Robert Burns: Letter to an Unknown Critic

“Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.” ~ Robert Burns | Letter to an unknown critic, 1791

What Turns Intellectuals into Strident, Ruthless, Slavedrivers?

Eric Hoffer, in his essay, “The Readiness to Work,” observes that most intellectuals, even those who stand for liberty and individualism, cannot feel wholly at home in a free society. Here’s an excerpt:

"The paradox is, then, that although the intellectual has been in the forefront of the struggle for individual freedom, he can never feel wholly at home in a free society. He finds there neither an unquestioned sense of usefulness nor favorable conditions for the realization of his talents. Hence the contradiction between what the intellectual profess while he battles the status quo, and what he practices once he comes to power. At present, in every part of the world, we see how revolutionary movements initiated by idealistic intellectuals and preserved in their keeping tend to crystallize into hierarchal social orders in which an aristocratic intelligentsia commands and the masses are expected to obey. Such social orders, as we have seen, are ideal for the performance of the intellectual but not for that of the masses. It is this circumstance rather than the corruption of power which has been turning idealistic intellectuals into strident, ruthless, slavedrivers." ~ (The Ordeal of Change by Eric Hoffer; Chapter 5, “The Readiness for Work”) 

I think that our modern society offers several examples to substantiate Hoffer’s point of view.

The Advantage of Having a Philosophical View

To have a philosophical view is like going up a mountain and from the height taking a look at the world below. The filth and confusion, sadness and pain, irrationality and malice fade away and what you have is a sanitized, grand, orderly, and sublime view of civilization.

Heart of Darkness

The final page in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: 

When Mr. Kurtz, the rogue ivory trader, dies his last words are: “The horror! The horror!” By then the novel’s narrator, Charles Marlow, is himself very ill—he is in the borderline between life and death when he contemplates about the sadness of life in these words:

“Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.” 

Marlow survives and returns to London and there be breaks the news of Kurtz’s death to his fiancé. But in the settings of the modern world he is unable to tell her the truth and lies about Kurtz’s life and business in the jungles of Africa. When she asks him what were Kurtz’s last words, Marlow replies: "The last word he pronounced was—your name.”

Schopenhauer On University Philosophy

Arthur Schopenhauer talks about university philosophy in his book The World as Will and Representation, Volume Two, Chapter 17, “On Man's Need for Metaphysics.” Here’s an excerpt:

"As for university philosophy, it is as a rule mere juggling and humbug. The real purpose of such philosophy is to give the students in the very depths of their thinking that mental tendency which the ministry that appoints people to professorships regards as in keeping with its views and intentions. From the statesman's point of view, the ministry may even be right, only it follows from this that such philosophy of the chair is a nervis alienis mobile lignum*, and cannot pass for serious philosophy, but only for philosophy that is a joke. Moreover, it is in any case reasonable that such a supervision or guidance should extend only to chair-philosophy, not to the real philosophy that is in earnest. For if anything in the world is desirable, so desirable that even the dull and uneducated herd in its more reflective moments would value it more than silver and gold, it is that a ray of light should fall on the obscurity of our existence, and that we should obtain some information about this enigmatical life of ours, in which nothing is clear except its misery and vanity. But supposing even that this were in itself attainable, it is made impossible by imposed and enforced solutions of the problem.”

*"A wooden puppet moved by extraneous forces." [Tr.]

Moral Argument is Rationally Interminable

Why can’t mankind reach an agreement on the problems of wars, abortion, welfare state, and several other issues? Why is it that the philosophical and political debates on these issues are always unending? According to Alasdair Macintyre, in modern times all moral argument is rationally interminable. In Chapter 2, “The Nature of Moral Disagreement Today,” of his book After Virtue, Macintyre writes:

“Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rationally interminable. Contemporary moral disagreements of a certain kind cannot be resolved, because no moral disagreements of that kind in any age, past, present or future, can be resolved.”

Macintyre notes that this challenge of there being no rational way of securing agreement in moral disputes invites us to confront the philosophical theory of emotivism. He defines emotivism as a “doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.”

The Political Consequences of Destruction of Language

Eric Voegelin blames the intellectuals and their destruction of language for the rise of National Socialism. Here’s an excerpt from his Autobiographical Reflections:

"It is extremely difficult to engage in a critical discussion of National Socialist ideas, as I found out when I gave my semester course on “Hitler and the Germans” in 1964 in Munich, because in National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work. A person on this level—which I characterize as the vulgarian and, so far as it becomes socially relevant, as the ochlocratic level—again, is not admissible to the position of a partner in discussion but can only be an object of scientific research. These vulgarian and ochlocratic problems must not be taken lightly; one cannot simply not take notice of them. They are serious problems of life and death because the vulgarians create and dominate the intellectual climate in which the rise to power of figures like Hitler is possible. I would say, therefore, that in the German case the destroyers of the German language on the literary and journalistic level, characterized and analyzed over more than thirty years by Karl Kraus in the volumes of Die Fackel, were the true criminals who were guilty of the National Socialist atrocities, which were possible only when the social environment had been so destroyed by the vulgarians that a person who was truly representative of this vulgarian spirit could rise to power."

He notes that Hitler could come to power because society was intellectually and morally ruined:

"The phenomenon of Hitler is not exhausted by his person. His success must be understood in the context of an intellectually or morally ruined society in which personalities who otherwise would be grotesque, marginal figures can come to public power because they superbly represent the people who admire them. This internal destruction of a society was not finished with the Allied victory over the German armies in World War II but still goes on. I should say that the contemporary destruction of German intellectual life, and especially the destruction of the universities, is the aftermath of the destruction that brought Hitler to power and of the destruction worked under his regime. There is yet no end in sight so far as the disintegration of society is concerned, and consequences that may surprise are possible. The study of this period by Karl Kraus, and especially his astute analysis of the dirty detail (that part of it that Hannah Arendt has called the “banality of evil”), is still of the greatest importance because the parallel phenomena are to be found in our Western society, though fortunately not yet with the destructive effect that led to the German catastrophe."

On The Libertarian Flags

Why do some libertarian movements use as their flag the picture of a rattlesnake coiled ready to strike with the text “DON'T TREAD ON ME” written beneath it? I understand that the flag has a historical connection—it was designed in 1775 (during the American Revolution) by the American general and politician Christopher Gadsden. During revolutionary times a flag with this kind of a symbolism is fine, but it makes little sense to use it in times of peace and stability.

When the libertarians use such a flag, they risk sending out the signal that they are dogmatic in their thinking, full of hatred for all non-libertarians (which means vast majority of the population), and alienated from the society. Your philosophical, economic, and political thinking might be good, but few people will come forward to support your cause if your calling card contains the image of a rattlesnake with its fang bared and the text “DON'T TREAD ON ME”. People have a poor sense of history—most of them may not even know about the connection with the Gadsden flag.

Some libertarian scholars, I have noticed, use the image of a hemp leaf as their flag. Perhaps they think that that the hemp leaf stands for liberty and good life. I believe that people should be free to consume the intoxicants of their choice, but to use a hemp leaf as the flag for a social and political movement is not a good strategy as it creates the impression that this is a movement of the hedonists, by the hedonists, and for the hedonists.

The “DON'T TREAD ON ME” flag and the hemp leaf flag should be rejected because they create the impression that the libertarians are a community of unhinged and alienated people. A social and political movement is also about winning—your flag should be such that it helps you in making a positive impression on maximum number of people.

Skepticism is the Fountainhead of Philosophy

In his book Way to Wisdom,  Karl Jaspers writes, “The source of philosophy is to be sought in wonder, in doubt, in a sense of forsakenness. In any case it begins with an inner upheaval, which determines its goal.” ~ (Chapter 2: “Sources of Philosophy”). I think this is correct. Till about 70,000 years ago the human beings were more or less like animals—they lacked the ability to doubt anything. But if people believe in everything that their senses tell them, there can be no philosophy. Philosophy came into being when language become advanced and human beings developed the ability to communicate to themselves and share with each other their doubts about the nature of the world. The first spark of philosophy must have been lit by the man who for the first time propagated the idea that the things that he and others see can be something else or may not even exist. But this implies that  the idea that there is a reality outside the mind and that the world that we perceive through our senses is real has been gained through skepticism itself.

The Definition of an Intellectual

In his article, “The Definition of an Intellectual,” (February 16, 1969), Eric Hoffer gives a definition of the kind of intellectuals that he despised:

I have been wiping the floor with the intellectuals these many years, blaming them for everything under the sun. Though I have spelled out many times who these intellectuals are, I am still being asked quite often for a definition of the intellectual. Here it is:  

My intellectual is a person who feels himself a member of the educated elite with a God-given right to direct and shape events. He need not be well educated or very intelligent. What counts is the feeling of the being a member of the educated elite. 

What the intellectual wants above all is to be listened to—with deference. He will forgive you everything if you take him seriously, and allow him to instruct you. It is more important to him to be important than to be free, and he would rather be persecuted than ignored. 

He ends his article with these lines: “The intellectual knows with every fiber of his being that men are not equal, and there are a few things he cares for less than a classless society. He is convinced that government is too weighty and complex to be left to common people. He cannot see how anything originating in an uninformed, unprincipled and uncommitted populace could be of any value. There is nothing he loathes more than government by and for the people.”

MacIntyre's Comparison Between the Fall of Rome and Modern Civilization

Alasdair MacIntyre ends his book After Virtue with this paragraph:

“It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognizing fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.” (Page 304-305)

Since the barbarians are not at the gates, but are governing us, what should the modern man do?

Strauss on Success and Truth

In his discussion of the connection between historical knowledge and political philosophy, Leo Strauss says: "If, however, we do not worship “success” as such, we cannot maintain that the victorious cause is necessarily the cause of truth. For even if we grant that truth will prevail in the end, we cannot be certain that the end has already come." ~ (What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies by Leo Strauss; Page 61). I think this is a fine point—history has no beginning or an end and therefore the old cliche that truth will prevail in the end has no meaning.

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

Ancient Greece, according to Josiah Ober, fell for virtually the same reasons for which it had once achieved greatness. In his The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Chapter 11: “Creative Destruction and Immortality”), Ober says: “Both greatness and fall had similar causes: high levels of specialization, innovation, and mobility of people, goods, and ideas as the result of distinctive political conditions.” But the fall of Greece was never total—it was more of a creative destructive, rather than a ruinous destruction leading to quick economic and cultural collapse. Many of the Greek city-states continued to thrive—Ober notes that “by the end of the fourth century BCE, it is likely that more Greek poleis were democracies than ever before.”

When Imperial Rome took control in second century BCE, the Greek world was flourishing. Impressed by Greek culture, the Roman elites themselves became hellenized and they ensured the preservation of Greek culture and its propagation throughout the expanding Roman Empire. Ober writes: “By the time imperial Rome took over a still-flourishing Greek world, the Romans had become eager consumers of Greek culture. By the second century BCE, Roman elites were deeply enough Hellenized to ensure the subsequent preservation and dissemination of Greek thought and culture throughout the huge and still-growing Roman empire and across the next several hundreds years. Having jumped scale to become a dominant imperial culture in one of the two biggest empires of the premodern world (the other was Han China), the immortality of Greece was, if not ensured, at least made possible.”

After the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth to seventh centuries, Greek culture was preserved by the Eastern Empire and by the scholars and scientists of the medieval world.

Schopenhauer On Kant and Scholasticism

In his essay, “Criticisms of The Kantian Philosophy” (Chapter: Appendix; The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1), Arthur Schopenhauer notes that scholasticism lasted for 1400 years before Immanuel Kant, but this would mean that scholasticism predates Thomas Aquinas, and that the scholastic system got manifested towards the end of the Roman Empire when there was a significant rise in the power and influence of Christianity. Here’s an excerpt:

"That Kant's great achievements were bound to be accompanied by great errors is easy to understand on merely historical grounds. For although he effected the greatest revolution in philosophy, and did away with scholasticism, which in the above-mentioned wider sense had lasted for fourteen hundred years, in order really to begin an entirely new third world-epoch in philosophy, the immediate result of his appearance was, however, in practice only negative, not positive."

According to Schopenhauer, Kant was unable to break away from scholasticism in every region of his philosophy. As an example of the bad segments in Kantian philosophy which are reminiscent of a scholastic mindset, Schopenhauer mentions the chapter on the Transcendental Ideal in Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason.  “There now follows the chapter on the Transcendental Ideal, which at once takes us back to the rigid scholasticism of the Middle Ages.”

Philosophy is a Never-ending Dialogue

Julia Annas in her book Ancient Philosophy (Page 17):

"Ancient philosophy (indeed, philosophy generally) is typically marked by a refusal to leave things opaque and puzzling, to seek to make them clearer and more transparent to reason. Hence reading ancient philosophy tends to engage the reader’s reasoning immediately, to set a dialogue of minds going.

"Ancient philosophy is sometimes taught as a procession of Great Figures, whose ideas the student is supposed to take in and admire. Nothing could be further from its spirit. When we open most works of ancient philosophy, we find that an argument is going on – and that we are being challenged to join in."

The Ignorant are More Wise than the Learned

Eric Hoffer, in his article “The Cauldron of Youth” (Published on Feb 11, 1968), writes:

The ignorant are a reservoir of daring. It almost seems that those who have yet to discover the known are particularly equipped for dealing with the unknown. The unlearned have often rushed in where the learned feared to tread, and it is the credulous who are tempted to attempt the impossible. Where you see a revolution taking place without revolutionaries there the vulgar and the ignorant are at work.  They know not whither they are going, and give chance a chance. 

Often in the past the wise were unaware of the great mutations which were unfolding before their eyes. How many of the learned knew in the early decades of the 19th century that they had an industrial revolution on their hands? The discovery of America hardly touched the learned, but it influenced the minds of the common folk.

I think Hoffer is spot-on. A country of ignorant and hardworking folks is more likely to succeed than a country dominated by intellectuals.

On the Regime of Ignorance

Here’s an excerpt from the speech by Thon Taddeo in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz:

"Ignorance has been our king. Since the death of empire, he sits unchallenged on the throne of Man. His dynasty is age-old. His right to rule is now considered legitimate. Past sages have affirmed it. They did nothing to unseat him.


"Tomorrow, a new prince shall rule. Men of understanding, men of science shall stand behind his throne, and the universe will come to know his might. His name is Truth. His empire shall encompass the Earth. And the mastery of Man over the Earth shall be renewed. A century from now, men will fly through the air in mechanical birds. Metal carriages will race along roads of man-made stone. There will be buildings of thirty stories, ships that go under the sea, machines to perform all works.


"And how will this come to pass?" He paused and lowered his voice. "In the same way all change comes to pass, I fear. And I am sorry it is so. It will come to pass by violence and upheaval, by flame and by fury, for no change comes calmly over the world.”

He glanced around, for a soft murmur arose from the community.

“It will be so. We will not will it so.”

“But why?”

"Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry: But that is how I see it."

(A Canticle for Leibowitz; Chapter 20; Pages 214-215)

Reading Kant in the 1790s

Germany, in the 1790s, witnessed the pantheism controversy, the effects of the French Revolution, and the rise of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Jakob Friedrich Fries was introduced to Kantian philosophy by Karl Bernhard Garve, his teacher at the Moravian seminary in Niesky, where Fries was studying in the years 1792 to 1795. The brethren at the Moravian seminary considered Kant’s thought bad for religious faith and they did not take kindly to Garve’s endeavors for acquainting his students with Kantianism. Garve was relieved of his duties, but his efforts had the intended effect—at the top of the reading list of his students was Kant. In his book The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880, Frederick C. Beiser writes about Fries’s attempts to read Kant at the seminary. Here's an excerpt: "At first the only books he could obtain were the Prolegomena and the so-called Prize Essay, that is, Kant’s 1764 pre-critical work Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral. Fries was greatly impressed by both works, which, he said, taught him a completely new method of doing philosophy. But how was Fries to get Kant’s masterwork, his Kritik der reinen Vernunft? Only with great stealth. Against regulations, Fries sneaked out of the seminary and walked to the bookdealer in neighbouring Görlitz. There he bought only parts of the book, some printed sheets; he dared not buy a whole bound copy, because this would have attracted the suspicion of the inspectors. When the seminary’s doctor visited the bookshop in Görlitz, the bookdealer praised the youth’s intellectual curiosity; the doctor raised alarm, and the inspectors duly confiscated the sheets. Fries managed to get them back by convincing the inspectors that he would do it again anyway." Beiser notes that “Kant had become “forbidden fruit” for students at the seminary. The temptation of reading him was all the greater precisely because it had been prohibited.”

Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer

Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer

Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer is an oil-on-canvas painting done by Rembrandt in 1653. The painting was commissioned by Rembrandt’s Sicilian patron named Don Antonio Ruffo, who did not request any particular subject.

The painting shows Aristotle, wearing a gold chain, resting his hand on a bust of blind Homer, a legendary figure from three centuries earlier, and thoughtfully looking at it. The gold chain that Aristotle is wearing is presumed to have an image of Alexander the Great. Some scholars have interpreted the painting as a morality tale—Aristotle, a successful and well-dressed courtier, is envying Homer who was blind but lived like a free spirit and did not have to wear any chain.

The painting was purchased by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1961 for $2.3 million. 

Strauss On Rousseau’s View of Man

Leo Strauss sees Rousseau as a modern Epicurean, an atheistic and materialistic thinker. On Rousseau’s Second Discourse (The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality), Strauss makes the following comment in his book Natural Right and History (Chapter 6: “The Crisis of Modern Natural Right”):

"The Second Discourse is meant to be a “history” of man. That history is modeled on the account of the fate of the human race which Lucretius gave in the fifth book of his poem. But Rousseau takes that account out of its Epicurean context and puts it into a context supplied by modem natural and social science. Lucretius had described the fate of the human race in order to show that that fate can be perfectly understood without recourse to divine activity. The remedies for the ills which he was forced to mention, he sought in philosophic withdrawal from political life. Rousseau, on the other hand, tells the story of man in order to discover that political order which is in accordance with natural right. Furthermore, at least at the outset, he follows Descartes rather than Epicurus: he assumes that animals are machines and that man transcends the general mechanism, or the dimension of (mechanical) necessity, only by virtue of the spirituality of his soul. Descartes had integrated the "Epicurean" cosmology into a theistic framework: God having created matter and established the laws of its motions, the universe with the exception of man's rational soul has come into being through purely mechanical processes; the rational soul requires special creation because thinking cannot be understood as a modification of moved matter; rationality is the specific difference of man among the animals. Rousseau questions not only the creation of matter but likewise the traditional definition of man. Accepting the view that brutes are machines, he suggests that there is only a difference of degree between men and the brutes in regard to understanding or that the laws of mechanics explain the formation of ideas. It is man's power to choose and his consciousness of his freedom which cannot be explained physically and which proves the spirituality of his soul."

Like Lucretius, Rousseau viewed man as naturally independent, self-sufficient, limited in his desires and, therefore, happy. He saw society as the creator of all the artificial desires and false opinions which gave rise to conflict and misery. Both Lucretius and Rousseau had a non-teleological view of man’s passage from nature into history.

On The Impact Of Language On Sensations

Henri Bergson is of the view that language gives a fixed form to the fleeting sensations that we experience. Here’s an excerpt from his book Time and Free Will (Chapter 2, “The Idea of Duration”):

Our simple sensations, taken in their natural state, are still more fleeting. Such and such a flavour, such and such a scent, pleased me when I was a child though I dislike them to-day. Yet I still give the same name to the sensation experienced, and I speak as if only my taste had changed, whilst the scent and the flavour have remained the same. Thus I again solidify the sensation; and when its changeableness becomes so obvious that I cannot help recognizing it, I abstract this changeableness to give it a name of its own and solidify it in the shape of a taste. But in reality there are neither identical sensations nor multiple tastes: for sensations and tastes seem to me to be objects as soon as I isolate and name them, and in the human soul there are only processes. What I ought to say is that every sensation is altered by repetition, and that if it does not seem to me to change from day to day, it is because I perceive it through the object which is its cause, through the word which translates it. This influence of language on sensation is deeper than is usually thought. Not only does language make us believe in the unchangeableness of our sensations, but it will sometimes deceive us as to the nature of the sensation felt. Thus, when I partake of a dish that is supposed to be exquisite, the name which it bears, suggestive of the approval given to it, comes between my sensation and my consciousness; I may believe that the flavour pleases me when a slight effort of attention would prove the contrary. In short, the word with well-defined outlines, the rough and ready word, which stores up the stable, common, and consequently impersonal element in the impressions of mankind, overwhelms or at least covers over the delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness. To maintain the struggle on equal terms, the latter ought to express themselves in precise words; but these words, as soon as they were formed, would turn against the sensation which gave birth to them, and, invented to show that the sensation is unstable, they would impose on it their own stability.

According to Bergson, the language that we use to analyze and describe our feelings leads to a distortion of the same feelings. We discern a certain kind of feelings as violent love or a deep melancholy because our immediate consciousness is overwhelmed by our language.

Leo Strauss on Thomas Hobbes

Leo Strauss views Thomas Hobbes as the creator of political hedonism and political atheism. In his book Natural Right and History, (Chapter 5, “Modern Natural Right”; Page 168-169), Strauss writes:

"Hobbes rejects the idealistic tradition on the basis of a fundamental agreement with it.  He means to do adequately what the Socratic tradition did in a wholly inadequate manner.  He means to succeed where the Socratic tradition had failed.  He traces the failure of the idealistic tradition to one fundamental mistake: traditional political philosophy assumed that man is by nature a political or social animal.  By rejecting this assumption, Hobbes joins the Epicurean tradition.  He accepts its view that man is by nature or originally an a-political and even an a-social animal, as well as its premise that the good is fundamentally identical with the pleasant.  But he uses that a-political view for a political purpose.  He gives that a-political view a political meaning.  He tries to instill the spirit of political idealism into the hedonistic tradition.  He thus became the creator of political hedonism, a doctrine which has revolutionized human life everywhere on a scale never yet approached by any other teaching.

"The epoch-making change which we are forced to trace to Hobbes was well understood by Edmund Burke: “Boldness formerly was not the character of atheists as such. They were even of a character nearly the reverse; they were formerly like the old Epicureans, rather an unenterprising race. But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.” Political atheism is a distinctly modern phenomenon. No pre-modern atheist doubted that social life required belief in, and worship of, God or gods. If we do not permit ourselves to be deceived by ephemeral phenomena, we realize that political atheism and political hedonism belong together. They arose together in the same moment and in the same mind."

On The Three Enlightenments

Gertrude Himmelfarb, on the three Enlightenments (The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments): "The British Enlightenment represents “the sociology of virtue,” the French “the ideology of reason,” the American “the politics of liberty.” The British moral philosophers were sociologists as much as philosophers; concerned with man in relation to society, they looked to the social virtues for the basis of a healthy and humane society. The French had a more exalted mission: to make reason the governing principle of society as well as mind, to “rationalize, as it were, the world. The Americans, more modestly, sought to create a new “science of politics” that would establish the new republic upon a sound foundation of liberty."

Bergson on Two Sources of Morality and Religion

In his 1932-book Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Henri Bergson notes that the most societies are closed like a hive or an ant-hill. In closed societies, men are motivated by instinct and are indifferent to each other, and they are prepared to take defensive or offensive actions. In an open society, on the other hand, men are motivated by intelligence and are capable of embracing all humanity. From this definition, Bergson draws the analogy between a “closed morality,” which is a social morality that does not extend to all human beings but only to the group, and “open morality,” which embraces all humanity. On religion, Bergson says that there has never been a society without religion, and he differentiates between a "static" and "dynamic" religion. He draws a distinction between a “closed soul” and an “open soul” and gives the example of Socrates as an open soul who is concerned about entire humanity. He writes, “There was irony running through Socratic teaching, and outbursts of lyricism were probably rare; but in the measure in which these outbursts cleared the road for a new spirit, they have been decisive for the future of humanity.”

Here’s his description of the relationship between the closed soul and the open soul:

“Between the closed soul and the open soul there is the soul in process of opening. Between the immobility of a man seated and the motion of the same man running there is the act of getting up, the attitude he assumes when he rises. In a word, between the static and the dynamic there is to be observed, in morality too, a transition stage. This intermediate state would pass unnoticed if, when at rest, we could develop the necessary impetus to spring straight into action. But it attracts our attention when we stop short - the usual sign of insufficient impetus. Let us put the same thing in a different way. We have seen that the purely static morality might be called infra-intellectual, and the purely dynamic, supra-intellectual. Nature intended the one, and the other is a contribution of man's genius. The former is characteristic of a whole group of habits which are, in man, the counterpart of certain instincts in animals; it is something less than intelligence. The latter is inspiration, intuition, emotion, susceptible of analysis into ideas which furnish intellectual notations of it and branch out into infinite detail; thus, like a unity which encompasses and transcends a plurality incapable of ever equalling it, it contains any amount of intellectuality; it is more than intelligence. Between the two lies intelligence itself. It is at this point that the human soul would have settled down, had it sprung forward from the one without reaching the other. It would have dominated the morality of the closed soul; it would not have attained to, or rather it would have not have created, that of the open soul. Its attitude, the result of getting up, would have lifted it to the plane of intellectuality.”

Sartre’s Search for a Title: from Melancholia to Nausea

Jean-Paul Sartre had thought of giving the name Melancholia to the novel on which he was working during the 1930s. But Gaston Gallimard, the book's publisher, felt that Melancholia was not commercial enough. He advised Sartre to find a better title. Sartre suggested Factum on Contingency as an alternative. This had been the title that he had given to his early notes for the book in 1932. He also came up with a longer title, Essay on the Loneliness of the Mind. But Gallimard was not enthused by these titles. Sartre then suggested another title: The Extraordinary Adventures of Antoine Roquentin. He told Gallimard that the blurb would offer an explanation of there being no adventures. After pondering for a few days, Gallimard came up with his own suggestion: Nausea. Sartre liked the suggestion and Nausea became the title of his book which got published in 1938.

MacIntyre On Character and Intelligence

In his book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre notes that for Aristotle character is inseparable from intelligence. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 12, “Aristotle’s Account of Virtues” (Page 154-155):

“According to Aristotle then excellence of character and intelligence cannot be separated. Here Aristotle expresses a view characteristically at odds with that dominant in the modern world. The modern view is expressed at one level in such banalities as ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’ and at another in such profundities as Kant’s distinction between the good will, the possession of which alone is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth, and what he took to be a quite distinct natural gift, that of knowing how to apply general rules to particular cases, a gift the lack of which is called stupidity. So for Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness. Moreover genuine practical intelligence in turn requires knowledge of the good, indeed itself requires goodness of a kind in its possessor: '... it is clear that a man cannot have practical intelligence unless he is good’.”

According to MacIntyre, modern social practice and theory follows Kant rather than Aristotle: “It is indeed difficult to envisage the exaltation of bureaucratic expertise in any culture in which the connection between practical intelligence and the moral virtues is firmly established.”

On Philosophers and Street Porters

In his book The Wealth of Nations (Book I, Chapter 2), Adam Smith asserts the common humanity of the street porter and the philosopher : "The difference of natural talents in different men, is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education… By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a greyhound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd's dog."

On The Role of Senses and Freedom of the Mind

In his essay, “Good Sense and Classical Studies,” (Henri Bergson: Key Writings; page 422), Henri Bergson says:

"The role of our senses, in general, is not so much to give us knowledge of material objects as to signal their utility to us. We taste flavours, we breathe odours, we distinguish hot and cold, darkness and light. But science tells us that none of these qualities belong to objects in the form that we apprehend them; they only tell us in their picturesque language the inconvenience or advantage that things have for us, the services they could render us, the dangers they could lead us into. Our senses thus serve us, above all, to orient us in space; they are not turned towards science, but towards life. But we do not only live in a material milieu, but also in a social milieu. If all of our movements are transmitted in space and thus disturb part of the physical universe, by contrast most of our actions have their immediate or far-reaching consequences, good or bad, first of all for us, then for the society that surrounds us. Foreseeing [prevoir] these consequences, or rather having a presentiment of them [pressentir]; distinguishing the essential from the inessential or indifferent in matters of behaviour; choosing from the various possible courses of action the one which will produce the greatest amount of attainable rather than imaginable good: this is, it seems to me, the role of good sense. It is thus indeed a sense in its own way; but while the other senses place us in relation to things, good sense presides over our relations with persons." (This essay is an address delivered by Bergson at the Great Ampitheatre of the Sorbonne, July 30, 1895.)

Here's Bergson view of freedom of the mind:

"One of the greatest obstacles, we were saying, to the freedom of the mind, are the ideas that language gives to us ready-made, and that we breathe, so to speak, in the environment which surrounds us. They are never assimilated with our substance: incapable of participating in the life of the mind, they persevere, as truly dead ideas, in their stiffness and immobility. Why then do we so often prefer them to those which are living and vibrant? Why does our thought, instead of working to become master of itself, prefer to exile itself from itself? It is firstly through distraction, and by dint of amusing ourselves along the road, we no longer know where we wanted to go."

Bergson On The Meaning of The Comic

Henri Bergson’s 1911 book Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic is a collection of three essays which explore why people laugh and what laughter means, especially laughter that is caused by comical acts. Here’s an excerpt from the first essay, “The Comic in General — The Comic Element in Forms and Movements — Expansive Force of the Comic”:

"The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,—the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers. Several have defined man as "an animal which laughs." They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to."

Bergson sees laughter is a social gesture which inspires people to avoid eccentricity and be normal. In his first essay, he notes: “By the fear which it inspires, it restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into their shell and go to sleep, and, in short, softens down whatever the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical inelasticity.”

William James and Henri Bergson

William James, a senior to Henri Bergson by 17 years, had a high opinion of Bergson's work. In his 1909 book The Pluralistic Universe, James writes: “If I had not read Bergson, I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper privately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant to meet, and trying to discover some mode of conceiving the behavior of reality which should leave no discrepancy between it and the accepted laws of the logic of identity. It is certain, at any rate, that without the confidence which being able to lean on Bergson's authority gives me I should never have ventured to urge these particular views of mine upon this ultra-critical audience.” Here’s an excerpt from James’s letter to Bergson on June 13, 1907:

O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy, making, if I mistake not, an entirely new era in respect of matter, but unlike the works of genius of the “transcendentalist” movement (which are so obscurely and abominably and inaccessibly written), a pure classic in point of form. You may be amused at the comparison, but in finishing it I found the same after-taste remaining as after finishing “Madame Bovary,” such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim. Then the aptness of your illustrations, that never scratch or stand out at right angles, but invariably simplify the thought and help to pour it along! Oh, indeed you are a magician! And if your next book proves to be as great an advance on this one as this is on its two predecessors, your name will surely go down as one of the great creative names in philosophy. 


There! have I praised you enough? What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise — although the philosophers generally call it “recognition”! If you want still more praise, let me know, and I will send it, for my features have been on a broad smile from the first page to the last, at the chain of felicities that never stopped. I feel rejuvenated. 

As to the content of it, I am not in a mood at present to make any definite reaction. There is so much that is absolutely new that it will take a long time for your contemporaries to assimilate it, and I imagine that much of the development of detail will have to be performed by younger men whom your ideas will stimulate to coruscate in manners unexpected by yourself. To me at present the vital achievement of the book is that it inflicts an irrecoverable death-wound upon Intellectualism. It can never resuscitate! But it will die hard, for all the inertia of the past is in it, and the spirit of professionalism and pedantry as well as the aesthetic-intellectual delight of dealing with categories logically distinct yet logically connected, will rally for a desperate defense. The élan vital, all contentless and vague as you are obliged to leave it, will be an easy substitute to make fun of. But the beast has its death-wound now, and the manner in which you have inflicted it (interval versus temps d'arrêt, etc.) is masterly in the extreme. I don’t know why this later redaction of your critique of the mathematics of movement has seemed to me so much more telling than the early statement — I suppose it is because of the wider use made of the principle in the book. (The Letters of William James, Edited by his son Henry James; Page 290-294)

James is talking about Bergson's Creative Evolution and in a later section of the letter, he informs Bergson about his own book Pragmatism: “You will be receiving my own little “pragmatism” book simultaneously with this letter. How jejune and inconsiderable it seems in comparison with your great system! it seems in comparison with your great system! But it is so congruent with parts of your system, fits so well into interstices thereof, that you will easily understand why I am so enthusiastic. I feel that at bottom we are fighting the same fight, you a commander, I in the ranks.”

Enlightenment Endangers Philosophy

Allan Bloom in his “Interpretative Essay,” (The Republic of Plato; Page 392):

“Socrates teaches that wisdom and political power are distinct. Their coming together can only be due to the coincidence that a man who is wise happens also to be a ruler, thus uniting the two things; nothing in their two natures leads the one to the other. Political power serves the passions or desires of the members of a city, and a multitude cannot philosophize. It may use the results of science or philosophy, but it will use them to its own ends and will thereby distort them. Moreover, the wise man by himself is more of a threat to a regime than a helper. Intellectual progress is not the same as political progress, and, because there is not a simple harmony between the works of the mind and the works of the city, the philosopher without power must remain in an uneasy relationship with the city and its beliefs. Enlightenment endangers philosophy because it tempts philosophers to sacrifice their quest for the truth in favor of attempting to edify the public; in an "enlightened" world, philosophy risks being made a tool of unwise and even tyrannical regimes, thus giving those regimes the color of reason and losing its function as the standard for criticism of them.”

Allan Bloom on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

In his interpretive essay on Plato’s the Republic, Allan Bloom offers an interpretation of the Platonic Allegory of the Cave. Here’s an excerpt:

“After initiating Glaucon into the mysteries of this divine beauty, Socrates turns to an elaboration of the relationship of the philosophic soul to the city. The divided line described the soul's progress from its lowest level of cognition, imagination, to trust, thought, and finally intellection, its highest level. But now Socrates makes clear that this is not a simple movement depending only on talent and effort. There are powerful forces that stand in the way of the philosophic quest. The discovery of that quest has the character of a liberation from bondage. In the most moving of all his many images, Socrates compares our situation to that of prisoners in a cave. We are surrounded by darkness, our only access to ourselves and the world coming from the observation of shadows on the wall. But, although there is darkness, there is also a light in the cave; the pale shadows we possess are made possible by that light. Moreover, a few human beings can emerge from the cave. Our lives are a combination of ugliness and sublime possibility. The Enlightenment, taken literally, believed that the light could be brought into the cave and the shadows dispelled; men, in that view, could live in perfect light. This Socrates denies; the philosopher does not bring light to the cave, he escapes into the light and can lead a few to it; he is a guide, not a torchbearer. The attempt to illuminate the cave is self-defeating: a part of man craves the shadows. The light would be dimmed and distorted; it would not provide real clarity within the cave. And, at the same time, those who have the urge to ascend to the light would be discouraged from the endeavor by the myth, apparently based on reason, that there is no other light to which they can ascend. Thus the only source of liberation and inspiration would disappear from the cave. The Enlightenment teaches that the cave can be transformed; Socrates teaches that it must be transcended and that this transcendence can be accomplished only by a few.” ~ (“Interpretative Essay”; The Republic of Plato by Allan Bloom; Page 402-403)

Voegelin on Nietzsche’s Last Man

There is a resistance to transforming into the Nietzschean overman—this challenge will not be acceptable to most men. They would rather live as the antithesis to the overman, the Nietzschean Last Man. In his essay, "Nietzsche, the Crisis, and the War" (Journal of Politics, 1944), Eric Voegelin talks about the Last Man:

"The refusal of the challenge can assume various forms which, in part, are determined by the time position of the evading person. A first form has been characterized by Nietzsche himself in the symbol of the “Last Man.” Zarathustra preaches the gospel of the superman to the people, and the people are silent. He then tries to arouse them by an appeal to their pride and draws the picture of the most contemptible, of the Last Man, whom they will be unless they overcome their present state. The Last Man is the man without creative love, without creative imagination, without a desire for anything that is more than himself. “What is a star?” asks the last man, and he is satisfied with his little pleasures and the comforts of his existence. What he wants is: some warmth, some neighborliness, not too much work, protection against disease, a sufficient measure of drugs to create pleasant dreams (liquor, movies, radio), no poverty but not too much wealth. He wants to know what is going on and to thrash it out; all want the same and want to be equal; he who feels different goes voluntarily into the insane asylum; “formerly all the world was insane”—say the most subtle and leer; one has a pleasure for the day and a pleasure for the night— but with restraint, for the last man is concerned about health and wants a long life. “ ‘We have invented happiness’—say the last men and leer.” At this point of the speech the audience breaks out in enthusiasm: “Oh, give us this last man—make us these last men. You can have then your superman!” and they laughed. “But there is ice in their laughter,” adds Nietzsche, having diagnosed correctly the schizophrenic touch of the man who is last because he is lost spiritually."

The popularity of the Last Man leads to despiritualized existence or nihilism which is the a cause of brutality and war. “The evasion of the challenge through derision and through acceptance of the despiritualized existence is, however, a short-lived possibility. When the organizing power of the spirit becomes weak, the result is not a peaceably happy despiritualized society, but a chaos of instincts and values. Despiritualized happiness is the twin brother of despiritualized brutality; once the spiritual order of the soul is dissolved in happiness, it is only a question of time and circumstance when and from which quarter the attack on an order without dignity will begin.” 

Exercise of Reason Preceded the Philosophy of Reason

Brand Blanshard in Reason & Analysis (Page 52):

“Indeed men seem to have been exercising the reason we have just described for at least five hundred thousand years before they had anything like an adequate idea of what being reasonable meant. Aristotle, who struggled long to achieve such an idea, pointed out that what was first in order of nature may be last in order of recognition; and he would certainly have agreed with Locke’s remark that ‘God has not been so sparing to men, to make them barely two-legged animals, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational.’ But while rational practice may be developed independently of theory, the theory of reason does depend on a developed practice; it is only with instances of an accomplished use of reason before them that philosophers have ever succeeded in giving an account of that use. The great advances in understanding what reason means have accompanied or shortly followed bursts of reflective activity."

In the next passage, Blanshard points out: "When man escaped from the animal mind, his use of reason seems to have been concentrated for some hundreds of millenniums on the connection of means to end.” (Page 52)

On the Absence of Dogmatism in Socrates

Socrates was not a dogmatic thinker. He was tolerant and open-minded. In the Platonic dialogues, he is willing to hear the other side; he listens to objections, gives others a chance to express their ideas, and often points out that it is important go on learning. Here’s an excerpt from Allan Bloom's “Interpretive Essay,” in his book The Republic of Plato (Page 331): "The intellectual voice of the city can become tractable as the city never will. The Republic, a book about a perfect city, is characterized by having perfect interlocutors, that is, men without whom a city could not be founded and who are, at the same time, persuadable, whom argument can convince to adapt to a new kind of world which is contrary to their apparent advantage. Just as one must have almost unbelievable conditions to found the best city in deed, so one must have exceptional interlocutors to found it in speech."

Eric Voegelin on Karl Popper: Rascally, Impertinent, Loutish

Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin were contemptuous of Karl Popper’s work on political theory The Open Society and Its Enemies. They believed that Popper’s depiction of Plato as a philosopher of totalitarianism was scandalous and a complete fabrication. In the 1950s, Popper was auditioning for an appointment at the University of Chicago. This alarmed Strauss. In his letter dated April 10, 1950, Strauss wrote to Voegelin: "May I ask you [Voegelin] to let me know sometime what you think of Mr. Popper. He gave a lecture here [at the University of Chicago], on the task of social philosophy, that was beneath contempt: it was the most washed-out, lifeless positivism trying to whistle in the dark, linked to a complete inability to think "rationally," although it passed itself off as "rationalism" -- it was very bad. I cannot imagine that such a man ever wrote something worthwhile reading, and yet it appears to be a professional duty to become familiar with his productions."

Voegelin replied in just eight days. In his letter dated April 18, 1950, he wrote: "The opportunity to speak a few deeply felt words about Karl Popper to a kindred soul is too golden to endure a long delay. This Popper has been for years, not exactly a stone against which one stumbles, but a troublesome pebble that I must continually nudge from the path, in that he is constantly pushed upon me by people who insist that his work on the “open society and its enemies” is one of the social science masterpieces of our times. This insistence persuaded me to read the work even though I would otherwise not have touched it. You are quite right that it is a vocational duty to make ourselves familiar with the ideas of such a work when they lie in our field; I would hold out against this duty the other vocational duty, not to write and publish such a work. In that Popper violated this elementary vocational duty and stole several hours of my lifetime, which I devoted in fulfilling my vocational duty, I feel completely justified in saying without reservation that this book is impudent, dilettantish crap. Every single sentence is a scandal, but it is still possible to lift out a few main annoyances."

Voegelin listed four major flaws in Popper’s work. His complete letter can be read here. He summed up his argument against Popper in these lines: "Popper’s book is a scandal without extenuating circumstances; in its intellectual attitude it is the typical product of a failed intellectual; spiritually one would have to use expressions like rascally, impertinent, loutish; in terms of technical competence, as a piece in the history of thought, it is dilettantish, and as a result is worthless." It took Strauss a few months to write a reply. He thanked Voegelin for the detailed letter on the problems in Popper’s thesis and revealed that he had taken the liberty of showing Voegelin’s letter to an in influential colleague “who was thereby encouraged to throw his not inconsiderable influence into the balance against Popper’s probable appointment here [at the University of Chicago]. You thereby helped to prevent a scandal.”

Kant and the Capacity to Judge

In her book Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the "Critique of Pure Reason," Béatrice Longuenesse cites an example given by Immanuel Kant (in Lectures on Logic, translated by Michael Young) to illustrate the rule-governedness of the apprehension that precedes the formation of concepts in which these rules are expressed discursively. Here’s Kant’s description of the situation in the Lectures of Logic: "If, for example, a savage sees a house from a distance, whose use he does not know, he admittedly has before him in his representation the very same object as someone else who knows it determinately as a dwelling established for human beings. But as to form, this cognition of one and the same object is different in the two cases. In the former it is mere intuition, in the latter it is simultaneously intuition and concept."

According to Longuenesse, the savage cannot recognize a house as a house not only because he lacks the concept but also because he misses the schema (an essential condition for developing a concept). The savage receives the same sensory information on the house as someone familiar with the concept of a house does but he does not possess the procedure to process the information in a determinate way. Here’s an excerpt from Longuenesse’s book (Page 119):

"Kant's savage intuits a combination of sensations according to relations of contiguity in space, differences in color, light, and shadow, similar in "matter" to those intuited by "someone else" who knows that what he has before him is a house. Thus, in his intuition of the house, the "savage" is conscious of the "combination of representations with each other." He is also conscious of a relation of these representations "to (his) senses," that is, conscious of them not merely as presenting an object to him but as sensations within him, perhaps associated with feelings of pleasure or displeasure. But the system of comparisons into which the content of his intuition is channeled has nothing in common with ours. He has never seen anything similar (in the way "a spruce, a willow, and a linden" are similar) from which he could have obtained a common concept by comparing objects according to their similarities and differences, reflecting similar features and abstracting from the differences (in material, size, shape, and so on). In his apprehension there is no rule guiding him to privilege certain marks and leave aside others, so that a concept of house might apply. Should someone point to the object and call it 'house', this might suggest to him a proper name for the singular object he has in front of him, but even this is uncertain: how is he to know what is being referred to—the door, the color, the shape, the site, or what? Only the "application in a comparison," that is, the gradually dawning consciousness of a "rule of apprehension" common to the representation of various objects serving the same purpose, would pick out analogous marks and bring forth the concept of a house. This application alone will complement the intuition of Kant's savage with a discursive form similar to that acquired by the man who throughout his life passed his nights in a warm house in Königsberg."

In the above passage, it's to be noted that Longuenesse says that “there is no rule guiding him to privilege certain marks and leave aside others, so that a concept of house might apply.” This means that, according to Kant, in order to recognize a thing a human being needs not only the concept of the thing but also the precondition for acquiring the concept of the thing, namely its schemata.

On Hegel’s Historicism

Frederick C. Beiser, in his essay, “Hegel’s Historicism,” (Chapter 9; The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, Edited by Frederick C. Beiser), says that Hegel’s historicist thought has engineered a revolution in history of philosophy: "Hegel's historicism amounted to nothing less than a revolution in the history of philosophy. It implied that philosophy is possible only if it is historical, only if the philosopher is aware of the origins, context, and development of his doctrines. Hegel thus threw into question the revolution with which Descartes began modern philosophy. It is not possible to create a presuppositionless system of philosophy a la Descartes, Hegel believes, by abstracting from the past and by simply relying upon one's individual reason. For if Descartes were a completely self-sufficient, self-enclosed mind, transcending the realm of history, he would not have been able to produce his philosophy. The aims of his system, and the ideas he defended in it, were typical products of the culture of seventeenth-century France. So if philosophy is to be truly presuppositionless, Hegel maintains, then it must not abstract from, but incorporate history within itself."

Aristotle on Familial Motivation

Here’s Martha Nussbaum’s perspective on Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s proposals for holding spouses and children in common:

“Aristotle points out that close particular attachments are fundamental to familial and political motivation. "There are two things above all that make people love and care for something: the thought that it is all yours, and the thought that it is the only one you have" (Aristotle in Politics). A person motivated in this way is unlikely to view her own particular spouse or child as simply the object of universalizable ethical obligations. Parental education is superior to public education, Aristotle argues, because it begins from a grasp of the child's particularity, and is thus more likely to hit on what is appropriate.”

(Source: The Therapy of Desire by Martha Nussbaum, Chapter: “Medical Dialectic: Aristotle on Theory and Practice”)

Kepler and Modern Cosmology

Johannes Kepler has said, “I have cleared the Augean stables of astronomy of cycles and spirals, and left behind me only a single cartful of dung.” What he is describing as a cartful of dung is the non-uniform motion in non-circular orbits of the planets which could only be justified and explained by using arguments derived not from geometry, but from physics. His was the first serious attempt to explain the mechanism of the solar system in terms of physical forces, and it resulted in the formerly separate fields of physics and astronomy coming together.

On the Influence of Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics

In The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, Martha C. Nussbaum notes that in the modern age, the Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics have been more influential than Aristotle and Plato; even the founders of USA were influenced by Stoic and Epicurean thought: "Twentieth-century philosophy, in both Europe and North America, has, until very recently, made less use of Hellenistic ethics than almost any other philosophical culture in the West since the fourth century B. C. E. Not only late antique and most varieties of Christian thought, but also the writings of modern writers as diverse as Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Adam Smith, Hume, Rousseau, the Founding Fathers of the United States, Nietzsche, and Marx, owe in every case a considerable debt to the writings of Stoics, Epicureans, and/or Skeptics, and frequently far more than to the writings of Aristotle and Plato. Especially where philosophical conceptions of emo­tion are concerned, ignoring the Hellenistic period means ignoring not only the best material in the Western tradition, but also the central influ­ence on later philosophical developments."

Epicurus on Philosophy and Pleasure

Epicurus held that philosophy is vital for achieving health of one’s soul. In his Letter to Menoeceus, he writes:

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search thereof when he is grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more. Therefore, both old and young ought to seek wisdom, the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come. So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it. 

Here’s a paragraph from the letter in which Epicurus is explaining his view of pleasure:

When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of merrymaking, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest disturbances take possession of the soul. Of all this the d is prudence. For this reason prudence is a more precious thing even than the other virtues, for ad a life of pleasure which is not also a life of prudence, honor, and justice; nor lead a life of prudence, honor, and justice, which is not also a life of pleasure. For the virtues have grown into one with a pleasant life, and a pleasant life is inseparable from them.

John Dewey on Aristotle’s Naturalism

John Herman Randall, in his book Aristotle (Chapter: “Science as Right Talking: The Analysis of Discourse”), says that “the relations of the syllogistic instrument of science to the conception of science itself, and to the kind of world in which that instrument functions, are summed up in the following statement” from John Dewey’s article:

Aristotle was above all a naturalist. He asserted that the universal is united with particular existences, binding them together into a permanent whole (the species) and keeping within definite and fixed limits the changes which occur in each particular existence. The species is the true whole of which the particular individuals are the parts, and the essence is the characteristic form. Species fall within a graded order of genera as particular individuals fall within the species. Thinking is the correlate of these relations in nature. It unites and differentiates in judgement as species are united and separated in reality. Valid knowledge or demonstration necessarily takes the form of the syllogism because the syllogism merely expresses the system in which, by means of an intervening essence, individuals are included in species. Definition is the grasp of the essence which marks one species off from another. Classification and division are counterparts of the intrinsic order of nature.

The above text is from John Dewey’s article on “Logic” (published in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, IX, 599). In a footnote on the same page of Aristotle where he offers the excerpt from Dewey’s article, Randall says that he sees a problem in Dewey’s view. Randall writes: “It is doubtful whether Aristotle thought of the universal as “keeping within definite and fixed limits the changes which occur in each particular existence.””

Immanuel Kant’s View of Genius

Paul Guyer, in his essay, “Exemplary Originality: Genius, Universality, and Individuality” (Chapter 10, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics, edited by Paul Guyer) talks about a subject that was of great interest to Immanuel Kant. Kant’s conception of genius as an instance of exemplary originality is markedly different from that of most other philosophers. Here’s an excerpt from Guyer’s essay:

At the outset of the eighteenth century, genius was characterized simply as exceptional facility in perception and representation, where the latter is the object of artistic production and the former its precondition. As the century progressed, and as long into the nineteenth century as genius remained a lively topic, it came to be characterized as a gift for invention, leading to originality in artistic representation. But only by a few, whom we might for this reason call philosophical geniuses, were the implications of the new conception of genius fully embraced. Immanuel Kant was the first to recognize that genius, as exemplary originality, would be a stimulus and provocation to continuing revolution in the history of art…

Guyer points out that Kant in his Critique of the Power Judgement defines genius as “the talent (natural gift)” or “inborn productive faculty” “that gives the rule to art,” or “through which nature gives the rule to art.” Further in the essay, Guyer says:

Analysis of artistic beauty entails that truly successful art must always possess what Kant calls “exemplary originality”: originality, because the successful work of art can never appear to have produced contingency or novelty; yet exemplary, because it must at the same time strike us as pleasing in a way that should be valid for all. Originality by itself, to be sure, is easy to achieve: just make something that departs from all known rules and models. Of course, in this way a lot of nonsense will be produced, so what Kant calls “original nonsense” is easy to come by. The trick is to produce exemplary originality, objects which, “while not themselves the result of imitation… must yet serve others in that way, i.e., as a standard for judging,” or objects that strike us as original in appearing to depart from known rules and models but which can themselves be pleasing to all or a rule for all. Thus, in Kant’s view, all truly successful art must be the work of genius.

Modal Properties, Moral Status, and Identity

In his essay, “Modal Properties, Moral Status, and Identity,” David S. Oderberg answers the objections that have been raised against the Identity thesis, the claim that the zygote and the embryo are individual human beings. He concentrates on the cluster of objections that are based on certain biological phenomenal and appeal to the modal properties of the zygote and the embryo—to what could happen to the immature human being in certain circumstances.

Here’s Oderberg’s explanation of the embryological terms:

The term 'embryo' comes from the Greek for 'to grow,' and simply means 'growing human being'; and 'foetus' comes from the Latin for 'young offspring.' Hence either term could properly be used to denote the human being at any stage of development. 'Zygote,' 'morula,' and 'blastocyst,' on the other hand, denote specifically cellular aspects of the early human-the first coming from the Greek for 'yoke,' and signifying the coming together of the gametes, the second from the Latin for 'mulberry' and signifying the shape of the cellular matter, and the third from the Greek for 'sprout' and 'bladder,' signifying the hollowing out of the cellular matter constituting the human being at this early stage. 

According to Oderberg, the status of the zygote and the embryo can only be understood when there is a proper grasp of the metaphysics of human identity and there is a determination to keep morality at the top of the scientific agenda. He argues that life starts at the stage of conception itself. Here’s an excerpt:

Conception is that event, typically involving the union of sperm and egg, which consists in a change in the intrinsic nature of a cell or group of cells, where that change confers on the cell (or its descendants in the case of division) the intrinsic potential to develop, given the right extrinsic factors, into a mature human being. Note that the concept of intrinsic potential employed here is not the same as that rejected earlier when discussing whether the zygote is a potential human being. It was claimed that the zygote is an actual human being, but the definition of conception just given appeals to the idea that it is an actual human being with the potential to develop into a mature member of its kind, as long as circumstances permit it. The intrinsic potential mentioned in the definition is, therefore, a property of its actual humanity. We can see that this definition excludes the possibility that the egg is a human being, since its nature would have to change; without that change, it does not have the intrinsic potential to develop into a mature human being. The definition includes the union of sperm and egg, however, since there is an intrinsic change of nature. Whether this change is in the sperm or the egg is irrelevant for metaphysical purposes—it could be the egg which is changed by the sperm, or vice versa. As a matter of brute biological fact, however, the sperm-egg union is best conceived of as a change in the egg: the sperm enters it from outside, disintegrates, and the nucleus in its head merges with the nucleus of the egg. The definition also includes parthenogenetic cells and cloned cells, both of which have undergone an intrinsic change of nature from mere gametes, somatic cells or whatever, to cells with the intrinsic potential, given the right environment, to develop into mature human beings. If one of these cells only develops for, say a few days and the embryo then dies, this is not because the cell lacks the intrinsic potential to develop into a baby, child, or adult, but because certain extrinsic factors are not present, such as important nutrients; and this is indeed the currently proposed biological explanation of why full development fails in the case of cloned or parthenogenetically generated nonhuman animals. 

Oderberg defines conception as the coming into existence of a human being, but if this is the case then the zygote has the moral status of a human being.

The Power of Books

Matthew Stewart in Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (Chapter: “The Dirty Little Screw of the American Revolution”):

“DO BOOKS MATTER? Do they change minds—or do we just read into them whatever we want to know? We live in the most literate age in human history, yet many people today find few things less useful than books, and no books as useless as those of the philosophers. Many scholars today take for granted that philosophy is a technical discipline concerned with questions that can make sense only to a cadre of professionals trained to a perfection of irrelevance. The wider public, meanwhile, tends to think of philosophy as a place to stash all the questions that well up wherever our knowledge runs completely dry: the meaning of life, why there is something rather than nothing, the existence of the supernatural, and all that. Of the many attributes that seem to mark America’s founders as residents of a foreign time and place, probably none is more astonishing today than their unapologetic confidence in the power of books—and in particular the books of the philosophers.”

On The Philosophy of Reason

Those who contend that their philosophy is the philosophy of reason have a poor understanding of philosophy and reason. The evolutionary way has firmly placed mankind in the province of reason, and for a creature of reason there is no alternative to philosophizing. Therefore, every philosophy, whether rational or irrational, is a philosophy of reason. You can’t conceive of a philosophy without using reason. Even if you want to undercut reason, you need to philosophize using reason.

In his 1893 book Appearance and Reality, F. H. Bradley says: “The man who is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is wholly impossible has no right here to any answer. He must be referred for conviction to the body of this treatise. And he can hardly refuse to go there, since he himself has, perhaps unknowingly, entered the arena. He is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles… To say the reality is such that our knowledge cannot reach it, is a claim to know reality; to urge that our knowledge is of a kind which must fail to transcend appearance, itself implies that transcendence.”

Why Did Early Stoicism Ignore Aristotle?

Zeno of Citium came to Athens around 300 BC and founded the School of Stoicism which formed a deep bond with the philosophical culture in ancient Greece. But we don’t find any sign of engagement between Zeno's Stoicism and Aristotle’s philosophy. David Sedley offers an answer in his essay, “The School, from Zeno to Arius Didymus” (Chapter 1; The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, edited by Brad Inwood). Here’s an excerpt:

"One apparent feature of early Stoicism that has caused controversy is the surprising rarity of engagement with the philosophy of Aristotle. Even some of the most basic and widely valued tools of Aristotelian philosophy, such as the distinction between potentiality and actuality, play virtually no part in Stoic thought. Although there is little consensus about this, the majority of scholars would probably accept that, at the very least, considerably less direct response to Aristotelianism is detectable in early Stoicism than to the various voices of the Socratic-Platonic tradition. It is not until the period of Middle Stoicism (see Section 7) that appreciation of Aristotle’s importance finally becomes unmistakable. Yet Aristotle and his school were among the truly seminal thinkers of late-fourth-century Athens and, in the eyes of many, Aristotle himself remains the outstanding philosopher of the entire Western tradition. How can a system created immediately in his wake show so little consciousness of his cardinal importance? One suggested explanation is that Aristotle’s school treatises, the brilliant but often very difficult texts by which we know him today, were not at this date as widely disseminated and studied as his more popularising works. But an alternative or perhaps complementary explanation lies in Zeno’s positive commitment to Socratic philosophy, of which the Peripatetics did not present themselves as voices. Either way, we must avoid the unhistorical assumption that Aristotle’s unique importance was as obvious to his near-contemporaries as it is to us."

Cicero Versus Machiavelli

The Renaissance's humanist philosophers preached that the princes ought to keep their word and eschew force and fraud. They ritualistically repeated Cicero’s injunction in De officiis: ‘‘wrong may be done in either of two ways, that is, by force or by fraud; both are bestial: fraud seems to belong to the cunning fox, force to the lion; both are wholly unworthy of man.’’ Machiavelli, however, countered Cicero's philosophy with his own dictum which he presented in The Prince: ‘‘rulers who have done great things have set little store by keeping their word, being skillful rather in cunningly deceiving men.’’ Machiavelli asserts that a ruler must ‘‘know well how to imitate beasts . . . he should imitate both the fox and the lion.’’ The humanists used to preach that it's better to be loved than feared, and that cruelty can never profit a prince. But Machiavelli was of the opinion that for a prince ‘‘it is much safer to be feared than loved..." He preferred the governance model of Cesare Borgia. He says that Borgia ‘‘was considered cruel,’’ but that his ‘‘harsh measures restored order to the Romagna, unifying it and rendering it peaceful and loyal."