Isabel

“It has always been the case that while people were seeking answers to the ultimate questions, they have discovered clear and final solutions to many other problems” (456). This quote seems fitting to start my final philosophy blog, because that is something I have definitely noticed throughout my philosophizing. The most seemingly basic questions are those that are actually the toughest to answer, and those that will lead us to a multitude of other answers, except of course that which we were originally looking for. I say this of course as a newly converted Humian who is quite sure that she cannot know anything. This chapter included a lot of philosophies that I found interesting including Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. All of these philosophers were known to be existentialists, or people who “take man’s existential situation as their point of departure” (449).

One interesting connection I found was from the humanism of the Renaissance to the humanism of the twentieth century existentialists. During the Renaissance life was celebrated, and man was the focus of life. But, during the twentieth century a slew of Atheist philosophers saw man’s existence, and his freedom as a curse (such a short sentence, yet I still managed two commas!). These philosopher’s believed that men used human nature and God as a safety net, and that they used it to guide the path of their lives. However, these philosophers believed man had no innate nature, and actually created their own nature, and were therefore “condemned” to wander through life without purpose, so long as they viewed Heaven or “the world of ideas” as one of their goals. Instead, Sartre and his contemporaries believed that man should choose his own purpose and goal. This is all a very different from the way humans had been viewed before. The existentialists started their philosophy from man’s existence, but most of them viewed that existence, or living, as a curse that was incurable.

(I wish I would’ve been able to read the chapters that led up to this one so that I could have further understood the philosophies that these men based their own philosophies after!)

Something I found interesting about this chapter is how Sartre believed that no existential question can be answered definitely. I keep wondering as I progress through the centuries of philosophy why the Pre-Socratics were so sure of certain answers and truths, and those who came after them are continually less and less sure. The one answer I keep returning to is science. There are so many things people of the modern day have to take in to account that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had no knowledge of. I also believe it is this knowledge that has us so deeply burrowed into the rabbit’s fur. For Natural Philosophers, it was quite easy to imagine that the world was held together by love, but for modern philosophers, or those of us just beginning to ask ourselves these questions, when asked what is real, it is very hard not to answer that anything made of atoms is real. Or maybe the answer really is just that simple, and the philosophers of old were able to create such wild philosophies because they also had a wild faith without the restrictions and limitations science puts on us.

In the end I think I’ll stray from faith and science, and just cop out with Agnosticism.

Hume was a very, very pure empiricist, who looked to see where ideas come from. He took any idea that did not have it’s entire foundation in experience or the senses to be false. “Hume wanted to know how a child experiences the world” (265) because it is a child who experiences the world most open-mindedly. Hume noted of course, that if a child were to see a rock floating in the air, the child would not be nearly as amazed as the child’s parent who would be astonished by the floating rock. Hume believes that people have become enslaved by their habits and their expectations. He also believes that people much too often take two ideas that are true to form other false ideas. Looking at the angel for an example: an angel is essentially a human with wings; we’ve seen a human, and we’ve seen wings, but that does not mean that by putting the two together the resultant angel exists.

Hume believed that nothing was ever invented by the mind, and that all of our thoughts and conceptions originated somewhere in the sensory world. As a contemporary of Hume’s, John Locke would have disagreed greatly. Though Locke too was an empiricist, and also believed that things not actually experienced were false, he still believed that God was an idea that was innate to humans. Locke thought that we were born with the idea of an all-good, all-powerful God. Hume however, would have said that the idea people have of God is nothing but a more dense version of an angel. He would argue that “God” is just composed of multiple simple and complex ideas, and though once all the ideas of God are broken down to their simplest form have their bases in truth, the combination of all the truths does not consequently equal another truth, but in fact something that is false because it’s basis is not in experience.

Something interesting is Hume’s disbelief in a true right and wrong. To Hume, it all boils down to habit, which too has it’s base in the senses. Most people would agree that it is “right” to help a person in need, but it is not appropriate to say that reason tells us to help someone else. Hume would argue that it is are sentiments, or our feelings that are the real motivation behind helping others. However, because not all people have the same level to sympathize, or to feel compassion there can be no universal right. One person sees a dog on the side of the road and decides to take it in, because they feel badly for the hungry dog; another person sees a hungry dog on the side of the road, and feels no urge to help it because they do not feel sor

The seventeenth century was filled with philosophers who used rationalism as their mode of finding philosophical truths. However, with the eighteenth century came a slew of philosophers who “held that we have absolutely nothing in the mind that we have not experienced through the senses. A view such as this is called empiricism” (258). An empiricist is someone who believes whole heartedly in the senses, and believes that they are a trustworthy means of gaining information. John Locke was one of these such philosophers whose main focus was to understand where people get their ideas from, and furthermore whether the senses really were a reliable mode of philosophizing. Locke’s belief was that everything we had come to know had entered our minds through the senses.

As far as I understand, Locke contrasts most with Anselm. Because Locke believed that our knowledge was gained through our senses he also believed that we cannot prove that God exists through reason because we have never experienced God through our senses. Of course, Anselm is famous for attempting to prove God’s existence through reason, something which Locke would not have taken for truth. Locke saw it as such: “simple sensations” which lead to “complex ideas”. Or, basically to draw on other philosophers it is the same as seeing a number of horses before having the image of the “idea” horse. We as people use “simple sensations” to form our “complex ideas”. When eating an apple for the first time we note that it is red, that it has an outer skin, that it is juicy, and that it is crisp; none of those characteristics become known to us until we experience them through our senses. It was philosophers like Locke who then began to look at where all of humans seemingly innate ideas came from, and if those ideas did not come through the senses they were viewed as false.

What is so interesting to me about Locke is that he is a pure materialist. He believes that experience is the only way to learn about something, and nothing that sits in the realm of ideas could ever be experienced through the senses. Thus, things like God, could never be thought to be true by Locke, but they were. He sharp

Spinoza believed that, “For everything is One. There is only one God, one nature, or one Substance” (248). Spinoza was one of the first to question the Bible from a historical and logical viewpoint. He was shunned by his community because of his loose reading of the Bible. Spinoza was a monist who believed that all things could be reduced to One, which was sometimes God, or Nature, but dually both, because in the eyes of Spinoza, God is nature, and vice versa. To explain this unity of substance to Sophie, Alberto Knox explains that though Descartes saw everything as thought and extension, Spinoza just saw these two modes of understanding as the two that human minds were capable of grasping. He also explained their duality with an example that a stomach can hurt from hunger and be felt, and later that same pain can be thought about by the person, and that both are just different expressions of nature, or as Descartes would have put it a thought, and an extension.

I thought of both Anselm and Descartes while reading this section. I thought of Descartes because Spinoza preferred a strict, rational route of philosophizing as Descartes did. I thought of Anselm because of his arguments that God was too great to be able to be perceived by mortal souls. Anselm argued that God’s “light” and God’s “power” was unimaginable to people, even though we thought of him as that than which nothing greater can be thought. Similarly, Spinoza believed that all things could be reduced to one substance, God, and that people were only capable or knowing of two ways to perceive God, through Descartes’ “extension” and “thought”. Alberto explains that there could be thousands of more ways to perceive this oneness, but as of now man is incapable of reaching them.

Something very interesting, and equally disturbing I found when reading about Spinoza were his thoughts on free will. Like I mentioned earlier, Spinoza thought everything was nature, and thus he thought that nature was in control of ourselves, not our own will. Spinoza believed in an “inner cause” that was the force behind all actions. The example was given of a lion in Africa; could that lion make the decision to be a vegetarian instead of preying on antelope and elk? We’d say absolutely not. Who teaches a baby to cry when it’s hungry? Or suck on it’s thumb? No one teaches a child that; it’s all predestined habit based on nature. So, how could we say as people that we are not simply programmed by our complex nature?

“Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful” (xxiii). This is where Rene Descartes began his explorations as a philosopher. He acknowledged that he could not base his understandings on anything that he had previously accepted without thought. From there he set forth to discover truths by assuming the role of someone who knows nothing, and only reasons with himself, just as Anselm did. Descartes believed that anything that had been deceptive once could never be trusted, so to him the senses were entirely untrustworthy. This far into Meditations On First Philosophy Descartes is my favorite philosopher because he is so logical and meticulous in his reasoning.

In the first Meditation I found connections to a few philosophers, but particularly to Anselm. Descartes shared some views with Anselm, who reasoned that because the idea of God exists in the intelectus he existed in reality. Similarly, Descartes reasoned that “the objects which appear to us in sleep are, as it were, painted representations which could not have been formed unless in the likeness of realities” (4). Therefore, those “representations” had to exist somewhere in reality as well.

What I find interesting, and at the same time exceedingly daunting, is how far Descartes was willing to go to discover absolute truths. He went as far as to throw away all that he believed in, and all that he had previously accepted as truth, so that he might find a real understanding in the world. He threw away all of the ideas he was predisposed to, and started from scratch. He took his times imagining that the God he believed to be true, was not, just to further push his boundaries of thought, which is absolutely remarkable.

“I would advise none to read this work, unless such as are able and willing to meditate with me in earnest, to detach their minds from commerce with the senses, and likewise to deliver themselves from all prejudice; and individuals of this character are, I well know, remarkably rare” (xvi). This is Descartes advise to anyone who may read his Meditations On First Philosophy. Descartes gives this advice because in his reasoning he suggests to rid yourself of any information you’ve acquired from others, for him it means acknowledging that perhaps instead of an almighty and gracious God it is the Devil who is constantly trying to deceive him. The preface serves to introduce each of the ideas, and arguments that may arise, but Descartes promises to answer any objections he receives, and believes that if the reader is to fully meditate on his ideas they will find their truths.

I found Descartes to be similar in some way to almost every philosopher we have studied thus far, and I believe this to be because since he started his philosophizing from a literal point zero he was able to take bits and pieces of theories from philosophers who may have disagreed with each other, and formulated their ideas together to arrive at his own individual conclusion. The greatest connection I saw though was in Descartes’ introduction to the discussion of ideas, which reminded me of Plato and the shapes on the cave walls just being lesser reflections of what exists in reality.

Something I found interesting was Descartes’ reasoning on what the mind is. It was said that the mind could not comprehend that it was nothing but a “thinking thing” (xiv), and to that Descartes just explained that the mind possesses nothing except the ability to think, which is a very tantalizing thought, especially coming from just reading Anselm whose thoughts on what the soul or the mind was were close to what God is with the only difference being that the mind or soul had a starting point whereas God was eternal.

**I had a pretty difficult time coming up with a connection for this blog, because the reading was so short, and because each idea was only introduced briefly, but I had to do the blog to get twelve by the end of the semester.

“His main concern was with what we can know,” (232) and “the other great question that preoccupied him was the relationship between body and mind” (232). This quotation is all about Descartes philosopher’s project, or what he was most concerned with. Descartes looked at certain knowledge, and to do that he had to throw away all that he had not rationalized himself. So all the work and ideas and theories of the philosophers before him were put aside so that he himself could discover what was absolute and what was true. He also took a look at the relationship between the body and the soul, which as we know has been thought over by many varying philosophers, but the difference with Descartes is that he believed that he could find an answer to how the concrete relates to the abstract. By steering clear of a given or accepted idea Descartes was exceedingly successful in his studies of philosophy.

For a man who attempted to rid himself of all prior ideas I found many connections between the thoughts of Descartes to the thoughts of the Stoics, Socrates, and Plato. Perhaps because he took no one person’s ideas as truth he was able to sieve through them and pick and choose where he agreed with them. He disagreed with the Stoics and their acceptance of Fate and with the fact that they cannot know. Descartes firmly believed through rationalization absolute truths could be discovered. Descartes agrees with Plato because he believes that we have innate ideas, such as the idea of a perfect God. This also of course connects to Anselm who believed that even the fool understands the concept of God to be “that than which nothing greater can be thought”. I also saw some ideas that brought me all the way back to Democritus, who discovered the atom, however Descartes found that matter can always be subdivided, whereas Democritus believed that the atom was the smallest unit matter could be. It was all just very interesting that someone who only relied on his own rationalizations found himself agreeing (and disagreeing) with so many other philosophers’ specific projects.

What I found most interesting was the concept of being a true dualist like Descartes was. He had the idea of reality, which was what exists in the mind, and outer reality, which is all that exists in the space that surrounds us. While our minds live in reality, our bodies live in an extended reality. This also reminds of another philosopher, Parmenides, and other rationalist philosophers who believed the senses to be untrustworthy. Descartes sees that our minds exist in the only true reality because only by rationalizing can we reach truth, while our bodies live in an extended reality that lends itself to convoluted, untrustworthy truths.

Galadriel speaking telepathically to Frodo says, “It is what will come to pass, if you shall fail. The Fellowship is breaking, it has already begun. He will try to take the Ring, you know of whom I speak. One by one, it will destroy it.” This is right after Frodo looks into the water, and sees the future of what will happen if Frodo is to lose the ring. The Fellowship is beginning to fall apart for a few reasons. Boromir, though he is essentially a good person, is flawed, and has an unrelenting desire to obtain the Ring of Power. We even did see later when Boromir did attempt to steal the ring from Frodo, and only narrowly missed getting it. Boromir later tries to atone for this, and dies with honor with Aragorn by his side.

This is all very interesting because Boromir was fated to steal the Ring as predicted by Gladriel, but it didn’t come true. If you watch the other movies I can tell you more about how this relates to Philosophy. But what’s interesting is if the Ring actually does have a particular Fate, or Destiny, or if it really is just the path it takes. Does every path lead to the same outcome? Would every possibility end up with Boromir’s attempt to get the Ring, and his eventual death?

What will fate do in the second movie (this is for you Dr. Luongo)? What’s to happen with only two Hobbits having the fate of the ring?

The Fellowship has just been formed from nine different members, and as they all pledge their allegiance by promising their bow and arrow, or the swords, Boromir says, “You carry the fate of us all, little one. If this is indeed the will of the Council, then Gondor will see it done.” Certainly we saw a lot of ideas about fate and destiny in the second part of “Lord of the Rings”–many made mention that Frodo actually held the “fate” of Middle Earth in his hands, and that it was his duty to protect everyone from Sauron. Was it Frodo’s fate to have the Ring of Power fall into his hands? Gandalf the Grey certainly believes so. No matter what Frodo were to do the Ring would have fallen into his sphere, and it would be his mission to destroy it. Although Frodo is at first reluctant at the task that faces him, he eventually accepts it, and he too sees it as his fate. In this sense Frodo acts as a Stoic because he realizes he cannot escape his own destiny, and chooses not to fight it, but rather accept it as what must be done.

One connection is that of the power of speech. “Lord of the Rings” was written by a Philologist, which has a lot to do with linguistics, so it’s not shocking that so much of the “Lord of the Rings” has to do with the different languages of Middle Earth. We’ve already been introduced to Sarumon, or as the Elves call him “Curunir” or “The Cunning” and this is because of his ability to persuade weak minds with speech. He always sounds as though he is the voice of reason, and this allows him to gain many followers in his pursuit of the Ring of Power. Just like Socrates, who was accused of turning the weaker argument into the stronger (though he did not use this gift for evil), Sarumon also uses his charisma and power of speech to persuade commoners of what benefits him.

What I find interesting is that the Fellowship is made up of so many different kinds of creatures. There is a wizard, an elf, a ranger, a dwarf, and hobbits. All completely different, but all with a common goal. I’m amazed that they are all willing to put aside past differences in order to protect their home from the Ring and from Sauron. And in addition, that they intrust the biggest job of actually holding the Ring to what is seen as the “weakest” species of the group, the Hobbit.

When Gandalf picks the ring from Bilbo Baggins’ furnace and hands it to Frodo he says, “In the common tongue it reads ‘One Ring to Rule Them All. One Ring to Find Them. One Ring to Bring Them All and In The Darkness Bind Them.’” Of course, Gandalf is referring to the inscription on the Ring which is written in the language of Mordor, Elvish. This inscription makes me go back to our original conversation about free will: do we really exercise free will? does it really matter if we have the illusion of it? The Ring certainly suggests that while in the rings presence free will is minimal, or very difficult. Though Frodo believes he has free will he also definitely notes the strong hold the Ring has over him. Secondly, this quote reminded me once again of the Neoplatonists. In this case though it seems that Light would be absence of the Ring, and darkness would be presence of the Ring. The Ring is the root of all evil, and greed in Middle Earth, and a world of darkness, a world where the Ring has supreme power, would be a world where all are ‘binded’–no free will, no light.

As I think is very interesting (and I think you will too as the movie goes on!) is why Hobbits seem to be perfectly capable of handling the Ring, but Gandalf, a much greater, more powerful wizard cannot. As we saw multiple times already Gandalf when offered the Ring refuses to even touch it. Is this because he is too weak, or could not contain himself in the presence of such power? While Hobbits, which are looked upon as very lowly creatures have absolutely no problem? Or could it just be that Frodo, who at first lacks an understanding of the Ring’s power, is unaffected out of sheer ignorance? This certainly brings up how free will and knowledge interact, and how destiny and fate play into the grand scheme of things as well.