By accident I discovered this DailyKos user who has just begun a series (only the first is up so far) of diaries talking about philosophy, and given recent posts of mine and other threads weaving through my thoughts and life, I’m finding it highly useful for me right now.
He’s called it “Philosophy for Kossacks.” As I wrote in a comment, I’ve never been able to get into reading philosophy, as it always seemed too dense — a difficult to enter without proper reference points or a compas. Plus, people always wanted to start with Plato, who always struck me as distasteful somehow, which hindered my desire to continue.
Still, philosophy and philosophical questions have always attracted me, and are one of the main things I enjoy in Kim Stanley Robinson‘s work is his inclusion of philosophical subject matter. He and other writers have introduced me to a lot, from the psychological insights of Buddhism to the fragments of Heraclitus, but I haven’t had a way to integrate it.
I’ve always thought that science itself was a great philosophy, that could and should be applied to everyday life (and now that I’ve finished Robinson’s latest book, I can say I think that’s what he’s getting at, too — in fact, arguably the main character in the book is science itself).
And with this diary at DailyKos, I feel I suddenly have a key, the reference point I needed. I think a view of science as an ultimately humanist undertaking, rather than a mere engine for technology creation, is all the more strengthened.
Protagoras, and many teachers like him, were the folks going around from door to door, undermining the overarching power of aristocracy. They educated pretty much everyone, from the sons of aristocracy to the folks in the Agora [the market - root of agoraphobia, fear of open places]. As attested to in the `statement we all know’, `Sophists’ believed in education.
The gods aren’t the measure; the aristocracy isn’t the measure; social order isn’t the measure. No, `Man is the measure’. More properly translated, it is thus: `Of that which is, that it is, humanity is the measure’.
Protagoras, in blatant disregard for the aristocratic powers that silently destroyed the idea and reality of Athenian democracy, exemplfied the idea of equality, i.e. the equation of the individual and the universal. That is, after all, what `equality’ means.
In keeping with the original idea of the `moraie’ in Greek religion, `Equal’ is what we are. Any step made against that fundamental `equality’ calls for `dike’, justice, a return to equality. It was the way of the Titans, it was the way of the Olympians, it was the way of the tragedians. It became the way of certain philosophers – those that actually taught people. It was the way of `democracy’.
We make justice. We make our world. The gods are irrelevant; the aristocrats are the enemy.
Many of the comments on the diary are great, too — and by that I mean intelligent, interesting, elucidating. I asked, if “the aristocracy isn’t the measure” and instead “the enemy,” isn’t that a problem since they are human as well, and part of the “we” who are the measure? How do we bring aristocrats into the fold, or conversely, how do we justify classifying them non-human?
When I say the aristocrats are the enemy, I don’t mean to imply that they are non-human and not part of the ‘we’. More properly stated, ‘aristocratic values’ are the enemy, not aristocrats themselves. Much of what one would call the ‘anti-humanist’ tradition is based on concepts who’s origins rest in ‘aristocratic values’. This may be the most important legacy of Plato – the invention of the category ‘substance’.
Philosophically speaking, anti-humanists do not believe in equality, they believe in heirarchy. They believe that ‘some people are better than others’ [and they largely think so from a cultural standpoint]. This is what I would call an ‘aristocratic value’ – and with such values, the “we” of which we think we’re all a part is reserved for a much smaller class of people – those of proper mettle, those of the correct ‘substance’.
So to anyone else interested in philosophy but feeling lost about it, or just to any fellow human, I highly recommend this diary with all its comments, and I look forward hungrily to any that may follow.
Some further examples just to record them for myself, and y’all might also find interesting:
zdefender: Recall also that Christianity is often called Platonism (as opposed to the pre-socratics) for the masses, because both believe in an ideal world unattainable by man.
lucid: Christianity, as opposed to Platonism also gave us the concept of ‘the will’. I am an atheist, and very much anti-religion, but philosophically speaking, Chritianity is very much opposed to Platonism on specific issues that later were taken up as the project of humanism. Augustine, for all his flaws, is as important to the humanist tradition as Protagoras is.
And another exchange:
pico: In fairness, secular humanism does have a few historical skeletons in the closet.
By the mid nineteenth century, it had begun to develop into a more stringent positivism, with idealism and hope in rationalism reaching the point of absurdity. This was the danter that Dostoevsky addressed in his Notes from Underground – a society so ‘rational’ that it forgets that we human beings are frustratingly irrational at the core. We’d have to jump a few steps to get there, but there is a traceable line from this strain of secular humanism to the Soviet terror – although by that point in the geneology, the great-grandchild bore little resemblance to its ancestor.
lucid: Quite true
In fact one can already see this in the responses to Kant from Hegel and Schelling [who are also both still humanists]. And it wasn’t just the crazies who came after Marx trying to make a political project out of a dialectical history, it was also the logical positivism of the Vienna School and others.
A nice observation:
Eternal Hope: I wonder if one of the biggest ironies of history was that one of the biggest movements in philosophy was started by Plato’s refusal to listen, but only to ridicule.
And finally, a bit on Marxism from another diary altogether:
lucid: Communism isn’t actually Marxist
Marx characterized Communism as it was present at the time – an attempt to industrialize an agrarian economy without going through the historically necessary step of capitalist development – kinda like what happened in the Soviet Union and Cuba, no?
The revolution for Marx was a structural one, not a social one. The ‘end of history’ is more precisely ‘the end of the history of production’, wherein technological development has conquered scarcity and economy itself, the true obstacle to human freedom, falls.
The problem with this is that it, like capitalist economics, presumes infinite resources, infinite energy input, if you will. That 19th century naivety toward the finite nature of our planet’s resources and climatactic tolerances…
psnyder: Thank you.
Historical instances of “communism” have borne little resemblance to the utopia that Marx lyrically describes in “On the Jewish Question.” Many proponents of Marx have just ignored his analysis of the developmental arc of capitalism, which eventually ensues in its own extinction. In particular they set aside what Marx saw as conditions for the emergence of humanity on the other side of history: industrial globalization so that the necessities of life could be almost effortlessly produced by technological means and the correlative sharpening of class distinctions and the deep immiseration and alienation of the proletariat. It’s a kind of private joke with me to see proponents of unfettered globalization as unwitting agents in the historical dialectic that Marx mapped out, for we do seem to be following it, while states and parties that chose to try to turn his analysis into a political program have fallen by the wayside.
Speaking of 19th century naivete, I think his vision of what the globally industrialized world would look like was naive. He seemed to assume that the industrialization of the production of life’s necessities would be practically universal, rather than different regions being specialized in, say, garment production but unable to provide for their own food or energy needs. I think he was also naive in his assessment of the capacity of capital to flow and exploit relative differences in misery across the globe and thus to indefinitely postpone the end of history.
psnyder: He also seems to assume relatively static populations, i.e., basic labor immobility, which was reasonable to assume in his time but no more, as the current immigration debates in the US and in Western Europe show.
One of the things that makes the current immigration debate so difficult is that it is a part of the larger issue of capitalist globalization. If the fluidity and globalization of capital is a good and virtuous thing, then why isn’t that true for labor as well? If capital need be no respecter of borders, why should people seeking economic opportunity? If the state should be made irrelevant with respect to capital flows, why should it not be made irrelevant with respect to flows of labor?
States have lost ideological and political ground against the conventional wisdom of the inevitability and ultimate desirability of globalization. It seems that the immigration debate raises the question of a robust new role for states in a globalized economy.
Libertarians and Chicago school economists would have the state just wither away, turning into an nightwatchman state, which is inherently protective of the status quo distribution of power. What would the left have the state be and do in a globalized capitalist world?
lucid: And the irony when it comes to the Chicago school is that this is precisely what Marx predicts in the Grundrisse – the last institution to whither away within capitalism is the state. It is rendered superflous.
It’s hard to say where the state comes in. I’m implicitly attracted to Marx’s anarchist tendencies, however, while his structural predictions for the course of capitalism ring true, he didn’t anticipate many of these points you mention, all of which undermine the notion that ‘the end of history’ can be achieved in a remotely egalitarian manner. It’s almost as if we’re returning to an ancient economy, full of deified aristocrats, commodities mystification, slave labor and misery. [And on the second point, if the curreny markets aren't the penultimate example of commodity mystification, I don't know what is]. And all the while, value still accumulates – just in the hands of the few rather than the many.
In a sense, the failure of Marx isn’t exemplified in failed Communist states, but by the failure of capitalism to deliver its truth and end the dialectic of production.
What do states do? I think they are already so weakened by economic manipulation that they can’t do much anymore – except blow each other up and imprison their populations.
However, if the disenfranchised could again take up the reins of state power, there might be a chance for real economic regulation that would ensure things like public domain for intellectual property, comprehensive energy policies to address our waning resources and decaying environment, living wages and adequate labor protections, equal and free access to education. Somehow though, I’m pessimistic about this…
Who knows.
And finally:
lucid: Religion, in and of itself, as positing ontological heirarchy, is an historical impediment to humanity actualizing it’s true nature, i.e. freedom. It cloaks humanity’s true nature [as self-creating beings] by placing primacy on substance [Greek - ousia, literally 'inheritance'] over subject [i.e. self-consciousness].
And further, the good news about ‘capitalism’ is that it whittles away at the cloaking power of religion by enabling the individual to understand themselves as self-creating, self-conscious, free beings precisely through the selling of their labor, i.e. precisely through self-alienation. This is a necessary step in the history of humanity realizing itself as free, as universal in and of itself. Marx was, after all, a capitalist – the entirety of his economics are based on Ricardo and the all of his historical and metaphysical formulations are based on a fusion of Kant and Hegel.
For Marx the self-alienation of a capitalist, consumer driven culture is necessary, not because that is ‘what freedom is’ in actuality, but because it gives humanity a glimpse of ‘what it can be’ in actuality – and it lifts the veils of religion, family, clan, nationality which so historically cloaked our true nature, i.e. the very Kantian truth that each individual is an end in and of themselves, and thereby the individual is universal…
[If any of the authors of these comments wish me to remove them, just let me know and I shall; I'm copying them out here just because they seem to articulate certain truths for me. I'm starting to think it's valuable to record things that jump-start my mind to new understandings. Consider it flattery...]