When plato first conceived his idea of a utopian society based on meritocracy of intellect, was he himself aware of where he would be placed in such a society?
To me, and i hope to others, the philosophies of many greats : Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Young, etc. have not been reapplied to those people from which they sprung, and which they should have also modified.
Hobbes talked of human nature, speaking of humans from a “philosophers standpoint”, vicariously observing the world and its tendencies.
But if he was in such a position to define humanity, could he define himself?
He suggested that man is inherently evil, but did he comprehend himself as evil?
With the philosophies of today concieved by those at a greater intellectual vantage point than the everday societies they typically define, can those philosophers apply such ideas to themselves, and still find credibility in their meanings?
My problem is this: Philosophers are humans defining humans, and trusted as sometimes “above the law of human nature” in their ideas. But truly, aren’t we all vulnerable to the same secular emotions and views that reattach us to the barbaric humanity that some philosophers are so willing to classify? Who are we to classify ourselves and observe ourselves when the philosophies we apply contradict our means?
In a logic progression: Hobbes says humans are evil. Hobbes is a human. Hobbes is evil.
Where does that leave his philosophy?
Can philosophy really expect to achieve a higher state of observation when the minds fueling its skeptical rage are equally as human to those they typically observe.
The fact that the philosopher is human could just as well be seen as being precisely what qualifies hir for the act of philosophizing . . . Who else is going to skeptically analyze us?
Heidegger had the same problem when he sought to answer the question “What is Being?” Note that the is is already part of the question, thereby presupposing what it seeks to answer. He had to define a type of being for beings and from there he would move to investigate the question of Being. He observed that formally this is circular logic, however, he noted the following in Being and Time, “Insofar as being constitutes what is asked about, and insofar as being means the being of beings, beings themselves turn out to be what is interrogated in the question of being. […] Beings can be determined in their being without the explicit concept of the meaning of being having to be already available. […] “Presupposing” being has the character of taking a preliminary look at being in such a way that on the basis of this look beings are already given and tentatively articulated in their being. […] Such “presupposing” has nothing to do with positing a principle from which a series of propositions is deduced. A “circle in reasoning” cannot possibly lie in the formulation of the question of the meaning of being, because in answering this question it is not a matter of grounding by deduction but rather of laying bare and exhibiting the ground. “Circular reasoning” does not occur in the question of the meaning of being. Rather, there is a notable “relatedbess backward or forward” of what is asked about (being) to asking as a mode of being of a being. […] Formal objections such as the arguments of “circular reasoning,” an argument that is always easily raised in the area of investigation of principles, are always sterile when one is weighing concrete ways of investigating. They do not offer anything to the understanding of the issue and they hinder penetation into the feild of investigation.” Of course one always implicates oneself through a philosophical theory that is deducted and/or investigated. Inductive theories might get around the problem.
But as for Hobbes… he was probably wrong. I am postivie, simply based on my own memory, that I wasn’t born evil but corrupted by kindergraden and nursery school. However, I had the tendencies inside me that culture feuled and actualized on their most basic levels. I was born, for example, with a certain degree of aggression, but to combine aggression with a deprave desire for rape is culturally induced – no one is born a rapist. Now as for the original question, yes, one’s philosophical theories will usualy apply to oneself.
You make the assumption that we need to be analyzed. Maybe such is used as an escapist attempt to comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we have that ability.
A philosopher may feel above the world because he can see it, but truly he is just as human as it. That is my point.
I see your point to circular logic. But the question at hand is not of being. It is of the being of being and a progression of ideas that define themselves.
From an analytical standpoint, can the philosopher really expect to define the world when he is just as vulnerable to its tendencies?
I see no point in defining a world as something “evil” or “utopian” if the mentality that reflects those views are products of that very same judgement.
sure, maybe - but that conclusion is necessarily the result of a skeptical analysis as well - either way, it’s in our nature.
Though some may or may not have felt that way, I don’t think a philosopher NEEDS to feel above the world in order to philosophize - and in any case, philosophy is far from being the only activity that could lead to such a feeling.
I am not assuming that a philosopher needs to feel above the world to observe it, but often, takes that “vantage point” to escape the normal realm of society, himself.
An evil man judging something as evil, why not? How would evil (or an evil mentality) influence judgement? Is an individual making a judgement necessarily predisposed to judge in a malicious way [example?] because one judges oneself and everyone else to be evil? Isn’t this an ad hominem? Do we disregard Bin Laden’s judgement that, say, America has an excess amount of greed, solely on our account of his evil and his prejudices? Shouldn’t an act of judgement be black, like those robes our supreme men and women wear: strictly guided by certain laws (whatever the normative ethical theory is that one judges by)?
Sure, that’s one of the things that thought enables us to do - that doesn’t discredit thought as an enterprise though, it is merely one of many variables pointing to the fact that we should take the intentions of the philosopher into account when evaluating hir philosophy . . .
No, there are no fully disembodied philosophies, which is just another way of saying there is no fully decontextualized meaning - but there’s nothing that requires philosophy to be fully disembodied or meaning to be fully decontextualized in order to be valid - in fact, i think the validity is in many ways inextricably bound to, and even product of, the context or embodiment wherein it is expressed.
I think this depends on the particular philosophy in question. Surely, some philosophies aren’t incommensurate with their enunciation or their being held while others not. For example, if I say “We as humans have two arms”, surely this could be true of humanity and myself even if I’m the one speaking it (probably not a good example of philosophy per se but you get the idea). A different philosophy that says, for example, “We as humans can’t truly know anything” is incommensurate with the one speaking it, for if true, it presupposes that the speaker knows at least this.
On reflection, this is actually a pretty good test of the coherence of one’s philosophy - it must be applicable to himself in order to be granted generally (unless, of course, the philosopher explicitely says ‘My philosophy applies to everyone except me’).
If someone is judging the world around them as evil, then they must be part of that placement.
This is to say that their situation becomes empathetically observational rather than of unbiased judgement.
If i say the world is evil, i am evil. If i am evil, there is no statement to be made because i am not exempt from such classification.
When we look at the world, we judge it. But by this we judge ourselves, and are not in a place to find meaningful (i use this term loosely) relation if such truths are already defined by our existence in that world, itself.
Classification of “evil” however, implies a used of artifice; something without place in the subjective judgement of humanity.
From there, regardless of the meanings “evil” evokes, an inherent bias is instilled within such thoughts.
Appealing to emotions may itself, be the basis of such philosophical endeavours. Even the stoics were at a presumed state of philosphical mentality that derived sense from their small populations.
This concept ,however, does not imply an appeal to emotions, but rather suggests that the inherent emotions of insignificance, as a relative proportion to the humanity that is defined, are already appealed to by the ideas that are evoked from defining such humanity as a small proportion.
“if the human brain was more simple we would still be too stupid to understand it. Maybe we can comprehend an insect or a flower but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe.” to paraphrase a great introduction to philosophy: sophie’s world.
My answer is that we cannot understand ourselves or the universe any more than a fly can understand it’s self or us as humans. However, it is human to search. Depressing to know we know nothing and maybe never will but exciting to know how much there is to know and to search for answers. We are the only animals on the planet that can think the way we do in philosophy and we seem to enjoy it.
What bias does “evil” create? I can know the truth, speak the truth, and still be an evil man who does evil deeds. For all I know the “truth” can itself be evil, and as Nietzsche asked, why not untruth? What makes truth more valuable than untruth? than falsehood?
Look, I don’t see how “evil,” a moral value judgement, affects other judgements. I judge all to be evil. I judge 2+2=5 does not accord to the rules of mathamtics. The second judgement is not false by virtue of the first being true.
Hobbes, let’s not forget, was an empiricist, and all empirical judgements are inductive and therefore not necessarily true for all. Just one way to get out of the problem, unless Hobbes derives his judgement from introspection.
Heidegger’s concern, however, was exactly that the question of the meaning of being be viewed as the question of the being of being and not simply the question of the being of beings (he called this “the ontological difference” and the ignorance of it since Plato “the forgetting of being”). Hence the very great difficulty he had in defining the grounds for his discussion of a properly “fundamental ontology” (as opposed to a metaphysics). Heidegger, then, was not just concerned with existence (literally, standing out, as a being-in-the-world) but also with ek-sistence (standing in), which is an openness to being as such, and therefore existentialism, in its Heideggerian form, can perhaps be seen as a philosophy about exactly the kind of question you raise.
