29 ideas
| 23392 | The Dao (Way) first means the road, and comes to mean the right way to live [Norden] |
| Full Idea: The 'Dao' (tr 'Way) has five meanings: 1) path or road, 2) mode of doing something, 3) account of how to do something, 4) the right way to live, and 5) the ultimate metaphysical entity responsible for nature, and how it should be. | |
| From: Bryan van Norden (Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy [2011], 1.III) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] So it is essentially metaphorical, just like the English 'way to do a thing'. Number 5 seems a rather large leap from the others, and most discussion seems to centre on number 4. The Chinese hoped for consensus on the Dao. |
| 5988 | Anaximander produced the first philosophy book (and maybe the first book) [Anaximander, by Bodnár] |
| Full Idea: Anaximander was the first to produce a philosophical book (later conventionally titled 'On Nature'), if not the first to produce a book at all. | |
| From: report of Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE]) by István Bodnár - Anaximander | |
| A reaction: Wow! Presumably there were Egyptian 'books', but this still sounds like a stupendous claim to fame. |
| 23408 | The hermeneutic circle is either within the text, or between text and biased reader [Norden] |
| Full Idea: The first type of hermeneutic circle operates inside the text, studying relationships between sentences. …The second type is between the text and the reader, …who brings assumptions about what it means. | |
| From: Bryan van Norden (Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy [2011], App A.I) | |
| A reaction: The first kind is an essential aspect of reading well. Readers are biased, but I get very tired of those who do nothing but search for bias, and ignore the truth a text has to offer. If everything is bias, intellectual life is dead. |
| 23407 | Heremeneutics is either 'faith' (examining truth) or 'suspicion' (looking for hidden motives) [Norden] |
| Full Idea: A 'hermeneutics of faith' treat a text as a candidate for truth. ….A 'hermeneutics of suspicion' looks not for truth but for explanations of why someone makes certain claims, …particularly to serve their ulterior interests. | |
| From: Bryan van Norden (Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy [2011], App I.1) | |
| A reaction: As far as I can see, the suspicious approach was a legitimate development in sociology, which studies the sources of ideas, but is absurdly offered by some philosophers as a total replacement of the faith approach. |
| 1496 | The earth is stationary, because it is in the centre, and has no more reason to move one way than another [Anaximander, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Something which is established in the centre and has equality in relation to the extremes has no more reason to move up than it has down or to the sides (so the earth is stationary) | |
| From: report of Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE], A26) by Aristotle - On the Heavens 295b11 |
| 23755 | Genius and love of truth are always accompanied by great humility [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Love of truth is always accompanied by humility, and real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.87) | |
| A reaction: A striking and attractive thought, true of all the lovers of truth I have ever encountered. Socrates is the role model. She likens truth to an inarticulate plaintiff stammering before a judge who fluently manipulates opinions. |
| 14874 | Anaximander saw the contradiction in the world - that its own qualities destroy it [Anaximander, by Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Anaximander discovers the contradictory character of our world: it perishes from its own qualities. | |
| From: report of Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE]) by Friedrich Nietzsche - Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 19 [239] | |
| A reaction: A lovely gloss on Anaximander, though I am not sure that I understand what Nietzsche means. |
| 23747 | What is sacred is not a person, but the whole physical human being [Weil] |
| Full Idea: There is something sacred in every man, but it is not his person. Nor yet is it the human personality. It is this man; no more and no less. …It is he. The whole of him. The arms, they eyes, the thoughts, everything. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p,70) | |
| A reaction: I take her to be referring to exactly the concept of a 'person' which Locke introduced. It is important to remember that his concept is mainly forensic - as a concept of ownership and contracts. A person is an abstraction. Even a corpse is a human. |
| 23756 | The mind is imprisoned and limited by language, restricting our awareness of wider thoughts [Weil] |
| Full Idea: At the very best, a mind is enclosed in language is in a prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.89) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a germ of the type of view of language which blossoms in Derrida. But she is on to something. None of us grasp fully, I think, the non-linguistic nature of good thinking. |
| 23758 | Beauty is an attractive mystery, leaving nothing to be desired [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Beauty is the supreme mystery of the world. It is a gleam which attracts the attention and yet does nothing to sustain it. …While exciting desire, it makes clear that there is nothing in it to be desired, because what we want is that it should not change. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.92) | |
| A reaction: She attributes beauty to a supernatural source. I catalogue this idea under 'the sublime', rather than 'beauty'. It may be better to say that beauty inspires love, rather than desire. |
| 23760 | All we need are the unity of justice, truth and beauty [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Justice, truth, and beauty are sisters and comrades. With three such beautiful words we have no need to look for any others. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.93) | |
| A reaction: The embodiment of platonist values. Without the platonist ontology, I like the identification of a few core values, and have always thought that Beauty, Goodness and Truth were a well chosen trio. Swapping 'justice' for 'goodness' is interesting. |
| 23748 | The sacred in every human is their expectation of good rather than evil [Weil] |
| Full Idea: At the bottom of every human heart …there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all crimes committed, suffered and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.71) | |
| A reaction: I'm thinking that this expectation may come from having at least one loving parent, and failing that there are people who have no such expectation as adults. Simone obviously thinks the hope runs deeper than that. |
| 23759 | Everything which originates in love is beautiful [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.93) | |
| A reaction: I suppose if I found a counterexample, she would say that is not 'pure' love. This sentence leaves open the possibility of beauty in the absence of love (such as a beautiful face noticed in the street). In her case, can beauty and love be separated? |
| 23762 | Evil is transmitted by comforts and pleasures, but mostly by doing harm to people [Weil] |
| Full Idea: One may transmit evil to a human being by flattering him or giving him comforts and pleasures; but most often men transmit evil to other men by doing them harm. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.94) | |
| A reaction: Some people receive harm very passively, especially if it is normal. What of tough love, which is erroneously seen as harm? |
| 23750 | It is not more money which the wretched members of society need [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Suppose the devil were bargaining for the soul of some wretch, and some pitying person said to the devil 'Shame on you, that commodity is worth twice as much'. Such is the sinister farce played by the working class unions, parties and intellectuals. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.80) | |
| A reaction: A striking thought. It is paradoxical when the working classes despise the middle classes, and yet aspire to be like them. It's hard to know what a mystic like Weil has in mind. An obvious thought is that the aspiration should be freedom, not money. |
| 23749 | The problem of the collective is not suppression of persons, but persons erasing themselves [Weil] |
| Full Idea: The chief danger does not lie in the collectivity's tendency to circumscribe the person, but in the person's tendency to immolate himself in the collective. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.78) | |
| A reaction: I'm guessing that in 1943 she had in mind both Nazis and Communists. She seems to articulate a strong form of liberalism in an interesting way. It sounds like a form of Bad Faith. |
| 23753 | People absurdly claim an equal share of things which are essentially privileged [Weil] |
| Full Idea: To the dimmed understanding of our age there seems nothing odd in claiming an equal share of privilege for everybody - an equal share in things whose essence is privilege. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.84) | |
| A reaction: Not sure what she has in mind. Probably not the finest food and drink. I suppose she is attacking the modern egalitarian view of democratic society. What things have privilege as their 'essence'? Being a 'winner'? Interesting, though. |
| 23751 | Rights are asserted contentiously, and need the backing of force [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Rights are always asserted in a tone of contention; and when this tone is adopted, it must rely upon force in the background, or else it will be laughed at. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.81) | |
| A reaction: This is the sort of observation which leads on to Foucault's account of all-pervasive power. Her observation may not be so sinister. It is obvious that introductions of new rights go against the grain of a conservative society - and so need a push. |
| 23752 | Giving centrality to rights stifles all impulses of charity [Weil] |
| Full Idea: To place the notion of rights at the centre of social conflicts is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity on both sides. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.83) | |
| A reaction: I think she exaggerates. To place personal charity at the centre of social conflicts strikes me as extremely conservative, and unlikely to improve the situation very much. I'm unsure how to reconcile this with Idea 23750. What sort of charity? |
| 23757 | The spirit of justice needs the full attention of truth, and that attention is love [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Because affliction and truth need the same kind of attention …the spirit of justice and the spirit of truth are one. The spirit of justice and truth is nothing else be a certain kind of attention, which is pure love. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.92) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about this as an observation, but as an inspiration it is very appealing, and (as so often with Weil) strikingly and attractively independent. I prefer love to arise naturally, rather than be a product of exhortation. |
| 23761 | Justice (concerning harm) is distinct from rights (concerning inequality) [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Justice is seeing that no harm is done to men. When a man cries inwardly 'Why am I being hurt?' he is being harmed. The other cry of 'Why have others got more than me?' refers to rights. We must distinguish them, and hush the second with law. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.93) | |
| A reaction: Her great passion is for justice, and so she downplays rights. The simple 'why am I being hurt?' has a horrible resonance in 1943. What of the hurts of disease? Are they unjust? |
| 23764 | The only thing in society worse than crime is repressive justice [Weil] |
| Full Idea: There is one, and only one, thing in society more hideous than crime - namely, repressive justice. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.95) | |
| A reaction: Presumably fans of 'repressive' justice would describe it as 'reformative' justice. In general, one of the most hideous parts of historical human societies has been the punishments they dished out (simply because they had the power to do it). |
| 23763 | Punishment aims at the good for men who don't desire it [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Punishment is solely a method of procuring pure good for men who do not desire it. The art of punishing is the art of awakening in a criminal, by pain or even death, the desire for pure good. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.95) | |
| A reaction: I know Weil is seen as some sort of saint, but this remark could have come from the Inquisition. I'm always alarmed by talk of 'pure' good and 'pure' evil, which seem to need a superior insight the rest of us lack. But see Idea 23764. |
| 13222 | The Boundless cannot exist on its own, and must have something contrary to it [Aristotle on Anaximander] |
| Full Idea: Those thinkers are in error who postulate ...a single matter, for this cannot exist without some 'perceptible contrariety': this Boundless, which they identify with the 'original real', must be either light or heavy, either hot or cold. | |
| From: comment on Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE]) by Aristotle - Coming-to-be and Passing-away (Gen/Corr) 329a10 | |
| A reaction: A dubious objection, I would say. If there has to be a contrasting cold thing to any hot thing, what happens when the cold thing is removed? |
| 404 | Things begin and end in the Unlimited, and are balanced over time according to justice [Anaximander] |
| Full Idea: The non-limited is the original material of existing things; their source is also that to which they return after destruction, according to necessity; they give justice and make reparation to each other for injustice, according to the arrangement of Time. | |
| From: Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE], B1), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 24.13- | |
| A reaction: Simplicius is quoting Theophrastus |
| 405 | The essential nature, whatever it is, of the non-limited is everlasting and ageless [Anaximander] |
| Full Idea: The essential nature, whatever it is, of the non-limited is everlasting and ageless. | |
| From: Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE], B2), quoted by (who?) - where? |
| 1495 | Anaximander introduced the idea that the first principle and element of things was the Boundless [Anaximander, by Simplicius] |
| Full Idea: Anaximander said that the first principle and element of existing things was the boundless; it was he who originally introduced this name for the first principle. | |
| From: report of Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE], A09) by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 9.24.14- | |
| A reaction: Simplicius is quoting Theophrastus |
| 1746 | The parts of all things are susceptible to change, but the whole is unchangeable [Anaximander, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: The parts of all things are susceptible to change, but the whole is unchangeable. | |
| From: report of Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.An.2 |
| 23754 | The only choice is between supernatural good, or evil [Weil] |
| Full Idea: In all the crucial problems of human existence the only choice is between supernatural good on the one hand and evil on the other. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.86) | |
| A reaction: This idea strikes me as absurd, but I include it for a fuller picture of Simone Weil. Aristotle (my hero) is referred to, and labelled as more stupid than a village idiot. |