We are taking from where we left of summarizing the book called "a little history of philosophy". If you haven't read the first post or the second post of this mini series, please refer to those posts first :) I will be finished with the book in this post. Therefore i have concluded the post by writing about my thoughts too. As i mentioned in the first post, this is not an end, on the contrary, this is a beginning for a more comprehensive set of ideas.
Kierkegaard is mostly mentioned by his questionings on religious beliefs. For example, Kierkegaard believes that belief is superior to ethical values. He explains this with the prophet Abraham. He says it is not ethical for us humans for a person to be forced to kill his own son, but god's orders might overrule our ethical values. He states that the concept or act of belief is illogical. Kierkegaard was a christian and says we are taking a step into darkness by believing in god. He calls this decision, fateful. One small note is that he has published his book without his name on it.
I actually have a post idea about believing but i have to gather a couple of more examples. It is not only about religious beliefs and the term "believing" may be something completely different than what you think. I think we are moving towards questioning the act of belief by following Kierkegaard's path.
When i first saw his name, i said "what is this one doing here", well i was ignorant :D Karl Marx analyzes the employer - employee relation that arose after the industrial revolution and he believes it is established the wrong way. After the industrial revolution, the workers, who are the real producers, where working to earn as little as they can manage their lives only to make the employers richer. That is why he sees the world as a constant war between the labor class and the wealthy. He suggests all the working class should unionise and establish an equalizer system called communism. With this system, there wouldn't be a need for beliefs or ethics, since it will be all designed ideally by the system. As a matter of fact, Marx believes that religion is opium of the people. The thing that made all this talent and labor exploitation system to work, was people's belief of a religion and neglecting their rights and earnings.
The workers were making the rich people richer 200 years ago and after 2 centuries, this system is still all around us in different and deceptive forms. We haven't advanced an inch on this subject. The industrial revolution turned into capitalism revolution. Maybe Machiavelli were right and humankind is selfish and despicable. The developments and discoveries that should serve the people are monopolized by wealthy people. The gifted and the talented and the real workers are being digested inside systems. These facts make me think that humankind should not be given more power than necessary in any way. I can write a lot more about this. But let me summarize it: There are invisible reflexes of the systems whether they are good or ill intentioned, to protect themselves. These reflexes are presented as human rights infringements in ill intentioned systems, and as devotion in good intentioned systems.
The belief that religion is the opium of the people is logical if you look at the situation from outside. But the problem is, Marx thinks the religion is the problem. This delusion is also present today. We didn't even advance an inch forward here too. The communist managements are built by humankind's nature and it got mixed with evil. That is why marxist people seemed evil, even though this system is not the worst of the existing systems. In other words, it is again people who is the trouble, not the belief itself. Also the way i see it, the biggest enemies of communism is mostly big wallets, which i think is not a coincidence :D
He is one of the widely mentioned and speculated philosophers and i think is the only one who i can't truly understand :D I just can't grasp his core idea even if i read about it in the book or on the internet. I also wonder if it is a coincidence that his mental health was impaired due to an illness caused by a bacteria. Nietzsche's work is handed over to his sister after his death, or even before it, because of his illness. His sister was a nazi so his words could have been corrupted or manipulated. Nietzszche says "god is dead" and i think he means that there is no more need to believe in a god and we can establish social systems with our humane values. At least that is how i understand it :) He seems like someone who has ideas to be pondered on for hours but for some reason, i can't get into his frequency.
Freud is the famous psychiatrist who has discovered the concept of subconscious. According to Freud, the philosophers who thought about good and bad couldn't really explain why and how people are choosing the good or bad. He looks at this from a scientific point of view and thinks there is a concept in our minds, which is called subconscious. Then he suggests that subconscious thoughts emerge in our dreams. He says most of our dreams contain sexual references and subconscious is the nest for our primitive urges. That is why there are sexual references in our dreams according to Freud.
This may sound strange to you but you shouldn't judge him to soon. He also believes that there can be fears or concerns behind people's inexplicable mistakes or behaviours. For example, it is quite possible for a healthy man to have sexual problems because he is afraid of having kids. Psychiatrists also thinks that your subconscious thought can get stronger and can effect your physiology too. So that means the quality of reproductive cells of a healthy man can go down over time, because of this fear.
There are also other studies about consciousness and subconscious today. Since the technology is advanced now, they can track activities in people's brains. They can observe there are some signals firing up before someone decides to do something or answer a question. (I do have an explanation for this but it will be in a future post :) There are Libet experiments that suggests there are some signals in your brain before you decide on something. Therefore they say there is no free will. But the detail in these experiments is that there is not much thought in these decisions. For example, those decisions are about choosing one of two pens. They don't contain much parameters. These choices can be explained by habits and we can also call it subconscious. So this wouldn't mean there is no free will.
I wonder what happens if you make a more complex decision, like saving the life of an old man or a newborn child. If you save the kid, he/she can turn into a monster in the future. If you save the old man, he can die naturally after 2 days. You can't make this decision within seconds. In this process, the information sent out from the subconscious and your frontal region would clash for a while and there will emerge a decision. This doesn't always mean frontal lobe or subconscious won. This subject goes on and on so let me cut it here for now :)
I don't know if there is a scientific evidence that dreams are reflections of our subconscious thoughts, but i would agree with it. The act of dreaming is actually half active way of thinking. I can watch my dreams like a spectator frequently because i question reality a lot while dreaming :) Even more so, i might have developed a mechanism to determine if i am dreaming or not. I am analyzing the relation between what i am dreaming and what i know from the past. For example, if my dad comes up and says he bought a car for me, i would start thinking where did he find the money or did something happened to my car. So i can deduce it is a dream and it could be totally weird :)
He is an atheist existentialist. He thinks of existing as sort of creating yourself. He thinks it is our actions and choices that makes us human. For example, just like stoics, what happens to you is not under your control but your reactions are. This is why Sartre thinks we have way too much freedom. We can react in anyway we want to the events in our lives and this much freedom is our hunchback in return. And another existentialist, Albert Camus, illustrates this with a story. There is a person called Sisyphus in this story. Sisyphus tries to trick the gods and gods punish him to roll a big rock up a hill. But everytime he tries, the rock falls back down. So the cycle continues forever. Camus says that Sisyphus must be happy because he is living the way his life is meant to be lived. Sisyphus should not question his life because he is living his existential goal.
I thought existentialism is odd when i read it from this book :D Maybe it's because i knew it differently. I don't think this is existentialism, this is rather creativitism (not creationism). Or again maybe my understanding is wrong. Existentialism is a bigger subject than i know. On the other hand, Satre is completely spot on by saying we have way too much freedom. Sometimes you may even wish you didn't have the freedom at some point. We'll see an example in Philippa Foot.
The book mentions this woman primarily on her thoughts about a nazi engineer. Adolf Eichmann was an engineer working to make railway systems for jewish people to be transported to camps. He believed this was his duty. When he is arrested after the war, he says that what he did was not a crime. Arendt explains this situation as banality of evil. If Eichmann was telling the truth about his feelings, he must be just an inconsiderate person or a coward who just follows the orders. Either way, his actions served a very bad system. Some say, Eichmann can't even stand seeing blood. Maybe he was just an ordinary citizen who spots a business opportunity. There is no way we can actually now if he was antisemitist.
This subject diversifies into different sub-categories. Maybe you are working for your country but the governors are using what you produce to harm others. You may not even now this happening. Or you might be working hard in your company but only to feed a capitalist monster. These probabilities are seriously worrying me these days. Are most of us being Eichmanns unintentionally?
The thought experiments that these two offers are quite interesting. Suppose there is a train rallying without a conductor and going to kill 5 workers on its path. But there is a switch nearby and you can switch the paths. But there is 1 worker on the other rail and you would cause him die. What would you have done? Would you kill 1 person to save 5 people?
You might say yes, you would save 5 workers, since it makes more sense. So let's say there is 1 healthy person in a hospital. Also there are 5 patients waiting for an organ donor. It seems that you must kill that healthy person to save 5 lives too :)
One more example is a different version of the train example. Suppose you are standing on a bridge with a very very fat person. The train is going to kill 5 workers and there is no switch. If you push the fat person on the rails, it would stop the train and save workers. Would you do it actively in this case?
These three examples proves there are no universally acceptable right - wrong or good - bad concepts. You can't classify people as good or bad by their answers to these questions. You can only say realist, irrational or cold blooded or something. In other words, the concepts like good - bad, right - wrong, real and fake transcend us, as i have said here and there. They can reflect differently under different circumstances.
He mostly thinks about justice and equal opportunities. There is one particular approach in Rawls' fair society design. Designing a society without putting yourself in a certain spot. In other words, without knowing where you would end up after designing the society. This way, you can be as objective as it gets. He says humans have some basic and absolute rights and people born in unlucky environments should have them too. From the economics point of view, he says there shouldn't be more rich people emerging without increasing the minimum prosperity in the society. Likewise, Rawls says just because you are born with skills to do one sport, you don't have the right to earn million times more than the poor.
I strongly agree with the mindset, the maximum wealth shouldn't increase without increasing the minimum. Because there is no problem to be rich without stealing or exploiting. The real trouble is getting rich by making others poor or exploiting them. The minimum prosperity here can be thought as wide as the world in this globalization age.
The last philosopher is Peter Singer whom i mostly agree with. He gives an example. Think about a child drowning in a pool. You would mess your favourite clothes in order to save the child. You might do this by your moral values. But Peter Singer asks "why don't you feel the same way for all the children around the world?". Why aren't you doing the same for all the children around the world? (Is it because they are far away?) You might have a big impact on someone's life by helping the right charity organization even for a small amount. Or you should be doing something for the starving people in your country while there are people who can't decide what to eat. This is why we can say Peter Singer is the ethical part of John Rawls' philosophy.
We shouldn't say "some people are helping these poor people". This is just passing the responsibility on to other people. But on the other hand, Singer says that you shouldn't create nations that lives on charities. You should give them the necessary amount of productivity so that they can help themselves. These are literally happening around the world these days. This is why i can say the most realist and concrete deductions are coming from Peter Singer.
But there is a fact that we are reproducing like amoeba in this world. We are acting like we can consume finite resources indefinitely. Just like Hegel says, there is an ultimate meaning of the flow of the history and it has a destination. From this perspective, one can think that ideals may not be able to beat the realities. I think you don't get what i am saying, since i am grumbling to myself :) Let's conclude with my experiences and deductions from the book.
I have read a brief summary of a huge western philosophy and i realize that there are way more to know in this field. I didn't know that i was going to face a huge field here and there would be connections inside it. The last sentence of the book is very cool: Philosophy started out with strange questions and tough challenges. As long as we have gadfly philosophers like Peter Singer around, we can say that Socrates' soul will continue shaping the philosophies.
One of the most common theme i have realized among the philosophers is going to extremes in their beliefs and thoughts and ending up with strange deductions. It is not possible for a philosophical thinking to find or have an answer to all the questions that a human can have, or all the situations that we could face. In other words, you can find or create your own philosophy in this life but your philosophy can't encapsulate all the humankind's way of life. You can't find a formula of everything here. I resemble these extremes with the singularities in physics, which are believed to be in the center of the black holes. The concept says there is something missing in the formulas but there is no explanation exists either :)
If i try to look at the big picture, i see questions like "why does a human struggle with philosophy, why would a human ask questions and wonder" in Socates' times. These were fundamental and abstract problems. Later than, philosophy was already accepted and people were trying to figure out how philosophy can explain things. We usually tend to make concrete deductions on basic abstract presumptions.
The gauge of the philosophers i find remarkable is ranging from Socrates to Peter Singer :D Maybe i have even agreed with the philosophers with opposite perspectives. This is actually what excites me. Being able to produce something by synthesizing from a variety. But i need to know a little bit about eastern philosophy too, in order to have a high quality filter or synthesizer. If you have noticed, there is a 600 years gap between Boethius and Anselmus. These are the times that islam were spreading around and islamic thoughts were building up.
There are couple of narratives about the nazis and their horrible actions in the book in parallel to the historical facts. I wonder if there would be philosophers included in these books who talks about the atrocities of invader countries lie USA, Russia, Israel, China ...etc in the future. Noam Chomsky is one of them. I am sure that one day someone will include the modern terror and nazis together to make sense of all these events.
You shouldn't think that i am 100% agreeing with all the thoughts of the philosophers in these posts. I have subjectively evaluated the philosophers in a book that someone subjectively explained. That is why i have written my own thoughts in italic font. Also i have skipped some of the names in the book that i thought uninteresting or irrelevant. Nevertheless, there are honourable mentions which are not in the book or in my posts. Leibniz (very briefly mentioned in the book), Heraklitos, Heideger are 3 notable ones. I also suggest you to watch videos of Chomsky on youtube or read his book.
So do i have a final deduction? Actually i do have but it is not meaningful yet. Somehow i think i can bring human - beliefs - universe together. But the field grows really big and my knowledge falls short :) This series of posts were a pioneer for an ultimate picture. Kant, Freud and Anselmus triplet could be a nice way to start. Plato and Pyrrhon might come together at some point. From the social point of view, Marx, yes the famous Marx, Rawls and Singer makes sense. Leibniz has some fascinating deductions. Hegel might draw the framework. We shouldn't forget about the quantum physics too. But if you try to make a soup out of these names, it may be disgusting. The real deal is to be able to make the good soup recipe, instruction or manifest by looking at the previous experiences. This is the end of the summary of the western philosophy series. See you at the next post :)
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