Things and Nothing

 by Thomas Scarborough

As this year draws to a close, we soar beyond the turbulent things which have so exercised philosophical hearts and minds, to consider for a moment one of the very abstract and timeless questions of philosophy: ‘things’ and their opposites.

There are, in this world, ‘things’. Or so we suppose. These are also called objects, entities, items, existents, or beings—terms which, by and large, all mean the same thing. The philosopher William Rowe wrote that a ‘thing’ is any item whose existence is acknowledged by a system of ontology, whether that item be particular, universal, abstract, or concrete. The whole universe, even, may be called a ‘thing’. So far so good.

But what is the opposite of a thing? Or what is its contrast, or complement? Nothing, perhaps. But how could there be ‘nothing’? That would seem to be supreme philosophical nonsense. Or suppose that there is a thing which failed to exist? It never came into being. What should we say about that?

Somebody observed that all of our philosophical concepts may be grouped in pairs. Where we find ‘altruism’, we find ‘egoism’; where we find ‘theism’, ‘atheism’; where we find ‘realism’, ‘anti-realism’—and so on, from A to Z. Some do the same with ‘things’. Where there are things, we find nothing. The philosophers Bradley Rettler and Andrew Bailey comment,

‘It’s not clear whether anyone sincerely endorses the thesis that there is nothing, However, it has been defended several times over.’

One could contend that ‘things’ are things in space and time, while nothings are not—like numbers, for instance, or society, or force. Or one could say that things exist, but properties do not. Say, a house exists, but its karma does not. In that case, a great many things ‘do not exist’. Or one could say, as the existentialists do, that one may experience Nothing. But existentialists are afraid of Nothing, jokes the philosopher Simon Blackburn, where there is nothing to be afraid of.

There is one obvious way that we can try to solve the problem, and many have taken this course: namely, first define a ‘thing’. If what chiefly defines a ‘thing’ is that it is, then of course, its opposite must be a thing which is not—perhaps rather, nothing. But is that properly the way to define a thing?

I shall here accept the view, for the sake of argument, that all the things we call things are things: things which exist in space and time (objects), things which happen (events), and things which exist in the mind (concepts). Now suppose that, in order to create all of these things, we need to differentiate them from what the philosopher and psychologist William James called the ‘undifferentiated stream of experience’.

Things have contours. They have definition. But the opposite of things do not. When things lose their contours, they slip back into the undifferentiated stream. Another way of putting it is that, if nothing is not related to the rest of reality—not a word, not a motion, not an entity, not an event—then we artificially separate things when we call them ‘things’. Artificially, because we strip away from them their completeness.

To create a 'nut', we throw away the fruit, and the tree, and the soil, and the air, and the universe. If we included all these things which are essential to the nut's existence, we could never isolate a nut as a thing. Therefore it is simply 'an edible kernel', or something of the sort.  We strip away the interconnections or interdependencies, to create something which is self-contained.  

The philosopher of science Alan Chalmers describes our reality like this:

‘Many kinds of processes are at work in the world around us, and they are all superimposed on, and interact with, each other ...’

If this is true, then it stands to reason that any ‘thing’ which we cut out from this whole is not wholly itself. 'Nothing' is therefore that which gives birth to things. It is that which exists before we create the contours which create things. In his translation of Lao Tzu, Sam Hamill writes, ‘There was some undifferentiated something here, before heaven and earth.’

The opposite of things, therefore, is a world which is without them—because they have not emerged from it. Nothing was the plastic rattle, before the infant apprehended it. Nothing was the theory, before the scientist formulated it. Nothing was the environment, before it emerged in our minds and hearts. Nothing is all those things which could be, but are not, or are yet to come, because they have no contours.

Resist or Die

An implicit celebration of nihilism turns into

satire or pop culture. The seriousness of it all is minimised.

Posted by Jeremy Dyer

We have all become more aware of how fragile we actually are (mind, body, and spirit), and are all hanging on to the reality that we once knew, though it is slowly dissolving. But the future marches inexorably upon us, clouds of toxic mind-dust choking all hope. Right now we face an unprecedented assault upon body, mind, and spirit, akin only to a World War or widespread plague.

In normal times, society had the bedrock of religion, and a fatalistic stoicism; death was part and parcel of life: people died, but the living moved on. Society ticked along all by itself, and we just went with the flow in a reasonably predictable world. There was the assumption of law and order that did not require our active engagement. There was an education ladder and a job at the end, if you put in the effort. Predictable.

Initially we were confident that this Corona-tsunami would pass. However, as it has stubbornly persisted, a future desert of human and economic devastation is steadily coalescing. According to the UN World Food Programme’s David Beasley, more than a quarter-billion people are now “marching toward the brink of starvation”, in large measure due to the Coronavirus. 400 million full-time jobs have already been lost.

Additionally it is becoming glaringly apparent that “leaders” and “scientists” alike are actually confused and unsure what to do. Like us, they are in fact flying by the seat of their pants. In one of the world's largest cities, New York, wrote Dan Adler of Vanity Fair, “frenzied confusion [is] about par for the course.” It has become obvious that the powers that be are not looking after our interests in the broader macro-economic or philosophic sense ...

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The whole machine of civilisation is choking and stuttering, 

and a group of vultures are profiteering off its suffering.

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In South Africa, where I write, “Rona” has glaringly exposed our elected officials for the worthless thieves that they actually were all long. The Auditor-General, Tsakani Maluleke, turned up “frightening findings,” and law enforcement agencies are investigating more than R10.5 billion (£500 million, or $700 million) in potentially corrupt Coronavirus spending across South Africa.

“What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.” (Morpheus, The Matrix, 1999).

The whole machine of civilisation is choking and stuttering, and a group of vultures are profiteering off its suffering. Bolts and cogs are daily falling off the interlocking wheels of our finely-meshed consumer society. Doomscrolling news on our smartphones only intensifies our existential angst.

Is it any surprise people feel the claws of despair in their inner being? No wonder existential anxiety is at an all-time high – the pain of being alive; the pain of accepting that our own fate is horrifyingly, completely up to us. The philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote that it all evokes nausea.

Society offers very little hope, though some rage against this “invisible other” by destroying all symbols of authority and civilisation. But the spectre of a wasteland is not an encouraging future.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

(Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919).

In our 21st Century consumer society, we have become accustomed to problems being solved. We have become thin-skinned, forgotten the reality of war, and cannot accept that misfortune is “just life”. We demandingly insist that things get resolved, be it a skin cancer, refuse removal, or a luke-warm latte.

We find cognitive dissonance (stress, conflict) intolerable. So we act out, protest, insist on pills to solve what is essentially a personal, existential issue. We want pharmacy to numb our philosophy. Or money to numb our fear of poverty. Usually both. We feel the pressure of slowly being reduced to animals. Our noble ideals of ourselves as spiritual, caring and helping others, being steadily crushed by the predatory motivation of “every man for himself”.

The future appears “bleak,” as the trendy expression goes, but it is also a bleakness we have created in our own minds. Despair prompts apocalyptic solutions: get solar, prep your bunker and grow your own food; yield all responsibility to a totalitarian state; retreat into a personal haze of addiction and denial; kill yourself.

Realistically though, this is not the end of the world, but just another catastrophe, and a relatively mild one by historical standards. We should most determinedly resist despair.

What else remains but hard, personal moral choices?

Persuasion v. Manipulation in the Pandemic

Posted by Keith Tidman

Persuasion and manipulation to steer public behaviour are more than just special cases of each other. Manipulation, in particular, risks short-circuiting rational deliberation and free agency. So, where is the line drawn between these two ways of appealing to the public to act in a certain way, to ‘adopt the right behaviour’, especially during the current coronavirus pandemic? And where does the ‘common good’ fit into choices?

 

Consider two related aspects of the current pandemic: mask-wearing and being vaccinated. Based on research, such as that reported on in Nature (‘Face masks: what the data say’, Oct. 2020), mask-wearing is shown to diminish the spread of virus-loaded airborne particles to others, as well as to diminish one’s own exposure to others’ exhaled viruses. 

Many governments, scientists, medical professionals, and public-policy specialists argue that people therefore ought to wear masks, to help mitigate the contagion. A manifestly utilitarian policy position, but one rooted in controversy nonetheless. In the following, I explain why.

 

In some locales, mask-wearing is mandated and backed by sanctions; in other cases, officials seek willing compliance, in the spirit of communitarianism. Implicit in all this is the ethics-based notion of the ‘common good’. That we owe fellow citizens something, in a sense of community-mindedness. And of course, many philosophers have discussed this ‘common good’; indeed, the subject has proven a major thread through Western political and ethical philosophy, dating to ancient thinkers like Plato and Aristotle.

In The Republic, Plato records Socrates as saying that the greatest social good is the ‘cohesion and unity’ that stems from shared feelings of pleasure and pain that result when all members of a society are glad or sorry for the same successes and failures. And Aristotle argues in The Politics, for example, that the concept of community represented by the city-state of his time was ‘established for the sake of some good’, which overarches all other goods.

Two thousand years later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserted that citizens’ voluntary, collective commitment — that is, the ‘general will’ or common good of the community — was superior to each person’s ‘private will’. And prominent among recent thinkers to have explored the ‘common good’ is the political philosopher John Rawls, who has defined the common good as ‘certain general conditions that are . . . equally to everyone’s advantage’ (Theory of Justice, 1971).

 

In line with seeking the ‘common good’, many people conclude that being urged to wear a mask falls under the heading of civic-minded persuasion that’s commonsensical. Other people see an overly heavy hand in such measures, which they argue deprives individuals of the right — constitutional, civil, or otherwise — to freely make decisions and take action, or choose not to act. Free agency itself also being a common good, an intrinsic good. For some concerned citizens, compelled mask-wearing smacks of a dictate, falling under the heading of manipulation. Seen, by them, as the loss of agency and autonomous choice.

 

The readying of coronavirus vaccines, including early rollout, has led to its own controversies around choice. Health officials advising the public to roll up their sleeves for the vaccine has run into its own buzzsaw from some quarters. Pragmatic concerns persist: how fast the vaccines were developed and tested, their longer-term efficacy and safety, prioritisation of recipients, assessment of risk across diverse demographics and communities, cloudy public-messaging narratives, cracks in the supply chain, and the perceived politicising of regulatory oversight.

As a result of these concerns, nontrivial numbers of people remain leery, distrusting authority and harbouring qualms. As recent Pew, Gallup, and other polling on these matters unsurprisingly shows, some people might assiduously refuse ever to be vaccinated, or at least resist until greater clarity is shed on what they view as confusing noise or until early results roll in that might reassure. The trend lines will be watched.

 

All the while, officials point to vaccines as key to reaching a high enough level of population immunity to reduce the virus’s threat. Resulting in less contagion and fewer deaths, while allowing besieged economies to reopen with the business, social, and health benefits that entails. For all sorts of reasons — cultural, political, personal — some citizens see officials’ urgings regarding vaccinations as benign, well-intentioned persuasion, while others see it as guileful manipulation. One might consider where the Rawlsian common good fits in, and how the concept sways local, national, and international policy decision-making bearing on vaccine uptake.

 

People are surely entitled to persuade, even intensely. Perhaps on the basis of ethics or social norms or simple honesty: matters of integrity. But they may not be entitled to resort to deception or coercion, even to correct purportedly ‘wrongful’ decisions and behaviours. The worry being that whereas persuasion innocuously induces human behaviour broadly for the common good, coercive manipulation invalidates consent, corrupting the baseline morality of the very process itself. To that point, corrupt means taint ends.

 

Influence and persuasion do not themselves rise to the moral censure of coercive or deceptive manipulation. The word ‘manipulation’, which took on pejorative baggage in the eighteen hundreds, has special usages. Often unscrupulous in purpose, such as to gain unjust advantage. Meantime, persuasion may allow for abridged assumptions, facts, and intentions, to align with community expectations and with hoped-for behavioural outcomes to uphold the common good. A calculation that considers the veracity, sufficiency, and integrity of narratives designed to influence public choices, informed by the behavioural science behind effective public health communications. A subtler way, perhaps, to look at the two-dimensional axes of persuasion versus manipulation.

 

The seed bedding of these issues is that people live in social relationships, not as fragmented, isolated, socially disinterested individuals. They live in the completeness of what it means to be citizens. They live within relationships that define the Rawlsian common good. A concept that helps us parse persuasion and manipulation in the framework of inducing societal behaviour: like the real-world cases of mask-wearing and vaccinations, as the global community counterattacks this lethal pandemic.

 

Book review: Divine Wisdom in the Art of Aphorism

Miniature from Vani Gospels

 

The Prelude of Divine Wisdom in the Art of Aphorism 

By Zura Shiolashvili 

ISBN 978-0-9565175-2-4

This slim volume, under the title of The Prelude of Divine Wisdom in the Art of Aphorism. represents a revised third edition of Zura Shiolashvili’s long and earnest study of Nietzsche and the art of aphorism. I reviewed an earlier version, ten years ago (how time flies!) and this is a much broader and deeper work. 

That earlier edition was a little too strident in its attack on Nietzsche, but here is a more nuanced view, that I think throws more light on the strange conflict in Nietzsche’s writing between contempt and dismissal of Christianity and yet a kind of grudging respect and admiration. 

‘I regard Christianity as the most disastrous lie of seduction there has ever been, as the great unholy lie. I draw its after-growth and tendrils of ideal out from under all other disguises, I resist all half and three-quarter positions towards it - there must be war against it’, wrote Nietzsche in Notebook 10, written in 1887. Over a century later, Shiolashvili, by contrast, is very much writing as a believer, indeed a preacher, as one who starts from the perspective of one seeking to defend Christian truth from the ‘withered aphorisms’ of the ‘most eloquent Antichrist of the nineteenth century’. 

In his earlier writing, The Art of Aphorism and Nietzsche's Blind Passion, Shiolashvili found in Nietzsche’s prescription a kind of absurdity - for how can a roe deer resist the jaws of a wolf, if its fate is to be weak in its beauty? For the existing world is inseparable from sorrow and beauty. This, he says, is a pessimistic reality innate to the logic of the natural world… 

Because, if soo, ‘by Nietzsche’s psychological metamorphosis and will to power, a roe deer should turn itself into a wolf to become strong and save its life, denying its tenderness and beauty’. 

In such ways, through advocating his ‘barbaric ethic’, Nietzsche ‘did not want to see everything that is weak is not ugly, and everything that is strong is not lovely’. Nietzsche’s spirituality, Shiolashvili prefaces this edition by saying, ‘starts with his carnal self and ends with psychological delusion’. In fact, for the German nihilist, he adds, depravity represents ‘not psychological degradation but rather the truth of the free spirit’. 

In this slim but elegantly illustrated volume is a mix of prose analysis and commentary on Nietzsche that draws on sources such as Cambridge University Press’ invaluable (for Nietzsche scholars) Writings of the Late Notebooks, as well as elements of Freud and Jung, and philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant and Hume - the first and last committed atheists. 

Shiolashvili’s claim is Nietzsche reduces thought itself to the ‘will to power’, a notion Nietzsche appropriated from Schopenhauer, who saw the life force as manifesting itself identically in humans, in animals and in rocks. The result is that: ‘Nietzsche's philosophical psychology states the absolute priority of animal desire over the sublime value of mind’. 

In consequence, just as Nietzsche openly promised, the ‘highest becomes the lowest’. It is in resistance to this that Shiolashvili offers his aphorisms, no less than 327 of them in this book! The first is: ‘It is pure thought that beautifies a human being’, while the last is ‘Roses plucked from heaven never wither’.

The aphorisms do, in a curious way, help to clarify and highlight the Nietzschean idea under examination - the search for meaning in a universe with no meaning, other than that pursuit of power. Aphorism 17, for example: ‘You stand on the peak, the bottom of the precipice moves your soul even there - this is the emptiness’. 

By choosing, in this way, to write with an unconventional blend of literary aphorisms, textual quotation and complex, multilayered analysis, Shiolashvili, an unabashed critic of Nietzsche, is also one of his followers.