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Diet Tips of the Great Philosophers ≠92: Henry Thoreau and Green Beans

Posted by Martin Cohen

Many of the philosophers whom we rely on to represent little oases of good sense and rationality in a disorganised world, disappointingly turnout, on closer inspection, to be not only rather eccentric, but downright irrational. David Henry Thoreau, an anarchist who eked out a living by making pencils while living in a shed by a pond, on the other hand, appears even at first glance to be rather eccentric. Short, shabby, wild-haired and generally rather unprepossessing, he nonetheless seems to have anticipated much of the ecological renaissance that today’s philosophers (and diet gurus) have only just begun to talk about. Oh, and yes, he was always rather thin.

In his Journal entry for January 7, 1857, Thoreau says of himself: 

'In the streets and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it - dining with the Governor or a member of Congress! But alone in the distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine.

I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. . . I wish to . . . be sane a part of every day.'

He is famous for having spent two years living in a small wood cabin by a pond, and living off, not so much three fruits of the woods, but his own allotment. Naturally, Thoreau was a vegetarian. He remarks how one farmer said to him: ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;’ even as the farmer:

‘... religiously devoted a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones, walking all the while behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.’

Thoreau himself cultivated, not so much an allotment, as a small bean farm, of two and a half acres, which provided for himself the bulk of the food he ate –peas, corn, turnips, potatoes and above all green beans, the last of which crop he sold for extra cash. During the second year, he reduced his crops, if anything, writing:

‘ … that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer.’

He drank mainly water, writing that it was ‘the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor’ and worrying about the temptations of a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea!

From life in the woods he learned, among other things, that it ‘cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food’ and that ‘a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.’

In a chapter of his most famous book, Walden, entitled simply, ‘The Bean Field,’ Thoreau records how:

‘I came to love my rows, my beans… They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antæus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer — to make this portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work.’

For Thoreau, buying food, allowing others to grow food for him, would have disconnected him from the land, from direct contact with Nature, the source of both his bodily and spiritual nourishment. It was not enough to just have something to eat; he also wanted the experience of growing it.

Diet tips:

Food that you’ve grown has a special quality
You don’t need to eat a huge range of things to be healthy 

Follow @docmartincohen

What Would Happen If 3-D Printers Could 3-D Print Themselves?

Posted by Matthew Blakeway

“In the future, [the human species] will refuse to put themselves at the service of pirates. They will become what I call transhumans – who will give birth to a new order of abundance” ―Jacques Attali.

The French philosopher and economist Jacques Attali* predicted in the 1970s that the music industry would collapse. Within twenty years, he was basically proved right. If something is freely or cheaply replicable, then economic theory predicts that its value will trend towards zero. Ever since we were able to record our friends’ vinyl LPs on cassette, the ability of musicians to earn a living from recorded music was doomed – and so it turned out to be. Musicians today earn less and less from selling recorded music. I myself, as a writer, am acutely aware that it is getting harder to make a living, even in a world where people are reading more.

Now Attali is making the same predictions about manufactured goods. 3-D printing, while it still is a relatively new technology, opens the door to being able to scan a wide variety of objects into a 3-D printable file and e-mail it. Many manufactured products may become infinitely reproducible, their value trending towards zero. It has already been done, if only experimentally. We already have 3-D printed musical instruments, camera lenses, weapons – even 3-D printed refrigerators and cars. It isn’t inconceivable that we all will be able to upload 3-D printable files for such items which we can print at home and assemble Ikea-style. We could then tweet the link so that everybody else can have one.



At first glance, this all sounds as though it represents an impressive technological advancement. But actually, in an important sense, it is anti-technological – just as music streaming is anti-creative. The incentive to invent a better refrigerator or car is to make money. But if, as soon as you have done so, the value of the inventor’s work trends towards zero, then all hope that the inventor has of making money evaporates. So what is the point of innovation?

We like to think that people will continue to create and to innovate for the love of it – like inventing a new music genre. But I remember a time (not so long ago) where all waiters and bar tenders in New York City were aspiring actors, musicians, or artists. They could survive on three shifts a week and devote the rest of their time to their creative pursuits. But today, it takes six shifts to support subsistent living in a dingy bed-sit – so all those creatives have disappeared. I would like to think that they went to another, better place, but I see anecdotal evidence instead that many of them were forced to take menial office jobs.

If most forms of creative output (artistic or manufactured) will eventually become valueless in economic terms, then the economic constraints upon consumption will evaporate – as has already happened with music. But then so will all the manufacturing jobs that create that stuff, and so will the artists and inventors. In fact if we look at what is going up in value, not down, it is mostly what is not infinitely replicable, like land. The cost of education is currently going up, but this could sharply reverse through the rise of Internet education. Fossil fuels were becoming cheaper as we became more effective at extraction, but this already is understood to be a passing phase.

There is something else on planet earth that is infinitely and cheaply replicable – and that is humans. During my lifetime, the population of humans on this tiny planet has doubled. And if I survive into my eighties, it will treble. If something is freely and infinitely replicable, then in purely economic terms its value will trend towards zero. And that is precisely what is happening across the world.

The value of unskilled labour is trending towards subsistence wages – and in a globalised world, nations that value human rights are powerless to protect unskilled workers from the market forces of labour in countries far away, that have too many people doing jobs of declining worth. Real wages, even of American workers, have declined as their productivity has increased**. And this divergence of wages and productivity started in the 1970s, just as economists started preaching the value of globalisation. In the developed world, we have been trying to resist this trend, by pouring resources into education – attempting to ensure that we have no unskilled workers. But this post started by explaining why the value of the output of skilled creatives, too, is trending towards zero. This strategy only seems to defer the inevitable.

The logical conclusion is that, while people's labour will have little value, there will be few economic constraints on the consumption of products which cost little to produce. And while increased productivity should reduce the need to work, that is not the experience of the workers, who everywhere are working harder just to stand still. Even if – playing devil’s advocate – we argue that goods cost little to produce but that the cost of raw materials will offset this, it so happens that commodity prices are universally declining too.

We need to ask what this means for the future of humankind. But first, we need to ask what it means for the future of economic theory. It occurs to me that most economic theory doesn’t work in a world where there is an infinite supply of everything and therefore everything costs nothing. And if everything costs nothing, money no longer works as a means of allocating access to resources. This sort of argument isn’t trivial, and economists are currently debating different forms of the same thing: they worry about what happens when the conventional tools of economic management (among them, fiscal and monetary policy) simply stop having the effect that they used to have. Some governments have already tried negative interest rates after an interest rate of zero was found not to be low enough to stimulate growth and recovery from recession.

One way to escape this death spiral, where ultimately the planet may have billions of economic migrants, is to abandon the idea that all decision-making should revolve around money. We need to stop thinking about the monetary value of labour, and start thinking about the intrinsic and emotional value of a human life, and how this may be safeguarded and guaranteed. A good place to start is to consider how much consumption would optimise a human life. Bearing in mind that the advertising industry has been pummelling us with propaganda as to how consumption enhances our emotional wellbeing, it seems likely that we need a lot less consumption in reality than most of us think. Then we can start to consider how much consumption this planet can support. And then it becomes easy to compute how many humans we can fit on this planet before it bursts.

If economics is going to have any role in working this all out, then it is going to have to go cold turkey on its addiction to converting everything to monetary value before it can even think about it. Interestingly, we have seen powerful trends in this direction, reflected no less in the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

* Sam York. The Pop Star and the Prophet.bbc.com. 17 September 2015.

** Gillian White. Why the Gap Between Worker Pay and Productivity Is So Problematic. The Atlantic. 25 February 2015.

Meaning is More

Cueva de las Manos, Argentina

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

The title of one of Thomas Nagel's popular books reads at first sight like a question to be answered: 'What Does It All Mean?' But the word 'All' has undertones of something more perverse. I wrote to Professor Nagel that, as one turns the pages, the meaning of the title seems to turn into to a cry of despair. Yes, he replied, I had recognised the double entendre.

For many people, a lack of meaning is no slight problem. Some experience it as a living death, while others would rather die than surrender their meaning. At the same time, there has been a curious retreat of meaning in our day. It now lies beyond the interest of many people – even, sometimes, beyond the interest of dictionaries of philosophy. Historically, however, it has been an important philosophical question.



What is meaning? There are many kinds of meaning: existential meaning, psychological meaning, linguistic meaning, semiotic meaning, and various meanings besides. There is, too, a classic book on the subject: The Meaning of Meaning. The professor of philosophy Gilbert Harman notes that, in the theory of language, meaning can mean three things: the place which an expression has in the language, the thought which it communicates, and that for which it is used.

One may say much the same about the meaning of life. One's meaning is about finding one's place in the universe, bringing one's own self to full expression, and achieving one's goals and purpose. All three, in fact, are aspects of one and the same: I experience meaning when I know and feel my place in the big, wide whole – in the context of everything. Aristotle noted, 'Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life – the whole aim and end of human existence.' We may note his emphasis on 'the whole'. The meaning of life is not partial. Rather, it encompasses everything.

What, then, is 'the whole' of it? It has been the tragic tale of countless people, that they held a meaning which was later exposed as being only partial – in fact, was found to hold no real meaning at all. They found their meaning in a cause which was destroyed, in a relationship which ended, even in things which later proved to be ruinous.

Some philosophers suggest that there may be no real problem with that. The professor of philosophy Thomas Nagel writes, 'Perhaps the trick is to keep your eyes on what's in front of you.' The fleeting meanings of the moment are all that we need – we just shouldn't think on it too hard. This may seem to have some appeal, except for two reasons: we sense that meaning is not something we should ever lose – it ought to be timeless, absolute, not a victim of the vagaries of life. But more than this, if meaning is partial or fleeting, we may bring others into bondage to our own petty meanings (of which more in a moment).

MEANING IS MORE

Meaning may be found in many things: in a lover, a family, an ambition, a culture. Various ideas, too, may play a focal role in our lives: economics, social evolution, science, or politics. And this gives us a clue as to what we do when we find a meaning. We find it within the systems we create. Consider for a moment that this universe is, in the words of the Buddhist expositor Lama Govinda, an inseparable net of endless, mutually conditioned relations'. It is, in a sense, beyond all systems – so our systems of meaning may be understood to be 'regions of relations' within this infinite expanse.

But now, a problem arises. If we step outside of our 'regions of relations', our meanings will evaporate. There is no meaning outside the system. All is well while I measure my meaning, say, by the well-being of the roses in my garden. Yet if I step outside of this, to ask what life is about beyond it, I find no answer. Until, that is, I find a new and a bigger answer.

It is a fundamental feature of meaning, then, that it always requires something more. It always requires something which lies outside of my given system of meaning. Every closed system can be imagined to be larger. The entrepreneur Adam Toren gives us this timely reminder about meaning: 'It is bigger than this!'

Seen like this, we may call our quest for meaning an infinite progression. It must be more, and more, and more. And as the horizons of our systems of meaning expand, so we come to realise that, ultimately, meaning must be unbounded. Ultimately, meaning is found in the 'infinite expanse' – without those constructions which confine it and reduce it to mere 'regions of relations'. Ultimate meaning only reveals itself to me where systems of meaning are destroyed. Meaning is found, in an important sense, only where the quest for meaning is abandoned – or perhaps one should say, fulfilled.

This, presumably, is why the 'larger' meanings of our world have such an allure: they incorporate our smaller meanings, which fail to answer our search for 'more'. Larger meanings are systems which lie outside of the confines of our own muddling purposes. This is why a Napoleon, or a Hitler, or a Stalin can exist. They offer a meaning which is more.

Or a God. However, God may be understood not only as the guarantor of my own system of meaning – 'God told me to do it,' or 'I was obeying God' – but God may be seen as the purpose beyond all purposes, before whom all contrived meanings dissolve. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote, 'God is being-itself, not a being.' God is not entangled with our own small designs.

THE LOSS OF MEANING

Destiny, culture, ideology are schemes of meaning so large that one can barely imagine anything larger, that might lie outside of them or beyond them. Not even famine or war or genocide may defeat such systems, so large may they become. This presents us with a sobering thought on the 'more' of meaning. If our meaning is not to be found in the whole of the infinite expanse of relations, or in something which transcends our meaning, our meaning may well lead to disaster.

There are other dangers which lie in a loss of a larger meaning. More than anything, my own loss of meaning may reduce the meaning of others. One is able to view others only in terms of the meaning – the 'regions of relations' – which one has traced for oneself in this world. This means that everything, and everyone, must be understood in terms of my own meaning.

When a woman becomes a student of sociology, she may comment at a cocktail party, 'Sociology explains all that.' When a businessman owns a nature reserve (and remains a businessman at heart), he will run his nature reserve as a business. If an economist becomes a president (and remains an economist at heart), he will treat the nation as an economy. One president said that untimely deaths were bad for the economy.* The earth quakes, wrote King Solomon, when a slave becomes king – presumably because the slave sees the world in terms of the master-slave relationship, and cannot see its meaning beyond such terms.

The flight of 'meaning' today, from our social and philosophical debate, has much to do with the fragmentation of our society. As we have developed a complex social diversity, so we have lost touch both with our world as a whole, and with one another's worlds. Increasingly, we have needed to focus on smaller meanings. And all too often, when these smaller meanings dissolve, we seek to preserve them and protect them. And if they should represent my total system which I cannot see beyond, I may choose any means to keep them: petty fraud, white lies, implied threats, even worlds of fancy in my mind which do not exist. But the world is bigger and more beautiful than that. In the words of Graham Ward, professor of divinity at Oxford:

The system is a self-contained whole within which everything is made meaningful.

*President Thabo Mbeki, who was trained as an economist.

Maybe our life is not that personal...

Posted by Tessa den Uyl

 We think, act and feel without understanding precisely what it is that makes us act, feel or think the way we do. It is difficult to understand why we became accustomed to our visions of, and opinions about, life. We find ourselves into narratives others have created for us and have to find ourselves within these accustomed stories that maybe are not as familiar as we would like to believe. To extract ‘the impersonal’ out of this familiarity and bring it towards the narrative we identify with is difficult. 

As physical beings, we become a person and during life we try to keep up with that conception. We are conceived to then conceive ourselves. When we are born, someone else has already imagined us. This pre-imagination initiates a life to become your life to then be re-imagined as a life somehow different from that one. The better the ‘proper’ narrative fits, the less conflict will occur; the idea of exclusion fits an idea of inclusion in safeguarding experiences of certain values and goals.

In the routine of daily life rarely attention focuses on the premises that gave raise to those values. We might say that the value doesn’t remember where it came from and neither can it be understood why it is believed, though those values seem to constitute a rather important playground for our narratives. Previous ideas are exactly those we use to inhabit our narratives and comprehend the narratives of others - the abstract building blocks we identify with.

Strangely, we are tempted to identify with something we didn’t imagine ourselves but are willing to see ourselves, and others, in that picture. The picture is to always have a picture: without a picture we fall out of identification, one of the greatest human fears. In the absorption of many narratives deposited into many values, a person has to find, create and become in a universe. In such situations we start to understand the difficulty involved in coming to ones senses. ‘We are born as a person but it is difficult to die as a person.’

Changing your personal narrative means taking considerable responsibility while undertaking a flight into the unknown. A change of narrative doesn’t solely involve doubt and questioning life as a whole; it means searching to apply those doubts into a life for which there are no alternatives at hand. Altering ones narrative is a struggle with estrangement. Somehow the narrative is pulled into a need to not safeguard former descriptions; it is a profound surrender towards the unknown. This is why such change provokes perplexity, a state of being that is needed to avoid ending thinking (too quickly). Perplexity indicates a pause to identify things and put them into the proper narrative, inevitably postponing the identification of those narratives thought by others.

Imagining narratives is our tool to relate ourselves in a world; our capability to weave things together. It is the human way to give a sense to Life. Now if this weaving is used to confirm the best copy of what we think is a good picture, we are not truly weaving the relations ourselves but only those that serve a particular purpose: the picture orders the weaving. Any perplexity that arises during this kind of weaving is due to estrangement from that picture; it cannot but pull the proper confusion back into that picture.

Yet you cannot simultaneously weave a picture while not affirming it, even though you’re still weaving. Such weaving is of changing phenomena and every confusion that arises cannot be drawn back into the picture but only into the weaving. When you no longer work with static images, you are forced to dismantle the rigidity of your perception. This is the moment that imagination can truly break loose.

Long ago, we identified with the mammoth we killed to provide shelter, clothes, food and sacrifice: however the mammoth was standing next to us. Our relation was then rather direct. Today, when we’re asked to give opinions about world politics and economics, we witness visions from others all over the globe; but this is an abstraction of which our lives have become another instantiation. It seems awfully frightening to become aware of this picture; the awareness involves envisioning your proper narrative placed onto those ‘impersonal’ building blocks that have become more abstract then ever before and of which it seems we don’t want to separate ourselves. What tricks us is that the picture enigmatically provides an idea for the worthiness of our life. But upon what exactly have we placed that worthiness?

An important question to pose might be whether we are capable to keep track with those narratives that gave raise to our visions about life? We identify with those abstractions, we have feelings, opinions about, one might say, almost everything. Maybe we overestimate what we know in those narratives and lack humility in recognising what we can know.

Is the vision of our lives in which we overcome (and thus embrace) insecurity something too abstract to be imagined? Must we accept to live lives based on an abstraction that is far beyond our own imagination? Or dare we enter into a deep crisis of the kind hinted at by Nietzsche when he has the madman warn:

 “ ...what did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun?”

The challenge, as Zarathustra might have expressed it, is to try to relate our own, proper narratives to our suns.

Picture Post No. 5 Tabernacle Reflections

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they becme what they might appear to become.'

---

Piazza Vetra, Milan, November 2014
Picture credit: Antonio Borrani

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl

The expressive imagery necessary to bring some kind of sense to our lives is compromised by the production of other, competing images. This neutralisation of the grace of the image brings with it some transformations in our perception.

If we can say that every image offers us various possibilities for interpretation, placing itself before our thinking, then we can see images as providing a kind of balancing pole for our lives. This balancing element is rightly placed between the image and the viewer - like a bridge where imagination is free to flourish, for the bridge is the space of the unforeseen.

We might say that the very instability of the bridge provides the movement for our imagination. It is by using such bridges that human beings can deal with their existential selves.

Yet what happens when the unforeseen becomes foreseen?

When things are taken away from their natural environment and placed somewhere else, change occurs. When change occurs by a manipulative act, it is very much possible that the next act upon that will function to enforce that first one.

An image that originally handed to us a multiplicity of possible interpretations, offering to give sense to our lives, becomes meaningless. The image is placed behind the thought.