A Conversation with Plato on Being and Change
Plato (428-347BC) is known for putting words in other people’s mouths – into dialectical scenarios where each of the characters take turns expressing an opinion, for example in Symposium they speak of love. (See entry: Homoerotic Platonic Eulogies to Love) Following what Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Zeno said about it yesturday, today I wish to explore Plato’s theories on the universe, specifically on the relationship between being and change. And playing with Plato’s style, I will do this through dialogue.
I love Three Minute Philosophy!!! Maybe watch this first:
“So Plato, dear friend, does our world exist in a state of change, or a state of permanence?”
“Well Juliet,” (let’s just assume he miraculously speaks English) “the problem of being and change is essentially the same as the problem of one and many. It’s not a problem – both exist at the same time.”
“But how can two opposites exist at one time?”
“Well, you see, our everyday experience is made up of more than meets the eye.”
“I understand my eyes can’t see everything, and that there are sounds I can’t hear, simply because they haven’t evolved for me to do so. Is that what you are talking about?”
“Well not really, I don’t know much about Darwin – he was born long after I finished my footnotes. But let me tell you about my ideas. I think reality is made up of two parts, Form – which is an idea, or the essence of an object; and Matter – the individuality, or sense-driven manifestation of it.”
“Ah, you kinda lost me there Plato. Can you explain this Form and Matter in a way I might understand?”
“Like the mirror image seen in a pool of water and the object itself – which is real? Men are only men because of other men. They are defined as such because of what it means to contain the essence of a man.”
“Or woman, you should say. These days we respect women too.”
“Ha ha, yes, times have changed. Oh how I miss the boys… I’m getting distracted. Speaking of time. You see, Juliet, the universe can be divided into the temporal and the nontemporal.”
“So there’s forms and matter, temporal and non temporal? I this really is confusing.”
“Well yes, it would be for you my dear.”
“Thanks Plato, arrogant ***. I’m almost there. Keep going.”
“It all depends where you are observing the universe from. Surely you have heard my analogy of the cave. It’s very famous these days, so they say.”
“Who says?”
“Never mind. But it is, isn’t it?”
“Yes. And I get it, I think I do anyway. Some people are stuck in the cave, only observing shadows and thinking the shadows are real. Even when people tell them there’s a whole bigger reality out there, the people in the cave don’t want to know about it.”
“Well, I guess you could use it for that interpretation. There are many ways you can read my work. That was completely intentional, although sometimes people get it very wrong. And in the translation process…. oh well. You get it for the most part. But in terms of the temporality of life, my cave analogy allows you to see how the two parts of the universe, temporal and nontemporal, forms and matter, exist at the same time.
For those who only every view the world from inside the cave, there appears to be only one simple temporal world. For others, who observe from outside the cave, there exists a multiplicity of changing realities as well as one ideological permanent Reality. The reality we experience, or the truth we conceive of, in matter, is but a shadow of the Reality or Truth of Forms.”
“Ok, that makes more sense now. You’re a good teacher.”
“Yes, so they say.”
“Arrogant and chauvinistic, but a good teacher, and a good storyteller.”
“Thanks. I think. So you get it now – there’s a world of forms – of ideas – which is real and permanent; and a world of objects – particular expressions – appear and disappear, and constantly change.”
“But don’t ideas change too?”
“Yes but your ideas might change, but in the abstract form the ideas of beauty and justice are fixed like the laws of the universe.”
“You know about Newton’s laws?”
“We did know some of these things before the birth of the scientific method, you do know that don’t you?”
“Ok. Stop making fun of me. Tell me then, how do we get to Truth? How can I know what is true knowledge and what is not? What is a permanent idea and what is opinion?”
“You can’t really know but you can keep talking – you can keep learning more. You can keep mounting one image of an object on top of another, one opinion on top of another, and eventually you’ll grow closer and closer to what you are looking for.”
“I had an epiphany about this at a photoshoot the other day.”
“Ah yes, but you do know it’s all footnotes in my work.”
“Ha ha. Yes, yes it is. Good for you.”
Ok, maybe I got a bit carried away. It was fun putting words in other people’s mouths. I like the idea that Truth is a dialogue between truths. As Prof Emeritus Stuart Rees told me the other day, even more than one’s study, it is in conversation that we learn. It is through conversation that we can, while trapped in the cave of matter, get closer to an understanding of the forms that exist beyond.
References:
[1] J. T. Fraser, The Voices of Time: A Cooperative Survey of Man’s Views of Time as Expressed by the Sciences and by the Humanities (London,: Penguin P., 1968). pp. 10-12.
Mastering Philosophy: Heraclitus, Parmenides & Zeno
Is reality undergoing constant change or is change an illusion? Heraclitus, Parmenides and Zeno were pre-socratic early Greek philosophers (before Socrates), living and philosophizing around 500 B.C. These philosophers had very different ideas about metaphysics - the branch of philosophy concerned with the fundamental nature of us and our world.
Heraclitus insisted that reality is flux and change - that without change the universe would not exist. Parmenides and Zeno, on the other hand, believed that there was no such thing as change – that everything is permanent.
Heraclitus used analogies of rivers and fire. He says, “You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you” (fr. 41).
Similarly fire has a flame which ‘continues steadily and appears to be the same, yet it passes constantly into smoke, and the flame which takes its place must be fed repeatedly by new fuel. Thus fire seems to be a thing, but it is eternally undergoing change. The principle of all change is the law of opposites or of strife (fr. 62); everything tends to become its contrary and in this way change is produced.’ [1]p.6.
Plato attributes the view that “nothing really is, but all things are becoming” and that “all things flow and nothing stands still” to Heraclitus. [1]p.8. The paradox of this idea is that the law of change cannot change…
Parmenides proposed that ‘we can never say of anything that it becomes; for it would have to come from nothing, and this is impossible. If anything is, it is now, all at once.’
Zeno’s ‘paradoxes of motion’ drew the same conclusion, stating that ‘there are an infinite number of points in any given space, and you cannot touch an infinite number one by one in a finite time.’ Hence movement was an appearance because logic proves one cannot move. Diogenes the Cynic rose to his feet and walked away, as the best way to refute Zeno was to move.
Check out this Three Minute Philosophy:
In sum, Heraclitus had established all is change and Parmenides and Zeno that nothing changes.
What do YOU think? Is the world in a constant state of change, or is time and change actually an illusion?
What do I think? I think the answer to this question depends on the location from which you view: from the perspective of the individual inside, or imagining you are observing from a perspective that lies outside the whole. Whether you see things as static or moving, in a state of permanency or change, depends purely on this location. From a location within the construct, in my position on this planet as it circumnavigates the sun, it seems to me that the only thing permanent for life on earth is change. The natural cycles of our planet seem to be the source of our mental construction of time. And time, appears (illusion or not) to be the skeleton of the reality faced by life-on-earth. So as long as we are viewing the world from our planet, hence within the construct of time, everything will appear to always be in a constant stage of change – everything is a process, not an entity.
References:
J. T. Fraser, The Voices of Time: A Cooperative Survey of Man’s Views of Time as Expressed by the Sciences and by the Humanities (London,: Penguin P., 1968). pp. 8-10.
Picture:
I took this of a massive bonfire on a weekend down the coast at a friend’s uncle’s country home. It was so awesome.
Truth through a photoshoot
On Monday I did my first fashion shoot for the year. I was modeling my sister’s fashion line (she’s a fashion student at Sydney Tafe) with Gilbert Rossi, an amazing photographer who I’ve remained friends with over the years.
Rossi was standing about 8 metres away with a long lens, instructing me what to do. Holding myself in a ridiculously awkward position with my elbows out, one hand under a jacket hole, my feet crossed over and trying not to wobble on my ridiculously high heels, I had the most unexpected epiphany about “truth”.
You see, the photographer was seeing one version of the truth – a version edited by his lens, his lighting, his framing, and by his finger on the shutter.
But there I was, awkward as all get out, seeing and feeling a very different truth.
My sister was seeing a third version of the truth from a location of an outside observer. She could observe both my and Rossi’s truths, (seen in the photo above) and was also experiencing an entirely different truth that focused on how what she liked and didn’t like about her designs, and how she hoped they would look in the photo.
On one hand this could be judged as three relative truths: all three of us were obviously seeing a perspective of the “truth”, and each was seemingly a correct interpreting the shared reality, when one viewed at the situation from our positions.
How does this relate to the big question of the last fifty years of great thinkers: Does such a thing as an objective version of the truth also exist?
I think yes. Yes, the Truth with a capital T does exist. I think this Truth is one that encompasses all the relative truths, and more. It would come from the location an all-knowing perspective, that can completely comprehend the relative perspectives and combine them together in a bigger perspective.
Can we ever really know the Truth? I think not. Not unless we can become each of these people.
However, by learning about the other’s perspectives we can get closer to knowing the objective Truth.
Another thought I had was on the creation of the Truth. On Monday any of us could have changed the Truth, for example, I could have pulled a horrible face and created a bad photo. But experience has built a level of trust in the photographer’s perspective, so I didn’t pull a face, knowing that the temporary pain I experienced in awkward positions would be worth the photographic results.
Rossi reminded me of his perspective during the shoot, showing me a sample of the images he was capturing. This positive affirmation motivated me to hide my true feelings and create a better Truth (and better photos for my sister).
How does this apply to other situations? Well I guess when it comes to conflicting views, different understandings of reality, and the debate between modern and post-modern, it provides an analogical way to think about relative and objective perspectives.
If each party analyses their position in spatial and temporal terms – looking at where they are located, and the historical factors that brought them there; and if they do the same to understand the “other”s perspective, a dialectical relationships between the different perspectives will allow each relative position to move closer to an unattainable objective one.
The closer you can get to the objective truth depends on your ability to reflect on yourself and to empathise with others.
The more we “conscientize” as a scholar by the name of Lederarch calls it, the more we can gain awareness of our self-in-context, and others-in-context, the closer we can get to understanding the bigger context of our microcosmic-macrocosmic position: with universes seemingly existing both inside and outside our consciousness.
Some are a few images from my sister (Nicole Bennett – remember that name)’s new look book:
Credits:
Photography & Copyright – Gilbert Rossi
Fashion – designed and produced by Nicole Bennett
Make up – Maria Buavo.
Featured Image:
Behind the scenes with Gilbert, taken by Nicole on my iPhone.
Side note:
Also this day I met Margaret, a 17 year old Aussie blogger who has built up an international following of her fashion blog: http://shinebythree.blogspot.com/ Pretty impressive stuff!
Variety … the spice of life
“Variety’s the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavour,” said the William Cowper, an English poet of the 18th century.
Food tastes okay without spices, but can anyone deny the enhancement of flavours when little salt and spice is added to the palate?
When it comes to life, I see nothing wrong with a life that plots along – working, watching television, catching up with friends, etc. etc… but like spice to food, variety gives life a whole new flavour.
This year I have experimented with some new spices – a new home, a new job, a new degree, a new sport … but in the process I seem to have let some of my old favourites expire.
Last week I pulled some out of my pantry, and made the most incredible dish (so to say): I taught my first Pilates class and did my first photoshoot for 2010. Somehow in my bookish ways I had forgotten the joy I get from these things.
While it’s great to embrace the new, and to get focussed on something in particular, life seems to get better the more varied the activities it involves.
Of course there are limits. Like a tummy after over-spiced foods, we don’t want to overdo it.
In the pursuit of balance this week has reminded me that in the process of discovering new spices, try not forget the old. Looking ahead to 2010 I see no reason not to mix the two together… and I wonder what creative flavours they may concoct?
I will keep this post short and sweet, and leave you with a little question: how tasty is your life?
Photo:
Taken by Tenda in Tokyo (sorry Tenda, I forget your last name) back in 2006.
Overcoming a Fear of Failure
So I’ve been talking about this book for far too long – the travel memoir about South America. I’ve been working on it for too long, editing it for too long, putting my favourite snippets next to my favourite songs in attempt to get back in the head space for too long, and procrastinating the rejection for waaaaay too long. But it’s scary. The idea of friends reading your work is scary enough, let alone professionals whose opinion can make or break you.
After the second draft, about five months ago, I went to a “learn how to get published course”. Then I hired a “professional” editor – in hope that an external opinion would be a more efficient use of time, perspective and skill in the act of cutting out the crap from my 600 page manuscript and making it into a more readable 300 or so pages. Unfortunately things didn’t quite pan out according to the idealistic scenario in my head.
The good news is that, over time, I have lost some attachment to the story. I’m even considering fictionalising it, although not sure if this idea is just another form of procrastination. And the editor did at least help me prepare a professional-looking proposal and about 50 pages that are close to ready to send.
So basically I find myself in a situation where I switch daily from wanting to throw the whole thing in the bin, to wanting to turn it into a PhD topic (applying narrative techniques to the travel narrative), to wanting to send something, anything, it to a publisher.
According to Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist, 1992) there are four obstacles to achieving our dreams:
“First we are told from childhood onwards that everything we want to do is impossible.”
“The second obstacle: love. We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream.”
“The third obstacle: fear of defeats we will meet on the path. We who fight for our dream suffer far more when it doesn’t work out, because we cannot fall back on the old excuse, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t really want it anyway.’ … The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”
“The fourth obstacle: the fear of realizing the dream for which we have been fighting all our lives.” This last obstacle, says Coelho, is “the most dangerous of the obstacles because it has a kind of saintly aura about it: renouncing joy and conquest.”
It seems I’m presently stuck at the third obstacle. I think a big part of me (the ego) thinks my book is for sure going to be rejected by publishers and quite simply does not want to hear it. It would rather live in the dream of naive possibility than to feel like a failure. This in turn leads to more procrastinating, a little more editing, more playing around with photos and film, and even come up with more “brilliant” narrative-inquiry-driven approaches (that may actually make it a more interesting book but I’m not sure about any of my ideas anymore).
Coelho says we must “be prepared to have patience in the difficult times and to know that the Universe is conspiring in our favor, even though we may not understand how” …
What does the universe want me to do? I don’t know!!!
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”
Maybe my fear of rejection is worse than actually getting rejected?
Maybe it is time to face my fears, accept face the fact that my first book probably will be rejected, and somehow find the strength to still take that chance?
My mum told me today that of the authors she has read (which is A LOT), their very first book sucks – at least compared to the ones that follow. Their writing style, confidence, use of words – everything improves. So whether or not this book sucks, my next one will surely be better. I suppose when it comes down to it, if I fall it won’t hurt that much, and then I’ll just have to get up, learn some patience, and continue along the long path to who-knows-where.
Ok, I’m ready, I’ll do it … after just one more edit. 
Picture:
My favourite photo from the trip – the majestic Galapagos Eagle that landed behind me at the top of a volcano and posed for this shot. My little reminder that, cliche as it may sound, anything is possible.
Mapping out religious beliefs and learning to think
I drew this up flowchart / map of religious beliefs about three years ago. I agree with this quote in part. Thinking can be terrifying. At the time I drew up this map I was at the beginning of an emotional process of learning to think – discovering where the worldview of my upbringing fit with the worldview of other people’s upbringing.
Can you see where your beliefs fit?
There seems to be an endless list of ism’s. Have I missed yours? If I’ve missed any to do with key categories of beliefs about the universe then please let me know so I can add it.
It was during this process of surfing wikipedia and exploring different ism’s that I first came across “Panentheism” (from Greek πᾶν (pân) “all“; ἐν (en) “in“; and θεός (theós) “God“; “all-in-God”) – the idea that everything is in that which we call “God” is different from “Pantheism” (πᾶν (pân) “all“; θεός (theós) “God“; “all-is-God”) which equates The Universe or Nature to “God”.
I like the idea of Panentheism so much that I’m now writing a thesis on it.
I like of pantheism too but seeing as we will never know what lies beyond what we know (until we know it) I cannot see a reason to keep the doors of our imagination open for what might exist beyond our universe. For example, the energies/macrososm we call “God” could encompass a universe of universes, or even a universe of universes of universes… we will never know. Ok, now I’ve lost myself.
I guess this is flowchart is the basis of a number of entries that I will post as I research Panentheism and Process Theology (the idea that everything is a process, an event, that nothing (even “you”) is ever a static “thing”). And by combining these ideas with what I told you about the other day – Narratology (the study of narratives) – I hope to see where and how these different ism’s may actually meet, differing mainly in the historical context that the words, images and stories that describe their beliefs developed.
“ISM” means adherence to an ideology.
Ideology refers to ideas that constitute a person’s goals, expectations and actions – what makes up a person’s view of the world.
My hypothesis is that all the above ideologies might actually meet each other in the idea of Panentheism.
That is, I think that everyone – atheists, agnostics, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, new-age people, etc. etc. – are panentheists, they just don’t know it yet.
What would this mean? Well, maybe if we see that our ideologies are talking about the same thing, it will be harder for our identities to get caught up in them. And seeing as misuse of identity-driven ideologies is a major cause of violence, from terrorism to intolerance, maybe some forms of violence will discover a peaceful resolution.
Of course a lot of people will disagree – which is the fun of having a hypothesis and exploring it.
Maybe I will like my conclusions, maybe I won’t, but it is in the process of thinking and exploring that I expect I will learn and grow and get even just a little bit closer to “truth”.
So somewhere in the intersection of philosophy, religion, and science, I have over the last few blog entries, attempted to introduce the narrative-oriented research project that I suppose will (after many years, if not my entire life), be my magnum opus.
Anyway, I’ve spent enough entries telling you what I want to do… now I have to figure out how I’m going to do it.
Any research project (at least any academic research project), starts with a “literature review”. The objective is to learn who has had similar thoughts in the past, what influenced their ideas, how their ideas evolved, how their ideas influenced other people’s ideas, (and so on and so on), and observing what practical actions have come from it.
As a friend said to me the other day, “There are no new ideas… just new applications of old ones. It’s how ideas are used that matters.” Hopefully whether or not we like the conclusions of our thinking, our ideas will be used in ways we can be proud of.
Picture:
Taken at a cafe I often walk past on my way to work – it always has these cool little quotes so sometimes I stand there feeling a little silly taking a photo of it with my phone.
Have you met TED? Introducing “Narratology”
Which Ted? Ted from How I Met Your Mother, or Ted-Talks? While both are wonderful sources of inspiration, today I will using the former to introduce “Narratology”.
Narratology is the study of narratives, the stories lived and the stories told. The stories in one’s head, and the stories that become one’s reality. The story of you, the story of your people, your culture, your religion, the story of humanity, the story of the universe… stories surround us.
Roland Bathes, sums up narrative better than I ever could:
The narratives of the world are numberless. … Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news times, conversation … [and] narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society… Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural. It is simply there, like life itself. [1]
Narrative is, in the words of another great narratologist Theodore R. Sarbin, our “root metaphor.” [2]
How I Met Your Mother has some of the cleverest scripting ever. Besides the fact that it has me laughing, and that it has even had me in tears (when Ted got hit by the car), my favourite thing about this show is the way they play with narrative.
In case you haven’t seen it, every episode is told from told from the viewpoint of a father in 2030 telling his children “how he met their mother”, recollecting his friends’ stories from and seemingly never getting to the part where he actually meets their mother. Episodes don’t always follow exactly on from one another and stories are played out as they would be told – with parts forgotten, exaggerated and imagined. Stories within stories within stories are told from individual people’s different perspectives, capturing many truths about our culture, social nuances, fantasies and life issues.
This is one of my favourite examples… “Blah Blah” and the hot-crazy scale!
Ok, so if you are a keen follower of this blog, you will notice that (once again) I am jumping eclectically from one topic to another. The other day I introduced my plans for studying philosophy, and now I’m talking narratology. Where is my structure? My staged methodolic organised research? It might make no sense to anyone else but it is there, somewhere in my unconscious and subconscious mind, I just haven’t identified it yet.
My approach to research is more intuitively led – and I like it this way, it keeps things fun. I’m also interested the application of the concepts I’m studying – rather than just the theory. The different theories I’m reading about seem to overlap and shine lights on each other.
What does narratology mean for philosophy and religion and big history? What does Social Construction Theory have to do with Faucault’s Discipline and Punish, with power, structure and agency? What does this have to do with our ecological trajectories? What does this mean for me, and the life I am living? These are the sort of questions going through my head.
It might seem mind-boggling, with complicated topics layered upon one another, but I get bored easily, and this keeps me entertained. I would much prefer move organically through the literature, reading whatever topic makes me excited in a moment, rather than over-indulging in one of them and moving sloggishly onto the next. How this pans out in pulling together a large body of academic work… I suppose I’ll just have to wait and see.
As I learn about these very interesting mind-twisting concepts, I will share them. If you get lost in my brain, in the hopping from one topic to another, then I appologise – it probably means I’m just as lost as you!
Long story short – if you haven’t met Ted then you should meet him soon!
References:
[1] Barthes 1966 essay Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, quoted in Michael J Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (London: Routledge, 1988). p. 6.
[2] Theodore R. Sarbin, ‘The Narrative as a Root Metaphor for Psychology’, in Sarbin ed., Narrative Psychology : The Storied Nature of Human Conduct (New York: Praeger, 1986b).
Don’t be so hard on yourself… sometimes its soft
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” said one of my friends over coffee today. “Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s soft,” he laughed.
“It’s important to have goals and dreams and expectations, but it’s more important to have a sense of humour about them.”
I can expect a lot of myself. If I don’t feel I have got enough boxes ticked – be it my short-term or long-term work or study or sporting or social or financial objectives – it is easy to feel frustrated. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
“I just don’t know what I’m doing,” I complained, going on to list some of the random things bouncing around on my mind: “I have about a twenty library books waiting for me to read and haven’t touched any of them this week; I want to send my book proposal to publishers but I’m afraid they won’t like it; I have been walking to work all week and don’t feel I’ve lost a pound off my winter belly; I don’t want to get old; I want to pack my bags and run away; Last night I wore my favourite shorts from Peru even though the fly is basically broken and they are almost falling apart; I don’t think I want to let go of the past… ” The list went on. Oh woe is me.
Lucky for me this particular friend has written books and done presentations with children about self-esteem, and our morning coffee evolved into a little session of psychoanalysis.
“Are you breathing?” he said, “Yes. Well then you are ok. You should feel good that you are breathing, and accept anything more than that as bonus. And everyone gets attached to their favourite clothes…”
I laughed – maybe I was blowing a few things out of proportion.
He went on to tell me how all these goals we make for ourselves – these stories we tell ourselves that we think we should live up to – are not something that we should not connect with a sense of how good or bad we feel about ourselves. From looking tight in our bikinis, to getting good grades on an essay.
Apparently there’s a line of psychological thought that says that self-esteem is self-defeating. The idea of self-esteem separates you from your self, making you stand outside yourself like a judge with a score card.
Instead we need to appreciate the incredible expression of life we are a part of, which has nothing to do with anything we do. We breath and our hearts beat without us thinking or doing anything. It seems so easy, but it’s actually pretty incredible simply to be an expression of life. We should be happy about this, and while we can have goals we shouldn’t let the consequences of our goals make us feel better or worse about ourselves. All we have to do is be.
“It’s about unconditional self-acceptance,” He concluded. “Accept yourself, because you can breath. And whether your goals are attained or not, whether its hard or soft, don’t forget to laugh.”
Photo: In my opinion the best statue at this year’s Bondi Statues by the Sea.
Mastering Philosophy: A Love of Wisdom
Before I even properly knew what philosophy was, I knew I wanted to study it. I remember being drawn to it and religion when I first finished school, but my UAI and father’s advice lead me to study Business. I know the world in the 21st century is dominated by business… but is that really what life is about???
Well as you know I’ve moved on from a marketing-money dominated paradigm, and eventually to a situation where here I am blogging my “search for truth”. And would you know it, searching for “truth” is exactly what philosophy is all about!!!
“Don’t go killing yourself,” my dad laughed when I told him now I am studying philosophy. “All the philosophers go around and round in circles, and eventually they kill themselves to put themselves out of the misery.”
I wiki’d it and suffice to say the odds aren’t so bad. Only six high profile philosophers have suicide in the last 30 years, and one (Foucault) died of aids. Before that majority of the deaths of philosophers were from treason, murder or the Inquisition. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_of_philosophers)
Anyway I don’t plan to get too deep into the linguistic word plays so hopefully I will deepen my understanding of the meaning of life, and not lose a sense of the worth of it all. The thing is, I have to study philosophy, I mean, how a “search for truth” not include at least a peak at the great minds of the last few thousand years?
The word “philosophy” comes from the Greek φιλοσοφία (philosophia), which literally means “love of wisdom”. Philosophy is ‘the study of general and fundamental problems, such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. [1]
If you have been following the journey you have over the last month caught up on some insights from peace and conflict studies. Now I invite you join me as I try to “master” philosophy – something that’s not exactly going to be so easy for someone who has NEVER studied philosophy…
But heck, throwing oneself in the deep-end and forcing yourself to swim (generally) won’t kill you, so porque no?! (Why not?!)
Today just a very quick overview, so you can have some idea of the journey ahead. I’m not going to study all of these categories, or at least I don’t plan to, but it’s good to know what’s out there.
There seems to be an infinite number of branches and types and schools of philosophical thought. Thanks to the web, summaries are easy to find. These (according to wikipedia) are the main branches:
- Metaphysics is the study of the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and body, substance and accident, events and causation. Traditional branches are cosmology and ontology.
- Epistemology is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge, and whether knowledge is possible. Among its central concerns has been the challenge posed by skepticism and the relationships between truth, belief, and justification.
- Ethics, or “moral philosophy”, is concerned with questions of how persons ought to act or if such questions are answerable. Ethics is also associated with the idea of morality. Plato’s early dialogues include a search for definitions of virtue.
- Political philosophy is the study of government and the relationship of individuals and communities to the state. It includes questions about justice, the good, law, property, and the rights and obligations of the citizen.
- Aesthetics deals with beauty, art, enjoyment, sensory-emotional values, perception, and matters of taste and sentiment.
- Logic is the study of valid argument forms. Today the subject of logic has two broad divisions: mathematical logic (formal symbolic logic) and what is now called philosophical logic.
- Philosophy of mind deals with the nature of the mind and its relationship to the body, and is typified by disputes between dualism and materialism. In recent years there has been increasing similarity between this branch of philosophy and cognitive science.
- Philosophy of language is inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language.
- Philosophy of religion is a branch of philosophy that asks questions about religion.
Also, most academic subjects have a philosophy, for example the philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics the , the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of history.
Then there’s a range of newer subjects that historically were the subject of philosophy. These include science, anthropology, and psychology.
Then philosophy divides into Western and Eastern, each with their own periodic and geographical categories, and then some main theories including:
- Realism is the doctrine that abstract entities corresponding to universal terms like “man” or “table” or “red” actually exist outside the mind.
- Rationalism is any view emphasizing the role or importance of human reason. Extreme rationalism tries to base all knowledge on reason alone. Rationalism typically starts from premises that cannot coherently be denied, then attempts by logical steps to deduce every possible object of knowledge.
- Empiricism downplays or dismisses the ability of reason alone to yield knowledge of the world, preferring to base any knowledge we have on our senses.
- Skepticism is a philosophical attitude that, in its most extreme form, questions the possibility of obtaining any sort of knowledge.
- Idealism is the epistemological doctrine that nothing can be directly known outside of the minds of thinking beings. Or in an alternative stronger form, it is the metaphysical doctrine that nothing exists apart from minds and the “contents” of minds.
- Pragmatism was founded in the spirit of finding a scientific concept of truth that does not depend on personal insight (revelation) or reference to some metaphysical realm. The truth of a statement should be judged by the effect it has on our actions, and truth should be seen as what the whole of scientific enquiry ultimately agrees on
- Phenomenology was Edmund Husserl’s ambitious attempt to lay the foundations for an account of the structure of conscious experience in general. An important part of Husserl’s phenomenological project was to show that all conscious acts are directed at or about objective content, a feature that Husserl called intentionality.
- Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the acting, feeling, living human individual.
- Structuralism sought to clarify systems of signs through analyzing the discourses they both limit and make possible. Saussure conceived of the sign as being delimited by all the other signs in the system, and ideas as being incapable of existence prior to linguistic structure, which articulates thought – that language is no longer spoken by man to express a true inner self, but language speaks man. Structuralists believed they could analyze systems from an external, objective standing.
- Poststructuralists argued that this is incorrect, that one cannot transcend structures and thus analysis is itself determined by what it examines – hence every attempt to grasp the signified results in more signifiers, so meaning is always in a state of being deferred, making an ultimate interpretation impossible.
Then there’s key philosophers to which the list is endless and debatable… a few can be seen on the map above. This map comes from www.philosophybasics.com which also has details on all of these theories and philosophers and more. Also an amazing resource for comparing similarities and differences and time lines of thought I discovered this one: http://www.wadsworth.com/philosophy_d/special_features/timeline/timeline.html# And of course there’s youtube!
I’m going to leave it there for today. If you are at my level of philosophical training most of these category titles won’t mean so much, but it’s nice to know they are there.
The lines of philosophical thought I will research will be far more narrow than this – my main interests seem to be basics of metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, history and science; and then in more detail something called Process Philosophy and the intersections between Modernism and Post-modernism.
While all this jargon can seem scary (at least it is for me), please don’t let this turn you off - I plan to keep it as practical as possible, applying the lines of thought to everyday life, and (hopefully) avoid a lot of those (almost unavoidable) word games 
Note:
For anyone who is interested in academic formalities, I should tell you that a MPhil or “Master of Philosophy” is pretty much half of a PhD or “Doctor of Philosophy” which is not restricted to the discipline of philosophy but is a philosophical argument based on research. So, the MPhil I will write will still be in the discipline of Peace and Conflict Studies. It is for my own personal integrity, if I am going to carry the label “master of philosophy”, I want to know the basics.
References:
[1] Wikipedia – “Philosophy” (Apologies to academics)
Picture credit:
Farewell Superstitions
I like experimenting, trying things I’ve never tried, testing one thing against the other – whether it be conducting little social experiments, buying the strange looking packet of dry fish from the Asian section of the supermarket, or giving the superstitious options on society’s menu a really good shot. But in my mind, three strikes and you are out, and I’ve now done three pretty long experiments with fortune tellers and “make a wish” superstitions. In each of these experiments I gave the superstition the benefit of the doubt and gave it a full go, yet not even the placebo effect brought an ounce of truth from these experiments.
One was an old fortune teller on the streets of Amsterdam, “Baba”, who in 2006 sat me on a park bench and he told me I was having dilemmas about two men and gave me dates for marriage and children. At the time I thought I was having dilemmas only about one guy, but my imagination stretched it to include another guy I was traveling with. I can’t remember all the details but I’m pretty sure those dates included marriage at 28, and kids at 29, and… (thankfully) NOTHING! Even if I only recently turned 28 I think I’m safe to say Baba was wrong.
The second was an “intuitive life guidance” chick in Sydney who among many career and life projections about marriage to a human rights lawyer when I’m 33, and kids at 34, said I’d have a summer romance in Bondi that would start in September with someone just a couple of years older than me. It’s now November and… nope – NOTHING! Well, nothing of the nature she described.
The third strike happened yesterday. I have been wearing one of the “Fita do Senhor do Bonfim” ribbons (in photo above) since a friend wrapped it around my wrist in Brazil in February 2009. “Three ties and three wishes – when the ribbon comes of you wishes come true…”
The ribbon after almost two years:
For almost two years the ribbon on my wrist got thinner and thinner, uglier and uglier. I covered it up for photoshoots and weddings, playing out this superstition (of course for the fun of it more than anything else). Granted I made some pretty big wishes (that I still think will come true) but the ribbon fell of yesterday, and… NOTHING!
That’s three strikes.
So while I still have my own slightly superstitious beliefs about how personal intuition can sometimes be connected to some universally connected source of intuition (through “the power of intention” or “law of attraction” or “prayer”), I will definitely think twice before bothering with another experiment that something kinda annoying like a ribbon, or paying someone else for their “intuitive” time…
Goodbye superstition, hello personal agency.
While there are some societal structural limits on what I’ll do with my life, these little experiments have reminded me that most human-created superstitions are bull****.
No one can know your future better then you do.
Ikigai – a reason to wake up in the morning
Why do you get up in the morning? Does an answer come into your mind straight away? It does for the people in Okinawa, and it thought to be one of the key factors in their longevity – estimated to lengthen the lives of the people by 7 years! Ikigai is kind of like the French raison d’etre - ’a reason for being’. It could be a creative passion, your relationships, your job… Everyone has a ikigai, even if you don’t know it yet.
In Okinawa they do that thing they love until they die. Why do we focus so much on retirement? If we were doing jobs that we enjoyed, if we were living our life for a purpose other than money, one would think that we would never want to finish. According to the TED Talks that inspired this entry, the most dangerous years of your life are the year you are born (because of infant mortality) and the year you retire. People die after all those years of working something they hate, because after all that they don’t know what they love! That’s how important a sense of purpose is…
Does anyone else think it’s strange that there is no simple English word for ikigai? Do you think this is intentional… assisting the transition from people into “human capital”/money-making machines?
Another couple of good tips for a long life as enjoyed by the people of Okinawa included:
- hara hachi bu – eating until your stomach is 80% full
- eating lots of plant products
- your choice in friends (friends who lead healthier lifestyles will see you lead a healthier lifestyle)
- NO exercise – well at least no gyms (walking and activities for enjoyment are much better than segmenting and separating the different needs of our body)
I recommend checking out the full TED Talks with Dan Buettner “How to live to be 100+” – he also goes to Sardinia http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100.html and this article too http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-good-life/200809/ikigai-and-mortality
Personal side note – I’ve come down with a head cold so if this things I write don’t flow very well that is why. Maybe expect a couple more short entries like this while I can’t think straight enough to finish up that October Peace & Conflict Studies blog series, or to start the philosophy series I promised. I’m good at starting things and not finishing them (I think I started a “Big History” series quite a while back too). Anyway, I guess mixing it up keeps things interesting.
Hearing about Okinawa got me reminiscing so I thought I’d post a few photos of foods from Japan. Seeing as some of the other photos had me falling off my chair I might have to put them up soon too. Unfortunately I wasn’t into photography back then – so they are just point & shoot or keitei (mobile phone) shots. Man this feels like a life time ago…
