Category Archives: Philosophy

The Future of the History of Philosophy

Posted on by under History, Philosophy, Shared

by Josh Platzky Miller and Lea Cantor

From The Philosopher, vol. 111, no. 1 (“Where is Philosophy Going?“).
If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation.
We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.

One way to scry the future of philosophy is to look at its past. However, the history of philosophy – both as a field of academic study and in more popular literature – tends to tell a rather narrow and parochial story. This story predominantly focuses on Europe to the exclusion of almost everywhere else. The shift away from such a bias has already begun, especially in the specialist history of philosophy literature, but there are still deeply Eurocentric assumptions built into the most influential general histories of philosophy available today. One invisible assumption, still widely adopted, is that there is such a thing as “Western Philosophy”. As we will argue, the history of philosophy – both in Europe and globally – would be better understood if we abandoned the idea of a “Western Philosophy”. To see why, we start with the most widespread narratives about philosophy’s past.

***

Mainstream histories of philosophy contain what we might call a “Standard Narrative”: that philosophy begins in ancient Greece, usually starting with Thales; that it is continuous to the present day (the “Plato to NATO” picture); and that it is a largely self-standing European achievement with minimal influence from elsewhere. Some form of this picture is present in most influential histories of philosophy, from Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (1945) to more recent works like Anthony Gottlieb’s The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy (2000), Anthony Kenny’s New History of Western Philosophy (2010), James Garvey and Jeremy Stangroom’s The Story of Philosophy: a History of Western Thought (2012), and A.C. Grayling’s History of Philosophy (2019). In these histories, the Standard Narrative tends to be equated to the history of “Western Philosophy”, although it is sometimes used interchangeably with philosophy as such, for instance in Philip Stokes’ Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers (2016).

So far, so familiar. But there are real problems with the Standard Narrative. Most obviously, for a supposedly continuous tradition, we might have some questions about a glaring c. 600-year gap (about 450-1050 CE). The gap seems to suggest that there weren’t really any philosophers for over half a millennium – or, as Brian Magee presents it, “for a long time scarcely any new intellectual work of lasting importance was done.”

We might further wonder about a history of philosophy that tells a story of almost entirely men boasting an age-old European lineage. How have the Ancient Greeks become equated to Western Europeans when their main interactions were with the Eastern Mediterranean, and they themselves often hailed from the Levant and North Africa? What of the “canonical” thinkers in the Graeco-Roman world who were actually from contemporary Turkey (e.g., Thales), Egypt (e.g., Plotinus), and Algeria (e.g., Augustine)? And that’s just the start of it: what about philosophers prior to the Greeks, or altogether excluded from the ambit of Ancient Philosophy, who wrote in languages other than Greek or Latin, such as Sanskrit or classical Chinese?

The Standard Narrative is presented by historians of philosophy in Europe as having been passed down since antiquity. Yet, one of its most striking features is how recently it was fabricated. Even until the late 1700s, many European histories of philosophy offered a significantly different picture. For instance, Gilles Ménage in France published a History of Women Philosophers (1690), while in Germany, Johann Jakob Brucker’s 1742 Critical History of Philosophy contained hundreds of pages on philosophy prior to the Greeks and beyond Europe.

The Standard Narrative is presented by historians of philosophy in Europe as having been passed down since antiquity. Yet, one of its most striking features is how recently it was fabricated.

How, then, did we arrive at the Standard Narrative? The story of a Greek origin of philosophy became common in late-18th century Eurocentric historiography. It was used to cement the exclusion of non-European traditions from the mainstream canon of philosophy in the 19th century. Echoing Peter Park’s important 2013 book, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy, Yoko Arisaka recently emphasised that the broader Standard Narrative “is in fact a particular post-19th century construction arising out of the German tradition and establishing itself as the canonical Eurocentric history of philosophy”. It emerged from a long history of exclusion and marginalisation that is tied up with a host of extra-philosophical concerns, including European colonial expansion, slavery, pseudoscientific racial theorising, gendered social restructuring, academic disciplinary specialisation, religious sectarianism, and political expediency. Prominent European philosophers increasingly made a lot of noise about ancient Greece having inaugurated an unprecedented era of logic and reason, of logos, freed from superstition and murky mythos.

By the early 20th century, the Standard Narrative had largely assumed its contemporary form in specialist texts. Amongst Anglophones, it then became popularised through best-selling books like Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy (1926) – the most sold book in the United States that year, with some four million copies sold overall – and Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which has sold an estimated two million copies since first publication in 1945 and made the Standard Narrative widely known under the label of “Western Philosophy”. The Standard Narrative has since spread to become globally influential, especially in former European settler-colonies.

Contemporary, 21st-century histories of philosophy have an ambivalent relationship to the Standard Narrative. There is usually some recognition of its inadequacy and parochialism, especially amongst feminist historians of philosophy such as Mary Ellen Waithe and Eileen O’Neill. This is also true amongst figures working on less Eurocentric, more global histories (or histories “without any gaps”), such as Hajime Nakamura, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and Peter Adamson. However, many continue to replicate the Standard Narrative as the basis for a specifically “Western Philosophy”, and hence remain wedded to its basic premises (Greek origins, insularity, and continuity with contemporary Europe). In so doing, even contemporary histories of philosophy set up a false dichotomy between so-called “Western” and “non-Western” philosophy, trapped by the Eurocentric biases that birthed it, and are thus unable to offer a truly global history of philosophy.

***

If the future of the history of philosophy is global rather than Eurocentric, how do we get there? One lesson is from feminist critiques of male-dominated history of philosophy: simply adding [excluded group XX] and stirring is inadequate; genuine integration in the history of philosophy might mean reimagining what counts as philosophy. The same is likely to be true for rewriting the history of philosophy from a non-Eurocentric or global perspective. This will require much painstaking work, from historiographical challenges (that is, how to write such history) to exploring how philosophising itself has been conceptualised beyond Europe.

Meanwhile, however, there is a major hurdle to address: the idea of a “Western Philosophy” itself. The idea of “Western Philosophy” is largely taken for granted: few authors have attempted to define what the term picks out, mostly leaving it implicit and equivalent to the Standard Narrative (noteworthy exceptions include Ben Kies in the 1950s, and Lucy Allais and Christoph Schuringa more recently). When explanations are attempted, these turn out to be implausible, unstable or nonspecific to this supposed “tradition”: from a purely geographical descriptor, to supposed characteristics like “secular” or “scientific” thinking, “rational inquiry” or “concern with argumentation”, to simply a “legacy of the Greeks”.

If “Western Philosophy” is defined by a commitment to secular thinking, then most Greek philosophers probably wouldn’t qualify.

The idea of “Western Philosophy” cannot be purely geographical, since “west” is a relational term. Does it rule out “any sources east of Suez”, as Antony Flew put it in his Introduction to Western Philosophy (1971)? If so, this would exclude Australia and New Zealand while including indigenous thinkers from the Americas. Nor is “Western Philosophy” easily defined by putative characteristics. Take secular thinking: as Grayling puts it in his recent History of Philosophy, “this is a history of philosophy, not of theology and religion”. But if “Western Philosophy” is defined by a commitment to secular thinking, then most Greek philosophers probably wouldn’t qualify (interest in the nature of the divine and theological concepts underpinned many of their philosophical theories and scientific explanations), let alone Medieval Christian thinkers in the “Latin West”. In Europe, you would have to wait until about the 18th or even 19th century before finding widespread secular theorisations in metaphysics, ethics, and so on. On the other hand, you can find plenty of evidence of “secular thinking” amongst, say, ancient Indian Cārvāka/Lokāyata thinkers, but nobody sees Cārvāka as part of “Western Philosophy”.

What about the “legacy of the Greeks” idea? On this conception, philosophy in the Islamic world (as Peter Adamson frames it) would be a much stronger contender for being characteristic of “Western Philosophy” than anything happening across medieval Latin Christendom in Europe for, roughly, 600 years. As it happens, this is precisely the issue with the 600-year-gap in the continuity story. If there is any continuity in philosophising with Greek sources in or around Europe, the story predominantly runs through scholars east and south of Greece, in Byzantium and the Islamic world. In this period, translations of Greek texts proliferated in numerous languages, including Syriac, Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Armenian, Coptic, and Ge’ez.

The incoherence of the idea of “Western Philosophy” doesn’t stop at the 600-year gap: one exemplar is Ibn Rushd (Latinised as Averroes, 1126-1198), a rationalist scholar working between Al-Andalus – contemporary Spain, one of the westernmost regions of Europe, no less – and northwest Africa, especially contemporary Morocco. Ibn Rushd’s commentaries on Aristotle and distinctive philosophical views were hugely influential in Europe up to the 16th century. If we wanted to tell a story that was continuous, Greek-responding, and in a geographical “West” (of Europe), then Ibn Rushd would appear to be an essential part of such a narrative. However, he is rarely foregrounded in Histories of “Western Philosophy”, and sometimes excluded entirely. Often, he is presented in passing as having merely “preserved” and “transmitted” Aristotle.

“Western Philosophy” is presented as a purely European phenomenon (at most, perhaps, extending to North America and Australasia), hermetically sealed from outside influence.

This leads us to the final major problem with the idea of “Western Philosophy”: insularity. It is presented as a purely European phenomenon (at most, perhaps, extending to North America and Australasia), hermetically sealed from outside influence. Even some of the “global” histories of philosophy, such as Julian Baggini’s How the World Thinks (2018), recreate the narrative of hermetically sealed traditions in isolation from one another. Despite being written out of histories of “Western Philosophy”, however, there is increasing scholarly interest in the histories of exchange, connection, and conversation (or even outright theft of ideas) between canonically “Western” philosophers and the rest of the world. Some examples are well known, such as the influence of Indian and East Asian philosophy on Schopenhauer and Heidegger, while others have been the subject of more recent scholarly work, such as Leibniz’s interest in China.

This trend also holds within the ancient periodisation of “Western Philosophy”, which downplays the exchanges between ancient Greece and much of Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, and India, as well as between the Roman Empire and much of North Africa and Eurasia. In fact, some scholars have argued that quintessential periods in so-called “Western” history, such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, are in fact the product of European learning from Islamic and, later, indigenous American, African, Indian, and Chinese thinkers.

Historical entanglement is, perhaps, the key problem with the narrative of “Western Philosophy”: if philosophers in Europe have, throughout history, been in conversation with those outside of Europe, then it becomes difficult to justify sectioning off a “Western Philosophy” that is distinctive from all others (much less holding “Western Philosophy” as unique and equivalent to philosophy proper). This is precisely the argument raised by Ben Kies (1917-1979), a South African school teacher, anti-colonial activist, and public intellectual – and perhaps the first person to challenge the idea of a “Western Philosophy”. As Kies argued in 1953, the formation of this narrative is primarily “a matter of myth and political metaphysics”. Moreover, as Kies argues, the project of “Western Civilisation”, with an attendant “Western Philosophy”, only becomes widespread in post-World War II attempts to recuperate a racial category of “white civilisation”. If Kies is right, then “Western Philosophy” is fundamentally an ideological construction, tied to forms of political dominance. This would explain why none of its explanations can coherently track the cast of characters and intellectual movements associated with it.

***

The idea of a “Western Philosophy” is a recent invention: a political project that masks its origins in, to no small degree, racial and imperialist thinking. Indeed, the very idea itself is the productof a fabricated history that does not fit the facts, and inhibits our understanding of both philosophy and its history. As a result, we should abandon the idea of a “Western Philosophy” and re-examine the history of philosophy without its distorting effects. In doing so, we have much to learn from the past. Throughout history, thinkers around the world have engaged in philosophy that is “cross-cultural”, even globally entangled, but today their insights and methods are largely missing in historiographical and metaphilosophical debates. We suggest that a crucial step to rectify this situation is to draw these approaches into the history and historiography of philosophy, without reusing and reinforcing the Eurocentric category of “Western Philosophy”.

—

If you are interested in reading more about these issues, we recommend:

—

Josh Platzky Miller is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the Free State (South Africa), with a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Josh’s primary research interests are social movements, African and Latin American politics and political thought, social epistemology and the imagination, and the global history and historiography of philosophy.
(Not really on) Twitter: @jplatzkymiller

Lea Cantor is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at Worcester College, University of Oxford, and a British Society for the History of Philosophy Postgraduate Fellow (2022-2023). Lea’s primary research interests are in classical Chinese philosophy, early Greek philosophy, the reception of ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy in European philosophy, comparative methodology, and the global history and historiography of philosophy.
Website: leacantor.com
Twitter: @LeaMundi

Josh and Lea are organising a conference addressing these themes in April 2023.

From The Philosopher, vol. 111, no. 1 (“Where is Philosophy Going?“).
If you enjoyed reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation.
We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.

This article is shared from The Philosopher – Published since 1923.

The Philosopher is the journal of the PSE (Philosophical Society of England), a charitable organisation founded in 1913 to provide an alternative to the formal university-based discipline. You can find out more about the history of the PSE here.

Read the original article here.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum

Posted on by under Culture, Education, Ethics, History, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion
Remembrance plaque on the Marktplatz in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, reading: Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings. (Heinrich Heine, 1820) In memory of the book burning by the National Socialists on May 14, 1933

Remembrance plaque on the Marktplatz in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, reading: Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings. (Heinrich Heine, 1820) In memory of the book burning by the National Socialists on May 14, 1933

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“List of Prohibited Books”) was a list of publications deemed heretical or contrary to morality by the Sacred Congregation of the Index (a former Dicastery of the Roman Curia); Catholics were forbidden to read them.

There were attempts to ban heretical books before the sixteenth century, notably in the ninth-century Decretum Glasianum; the Index of Prohibited Books of 1560 banned thousands of book titles and blacklisted publications, including the works of Europe’s intellectual elites. The 20th and final edition of the Index appeared in 1948; the Index was formally abolished on 14 June 1966 by Pope Paul VI.

The Index condemned religious and secular texts alike, grading works by the degree to which they were seen to be repugnant to the church. The aim of the list was to protect church members from reading theologically, culturally, or politically disruptive books. Such books included works by astronomers, such as Johannes Kepler’s Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae (published in three volumes from 1618 to 1621), which was on the Index from 1621 to 1835; works by philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781); and editions and translations of the Bible that had not been approved. Editions of the Index also contained the rules of the Church relating to the reading, selling, and preemptive censorship of books.

The canon law of the Latin Church still recommends that works should be submitted to the judgment of the local ordinary if they concern sacred scripture, theology, canon law, or church history, religion or morals. The local ordinary consults someone whom he considers competent to give a judgment and, if that person gives the nihil obstat (“nothing forbids”), the local ordinary grants the imprimatur (“let it be printed”). Members of religious institutes require the imprimi potest (“it can be printed”) of their major superior to publish books on matters of religion or morals.

Some of the scientific theories contained in works in early editions of the Index have long been taught at Catholic universities. For example, the general prohibition of books advocating heliocentrism was removed from the Index in 1758, but two Franciscan mathematicians had published an edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) in 1742, with commentaries and a preface stating that the work assumed heliocentrism and could not be explained without it. A work of the Italian Catholic priest and philosopher Antonio Rosmini-Serbati was on the Index, but he was beatified in 2007. Some have argued that the developments since the abolition of the Index signify “the loss of relevance of the Index in the 21st century.”

J. Martínez de Bujanda’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, 1600–1966 lists the authors and writings in the successive editions of the Index, while Miguel Carvalho Abrantes’s Why Did The Inquisition Ban Certain Books?: A Case Study from Portugal tries to understand why certain books were forbidden based on a Portuguese edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum from 1581.

Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea. The burning of Arian books. (Illustration from a compendium of canon law, ca. 825, MS. in the Capitular Library, Vercelli)

Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea. The burning of Arian books. (Illustration from a compendium of canon law, ca. 825, MS. in the Capitular Library, Vercelli)

European Restrictions on the Right to Print

The historical context in which the Index appeared involved the early restrictions on printing in Europe. The refinement of moveable type and the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg circa 1440 changed the nature of book publishing, and the mechanism by which information could be disseminated to the public. Books, once rare and kept carefully in a small number of libraries, could be mass-produced and widely disseminated.

In the 16th century, both the churches and governments in most European countries attempted to regulate and control printing because it allowed for rapid and widespread circulation of ideas and information. The Protestant Reformation generated large quantities of polemical new writing by and within both the Catholic and Protestant camps, and religious subject-matter was typically the area most subject to control. While governments and church encouraged printing in many ways, which allowed the dissemination of Bibles and government information, works of dissent and criticism could also circulate rapidly. As a consequence, governments established controls over printers across Europe, requiring them to have official licenses to trade and produce books.

The early versions of the Index began to appear from 1529 to 1571. In the same time frame, in 1557 the English Crown aimed to stem the flow of dissent by chartering the Stationers’ Company. The right to print was restricted to the two universities (Oxford and Cambridge) and to the 21 existing printers in the city of London, which had between them 53 printing presses.

The French crown also tightly controlled printing, and the printer and writer Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake for atheism in 1546. The 1551 Edict of Châteaubriant comprehensively summarized censorship positions to date, and included provisions for unpacking and inspecting all books brought into France. The 1557 Edict of Compiègne applied the death penalty to heretics and resulted in the burning of a noblewoman at the stake. Printers were viewed as radical and rebellious, with 800 authors, printers and book dealers being incarcerated in the Bastille. At times, the prohibitions of church and state followed each other, e.g. René Descartes was placed on the Index in the 1660s and the French government prohibited the teaching of Cartesianism in schools in the 1670s.

The Copyright Act 1710 in Britain, and later copyright laws in France, eased this situation. Historian Eckhard Höffner claims that copyright laws and their restrictions acted as a barrier to progress in those countries for over a century, since British publishers could print valuable knowledge in limited quantities for the sake of profit. The German economy prospered in the same time frame since there were no restrictions.

Early Indices (1529–1571)

The first list of the kind was not published in Rome, but in Catholic Netherlands (1529); Venice (1543) and Paris (1551) under the terms of the Edict of Châteaubriant followed this example. By mid-century, in the tense atmosphere of wars of religion in Germany and France, both Protestant and Catholic authorities reasoned that only control of the press, including a catalog of prohibited works, coordinated by ecclesiastic and governmental authorities, could prevent the spread of heresy.

Paul F. Grendler (1975) discusses the religious and political climate in Venice from 1540 to 1605. There were many attempts to censor the Venetian press, which at that time was one of the largest concentrations of printers. Both church and government held to a belief in censorship, but the publishers continually pushed back on the efforts to ban books and shut down printing. More than once the index of banned books in Venice was suppressed or suspended because various people took a stand against it.

The first Roman Index was printed in 1557 under the direction of Pope Paul IV (1555–1559), but then withdrawn for unclear reasons. In 1559, a new index was finally published, banning the entire works of some 550 authors in addition to the individual proscribed titles: “The Pauline Index felt that the religious convictions of an author contaminated all his writing.” The work of the censors was considered too severe and met with much opposition even in Catholic intellectual circles; after the Council of Trent had authorized a revised list prepared under Pope Pius IV, the so-called Tridentine Index was promulgated in 1564; it remained the basis of all later lists until Pope Leo XIII, in 1897, published his Index Leonianus.

The blacklisting of some Protestant scholars even when writing on subjects a modern reader would consider outside the realm of dogma meant that, unless they obtained a dispensation, obedient Catholic thinkers were denied access to works including: botanist Conrad Gesner’s Historiae animalium; the botanical works of Otto Brunfels; those of the medical scholar Janus Cornarius; to Christoph Hegendorff or Johann Oldendorp on the theory of law; Protestant geographers and cosmographers like Jacob Ziegler or Sebastian Münster; as well as anything by Protestant theologians like Martin Luther, John Calvin or Philipp Melanchthon. Among the inclusions was the Libri Carolini, a theological work from the 9th-century court of Charlemagne, which was published in 1549 by Bishop Jean du Tillet and which had already been on two other lists of prohibited books before being inserted into the Tridentine Index.

Killing the Scholars and Burning the Books, anonymous 18th century Chinese painted album leaf; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Killing the Scholars and Burning the Books, anonymous 18th century Chinese painted album leaf; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Sacred Congregation of the Index (1571–1917)

In 1571, a special congregation was created, the Sacred Congregation of the Index, which had the specific task to investigate those writings that were denounced in Rome as being not exempt of errors, to update the list of Pope Pius IV regularly and also to make lists of required corrections in case a writing was not to be condemned absolutely but only in need of correction; it was then listed with a mitigating clause (e.g., donec corrigatur (forbidden until corrected) or donec expurgetur (forbidden until purged)).

Several times a year, the congregation held meetings. During the meetings, they reviewed various works and documented those discussions. In between the meetings was when the works to be discussed were thoroughly examined, and each work was scrutinized by two people. At the meetings, they collectively decided whether or not the works should be included in the Index. Ultimately, the pope was the one who had to approve of works being added or removed from the Index. It was the documentation from the meetings of the congregation that aided the pope in making his decision.

This sometimes resulted in very long lists of corrections, published in the Index Expurgatorius, which was cited by Thomas James in 1627 as “an invaluable reference work to be used by the curators of the Bodleian Library when listing those works particularly worthy of collecting”. Prohibitions made by other congregations (mostly the Holy Office) were simply passed on to the Congregation of the Index, where the final decrees were drafted and made public, after approval of the Pope (who always had the possibility to condemn an author personally—there are only a few examples of such condemnation, including those of Lamennais and Hermes).

An update to the Index was made by Pope Leo XIII, in the 1897 apostolic constitution Officiorum ac Munerum, known as the “Index Leonianus”. Subsequent editions of the Index were more sophisticated; they graded authors according to their supposed degree of toxicity, and they marked specific passages for expurgation rather than condemning entire books.

The Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church later became the Holy Office, and since 1965 has been called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Congregation of the Index was merged with the Holy Office in 1917, by the Motu Proprio “Alloquentes Proxime” of Pope Benedict XV; the rules on the reading of books were again re-elaborated in the new Codex Iuris Canonici. From 1917 onward, the Holy Office (again) took care of the Index.

Holy Office (1917–1966)

While individual books continued to be forbidden, the last edition of the Index to be published appeared in 1948. This 20th edition contained 4,000 titles censored for various reasons: heresy, moral deficiency, sexual explicitness, and so on. That some atheists, such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, were not included was due to the general (Tridentine) rule that heretical works (i.e., works that contradict Catholic dogma) are ipso facto forbidden. Some important works are absent simply because nobody bothered to denounce them. Many actions of the congregations were of a definite political content. Among the significant listed works of the period was the Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century for scorning and rejecting “all dogmas of the Catholic Church, indeed the very fundamentals of the Christian religion”.

Abolition (1966)

On 7 December 1965, Pope Paul VI issued the Motu Proprio Integrae servandae that reorganized the Holy Office as the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Index was not listed as being a part of the newly constituted congregation’s competence, leading to questioning whether it still was. This question was put to Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, pro-prefect of the congregation, who responded in the negative. The Cardinal also indicated in his response that there was going to be a change in the Index soon.

A June 1966 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith notification announced that, while the Index maintained its moral force, in that it taught Christians to beware, as required by the natural law itself, of those writings that could endanger faith and morality, it no longer had the force of ecclesiastical positive law with the associated penalties.

Pedro Berruguete: Saint Dominic and the Albigensians

Pedro Berruguete: Saint Dominic and the Albigensians. A dispute between Saint Dominic and the Cathars in which the books of both were thrown on a fire and St. Dominic’s books were miraculously preserved from the flames.

Censorship and Enforcement

The Index was not simply a reactive work. Roman Catholic authors had the opportunity to defend their writings and could prepare a new edition with necessary corrections or deletions, either to avoid or to limit a ban. Pre-publication censorship was encouraged.

The Index was enforceable within the Papal States, but elsewhere only if adopted by the civil powers, as happened in several Italian states. Other areas adopted their own lists of forbidden books. In the Holy Roman Empire book censorship, which preceded publication of the Index, came under control of the Jesuits at the end of the 16th century, but had little effect, since the German princes within the empire set up their own systems. In France it was French officials who decided what books were banned and the Church’s Index was not recognized. Spain had its own Index Librorum Prohibitorum et Expurgatorum, which corresponded largely to the Church’s, but also included a list of books that were allowed once the forbidden part (sometimes a single sentence) was removed or “expurgated”.

Continued Moral Obligation

On 14 June 1966, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith responded to inquiries it had received regarding the continued moral obligation concerning books that had been listed in the Index. The response spoke of the books as examples of books dangerous to faith and morals, all of which, not just those once included in the Index, should be avoided regardless of the absence of any written law against them. The Index, it said, retains its moral force “inasmuch as” (quatenus) it teaches the conscience of Christians to beware, as required by the natural law itself, of writings that can endanger faith and morals, but it (the Index of Forbidden Books) no longer has the force of ecclesiastical law with the associated censures.

The congregation thus placed on the conscience of the individual Christian the responsibility to avoid all writings dangerous to faith and morals, while at the same time abolishing the previously existing ecclesiastical law and the relative censures, without thereby declaring that the books that had once been listed in the various editions of the Index of Prohibited Books had become free of error and danger.

In a letter of 31 January 1985 to Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, regarding the book The Poem of the Man-God, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (then Prefect of the Congregation, who later became Pope Benedict XVI), referred to the 1966 notification of the Congregation as follows: “After the dissolution of the Index, when some people thought the printing and distribution of the work was permitted, people were reminded again in L’Osservatore Romano (15 June 1966) that, as was published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis (1966), the Index retains its moral force despite its dissolution. A decision against distributing and recommending a work, which has not been condemned lightly, may be reversed, but only after profound changes that neutralize the harm which such a publication could bring forth among the ordinary faithful.”

Changing Judgments

The content of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum saw deletions as well as additions over the centuries. Writings by Antonio Rosmini-Serbati were placed on the Index in 1849 but were removed by 1855, and Pope John Paul II mentioned Rosmini’s work as a significant example of “a process of philosophical enquiry which was enriched by engaging the data of faith”. The 1758 edition of the Index removed the general prohibition of works advocating heliocentrism as a fact rather than a hypothesis.

Listed Works and Authors

Noteworthy figures on the Index include Simone de Beauvoir, Nicolas Malebranche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Nikos Kazantzakis, Emanuel Swedenborg, Baruch Spinoza, Desiderius Erasmus, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, John Milton, John Locke, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, and Hugo Grotius. The first woman to be placed on the list was Magdalena Haymairus in 1569, who was listed for her children’s book Die sontegliche Episteln über das gantze Jar in gesangsweis gestellt (Sunday Epistles on the whole Year, put into hymns). Other women include Anne Askew, Olympia Fulvia Morata, Ursula of Munsterberg (1491–1534), Veronica Franco, and Paola Antonia Negri (1508–1555). Contrary to a popular misconception, Charles Darwin’s works were never included.

In many cases, an author’s opera omnia (complete works) were forbidden. However, the Index stated that the prohibition of someone’s opera omnia did not preclude works that were not concerned with religion and were not forbidden by the general rules of the Index. This explanation was omitted in the 1929 edition, which was officially interpreted in 1940 as meaning that opera omnia covered all the author’s works without exception.

Cardinal Ottaviani stated in April 1966 that there was too much contemporary literature, and the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith could not keep up with it.

A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of "un-German" books on the Opernplatz in Berlin. In 1933, Nazis burned works of Jewish authors, and other works considered "un-German", at the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin.

A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of “un-German” books on the Opernplatz in Berlin. In 1933, Nazis burned works of Jewish authors, and other works considered “un-German”, at the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin.

Wikipedia – Index Librorum Prohibitorum

List of Book-Burning Incidents

Book Burning

Internet Archive: Digital Library

Open Library

Project Gutenberg

Lex Luthor: Man of Steel

Posted on by under Art, Ethics, Nietzsche, Philosophy, Psychology

© DC Comics | Cover Art: Lee Bermejo | Writer: Brian Azzarello

Lex Luthor: Man of Steel (later collected as simply Luthor) is a five-issue monthly American comic book limited series written by Brian Azzarello and illustrated by Lee Bermejo, which features Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor as the protagonist.

The story explores Luthor’s motivations behind being a constant foe to the Man of Steel inside a city that has largely embraced him. Luthor views Superman as a demigod who looks down on humanity and believes that in order to “save” the human race from extraterrestrial threats, Superman must be stopped.

At the onset of the series, the story seems to be narrated from Luthor’s point of view, one depicting himself as someone much different than the ruthless, corrupt killer that readers are accustomed to. He displays a charitable nature by giving a loyal employee an invitation to the grand opening of Luthor’s own “Science Spire”, a new Metropolis attraction under construction. By contrast, many of the “heroes” Luthor encounters during his story (Superman, Batman) are depicted as duplicitous and unworthy of trust. Luthor watches footage of Superman engaging criminals with heat vision and wonders to himself why the public invests so much trust in an alien simply because he looks human. Meanwhile, in Chechnya, Mr. Elias Orr, one of Lex’s operatives, leads a group of mercenaries in a raid to free a Russian scientist named Sasha who is to assist Lex Luthor in a new project.

While holding a meeting, it is brought to Luthor’s attention that the union workers building the Science Spire want a higher wage. Luthor tosses his business plan and decides to build and unveil the attraction as a non-profit project, which undercuts the union’s demands. Upon leaving the boardroom full of stunned executives, Luthor arrives at his lab where he observes Hope, a woman floating inside a gigantic vat apparently asleep. Luthor ask Sasha if he can speak with Hope and Sasha opens the communication relay systems barrier which causes Hope’s eyes to open. Luthor then engages in a conversation with Hope to see how in turn she responds in kind. Hope asks some questions about how Luthor thinks and feels about her. Luthor tells Hope how important she is to him and that how he promised that Sasha would make her better. After this conversation has taken place Sasha informs Luthor that although it is good that Hope responds with questions, what is truly missing are synapses and what is inside. Luthor wishes for a past for Hope but that there is nothing for her outside her development chamber and that what he wants requires more. Luthor then tells Sasha he will get it for him. Sometime later, Orr beats and threatens the union leader into complying with his demands while Lex flies to Gotham City to try to arrange a deal with Bruce Wayne (Batman). Luthor lets Bruce know that he heard of the breakthrough made at Thomas Labs, one of Bruce’s research facilities at Wayne Enterprises, on the Alzheimer’s front and that he thinks that it could be beneficial on another. Lex also tells Bruce of the potential threat that Superman poses due to his vast array of powers and overall strength. As a gift, Lex presents Bruce with kryptonite and asks him to consider how the public only has Superman’s word that he will not turn on them.

That night, Batman is looking at the kryptonite when Superman arrives in Gotham and uses his breath to blow the kryptonite from Batman’s hand before confronting Batman in a brief but intense fight. Superman eventually bests Batman. Superman goes to finish the confrontation with a knockout punch to Batman’s face before stopping, x-ray visioning Batman’s utility belt, picking out Batman’s own lead-lined piece of Kryptonite and crushing in his fist. Later that evening Bruce calls Lex and tells him he will give the research to Luthor.

At the opening for the Science Spire, Lex announces the arrival of a new superhero by introducing Hope to the public, the result of the Sasha’s work and Wayne’s medicinal breakthroughs. Hope displays abilities of super-strength and flight, essentially replacing Superman and becoming a corporate-sponsored hero who soon takes on duties normally reserved for Superman. One month later and Hope has gained a loyal following. At Lexcorp, Lex tells Hope how proud he is of her and that she is more than that he had ever dreamed she would be, much to the chagrin of his secretary Mona.

The next day at Lexcorp, Hope’s Q-rating has gone up through the roof. Luthor watches Hope on TV as she is being given an interview. She tells the reporter named Reggie that her favorite place to eat is at an eatery called The Pineapple King as her father took her there once when she was five and she was hooked for life. It is now realized that Luthor has used Bruce’s research on his Alzheimer’s aiding technology so as to give Hope these fake memories as her past like Sasha asked for earlier. Reggie then makes a joke about hoping that she will not be taking the Justice League there when they come recruiting her or there will be lines wrapped right down around the block. Hope informs Reggie that she has no intention of joining The Justice League as she is a born-and-raised Metropolitan girl. She states that there are many heroes in the country and that they are all blessed to have Justice League as those heroes, but her heart belongs to the city of Metropolis as it is her home and it is their home.

Orr approaches Winslow Schott (Toyman) with an offer on behalf of Lex. Hope and Lex are in bed together when a news bulletin breaks that Schott is wanted for a bombing at the Metropolis Daycare Center (in which over seventy adults and children, including, coincidentally, Sasha and his family are killed). Orr realizes that he has been double-crossed when Schott mentions a different kind of explosive being delivered to him from someone other than Orr’s men. Lex urges Hope to bring the criminal to justice.

Inside his warehouse, Toyman is confronted by Superman, who is immediately met by Toyman’s soldiers as Hope grabs Schott and soars into the sky with him. From a separate location, Lex activates a control and causes her to drop Toyman, a development that pleases many of those watching on television. At the last moment, Superman flies up and catches Toyman.

Hope wonders why she involuntarily let Toyman go just as Superman confronts her for attempted murder. Hope attacks Superman and flies away towards the Science Spire. During a battle with Superman, Hope is blasted by his eye lasers, revealing to both of them that Hope is actually an android. Lex then remotely detonates Hope, causing the Science Spire to explode. This destroys all evidence that she was an android and makes it appear as though Superman killed her.

Superman flies to Lex’s office, where he is waiting with his back turned. Lex says that not one person in Metropolis wanted to see Schott live after the destruction he caused and that, even with his many visions, Superman can’t see Luthor’s soul. Lex is infuriated by Superman’s silent judgment and demands he say something. Superman simply says, “You’re wrong…I can see your soul”. Taken aback, Lex pounds the window in defiance then tries to regain composure, saying that, if Superman could, he would see a man who sacrificed everything, including hope, for “A world without a Superman” and that if just one person out there saw Superman saving a condemned man and “realizes what you are” then his actions were worthwhile. Luthor turns away from the window, asking him to “Please, just fly away”. Superman complies, soaring off with a sad expression, leaving Lex with the thought “I am a man. I hope”.

DC Comics Page

Art by: Lee Bermejo | Jason Martin | Karl Story | Mick Gray

Colorist: Lee Bermejo

Written by: Brian Azzarello

The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth

Posted on by under Ethics, History, Philosophy, Religion

In a letter to his daughter, written in 1803, Thomas Jefferson said: “A promise made to a friend some years ago, but executed only lately, has placed my religious creed on paper. I have thought it just that my family, by possessing this, should be enabled to estimate the libels published against me on this, as on every other possible subject.” The “religious creed” to which he referred was a comparison of the doctrines of Jesus with those of others, prepared in fulfillment of a promise made to Dr. Benjamin Rush. This paper, with the letter to Dr. Rush which accompanied it, is a fit introduction to the “Jefferson Bible.”

Washington, April 21, 1803:

Dear Sir: In some of the delightful conversations with you, in the evenings of 1798-99, and which served as an anodyne to the afflictions of the crisis through which our country was then laboring, the Christian religion was sometimes our topic; and I then promised you that one day or other, I would give you my views of it. They are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that Anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.

At the short intervals since these conversations, when I could justifiably abstract my mind from public affairs, this subject has been under my contemplation; but the more I considered it, the more it expanded beyond the measure of either my time or information. In the moment of my late departure from Monticello, I received from Dr. Priestly his little treatise of “Socrates and Jesus Compared.” This being a section of the general view I had taken of the field, it became a subject of reflection while on the road, and unoccupied otherwise. The result was to arrange in my mind a syllabus, or outline, of such an estimate of the comparative merits of Christianity, as I wished to see executed by some one of more leisure and information for the task than myself. This I now send you, as the only discharge of my promise I can probably ever execute. And in confiding it to you, I know it will not be exposed to the malignant perversions of those who make every word from me a text for new misrepresentations and calumnies.

I am moreover averse to the communication of my religious tenets to the public; because it would countenance the presumption of those who have endeavored to draw them before that tribunal, and to seduce public opinion to erect itself into that inquisition over the rights of conscience which the laws have so justly proscribed. It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself to resist invasions of it in the case of others, or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own. It behooves him, too, in his own case, to give no example of concession, betraying the right of independent opinion by answering questions of faith, which the laws have left between God and himself.

Accept my affectionate salutations.

Syllabus of an Estimate of the Doctrines of Jesus, Compared with Those of Others

In a comparative view of the ethics of the enlightened nations of antiquity, of the Jews, and of Jesus, no notice should be taken of the corruptions of reason among the ancients, to wit, the idolatry and superstition of the vulgar, nor of the corruptions of Christianity by the learned among its professors. Let a just view be taken of the moral principles inculcated by the most esteemed of the sects of ancient philosophy, or of their individuals; particularly Pythagoras, Socrates, Epicurus, Cicero, Epictetus, Seneca, Antoninus.

I. PHILOSOPHERS

  1. Their precepts related chiefly to ourselves, and the government of those passions which, unrestrained, would disturb our tranquility of mind. In this branch of philosophy they were really great.
  2. In developing our duties to others, they were short and defective. They embraced indeed the circles of kindred and friends, and inculcated patriotism, or the love of country in the aggregate, as a primary obligation: towards our neighbors and countrymen they taught justice, but scarcely viewed them as within the circle of benevolence. Still less have they inculcated peace, charity, and love to our fellow-men, or embraced with benevolence the whole family of mankind.

II. JEWS

  1. Their system was Deism, that is, the belief in one only God; but their ideas of him and of his attributes were degrading and injurious.
  2. Their ethics were not only imperfect, but often irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason and morality, as they respect intercourse with those around us; and repulsive and anti-social as respecting other nations. They needed reformation, therefore, in an eminent degree.

III. JESUS

In this state of things among the Jews, Jesus appeared. His parentage was obscure; his condition poor; his education null; his natural endowments great; his life correct and innocent. He was meek, benevolent, patient, firm, disinterested, and of the sublimest eloquence. The disadvantages under which his doctrines appear are remarkable.

  1. Like Socrates and Epictetus, he wrote nothing himself.
  2. But he had not, like them, a Xenophon or an Arrian to write for him. I name not Plato, who only used the name of Socrates to cover the whimsies of his own brain. On the contrary, all the learned of his country, entrenched in its power and riches, were opposed to him, lest his labors should undermine their advantages; and the committing to writing of his life and doctrines fell on unlettered and ignorant men; who wrote, too, from memory, and not till long after the transactions had passed.
  3. According to the ordinary fate of those who attempt to enlighten and reform mankind, he fell an early victim to the jealousy and combination of the altar and the throne, at about 33 years of age, his reason having not yet attained the maximum of its energy, nor the course of his preaching, which was but of three years at most, presented occasions for developing a complete system of morals.
  4. Hence the doctrines which he really delivered were defective, as a whole, and fragments only of what he did deliver have come to us mutilated, misstated, and often unintelligible.
  5. They have been still more disfigured by the corruptions of schismatizing followers, who have found an interest in sophisticating and perverting the simple doctrines he taught, by engrafting on them the mysticisms of a Grecian Sophist (Plato), frittering them into subtilties and obscuring them with jargon, until they have caused good men to reject the whole in disgust, and to view Jesus himself as an impostor.

Notwithstanding these disadvantages, a system of morals is presented to us which, if filled up in the true style and spirit of the rich fragments he left us, would be the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man. The question of his being a member of the Godhead, or in direct communication with it, claimed for him by some of his followers, and denied by others, is foreign to the present view, which is merely an estimate of the intrinsic merits of his doctrines.

  1. He corrected the Deism of the Jews, confirming them in their belief of one only god, and giving them juster notions of his attributes and government.
  2. His moral doctrines, relating to kindred and friends, were more pure and perfect than those of the most correct of the philosophers, and greatly more so than those of the Jews; and they went far beyond both in inculcating universal philanthropy, not only to kindred and friends, to neighbors and countrymen, but to all mankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants and common aids. A development of this head will evince the peculiar superiority of the system of Jesus over all others.
  3. The precepts of philosophy and of the Hebrew code laid hold of action only. He pushed his scrutinies into the heart of man; erected his tribunal in the region of his thought, and purified the waters at the fountain head.
  4. He taught emphatically the doctrine of a future state, which was either doubted or disbelieved by the Jews; and wielded it with efficacy as an important incentive, supplementary to the other motives to moral conduct.

I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials (The Gospels) which I call the Philosophy of Jesus. It is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen. It is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the Gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were he to return on earth, would not recognize one feature.

– Jefferson to Mr. Charles Thompson

“Say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.”

– Thomas Jefferson

Full Text of the Jefferson Bible (PDF)

The Meaning of Ascetic Ideals

Posted on by under Nietzsche, Philosophy, Religion

Such a self-contradiction, as apparently manifests itself among the ascetics, “Life turned against Life,” is—so much is absolutely obvious—from the physiological and not now from the psychological standpoint, simply nonsense. It can only be an apparent contradiction; it must be a kind of provisional expression, an explanation, a formula, an adjustment, a psychological misunderstanding of something, whose real nature could not be understood for a long time, and whose real essence could not be described; a mere word jammed into an old gap of human knowledge. To put briefly the facts against its being real: the ascetic ideal springs from the prophylactic and self-preservative instincts which mark a decadent life, which seeks by every means in its power to maintain its position and fight for its existence; it points to a partial physiological depression and exhaustion, against which the most profound and intact life-instincts fight ceaselessly with new weapons and discoveries. The ascetic ideal is such a weapon: its position is consequently exactly the reverse of that which the worshippers of the ideal imagine—life struggles in it and through it with death and against death; the ascetic ideal is a dodge for the preservation of life.

An important fact is brought out in the extent to which, as history teaches, this ideal could rule and exercise power over man, especially in all those places where the civilization and taming of man was completed: that fact is, the diseased state of man up to the present, at any rate, of the man who has been tamed, the physiological struggle of man with death (more precisely, with the disgust with life, with exhaustion, with the wish for the “end”). The ascetic priest is the incarnate wish for an existence of another kind, an existence on another plane,—he is, in fact, the highest point of this wish, its official ecstasy and passion: but it is the very power of this wish which is the fetter that binds him here; it is just that which makes him into a tool that must labor to create more favorable conditions for earthly existence, for existence on the human plane—it is with this very power that he keeps the whole herd of failures, distortions, abortions, unfortunates, sufferers from themselves of every kind, fast to existence, while he as the herdsman goes instinctively on in front. You understand me already: this ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of life, this denier—he actually belongs to the really great conservative and affirmative forces of life.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, Third Essay, Section 13

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?

Posted on by under Philosophy, Psychology, Shared
dance-with-death

Detail from the Dance with Death by Johann Rudolf Feyerabend. Courtesy the Basel Historical Museum, Switzerland/Wikipedia

Warren Ward | Aeon Ideas

‘Despite all our medical advances,’ my friend Jason used to quip, ‘the mortality rate has remained constant – one per person.’

Jason and I studied medicine together back in the 1980s. Along with everyone else in our course, we spent six long years memorising everything that could go wrong with the human body. We diligently worked our way through a textbook called Pathologic Basis of Disease that described, in detail, every single ailment that could befall a human being. It’s no wonder medical students become hypochondriacal, attributing sinister causes to any lump, bump or rash they find on their own person.

Jason’s oft-repeated observation reminded me that death (and disease) are unavoidable aspects of life. It sometimes seems, though, that we’ve developed a delusional denial of this in the West. We pour billions into prolonging life with increasingly expensive medical and surgical interventions, most of them employed in our final, decrepit years. From a big-picture perspective, this seems a futile waste of our precious health-dollars.

Don’t get me wrong. If I get struck down with cancer, heart disease or any of the myriad life-threatening ailments I learnt about in medicine, I want all the futile and expensive treatments I can get my hands on. I value my life. In fact, like most humans, I value staying alive above pretty much everything else. But also, like most, I tend to not really value my life unless I’m faced with the imminent possibility of it being taken away from me.

Another old friend of mine, Ross, was studying philosophy while I studied medicine. At the time, he wrote an essay called ‘Death the Teacher’ that had a profound effect on me. It argued that the best thing we could do to appreciate life was to keep the inevitability of our death always at the forefront of our minds.

When the Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware interviewed scores of people in the last 12 weeks of their lives, she asked them their greatest regrets. The most frequent, published in her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying (2011), were:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me;
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard;
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings;
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends; and
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

The relationship between death-awareness and leading a fulfilling life was a central concern of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose work inspired Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist thinkers. Heidegger lamented that too many people wasted their lives running with the ‘herd’ rather than being true to themselves. But Heidegger actually struggled to live up to his own ideals; in 1933, he joined the Nazi Party, hoping it would advance his career.

Despite his shortcomings as a man, Heidegger’s ideas would go on to influence a wide range of philosophers, artists, theologians and other thinkers. Heidegger believed that Aristotle’s notion of Being – which had run as a thread through Western thinking for more than 2,000 years, and been instrumental in the development of scientific thinking – was flawed at a most fundamental level. Whereas Aristotle saw all of existence, including human beings, as things we could classify and analyse to increase our understanding of the world, in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger argued that, before we start classifying Being, we should first ask the question: ‘Who or what is doing all this questioning?’

Heidegger pointed out that we who are asking questions about Being are qualitatively different to the rest of existence: the rocks, oceans, trees, birds and insects that we are asking about. He invented a special word for this Being that asks, looks and cares. He called it Dasein, which loosely translates as ‘being there’. He coined the term Dasein because he believed that we had become immune to words such as ‘person’, ‘human’ and ‘human being’, losing our sense of wonder about our own consciousness.

Heidegger’s philosophy remains attractive to many today who see how science struggles to explain the experience of being a moral, caring person aware that his precious, mysterious, beautiful life will, one day, come to an end. According to Heidegger, this awareness of our own inevitable demise makes us, unlike the rocks and trees, hunger to make our life worthwhile, to give it meaning, purpose and value.

While Western medical science, which is based on Aristotelian thinking, sees the human body as a material thing that can be understood by examining it and breaking it down to its constituent parts like any other piece of matter, Heidegger’s ontology puts human experience at the centre of our understanding of the world.

Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with melanoma. As a doctor, I knew how aggressive and rapidly fatal this cancer could be. Fortunately for me, the surgery seemed to achieve a cure (touch wood). But I was also fortunate in another sense. I became aware, in a way I never had before, that I was going to die – if not from melanoma, then from something else, eventually. I have been much happier since then. For me, this realisation, this acceptance, this awareness that I am going to die is at least as important to my wellbeing as all the advances of medicine, because it reminds me to live my life to the full every day. I don’t want to experience the regret that Ware heard about more than any other, of not living ‘a life true to myself’.

Most Eastern philosophical traditions appreciate the importance of death-awareness for a well-lived life. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example, is a central text of Tibetan culture. The Tibetans spend a lot of time living with death, if that isn’t an oxymoron.

The East’s greatest philosopher, Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, realised the importance of keeping the end in sight. He saw desire as the cause of all suffering, and counselled us not to get too attached to worldly pleasures but, rather, to focus on more important things such as loving others, developing equanimity of mind, and staying in the present.

The last thing the Buddha said to his followers was: ‘Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!’ As a doctor, I am reminded every day of the fragility of the human body, how closely mortality lurks just around the corner. As a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, however, I am also reminded how empty life can be if we have no sense of meaning or purpose. An awareness of our mortality, of our precious finitude, can, paradoxically, move us to seek – and, if necessary, create – the meaning that we so desperately crave.Aeon counter – do not remove

Warren Ward is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Queensland. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Lovers of Philosophy (2021).

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the original article here.

Would you rather have a fish or know how to fish?

Posted on by under Ethics, Philosophy, Shared
fishing-lure

Public domain

Jonny Robinson | Aeon Ideas

Imagine the following. You are living a life with enough money and health and time so as to allow an hour or two of careless relaxation, sitting on the sofa at the end of the day in front of a large television, half-heartedly watching a documentary about solar energy with a glass of wine and scrolling through your phone. You happen to hear a fact about climate change, something to do with recent emission figures. Now, on that same night, a friend who is struggling to meet her financial commitments has just arrived at her second job and misses out on the documentary (and the relaxation). Later in the week, when the two of you meet for a drink and your friend is ignorant of recent emission figures, what kind of intellectual or moral superiority is really justified on your part?

This example is designed to show that knowledge of the truth might very well have nothing to do with our own efforts or character. Many are born into severe poverty with a slim chance at a good education, and others grow up in religious or social communities that prohibit certain lines of enquiry. Others still face restrictions because of language, transport, money, sickness, technology, bad luck and so on. The truth, for various reasons, is much harder to access at these times. At the opposite end of the scale, some are effectively handed the truth about some matter as if it were a mint on their pillow, pleasantly materialising and not a big deal. Pride in this mere knowledge of the truth ignores the way in which some people come to possess it without any care or effort, and the way that others strive relentlessly against the odds for it and still miss out. The phrase ‘We know the truth [and, perhaps, you don’t]’, weaponised and presented without any qualifying modesty, fails to recognise the extraordinary privileges so often involved in that very acquisition, drawing an exclusionary line that overlooks almost everything else of significance.

A good attitude towards knowledge shines through various character traits that put us in a healthy relationship with it. Philosophers call these traits epistemic virtues. Instead of praising those people who happen to possess some piece of knowledge, we ought to praise those who have the right attitude towards it, since only this benchmark also includes those who strive for the truth and miss out on it for reasons not entirely under their control. Consider traits such as intellectual humility (a willingness to be wrong), intellectual courage (to pursue truths that make us uncomfortable), open-mindedness (to contemplate all sides of the argument, limiting preconceptions), and curiosity (to be continually seeking). You can see that the person ready to correct herself, courageous in her pursuit of the truth, open-minded in her deliberation, and driven by a deep curiosity has a better relationship to truth even where she occasionally fails to obtain it than does the indifferent person who is occasionally handed the truth on a silver platter.

In a sense, it’s difficult to answer to the disjunction ‘Is it better to know, or to seek to know?’ because there is not quite enough information in it. In respect to knowing (the first half of the disjunction), we also want to hear how that knowledge came about. That is, was the knowledge acquired despite the disinterest and laziness of the possessor, or was it acquired through diligent seeking? If the latter, then it is better to know since the second half of the disjunction is also accommodated in the first: the possession of knowledge and the attitude of seeking it. We can build on the idea with another example.

Would you rather have a fish or know how to fish? Again, we need some more information. If having the fish is the result of knowing how to fish, then once more the two halves of the disjunction are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and this combination is the ideal. But, if the having is the result of waiting around for someone to give you a fish, it would be better to know how to do it yourself. For where the waiting agent hopes for luck or charity, the agent who knows how to fish can return to the river each morning and each evening, throwing her line into the water over and over until she is satisfied with the catch.

And so it is with knowledge. Yes, it’s better to know, but only where this implies an accompanying attitude. If, instead, the possession of knowledge relies primarily upon the sporadic pillars of luck or privilege (as it so often does), one’s position is uncertain and in danger of an unfounded pride (not to mention pride’s own concomitant complications). Split into two discrete categories, then, we should prefer seeking to knowing. As with the agent who knows how to fish, the one who seeks knowledge can go out into the world, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding, but in any case able to continue until she is satisfied with her catch, a knowledge attained. And then, the next day, she might return to the river and do it all again.

A person will eventually come up against the world, logically, morally, socially, even physically. Some collisions will be barely noticeable, others will be catastrophic. The consistent posture of seeking the truth gives us the best shot at seeing clearly, and that is what we should praise and value.Aeon counter – do not remove

Jonny Robinson is a tutor and casual lecturer in the department of philosophy at Macquarie University. He lives in Sydney.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. View the original article here.

We all know that we will die, so why do we struggle to believe it?

Posted on by under Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Psychology, Shared
tolstoy

Tolstoy photographed by Karl Bulla in 1902. Courtesy Wikipedia

James Baillie | Aeon Ideas

In the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Leo Tolstoy presents a man who is shocked by suddenly realising that his death is inevitable. While we can easily appreciate that the diagnosis of a terminal illness came as an unpleasant surprise, how could he only then discover the fact of his mortality? But that is Ivan’s situation. Not only is it news to him, but he can’t fully take it in:

The syllogism he had learned from Kiesewetter’s logic – ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal’ – had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but by no means to himself. That man Caius represented man in the abstract, and so the reasoning was perfectly sound; but he was not Caius, not an abstract man; he had always been a creature quite, quite distinct from all the others.

Tolstoy’s story would not be the masterpiece that it is were it describing an anomaly, a psychological quirk of a fictional character with no analogue in real life. The book’s power resides in its evocative depiction of a mysterious experience that gets to the heart of what it is to be human.

In 1984, on the eve of my 27th birthday, I shared in Ivan’s realisation: that one day I will cease to exist. That was my first and most intense episode of what I call ‘existential shock’. It was by far the most disorienting event of my life, like nothing I’d ever experienced.

While you need to have undergone existential shock to really know what it is like, the experience need not yield any understanding of what you have gone through, either at the time or later. The acute anxiety induced by the state renders you incapable of thinking clearly. And once the state has passed, it is almost impossible to remember in any detail. Getting back in touch with existential shock is like trying to reconstruct a barely remembered dream, except that the struggle is to recall a time when one was unusually awake.

While granting the strangeness of existential shock, the revealed content itself is not peculiar. Indeed, it is undeniable. That’s what makes the phenomenon so puzzling. I learned that I would die? Obviously, I already knew that, so how could it come as a revelation? It is too simple to merely say that I had long known that I would die, because there is also a sense in which I didn’t – and still don’t – really believe it. These conflicting attitudes emerge from the two most basic ways of thinking about oneself, that I will call the outside and inside views.

Let’s consider the way in which my inevitable death is old news. It stems from the uniquely human capacity to disengage from our actions and commitments, so that each of us can consider him or herself as an inhabitant of the mind-independent world, one human being among billions. When I regard myself ‘from the outside’ in this manner, I have no trouble in affirming that I will die. I understand that I exist because of innumerable contingencies, and that the world will go on without me just as it did before my coming to be. These reflections do not disturb me. My equanimity is due to the fact that, even though I am reflecting on my inevitable annihilation, it is almost as if I am thinking about someone else. That is, the outside view places a cognitive distance between myself as the thinker of these thoughts and myself as their subject.

The other basic way of conceiving of ourselves consists of how our lives feel ‘from the inside’ as we go about our everyday activities. One important aspect of the inside view has recently been discussed by Mark Johnston in Surviving Death (2010), namely the perspectival nature of perceptual experience. The world is presented to me as if it were framed around my body, particularly my head, where my sensory apparatus is mostly located. I never experience the world except with me ‘at the centre’, as if I were the axis on which it all turned. As I change location, this phenomenologically central position moves with me. This locus of perceptual experiences is also the source from which my thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations arise. Johnston calls it the ‘arena of presence and action’. When we think of ourselves as the one at the centre of this arena, we find it inconceivable that this consciousness, this point of view on the world, will cease to be.

The inside view is the default. That is, the automatic tendency is to experience the world as if it literally revolved around oneself, and this prevents us from fully assimilating what we know from the outside view, that the world can and will go on without us.

In order to fully digest the fact of my mortality, I would need to realise, not just intellectually, that my everyday experience is misleading, not in the details, but as a whole. Buddhism can help identify another source of radical distortion. As Jay L Garfield puts it in Engaging Buddhism (2015), we suffer from the ‘primal confusion’ of seeing the world, and ourselves, through the lens of a substance-based metaphysics. For example, I take myself as a self-contained individual with a permanent essence that makes me who I am. This core ‘me-ness’ underpins the constant changes in my physical and mental properties. Garfield is not saying that we all explicitly endorse this position. In fact, speaking for myself, I reject it. Rather, the primal confusion is the product of a non-rational reflex, and typically operates well below the level of conscious awareness.

When we combine the phenomenological fact of our apparent centrality to the world with the implicit view of ourselves as substances, it is easy to see how these factors make our non-existence unthinkable ‘from the inside’, so that the best understanding of our own mortality we can achieve is the detached acknowledgement that comes with the outside view.

The Buddhist alternative to a substance-based view of persons is the ‘no-self’ account, which was independently discovered by David Hume. Hume introspected only a constantly shifting array of thoughts, feelings and sensations. He took the absence of evidence of a substantial self to be evidence of its absence, and concluded in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) that the notion of a ‘self’ is merely a convenient device for referring to a causally linked network of mental states, rather than something distinct from them.

While remarkably similar lines of thought can be found within Buddhist texts, philosophical argument comprises only part of their teaching. Buddhists maintain that a developed practice of meditation allows one to directly experience the fact of no-self, rather than just inferring it. The theoretical and experiential methods are mutually supporting, and ideally develop in tandem.

Let us return to existential shock. One might be tempted to look for some unusual factor that has to be added to our normal condition in order to bring the state about. However, I believe that a better approach is to consider what must be subtracted from our everyday experience. Existential shock emerges from a radical alteration of the inside view, where the primal confusion lifts so that the person directly experiences herself as insubstantial. I see the truth of no-self, not merely as an idea, but in an impression. I see that my ego is an imposter, masquerading as a permanent self. The most perplexing feature of existential shock, namely the sense of revelation about my inevitable death, comes from my mortality being re-contextualised as part of a visceral recognition of the more fundamental truth of no-self.

But this raises the question as to what causes the primal confusion to temporarily withdraw when it does. The answer lies in Hume’s observation that the natural movement of our mental states is governed by associative principles, where the train of thought and feelings tends to run on familiar tracks, with one state effortlessly leading to another. The relentless operation of our associative mechanisms keeps the shock at bay, and the collapse of these mechanisms lets it come through.

It is no coincidence that my first encounter with existential shock took place towards the end of a long and rigorous retreat. Being away from my habitual surroundings – my social routines, my ready-to-hand possessions, all my trusted distractors and de-stressers – created conditions in which I functioned a little less on autopilot. This created an opening for existential shock, which brought about an inner STOP! – a sudden and radical break in my mental associations. Just for a moment, I see myself for what I am.Aeon counter – do not remove

James Baillie is a professor of philosophy at the University of Portland in Oregon. He is the author of the Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Hume on Morality (2000).

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.