41 ideas
| 5893 | A wise man has integrity, firmness of will, nobility, consistency, sobriety, patience [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: The wise man does nothing of which he can repent, nothing against his will, does everything nobly, consistently, soberly, rightly, not looking forward to anything as bound to come, is not astonished at any novel occurrence, abides by his own decisions. | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (Tusculan Disputations [c.44 BCE], V.xxviii) | |
| A reaction: Notice that the wise man never exhibits weakness of will (an Aristotelian virtue), and is consistent (as Kant proposed), and is patient (as the Stoics proposed). But Cicero doesn't think he should busy himself maximising happiness. |
| 20678 | The Scientific Revolution was the discovery of our own ignorance [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The great discovery of the Scientific Revolution was that humans do not know the answers to their most important question. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 14 'Ignoramus') | |
| A reaction: I think of that revolution as raising the bar in epistemology, but this idea gives a motivation for doing so. Why the discovery then, and not before? |
| 20686 | For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another [Harari] |
| Full Idea: For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another, …and the only machine capable of performing energy conversion was the body. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 17 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Hence the huge and revolutionary importance of the steam engine and the electricity generator. |
| 5891 | Philosophy is the collection of rational arguments [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy consists in the collection of rational arguments. [Philosophia ex rationum collatione constet] | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (Tusculan Disputations [c.44 BCE], IV.xxxviii.84) | |
| A reaction: A nice epigraph for this database. Philosophy is, I trust, a little more than that, because you don't just hide them away in a drawer. But if you arrange them nicely in a museum (a website, for example), not a lot more can be done. |
| 5879 | The soul is the heart, or blood in the heart, or part of the brain, of something living in heart or brain, or breath [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: Some think the soul is the heart; Empedocles holds that the soul is blood in the heart; others said one part of the brain claimed the primacy of soul; others say the heart or brain are habitations of the soul; while others identify soul and breath. | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (Tusculan Disputations [c.44 BCE], I.ix.17-19) | |
| A reaction: A nice survey of views. Note that many of them identify the psuché/anima with physical parts of the body; only the fourth option seems to be dualist. This is despite the contemptuous response to Democritus' atomist theory of soul. |
| 5884 | How can one mind perceive so many dissimilar sensations? [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: Why is it that, using the same mind, we have perception of things so utterly unlike as colour, taste, heat, smell and sound? | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (Tusculan Disputations [c.44 BCE], I.xx.47) | |
| A reaction: This leaves us with the 'binding problem', of how the dissimilar sensations are pulled together into one field of experience. It is a nice simple objection, though, to anyone who simplistically claims that the mind is self-evidently unified. |
| 5887 | The soul has a single nature, so it cannot be divided, and hence it cannot perish [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: In souls there is no mingling of ingredients, nothing of two-fold nature, so it is impossible for the soul to be divided; impossible, therefore, for it to perish either; for perishing is like the separation of parts which were maintained in union. | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (Tusculan Disputations [c.44 BCE], I.xxix.71) | |
| A reaction: Cicero knows he is pushing his luck in asserting that perishing is a sort of division. Why can't something be there one moment and gone the next? He appears to be in close agreement with Descartes about being a 'thinking thing'. |
| 5886 | Like the eye, the soul has no power to see itself, but sees other things [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: The soul has not the power of itself to see itself, but, like the eye, the soul, though it does not see itself, yet discerns other things. | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (Tusculan Disputations [c.44 BCE], I.xxvii) | |
| A reaction: The soul is a complex item which contributes many layers of interpretation to what it sees, so there is scope for parts of the soul seeing other parts. Somewhere in the middle Cicero seems to be right - there is an elusive something we can't get at. |
| 5885 | Souls contain no properties of elements, and elements contain no properties of souls [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: No beginnings of souls can be found on earth; there is no combination in souls that could be born from earth, nothing that partakes of moist or airy or fiery; for in those elements there is nothing to possess the power of memory, thought, or reflection. | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (Tusculan Disputations [c.44 BCE], I.xxvi.66) | |
| A reaction: Interesting, but I think magnetism is an instructive analogy, which has weird properties which we never perceive in elements (though it is there, buried deep - suggesting panpsychism). Cicero would be disconcerted to find that fire isn't an element. |
| 5890 | We should not share the distress of others, but simply try to relieve it [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: We ought not to share distresses ourselves for the sake of others, but we ought to relieve others of their distress if we can. | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (Tusculan Disputations [c.44 BCE], IV.xxvi.56) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as a sensible and balanced attitude. Some people, particularly in a Christian culture, urge that feeling strong and painful compassion for others is an intrinsic good, but the commonsense view is that that just increases human suffering. |
| 20692 | Money does produce happiness, but only up to a point [Harari] |
| Full Idea: An interesting conclusion (from questionnaires) is that money does indeed bring happiness. But only up to a point, and beyond that point it has little significance. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 19 'Counting') | |
| A reaction: The question is whether that flattening-off point is relative to those around us, or absolute, according to the needs of living. Though these two may not be separate. |
| 5894 | All men except philosophers fear poverty [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: All men are afraid of poverty, but not a single philosopher is so. | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (Tusculan Disputations [c.44 BCE], V.xxxi.88) | |
| A reaction: Not a thought which is encountered very often in modern philosophy journals. If a person is to be 'philosophical' in the way they live, calm endurance of the vicissitudes and hardships of life has to be a key prerequisite. |
| 20663 | If a group is bound by gossip, the natural size is 150 people [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Sociological research has shown that the maximum 'natural' size of a group bound by gossip is about 150 individuals. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 02 'Legend') | |
| A reaction: On the other hand, most of us can learn the names of a group of about 450. Maybe the 'known' group and the 'gossip' group are equally significant. Not much use for a modern state, but of interest to communitarians. |
| 20677 | Since 1500 human population has increased fourteenfold, and consumption far more [Harari] |
| Full Idea: In the year 1500 there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the world. Today there are 7 billion. …Human population has increased fourteenfold, our production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 14 'Discovery') | |
| A reaction: We really need to grasp how extraordinary this is. |
| 20688 | People 300m tons; domesticated animals 700m tons; larger wild animals 100m tons [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The combined mass of homo sapiens is about 300 million tons; the mass of all domesticated farmyard animals is about 700 million tons; the mass of the surviving larger wild animals (from porcupines up) is less than 100 million tons. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 18 'Permanent') | |
| A reaction: These really are figures that deserve much wider currency. Every school entrance hall needs a board with a few of the basic dramatic statistics about human life on Earth. |
| 20674 | The Nazi aim was to encourage progressive evolution, and avoid degeneration [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The main ambition of the Nazis was to protect humankind from degeneration and encourage its progressive evolution. …Given the state of scientific knowledge in 1933, Nazi beliefs were hardly outside the pale. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Worship') | |
| A reaction: It still sounds a fairly worthy ambition, close to the heart of educationalists everywhere. The problems start with the definition of 'degeneration' and 'progress'. |
| 20679 | We stabilise societies with dogmas, either of dubious science, or of non-scientific values [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Modern attempts to stabilise the sociopolitical order either declare a scientific theory (such as racial theories for Nazis, or economic ones for Communists) to be an absolute truths, or declare non-scientific dogmas (such as liberal values) | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 14 'Ignoramus') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] |
| 5895 | If one despises illiterate mechanics individually, they are not worth more collectively [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: Can anything be more foolish than to suppose that those, whom individually one despises as illiterate mechanics, are worth anything collectively? | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (Tusculan Disputations [c.44 BCE], V.xxxvi.104) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle disagrees (Idea 2823). In 1906 a huge number of people guessed the weight of a cow at a fair, and the average was within one pound of the truth. In our world the healthy workings of the group are warped by the mass media. |
| 20690 | The state fostered individualism, to break the power of family and community [Harari] |
| Full Idea: States and markets use their growing power to weaken the bonds of family and community. They made an offer that couldn't be refused - 'become individuals' (over marriage, jobs and residence). The 'romantic individual' is not a rebel against the state. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 18 'Collapse') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] See the film 'Breaking the Waves'. An interesting slant on the Romantic movement. See Wordsworth's 'Michael'. Capitalism needs shoppers with their own money, and a mobile workforce. |
| 20689 | In 1750 losing your family and community meant death [Harari] |
| Full Idea: A person who lost her family and community around 1750 was as good as dead. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 18 'Collapse') | |
| A reaction: This is a very good advert for liberal individualism, and marks the downside of 'too much community'. |
| 20682 | The main rule of capitalism is that all other goods depend on economic growth [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The principle tenet of capitalism is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for it, because justice, freedom, and even happiness all depend on economic growth. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 16 'Growing') | |
| A reaction: In this respect, the main opponent of captitalism is green politics, rather than marxism. |
| 20681 | The sacred command of capitalism is that profits must be used to increase production [Harari] |
| Full Idea: In the new capitalist creed, the first and most sacred commandment is: The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 16 'Growing') | |
| A reaction: In this sense, capitalism is less greedy than its predecessors. 17th century aristocratic monopolists simply spent the profits of their activities. See the gorgeous clothes then (and pyramids and palaces), and the quiet suits of capitalists. |
| 20683 | The progress of capitalism depends entirely on the new discoveries and gadgets of science [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The history of capitalism is unintelligible without taking science into account. …The human economy has managed to keep on going only thanks to the fact that scientists come up with a new discovery or gadget every few years. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 16 'Growing') | |
| A reaction: For example, the desperate but unconvincing attempts to persuade us of the novelty of new models of car. Built-in obsolescence is needed once a design becomes static. |
| 20687 | In capitalism the rich invest, and the rest of us go shopping [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The supreme commandment of the rich is 'invest!', and the supreme commandment of the rest of us is 'buy!' | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 17 'Age') | |
| A reaction: Hence not only do the rich get much richer, while most of us remain roughly where we were, but there is a huge gulf between the investors and the non-investors. Encouraging small investors is a step forward. |
| 20685 | No market is free of political bias, and markets need protection of their freedoms [Harari] |
| Full Idea: There is no such thing as a market free of all political bias, …and markets by themselves offer no protection against fraud, theft and violence. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 16 'Cult') | |
| A reaction: Is this in theory, or in practice? In Sicily the free market has been a tool of the mafia. |
| 20693 | Freedom may work against us, as individuals can choose to leave, and make fewer commitments [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The freedom we value so highly may work against us. We can choose our spouses, friends and neighbours, but they can choose to leave us. With the individual wielding unprecedented power to decide her own path, we find it ever harder to make commitments. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 19 'Counting') | |
| A reaction: This is the worry of the communitarian. I take freedom to be a great social virtue - but an overrated one. |
| 20691 | Real peace is the implausibility of war (and not just its absence) [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Real peace is not the mere absence of war. Real peace is the implausibility of war. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 18 'Pax') | |
| A reaction: I have a nasty feeling that war only becomes implausible because it hasn't happened for a long time. War looked implausible for Britain in 1890. War certainly now looks implausible in western Europe. |
| 20684 | Financing is increasingly through credit rather than taxes; people prefer investing to taxation [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The European conquest of the world was increasingly financed through credit rather than taxes. …Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 16 'Columbus') | |
| A reaction: This is presumably the mechanism that drives the unstoppable increase of the gulf between the rich and the poor in modern times. With investment, the rich get richer. |
| 13304 | Learned men gain more in one day than others do in a lifetime [Posidonius] |
| Full Idea: In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes. | |
| From: Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]), quoted by Seneca the Younger - Letters from a Stoic 078 | |
| A reaction: These remarks endorsing the infinite superiority of the educated to the uneducated seem to have been popular in late antiquity. It tends to be the religions which discourage great learning, especially in their emphasis on a single book. |
| 20675 | The more you know about history, the harder it becomes to explain [Harari] |
| Full Idea: A distinguishing mark of history is that the better you know a historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 13 'Hindsight') | |
| A reaction: Presumaby that means it resembles statistics. Each individual reading is perplexing, but some patterns emerge on the large scale. |
| 20676 | History teaches us that the present was not inevitable, and shows us the possibilities [Harari] |
| Full Idea: We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and the we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we can imagine. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 13 'Hindsight') | |
| A reaction: On the whole winners forget history, and losers are branded through and through with it. If you don't know history, you can never understand the latter group. |
| 20820 | Time is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed [Posidonius, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: Posidonius defined time thus: it is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed and slowness. | |
| From: report of Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.08.42 | |
| A reaction: Hm. Can we define motion or speed without alluding to time? Looks like we have to define them as a conjoined pair, which means we cannot fully understand either of them. |
| 20671 | In order to explain both order and evil, a single evil creator is best, but no one favours that [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Monotheism explains order but not evil, and dualist religion explains evil but not order. One logical solution is a single omnipotent God who created the universe, and is evil - but nobody in history has had much stomach for that belief. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Battle') | |
| A reaction: Eh? Is there not also good, which also needs explaining? And there is some chaos to be explained too. Hume offers the best explanations. An inexperienced god, a team of squabbling gods, a god with shifting moods…. Study the facts first. |
| 20664 | Animism is belief that every part of nature is aware and feeling, and can communicate [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Animism is the belief that almost every place, every animal, every plant and every natural phenomenon has awareness and feelings, and can communicated direct with humans. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 03 'Talking') | |
| A reaction: So does this count as a 'supernatural' belief system? It seems not, if the awareness is integral to the natural feature, and dies with it. Panpsychism is not supernatural either. A problem for anyone trying to define Naturalism. |
| 20666 | Most polytheist recognise one supreme power or law, behind the various gods [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Polytheism does not necessarily dispute the existence of a single power or law governing the entire universe. Most poytheist and even animist religions recognised such a supreme power that stands behind all the different gods, demons and holy rocks. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Benefits') | |
| A reaction: Presumably this one supreme power was always taken to be too remote for communication or worship. Are the other gods seen as slaves, or friends, or ambassadors of the Supreme One? |
| 20667 | Polytheism is open-minded, and rarely persecutes opponents [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes 'heretics' and 'infidels'. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Benefits') | |
| A reaction: The Old Testament tells of the Jews turning on local pagans, and India was presumably tolerant Hindus encountering less tolerant Muslims. Then there's Christians in Africa. Dreadful bunch, the monotheists. Romans killed very few Christians. |
| 20665 | Mythologies are usual contracts with the gods, exchanging devotion for control of nature [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Much of ancient mythology is a legal contract in which humans promise everlasting devotion to the gods in exchange for mastery over plants and animals. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Silencing') | |
| A reaction: [He cites the first book of Genesis] So how readily do you swith allegiance, if someone else's gods are more successful? Why be loyal a loser. It should be like shopping - but I bet it wasn't. |
| 20669 | Dualist religions see everything as a battleground of good and evil forces [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Polytheism gave birth to monotheism, and to dualistic religions. Dualism explains that the entire universe is a battleground between good and evil forces, and everything that happens is part of that struggle. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Battle') | |
| A reaction: Presumably we are supposed to support the good guys, so the gods are not equals. God v Satan seems the right model, but Satan has to be beyond God's control, or else the problem of evil has to be solved. Empedocles held something like this. |
| 20670 | Dualist religions say the cosmos is a battleground, so can’t explain its order [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Dualist religions solve the problem of evil, but are unnerved by the Problem of Order. …If Good and Evil battle for control of the world, who enforces the laws governing this cosmic war? | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Battle') | |
| A reaction: You might explain it if one side was persistently winning, which is roughly God v Satan. |
| 20673 | Manichaeans and Gnostics: good made spirit, evil made flesh [Harari] |
| Full Idea: Manichaeans and Gnostics argued that the good god created the spirit and the soul, whereas matter and bodes are the creation of the evil god. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'Battle') | |
| A reaction: Hm. What motivated the evil god to do that? The evil god's achievement looks a lot more impressive. |
| 20668 | Monotheism appeared in Egypt in 1350 BCE, when the god Aten was declared supreme [Harari] |
| Full Idea: The first monotheist religion known to us appeared in Egypt c.1350 BCE, when Pharaoh Akenaten declared that one of minor deities of the Egyptian pantheon, the god Aten, was in fact the supreme power ruling the universe. | |
| From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 12 'God') | |
| A reaction: Zeus seems to have started like a tribal chief, and eventually turned into something like God. |