PHILOSOPHY PATHWAYS Issue 70

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     2 And early in the morning he came again into the temple,
     and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and
     taught them. 3 And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto
     him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in
     the midst, 4 They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken
     in adultery, in the very act.

     5 Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be
     stoned: but what sayest thou?

     6 This they said, tempting him, that they might have to
     accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger
     wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.

     7 So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself,
     and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let
     him first cast a stone at her.

     8 And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. 9 And
     they which heard it, being convicted by their own
     conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest,
     even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman
     standing in the midst. 10 When Jesus had lifted up himself,
     and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where
     are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?

     11 She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither
     do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

     12 Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light
     of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in
     darkness, but shall have the light of life.

This text displays all three important aspects of human mutual understanding:

(1) Through "social understanding" Jesus knew what the scribes and Pharisees intended. This he knew -- as we all do -- by experience. And by the same token he knew how to convince them by their own conscience. The evangelist describes a credible reaction when they all leave. And Jesus understood the woman too: She may have felt real love for her lover. We may safely assume that Jesus was well aware of these things. Thus in this too he was "understanding". And of course he was fully of pity, since he felt her great fear. She was just about to be killed.

(2) But Jesus understood -- like the women -- that there had to be some social order to be obeyed. Thus the situation has some practical implications too, even if it is "only" to back up the social order. This is implied in the justifying argument: "Moses in the law commanded us, that such (adulteresses) should be stoned".

(3) And there is even a "metaphysical" understanding: When Jesus said "go, and sin no more !" he did not say "forget about it, don't worry, they are fools". He acknowledged that there was sin. But sin is a metaphysical term, not a moral one. A moral term relates to the rules of humans. A term like "sin" relates to the rules of God or to some other holy or supra-natural order of values.

Today many people jeer at such a thing. But after we have solved our practical and social problems, there remains a third class of problems arising from the questions "What are we doing as humans in this world? What is the meaning of our existence and of our deeds and of our life and fate?" Humans are metaphysical animals, not only intelligent ones. They ask -- they have to ask -- questions transcending the physical world, the world of touching and seeing and hearing. This is the meaning of meta-physical questions.

The moral realm is a practical realm in the social sphere. But the notion of sin lies outside of this moral realm. The notion of sin relates to the situation of any single person or to a whole society with respect to the whole of being, to the overarching order of things visible and invisible. And while this way of seeing things may be impossible to have for any "non-metaphysical" being, it is unavoidable for a "metaphysical" one.

Animals live "under conditions" but not "in situations". Only humans can be aware of "situations", because this awareness requires "metaphysical phantasy", seeing not only an "environment" but "a world". "God" like "the law of gravitation" is not part of our environment but of our "world" [1]. What we call a world is only to be seen and reacted to with the inner eye of imagination or theory. There are no "sense organs" save spiritual and intellectual ones for this sort of "transcendent reality".

Humans are always "interpreting" the world they live in, they struggle over "the true meaning and reading" of "the past" and "the future" and even "the current situation". Animals never could struggle over "interpretations of their situation" in this way, since they know of no "world". To call a situation "unjust" is possible only for humans, since this notion alone requires the metaphysical concept of justice. Such a concept is neither "empirical" nor "rational" but "conceptual": It is a pattern of things AS THEY SHOULD BE -- not as they are.

The "environment" of animals is essentially "imprinted on them by their genes" [2]. The "world" of humans is not imprinted on them at all, but is suggested by "collective knowledge and traditional wisdom" and by the language and its concepts and by "stories" and "histories". Those all -- religions, philosophies, sciences, sayings and folklore, ideologies, histories etc. -- build up "the world we live in". This is not so much a "genetic" world but a "memetic" one, spreading cultural "memes" -- collective and private memory contents -- instead of natural "genes" [3].

Of course there are "natural needs" in some way. There is hunger and thirst, there is cold and heat, there is the need to sleep, there is illness and pain etc.. But there are spiritual hunger and thirst "for justice" or "for truth" or "for beauty" etc. too. There is spiritual illness and spiritual pain -- and even a great spiritual tiredness and exhaustion sometimes. Thus human "reality" always is an artificial one, a cultural one to a very great part. Not even "hunger" or "sex" in humans are "natural", since otherwise the notions of "chastity" and "fasting" would be meaningless. But they are valued in most if not all religions. No behaviourist external observer could explain the existence of monasteries and the vows to "poverty, chastity, and obedience".

This metaphysical longing is real and essential in humans. As I wrote elsewhere: "Jesus was not teaching "group dynamics" nor guiding "encounter groups" and not stimulating "good vibes". His setting was of a much greater scale, even greater than the Roman Empire.'[4].

There is the natural eye, seeing the physical world with its physical objects -- mountains, clouds, trees, animals, other humans etc. -- and there is the spiritual eye, the imaginative eye, seeing worlds to be or to come or worlds invisible. And these "invisible worlds" are not at all "mere fancy and nonsense" or "delusion and superstition". Of course they are in many cases. But how do we see the worlds of Einstein's "General Theory of Relativity" or of Quantum Mechanics or of mathematics? Those are invisible worlds existing in our theories and in our brains only. They have no visible mode of existence. But they guide us to the right behaviour in technical things where cars and radios and computers and other technical devices are impossible to have without those theories.

Similiarly our social relations are usually formed and transformed or at least modified in the light of some metaphysical concepts -- Christian or Islamic or Buddhist or Confucian or socialist or liberal or in some other way.

This, then, is my question concerning "good society": What values and ideas concerning human togetherness and human future should be picked from a vast offer for getting at a better future for humankind?

What would we call a better future in this sense? I think we should call a better future one that we could be proud of in the eyes of future generations of human or non-human descendants in a distant future. And even if we make some stupid choices this time, intelligent beings looking back from a distance of some hundreds or thousand years should be able to grant us the best intentions and the most serious efforts. The worst thing we should fear is to be valued in a distant future as having been sloppy and egotistic and thoughtless and much behind our own best standards.

The most important difference is not between "dreams" and "reality" but between "good" and "bad" dreams. Humans are always driven by dreams. The important question is whether you are loving and helping your neighbor in the name of your dreams -- or suppressing, torturing and killing him. The important question is whether you are loving the world you live in, or despising and neglecting it for your dreams. So many people are full of hate when confronted with the world and the future and with other people. They want to get rid of it all and they enclose themselves in their dreams as in tanks and fighter-planes.

In this respect our evaluation of Plato and Plotinus and St.Augustine and Dante may be ambivalent: While they showed us great visions of an ideal faultless and eternal world, they tended to dismiss this imperfect world surrounding us as meaningless and rotten, whereas Aristotle and Cicero and St.Thomas and even Luther and Calvin and surely Erasmus and Kant and Hegel and Marx tried to keep our eyes down to the requirements of everyday life without ever losing sight of the greater ambitions of the human soul.

You cannot build up a better world of more mutual love and respect and better cooperation and understanding if you don't love this world and its people and its future. You cannot build up a better future without sincerity, honesty, and love, accepting the fact that there is much hard work to do. And this explains why Hitler and Stalin and their likes were not up to the task. They did not like this world and they did not really love life and humans and not even the future. What they loved most was their own power. They were full of fear and hate, so they needed power to keep their hate and fear down. They were able to spend millions of people and even the future of the world for their private mad obsessions and their interest in human future and well being was only a pretence to stay in power. It all was a great lie. What they lacked was love and the sense of decency and humility flowing from it. You never will build a good future or good society from arrogance.

See Don Quijote instead: Don Quijote -- while being enclosed in some delusions about what we generally call "reality" -- was full of real love for what he took to be "Gods creation". And in a similar way, whether he was right or wrong on the real nature of things, St.Francis was full of love towards all creatures too. Thus we all may be dreaming, we all may live in delusions, but to love or not to love -- that is the question.

It does not matter whether we have a free will or not. We have to choose from options, so there have to be options -- the more of them the better. Today we call poverty a scandal and a sign of "backwardness", of historical and social "under-development". But before "Enlightenment" nobody would have thought so. Up to some 300 years ago "poverty" was simply part of normal reality and had to be accepted. Thus "Enlightenment" has brought about just as great a shift in our understanding of what "reality" is as has Christendom during the 4th century AD.

It is in our minds -- privately and collectively -- how we see "human greatness and dignity". There can be no "objective" criteria. Our measure of what is great and dignified is a collective and private vision checked against private and collective experience. The great saints and sages and poets show us models of man -- good ones and bad ones -- to sharpen our awareness of options to select from. As Goethe once put it in a distichon for his little son:

Keep to the images of the great. Like shining stars did
Nature place them across the immensity of space.

No, we are no automata. We have to make choices since there are choices to be made, so we are responsible for picking the better ones by our best insight and understanding. If something is bad, mean, and disgusting, we should say so. And if something is great, noble, and worth our best endeavours we should go for it. But this is not "out there" for physical measurements, it is "in there" for the visionary and admiring mind. But this mind is always deceivable by false dreams and misguiding visions. And that is the problem. Nothing is more deceivable than idealism. But the existence of false gold does not prove the non-existence of the true one. There are many false saints, but there are some real saints too. Even the Buddha found some ground to stand on. We have to find out.

There remains one strange question: Why do we try to improve ourselves and the world around us and to build up a better future at all? Why not simply dream great and lovely dreams using drugs [5]? Some say that we do this all the time already, that we always live in a web of lies and self-deceptions -- socio-religious ones (Feuerbach), economic-political ones (Marx), moral-erotical ones (Freud), and others.

In a certain sense there is this web of self-deception. There is "maja" in the Buddhist sense and the web of collective self-deception and alienation in the sense of the Frankfurt School [6]. But this too is ambivalent. Of course you may call love and honour and dignity and greatness "deceptive", as did the behaviourist F.B.Skinner [7]. But then take all deeds of love and honour and dignity and greatness from the world and from history: What do you gain by this? "Clarity"? What clarity? The clarity of materialism, of human rats running in a lust-maze for some pellets?

The credo of Skinner, put on top of the page of the Skinner-Foundation, reads: "The major problems of the world today can be solved only if we improve our understanding of human behavior" (About Behaviorism, 1974). To this I could subscribe. But not even Skinner knew what will be lost by applying this great program in a stupid way. And that's the problem. There is always this danger to get humans down to be "mere intelligent rats" -- which is not "realistic" but simply plain stupid.

Sure: Culture can be seen as being nothing else than a man-made maze. And by this one may even call "eternal bliss" a spiritual pellet and the whole of Plato and Aristotle and Christianity and Islam and of Renaissance and Enlightenment and all else comes down to nothing, and all those temples and cathedrals come down to nothing too and fall in ruins. But once more: What do we gain by this? Does beauty stop to be beautiful? Does truth stop to be great? Does what is good between humans or between humans and animals and nature turn sour? What do we gain by this "clarity" of the sceptics and materialists? We still are humans carrying "our primate inheritance" with us. It would be the worst of all self deceptions to think otherwise. Those "saintly robots" and "super-humans" are not yet here.

There have been time and again those false dreams to be torn down. This was what the Buddha and Socrates and Jesus and Kant and Marx and Freud and Wittgenstein and some others always tried to do. But to tear down a house before it comes down all of itself is not to deny the value of a house. We have to tear down old houses, but then we have to build new ones. Humankind is growing in history all the time -- so we need new houses like the snakes need new hides. But there never will be "clarity" in the sense of the sceptics. The clarity of the sceptic is a sterile sort of clarity begetting no offspring, no charming babies to grow up and invent a better future and make it happen. The sceptic is no artist or engineer. There need to be critics. But the best critic is the artist and novelist and architect and composer and scientist and philosopher and politician etc. whose work is better than those criticized.

Those creative people are all moved by visions and ideas that they want to realize. They are inventive and trying to transform this world into a better one in some way. There is not only a great hope and longing in the human soul, but there is a great creative force driven by this hope.[8]. If you mourn some love you either light some candles on a grave or you build a Taj Mahal. Thus you even may transform great pain into smaller or greater works of art or science or politics. In this way humankind explores and transforms the world and the future according to its visions.

1. To be precise: The FACT of gravitation is physical and empirical of course, but the THEORY of gravitation is not. Before Newton's work (1687) there was no THEORY of gravitation. Even today the "empirical" world is full of facts and experiences we are not really aware of since we lack a proper theory to rouse our awareness.

2. See Jakob von Uexkuell (1864-1944) on the environments of animals: http:--- and http:---. From the latter I cite: "His later work was devoted to the problem of how living beings subjectively perceive their environment and how this perception determines their behaviour. In the book Umwelt und Innenwelt derTiere (1909) he introduced the term Umwelt to denote the subjective world of organism." Further see: "Constructivism" http:--- On "ethology" see: http:--- and http:--- and look up the names of Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen in the list of Nobel-Laureates http:--- and http:--- and http:--- and http:---

3. On "memetics" see http:--- and from this http:--- for a short history of this concept.

5. On Huxley's "Brave New World" and on "happiness drugs" and "paradise engineering" see http:---

7. F.B.Skinner (1904-90) popularized his views in his books "Walden Two" and "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" (1971). The title "Walden Two" plays on "Walden, or Life in the Woods" published by H.D.Thoreau in 1854. On Skinner see http:--- and http:--- where some further remarks on "Walden Two" and on "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" are given.

8. On this see Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) "The Principle of Hope" (dt.1960) http:---

1. The oldest philosophical question known to us is associated with the Greek thinker Thales of Miletos. I call it a question rather than a proposition because we are hardly in a situation of certainty in regard to the origin of the opinion, usually attributed to him, that water (or perhaps just moisture) is the fundamental stuff. Our most reliable source, Aristotle (in his 'Metaphysics'), after affirming that such a view 'seems' to have been promoted by Thales, then goes on to furnish explanations of the kitchen-maid type: well, can't you see that we're all full of water, likewise all plants, and that, if you look really hard, you can find water even in rocky and desert landscapes. Etcetera.

If this were the long and the short of it, philosophers would have to be even more loony than they're often accused of being. But of course the point is not, despite Aristotle, water as such, but that in Thales' proposition an underlying question about our relation as interrogators of Nature is expressed. For example: are life, existence, the world really intelligible? Are we looking at a rational structure in our attempt to apprehend the cosmos? Are the connections between all elements of which this cosmos consists reducible to a single primordial substance; and if so, is reconstitution possible by transformation upwards? Questions of this sort reverberate beneath the overt suggestion that one answer might be 'water'.

Roughly speaking, then, Thales proposed not so much a question but an agenda. The intellectual milieu in which he lived and worked was still dominated by the 'Just-so' stories of Chaos and Rhea, Uranos and Gaia and their ample menagerie of anthropomorphised forces: which to an inquisitive intellect like Thales' and, perhaps, others among the intelligentsia of Ionia, comprised a highly unsatisfactory bundle of closed off explanations, tantamount in fact to a refusal to explain anything. Reasoning should be able to do better than this.

Accordingly everyone who has ever written on Thales -- myself included -- has pushed the philosophical barrow of principle and left the idea of 'water as arche' to fend for itself or acknowledged it as, at best, a primitive means to insert an intellectual wedge into an admittedly big and intractable cognitive issue.

2. Still, inadvertence can do marvellous things on occasion. We are not unfamiliar with spooky anticipations. Many of these are nothing more than idle dreams -- but even as dreams and fancies they may convey hints to us about the idiosyncrasies of thinking (e.g. Leonardo's helicopter). But to stay with Thales' era, recall that Anaximenes substituted air for water as the fundamental stuff. There is pretty sound principle behind this, namely that a more malleable substance is needed to enable all the transformations to occur which are required of an 'Urstoff'. In particular, a sort of tremulous intimation of a continuum of matter states (phase changes) makes itself felt in this substitution of gas for a liquid. We should not forget that Anaximenes wasn't a chemist: it was pure guesswork on his part and it took about 2000 years to confirm that air and water share some of the same atomic matter in their constitution. So the idea of a foundational matter of all there is begins to sound a little more logical. We are not indeed compelled to dismiss either water or air as candidates for serious philosophical contemplation. And now I want to use this little fact to propose in my turn that -- albeit from a totally anachronistic point of view -- Thales and Anaximenes had between them struck the right idea after all.

     (a) In our dictionaries, all entries beginning with the
     prefix 'hydro' have a denotation of liquidity. Its Greek
     root word means "maker of water".

     (b) This is not coincidental, for hydrogen is after all the
     dominant element in water.

     (c) Now hydrogen is the simplest and lightest atomic
     element in the periodic table and a completely colourless
     and odourless gas.

     (d) The hydrogen atom owns just one orbital electron, on
     which account it is called 'symmetrically ambivalent', for
     it may donate or accept an electron from other atoms.

     (e) This ambivalence, however, makes hydrogen highly
     active. There are more compounds involving the hydrogen
     atom than any other (carbon comes a close second).

     (f) It is supposed that hydrogen is dispersed throughout
     the universe and accounts for roughly 90 per cent of the
     whole complement of atoms contained in it.

     (g) Moreover it is believed that hydrogen is the source of
     all matter in the universe through fusion processes in the
     interior of stars. More particularly hydrogen is present in
     all animal and vegetable tissue.

     (h) Most crucially, however, hydrogen decay is a multistep
     process, and every now and then a carbon atoms is ejected
     from this furnace. -- No carbon, no life: so clearly
     without this byproduct of hydrogen fusion we would not be
     here to discuss the question.

Returning from this 'scientific' excursion to home waters, we might wish to draw some philosophical conclusions. Essentially the problem, when viewed from such a perspective, reduces to a criterion of relevance: what do we mean by 'stuff'? Whose answer, the physicist's or the chemist's, shall be espouse?

For a long time now we have inclined to the former, bewitched by the vocable 'fundamental'. Somewhere along the line we forgot that this expression is mortgaged to infinite regress -- a hard task master. Since my perspective here is governed by the Thalesian agenda, I'm inclined to reject the knee-jerk agreement between fundamentals and physics, though not without a short sideways glance at some pretty cogent reasons.

First: one might be tempted to say that every time we look, yesterday's fundamental particle has been demoted by today's new candidate. However, if you keep looking, you will eventually detect some telltale signs of pretty queer goings-on. Just consider how many 'particles' in this zoo have zero mass, zero momentum, zero everything, and you may get more than an inkling that the idea of a 'property' in this context describes exactly the Emperor's new clothes. Accordingly there is observable, even among physicists, a strong drift away from the billiard ball model of fundamental particles and over to the concept of a 'field'. Yet I shall propose that even this turnabout is not completely satisfactory -- not the answer to a philosophical conundrum.

Therefore I'm tempted to suggest that the concept of matter is in such dubious shape as to be almost meaningless. This wasn't always the case; as I said we seem to have lost track of what we were looking for when the notion of fundamentality took on a life of its own. But to come to the point: I would suggest that the concept of matter is completely misapplied when used in a subatomic context. All the items below that line represent (to revert to an old Aristotelian distinction) nothing more than a potential for matter. To satisfy the criterion of a 'matter state', this potential requires actualisation; and there is but one avenue for this to eventuate: namely assembly in an atom.

That the particles making up such an atom are its constituents is neither here nor there -- this is precisely where the spectre of infinite regress rears its ugly head. For it is easily shown that 5000 electrons do not by themselves comprise anything remotely apprehensible as matter; but the same 5000 electrons distributed into formal arrangements among atoms tell a different story. For in such an arrangement they become members of chemical aggregates, that is to say clearly defined and articulated, 'actualised' matter.

What we have been doing, in our emphasis to locate fundamental particles via physics, is to keep looking for constituents of constituents of constituents, without taking care of the concept with which we began, and which indeed disappeared from right under our nose. Analogously one might have defined all mankind as one big brotherhood, and then begun reduction of the term to nation, province, neighbourhood, club and family -- but somewhere along this line the idea of a brotherhood meets its inevitable limit. A person is not a brotherhood, though they might be a member of many.

Concluding: matter is minimally defined as one atom. And this where our search ends. Below that level a different -- radically different -- concept reigns. And since hydrogen does possess the properties mentioned above, it qualifies as 'the fundamental stuff'. Maybe 100 per cent fundamentality was aiming too high in the first place. But in every other respect, water was a pretty good guess for someone living about 2500 years before the technology was available to pronounce with finality that it was just a guess. But all the same, only a near miss.

     Greetings dear mr.Klempner,
     Here is something I wrote on Peace. I would be glad if it
     would be published in philosophy pathways.
     Anyway, doesn't matter. Enjoy it:)
     truly,
     Tatomir.

     "They shall see the door of life, and they will enter with
     great joy in their hearts, and they will find peace."

Introduction: The way.

The future of human rights depends on us, to create a more enlightening and stronger foundation for its support, through education and promotion of the true values of the human race -- of which the most precious is peace, the integration and continuation of history with this holy crown and divine gift.

Mankind's duty is to obtain it, keep it, and to never lose it...in a global harmony to work for the equality of the social classes, for the disappearance of differences, fights, misunderstandings, in preparing the inauguration of a new Era -- the Era of the human, where we shall have only one truth, only one master, only one reason to lead the life:

1. the only Truth -- the Light, 2. the only Master -- Goodness, 3. the only Reason to lead the Life -- to share truth and goodness with all beings.

We need peace.

Daily reports inform us about crimes and explosions caused by criminal hands; children, old people, young people are losing their lives in suffering, for they have no food and water, while the big players of international politics spend millions of dollars on armaments and military equipment and actions...

Interethnic wars, pollution, disease, accidents, earthquakes, floods -- there are so many aspects of the human tragedy -- why are these "players" blind, what kind of blindness has covered their eyes, that they do not see all these things?

They do not hear, they do not see...we must put the question...really, why do we need such statue-like leaders, without sensibility, without shame, without human feelings...

Well, you will surely ask me, what do I mean by 'human feelings'? I will answer you...

By human feelings I understand the normal predisposition to be merciful and peace loving, to put the interests of society first, and all that these interests consist in: the healing of pain, giving a helpful hand to all who need it, homes for the homeless people, to build and not to destroy -- and only charity can do it -- to bring consciousness as closely as possible to the notion HUMAN, to give education and set an example to the youth in this spirit, to discover, to appreciate, to understand, and to practice the values of this cherished title.

The violence, the destructive force, which characterizes a great part of the world is a form of suicide of mankind.

And our duty, the duty of those of us who are peace loving, constructive people, is to stop this degenerative process which poisons the hope of the future of our children, and like a nightmare is spoiling the beautiful dreams that we build for them.

Everyone must see the horrible, hideous, repulsive face of violence, its ugly apparition, with its typical effects: death, torture, mutilated people, tears from the eyes of mothers, sons, wives, fathers, children without childhood; and more than that, not just to see, but never accept, use or make concessions to violence.

I am sure you have observed the stupidity of violence -- because it is a form of self-destruction of the human race, and of the planet. It is between the two negative philosophical categories of stupidity and the non-esthetic that I place violence.

Just to build, just to construct, to elevate -- just in these actions the esthetic takes part, and any distancing from these principles constitutes the contrary of peace, the beautiful, the esthetic, and the approach to violence, to the ugly, to the non-esthetic, in other words:

In conclusion: to prefer violence is to love self-destruction. To assimilate it is to choose the category of the non-esthetic -- an absolutely abnormal decision, which rational people will not do.

To say things accordingly: Violence-loving people are blind (without spiritual sensors), and more than that, stupid (without the capacity to have a good way of thinking -- the rational way of Descartes Cogito, ergo sum...).

We need humans, not statues without feelings, we don t need segregation, but unity, and this unity is possible to find through mercy, charity, respect towards human rights and values.

May God bless us, all the peoples believing in the constructive principles and in the supremacy of peace.

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