Was There a First Human Language?: Theories from the Enlightenment Through Noam Chomsky

in Biology, Philosophy, Science | December 6th, 2016

During the 17th and 18th centuries, European Enlightenment philosophers discarded the origin stories in religious texts as wildly implausible or simply allegorical. But they found themselves charged with coming up with their own, naturalistic explanations for the origins of life, law, morality, etc. And most pressingly for their inquiries into psychology and cognition, many of those thinkers sought to explain the origins of language.

The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel had long been widely accepted, either literally or metaphorically, as indicative that all humans once spoke the same language (The so-called “Adamic Language”). Many competing theories came from philosophers like Locke, Rousseau, Condillac, Herder, and the Scottish jurist and philosopher James Burnett, known by his hereditary title, Monboddo.

Anticipating Darwinian evolution as well as comparative linguistics, Monboddo argued that language arose as a response to a changing environment, and that it came into being, along with human beings, in one place, then diversified as humans spread across the globe and diverged culturally. This was known as the theory of monogenesis, or the “single-origin theory” of language.

As the narrator in the video above, from linguistics YouTube channel NativLang, puts it, even after the story had been naturalized—and the languages of the world mapped into proto-evolutionary family trees—“Babel still held one intriguing idea over us; that original language.” And yet, rather than search for the mystical Adamic Language—the revelation of a divinity—as many alchemists and occultists had done, natural philosophers like Monboddo used emerging comparative linguistics methods to attempt a historical reconstruction of the first human language.

They were less than successful. Giving it up as futile, in 1866, the Society of Linguistics in Paris banned all discussion of the issue. “Enter the late Joseph Greenberg” to begin the search anew, says NativLang. A 20th-century American linguist, Greenberg used mass comparison and typology to compare “superfamilies.” Later linguists took up the challenge, including Merritt Ruhlen, who “compared vocabulary from across the globe and reconstructed 27 proto-words” supposedly belonging to the first human language, called “Proto-World.” Ruhlen’s theory has since been critically savaged, says NativLang, and “confidently tossed… into the bins of fringe linguistics, pseudoscience… and yet, Babel’s first, and biggest claim lingers.”

The intellectual history in this five-minute video is obviously oversimplified, but it highlights some fascinating features of the current debate. As Avi Lifschitz, historian of Enlightenment theory of language, writes, we tend “to assume that our own cognitive theories are the latest word when compared with those of our predecessors. Yet in some areas, the questions we are now asking are not too different from those posed some two or three centuries ago.” In the case of the origins of language, that is most certainly so. Central to the theories of Locke and others, for example, “the precise role of language in the brain and in human perception” remains “one of the most topical questions in today’s cognitive science.”

Although many scholars have given up attempting to reconstruct the original language, linguists, cognitive scientists, and evolutionary biologists continue to find compelling evidence for the single-origin theory. The NativLang video omits perhaps the most famous modern linguist, Noam Chomsky, who argued that a chance mutation occurred some 100,000 years ago, giving rise to language. Even as languages have diverged into what’s currently estimated at around 6,000 different tongues, Chomsky claimed, they all retain a common structure, a “universal grammar.”

Whatever it might have sounded like, original language would likely have arisen in Sub-Saharan Africa, where modern humans evolved somewhere between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago. In 2011, University of Auckland biologist Quentin Atkinson used linguistic techniques somewhat like Monboddo’s to show that African languages—especially click languages like the South African Xu—have considerably more individual sounds (phonemes) than others. And that languages around the world have fewer and fewer phonemes the further they are from southern Africa.

Most scientists agree with the basic evolutionary history of human origins. But like Ruhlen’s “Proto-World,” Atkinson’s linguistic theory “caused something of a sensation,” writes Science Daily, and has since come in for severe critique. The debate over many of those Enlightenment questions about the origins of language continues. Barring some draconian ban, “the search for the site of origin of language,” and for the language itself and the evolutionary mechanisms that produced it, “remains very much alive.”

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Why Socrates Hated Democracies: An Animated Case for Why Self-Government Requires Wisdom & Education

in Philosophy, Politics | November 29th, 2016

How often have you heard the quote in one form or another? “Democracy is the worst form of Government,” said Winston Churchill in 1947, “except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…” The sentiment expresses two cultural values many Americans are trained to hold uncritically: the primacy of democracy and the burdensomeness of government as a necessary evil.

In his new book Toward Democracy, Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg argues that these ideas arose fairly recently with “mostly Protestants, at least at first,” notes Kirkus, in whose hands “the idea of democracy as a dangerous doctrine of the mob was reshaped into an ideal.” Much of this transformation “occurred in the former British colonies that became the United States, where, at least from a British nobleman’s point of view, mob rule did take hold.”

The modern revamping of democracy into a sacred set of universal institutions has defined our understanding of the term. Just as the West has co-opted classical Athenian architecture as symbolic of democratic purity, it has often co-opted Greek philosophy. But as anyone who has ever read Plato’s Republic knows, Greek philosophers were highly suspicious of democracy, and could not conceive of a functioning egalitarian society with full suffrage and freedom of speech.

Socrates, especially, says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “was portrayed in the dialogues of Plato as hugely pessimistic about the whole business of democracy.” In the ideal society Socrates constructs in the Republic, he famously argues for restricted freedom of movement, strict censorship according to moralistic civic virtues, and a guardian soldier class and the rule of philosopher kings.

In Book VI, Socrates points out the “flaws of democracy by comparing a society to a ship.” If you were going on a sea voyage, “who would you ideally want deciding who was in charge of the vessel, just anyone, or people educated in the rules and demands of seafaring?” Unless we wish to be obtusely contrarian, we must invariably answer the latter, as does Socrates’ interlocutor Adeimantus. Why then should just any of us, without regard to level of skill, experience, or education, be allowed to select the rulers of a country?

The grim irony of Socrates’ skepticism, de Botton observes, is that he himself was put to death after a vote by 500 Athenians. Rather than the typical elitism of purely aristocratic thinking, however, Socrates insisted that “only those who had thought about issues rationally and deeply should be let near a vote.” Says de Botton, “We have forgotten this distinction between an intellectual democracy and a democracy by birthright. We have given the vote to all without connecting it to wisdom.” (He does not tell us whom he means by “we.”)

For Socrates, so-called “birthright democracy” was inevitably susceptible to demagoguery. Socrates “knew how easily people seeking election could exploit our desire for easy answers” by telling us what we wanted to hear. We should heed Socrates’ warnings against mob rule and the dangers of demagoguery, de Botton argues, and consider democracy as “something that is only ever as good as the education system that surrounds it.” It’s a potent idea, and one often repeated with reference to a similar warning from Thomas Jefferson.

What de Botton does not mention in his short video, however, is that Socrates also advised that his rulers lie to the citizenry, securing their trust not with false promises and seductive blandishments, but with ideology. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes, Socrates “suggests that [the rulers] need to tell the citizens a myth that should be believed by subsequent generations in order for everyone to accept his position in the city”—and to accept the legitimacy of the rulers. The myth—like modern scientific racism and eugenics—divides the citizenry into an essential hierarchy, which Socrates symbolizes by the metals gold, silver, and bronze.

But who determines these categories, or which voters are the more “rational,” or what that category entails? How do we reconcile the egalitarian premises of democracy with the caste systems of the utopian Republic, in which voting “rationally” means voting for the interests of the class that gets the vote? What about the uses of propaganda to cultivate official state ideology in the populace (as Walter Lippman so well described in Public Opinion). And what are we to do with the deep suspicions of, say, Nietzsche when it comes to Socratic ideas of reason, many of which have been confirmed by the findings of neuroscience?

As cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff writes, “Most thought is unconscious, since we don’t have conscious access to our neural circuitry.… Estimates by neuroscientists vary between a general ‘most’ to as much as 98%, with consciousness as the tip of the mental iceberg.” That is to say that—despite our levels of education and specialized training—we “tend to make decisions unconsciously,” at the gut level, “before becoming consciously aware of them.” Even decisions like voting.

These considerations should also inform critiques of democracy, which have not only warned us of its dangers, but have also been used to justify widespread voter suppression and disenfranchisement for reasons that have nothing to do with objective rationality and everything to do with myth and political ideology.

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Zen Master Alan Watts Explains What Made Carl Jung Such an Influential Thinker

in Philosophy, Psychology | November 17th, 2016

The twentieth century produced a fair few thinkers on the human mind whose observations still resonate today. The Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung certainly appears in that group, as does the British philosopher and interpreter of Buddhism Alan Watts, and though not a week goes by when I don’t hear their words cited, I seldom hear the words of both of them cited by the same person. Though nearly two generations (among other things) separated Watts and Jung, the two men did once meet, in 1958, as Watts traveled through Europe with his father. Three years later, Jung passed on and Watts recorded the lecture above.

What made Jung such an important observer of humanity? Watts points to “one fundamental principle that underlay all his work and that was most extraordinarily exemplified in Jung himself as a person,” which he calls Jung’s “recognition of the polarity of life. That is to say, his resistance to what is to my mind the disastrous and absurd hypothesis, that there is in this universe a radical and absolute conflict between good and evil, light and darkness that can never never never be harmonized.”

He goes on to talk for a little under an hour about about Jung himself, Jung’s influence on his own work as a “comparative philosopher,” and the continuing relevance of Jung’s ideas to the modern world — all of which he ties together in an integrated tribute to this “integrated character.”

“There is a nice German word, hintergedanken, which means a thought in the very far far back of your mind,” says Watts. “Jung had a hintergedanken in the back of his mind that showed in the twinkle in his eye. It showed that he knew and recognized what I sometimes call the element of irreducible rascality in himself. And he knew it so strongly and so clearly, and in a way so lovingly, that he would not condemn the same thing in others, and would therefore not be led into those thoughts, feelings, and acts of violence towards others which are always characteristic of the people who project the devil in themselves upon the outside, upon somebody else, upon the scapegoat.” And so, whether we enter into this field of thought through Watts, through Jung, or through anyone else, it always seems to comes back to the ancient Greeks: “Know thyself.”

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Philosopher Richard Rorty Chillingly Predicts the Results of the 2016 Election … Back in 1998

in Literature, Philosophy, Politics | November 17th, 2016

Twenty years ago a strong academic left in universities all over the world spoke to political culture the way that a globalized nationalist far-right seems to now. Among public intellectuals in the U.S., Richard Rorty’s name held particular sway. Yet in his contrarian 1998 book Achieving Our Country, Rorty argued against the participation of philosophy in politics. A member of the so-called “Old Left,” or what he called the “reformist left,” Rorty took on the “Cultural Left” in ways we now hear in (often bitter) debates between similar camps. In the course of his attacks, he made the uncanny prediction above.

The cultural left, wrote Rorty, had come “to give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.” He foresaw cultural politics on the left as contributing to a tidal wave of resentment that would one day result in a time when “all the sadism which the academic left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back.”

As democratic institutions fail, he writes in the quote above:

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words [slur for an African-American that begins with “n”] and [slur for a Jewish person that begins with “k”] will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

He also then argues, however, that this sadism will not solely be the result of “economic inequality and insecurity,” and that such explanations would be “too simplistic.” Nor would the strongman who comes to power do anything but worsen economic conditions. He writes next, “after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international superrich.”

Rorty blamed the Marxist New Left for “retreating from pragmatism into theory,” wrote The New York Times in its review of Achieving Our Country. He felt the cultural left had abandoned the “American experiment as secular, anti-authoritarian and infinite in possibilities,” such as “Whitman idealized as loving relationships and Dewey as good citizenship.” The Times wrote then that Rorty’s predictions above were a form of “intellectual bullying.” We can take our dystopian futures from sci-fi novelists and filmmakers, but when philosophers “haruspicate or scry,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Dry Salvages,” we tend to dismiss it as the “usual / Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press.”

The eminent Stanford professor exhorted his contemporaries to leave behind “semiconscious anti-Americanism” and embrace pragmatic civil engagement, and did so by offering up examples from American literature and philosophy that all had fierce activist strains. Excoriating one kind of life of the mind, Rorty can’t help but offer another. “What does Rorty offer as a solution?” asked the Times review, “Not really very much.” Perhaps not to politicians. But to the postmodern academics and writers he accused, he offers up as counter examples Walt Whitman, John Dewey, and—as Rorty noted in an interview—James Baldwin, whose “use of the phrase… achieving our country” inspired his book’s title, Achieving Our Country.

via Slate

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Henry David Thoreau on When Civil Disobedience and Resistance Are Justified (1849)

in Philosophy, Politics | November 15th, 2016

History is rife with examples of oppressive governments. The present is rife with examples of oppressive governments. You can name your own examples. The question that presents itself to any opposition is what is to be done? Go underground? Sabotage? Take up arms? The likelihood of success in such cases—depending on the belligerence of the opposition and the capabilities of the government—varies widely. But I see no moral reason to condemn people for fighting injustice, provided their cause itself is just. Neither, of course, did Henry David Thoreau, author of the 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” a document that every student of Political Philosophy 101 knows as an ur-text of modern democratic protest movements.

This is an essay we have become all-too familiar with by reputation rather than by reading. Thoreau’s political philosophy is not passive, as in the phrase “passive resistance.” It is not middle-of-the-road centrism disguised as radicalism. It lies instead at the watering hole where right libertarianism and left anarchism meet to have a drink. “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least,’” wrote Thoreau, and ultimately “’That government is best which governs not at all.’”

Like many utopian theorists of the 19th century, Thoreau saw this as the inevitable future: “when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government they will have.” Thoreau laments all restrictions on trade and regulations on commerce. He also denounces the use of a standing army by “a comparatively… few individuals.” And yet—despite these radical positions—Thoreau has been enshrined in the history of political thought both for his radical tactics and his defense of preserving government, for the present.

“To speak practically and as a citizen,” he wrote, “unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.” He does not go to great lengths, as classical philosophers were wont, to define the ideal government. It is radically democratic, that we know. But as to what constitutes injustice, Thoreau is clear:

When the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.

The figure he cites of “a sixth of the population” is not erroneous. As W.E.B. Du Bois showed in one of his revolutionary 1900 sociological visualizations, during the time of Thoreau’s essay, one-sixth of the country’s population was indeed comprised of people of African descent, most of them enslaved. Thoreau wrote during debates over the impeding Fugitive Slave Act, a law that put every person of color in the expanding country—free or escaped, in every state and territory—at risk of enslavement or imprisonment without any due process.

Thoreau found both this developing nightmare and the Mexican-American war too intolerably unjust for the country to bear. And he recognized the limitations of elections to resolve them: “All voting is a sort of gaming… with a slight moral tinge to it,” he wrote, then observed with devastating irony, given total disenfranchisement of people who were property, that “Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.”

“Unjust laws exist,” writes Thoreau, “I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.” Thoreau had put his dicta into practice already many years before. He had stopped paying his poll tax in 1842 to protest the war and the expansion of slavery. He was finally arrested and jailed for the offense in 1846. The incident hardly sparked a movement. He was bailed out, perhaps by his aunt, the following day. And as we well know, the Mexican-American war and the crisis of slavery were both resolved with… war.

But Thoreau used his experience as the basis for “Civil Disobedience,” which he wrote to a local audience in his home state of Massachusetts, and which went on to directly inspire the massively successful, national grassroots movements of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other non-violent Human Rights and Anti-War leaders around the world. So what did he recommend dissenters do? Here are the basics of his prescriptions, with his words in quotes:

“I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts.” Thoreau then goes on to describe his particular form of resistance, the non-payment of tax. His thesis here, however, allows for any just refusals to recognize government authority.

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison.” Thoreau himself suffered little, it’s true, but millions who came after him—dissidents on all continents save Antarctica—have endured imprisonment, beating, and death. “Suppose blood should flow,” writes Thoreau, “Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded?” As for the justness of disobedience, Thoreau makes a very logical case: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”

Thoreau goes on to introduce a good deal of nuance into the argument, writing that community taxes supporting highways and schools are ethical, but those supporting unjust war and enslavement are not. He recommends discerning, thoughtful action. And he expected that the poor would undertake most of the resistance, because the burdens fell heaviest on them, and “because they who assert the purest right, and consequently are the most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property.” This has generally, throughout history, been true.

The best thing a person of means can do, he writes, is “to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor.” Or, presumably, if one has never been so, to follow the poors’ lead. The paradox of Thoreau’s assertion that the least powerful present the greatest threat to the State resolves in his recognition that the State’s power rests not in its appeal to “sense, intellectual or moral” but in its “superior physical strength.” By simply refusing to yield to threats, anyone—even ordinary, powerless people—can deny the government’s authority, “until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.”

Read Thoreau’s complete essay, “Civil Disobedience,” here.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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An Animated, Monty Python-Style Introduction to the Søren Kierkegaard, the First Existentialist

in Philosophy | November 15th, 2016

When first I visited Copenhagen, I went over, as many tourists do, to the Assistens Cemetery to find the grave of Søren Kierkegaard. But for all of us who know the name of that 19th-century Danish philosopher, how many can claim even an acquaintance with the ideas that made his into a near-household name? The introductory video from Alain de Botton’s School of Life just above gets us started on forming that acquaintance with this “brilliant, gloomy, anxiety-ridden, often hilarious” thinker in a manner relevant to the problems of modern life, highlighting three of Kierkegaard’s best-known works: 1843’s Either/Or and Fear and Trembling and 1849’s The Sickness Unto Death.

In the first two, says de Botton in the role of the narrator, “what Kierkegaard wants us to do, above all, is wake up, and give up our cozy, sentimental illusions. He systematically attacks the pillars of modern life: our faith in family, our trust in work, our attachment to love, and our general sense that life has purpose and meaning.” He quotes the philosopher himself and his realization that “the meaning of life was to get a livelihood. That the goal of life was to be a high-court judge. That the brightest joy of love was to marry a well-off girl. That wisdom was what the majority said it was. That passion was to give a speech. That courage was to risk being fined $10. That cordiality was to say ‘You’re welcome’ after a meal, and that the fear of God was to go to Communion once a year. That’s what I saw, and I laughed.”

The direction in which this realization took Kierkegaard’s thought produced a body of work considered a precedent of the Existentialism explored in the 20th century by the likes of Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. “Marry, and you will regret it,” Kierkegaard wrote in Either/Or. “Don’t marry, you will also regret it. Marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it. Weep over it, you’ll regret that, too. Hang yourself, you’ll regret it. Don’t hang yourself, and you’ll regret that, too. Whether you hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”

Kierkegaard stressed the then-new idea of angst, “a condition where we understand how many choices we face, and how little understanding we can ever have, of how to exercise these choices wisely.” Some might turn to religion for the solution, and so, in a way, did Kierkegaard, who “adored the simple truths of the Gospels” but “loathed the Christianity of the established Danish Church.” What an irony that his family name means “churchyard” in Danish, let alone that he should be buried in such a famous one himself. (Kierkegaard’s nephew protested the burial, which resulted in a fine for disrupting a funeral.) But to the extent that the philosopher’s presence there causes its pilgrims both casual and devoted to reflect seriously on the irresolvable contradictions still at the core of our lives, his mission (in de Botton’s words) “to save himself and, he thought, humanity,” continues.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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What Did Nietzsche Really Mean When He Wrote “God is Dead”?

in Philosophy | November 8th, 2016

The quote inspired an anxious 1966 Time magazine cover, and a preachy 2016 movie franchise that works hard to inoculate the faithful against atheism’s threatening seductions: “God is Dead,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1882 book of incisive aphorisms, The Gay Science, and unwittingly coined a phrase now inseparable from 20th century culture wars. Of course, Nietzsche knew he was tossing a Molotov cocktail into the fraught culture wars of his own time, but he didn’t blow things up for the sheer pleasure of it. Instead, his blunt assertion lay at the heart of what Nietzsche saw as both a tremendous problem and a necessary realization.

To clarify, Nietzsche never meant to say that there had been some sort of god but that he had died in recent history. “Rather,” writes Scotty Hendricks at Big Think, “that our idea of one had” been rendered a relic of a pre-scientific age. The philosopher, “an atheist for his adult life,” found no place for Christian belief in a post-Enlightenment world: “Europe no longer needed God as the source for all morality, value, or order in the universe; philosophy and science were capable of doing that for us.” Accepting this brute fact can impose a heavy existentialist burden, as well as a heavy philosophical and ethical one: theological thinking is deeply embedded in Western philosophy and language, or as Nietzsche wrote, “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”

A committed metaphysical naturalist, Nietzsche nonetheless saw that just as he was haunted by his strict religious upbringing, unable to easily rid himself of the traces of the Christian God, so too was European civilization haunted, particularly the bourgeois German society he often savaged. “God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow.—And we—we must still defeat his shadow as well!” The “shadow” of god trails our ideas about morality. Fearing to give up religious thought, we cling to it even in the absence of religion. What is to take its place, we wonder, except for widespread, destructive nihilism, a condition Nietzsche feared inevitable?

Nietzsche even saw scientific discourse as haunted by ideas of divine agency. “Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature,” he writes in The Gay Science, “There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for only against a world of purposes does the word ‘accident’ have a meaning.” Far from pulling away the source of human meaning, however, Nietzsche seeks to liberate his readers from the idea that “death is opposed to life”—or that losing a cherished belief is a catastrophe.

On the contrary—as philosopher Simon Critchley aptly paraphrases in a brief video at Big Think— Nietzsche thought that belief in God made us “cringing, cowardly, submissive creatures,” and profoundly unfree. He believed we would continue to be so until we accepted our place in nature—no easy feat in an age so steeped in god-think. “When will we be done with our caution and care?” Nietzsche wondered, “When will all these shadows of god no longer darken us? When will we have completely de-deified nature? When will we begin to naturalize humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?”

For Nietzsche, the mass of people may never do so. He reserves his redemption for “the kind of people who alone matter; I mean the heroic.” Failing to become heroes, ordinary people in modernity are fated to go the way of “the Last Man,” a figure, writes Hendricks, “who lives a quiet life of comfort, without thought for individuality or personal growth.” A passive consumer. We can read Nietzsche’s philosophy as thoroughgoing elitism, or as a call to the reader to personal heroism. Either way, the anxiety he tapped into has persisted for 134 years, and shows little sign of abating for many people. For others, the nonexistence of a supreme being has no effect on their psychological health.

For billions of Daoists and Buddhists, for example, the problem has never existed. Nietzsche knew perhaps as much about Eastern religion as his contemporaries, much of his knowledge tainted by Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic take on Buddhism. “Compared to [Schopenhauer’s] world view,” writes Peter Abelson, “which is very severe, Buddhism seems almost cheerful.” Nietzsche could be equally severe, often as a matter of polemic, often as matter of mood, sometimes dismissing other religious systems with only slightly less contempt than he did Christianity. But he sums up one of his key atheistic values in a supposed quote from the Buddha: “Don’t flatter your benefactors! Repeat this saying in a Christian church, and it will instantly clear the air of everything Christian.” To live without belief in god, he suggests over and over, is to be fully free from servitude, and fully responsible for oneself.

Walter Kaufmann’s Classic Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

The Digital Nietzsche: Download Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 14 ) |

Stephen Fry Narrates 4 Philosophy Animations On the Question: How to Create a Just Society?

in Animation, History, Philosophy | October 25th, 2016

How do we create a just society? 50,000 years or so at it and humanity still has a long way to go before figuring that out, though not for lack of trying. The four animated videos of “What Is Justice?”—a miniseries within BBC Radio 4 and the Open University’s larger project of animating the ideas of philosophers throughout history and explaining them in the voices of various famous narrators—tell us what John Rawls, Henry David Thoreau, and the Bible, among other sources, have to say on the subject of justice. Stephen Fry provides the voice this time as the videos illustrate the nature of these ideas, as well as their complications, before our eyes.

Imagine you had to create a just society yourself, but “you won’t know what kind of a person you’ll be in the society you design.” This thought experiment, first described by Rawls in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice as the “veil of ignorance,” supposedly encourages the creation of “a much fairer society than we now have. There would be extensive freedom and equality of opportunity. But there wouldn’t be extremes of high pay, unless it could be shown that the poorest in society directly benefited as a result.” An intriguing idea, but one easier articulated than agreed upon, let alone realized.

Much earlier in history, you find the simpler principle of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” an “ancient form of punishment known as lex talionis, or the law of retaliation.” Any reader of the Bible will have a strong sense of this idea’s importance in the ancient world, though we’d do well to remember that back then, it “was a way of encouraging a sense of proportion — not wiping out a whole community in retaliation for the killing of one man, for example.” While harsh punishment could, in theory, deter potential criminals, “severe legal violence can create martyrs and increase society’s problems.” The rule of law, naturally, has everything to do with the creation and maintenance of a just society, though not every law furthers the cause.

But you’ve no doubt heard of one that has: habeas corpus, the legal principle mandating that “no one, not even the president, monarch, or anyone else in power, can detain someone illegally.” Instead, “they need to bring the detainee in question before a court and allow that court to determine whether or not this person can legally be held.” Yet not every authority has consistently implemented or upheld habeas corpus or other justice-ensuring laws. At times like those, according to Thoreau, you must engage in civil disobedience: “follow your conscience and break the law on moral grounds rather than be a cog in an unjust system.” It’s a dirty job, creating a just society, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. And though we may not all have given it as much thought as a Rawls or a Thoreau, we’ve all got a role to play in it.

Justice: Putting a Price Tag on Life & How to Measure Pleasure

Free: Listen to John Rawls’ Course on “Modern Political Philosophy” (Recorded at Harvard, 1984)

47 Animated Videos Explain the History of Ideas: From Aristotle to Sartre

What is the Self? Watch Philosophy Animations Narrated by Stephen Fry on Sartre, Descartes & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Was There a First Human Language?: Theories from the Enlightenment Through Noam Chomsky

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Henry David Thoreau on When Civil Disobedience and Resistance Are Justified (1849)

An Animated, Monty Python-Style Introduction to the Søren Kierkegaard, the First Existentialist

What Did Nietzsche Really Mean When He Wrote “God is Dead”?

Stephen Fry Narrates 4 Philosophy Animations On the Question: How to Create a Just Society?

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