Protagaras is considered to be the first, and one of the greatest, Sophist philosophers. He uttered the famous phrase “Of all things the measure is man, of the things that are, how they are, and of things that are not, how they are not.” This means that knowledge is relative to the knower: what is hot to one person may be cold to another. I would be a great believer in adding Philosophy to the Leaving Cert curriculum, if only to be able to slip this theory into the answer papers of various other subjects. How could you argue with a maths paper that has a footnote saying: “According to Protagaras’s teachings, what’s right to me might be wrong to you but I’d still be right in saying it, even if your answer book says I’m wrong. So while you might claim that x=9, I think it’s actually equal to –12. Remember, I’m right even if I’m wrong, so I’ll have an A1, please. P.S.- God bless philosophy.”
Continuing the educational note, the original title belt holder of the Greek philosophy match, Socrates, said: “Wisest is he who knows he knows nothing”. By this reasoning, if I’m aware of the fact that I have no idea what a particular topic is about, does that make me as wise as Socrates? That thought is as comforting to me as when I found out that Einstein got bad marks in school. If my marks were even worse that Einstein’s, does that imply that I will be an even more brilliant Nobel Prize winning physicist?
“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.” -Plato
I see I haven’t mentioned Socrates yet except to explain how he was a great comfort to me when those As in school weren’t flowing in. Any essay on philosophy would be a bit empty without mentioning the three philosophers that many, myself included, consider to be some of the best in history, and certainly of their time: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Socrates was concerned mainly with the nature of language in all its forms- thinking and meaning, for example-, and the nature of human nature itself. He was famous for what was dubbed the ‘Socratic method’ of philosophy. Unlike the philosophers before him, who simply spoke themselves, without engaging their audience, Socrates taught by asking questions. He was something like a preacher (“And what did the Lord say? He said rise up in my name!”), except he waited for his listeners to answer him. Through this series of questions, he poked holes in the logic of his unfortunate subject, until they eventually admitted they were wrong or ran away. Plato was probably Socrates’ most famous student. He had many theories, but the most famous is probably that of the two realms of the world. He said that there were two realities- the imperfect one in which we live, and the ‘Idea’ world, where there is a perfect shape of everything in the world known to us, out of which everything is cast. He also said that men do evil only because they lack knowledge of what is good, something which I disagree with. Maybe that was true in Plato’s time, but certainly not nowadays. Anyone who commits a crime- particularly serious ones like murder or rape- knows that it is wrong and is aware of the possible consequences of the act. The only exception to this, in my opinion, is when a person is either temporarily (this is now a common and not always true defence) or permanently insane, and don’t understand what they’re doing. As he never wrote anything himself, we know of Socrates’ teachings mainly through Plato’s Dialogues, which are written accounts of some of Socrates’ theories as he explains them (usually using the Socratic method). One of the theories that Socrates proposes is that of an immortal soul. I’m not sure whether I agree with this. Socrates says that everybody possesses a soul, which, upon death, separates with the body and later enters another body upon birth. It’s a comforting notion, that we will live on forever in another body, but I’m divided on whether I believe that we have a soul at all. And in what form would we be reborn? Will I return to the world in the form of an armadillo once I die? Aristotle was in turn Plato’s student. He studied for 20 years at the Academy that Plato set up in Athens. After Plato’s death in 347BC, Aristotle left Athens. He returned a few years later and set up his own school of philosophy. About 13 years later, however, he was charged with impiety and fled Athens so that (as he said) “The Athenians might not have another opportunity of sinning against philosophy as they had already done in the person of Socrates.” Aristotle wrote about many subjects. Included in these writings are his physical works- on the heavens and meteorology, and his psychological works- on the soul and memory. The writings I find most interesting, however, are those on friendship and achieving happiness. He said of friendship: “For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” He distinguished between the three forms of friendship he thought most commonly formed:
- A friendship formed on pleasure. This occurs when two people find that they share a common interest which they can enjoy together. The two may both enjoy swimming, for example. The pleasure they gain from participating in this interest together is more than they would if they were alone.
- A friendship built on mutual benefit. This friendship is based on how the two may benefit from eachother, rather than simply sharing enjoyment. For example, one of the pair may teach the other how to swim. One person gains from developing this new skill, the other from the money they receive for teaching. This particular form of friendship lasts only as long as is necessary for the purpose- it will end when the student learns how to swim well.
- A friendship for the good of both parties occurs when two people engage in an activity for the sake of developing their common goodness. This friendship can be a combination of both pleasure and utility, although they also benefit from a third goal to achieve ‘goodness’. For example, the pair might swim together to keep fit. As the shared good never fully ends- they like to keep fit forever- neither should this sort of friendship ever end.
Another of Aristotle’s teachings that I find interesting is on the method of achieving true happiness. Pleasure is not a good in itself, he argued, since it is by its nature incomplete. True happiness is to be found not in activities the person finds pleasurable, but in those that lead to virtue. Philisophical thought, he argued, is the highest form of moral activity, as it is pleasurable, continuous and complete, unlike most other pursuits. “The activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness.” (from Aristotle’s ‘Nichomachean Ethics’.)
If not from air or fish, where did it all come from?
“Who am I?” “Where did all this come from?” Why do these questions seem familiar to me? Think, Lorna, think. Have I engaged in any philosophical debates of late? No. Any sudden profound epiphanies about what it’s all about? Alas, no to that one also. Ah, yes! My cousin and I were drunk in a Sligo field, admiring a cloudless night sky. The stars were shining a lot brighter than those which I’m used to seeing, the sky unpolluted by streetlights and Dublin factory- created fog. The kind of night that makes you stop and think about life as we know it. I have also found that slight inebriation can help you on your way to deep philosophical thought. Now I’m by no means advocating the use of intoxicating substances, be they legal or otherwise, to bring out the philosophical side to you, but it is interesting to stop and ponder our creation every now and then. And if a gentle push in the direction of this state of mind is needed…
It’s very hard to separate scientific theory and the occasional existential thoughts that might pop up in a person’s head every now and then. Almost everyone has, at some stage in their life, thought about the question of how are we here and where it all began. Some people prefer to find comfort in scientific explanations, while others like to continue pondering the question in a philosophical manner.
So what do I think? I think I fall between both camps. On the one hand, as that oft’ quoted saying by Alberto Knox, AKA the mysterious philosopher from Sophie’s World, “at some point something must have come from nothing”. No scientific explanation for how the universe was created can answer that- at least not at the moment. If there is a god who created it all, the question of where He (or She?) came from in the first place is equally valid. It is unlikely that we will ever know. Where do the scientists say it all came from? Well, according to the currently widely accepted theory, a big explosion, but maybe that’s oversimplifying it. The Big Bang theory, as it’s known, says that billions of years ago, the universe as we know it was all compressed into a single atomic nucleus. That nucleus is known as a ‘singularity’, and at that stage, before everything burst out of it, time and space did not exist. Eventually it became too dense and, with an explosion that was hundreds of trillions of degrees in heat, time began. Although the explosion itself took just many tenths of a second to happen, it wasn’t until about 15 billion years ago that everything cooled enough to form the galaxies we know today. Again, although this explanation can tell us how the universe was created, it cannot tell us where that first atomic nucleus came from.
While the Big Bang theory is widely accepted by most scientists and laymen, it is refuted by some. But then, some people have no faith in anything that science tells us: NASA recently commissioned a 30,000-word book to shut up everyone who still believes that none of the Apollo missions did in fact land on the moon. Doubters (now 20% of the U.S. population!) claim that the ‘moon’ landing shown on TV, which featured the astronauts dismounting the spaceship, actually happened on an elaborate sound stage in the Nevada desert. Their reason for this theory is that in the TV transmission of Neil Armstrong putting the American flag on the moon in the first landing, it seemed to be blowing in the wind, but there is no wind on the moon.
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”-Isaac Asimov
Trust the Catholic Church to be able, in a couple of centuries, to turn itself around from an small organisation whose members were a persecuted minority and when denounced as Christians were often beheaded for impiety, to become arguably the most powerful institute in Europe in the Middle Ages, whose challengers were a persecuted minority and when denounced as dissenters were often beheaded for heresy.
It was no surprise to me to read that philosophy pretty much died out as Christianity came to the fore in the Middle Ages. It was equally unsurprising that the early centuries of the church’s reign were called the Dark Ages. After reading about it, if I were asked to give a basic description of the times, it would run something like “a period characterised by the total dominance of Christianity and the resulting repression of anything considered not Christian in nature”. This period resulted in millennia’s worth of art, science, philosophical thought and cultural writings being suppressed, all being attributed to the work of pagans.
“Religion has no place in public schools the way facts have no place in organized religion.” -Superintendent Chalmers, The Simpsons.
Probably the most famous examples of anti- scientific thought that the Church taught were that the sun orbited the Earth and that the world was flat- the Bible spoke quite clearly of the four corners of the Earth, so the world must be square. They violently oppressed any opposition to these beliefs and forced any challengers to their power to either renounce their ideas or be denounced and executed as heretics. The Italian physicist Galileo Galilei agreed with Copernicus’s belief that the solar sytem is heliocentric- that the Earth revolves around the sun, not vice- versa as the Church claimed. Predictibly, he was soon put before a Catholic tribunal in Rome and forced to say that what he claimed about the nature of the solar system was untrue. He said of the Catholic Church “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
Despite the rabid opposition to many philosophical writings during the Middle Ages, a lot of Catholic theology is built on its teachings. St Augustine was certainly a philosopher: he saw little contradiction between Platonism and Christianity- he believed that before there was the actual world, there was the world of Ideas, out of which God created the imperfect world we now live in. He admired the philosophy of the Sceptics. Although he converted to Christianity only in his middle age, he was an important figure in early Christian theories. His most famous writings were probably his proposed Cities of God and the Devil. These were basically two places for two types of people: the virtuous in the City of God and everyone else in the City of the Devil. And of course only good virtuous people of the Christian variety were allowed into God’s City.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Well, according to the Monty Python boys in their brilliant film ‘Life of Brian’, they brought sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, public health and peace to their colonies. And what did Christianity do for the Romans? More important is what the church took away from them. Let’s give it the benefit of the doubt that it was a coincidence that the Roman Empire crumbled as Christianity was introduced as the official religion. The Roman Empire was an early example of a democracy- despite the fact that slaves and women weren’t considered citizens, it was a pretty good set up. With the advent of the Middle Ages, however, more came than just the imposed Christian doctrine. Feudalism was introduced. This was a system of serfdom and virtual slavery, where nobles gave peasants (or vassals, as they were known) small plots of land on their property, providing protection from attack in return for the vassal’s loyalty and labour power. This oppressive and often cruel system was one of the biggest reasons for the desertion of large numbers of peasants from Europe to settle in America and other new colonies in the years to come.
In our seminar this week, we discussed God and his presence in our lives. A surprising (to me) number of students believed in God and regularly attended church. I suppose I would be agnostic, as I don’t really believe in God, but neither can I prove he doesn’t exist. I would have thought that more people in the class were atheists, or at least questioned God’s existence, as none of my friends attend Mass other than to oblige their mothers at Christmas and Easter. Those are the only times I attend, other than when I’m in my granny’s house in Sligo, where anyone who stays with her has to go every Sunday.
Reforming and Enlightening.
In the beginning of the 16th century, the Catholic Church remained powerful, but was falling apart. Various social, artistic and political changes were occurring within the church. A German monk called Martin Luther, who nailed his famous ‘95 Theses’- his complaints against the Catholic Church- to a church door in Wittenberg, is credited with having started what is called the Protestant Reformation.
Protestants had many problems with the Catholic Church as it was. One of these was their belief that the extravagant artwork within Catholic churches- for example the stained glass windows, large pipe organs and statues of saints- were unnecessary. The Catholic Church’s counter- reformation answered these complaints by saying that worshipping God and the saints through the extravagant visual art was necessary to the religion, and proceeded to produce even more religious artwork. The Pope met with the Council of Trent, which ended in 1563, to address these matters, and it was decided that a united, though non- violent, front should be created against the proposed changes of the Protestant Reformation.
The scientific discoveries and re-discoveries of the Enlightenment included some very important inventions such as Galileo’s telescope, Newton’s theory of gravity and Gutenberg’s printing press. However, it should be pointed out that the Protestant Church was not infallible either in its attitude towards scientific beliefs. Luther said of Galilei “People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon . . . This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy, but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.”
In addition, various philosophical theories were either put forward for the first time or developed on earlier ideas. The study of the nature of knowledge, its defining features and its limits is called epistemology. One of the principal questions debated amongst Reformation and Enlightenment philosophers was this topic. The two most important aspects of the nature of knowledge are rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism is the theory that knowledge is based primarily on reason and is independent of sense perception. Experience and observation are not essential to gain knowledge about things or the universe in general. Rene Descartes was a fan of this theory. Empiricism is the opposite. Although this theory goes back a long way, it was John Locke who was considered the first British Empiricist. He said that everyone is born with a “tabula rasa”- a clean slate upon which we build our knowledge. All knowledge is based on our experience through the five senses. I agree with this theory more than I do with rationalism. As I said, I’m not sure whether I believe in an afterlife, but even if we do return in another form, I don’t think that we bring with us knowledge of previous lives. I also believe that knowledge is built on our experience of the world using our five senses- or six if you’re a young boy who sees dead people.
An economic paradise for all?
There have been a variety of economic systems in this world. In Roman times, slavery was all the rage. In the Middle Ages, along came feudalism, which was basically a more elaborate version of slavery. Feudalism then gradually gave way to a capitalist society, which has been the most popular economic system since the Industrial Revolution.
Over the last two weeks, we have dealt with Marxism and its influence over economic systems in Europe. Marxism is undoubtedly one of the most important political and philosophical theories in recent times. We discussed how revolutionaries like Lenin have adapted it to fit what they considered an ideal society. While I knew the bones of what Marx talked about- doing history for the Junior Cert, I loved when we spoke in class about Hitler and, occasionally, communist Russia, so I looked them up in various sources. I found that any mention of Stalin or in particular Lenin was without exception linked to Marxism. I wasn’t there for philosophical theories, however, so I scrolled down to the parts where communism was put into action. I did know from class and readings that at the time of the Industrial Revolution, many people were very dissatisfied with the rise of capitalism and were seeking an alternative.
Which brings us to Karl Marx. Marx was born in 1818, at the peak of the Industrial Revolution, which began around the end of the 17th century and lasted for about 200 years. Living in this age, he was able to study the nature of society and the rise of capitalism. He didn’t like what he saw- an increasingly materialistic society with clear class divisions where the lower classes had little ownership of their own lives and time. He wished to create an alternative society which would be based on equality for all.
Marxist philosophy views capitalism as little more than a system of exploitation of one class by another- specifically the abuse of the working class by those who own the factories and land, and as a result, the power. The working class are considered simply as labour power, with no place in society other than to provide this labour for their employers- the capitalists. Marx said that under the capitalist system, workers are turned simply into a commodity for sale. In an economy where everything is geared towards profit, the worker has nothing to sell but their labour power. They have little ownership over their own lives because the capitalist they work for decides what hours they work and what jobs they perform. The creativity innate to each person is suppressed by this system, resulting in an alienation from themselves. This alienation of the population causes what Marx called ‘reification’, which means viewing something or someone as a material good. Reification occurs when the concerns of capitalism- mainly the pursuit of profit- become the most important goals in society. As a result of being little more than a tool necessary to achieve these goals, workers are deprived of a fulfilling life, as their labours lack any sense of communal or personal satisfaction and they feel they have little control over their own lives.
Alongside another German, sociologist Frederich Engels, Marx formed a theory on what an ideal economic system would be. Their aim was to create a society in which industry and transport were State owned instead of by private investors. This classless society would be the result of common ownership of all means of production, distribution and exchange. They discussed these philosophies in their 1848 publication ‘Communist Manifesto’.
As Marx and Engels themselves only wrote about the system, it was inevitable that someone would put it into practice. Enter one Vladimir Lenin from stage extreme right. Lenin, a Russian born in 1870, took the first step towards turning the philosophical writings of Marx and Engels into a political movement. He planned on creating a communist society based on Marxist teachings. In 1895, Lenin went abroad to get up to speed with the European revolutionary movement. After spending five months travelling through Switzerland, France and Germany, Lenin returned to Russia laden down with Marxist ideas and literature. Two months after his return, Lenin was jailed for over two years and eventually exiled to Siberia for his Marxist writings and political connections.
Lenin led the successful October Revolution of 1917. He quickly formed the Communist Party and laid out his plans to run the country according to Marxist principles. However, in 1921 he created the rather capitalistic New Economic Plan (NEP), which allowed trade with other countries, which was unpopular with some extreme communists. In 1924, upon Lenin’s death due to a series of strokes, Josef Stalin became head of the Communist Party. Stalin’s reign resulted in what I think are the two features that would sum up communism: collectivism and slaughter. He introduced ‘agricultural collectivism’, which forced peasants to give up their own land and work on large communal farms. Millions of peasants were removed from their homes and forced to work on the collective farms, forcing them into an almost feudalist system. They were once again tied to these farms indefinitely. Stalin’s reign is often called ‘The Great Purge’, due to the fact that he systematically had any challengers to him or the communist regime executed: he had millions of people arrested and killed for even the slightest hint of opposition to his party. Many people were forced to give false confessions, which inevitably resulted in their execution.
If you tried to compare the communist regime with modern day life, the workplace would be a good example. The evilness of your boss may not seem to be quite in the same class as the Stalin, but no doubt if he could get away with having regular bloodbaths to fish out the deadwood, the term ‘Massacre Monday’, or maybe ‘Thinning the herd Thursday’ would be an accurate description of your working week. Stalin would be the utterly authoritarian manager who constantly breathes down your neck and snarls when you look him in the eye. Little do you know that many of his minions have infiltrated your ranks and are reporting on your every move- or worse, lack of movement, if you’re the office sloth. The Stalin-esque boss is ready to pounce if he detects even a hint of dissent in his minion’s reports on the staff. Unfair dismissal laws are to this boss what capitalism was to Stalin. And like Stalin, it would probably take death to wrench him out of the driving seat.
Everything falls apart eventually.
It’s not hard to see the attraction of communism. It sounds good on paper- a system in which everyone is equally happy with their lives and financial situation, where everyone is paid the same and has the same social status? Sounds good. After reading about it, I think that there’s a lot in Marxist philosophy that is true today, particularly his writings on the alienation of workers from each other and the community. This is something that my mother feels particularly strongly about: occasionally some of her arguments lean very much towards Marxism. In fact, if she hadn’t visited Russia a few times and seen the state of it post- communism, she would probably believe in the merits of the regime.
It is easy to look at capitalism and say that the system doesn’t work. It is almost a cliché to say that in our society, in which pursuit of profit is the overriding- if not the only- goal, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. In my opinion, there is not, nor will there ever be, a utopian society where everybody is equally satisfied with their economic situation, and happy about life in general. Throughout history, times and systems have changed and none have been close to perfect. Slavery could hardly be described as an equal society, nor could feudalism. The basic beliefs of communism seem the closest to equality we’ll find, but we have seen it fail in Russia and elsewhere with a spectacular amount of bloodshed. For me, until this perfect society is created, capitalism is the best choice.
I’ll finish talking about Marxism with a quote from that eminent philosopher Homer Simpson: “Please, please, kids, stop fighting. Maybe Lisa's right about America being the land of opportunity, and maybe Adil’s got a point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers.” You choose.
Thanks folks, you’ve been great!
I think that I’ve have learnt a lot that I didn’t know about the history of philosophical thought, and history in general, in the six weeks I’ve studied this course so far. Oddly enough, that knowledge doesn’t seem to have been shoved down my throat so hard that, as soon as I longer need to remember any of it, I instantly regurgitate it, wiping all evidence of learning off my brain (creating a new tabula rasa, if you will). I must say this is one of the few times that this has ever happened. These diaries have also helped, as they force me (in a good way!) to look up relevant information weekly- writing a summary of lectures also helps me remember them. Those hearty tunes and video clips featured in most presentations have also stuck with me, and after the brightly coloured PowerPoint slides, the black and white acetates we transcribe daily in every other class seem even more boring. So the fun weekly multimedia exhibitions have served both to interest me more in this subject and cause further boredom in other classes. Well, you can’t win everything.
By the way, after a couple of weeks of this course, when I’d finished Sophie’s World, I thought I should sit down with my aforementioned friend and explain to her how it might be of benefit to her to get her hands on a copy of it (she might finally understand what the rabbit’s fur was all about). She asked why should she, when there was a copy of ‘Philosophy for Beginners’ in the UCD library. Has she actually borrowed it? What a stupid question. I told her that even though there were more words and fewer cartoons in Sophie’s World, it’s a bit more detailed and even has a little story linking up the various sections, which might keep her interested (I swear to God she’s a lot smarter than she sounds here), although it does take an odd turn towards the end. She asked me to briefly sum up the book so she could decide whether she’d buy it or not. I tried my hardest to describe a 400-page book, which spans 3,000 years of history, in one sentence. Her sole comment on my efforts? “Alberto Knox sounds like a bit of a knacker’s name. Is he from the flats?” I’ve decided to give up on her and hope that prayers and Red Bull will get her through her exams.