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 

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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.

Reason and Contradiction

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

“Beginning to think is beginning to

be undermined.”  –Albert Camus.

What is reason? Like an axe in our hands, we use it, we don't contemplate it. But we do know that we use it to make sense of things. We do know that we (puzzlingly) apply it to a variety of seemingly disconnected fields: science, ethics, and art, among others. And then, perhaps most importantly, we know that reason is a conscious activity.

One of the most important characteristics of our consciousness is that it kicks in where contradiction arises. Imagine a pendulum, swinging, swinging, swinging. So little contradiction does this present that, rather than producing consciousness, people use pendulums to induce hypnosis. But let the pendulum suddenly drop, and we quickly jump forward to examine what has happened to it -- for then it has contradicted our expectations. 

Things like this happen all the time, in many different ways. A shadow passes over my table in a restaurant. I feel a sudden pain under my foot. Or there is a strange taste in my coffee. These all contradict what I expect – and immediately I want to know: What is it? Why? Where did this come from?

 

Instinctively, we think of reason as a constructive enterprise. We use it to build houses, design computers, plan conferences, or construct theories. Yet when we examine it more closely, it seems that all such activities are in some way rooted in some kind of contradiction – or perhaps rather, in setting contradictions aside:

We build a house because we don't have a roof over our heads. We design a computer because we lack the power of thought. We call a conference because we need to connect. Or we construct a new theory because the old one won't work. Jean van Heijenoort, the historian of mathematical logic, wrote, “The ordinary notion of consistency involves that of contradiction, which again involves negation.” To put it simply, reason is the innate sense of contradiction. Call it our sixth sense.

This is not a new idea. Bernard Bosanquet suggested that reason kicks in where we have two competing explanations for the same thing in our minds. In fact no less a luminary than Immanuel Kant considered that reason is the power of synthesizing into unity (from disunity, we presume) the concepts which are provided by the intellect. By way of example, Galileo reconciled the sub-lunar and the supra-lunar worlds. James Maxwell united electricity and magnetism. And Albert Einstein melded space and time.

Many would object. The truth is in our first guess, they would say: namely, that reason is a constructive enterprise. In fact reason, they remind us, is a magnificent builder of things, both abstract and real: quantum theory, for instance, or the Golden Gate bridge. And yet, even the things which we construct may be viewed as reverse processes, launched from needs and contradictions.

Take the simple example of a house. A house is needed. Therefore a roof is needed – and walls and foundations. We know then that we cannot purchase a roof as a roof. But this contradicts our need – for a roof. The best we can do is timbers and tiles. But tiles must be secured. Now we need nails. And so on. In fact the best of minds know how to anticipate all contradiction. Thus through the application of reason, we solve a great complex of needs, then paradoxically claim that we have “constructed” something.

In fact the entire scientific enterprise, according to Karl Popper, is an exercise in what he called falsification. Reason may reveal that a theory is wrong, but it can never prove that it is right. 

More broadly. Wherever contradiction melts away, there we find that the holistic qualities of life emerge, which we so greatly value and desire: among them love, beauty, and grace. But apply reason to them, and they disappear. In fact, even the scientific quest is described as a search for beauty. We are able to appreciate the “beauty” of simple equations because they are about reduction and reconciliation – just as we desire any kind of simplicity, simplification, even simplistic-ness. “You can recognize truth,” wrote Richard Feynman, “by its beauty and simplicity.”

What then is reason? We may now summarise it like this: reason “flags” contradictions. Wherever we find a contradiction – or perhaps rather, wherever there arises a contradiction for me (sight, smell, touch, and all), reason pays attention. In this way, reason helps us to create a world without contradiction – a conceptual arrangement of the world which is “one”.

Stay with this idea. It further helps us to resolve the age old conflict between reason and passion:

Long has it been debated whether reason is our most basic driving force, or passion. It is reason, wrote John Locke. It is passion, countered David Hume. Which, then, is it to be? We know from recent empirical advances that it is our conceptual arrangement of the world which feeds our visceral (“gut”) feelings. That is, when my view of the world is held up against the world itself – specifically, where I encounter novelty, discrepancy, or interruption in the world around me – this leads to motivation. Even a dog, when faced with food which it does not expect to see in its bowl, is visibly affected.

In sum, what reason does is to modify our conceptual arrangement of the world. Our conceptual arrangement of the world, in turn, produces passion, whenever it contradicts the world. In this way, reason and passion are both masters and slaves. Reason does not directly control our passions, yet we may trace our passions back to reason.

Simply put: reason in, passion out.

Aspects of Mind

by Thomas Scarborough
 

---

Part I. Mind and Matter

I tap my finger on a table-top. I drink a glass of milk. I feel the warmth of the sun on my face. Such experiences seem perfectly real to me. So does the passion I have for my diesel pick-up, my grief over my grandmother's passing, or the fact that I am a Yorkshireman. Which means that, on the surface of it, my life seems real to me, through and through.

Now consider what this means to me philosophically. It seems to me, therefore, that I am living in a real world. It is not imagined, or illusory. Further, it would seem to me that I am an observerof this world, not merely a “robotic” presence there. And on this basis, it would seem to me that I have a mind which observes reality: mind here, reality there, which separates my mind from the matter which it observes.

If it were so simple. As to what reality really is, is another question. Itis a problem which has become acute in recent generations. Three things in particular have changed. Firstly, the natural sciences have enabled us to get behind our surface impressions, to understand that the physical world is no more than it seemsto be to me. Secondly, psychologists have discovered that our senses canall of them without exception be wrong: sight, smell, touch, and all. And thirdly, an increasingly materialistic outlook has led us to wonder whether there is any mind at all: the mind, said D.M. Armstrong, is nothing but the brain.

What should we do, then, with the old intuitive view, which leads us to set our mind apart from matter?

Since the 1950's, linguistics has been integral to the study of the mind, and it is linguistics we shall call upon here for help. Francis Bacon, four-hundred years ago, in his Novum Organum (Book 1:59), may have given us an unwitting clue as to what may be so different about the mind. There is an evil, he wrote, in dealing with natural and material things: the definitionsof these things consist of words, and these words beget words. 

To paraphrase Bacon, definitions consist of words, which have definitions which consist of words. This is much like having money in a bank, which has its money in another bank, which has its money in another bank, and so on. It is easy to see that one will never access one's money – which is the whole point of it after all. Similarly, our language, when we examine it closely, deals in nothings– yet nothing is the antithesis of the something that our reality is – or seems to be.

There are other ways of proving this “disjunction” between our language andreality. One of these is described in my Metaphysical Notes Part III. What seems clear is that, if this disjunction did not exist, we would be mere “machines”.

We therefore have a real reality, so to speak – which is however partnered with an unreal language which can never really get a grip on this reality we seem to know. The very nature of our language curiously distances our words – in fact our mental processes – from the reality which they describe. There is no real correspondence between the two. The mind, in a sense, hovers over the surface of reality. The mind  is wholly other.

The mind, one might say, functions in a completely different modeto the reality which we seem to know. This may well explainwhywe perceive our mind to be so different. It may explain, too, the many situations and states of mind which give us a sense of unreality or detachment: déjà vu, for instance, or the imposter syndrome, or a sense of alienation. As to whythe mind is wholly other, and what this means, are different questions, which we may examine in time.

---

Part II. Consciousness and Attention

Pointing to my arm, you ask me, “How did you cut yourself there?” “Oh!” I exclaim. “I really don't know. It completely escaped my attention!” Then, with a philosophical turn of mind, you ask me, “Were you consciousat the time that you cut yourself?” “Well of course!” Ireply. “At least, presumably I was! But, not about the cut.”

This imaginary conversation contrasts the concepts “attention” and “consciousness”. Consciousness is of course the more familiar of the two, although nobody really seems to know what it is, let alone how to explain it. Simon Blackburn tentatively suggests: the theatre where my thoughts and feelings have their existence. Attention, on the other hand, while not as well known, iswell established in psychology. Daniel Dennett defines it as the conscious awareness of information.

Could the two be one and the same? And if not, then what is the relationship between the two?

Just one-hundred years ago, it first came to the public attention that we might not be as conscious as we think – and at the time, people were (and they still are) loath to accept it. Yet one should have guessed it. Our very language is replete with words which speak of our lack of conscious awareness: we are oblivious, inattentive, napping, and so on. Alternatively, we may lose ourselves in what we are doing: we are, for instance, absorbed, preoccupied, immersed.

If then I am oblivious to my surroundings – or more accurately, to aspectsof my surroundings – am I always conscious? Similarly, if I am absorbed in my surroundings, am I always conscious? If I am absorbed in myself, or in the problems of the imaginary world of constructs, am I always conscious? Clearly, none of these states of mind would seem to be quite the same as being fully aware, awake, or alert.

There are, too, degrees of awareness. Norman Dixon famously ranked the conscious and non-conscious aspects of our sensory modalities (see the image). We easily become aware of pain, he noted. We are vaguely aware of smell. Yet we hardly become aware of what are called visceral interceptors, such as our heartbeat or breathing – even riding a bicycle, perhaps, while sending a text message. It is a hierarchy of that which, so to speak, grabs our attention.

Consciousness and attention might seem to be frightfully complex subjects– yet we find a common thread which runs through all our attentive moments, if not our conscious ones. We take notice of (and sometimes we especially ignore) novelty,discrepancy, and interruption – or perhaps rather, we take notice of that which representsnovelty, discrepancy, and interruption, to me. In short, we detect the “unexpected”, writes Richard Gregory. 

Let us pause at this point, to notice that this speaks of my taking notice, in every case, of some kind of contradiction. Novelty is a contradiction of that which I have been accustomed to. Discrepancy is a contradiction of that which I know. Interruption is a contradiction of that which I expect. Therefore, it is contradiction that arrests my attention, more than anything else. It is in moments of contradiction that I am most aware. And one does not need to see far to see that this further relates to reason – which we may explore, too, in time.

In short, consciousness has a lot to do with attention – and attention has a lot to do with those things which conflict. Now combine this with the fact that the pace of modern society todayis such that we need to process far more contradictions of many kinds than people used to do – many of whichwere not even contemplated one-hundred years ago. David Gelernter writes, with this in mind, that the modern mind is characterised by an ever more acute self-consciousness.

Not only this, notes Gelernter, but previous generations were far more disposed to low-focus thought – a thought which had and has little concept of contradiction or logicality. Pre-historic societies, perhaps, were no less intelligent than we are. Rather they entertained less contradictions – and perhaps, thereby, they were happier. 

---

Part III: Reason and Contradiction. 

Aspects of Mind

by Thomas Scarborough
 

---

Part I. Mind and Matter

I tap my finger on a table-top. I drink a glass of milk. I feel the warmth of the sun on my face. Such experiences seem perfectly real to me. So does the passion I have for my diesel pick-up, my grief over my grandmother's passing, or the fact that I am a Yorkshireman. Which means that, on the surface of it, my life seems real to me, through and through.

Now consider what this means to me philosophically. It seems to me, therefore, that I am living in a real world. It is not imagined, or illusory. Further, it would seem to me that I am an observerof this world, not merely a “robotic” presence there. And on this basis, it would seem to me that I have a mind which observes reality: mind here, reality there, which separates my mind from the matter which it observes.

If it were so simple. As to what reality really is, is another question. Itis a problem which has become acute in recent generations. Three things in particular have changed. Firstly, the natural sciences have enabled us to get behind our surface impressions, to understand that the physical world is no more than it seemsto be to me. Secondly, psychologists have discovered that our senses canall of them without exception be wrong: sight, smell, touch, and all. And thirdly, an increasingly materialistic outlook has led us to wonder whether there is any mind at all: the mind, said D.M. Armstrong, is nothing but the brain.

What should we do, then, with the old intuitive view, which leads us to set our mind apart from matter?

Since the 1950's, linguistics has been integral to the study of the mind, and it is linguistics we shall call upon here for help. Francis Bacon, four-hundred years ago, in his Novum Organum (Book 1:59), may have given us an unwitting clue as to what may be so different about the mind. There is an evil, he wrote, in dealing with natural and material things: the definitionsof these things consist of words, and these words beget words. 

To paraphrase Bacon, definitions consist of words, which have definitions which consist of words. This is much like having money in a bank, which has its money in another bank, which has its money in another bank, and so on. It is easy to see that one will never access one's money – which is the whole point of it after all. Similarly, our language, when we examine it closely, deals in nothings– yet nothing is the antithesis of the something that our reality is – or seems to be.

There are other ways of proving this “disjunction” between our language andreality. One of these is described in my Metaphysical Notes Part III. What seems clear is that, if this disjunction did not exist, we would be mere “machines”.

We therefore have a real reality, so to speak – which is however partnered with an unreal language which can never really get a grip on this reality we seem to know. The very nature of our language curiously distances our words – in fact our mental processes – from the reality which they describe. There is no real correspondence between the two. The mind, in a sense, hovers over the surface of reality. The mind  is wholly other.

The mind, one might say, functions in a completely different modeto the reality which we seem to know. This may well explainwhywe perceive our mind to be so different. It may explain, too, the many situations and states of mind which give us a sense of unreality or detachment: déjà vu, for instance, or the imposter syndrome, or a sense of alienation. As to whythe mind is wholly other, and what this means, are different questions, which we may examine in time.

---

Part II. Consciousness and Attention

Pointing to my arm, you ask me, “How did you cut yourself there?” “Oh!” I exclaim. “I really don't know. It completely escaped my attention!” Then, with a philosophical turn of mind, you ask me, “Were you consciousat the time that you cut yourself?” “Well of course!” Ireply. “At least, presumably I was! But, not about the cut.”

This imaginary conversation contrasts the concepts “attention” and “consciousness”. Consciousness is of course the more familiar of the two, although nobody really seems to know what it is, let alone how to explain it. Simon Blackburn tentatively suggests: the theatre where my thoughts and feelings have their existence. Attention, on the other hand, while not as well known, iswell established in psychology. Daniel Dennett defines it as the conscious awareness of information.

Could the two be one and the same? And if not, then what is the relationship between the two?

Just one-hundred years ago, it first came to the public attention that we might not be as conscious as we think – and at the time, people were (and they still are) loath to accept it. Yet one should have guessed it. Our very language is replete with words which speak of our lack of conscious awareness: we are oblivious, inattentive, napping, and so on. Alternatively, we may lose ourselves in what we are doing: we are, for instance, absorbed, preoccupied, immersed.

If then I am oblivious to my surroundings – or more accurately, to aspectsof my surroundings – am I always conscious? Similarly, if I am absorbed in my surroundings, am I always conscious? If I am absorbed in myself, or in the problems of the imaginary world of constructs, am I always conscious? Clearly, none of these states of mind would seem to be quite the same as being fully aware, awake, or alert.

There are, too, degrees of awareness. Norman Dixon famously ranked the conscious and non-conscious aspects of our sensory modalities (see the image). We easily become aware of pain, he noted. We are vaguely aware of smell. Yet we hardly become aware of what are called visceral interceptors, such as our heartbeat or breathing – even riding a bicycle, perhaps, while sending a text message. It is a hierarchy of that which, so to speak, grabs our attention.

Consciousness and attention might seem to be frightfully complex subjects– yet we find a common thread which runs through all our attentive moments, if not our conscious ones. We take notice of (and sometimes we especially ignore) novelty,discrepancy, and interruption – or perhaps rather, we take notice of that which representsnovelty, discrepancy, and interruption, to me. In short, we detect the “unexpected”, writes Richard Gregory. 

Let us pause at this point, to notice that this speaks of my taking notice, in every case, of some kind of contradiction. Novelty is a contradiction of that which I have been accustomed to. Discrepancy is a contradiction of that which I know. Interruption is a contradiction of that which I expect. Therefore, it is contradiction that arrests my attention, more than anything else. It is in moments of contradiction that I am most aware. And one does not need to see far to see that this further relates to reason – which we may explore, too, in time.

In short, consciousness has a lot to do with attention – and attention has a lot to do with those things which conflict. Now combine this with the fact that the pace of modern society todayis such that we need to process far more contradictions of many kinds than people used to do – many of whichwere not even contemplated one-hundred years ago. David Gelernter writes, with this in mind, that the modern mind is characterised by an ever more acute self-consciousness.

Not only this, notes Gelernter, but previous generations were far more disposed to low-focus thought – a thought which had and has little concept of contradiction or logicality. Pre-historic societies, perhaps, were no less intelligent than we are. Rather they entertained less contradictions – and perhaps, thereby, they were happier. 

---

Part III: Reason and Contradiction.