,500 years ago. No one else anywhere on Earth had done anything like that before.

That really blew my mind at first. Because philosophy consists of things which are really familiar to us: thinking about the nature of reality, of perception, etc etc.

But then I had this thought: perhaps people had always thought about such things, and had always talked about such things, but before Greece, ca 500 BC, it had simply never occurred to anyone to write it down.

So for example, in Babylon in 2500 BC, two temple scribes could be taking a break and talking, speculating about how far away the moon was, and whether matter was composed of one substance or four substances or many substances; and then it was like, "Okay, break's over. I wish we could keep talking about these interesting things, but we have to get back to work, and think of three dozen more things to compare the king to."

Socrates, not the first philosopher but within 100 years of the first philosopher, and the most influential of all of them so far, never wrote any philosophy. He talked to people. That was his full-time job. And then after he was executed, his pupil Plato wrote down those conversations. That's what all of Plato's works are: conversations starring Socrates.

So maybe the explanation of why there isn't any earlier philosophy is staring us right in the face in the form of the best-known philosophy of all time, of some of the oldest: there was earlier philosophy, but it was all just conversations, so it never got recorded, never got organized, just blew away like dead leaves in the wind.

 

Jacob Burckhardt

About 35 years ago, David Lee, then the Head of the department of Germanic and Slavic languages at the University of Tennessee, and the instructor of an undergraduate course I was taking, explained to me, as we were chatting between classes, that Germany has a tendency toward the monolithic. More than some other cultures, the Germans tend to regard one person or entity as being the greatest in its category: the greatest conductor, the greatest painter, the greatest automobile manufacturer, the greatest culinary country (not Germany, Germans freely admit) -- the greatest professor of history.

It's the latter category which concerns us here. In the mid-19th century, the University of Berlin was considered by Germans to be the greatest university -- certainly the greatest in Germany, and perhaps in the world. Cultured Germans were certainly not unaware of the Sorbonne and other great universities in other lands -- and Leopold von Ranke, the chairman of the history department in Berlin, was a figure treated with awe. If there was a greater historian than Ranke somewhere in the world in 1872, then Germans, at least, didn't know much about that. In 1872, Jacob Burckhardt,

who had caught Ranke's attention as a student in Berlin, and who was then a professor at Basel, was offered Ranke's chairmanship -- and to the surprise of many, he declined. Burckhardt preferred to stay in Basel, where he had been born in 1818, where he had taught from 1843 to 1855 and again since 1858, and where he would remain until retiring in 1893. And where he had, among great throngs of devoted students, a notable prodigy of his own: Friedrich Nietzsche. If Burckhardt had gone to Berlin in 1872, and if Nietzsche had come with him -- not an unreasonable thought, surely a number of people would've followed Burckhardt anywhere -- what all might have been different in the world since 1872?

Heinrich von Treitschke ended up succeeding Ranke in Berlin, a highly respected figure, to be sure, but not as charismatic, as individualistic, as memorable as Burckhardt. Somewhat the way Nietzsche did in philosophy, Burckhardt drew outside the lines in history. He did things his own way, to the extent that many people describe him as an art historian, or an historian of culture, or something else rather than just an historian. I think it's best to describe him simply as Jacob Burckhardt. To the best of my knowledge, there have not been others like him. Very much of his prose, perhaps most of it, combines political, art-historical, philosophical and other considerations, in a way which no-one else I know of has done. His best known book is probably Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, but he also wrote Der Cicerone, a book intended to be used as a field guide to painting, sculpture and architecture in Italy, from the Greek temple of Paestum, built around 600 BC, up to 18th-century works; Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen (The Time of Constantine the Great); Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (World-Historical Considerations); and other works which don't fit into similar categories any more than the ones I've named.

Burckhardt's reputation may have faded a bit since his time. One of the reasons I say this is that I had a very, very hard time finding a copy of Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, and the copy I found was published in Bern in 1941. And I can't find any record that it was ever translated into English. World-Historical Considerations, that's my own translation. This is a collection of lectures making up a course which Burckhardt gave at Basel just twice. He didn't repeat himself very much, to put it mildly. Those lectures blew students' minds, and they carried his reputation with them out into the world. He very much believed in the view of history being shaped by geniuses, by "world-historical figures," a phrase made popular by Hegel (and then, after Burckhardt's time, by Edward Albee), although Burckhardt is at pains in these lectures to point out how his views differ from those of Hegel. The view that history is shaped by great individuals, by geniuses, is rather unpopular at the moment among academics. But it makes sense to me. And for that reason, it makes sense to me to assume that Burckhardt's reputation will rise again at some point.

Will I Re-Consider Hegel?

If everyone or almost everyone disagrees with you, you may be a genius, far ahead of your time, or you may be wrong. Best to at least investigate the latter possibility.

I know of only one person who shares my opinion of Hegel: Schopenhauer, who called Hegel the worst, most ignorant, incoherent, empty, pretentious charlatan ever to successfully pass himself off as a philosopher. (See any remark about Hegel in any of Schopenhauer's works in which Hegel is mentioned.)

On the other side, those who considered Hegel to be somewhere between very clever and a world-beating genius include almost everyone whose opinion remotely matters, from Marx to Adorno to some of today's sneakiest anonymous post-postmodern YouTubers... Kierkegaard rejects some aspects of Hegel's system very energetically, but he doesn't call Hegel a fool or a fake the way Schopenhauer does. Kierkegaard clearly sees Hegel as a worthy adversary, who will not be defeated by mere insults.

Even Nietzsche, who has some passing insults for Hegel, seems to regard him as at least interesting. Speaking of having almost everyone disagree with you: When Nietzsche composed his list of "meine Unmoeglichen" ("my impossible ones," that is: "those whom I simply cannot stand") at the beginning of the chapter "Streifzuege eines Unzeitgemaessen" in Goetzendaemmerung, he doesn't list Hegel, but he does list Kant (along with Seneca, Rousseau, Schiller, Dante, Victor Hugo, Liszt, George Sand, Michelet, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, the brothers Goncourt and Zola), whom almost everyone else whose opinion matters -- including Schopenhauer -- considers to be a stone genius. Time for me to admit: I don't understand Kant nearly well enough to have any opinion about him, and time for me to admit that maybe my hero Nietzsche, who was dead wrong about women and war, didn't understand Kant either. (I'm still just fine with the rest of the list.)

For Schopenhauer (and almost everyone else), Kant was the most brilliant by far of all the philosophers of the preceding century.

Hegel built upon Kant, and so did Schopenhauer.

And Marx built upon Hegel, which means that most Leftists since Marx have built directly or indirectly on Hegel.

What finally made me decide that I had to give Hegel another chance, although the camel's back had been close to breaking already for a while, was Ernst Bloch. He's one of my favorite writers, and he wrote an entire book so extravagantly praising Hegel that I had to throw in the towel and agree to read and re-read some Hegel, this time trying to hold my mind open to the possibility that he's not as bad as Schopenhauer thought.

Or at the very least, I need to re-read that particular book of Bloch's, -- Subjeckt-Objekt. Erlaeuterungen zu Hegel -- slowly and carefully, and try to decide whether I want to approach Hegel again. At this point, I don't really want to. But I'm willing to let Bloch try to change my mind. I probably will read Hegel again. It's not just Bloch, it's everybody except Schopenhauer.

Oh, and I also need to research this fellow Solger. He's mentioned by both Kierkegaard and Bloch, it seems he and Hegel were friends. I've never heard anyone else mention him, but Kierkegaard and Bloch are more than enough.

I recently heard an English philosopher say that, yes, Hegel's prose is terrible, but that his books were actually lecture notes, not intended to be published as books. And this guy was saying that Hegel was brilliant even though his prose was awful. In Subjekt-Objekt, Bloch is having none of this talk about Hegel's prose being awful. Hegel's prose is sometimes difficult, Bloch says, but it's brilliant, full of deep music and blood and guts and Luther. And the thing is: German is Bloch's native language, he's very very good at it. If Bloch says someone writes brilliantly in German, I have to listen, even if that someone is Hegel, whom I'm used to thinking of, agreeing with Schopenhauer, as writing sheer shameless nonsense.

As long as I'm here I may as well defend Schopenhauer and Nietzsche against the usual accusation from my colleagues on the Left, that they were reactionary. Certainly neither of them was progressive, but reactionary? What, exactly, do you think they were reacting against? They were both classless, and both clueless when it came to politics. I see no evidence that either of them was the slightest bit familiar with any socialist philosophy.

Jordan Peterson is Not an Intellectual, He Just Plays One on YouTube

PZ Meyers sez we should call Jordan Peterson what he is: an anti-intellectual. I'm down with that. (And it's nice to be able to agree with PZ Meyers about something for a change.)

This takedown of Peterson by Nathan J Robinson in Current Affairs is wonderful. I take exception with Robinson referring to Peterson as an intellectual. But Robinson makes it clear that he uses the term very loosely:

"In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train. But we do not live in a reasonable world."

And I also take issue with Robinson's... okay, I was about to say that I take issue with Robinson's characterization of Peterson as "the intellectual we deserve," and giving some of the responsibility for Peterson's success to the sorry state of the Left -- but then I remembered the Occupy movement and their position that "it's okay not to have goals" and how that has always struck me as a particularly poor attitude for a (supposedly) political movement to take.

But in this post, I'm about accentuating the upside. I see intellectuals (real ones) being energized by Peterson. If anyone ever could energize and unite Marxists, postmodernists, intersectional feminists, philosophers in general, English teachers, evolutionary biologists, comparative mythologists and other (real) intellectuals who normally don't necessarily all get along so well with each other, then surely it's Mr Go Clean Up Your Room There Bucko. If any one person ever could inspire us to go grab the public by its mental lapels and explain to them just who really does and does not deserve to be called an intellectual, it's Peterson, with his constant and thorough misrepresentation of who we are and what we do and say and want.

Oh and by the way, let me take the opportunity to address the reason I've seen most often proposed by writers on the Right for the Left's hostility to Peterson: the amount of money that he makes. That's absurd. George Clooney has made over a billion dollars so far, many times as much as Peterson, and we're not pissed off at him. Because Clooney isn't constantly talking out of his ass.

I'd also like to address the excuses so often being made for him by critics on the Left: he's not so bad, they say. Yes, very many of his fans are alt-right and antisemitic and brimming with toxic sexism and otherwise atavistic, but he's not far-right. How much longer will the non-Right keep giving Peterson this thoroughly undeserved concession? Wake up and smell the barbed wire: he's far-right. That's why all of those fans of his are far-right (and very often deny that they are, perhaps oftener than not). I know of only one admiring description of Peterson from the Left -- except, to be precise, it's from an author, a fellow mythologist, who sez "I'm a Leftist and I like Peterson." I'm not sure whether anyone else sez that that guy is a Leftist.

Philosophers Don't Make Good Cheerleaders

It has been asked whether philosophers are good for anything at all. And not just by high-school bullies and robber barons, but sometimes even by philosophers. My answer: it definitely depends on the philosopher. Some of them are truly awful. Others are awesome geniuses who only seem useless to some of their contemporaries because they're so brilliant that it literally takes centuries before anyone can begin to figure out what they were talking about. If you ask me -- I realize no one asked me -- we should pose that question, the question of whether or not someone is good for something or not, we should pose that question more often in regard to bullies and robber barons. I mean, look who's about to get the freakin Republican nomination for President of the United States. It's not a philosopher. It's not even nearly as close to being a philosopher as the average human being. It's a walking, talking combed-over indictment of our society and how we kiss the asses of those we think are extremely rich, (I agree with those who say the most likely reason Trump doesn't want to make his tax returns public is because it would become plain that he's been lying about being a billionaire.) and underrate those who truly attempt to use their minds to the utmost. Hillary Clinton got stomped in West Virginia for telling the truth about the future of coal mining: that it doesn't have a future. A country which valued philosophy even a little bit would never have anyone like Chump or W within miles of being elected for even a small elected office. In a country with some respect for philosophy, a candidate for the leadership of that country wouldn't be set back politically for saying something which is common knowledge. A country with some respect for philosophy wouldn't be in full flight from its own knowledge so much that such a candidate would suffer a loss of popularity for such a confrontation of what everyone knows.

Stop and think more often. Who knows, it just might end up doing everybody a lot of good.

Or, if you want to be like that walking, talking orange comb-over, don't.

I Nietzsche To Stop With These Im-Popper Puns

Hegels and guys, I Nietzsche to stop with these im-Popper puns. I Kant stand it. It's simply not in Descartes. Heidegger! Degger agrees with me: Husserl unravel such frivolous wordplay? You Sartre be ashamed of yourselves! This Shaw gives you bad Marx! Adorno what I'm gonna do with you guys! Horkeimer can't get you to stop it?! Who Weber started this is gonna be sorry! I'll Pindar blame where it belongs and Russell up the punishment which is Owen. This Mill not stand! I'll Machiavelli memorable example of you! You'll Rousseau what you did every time you Pascal Thomas! No More! Locke it up! With Hume do you think you're dealing?! You mustn't Berkeley up the wrong tree and Plato my strengths! Don't Fichte mize me! You Diderot, ro thing! Cicero guy to mess with! Loyola fans are in my corner! Occam you won't stop?!

"Religion Is A Sand-Castle, And A Tidal Wave Of Reason Is About To Wash It Away!"

Another parallel to the fundies: the fundies say that Jesus is coming back really soon, any minute now, and the New Atheists say that Reason will wash religion away really soon, any minute now.

If the New Atheists read more than scientific journals, comic books, the occasional sci-fi or fantasy novel and each other, they might have come across some of the atheist philosophers and historians from one or two centuries ago who sounded exactly like the 21st-century New Atheist over-optimism quoted in the title of this blog post. The Age of Reason could also have been called The Age of the Premature Belief in the Coming Final Victory of Reason.

I believe that if humanity survives long enough, religion will eventually fade away. If we're not killed off in the meantime by an asteroid or by our own nuclear weapons, or by ironically actual tidal waves, strengthened by the climate change we're causing, or by some disease, or one of the many other things which could quite suddenly render this discussion moot. But not only has religion proven much more tenacious than those historians and philosophers from the late 18th to the early 20th century thought: in addition, atheism in its current form has some problems.

Probably the most serious of those problems right now is that the most prominent leaders of the atheist movement are ignorant obnoxious pricks. Arguably, they are slowing the progress of atheism down more than they are aiding it, because they're so repulsive. They're inducing some atheists to deny that they're atheists and call themselves something like skeptics instead, lest someone should assume that they're with THEM. That's not a hallmark of the best possible leadership. Sam Harris, in addition to many, many other glaring shortcomings, believes in spirituality, which in my opinion raises serious doubts about whether he is really an atheist at all. He and Dawkins and Hitch and Myers and other leading New Atheists are atrociously ignorant Islamophobes. Dawkins, who simply cannot shut up about Islam and how horrible and dangerous it is, has never read the Koran and announces proudly that he never intends to, reminiscent of the Ayatollah Khomenei putting a price on Salman Rushdie's head for writing a book which the Ayatollah did not read. Dawkins has recently referred to Christianity as a valuable bulwark against the menace of radical Islam, which for me raises questions about his credibility as an atheist just as Harris' nonsense about spirituality does.

Harris claims that Islam is currently going through its "Medieval" phase, which shows you that he can count to 14: the beginnings of Islam are 1400 years ago, and 1400 years AD Christendom was in its Middle Ages (or at least some of it still was). It also makes one wonder, not only how the tremendous flowering of Islamic science, philosophy and art during the actual Christian Middle Ages fits into Harris' chronology, in which Islamic culture's progress is to mirror Christendom's, but 600 years later, but also whether Harris gave any thought at all to the fact that most of the oldest cities on Earth, Eridu, Ur, Babylon, Memphis, Thebes, are in the most central regions of Islam.

But you can't give much serious consideration to that which you never learned to begin with, can you?

A really remarkable, truly striking example of New Atheism's negligence of the study of history is the widespread New Atheist ignorance of both the history of religion and the history of atheism. Remarkable and striking because, if you're going to have an atheist movement which isn't absurd, the leaders of that movement should be among the leading experts on that history. Otherwise, what is the movement actually about? Batman and Spidey may be pretty cool, I wouldn't know, but they're no substitute for Thucydides and Livy and Gibbon and Voltaire and Marx and Burckhardt and Nietzsche.

By no means should the leaders of an atheist movement be as ignorant of science as Dawkins, Harris, Hitch, Myers and New Atheists generally are of history and philosophy. Looking at the New Atheists, the gulf between the sciences and the humanities seems as huge and strong as ever on the part of the scientists, but fortunately, the people who used to be known as humanists have been much better at filling it. Perhaps Bronowski should've been scolding both scientists and the people who used to be known as humanists about it, and not just the people who used to be known as humanists. (You see, before the New Atheists appropriated the word, a humanist was a specialist in the humanities. Made sense, didn't it? Ah, all the amazing things you can learn by studying history!)

More On My Problems With Buddhism

Either Buddhism has been erroneously called a religion by very many people for a very, very long time, or it is a religion which recently has been very successfully marketed to atheists.

Just today in an online discussion, I was saying Yu-huh it is too a religion, and this other person, possibly a Buddhist, I don't know for sure, was saying no it's a philosophy, and I indicated that I was tired of the discussion, and the other person said Okay if you don't want to discuss religion...

*sigh* I pointed out that -- *sigh*

I'm so sick of them. "Buddhism is not a religion. We don't worship deities or preach any sort of metaphysics. Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to go to a temple and kneel in front of a statue of the Buddha alongside some Buddhist monks, and chant and meditate in my quest to attain eternal bliss."

This little tiff started off with a quote from the Dalai Lama: "I believe that the only true religion consists in having a good heart." I replied: "I don't think you need any religion to be a nice person."

The other person tossed me an LOL and said that that was exactly what the quote meant, because Buddhism isn't a religion, and we were off.

It's one thing if you think that the Dalai Lama is a great person and a powerful force for good in the world. Maybe he is. I admit that I can't really judge his personality or his effect on the world objectively, because all of this it's-not-a-religion sticks in my craw.

I happen to like Pope Francis very much. (I didn't right at first, as you can see by reading what I wrote about him in this blog immediately after he was elected Pope. But part of that, of course, was just my own personal disappointment because I hadn't been elected Pope.) I like him more and more.

I'm not sure whether I would like him if he and/or some of his followers started to claim that Catholicism is not a religion and never has been. If, for example, Catholics suddenly started to claim that the belief in the Resurrection isn't really a belief in the Resurrection and never was such a belief, the way that some Buddhists have suddenly begun to claim that Buddhists beliefs in reincarnation -- reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, for example -- are not actually beliefs in reincarnation and never have been.

If you're a Catholic and also an atheist, that's fine with me. Just don't try to tell me that no Catholics believe in anything supernatural and that none ever have.

If you're a Buddhist and you don't believe in reincarnation, I have no problem with that.

If you're trying to tell me that "Buddhists don't believe that the Dali Lama has been reincarnated, they believe that aspects of one Dali Lama are transferred to the next, because they all share one heart," and that I'm just silly for thinking this is a religion and not a philosophy, and for thinking that what you just said has anything to do with reincarnation, then I don't want to talk to you any more.

Not about Buddhism, not right now anyway.

Why? Because I'm always struggling to make sense, and that struggle is difficult for me under the best of conditions. Maybe it's actually much harder for me personally because I'm autistic. Perhaps if I were neurologically-typical I wouldn't loath theology so because it wouldn't pose such a threat to me. Perhaps if I were neurologically-typical and someone were to say to me: "Buddhists don't believe that the Dali Lama has been reincarnated per se, they believe that the ideals of the last Dali Lama have been transferred to the new one. The one who owns the heart," I'd find it fascinating, and we'd be able to discuss it all day and all night and I'd find it all ever so delightful. I seem to remember a line from a poem by Jack Kerouac about Buddhism being delightfully empty baloney any way you slice it. I'm sorry, I can't find that line right now. And often I remember lines completely wrong. (Is that also because I'm autistic?) But assuming that Kerouac did actually write something more or less like that -- is this a matter of some people finding a perfectly good and healthy sort of nonsense in religion?

Is it possible that it's similar to the wonderful stuff I find in Gertrude Stein, which so many people have had to explain so laboriously to each other but which no one ever had to explain to me, which I loved from the first instant?

Maybe. Or maybe I simply have a very good point here and I'm right to call some Buddhists on their nonsense.

[PS, 20. March 2016: Another thing has occurred to me lately: how seldom anyone seems to wonder whether the feats of archery described by Eugen Herrigel in his famous book Zen in the Art of Archery were faked. (Herrigel tells of a Zen master shooting an arrow at a faraway target in the dark and hitting the center of the bulls-eye, and then shooting a second arrow which splits the first one right up the middle.)]

"Die WIRKLICHE Philosophie Des 19. Jahrhunderts" Nach Spengler

In dem Untergang des Abendlandes, DTV, 9. Auflage 1988, S 479-81, gibt Spengler eine Liste von mehreren Dutzenden Buechern, Theaterstucken, Opern und Pamphleten, die er "eine Uebersicht ueber die wirkliche Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts" nennt. Es ist eine sehr interessante Liste. Aber wie so sehr oft bei Spengler, obwohl etwas sehr interessant ist, fragt man sich, ob das Interessante auch ueberhapt sinnvoll ist, von tiefsinning ganz mal zu schweigen. Spengler wollte mit dem Untergang eine "Umrisse einer Morphoplogie der Weltgeschichte" schreiben. Ich denke, das ist ihm voellig mislungen, dass er aber stattdessen und unabsichterweise etwas faszinierendes schrieb, das einsam in seiner eigenen Katagorie dasteht. Spengler war ein Reaktionaer, ein Rassist und ein Wirrkopf, aber ganz anders als die allermeisten Reaktionaeren, Rassisten und Wirrkoepfe ist er gar nicht langweilig. Vorausgesetzt dass man ihn nicht ernst nimmt, enthaelt sein seltsam magum opus etliches Wertvolles.

Also, zu dieser angeblich wirklichen Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts: es ist weite davon, die schlechteste Auswahl von 19jahrhundertiger Schreibungen die ich je gesehen habe. Vieles davon finde auch ich ganz gut.

Fragt sich aber, wie die Authoren dieser Philosophie Spengler gefunden haetten.

Fuer jemanden wie Spengler, der die ganze Welt mit seinem Buch umfassen will, ist diese Liste kaum umfassenderweise international. Nicht nur, dass Schriften aus Nord- und Suedamerkia, Afrika, Asien und Ozeanien voellig fehlen. Dachte Spengler, dass waehrend des ganzen 19. Jahrhunderts nur in Europa (wirklich) philosophiert wurde?

Ich denke, dass er vielleicht eben das wirklich gedacht hat. Und dass in einer gewissen vergangenen Epoche nur in China, in einer anderen nur in Aegypten (wirklich) philosophiert wurde usw. So eine Art von Wirrkopf war er: er war nicht gluehend mit Hass noch triefend mit Verachtung fuer die meisten Menschen der Welt wie viele Rassisten. Er war vielmehr die Art von rassistischem Wirrkopf, der glaubte dass er in einem "europaeischen Zeitalter" lebte.

Aber immerhin: wenn ich richtig gezaehlt habe, gibt es 20 deutschspraechige Werke auf dieser Liste von angeblich wirklicher Philosophie, und dann nur 14 nichtdeutschspraechige. Das heisst: von der urspruenglichen Sprache her gezaehlt, obwohl Spengler einigen Titeln in deutscher Uebersetzung nennt. Also: 2 Werke von Schopenhauer, 1 von Proudhon, 1 von Comte, 3 von Hebbel, 1 von Feuerbach, 1 von Engles, 3 von Marx, 5 von Wagner, 5 von Ibsen, 1 von Darwin, 1 von Mill, 1 von Duehring, 3 von Nietzsche, 3 von Strindberg, 1 von Weiniger und 2 von Shaw.

Nicht nur, dass dies eine ausschliesslich europeaische Liste ist; es ist eine fast ausschliesslich germanische. Nichts auf dieser Liste von Spanien, oder Italien, oder Polen oder Russland. 32 von 34 Werken in germanischen Sprachen, und dann 2 auf Franzoesisch. Und auf Deutsch nichts von Goethe; 4 Opern und eine Pamphlete von Wagner aber nicht Faust. Und nichts von Heine. Schwer, mir vorzustellen, dass Nietzsche sich gern auf einer solchen Liste gesehen haette, nachdem er sich die Muehe gemacht hatte, mehrere Werke und zahllose Bemerkungen in den ueberigen Werken seiner Feindschaft mit Wagner zuzuwidmen, und zwar gar nicht zuletzt Wagners Mitmachens in Deutschtuemmelei und Antisemitismus wegen. Oder Proudhon, Comte, Hebbel, Feuerbach, Engles (wusste Spengler ueberhapt, dass Engles ein ganzes anti-Duehring-Buch schrieb?), Marx, Darwin. Shaw war ganz laessig wenn man ihn auf Listen setzte; er erklaerte dann und wann ruehig, warum er nicht auf dieser oder jener Liste gehoerte, schien aber gar nicht aufgeregt uber solchen Sachen zu werden. Und so muss ich an seiner statt empoert werden.

Was denkt ein so emsiger Deutschtuemmler wie Spengler, dass er hoch priest, wenn er Internationalisten wie Proudhon, Comte, Hebbel, Feuerbach, Engles, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche und Shaw als Schoepfer einer wirklichen Philosophie lobt?

Zeigt diese merkwuerdige Liste dass Spengler gelegentlich besser als seine Nationalismus war, dass er Besserem und Tieferem gegenueber gar nicht blind und taub war?

Oder zeigt es vielleicht, dass er gelegentlich (oder staendig?) Buecher hochpries, welche er gar nicht gelesen hat, und ganz einfach aus Unwissen so tut, als haetten Marx und Nietzsche mehr mit Wagner und Duehring als mit Goethe und Heine zu tun?

Philosophy -- My Kind Of Philosophy -- And Science

There is no strict, precise definition of philosophy which is generally agreed upon, and as a philosopher, I'm fine with that. Philosophers often contradict each other, and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that, because, unlike physicists, philosophers are not always concerned with objective and quantifiable things.

However, if a philosopher contradicts the science which is current in his time, then that's just bad philosophy and ignorance of science. A philosopher is not required to stay current with physics, but if he's not current about something, he shouldn't comment on it. ("Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein) ("When one isn't qualified to speak on a certain topic, one really ought to STFU about it." -- my translation)

Occasionally a famous and well-respected scientist will diss philosophy. Recently I discovered that back in 2011, Stephen Hawking had declared that philosophy is dead. And my first response was very negative. But, again: there is no strict, precise definition of philosophy which is generally agreed upon. So it's kind of hard to tell just exactly what Hawking was declaring to be dead. And until and unless I know exactly what Hawking meant -- what exactly is there to get upset about?

I realize that by reconsidering my attack upon Hawking, and by many other things I've written in this blog, I may have lost any hope of the support of many contemporary philosophers. And you know what? I'm fine with that too, because most of those philosophers who will be inclined to denounce me and call me names are not doing the same sort of thing I am. I'm the sort of philosopher I've often described in this blog: someone who reads a lot of other philosophers, plus fine authors in other genres, and is very interested in the arts, and defines himself by being very specific about where he agrees and disagrees with earlier philosophers. And the philosophers I read -- Sartre, Wittgenstein, Russell, Nietzsche, Hume, Spinoza, etc, etc -- were the same kind of philosophers. Which is far from the only kind of philosopher there has ever been. Which is just fine with me.

Categorization

I posted a link on Reddit, in the philosophy subreddit, to this blog post, which introduces Bollinger's Axiom -- "Don't assume, because someone is brilliant in one field, that they have useful insights about -- anything else at all." -- to the world.

Right away it received a positive response: upvotes, 100% upvotes, and some comments. Then, after the link had been on Reddit for about 2 hours, an admin in the philosophy subreddit removed it, and sent me a message saying that it was interesting but that it was sociological rather than philosophical.

I was about to link it in the sociology subreddit, but then I stopped, because I wasn't at all sure that the sociology admins would agree with the philosophy admin that it belonged in sociology.

I myself believe that the most interesting efforts of mankind in the arts and humanities defy categorization. And I certainly always try to be every bit as interesting as I can. Obviously, I am not an academic, and many philosophers and sociologists are.

I'm reminded of another axiom, almost 2000 years old and also difficult to categorize: "Cast not your pearls before swine."

My search for non-swine continues.

Bollinger's Axiom

Just recently I learned that back in 2011 Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy is dead.

Speaking at Google’s Zeitgeist Conference in Hertfordshire, Hawking said, "Almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics."

And that doofus Lawrence Krauss shot his mouth off around the same time, saying that philosophy had made no progress in 2000 years, and then wrote an entire article in Scientific American in which he sort of apologized. Sort of. Krauss' case is somewhat more annoying because he claims to have a solid knowledge of philosophy.

Then again, to put that into perspective: Sam Harris claims to be a philosopher.

For as long as I can remember thinking about it I had always assumed that everybody was stupid about something. Then in 2007 I learned that I am autistic. Then just recently I started to wonder whether the dumb-in-some-areas, smart-in-others paradigm was not universal, but applied especially to me because I'm autistic.

Then I hear about what Hawking said in 2011, and I reflect on him and Krauss and Dawkins, all brilliant in their own fields and occasionally quite shaky indeed when they wander outside of them -- and the New Atheists in general, most of whom, unlike Harris, are actually competent in some field or other -- and it seems to confirm that I was on to something all along:

Don't assume, because someone is brilliant in one field, that they have useful insights about -- anything else at all.

I like that. How about if we call that Bollinger's Axiom, so that people can start mis-quoting it and mis-applying it right away and claiming that I think all sorts of things which I don't?

I was just thinking to myself that Nietzsche should be read in German,

because he wrote so well that translations almost always mess up what he said. (Can't read German? Nietzsche is a great reason to learn!) I also thought: Why comment on Nietzsche? How can a comment, even in German almost as elegant as his, improve on what he wrote? Then I read in a Reddit Nietzsche-subreddit: "All comments must be in English."

(Reddit is, to quote Wiki, "an entertainment, social networking, and news website where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links, making it essentially an online bulletin board system[...]Reddit entries are organized into areas of interest called 'subreddits.'")

Then I sighed and once again gave up trying to discuss Nietzsche with people. When I discuss Nietzsche with cats, the discussion can be a bit one-sided, but I tend to get fewer silly responses.

Although Nietzsche in undeniably a philosopher, he is also undeniably a poet, and artists (including poets, musicians, etc) have made made much better use of his work than have philosophers.

Now, philosophers might well dispute that, and they might even be right, but you know what? That discussion would bore the living crap out of me. And how can philosophers possibly be right about Nietzsche when they're boring? How can that not constitute entirely missing the point? Eh, let them be right if they're right, I don't care.

Artists have also made better use of Freud than have psychologists including psychiatrists. I don't currently hang out with any artists who are fluent in German and thoroughly unfamiliar with Nietzsche and Freud.

(The rororo Bildmonograph on Thomas Mann does not even mention Theodor Fontane! I know, that was an abrupt tangent, but still, it fits here perfectly.)

I should get out more, the lack of my friends who are artists who are fluent in German and familiar with Nietzsche and Freud illustrates that, however, if I knew such an artist, would we discuss Nietzsche? As I hinted above and have said before on this blog, really the only sensible comment on Nietzsche is WHOAH, READ THIS!! and since we'd already done so, perhaps my hypothetical artist friend would say something much more sensible like "You wanna get high and go bowling?" or "Get out of my apartment, I'm trying to work!!"

Philosophy And Politics And Tania Lombrozo's Piece For NPR

In a recent piece for NPR, Tania Lombrozo called for philosophers to be more engaged in public life.

I'm very much interested in philosophy, so why do I have a negative reaction to this NPR article? Perhaps it aroused the Epicurean in me. In ancient Greece, Stoic philosophers believed that the more fortunate members of society had a duty to serve society, while Epicurean philosophers thought that the wise thing to do was to enjoy life with a circle of close fiends and ignore the rest of the world as thoroughly as possible. Perhaps I have a Stoic approach to politics, except that I want to keep my Epicurean philosophy separate from it. Oscar Wilde loved art, including theatre, and he wanted to see society become more democratic and more responsive to the needs of those who needs were greatest, and yet he was opposed to the Realist plays which were in a great vogue during his lifetime, plays which sought to address social inequities. Wilde insisted: "All art is quite useless." Perhaps he felt that plays were the last thing which were suited to enacting great social change. And perhaps my involvement with philosophy boils down to something resembling Wilde's involvement with art -- it's something I dearly love, but I wouldn't recommend it as a cure for society's ills.

If we're going to involve philosophers in public life -- what kind of philosophers? Philosophers tend to constantly and sharply disagree with one another about just about everything imaginable, and have since ancient Greece. As far as I can tell, the most influential single philosopher in the politics of the US of the past 100 years has been Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind and instructor, at the University of Chicago, of a very nasty and powerful brood of Republican neocons.

My favorite philosopher is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was emphatically ivory-tower. He wanted no part of any political party. Epicurean all the way, he was. "Beneath him and behind him" was how, in his opinion, every true philosopher should regard politics. And given Nietzsche's views on women, perhaps it's very much for the best that he never involved himself in politics. (Saying that Nietzsche is my favorite philosopher is far from saying that I agree with him about everything. In fact, I disagree with just about every single thing Nietzsche says about women in his philosophical works. Turning directly from those works to the letters he wrote to actual individual women, it's hard to believe that the misogynistic philosopher and the downright nice letter-writer are one and the same.)

I know of only 2 philosopher-kings, both Roman Emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Julian. Neither one a bad Emperor -- Julian is admirable for his concerted although unsuccessful attempt to oppose Christianity's intolerance of all other religions -- but neither one a particularly interesting philosopher either. (I think a case can be made that both Alexander the Great and Napoleon were philosopher-kings, and quite interesting philosophers, but I mention that only as an aside in this post because the general consensus is that they were not philosophers.)

I must be honest and point out that one reason for my negative response to Lombrozo's article is that I have heard of none of the living philosophers mentioned in it. I read mostly philosophers from bygone eras. Peter Sloterdijk, and dead guys. For all I know, all the people Lombrozo mentioned are perfectly brilliant, and their participation in public life could be nothing but tremendously good, and I'm missing an incredible amount of top-notch philosophizing which puts Sloterdijk to shame. I doubt it, but it's possible.

Science And Western Philosophy

In what follows, as in my blog generally, the term "philosophy" refers to Western philosophy. This is not because I have anything against philosophy from China or India or the indigenous cultures of the Western Hemisphere or from anywhere else on the planet; on the contrary, it's merely because I know so little about non-Western philosophy.

Every now and then someone who knows a bit about physics or biology or geology and remarkably little about a lot of other things will answer the question "What is philosophy?" by saying that philosophy was what very weakly and incompletely plugged a few gaps in things before Francis Bacon formulated the scientific method and the Scientific Revolution got underway, and add with a condescending smirk that of course this answer doesn't sit well with philosophers. And of course he or she (usually he) is right, that answer does not sit well with philosophers. Or with anybody who actually knows what philosophy is, or knows that the scientific method actually was used now and then -- by philosophers -- for thousands of years before Francis Bacon formulated it.

Western philosophy is the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and their pals, and Russell, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Rorty, Sloterdijk and their pals, and all the people in between who studied Plato and Aristotle and the people in between up until their own time, however you want to describe them, and whatever their attitude toward their illustrious predecessors was.

Within Western philosophy, up until and including Galileo and Francis Bacon, the terms "philosopher" and "scientist" mean pretty much the same thing, and since then, by and large, with a few exceptions, philosophers have tended to know a shitload more about science than scientists have known about philosophy. People generally these days have a healthy appreciation of and respect for science, and philosophers are very rarely an exception to this rule. It's a shame that some prominent scientists don't know jack about philosophy, or history, or art or literature or music or psychology, and yet publicly hold forth on their special area of ignorance as if they had a clue. That's really a shame.

I am notorious for my unwillingness to describe philosophy any more exactly than by saying that it's been what has been written by those people known as philosophers: the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, Boethius, Roger Bacon, William of Occam, Machiavelli, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Pascal, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Russell, Sarte -- you know, all those guys plus the handful of gals which they, unfortunately very misogynistic, very many of them, have let into their club. What it is is what those people have done, however you choose to describe it. I don't define it any more exactly than that because I happen to think that that is exactly what it is. If you have something intelligent to say about Plato and Hume, because you've actually read and understood them, there's a good chance you could reasonably be called a philosopher. If you can't, because you haven't, then chances are you can't be. Just as I think that a religion is that group of people who identify as belonging to that religion, and not a set of beliefs, so I think that philosophy is the above-described group of people, and not something they all have in common which can be abstractly described in several dozen words or less. Philosophers, including the famous ones, have been brilliant and stupid, gregarious and misanthropic, nationalistic and enemies of cultural boundaries, polyglots and bigoted haters of all but one language (although more usually polyglots), world travelers and agoraphobes, sometimes not misogynistic at all, sometimes women, and so on and so forth. As we all know, "philosopher" means "lover of wisdom," but it's not as if there's anything close to a consensus among philosophers about what actually is and isn't wise, or who's wise and who's a fool.

I suppose I actually can think of one characteristic which philosophers generally share, just one: we like to read the works of other philosophers, even the ones we disagree with intensely. We read the latter so as more soundly to refute them and overturn the influence of their folly. It's not as if we're doing it for the money.

Who And What Is A True Philosopher?

Different people have very different opinions and criteria about who is and isn't a great philosopher. Some say Ayn Rand is a great philosopher, I'd say she's just a crude creep who encourages other crude creeps to feel good about themselves, when they shouldn't. Recently I finally broke down and read a book by Karl Barth, Einfuehrung in die evangelische Theologie, because some people insisted that Barth was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. After hearing such high praise, I was hugely disappointed. (Number of Christian theologians who have impressed me at all: still 1: Kierkegaard. And he only impresses me in those moments when he stops being theological.) But I might still actually dislike Barth less than Popper, whom I very recently read, submitting to the rave reviews of many different acquaintances. And I really don't know what to think of Sloterdijk, or Heidegger. They're both much more interesting than Rand, Barth or Popper. I don't know whether Sloterdijk and Heidegger are driving at things I approve or disapprove of. Either way, I approve very highly of interesting prose, and I'm not being flippant here, quality of prose is far from a trivial thing for me. I've finally figured out that I thoroughly loathe what Spengler stands for, and completely disagree with the basic tenets of his philosophy, which compared cultures to organisms -- but the man can write.

Hegel is one of the most highly-esteemed philosophers of the past 2 centuries. And yet, his contemporary Schopenhauer called him worse than worthless, a charlatan who heaped together piles of bullshit meant to sound like philosophical statements. I think Schopenhauer was exactly right about Hegel. I think Schopenhauer was right most of the time. Then again, he wrote some stuff which was utterly stupid, some of it antisemitic, a lot of it sexist.

I'm not sure how far you'd get as a philosophy student quoting Schopenhauer approvingly on the subject of Hegel. I suppose it would vary greatly from school to school, and would generally be risky to your grades. Much riskier still might be if you agree with Nietzsche on the subject of Plato. For many if not most people interested in Western philosophy, Plato is one its pillars and triumphs. For Nietzsche Plato is a catastrophe for Western civilization and a very, very bad man.

To answer the title of this blog post by not answering it: I would encourage you to decide for yourself who and what a great philosopher is, because a true philosopher truly thinks for him- or herself, and if you're not a philosopher yourself what's the point in studying philosophy? Ah, but I suppose that many of you asking who and what is a great philosopher are primarily philosophy students, on your way to becoming philosophy professors, and while I suppose it's possible to be one of those and also truly be a philosopher --

Don't put too much stock into my skepticism, or Schopenhauer's skepticism, about the conflict between being a philosopher and being a professor of philosophy. Schopenhauer's bete noir Hegel was a fabulously successful philosophy professor, and I failed in academia because I'm autistic and I was undiagnosed when I was a student.

That doesn't necessarily mean that Schopenhauer and I are wrong. Decide for yourself.

Then there's the question of how much my opinion of whether you're really a philosopher or not counts. Decide for yourself about that -- if you really want to be a philosopher. (It's not for everybody.)

The Willingness To Consider That You May Be Wrong --

-- what could be more essential for a philosopher, if a philosopher truly is a lover of wisdom? If you never admit that you may be wrong, you'll never know more than you do now, you'll just know less and less as you forget stuff.

And yet this willingness seems so often to be lacking among those who consider themselves to be philosophers. Look at them debating: Philosopher1 asserts: A. Philosopher2 says: no, you're wrong, B. Philosopher1 retorts: B!? You're obviously unfamiliar with Philosopher3's work on this topic, you dolt! Educate yourself before you dare to darken my door! Philosopher3 pops up and says: You're both idiots! C!

And this unfortunate behavior occurs not only when questions of a deep and universal nature are being discussed, questions which an objective onlooking Philosopher4, if such could be found, might well consider to be unanswered or possibly even unanswerable. Philosophers can be found behaving this way concerning questions of a much more mundane nature such as "Was Philosopher5 an atheist?"

You might be thinking to yourself: "How could you fuck up a question as mundane as that? All you have to do is examine the statements of Philosopher5, and conclude from them that Philosopher5 was either a believer, or an atheist, or an agnostic, or that he (Let's face it: to the greater glory of neither philosophy nor the male gender, most philosophers have been and continue to be male.) changed his position on this matter from time to time, or that the evidence is insufficient to answer the question."

That's a perfectly sensible thing to think, but if you're thinking that, you may be far too sensible to be a philosopher, or at least, to be a run-of-the-mill philosopher. For, unfortunate and illogical as it seems, Philosophers1, 2, 3 & 4 may actually leave the late and highly-esteemed Philosopher5 out of the discussion entirely, and instead quote Philosophers6, 7, 8 & 9 on the matter as if they know things about Philosopher5 which Philosopher5 himself did not.

Looking at them bickering, you might get the impression that neither Philosopher1 nor 2, 3 or 4 actually cares about Philosopher5 as much as winning a game whose rules are petty, shameful and never openly acknowledged and whose stakes have to do much less with wisdom than with tenure and who gets which office or the front-cover headline in JournalX. And sadly, your impression might be entirely correct. (You might think that I'm exaggerating things -- but only if you've never had very much contact with philosophers.)

Not that so much as a Bachelor's degree is required in order to engage in this sort of a travesty of non-debate. All that is essential is an unwillingness to admit the possibility of error, instead of, when you say A and someone responds: B, asking that person for his or her evidence for B, and actually being glad if in the course of the discussion you learn something. If you're that kind of person, and you're also a philosopher, it may just be that you have a big leg up on other philosophers, and it may even be that you're the kind of philosopher who, long after you're dead, other philosophers may pretend to be arguing about, when they're actually bickering over disgusting things which have nothing to do with you, and dragging your good name down to their revolting level.

How Should I Begin To Study Philosophy?

I'm so glad you asked!

If you want to do this right, you should become proficient in Greek, Latin, German and French at the least, because translations of philosophy into English generally suck. If you want to learn still more languages, it would do you no harm and a world of good. Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Hebrew are all of great relevance to the study of Western philosophy, and heylookit that we haven't begun to address Eastern philosophy yet. Not that there is one homogenous Eastern philosophy corresponding to Western philosophy. Mandarin is relevant to Confucianism and Tao, and Sanskrit and Japanese to Hindu-Buddhism.

I don't really know squat about Eastern philosophy. Back in the West, once you've mastered Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Hebrew, you may begin to keenly feel the lack of Portugese, Catalan, Provencal, Danish, Polish, Coptic and/or Armenian, to name just a very few. And the fact that I've so far mentioned Arabic, Hebrew, Coptic and Armenian only as they related to Western philosophy may have already led you to suspect it, but let me come right out and say it: I know significantly less than squat about Muslim/Arab/Middle Eastern philosophy. Although I may have a vastly greater idea of how much I don't know about it, how much is there unknown by me, than does the average Westerner.

But screw average! Philosophy doesn't have much to do with being average. Not Western philosophy, anyway. So screw the average person giving you advice about studying philosophy and telling you to start with Plato. That advice has cost the world an immeasurable amount of wisdom, because most of us hate Plato. (By "us" I mean "people," whether philosophers or not.) Start with almost anybody except Plato: the Pre-Socratics, or Aristotle, or Zeno, or Diogenes, or Epicurus. Or Machiavelli (Yeah! He'd be a GOOD one to start with!), or Hume, or Nietzsche. Just not Plato. Or Plotinus. Or Hegel.

If you're even the least bit inclined to start with Aquinas, or Augustine, or Barth, leave me alone and go and ask a theologian for advice, and if you want to call what you're studying philosophy, or even the greatest of Western philosophy, that's your own business, and many other theologians will agree with you. Mazel tov.

Okay. Now that we've gotten rid of THOSE jerks -- you're going to have to read Plato at some point if you're to become a great Western philosopher. There's no getting around it because all of the other great Western philosophers from his time to ours also had to deal with him, and if you don't read him you often won't know what they're talking about. Now, if you're unable to summon any enthusiasm for Epicurus or Machiavelli or Nietzsche, you should probably just face the fact that you're not going to become a philosopher. But don't be mad at me, because I saved you from having to study Plato -- and, you're fluent in 15 or more languages, and believe me, that's going to come in handy no matter where life takes you.

And I haven't said a word yet about the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere! Ah, many more languages here to be studied. Probably most of my readers are from the United States, and may not realize the extent to which the languages of the Aztecs and the Incas and the Mayans continue to flourish in Latin America, with several million native speakers each. The most widespread indigenous language in the US, Navajo, is spoken by fewer than 200,000 people. So you can study the more widespread languages because they're more widespread, or the less widespread languages because they need more support -- or both? Who's stopping you?

Not me! But what I actually know about has more to do with the European and Middle Eastern languages, and besides the ones I've mentioned above, you could learn Icelandic and Norwegian and Swedish, and Basque, and Finnish and Estonian and Hungarian, and Czech and Slovak and Slovenian and Serbian and Croatian and Bulgarian, and Gaelic and Welsh and Breton, and Albanian, and Lithuanian and Latvian, and Turkish, and Ukrainian and Belorussian and Macedonian, and Rumanian and Moldavian, and Kurdish, and Maltese. And Georgian! And I've left out a lot, not intentionally, but because the region between Greenland and the Caucasus is an incredibly rich linguistic quilt. And because translations really do suck, or at least especially most translations of philosophy into English. Being multilingual really will open up new worlds for you in a way which monolingual people simply can't imagine. Which means that monolingual native speakers of English are ironically at a disadvantage because of the power of our language, the same way that monolingual native speakers of French were at a disadvantage as late as a century ago when French held an international dominance similar to that held by English today, the same way that monolingual native speakers of Greek were at a disadvantage 2000 years ago in the Graeco-Roman world because everyone adored Greek culture and Greek was the dominant international language and the monolingual Greek-speakers despised Latin without even knowing anything about it, much as many Americans despise Spanish without having a clue about what they're missing, even with the Nobel Prize committee trying mightily to give them a clue by giving Lit prize after Lit prize to authors in Iberia and to the south of us.

Most (not all!) of the ancient Greek philosophers had little knowledge of languages other than Greek. This shows us that progress has occurred in philosophy as in other things. Some people might tell you that I'm yankin' ya here, that the title of this post has promised you something I have failed to deliver. But those people are wrong. And the best advice they'll give you is something like urging you to read Will Durant. And that's not very good at all. If you want to have a chance at learning philosophy deeply, and even a chance at becoming a significant philosopher yourself, I'm the kind of guy you need to listen to. Listen up very carefully, kids, here comes the punchline, and it's a good one:

Look at ALL of the great modern Western philosophers: Machiavelli, Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume, Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Shaw, Heidegger, Santayana, Russell, Sartre -- there is very, very little that all of them agree about. About the main tenets of their various philosophies they are often in the bitterest disagreement: you've got devout Christians alongside atheists, some far Left politically, some far Right, and some with a hearty contempt for both Left and Right. What do they all have in common?

They were all multilingual, that's what. Boom.

What Is Science, What Is Philosophy?

To all of you who are so obsessed with precisely determining what is and what isn't science, be aware that science is defined quite differently in different languages, and that the Latin word for "science," "scientia," was in use over 2000 years ago, long before Francis Bacon and Galileo were born, long before there was an English language. In German, the word for "Science," "Wissenscaft," is applied much more broadly than in English. Not only is history a Wissenschaft to ze Chermans -- they even have things like "Literaturwissenschaft," "the scientific study of literature," which sounds very silly even to me, and will presumably make your head explode if you're one of those English-speakers currently very much at pains to label as incorrect all definitions of "science" but the most narrow.



Is philosophy scientific, is science philosophical? Again, it's partly a matter of semantics. The term "φιλοσοφία (philosophia)" is even older than "scientia," and the ancient Greeks who were called philosophers in their day, from Thales to Pythagoras to Plato to Plotinus, we still call philosophers today -- which leads me to suspect that the present-day English-speakers squabbling about the definition of "science," and defining it very narrowly, don't know very much about those ancient Greeks, or they'd be disturbed that one of them who's always been referred to as a philosopher, Thales, acted very much like someone they'd call a scientist, using mathematical principles to determine things such as the height of Egyptian pyramids, the distance of ships seen from the shore, and the size and shape of the Earth. Then there's Pythagoras, whom these strict categorizers today call a mathematician, but in his time was known as a philosopher along with Thales and Plato. The present-day categorizers call Plato a philosopher, but how many have heard that Plato is believed to have put a sign at the entrance to his Academy which asked all those unfamiliar with geometry to go away? But wait, there's still more bad news for those would have clear and clean distinctions between one academic discipline (Did you notice where the term "academic" comes from?) and the next: Although Plato called geometry "γεωμετρία, geometria," it's not at all clear that he or his contemporaries restricted the use of the term anywhere nearly as English-speakers do today. If you break the word into its parts you see "geo" and "meter," "Earth" and "measurer." To the ancient Greeks this could have meant all sorts of things including the study of history and literature and art botany and all other things in categories as diverse as the Earth. Could have, and in the practical everyday use of the word, probably did.



And, finally, to really make the New Atheists swallow their gum: in Medieval universities, theology was often referred to as the "Queen of the sciences."

Except of course that New Atheists are not swallowing their gum: since I'm rambling on about stuff that happened a long time ago when everybody was ignorant, they're impatiently asking, as they impatiently ask whenever I point out that one of their own has said something wildly inaccurate on an historical subject, "So what?"

So Thales and Pythagoras and Euclid and Bacon and Galileo and Einstein and Heisenberg and many others (Many, many others. It's a long time from Euclid to Francis Bacon, and 1 person who knew that science didn't stop in the meantime, and wasn't waiting to be invented, by Francis or by Galileo, depending on which New Atheist yahoo you talk to, was Francis Bacon. I know this because I've read some Bacon and noticed all of the earlier scientists he mentions and praises. He knew he was building on their work, as opposed to having sprung fully-formed from the brow of Zeus.) did what they did while entirely un-plagued by this English-language mania, particularly virulent right now, to section science off from mathematics and and philosophy and history and linguistics and music and art all the other things which have gotten us out of the trees eating grubs and berries and trying in vain to fight off panthers with sticks and made life somewhat more bearable. Yes, science when extraordinarily narrowly defined has helped with that, too. Yes indeed it has, it's helped greatly. But Einstein didn't cordon himself off from the rest of the world. He played the violin, he loved the visual arts and philosophy. Galileo wrote a treatise on Dante. You think that's odd? His contemporaries would have found it odd if an Italian as learned as he had not done so. (Milton published some scientific works.) You want to talk about this supposed division between science and art -- can you say "Leonardo da Vinci"?

Derek Flood And Søren Kierkegaard

Two theologians, but only one philosopher between them. I thought long and hard about how best to describe Derek Flood here, but it's hard to top his Huffington Post author bio:

A longtime voice in the post-conservative evangelical movement, Derek’s focus is on wrestling with questions of faith and doubt, violence in the Bible, relational theology, and understanding the cross from the perspective of grace and restorative justice.

Yeah. Stick that in yr pipe and smoke it. In his HP icon Flood's mane of hair looks a bit like Kierkegaard's. Like Kierkegaard in that one portrait of him we all know, Flood stares at you earnestly, but while Kierkegaard has a twinkle in his eye and the hint of of a smile, Flood looks deadly dull. Kierkegaard looks like he might actually be interested in you and what you have to say. Flood looks like he thinks that what he has to say to you is so important that it may not even have occurred to him to listen to you unless it's to see whether or not you've understood him. In every piece I've read by him, Flood can't go for 2 sentences in a row without being unmistakeably Christian. Kierkegaard talks about all sorts of things other than Christianity without constantly distorting them in that theological way we all know and love. Not only does he quote many pre-Christian Greek authors, he clearly also likes them the way they really are. No distortion required. He sometimes goes dozens of pages at a stretch without giving the slightest sign that he's a Christian theologian. This of course is what makes Kierkegaard the most appealing of all Christian theologians: he's the one who least resembles a Christian theologian. All the others have no end of urgent things to tell you, such as how they understand the cross from the perspective of grace and restorative justice. Kierkegaard's interests are much wider. He's receptive.

Of course, autistics, such as myself, are not receptive so much, that is to say: one of the major ways you can tell we're autistic is that we have a hard time switching from telling everybody what's what, to listening. At least when it comes to face-to-face conversation. We may be good at absorbing written communications -- although there can be problems there too -- but that often breaks down in face-to-face communication. "Face to face" is even a misnomer in some conversations with autistics, because some autistics have a very hard time maintaining normal amounts of eye contact. I pretty much can't do it with most conversation partners. Don't take it personally, I have a problem.

But at least I know that it's a very serious problem. And I know that a lack of eye contact is just one of the ways in which I routinely fail to achieve what most people think of as the normal back-and-forth and give-and-take of conversation.

But that doesn't mean that I don't want to have more give-and-take with you. I doesn't mean I don't care. I realize that it often looks like I don't care, if it doesn't look even worse, as if I'm hostile or something like that. It's a technical problem with the interface. Don't worry, people are working on this.