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Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

Welcome back! Last week in the premium newsletter, we had the second of a series of four (or five?) posts on whether humanity might have a future in the oceans. In case you missed it, it is here:

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Back to our weekly, free article! Last week, we examined the idea of a just war. Is the attack Russia’s on Ukraine justifiable? How would a philosopher judge the ethics of war? Find this article here in case you missed it:

Today we’ll continue our exploration of the ethics of war with more fascinating questions. For example, are there any rules about how to behave in a war? Read on to find out.

The rules in war (jus in bello)

We said last week that the theory of just war distinguishes three different kinds of moral problems:

The ethics of entering war (jus ad bellum)

The rules to be obeyed during war (jus in bello)

The ethics of restoration and peace after a war (jus post bellum)

Today we are examining the second part, the ethical conduct during a war.

There are, essentially, three requirements that must be fulfilled for an action in war to count as (relatively) ethical. One should emphasise the “relatively” part, because, for example, radical pacifists might claim that participating in a war, in whatever way, can never be a morally right act.

The three requirements are: discrimination, proportionality and necessity.

Discrimination

First, we must make sure that we target only combatants in a war and not non-combatants like children, old people, and civilians who are not taking part in hostilities.

Philosophically, it is an interesting question why we would make this distinction. If I say that it is not morally right to kill a civilian, but it is morally right to kill the same person if he stands opposite of me in a soldier’s uniform — why would that be? What is it that allows me to kill a soldier, while I am not allowed to kill anyone else?

I could perhaps try to argue that a soldier poses a threat to my own life, so killing a soldier who is about to kill me is an act of self-defence, and should therefore be permissible. But today’s war is often fought with rockets over great distances. When the enemy fires a rocket and kills a soldier miles away, they cannot argue that this soldier posed any real threat to them. So then, why was it permissible to fire that rocket?

They might try to justify it by saying that the soldier, by freely signing up to be a soldier, has already accepted the possibility that they will be shot at, and therefore it is not immoral to shoot at them. It’s just an occupational risk of sorts. This would be similar to how the Fire Department can justify sending its firemen into a dangerous fire. The Fire Department can expect its firemen to risk their lives in a way that my University employer cannot ask of me. If my University is in danger of burning down, the University administration cannot ask me to risk my life to save it.

Why is this? Because, one might argue, the fireman has freely agreed to take on this job and it is an essential and well-known part of the job description that firemen have to enter dangerous situations when this is the only way to extinguish a fire. The same applies to the dangers policemen, divers and lifeguards face. You don’t take on such jobs if you are a risk-averse person. You do so fully knowing that a situation might arise in which your life might be endangered. And you accept that risk.

Now this sounds good, but we must be careful with this argument. Did the civilians in Ukraine, who now pick up a gun to defend their country, freely agree to the risks involved? It doesn’t seem so. They are not all professional soldiers who made a career choice in times of peace. Many of them are computer programmers, truck drivers, taxidermists and accountants who felt that not defending their home country would expose them and their families to even more danger. So their choice is forced by the circumstances. A truck driver who picks up a gun when attacked is not a soldier who has freely accepted risk, but a person who has been forced to defend themselves against their will. And so the argument above would not apply to them.

The discrimination requirement has more problems. In many wars, we have seen children picking up guns. What does this mean for the morality of war? Am I allowed to kill a child in war just because they are carrying (or even threatening me with) a gun? Even if it is in self-defence, can I justify killing a child? Or do I need to make an effort to, say, disarm it in a way that would remove the threat without actually taking its life?

Connected with this, of course, is the next question: what is different about children in war? Isn’t anyone with a gun an enemy I can use lethal force against? Why should age matter?

There are many reasons one could think of. For example, children may not clearly understand what killing means. They might not understand the finality or the consequences of it for others (the dead soldier’s family). They might not understand the goals of the particular war. They might not be able to judge the morality of that war. They might be at a disadvantage because they don’t have fighting experience, which their enemy might have. And so on. But in the end, if it’s me against the child, and the child is ready to shoot me, am I justified in shooting first?

But in the end, if it’s me against the child, and the child is ready to shoot me, am I justified in shooting first?

Not only children cause such moral dilemmas. What about civilians who are not directly part of the hostilities? In the Second World War, women were mostly at home, while men were fighting. But German women, for example, were often occupied as workers in munition factories, or supplying the fighting men with clothing items that made it possible for them to fight in the snows of the Russian front. Can we then so clearly distinguish who is a combatant and who is not?

And what about fighters who are not regular soldiers, but what we might call “terrorists” (or, as they would probably label themselves, “freedom fighters”?) From the IRA and the German RAF to villagers supporting the resistance in WW2 France or Greece, involvement in combat often comes in degrees, and often combatants don’t wear any uniforms or other distinctive signs.

One could argue that civilians should be protected because they are innocent, vulnerable and defenseless. But, as we saw, this is not always the case. And even if they are, individually, vulnerable and defenseless, they are still part of a war machine that requires their cooperation, and, as such, they are not innocent. One argument could be made (and has been made) that the German population during Nazi times has not been innocent. They knew more or less what was happening and they did support their government. Hitler could not have ruled without all the “normal” people who supported him and who executed his orders. The same could be argued about any government today. Whether it is an autocratic state like Russia or a social democracy like Sweden, every state requires some amount of cooperation from its subjects in order to be able to exist. To this extent, then, its citizens are complicit in the actions of that state.

So discrimination, although a good idea in an ideal world, is, in the messy reality of our world, often difficult to achieve.

Proportionality

“The use of force is proportionate when the harm done is counterbalanced by the good achieved in averting a threat. To determine this, we typically compare the candidate course of action with what would happen if we allowed the threat to eventuate.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, War.)

This can also be pretty difficult to judge, particularly since “good” is such a subjective measure. For the Russian attackers, a Russian Ukraine and the removal of the NATO threat is presumably a “good” thing. For the Ukrainian defenders of their country, keeping the occupying force out is “good.” Each one could argue that the other side is not justly engaging in war, because their actions are not proportional: they don’t promote any “good” (as seen from the other side’s point of view).

Proportionality can be useful when we judge strikes against particular targets, especially civilian ones. Bombing a hospital will rarely be seen as proportional, since the resulting harm is not counterbalanced by any good outcome. After all, the hospital did not pose a threat.

On the other hand, something like the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in the 20th July plot might be considered proportional: the harm consists in killing a number of generals and the dictator himself; the expected benefit would be the end of the World War and peace with the Allies. Here, the expected benefits clearly would outweigh the harm done.

The problem is not only that it is largely subjective what a “harm” is; but also that we cannot see the future. In judging whether an action is permissible, we are required to calculate the expected benefit of the action before the action has taken place. And this can be very hard to do.

For example, ruthless and decisive bombing of an enemy’s cities might be motivated by the wish to break the enemy’s will to fight and to reach a faster peace (as the Allies did with the bombing of Dresden, for example). On the other hand, one might argue that the harm caused through the bombing of a civilian population can never be outweighed by any military objective.

Necessity

Finally, the necessity criterion requires us to make sure that an act in war is necessary to achieve a particular outcome.

This is quite a weak requirement as a moral guideline, because it reduces the issue to a question of means: It is necessary to do X in order to achieve Y?

What it does not ask is: Is it morally right to pursue Y in the first place? — But this question is the one where the disagreement between different parties in the war would arise.

Let’s assume it is necessary to bomb Kiyv in order to achieve the surrender of Ukraine. Does this make bombing Kiyv right? No, because we have to ask first whether the goal of achieving the surrender of Ukraine is a good goal. And here we’re back to the questions asked in the previous article, about what a good, moral reason to enter a war would be.

Often, necessity is understood in very narrow, technical, military terms. “It is necessary to bomb this hill in order to take that valley.” This surely is not a sufficient justification for an action in war. Arguing like this shifts the weight of the moral decision from the means to the goals of the action, and we would have then to question whether those goals are ethical.

In an unprovoked war of conquest, like the one in Ukraine seems to be, it would probably be difficult to justify any aggressive action of the Russian side by citing a “necessity,” since the whole war might be said to lack necessity.

This would be different in wars where not engaging in the war would bring about greater harm, for example when the Allies entered the war against Germany in 1941. Here, it could be argued that not engaging the Nazi state would, in the long run, cause greater harm.

Is it “necessary” to defend Ukraine’s independence?

The question is trickier when we look at the Ukrainian defenders. Are their actions “necessary”? Are they justified in their use of lethal force against the attackers?

As much as one would like to postulate a right for every country to defend its territory, things are not so clear here. After all, one might argue, Russia itself was originally part of Ukraine if we go back long enough to the times of the Kievan Rus' (9th-13th centuries). Kiyv has been part of Lithuania in the 14th century, then part of Poland. As the Krimean Khanate, Mongol-led Ukraine captured and devastated Moscow in 1571. In the 19th century, Ukrainians emigrated in great numbers to the Russian Empire. In the First World War, Ukrainian soldiers fought both with the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian armies. In 1919, Ukraine was divided, and part of was given to Poland, while the rest became part of the Soviet Union. It was only in 1990/91 that Ukraine became independent, and even then there always was a tension between those parts of the Ukrainian population who wanted closer ties to Russia and those who wanted to become part of the EU.

This complicated history and the relatively recent independence of Ukraine is what makes it difficult to say whether defending this independence is really “necessary” or proportionate considering the harms involved to the civilian population of Ukraine itself. Assuming (which is not certain to be the case, but assuming it for the moment) that after the participation of Ukraine into a long-term cooperation and peace treaty with Russia its population could live in peace and the whole war would not have taken place, is it still justifiable to resist such an agreement? On the other hand, if we argue like this, we could justify submitting to many kinds of bullying and violence that we don’t normally accept.

Probably here one must make a choice, whether one looks strictly at the consequences of acts or also at the general principles behind moral actions. Sometimes, submitting to force, even if it is not justifiable, might bring about better consequences than resisting it. For example, when one is the victim of an armed robbery, giving away one’s money to the robber might be the most prudent action in terms of the expected consequences. On the other hand, this would mean submitting to the injustice of the robbery. If we consider the principles of freedom and justice to be more important than minimising the harm caused by the robbery, then resisting it (and likely getting harmed or killed) might seem like the more ethical choice.

Probably here one must make a choice, whether one looks strictly at the consequences of acts or also at the general principles behind moral actions.

This is a dilemma that goes back to the roots of our moral fabric, and that cannot really be resolved in an argumentative way. In the end, it is a personal choice: how important is my freedom to me? How important is it to me not to give in to bullying and unjustifiable force? Am I the person who would keep silent, obey, and, in the end, achieve better consequences because of that; or am I the kind of person who will fight against injustice, even if that means that I will suffer or die in the process?

Philosophy cannot help make this decision.

Thanks for reading! Don’t miss the third part of this series in two weeks, where we will talk about the ethics of Double Effect in war! If you enjoyed this article, please share it and subscribe! The podcast music is from the Open Goldberg Variations, played by Kimiko Ishizaka and made available in the public domain.

Sources

[1] Lazar, Seth, "War", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available online.

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Today we talk about the ethics of war. Are there any ethical rules for wars, or are soldiers allowed to do whatever they want on the battlefield? How can attacks like that of Russia on Ukraine be justified? And do other countries have a moral obligation to come to Ukraine’s assistance? Read on to find out!

Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

Welcome back! Last week in the premium newsletter, we had the first of a series of four posts on whether humanity might have a future in the oceans. In case you missed it, it is here:

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Back to our weekly article! Everyone is talking about the war in Ukraine right now, and I feel that, as philosophers, we also have something to contribute to the discussion.

So let us today talk about the ethics of war.

What are the moral rules for war, how can wars be justified and are we obliged to help a country that has been attacked?

Are there any ethical rules for wars?

One might think that perhaps wars don’t really obey any rules. Since the expected behaviour in a war is that people shoot with the intention to kill each other, what rules could there be that they would be likely to obey?

But it turns out that we do distinguish between good (relatively speaking) and bad behaviour, even in war situations. Killing an armed enemy soldier in order to save one’s own life will not be as bad, morally speaking, as bombing a school full of children or a hospital. Killing a soldier in war might not generally be seen as equally bad as murdering someone at peacetime. But there are also behaviours that we would recognise as “war crimes,” that is, behaviour that even in the context of war should be considered a crime. So how do we know which behaviours are relatively better or worse in a war situation?

One crucial question is: do we believe that wars are really totally different from everyday life, so that killing in a war obeys radically different rules than killing in peace? Or do we see a war just as one more kind of human behaviour (like, say, working or mating)? If this is the case, then we would try to argue that, in principle, the same kinds of moral rules should apply to wars that also apply to everyday life at peacetime.

The laws of war

The ethical problems of wars can be divided into three groups (see [1] for a good overview and more details):

Declaring and entering war. This is often called the jus ad bellum part of war ethics: the law towards war. Here, we would ask questions like:

What are good reasons to go to war?

Are there better and worse reasons?

Are some wars easier to justify than others?

The jus in bello (law during war) is about the behaviour of the warring parties while the war is taking place. Here, issues include:

Is it ever permissible to target civilians?

What if underage children take part in the war as armed soldiers? Should they have a special status and must the enemy avoid harming them?

Which kinds of infrastructure is it okay to target? (Weapons factories or hospitals?)

How to treat the wounded and the prisoners of war?

The jus post bellum (law after the war) deals with questions like:

How to end a war?

How should the losing party be treated?

How to rebuild the warring countries and their relations after the end of the war?

How to deal with the return of prisoners and the wounded?

How should the aggressor compensate the other parties for the damages inflicted during the war?

The six conditions for a just war

Let’s take the recent Russian attack on Ukraine as an example for the thoughts that one might have during the first stage, the jus ad bellum (the law of entering the war).

A “just” war (if we assume, for the moment, that such a thing even exists) is generally thought to fulfil six criteria:

Just cause

It must have a just cause. There must be a good reason to go to war, and this means that the reason cannot only be greed or the wish of the one party to eliminate the other. There must be some kind of moral justification for the war, some attempt to use the war in order to prevent a worse outcome.

Right intentions

The party that enters the war must have the right intentions. This means that they must be honest that they enter the war only because of the just cause (see above). They should not use the cause as an excuse to start a war that really is motivated by other causes. Unfortunately, bad intentions are all too common in wars. Often, the warring parties will fabricate some excuse to go to war, but the actual reason will be something entirely different.

Reasonable chances to succeed

The war must have reasonable chances to be successful and to achieve its aims. It would be immoral to drag two (or more) countries into a war, if it is already foreseeable that a country is going to lose that war.

Benefits proportional to losses

The expected benefits must be somehow proportional to the expected losses due to the war. One wouldn’t start a war that is expected to lead to thousands of deaths just in order to take revenge for an insult uttered by the other country’s president, for example. Of course, this (and the other criteria) can all be disputed. Especially the idea of proportionality is easy to question: What benefit could possibly outweigh thousands of human deaths? Even to ask this question seems to show that the questioner has a wrong, too low idea about the value of human lives. If human lives are, as we would perhaps want to maintain, almost infinitely valuable, then we can not use them as “means” (as Kant would say) to any “end” that the war might achieve.

War is a last resort

The requirement of last resort emphasises that war, being the source of a great amount of suffering for innocent populations, should not be entered lightly. It must be the last possible way to achieve the just cause. If there is any other way, no matter how costly or inconvenient, that should be attempted first.

War can only be declared by a legitimate authority

And finally, the war should be decided upon by a legitimate authority: a head of state, a government or an administration that legitimately holds the power to declare this war and to ask its citizens to sacrifice their lives for the just cause. This requirement, too, can be questioned: Does any government, even a democratically elected one, have the right to order me to be killed in a war? Would such an order not be directly opposed to what is the whole point of having a state in the first place, which is to protect the interests of its citizens? And what if this is a war of liberation, where the people who are pursuing the just cause (their freedom from oppression) do not in advance have a suitable, legitimate, official authority to declare the war? If this criterion were always observed, there could never be just wars that are not started by already existing, stable, democratically legitimised states. But this is obviously not realistic.

Is Russia’s war in Ukraine a just war?

Now let’s briefly look at the present war in Ukraine. Is it a just war in terms of the jus ad bellum?

First, Putin passes the legitimate authority test. He and the Russian government are internationally recognised, legitimate authorities with the power to declare a war.

Second, the just cause test. Although one might initially think that Russia lacks a just cause, on a closer look perhaps we might say that it has a legitimate interest to preserve its own safety and to safeguard its own territorial integrity. With NATO constantly expanding East since the end of the Soviet Union, it is understandable that Russia might feel threatened. Not only has Poland been in the NATO (a US-led military alliance) for over 20 years, but Ukraine itself had begun negotiations to be accepted. This would clearly threaten Russia’s interests and long-term safety. So we might assume that Russia could have a just cause in wanting to keep NATO off its borders.

Third, right intention. This is more difficult to answer, especially since it is in principle impossible to know other people’s intentions. But we have some hints. Does President Putin likely enter this war with the sole intention to protect Russia’s interests against an attack from NATO states? It seems questionable.

Even with NATO states approaching from the West, it is not obvious that there was an actual threat to Russia that would justify starting a war. I am not a political analyst, but from my limited knowledge of world affairs, it doesn’t seem like the Western world has recently shown any signs of aggression against Russia. Quite the opposite. The West has been very relaxed about Putin’s rule in the past, the Novichok poisonings, the imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s role in Syria, the invasion of Georgia, and many other instances where it could have reacted in much stronger ways. Would not cooperation with Russia, rather than a war, have been in the interest of all parties, including NATO?

If we look at Putin’s own life: he is an ex-KGB officer who ruthlessly has removed all possible rivals from positions of power for years, he is accused of widespread corruption, disregard for the rule of law and has repeatedly presented his nostalgic views of the Soviet Empire. All these make it plausible to question whether there might be other motives behind the attack on Ukraine than just the objective security needs of his country.

It might be that the aim of restoring Russia’s security and blocking further NATO memberships of countries bordering the country could be better achieved by other means, like economic pressure or the threat of cutting off gas supplies to Europe. Would the prospect of being attacked by Russia not increase the willingness of bordering countries to seek the protection of NATO? Would it not likely achieve the opposite of the stated goal?

Considering such points, it does not seem plausible that Russia’s intention in attacking Ukraine was only to guarantee its own safety. There seem to be other goals behind the attack: the wish to restore the historical power and unity of the Soviet Union perhaps, or Putin’s desire to expand his personal power and to secure a world-changing legacy of his reign.

Let me say again that this is an example for how to apply the philosophical principles of Just War Theory to a particular situation. It is not a political analysis. If you disagree with my points and conclusions, you are welcome to provide your own. You are even more welcome to do it right here, in the comments section below. I don’t claim to have any superior knowledge of this particular conflict or its political background.

Fourth, there also don’t seem to be many reasonable chances to succeed for Russia in this war. Yes, a purely military victory is likely, but politically it will be difficult to avoid negative long-term effects on Russia’s interests. This poses the question what would actually count as a “success” for Russia? Is it only achieving a particular military goal, e.g. controlling Kyiv? Or is it to enter a long-term state of safety and prosperity for the country?

Fifth, are the benefits proportional to the losses? What is the actual, measurable benefit to Russia of this attack? And could that effect not have been achieved much easier and more sustainably by improving relations with all neighbouring countries and the West, instead of starting a new war? This question always also has a cynical ring to it, because what we are asked to do is weigh human lives against other goals and perceived “benefits.” Can any benefits ever be “proportional” or “more important” than the intentional destruction of human lives? This is the point where radical pacifists would disagree with Just War Theory.

Last, if we believe that Russia’s long-term goals could be better served by being cooperative and non-threatening, then war would not be a last resort. If we assume that Russia has many other ways of achieving its geopolitical goals without needing to start a war, then this criterion is not fulfilled and we should conclude that this war is not just.

To summarise, according to what are generally taken to be the criteria for just wars, Russia’s attack on Ukraine seems to fail 4 of the 6 requirements. It would therefore seem to not be a just war. The international community is probably right to oppose Russia’s aggression. Of course, as always, one might disagree. The criteria themselves can be questioned and also my own evaluation of the political and historical background may be wrong. If you have more ideas, please feel free to add them to the comments below!

We could only cover a small part of the ethics of war in this article. We did not talk about the jus in bello or whether other countries are obliged to come to Ukraine’s assistance. We will cover these other questions next week, so stay tuned and come back next weekend for the second part of this article on the philosophy of war and armed conflict!

Thank you for reading Daily Philosophy. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Source

[1] Lazar, Seth, "War", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available online.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, please share it and subscribe! The podcast music is from the Open Goldberg Variations, played by Kimiko Ishizaka and made available in the public domain. The cover image is a screenshot from a BBC news Youtube video.

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel thought that the whole world is better understood not as a collection of isolated objects, but as the synthesis of opposites into a bigger whole. In this, he is much closer to today’s ecological thinking than he is to much of modern Western philosophy. Perhaps it’s time to re-discover Hegel’s philosophy of synthesis for our world.

Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

last week’s premium newsletter was about the fascinating idea (and a prominent environmental advocacy project) of reserving half the Earth for nature: “Half the Earth.” Find the article here:

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And now, let’s go back to our series of discussing the most famous quotes in the history of philosophy — and what they really mean. Today, it’s Hegel’s turn.

Hegel: Truth is a synthesis

“Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.” (Attributed to Hegel)

This quote feels so familiar: the dialectic exchange of thesis—antithesis—synthesis is such a common pattern of thought, particularly since Marxism took it up and the rhetoric of the student movements in the late 1960s made it famous. It has even made it into Hollywood movies: in the 1992 film Sneakers, the characters of Robert Redford and Ben Kingsley playfully go through an argument in exactly these three stages: thesis—antithesis—synthesis.

It was therefore quite surprising for me to discover that it is disputed whether Hegel ever actually said (or wrote) that sentence above.

The sad truth about academic philosophy is that the overwhelming majority of philosophy professors have never read the overwhelming majority of philosophical works.

When it takes a whole academic lifetime to become a Kant or Plato specialist, it is impossible for any one person to have read everything. Like most of my peers, I have never actually read Hegel himself, except in small doses: a chapter here, a paragraph there, and fragments of works about him from other authors. So I cannot really say with certainty whether he wrote this quote or not: if you happen to know, please tell me in the comments!

The closest I came to a source for this quote is actually a sermon by Martin Luther King, “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart” (1962/1963), which exists in multiple versions. In one of them, we find the passage:

The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self-assertive humble. But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. The philosopher Hegel said that truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two. (Martin Luther King, A Tough Mind; emphasis by me)

According to a comment in a collection of papers by Martin Luther King, published by the King Research and Education Institute at Stanford, “the quote mirrors lines from an E. Stanley Jones book that King annotated and kept in his personal library (Jones, Mahatma Gandhi An Interpretation; New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1948, p. 17)”.

So the quote recedes more and more into the distance of literary lore and might or might not have been by Hegel, or perhaps by King, or perhaps by E. Stanley Jones, or maybe even by Gandhi. One wonders whether some version of it might not be found in the Gospels.

In the end, it doesn’t matter much whether Hegel actually wrote these precise words. They are quoted all over the Internet for a reason: they beautifully summarise what Hegel thought about truth, about history and about God. And since they are so famous, we are justified in discussing them here.

Hegel’s dialectic

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was an enormously influential philosopher of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was a contemporary of many famous German Idealists and romantic poets, and this shows in his philosophy, which is heavily influenced by the times.

Like them, Hegel had a tendency towards the mystical and he sought to see the union that underlies the apparent diversity of the world. The German poet Novalis (born only two years after Hegel) expressed the longing for cosmic harmony in these words:

Mankind travels along manifold pathways. He who pursues and compares them will perceive the emergence of certain strange figures; figures that appear to be inscribed in that massive tome composed in cipher that one everywhere and in everything beholds: on wings, eggshells, in clouds, in the snow, in crystalline and stone formations, in freezing waters, on the skins and in the bowels of mountain-ranges, of plants, beasts, people, in the stars of the heavens, in contiguous and expansive panes of pitch and glass, in the clustering of iron filings around the magnet (…) In these one may glimpse an intimation of the key to this wondrous text, its very grammar-book (…) He [our teacher] would behold the stars and plot their courses and positions in the sand. He would gaze into the celestial sea, never tiring of contemplating its movements, its clouds, its lights. He would collect rocks, flowers, beetles of all species, and array them in manifold sequences and combinations. He would keep a keen eye on both men and beasts and sit on the seashore searching for shellfish. He would eavesdrop attentively on his own thoughts and emotions. (translation © 2008 by Douglas Robertson, reprinted here with permission. Source here)

To understand Hegelian dialectics, we can take the example of love. A lover is a fact, a thing that exists. The lover is our starting point in trying to understand the phenomenon of love. This starting point, we may call the thesis, which, in Greek, literally just means that which has been “put out there”.

But looking at an isolated lover, we realise that this alone cannot give us an understanding of the phenomenon of love. It is essential to also see what is outside this lover — the world around them, which will, necessarily include the object of this lover’s love. So we have to look outwards, to all that is not this lover. This is, in the dialectic way of speaking, the anti-thesis, the negation of the original thesis.

But still: the world outside the lover, even if it includes the beloved, cannot alone give us an understanding of love. Only when we bring the two together, we can understand the relation between the two lovers, and thus gain a better understanding of their relationship. This is the synthesis, the coming-together of thesis and antithesis. The synthesis is not only a collection of two things, where thesis and antithesis are put together into one bag. Instead, it provides a new insight, which we couldn’t have had before: the understanding of the interrelation of lover and beloved.

But the process does not stop here. Now that we have synthesised the relationship between the lovers, we discover that we still don’t have a truly complete understanding of love. Yes, we can understand parts of their relationship. But much of their love will also be influenced by their pasts, their childhoods, their families, their societies. So we construct more “non-lovers,” more antitheses to the lovers, and end up with more, and more higher-level syntheses. These syntheses give us more and more insights into the workings of that love affair, its history, and its social embeddedness.

In the end, if we want to have a truly complete understanding of this one love relationship, we will have to include all of the universe in our final synthesis, since everything, all laws of nature and all history, somehow have had an effect on these two particular people and their love. Unquestionably, their DNA is part of the game, their mammal ancestry, their hormonal regulatory systems, their religious beliefs, their ideas about parenthood, and a myriad other things.

The conclusion from that is, according to Hegel, that what we perceive as individual objects are always, necessarily, partial versions of the truth. The full truth is that the universe is one big thing that can only be comprehended in its entirety. Hegel calls this “the Spirit,” and at some point it becomes a quasi-religious thing, his version of a God manifesting herself in all of creation. And here we’re back at Novalis and the Romantic sentiment.

Dialectics and ecology

What I find surprising is how modern Hegel sounds here. The idea of the interconnectedness of nature is something we constantly hear about from the ecology movements. From Arne Naess’ Deep Ecology to a David Attenborough documentary, we are always reminded that the conditions of flourishing of any species necessarily involve all others.

It also reminds me of the truth sought in Zen Buddhism. My understanding of it is very limited, but it seems to me that “the sound of one hand clapping” and similar koans are meant to point out the fallacies in our dualist, subject/object dichotomies of thinking.

Sure, we can study the leaf of a tree in isolation, but how much understanding of what a leaf truly is about will we gain from such a study? A leaf cannot be understood in its full role without the knowledge of how and why it is attached to a tree. And that cannot be understood without an understanding of the roots of the tree, the ecosystems in the soil, the weather patterns in that region, the global weather patterns, insect pollinators, bird migration and so on. All these relationships and these ever widening circles of understanding can be described as successive stages of thesis—antithesis—synthesis.

Natural sciences, in modern times, have been decidedly analytical. They take things apart into their components, divide, cut open, separate, and study smaller and smaller components in isolation. But after about four hundred years of that, we now begin to realise that what waits for us at the end of natural science is not the full picture of how nature works. A clock, taken apart into a pile of gears and sticks, does not anymore show the time or even provide any understanding of what the clock originally was about. The clock cannot be understood without its user. The user’s use of the clock cannot be understood without that person’s need to go to their workplace. This cannot be understood without an understanding of society and its structures of labour. And so on.

Hegel today?

Looking at it like that, it seems that perhaps it’s time to rediscover Hegel. Not as the (often misunderstood) philosophical background to Marx’s view of history and (later) one of the patron saints of “actually existing socialism,” but as a philosopher of non-dualism, of integrative, ecological thinking.

In the lyrics to the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, Tim Rice has Judas say to Jesus:

If you'd come today You could have reached the whole nation Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication...

In a similar way, it seems that Hegel was sometimes hindered in developing a consistent system by the limitations of his time. He saw history as a progression towards an ideal state, but then he identified that state with the Prussia of his time. He mentions “oriental” philosophies as one stage of the self-realisation of the Spirit, but he didn’t know much about these oriental philosophies to really be able to estimate their importance for mankind. And his understanding of social organisation never goes beyond the nation-states of his time.

Is it time to rediscover and re-apply Hegel’s dialectic to the problems of our world?

Bertrand Russell, a sharp critic of non-analytic approaches to philosophy, writes in his History of Western Philosophy:

In the best thinking, according to Hegel, thoughts become fluent and interfuse. Truth and falsehood are not sharply defined opposites, as is commonly supposed; nothing is wholly false, and nothing that we can know is wholly true. ... [Hegel’s system] illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.” (Hist. of W. Phil, 734)

Was Hegel’s so terribly illogical? Or was Russell just trying to justify the blandness of his own flavour of analytical philosophy?

“Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.”

Perhaps the time has come to take Hegel’s thesis and the analytical philosophy’s antithesis and to envision a synthesis of the two. A new, holistic, non-dualist way of seeing the world and our place in it.

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Since ancient times, philosophers have been portrayed as “walking on clouds,” being too busy to concern themselves with the mundane things in life. Immanuel Kant certainly fits the cliche. Today, we talk about Kant’s idea of the value of human beings, the quote that changed ethics forever.

Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

last week’s premium newsletter was about the question “Can we control technology?” Find it here:

To read all of it and to support Daily Philosophy, please consider subscribing.

On the Daily Philosophy website, we had an article by Prof. Stephen Leach, “In Praise of Pyrrhonian Scepticism”:

Contemporary philosophers, who will agree with each other on very little else, tend to agree that it is one of the defining characteristics of philosophy that it should examine its own foundations. Thus, for example, philosophers have often pointed out that it is not part of mathematics to ask ‘what is mathematics?’ and it is not part of natural science to ask ‘what is natural science?’ However, it is part of philosophy to ask ‘what is philosophy?

Find the article here on Daily Philosophy!

This past week, Prof John Shand sent us a fascinating article about the paradox of empathy:

It is often supposed that greater empathy is a good thing. But this is a mistake, unless one assumes that being empathetic will inevitably bring it about that one treats others better. But there is no logical reason to suppose this. Being empathetic may be a good way to know how to do hurt to someone in respect of their feelings and thoughts more acutely and damagingly. Not being empathetic may result in such hurt too, but that will be because of poor understanding, or lack of awareness, of the feelings and thoughts of others, not through calculated use of good understanding enabling one to better get people where it really hurts.

Find the article in full here.

And now, let’s go back to our series of discussing the most famous quotes in the history of philosophy — and what they really mean. Today, it’s Kant’s turn. One could argue that with this sentence alone, Kant fundamentally changed ethics, from his time all the way up to the present day.

Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means. (Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section)

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was one of the most influential philosophers of the past 300 years. Not only that --- he was also the embodiment of a philosopher who is too busy with his thoughts to take notice of the actual world.

One of his favourite pastimes was to visit a friend, one Mr Green. Kant would go to Green’s home, only to find him asleep. This happened in the same way every time, without fail. Kant would sit beside Green, waiting for him to wake up. After a while, he would doze off himself. A little later, a third friend would come along and also fall asleep with them, until, finally, the last of the group of friends would enter the room and wake everyone up. Once awake, they had a blast talking about interesting ideas, but only until precisely seven o’clock in the evening. At seven, and not a minute later, the group would break up and everyone would go their own way. The locals, who were used to this weird meeting, would know when it was seven o’clock, because Kant would always pass by the street at exactly this time. [1]

Kant needed this kind of regularity and could be profoundly unhappy when something didn’t go according to plan. One time, an acquaintance invited him for a trip to the countryside. But the trip took a bit longer and Kant wasn’t home at his customary bed-time at precisely ten o’clock. This upset him so much that he immediately created a new rule for his life: never to accept another invitation for a trip to the country.

Kant could be charming and witty, his students reported, but he could also do the weirdest things. When his long-time servant, a man named Lampe, left him, he found it very difficult to accustom himself to a life without the man. So he stuck a note to the wall: “Lampe must be forgotten!” One wonders whether the wise man expected this to actually work.

Means and ends

Kant never left his home town, Koenigsberg (today’s Kaliningrad), never married, never changed his daily schedule or his diet, and died, presumably happy and mildly bored, at the age of 80. His last words were: “It’s fine.”

In the course of his long and externally uneventful life, Kant created a series of works that uprooted and changed philosophy for ever. His fundamental Critique of Pure Reason tried to sort out the limits of what we can know independently of all experience of the world; that is, with our “pure reason” alone.

But what we’re interested in today is his ethics. Today, we are accustomed to the thought that all living things have developed out of each other in the long process of natural evolution. We are willing to give rights to animals and to recognise that their concerns are, essentially, of the same importance as our own; their suffering as bad as our own.

But Kant would not entirely agree. He saw that human beings have a particular kind of value that animal lives lack. And this value comes from the ability we have to be autonomous, to decide for ourselves how we want to act and then to actually act upon our decisions.

Animals are caught in the necessities of their instincts. A bee cannot decide to ignore a flower. An ant cannot ignore a morsel of food. A lion cannot freely decide to let a zebra live. And this applies even to those animals that we consider the “highest” on the evolutionary scale, those closest to us: dogs are as much slaves to their instincts as apes. It is only humans, at least this is what Kant believes, who can freely decide which course of action to follow in every situation. Yes, we also have to eat, but many have voluntarily starved to death in hunger strikes, clearly showing that our mind and our free will can triumph over the demands of our bodies. Many are voluntarily celibate. Many abstain from particular foods when dieting. And so on.

This ability we have to act freely, to decide how we want to act, makes us special. Every time we do follow a rule, say a moral rule, we are doing it freely. There is no way to coerce a human being into doing anything. You can punish a murderer, but murders still happen. In principle, we are all free to be murderers, as we are free to be saints. We can decide to be lazy or hard-working. It is always a free decision, no matter which way we choose.

This ability of human beings is what gives them a value that is of a different kind than the value other things have. You can replace one car by another. If you lose a pen, you can buy another. You can go to the market and exchange two eggs for a head of lettuce. And so on.

But one cannot exchange human beings for one another, Kant thinks. You cannot say, I have too many children, so let me exchange two of them for a new car. This would not make sense, and we would immediately recognise such an action as immoral. Why? Because this would implicitly put human beings on the same level as a mere thing, a car. Such an action would deny human beings their special status, what Kant calls their “dignity.”

But now, if we agree with Kant that human beings are special in this way, then we can never “make use” of a human being in order to achieve some other goal, since any other goal must be of less value, inferior to the value of the human being. This is what Kant means with his talk of “means” and “ends.”

The “end” of an action is what I want to achieve. Let’s say, I want to get my pen back, which I forgot at a friend’s house yesterday. The “means” are the instruments or tools that I will use to get that pen back. I might walk over to my friend’s house to get my pen back, for example. Then my walking there would be the means towards the end of getting my pen back.

But what if my friend lives far away? I can take a taxi. Assuming my pen is worth 5 dollars, and I pay 50 to the taxi to get the pen back: would this be a rational action? No, in this case, I should just use the money directly to buy another pen (or ten of them) instead of trying to retrieve that one pen that I forgot.

So the means that I use to achieve some end must, if I want to be rational, have less value than the end itself.

But now, if humans have a special, unlimited value, it follows that I can never use them as means towards any end. Because no end can have a value that is higher than a human being’s dignity.

Acting in a way that recognises this fact makes sure that we always respect human dignity and that, therefore, we act in a way that is morally right. For Kant, the highest good in acting is to act rationally. And respecting human dignity is a rational necessity. Not doing so would be like paying a 50 dollar taxi bill in order to retrieve a five-dollar pen.

If we follow Kant’s advice, we will never sacrifice a person for any reason. We will not agree to wars where soldiers get killed for a military gain. We will not accept a prison system that mistreats human beings in the name of deterrence. We will not lie to another just to secure an advantage for ourselves. And we will not exploit workers to lower the prices of our consumer products.

Kant’s “Categorical Imperative,” as this idea is also called, is actually pretty demanding, and it is rightfully considered a kind of gold standard of human behaviour towards others.

Just think how much better our world would be if everyone acted following this quote, if we treated the soldier, the worker, the prisoner, the prostitute, the beggar as ends and not only as means to our own ends:

“Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means.”

What do you think of Kant’s idea? Leave a comment right here!

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[1] The facts on Kant’s personal life were taken from Wilhelm Weischedel’s genius book on the lives of famous philosophers, which, unfortunately, exists only in German. But if you can read German, get it. It’s one of the most entertaining philosophy books: Wilhelm Weischedel, Die Philosophische Hintertreppe. 34 grosse Philosophen in Alltag und Denken.

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Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

last week we started a new journey, which will bring us across all the history of philosophy over the course of this year: we’ll see philosophy through its most famous quotes. Last time, we talked about Marcus Aurelius. Today, we’re going to look at one of Socrates’ best-known sayings: “I know only that I don’t know anything.”

In the premium newsletter, we went to the far future and asked what will likely be left of us a million years from now. And, by extension, if there had been another civilisation just like ours on Earth a million years ago, would we actually know about them?

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Socrates: Apology

I know only one thing: that I know nothing. (Attributed to Socrates, Apology)

Socrates (470–399 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, often cited as one of the “fathers” of philosophy, especially of a particular method of philosophical questioning. He was the teacher of Plato (428/427--348/347), who, in turn, was the teacher of Aristotle. These three together are certainly the most influential trio of thinkers of all time in the Western philosophical tradition.

Socrates left no written works of his own. Part of his famous method was not to write down theoretical works, but to engage the citizens of Athens in discussions at the marketplace. Often, he would ask them questions about something they were supposed to be experts on, in the manner of children who keep asking “but why ...?” after every reply. Sooner or later, this method made it impossible for the supposed expert to further justify his assumptions. And then, Socrates would triumph, having shown that the person did not actually know as much as they assumed.

In time, having in this way publicly humiliated the most prominent citizens of Athens, Socrates had created a formidable alliance of enemies. When they thought that the time was right, they accused Socrates of corrupting the youth with his teachings and brought him to court.

The trial of Socrates became legendary, because the old philosopher did not only refuse to apologise. Instead, he asked his accusers to thank him with a lifelong pension for his service to the city, and kept making fun of them. Unsurprisingly, they sentenced him to death.

It is today understood that even then Socrates would have been able to escape the sentence, as others had done before him. He could have left the city and gone somewhere else to live. But, in his typical stubbornness, he refused. By forcing his accusers to go through with the execution, he became a martyr for the ideals of truthfulness and his name and story became immortal.

The actual quote above cannot be found in Plato’s works. There are similar statements in Socrates’ Apology, which is Plato’s recollection of the speech that Socrates gave in court. “Apology” here does not mean what it means today in English. For the ancient Greeks, an apologia was just a defence in court, not a plea for forgiveness.

Let’s look at some of the statements that we can find in Socrates’ Apology, as it has come to us through Plato’s retelling (transl. Benjamin Jowett):

And this is the point in which, as I think, I am superior to men in general, and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than other men, — that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know.

Note that here Socrates does not say that he knows “nothing.” Instead, he says that he does know “little.” The main point is not that he wants to glorify ignorance, but to expose those who pretend to know things that they don’t.

Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is — for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.

The enemy of knowledge, according to Socrates (and Plato) is not ignorance. Not to know is not shameful. Someone who does not know, and is aware of their ignorance, can do something about their lack of knowledge and start to study and learn and improve themselves. The true enemy of knowledge is the ignorance that we don’t even perceive as such. If we are caught in the illusion that we know something that we actually don’t know, then it will be much harder for us to improve. First, we would have to admit that we don’t know, which is something that we don’t like to do. And only then we’d be able to learn and start really knowing something.

It is a paradox that we can observe particularly well today, in the age of rampant miseducation and misinformation. It is mainly the uneducated and misguided who have the strongest opinions about things. From opponents of vaccinations to proponents of flat Earth theories, the least educated the person, the strongest the conviction often is. And, generally, they don’t take kindly to being shown that they are wrong. Socrates:

There are plenty of persons, as they soon enough discover, who think that they know something, but really know little or nothing: and then those who are examined by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me.

The Apology, Socrates’ speech to his judges and the people of Athens, ends when he is handed his death sentence. In one of the most beautiful and striking sentences of acceptance, Socrates once again emphasises how little we all actually know:

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

What do you think of Socrates’ famous quote? Tell me right here:

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Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

last year I asked for your votes on what we should be talking about this year. Many of you voted for a short history of philosophy through its famous quotes. And this, right here, is the first instalment of this new series. But don’t worry; I will still mix this series up with other posts to keep things interesting.

Over this year, we will be going over some of the best-known quotes from famous thinkers. As opposed to popular “philosophy quotes” collections that you can find all over the Internet, here I will give you not only the precise location of the quote (so that you can look it up yourself), but also an explanation in a few hundred words. Short enough to read quickly, but with sufficient context and interpretation, so that you can really understand what the quote originally was about and where it fits into the history of thought.

In our premium newsletter, which you can find on Substack, we have been discussing the past and the future of mankind in very broad terms.

Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about whether there could have existed another technological civilisation on Earth in the millions of years before us. If this sounds interesting, please upgrade your subscription for the price of a coffee a month! This not only allows you to support Daily Philosophy, but it also gives you access to exclusive content, a printable version of these articles, free ebooks, and much more.

As I had promised earlier, premium subscribers will get a printable copy of the articles of the past month in a magazine format! I’m happy to announce that the first issue is now available, and, because it’s the first, I’m making it available to all subscribers. Get yours here (for free):

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If you are not yet a subscriber (free or premium) then, by downloading the magazine, you will be automatically subscribed to the free edition. If already are a subscriber, please enter the email address you used to subscribe here in order to download the magazine. You can choose one of: epub, mobi (Kindle) or PDF (printable, A4) formats.

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Finally, you can take Daily Philosophy to the bathtub without being in danger of killing your phone! :) Enjoy, and please tell me what you think of it. Is it a good idea? Is it useful to you? — Thanks!

To ease us into the new format, let me begin with a quote that will already sound somewhat familiar to you. Later on, we will look into many different philosophers and times, from Heraclitus to Hegel and from Confucius to Carnap; so keep reading!

Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul; for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgements. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6)

Marcus Aelius Aurelius Verus Caesar (121-180 AD) is still one of the most well-known and generally well-regarded emperors of Rome. Read more about him here:

Marcus Aurelius was not only an emperor, but also a philosopher. In a difficult time for Rome and for himself, he turned to philosophy to find strength and guidance. While away from Rome, on military expeditions to the barbarian lands in Central Europe, he kept a diary of his thoughts. This later became known as “Meditations.” But the original title is much more modest: “Notes to Myself,” or “Things that Concern Myself.”

Stoic philosophy is complex and has many facets, but one of its overarching goals is to show a path to human happiness. This happiness comes through cultivating a particular approach to the world that allows us to stay composed and strong in the face of difficulties.

In the quote above, the important concept is things being “in our power” or not. For Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, it was essential to distinguish between what aspects of our lives and our experience we can control and which things we cannot control. Some of us, for example the Emperor of Rome, might have more control than others, but we all have only limited power to bend the world to our will. Diseases, bad luck, economic collapse, natural disasters and old age spare no one. This is what Marcus Aurelius calls the “things themselves” in the quote above.

If those “things themselves,” that is, the unpredictability of the outside world, can throw us into poverty, illness, hardships and death, what can we do to try and safeguard our happiness? Here, the Stoics employ a psychological trick. They say, it is true that an external event creates a factual situation. But the facts are distinct from our judgements about them.

You can see this easily when you look at the misfortune of others. If you see in the news that a house somewhere far away collapsed and killed most of the members of a family, you will perhaps pity these people; but you will not be devastated by the news. You will be more or less indifferent to the plight of these people you don’t know.

If, on the other hand, this is your house that collapsed, your family that was killed, you will certainly have a different reaction.

From this starting observation, the Stoics conclude that what affects our state of mind, as a reaction to the collapse of the house, is not the collapsed house itself; since one collapsed house affects us, but the other does not. It is, rather, the interpretation that our minds give to these events. When my house collapses, I make a judgement about this event. And this judgement is different from what it would be if the house of a stranger had collapsed.

In the end, therefore, it is these judgements that cause our emotional reactions, and not the events themselves.

But now we should also realise, the Stoics say, that any judgements we make are products of our own minds -- they entirely take place within our minds. And, because of that, we always have the power to change them. Nobody and nothing can prescribe to me what judgement I should make in response to some external event. With training, we will be able to keep our own judgements under control. We will be able, therefore, to control our own emotions, and consequently to achieve lasting happiness, even in the face of catastrophic events.

“It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul,” Marcus Aurelius writes. And this is because “the things themselves have no natural power to form our judgements.” Only we, ourselves, can do that.

Happiness, for the Stoics, is a state of our minds. And therefore entirely in our own control.

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Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

Welcome to another weekend philosophy missive! We have been discussing the Stoics recently, but I thought I’d bring you a bit of variety with something entirely different: today we’re having a look at the Frankfurt School and one of the most important books of (almost) contemporary social theory, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment.”

Don’t be put off by the title. It sounds like a bore, I know, but the book is still one of the most clear-eyed critiques of the modern way of life, of capitalism and of media-driven societies like ours. And in this post, we’re going to skip all the boring bits and bring you only a “Good Parts” version of that important work.

Tomorrow, in our premium newsletter, we’ll be talking about geological and evolutionary time and how we can get a feeling for different time scales. If you’d like to read that, please subscribe:

Now grab a coffee (or tea) and let’s have a look at what Horkheimer and Adorno have to say!

The Frankfurt School

The Dialectic of Enlightenment is one of the main texts of what has come to be called the Frankfurt School, although it was neither a school nor located anywhere near Frankfurt for much of the time it was active.

The Frankfurt School is generally taken to mean a lose collection of thinkers who first congregated around the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The Institute was founded in 1923 with the money of a wealthy student, Felix Weil, but from the beginning the founders sought to integrate the Institute into the formal university system, so that it could offer lectures, attract academics, get research funding and confer academic degrees.

The most prominent of the founding members were Max Horkheimer, who became the Director of the Institute in 1930, musicologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno, psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm, whom we already know quite well, and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Later, many others became loosely associated with the Frankfurt School, for instance Jurgen Habermas, who started out as a doctoral student of Horkheimer’s but later went his own way and created his own theoretical framework, distancing himself from the Frankfurt School. Erich Fromm, too, was only loosely associated with the School, having his own research program that emphasised psychoanalysis rather than Hegelian and Marxist philosophy and Critical Theory.

The main topics of the Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School was, as we said, never a “school” in the narrow sense of having one set of teachings that it promoted through its members.

Instead, it was a loose association of very different thinkers who, for a time, had common research interests and found inspiration and support from working together, despite always also having differences and sometimes fundamental disagreements among them. It was more like a flock of birds who, for a while, find themselves sitting on the same branch of a tree, rather than a pack of wolves that will hunt and live together as closely knit family unit.

What united the Frankfurt School was, first, an interest in Marxism and the question why Marxist teachings had not succeeded in creating the ideal society. As the 20th century progressed, first towards the dictatorship of the Nazi party in Germany and later to the absolutism of our technological consumer societies, the members of the Frankfurt School were asking what the social and psychological mechanisms behind these developments were. What made perfectly normal people into Nazis? What made workers who suffered from overwork and poverty in a capitalist state accept their fate rather than revolt? And how could perhaps the trend towards more and more centralisation of power in the hands of a few industrialists be reversed and a better, more just society created?

Dialectic of Enlightenment

The book by Horkheimer and Adorno, published in 1947, became the early poster work of the Frankfurt School and its criticism of capitalist society, later to be followed by Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. Both books agree on many of their basic views.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a complex book, addressing many topics: mythology, enlightenment, sexuality and liberation, sickness and psychoanalysis. We will only talk here about the fourth part of the book, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” This part seems to me to be the most practical, easy to understand and immediately applicable to our own lives today. It is amazing how well their criticism of culture has held up over the past 75 years. It reads today as real and fresh as when it was written. It perfectly describes our own problems with our culture industries. Horkheimer and Adorno could not have dreamt of the Internet, of Twitter, Facebook and Netflix, but their criticism of culture applies perfectly to all these modern phenomena. This underlines just how correctly they diagnosed what was happening and how much we need this book and its conclusions, even (and particularly) today.

Horkheimer and Adorno begin with a criticism of mass culture, which they diagnose as having lost every significance or meaning and having become just commercial entertainment:

All mass culture under monopoly is identical, and the contours of its skeleton, the conceptual armature fabricated by monopoly, are beginning to stand out. Those in charge no longer take much trouble to conceal the structure, the power of which increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted. Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce. (p.95)

How did we come to that? Those who make culture, the authors say, tend to explain the uniformity of radio and TV programs (and today, we would add, of Internet content, self-published books, and Youtube channels) by the needs of the millions who consume this content. Standard products just happen to best meet the needs of all these different people who live in different cultures and in different locations.

But now comes an interesting paragraph. At the end of the same page, Horkheimer and Adorno talk about the difference between telephone and radio:

The step from telephone to radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former liberally permitted the participant to play the role of subject. The latter democratically makes everyone equally into listeners, in order to expose them in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations. (p.95)

Has the Internet changed the media landscape?

We might feel like questioning this today. Isn’t the Internet proof enough that the authors are wrong here? Yes, when we went from telephone to radio we temporarily lost something, but when we went from radio and TV to blogs and YouTube, didn’t we get the ability back to be subjects, real participants, initiators of the social media discourse, rather than just passive listeners?

I’m not sure. The list of the 20 most subscribed YouTube channels (end of 2021) includes seven music channels (most non-English, interestingly, with Hindi channels in the first two places), one channel for children, 11 channels about entertainment and sports, and one channel about 5-minute crafts. Many of these channels are owned by the same big names that dominate culture outside of the Internet: Sony Entertainment, Bollywood production companies, World Wrestling Entertainment and Justin Bieber. The most watched video on YouTube is the Baby Shark Dance with 8.8 billion views (one for every human on Earth) and the most viewed video categories are comedy and music. At the same time, there are more than 37 million YouTube channels out there, most of which, essentially, nobody watches.

So has the Internet replaced the telephone in the way that Horkheimer and Adorno hoped? Or has it become just another reincarnation of TV, of a way of pushing prefabricated cultural content down the viewers’ throats? With over 75% of watch time going to comedy, it certainly doesn’t seem like YouTube is primarily used to educate or to facilitate serious communication between individuals. Other social media do allow people to connect in person, but these also tend, over the long run, to be appropriated, controlled and censored by a system that has the primary purpose of generating income for the companies that own the Internet’s real estate: Facebook, Twitter, TikTok.

But Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s criticism of the modern media landscape goes beyond that: It is not only that modern media exclude many from participating as creators in them (which may be disputed today) --- the real problem is that modern culture is all the same:

That the difference between the models of Chrysler and General Motors is fundamentally illusory is known by any child, who is fascinated by that very difference. (p.97)

This certainly is true of our media landscape, both on- and offline. It is irrelevant whether I’m watching a channel with 20 or 20,000 subscribers if all I’m seeing is the same stuff on both; and this again is the same I’ve been seeing over the past days and weeks, thanks to a recommendation algorithm that presents the ever same content to me, trying to shield me from anything that I might dislike, anything that I might find boring or upsetting. YouTube maximises view time (and, consequently, ad income) by presenting me with ever more of exactly what it knows me to like, and by carefully filtering out anything that I might find objectionable, everything I might disagree with or feel offended by. But in this way, the recommendation algorithm takes away that most basic of public functions of truly social media: to be a platform for democratic exchange, for the dissemination of ideas, for dialogue, dissent and dialectic.

Dialectic and cultural uniformity

“Dialectic” is a word that has had many different meanings over its long history. Generally it can be understood as a process of improving one’s understanding by contrasting different, opposite approaches or theses and trying to integrate them into a “higher” version of the truth. A dialectic process is inherently pluralistic, because it requires the opposites that it can then synthesise into a new insight. The “media-bubbles” that recommendation algorithms create are by default “one-dimensional” (as Marcuse would put it): they exclude dissent and opposition and create an illusion of harmony and unanimity by cutting off every dissenting voice.

Culture has in the past always contained the seeds of dissent, dissatisfaction with the status quo and artistic suffering. But today it has become something that is administered and rendered harmless inside an officially sanctioned machinery that administrates it:

To speak about culture always went against the grain of culture. The general designation "culture" already contains, virtually, the process of identifying, cataloging, and classifying which imports culture into the realm of administration. Only what has been industrialized, rigorously subsumed, is fully adequate to this concept of culture. (p.104)

This concept of culture has a built-in way of dealing with dissenters, with those who might be tempted to criticise the sameness and meaninglessness of cultural products:

By artfully sanctioning the demand for trash, the system inaugurates total harmony. (p.106)

Those who want higher quality products are seen as arrogant and unreasonable, whereas culture “distributes its privileges democratically to all.”

This is seen, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, most clearly in the movie industry. It is amazing, how well their diagnoses describe today’s movies, over 70 years later.

One characteristic of a movie industry that tries to cater to bland sameness is, they say, that it will only create movies from material that is sure to appeal to the masses. And indeed, this is what we clearly see as a development in the movie industry from the 1970s and 80s to today.

In film, any manuscript that is not reassuringly based on a best-seller is viewed with mistrust,

they write. This is even more true today. Not even bestsellers are sufficient any more to get a movie project greenlighted in Hollywood. It’s best if the movie project is a sequel of another, already proven blockbuster. James Bond 20, Star Wars 13, the Marvel Cinematic Universe: these productions suck up nearly all movie production resources and funding, leaving almost nothing for the creation of original or art movies, cultural products that might be even the slightest bit challenging or different. The consequence of this way of creating movies is that they all resemble each other --- not necessarily in the details of the plot, but certainly in their architecture.

Look up “rules of screenwriting” or “screenplay plot structure” on the Internet and you will find endless discussions among movie professionals that all, essentially, boil down to one piece of advice: structure your movie just like any other movie or forget writing for Hollywood. Movies must be predictable, with scripts being rejected if they miss the essential beats and plot-points. The first act must end on page 25, the first half of the second on page 50 and so on. If a screenplay does not hit the right page numbers with its structure, then it is a loser and will be rejected by any Hollywood script reader. This guarantees that all movies turn out to be exactly the same, having the same emotional ups and downs at exactly the same places, with only the names of the characters and the details of their occupations changing. Horkheimer and Adorno:

This is the incurable sickness of all entertainment. Amusement congeals into boredom, since, to be amusement, it must cost no effort and therefore moves strictly along the well-worn grooves of association. The spectator must need no thoughts of his own: the product prescribes each reaction, not through any actual coherence — which collapses once exposed to thought — but through signals. Any logical connection presupposing mental capacity is scrupulously avoided. Developments are to emerge from the directly preceding situation, not from the idea of the whole. There is no plot which could withstand the screenwriters' eagerness to extract the maximum effect from the individual scene. Finally, even the schematic formula seems dangerous, since it provides some coherence of meaning, however meager, when only meaninglessness is acceptable. (p.109)

In this way, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest, the whole of the culture industry becomes quite the opposite of what “art” used to be. Instead of a critical commentary on life and an imaginative evaluation of alternatives, modern culture becomes one of the pillars of the repressive system. Amusement, they say, always meant to put painful things out of one’s mind, to forget suffering:

At its root is powerlessness. It is indeed escape, but not, as it claims, escape from bad reality but from the last thought of resisting that reality. (p.116)

This cultural uniformity, along with the power of advertisements to prescribe to us the properties that are considered desirable and those to avoid, leads to an ever growing equalisation of people. Instead of individuals, we are now members of a tribe. The initiation ritual may be painful, but in the end it binds us together and provides our lives with meaning. We see here echoes of Erich Fromm, who also emphasised how becoming part of a tribe, of a group of people, can free us from the anxiety and the existential terror of alone-ness.

The society provides materially for all its members, as long as they accept the society’s hegemony over their lives and choices. Officially, it all looks like freedom and democracy. The real control is hidden beneath the surface:

Formal freedom is guaranteed for everyone. No one has to answer officially for what he or she thinks. However, all find themselves enclosed from early on within a system of churches, clubs, professional associations, and other relationships which amount to the most sensitive instrument of social control. Anyone who wants to avoid ruin must take care not to weigh too little in the scales of this apparatus. Otherwise he will fall behind in life and finally go under. ... Specialist knowledge as a rule goes hand in hand with a prescribed set of attitudes ... (p.120)

That last point is crucial. The system filters its specialists through churches, clubs, professional associations and other institutions so that, when finally people arrive at positions of power, society can be sure that they have the correct, desired attitudes. Those who don’t conform are not forcibly silenced, which would generate discontent and opposition; instead, they are silently left to fall behind in the race for social advancement and “finally go under,” leaving no trace.

Let’s try it out!

The Dialectic of Enlightenment provides an all-encompassing criticism of society and culture. It is difficult to see how one could do anything about a society that insists to feed us with uniform cultural products, that takes away even our imagination of any different world and style of life, that aims to make us into clones, robots, virtually identical copies of each other, endlessly obedient, endlessly patient, with no strength or will left to revolt.

If this was so, what could we possibly do?

Well, there are a number of possibilities. Assuming Horkheimer and Adorno are right (which, like everything in philosophy, can be disputed), we still have at least some chance of trying to escape the total cultural domination of the system. If the system creates all the eternally-same cultural content in order to dull our senses and our opposition, then at least we can recognise its cultural products by just that sameness, that absence of anything interesting, of real depth, of real difference, of real suffering (as they themselves say). And if we can recognise these products as dangerous to our individuality, we can avoid them and instead try to find those pockets of culture that are still genuine, still not taken over by the cultural “machine” (to use an expression from Pink Floyd). And we can recognise these specifically through their being different.

How can we apply this to our lives?

For a week, you could make a point of avoiding every bit of mainstream culture and instead try to find those pockets of genuine culture, the forgotten, neglected, anarchic, imaginative and authentic expressions of human imagination. Don’t even try TV or Netflix, but you might find something on the forgotten backwaters of YouTube. The movie industry has been trading in sameness ever since the times of Horkheimer and Adorno, so there is little hope of finding anything of value there. But YouTube does have Marxist channels, for instance. It does have channels showcasing non-European, non-Westernised, indigenous cultures. Listen to some indigenous music from different parts of the world, for example.

Also, you could read books that were part of human history long before our advanced technological societies flattened out our culture. The Bible, the Illiad and the Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, the works of Virgil and Ovid, the works of Dante and Shakespeare, and try to derive inspiration from those. Or read the classic philosophers: Aristotle, Plato, Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu. Or read those who were always considered rebels and whom polite society always sought to discredit and silence: from some of the ancient Roman poets through Marquis de Sade to Hermann Hesse, Henry Miller and Anais Nin. One could also read the philosophers of revolt and anarchism: Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and many others.

Among spiritual writers, choose those who advocate a life away from society: the hermits, the monks, the Buddhist and Daoist sages, the Desert Fathers and their modern counterparts, the proponents of alternative lifestyles, those who go for foraging instead of shopping in the luxury mall, those living in the wilderness or in their own smallholdings rather than those spending their lives in office towers.

I recently read a fascinating book by Michael Pollan, “This is Your Mind on Plants,” where he discusses the mind- (and society-) altering effects of plants, from opium to coffee. I am not advocating using recreational drugs -- if anything, our society could do with a lot less alcohol, nicotine and caffeine. But, if we believe the Frankfurt School, then true happiness and satisfaction in life might only be found outside of the narrow confines of what is socially accepted behaviour. And, surely, keeping an open mind towards alternative experiences and lifestyles can only give us more options and more ideas on how to enrich our own lives.

One has to learn to distinguish between those who genuinely have a valuable spiritual path to offer; and those who are just crazy, mentally and culturally bankrupt. Conspiracy theorists, UFO scientists, flat-earthers and paranormal mediums are not manifestations of brave revolt against the society’s cultural hegemony, but just misguided and insufficiently educated people who have little to contribute to true education and culture. Sometimes, as in the case of Alexandra David-Neel, it can be hard to decide into which of the two categories specific “inspirational” writers belong.

I have, at times, engaged with many of these pockets of untamed, alternative culture, and I have always come back into my own life refreshed and full of new ideas and with a better, deeper appreciation of what human life can be. Try it out and see how varied and interesting life really is if we just escape the narrow cage that society is constantly trying to erect all around us.

This week, why not try it? If you do, please make sure to leave a comment below about how your experiment went!

Thank you for reading and see you next week! If you liked this article, please subscribe for more! Cover image: Jjshapiro at English Wikipedia.

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Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

last week we read two passages from Epictetus about how to approach the everyday annoyances in one’s life. Since then, I sent you the first premium post with the announcement of our tour into the future of mankind. If you’re curious, subscribe here to come on board! Only for today and tomorrow, you can still use the half-price promotion, which will give you one year’s worth of access to all premium posts for only 3.50 USD per month, less than you’d pay for a single Starbucks coffee. Click here to go to the half-price offer page.

On Daily Philosophy last week, we had a fascinating article by Prof. Michael Hauskeller, “Nothing Matters. Or Does It?”. The article explores what we might actually mean when we say that “nothing matters” to us:

For the statement “nothing matters” to be true it would have to be true that the one who makes the statement is not concerned about anything at all. So, if I am the one who says that nothing matters, then this is true if and only if nothing matters to me, and if you are the one who says it, then it is true if and only if nothing matters to you.

Read the whole article here on Daily Philosophy.

Tomorrow we’ll have a premium post in our series about the future. We will see what we can learn from the recent history of a number of technologies. And we will try to understand how technology affects society. Are we ever able to predict the effects of technologies? Look out for the article in your mailbox!

And now, let’s go back to Epictetus and his views on how to lead a happier, truly Stoic life.

A Stoic at a dinner party

I promised last time to show you the slightly mad side of the famous Greek philosopher. It all begins quite inconspicuously and respectably. Epictetus compares life with a dinner party:

(15) Remember that you must behave in life as at a dinner party. Is anything brought around to you? Put out your hand and take your share with moderation. Does it pass by you? Don't stop it. Is it not yet come? Don't stretch your desire towards it, but wait till it reaches you. (Epictetus, Handbook)

There are multiple ideas that are central to the Stoics here. The main point is that we don’t have control of the outside world and what it will present to us or keep away from us. One does not have control over the dishes served at a dinner party. In the same way, one cannot really make sure that one’s job will be satisfying, that one’s marriage will be happy, that one’s health will always be perfect, or that one’s children will not have accidents.

Of course, our own behaviour can influence our chances to lead healthy and happy lives. We can take care of our health, choose our jobs wisely, put effort into a good relationship with our spouse and try to protect our children. But, as most of us have probably already discovered, our own efforts are only part of the equation. One can never be sure that one will not be the victim of a heart attack. One’s children may be involved in a traffic accident no matter how careful we are. And one’s partner may still find the plumber more attractive than oneself one day.

It is really not that different from a dinner party. One can avoid dinner parties one knows to be boring; or where aunt Annie is in charge of the kitchen. But even the most promising invitation can turn out to be a disaster in the end for all sorts of unpredictable reasons.

If, as good Stoics, we want to minimise the negative effects of a bad dinner party on our happiness, it is prudent to attend the party without too many expectations. This is why a Stoic wouldn’t reach for the food. It might not be that good, after all. But even if it is good, there is always the seed of disappointment in everything: the best bits might be gone when the plate arrives at our place. Or the wrong plate may come to our side of the table.

We should be cultivating a calculated indifference to the food, Epictetus thinks. In this way, we maximise our chances of staying in a happy frame of mind and being able to enjoy the party regardless of the food. If the food is not good, or we don’t get any of the good bits, we can still enjoy the conversation, the music, the atmosphere, the jokes. If, instead, we are disgruntled, disappointed and tired from unsuccessfully chasing after the food we’d like, then we will be much less likely to have fun that evening. It will be much harder for us to enjoy whatever positive experiences the party would have to offer.

So far, this is a pretty obvious point, that many philosophers, not only Stoics have made. (Epicurus had similar ideas).

Epictetus in weird mode

Here’s how the quote above continues:

... Do this with regard to children, to a wife, to public posts, to riches, and you will eventually be a worthy partner of the feasts of the gods.

Again, this is understandable. Not everyone can have children, not everyone will find a suitable partner, not everyone will be rich. By focusing on our desires for such things, we just increase the likelihood of being disappointed if things don’t turn out as we would like. Life, like a dinner party, has a lot to offer. Being fixated on the one thing that we can’t have, however important this may seem, only prevents us from enjoying what we do have.

But Epictetus does not stop there. A few lines earlier, he writes:

(11) Never say of anything, "I have lost it"; but, "I have returned it." Is your child dead? It is returned. Is your wife dead? She is returned. Is your estate taken away? Well, and is not that likewise returned? "But he who took it away is a bad man." What difference is it to you who the giver assigns to take it back? While he gives it to you to possess, take care of it; but don't view it as your own, just as travelers view a hotel.

There are many interesting things to see here.

One is the psychological difference between “losing” and “returning.” The metaphor with the hotel is interesting and instructive. Indeed, when we visit a hotel, we are never sad about the loss of our hotel room when the holidays are over. (We might be sad about the end of the holidays, but that’s another point). Obviously, and the hotel example shows this clearly, we are able to temporarily possess things without being attached to them. We are able to enjoy a hotel room without being devastated by its loss when we move out.

Why, then, can we not do the same with “our own” things?

I put “our own” in quotation marks there, because Epictetus would dispute that anything is ever “our own.” See how he talks above of “the giver,” a strange, almost religious reference. It emphasises that, in his view, we never “earn” anything. We never “possess” anything. Things are given to us, in a kind of loan, and if we think that we “deserve” them, then we are misguided and mistaken.

The Stoic commitment to seeing the world as it is demands that we recognise that we are not better than the other man. We are all born equally naked and poor. It is only the chance of our birth, our family, our class, our country that makes us be rich or poor, healthy or ill, advantaged or disadvantaged, educated or illiterate. Even our mental abilities are not “ours.” We’re born with a brain that is affected by hereditary factors (nothing we could control), but also by our upbringing. Our brains are shaped by the language we speak, the toys we played with as babies, the music our parents listened to, the friends we had, the books we read. All of these have not been our own choices and we cannot claim any praise for the good luck that we had. Equally, we cannot blame ourselves for whatever went wrong in the set-up of the accidental circumstances of our lives.

The weirdness begins when Epictetus, always the philosopher, applies this insight not only to hotel rooms. In the same way, he thinks, we should also view our family members:

Is your child dead? It is returned. Is your wife dead? She is returned.

Really?

In a sense, yes, we can see how Epictetus arrives at this point. Of course, I cannot claim any right to the members of “my” family. I didn’t create them, I don’t own them. They are not “mine” in any real sense of the word.

It is unfortunate that English (and many other languages) uses possessive structures to talk about association. “My” family expresses association, just as “my” university, “my” country, “my” religion. I don’t own these things in the same way as I own “my” coffee cup or “my” coat. But we don’t have another, more correct way of expressing association, so we’re stuck with this confusing and wrong way of speaking and thinking.

Perhaps we should change language and talk about association without using possessives. “The family I’m a member of,” rather than “my family”. “The religion I follow,” rather than “my religion.” But I think that Epictetus would disagree. His point is even more radical: even with those things where we feel justified using possessives, we’re actually wrong.

We possess nothing at all.

“My house,” even if I’ve bought it, even if I’ve built it, is no more “mine” than “my family.” It is a building that it standing there. Yes, I initiated and coordinated its creation, but this doesn’t make it “mine.” The money that I used to pay for it wasn’t really mine. Again, it goes back to a job that I got because of properties that I’m not really to praise or to blame for: my upbringing, my education. The ability of my parents to pay my way through university. The choices of others to hire me, to mentor me, to help me or to hinder me at a thousand random points along the way. The street on which the house stands is not mine, and yet it is necessary; without it, the house could not exist there. The company that planned it, the workers who built it with their hands, the infrastructure that supplies water and electricity to it — all these are not mine. The state that made the building laws, the bank that gave me the loan to pay for the house. The police who keep the streets safe so that I can enjoy living there... all these are not mine. They are not even the slightest bit in my control. “I” am no more than a focal point on which all these forces converge to create a house. Calling it “mine” is just a wrong use of language, a mistaken view of the world, an error in perception.

Somebody to love

Somebody (somebody) ooh somebody (somebody). Can anybody find me somebody to love? (Lyrics from Queen, Somebody to Love)

And now we are finally where Epictetus wants us. If the perception that “I” own things is an illusion, and if my first person perspective is also an illusion (as we already discussed here), then all people are actually interchangeable. Individuals are irrational misconceptions. What truly exists are only categories of things that are all equally valuable. Therefore, Epictetus says:

(3) With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is only ceramic cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed... (Epictetus, Handbook)

What counts is not the individual thing, but the kind of thing that it is. Things, we would say today, are fungible, mutually interchangeable. If I replaced your favourite cup while you were sleeping with another, identical cup, you’d never know the difference and you wouldn’t be sad. Why then are you sad when it breaks? You can buy another that will do just as well.

But what about people? Here is the last sentence of paragraph 3 of Epictetus Handbook. This comes immediately after the passage above:

... If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies. (Epictetus, Handbook)

Seriously?

One must say that, as crazy as this sounds, there is some plausibility to it.

For one, most people, with only hopeless romantics exempted, would agree that there is more than one person that we can love. Many of us have loved multiple times, and we wouldn’t say that any of these loves were necessarily worse or less genuine than others. When we come of age to love, we fall in love with the first suitable object. Who this turns out to be is largely a matter of chance and circumstance. If I spend my youth in Germany, I’ll be likely to meet a German person who will become my husband or wife. Had my parents lived expat lives in Kenya, I would very likely have fallen in love with a Kenyan person.

And even within one place: what if I had never gone to that party where I met my future wife? Would I never have married? Unlikely. Most of us will probably assume that I’d have met someone else a few days later, at another party. I’d still be married, still have a family — just with an entirely different person.

Are lovers exchangeable?

There’s a whole discussion in the philosophy of love about this point: is the object of love replaceable? Is not everyone looking for a partner with a number of attributes (tall, blond, humorous, looking like Harrison Ford)? And will not everyone who fits the bill be a suitable object for our affections?

Is this true? Although I’m a romantic, I must admit that it sounds plausible. But then, I must also accept that if partner A dies or leaves me at some later point in time, there’s no good reason why another potential partner B, with the same properties as A, couldn’t be a perfect replacement.

Or is there something else to A that will make them special and irreplaceable? But if this was the case, then how likely was it that I would meet A in the first place? If we look around, it seems that, by and large, most couples seem reasonably happy. If there was only one person for every one of us, shouldn’t there be an overwhelming majority of people around who just never found their destined partner? Shouldn’t then almost all relationships be deficient? (All, except for the one-in-seven-billion, who happened to find just the right person for them at just the right moment). This seems to suggest that we can do just fine with more than one specific person as a partner.

But of course, even if we admit that perhaps there are multiple potential loves for every one of us, having already entered into a relationship with a particular person changes things. The same applies for having an attachment towards a particular, individual object. The relationship itself, the history of my interaction with that particular person or object produces something new. Shared history creates a bond that I don’t have with any of the other people with the same properties as my beloved. Because, although they would have been, at the time when I first met them, equally valid objects for my affections, now, twenty years later, they are not. The history of my life with my actual partner has created a relationship that can never be duplicated with any of the others.

I don’t know what Epictetus would say to this. It’s not a difficult thought, and I believe that even in his time, without the benefit of modern analytic philosophy, Epictetus’ contemporaries must have felt how odd paragraph 3 of his Handbook sounded...

Or perhaps not?

Let’s not forget that there’s a long history of religion, for example, discouraging us from individualising love too much. Agape, Christian love, looks at all human beings as equal. We don’t (or shouldn’t, in any case) look at the properties of a particular beggar who asks for our charity. Instead, the Christian God’s command is to love all equally.

Charity, like justice, is best pictured blind.

The same, without the Christian background, would also be the opinion of Immanuel Kant. For him, mere things have a value that can be measured and exchanged (one egg for two slices of bread, for example). But human beings cannot be exchanged for one another. Kant here disagrees directly with Epictetus. For Kant, every human being has a dignity, a kind of value that is absolute and demands absolute respect and that cannot be traded in for the dignity of others.

So who is right?

Are we individuals, non-fungible, dignified, irreplaceable? Or are we just different in irrelevant detail, while we’re “really” best thought of as exchangeable parts of a kind, just like computers that roll off a factory assembly line, all alike? Are we like zebras, different only in the pattern of our individual stripes, but essentially indistinguishable from each other in every respect that really matters?

I don’t have the answer, Epictetus didn’t have it, and no one else seems to have it. After all, philosophy is the art of asking the interesting questions. Perhaps the wise Stoic should leave it at that.

And learn to love a kind of cup, rather than this particular one.

Do you agree with Epictetus? Or is he a silly old fool? Tell me in the comments!

Thank you for reading! See you tomorrow for the premium post of the week — and next Friday for another look at Stoic wisdom. Have an excellent weekend and keep living thoughtfully! — Andy

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This is the first installment of a premium series on the Future of Mankind. To read the following posts in this series, please subscribe:

These posts come with audio narration, which is essentially the same as the printed text below. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you prefer to read or listen to this. I hope that my narration and audio skills will improve over time. Have fun!

A trip to our future

Hi, it’s great to see you here! You’ve come to just the right place.

This is the first post in a new series where we’ll look, week after week, into the possible futures of mankind. What will our future and that of our kids be like? Will we terraform Mars? Will we live in cities that soar above the clouds of Venus? Will robots take over and enslave us? Will we ever meet aliens?

In this series, we’ll go to philosophy, history and science in search of answers. We will look at how art and science-fiction imagine our future. I am a university professor in philosophy, and this series of posts first began as a lecture on “Technology and the Future of Mankind.” But if hours upon hours of university lecturing is not your thing — well, then just stay right here on this page. In this series of posts, I’ve put together everything that I found exciting and amazing, while skipping all the boring stuff.

I hope that you’ll have the same fun that I had when I was researching these posts: the fun of taking a small peek into the mists of our future.

What will it be like, our future?

Will we live in a world like that of New Generation Star Trek, where everyone has a crisp clean uniform, a smile on their face, and gets to spend their free time in Ten Forward, looking out of the panoramic windows into the promise of endless adventure? Will we have a future, like Gene Roddenberry’s vision, in which there are no wars, no poverty, no hunger, no money? In which we work only to perfect ourselves, as Captain Picard is fond of saying?

Or will it be the world of Ridley Scott’s Alien? Badly paid space workers, crammed together into dirty mining ships that roam the solar system for resources, owned by companies that exploit their employees in the ruthless pursuit of more inequality and power?

Or will it be Blade Runner? A world in which we cannot any more distinguish between man and machine? A world in which not even oneself knows what kind of thing one is... Will it be like that?

And what about space?

Will we ever fly through space like in those movies? Colonise the solar system? Live on the shores of a lake on Titan, or underwater in the oceans of Enceladus? Will we live in glass domes on the red sands of Mars? And will we be able to leave the solar system? Fly to other stars? Will we cross the galaxy, utilising warp drives and dilithium crystals, or will we have to finally surrender in the face of the enormous distances between the stars?

Will we be tied to our little planet forever?

Tourists in space?

In 2016, NASA created a series of posters that show off the tourist attractions of the universe as artists imagined them. Nightlife on planets where the sun never rises, planet hopping in the Trappist-1 system, a walk on the bright red grass of an alien world... Will this ever be our reality?

Of course, we cannot know the future, and perhaps that’s for the best. But we can try to use all our available resources to make an educated guess.

There are things we know about the future: We know how humans behave, how societies develop, and what priorities drive our decisions. We have a long history to look back upon and learn from. If technologies developed in a particular way in the past, again and again, then perhaps these patterns will also repeat in the future.

And then, we have about fifty years of modern, hard science-fiction to give us ideas and inspiration, alongside our real-life spaceships, moon landings, mars exploration projects, self-driving cars and the recent AI explosion. Using all these, we might at least try to get a sense of where we might be headed with our world.

When we talk about the future, we always imagine a technological or post-technological future. “Futuristic” is almost synonymous with “technological.” In order to understand our future, we will therefore have to begin by examining what technology is and how it affects our societies.

Progress and democracy

And we will have to talk about progress. What really is progress? Is technological progress something different from social progress? Or do both always go hand in hand? Has technology in the past made us better, happier people? Or did we live better lives 500 years ago? Or perhaps even 5000 years ago? Some say that the development of agriculture was where things first went south. Hunters and gatherers had easier lives, worked less, were healthier and had more fun. Or not?

We will also look at politics and democracy. In the past two hundred years or so, we have embraced and cultivated the view that democratic governments are the best way to organise a society. But what happens when we add our advanced technologies to the mix? We know today about the effects that social media like Facebook and Twitter have on democracy, and it’s not always a pretty picture. But perhaps the fault is not with social media but with democracy itself. In a society that’s governed by a future benevolent and all-knowing AI, does it even make sense to leave decisions in the hands of people who might be fallible, greedy, selfish, corrupt, or uneducated? If not, can we justify taking away human freedom in the name of a benevolently paternalistic, absolutist AI dictatorship?

And does democracy even scale the way we need it to?

Let’s not forget that, originally, democracy was a way for the 30,000 male citizens of Athens to talk to each other and engage with the issues that affected them all. This model was never meant to apply to the one billion citizens of China or India, or even to the thirty or fifty billion that might, one day, live and die all over the solar system. But if democracy has outlived its usefulness, what is there to replace it?

The environment

Of course, in a series like this, we will also talk about environmental destruction: the most likely reason that we won’t actually have a future beyond perhaps a few hundred years from now.

It’s not only global warming that we will have to face. It’s unsustainable fishing practices, extinction of species, including vital insect life, the poisoning of land and water through agriculture and industry, ocean plastics and microplastics, radioactivity, the lack of clean water in many parts of the world. One thing we don’t have is a lack of environmental problems, and while some may deny that global warming is to be taken seriously, there is no denying that all the other issues are also out to get us and terminate our civilisation (if it deserves that name).

Reminds me of a reply, attributed by the Internet’s collective memory to various different people; so let’s just leave it anonymous. A famous person was once asked: “What do you think of human civilisation?” And the great thinker replied: “I think it would be a good idea.”

And there are many other topics coming up later on. We will talk about energy, medicine, and nanotechnologies. About AI and robots. About planetary catastrophes and what we can do to prevent them or, alternatively, to recover from them.

At the end of the series, we will have enough material to try and predict what the world might look like in 50, or 100, or 500 years. Of course we will be wrong. But we will have had fun getting there.

But what about 5,000 years? And what about the far future of the Earth and our solar system? Even if we don’t destroy it, our planet won’t exist forever. At some point, all life on Earth will end. How will this happen, and when?

I am so excited to share this journey with you! Depending on where you read or listen to this, click here to go to Daily Philosophy and subscribe, so that you don’t ever miss a post! Please also don’t forget to share these posts on your favourite social media program, so that others may also have an opportunity to learn about our journey and come along.

Welcome to Our Future!

Do you believe in a positive or a dystopian future? Are we heading into catastrophe or into a new golden age? Please tell me in the comments! See you next Saturday! — Andy

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Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

I’m happy to welcome everyone to our first post of the new year!

In 2022, we will be touching on a number of topics. Like last year, I will try to cluster similar topics together a bit, so that we will have a focus theme for a few weeks before switching to another topic. Of course, we will be breaking up the monotony with all sorts of additional, exciting articles, interviews, guest articles, and much more.

For this first month, we will go a bit more into Stoic philosophy, which is so popular nowadays — but often misunderstood. In the premium newsletter, to which you can subscribe for the price of two coffees a month (or one coffee, if you do so in the coming eight days), we will begin by exploring the future of mankind — a topic which many readers wished for, but which requires a lot of research and which therefore I can tackle only with the support of our premium members.

Later on this year, I would like to go more into ethics, particularly the ethics of the environment and of global warming, and the very interesting topics in the philosophy of global risk more generally. We will also talk about political philosophy, and I’d like to do a project over the whole year where we will get to know the most prominent philosophers in the history of philosophy, each from their most prominent quote (“Philosophy in Quotes”). We will also cover daily topics from the news that are relevant to philosophy, or where philosophers have something interesting to say.

So stay tuned, look for this email every Friday (or Saturday, if I’m late :)) and always keep telling me what you like or dislike and what other topics you’d love to see covered. You can always reply to these emails to reach me in person, or you can leave a comment below. Thanks!

What you may have missed

On Daily Philosophy this past week:

It is impossible to identify one person who is supposed to be the “father” or “mother” of philosophy. Skills like philosophy, writing or art developed independently many times over the course of human history. And one could argue that even a child that asks, for example, “why is it wrong to steal something?” is actually doing philosophy by asking one of the timeless philosophical questions.

This is from an article “Who is the Father (or Mother) of Philosophy?” Read the whole article right here.

Professor John Shand just published a brilliant meditation on the meaning of life and the role of God in it on Daily Philosophy:

When one dies, if one is the last to go, one is just left with a detritus of objects and the ghost of events, actions and happenings, and then in turn those objects are removed or heading away from each other forever, the places where those events took place are overlaid and rubbed out by new ones, until not a trace remains that once had the meaning or value it did.

Read the whole article here: “Meaning, Value, Death, and God.”

And, finally, if you missed our “Best of 2021” review of the best articles of the past year, here it is: “Highlights of 2021.”

Now let’s go back to Epictetus for a dose of Stoic wisdom in our lives!

Reading Epictetus

The interest in stoic books and life advice has been consistently growing over the past few years. Google Trends shows four times more searches for “stoic” now than in 2009. Unfortunately, much of that public interest in Stoicism is, like everything else in our societies, exploited commercially to sell more books and Stoic lifestyle courses. (And yes, I do see the irony that this very sentence will be in the book on Stoicism that I will be publishing three months from now, in a bid to commercially exploit public interest in Stoicism :)).

But we want to do something different and a lot more interesting here. We’re going to read Epictetus himself, the ancient philosopher-slave. Surprisingly for a 2000-year-old text, the Handbook of Epictetus is really easy to read (in translation, at least), and, besides the wisdom and gravitas that one would expect, also contains some of the weirdest philosophical arguments ever made in the philosophy of happiness. Unlike many modern philosophers, especially since the advent of the weaponised political correctness movements, Epictetus has the courage to pursue his arguments to their very logical end and he doesn’t shy away from conclusions that to the unsuspecting reader must seem obviously wacky (but more on this in our next episode).

Epictetus riding a bus

In his Enchiridion (literally: “handbook”), Epictetus makes the well-known Stoic point (discussed here previously) that we must accept what we cannot change, while still trying to exercise control over what we can change:

When you are going about any action, remind yourself what nature the action is. If you are going to bathe, picture to yourself the things which usually happen in the bath: some people splash the water, some push, some use abusive language, and others steal. Thus you will more safely go about this action if you say to yourself, “I will now go bathe, and keep my own mind in a state conformable to nature.” And in the same manner with regard to every other action. For thus, if any hindrance arises in bathing, you will have it ready to say, “It was not only to bathe that I desired, but to keep my mind in a state conformable to nature; and I will not keep it if I am bothered at things that happen.” (Epictetus, Ench. 4)

What he is saying here is that we need to acknowledge that every action is part of a context in which it takes place. Our brains are often focusing on only the action that we intend to perform, without realising that this action will be performed within its inescapable context; and we get angry and frustrated when that context forces consequences upon us that we did not want.

For Epictetus, this shortsighted attitude is the source of much unhappiness in our lives. When I imagine myself taking a bus, what I see is only me, the bus, and my desire to arrive at my destination. What I don’t see in my mental image of this bus trip, but what equally is part of the reality of a bus ride, is the long wait at the bus stop, perhaps in bad weather. It may be raining, it may be snowing, there might be a cold wind… Reality is the man in the seat next to me, who refuses to wear his mask properly and who is coughing into my direction while talking loudly into his phone. It is the long, slow stop-and-go of morning rush-hour traffic. It is the baby screaming in the seat behind me.

If I go into the bus thinking only of myself, all these annoyances and distractions will make it impossible for me to be happy and at peace during the ride.

But now look how Epictetus reframes the situation: Instead, he says, I should go into that bus seeking to “keep my mind in a state that conforms to the nature of what I am doing.” Why should I do that? Why should I keep my mind focused on the nature of a bus ride? Well, because no one can escape “nature,” by which Epictetus means the reality in which we live, whether we like it or not. A wise person, he says, would realise that taking a bus involves all these annoyances. Only if we enter the bus with a clear understanding of what we are buying into and with the firm intention of keeping our minds at peace, then all this context ceases to be annoying and instead becomes a kind of philosophical training-ground.

Nobody would see the equipment in a gym as “annoying” because it makes them walk or run on the spot, pointlessly lift weights, sweat and pant. Why not? Because when we go to the gym, we do it precisely because we want to exercise our bodies to be stronger and healthier. The training equipment is not “annoying” us but supporting us in our goal to become healthier human beings.

In the same way, the obstacles and trials that accompany a bus ride are, for the Stoic wise person, the mental equivalent of gym equipment. A bus ride is not only a way to get somewhere, but it is also always an opportunity to lift some mental weights, to run some patience marathons, to exercise and to strengthen our mental health. When we enter a bus with a mindset like that, we might almost be a little disappointed if it arrives on time, if everybody in it is quiet and friendly, if we get off the bus without an incident, quickly, efficiently and... without having had any opportunity to grow and develop our Stoic skills. It would be like a visit to the gym when all the equipment is configured to be too easy for us: a waste of time.

Everything else, especially our usual attitude of being annoyed by everything unexpected, is stupid, Epictetus would think: a sign that we are living in an unreal dream-world where the only certainty waiting for us is a harsh awakening to reality:

“But,” you say, “I would have everything result just as I like, and in whatever way I like.” You are mad, you are beside yourself. Do you not know that freedom is a noble and valuable thing? But for me inconsiderately to wish for things to happen as I inconsiderately like, this appears to be not only not noble, but even most base. For how do we proceed in the matter of writing? Do I wish to write the name of Dion as I choose? No, but I am taught to choose to write it as it ought to be written. (Epictetus, Discourses, Ch. 12)

Learning to live wisely, for Epictetus, is just like learning to write. One does not write a word as one likes. Wun cood, off coarse, doo theat, but it wouldn’t be much use and make life harder, both for oneself and for everyone else. Learning to write involves, crucially, adhering to the rules of writing and spelling words as they ought to be spelled. After all, communication is the whole point of writing, not the expression of one’s own orthographical whims.

In the same way, our life is inextricably entangled with the universe around us: with people and things, with places, institutions, events, accidents, feelings. It is folly to believe that we can live it the way we imagine without taking all that world that surrounds us into account. Just like orthography is the basis for happy and effective writing, the Stoic acceptance of the nature of things is the basis for a happy and effective life.

Thank you for reading! See you tomorrow for the premium post of the week — and next Friday for another look at Stoic wisdom. Have an excellent weekend and keep living thoughtfully! — Andy

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The Middle Ages brought a new dimension to the history of robots and the dream of the artificial man. Instead of art, now it was magic that provided the life force. Sometimes this magical power originated in God, sometimes it was a darker force that the magician himself controlled.

Read the full article here.

If you liked this episode, why not…

Thanks!

Music: Open Goldberg Variations by JS Bach, recorded by Kimiko Ishizaka. https://opengoldbergvariations.org/ Licence: All tracks are provided without copyright (Creative Commons Zero). All uses permitted.

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Creation of a man from nothing is the ultimate fantasy of human empowerment, and it is not surprising that people from all cultures have been drawn to it. For tens of thousands of years we have been able to make effective tools for our everyday needs; for thousands we have been creating cities, domesticating animals and planting crops; we are now able to repair human bodies and to fight illnesses; but the dream of creating a full human being from inanimate materials is still far out of reach for our 21st century technologies. (Listen for more…)

Read the full article here: daily-philosophy.com/the-artificial-man-in-ancient-myth

If you liked this episode, why not…

Thanks!

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According to Bertrand Russell, one of the main ingredients of a happy life is what he calls a “friendly interest in things”:

“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

This way of approaching the world will lead to a life of “zest,” as he calls it: it will enable us to approach situations with genuine interest, and thus will make us able to derive pleasure from engaging with the world…

Thanks for listening! Find the full blog post here.

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Welcome back to our year-long challenge to live six philosophies of happiness in our everyday lives! In the previous episode, we talked about what are, for Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness, 1930) some of the reasons people are unhappy: fashionable pessimism, competition, boredom, and fatigue that comes from anxiety. Today, we will examine four more factors that contribute to unhappiness: envy, the sense of sin, persecution mania and the fear of public opinion. Let’s go!

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“My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilised countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable,” writes Bertrand Russell in his 1930 book ‘The Conquest of Happiness’. It is not a book on philosophical theory. Instead, Russell draws on his own life, his own experiences as an unhappy child and young man, to try and understand what makes us unhappy — and how we could be happier.

Thanks for listening! Find the full blog post here.

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Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

Here’s another audio version of the article with the same title. I hope you enjoy it. This Monday I’ll have to skip the regular article, because I’ve been working full-time on the new website at daily-philosophy.com, which will go online tomorrow. I hope that this recording, together with yesterday’s eclipse piece, might be a small consolation for the missing article. We’ll get a new one on Wednesday, when the new site will be up and running.

From the attached recording:

Every human life is a collection of experiences, moments, images. A product of the books, stories, places and people that shaped the person. And the work can never be separated from the man as neatly as some histories of philosophy pretend. Life and work form a whole, and in order to understand the one, we always also have to look at the other. This is never so clear as it is with philosophers. Not dependent on observation or experiment for their theories, philosophers are freer than other academics to shape their theories to follow the contours of their own personalities.…

Thanks for listening! Find the full blog post here.

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Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

here comes, a little bit delayed :) the audio version of the post on Russell. I am churning away at these podcasts, slowly learning how to make them better (I hope), while also working on the new version of the main Daily Philosophy website, which takes up a lot of time. But perhaps it’s not so bad if the audio comes a few days (weeks) later than the original post — it gives us an opportunity to remember some of the things we talked about previously and perhaps to see them with new eyes (or ears, in this case).

And a bit of news that might interest some of you: There’s a talk via Zoom this coming Friday about the ethics of Covid surveillance. This is a thing taking place in Hong Kong, so the time might not be the most convenient if you’re in the US or Europe, but anyway, if you’re interested, here is the poster and all other information:

https://daily-philosophy.com/the-ethics-of-covid-surveillance/

So here we go: The life of Bertrand Russell.

It is always amazing to see how the biographies of great men determine much of what would become their world-views and, in the case of philosophers, their life’s work. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is no exception.

Russell was born into a family as aristocratic as they come. His godfather was one of the founders of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill. The Russells have been involved in the highest ranks of British society for centuries before Bertrand was born. His grandfather had been a prime minister.

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I’m happy and excited today [end of January 2021] that we are finishing our first month of living an ancient philosophy of life and happiness. For thirty days, we tried to make sense of Aristotle’s ethics and we tried to give it meaning in our everyday lives in the 21st century. I’d like to know whether you think that we succeeded: me, in making Aristotle interesting to you, and you, in actually trying to see what you can take away from his ideas for your own life… Have fun listening to how I perceived this month and what relevance Aristotle still has for our lives today.

Since I am being harassed (along with many others) by Sony Music Entertainment for use of a piece of JS Bach that doesn’t belong to them, I also want to make very clear that what you are hearing is not Sony’s recording, but:

Thanks and enjoy listening!

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Last week, the Guardian had an article titled “Touching fish craze sees China's youth find ways to laze amid '996' work culture”. This was a bit puzzling on the first look, so I tried to read it and understand what it was talking about. Turns out, in case you don’t know (like I didn’t), that “996” means having to work from 9 in the morning to 9 in the evening, 6 days a week.

For Aristotle, behaving ethically is not something that we do because we would be punished if we did not obey the laws. It is, rather, the only way of acting rationally, of acting in a way that will, in the long run, benefit ourselves.

Listen to the podcast or visit daily-philosophy.com for the full article! Thanks!

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We saw before how to exercise our virtues, how to develop our practical wisdom and how to improve the way we relate to our work. We talked about having the right values in life, how to make new experiences and how to stay young.

But one could ask: does Aristotle’s theory apply in the same way to all cultures, or is it specific to some Western notion of the desirable life? Could a Muslim society, or an indigenous tribe in South America, embrace the Aristotelian life? And if so, what exactly would this look like?

In the capabilities approach, philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that a human life, in order to reach its highest potential, must include a number of “capabilities” — that is, of actual possibilities that one can realise in one’s life. These include the ability to live a life that is “worth living,” the ability to use one’s imagination, sufficient education to enable a “truly human” understanding of the world and one’s position in it, having dignity and a sense of equal worth, as well as the ability to participate in the political life of one’s society.

Thanks for listening! Find the full blog post here.

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“If activities are,” Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics, “what gives life its character, no happy man can become miserable; for he will never do the acts that are hateful and mean.”

Welcome back to our year-long experiment of living the great theories of happiness in our everyday lives! Today, we look at how the wise person should approach the hardships and setbacks that are part of every life. Don’t forget to subscribe, if you have not yet done so. If you enjoy this series, please tell others who might be interested!

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Benefiting others in the right way, for Aristotle, always means that we will also benefit ourselves. And being rational about benefiting ourselves will make us realise that we can only achieve the best life available to us by also helping those around us.

Today, we will examine Aristotle’s ideas on how to look after our own interests at work, while, at the same time, doing good to others.

Thanks for listening! If you liked this, please leave a comment or share it.

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For Aristotle, the ability to act right in every situation is a skill that has to be learned — but we also need to practice it throughout our lives. This becomes more difficult as we age and become less inclined to try out new things and make new experiences.

But this is a mistake. Cutting ourselves off from new experiences will only make us less happy in the long run.

Listen to another episode of our year-long exploration of what the classics of philosophy have to say on how we can improve our lives today!

For a blog version of this post, look at:

https://daily-philosophy.com

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https://dailyphilosophy.substack.com

Thanks and I hope that you’ll enjoy this episode!

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Aristotle wants us to acquire what he calls “phronesis,” the ability to always know how to act optimally in any given situation. This is a skill that we can only get through experience, and the more varied our experiences are, the better. Here is, in our challenge to live an Aristotelian life, we will talk about how to optimise one’s experiences in order to grow as a human being. Tune in!

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In our challenge to live for a month like the ancient philosopher Aristotle proposes, this week we focus on balancing work and family life. What of all the things we pursue daily is really important to our lives? Listen to find out!

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Welcome back!

This week’s audio comes with a bit of a delay, but the timeless wisdom in it is as valuable as ever :) Sit back and enjoy Aristotle’s ideas on what human wisdom is all about: knowing the value of one’s goals.

Subscribe at https://dailyphilosophy.substack.comYou can also find an audio version of these videos in any podcast directory under The Daily Philosophy Podcast.

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Hi and welcome back!

We’re moving towards the first weekend in our “live like Aristotle” challenge for January, and here is something to think about. The content of this is the same as that of the last email you received on this list; but I think it’s nice to have a choice how you’d like to consume that.

If you prefer videos instead of text or podcasts (here on Spotify!), you can also watch the same on your phone or Internet-connected TV (link below). Unfortunately, the Youtube channel and the Spotify podcast are just created, and so they have zero visibility or fans.

Therefore, if you really want to do me a favour, I’d appreciate it immensely if you went over to Youtube and/or Spotify and liked or subscribed to the channel and/or the podcast, so that the algorithms can pick them up and recommend them to others.

Many thanks for that! — Andy

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Welcome to the second part of the year-long challenge to live like a philosopher! Here you will get information, knowledge and advice on how to create a better life by following some of the classic theories of philosophy. Have fun!

daily-philosophy.com: The philosophy blog that will change your life!

By the way, we now also have a Youtube channel, in case you prefer to watch this as a video! Just go to:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAo-cIVKklluy85QeKn8skA

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Welcome back! This is the first part of our exploration of Aristotle’s theory of the good life.

The article that accompanies the audio is on Substack. The discussion forum is here.The daily philosophy blog is here.

Thanks for listening!

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Welcome to the one-year challenge of trying out six different theories of life! This instalment is the first introduction to the project and an overview of what’s ahead.

The article that accompanies the audio is here.

The discussion forum is here.

The daily philosophy blog is here.

Thanks for listening!

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The Daily Philosophy Podcast: Recent Episodes

Dr Andreas Matthias