Category Archives: Philosophy

” What did the Greeks ever do for God?” By Kenan Malik

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Interesting article on how the concept of Gods evolved from immortal and powerful, but as immoral as humans, to most powerful, immortal and unrivaled moral God- and humans became nothing but morally frail, who need God’s graciousness to become moral. (F.Sheikh). Some excerpts from article;

”  Cruelty, treachery, disloyalty, corruption, meanness – the myths and tales of most ancient societies were alive to the worst aspects of human nature. Such moral frailty was not, however unique to humans. The gods were often equally wretched in their behaviour. The line between humanity and God was drawn not in morality but in power.  Gods possessed powers that humans could only dream of, and as immortals they were untouched by death, but their power and immortality did not improve their moral conduct.

Monotheism remade that line between human nature and divine nature. Gods remained powerful, humans restricted in their powers. Indeed, as a whole divinity of gods was reduced down to a single Creator, that single Creator became far more powerful than previous gods had been.  But the key distinction between human beings and God was now not simply one of immortality and power.  It was also one of morality. The monotheistic faiths drew a new contrast between corrupted humanity and incorruptible God, a contrast that transformed moral frailty into a condition, not of the cosmos, but of being human. It was in Christianity that this distinction was made clearest.

In redrawing the line between humanity and God, monotheism both adopted and discarded major themes in Greek philosophy. Greek philosophers had recognized human moral frailties, but had also believed that through reason and education some individuals at least could overcome the lure of the baser aspects of the soul. It was in the use of reason to accommodate life to the exigencies of fate that human dignity lay. At the same time, there was a strand within Greek philosophy that  helped make more profound the distinction between Man and God. The distaste for the idea of capricious gods, and the desire for naturalistic explanations, evident from the Presocratics onwards, led some, like Democritus, to dismiss the very idea of gods and to insist on a purely materialist universe. Others redefined the nature of godliness.”

“Greek philosophers had accepted that the standards followed by virtuous people are too demanding for ordinary folk, but believed that, given the appropriate knowledge and character, human individuals are capable of satisfying the most exacting moral measure. For Aristotle, humans were capable both of establishing what constituted the good and of working their way towards it. For Plato, the Good was defined by a transcendental Form in a different realm. Humans, however, or at least some humans, possessed the capacity to apprehend the Good and to attempt to create the good life on Earth. For Christians, however, only through the grace of God could humans be moral. ‘None is good’, as Jesus was to say, ‘save one, that is, God.’ Or as Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians ‘For by grace are ye saved through faith and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God’. The other side of faith in the goodness of God was the insistence on the moral wretchedness of human beings. Not for more than a millennium would a new vision of human nature, and of human capacities, begin to challenge Pauline despair.”

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/what-did-the-greeks-ever-do-for-god/

Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene

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An interesting and worth reading article by Roy Scranton in NYT. He visited Baghdad as a private in the Army and saw the total destruction of the beautiful ancient city by the ” shock & awe”. When he returned home, he saw similar destruction done by Katrina and Sandy and now the Typhoon in Philippine. National Security experts in USA say that the extreme weather is more danger to our national security than terrorism,Chinese hackers and North Korean nuclear missiles. The period we are living in now has been named ” Anthroprocene”. ( F.Sheikh)

Some excerpts;

“This March, Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, the commander of the United States Pacific Command, told security and foreign policy specialists in Cambridge, Mass., that global climate change was the greatest threat the United States faced — more dangerous than terrorism, Chinese hackers and North Korean nuclear missiles. Upheaval from increased temperatures, rising seas and radical destabilization “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen…” he said, “that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

“There’s a word for this new era we live in: the Anthropocene. This term, taken up by geologists, pondered by intellectuals and discussed in the pages of publications such as The Economist and the The New York Times, represents the idea that we have entered a new epoch in Earth’s geological history, one characterized by the arrival of the human species as a geological force. The Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term in 2002, and it has steadily gained acceptance as evidence has increasingly mounted that the changes wrought by global warming will affect not just the world’s climate and biological diversity, but its very geology — and not just for a few centuries, but for millenniums. The geophysicist David Archer’s 2009 book, “The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate,” lays out a clear and concise argument for how huge concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and melting ice will radically transform the planet, beyond freak storms and warmer summers, beyond any foreseeable future.”

“But the biggest problems the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning: “What does it mean to be human?” and “What does it mean to live?” In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality — “What does my life mean in the face of death?” — is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination. What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end?”

These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They are philosophical problems par excellence. Many thinkers, including Cicero, Montaigne, Karl Jaspers, and The Stone’s own Simon Critchley, have argued that studying philosophy is learning how to die. If that’s true, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age — for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The rub is that now we have to learn how to die not as individuals, but as a civilization. Click link for full article;

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/?hp&rref=opinion

” Reflections on Violence ” By Hannah Arendt

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As Conor Cruise O’Brien once remarked, “Violence is sometimes needed for the voice of moderation to be heard.” And indeed, violence, contrary to what its prophets try to tell us, is a much more effective weapon of reformers than of revolutionists. (The often vehement denunciations of violence by Marxists did not spring from humane motives but from their awareness that revolutions are not the result of conspiracies and violent action.) France would not have received the most radical reform bill since Napoleon to change her antiquated education system without the riots of the French students [in May 1968], and no one would have dreamed of yielding to reforms of Columbia University without the riots during the [1968] spring term.

Still, the danger of the practice of violence, even if it moves consciously within a non-extremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will not merely be defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jul/11/hannah-arendt-reflections-violence/

FREE WILL, DETERMINISM, QUANTUM THEORY AND STATISTICAL FLUCTUATIONS: A PHYSICIST’S TAKE

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By Carlo Rovelli

Since Democritus suggested that the world can be seen as the result of accidental clashing of atoms, the question of free will has disturbed the sleeps of the naturalist: how to reconcile the deterministic dynamics of the atoms with man’s freedom to choose? Modern physics has altered the data a bit, and the ensuing confusion requires clarification.

Democritus assumed the movement of atoms to be deterministic: a different future does not happen without a different present. But Epicurus, who in physical matters was a close follower of Democritus, had already perceived a difficulty between this tight determinism and human freedom, and modified the physics of Democritus, introducing an element of indeterminism at the atomic level.

The new element was called “clinamen.” The “clinamen” is a minimum deviation of an atom from its natural rectilinear path, which takes place in a completely random fashion. Lucretius, who presents the Democritean-Epicurean theory in his poem, “De Rerum Natura”, “On Things Of Nature,” notes in poetic words: the deviation from straight motion happens “uncertain tempore … incertisque loci “, in an uncertain time and an uncertain place [Liber II, 218].

A very similar oscillation between determinism and indeterminism has happened again in modern physics. Newton’s atomism is deterministic in a similar manner as Democritus’s.  But at the beginning of the twentieth century, Newton’s equations have been replaced by those of quantum theory, which bring back an element of indeterminism, quite similar, in fact, to Epicurus’s correction of Democritus’s determinism. At the atomic scale, the motion of the elementary particles is not strictly deterministic.

Can there be a relationship between this atomic-scale quantum indeterminism and human freedom to choose?

The idea has been proposed, and often reappears, but is not credible, for two reasons. The first is that the indeterminism of quantum mechanics is governed by a rigorous probabilistic dynamics.  The equations of quantum mechanics do not determine what will happen, but determine strictly the probability of what will happen. In other words, they certify that the violation of determinism is strictly random. This goes in exactly the opposite direction from human freedom to choose. If human freedom to choose was reducible to quantum indeterminism, then we should conclude that human choices are strictly regulated by the chance. Which is the opposite of the idea of freedom of choice. The indeterminism of quantum mechanics is like throwing a coin to see if it falls heads or tails, and act accordingly. This is not this what we call freedom to choose. click link for full article;

http://www.edge.org/conversation/free-will-determinism-quantum-theory-and-statistical-fluctuations-a-physicists-take