As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us… Their great crime [the Stoics] was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines; in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice. Diffuse, vapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. His prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Short, 1819-10-31.
June 9, 2018
QotD: Thomas Jefferson on Epicurus and Plato
May 29, 2018
The History of Non-Euclidian Geometry – Sacred Geometry – Extra History – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 26 May 2018Before we get into non-Euclidian geometry, we have to know: what even is geometry? What’s up with the Pythagorean math cult? Who was Euclid, for that matter? And what the heck is the 5th Postulate?
May 27, 2018
QotD: Epicurus on the ethics of pleasure
Epicurus begins with the question asked by Socrates at the end of the fifth century — what is the good life? His answer is that the good lies not in virtue or justice or wisdom — though these are not to be ignored — but in happiness.
“Pleasure” he writes, “is our first and kindred good. It is the starting point of every choice and every aversion, and to it we come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing.”
Now we have more than enough of Epicurus to know that he is not arguing for what are called the self-indulgent pleasures — of eating and drinking and sex and the like. Aristippus of Cyrene (c435-366 BC), we are told, had already argued for these. He also claimed that happiness was the highest good, but went on to claim that happiness lay in the pursuit of pleasure regardless of convention or the feelings of others or of the future.
This interpretation was attached to Epicurus in his own lifetime, and the attachment has been maintained down to the present — so that the words “Epicure” and “Epicurean” have the meaning of self-indulgent luxury.
What Epicurus plainly means by happiness is the absence of pain. We are driven to act by a feeling of discontent. We seek food because we are hungry. We seek warmth because we are cold. We seek medicine because we are sick. Once we have acted correctly and removed the cause of discontent, we are happy.
Turning to his own words, he says:
When we say… 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 wilful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not by an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry, not by sexual lust, nor the enjoyment of 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 tumults take possession of the soul. Of this the beginning and the greatest good is wisdom. Therefore wisdom is a more precious thing that even philosophy; from it springs all the other virtues, for it teaches that we cannot live pleasantly without living wisely, honourably and justly; nor live wisely, honourably and justly without living pleasantly.
In this scheme, therefore, happiness is to be defined as peace of mind, or ataraxia. This pursuit of happiness does involve bodily pleasure, but such pleasure is a means to the greater end of ataraxia. “No pleasure” he says, “is a bad thing in itself, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail disturbances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.”
His ethics of pleasure can be summarised as:
The pleasure which produces no pain is to be embraced. The pain which produces no pleasure is to be avoided. The pleasure is to be avoided which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain. The pain is to be endured which averts a greater pain, or secures a greater pleasure.
And so the happy man for Epicurus is one who lives simply within his means, who seeks only those pleasures which contribute to his long term peace of mind.
And while hedonism is ultimately a doctrine of selfishness, what Epicurus had in mind was not a life spent in the pursuit of solitary happiness. He says: “Of the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship.”
It may be that we seek friendship for selfish reasons. But friendship is to be persistently sought and maintained throughout life. Epicurus himself had an immense capacity for friendship.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
May 13, 2018
QotD: The lost works of Epicurus
[Most of the original writings of Epicurus have been lost.] There are the elaborate refutations of Epicureanism by Cicero and Plutarch. These inevitably outline and sometimes even quote what they are attacking. There are hundreds of other references to Epicurus in the surviving literature of the ancient world. Some of these are useful sources of information. Some are our only sources of information on certain points of the philosophy.
During the past few centuries, scholars have been trying to read the charred papyrus rolls from a library in Herculaneum buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Some of these contain works by Philodemus of Gadara, an Epicurean philosopher of the 1st century BC. Much of this library remains unexcavated, and most of the rolls recovered have not really been examined. There are hopes that a complete work by Epicurus will one day be found here.
Above all else, though, is the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius. He was a Roman poet who died around the year 70 BC. His epic, in which he claims to restate the physical doctrines of Epicurus, was unfinished at the time of his death, and it is believed that Cicero himself edited the six completed books and published the text roughly as it has come down to us. This is one of the greatest poems ever written, and perhaps the strangest of all the great poems. It is also the longest explanation in a friendly source of the physical theories of Epicurus.
Therefore, if anyone tries to say in any detail what Epicurus believed, he will not be arguing from strong authority. If we compare the writings of any extant philosopher with the summaries and commentaries, we can see selective readings and exaggerations and plain misunderstandings. How much of what Karl Marx really said can be reliably known from the Marxist and anti-Marxist scholars of the 20th century? Even David Hume, who wrote very clearly in a very clear language, seems to have been consistently misunderstood by his 19th century critics. For Epicurus, we may have reliable information about the main points of his ethics and his physics. We have almost no discussions of his epistemology or his philosophy of mind. Anyone who tries writing on these is largely guessing.
All this being said, enough has survived to make a general account of the philosophy possible. Epicurus appears to have been a consistent thinker. Though it may only ever be a guess — unless the archaeologists in Herculaneum find the literary equivalent of Tutankhamen’s tomb — we can with some confidence proceed from what Epicurus did say to what he might have said. Certainly, we can give a general account of the philosophy.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
May 1, 2018
QotD: The work of Epicurus
According to Diogenes Laertius, Epicurus himself was the most prolific of all the main ancient philosophers. His total original writings filled 300 papyrus rolls. If we take one papyrus roll as containing the equivalent of 30 printed octavo pages, his collected works would fill 30 modern volumes. His longest single work, On Nature, filled 37 papyrus rolls, which makes it about as long as Das Kapital.
To these original writings, we must add the various writings of his followers, both during his life and during the following six centuries or so. These also were substantial. Taken together, they must easily have filled a library.
Moreover, unlike its main rivals, Epicureanism was a proselytising philosophy. There were no hidden teachings — no mysteries too complex for the written word. There was no need for long preparatory studies in logic and mathematics and rhetoric before the meaning of the Master could become plain. No one was too old or too young to embrace the truths taught by Epicurus. He accepted slaves and even women to the courses he ran in the Garden. He wrote in the plainest Greek consistent with precise expression of his doctrines. He discouraged his followers from poetry and rhetoric.
For those able or inclined to study his doctrines in full, there were the many volumes of On Nature. For those not so able or inclined, there was a still substantial abridgement, and then a shorter summary. For the less attentive or the uneducated, there were collections of very brief sayings — whole arguments compressed into statements that could be memorised and repeated.
Nearly all of these works have vanished. Of what Epicurus himself wrote, we have three complete letters and a list of brief sayings known as the Principal Doctrines. Of other Epicurean writings, we have the Vatican Sayings, which is another collection of brief statements, some by Epicurus. We have a biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius, which summarises his main doctrines and also contains the only extant whole works already mentioned. We have more of the brief statements and a partial summary of the whole system inscribed at the expense of another Diogenes on a wall in Oenanda, a city in what is now northern Turkey.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
April 19, 2018
QotD: The Epicurean view of the soul
The purpose of the 37 volumes of his On Nature is to free us from the fear of death and therefore from the control of priests and from the internal fears of the religion that Plato and his followers had in mind. Epicurus says:
…[W]e must recognise generally that the soul is a corporeal thing, composed of fine particles, dispersed all over the frame….
…[T]he rest of the frame, whether the whole of it survives or only a part, no longer has sensation, when once those atoms have departed…. Moreover, once the whole frame is broken up, the soul is scattered and has no longer the same powers as before, nor the same notions; hence it does not possess sentience either.
The atoms that comprise the soul are immortal. They are passed on from being to being like the torch in one of the Athenian races. But the larger structure of atoms that is the soul of any one individual is itself mortal. Once we are dead, our atoms are recycled. Since there is nothing but atoms moving in the void, we as individuals are annihilated. After death, there is nothing; and because of that, death is nothing. Epicurus says:
Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensations is nothing to us.
After two thousand years of Christian spiritual hegemony, this may seem to many of us a gloomy doctrine. For Epicurus and his followers, however, it was a removal of the greatest barrier to happiness as they conceived it. That barrier was fear of endless punishment for the alleged sin of seeking their own happiness in life.
It may be, Lucretius says, that beating down religion is impious and the entry to a life of crime. Much rather, it is religion which has brought forth criminal and impious deeds. He lived before the most notable acts of religious mania. But he was poet enough to know the psychology of enthusiasm. In Book One of his poem, he produces one of the most striking of all denunciations of religion. He describes how, at the beginning of the Trojan War, the priests tell Agamemnon that a good passage across the Aegean required the sacrifice of his daughter. So a young girl was dragged to the altar for her throat to be cut by her own father.
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum he concludes — “Such are the evils to which religion leads”
He says later, in Book Three:
Some wear out their lives for the sake of a statue or a name. Religion and its resulting fear of death can induce one man to violate honour, another to break the bonds of friendship, and to overthrow all natural feeling. It has induced men to betray their country or their parents for the sake of avoiding hellfire. For just as children tremble and fear all in the darkness, so we in the light of day often fear what is no more real. This terror must be dispersed, not by rays of sunshine nor by the bright shafts of daylight, but by the sight and understanding of nature.
It is Epicurus, he says, who brought us into this light of understanding. Do not fear the priests. Do not fear death. Pay no attention to dreams or omens. These latter have a natural explanation. The former have neither a divine nature nor a prophetic power, but they are the result of images that impact on us.
Follow the ethical teachings of Epicurus, and be happy.
None of this means, by the way, that Epicurus and his followers were atheists. They did accept the existence of gods, and were willing outwardly to conform to whatever cults were established. They only denied that the gods were immaterial, and that the gods had any interest in human affairs. Confronted with evidence for any supernatural event, they were content with insisting on a natural cause, whether or not they were able to think of one that convinced.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
April 14, 2018
QotD: Plato’s ideal society
This [controlling the poor to protect the wealthy] is a problem addressed by Plato in at least two of his works — The Republic and The Laws. The first is his description of an ideal state, the second of a state less than ideal but still worth working towards. I do not claim to be an expert on Plato, though am dubious of many of the claims made against him. However, his general solution to the problem was to stop the enlightenment and to reconstruct society as a totalitarian oligarchy.
His ideal society would be one in which democracy and any degree of accountability would have been abolished, together with married life and the family and private property. Poetry was to be abolished. All other art and music were to be controlled. There was to be a division of society into orders at the head of which was to be a class of guardians. These would strictly control all thought and action.
His workable society would be one in which some property and some accountability would be allowed to remain. Even so, there was to be the same attempt at controlling thought and action.
The stability of these systems was to be maintained by a new theology. A single divine being would take the place of the quarrelling, scandalous gods of mythology and the Homeric poems. The common people could be left with a purified version of the old cults. But these gods would be increasingly aligned with the secondary spirits through which the One God directed His Creation.
People were to be taught that the Platonic system was not a human construct, but that it reflected the Will of Heaven. Rebellion or disobedience would be punished by the direct intervention of God through His Secondary Spirits. Before then, though, it would be punished by the state as heresy. At the end of the fifth century, Anaxagoras had been exiled from Athens for claiming that the sun was a ball of glowing rock. This had been an occasional persecution — indeed, it is hard to think of other instances. In the Platonic system, there was to be a regular inquisition that would punish nonconformity with imprisonment or death.
Thus there is at the heart of the Platonic system a “noble lie” — though Plato may have believed much of it himself. This is of a religion that looks into the most secret places of the mind, and dispenses rewards and punishments according to what is found there. In the old theology, Poseidon had no power beyond on land. Apollo had none in the dark. Zeus had no idea who was thinking what. The Platonic God was just like ours. No sin against His Wishes could go undetected or unpunished.
And so the people were to be kept in line by fear of hellfire, or by fear of everything short of that.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Englightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
April 4, 2018
QotD: Epicureanism and the Social Contract
[…] we return to the great question: what of social order? How, without the terrors of religion, can the many be kept from murdering and plundering the more fortunate?
The answer, says Epicurus, lies in friendship and in an understanding of natural justice. This is, he says, a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another.
He says also:
There never was such a thing as absolute justice, but only agreements made in mutual dealings among men in whatever places at various times providing against the infliction or suffering of harm.
We do not have any full explanation of this side of Epicureanism. But it seems that Epicurus believed a stable and just social order could be sustained by the self-interest of individuals. Let each person pursue his own happiness, only refraining from the lives and property of others, and a natural order of society would emerge — rather as the collision of atoms in the void had led to the emergence of a vast self-sustaining universe.
Certainly, we know that he recommended his followers to avoid politics. This did not mean withdrawal from the world. Bearing in mind the quantity of his own writings and the missionary zeal of the school he founded, he was as active in impressing his ideas on the world as Plato or Aristotle were.
According to Diogenes Laertius, the Epicurean
will take no part in politics…. But… he will not withdraw himself from life…. And be will take a suit into court…. He will have regard to his property and to the future. He will be fond of the country. He will be armed against fortune and will never give up a friend. He will pay just so much regard to his reputation as not to be looked down upon. He will take more delight than other men in public festivals. …. And he will make money, but only by his wisdom, if he should be in poverty, and he will pay court to a king, if need be. He will be grateful to anyone when he is corrected. He will found a school, but not in such a manner as to draw the crowd after him; and will give readings in public, but only by request. He will be a dogmatist but not a mere sceptic; and he will be like himself even when asleep. And he will on occasion die for a friend.
As said, we do not have much Epicurean writing on this point. As with the Benthamites, he does not seem to have found any imperative for these ethical teachings. We may ask, for example, what reason there is against my killing someone if I can thereby take possession of his property — or just enjoy the sensation of killing — and if there is no chance of my being caught. The only answers we have are:
Do nothing in your life that will cause you to fear if it is discovered by your neighbour.
And:
The just man is most free from disturbance, while the unjust is full of the utmost disturbance.
If these are attempts at answering the question, they are feeble attempts. That the unjust are invariably unhappy is plainly false. As for the threat of discovery, the opportunities for secret crime have always been everywhere.
Nor does Epicurus take issue with the greatest injustice of ancient society. He admitted slaves to his school. He encouraged kindness to slaves. But he does not seem ever to have questioned the morality of or the need for slavery.
But, these reservations being granted, what we seem to have in the complete system of Epicurus is something remarkably similar to modern classical liberalism. While respecting the equal rights of others, we should pursue our own happiness in life. We can do so sure that we exist in a universe governed by knowable and impersonal laws that are not hostile to the pursuit of such happiness.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
March 31, 2018
If anybody could be described as Machiavellian, it’d surely be Machiavelli, right?
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Paul Meany tries to rescue the reputation of Niccolò Machiavelli:
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.If you have ever studied Shakespeare, you might have heard your teacher use the word “Machiavellian” to describe amoral characters such as Iago from Othello or Edmund from King Lear. “Machiavellian” denotes a person or action that disregards morality and is wholly self-serving. The origin of the word derives from the famous Florentine politician and writer Niccoló Machiavelli.
[…]
Published posthumously, The Prince left Machiavelli with an infamous reputation as an amoral, atheistic, and cynical writer. In 1559, the Catholic Church put Machiavelli’s works on the Index of Prohibited Books. In the play The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, written in 1589, Machiavelli appears in the prologue, boldly exclaiming, “I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.”
Machiavelli came to be associated with an Elizabethan term, “Old Nick,” used to denote the devil. There is a subject of modern psychology, known as the “dark triad,” which focuses on three malevolent personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.
However, this deeply negative image of Machiavelli did not always exist. In the 17th and 18th centuries, a more positive view of Machiavelli emerged, with authors such as the Republican James Harrington referring to Machiavelli as “the prince of politicians.” During the Italian Renaissance, humanist Giovanni Battista Busini fondly described Machiavelli as “a most extraordinary lover of liberty.”
This praise might seem confusing; after all, the word “Machiavellian” denotes someone who is cunning and unscrupulous. How could a man so devious and pragmatic be called a lover of liberty? The answer lies with Machiavelli’s other book, known as Discourses on Livy, which presents a very different image of his political beliefs.
[…]
The stark differences between Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy and The Prince come from the nature of the aims of each book. The Prince aims to refine the conduct of a single prince, while Discourses on Livy offers guidance for the entire citizen body. The Prince was written to address a unique political opportunity that quickly evaporated, whereas Discourses on Livy was written to articulate the principles required by republics that sought longevity, liberty, and prosperity.
To this day, there still remains a huge debate over the intricacies and contradictions that characterize Machiavelli’s writings. Machiavelli was an extremely nuanced and original thinker whose reputation should not exclusively be that of an evil schemer. He argued for a republic whose liberty is safeguarded by the common person, in which free, unhindered debate provides the best course of action, and where compromises between opposing groups create harmony. Discourses on Livy reveals another side of Machiavelli, a man committed to the ideals of freedom through the means of representative government.
March 29, 2018
QotD: The decline of Epicureanism
The philosophy seems to have continued strong into about the 3rd century AD. Thereafter, it went into decline. By the middle of the 6th century, when the Emperor Justinian closed all the philosophical schools in Athens and dispersed the teachers, Epicureanism appears to have been already dead.
The main traditions of thought during the last few centuries of the ancient world were turned away from the everyday world. There were the neoplationists, with their settled belief in a higher reality that could be approached through a combination of mathematics and magic. There were, of course, the Christians, for whom the world is simply a preparation for the better life that is to come.
As said, relating what people think to what is happening around them is not easy. But the last few centuries of the ancient world were ages of great uncertainty. There were epidemic diseases that swept away multitudes without warning and without apparent cause. There were barbarian raids and civil wars. There was catastrophically overextended government to grind the survivors into helplessness and poverty. In this sort of world, teachings of Epicurus about seeking happiness in this life may have lost their attraction.
In one of his more sensible comments on Epicurus, Plutarch writes:
As to the vulgar sort… when they lose their children, wives, or friends, they would rather have them be somewhere and still remain, though in misery, than that they should be quite destroyed, dissolved, and reduced to nothing. And they are pleased when they hear it said of a dying person, that he goes away or departs, and such other words as intimate death to be the soul’s remove and not destruction. …. …. And they are discomposed when they hear it said of any one, he is perished, or he is gone or he is no more…. And therefore it is very plain that with the belief of immortality they [the Epicureans] take away the sweetest and greatest hopes the vulgar sort have.
In a world where life is uncertain and often unpleasant, there will tend to be an emphasis on some happier supernatural future.
There may be nothing sinister in the loss of virtually the whole body of Epicurean writings. Perhaps they were destroyed by a triumphant Church that had room for Plato and Aristotle but none for a naturalist enemy of all that Christianity proclaimed. But there is no reason to suppose any deliberate act of destruction. Papyrus rolls were by their nature delicate things. They were also far more expensive and therefore scarce in number than modern books. In any European climate, a papyrus roll would last for about a century, and then the glue that held it together would perish. Without careful recopying, a work might easily be lost.
The last centuries of the ancient world were mostly ages of depression. There was a shortage of all the means that had so far kept libraries together. Such means as remained were naturally given to recopying works for which there was an active demand. That means Christian theology, those parts of the pagan philosophies that could be reconciled to Christianity, and the greatest products of the pagan high culture. Since, with the exception of Lucretius — whose work largely survived — the works of Epicurus and his followers were in a style remarkable only for its plainness, it is unreasonable to suppose that librarians, forced to choose what to copy and what to leave to die, would take up the 37 volumes of On Nature and not the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius.
So far as I can tell, whatever works of Epicurus survived were not studied in the Byzantine Empire. In the West, all but his name and whatever is said about him in Cicero vanished for a thousand years.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
March 14, 2018
“[Jordan Peterson has] been described as ‘rightwing’ or ‘far right’ by journalists who have apparently forgotten how to think”
In The Guardian, Gareth Hutchens discusses the rise of Jordan Peterson:
Professor Jordan B Peterson is not yet a household name in Australia.
But he’s in the middle of a speaking tour that has found an enthusiastic audience. All four speaking events have sold out, including his Sydney and Brisbane shows this week. Organisers know they could have booked more venues.
Why are Australians paying to hear him talk?
Peterson loathes identity politics, rails against postmodernism and “neo-Marxism”, and despises gender studies and political correctness. He asserts the biological differences between men and women, and delivers pep talks on how to live a meaningful life and how to find the right partner.
He gives lectures on the truths embedded in myths and legends that are thousands of years old.
To appreciate where he’s coming from, it helps to be familiar with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and their premonition that the death of mass belief in God would lead to nihilism and/or the rise of totalitarian value systems as alternatives.
I’ve watched Peterson’s online lectures for a while now, after he became an internet celebrity in late 2016.
It’s been fascinating witnessing media outlets trying to come to terms with him. He’s been described as “rightwing” or “far right” by journalists who have apparently forgotten how to think.
Does he belong to the far right because he loathes political correctness, identity politics and postmodernism? Noam Chomsky has made similar criticisms for decades. As did Christopher Hitchens.
Is it rightwing to lament the damage done to the left by the increasing tendency of leftist students on North American campuses to harass people who challenge their ideological orthodoxy? Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician from Yale University, who is a self-confessed progressive, says he can’t understand their behaviour. Bret Weinstein, a former biology professor of Evergreen State College, says he can’t understand it either. He considers himself “deeply progressive” but he says the left is “eating itself.”
Peterson deserves to be taken seriously.
February 28, 2018
QotD: Words as “physical violence”
Berkeley. Evergreen. Middlebury. Missou. Yale. Brown. McMasters. Wilfred Laurier. The list goes on. One must wonder where this trend will ultimately take us. There have been several justifications given for this increasing rash of no-platforming, shaming, and at times, physical violence on North American campuses. In essence, these justifications can be distilled into a triad of well-meaning but ultimately flawed theses, namely, 1.) that all discourse is about power and that any speech that renders a listener physiologically uncomfortable therefore rises to the level of a physical attack upon that individual, thereby justifying actual physical violence in response, 2.) that for the sake of historically marginalized voices, persons who are members of historically privileged groups should forfeit their right to free speech or ought to remain silent, 3.) that certain assertions, even if possibly true, are nonetheless morally impermissible to make since to do so will likely create conditions whereby bad-intentioned persons will inevitably and successfully advance their morally heinous projects.
This first thesis — that all discourse is fundamentally about power — finds its philosophical origins in the likes of post-modernists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. To quote Foucault, “Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations.” Thus, on Foucalt’s view, if all discourse is, at heart, really just veiled force relations between competing groups; if language isn’t fundamentally capable of being about objective truth or about the world in any meaningful sense, then the ink symbols written on the page and the shaped air admitted from one’s mouth in the forms of ‘rationality’, ‘facts’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘truth’ are just another set of weapons in a person’s overall arsenal to seize and maintain power, no different in kind from weapons of a physical sort. To speak then, on Foucault’s view, is to wield a weapon, albeit a subtler and refined one. The uncomfortable physiological feeling of hearing offensive speech, it would then seem, vindicates this view that one is being attacked. One might thus conclude, “Why not attack back with heavier, more effective, and more expedient weapons?”
Michael Robillard, “In Defense of Offense”, Quillette, 2018-02-05.
February 25, 2018
Assassin’s Creed: Games with a Libertarian View of the World
ReasonTV
Published on 23 Feb 2018A look into the philosophy of Ubisoft’s long-running franchise.
—————-
Video games have become one of our most influential, popular, and creative forms of media. Last year, the industry generated almost $150 billion in revenue worldwide, rivaling books and films and dwarfing music.
Gamers spend over three billion hours a week in the virtual worlds of their choosing. And more so than other contemporary forms of media, video games explore the themes of freedom and personal agency, allowing players to go where they want and do what they please — as long as they’re prepared to bear the consequences. Two of the three best selling video games of all time are Grand Theft Auto 5 and Minecraft. They’re polar opposites in terms of violence and target audience, but both were designed to offer players the opportunity to make their own destinies.
But it’s the Assassin’s Creed series, published by Ubisoft, that puts the conflict between liberty and authority at the center of its plots, its characters, and the alternate history in which the games are set. Reason takes a look at the series’ narrative merits, and at the titular creed.
Written and edited by Ian Keyser. Read by Andrew Heaton. Gameplay footage by Sean Keyser.
“Plague” by Kai Engel is used under CC BY 4.0.
February 18, 2018
Nitay Arbel on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life
A guest post at According to Hoyt:
Those looking for an ‘alt-right’ manifesto will be sorely disappointed. Peterson actually says explicitly that on some economic issues (e.g., income disparity) he leans somewhat left, and elsewhere in the book laments that the cultural demonization of anything masculine is (as he describes it) causing a backlash, in terms of a resurgence in popularity of European parties he calls ‘far right’ or even ‘fascist’. (For Trump, to be clear, he uses the term ‘populist’, which undeniably fits.)
Nor will you find a camouflaged Christian revivalist tract here, as some claim. To be sure, Peterson heavily draws on the Bible and particularly on the Christian New Testament for quotes, but there are plenty of references to Eastern religious philosophies as well, particularly Taoism (‘yang vs. yin’, which here becomes ‘order vs. chaos’) and classical Buddhism (the concept that life is suffering). Among Christian theologians, Kierkegaard’s “act of faith” comes up repeatedly. During an interview, he was asked point-blank “Are you a Christian, and do you believe in G-d?” His intriguing answer: “I think the proper response to that is No, but I’m afraid He might exist.”
Nor is it some sort of “EST”-type (quasi-)cult manual, with Peterson setting himself up as a guru.
Moreover, it does not purport to be a reasoned scholarly tome of conservative philosophy. This is where Peter Hitchens (brother of the late Christopher) gets a little dyspeptic in his review in The Spectator, as he found it wanting there. http://archive.is/4eQIE (h/t: masgramondou)
David Solway, in his much more sympathetic article on PJMedia, hits the nail on the head, I believe. https://pjmedia.com/trending/jordan-peterson-phenomenon/ Like Solway, I find it hard to identify a single new idea in the book — pretty much everything Peterson says would be familiar to those of us who have been reared on Scripture and the Great Books.
But we have reached the level of intellectual corruption where, as George Orwell put it, the first duty of any thinking person is the restatement of the obvious. And that, Peterson does very well indeed. The book is a coherent whole, an engaging read, yea even a compelling ‘recap’ to the well-read. Peterson makes his discourse more engaging through extensive illustrations from psychological research, his own clinical practice, neuroscience, and his own life experience. Most importantly, it will bring wisdom of the ages (and of rational-empirical thinking) to a millennial generation drowning in derp and denial of objective reality. To those who, if you will pardon me the phrase, “know not the gods of the copybook headings”.
I just finished reading the book myself, and I largely agree with this summary.
January 30, 2018
The Three Teachings – Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism l HISTORY OF CHINA
IT’S HISTORY
Published on 1 Aug 2015The Three Teachings Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism have been a backbone of Chinese society and culture since the bronze age. The Three teachings are still intertwined strongly with today’s China. There are different interpretations to China’s chore faiths. Over time, different dynasties favoured different faiths, if only to define themselves against their predecessor. Ultimately though, its all about the philosophy of combining spirituality with every day life. All about the Three Teachings now on IT’S HISTORY.
