Plato

Plato (428/427 BC[a] – 348/347 BC), was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of natural philosophy, science, and Western philosophy. Plato was originally a student of Socrates, and was as much influenced by his thinking as by what he saw as his teacher’s unjust death.

Plato’s sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him. Plato’s writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato’s texts.

Although there is little question that Plato lectured at the Academy that he founded, the pedagogical function of his dialogues, if any, is not known with certainty. The dialogues since Plato’s time have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, and other subjects about which he wrote.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato

I organized my closet and desk. I moved away papers that had lost their importance, and brought out pens flowing fresh ink and blank post-its. I tacked colored unicorns and drawn memorabilia to my bulletin board. I moved books I had read to the top shelf of my closet, and filled the left corner of my desk with new books I plan on reading sometime soon.

All for what? The holiday season is approaching and with that, coming gifts from loving family members and friends. All come appreciated and appear to be hand selected. Mine; generally come in the form of books, they are the quickest way to my heart no matter what genre or author. Books, books, books to add to my plethora of books.

With all the classics that have been on shelves for years, and the new books that are virgins to my reading eyes, I cannot help but think which books would please me best.

In the latest months, I have found myself venturing in to the philosophy section of bookstores. My latest purchase: The Symposium by the thinker Plato. Now, in somewhat of a switch, I think I would like to take a journey through some Charles Darwin, or Greek plays, maybe something more religious and controversial or possibly something more recent such as Under the Dome.

Every title I see provokes my interest in one way or another, I could argue any which one to the death of whether or not I would actually read it. It may sit, but the sitting and being unread is still a comfort in my heart. At least I have another book, I say to myself, and I love the gift thoroughly.

As I shuffled through my books, my two young cats wrestled beneath my feet with no idea of the compromises I was making in my head. I made choices of what books I was most likely not going to read anytime soon; these books feel to the deepest but still very fluorescently lit part of my closet. Other books built the foundation for mediocre piles of books I thought I might read soon. Through each decision, Oscar and Char continued to bicker.

Here is the third and final installment of my in-class essay transcription project.  Part one, WCW & The Rose, is here and part two, E.E. Cummings & Matter, is here.  The following is a bit more understandable, I think, without extra framing than the E.E. Cummings essay.  The following focuses on Barbara Guest’s poem “An Emphasis Falls on Reality”.  The topic was to discuss why the “willows are not real trees”…

Barbara Guest states that “willows are not real trees” in her poem “An Emphasis Falls on Reality”.  The first compulsion upon reading this line, perhaps, is to run to the encyclopedia–is the willow not in the tree phylum?  What could it be if not a tree?  Alas, the encyclopedia will give no assistance to the diligent reader.  Yes, some willows are technically shrubs, but enough are trees to discount that as the easy answer.  The reader must then look precisely where the reader should have been looking from the start–the poem itself.

In the previous stanza, Guest writes

These metaphors may be apprehended after

they have brought their dogs and cats

born on roads near willows

These metaphors?  What metaphors?  There is not any metaphor in the poem as we traditionally think of metaphor.  There is one preceding simile:

they are orderly as motors

floating on the waterway

What are these metaphors, then?  For Guest, the metaphor is the connection between the words themselves and the concept they communicate.  Thus, willow is:

[note: I drew a very poor rendition of a willow tree at this point of the essay].

Though, as discussed in other parts of the poem, the picture isn’t a real tree either.  The word willow is ink on paper that signifies something in reality but is not itself reality, and the thought moreover is not reality (of the willow tree) either.  There is not a real tree in my head when I think ‘willow tree’.

The final line of the poem also gives some indications as to how to conceptualize the willow as not real: “The darkened copies of all trees.”  The words “copied” sends the reader to thoughts of Plato and the Platonic ideal.  Except that Guest inverts the relationship.  Where Plato gives superiority and authority to his ideal tree or willow–the perfect tee that only exists in the mind–and considers all physical trees a flawed copy of that tree, Guest counters with:

The necessary idealizing of your reality

is part of the search

Guest begins with reality as the starting point, the willow trees that actually do exist, and states that from these real things each of us separately create an idealized thought or image that we then use in our attempt to approach or better understand our reality.  Without the real, the ideal doesn’t exist.  Someone who has never seen or heard of a willow tree cannot create an idealized image in their mind of a willow tree.  Reality is the original; not a copy of some real or idealized reality.

Whereas Plato is trying to get back to reality–the cave where we can see only shadows of the real–Guest is trying to move ahead to get to reality:

This house was drawn for them

it looks like a real house

perhaps they will move in today

It is necessary for “them” to idealize their house in their search for it.  Through that idealism they can find what it is in reality that they are looking for.  Reality, then, is both the beginning and the end.  The word, though, and concept “willow” is our attempt to approach, understand, and interact with our own personal reality that surrounds us.

The title also gives an indication of how to understand the willow as not a real tree.  “An Emphasis Falls on Reality” is stating that emphasis, or one’s attention, interacts with reality when that attention happens to notice something around it in its reality.  In the reading of the poem there are no real clouds, no real dogs or cats, no real willows.  The reality of reading the poem is the poem itself, the words on the page, the thoughts that rise (or potentially rise) from them.  The reality of the moment is the Guest poem itself, which, in its existence on the page is a physical object of reality too.  It has been created.  I have a sudden tangential thought about what this has to do with Cummings, kenosis, and adding matter to the world.  Guest’s poem is made of words, not trees.  She writes:

A column chosen from distance

mounts into the sky while the font

is classical

Is it too much to say that “font” is a pun indicating typography?  And that the column is the physical appearance of the poem on the page?

So Guest seems to want us to see her words as words, and then correspondingly look at reality as reality.  Her word “willows” is just a word and the thought that arises is just a thought.  But this acknowledgment actually brings us closer to reality by encouraging us to privilege reality, not the supposed Platonic ideal that Plato claims exists above reality.  There is no above or below, really, according to Guest–words are words, thoughts are thoughts, trees are trees.  And all are “necessary” for the “journey”.

I’m taking an Introduction to Philosophy Course this semester.  As we’ve learned about the advent of the Christian era, I have begun to think about the continued role of philosophy.  What should be the relation between the gospel and philosophy?

A Bad Name

Philosophy seems to have been given a bad name in the scriptures, specifically for the way it leads us away from God.  In his epistle to the Colossians, Paul warns, “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Colossians 2:8,emphasis added).

In this dispensation, the Lord explains that it is because of the creeds of men that many have been unable to find the truth.  Through Joseph Smith, he says,  “For there are many yet on the earth among all sects, parties, and denominations, who are blinded by the subtle craftiness of men” (Doctrine and Covenants 123:12, emphasis added).

In these cases (and others – see Jacob 4:10; 2 Nephi 9:42-43), we are warned that sophistry and learning can lead us into spiritual darkness.

But philosophy is not inherently evil.  In fact, it can be beneficial if we exercise wisdom and prudence.  Jacob tells us,  “When [men] are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God….  And they shall perish.  But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God” (2 Nephi 9:28-29, emphasis added).

What Good – The Scriptures

There are a few scriptures which speak of the benefit of philosophy and learning, including Jacob’s quote above.

In the Book of Mormon, Mosiah made sure that his sons were “taught in all the language of his fathers, that thereby they might become men of understanding; and that they might know concerning the prophecies which had been spoken by the mouths of their fathers, which were delivered them by the hand of the Lord” (Mosiah 1:2, emphasis added).

In the Old Testament, Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, and Daniel were honored for their “knowledge and skill in all learning,” and Daniel specifically for his understanding of visions (Daniel 1:17, emphasis added).

In these and other situations, individuals were able to deepen their spirituality and understanding of spiritual things because of their philosophical preparation.

What Good – The Philosophers

Scholars and church leaders have had varied opinions on the value of philosophy.  As Tertullian asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” or “the Academy with the Church?”  It’s a valid question, and one that has garnered many answers since its inception.  Some believe that it is useless, others essential, and still others that it serves a purpose only until we find the gospel.

In teaching the Galatians, Paul described the law as a pedagogue that would bring us to Christ (Galatians 3:24).  Clement expanded on this idea when he said that philosophy was actually inspired of God, and also a pedagogue that could bring men to Christ.  A pedagogue, rather than a schoolmaster (as its translated in the KJV), was a servant who would lead children to school.  Clement argued that philosophy, in that same way, can lead us to the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Philosophy has always been used to answer man’s questions about how they should live their lives – how they might best act so as to be happiest, or most well, or most just.  The gospel, coming from a divine source, meets these same needs, so we can see how one might lead to the other.

Others thought Clement’s position does not go far enough, arguing that while valuable for leading us to Christ, philosophy can also enrich our experience with Christ once we have found him.  This position mirrors that of Augustine, who said in prayer, “I now believe that it was thy pleasure that I should fall upon these books [of Plato] before I studied thy Scriptures, that it might be impressed on my memory how I was affected by them….  For had I first been molded in thy Holy Scriptures… they might have pushed me off the solid ground of godliness.”  Augustine was able to, using the tools given him by his study of philosophy, remain on the ‘solid ground of godliness.’  Origen’s position is similar, believing that we can understand who God is through reading Plato‘s writings on the “good.”  In either case, using the teachings of the great philosophers allowed these men to better understand the gospel.

The analytical tools of philosophy also allow men to explore belief.  Epicurus, an ancient philosopher, used philosophy to outline the problem of evil and a belief that led some to charge him as an atheist.  Since his time, philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and BYU’s David Paulsen have used philosophical logic to refute this problem of evil (see the Free Will Defense and Joseph Smith and the Problem of Evil) .  Others can now study their arguments and have more than a superficial experience with their religion.  Instead, they can understand both what they believe and why they believe it.

What Good – My Experience

I offer my own opinion, with an example from just a few days ago.  While philosophy can work in such a way as to bring men to Christ, it should not be abandoned when religion is found, but rather embraced as a way to deepen and enrich religious experience.

Philosophy is essential in giving us the tools to have constructive discussions about the gospel.  In my short philosophical experience, I have become much better at recognizing, formulating, and refuting arguments.  I also have experience with common mistakes people make, including fallacious arguments that pop up frequently, and this has allowed me to better discuss controversial issues with others.  Those who have less experience in philosophy are not as adept at having constructive discussions.

I am a “fan” of The Book of Mormon on Facebook.  In an effort to gain more control over the discussions that took place on the topic, the administrators opened a forum at MormonTopics.net.  I thought it would be fun to join in, and registered.

My first contribution was regarding the question, “Are Mormons Christian?”  This is a good question, and doesn’t have a clear answer.  There are lots of questions to clarify, including what the term “Christian” means, what the requirements may be to qualify as Christian, what may disqualify a group as Christian, or if there is even more than one way to be Christian.  The majority of LDS posters ignored these types of questions, and wrote things like “Of course we’re Christian!” or “The name of the Church proves we’re Christian!” or “The subtitle of The Book of Mormon proves we’re Christian!”  The majority of non-LDS posters wrote things like “Mormons aren’t Christian!” or “You worship a different Jesus!”  As you can see, such posts are ineffective at resolving, or even coming to a greater understanding of, the question.

My post differed from the norm.  While certainly not polished or perfect, it offered a different view from the views being expressed.  Few others seemed to agree or care.  Still, I was grateful for my experience in philosophy, for it allowed my religious experience to be deeper and more fulfilling, and still does.  Those who study religion without the aid of philosophy can still have wonderful experiences that draw them closer to God.  It seems clear to me, though, that a philosophical background can assist in deepening and enriching those same experiences.

Balance

Certainly balance is the key to any such situation; being extreme in either direction will ultimately end with some sort of loss.  And clearly, priority should be given to divine counsel – the scriptures and the words of living prophets.

What are your thoughts on balance?  Or on the original question of what “Athens has to do with Jerusalem”?

It’s a pretty bold and clear title, but unfortunately, the talk I went to on it by Tim Addey, at the Prometheus Trust’s London base,  was anything but.

The talk began at half 6 and I arrived about 15 minutes early. From the outside it looks like any ordinary house in a London street, but there was a small plaque on the door announcing that it was indeed the ‘New Acropolis’. I knocked and was shown into a room to the left of the hallway where a friendly looking man asked for my name, holding his pen ready at the top of a list. A list that contained no other names. Rather terrified, I asked if I was the only person there, already knowing the answer and dreading it. Yes I was, he said, before changing his mind to say that there were two others already downstairs. Steeling myself to be brave, I handed over my £5 and headed down the stairs.

The room in which I found myself was small, perhaps the size of your average living room. There were 20 chairs arranged facing a black table, behind which were a large set of shelves holding what looked like replicas of artefacts from ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt. Gradually, a few other people joined me but I was still worried that I might be called upon to answer questions to check that I had done my homework. When Mr Addey arrived, there were eight of us sitting down to listen.

I had been looking forward to this talk since I first discovered it on www.lecturelist.org, hoping that it would be inspiring and thought-provoking, but it was nothing like I expected. Mr Addey’s style was mainly to state what Plato had written, give an example of what this might mean and then move on. There was no analysis and no discussion of it’s validity or flaws. It was pure blind acceptance that what Plato had said must be right. And this from a ‘philosopher’! I was taught to question and examine all texts that I worked with, and so to hear an ‘expert’ naively expounding that we should all think how Plato thought was very strange. It was glaringly obvious that Mr Addey was no university lecturer, as the talk was quite disjointed and more a list of facts rather than a discussion. Having done some research since arriving home, I have been unable to find out anything about him, except that he has written a book for the Prometheus Trust.

However, he clearly loves his subject and had a very deep knowledge of Plato’s works. It was a bit frightening though, how he seemed to have philosophy on a pedestal. He appeared to believe that if we all studied philosophy, everything would be right with the world and our government would never make mistakes. If we could only attain this higher wisdom, all life would be perfect. He doesn’t appear to realise that even the wisest of humans are still only human. Take the story of the trial of Socrates, for example: out of the jury of 500, Socrates was found guilty by just over half of them. However, when it was time to decide his punishment, the great majority decided that he should die, meaning that many of these who believed he was innocent still wanted him put to death. Perhaps he shouldn’t have made that joke that he deserved to be paid for his services to the state, rather than be punished, before his penalty had been decided. But it does show he still had a lot to learn about life.

He did have some fans, so perhaps I’m just being hard on him. One man said he’d been to the previous two lectures (this being the 4th of 7), so he clearly had some appeal. By the end, there were probably about 14 of us in the room.

Personally, though, I don’t think I’ll be going to next week’s lecture.

.

Extremely Brief Notes from Lecture

The ancient world saw us as part of something that was much larger, a wider movement. We are a small part of a whole in the natural world.

Plato believed there were three initial political virtues: temperance, reason and fortitude, and together these led to the fourth: justice.

Plato believed that:
city = soul   =   universe = body

Everything that we have an effect on can be called ‘political’. This does not include the natural world as that will carry on in the same way after we have been and gone.

Plato said that if there is a problem in society, human beings will rise up to rectify it. However, if they fail, nature will take over and deal with the problem.

Although Plato tried to influence rulers, he did not enter politics directly. He was given the opportunity to do so but turned it down.

Dialectic = gaining understanding through analysis to reach the ‘eternal ideas’.

There are two forms of ignorance:

1. Not knowing that you are ignorant
2. Realising that you are ignorant

He believed that the second of the two is the safest, and that most mistakes are a result of the first – ‘double ignorance’.

The leaders of society should be wise, employing reason in all that they do. In this way, they can guide the rest of society. Plato argued that rulers should live on the bare minimum necessary so as not to be distracted from their ‘thinking’. Thinkers should not be obsessed with wealth – a marked contrast to the high wages of MPs today (not to mention the expenses scandal…)

Every community pursues happiness and what is good.
Good society helps citizens become wise.
Society gives leadership to those who are wise.
The community should temper its activities to those that are good and which have been agreed.
The community should be based on a system of exchange of merits: if everybody contributes goods to the community, this will balance peoples’ rights and responsibilities, keeping things equal.

When asked how he would bring about philosophy into today’s politics, Tim Addey recommended:

• Parents teach philosophy to their children at a young age
• Children learn philosophy in schools
• People should vote for those they believe wise in elections

After Cape Town Mayor Dan Plato was slapped in Blikkiesdorp, the police have warned politicians not to enter the area without police backup.
Blikkiesdorp is a government built shack settlement on the barren sands of Delft, outside of Cape Town. With rows of tin shacks, razor wire fencing, invasive lighting and armoured vehicles at the gated entrance, it looks like a concentration camp. To his credit the local police chief describes Blikkiesdorp as a ‘housing time-bomb’ close to reaching ‘boiling point’. But, incredibly, Dan Plato says that he is ‘happy’ with Blikkiesdorp despite the fact that the residents are ‘ungrateful’. He intends to build more camps like it.

State officials refer to these camps as ‘temporary relocation areas’ in Cape Town, ‘transit camps’ in Durban and ‘decant areas’ in Johannesburg. All the major political parties see them as a useful way of expelling the urban poor from the cities and ending any political autonomy that they may have developed through self organised occupations without having to pay the traditional price of providing decent housing.

But, they are universally hated and widely disparaged as ‘amatins’ and ‘government shacks’. Across the country people have burnt them down, marched, thrown up burning barricades and gone to court in their attempts to avoid being dumped in these places. But despite the ubiquity of resistance, thousands of people have been forced into these camps unlawfully at gunpoint or lawfully by judges who tend to hold to the bizarre assumption that they are automatically better than shack settlements.

Although the amatins look very much like a futuristic nightmare out of District 9 they have a long history in our country. The apartheid state used them to assert white control of cities by corralling blacks into contained and easily policed peripheral spaces — and by ensuring that its officials, rather than any popular process, would allocate access to these toeholds in the cities.

The apartheid state often justified its urban planning in the international language of modernisation and slum clearance rather than an explicit racism. But, of course, the function of that technocratic language was to mask the base fears and desires that drive oppression in the guise of scientific neutrality and necessity. That mask was torn from the face of oppression by a properly political language that named and denounced segregation and forced removal for what they were.

Some of the people that have been sentenced to Blikkiesdorp for being poor used to live in centrally located Cape Town neighbourhoods like Salt River and Woodstock. The parallels with previous rounds of dispossession and exclusion from central Cape Town are obvious.

But, Lindiwe Sisulu got the idea for these camps from India and not from apartheid. This fact offers an important insight into the mind of the political elites that are driving a violent programme of class segregation that literally puts the poor, be they shack dwellers, street traders or sex workers, in their place.

In India the rich have turned on the poor, driving them out of the cities and dispossessing them of rural land in a kind of internal colonialism that has produced ‘a world class India’ with its billionaires, IPL and glamorous film stars at the direct expense of the devastation of the poor.

It has resulted in a massive popular rebellion against elites, which is sometimes, as with the Naxals, armed. But it has also produced a turn to ethnic and religious communal violence, led by various factions of the Hindu right. The state is treating the rebellion against the elites as a civil war, but is, via local politicians, often actively complicit in fermenting the communal politics that directs the desperation of the poor against other poor people.

The great anti-colonial philosopher, Frantz Fanon, argued that the colonial world is a world of compartments. For Fanon, the creation of different kinds of spaces for different kinds of people was a key tactic by which colonialism divided a single humanity into different ’species’. He concluded that a key measure of decolonisation would be the degree to which space was democratised.

Post-apartheid South Africa has not sought to democratise space. On the contrary ‘development’ has been all about deracialising and further modernising elite space while simultaneously expelling the poor from access to that space and firming up class segregation.

It is a simple fact that the material reality of Blikkiesdorp, as well as plenty of the peripheral RDP housing developments, is more inhuman than that of the townships built under apartheid.

And life in these new ghettoes is not only compromised by a second rate material reality. There is also a second rate political reality. It’s not at all unusual for local party structures to regulate allocation of houses and for the police to treat the poor in these new ghettoes with systematic, enthusiastic and entirely criminal sadism.

The enormous popular opposition to attempts to cloak oppression in allegedly technical processes like ‘development’ and ‘delivery’ has not been taken with anything like sufficient seriousness in elite society. This has led to a situation where political elites actually believe their own propaganda and can only see resistance as criminality or conspiracy.

Neither Julius Malema’s buffoonery that seeks to cloak the interests of a predatory elite in the language of nationalism, nor the technocratic delusion of development as post-political and delivery as a mere question of managed efficiency offer us any route out of the new forms of segregation that produce Melrose Arch and private security for some and Blikkiesdorp and police harassment for others.

We need, again, to think politically about our cities and to give things their proper names,

But there are some encouraging signs that Dan Plato’s slap in the face has done more to jolt the middle classes from their dogmatic slumbers than the whole slew of human rights reports indicting the amatins and failed court cases aimed at keeping people out of these camps.

In an editorial titled ‘Blinker’s Dorp’ The Cape Times has denounced Blikkiesdorp as “a grim place where no one should have to live, a desolate settlement of one-room huts, where families share outside toilets and water taps, with little privacy, no trees and nowhere for children to play.” This is the sort of heretical language for which organised shack dwellers have been denounced as the Third Force, accused of opposing development and subject to all kinds of violent state repression. It is quite encouraging to see it making its way into the authorised general common sense of society.

By Richard Pithouse. Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University.

This week my quotation comes from Plato’s Republic, which I am reading for a book group. I have to admit that I’m a bit daunted by all the philosophising, but I’m curious to give it a go and read the ideas. As I am only on the introduction right now, this quotation is completely random:

“It turns out, then,  that people to whom intelligence and goodness are unfamiliar, whose only interest is self-indulgence and so on, spend their lives moving aimlessly to and fro between the bottom and the halfway point, which is as far as they reach. But they never travel any further towards the true heights: they’ve never even looked up there, let alone gone there; they aren’t really satisfied by anything real; they don’t experience steady, pure pleasure.”

Page 335, Plato, Republic (Oxford World’s Classics).

Have you read any philosophical writing? What do you think of the point made here?

The Professional and Technical Surveyors Act 40/1984 requires the SA Council of Professional and Technical Surveyors (PLATO) to accredit academic courses as qualifying graduates of those courses for registration in the PLATO categories of professional and technical practitioners. Under Section 19 of the Act there is established the Education Advisory Committee (EAC) one of whose functions is “to investigate the syllabus of instruction and the standard of training” provided by educational institutions… (more)

Ever since Shakespeare the ultimate symbol of beauty...

It is tempting to sing the praises of nature. Sweet-smelling flowers, colourful kingfishers, a pastoral pond to dangle your feet in – gorgeous. The standard is (at least in Europe) set by breathtaking BBC-documentaries and dodgy TV-commercials. Presenting washing your hair in rivers as the ultimate state of happiness, and cheerful families in delightful green surroundings, buttering sandwiches all day long.

But jellyfish, spiders and round-worms, that’s a horse of a different colour. And what about the bacterial ooze in your drain or the snails that dine on the doings of a dog? Sheer nature, but hardly considered beautiful. Richard Attenborough once said that some footage is never broadcasted, for instance the cute little antelope that ran for its mother after a lion attack, with its bowels hanging out. Not all in nature is beautiful.

A long time ago Plato thought that beauty is evoked by the extent to which something resembles a pre-imprinted ideal in our ‘realm of thoughts’. In a way it seems logical. For instance, I have some holiday pictures in which I sit under a palm tree on a white tropical beach, a clear blue sea in the background. The more this picture resembles our idea of holiday, the more beautiful it seems. Apparently we have some idealized picture in our mind. But then: where does this idealized picture come from? Do we have a free supply when we are born?

Some of us think so. For instance, scientists have examined our preference for pastoral, Arcadian landscapes (in the Netherlands for instance Freek Couterier). Our preference is explained by deeper biological motives. The landscapes fulfilled a primeval sense, a memory from the times that we were primitive hunters-gatherers. Such a landscape offered enough food and shelter for a worriless existence, and the inhabitants had more chance of survival. In the same way, our feelings of affection for small creatures with large, innocent baby-eyes contributed to the continued existence of future generations. Our love and lust preferences for large, symmetrical people aided to keep that offspring as healthy and strong as possible. Resentment and fear do fit into this idea: bitter tastes, fungus, dead or malformed creatures, poop and garbage promise most of all disease, death and misery. Beauty is oriented towards what supports human survival.

My colleague Edo Knegtering will obtain his PhD next week with a dissertation, The Featheries and the Furries, on the preferences for colourful, big and cute animals in Dutch nature conservation. Many organisations admit that they focus mainly on these animals. And the government joins in as their interest is with pleasing the voters. Protecting fluffy and colourful creatures is acceptable. But a government that protects unsightly snails smaller than 2 millimetres, even delaying road construction because of them, has a lot of explaining to do in our automobile Netherlands. International research on communication has discovered a lot of these preferences: size, colour, texture of skin, the possession of a spine, children-like faces, resemblance to people, predatorily behaviour, competition with humans, economic value, social way of life… and so forth.

Suppose now that you and your family are happily buttering your bread in the countryside and suddenly you see a cute little rabbit. What do you actually see? According to the philosopher Kant we only see our own thoughts. He states that we can only see the world around us because we have pre-imprinted ideas of what we expect to see. The continuous flow of signals from our senses only takes on meaning as we have learned to add meaning to it. In the way that a baby learns that these vague visual blurs and the tickling of the belly are parents with food. That is to say, of course they are not parents, but it is very convenient for the baby to think that they are. And is if appears to be convenient for a lifetime to think so, than in due time we will accept this as reality. We think that our parents exist.

Kant’s theory also explains why people perceive different things as beautiful. If you look at my picture of the beach, you’ll see a place where you would like to go to, preferably today. You think that this place will offer you some time off, relaxation and an escape from your hectic existence. If I look at the same picture, in my mind I see the poverty of the people in the village, the demolition of the coral reef under water by dynamite fishing, and the tourist hotels just around the corner of the bay. Our interpretation is different, and so is our appraisal.

And how exactly does this appraisal work? I think: through emotions or feelings. I don’t know whether research has been conducted in this area. It simply seems logical that evolution has invented a mechanism that triggers during perception, at the exact same time of the rational assignment of meaning, a parallel system that induces sense. A kind of reflex. In the way that you pull back your hand from a flame even before you discover that it hurts, and long before you have explained rationally the meaning of your melting skin. Likewise, your body is already in a state of euphoria even before you have considered that the landscape with flowers might be a suitable place to rest and look for food.

Sidetrack. Fear, fury and pure hate are emotions as well, gloomy emotions (I know, this is a normative adjective, but ethics and aesthetics are in line). Is it possible that gloomy emotions also form the basis of such a ‘beautiful’ feeling? Yes it is. In the beginnings of the last century, the art world lost itself in a panting sequence of innovative movements. Of course these renewals could not continue for ever, and when all new ideas had been thought of, the artists focused on shocking the public. At first, they started rather decent, with empty walls, empty stages and concerts without a sound. But in the end the search across the borderline generated into pictures of torture, the crushing of goldfish in a blender and a show of dissected bodies of executed Chinese prisoners. Horror and pulp have a cult status. It is allowed to indulge in gloomy emotions, in the beauty of evil.

But wait… Are our preferences really ours? Do we determine ourselves what is beautiful and what not? No, of course not. An overload of commercials tries to stress our individual freedom of choice, but the truth is that beauty is mainly the norm of a group. Bony cover girls, cubic paintings and the last performance of the National Ballet – the feelings that they rouse are mainly determined by the way we share our thoughts about them with others. Call it fashion, yes. Or a little more sophisticated: culture. This also offers an evolutionary advantage: a person who conforms to the norm of the group has a higher chance of survival than an outcast. In overblown language Nietsche has described how he sees the world as a collection of meanings that we have attributed, with behind it a kind of hidden force that wants to express itself (‘will’). And that is in a state of continuous conflict with other forces from other people. What we see, or what we think we see, is a result of power. Unconsciously, like children in a schoolyard who say that pink is so much prettier for girls. Consciously, when an inhabitant of the Dutch city of Leiden refers to those beautiful seagulls as ’shrieking crap machines’. So maybe our preference for Arcadian landscapes has nothing to do with memories of our times as hunter-gatherers. Maybe it just comes from a time that landscape paintings were a response of the dominant culture to certain social developments.

So this is how it works with nature. The beauty is in the ideas that we have already and that are imposed upon us. We regard nature as beautiful, because it is repeatedly confirmed from specific points of view with specific purposes. Holiday nature. Nature to wash your hair in. Nature to drive through, smoothly and fast.

I thought of a picture of a rose as an illustration. Ever since Shakespeare the ultimate symbol of beauty. And what surprise when I read Hans Achterhuis this week. In ‘Natuur tussen mythe en ethiek’ he describes the rose as a technological product, scentless but with exact the right colour, produced with great precision, in endless monotonous rows, connected to a drip with artificial food, on rock wool, in closed systems, free of bacteria and other nasty natural influences. Pseudo-nature that has nothing to do with what traditionally was referred to as nature. “The rose as the end of nature.”

It is beauty, but not as we know it.

Plato’s Prisons of Techne

I repost here the quote from the Republic that in usual Platonic, imagistic language is full of potential truths. Here we find Socrates discrediting primarily the sophists, but really by virtue of a whole class of technically skilled [techne] workers, those whose power and knowledge consists in their experiences, and standing, as workers. In condensed fashion he runs the gambit from prisoners to technicians to mere machine workers. All of these he tells us, wish to gravitate, actually more, leap or fly to the prestige of philosophy:

Just as men out of prisons into holy sanctuaries are fleeing, so these joyous men out from technical arts are leaping into Philosophy, as if those being most intricate would hit upon the little art of themselves. For in comparison with the other arts the honor of philosophy even though abandoned is more magnificent. This is the flight of the many unaccomplished by nature, who from the technical arts and even workmanship, their bodies have been mutilated and their souls envined and even crushed through the mechanical arts.

Plato, Republic [495d]

Leaving the question of the sophists aside and picking up the word-image, we really have something here. There is the interminable sense that our experiences as workers confined to the techniques of our knowing and doing, caught within the demands of an economic and thereby psychic necessity, contort us, alter us. And Plato’s image is quite strong as he evokes the worker or technician (and some editors have thought that he had the military arts in mind, but the image carries through) whose body is maimed by the arts he practices. We see vividly the industry worker, or other friends of the ”machine” who has lost fingers or received other bodily harm, even desk workers whose time in the chair have changed their posture. All of these graftings of a machinic upon the human body are rolled up into the image of the prisoner at the beginning of the passage, the one who is confined, shackled by circumstances of every degree. And all of these make for Socrates those who are unqualified to the seat of Philosopher. This is because, as the body is the image of the soul, it is not only bodies that have been exacted upon, it is souls, and here in the end forming a bookend to the prisoner the image is striking. The mechanical arts (by which we are to see mean arts, perhaps those of low craftsmen, even with the association of the weaver who is feminine), actually “envine”, they envelope and slowly twist and choke the soul, even eventually crush or pulverize it. What comes to mind for me is of a gear-working, a rack that out of its unnatural nature incrementally destroys the cognitive powers of the soul. Here “work” in every mechanical gradient becomes the equivalent of torture.

At a certain level we have condensed here all of the reasons why the economic freedoms of others become a high priority for us. For it is not just in political restriction that the voice and soul becomes contorted, but also that the very lived mechanical – and we read mechanical even in the most abstract sense of purposed and productive repetitions - states of workers are binding and cognitively contorting devices. At least that is the rhetorical picture. Aside from Plato’s political aim, the freeing of cognitions from devices remains a kind of halo of a hope, an attractor.

Scholastic Silence: How to Comtemplate

But in this ethical picture stands its opposite, the idea that the Philosopher is he who is not contorted, maimed or crushed. The one whose body and soul stands relatively whole, unpressured, the one who can see clearly, from a distance. It is there that Bourdieu’s critique of the “scholastic point of view” which I brought up in my last post, occurs. The production of the quietude of the Philosopher, the near monastic, let us say scholastic isolation from the contortions of mechanical art pressures, is, Bourdieu wants us to know, artificial. The cocoon and buffer that creates the gap between a world of devices and techniques exacted, and the imagined realm of reasons, has to be built. It has been constructed through labors which themselves are structured. And then it too is structured by internal devices and arts. What Bourdieu wants us to know is that when the philosopher adopts the scholastic point of view, he/she is likely carrying with him/her the vast train of social constructions (literal constructions) which enable that monastic cell of contemplation, and there is both a social and epistemic responsibility towards the excavation of those inherited and largely unconscious relations (an excavation that in some sense is retarded by flat ontologies who know only their surface).

The One Machinist of the 17th Century

In a way it is the Philosopher who knows least the mutilations of his/her body, the envinings of his/her soul, the pulverizations, due to the very quietude of contemplation. And to this great dis-orientation of thinking towards the mere mechanical, my mind turns towards the rise of the philosophy of the mechanical, the Dutch flowering of Cartesian mechanism. It seems here that most, if there was to be a philosophy that embraced the mechanical nature of thinking it would be found here. I wrote some time ago about the “hand of de Beaune” a brilliant mathematician who was working hard in the service of Descartes on the production of a fantastic automated lens-grinding machine :Descartes and Spinoza: Craft and Reason and The Hand of De Beaune. With somewhat of a coincidence de Beaune’s hand was severely cut just as Plato’s technician’s body was maimed. Descartes’ dream though was of producing machines which no hand would touch, pure, abstract machines, concretized maths, in a sense, those which would free the otherwise fettered human mind. Plato’s dichotomy duplicates itself, the machine as enemy to the mind because of the body, as well as its instrumental aid. As I have pointed out in my investigation of Spinoza’s lens-grinding, Spinoza was the only “worker” of the period, and in fact the only craftsman per se. While lens-grinding and machine fascination was an elite hobby among the new scientist riche, Spinoza was actually a worker, and engaged his lens lathe daily as a matter of his economic sustainance. Deep in this machinic age, only Spinoza new the machine in a fashion Plato’s Socrates could not. He knew it with his hands.

In an interesting fashion, Spinoza’s “scholastic point of view” embodies a unique self-reflective awareness that is encapsulated in his worker, machine status, as well as one might admit, his standing as an ostricized Jew. He occupied a position at the border, a stand-point, that made of his quietude a different sort of awareness. Born of the age of the machine, Spinoza understood the human being too as a device, a complex series of ordinations, to which other complex serieses of ordinations are connected, a “spiritual automaton” he called the human being. In this awareness the “worker” takes on a different place: Not that of “prisoner” to stand in dialectical opposition to the unmutilated man, but of machinic degree. Our work becomes an expression of machines, machines of which we never extricate ourselves. It is only that we need to choose our machines (those of which we are made) more carefully, with an eye to liberation. The gaze of leisure is to be questioned.

Blogged Quietism

In this view blogging of course becomes a significant phenomena. Some philosophical bloggers write out of a self-created cocoon to escape the twisting techne of university or college, forming however brief a contemplation of respite, engaging the machinic of the internet. Some blog in order to be able to speculate, to freely exhibit what they might be able to think, if they were allowed to. Yet, as we produce our ideas and disseminate them, to the degree that we do not embrace the machinic, we are fraught with generating the modes that have produced our monk-cell, unconsciously, not recognizing the shapes of our bodies and souls.

Atop this image of the mechanical arts that contort there is the artist, we might say, is also the self-artist. The one that grasps the inherent machinic character of the human, and purposely undergoes specific machinic contortions upon both body and soul, not to perfect, but to express (and to some degree soterologically free themself and others from) the specific techne of the world, as it stands. To take on the machine, in the way that a poet takes on a complex meter.

Presenting Plato’s Atlantis, the Spring/Summer 2010 collection by reportedly Excellent designer Alexander McQueen.

This is the way it goes between first and second period: a twenty minute break in the children’s book library, an oasis of warmth on the fifth floor of Changjin Elementary in Sasang, Busan, South Korea. The rest of the school’s windows gape wide open to the cool air whirling down to us from the north, but the windows in the library stay shut while the heater stays on, and for the first few minutes there I try to settle in with a book and recalibrate my brain. I’m no longer playing with kids, I’m alone, I’m reading, I’m focusing, absorbing, analyzing, trying to print my soul with the thoughts in this text, not sure if any company will join me.

“…Good, but if there is anything in such a state as both to be and not to be, that would lie between that which simply is and that which is not at all; is that correct?…”

The wooden sliding door roars open and a handful of third grade girls comes in. I finish marking the text while they wait a moment; one says something about Christmas, grabs a Christmas book (“If You Take A Mouse To The Movies”), and we read it together at one of the round tables, sitting on chairs which are themselves strange combinations of stools and cushions colored lime green. Their understanding of English is extremely rudimentary but I tell myself that we’re there just to practice reading, so I make them read to me, but one by one they grow bored, tuck themselves under the table, and then melt away out the door.

I’ve managed to dragoon one of them, a girl in blue with a husky voice whom I’ve never seen before. I encourage her, correct her as she reads, and do my best to define the words by pointing to the pictures and miming the ideas. The bell rings (actually an electric string of musical notes on the intercom), she skips out the door and down the dark hallway while I rush in to class and, once again, for the thousandth time, ask thirty kids how they’re doing with the enthusiasm of a talk show host or a school mascot running along packed bleachers.

Monday and Tuesday classes are full of the good kids, fifth graders, so I put a lot of energy into them and they go quickly. Before I know it I’m sitting in the library again for five minutes (“My good man, of all these beautiful things is there a single one which will not sometimes appear ugly?”) when the girl returns alone to continue: a sign somehow that I’ve made an impact. We continue with our mouse book. She leans in very close to the words—so close I can feel her breath on my fingers—and reads more quickly as we move along. But we still don’t have enough time. The bell rings and out we go: while dancing down the dark hallway my payment is a grin.

I feel bad about this loyal FilmWipe readers.  For the second night in a row of my long awaited comeback, I am going to talk about how much I have hated a film.  Don’t get me wrong this film is no Rudo y Cursi. There are actually moments that are actually enjoyable.  However, the plot made my eyes, ears and brain wish that I was being kidnapped by the SS and whisked of to Krackow for instant execution.  Every single predictable minute was as excruciating as sand papering my genitals and then squeezing lemon juice on to them.  I would guess that within 30 second of the film making itself clear I knew what exactly what was going to happen.  I will be h0nest I feel the need to give a bit of the plot of the way in this review to clearly explain what is so bad about this.  Anyway, sit  back relax and find out why you should avoid, avoid, avoid An Education.

The film follows Jenny (Carey Muligan) a school girl growing up in suburban 60s London, aiming to go to Oxford.  She is repressed by her father, Jack (Alfred Molina) who makes her work obsessively in order to fulfil the ambition.  One day she is caught waiting for a lift in the rain.  After waiting for a long time for a bus on a rainy day, she is offered a lift home by David (Peter Sarsgaard).  He chases after her for several weeks impressing her normally hard line parents enough to letting her go on trips with him.  He shows her a life she could only imagine.  However, things turn sour when he proposes.  This leaves Jenny in the position of trying to decide whether she stays at school and goes to Oxford or leaves and gets married.

The acting in the film is generally very good.  Carey Muligan is superb as is Alfred Molina.  The father daughter relationship between the pair is both gritty and yet touching and has certain element of truth in relation to the era.  However, I did not understand the rationale behind Peter Sarsgaard and Dominic Cooper’s (Danny) casting.  The pair are both excellent actors, but should have been playing each others role.  Cooper is young and charming.  His obvious chemistry with Muligan (exhibited only for a brief second) was so intense it made the remainder of the relationship between Jenny and David seem flimsy at best.  Similarly Peter Sarsgaard would have suited the role of Danny much better.  Also it would have made the characters relationship with Helen (Rosamund Pike) seem plausible.  As it was Rosamund Pike looked as if she was doing an impersonation of Gary Glitter by dating someone dramatically younger than herself.  It looked appalling on screen and detracted from the film as a whole.

The script was excellent.  Nick Hornby (Writer of High Fidelity and About a Boy) wrote an excellent script with some absolutely brilliant lines.   However, the overall plot was dismal.  The idea of the fallen school girl seduced from her path of academic excellence, drawn instead to a sordid life of fun that almost costs her the dream but instead through hard work and determination achieves anyway, has been done so many times it might as well have been a plot line written by Plato (It probably was).  It would have been more interesting to see Jenny lose her future as a result of this relationship.  Instead the disappointing attempt to play everything safe was both weak and expected.

The worst bit of the film had to be its ending.  After rushing through the reclamation of Jenny’s life  the film flips to Oxford where she is a student.  Here Jenny gives the most patronising sentence  about the last hour and half which is comparable to the ending of the new crossroads “it was all a dream”.  Rubbish.

Overall this is ok.  It is worth watching, but is more of a present for someone you don’t like.  Treat them to this and they will get the message.

1/10 – Tiresome

While most management gurus trowel out sludge worth more in paper weight than in business insight, one man – often referred to as a guru – has claimed my respect and admiration, as he has those of many leaders, managers and businesspeople worldwide. Peter Drucker died four years ago, and his writings seem just as relevant today as when he wrote them.

Many years ago, I dismissed Drucker as simply belonging to that underperforming group of people – gurus. Granted, I did this unfairly, having never read him. But a friend implored me to take up his writings. I do not exaggerate when I note that reading Drucker for the first time was like reading Plato for the first time: intensely confusing, fascinating and mind-blowing. I knew in five pages that Drucker had me hooked; like Plato, I would read him for years, maybe for the rest of my life, to glean his wisdom and attempt to profit by it.

Reading Drucker, this comparison with Plato struck my mind first. It seems apt. Just as all of philosophy since Plato is a commentary on Plato, so all examination into the nature of organizational management – research, writings and theories – is a commentary on Drucker. Many years will pass before his lessons become obsolete, perhaps centuries.

As I have stated before, I do not particularly like most management gurus, and I do not think of Drucker as a guru. I think of him as a philosopher of management. That does not mean his writings have no practical application; they have great value in the real world (just as many of Plato’s ideas do). Indeed, if Capitolism has any aspirations, it views Drucker as a guiding light and seeks to become a forum of practical philosophy on business, organizational, trade, management, leadership and small business issues. Over the coming months (and hopefully years), I will frequently refer to and highlight the lessons of this great man. For the time being, two additional thoughts:

First, among his writings, his autobiography, Adventures of a Bystander, is an underappreciated treasure.  Reading it, I came away with the impression of a man of truly unique wisdom and virtue. Putting the book down, I reflected that Drucker was one of the great minds of the 20^th century.

Second, The Economist contains a good reflection on Drucker this week – well worth reading.

Ever since Shakespeare the ultimate symbol of beauty...

It is tempting to sing the praises of nature. Sweet-smelling flowers, colourful kingfishers, a pastoral pond to dangle your feet in – gorgeous. The standard is (at least in Europe) set by breathtaking BBC-documentaries and dodgy TV-commercials. Presenting washing your hair in rivers as the ultimate state of happiness, and cheerful families in delightful green surroundings, buttering sandwiches all day long.

But jellyfish, spiders and round-worms, that’s a horse of a different colour. And what about the bacterial ooze in your drain or the snails that dine on the doings of a dog? Sheer nature, but hardly considered beautiful. Richard Attenborough once said that some footage is never broadcasted, for instance the cute little antelope that ran for its mother after a lion attack, with its bowels hanging out. Not all in nature is beautiful.

A long time ago Plato thought that beauty is evoked by the extent to which something resembles a pre-imprinted ideal in our ‘realm of thoughts’. In a way it seems logical. For instance, I have some holiday pictures in which I sit under a palm tree on a white tropical beach, a clear blue sea in the background. The more this picture resembles our idea of holiday, the more beautiful it seems. Apparently we have some idealized picture in our mind. But then: where does this idealized picture come from? Do we have a free supply when we are born?

Some of us think so. For instance, scientists have examined our preference for pastoral, Arcadian landscapes (in the Netherlands for instance Freek Couterier). Our preference is explained by deeper biological motives. The landscapes fulfilled a primeval sense, a memory from the times that we were primitive hunters-gatherers. Such a landscape offered enough food and shelter for a worriless existence, and the inhabitants had more chance of survival. In the same way, our feelings of affection for small creatures with large, innocent baby-eyes contributed to the continued existence of future generations. Our love and lust preferences for large, symmetrical people aided to keep that offspring as healthy and strong as possible. Resentment and fear do fit into this idea: bitter tastes, fungus, dead or malformed creatures, poop and garbage promise most of all disease, death and misery. Beauty is oriented towards what supports human survival.

My colleague Edo Knegtering will obtain his PhD next week with a dissertation, The Featheries and the Furries, on the preferences for colourful, big and cute animals in Dutch nature conservation. Many organisations admit that they focus mainly on these animals. And the government joins in as their interest is with pleasing the voters. Protecting fluffy and colourful creatures is acceptable. But a government that protects unsightly snails smaller than 2 millimetres, even delaying road construction because of them, has a lot of explaining to do in our automobile Netherlands. International research on communication has discovered a lot of these preferences: size, colour, texture of skin, the possession of a spine, children-like faces, resemblance to people, predatorily behaviour, competition with humans, economic value, social way of life… and so forth.

Suppose now that you and your family are happily buttering your bread in the countryside and suddenly you see a cute little rabbit. What do you actually see? According to the philosopher Kant we only see our own thoughts. He states that we can only see the world around us because we have pre-imprinted ideas of what we expect to see. The continuous flow of signals from our senses only takes on meaning as we have learned to add meaning to it. In the way that a baby learns that these vague visual blurs and the tickling of the belly are parents with food. That is to say, of course they are not parents, but it is very convenient for the baby to think that they are. And is if appears to be convenient for a lifetime to think so, than in due time we will accept this as reality. We think that our parents exist.

Kant’s theory also explains why people perceive different things as beautiful. If you look at my picture of the beach, you’ll see a place where you would like to go to, preferably today. You think that this place will offer you some time off, relaxation and an escape from your hectic existence. If I look at the same picture, in my mind I see the poverty of the people in the village, the demolition of the coral reef under water by dynamite fishing, and the tourist hotels just around the corner of the bay. Our interpretation is different, and so is our appraisal.

And how exactly does this appraisal work? I think: through emotions or feelings. I don’t know whether research has been conducted in this area. It simply seems logical that evolution has invented a mechanism that triggers during perception, at the exact same time of the rational assignment of meaning, a parallel system that induces sense. A kind of reflex. In the way that you pull back your hand from a flame even before you discover that it hurts, and long before you have explained rationally the meaning of your melting skin. Likewise, your body is already in a state of euphoria even before you have considered that the landscape with flowers might be a suitable place to rest and look for food.

Sidetrack. Fear, fury and pure hate are emotions as well, gloomy emotions (I know, this is a normative adjective, but ethics and aesthetics are in line). Is it possible that gloomy emotions also form the basis of such a ‘beautiful’ feeling? Yes it is. In the beginnings of the last century, the art world lost itself in a panting sequence of innovative movements. Of course these renewals could not continue for ever, and when all new ideas had been thought of, the artists focused on shocking the public. At first, they started rather decent, with empty walls, empty stages and concerts without a sound. But in the end the search across the borderline generated into pictures of torture, the crushing of goldfish in a blender and a show of dissected bodies of executed Chinese prisoners. Horror and pulp have a cult status. It is allowed to indulge in gloomy emotions, in the beauty of evil.

But wait… Are our preferences really ours? Do we determine ourselves what is beautiful and what not? No, of course not. An overload of commercials tries to stress our individual freedom of choice, but the truth is that beauty is mainly the norm of a group. Bony cover girls, cubic paintings and the last performance of the National Ballet – the feelings that they rouse are mainly determined by the way we share our thoughts about them with others. Call it fashion, yes. Or a little more sophisticated: culture. This also offers an evolutionary advantage: a person who conforms to the norm of the group has a higher chance of survival than an outcast. In overblown language Nietsche has described how he sees the world as a collection of meanings that we have attributed, with behind it a kind of hidden force that wants to express itself (‘will’). And that is in a state of continuous conflict with other forces from other people. What we see, or what we think we see, is a result of power. Unconsciously, like children in a schoolyard who say that pink is so much prettier for girls. Consciously, when an inhabitant of the Dutch city of Leiden refers to those beautiful seagulls as ’shrieking crap machines’. So maybe our preference for Arcadian landscapes has nothing to do with memories of our times as hunter-gatherers. Maybe it just comes from a time that landscape paintings were a response of the dominant culture to certain social developments.

So this is how it works with nature. The beauty is in the ideas that we have already and that are imposed upon us. We regard nature as beautiful, because it is repeatedly confirmed from specific points of view with specific purposes. Holiday nature. Nature to wash your hair in. Nature to drive through, smoothly and fast.

I thought of a picture of a rose as an illustration. Ever since Shakespeare the ultimate symbol of beauty. And what surprise when I read Hans Achterhuis this week. In ‘Natuur tussen mythe en ethiek’ he describes the rose as a technological product, scentless but with exact the right colour, produced with great precision, in endless monotonous rows, connected to a drip with artificial food, on rock wool, in closed systems, free of bacteria and other nasty natural influences. Pseudo-nature that has nothing to do with what traditionally was referred to as nature. “The rose as the end of nature.”

It is beauty, but not as we know it. 

Diogenes in his barrel, where he slept and lived

The mascot of Home-free Living is Diogenes of Synope, a Greek philosopher and “Cynic” (he is actually the originator of the word cynic, more on that later) and a perpetual vagabond and wanderer.

Diogenes may have been the world’s first official freegan-–he was the first espouser of freegan philosophy, at least. He is reputed to have slept in a barrel and eaten for free off of others’ plates. Diogenes was famously skeptical of capitalists, finding it incredulous

“…that misers blamed money but were preposterously fond of it.” [...] He often condemned those who praise the just for being superior to money, but who at the same time are eager themselves for great riches. (227)

He (like me) didn’t seem to believe in private property: he was admonished by none other than Plato for eating off his plate:

“At another time [Diogenes] was eating dried figs when Plato met him, and he said to him, “You may have a share of these;” and as he took some and ate them, he said “I said that you might have a share of them, not that you might eat them all!” (this is from Diogenes Laertius’ [a different Diogenes, this one 3rd c. AD] The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, p. 226)

Diogenes was quite fond of pointing out what he viewed as Plato’s hypocrisies. Diogenes’ impression of Plato seems to be that he was a spoiled yuppie contrarian; in another instance, Diogenes makes fun of Plato for eating expensive imported olives that he could’ve bought locally:

On one occasion when he noticed Plato at a very costly entertainment tasting some olives, he said “O you wise man! why, after having sailed to Sicily for the sake of such a feast, do you not now enjoy what you have before you?” And Plato replied “By the Gods, Diogenes, while I was there I ate olives and all such things a great deal.” Diogenes rejoined, “What then did you want to sail to Syracuse for? Did not Attica at that time produce any olives?” (225-6)

Another sample of his commentary on poverty:

A man once asked [Diogenes] what was the proper time for supper, and he made answer, “If you are a rich man, whenever you please; and if you are a poor man, whenever you can.” (231)

I take inspiration from Diogenes in that he managed to be a very happy, contented and respected man who was homeless for philosophical reasons.

Diogenes communes in his barrel

Diogenes and I are both also dog-lovers:

Many anecdotes of Diogenes refer to his dog-like behavior, and his praise of a dog’s virtues. It is not known whether Diogenes was insulted with the epithet “doggish” and made a virtue of it, or whether he first took up the dog theme himself. The modern terms cynic and cynical derive from the Greek word kynikos, the adjective form of kyon, meaning dog.^[39] Diogenes believed human beings live artificially and hypocritically and would do well to study the dog. Besides performing natural bodily functions in public without unease, a dog will eat anything, and make no fuss about where to sleep. Dogs live in the present without anxiety, and have no use for the pretensions of abstract philosophy. In addition to these virtues, dogs are thought to know instinctively who is friend and who is foe. Unlike human beings who either dupe others or are duped, dogs will give an honest bark at the truth. (from Wikipedia, which I don’t like to quote, thought I will when pressed).

All the original source quotes are from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, by 3rd century Greek philosopher Diogenes Laertius. The version I cited is the translation by C.G. Yonge, which you can read online for free here. The section on Diogenes of Sinope starts on page 224.

Sinds Shakespeare toch het ultieme symbool van schoonheid. ...

Het is verleidelijk om de schoonheid van de natuur te bezingen. Geurende bloemen, kleurige ijsvogels, een rustiek plasje om de voeten in te laten bungen – het is schitterend allemaal. De standaard wordt gezet door adembenemende BBC-documentaires en listige TV-spotjes. Met als ultiem geluk het harenwassen in rivieren en vrolijke gezinnen die tussen oogstrelend groen de hele dag boter smeren.

Maar kwallen, spinnen of spoelwormen, dat is andere koek. En wat te denken van het bacterieprutje in uw afvoer of slakken die op straat drollen opsmikkelen? Puur natuur, maar mooi is anders. Richard Attenborough vertelde dat sommige filmbeelden nooit worden uitgezonden, bijvoorbeeld van schattige kleine antilopes die na een aanval van leeuwen met hun darmen buiten hun lichaam naar moeder vluchten. Niet alle natuur is mooi.

Heel lang geleden dacht Plato dat schoonheid wordt opgeroepen door de mate waarin iets lijkt op een soort voorgeprent ideaalbeeld in onze ‘gedachtenwereld’. Dat klinkt wel logisch. Ik heb bijvoorbeeld vakantiefoto’s waarop ik onder een palmboom op een parelwit tropisch strand zit, met een helder blauwe zee daarachter. Hoe meer het plaatje lijkt op wat we kennen als vakantie-ideaal, des te mooier is het. Kennelijk hebben we dus een ideaalbeeld in ons hoofd. Maar waar komt dat ideaalbeeld dan weer vandaan? Krijgen we bij onze geboorte een gratis voorraadje mee?

Sommigen denken van wel. Zo is er onderzoek gedaan naar onze voorkeuren voor arcadische landschappen (in Nederland o.a. Freek Couterier). De verklaring voor die voorkeur werd gezocht in diepere biologische drijfveren. De landschappen beantwoordden aan een oergevoel, een herinnering uit de tijd dat we nog jagers-verzamelaars waren. Zo’n landschap bood genoeg voedsel en schuilplaatsen voor een onbekommerd bestaan, en de bewoners hadden een grotere overlevingskans. Op dezelfde wijze droegen gevoelens van affectie voor kleine wezens met grote onschuldige baby-ogen bij aan het voortbestaan van nieuwe generaties mensen. Onze liefdes- en lustvoorkeur voor mooie, symmetrische mensen hielp om dat nageslacht zo gezond en sterk mogelijk te maken. Afkeer en angst passen keurig bij dit idee: bittere smaken, schimmels, dode en mismaakte wezens, poep en afval beloven vooral ziekten, dood en ellende. Het mooie is gericht op datgene wat de mens doet overleven.

Deze voorkeuren werken ver door. Collega Edo Knegtering promoveert komende week op een onderzoek naar onze voorkeuren voor kleurige, grote en schattige dieren in onze natuurbescherming, The Featheries and the Furries. Veel organisaties geven aan zich vooral op ‘aaibare dieren’ te richten. En de overheid, die luistert naar het volk en doet vrolijk mee. Een overheid die pluizige en kleurige wezentjes beschermt is dus okee. Maar een overheid die onooglijke, twee millimeter grote zeggekorfslakjes beschermt, en daarvoor zelfs de aanleg van wegen uitstelt, die heeft heel wat uit te leggen aan automobiel Nederland. Internationaal communicatie-onderzoek heeft een flinke rij voorkeuren ontdekt: grootte, kleur, vacht, het bezit van ruggengraat en kinderlijke gezichtjes, de mate waarin een dier op een mens lijkt, predator-gedrag, competitie met de mens, economische waarde, sociale leefwijze… noem maar op.

Stel, je ben als vrolijk gezin druk bezig met boter smeren in het groen en ziet opeens een schattig konijntje. Wat zie je eigenlijk? Volgens de filosoof Kant zien we alleen maar onze eigen gedachten. Hij stelt dat we de wereld om ons heen alleen kunnen zien doordat we al voorgeprogrammeerde ideeën hebben van wat we verwachten te zien. De stroom signalen van onze zintuigen krijgt slechts betekenis omdat we hebben geleerd daar betekenis aan te geven. Zoals een baby leert dat die vage vlekken en dat gekroel aan het lijf ouders met voedsel worden. Of nou ja, het zijn natuurlijk geen ouders, maar het is handig voor de baby om te denken dat het ouders zijn. En als het een heel leven lang handig blijkt om zo te denken, dan nemen we het op gegeven moment vanzelf voor waar aan. We denken dat onze ouders bestaan.

De theorie van Kant verklaart waarom mensen verschillende dingen mooi kunnen vinden. Als u naar mijn vakantiefoto op het strand kijkt, dan ziet u een plek waar u naartoe wilt, en liefst vandaag nog. U denkt dat die plek ontspanning biedt, en ontsnapping aan uw hectische bestaan. Als ik naar dezelfde foto kijk, dan zie ik in gedachten de armoede van de mensen in het dorp, en de afbraak van het koraalrif onder water omdat de vissers met dynamiet hebben gevist, en de toeristenhotels die om de hoek van de baai staan. Onze interpretatie verschilt, en onze waardering ook.

En hoe ‘werkt’ dat toekennen van betekenis dan precies? Ik denk: via emotie of gevoel. Geen idee of daar ook onderzoek naar is verricht. Het lijkt domweg logisch dat de evolutie een mechanisme heeft verzonnen waarbij tijdens het waarnemen, gelijktijdig met de rationele toekenning van betekenis, een parallel systeem in werking wordt gezet dat gevoel oproept. Een soort reflex. Zoals je je hand terugtrekt uit een vlam nog vóórdat je hebt ontdekt dat het pijn doet, en lang voordat je de betekenis van je smeltende huid rationeel hebt geduid. Zo is je hele lichaam al in een staat van euforie, nog vóórdat je hebt bedacht dat dat het arcadische bloemenlandschapje misschien wel een geschikte plek is om voedsel te zoeken.

Zijpaadje. Angst, boosheid en pure haat zijn ook emoties, duistere emoties (normatief, ik weet het, maar ethiek en esthetiek liggen in elkaars verlengde). Kunnen duistere emoties ook aan de basis liggen van zo’n ‘mooi’ gevoel? Jazeker. Begin vorige eeuw verloor de kunstwereld zich in een hijgerige opeenvolging van vernieuwende stromingen. Die vernieuwing kon natuurlijk niet eeuwig doorgaan, en toen alle ideeën waren bedacht richtten de kunstenaars zich op het shockeren van het publiek. Het bleef eerst nog netjes, met lege muren, lege tonelen en concerten van stilte. Maar uiteindelijk ontaardde de zoektocht naar het grensoverschrijdende in foto’s van martelingen, het vermalen van vissen in een blender en een show van ontlede lichamen van geëxecuteerde Chinese gevangenen. Horror en pulp hebben cultstatus. Het is toegestaan te zwelgen in duistere emoties, in de schoonheid van het slechte.

Maar wacht eens… Zijn al die gevoelens wel van onszelf? Beslissen wij zelf wat mooi is? Natuurlijk niet. Reclames buitelen over elkaar heen om onze individuele keuzevrijheid te benadrukken, maar de waarheid is dat mooiheid grotendeels een groepsnorm is. Graatmagere fotomodellen, kubistische schilderijen en de laatste uitvoerig van het Nationale Ballet – het gevoel dat ze oproepen wordt grotendeels bepaald door de manier waarop wij daarover met anderen van gedachten wisselen. Noem het mode, ja. Of iets eerbiediger: cultuur. Ook dat biedt evolutionair voordeel: iemand die zich conformeert aan de groepsnorm heeft een grotere kans te overleven dan iemand die door de groep wordt uitgestoten. Nietsche heeft in ronkende volzinnen beschreven hoe hij de wereld ziet als een verzameling van betekenissen die we hebben toegekend met daarachter een soort drijvende kracht die tot uiting moet (‘wil’) komen. En die voortdurend met andere krachten in conflict is. Wat wij zien, of wat wij denken te zien, is een resultaat van macht. Onbewuste macht, zoals kinderen die op het schoolplein zeggen dat roze veel mooier staat bij een meisje. Bewuste macht, zoals een inwoner van Leiden die prachtige zilvermeeuwen betitelt als schreeuwerige schijtmachine’s. Misschien heeft onze voorkeur voor arcadische landschappen dus niets te maken met herinneringen aan onze jager-verzamelaartijd. Misschien heeft het gewoon te maken met herinneringen aan de dominante cultuur van landschapsschilderijen, die een reactie waren op maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen.

Zo gaat dat dus met die natuur. Het mooie zit hem in de ideeën die wij al hebben, en die ons van buiten worden opgelegd. We denken dat natuur mooi is, omdat dat voortdurend wordt bevestigd vanuit specifieke gezichtspunten, met specifieke doelen. Vakantienatuur. Natuur om je haren in te wassen. Natuur om bijzonder snel en soepel doorheen te rijden.

Voor de aardigheid had ik een foto gemaakt van een roos. Sinds Shakespeare toch het ultieme symbool van schoonheid. En – in het licht van bovenstaande – wat een verrassing toen ik deze week Hans Achterhuis las. In ‘Natuur tussen mythe en ethiek’ beschrijft hij de roos als iets geheel anders. Als een hoog-technologisch product, geurloos, maar met exact de juiste kleur, in eindeloze gelijkvormige rijen geproduceerd met grote precisie, aan het infuus met kunstmatige voeding, op steenwol, in gesloten systemen, vrij van bacteriën en andere nare natuurlijke invloeden. Pseudo-natuur die niets te maken heeft met wat traditioneel natuur heette. Ofwel: ”De roos als het einde van de natuur.”

Tjonge… Schoonheid is ook niet meer wat het was. 

Try to see things from other people’s point of view.

Be kind – everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. ~ PLATO