Philosophers Squared – Diogenes of Sinope

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Cynicism, Diogenes of Sinope, Life in a barrel, Philosophers Squared, Simple life

Go to the Index of 120 Philosophers Squared

Diogenes of Sinope (412 – 323 BC) was the Greek philosopher of Cynicism and living the absolutely simplest life style. I am a citizen of the world.

Diogenes of Sinope lived in a barrel in downtown Athens, (by Waterhouse)

Diogenes of Sinope, philosopher

Quotations of Diogenes sourced from WikiQuote, GoodReads, EGS, BrainyQuotes,

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1.- Blushing is the color of virtue.

2. When Alexander the Great addressed him with greetings, and asked if he wanted anything, Diogenes replied, “I have nothing to ask but that you would move to the side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.”

3. The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

4. Alexander the Great found the philosopher looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes explained, “I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.”

5. It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.

6. When some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, “And I sentenced them to stay at home.”

7. Once he saw the officials of a temple leading away some one who had stolen a bowl belonging to the treasurers, and said, “The great thieves are leading away the little thief.”

8. The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

9. When people laughed at him because he walked backward beneath the portico, he said to them: “Aren’t you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?”

10. To one who asked what was the proper time for lunch, he said, “If a rich man, when you will; if a poor man, when you can.”

11. The only way to gall and fret effectively another is for yourself to be a good and honest man.

12. I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

13. If you are to be kept right, you must possess either good friends or red-hot enemies. The one will warn you, the other will expose you.

14. Aristotle dines when it seems good to King Philip, but Diogenes when he himself pleases.

15. Being asked where in Greece he saw good men, he replied, “‘Good men nowhere, but good boys at Sparta.”

16. One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his pack with the words, “A child has beaten me in plainness of living.”

17. Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, “Here is Plato’s man.”

18. He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, “I am looking for a an honest man.”

19. He was seized and dragged off to King Philip, and being asked who he was, replied, “A spy upon your insatiable greed.”

20. Perdiccas threatened to put him to death unless he came to him, “That’s nothing wonderful,” Diogenes said, “for a beetle or a tarantula would do the same.”

21. Behaving indecently in public, he said “I wish it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly.”

22. He once begged alms of a statue, and, when asked why he did so, replied, “To get practice in being refused.”

23. To the question what wine he found pleasant to drink, he replied, “That for which other people pay.”

24. He was breakfasting in the marketplace, and the bystanders gathered round him with cries of “dog.” “It is you who are dogs,” cried he, “when you stand round and watch me at my breakfast.”

25. Asked where he came from, he said, “I am a citizen of the world.”

26. He was going into a theatre, meeting face to face those who were coming out, and being asked why, he said, “This, is what I practise doing all my life.”

27. When the slave auctioneer asked in what he was proficient, he replied, “In ruling people.”

28. It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.

29. Other dogs bite only their enemies, whereas I bite also my friends in order to save them.

30. Boasting, like gilded armor, is very different inside from outside.

31. The noblest people are those despising wealth, learning, pleasure and life; esteeming above them poverty, ignorance, hardship and death.

32. Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either in a city or in a house.

33. Self-taught poverty is a help toward philosophy, for the things which philosophy attempts to teach by reasoning, poverty forces us to practice.

34. Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.

35. No labor, according to Diogenes, is good but that which aims at producing courage and strength of soul rather than of body.

35. I trample upon the pride of Plato.

36. Men strive at digging and kicking to outdo one another, but no one strives to become a good man and true.

37. And he would wonder that the grammarians should investigate the ills of Odysseus, while they were ignorant of their own. Or that the musicians should tune the strings of the lyre, while leaving the dispositions of their own souls discordant; that the musicians should gaze at the sun and the moon, but overlook matters close at hand; that the orators should make a fuss about justice in their speeches, but never practice it; or that the avaricious should cry out against money, while inordinately fond of it.

38. You must obey me, although I am a slave; for, if a physician or a steersman were in slavery, he would be obeyed.

39. He used to call the demagogues the lackeys of the people and the crowns awarded to them the efflorescence of fame. He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, “I am looking for a man.” One day he got a thorough drenching where he stood, and, when the bystanders pitied him, Plato said, if they really pitied him, they should move away, alluding to his vanity. When someone hit him a blow with his fist, “Heracles,” said he, “how came I to forget to put on a helmet when I walked out?” Further, when Meidias assaulted him and went on to say, “There are 3000 drachmas to your credit,” the next day he took a pair of boxing‐gauntlets, gave him a thrashing and said, “There are 3000 blows to your credit.

40. When some one reproached him with his exile, his reply was, “Nay, it was through that, you miserable fellow, that I came to be a philosopher.”

41. When he was dining in a temple, and in the course of the meal loaves not free from dirt were put on the table, he took them up and threw them away, declaring that nothing unclean ought to enter a temple. To the man who said to him, “You don’t know anything, although you are a philosopher,” he replied, “Even if I am but a pretender to wisdom, that in itself is philosophy.” When some one brought a child to him and declared him to be highly gifted and of excellent character, “What need then,” said he, “has he of me?” Those who say admirable things, but fail to do them, he compared to a harp; for the harp, like them, he said, has neither hearing nor perception.

42. Being asked why people give to beggars but not to philosophers, he said, “Because they think they may one day be lame or blind, but never expect that they will turn to philosophy.”

43. Most people, he would say, are so nearly mad that a finger makes all the difference. For if you go along with your middle finger stretched out, some one will think you mad, but, if it’s the little finger, he will not think so.

44 Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.

45. When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man.

46. The sun, too, shines into cesspools and is not polluted.

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COMMENTS

48.> Diogenes practiced his philosophy of Cynicism by his contemptuous actions and statements directed at the publicly virtuous men of his day. He is still famous for his insults directed personally at people who themselves are still famous more than two thousand years later. When Alexander the Great asked Diogenes, who was sitting in his barrel, if there was anything he could do for him, the tart reply was, I have nothing to ask of you, but that you would stand to the side, that you may not, by blocking the sunshine, take from me that which you cannot give. Then Diogenes went picking through some piles of human bones supposedly looking for Alexander’s dead father, Philip of Macedon, and proclaimed, I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of dead slaves.

49.> Of course Diogenes aroused the anger of people around him with his sarcastic cynicism and he was banished from his home city, Sinope, to which he replied, And I sentenced them to stay at home.

50.> Diogenes practiced a direct contradiction to Immanuel Kant’s later dictum The Categorical Imperative “Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.” If everyone behaved as Diogenes did, society wouldn’t last a day. Perhaps not really intending it as his message to the world, but he clearly showed us a path not to follow. Diogenes seems a comic hero of the absurd nihilist variety; and yet of the hundred billion people who have lived on Earth he is still famous two thousand years after his disgusting behavior ended.

A fifth testing of random Aphor ideas.

Earlier experiments:

A fourth testing of random Aphor ideas

A third testing of the Aphor list

A second testing of the Aphor list

A first testing of the Aphor list

Below is a fifth use of the Aphor system, making a list by simply choosing a word such as “now” and in the SEARCH box enter Aphor, and ‘space “your word” space.’ Entering Aphor will limit the search to pages with that CATEGORY search term previously entered on each post, and also entering your word, such as “now” with spaces before and after it, will find pages within the Aphor list with the word now. When at any page, hitting Ctrl-f and typing ‘space now space’ will highlight only those complete words on the current downloaded page. Here below is what was cut and pasted from the eight years of pages.

Aphor 2021/06/08 – Wisdom – 28. Most wisdom is to realize when you have been sitting on your ass long enough, and now is the time for action.

Aphor 2021/05/30 – Silence – 11. If you can occasionally silence your mind and then ask yourself what is essential now and tomorrow, you will find your way.

Aphor 2021/05/30 – Self-Reliance – 3. Don’t expect people now being motivated by childish things to behave like adults.

Aphor 2021/05/30 – Self-Reliance – 19. The world is complex, and our moment is always chaotic, but we must be ready for action now and make it fit the situation.

Aphor 2021/05/28 – Present – 2. It is guilt-free to think about the future now because you can’t be held responsible for future failures. – 7. All you need to be happy now is to choose to be content with the universe of beautiful things you have now. – 14. Prepare now for the probable future by using the known past.

Aphor 2021/05/27 – Pessimism – 12. I used to be a depressed pessimist, but I decided to treat other people better, and now I feel happier and interested in lots of things.

Aphor 2021/05/22 – Maturity – 25. Fit your actions to their appropriate time and do now what needs doing and put off forever what you shouldn’t do.

Aphor 2021/05/22 – Love 2 – 13. In the eternal now is the moment to be giving your full attention to loving your companions.

Aphor 2021/05/21 – Love – 6. The now instantly changes from an anticipated possibility to a fixed thing that we can choose to love with tranquility or hate with permanent stress.

Aphor 2021/05/12 – Fate – 1. Our destiny for our present now is essentially self-directed.

Aphor 2021/05/08 – Dreams – 20. If what needs doing can’t be done now, you can practice now the skills needed to perform when needed.

Aphor 2021/05/04 – Choice – 6. You can choose to make preparations now for doing the right thing when your time comes to make a choice.

Aphor 2021/05/02 – Adaptation – 3.The present moment is now as fixed as is any moment in the past, and you can only influence future moments.

Aphor 2021/05/01 – Action – 8. Between now and the death of our Universe, actions can have significance.

Maxims #161 — Alan Watts – 3. Every word we speak came from a tangled history of others using that word to define their thought that we now think of as our-thought. – 19. Because we have had the past experience of changing our future behavior and our physical surroundings, claiming we are only alive right now doesn’t fit our experience with reality. – In COMMENTS – The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that “I” and all other “things” now present will vanish until this knowledge compels you to release them – to know it now. 

Maxims #158 — Voltaire – 48. The media now fulfills the church’s traditional role of making our lives better, in the future, by purchasing their magical stuff. – 80 Your ancestral mothers choosing moral men for mates evolved into the natural morality that humans now possess. In COMMENTS – but now everyone has the opportunity to publish to the internet, and although they might not be heard at the moment their thoughts are there and available to everyone.

Maxims #154 — Thales of Miletus – In COMMENTS – Modern debt, especially credit cards, and now educational debt from which there is no escape by bankruptcy, becomes the fast track into individual slavery.

Maxims #146 — John Searle – In COMMENTS – I thought of it as humor, but in my more advanced age I suspect that my friends thought of it as a form of nastiness, what is now termed passive aggressive.

Maxims #137 — Charles Scamahorn – In COMMENTS – It is outrageous to place oneself in a list with so many fantastically successful philosophers, and yet I have created the most coherent theory of why people have risen from an animal state to the condition they now occupy. – Many qualities combine to make up morality, and there must be many genetically heritable genes underlying character, but because of these genes, people are now moral because it is now part of their genetic inheritance to be virtuous. – It is outrageous to place oneself in a list with so many fantastically successful philosophers, and yet I have created the most coherent theory of why people have risen from an animal state to the condition they now occupy. [I was unaware of the duplication of a that paragraph and at this moment that source duplication is being deleted. – Done.]

Maxims #115 — Thomas Paine – 68. We now have exposed, within our technology, the capacity to bring our galaxy to consciousness. – 82. The power that tried to subdue us on what is now our land must not be asked to be the one that defends us beyond our shores.

Some common thoughts stated as maxims, #2 – 12. You created your habits, now you get to live with them.

Some common thoughts stated as maxims. – 1. F. If you are now happy, healthy, and wise, you are rich enough.

Philosophers Squared – Donald Davidson – In COMMENTS – computers are now transitioning into thinking creatures, and will soon be making philosophical considerations about their own beingness and ultimate purpose in the Universe.

Condensed thoughts compilation from Probaway’s 2014 blog – 24 April 2014  In the infinity of the future it would seem inevitable that terrible things will happen. Now in times of calm thought and potential reflection is the time to prepare ourselves for appropriate action. – 27 April 2014  Writing something down, especially in an indexable form as is now done on a computer, makes it more easily available, and more used and thus more valuable. – 31July 2014 – Now is a wonderful time for action for those who are prepared to act. – 14 August 2014 – I’m on my hands and knees looking for the Skeptic in Bend – Now that I am officially geriatric it is probably better to be in a quieter community. – 08 September 2014 – Jack the Ripper returns again and again, and now it’s DNA. – Why did the Huffington Post article have so much linking to Doyle and nothing about Aaron Kosminski, today’s Ripper suspect? – 13 September 2014 – 2500 of Probaway’s condensed thoughts are now available. – Now is the time take a step up the maturity scale. – 04 October 2014 – Ebola compared to historical epidemics and wars. – Logarithmic charts are good for showing biological growth, which is how Ebola behaves, and we humans are now its food. – 03 December 2014 – Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) logarithmic chart update – A positive indicator is that the large amount of money and personnel being invested on stamping out Ebola is now beginning to show. – 15 January 2013 – A way out of the sad state of the world. Poor self-identity is associated with non-separation from one’s mother, and that’s now common. – 22 February – A new possible categorical imperative. The totality of humanity’s life and choices as may be seen in retrospect by people now living. – 31 May 2013 – MERS-CoV may or may not be the deadly pandemic, but it is wise now to prepare the right flu fighting habits. Links to my list. – 6 October 2013 – Daniel Dennett – That’s enough. I’ve considered this matter enough, and now I’m going to act. – 24 December 2013 – Will I, our world be better off a year from now if I apply these words, and concepts they imply, to my present decisions for action?

Philosophers Squared – John Searle – 6. It [writing] has enormous meta-cognitive implications. The power is this: That you cannot only think in ways that you could not possibly think if you did not have the written word, but you can now think about the thinking that you do with the written word.- 30. the lives of such people are made much easier than they had previously supposed, because now they don’t have to worry about an author’s intentions, about precisely what a text means, or about distinctions within a text between the metaphorical and the literal, or about the distinction between texts and the world because everything is just a free play of signifiers. The upper limit, and I believe the reductio ad absurdum, of this “sense of mastery” conveyed by deconstruction, is in Geoffrey Hartman’s claim that the prime creative task has now passed from the literary artist to the critic.

Philosophers Squared – Thomas Paine – 60. He can now provide for his own comfort, and learn from my munificence to all to be kind to each other.

The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Taleb – book review –  Taleb would now believe are poor responses to environmental stressors, such as, “You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.

COMMENTS

This compilation took about two hours of work, with some intermittent breaks to do household and garden chores, but it shows how a computer might respond to the original statement in the Probaway SEARCH box [Aphor now ]. This posted human search goes back to November 30, 2012.

It does have some uses, because the word “now” gives context which brings different ideas into the foreground of consciousness. Choose any pair, or more, of quotes above and smash them together to create a new idea.

Maxims #118 — Blaise Pascal

Go to the Index of 120 Philosophers Squared

Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) was a French mathematician, inventor, and philosopher. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists. If you win, you win all; if you lose, you lose nothing. 

Blaise Pascal, mathematician, inventor, and philosopher

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Probaway maximizing on Blaise Pascal

1. Things are true or false depending on our point of view, and the mind locks on to what it likes or dislikes and builds around that choice.

2. By being conscious, we are compelled to wager our eternal soul for or against God’s existence, and if we say no, we go to hell, but if we lie and say yes, do we trick God into accepting us into Heaven?

3. The heart evolved by reproducing those who survived with successful behaviors for instantly coping with danger, where the mind pauses to think and dies without heirs.

4. Understanding, feelings, and habits are formed by social interactions and our choosing companions who help or impede our life success.

5. People choose their adult beliefs that are compatible with being accepted into a social group they find attractive when teenagers.

6. Which of the renowned heroes, prophets, philosophers, and scholars of history had a contented old age?

7. A great philosopher brings some humble humor to his philosophy.

8. A philosopher’s years of complex thinking about philosophy usually result in inconstant and shaky feelings toward his peers.

9. A common person’s conversation is based on unknown rules, but mathematicians make themselves ridiculous by starting with definitions and axioms.

10. Admit to a person that from his point of view he is right, but that from another he was mistaken, and only failed to mention that other side.

11. A man is always right from his perceptions and reasoning, but he can admit that no one will see all of the infinite other possibilities.

12. Men are more confident of arguments they have thought through themselves than repeating those they have heard from others.

13. Statements that arouse a positive emotion in people are more readily accepted as arising within their personal experience and heart.

14. Eloquence is speaking with pleasure so our audience can feel pleasure and arousing their self-love so they are motivated to reflect on the matter.

15. We seek to establish a link between the head and heart of our audiences, speaking of the understandable in a simple and natural way.

16. Man loves to cultivate his malice toward superiors but not against unfortunate people like cripples and the blind, for they deserve pity.

17. Lust is the beginning of all our behavior and of babies.

18. We carry our audience with us because of our enthusiasm, or we bore them.

19. A knowledge of morality consoles me for my ignorance of physical science, but knowledge of physical science is of no help with applied morality.

20. To understand a document we must read it several times, first as a report of facts, second out loud for feeling, and third carefully for understanding.

21. A modern man has only glimpses of the enormity of space and time, its beginning and ending, and the vast numbers of lucky events that made him possible.

22. A void above, an abyss beneath and everywhere around us an infinity of incomprehensible things pulling our minds into … nothing.

23. Everything is all cause and effect, and all held together by gravity extending to the limits of time and space, and I know only a minuscule part of these multitudes of infinities.

24. A man is the most wonderful accumulation of the stuff of the universe brought to an awareness of himself and it, yet knowing little of it or himself and how they work.

25. At one time a man, indeed whole nations, thought good was heroic, or pleasure, knowledge, truth, ignorance, indolence, emptiness, indifference, awe, foresight, but were any satisfied?

26. Would Descartes get into God’s heaven although he had not much use for God or Pascal, who tried to fool God by pretending to believe as a safer bet than not believing?

27. Why do we remain calm if someone suggests that we have a headache, but get angry if they say our arguments and choices are poor?

28. It is natural for minds to believe because we must believe to understand, but once they do believe they build supporting evidence by themselves to support their new belief.

29. The wisest men appear wiser than they are because they have cultivated the art of persuasion, and obvious reason cannot change a man’s mind who has been persuaded to an opinion.

30. Imagination creates happy or sad, healthy or sick, rich or poor of the same circumstances, and gives deeper satisfaction than reasons.

31. Men with imagination are pleased with their thoughts, but prudent men can never surpass a moment’s grace, and then worry over the next problem.

32. Many occupations have symbols to identify their authorities and generate respect, like doctors with their white gowns and stethoscopes, judges with their black robes and gavels.

33. Our reasons for believing observed phenomena are disappointed by the inconsistency of different individuals’ observations.

34. We should be honest with ourselves about our faults and fix them rather than hide them and cheat others by depriving them of seeing our authentic self.

35. We like to be deceived into believing we are better than we are, and thus we encourage others to deceive us, which we readily accept as true.

36. Few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence; therefore, observe what your friends say of other mutual friends and thus form an idea of what they say of you.

37. Provide an idle man with a job; he needs a meaningful goal or he sinks into weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, and despair.

38. How ugly is a painting of a subject that is a beautifully rendered horror that would make us vomit it we were to personally witness the event.

39. Some people study things for no other purpose than to brag about the fact that they have some worthless facts to quote.

40. If one seeks to be happy it is better not to study one’s self too closely.

41. Curiosity is a form of vanity; for some, it is the vanity of knowing something their friend doesn’t, or discovering and naming a new beetle.

42. It is not shameful to scream at inflicted severe pain, but it is shameful to accept and succumb to wanton pleasure.

43. Men are not able to prevent their eventual death, so in order not to be miserable about losing everything they have, they ignore death.

44. We make religion attractive by creating beautiful architecture and music to make good men wish it were true, then convince them that it is true and put them to work making it true.

45. Men love only those things that are useful to them, and that being an observed fact it has been found useful to believe that God is watching over us personally and guiding us toward heaven.

46. This period of living humanity will soon be gone, and looking back from a million years hence we would probably say we were lucky to have lived here and now.

47. When I think about my decades of life compared to the void of time and space before, during, and after my consciousness, I smile with contentment while I have that option.

48. It is incomprehensible that God should exist, or not, that we have a soul, or not, that the soul should be joined to the body, that the world exists, or that original sin exists or not.

49. All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentimental belief in the absurd.

50. The heart evolved its actions, which in instant decisions overrule the slow mind, and it is the evolved heart that feels God, not the thinking brain.

51. All of man’s dignity and success is because of his ability to speak, to learn from others, and nothing in the known universe can foresee the future.

52. Humanity is not perfect, but we can postulate what perfection might be like and struggle to create a society that approaches it.

53. We do not sustain ourselves by virtue alone, but by the balancing of innumerable vices and pleasures.

54. Do not use your liberty to oppress others, or it will be taken away.

55. Inequality will arise between men because all men are different, and all men seek liberty of action; therefore, liberty must not be absolute.

56. Honest and informed contradiction is not proof of falsity, but only of opinion, and lack of contradiction is not an acceptance of truth but perhaps of agreement.

57. With faith in a belief, there is plenty of spiritual light for those who seek to believe and enough shadows to hide those who only seek the shelter of darkness.

58. Man is fool enough that he believes what he is told about his station in life and settles into its comforts and pains.

59. The primary aim of the Holy Bible is giving charity to our fellow man.

60. A man cannot subsist alone because of his limitations, nor with other men because of conflicting self-interests, so men live in constant struggle with themselves and other men.

61. We say we must know a person before we can love them, but alternatively, we must love holy things before we can know them.

62. We don’t believe anything is honest and fair unless it pleases us.

63. Every man has many personalities depending upon his physical and mental health, the people he’s speaking to, his obligations, and his clothing.

64. Persuasion depends upon using our words to fit our audience, proposing principles of self-evident axioms for proofs, and using demonstrations of the things behavior instead of the thing itself.

This art, which I call the <em>art of persuading</em>, and which, properly speaking, is simply the process of perfect methodical proofs, consists of three essential parts: of defining the terms of which we should avail ourselves by clear definitions, of proposing principles of evident axioms to prove the thing in question; and of always mentally substituting in the demonstrations the definition in the place of the thing defined

65. Descartes said, I think therefore I am, and in contradiction, that matter is incapable of thought, as did St. Augustine twelve hundred years earlier.

66. Is the man who unconsciously discards an apple core beside a path responsible for the bountiful apple tree living there decades later that has pleased thousands of travelers?

67. Logicians borrowed from the rules of geometry but are loathe to be categorized at that low level of reasoning.

68. Logicians proclaim an error to guide us away from it; geometricians claim to attain it, and scientists aim to demonstrate it.

69. The best books prove that we are right, and could have written them ourselves.

70. Words mean what I think they mean when I say them and what I think they mean when I hear them.

71. No child realizes that he can do bad things until he is taught the word NO!

COMMENTS on Quotations from Blaise Pascal

Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that God exists. This is Pascal’s most famous quote, and yet it is the worst advice possible for the simple reason that if God does exist, and he sees to the depths of a man’s soul as a religious man like Pascal would believe, then God would know perfectly well that Pascal intends to deceive Him. We would assume that God would resent an intelligent man trying to deceive him and would, therefore, send him to the most horrible Hell when Pascal died. God would look more kindly on an Atheist because an atheist is simply observing that God has left no clear and reliably testable evidence of His existence. Every claimed evidence comes to an atheist as hearsay from men, and everyone who knows mankind, even a little, is aware that they lie when it is in their own self-interest to lie. But an atheist might be forgiven by God because they only question the accuracy of some men’s statements who sometimes lie. But Pascal has carried his lie to a higher order of lie when he earnestly recommends to other people that they follow his example and try and deceive God too. If God does exist, he must bring Pascal to a very special place, perhaps even more unpleasant than those who tell more uplifting lies about Him and his character. Pascal’s wager is a great one from Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan theory when one is betting against the stock market, but God isn’t the stock market.
Let us endeavor to think well; this is the principle of morality. Thinking well is a fine thing, but it isn’t morality. Morality consists in treating people well, and even dogs with considerably less ability to think well than most men are much better at treating people well if they themselves are treated well. Men are well known for often biting the hand that feeds them.
We do not sustain ourselves in virtue by our own strength, but by balancing two opposed vices, just as we remain upright amidst two contrary gales. Remove one of the vices, and we fall into the other. This principle was later modified into a principle of government where men are assumed to be motivated by personal gain and are balanced against others with similar motivations. The balancing of powers of opposing parties is intended to create a more stable condition where more people may often live in peace, but perhaps not always. They cannot subsist alone because of their defects, nor unite because of their opposition, and thus they break and destroy each other to give place to the truth. It is an eternal struggle, but the average is armed hostility called peace.
A contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the want of contradiction a sign of truth. This is an important observation and supports the idea that everyone and every idea should be challenged. That process will expose the good, the bad, and the otherwise, and generally eliminate the worst abuses. Thus, everyone is encouraged to speak up when they observe a problem
In faith, there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t. There is a problem in that there are infinite ways to believe an infinity of imaginary things and only one way of doubting – to doubt. Unfortunately, it is much easier to organize people to a belief than to doubt and to set them into a fighting mood.
Man is so made that if he is told often enough that he is a fool, he believes it. That assertion is perhaps intended as a sarcastic joke. Everyone considers himself to be above average in intelligence, wisdom, and morality.
People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive. If this is true, then Pascal’s work on creating axiomatic driven human behavior is a waste of time. It is even more complex than Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which is also unworkable. But, what is workable is to present ideas in a story format that is attractive, which obeys his observation.
All that tends not to charity is figurative. The sole aim of the Scripture is charity. It would appear that Jesus’ message was to help other people to attain the highest level of approaching a heavenly state. The Beatitudes is a ladder to heaven, and his Golden Rule, “All things whatsoever, men should do to you, do you even-so unto them,” is the active process for helping them and yourself. It isn’t charity; it is kindness. Charity is helping unfortunate others; kindness is helping everyone to achieve a higher level toward their perfection.
Logic has borrowed, perhaps, the rules of geometry without comprehending their force it does not thence follow that they have entered into the spirit of geometry, and I should be greatly averse to placing them on a level with that science that teaches the true method of directing reason. This is an example of applied convergence, where two seeming remote realms of human endeavor have an even more abstract driving force. When this type of action is observed, it is a strong indicator that other applications of this driving force are probably available for use in remote fields.
One of the principal reasons that diverts those who are entering upon this knowledge so much from the true path which they should follow is the fancy that they take at the outset that good things are inaccessible, giving them the name great, lofty, elevated, sublime. This destroys everything. I would call them low, common, familiar: these names suit it better; I hate such inflated expressions. It is strange that the Stoics weren’t more popular with seekers, as their stated goal was to find tranquility in the simply attained things available to everyone. Theirs was only a habit of changing one’s attention from those things difficult to attain to those which were easy. In Pascal’s terms to change from the pursuit of the sublime to the acceptance of the common

No religion except ours has taught that man is born in sin; none of the philosophical sects has admitted it; none, therefore, has spoken the truth. Stated more strongly, this claims a baby is born a religious criminal and then condemns all other religions for not accusing their children of being born criminals. The Eveish Selection theory of humanity would claim the precise opposite, that normal humans are born with a natural propensity to be good, and it is only from faulty environmental circumstances that they become antisocial.

Maxims #90 – Immanuel Kant

Go to the Index of 120 Philosophers Squared

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was born in Prussia and is known as a German philosopher. He was an idealist seeking reality as mediated by the mind and had an impact on ethics, metaphysics and astronomy.

Immanuel Kant, philosopher of reality mediated by the mind

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Probaway Maximizing on Immanuel Kant

1. To be fully human, you must do human actions.

2. Act in compliance with your self-made law that fits the moment and postulate that everyone could act that way in that situation.

3. But you are not required to act in any situation in any specific way if some other way would comply with your first law.

4. In a world of ends, everything has a trade price in equal things, except for dignity, which alone is of infinite value and can not be traded away.

5. The end is accurate foreknowledge of behavior; it proceeds from a sensation of physical facts to concepts, ideas, knowledge, then wisdom.

6. All of our learned knowledge begins with perceived experiences.

7. Our knowledge begins with experience, but these can be mistaken in their observations or corrupted in their minds’ analysis of the facts.

8. What can I know with certainty? What can I do that will succeed? What can I hope for when there are many things over which I have no control?

9. Science is made visible with predictable natural actions, but wisdom also predicts future human behaviors.

10. Do you or I have any true knowledge of ourselves or others, or do we see only appearances driven by our preconceptions?

11. The unknown processes which brought us into existence deserve the same veneration for what they have denied us as for what they have given us.

12. If religion and law are exempted from a free and public examination, they can not expect the same respect as science, which permits these inquiries.

13. All thought must relate to us and our sensibilities and intuitions because there is no other way to communicate these things.

14. From the crooked stuff from which humanity is made, it is impossible to create anything genuinely straight.

15. A man who lies annihilates his dignity and is no longer accepted as a whole man.

16. Two strange things are worked into our natural being: a reverence for the starry sky and the morality within us all.

17. We make ourselves worthy of being happy by doing kind things for other people and animals.

18. I don’t need to live happily, but I must live honorably.

19. Seek the respect of honorable men, and ignore public clamor.

20. A man breaks the law when he violates other people’s rights, but he disregards his ethics if he thinks of profaning others.

21. It is reasonable to help others in their quest for a good life and unreasonable to hinder anyone from attaining one.

22. People buried deep in ideological absurdities are to be privately pitied rather than publicly ridiculed.

23. We can observe a man’s hidden beliefs towards people by watching his treatment of animals.

24. Moral conduct is pleasing to all societies, but all the other religious attempts to please them are seen as superstition and nonsense.

25. Modern life is easy for people with money, and all they need to get their annoying work done for them is some cash.

26. Maturity is the capacity to use one’s native intelligence without a mentor and a provocateur’s guidance.

27. Nearly all men and all women should avoid attempting to seek maturity, for it is not only tricky but dangerous.

28. Few have escaped the problems of immaturity by solitary cultivation of their minds.

29. Our men have been made as tame as domestic animals who dare not tug at their leashes, which teach them the narrow limits of their security.

30. Humanity’s life and freedom are to be achieved by adopting humanity as the ultimate end and replacing personal self-interest as the goal.

32. Every man rebels at becoming a slave to another man’s wishes, and his choosing to value humanity above himself must be made agreeable.

33. There must be a seed for every good thing to be developed in a man’s character, but without those seeds, we must cultivate his love of honor.

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COMMENTS:

Kant demands far more of humans than they are capable of delivering. Even the most intelligent and perfectly educated person can’t even for a moment obey him. Humans are individually too slow to learn and cultural transmission of wisdom is too piecemeal for his dictums to function.

Kant’s ideas function only as a fantasy inside of human minds. Outside of the mind, in human physical reality, his fantasy reality fails. It feels good, like the idea of a perfect life after death, but it is too complex for living people to apply. People need maxims they can apply and to cultivate habits that improve their lives.

It would appear that Kant’s most famous maxim is flawed. “There is, therefore, only one categorical imperative. It is: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” 1. It is impossible to have agreement on what that universal law would be, even for sophisticated philosophers. 2. It is impossible for normal humans to remember to apply such a complex idea when involved in the complexities of their lives. 3. It is replacing God and society’s laws with their own thoughts of the moment, which is condemned in both cases. 4. It means nothing beyond: do what you need to survive as a living being, and for your species’ living DNA to survive. In this view Kant’s morality predates Darwinian morality.

“But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.” Sometimes, actually usually, we see but we do not perceive. And this is generally true with every step of human thinking. Thus, to perceive doesn’t mean to understand, and to understand doesn’t mean to apply that understanding and that understanding applied to a single case doesn’t necessarily develop into guiding principles, and those principles don’t necessarily grow into wisdom, and that wisdom doesn’t necessarily transmit to humanity at large. We humans need more easily applied maxims like the Golden Rule – Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Or alternately the Silver Rule – Don’t do to others as you would not have them do unto you. Or if you can rise to what Jesus actually said, KJV “All things what so ever ye would that men should do unto you, do so even unto them, for this is the law and the prophets.” That word “should” becomes the difficult thought, but Jesus defines it as, “Help others to live, and to live more abundantly.”

“The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men.” This requires a universal government, a single Legal Sovereign Power which has only a few powers, but chief among them is the power to limit population to the carrying capacity of the environment via peaceful means.

“Human freedom is realized in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself.” When one considers this an absolute then humanity must include all the people who will come into life in the future. Thus the living individual’s ultimate responsibility to humanity and to those future people is to create a society in balance with Nature, so that there will be a decent future world and the necessities available to humanity such that it may thrive.

Sage tip #29, Expose people to things they can do.

Tags

How to make decisions, Mind your own business., What to do.

It would seem better to propose that a wise person should “Expose people to good things they can do.” And not just “Expose people to things they can do.” The problem is that it is difficult to know what another person would choose to value as good or bad. Just telling a person to be good puts an imposition on them that they can not possibly fulfill because that would require them to view things precisely as you or some other person would see them. It’s the same problem with Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative. It is impossible to know perfectly what will be good or bad actions in future situations by anyone’s perception at this moment. Thus it is ridiculous to state any moral imperative idea in words has any real meaning. Okay, perhaps there is some occasional substantial meaning but it is usually bordering on a lucky arbitrary definition.

Can a good act ever be anything other than a momentary action that seems to be the right thing to a person in the moment, or even a squirrel? In this last week I have counted four squirrels on the road that have made seemingly poor decisions and were squished by cars. Probably those squirrels thought they were making what they believed in the moment was the best decision. Perhaps if several seconds before it had chosen not to cross the road it would have been better off, but at that time it seemed like a good idea. Would Kant have crossed the road given that circumstance? In hindsight, it was a bad decision but in foresight, it might have been a good one and something totally unexpected caused the driver of the car to swerve. Perhaps a child chased a ball into the street and the driver swerved. How could a squirrel predict the child’s behavior or the driver’s or the future track of the car?

Decisions always come down to the moment of decision; how can it be otherwise? Sometimes, the decisions can be considered for a while, such as the timing as to when to cross a street and sometimes they must be made instantly, like when a car swerves unexpectedly. Sometimes it’s a bolt from the blue and there is no opportunity to even react instantly, let alone to react wisely. Rather than set up arbitrary Commandments, Laws, or Suggestions, perhaps it’s wiser to just expose tips to sentient beings and let them weigh all of the parameters themselves on how they will maximize the total life force of the Universe. Or, just ignore this whole thing and go watch TV.

Most of the time life just happens and death too.

Moving on from the title Love Your Life

Tags

Being Kind, Evolution of an idea, Hammurabi, Moses, Seven Sages of Greece, Zarathustra

The book I have been working on has taken on a more refined direction because of the conversations I have been having with my friends. They have been helpful with the concepts, the wording, the artwork and everything else, but of course, as the one who actually types up the working texts and does the artwork, I must take responsibility for all of the errors.

The grocery store walkthrough seems to be workable, and I have been using that technique in several different situations. It has an easy applicability to many other problems. The 147 sayings of the Ancient Sages of Greece has gone from being two-word descriptors of proper behavior to English representations of what I thought those Classic Greeks were trying to say in that first application of that first fully phonetic language readable by the public.

My version of those ideas developed from a set of prescriptions to a more gentle set of suggestions, but even that felt too directive. The tone of these statements moved from resembling the harsh laws of Hammurabi, on through the lordly phrasing of the Laws of Moses to the somewhat milder statements of Zarathustra. The Seven Sages’ ideas struck me as more like suggestions, but even that mild form of directive seemed too manipulative, and I wanted them to be even milder and within the willful control of the person using them.

Through that developmental state, we came to the feeling that the ideas should be better stated as operational tips given to fully self-conscious beings. The word tips carries the connotation of being an idea that might be applicable to a given person in a given unique situation, but tips are not to be considered anything approaching a Kantian Categorical Imperative. The tips are general rules, and it will be easy to construct mental situations where they are not the best form of action. However, in most situations, they are a good place to begin one’s approach to a problem.

With that formulation developing in the text of the book it became apparent that the title Love Your Life no longer carried the right tone. It has the mild undertone of telling the reader what to do. It tells you, even compels you to “Love” your life, and that forceful command is no longer sought for as a goal of this book. Furthermore, the word love implies a wholly inward complex of actions, and that has a selfish quality that tends to have negative habitual consequences for the person pursuing loving one’s self as a goal.

Those problems with the title are easily avoided by changing it to words that carry an implication closer to the developing life strategy. Since the goal is to develop techniques for creating habits of being kind to other people, and thus learning how to also be kind to one’s self a new title emphasizing that idea was sought. We quickly came to the title of Being Kind. The possible titles How to be kind, or On Being Kind had the tone of telling people what to do. We wanted to avoid all implications that we were telling people anything, even suggesting anything; instead, we were only giving tips on some ideas that we thought had some merit.

The new working title is …

Being Kind – A Way to Approach Health and Happiness.

Sage tip # 105, Protect your friend’s life as your own life.

Tags

Categorical imperative, Do lots of tiny good deeds, God is Love, Immanuel Kant, Protect your friends

The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece distributed suggestions for personal behavior on stone about the year 570 BC. These were not laws of the land with punishments like Hammurabi’s laws written in stone, nor Commandments with eternal rewards and punishments like Moses’ statements in stone. They were more like suggestions and while trying to make these ideas more readable and palatable to the modern English reader I have softened them into tips. These tips are stated as generalized actions that the reader may ponder, and if found reasonable for their life situation, practiced with mental exercises. There may be no Universal good actions because it seems to be possible to conjure up situations where a seemingly very good act has bad effects. Morality is based on situations and those may be viewed in many different ways. Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative,  “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law,” is famous and sounds great, but when you try to apply the idea it becomes too nebulous to be useful. In the Old Stone Church here in Bend, Oregon, the statement “God is Love” has hung over my head in stained glass for the last six years. It sounds nice and the sentiment is spiritual, but ask anyone what the terms God or Love mean and both of those terms drift off into a confusion of nebulous, fuzzy vapors. I can appreciate the intent of the statement but those terms and their pleasantly warm feelings, without a positive application to other people’s lives, go into the grave with those people’s bodies.

The Sage tips are action-oriented, and even the ones which are totally mental are intended to put the person thinking them into a positive-action frame of mind. This idea carried to the maximum yields Sage tip #105, Protect your friend’s life as your own life. I have also been stating that idea in a more mundane way for daily use because hopefully the situations that are dangerous to your friends’ lives are rare. The statement for daily life is “Treat others better than you treat yourself.” That action is more compatible with tip #75, Do lots of tiny good deeds and a few big ones.

 

Lists of meta rules for human behavior.

Tags

Categorical imperative, Golden Rule variations, History of Golden Rules, King James Version Matthew 7:12, Search for rules for human behavior.

What are the rules for human behavior?

First are a few items from Wikipedia’s list for the Golden Rule – compressed

• One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself (positive or directive form).
• One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated (negative or prohibitive form).
• What you wish upon others, you wish upon yourself (empathic or responsive form).

1. Now this is the command: Do to the doer to make him do. 1650 BC
2. That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another. 323 BC
3. Love your neighbor as yourself. Leviticus 19:18
4. Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself. Analects 500 BC
5. One would do for others as one would do for oneself. 400 BC
6. Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.
7. By self-control and by making right-conduct your main focus, treat others as you treat yourself. Mahābhārata,
8. Let not a man consent to do those things to another which, he knows, will cause sorrow. Tirukkuṛaḷ  500 AD
9. Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.” – Thales 546 BC
10. What you do not want to happen to you, do not do it yourself either. ” – Sextus the Pythagorean.
11. Do not do to others that which angers you when they do it to you.” – Isocrates 338 BC
12. Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others. Pahlavi Texts
13. Treat your inferior as you would wish your superior to treat you. Seneca the Younger 65 AD
14. What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. Hillel the Elder 10 CE
15. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Galatians 5:14 30 AD
16. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Catechism 1583 AD
17. That which you want for yourself, seek for mankind. 37 — Muhammad
18. Blessed is he who preferreth his brother before himself. Bahá’u’lláh, p. 71
19. that which is unfavorable to us, do not do that to others. — Padmapuraana
20. Just as I am so are they, just as they are so am I. Buddha 543 BC
21. A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated. — Sutrakritanga – Jainism
22. Don’t be the first aggressor. Modern Game theory

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Second is a set of ideas that might be similar to Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

1. When you are setting goals set goals, when working work. Probaway
2. A man’s most pleasant activity is to do the things he is best at doing. Marcus Aurelius
3. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. Albert Einstein
4. Be the change you want to see in this world. Gandhi
5. In our struggle for freedom, truth is the only weapon we possess. The Dalai Lama
6. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions means that we are free to change our destiny. Anaïs Nin
7. Any ideas, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought. Napoleon Hill
8. You create yourself by intentionally creating your habits. Probaway
9. Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. Eckhart Tolle
10. What we fear doing is usually what we need to do. Ralph Waldo Emerson
11. With a new idea, you must begin in the middle, as there is no precedent. Probaway
12. Tell the story of your life as you now want it to be and discontinue the tales of how it has been or of how it is. Esther & Jerry Hicks
13. We cannot always choose our external circumstances, but we can choose how we respond to them. Epictetus
14. Nothing has meaning except for the meaning we give it. Generate meaning! Sartre
15. You can dramatize your ideas in business or in any other aspect of your life. It’s easy. Dale Carnegie
16. Every time you choose to do the right thing, even when nobody would find out otherwise, your life grows a little. Steve Goodier
17. Growth happens in the throes of conflict, when you are angry, afraid, frustrated, when you realize that you have a choice. Vironika Tugaleva
18. Create more mature habits when you have the chance to do so. Probaway

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Grice’s Maxims of conversation

1. The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.
2. The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence.
3. The maxim of relation, where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion.
4. The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity.

What I was searching for was to find help for creating a list of meta-rules for human behavior. The condensed Golden Rule list above was suggesting rules for relating to other people. However, the goal, in this case, was to find and make some statements on how to relate to oneself to help oneself to become a fully functioning mature person. Is there a set of Golden Rule-like statements for relating to oneself?

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COMMENTS

This web search didn’t satisfy my personal search. I was hoping there would be some sage-level things to be found on Google. There are probably some there, and the search will go on, but today I never found anything better than the KJV Golden Rule – which by the way wasn’t even mentioned in the current Wikipedia article on the Golden Rule.

The King James version – “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” Matthew 7:12 – Wikipedia

The reason this version is so much more powerful that all of the other translations and the comments found on the internet and put into this post is because the word “should” attracts the reciprocity of other people. It is a way to help your personality grow to a more mature level by helping others to grow in the dimensions of personality growth you both need.

Do the right thing !

Tags

Categorical imperative, Do the right thing !, What is the right thing to do

Immanuel Kant writes that our highest good is to do the right thing. He calls this the Categorical Imperative – “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” This general law is impossible for me to comprehend because I can’t consider every possible action that I might do, let alone what action every other person could or should do.

The right thing to do varies enormously, and a wonderful action one second may be a terrible action a moment later. Because of this doing the right thing is dependent on time as well as on the action. It also depends on who is doing the action and to whom. Kissing your spouse might be a fine thing to do most of the time, but kissing your friend’s spouse is probably the wrong thing to do almost all of the time.

As we mature through the self-centeredness of adolescence into the adult mode of earning a living and providing for our families, doing the right thing changes from caring for ourselves to caring for the well-being of our family and friends. Caring for an orphan in a foreign land is important, but not at the expense of depriving your own child of the necessities of life, for then it isn’t the right thing to do even though it might be a wholly honorable act.

For a person who has fulfilled their adult duties and has grown into the mature form of relating to people, the right thing to do is to find ways and means for making those other people’s lives more meaningful. Sometimes the most mature thing a person can do is simply be there for the other person, hear exactly what they have to say, and respond appropriately to what they have said; and when the conversation is over to acknowledge their important place in humanity and to depart quietly.

Doing the right thing is probably invisible most of the time, because when viewed from outside it will usually be a simple act that fits the circumstances. So what’s there to comment about? No one will make a movie about the heroic action, and everyone who observes the action will find it such a common thing as to be bored with it, and probably with you.

Life is made of a lot of motivated actions, so make your motivations to do the right things at the right times for the right reasons.

Philosophers Squared – Wilfrid Sellars

Tags

American philosophers, Critical realism, Philosophers Squared, The hypothetical imperative, Wilfrid Sellars

Go to the Index of 120 Philosophers Squared

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (1912 – 1989) was an American philosopher of critical realism at the University of Pittsburgh. The hypothetical imperative which comes closest to capturing the moral point of view is that of impartial benevolence.

Wilfrid Sellars, philosopher

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Sources for Wilfrid Sellars quotes; AZQuotes, Stanford edu, GoodReads, PoemHunter,

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Quotations from Wilfrid Sellars

1. The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.

2. In all contexts of action you will recognize rules, if only the rule to grope for rules to recognize. When you cease to recognize rules, you will walk on four feet.

3. Ought-to-be’s imply ought-to-do’s; and ought-to-do’s typically lead to action.

4. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to ‘know one’s way around’ …, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, ‘how do I walk?’, but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred

5. To formulate a scientifically oriented, naturalistic realism which would “save the appearances”.

6. People live – within a framework of conceptual thinking in terms of which they can be criticized, supported, refuted, in short, evaluated.

7. The hypothetical imperative which comes closest to capturing the moral point of view is that of impartial benevolence.

8. In the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.

9. The interpretation of thought as “inner speech” has taken different forms, and has been used to clarify a variety of problems–thus problems pertaining to the logical forms of thought and the connection of thought with things.

10. That in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.

11. To put the matter in Aristotelian terminology, visual impressions are prior in the order of being to concepts pertaining to physical color, whereas the latter are prior in the order of knowing to concepts pertaining to visual impressions.

13. An ideally rational being would intend the implications of his intentions, just as he would believe the implications of his beliefs.

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COMMENTS on Wilfrid Sellars

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. The broadest possible sense of philosophy is generally related to human relations. This simple idea is quickly buried in definitions, spins, complications, alternate points of viewing the same thing, and abstractions of generalizations and functional rules, and so on, but ultimately most of it must come back to social relations. How do we best live with one another in an infinitely varying world?

People live – within a framework of conceptual thinking in terms of which they can be criticized, supported, refuted, in short, evaluated. This statement is comic when observing ordinary people these days, because the current trend is to claim they don’t criticize, refute or evaluate other people. It is a polite hypocrisy, because that is what they are constantly doing and its personal opposite, constantly seeking others’ approval for their actions. Sellars is right on with this observation, and it leads me to wonder if all enthusiastically spouted nonsense is laden with this kind of denial of the obvious. This idea might be a search method in my theories for probing into the unknown-unknowns.

The hypothetical imperative which comes closest to capturing the moral point of view is that of impartial benevolence. This is a comparison to Kant’s Categorical Imperative, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” The problem with Kant’s imperative is that it is impossibly complicated to apply to even the simplest human interaction. Whereas Sellars’ is easy, and even has Biblical footings. “for God maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” Matt 5:45

An ideally rational being would intend the implications of his intentions, just as he would believe the implications of his beliefs. This statement comes close to Kant’s Categorical Imperative, because it has an unending set of links off into infinity, and thus ties up even the most attentive person in complications and brings all action to a freeze. Thus we come back to impartial benevolence as a general life strategy even if we are incessantly distracted from performing that way by the constantly changing local circumstance. People in cities usually walk past unknown others with expressions of being lost in their own thoughts, but if you stop them politely and ask a simple question of help with directions they will generally respond as Sellars would suggest, with impartial benevolence. For most people impartial benevolence is the default opening statement.