My first thought: A philosopher need not be a saint. Schopenhauer is not Buddha. The Buddha walked away from a palace to contemplate the life of cripples and the general suffering in "the streets" while Schopenhauer, acknowledging the horror, hostility, and danger of the "civilized jungle" only wanted to hide ... with a loaded revolver. While I tend not to be too critical of the man and I have great respect for his determination to set his thinking down to be passed to those who may or may not exist in the future, it is best we do not romanticize our heroes. Sure, Schopenhauer is one of my heroes ... because of his boldness. I prefer his philosophy to that of Bertrand Russell who was critical of him ...
Having said this, though, I would like to go deeper. I think this is why Cioran was un-systematic.
One is influenced by another, but we each unfold the way we will.
I remember hearing about the term "ad hominen attacks" ... Is this when, unable to attack a man's ideas or refute his thinking, people will attack the character or lifestyle of an individual thinking this somehow is a refute of his ideas?
An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for
argumentum ad hominem, means responding to arguments by attacking a person's character, rather than to the content of their arguments. When used inappropriately, it is a fallacy in which a claim or argument is dismissed on the basis of some irrelevant fact or supposition about the author or the person being criticized.
The British philosopher and historian Bertrand Russell deemed Schopenhauer an insincere person, because judging by his life:
"He habitually dined well, at a good restaurant; he had many trivial love-affairs, which were sensual but not passionate; he was exceedingly quarrelsome and unusually avaricious. ... It is hard to find in his life evidences of any virtue except kindness to animals ... In all other respects he was completely selfish. It is difficult to believe that a man who was profoundly convinced of the virtue of asceticism and resignation would never have made any attempt to embody his convictions in his practice."
Bryan Magee points out that "the answer to such shallow, but not uncommon criticism" is found in a quotation from Schopenhauer:
"It is therefore just as little necessary for the saint to be a philosopher as for the philosopher to be a saint; just as it is not necessary for a perfectly beautiful person to be a great sculptor, or for a great sculptor to be himself a beautiful person. In general, it is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses. To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy."
As a teenager, Ludwig Wittgenstein adopted Schopenhauer's epistemological idealism. However, after his study of the philosophy of mathematics, he rejected epistemological idealism for Gottlob Frege's conceptual realism. In later years, Wittgenstein was highly dismissive of Schopenhauer, describing him as an ultimately "shallow" thinker: "Schopenhauer has quite a crude mind... where real depth starts, his comes to an end"
And yet Wittgenstein was known to use corporal punishment on his students ... something Thoreau refused to do. He held a similar job for only 3 weeks, quitting because he refused to "discipline" the children. Was Thoreau a "saint"? This is an interesting can of worms you have opened, Holden. What is ethics? Will ethical considerations influence which philosophers/mathematicians we will pay attention to?
I had found myself never eager to read Heidegger's work, and I always seemed sympathetic to Husserl. Was there something in my own character resistant to the image of a professional career philosopher being given the position of his teacher simply for wearing the State flag on his uniform?
It is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses. We must never lose sight of the fact that we are primates, each and every one of us an instantiation of the class: chimpanzee. This helps to keep things in perspective as far as the "slinging of poop" goes.
By the way, Frege discovered, on his own, the fundamental ideas that have made possible the whole modern development of logic and thereby invented an entire discipline.
Frege once said, “Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher at least half a mathematician.” He kept aloof from his students and even more aloof from his colleagues.
A diary kept at the end of his life reveals, as well, a loathing of the French and of Catholics and an anti-Semitism extending to a belief that the Jews must be expelled from Germany.
Shall I ask the global search engines what ethics is? Do I need a professor of philosophy to tell me what is right or wrong? Shall a professional mathematician teach me how to live? Who can teach us these things?
Kant preached that the right takes priority over the good.
Nietzsche was very harsh toward the masses who perpetuated the slave morality where the strong are viewed as evil and the weak are viewed as good ... or, let us put it another way, where the rich are seen as evil and the poor are seen as good. I have to confess that I have a bit of the slave mentality in me. How could one escape this morality in a world where, well, I don't have to tell you ... In India, is not all the wealth concentrated into a small group of elite families? Are they evil or just lucky? And are they really to be envied? Maybe the old saints (and Cioran) are on to something when they glorify the beggar. Wasn't this the meaning of the life of Diogenes?
So, Schopenhauer preached the life of the poor beggar, but lived the life of the upper middle class ... the bourgeois ...
I take it from our conversations that we both lean in the direction of "working class hero" where we identify with what is historically termed "the peasants" ...
Must we reconcile our intellectual pursuits with our political views concerning social justice?
Maybe it is not necessary for us to do so ... maybe we can be holy fools or sacred clowns or just court jesters who point out contradictions and absurdities ...
Maybe we take life too seriously ... or not seriously enough. I don't know. Who really knows?
Even if we do not come to any conclusions, at least we are diving deep. So what if we come up muddy.
My own position in my so-called "extended family" is rather ridiculous. I mean, here I am engrossed in fairly heavy duty scholarly pursuits, and yet I am considered a kind of village idiot, whereas some of the more crude members of the tribe can afford luxury cruises and luxurious homes ... boats ... Mercedes Benz (Hell, I can barely spell Mercedes and I can't afford a Volkswagen). My lifestyle does not allow me to even consider owning a 20 year old vehicle ... that doesn't mean I would not cherish a VW Eurovan ... I could live in it ... and after the collapse of the fossil-fuel age, maybe put it on cynder-blocks and connect to the Interwebs with a solar-powered water-proof rugged notebook computer ... ah, but who am I kidding?
Perhaps life is a joke par excellence.
Another thing I find perplexing is how great an influence "Islamic" mathematicians had on Europe ... Roman numerals? Where would we be without zero?
The number system we use today is referred to as "Indo-Arabic" or even Hindu-Arabic ... It's of Indian origin but was brought to Europe by Arab mathematicians. Myself, I prefer to use the term Indian rather than Hindu, and Arab rather than Islamic. I have contempt for totalitarian theocracies, but this does not imply I do not appreciate the cultures that have spawned mathematical thinkers ... al-jabr !!! Al-Khwarizmi
HEADLINE: The Indian number system. Europe discovers "Arabian numbers". <<<.>>>
When was a place-value number system introduced in Europe?
The concept of zero was essential to using a place-valued number system. Supposedly, fully developed place-value number systems existed in China since about 200 BC and in Central America since about 400 AD. The Chinese number system is still in use today; the Mayan number system was wiped out during the Spanish conquest.
How is one to evaluate another's understanding of mathematical ideas? Would it matter if one were barefoot and living in a hut without irrigation technology? That's one of the great insults to our humanity, that ostentatious consumption equates to high status, and along with that status comes a certain respect. What do we respect?
I apologize for the disordered nature of my thought processes.
Isn't it true that, with access to the Internet and a supply of nutritious food, a solitary youth might learn far more in solitude with a little guidance than were he or she shipped off for the standardized education which produces clerics and soldiers and obedient employees? I can just imagine some little kid interested in learning mathematics getting thrown around like a rag-doll by a "hard working" father who accuses him of "playing on the computer" ... when he might be engrossed in some automated tutorial ...
You see, Holden, my thinking is chaotic. I am all over the place, which is why I hate structured environments ... Oh, one of those "creative types" ? I remember how restricted I felt by the role I had to play in society. This phenomenon will become more and more common: the more we are exposed to higher learning, the more oppressed we may feel doing the grunt work of civilization ... It is inevitable that we run into contradictions and conflicts. I want to study several things at once, and yet my body is nourished by the watermelon some oppressed migrant worker lifted from the ground ... loaded onto a truck which was driven by someone who may beat the **** out of his son for studying Calculus and "thinkin' he's so damn smart" ...
Now I am once again curious about the origins of certain ideas ... and my attention has been devoured by this desire to understand technologies that transform faster than I can master anything. Right now I am exploring the uses of Python ... talk about a CAN OF WORMS ... one thing leads to another ... but it is good to pause, to reflect, to appreciate that I am standing on the shoulders of giants.
footnote
- The Indian number system
When we talk about the numerals of today's decimal number system we usually refer to them as "Arabian numbers." Their origin, however, is in India, where they were first published in the Lokavibhaga on the 28th of August 458 AD. Many changes had occurred in India since the rise and decline of the Indus Civilization. For several hundred years life had returned to small villages, but a second period of urbanization had developed at about 1500 BC. Shortly before that time the Aryans, a nomadic people, had entered India from the Iranian region. They introduced cattle breeding into the fertile river valleys and established a new civilization in the Ganges River valley.
The arrival of the Aryans coincided with the introduction of Vedic, an early form of Sanskrit and the first Indian script. The earliest examples of Indian literature, the Vedas, originate from this time, and the Ganges civilization is therefore often called the Vedic period. It lasted until about 500 BC.
Question: Who were these so-called Aryans? Did they come from the Caucus mountains of Iran? Iranians ... were they militaristic farmers who migrated into India to brutally subjugate the dark-hued intellectuals of India? I am curious.
When I do research into the origins of certain mathematical ideas which we take for granted today, I run across terms like Negrito, Australoid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid ...
Meanwhile ... another package for Wile E Coyote at the door ... it must be whole coffee beans and a grinder ...
Arabica whole beans ... and great respect for Al-Khwarizmi ... and a disdain for religion. One of the books I could not part with was written by Muhammed Ali Mazidi and Janice Gillispie Mazidi. It is called The 80x86 IBM PC and Compatible Computers (Volumes I & II).
It is about Assembly Language, Design, and Interfacing.
It mentions nothing about religion. Religion is not an issue, you see.
I feel compelled to return to my "studies", but which direction will I move in today?
I am going through Justin Seitz's Black Hat Python, Chapter 7: Github Command and Control ... but, as you can see, I am liable to go off on a mathematical tangent. Fortunately I do not have a boss breathing down my neck ... just a mother demanding I cut up her watermelon ...