How Life Has Value, Even Absent Overarching Purpose

Wherein lies value?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Among the most-common questions from philosophy is, ‘What is the purpose of life?’ After all, as Plato pithily said, humans are ‘beings in search of meaning’. But what might be the real reason for the question about the purpose of life? I suggest that what fundamentally lurks behind this age-old head-scratcher is an alternative query: Might not life still have value, even if there is no sublimely overarching purpose? So, instead, let’s start with ‘purpose’ and only then work our way to ‘value’.

Is an individual's existence best understood scientifically — more particularly, in biological terms? The purpose of biological life, in strictly scientific terms, might be reduced to survival and passing along genes — to propagate, for continuation of the familial line and (largely unconsciously) the species. More broadly, scientists have typically steered clear of deducing ‘higher purpose’ and are more comfortable restricting themselves to explanations of empirically, rationally grounded physical models — however inspiring those peeks into presumed reality may be — that relate to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of existence. The list is familiar:

• the heliocentric construct of Copernicus and the mechanistic universes of René Descartes and Isaac Newton
• the Darwinian theories of evolution and natural selection
• the laws of thermodynamics and the theory of general relativity of Albert Einstein 
• the quantum mechanics of Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger. 

But grand as these theories are, they still don’t provide us with purpose.

Rather, such theories focus on better understanding the emergence and evolution of the cosmos and humankind, in all their wonder and complexity. The (not uncommonly murky) initial conditions and necessary parameters to make intelligent life possible add a challenge to relying on conclusions from the models. As to this point about believability and deductions drawn, David Hume weighed in during the 18th century, advising,

             ‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence’.

Meanwhile, modern physics doesn’t yet rule in or rule out some transcendent, otherworldly dimension of the universe — disproof is always tough, as we know, and thus the problem is perhaps unanswerable — but the physical–spiritual dualism implied by such an ethereal dimension is extraordinarily questionable. Yet one cannot deduce meaning or purpose, exceptional or ordinary, simply from mere wonder and complexity; the latter are not enough. Suggested social science insights — about such things as interactions among people, examining behaviours and means to optimise social constructs — arguably add only a pixel here and a pixel there to the larger picture of life’s quintessential meaning.

Religious belief —from the perspectives of revelation, enlightenment, and doctrine — is an obvious place to turn to next in this discussion. Theists start with a conviciton that God exists — and conclude that it was God who therefore planted the human species amidst the rest of His creation of the vast universe. In this way, God grants humankind an exalted overarching purpose. In no-nonsense fashion, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza took the point to another declarative level, writing:

‘Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived’. 

This kind of presumed God-given plan or purpose seems to instill in humankind an inspirational level of exceptionalism. This exceptionalism in turn leads human beings toward such grand purposes as undiminished love toward and worship of God, fruitful procreation, and dominion over the Earth (with all the environmental repercussions of that dominion), among other things. These purposes include an implied contract of adding value to the world, within one’s abilities, as prescribed by religious tenets.

One takeaway may be a comfortable feeling that humankind, and each member of our species, has meaning — and, in a soul-based model, a roadmap for redemption, perhaps to an eternal afterlife. As to that, in the mid-20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in characteristically unsparing fashion:

‘Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal’. 

Universes constructed around a belief in God, thereby, attempt to allay the dread of mortality and the terror of dying and of death. Yet, even where God is the prime mover of everything, is it unreasonable to conceive of humankind as perhaps still lacking any lofty purpose, after all? Might, for example, humankind share the universe with other brainy species on our own planet — or even much brainier ones cosmically farther flung?

Because if humankind has no majestically overarching purpose — or put another way, even if existentially it might not materially matter to the cosmos if the human species happened to tip into extinction — we can, crucially, still have value. Ultimately value, not exceptionalism or eternity, is what matters. There’s an important difference between ‘purpose’ — an exalted reason that soars orders of magnitude above ordinary explanations of why we’re riding the rollercoaster of creation — and ‘value’, which for an individual might only need a benevolent role in continuously improving the lot of humankind, or perhaps other animals and the ecosphere. It may come through empathically good acts without the expectation of any manner of reward. Socrates hewed close to those principles, succinctly pointing out,

            ‘Not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued’.

Value, then, is anchored to our serving as playwrights scribbling, if you will, on pieces of paper how our individual, familial, community, and global destiny unfolds into the future. And what the quality of that future is, writ large. At minimum, we have value based on humanistic grounds: people striving for natural, reciprocal connections, to achieve hope and a range of benefits — the well-being of all — and disposing of conceits to instead embrace our interdependence in order not only to survive but, better, to thrive. This defines the intrinsic nature of ‘value’; and perhaps it is to this that we owe our humanity.

Fact and Value: The False Dichotomy

Image credit: The Guardian.

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

The fact-value distinction is one of the most important problems of philosophy.  The Scottish philosopher David Hume gave it its classical formulation: it is impossible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.  That is, it is impossible to establish any value amidst an ocean of facts. 

On the surface of it, Hume would seem to be unimpeachably right.  The facts cannot tell us what to do.  But here is a problem.  Neither can value.  While one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, neither can one derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘ought’, as it were.

Take, as an example, a statement of fact: ‘We are ready to hoist the spinnaker.’  Such a statement gives us no idea as to whether we should hoist the spinnaker.

Yet we find no difference with a statement of value: ‘We ought now to hoist the spinnaker.’  Why ought we to?  What gives us the authority to say so?  We find that such a statement is quite adrift, and equally unable to tell us whether we should or not.

What, then, was Hume thinking when he wrote about ‘ought’? 

It would seem to me that Hume made a lazy assumption, of the kind that philosophers fail to examine any further, on thinking that they have gained a special insight.  The assumption would be something like this: that there is a certainty which lies in value which fact does not possess.  Thus Hume equated value with a ground for our behaviour—if one should ever find it. 

To put it another way, Hume’s fact-value distinction would seem to be a false dichotomy.

What is it, then, that fact and value have in common, that neither will deliver ‘value’—in the sense of a ground for our behaviour?

I would propose that the scope of both fact and value is too limited for either to deliver universal truth.  Both statements of fact and statements of value exist in limited contexts, without being referenced to any fixed points except their own—while the question of certainty lies beyond this, in something which is far more expansive.

It may be easy to see, for instance, that I should hoist a spinnaker if I wish to win the race—and this I may state both as an ‘is’ and as an ‘ought’:

Given such and such conditions, the spinnaker will secure a win—alternatively, I ought to hoist the spinnaker to clinch it.  In both cases, it would be true and compelling that I need a spinnaker—yet not if I should expand my horizon, to ask whether I should have entered this race at all.

How then might we reference statements to something broader than simple fact and value?  An analogy might help.

I am in a boat on the ocean, to anchor a buoy.  If I reference its position to the seaweed I see underneath it, or the birds which circle overhead, I have in this case an unstable reference.  Or I may reference it to a spit of land that I see in the distance.  This would seem to be more stable, though not completely so—the wind and the waves may change it.  Or I may reference it to the stars—but even the stars will move. 

Ideally, my buoy would be referenced to everything.

This may not be as absurd as it sounds.  If the context is big enough—and if we should know just what kind of a context this should be—we may well be able to ground both fact and value.

If we reference everything to everything, there may be a way forward.  While space does not allow me to explore this further here, readers may refer to a post in which I sketched some thoughts on how this might be done: How Shall We Re-Establish Ethics in Our Time?

BOOK REVIEW: I Think, Therefore I Eat

Reviewed by Colin Kirk

‘Felling rain forests to free up land for growing animals and vegetables, pulverized into so called foods,..is nightmarish..’ PICTURE: Lowland rainforest in Sulawesi's Tangkoko Reserve, Indonesia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler for Mongabay.

Martin Cohen is well known to generations of budding philosophers for his ‘101’ books. Amongst many other productions Political Philosophy from Plato to Mao stands out for critical analysis presented with lucidity and humor. I Think Therefore I Eat is a worthy successor to these seminal texts.

In an age when most journalism is no more than regurgitation of the PR blurb of commercial and political interests, philosophy regains its rightful place as investigator. This account, not simply of food its production and marketing but of the constituents of the human body that result, is unique and unlikely to be surpassed.

These days experts contribute to the human horror story. It requires philosophy to correct their ever changing sound bites with straightforward examination of the facts. Witty and readable, I Think Therefore I Eat will shock food experts of all kinds but the rest of us will think carefully before we eat. We’ll improve our life styles and extend our life expectancy as a result.

This book is almost impossible to classify. The philosophy is certainly in evidence but unobtrusively, amongst careful description of the grotesque constituents of junk food and their effects on the human body and mind, interspersed with unusual recipes that rush one into the kitchen.

There is structure to this bizarre conglomeration that meanders through the food fashions of the past hundred years with reference back to the eating habits of philosophers over the previous two and a half millennia.

Not all the foodies referred to are generally regarded as philosophers nor are their eating habits necessarily sound, quite the reverse. Hitler exemplifies these peculiarities of some of the thinkers selected. Mein Kampf is a work of philosophy but a diet of macerated boiled vegetables was not a healthy choice, nor were the concomitant medical interventions designed to ease the Fuhrer’s resultant flatulence.

One great strength of this book is the exposure of the appalling practices of free market exploiters of the environment both around us and inside us. Felling rain forests to free up land for growing animals and vegetables, pulverized into so called foods, contaminated with all manner of chemical contrivances to extract the last fast buck, is nightmarish reading.

These are not scenes in a horror movie from some way-out, backward, banana republic but day by day activities of world brand agricultural, chemical, pharmaceutical, food and drinks manufacturing industries that fuel economic growth for the few and ill health for the many.

Even when there were active Food and Drug Administrations in Western Democracies, well healed lawyers, scientists and medics ensured they had little actual clout against conglomerate industries with turnovers measured in billions of dollars or euros. The quality of expertise applied to such matters is low and the price charged by such experts extremely high. These are business models of the worse kind applied to the basic essentials of life.

Every page of this book contains good advice but it leads to no overall conclusion of the one-size-fits-all variety, with the possible exception of the seal of approval given to real chocolate. Most of what’s sold unfortunately isn’t.

At heart this is a work of philosophy and its conclusion is the usual one. Be yourself, it’s up to you. Examine all facts directly yourself, not the conclusions of characters who claim to be experts. Interpret the facts as best as you can and decide a course of action that suits you.

We all know that we are what we eat but we apply that knowledge as our appetite dictates. However, we now know that our appetites are massively influenced by advertisements, chemicals, manufactured flavors and plasticized finishes that do us no good and a great deal of harm. The golden delicious chips at McDonald’s are a prime example.

Western Democracy, the political model we live in, is designed by and for multibillionaires and their bureaucratic and expert camp- followers, who are paid handsomely to betray us into horrid eating habits as they transfer our money into their pockets.

Fidel Castro, another philosopher not usually thought of as such, was forced, by the collapse of Russian Communism in 1989 and the total American blockade of Cuba that ensued, to cultivate every square meter of land capable of growing food. The city of Havana and every other city, town and village became fruit and vegetable gardens. The Cubans did not starve to death as intended but became more healthy and versatile.

The problem with doing the right thing by growing your own food, should that be your conclusion, is that it requires a great deal of thought and planning. Further, success follows a series of disheartening failures as one learns by experience. For good health, fitness and longevity it’s worth it.

This is not a reference book as such but you’ll refer to it time and again in your pursuit of good eating habits. You’ll more likely find it on the shelf of recipe books in the kitchen than along with Kant and Kierkegaard.

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Colin Kirk is the author of Life in Poetry.

Picture Post #38 What Happened Next to the White Rabbit

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

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

A shop window in Paris, captured en passant by Tessa den Uyl

      

This cozy scene reminiscient of Lewis Carroll's imaginary ‘wonderland’, is in fact, something rather more grim.

No surprise would fall upon us to discover a boar’s head hanging on the wall in a hunter’s lodge. But most often today, to encounter embalmed animals in non-rural houses reminds of gestures of excess that echo as non-virtuous.

This shop window in the centre of Paris offers a sitting room full of real dead animals. Yet perhaps it is not the embalmed animals that particularly draw the attention here, but rather the way that they are displayed with more or less anthropomorphic features.

The White Rabbit, in Lewis Carroll's famous story, Alice in Wonderland, occupies a particular role: he appears at the very beginning of the book, in chapter one, wearing a waistcoat, carrying a pocket watch, and in a great hurry muttering ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’ And Alice encounters him again at a stressful moment in the adventure when she finds herself trapped in his house after growing too large.

Most emblematic of all though, the Rabbit  reappears as a servant of the King and Queen of Hearts in the closing chapters of the book, reading out bizarre verses as ‘evidence' against Alice. In this scene, the stuffed white rabbit, too, seems to have a prosecutorial air, rather as though the animal is a judge surrounded by courtroom flunkeys.

In Alice’s case, the White Rabbit’s case for the prosecution is so convincing that the Queen of Hearts immediately announces ‘Off with her head!’ at which point, mercifully, Alice wakes up. In this real-life shop, too, a similar return to earth is marked by a neatly framed message held by the only fake animal in the shop.  It notifies the observer that all the animals have died naturally in zoos or zoological parks. Potential clients can presumably put their consciences to ease.

Aristotle mentioned that art is a representation of life, of character, of emotion and actions, and in contemporary art, animals in formaldehyde are exhibited in famous museums for world-scaring prizes. So why not admire a similar thing by looking into this shop window? Yet there is a repulsion.

Is it a reduction of the animal - or is it rather the excess - the building up of animals into fine decor for homes? Or is the display less commercial than in itself an artistic exploration? Or is it more a philosophical challenge, something to do with Aristotle’s notion that we seek to discover the universal hidden in a world of the everyday and particular?

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Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

For scientists, space is not empty but full of quantum energy

Posted by Keith Tidman

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz introduced this inquiry more than three hundred years ago, saying, ‘The first question that should rightly be asked is, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”’ Since then, many philosophers and scientists have likewise pondered this question. Perhaps the most famous restatement of it came in 1929 when the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, placed it at the heart of his book What Is Metaphysics?: ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?’

Of course, many people around the world turn to a god as a sufficient reason (explanation) for the universe’s existence. Aristotle believed, as did his forerunner Heraclitus, that the world was mutable — everything undergoing perpetual change — which he characterised as movement. He argued that there was a sequence of predecessor causes that led back deep into the past, until reaching an unmoved mover, or Prime Mover (God). An eternal, immaterial, unchanging god exists necessarily, Aristotle believed, itself independent of cause and change.

In the 13th century Saint Thomas Aquinas, a Christian friar, advanced this so-called cosmological view of universal beginnings, likewise perceiving God as the First Cause. Leibniz, in fact, was only proposing something similar, with his Contingency Argument, in the 17th century:

‘The sufficient reason [for the existence of the universe] which needs not further reason must be outside of this series of contingent things and is found in a substance which . . . is a necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself. . . .  This final reason for things is called God’ — Leibniz, The Principles of Nature and Grace

However, evoking God as the prime mover or first cause or noncontingent being — arbitrarily, on a priori rather than empirical grounds — does not inescapably make it so. Far from it. The common counterargument maintains that a god correspondingly raises the question that, if a god exists — has a presence — what was its cause? Assuming, that is, that any thing — ‘nothing’ being the sole exception — must have a cause. So we are still left with the question, famously posed by the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, ‘What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?’ To posit the existence of a god does not, as such, get around the ‘hard problem’: why there is a universe at all, not just why our universe is the way it is.

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Some go so far as to say that nothingness is unstable, hence again impossible.

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Science has not fared much better in this challenge. The British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell ended up merely declaring in 1948, ‘I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all’. A ‘brute fact’, as some have called it. Many scientists have embraced similar sentiments: concluding that ‘something’ was inevitable, and that ‘nothingness’ would be impossible. Some go so far as to say that nothingness is unstable, hence again impossible. But these are difficult positions to support unquestionally, given that, as with many scientific and philosophical predecessors and contemporaries, they do not adequately explain why and how. This was, for example, the outlook of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher who maintained that the universe (with its innumerable initial conditions and subsequent properties) had to exist. Leaping forward to the 20th century, Albert Einstein, himself an admirer of Spinoza’s philosophy, seemed to concur.

Quantum mechanics poses an interesting illustration of the science debate, informing us that empty space is not really empty — not in any absolute sense, anyway. Even what we might consider the most perfect vacuum is actually filled by churning virtual particles — quantum fluctuations — that almost instantaneously flit in and out of existence. Some theoretical physicists have suggested that this so-called ‘quantum vacuum’ is as close to nothingness as we might get. But quantum fluctuations do not equate to nothingness; they are not some modern-day-science equivalent of the non-contingent Prime Mover discussed above. Rather, no matter however flitting and insubstantial, virtual quantum particles are still ‘something’.

It is therefore reasonable to inquire into the necessary origins of these quantum fluctuations — an inquiry that requires us to return to an Aristotelian-like chain of causes upon causes, traceable back in time. The notion of a supposed quantum vacuum still doesn’t get us to what might have garnered something from nothing. Hence, the hypothesis that there has always been something — that the quantum vacuum was the universe’s nursery — peels away as an unsupportable claim. Meanwhile, other scientific hypotheses, such as string theory, bid to take the place of Prime Mover. At the heart of the theory is the hypothesis that the fundamental particles of physics are not really ‘points’ as such but rather differently vibrating energy ‘strings’ existing in many more than the familiar dimensions of space-time. Yet these strings, too, do not get us over the hump of something in place of nothing; strings are still ‘something’, whose origins (causes) would beg to be explained.

In addressing these questions, we are not talking about something emerging from nothing, as nothingness by definition would preclude the initial conditions required for the emergence of a universe. Also, ‘nothingness’ is not the mere absence (or opposite) of something; rather, it is possible to regard ‘nothingness’ as theoretically having been just as possible as ‘something’. In light of such modern-day challenges in both science and philosophy, Lugdwig Wittgenstein was at least partially right in saying, early in the 20th century (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, section 6.4 on what he calls ‘the mystical’), that the real mystery was, ‘Not how the world is . . . but that it is’.

The Way of Completeness

To mark its approach to the 200 000 Pageviews marker, Pi is pleased to feature a Pi Special by Sifiso Mkhonto of South Africa.  Sifiso helps Pi to celebrate:

• Author diversity.  Writers from (inter alia) the UK, USA, Germany, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, India, China, and South Africa
• Original perspectives.  In political philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, literature, science, poetry, art and 'the trenches'
• Quality and readability.  Scholarly contributions in an accessible style, expertly edited for quality and consistency

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Colour Study Quadrate, by Wassily Kandinsky, 1913

Posted by Sifiso Mkhonto

Completeness: some regard it as a state of being, where one flourishes in his or her way of living life the way one deems fit – without any restrictions, exceptions, or qualifications which invalidate one's being. Many people search for its true meaning. Many die without finding out. Some claim to be in this state.

However, can one be complete alone? If freedom is taken as the foundational value, then a society will seek to allow individuals to maximise their life opportunities without hindrance from government, political ideologies, religious beliefs, classism, and all sub-cultures in society.

The danger with this form of completeness: it creates many truths, and we know that what is good for me might not be good for the other. How then do we answer the question: does completeness reduce or increase the harm done to one, and to society at large?

The cultures and sub-cultures of wealth, politics, pleasure, knowledge, morality, science, human rights, worship, and classism are not entirely harmless nor harmful. They are convenient to each person.

Convenience, therefore, is a language spoken and understood in each of these cultures, yet does not lead to completeness. It focuses on our own experience and prospects. We speak in reality the language of convenience – not completeness.

Allow me briefly to expand on a few cultures and sub-cultures of convenience – taking a list of points outlined by socialist clergyman Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey on March 20, 1925. They are named ‘social sins’.

• Wealth without work - it leads to greed, including corruption, crime, social injustice, and colonisation.
• Pleasure without conscience – where those actions which are morally required are evaded.
• Knowledge without character – knowledge of anything without conscience and good character has often granted societies the ‘dangerous man’.
• Commerce without morality – exploits both individual and environment, to the point of social and ecological ruin.
• Science without humanity – to deny humanity in the service of science is to destroy the very thing you need to serve. You cannot deny yourself.
• Worship without sacrifice – which is the opium of the people wherever it serves to suppress the poor, to hold them in the same position.
• Politics without principle – has lost its purpose, having become politics for its own sake, and for the sake of those who use it.

The common element found in such ‘social sins’ is the convenience that leads to the illusion of completeness – in spite of the fact that we are aware of this illusion. In the interests of completeness, therefore, we should keep our mind always open to receive truth.

The logician and theologian Isaac Watts once said: ‘Be ready always to hear what may be objected even against your favourite opinions, and those which have had longest possession of your assent.’ Adding:

‘And if there should be any new and uncontrollable evidence brought against these old or beloved sentiments, do not wink your eyes fast against the light, but part with anything for the sake of truth: remember when you overcome an error, you gain truth; the victory is on your side and the advantages are all your own.’

The Way of Completeness

To mark its approach to 200 000 Pageviews, Pi is pleased to feature a Pi Special by Sifiso Mkhonto of South Africa.  Sifiso helps Pi to celebrate:

• Author diversity.  Writers from (inter alia) the UK, USA, Germany, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, India, China, and South Africa
• Original perspectives.  In political philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, literature, science, poetry, art and 'the trenches'
• Quality and readability.  Scholarly contributions in an accessible style, expertly edited for quality and consistency

---

Colour Study Quadrate, by Wassily Kandinsky, 1913

Posted by Sifiso Mkhonto

Completeness: some regard it as a state of being, where one flourishes in his or her way of living life the way one deems fit – without any restrictions, exceptions, or qualifications which invalidate one's being. Many people search for its true meaning. Many die without finding out. Some claim to be in this state.

However, can one be complete alone? If freedom is taken as the foundational value, then a society will seek to allow individuals to maximise their life opportunities without hindrance from government, political ideologies, religious beliefs, classism, and all sub-cultures in society.

The danger with this form of completeness: it creates many truths, and we know that what is good for me might not be good for the other. How then do we answer the question: does completeness reduce or increase the harm done to one, and to society at large?

The cultures and sub-cultures of wealth, politics, pleasure, knowledge, morality, science, human rights, worship, and classism are not entirely harmless nor harmful. They are convenient to each person.

Convenience, therefore, is a language spoken and understood in each of these cultures, yet does not lead to completeness. It focuses on our own experience and prospects. We speak in reality the language of convenience – not completeness.

Allow me briefly to expand on a few cultures and sub-cultures of convenience – taking a list of points outlined by socialist clergyman Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey on March 20, 1925. They are named ‘social sins’.

• Wealth without work - it leads to greed, including corruption, crime, social injustice, and colonisation.
• Pleasure without conscience – where those actions which are morally required are evaded.
• Knowledge without character – knowledge of anything without conscience and good character has often granted societies the ‘dangerous man’.
• Commerce without morality – exploits both individual and environment, to the point of social and ecological ruin.
• Science without humanity – to deny humanity in the service of science is to destroy the very thing you need to serve. You cannot deny yourself.
• Worship without sacrifice – which is the opium of the people wherever it serves to suppress the poor, to hold them in the same position.
• Politics without principle – has lost its purpose, having become politics for its own sake, and for the sake of those who use it.

The common element found in such ‘social sins’ is the convenience that leads to the illusion of completeness – in spite of the fact that we are aware of this illusion. In the interests of completeness, therefore, we should keep our mind always open to receive truth.

The logician and theologian Isaac Watts once said: ‘Be ready always to hear what may be objected even against your favourite opinions, and those which have had longest possession of your assent.’ Adding:

‘And if there should be any new and uncontrollable evidence brought against these old or beloved sentiments, do not wink your eyes fast against the light, but part with anything for the sake of truth: remember when you overcome an error, you gain truth; the victory is on your side and the advantages are all your own.’

Detours to Atlantic Avenue

Posted by Cliff Fyman

In which the night-time driver of a Manhattan cab transforms overheard conversations with his passengers into a collection of poems ...

When she first spotted my cab I had been starting to park on a snowy side street
          at 2 a.m. to buy a cup of coffee
and she surprised me opening the door
and said I could still buy that coffee
she’d wait but I said that’s okay
and we mapped a course to Gowanus
then skimmed across a conversation of the world’s religions
and how her parents down south wanted her to remain a Baptist but she wanted
          to explore Buddhism
as the snow fell and how a bad thing sometimes is a detour that helps us escape
          something worse
till we find our way
which was just like this detour
she said through the side streets till we came into the clear at Atlantic Avenue.

PP # 39 The Sideways Glance

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



Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Thomas Scarborough

‘Poster promoting the European workers revolution.’ *

Coordinated graphics serve a coordinated initiative. Marching feet resonate intentions towards a better future, in the name of the Proletariat. The large group of the poor, the workers, the people, is determined to proclaim its voice. 

What are those hats, strangely waved about? At root, a surplus labour that originates in a surplus value is subtracted by the rich, by subtracting the surplus value from those who produce. These marching men represent the possibility of an idea to overcome this alienation.

The idea is noble, except to the nobility, and all who have not truly lived up to the same—the idea of personal and social inclusion which rejects the asocial. Today these marching feet resound in our memory, ideas that could have revolutionised our way of thinking, of interacting, and of well-being.

For many it sounds like a (thankfully) lost cause. While it changed our perspectives, 'built the world in which we live', and brought lasting benefits for workers, it brought, too, destruction and carnage— the blood of the workers, and those who resisted them, symbolised in the red.

Do we understand Marxism after what has become of communism? Are Marx's warnings of individualism and atomism finally lost? Did we lose the dream? Between these historical red drapes and waving hats, the sideways glance of the man in the middle still speaks to us today. 'What do you think?'

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* This poster appears on a Chinese website. Though Pi was not able to track down the source, it is typical of early Soviet propaganda, and the banner characteristic of International Workers’ Day.

Utopia: An End, or a Quest?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Detail from the original frontispiece for More’s book Utopia

In his 1516 book Utopia, the English statesman and writer Sir Thomas More summed up his imagined, idealised vision of an island society in this manner:

‘Nobody owns anything but everyone is rich — for what greater wealth can there be than cheerfulness, peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety?’

A laconic, even breezy counterpoint to the imperfect and in some cases heavily flawed dystopian societies that actually populated the world — More’s utopia presenting a republic confronting much that was wrong in the 16th century. More’s utopia promulgates the uplifting notion that, despite humankind’s fallibilities, many ills of society have remedies.

Two other writers, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, who wrote Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels respectively, were both authors of popular 18th-century stories that took inspiration from the utopian principles of Thomas More.

The word ‘utopia’, coined by More, is from the Greek, meaning ‘no place’. Yet, it seems likely that More was also punning on a different word, pronounced identically, which applies more aptly to history’s descriptions of utopia — like that captured in Plato’s Republic (of ‘philosopher-kings’ fame), Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis — that word being ‘eutopia’. The word is also of Greek origin, but signifies ‘good place’.

Some see utopias and eutopias alike as heralding the possibility of reforming present society toward some idealised end point — what Herbert Marcuse, the 20th-century German-American philosopher, referred to as ‘the end of utopia’, when ‘material and intellectual forces capable of achieving the transformation are technically present’.

However, long ago, Aristotle pushed back against the concept of utopia as an unattainable figment — a chimera. Later political theorists have joined the criticism, notably More’s contemporary, the Italian political philosopher and statesman Niccolò Machiavelli. In The Prince, Machiavelli concurs with More’s notions of cynicism and corruption seen in society generally and in politics specifically. As such, Machiavelli believed that the struggle for political supremacy is conflictual, necessarily lacking morality — the ‘effective truth of the thing’ in power politics. ‘Politics have no relation to morals’, he stated bluntly. Machiavelli thus did not brook what he regarded as illusory social orders like utopias.

Nonetheless, utopias are, in their intriguingly ambitious way, philosophical, sociological, and political thought experiments. They promulgate and proclaim norms that by implication reproachfully differ from all current societies. They are both inspirational and aspirational. As H.G. Wells noted in his 1905 novel, A Modern Utopia:

‘Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible, if we can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole and happy world’.

In that vein, many thinkers have taken their definitions to the next level, offering concrete prescriptions: deconstructing society’s shortcomings, and fleshing out blueprints for the improved social order envisioned. These blueprints may include multiple dimensions: political, economic, ecological, moral, educational, customs, judicial, familial, values, communal, philosophical, and scientific and technological, among others.

The 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, however, paints a bleak dystopia, even in the highly reformed architecture of utopia:

‘For the laws of nature … of themselves, without the terror of some power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions’.

That is, given that the ‘natural condition of mankind’ is to incurably and quarrelsomely seek ever more power, the civilizing effects of laws and of governance are required to channel people’s energies and ambitions, and to constrain as necessary.

Yet legal constraints can reach too far: this kind of utopian theorizing lapses into a formula for authoritarianism. The German professor of literature Artur Blaim has summed up, as forthrightly as anyone, the suppressive nature associated with a political system of this kind as:

            ‘Utopias die, utopianism does not’.

The apprehension, then, is that even in a declared utopia, powerful leaders might coerce reluctant conformists to fit into a single mold. Dangerously patriarchal, given possibly counterfactual evidence of what’s best for most.

Certainly, there have been occurrences — ‘utopian’ cults, cabals, compounds, religions, and even nation states’ political systems — where heavy-handed pressure to step in line has been administered and violence has erupted. In these scenarios, repressive measures — to preserve society’s structural demands — are at the expense of freedom and liberal drives. As Bertrand de Jouvenel, a 20th-century French philosopher, counseled, if somewhat hyperbolically:

‘There is a tyranny in every utopia.’

So, might ‘utopia’ be defined differently than any single idealised end point, where ‘satisfied’ architects of utopia feel comfortable putting their tools down, hinting ‘it’s the end of history’?

Or instead, might utopianism be better characterised as a dynamic process of change — of a perpetual becoming (emergence) — directed in the search of ever-better conditions? The key to utopianism is thus its catalytic allure: the uninterrupted exploration, trying out, and readjustment of modalities and norms.

As the 20th-century German philosopher Ernst Bloch pointed out,

‘Expectation, hope and intention, directed towards the possibility which has not yet arrived, constitute not only a fundamental property of the human consciousness but also … a fundamental determination at the heart of objective reality itself’.