68 ideas
| 19635 | Hegel produced modern optimism; he failed to grasp that consciousness never progresses [Hegel, by Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism. How could he have failed to see that consciousness changes only its forms and modalities, but never progresses. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by E.M. Cioran - A Short History of Decay 5 |
| 8215 | Hegel was the last philosopher of the Book [Hegel, by Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Hegel was the last philosopher of the Book. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Jacques Derrida - Positions p.64 | |
| A reaction: Reference to 'the Book' connects this to the great religions which rely on one holy text. The implication is that Hegel was proposing one big solution to all problems. It is doubtful if many philosophers before Hegel dreamt of that either. |
| 16011 | Hegel doesn't storm the heavens like the giants, but works his way up by syllogisms [Kierkegaard on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Hegel is a Johannes Climacus who does not storm the heavens, like the giants, by putting mountain upon mountain, but climbs aboard them by way of his syllogisms. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Sřren Kierkegaard - The Journals of Kierkegaard 2A | |
| A reaction: [Idea from SY] This appears to be an attempt at insulting Hegel for his timidity, but it seems to be describing the cautious approach which most modern philosophers take to be correct. [PG] |
| 5433 | For Hegel, things are incomplete, and contain external references in their own nature [Hegel, by Russell] |
| Full Idea: The basis of Hegel's system is that what is incomplete must not be self-subsistent, and needs the support of other things; whatever has relations to things outside itself must contain some reference to those outside things in its own nature. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Bertrand Russell - Problems of Philosophy Ch.14 | |
| A reaction: This leads to the idealist doctrine of 'internal relations'. It has some plausibility if you think about the physicist's definition of mass, which has to refer to forces etc. Presumably there is one essence for all of reality, instead of separate ones. |
| 3301 | On the continent it is generally believed that metaphysics died with Hegel [Benardete,JA on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In continental Europe it is widely believed that the metaphysical game was played out in Hegel. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Intro |
| 19767 | Reason leads to prudent selfishness, which overrules natural compassion [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Reason is what engenders egocentrism ...turns man in upon himself ...and separates him from all that troubles him and afflicts him. Philosophy is what ...moves him to say at the sight of a suffering man 'Perish if you will; I am safe and sound'. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: He goes on to observe that fights in the marketplace are stopped by women, while the philosophers have all run away! This thinking leads to the sentimental movement, and then to romanticism. |
| 19661 | Making sufficient reason an absolute devalues the principle of non-contradiction [Hegel, by Meillassoux] |
| Full Idea: Hegel saw that the absolutization of the principle of sufficient reason (which marked the culmination of the belief in the necessity of what is) required the devaluation of the principle of non-contradiction. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812], 3) by Quentin Meillassoux - After Finitude; the necessity of contingency 3 | |
| A reaction: I pass this on without understanding it, though a joint study of my collection of ideas on sufficient reason and non-contradiction might make it clear. [Let me know if you can explain it!] |
| 20952 | Rather than in three stages, Hegel presented his dialectic as 'negation of the negation' [Hegel, by Bowie] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's 'dialectic' is often characterised in terms of the triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This is, however, not the way he presents it. The core of the dialectic is rather what Hegel terms the 'negation of the negation'. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Andrew Bowie - Introduction to German Philosophy | |
| A reaction: Interestingly, this connects it to debates about intuitionist logic, which denies that double-negation necessarily makes a positive. Presumably Marx emphasised the first reading. |
| 21777 | Negation of negation doubles back into a self-relationship [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the 'negation of negation' is negation that, as it were, doubles back on itself and 'relates itself to itself'. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 6 'Space' | |
| A reaction: [ref VNP 1823 p.108] Glad we've cleared that one up. |
| 5645 | The dialectical opposition of being and nothing is resolved in passing to the concept of becoming [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The concept of being contains within itself it own negation - nothing - and the dialectical opposition between these two concepts is resolved only in the passage to a new concept, becoming, which contains the truth of the passage from nothing to being. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.12 | |
| A reaction: The idea that one concept 'contains' another, or that an opposition could be 'resolved' by a new concept, sounds doubtful to me. For most analytical philosophers, and for Aristotle, oppositions are contradictions, and cannot and should not be 'resolved'. |
| 5646 | Hegel gives an ontological proof of the existence of everything [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: It would not be unfair to say that Hegel's metaphysics consists of an ontological proof of the existence of everything. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.12 | |
| A reaction: This is so gloriously far from David Hume that we must all find some appeal in it. The next question would be whether necessary existence has been proved. If so, given death, decay and entropy, what is it that has to exist? 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? |
| 21755 | For Hegel, categories shift their form in the course of history [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the categories of thought are not fixed, eternal forms that remain unchanged throughout history, but are concepts that alter their meaning in history. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
| A reaction: This results from a critique of Kant's rather rigid view of categories. This idea is very influential, and certainly counts among Hegel's better ideas. |
| 21754 | Our concepts and categories disclose the world, because we are part of the world [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the structure of our concepts and categories is identical with, and thus discloses, the structure of the world itself, because we ourselves are born into and so share the character of the world we encounter. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
| A reaction: This is a reasonable speculation, but it makes more sense in the context of natural selection, and an empiricist theory of concepts. |
| 22079 | Hegel said Kant's fixed categories actually vary with culture and era [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's disagreement with Kant is that categories are not unambiguously universal forms of human understanding, but are conceived in subtly different ways in different cultures and in different historical epochs. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - Hegel p.95 | |
| A reaction: This may be Hegel's most influential idea. Though he hoped that categories would contain truth, by arising untrammelled from reason, and thereby matching reality. His successors seem to have given up on that hope, and settled for relativism. |
| 14919 | Empiricists deny what is unobservable, and reject objective modality [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: To be an empiricist is to withhold belief in anything that goes beyond the actual, observable phenomena, and to recognise no objective modality in nature. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Scientific Image [1980], p.202), quoted by J Ladyman / D Ross - Every Thing Must Go 2.3.1 | |
| A reaction: To only believe in what is actually observable strikes me as ridiculous. It might be, though, that we observe modality, in observing dispositions. If you pull back a bowstring, you feel the possibilities. |
| 19757 | No one would bother to reason, and try to know things, without a desire for enjoyment [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: We seek to know only because we desire to find enjoyment; and it is impossible to conceive why someon who had neither desires nor fears would go to the bother reasoning. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: This appears to be an echo of Hume's pessimism about the autonomy of reason. This downgrading of reason is a striking feature of the Enlightenment, which presumably culminates in the romantic movement. |
| 6783 | To 'accept' a theory is not to believe it, but to believe it empirically adequate [Fraassen, by Bird] |
| Full Idea: To 'accept' a theory is not to believe it, but is instead to believe it to be empirically adequate. | |
| From: report of Bas C. van Fraassen (The Scientific Image [1980]) by Alexander Bird - Philosophy of Science Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: The second half of this doesn't avoid the word 'belief'. Nevertheless the suggestion is that we never believe (i.e. commit to truth) ever again. So you avoid an on-coming bus because the threat appears to be 'empirically adequate'. Hm. |
| 9225 | Hegel reputedly claimed to know a priori that there are five planets [Hegel, by Field,H] |
| Full Idea: Hegel is reputed to have claimed to have deduced on a priori grounds that the number of planets is exactly five. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Hartry Field - Recent Debates on the A Priori 1 | |
| A reaction: Even if this is a wicked travesty of Hegel, it will do nicely to represent the extremes of claims to a priori synthetic knowledge. Field doesn't offer any evidence. I would love it to be true. |
| 14917 | To accept a scientific theory, we only need to believe that it is empirically adequate [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: Science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate; and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empiricially adequate. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Scientific Image [1980], p.12), quoted by J Ladyman / D Ross - Every Thing Must Go 2.3.1 | |
| A reaction: This won't tell us what to do if there is a tie between two theories, and we will want to know the criteria for 'adequate'. Presumably there are theories which are empirically quite good, but not yet acceptable. Theories commit beyond experience. |
| 6784 | Why should the true explanation be one of the few we have actually thought of? [Fraassen, by Bird] |
| Full Idea: Van Fraassen asks why we should think that the actual explanation of the evidence should be found among the theories we are considering, when there must be an infinity of theories which are also potential explanations of the evidence? | |
| From: report of Bas C. van Fraassen (The Scientific Image [1980]) by Alexander Bird - Philosophy of Science Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: This has become one of the leading modern anti-realist arguments. We must introduce an element of faith here; presumably evolution makes us experts on immediate puzzles, competent on intermediate ones, and hopeful on remote ones. |
| 13066 | An explanation is just descriptive information answering a particular question [Fraassen, by Salmon] |
| Full Idea: On van Fraassen's theory an explanation is simply an answer to a why-question; it is nothing other than descriptive information that, in a given context, answers a particular type of question. | |
| From: report of Bas C. van Fraassen (The Scientific Image [1980]) by Wesley Salmon - Four Decades of Scientific Explanation 4.3 | |
| A reaction: Presumably we would need some sort of criterion for a 'good' explanation, and it seems to me that a very good explanation might be given which was nevertheless beyond the grasp of the questioner. |
| 19760 | General ideas are purely intellectual; imagining them is immediately particular [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Every general idea is purely intellectual. The least involvement of the imagination thereupon makes the idea particular. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: This thought is in Berkeley, who seemed to think that general ideas were impossible, because imagination was always required. Rousseau is certainly an improvement on that. |
| 19759 | Only words can introduce general ideas into the mind [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: General ideas can be introduced into the mind only with the aid of words. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: Hm. How did humanity manage to invent general words. Do animals not have general thoughts, e.g. about food, shelter, predators? Roussea goes on to deny that monkeys see nuts as a 'type' of fruit. |
| 19758 | Language may aid thinking, but powerful thought was needed to produce language [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: If men needed speech in order to learn to think, they had a still greater need for knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speaking. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: I take language to be a consequence of the emergence of meta-thought in humanity, so I thoroughly endorse Rousseau's view. The idea that rationality, and even consciousness, are mainly facilitated by language strikes me as quite wrong. |
| 19773 | Without love, what use is beauty? [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Where there is no love, what use is beauty? | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: Rousseau seems to be thinking of sexual attractiveness, but the aphorism seems to have universal application. |
| 19769 | Rational morality is OK for brainy people, but ordinary life can't rely on that [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Although it might be appropriate for Socrates and minds of his stature to acquire virtue through reason, the human race would long ago have ceased to exist, if its preservation had depended solely on the reasonings of its members. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: He takes our natural compassion to be the basis of morality. Hume combines that with a natural social prudence. Apes live successfully together in groups, without a Socrates. See MacIntyre on the failure of reasoned morality. |
| 19752 | If we should not mistreat humans, it is mainly because of sentience, not rationality [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: If I am obliged not to do any harm to my fellow man, it is less because he is a rational being than because he is a sentient being. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Pref) | |
| A reaction: How should sentience and rationality be weighted here? Kant demands instrinsic respect for beings on the grounds of their rationality. What could ever justify doing needless harm to anything? An open goal for virtue theory here. |
| 19768 | The better Golden Rule is 'do good for yourself without harming others' [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Instead of the sublime maxim of reasoned justice 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you', pity inspires a less perfect but perhaps more useful one: 'Do what is good for you with as little harm as possible to others'. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: His revised maxim is like J.S. Mill's formula for liberalism. The first maxim seems more contractarian, the second more utilitarian. |
| 19766 | The fact that we weep (e.g. in theatres) shows that we are naturally compassionate [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Every day one sees in our theatres someone affected and weeping at the ills of some unfortunate person ...Nature, in giving men tears, bears witness that she gave the human race the softest hearts. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: Lovely. Of course, tears in infants are for their own misfortunes, but adults more commonly weep over the sufferings of others. But we somewhat laugh at people who easily cry over dramas about suffering. |
| 21758 | Humans have no fixed identity, but produce and reveal their shifting identity in history [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the absolute truth of humanity is that human beings have no fixed, given identity, but rather determine and produce their own identity and their world in history, and that they gradually come to the recognition of this fact in history. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
| A reaction: This quintessentially existentialist idea, most obvious in Sartre, seems to have originated with this view of Hegel's. |
| 19756 | Humans are less distinguished from other animals by understanding, than by being free agents [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: It is not so much understanding which causes the specific distinction of man from all other animals as it is his being a free agent. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure how deep Rousseau takes 'free' to go. Having little enthusiasm for free will, I would say that we are distinguished by the complexity of our decision making. But I attribute that to meta-thought, the mark of humanity. |
| 19755 | Most human ills are self-inflicted; the simple, solitary, regular natural life is good [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Most of our ills are of our own making, and we could have avoided nearly all of them by preserving the simple, regular and solitary lifestyle prescribed to us by nature. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: It is important that he is not really disagreeing with Hobbes's pessimistic view of natural life as 'nasty'. Rousseau attributes that to a later stage, when people are ineptly beginning to emerge from the state of nature. I'm an optimist here. |
| 19762 | Is language a pre-requisite for society, or might it emerge afterwards? [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Which was more necessary: an already formed society for the invention of languages, or an already invented language for the establishment of society? | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: Rousseau declines to attempt an answer. Ants and bees seem to do well, but have some means of communication. Ape colonies are quite sophisticated. |
| 19763 | I doubt whether a savage person ever complains of life, or considers suicide [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: I ask if anyone has ever heard tell of a savage who was living in liberty ever dreaming of complaining about his life and of killing himself. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: Rousseau's state of nature is much too remote from any current tribal life for this to be tested. It is a nice speculation. Do apes ever attempt suicide? |
| 19778 | Leisure led to envy, inequality, vice and revenge, which we now see in savages [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: People developed leisure pursuits, and wanted esteem, which was the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice. Vanity, contempt, shame and envy were born, and acts of revenge. This is the stage of savage people we know of. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: [very compressed] This is important in understanding Rousseau, because his happier 'state of nature' is prior to what is described here, which is the violent warlike state which impressed Hobbes. |
| 19779 | Primitive man was very gentle [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: This summarises Rousseau's view of the earliest stage of mankind, when there was little rivalry, and little motivation or opportunity for viciousness. |
| 19751 | Our two starting principles are concern for self-interest, and compassion for others [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: One principle prior to reason makes us ardently interested in our well-being and self-preservation; the other inspires a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, especially our fellow man, perish or suffer. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This is strikingly like Hume's nascent utilitarianism. These two principles are the key to Rousseau's vision of the state of nature, from which the union around a general will leads to the formation of a state. Note that animals get included here. |
| 19765 | Savages avoid evil because they are calm, and never think of it (not because they know goodness) [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: We could say that savages are not evil because they do not know what is good; for it is neither enlightenment nor legal restraint, but the calm of the passions and the ignorance of vice which prevents them from doing evil. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: Suggests one of my favourite ideas (Idea 519). While his hopes for savages and the state of nature may be optimistic, the idea that you won't do evil if it never crosses your mind (and it won't if you are a calm person) is very powerful. |
| 19771 | Savage men quietly pursue desires, without the havoc of modern frenzied imagination [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Imagination, which wreaks so much havoc among us, does not speak to savage hearts; each man peacefully awaits the impetus of nature, gives himself over to it without choice, and with more pleasure than frenzy; then all desire is snuffed out. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: Interesting to identify imagination as a source of trouble. The idea that the savage lacks imagination seems implausible. Better to say that modern imagination has been poisoned by competition. |
| 20414 | Hegel's Absolute Spirit is the union of human rational activity at a moment, and whatever that sustains [Hegel, by Eldridge] |
| Full Idea: We may take Hegel's Absolute Spirit to be the union of collective, human rational activity at a historical moment with its proper object, the forms of social and individual life that the rational activity is devoted to understanding and sustaining. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Richard Eldridge - G.W.F. Hegel (aesthetics) 1 | |
| A reaction: From this formulation it sounds as if the whole human race might have momentary union, but presumably it is more local 'peoples' that can exhibit this. |
| 19774 | A savage can steal fruit or a home, but there is no means of achieving obedience [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: A savage man could well lay hold of the fruit another has gathered, the cave that served as his shelter. But how will he ever succeed in making himself obeyed? What can be the chain of dependence among men who possess nothing? | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: You'd certainly need language to express an enduring threat, like excluding someone from all of the local caves. You need to be able to say 'I'll be back', which animals can't say. Huge muscular men must have dominated in some way. |
| 19772 | In a state of nature people are much more equal; it is society which increases inequalities [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: There must be much less difference between one man and another in the state of nature than in that of society, and natural inequality must increase in the human species through inequality occasioned by social institutions. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: This is the main idea of his essay - the answer to the question set by the essay prize. Slavery is common in fairly basic societies, but that is at a much more advanced stage than Rousseau is thinking of. It's hard to disagree with him. |
| 19789 | It is against nature for children to rule old men, fools to rule the wise, and the rich to hog resources [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: It is obviously contrary to the law of nature, however it is defined, for a child to command an old man, for an imbecile to lead a wise man, and for a handful of people to gorge themselves on superfluities while the starving multitude lack necessities. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: I wonder if gregarious animals ever starve to death during a time of plenty, because of social exclusion? I bet this idea was quoted widely in 1780s Paris. The massive inequality is not just nasty, but 'contrary to the law of nature'. |
| 19787 | People accept the right to be commanded, because they themselves wish to command [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Citizens allow themselves to be oppressed only insofar as they are driven by blind ambition; ...they consent to wear chains in order to be able to give them in turn to others. It is difficult to reduce to obedience someone who does not wish to command. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: Beautiful. This produces what I call the 'military model of management', where people love tree diagrams showing chains of command, and their place in the hierarchy. Life becomes 'either give orders, or obey'. I like democratic teams. |
| 3909 | Society isn’t founded on a contract, since contracts presuppose a society [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, society cannot be founded on a contract, since contracts have no reality until society is in place. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Roger Scruton - Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey 28.2 | |
| A reaction: Interesting, and reminiscent of the private language argument, but contracts surely start as deals between individuals (on a desert island?). |
| 19780 | We seem to have made individual progress since savagery, but actually the species has decayed [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Evidence confirms that the savage state is the youth of the world, and all subsequent progress has been in appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, and in fact toward the decay of the species. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as an attack on the new rising philosophy of liberalism, and a plea for communitarianism. We should judge humanity as a whole, and not just look at some individual lives which seem to be going well. |
| 19747 | Revolutionaries usually confuse liberty with total freedom, and end up with heavier chains [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: If people try to shake off a yoke, they put more distance between themselves and liberty, because in mistaking for liberty an unbridled licence which is its opposite, their revolutions usually deliver them over to seducers who make their chains heavier. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Intro letter) | |
| A reaction: This 'Animal Farm' thought was presumably ignored in 1789 and 1917. There must be basic rules for revolutionaries, of which priorities they must never drop from sight, and which priorities are dangerous and misleading. |
| 19748 | Plebiscites are bad, because they exclude the leaders from crucial decisions [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: I would not approve of plebiscites like those of the Romans where the state's leaders and those most interested in its preservation were excluded from the deliberations on which its safety often depended. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Intro letter) | |
| A reaction: I wish David Cameron had read this before 2016. This is exactly what happened with the Brexit referendum, where the people voted for an action entirely opposed to the preference of the majority of their elected representatives. Chaos ensued. |
| 19749 | In a direct democracy, only the leaders should be able to propose new laws [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: In order to stop ...the dangerous innovations that finally ruined Athens, no one would have the power to propose new laws according to his fancy; this right belongs exclusively to the magistrates. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Intro letter) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle says (somewhere!) that control of the agenda for meetings is the key issue in democracies. I assume any citizen can propose a law, but only a magistrate can put it on the agenda. Maybe a separate 'citizen's committee' could filter suggestions. |
| 19775 | People must be made dependent before they can be enslaved [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: It is impossible to enslave a man without having first put him in the position of being incapable of doing without another. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: Ah yes. The key to running a slave plantation is not the threat of violence, but control of the shelter and food supply. |
| 19784 | Enslaved peoples often boast of their condition, calling it a state of 'peace' [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Enslaved peoples do nothing but boast of the peace and tranquillity they enjoy in their chains and they give the name 'peace' to the most miserable slavery. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: It seems to be a sad truth that enslaved peoples are less upset about their condition than outside observers are, especially in modern times, where slavery is usually deemed unacceptable. Slavery might be the best you can hope for. |
| 19785 | If the child of a slave woman is born a slave, then a man is not born a man [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: The jurists who have gravely pronounced that the child of a slave woman is born a slave, have decided, in other words, that a man is not born a man. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: The hidden premise of this enthymeme is that man is born free. A key issue of liberalism is the status of children. Are the children of religious believers automatically members of that sect? Can I be born a West Ham supporter? |
| 19746 | Like rich food, liberty can ruin people who are too weak to cope with it [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Liberty is like those solid foods or full-bodied wines appropriate for strengthening robust constitutions that are used to them, but which overpower, ruin and intoxicate the weak and delicate who are not suited to them. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Intro letter) | |
| A reaction: Rousseau vision of a successful society involves robustly self-sufficient citizens (as in the American ideal), rather than people who are free, but easily led into dependence (in a 'nanny state'). |
| 19786 | Three stages of the state produce inequalities of wealth, power, and enslavement [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Stage one gives law and property (producing inequalities of rich and poor), stage two gives a magistracy (producing weak and strong), and stage three is legitimate power becoming arbitrary (producing master and slave). | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: This is the final answer to the prize essay question (with Idea 19772). What a beautiful analysis - and he didn't even win the prize this time! |
| 19788 | The pleasure of wealth and power is largely seeing others deprived of them [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: If one sees a handful of powerful and rich men at the height of greatness and fortune while the mob grovels in obscurity and misery, it is because the former prize the things they enjoy only to the extent that the others are deprived of them. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be an accurate picture of ancien régime France, and it still applies to modern plutocrats. The pleasure of a nice house is not that it is very good, but that it is better than other houses. Inequality gives a lot of pleasure! |
| 19777 | Persuading other people that some land was 'owned' was the beginning of society [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say 'this is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: A wonderful riposte to Locke, who thought political legitimacy was based on property! Locke is way too simplistic about whether someone has a true right to their property. Highy dubious claims become ossified after a generation or two. |
| 19782 | What else could property arise from, but the labour people add to it? [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: It is impossible to conceive of the idea of property arising from anything but manual labour, for it is not clear what man can add, beyond his own labour, in order to appropriate things he has not made. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: A thorough endorsement of Locke's labour theory of value. It is not clear to me why you have to 'add' something in order to achieve ownership. Don't you own firewood just by picking it up? Golfers give ownership of a lost ball to the first one to see it. |
| 19781 | Land cultivation led to a general right of ownership, administered justly [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: From the cultivation of land, there necessarily followed the division of land; and from property once recognised, the first rules of justice. For in order to render everyone what is his, it is necessary that everyone can have something. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: This looks rather obviously correct. You don't plant crops if you are not protected in your right to reap what you have sown, and you would expect to re-sow from the proceeds. Other people will want you to do this. |
| 19754 | If we have a natural right to property, what exactly does 'belonging to' mean? [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Others have spoken of the natural right that everyone has to preserve what belongs to him, without explaining what they mean by 'belonging'. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at Locke. What Marxists will challenge is the legitimacy of property ownership, granted by patronage, enclosure, exploitation and conquest. These start as injustices, but that fades after a few generations. Locke has a labour-theory. |
| 19750 | Writers just propose natural law as the likely useful agreements among people [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Writers begin by seeking the rules on which, for the common utility, it would be appropriate for men to agree among themselves; they then give the name of 'natural law' to these rules, with no other proof than their presumed good results. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Pref) | |
| A reaction: The arguments for natural law strike me as quite good, but pinning down its content looks incredibly elusive, and at the mercy of cultural influences. |
| 19770 | Primitive people simply redressed the evil caused by violence, without thought of punishing [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: More primitive men regarded the acts of violence that could befall them as an easily redressed evil and not as an offence that must be punished; they did not even dream of vengeance, except as a knee-jerk response. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: This may be Rousseau at his most optimistic, trying to deny a rather more aggressive streak in people, seen in children's playgrounds. |
| 19783 | A state of war remains after a conquest, if the losers don't accept the winners [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: The conqueror and conquered peoples always remain in a state of war with one another, unless the nation, returned to full liberty, were to choose voluntarily its conqueror as leader. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part II) | |
| A reaction: Tricky if part of the conquered nation accepts the conqueror, and the other part doesn't, as in France in 1940. In a permanent conquest the state of war seems to fade away, as in England in 1066. |
| 19753 | Both men and animals are sentient, which should give the latter the right not to be mistreated [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Since being sentient is common to both animals and men, that should at least give the former the right not to be needlessly mistreated by the latter. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This is why utilitarianism led to the founding of the RSPCA in Britain. There is a disturbing picture of people smashing up animals for fun, if they can only persuade themselves that the animals are not sentient. I've heard fishermen claim that. |
| 4347 | When man wills the natural, it is no longer natural [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: When man wills the natural, it is no longer natural. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]), quoted by Rosalind Hursthouse - On Virtue Ethics Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: Sounds good, though I'm not sure what it means. The application of the word 'natural' seems a bit arbitrary to me. No objective joint exists between the natural and unnatural. The default position has to be that everything is natural. |
| 19761 | Men started with too few particular names, but later had too few natural kind names [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Men at first unduly multiplied the names of individual things, owing to their failure to know the genera and species, but later made too few genera and species, owing to their failure to have considered beings in all their differences. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: The fact that two leopards differ is not a good enough reason to assign them to two different general terms. Adjectives can do all the necessary modification. The single general term acknowledges something important. |
| 19776 | Small uninterrupted causes can have big effects [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Negligible causes may have surprising power when they act without interruption. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I) | |
| A reaction: A wonderfully simple observation that is a key idea of the theory of evolution. If life was created 6,000 years ago, evolution is impossible. If it appeared 500,000,000 years ago, how could evolution NOT occur? Little changes must occur. |
| 4188 | Hegel's entire philosophy is nothing but a monstrous amplification of the ontological proof [Schopenhauer on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's entire philosophy is nothing but a monstrous amplification of the ontological proof. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Arthur Schopenhauer - Abstract of 'The Fourfold Root' Ch.II | |
| A reaction: All massive a priori metaphysics is summed up in this argument, which is right at the core of philosophy. |
| 6686 | Hegel said he was offering an encyclopaedic rationalisation of Christianity [Hegel, by Graham] |
| Full Idea: Hegel claimed that his philosophy was nothing less than an encyclopaedic rationalisation of the Christian religion. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Gordon Graham - Eight Theories of Ethics Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: Why did he pick Christianity to rationalise? How can you reason properly if you start with a dogma? |