A Curious Little Blog

The political part of this book is much smaller and less convincing than the theological part.  Spinoza tries to outline an entire theory of politics in far too little space.  He begins with a Hobbesian state of nature in which everyone has a "right" to do anything: every individual has sovereign right to do all that he can; in other words, the rights of an individual extend to the utmost limits of his power as it has been conditioned. (16:8) Now it is the sovereign law and right of nature that each individual should endeavour to preserve itself as it is, without regard to anything but itself. It seems odd to assign everyone a "right" to do whatever they want.  What is the point of such a right?  If I have a right to shoot you, and you have a right to shoot me, then it seems to me that rights are pointless.  Of course, this is a pre-social setting, so there is no judge to decide rights in any case; but it seems like a more sensible starting point w...

Spinoza is a famous philosopher about whom I have heard very little.  I had a vague notion that he believed the world to consist of monads, and that he conceived of "God" as the same as natural laws.  Apart from that, I couldn't have told you anything about his ideas.  I used to think that this relative obscurity was because Spinoza did not influence other philosophers to a great extent, but I am learning that some people admired him greatly.  I suppose that he is not associated with a single idea that makes him easy to locate in the history of philosophy, the way Hume means scepticism, Kant means "thing-in-itself," and Decartes means dualism.  Or, it could be because his philosophy is too obscure to sum up. This particular work is certainly not obscure.  It is about as clear as anything could be, which is something that I appreciate, having no stomach for writers who try to enhance their fame by writing in a way that no one understands.  In fact, th...

I have only one thing to add to the last post, on Schopenhauer, concerning his personal behaviour.  Wikipedia cites Betrand Russell's complaint that Schopenhauer did not at all live the life of asceticism that he extolled.  Schopenahuer himself provided an anticipatory response, also cited in the article, "In general, it is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses. To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy." While it is true that a person's philosophy does not depend ultimately on whether he himself follows what he teaches, it is nevertheless a relevant matter to consider.  If a person were to proclaim publicly that there can be no earthly happiness outside of complete chastity, and yet spend his eve...

Schopenhauer has a reputation as being a little bit whack (to use the technical term), so I approached "The World as Will and Idea" with some trepidation.  It immediately put me at ease with its clear style.  After having just read "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and finding it little more than gibberish, it was refreshing to read an author who actually intended for his readers to understand him.  Admittedly, Schopenhauer does begin by saying that the only way to understand this massive work is to read it through twice, and he does jump right in with the arrogance by stating that he is going to give a real philosophy where all previous writers had only made attempts at it.  Still, I at least understood what he was saying, and that was more than I could say for Nietzsche or Hegel. I thought "The World as Will and Idea" would be an abstract phrase representing something else, but Schopenhauer means it quite literally:  everything in the world is either will, or i...

I came across a news headline yesterday that interested me:  " The NRA Just Scored One Of Its Biggest Victories In Years ."  I hadn't heard anything about this, so I checked out the article, which is on ThinkProgress.org so naturally it isn't going to like anything that benefits the NRA.  What interested (and, I'll be honest, irritated) me was not the content of the article but one phrase that says a recent Supreme Court decision "expanded the scope of that [the 2nd] amendment significantly — effectively creating a whole new area of constitutional law more than two centuries after the Bill of Rights was ratified." Stop the presses!  The radical Supreme Court has dared to radically expand the meaning of a Bill of Rights amendment!  You might think that the author was a Constitutional originalist, imbued with deep respect for the Constitution as written, sceptical of those who want to modify it with the times.  I don't actually know the author'...

I have been watching TED talks on YouTube recently.  I should immediately qualify myself that many of them are "TEDx" talks, which are just licensed events that aren't organized by the same company, so they don't carry quite the same caché.  There is so much buzz around TED, and the videos I have watched have all had several million viewers (I think I started with a list of 50 of the most popular ones), that I thought there must be something really interesting or useful about them.  With titles like " How to Make Healthy Eating Unbelievably Easy ," " How to Retire by Twenty ," and " How to Learn Any Language in Six Months ," it is easy to be seduced into thinking there is valuable information here.  I have a normal scepticism about outrageous claims, so I don't really expect to accomplish any of these things myself, but I did hope I would learn some valuable techniques from them. I have been disappointed.  I had the idea that the t...

What is real, the things we see and touch around us, or the ideas of those things?  It seems obvious, but Plato argued that things, being merely transitory, don't really exist in the same way that eternal ideas do.  Ever since then, this "idealist" position has been a major branch of philosophy. It always bothered me, and I am thinking about it again as I read Schopenhauer make the same basic argument.  If something exists in time, it is by definition transitory; everything in time is constantly changing, and there must be a time before and after it existed when the object did not exist.  But the idea of this thing, the template for it, always exists; it even exists outside of time and space.  Therefore, the idea is more real than the thing. I have trouble with the concept of anything "existing" outside of time and space, but that's another argument that I'm not prepared to make at the moment.  My more pertinent objection is that it is too hard to de...