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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Bertrand Russell

You don’t have to drop philosophy for activism

21 Sunday Apr 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Bertrand Russell, democracy, George Boole, Helen De Cruz, Judith Simmer-Brown, Nathan J. Robinson, Noam Chomsky, Peter Singer, United States, war

The United States has always been a relentlessly pragmatic place, which doesn’t leave it much room for philosophy. Watching three Republican presidential candidates all take pot-shots at philosophy on the same night was only the most vivid recent example. But it’s not just right-wingers. Today Helen De Cruz discussed a recent article from socialist former philosopher Nathan J. Robinson that wonders whether we should do philosophy at all – whether, in fact, we have an obligation not to do philosophy. He claims, “I definitely feel, though, that I couldn’t have justified spending a career as an academic philosopher” – not because there are so few such jobs out there and you’re taking them from people who want them more, but because the time you spend on such a career is supposedly abdicating a larger political responsibility.

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Mystics, Marx, and negating the negation

28 Sunday Jan 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Deity, Dialectic, Economics, German Tradition, Logic, Metaphysics, Politics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 3 Comments

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Alfred North Whitehead, Bernard McGinn, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Colledge, Friedrich Engels, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Meister Eckhart, nondualism

The phrase negation of the negation is best known from Karl Marx’s work, as when he uses it to describe capitalist production in Capital. It’s an odd phrase that seems simply redundant in the formal logic taught to analytic philosophers and computer scientists. There, the principle of double negation elimination tells you ¬¬P -> P: that is, the negative of the negative is the positive, and nothing more. Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica say simply: “a proposition is equivalent of the falsehood of its negation.” On that account, to “negate the negation” of something just leaves you with its affirmation, the original thing you were negating: all you’re doing is being unnecessarily wordy, by saying not-not-P when you could have just said P.

But in Marx’s inspiration Hegel, there is much more to the phrase than this redundancy. A great deal of Hegel’s thought proceeds in the kind of three-part progression that introductions to Hegel often call thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (though Hegel never used those terms in that way). When thinking through a particular idea we begin in a first, unquestioned or immediate, position – a prejudice. This idea gets challenged by its opposite, the negation or negative moment. The third and final step is in some ways closer to the first than to the second, but it is crucially different: it takes up the truth of the second within it, transcends and includes it. This is negating the negation: negating here is a process, not a simple inversion or opposite but a rational movement forward. That movement is at the heart of Hegel’s thought.

I was startled recently to encounter the phrase “negation of negation” in a rather different place: the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. At first, Eckhart’s only obvious commonality with Hegel and Marx is that they are all German. But the commonalities go deeper, at least with Hegel. Hegel isn’t obviously a mystic: his logocentrism leaves little room for ineffability or mystery, and leaves him to be disdainful of mystical experience. Yet depending on how one defines mysticism, there is a mystical dimension at least in Hegel’s nondualism, where everything comes back to a spirit or mind (Geist) that is both subject and object, both God and self. And Hegel traces that nondualism directly back to Eckhart himself. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel describes Eckhart as having “a thorough grasp of the divine depth” in this passage from Eckhart’s sermons:

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The virtue of laziness

29 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Self-Discipline, Work

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Bertrand Russell, Hugo Grotius, justice, Karl Marx, technology, United States

I’m really enjoying my new job at the intersection of academia and technology, and it’s made me want to improve my technology skills. So I’m now preparing for a Master’s degree in computer science, learning to program in modern computer languages. I’ve been trying to think about how to be a good programmer, and looking up some advice on the web. Of course people’s assessments of good programmers are widely different, but there’s one surprising claim that comes up quite a lot: a good programmer is a lazy programmer.

This is the point where programming becomes philosophically interesting. Continue reading →

Why I am not a right-winger

18 Wednesday Aug 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, German Tradition, Patient Endurance, Politics, Self-Discipline, Social Science, Virtue, Work

≈ 32 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Bertrand Russell, conservatism, George W. Bush, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Rod Dreher, United States, William Vallicella

In grad school it often struck me that most of my intellectual partnerships were with self-professed conservative grad students, despite my own left-wing politics. Similarly, some of the most interesting blogs I’ve found have been conservative or right-wing.

It took me a while to figure out the reason for this, but I came to see it quite clearly: for most left-wingers, the good is fundamentally political. The place to focus our efforts, in changing the way that things and people are, is on the inequalities, oppressions and pollutions of the state and the corporations and wealth it regulates. Conservatives, at least social conservatives, often do not think this way. Our big problems are with ourselves. It matters that people become better, more virtuous; even when they do obsess about politics, it is as an attempt to make people better in some sense. An interesting example is Rod Dreher, one of the conservative bloggers I linked to in the earlier post: while his blog was originally called “Crunchy Con” (as in “conservative”), it later just took on his name, and now is called Macroculture – the emphasis has been steadily less on politics and more on culture, and the blog has gotten steadily more interesting (though less popular) as it went. This is an attitude I tend to be largely in agreement with. My deepest debt to Buddhism is that it saved me from politics, made me focus on problems with myself and not with the world.

The question I’ve then come to ask myself is: why haven’t I become conservative myself? Continue reading →

Zest

16 Wednesday Sep 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Flourishing, Food, Greek and Roman Tradition, Health, Monasticism, Patient Endurance, Pleasure, Self-Discipline, Zest

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

André Comte-Sponville, Aristotle, Bertrand Russell

One of the most important virtues to consider, to my mind, is what Bertrand Russell called “zest.” Zest, in Russell’s terms, is the healthy enjoyment of worldly pleasures. He explains it as follows:

Suppose one man likes strawberries and another does not; in what respect is the latter superior? There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good, to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live. What is true in this trivial instance is equally true in more important matters. The man who enjoys watching football is to that extent superior to the man who does not. The man who enjoys reading is still more superior to the man who does not, since opportunities for reading are more frequent than opportunities for watching football. (Russell did not live to see ESPN.) The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another. Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days. (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, pp. 125-6)

Zest in this sense, I think, is and should be a controversial virtue. There are many lists of virtues in which it does not appear. Continue reading →

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