The Ladder as a Raft

I love the simile of knowledge as a ladder that gets tossed aside once enlightenment is attained. I read about it first in Schopenhauer and then Wittgenstein. I knew Buddhists talk of a similar thing, but I didn't know it was a raft, as Karen Armstrong explains in Buddha:

'Letting go' is one of the keynotes of the Buddha's teaching. The enlightened person did not grab or hold on to even the most authoritative instructions. Everything was transient and nothing lasted. Until his disciples recognised this in every fibre of their being, they would never reach Nirvana. Even his own teachings must be jettisoned, once they had done their job. He once compared them to a raft, telling the story of a traveller who had come to a great expanse of water and desperately needed to get across. There was no bridge, no ferry, so he built a raft and rowed himself across the river. But then, the Buddha would ask his audeince, what should the traveller do with the raft? Shoudl he decide that because it had been so helpful to him, he should load it onto his back and lug it around with him wherever he went? Or should he simply moor it and continue his journey? The answer was obvious. 'In just the same way, bhikkhus, my teachings are like a raft, to be used to cross the river and not to be held on to,' the Buddha concluded. 'If you understand their raft-like nature correctly, you will even give up good teachings (dhamma), not to mention bad ones!' His Dhamma was wholly pragmatic. Its task was not to issue infallible definitions or to satisfy a disciple's intellectual curiosity about metaphysical questions. Its sole purpose was to enable people to get across the river of pain to the 'further shore.' His job was to relieve suffering and help his disciples attain the peace of Nirvana. Anything that did not serve that end was of no importance whatsoever.

Heidegger on Technological Thinking

Not sure from where originally, but I read it on the last page of Michael Watts's A Beginner's Guide to Heidegger:

The approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted as the only way of thinking.

Thucydides v Plato according to Nietzsche

From Twilight of the Idols, What I Owe to the Ancients:

For the deplorable embellishment of the Greeks with the colours of the ideal which the 'classically educated' youth carries away with him into life as the reward of his grammar-school drilling there is no more radical cure than Thucydides

Man, not God

From The Four Great Errors in Twilight of the Idols:

8. What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives a man his qualities — neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself. (The nonsense of the last idea was taught as "intelligible freedom" by Kant — and perhaps by Plato.) No one is responsible for a man's being here at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his existence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. Human beings are not the effect of some special purpose, or will, or end; nor are they a medium through which society can realize an "ideal of humanity" or an "ideal of happiness" or an "ideal of morality." It is absurd to wish to devolve one's essence on some end or other. We have invented the concept of "end": in reality there is no end.

A man is necessary, a man is a piece of fatefulness, a man belongs to the whole, a man is in the whole; there is nothing that could judge, measure, compare, or sentence his being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole. That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a primary cause, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as "spirit" — that alone is the great liberation. With that idea alone we absolve our becoming of any guilt. The concept of "God" was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility that originates from God: and thereby we redeem the world.

Nietzsche on Free Will

From The Four Great Errors in Twilight of the Idols:

3. The error of a false causality. Humans have always believed that they knew what a cause was; but how did we get this knowledge — or more precisely, our faith that we had this knowledge? From the realm of the famous "inner facts," of which not a single one has so far turned out to be true. We believe that we are the cause of our own will: we think that here at least we can see a cause at work. Nor did we doubt that all the antecedents of our will, its causes, were to be found in our own consciousness or in our personal "motives." Otherwise, we would not be responsible for what we choose to do. Who would deny that his thoughts have a cause, and that his own mind caused the thoughts?

Of these "inward facts" that seem to demonstrate causality, the primary and most persuasive one is that of the will as cause. The idea of consciousness ("spirit") or, later, that of the ego (the "subject") as a cause are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as proved, as a fact, and these other concepts followed from it.

But we have reservations about these concepts. Today we no longer believe any of this is true. The "inner world" is full of phantoms and illusions: the will being one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence it does not explain anything — it merely accompanies events; it can also be completely absent. The so-called motives: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something shadowing the deed that is more likely to hide the causes of our actions than to reveal them. And as for the ego ... that has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words! It has altogether ceased to think, feel, or will!

What follows from this? There are no mental causes at all. The whole of the allegedly empirical evidence for mental causes has gone out the window. That is what follows! And what a nice delusion we had perpetrated with this "empirical evidence;" we interpreted the real world as a world of causes, a world of wills, a world of spirits. The most ancient and enduring psychology was at work here: it simply interpreted everything that happened in the world as an act, as the effect of a will; the world was inhabited with a multiplicity of wills; an agent (a "subject") was slipped under the surface of events. It was out of himself that man projected his three most unquestioned "inner facts" — the will, the spirit, the ego. He even took the concept of being from the concept of the ego; he interpreted "things" as "being" in accordance with his concept of the ego as a cause. Small wonder that later he always found in things what he had already put into them. The thing itself, the concept of thing is a mere extension of the faith in the ego as cause. And even your atom, my dear materialists and physicists — how much error, how much rudimentary psychology still resides in your atom! Not to mention the "thing-in-itself," the horrendum pudendum of metaphysicians! The "spirit as cause" mistaken for reality! And made the very measure of reality! And called God!

Nietzsche and the Art of Insightful, Unhinged Polemic

Nietzsche is the most entertaining of philosophers, and certainly very insightful, but it frightens me to think that philosophical neophytes might start with him and be taken in by some of his unhinged polemics. Insight blighted -- and made entertaining -- by unhinged polemic such as this from Hollingdale's translation of Twilight of the Idols:

1. In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless... Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound -- a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life. Even Socrates said as he died: "To Live -- that means to be a long time sick: I owe a cock to the saviour Asclepius". Even Socrates had had enough of it. -- What does that prove? What does it point to? -- Formerly one would have said (-- oh, and did say, and loudly enough, and our pessimists most of all!): "Here at any rate there must be something true! The consensus sapientium is proof of truth." -- Shall we still speak thus today? are we allowed to do so? "Here at any rate there must be something sick" -- this is our retort: one ought to take a closer look at them, these wisest of every age! Were they all of them perhaps no longer steady on their legs? belated? tottery? decadents? Does wisdom perhaps appear on earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?...

And then:

3. Socrates belonged, in his origins, to the lowest orders: Socrates was rabble. One knows, one sees for oneself, how ugly he was. But ugliness, an objection in itself, is among Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is frequently enough the sign of a thwarted development, a development retarded by interbreeding. Otherwise it appears as a development in decline. Anthropologists among criminologists tell us the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo. But the criminal is a decadent. Was Socrates a typical criminal? -- At least that famous physiognomist's opinion which Socreates' friends found so objectionable would not contradict this idea. A foreigner passing through Athens who knew how to read faces told Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum -- that he contained within him every kind of foul vice and lust. And Socrates answered merely: "You know me, sir!" --

Liberalism and Potentialities

In Dewey's essay, Philosophies of Freedom:

(the real fallacy of classical liberalism) lies in the notion that individuals have such a native or original endowment of rights, powers, and wants that all that is required on the side of institutions and laws is to eliminate the obsctructions they offer to the "free" play of the natural equipment of individuals. The removal of obstructions did have aliberating effect upon such individuals as were antecedently possessed of the means, intellectual and economic, to take advantage of the changed social conditions, but left all others at the mercy of the new social conditions brought about by the free powers of those advantageously situated. The notion that men are equally free to act if only the same legal arrangements apply equally to all -- irrespective of differences in education, and command of capital, and that control of the social environment which is furnished by the institution of property -- is a pure absurdity, as facts have demonstrated. Since actual, that is effective, rights and demands are products of interactions and are not found in the original and isolated constitution of human nautre, whether moral or psychological, mere elimintation of obstructions is not enough. The latter merely liberates fortce and ability as it happens to be distributed by past accidents of history. This "free" action operates disastrously as far as the many are concerned. The only possible conclusion, both intellectually and practically, is that the attainment of freedom conceived as power to act in accord with choice turns upon positive and constructive changes in social arrangements.

Mary Warnock on Thinking

From the chapter Materialism and Relativism in Hilary Putnam's Renewing Philosophy:

Mary Warnock once said that Sartre gave us not arguments or proofs but "a description so clear and vivid that when I thinhnk of his description and fit it to my own case, I cannot fail to see its application." It seems to me that this is a very good description of what Wittgenstein was doing, not just in the private language argument, but over and over again in his work.

Science Versus Metaphysics/Philosophy

This excerpt from the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason should be plastered all over the walls of university departments that house cultural theorists and philosophers who consider science a collective illusion:

But though it is older than all other sciences, and would survive even if all the rest were swallowed up in the abyss of an all-destroying barbarism, it has not yet had the good fortune to enter upon the secure path of a science. For in it reason is perpetually being brought to a stand, even when the laws into which it is seeking to have, as it professes, an a priori insight are those that are confirmed by our most common experiences. Ever and again we have to retrace our steps, as not leading us in the direction in which we desire to go. So far, too, are the students of metaphysics from exhibiting any kind of unanimity in their contentions, that metaphysics has rather to be regarded as a battleground quite peculiarly suited for those who desire to exercise themselves in mock combats, and in which no participant has ever yet succeeded in gaining even so much as an inch of territory, not at least in such manner as to secure him in its permanent possession. This shows, beyond all questioning, that the procedure of metaphysics has hitherto been a merely random groping, and, what is worst of all, a groping among mere concepts.

Hayek and Rationality

A quote of Hayek's found on the Language Log:

[Constructivist rationalism] produced a renewed propensity to ascribe the origin of all institutions of culture to invention or design. Morals, religion and law, language and writing, money and the market, were thought of as having been deliberately constructed by somebody, or at least as owing whatever perfection they possessed to such design. …

Yet... [m]any of the institutions of society which are indispensible conditions for the successful pursuit of our conscious aims are in fact the result of customs, habits or practices which have been neither invented nor are observed with any such purpose in view.

Man... is successful not because he knows why he ought to observe the rules which he does observe, or is even capable of stating all these rules in words, but because his thinking and acting are governed by rules which have by a process of selection been evolved in the society in which he lives, and which are thus the product of the experience of generations.

Heidegger and the I

In section 26 of Heidegger's Being and Time:

When others are encountered, it is not the case that one's own subject is proximally present-at-hand and that the rest of the subjects, which are likewise occurents, get discriminated beforehand and then apprehended; nor are they encountered by a primary act of looking at oneself in such a way that the opposite pole of a distinction first gets ascertained. They are encountered from out of the world, in which concernfully circumspective Dasein essentially dwells. Theoretically concocted 'explanations' of the Being-present-at-hand of Others urge themselves upon us all too easily; but over against such explanations we must hold fast to the phenomenal facts of the case which we have pointed out, namely, that Others are encountered environmentally. This elemental worldly kind of encountering, which belongs to Dasein and is closest to it, goes so far that even one's own Dasein becomes something that it can proximally 'come across' only when it looks away from 'Experiences' and the 'centre of its actions', or does not as yet 'see' them at all. Dasein finds 'itself' proximally in what it does, uses, expects, avoids -- in those things environmentally ready-to-hand with which it is proximally concerned.

And even when Dasein explicitly addresses itself as "I here", this locative personal designation must be understood in terms of Dasein's existential spatiality. In Interpreting this we have already intimated that this "I-here" does not mean a certain privileged point -- that of an I-Thing -- but is to be understood as Being-in in terms of the "yonder" of the world that is ready-to-hand -- the "yonder" which is the dwelling-place of Dasein as concern.

W. von Humboldt has alluded to certain languages which express 'I' by 'here', the 'thou' by 'there', the 'he' by 'yonder', thus rendering the personal pronouns by locative adverbs, to put it grammatically. It is controversial whether indeed the primordial signification of locative expressions is adverbial or pronominal. But this dispute loses its basis if one notes that locative adverbs have a relationship to the "I" qua Dasein. The 'here' and the 'there' and the 'yonder' are primarily not mere ways of designating the location of entities present-at-hand within-the-world at positions in space; they are rather characteristics of Dasein's primordial spatiality. These supposedly locative adverbs are Dasein-designations; they have a signification which is primarily existential, not categorial. But they are not pronouns either; their signification is prior to the differentiation of locative adverbs and personal pronouns: these expressions have a Dasein-signification which is authentically spatial, and which serves as evidence that when we interpret Dasein without any theoretical distortions we can see it immediately as 'Being-alongside' the world with which it concerns itself, and as Being-alongside it spatially -- that is to say, as desevering and giving directionality. In the 'here', the Dasein which is absorbed in its world speaks not towards itself but away from itself towards the 'yonder' of something circumspectively ready-to-hand; yet it still has itself in view in its existential spatiality.

Heidegger Sounding Like Schopenhauer

Towards the end of his essay, The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics, comes the following passage, redolent of Schopenhauer, from Heidegger:

1. The crux of the matter is the reinterpretation of the spirit as intelligence, or mere cleverness in examining and calculating given things and the possibility of changing them and complementing them to make new things. This cleverness is a matter of mere talent and practice and mass division of labour. The cleverness itself is subject to the possibility of organisation, which is never true of the spirit. The attitude of the litterateur and aesthete is merely a late consequence and variation of the spirit falsified into intelligence. Mere intelligence is a semblance of spirit, masking its absence.

...

3. As soon as the misinterpretation sets in that degrades the spirit to a tool, the energies of the spiritual process, poetry and art, statesmanship and religion, become subject to conscious cultivation and planning. They are split into branches. The spiritual world becomes culture and the individual strives to perfect himself in the creation and preservation of this culture. These branches become fields of free endeavour, which sets its own standards and barely manages to live up to them. These standards of production and consumption are called values. The cultural values preserve their meaning only by restricting themselves to an autonomous field: poetry for the sake of poetry, art for the sake of art, science for the sake of science.

Absolute Knowledge and Phenomenological Knowledge

From Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception at the end of the chapter titled The Cogito:

But, it will be asked, if the unity of the world is not based on that of consciousness, and if the world is not the outcome of a constituting effort, how does it come about that appearances accord with each other and group themselves together into things, ideas and truths? And why do our random thoughts, the events of our life and those of collective history, at least at certain times assume common significance and direction, and allow themselves to be subsumed under one idea? Why does my life succeed in drawing itself together in order to project itself in words, intentions and acts? This is the problem of rationality. The reader is aware that, on the whole, classical thought tries to explain the concordances in question in terms of a world in itself, or in terms of an absolute mind. Such explanations borrow all the forces of conviction which they can carry from the phenomenon of rationality , and therefore fail to explain that phenomenon, or ever to achieve greater clarity than it possesses. Absolute Thought is no clearer to me than my own finite mind, since it is through he latter that I conceive the former. We are in the world, which means that things take shape, an immense individual asserts itself, each existence is self-comprehensive and comprehensive of the rest. All that has to be done is to recognise these phenomena which are the ground of all our certainties. The belief in an absolute mind, or in a world in itself detached from us is no more than a rationalisation of this primordial faith.

Non-Contradiction Can Be Humorous

"Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned." Avicenna

Hegel and Phenomenology

From page 50 of Peter Singer's book, Hegel:

So our instrument cannot guarantee us an image of undisturbed reality, nor can we come closer to reality by making allowances for the disturbance caused by our instrument. Should we therefore embrace the sceptical position that there is nothing we can truly know? But such scepticism, Hegel says, is self-refuting. If we are to doubt everything, why not doubt the claim that we can know nothing? Moreover the sceptical argument we have been considering has its own presuppositions, which it claims to know. It starts with the idea that there is such a thing as reality, and that knowledge is some kind of instrument or medium by which we grasp reality. In so doing, it presupposes a distinction between ourselves and reality, or the absolute. Worse still, it takes for granted that our knowledge and reality are cut off from one another, but at the same time still treats our knowledge as something real, that is, as a part of reality. This scepticism will not do either.

Hegel has neatly set up a certain view of knowing, and then shown that it leads into a hole from which we cannot escape, and in which we cannot remain. We must, he now says, abandon all these 'useless ideas and expressions' about knowledge as an instrument or medium, all of which divide knowledge from reality as it is.

In all this argument there is no mention of any philosopher who has held the view of knowledge that Hegel now says we must reject. To some extent he is criticising assumptions common to the whole school of empiricist philosophers -- Locke, Berkeley, Hume and many others. It would, however, have been obvious to all his readers that his main target is Kant. Kant argued that we can never see reality as it is; for we can only comprehend our experiences within the frameworks of space, time and causation. Space, time and causation are not part of reality, but the necessary forms in which we grasp it; therefore we can never know things as they are independently of our knowledge.

In another work, the Lesser Logic, Hegel does name his opponent and mounts a similar attack against him (though as if to display his intellectual fertility, he presses home his point with a slightly different argument), The passage is worth quoting, because it concludes with an analogy that suggest the way forward:

We ought, says Kant, to become acquainted with the instrument, before we undertake the work for which it is to be employed; for if the instrument be insufficient, all our trouble will be spent in vain ... But the examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same thing as to know it. But to seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim.

The lesson taught by the folly of Scholasticus is clear. To learn to swim we must plunge boldly into the stream; and to obtain knowledge of reality, we must plunge boldly into the stream of consciousness that is the starting-point of all we know. The only possible approach to knowledge is an examination of consciousness from the inside as it appears to itself -- in other words, a phenomenology of mind. We shall not start with sophisticated doubts, but with a simple form of consciousness that takes itself to be genuine knowledge. This simple form of consciousness will, however, prove itself to be something less than genuine knowledge, and so will develop into another form of consciousness; and this in turn will also prove inadequate, and develop into something else, and so the process will continue until we reach true knowledge.

Kierkegaard Stripped Down

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

Proust as Philosophical Inspiration

Did Quine read Proust? From The Way by Swann's:

But the fact that M. Vinteuil peraps knew about his daughter's behaviour does not imply that his worship of her would thereby be diminished. Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor.

Kripke and Identity Statements

From AC Grayling's An introduction to Philosophical Logic:

In Kripke's view, names are 'rigid designators', that is, terms which refer to the same individual in every possible world in which that individual exists. Because individuals will have different properties in different possible worlds -- their being different possible worlds will turn in in some cases just on the hypothesis that some selected individual answers to different descriptions in those worlds -- it cannot be the case that the name of that individual is synonymous with some set of descriptions. In other possible dispensations of things Aristotle may have been a hoplite, a physician, or whatever; but his name still rigidly designates him in all the worlds in which he exists. He will only possess in all possible worlds such properties as are essential to his being Aristotle. This allows what is surely true, that we can discover of individuals that certain descriptions fail to fit them. For example, suppose it is confirmed that Bacon did indeed write Othello, Hamlet, and the rest; nevertheless the name 'Shakespeare' will not cease to refer because the description 'the author of Hamlet' ceases to apply to that individual. For if we irreversibly identify whoever is designated by 'Shakespeare' with 'the author of Hamlet', it would be impossible to discover that he did not write Hamlet.

This then is the first important feature of the causal theory, that ordinary proper names are rigid designators and not abbreviations for clusters of descriptions. An interesting consequence of this relates to identity statements. It is commonly held that identity statements like 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' are contingent, because the fact that the two are one is something that had to be established a posteriori. But Kripke argues that if 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is true, thens since both names are rigid designators and refer to the same entity in all possible worlds in which that entity exists, the identity statement is necessarily true. Philosophers had supposed this identity statement to be only contingently true because 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is not analytic; but a failure to distinguish the metaphysical notion of necessity both from the epistemological notion of apriority and the semantic notion of analyticity makes for the muddle here. On Kripke's view, 'necessarily true' means 'true in all possible worlds'; so although 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is a posteriori, it is necessary -- and if this is right, it establishes the existence of neceesary a posteriori truths, an exciting result.

Popper and Language

From David Edmonds's and John Eidinow's Wittgenstein's Poker:

Popper compared the interest in language to the practice of cleaning spectacles. Language philosophers might think this is worthwhile in itself. Serious philosophers realise that the only point of the cleaning is to enable the wearer to see the world more clearly.

Frege's Venus, Sense and Reference

I've never studied logic formally at university, but I have read up on the subject here and there. What I always found most confusing, however, was the presentation of the classic example illustrating the difference between sense and reference, that of the morning star and the evening star. The problem was that in quite a few noteworthy books, the point of the example was completely lost on me because it was not explicitly explained that the morning star and the evening star are actually the same object!

Thankfully though, I did discover what the morning star and evening star were referring to and, consequently, why distinguishing between sense and reference is so important.

And that is also why I'm so happy to have read perhaps the most lucid explanation of this distinction in AC Grayling's An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, and is why I'm hoping all books on logic will just reprint the following passage from here on in:

The classic example used is the planet Venus, which the Greeks thought was not one planet but two stars, namely the evening star Hesperus and the morning star Phosphorus. Because the evening and morning stars are the same entity, it is evident that both expressions denote the same entity, viz., Venus. But clearly the expressions 'morning star' and 'evening star' differ in sense despite having the same reference, which follows from the fact that if one says 'the morning star is identical with the morning star', the truth of what one says is a simple matter of logic and can be determined by inspecting the sentence itself; but if one says 'the morning star is identical with the evening star', the truth of what one says is a matter of astronomy, not logic. No one could discover that the morning and evening stars are in fact one and the same entity merely by inspecting the expressions 'the morning star' and 'the evening star' alone. It follows that although these two expressions are coreferential, which is to say, refer to the same thing, they differ in sense