Poetry: On Nuclear Logic

Editorial note: Poetry touching on the great stories of our time, from Iran to North Korea, to Turkey to Israel, to...?

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A poem by Chengde Chen 

Dr Strangelove provided a fictional insight into something all too real

On ‘Nuclear Logic’



Hearing that nuclear control on Earth is troublesome,
God sends His envoy to investigate.
Riding down the wind and passing over countries,
the envoy is puzzled by what he sees:
in country A, nuclear missiles striding proudly ahead;
in country B, nuclear programme being openly upgraded.
but in small countries like C and D,
there are inspectors under UN flags sniffing around,
searching for traces of nuclear evidence, or intention.

The envoy can’t figure out the logic,
so he asks the Secretary General of the UN,
‘If such weapons endanger human existence,
shouldn’t those who have them destroy theirs first?
If the UN principle is that all nations are equal,
why are they treated differently over the same thing?’

The Secretary General replies, ‘Your Excellency,
nuclear logic is different from ordinary logic.
It is not something that if I can have, so can you,
but that because I have it and you don’t,
I can forbid you while you can’t stop me.
“Equality” means that we have one right each.
Since I have had the right to have,
you have to have the right to have not –
which is just as important to the world peace and order.
It is most irrational and irresponsible to think that
that I can set a fire means you can light a candle!’

The envoy is stupefied,
‘What interesting logic; no wonder you’re unique!
I’d better hurry back to report it –
let the Old Man learn something new too.’ 

---

Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems. Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

Poetry: On Nuclear Logic

Editorial note: Poetry touching on the great stories of our time, from Iran to North Korea, to Turkey to Israel, to...?

---

A poem by Chengde Chen 

Dr Strangelove provided a fictional insight into something all too real

On ‘Nuclear Logic’

Hearing that nuclear control on Earth is troublesome,
God sends His envoy to investigate.
Riding down the wind and passing over countries,
the envoy is puzzled by what he sees:
in country A, nuclear missiles striding proudly ahead;
in country B, nuclear programme being openly upgraded.
but in small countries like C and D,
there are inspectors under UN flags sniffing around,
searching for traces of nuclear evidence, or intention.

The envoy can’t figure out the logic,
so he asks the Secretary General of the UN,
‘If such weapons endanger human existence,
shouldn’t those who have them destroy theirs first?
If the UN principle is that all nations are equal,
why are they treated differently over the same thing?’

The Secretary General replies, ‘Your Excellency,
nuclear logic is different from ordinary logic.
It is not something that if I can have, so can you,
but that because I have it and you don’t,
I can forbid you while you can’t stop me.
“Equality” means that we have one right each.
Since I have had the right to have,
you have to have the right to have not –
which is just as important to the world peace and order.
It is most irrational and irresponsible to think that
that I can set a fire means you can light a candle!’

The envoy is stupefied,
‘What interesting logic; no wonder you’re unique!
I’d better hurry back to report it –
let the Old Man learn something new too.’ 

---

Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems. Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

An Information Society

A Proposal For a New 'Checks and Balances'

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

“Power checks power,” wrote Charles de Montesquieu.  Yet power, to check power, rests on the disclosure of information.

The political philosopher Montesquieu, in the early 18th century, developed the political theory of the separation of powers, and with it, of checks and balances.  Through such a separation of powers, a government would be divided into three separate branches, each of which would serve as a check and a balance to the other two. Subsequently, Montesquieu's ideas have had a major influence on political philosophy – so that, today, democratic governments will typically (though not always) separate their legislative, executive, and judicial branches to guarantee continued stability and good governance.  It may seem a primitive notion today – namely, that power checks power – yet it really is the only way that we have.

However, given such a separation of powers, how should a nation know that this arrangement is working? How should one assess it? How should one confirm it? Separate powers can unite. Individual powers can gain the ascendancy. The answer is plainly: each branch of government needs to know what the others are doing – not only in terms of the various decisions which they take, but in terms of keeping open account of the way in which these decisions are carried out. And this needs to be public, or one loses not only public accountability and confidence, but the rich resources which are public thinking.



To put it another way, it is as simple as the disclosure of information. In fact, without the disclosure of information, there really can be no separation of powers. Therefore, the requirement for information is prior to the separation of powers. For this very reason, the various branches of government publish their information through government printing works – and more recently, through web portals.

But now, notice something about this information, which is of crucial importance to a nation. One doesn't need to go banging down any doors to obtain it. One doesn't have to apply for it. One doesn't need to pay for it. The basic information of government is ours. Not only do we have the right to such information – we have the information.

If only all of society would work in this way, from top to bottom: public officials, civil servants, professions councils, board members, business people – in fact, throughout. We know, from recent empirical advances, that transparency greatly moderates the exploitative power of individuals – and in so doing, greatly reduces the distress of a nation. Yet today, by way of specific example which is by no means unique, access to a single page of information in my home town Cape Town, through the provisions of a liberal Access to Information Act, may cost R30 000 in counsel fees alone – if anybody should be feeling clingy. This is well above the average monthly income, and an impractical prospect for most.

Yet information is critical to society. In the words of the philosopher Frederick Adams, it enables us to get “a fix on the way the world is objectively configured”. We need information before we can manage and grow a nation in an informed, considered, and impartial way.

In fact it may be the difference between the success and failure of a state. Wherever information is concealed, politicians accumulate personal fortunes, crimes are swept under the carpet, buildings rise without permissions, the poor are exploited, foodstuffs are unsafe – and a thousand things besides. In my own country South Africa, a bubbly young reporter pushed her way into a country estate, where she discovered blueprints on a wall. It was Nkandla – the beginning of a major information scandal, and unprecedented turmoil in the national parliament.

It is therefore critically important that there should be a way to shed light – through the disclosure of information – on rules, plans, processes, and actions, throughout society. Which is, one needs to know the why, how, what, and how-much in every sphere.

How far should this go? It needs to go far. Yet the application of the principle would be for each society to negotiate in its own unique situation. The bottom line is the need for information – not merely the right to it. And for the first time in human history, in our information society, this has become a real possibility.

Parallel to a three-fold separation of powers, therefore, it would seem crucial to propose another kind of separation: the separation of information. Duplication of information is not enough. Alter one copy, or destroy it, and the value of the other may be lost. In triplicate, information is secure. Three separate information databases would seem essential to secure the disclosure of vital information.

This should not be confused with a surveillance state, where the few have special access to information, and the power to exploit it. By and large, the concealment of information holds greater dangers than genuinely opening it up.

In early societies, houses and huts were often arranged in circles. So, too, were wigwams pitched in an oval, and wagons drawn up in a laager. Everyone was able to see into the heart of everyone else's world.  Yet through the course of history, this changed – and in many ways it has been to our detriment. While it is impossible, now, to return to such a society, it is possible to recreate one of its central features: namely, transparency. Nations, in order to thrive and survive, must have a high order of transparency.

An Information Society

A Proposal For a New 'Checks and Balances'

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

“Power checks power,” wrote Charles de Montesquieu.  Yet power, to check power, rests on the disclosure of information.

The political philosopher Montesquieu, in the early 18th century, developed the political theory of the separation of powers, and with it, of checks and balances.  Through such a separation of powers, a government would be divided into three separate branches, each of which would serve as a check and a balance to the other two. Subsequently, Montesquieu's ideas have had a major influence on political philosophy – so that, today, democratic governments will typically (though not always) separate their legislative, executive, and judicial branches to guarantee continued stability and good governance.  It may seem a primitive notion today – namely, that power checks power – yet it really is the only way that we have.

However, given such a separation of powers, how should a nation know that this arrangement is working? How should one assess it? How should one confirm it? Separate powers can unite. Individual powers can gain the ascendancy. The answer is plainly: each branch of government needs to know what the others are doing – not only in terms of the various decisions which they take, but in terms of keeping open account of the way in which these decisions are carried out. And this needs to be public, or one loses not only public accountability and confidence, but the rich resources which are public thinking.

To put it another way, it is as simple as the disclosure of information. In fact, without the disclosure of information, there really can be no separation of powers. Therefore, the requirement for information is prior to the separation of powers. For this very reason, the various branches of government publish their information through government printing works – and more recently, through web portals.

But now, notice something about this information, which is of crucial importance to a nation. One doesn't need to go banging down any doors to obtain it. One doesn't have to apply for it. One doesn't need to pay for it. The basic information of government is ours. Not only do we have the right to such information – we have the information.

If only all of society would work in this way, from top to bottom: public officials, civil servants, professions councils, board members, business people – in fact, throughout. We know, from recent empirical advances, that transparency greatly moderates the exploitative power of individuals – and in so doing, greatly reduces the distress of a nation. Yet today, by way of specific example which is by no means unique, access to a single page of information in my home town Cape Town, through the provisions of a liberal Access to Information Act, may cost R30 000 in counsel fees alone – if anybody should be feeling clingy. This is well above the average monthly income, and an impractical prospect for most.

Yet information is critical to society. In the words of the philosopher Frederick Adams, it enables us to get “a fix on the way the world is objectively configured”. We need information before we can manage and grow a nation in an informed, considered, and impartial way.

In fact it may be the difference between the success and failure of a state. Wherever information is concealed, politicians accumulate personal fortunes, crimes are swept under the carpet, buildings rise without permissions, the poor are exploited, foodstuffs are unsafe – and a thousand things besides. In my own country South Africa, a bubbly young reporter pushed her way into a country estate, where she discovered blueprints on a wall. It was Nkandla – the beginning of a major information scandal, and unprecedented turmoil in the national parliament.

It is therefore critically important that there should be a way to shed light – through the disclosure of information – on rules, plans, processes, and actions, throughout society. Which is, one needs to know the why, how, what, and how-much in every sphere.

How far should this go? It needs to go far. Yet the application of the principle would be for each society to negotiate in its own unique situation. The bottom line is the need for information – not merely the right to it. And for the first time in human history, in our information society, this has become a real possibility.

Parallel to a three-fold separation of powers, therefore, it would seem crucial to propose another kind of separation: the separation of information. Duplication of information is not enough. Alter one copy, or destroy it, and the value of the other may be lost. In triplicate, information is secure. Three separate information databases would seem essential to secure the disclosure of vital information.

This should not be confused with a surveillance state, where the few have special access to information, and the power to exploit it. By and large, the concealment of information holds greater dangers than genuinely opening it up.

In early societies, houses and huts were often arranged in circles. So, too, were wigwams pitched in an oval, and wagons drawn up in a laager. Everyone was able to see into the heart of everyone else's world.  Yet through the course of history, this changed – and in many ways it has been to our detriment. While it is impossible, now, to return to such a society, it is possible to recreate one of its central features: namely, transparency. Nations, in order to thrive and survive, must have a high order of transparency.

Picture Post No. 9: Balloons Floating into the Philosophical Dimension

'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.'

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Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Al-Azhar mosque, Cairo

Photo credit: AP via Guardian

Human beings have long been trying to explain the unknown. We have constructed grand theories, separated doctrines and invented names all in a bid to create systematic order out of the  unknown. In the process, we have been so enthusiastic in our examination of the mysterious and so hopeful to tame our reality within our notions of proof, that even when our logic no longer fits, we still believe it is present. After all, building edifices upon that lack of proof, just like proving stories  never happened, can be even more powerful than finding evidence for those that actually did.

In this image, perhaps the child’s innocent play shows in a single gesture the impossibility of stepping outside our essential humanity.

This girl and the balloon are so completely embedded in life itself that it is difficult not to recognise in the image this human urge to investigate. Yet, in the human search for knowledge, the tendency to  build walls has never outreached that clarity this girl and the balloon hand back to us.

When does something become intelligible?

Is there some kind of archaic intuition that determines when a relation becomes timeless within a spatial dimension? Could the girl and the balloon  have been pictured like this in front of a row of policemen,  or a church, in the desert - or even in Cairo's  busy traffic?  Instead,  the balloon seems to descend like another world that the girl is waiting to receive.

______________________________________________________________________________

The Death of Rationalism

By Thomas Scarborough

We shall inhabit, for a moment, the world of the German philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen.  In 1973, Kamlah and Lorenzen co-authored the 'Logische Propädeutic' – an obscure title, with a dull brown cover, and ragged text hammered out on an electric typewriter. Yet it soon became a best-seller.

At its heart lies the concept of the predicator, which Kamlah and Lorenzen thought (in their definition of it) to be the key to a disciplined scientific and philosophical language. A predicator, to borrow a term from Gottlob Frege, 'saturates' the object. For example, in the sentence 'This is a Persian cat,' 'Persian cat' is the predicator. The technical definition: 'We assert a predicator of an object when we state something about the object.' A predicator, too, properly belongs only to a very limited range of predicators. For instance, one can point to a Cheshire cat and say, 'This is an animal,' although one cannot point to a Cheshire cat and say, 'This is a bicycle.' Predicators which are legitimately available for our use occur in chains, webs, or networks. For example:

    Cheshire cat → cat → animal → living thing
    Mountain bike → bicycle → vehicle → non-living thing

Note that, even at the end of such predicator chains, we may not arrive at anything common. To put this another way, a Cheshire cat and a mountain bike will rarely turn up in the same conversation. Therefore, the words which we speak fit comfortably into certain predicator chains, webs, or networks (we shall simply call them 'networks' here). Whether we speak about chemistry, ecclesiology, or philosophy, or anything else under the sun, our words fit comfortably into the subject under discussion. Yet even at the same time, most predicators will fail to fit into our conversation at any given time. For instance, while we are permitted to say, 'The maid carries the pail,' we cannot say, 'The maid carries the moon,' or anything of that sort.

In fact, our language is tightly constrained – so tightly constrained that when we put pen to paper, in whichever direction we cast our thoughts, we tend to be able only to construct networks of predicators which are agreeble to our starting point. Kamlah and Lorenzen observe, 'Predicators always stand in such a tightly woven nexus that any one tends to appear with others.' And briefly, they suggest a 'thought-provoking example': philosophy from Augustine to Leibniz was 'determined' by philosophers' understanding of predicators.

A philosophy has ambitions to think in every direction. Yet as it does so, it follows predicator rules (which resemble set theory), and is tightly bound by these rules. Thus Kamlah and Lorenzen note that we are 'thoroughly dominated by an unacknowledged metaphysics'. Therefore, as philosophers sat down in the past to write their philosophies, words were attracted to words – much as magnets snap to magnets – and so predicator networks produced philosophies. One merely needs to posit a starting point – the will to power, for instance – and snap-snap-snap, one has a philosophy. In short, philosophies self-assemble.

It happens through the very nature of words and their attractional forces. We all have experience of the same. Drop an origin into the middle of a pool of thought – or a starting point, a kernel, whatever one may call it – and a system grows. We sit down with a group of people in a hotel lobby. Our talk revolves around the tasteful furnishings and elegant décor. Then I drop a comment that I am doing fascinating research into elephants. From this, a string of conversation results which occupies the whole group for some time – until a concierge interrupts us with a message. I wonder then at my powers of influence. Yet it lies in the very nature of language, which click-click-clicks together in keeping with predicator rules.

Therefore, while philosophising may represent a more systematic pursuit than any casual combinations of words, philosophers have represented little more than the inclinations of the philosophers and their culture. All were bound by centuries of 'unacknowledged metaphysics' – namely, predicator rules. In fact, the same must apply to religion, politics, ethics. Predicator networks, even with the passage of time, remain largely intact. Is there an American in the house? The massacres of the Red Indians are in you, and you were in them. Is there a German? Adolf Hitler inhabits your mind, and you inhabited his. Is there a South African? Apartheid is in your heart, and you were in apartheid's heart.

Of course, we need not think so narrowly. There have been many Americans, Germans, and South Africans, as there have been people of many nations and cultures. A changed environment, too, means changed behaviour for the same hapless creatures. Even predicator networks will change. In this, Kamlah and Lorenzen set their hope. If we take a close look at the system and structure of our language over generations, indeed we may discern faint traces of change, if we focus hard enough.

The Death of Rationalism

By Thomas Scarborough

We shall inhabit, for a moment, the world of the German philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen.  In 1973, Kamlah and Lorenzen co-authored the 'Logische Propädeutic' – an obscure title, with a dull brown cover, and ragged text hammered out on an electric typewriter. Yet it soon became a best-seller.

At its heart lies the concept of the predicator, which Kamlah and Lorenzen thought (in their definition of it) to be the key to a disciplined scientific and philosophical language. A predicator, to borrow a term from Gottlob Frege, 'saturates' the object. For example, in the sentence 'This is a Persian cat,' 'Persian cat' is the predicator. The technical definition: 'We assert a predicator of an object when we state something about the object.' A predicator, too, properly belongs only to a very limited range of predicators. For instance, one can point to a Cheshire cat and say, 'This is an animal,' although one cannot point to a Cheshire cat and say, 'This is a bicycle.' Predicators which are legitimately available for our use occur in chains, webs, or networks. For example:

    Cheshire cat → cat → animal → living thing
    Mountain bike → bicycle → vehicle → non-living thing

Note that, even at the end of such predicator chains, we may not arrive at anything common. To put this another way, a Cheshire cat and a mountain bike will rarely turn up in the same conversation. Therefore, the words which we speak fit comfortably into certain predicator chains, webs, or networks (we shall simply call them 'networks' here). Whether we speak about chemistry, ecclesiology, or philosophy, or anything else under the sun, our words fit comfortably into the subject under discussion. Yet even at the same time, most predicators will fail to fit into our conversation at any given time. For instance, while we are permitted to say, 'The maid carries the pail,' we cannot say, 'The maid carries the moon,' or anything of that sort.

In fact, our language is tightly constrained – so tightly constrained that when we put pen to paper, in whichever direction we cast our thoughts, we tend to be able only to construct networks of predicators which are agreeble to our starting point. Kamlah and Lorenzen observe, 'Predicators always stand in such a tightly woven nexus that any one tends to appear with others.' And briefly, they suggest a 'thought-provoking example': philosophy from Augustine to Leibniz was 'determined' by philosophers' understanding of predicators.

A philosophy has ambitions to think in every direction. Yet as it does so, it follows predicator rules (which resemble set theory), and is tightly bound by these rules. Thus Kamlah and Lorenzen note that we are 'thoroughly dominated by an unacknowledged metaphysics'. Therefore, as philosophers sat down in the past to write their philosophies, words were attracted to words – much as magnets snap to magnets – and so predicator networks produced philosophies. One merely needs to posit a starting point – the will to power, for instance – and snap-snap-snap, one has a philosophy. In short, philosophies self-assemble.

It happens through the very nature of words and their attractional forces. We all have experience of the same. Drop an origin into the middle of a pool of thought – or a starting point, a kernel, whatever one may call it – and a system grows. We sit down with a group of people in a hotel lobby. Our talk revolves around the tasteful furnishings and elegant décor. Then I drop a comment that I am doing fascinating research into elephants. From this, a string of conversation results which occupies the whole group for some time – until a concierge interrupts us with a message. I wonder then at my powers of influence. Yet it lies in the very nature of language, which click-click-clicks together in keeping with predicator rules.

Therefore, while philosophising may represent a more systematic pursuit than any casual combinations of words, philosophers have represented little more than the inclinations of the philosophers and their culture. All were bound by centuries of 'unacknowledged metaphysics' – namely, predicator rules. In fact, the same must apply to religion, politics, ethics. Predicator networks, even with the passage of time, remain largely intact. Is there an American in the house? The massacres of the Red Indians are in you, and you were in them. Is there a German? Adolf Hitler inhabits your mind, and you inhabited his. Is there a South African? Apartheid is in your heart, and you were in apartheid's heart.

Of course, we need not think so narrowly. There have been many Americans, Germans, and South Africans, as there have been people of many nations and cultures. A changed environment, too, means changed behaviour for the same hapless creatures. Even predicator networks will change. In this, Kamlah and Lorenzen set their hope. If we take a close look at the system and structure of our language over generations, indeed we may discern faint traces of change, if we focus hard enough.

Poem: Friendship

Posted by Theo Olivet *

Original painting by T.A. Marrison

A central question of life is that of where may I find firm ground as I search for my own position? Subsidiary ones are: Does friendship help? Is it possible to obtain support through common suffering? Or to define one's future position? And to what extent may one find strength through the weaknesses of others? 

Friendship
Translated from the original German by Pi Editors

Come, let the two of us bow down
at this, our so familiar place,
so many stubs you stubbed out here,
the white smoke rising from your face.

And then, in that deep silence
to which we often yielded,
A raw cough I coughed
and my eyes from yours I shielded.

At times a gentle word fell,
'I run from me, tomorrow.'
And you in turn, said frankly:
'My man has not been found, though,
I guess I am my own first foe ...'
I asked:  'You mean, above, below?'
Then we wept aloud.

Those were the days! I tell myself.
So awesome! they won't come again,
yet we stood there, all four feet
in a sea of tar then …

Come, give me one of yours
since mine are dull in taste,
I am changing, it would seem to me,
this house has all but gone to waste,
my doors are much a'rattling,
oh, were my sails by new wind chased.

The cigarette, yeah …  I say thank you,
the way it tastes, the smoke reminds me
how oft you fingered stubs and drew.
You … yes you … I wish once more to be
with you

---

* Theo Olivet is an author, artist, and retired judge in Schleswig-Holstein
The original German language poem appears at Gedicht: Freundschaft

The Thing-in-Itself

By Thomas Scarborough

Benjamin Lee Whorf, the American linguist, made a puzzling observation which, for no patent reason, has held our fascination for nearly eighty years. Whorf wrote it in simple language, and briefly:

'Around a storage of what are called 'gasoline (petrol) drums', behavior will tend to a certain type, that is, great care will be exercised; while around a storage of what are called 'empty gasoline drums' it will tend to be different-careless, with little repression of smoking or of tossing cigarette stubs about. Yet the 'empty' drums are perhaps the more dangerous, since they contain explosive vapor.'

Whorf, I here suggest, had stumbled upon the core problem of the thing-in-itself, and with that, the core problem of the thinking of our entire Western civilisation. The interpretation of the thing-in-itself is not critical here.  It is sufficient to understand it most simply as any 'object of inquiry'. Let us begin at the beginning.

First, the Scottish philosopher David Hume observed that all knowledge may be subdivided into relations of ideas on the one hand, and matters of fact on the other. That is, one begins with a handful of facts (which includes objects), and these facts stand in a certain relation to one another.

This view has remained engraved on metaphysicians' minds ever since. Generations later, Bertrand Russell wrote that many philosophers, following Immanuel Kant, have maintained that relations are the work of the mind, and that things-in-themselves have no relations. While this is not to say exactly the same, the thought is not far from Hume's.

A marble is a thing. A house is a thing. Even gravity, ideology, taxonomy are things (we call them constructs), which may in turn be related to other things. In a sense, even a unicorn is a 'thing', although one is unlikely ever to find one. Of course, our 'things' may not be exactly the same as we perceive them – but the point will be clear.

Things-in-themselves are not, of course, facts. They first need to be involved in what we call truth conditions – which is, they need to be inserted into statements. Then one may affirm or deny such statements, which is an essential condition of facts. For example, we insert the thing 'marble' into a statement: 'A marble sinks' – or the thing 'unicorn': 'The Scots keep unicorns.'

On the surface of it, our world is filled with such facts: 'There's a car,' 'A bird has wings,' or 'The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.'

But there is a mistake. There are no things, there are no objects, and therefore there are no facts. Hume got it wrong, and so did every philosopher since. One finds only relations. The mind is incapable of comprehending anything else. No mind can ever settle on a 'thing' alone.

Someone might object: 'But this is a coffee cup, and that's a fact!' But is it really? Take away the table on which the coffee cup rests, and what does one have? One has a coffee cup which rests on nothing.  If we ever found such a thing, we would marvel that it exists.  One would have scientists queuing up at the door to see it.  Further, the table, on which the coffee cup rests, stands on the floor, and this in turn rests on the earth, and so on.

The same is true if we down-scale our thinking as it were. Supposing that we should say, 'This coffee cup has a handle.' The same applies. We have to have a mind for a whole world of relations to be able to speak of a handle.

We never worried about this much – before the publication of Samuel Johnson's great dictionary of 1755.  But since then, our 'things' have been defined, and they have been defined (if implicitly) as things-in-themselves. But this they are not, as we have seen.

This now promises to explain Benjamin Whorf's puzzlement over the dangerous way in which people went about with empty petrol drums, and our continuing fascination with the same today. We have come to see petrol drums today as things-in-themselves, without the obvious relations in which they are involved.

One might wonder at the possible significance of it all. Quite simply, when we speak of the world today, our language causes us to view it as people viewed Whorf's petrol drums, namely, as a profusion of things-in-themselves.  Yet we deal with things far more dangerous than petrol drums.

If Aristotle Visited Us Today

Posted by Eugene Alper

The term 'metaphysics' was born with Aristotle. He was the first who aspired to gathering together all previous philosophical knowledge, and integrating it in a single great work.

Perhaps he felt hopeful – as one might feel on a fresh morning in the woods, with the first rays of the sun filtering through the trees. Although he was teased by a few outstanding questions, perhaps Aristotle felt that the end was truly in sight.

Yet if Aristotle visited us today, he might conclude that philosophy is in major crisis. For we have been asking the same fundamental questions – the same perennial questions – for two and a half millennia. And because of that, he might note, we are in a less enviable position than he was. For accumulated knowledge without obvious fruit affects one’s sense of self-confidence. It also undermines hope: the more knowledge, the less hope.

It is natural for the teenager – by way of analogy – to be hopeful about the future, to think that by the age of forty she will certainly know how to live a life, as opposed to her parents who, for some reasons, still do not. But when the age comes, and the former teenager asks the same question and still finds no answer, and suspects something even worse—that at the age of fifty and sixty and seventy she may still have no answer—a sense of unease dawns on her. This is what they call midlife crisis.

One wonders whether Aristotle might see, in the philosophic state of humankind today, the same sort of midlife crisis. He himself had a limited literature or recorded history to look back upon – but we, he might observe, have 2 500 years. This long view of the well-recorded past might give him – as it gives us – a deep sense of unease.

On the one hand, seeing so much treasure accumulated in literature, poetry, drama, philosophy, one can reasonably say, 'Look at the baggage of fine thought we are bringing along. Does this not give hope that its accumulation in the future may be even greater, and that, just as we have seen in technology, there may soon come a qualitative breakthrough? Isn’t this the evidence that we may be onto something? Just one more step, just one more realisation, and we may understand what the good life is?'

On the other hand, this very outlook on the past shows that our thinking, in the most fundamental ways, does not improve with time. Like the bird which greets each morning with the same old song, we fail to recognise that there is nothing new, that our questions are not different from the questions already asked by Aristotle long ago, or better than the answers he already gave.

Our baggage today, Aristotle might observe, is dubious and heavy, for the very ability to know the past and to observe the distance one has travelled without much philosophic growth may make one lose heart. Our human thinking, he might conclude, is somewhat defective, somewhat limited by nature. It could be that, by nature, our mind is incapable of going beyond the Biblical God, Plato’s One, or Aristotle’s Primary Cause. Or it could be that, by nature, our mind does better when dealing with things measurable, yet not so well with things abstract.

Perhaps, then, there is no exiting from the loop, no jumping out of the rut. On the most fundamental issues we will still think in inescapable circles, resembling the fish in the bowl, who thinks it is moving forward while sliding along the concave glass.