philosophybreak.com

[Tripolation]

Check out this website if you are interested in philosophy. I get weekly e-mails that delve into all sorts of philosophies. I enjoy reading them once a week and it gives me a chance to think deeply on various topics. You can also enter discussions and interact with the teacher for free.

Philosophy Break – Your Home for Learning about Philosophy | Philosophy Break

The home for philosophy's best questions, wisdom, and ideas – from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; to Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

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[Tripolation]

Around 700 years ago, Catherine of Siena wrote a letter outlining why justice works differently for the wealthy and the poor... do you think her analysis still holds today?

Born in 1347, Catherine of Siena had a great influence on Italian literature and the Catholic Church. She sent numerous letters to princes and cardinals to promote obedience to Pope Urban VI, and to defend what she called the “vessel of the Church.”

One such letter was addressed to the Anziani and Consuls of Bologna, and in it Catherine discusses the concepts of civil justice and injustice, dissecting why those who govern the state treat the wealthy differently from the poor.

Crimes and injustices committed by the wealthy, Catherine states, are often overlooked due to the corrupt self-interest of those who govern: they refuse to risk upsetting the wealthy, who lobby and hold power over them.

“This is the reason one often fails at justice,” Catherine writes:

One is afraid of losing one’s status, so in order not to displease others, one keeps covering and hiding their wrongdoing, smearing ointment on a wound which at the time needs to be cauterized. They pretend not to see the flatterers’ wrongdoing.
Crimes committed by the poor, in contrast, are met with a ruthless severity:

Toward the poor who seem insignificant and whom they do not fear, they display tremendous enthusiasm for ‘justice’, and show neither mercy nor compassion, they exact harsh punishments for small faults.
The ruler risks nothing in punishing the powerless, so making an example of them helps distract from the injustices committed by the wealthy, and demonstrates and reasserts the ruler’s moral authority in the eyes of the public.

Catherine’s observations have been echoed and anticipated by thinkers across time. Consider Plato in The Republic, written around 375 BCE:

Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones — you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states.
2,000 years after Plato, here’s George Eliot in her wonderful 1871 novel, Middlemarch:

When a youthful nobleman steals jewelry we call the act kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy who had stolen turnips.
So, what’s the solution to wealth’s corruption of justice? Is there one?

Catherine advocates the employment of rulers freed from self-love and dedicated to the disinterested, fair administration of law and order.

The spiritual and moral character of the ruler is thus absolutely key, and should be one of the most important criteria by which rulers are measured.

But Catherine made these arguments just under 700 years ago.

Do you think we’ve heeded her words? Have we made any progress in organizing society to produce rulers that govern impartially? Is such progress possible?

Or do you think we just have to live with the old proverb that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”?

EDIT: This was copy and pasted from the last email I received from them.

 

[Transform]

Around 700 years ago, Catherine of Siena wrote a letter outlining why justice works differently for the wealthy and the poor... do you think her analysis still holds today?

Born in 1347, Catherine of Siena had a great influence on Italian literature and the Catholic Church. She sent numerous letters to princes and cardinals to promote obedience to Pope Urban VI, and to defend what she called the “vessel of the Church.”

One such letter was addressed to the Anziani and Consuls of Bologna, and in it Catherine discusses the concepts of civil justice and injustice, dissecting why those who govern the state treat the wealthy differently from the poor.

Crimes and injustices committed by the wealthy, Catherine states, are often overlooked due to the corrupt self-interest of those who govern: they refuse to risk upsetting the wealthy, who lobby and hold power over them.

“This is the reason one often fails at justice,” Catherine writes:

One is afraid of losing one’s status, so in order not to displease others, one keeps covering and hiding their wrongdoing, smearing ointment on a wound which at the time needs to be cauterized. They pretend not to see the flatterers’ wrongdoing.
Crimes committed by the poor, in contrast, are met with a ruthless severity:

Toward the poor who seem insignificant and whom they do not fear, they display tremendous enthusiasm for ‘justice’, and show neither mercy nor compassion, they exact harsh punishments for small faults.
The ruler risks nothing in punishing the powerless, so making an example of them helps distract from the injustices committed by the wealthy, and demonstrates and reasserts the ruler’s moral authority in the eyes of the public.

Catherine’s observations have been echoed and anticipated by thinkers across time. Consider Plato in The Republic, written around 375 BCE:

Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones — you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states.
2,000 years after Plato, here’s George Eliot in her wonderful 1871 novel, Middlemarch:

When a youthful nobleman steals jewelry we call the act kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy who had stolen turnips.
So, what’s the solution to wealth’s corruption of justice? Is there one?

Catherine advocates the employment of rulers freed from self-love and dedicated to the disinterested, fair administration of law and order.

The spiritual and moral character of the ruler is thus absolutely key, and should be one of the most important criteria by which rulers are measured.

But Catherine made these arguments just under 700 years ago.

Do you think we’ve heeded her words? Have we made any progress in organizing society to produce rulers that govern impartially? Is such progress possible?

Or do you think we just have to live with the old proverb that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”?

EDIT: This was copy and pasted from the last email I received from them.

Wow, I have a porcelain bust of Catherine, having inherited it from my great aunt! Admittedly, it might be Catherine de Medici, it's a bit hard to tell with these things Either way, I shall now have an extra level of inspiration. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Tripolation]

Isaiah Berlin thinks visions of the ‘ultimate’ good, while inspiring in theory, have in practice the potential to do serious harm.

In his 1988 essay on political philosophy, The Pursuit of the Ideal, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909 - 1997) considers our tendency to seek some kind of ‘ultimate’ good.

Across both ethics and politics, Berlin observes, many people seek to establish ideals. What is the good? What is the moral system? What is the perfect society?

Berlin argues this approach is misguided: ideals don’t exist. There is not one single way to lead a fully human, fully rational life.

It is a mistake, for instance, to think of the ‘enlightened’ times across European history — ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment — as representing a common set of values, as resembling a singular thread of reason in the fight against ignorance.

For the reality, Berlin argues, is that these ‘enlightened’ times — these bright patches of ‘progress’ — are all fundamentally incompatible with each other.

While we may admire the great works of ancient Greece, we cannot compare them to our own, for they were the product of an entirely different set of values, languages, and peoples.

If we are to understand the creations of past cultures, we cannot do so through the lens of our current values.

We should not, therefore, force past cultures into cookie cutter molds of ‘good state’ vs ‘bad state’. Instead, we should recognize that there are multiple ways of organizing society whereupon the people in those societies believe they are generally living rational lives.

This is not moral relativism, Berlin argues; this is moral pluralism.

There are many different ways to live a good life; the idea that there is one Perfect Good to live up to (politically or ethically) is incoherent.

Acknowledging that we can embody lots of different values, Berlin thinks, is a fundamental part of what it means to live a free, rational human life. Those who give themselves up to dogma may make themselves feel better, but they are not being rational. As Berlin puts it:

Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt. I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human.

Utopia doesn’t exist

From moral pluralism, then, it follows that aspiring to create a perfect utopian state is not only foolish, but harmful. There is no Perfect State. There is no Final Solution.

Why? Because every generation of humanity faces a new set of problems, and responds with a new set of values and solutions. Berlin writes:

The children have obtained what their parents and grandparents longed for — greater freedom, greater material welfare, a juster society; but the old ills are forgotten, and the children face new problems, brought about by the very solutions of the old ones, and these, even if they can in turn be solved, generate new situations, and with them new requirements — and so on, for ever — and unpredictably.
Society will constantly have to adapt to new challenges, Berlin thinks. If we enter into a rigid ‘ideal’ state, we will be ill-equipped to respond to such challenges.

“Utopias have their value,” Berlin concedes – “nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities – but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.”

Why fatal? Well, anyone who deludes themselves into thinking there is one ‘final’ version of society that will lead to the flourishing of all — what won’t they do to attain such an end? If the reward is ‘all humans will be happy forever’, what atrocity could not be justified to obtain it?

The horrors of the 20th century provide their own answers to such questions, Berlin notes.

Promising a glorious future to justify a terrible present

Berlin recalls an 1848 essay by the Russian radical Alexander Herzen entitled From the Other Shore, in which Herzen eloquently criticizes those who invoke promises of a glorious future to justify a terrible present. Herzen writes:

If progress is the goal, for whom are we working? [...] Do you truly wish to condemn the human beings alive today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on… or of wretched galley slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge […] with the humble words ‘progress in the future’ upon its flag? […] a goal which is infinitely remote is no goal, only a deception; a goal must be closer – at the very least the laborer’s wage, or pleasure in work performed…
Commenting on this passage, Berlin starkly adds:

The one thing that we may be sure of is the reality of the sacrifice, the dying and the dead. But the ideal for the sake of which they die remains unrealized. The eggs are broken, and the habit of breaking them grows, but the omelet remains invisible. Sacrifices for short-term goals, coercion, if men’s plight is desperate enough and truly requires such measures, may be justified. But holocausts for the sake of distant goals, that is a cruel mockery of all that men hold dear, now and at all times.

How should we organize society?

If not utopia, then what? Should we cease all idealization? Should we never aspire for more?

Berlin thinks the best we can strive for is the maintenance of a somewhat ‘precarious equilibrium’, in which we structure society in ways that help us avoid desperate situations — i.e. in ways that help us ensure one party or person is unable to seize total power and inflict their version of utopia on their citizens.

This may not seem as exciting a vision as the Perfect State, but Berlin believes it to be an essential precondition for producing a basically decent society and morally acceptable behavior.

If you’d like to explore Berlin’s view further, you can read the full essay in this free PDF, hosted by a University of Oxford page on Berlin. (If you have a spare 30-40 minutes, I highly recommend the full essay — it’s a fantastically stimulating read).

What do you make of Berlin’s analysis?

• Do you agree with his ideas around moral pluralism and the dangers of utopia?
• Or do you think visions of the Ideal provide the impetus for human progress?

 

[Transform]

• Do you agree with his ideas around moral pluralism and the dangers of utopia?
• Or do you think visions of the Ideal provide the impetus for human progress?

I'd note that these are not entirely mutually exclusive, as specifically expressed here. We can drive human progress with ideals, but the law of unintended consequences inevitably applies.

 

[CommonConduit]

Morality is entirely relative to the one who dominates IMO.
Fair to keep renegotiating it, of course!

 

[Tripolation]

Interesting enough this weeks email pertains to perspectivism, which has been discussed on another thread recently. (There are no facts)

With his ‘perspectivism’, Nietzsche claims no one can ever escape their own perspective. It’s thus absurd to think of objectivity as ‘disinterested contemplation’. Knowledge comes not from denying our subjective viewpoints, but in evaluating the differences between them.

Does objective truth exist? And, as mere biologically-limited humans, are we able to know anything about it?

Philosophers have debated such questions for thousands of years, but the dominant view has generally been that a realm of objective truth — i.e. a single, universal reality — does exist.

Whether we can actually access this realm is another matter, but on this rather commonsensical view, objective truth exists independently of anything humans think or even could think about it.

On the one hand, there’s the Truth, i.e. whatever is the case in reality; on the other, there’s us, trying to understand and form knowledge about it.

In Reason, Truth and History, the philosopher Hilary Putnam offers a good articulation of this position:

On this perspective, the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of ‘the way the world is’. Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words of thought-signs and external things and sets of things.
While this kind of ‘metaphysical realism’ pervades philosophy, science, and convention, in the 19th century along came Friedrich Nietzsche to spoil the party. “There are no facts,” Nietzsche declares in a famous aphorism, “only interpretations.”

Elsewhere, Nietzsche notes that “truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions,” and that

truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of being could not live.
So, what is Nietzsche saying here? Is he denying that objective truth — a true reality — exists? Is he implying that truth is relative? Would he endorse ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras’s famous provocation, that “man is the measure of all things”?

This is indeed what many postmodernist interpretations of Nietzsche claim.

Quotations like those above, removed from the context of Nietzsche’s wider thought, have associated Nietzsche’s name with the view that objective truth doesn’t exist: that ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘true’ and ‘false’ are all relative, dependent on external factors like culture, psychobiology, and environment.

Nietzsche’s name is thus often invoked by postmodernists to support their arguments: that appeals to ‘objectivity’ are always flawed, that all knowledge (and the world itself) is merely a conceptual construct with no guarantee of accuracy or relevance outside the narrow human experience, and that reason and logic themselves are valid only within the intellectual traditions in which they are used.

Such extreme relativism, critics retort, is dangerous, for it seems to undermine all sources of knowledge.

If truth doesn’t exist, how can we judge one view over another, if there is no objective standard about what’s right and wrong?

Why trust the opinion of a qualified doctor over someone who knows nothing about biology, chemistry, or medicine? Why put our faith in ‘experts’, if everything such experts learn and train for ultimately has no claim on truth?

How can Nietzsche answer such questions? Well, while there is perhaps good reason to see why his work inspired such postmodernist and relativistic views as those given above, scholars are generally in agreement that Nietzsche has more interesting things to say about truth than simply denying its possibility entirely.

Indeed, Nietzsche’s apparent outright denial of truth seems too blunt a view for so sharp a thinker.

Over the years, scholars have interpreted Nietzsche as providing a much more subtle, nuanced account of truth than the aphorisms with which we started this chapter might suggest.

This account has come to be known as Nietzsche’s perspectivism, and while there is still much disagreement as to what it actually entails, there is some common ground with which we can set the scene…

If you find questions around truth, subjectivity, and objectivity interesting, then you can continue reading my deep dive into Nietzsche’s perspectivism, and see why scholars agree it’s among his most enduring and influential contributions to philosophy, here.

(I wouldn’t usually send you to the website to read the Sunday break, but this one’s a deeper dive than usual so I've hosted it there... Fasten your seatbelt!)

Once you’ve read it, do return and let me know your thoughts. Here are some questions to inform your reflections:

• Is there a True way the world really is? If so, which is more true, the world a dog sees, or the world a human sees?
• If there is no ultimate standard to which we can hold various perspectives on the world, how can we establish which perspective is more accurate?
• Do you agree with Nietzsche that the idea of a disinterested ‘view from nowhere’ is an absurdity?
• Is Nietzsche’s comparison between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ valid? I.e. is he right to say that stripping perspective from knowledge is just as incoherent a notion as stripping point of view from seeing?
• What counts as ‘perspective’? Is it cognitive interests? Sensory capabilities? Psychological drives and motivations? All of the above?
• Is the postmodernist interpretation of Nietzsche viable?
• Does Nietzsche’s perspectivism contribute towards our understanding of existence?
• Does truth exist independently of thought?
• Is truth possible without language?