Blindness, Being Vs. Non-being, and the value of primary documents

It took almost 50 years, but slowly, slowly David Stewart went blind. Until the day, that is, that he saw again.

Upon his interview, David showed no signs of being a flake or a hysteric. He was a manager, a financial officer, a pioneer in arts broadcasting in Europe. He's a sober man. But he was very blind by the end of his trial. He lost his memory for color - for blues, yellows and reds - and he lived in a black and white world. Until the day, he discovered to his delight, that he can still experience color, even though, technichally there is nothing there for him to see.

It's an experience manufactured by his halluncinating brain. And after about 30 minutes, the images will fade, but then others will follow. Paintings coming to life. Wallpaper moving. Mysterious curtains appearing. Stewart said he wasn't frightened, but he wondered what triggered all this.

One of his sons, who is already experiencing the same disease, found the explanation. Stewart has Charles Bonnet syndrom, a condition that often affects people with macular degeneration or diabetic eye disease. "The brain is doing a mash-up of stored visual memories," says ophthalmologist Jonathan Trobe of the University of Michigan. "A surprisingly large number of people who lose sight start seeing things."

The example of David Stewart does some work on the Pre-Socratics.

The first philosophers conceived being as (being) made of matter. Democritus for instance, and other Atomists, viewed Being as comprised of an infinite number of small particles. Both Epicureans and Stoics in the Hellenistic age imagined an outside world of Being, comprised of atoms, literally meaning 'indivisible'. Many people have this same view, though there is more science to back up their groundwork. Today, atoms combine to form all the objects of the universe. They are solid, microscopic, move in space and join one another to form more complex objects. Movement of atoms is possible since inbetween each one of them is a void.

The void is nothing at all. Non-being. A Non-being that, for the Hellenistic philosophers, existed; though, just Greek philosophy had to pass through another thinking revolution in order to postulate the existence of it. A second sailing. The leading figure in this revolution was Plato who conceived the tenet of the Forms. The Forms as the ultimate real Beings, having no special nor material properties.

For me, David Stewart is pragmatically Platonic. And he reminds me that we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe. That we see things internally. That in the search for certainty, it is natural to begin with present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experineces make us know is very likely to be wrong. Discouse and exegesis of texts, formulating tenents based on reasonable arguments rather than on theological doctrine, and setting the foundation on which the future realizations can be created. That process is valuable in and of itself.

The article says, David Stewart in fact has learned to enjoy what he calls 'phantoms'. He can even tigger them, he thinks.

The Owls Are Not What They Seem

Stoicism in David Lynch's Twin Peaks

On the Stoic Opposition that Pleasure is what Humans Seek

I have been thinking a lot about the last slide that we had in class on Wednesday. Especially the Stoic point that infants did not seek what was pleasurable in foods when they were young, meaning that pleasure is not what we seek but rather we seek what keeps us alive. Though this makes sense, I do not believe that it is true. I remember watching an episode of "I Shouldn't be Alive," which is a show about people who have survived dangerous situations, and in this episode a man was adrift at sea on a raft. He was able to catch fish, but oddly he found himself not craving the meat of the fish but the fish eyes. This is because fish eyes have a very high fat content which he needed to survive. This suggests that our bodies in some cases will change what we find pleasurable in order to keep us alive. If this same concept is applied to the infant example provided by the Stoics it does not seem as damaging to the Epicurean point. Rather it might suggest that both the Stoics and Epicureans were partially right, but failed to grasp the whole concept.

"One's lesser talents might lead to success in craft or business, but then one might never find out what one's more playful capacities might have been."-Gary Snyder

One thing I found really interesting in the Enchiridion is where it said that if you, "confine your aversion to those objects only which are contrary to the natural use of your faculties, which you have in your own control, you will never incur anything to which you are averse."  This doesn't relate perfectly, but reading this made me think of something I have heard many times before, which is that in order to live up to your full potential you should not focus on trying to fix things you're bad at, but instead focus on what you're good at.  For example, say you're terrible at math but you're an amazing artist.  You shouldn't try to get an A in your math class because by doing that you'll expend all your energy on something that you can probably become mediocre at at best.  Instead you should put all of your energy into you art, because if you do that you can accomplish really amazing things.  This also reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by the poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder:

"One's lesser talents might lead to success in craft or business, but then one might never find out what one's more playful capacities might have been."

This quote has really affected me, and kind of relates to what I was just talking about, but would relate even more if you thought of it like this: "One's lesser talents might lead to success in something one doesn't care about and isn't that great at, but then one might never find out what one's natural, passion-fed capacities might have been."  That's kind of the same idea, I think.  So basically just do what you like to do.

Going back to the Enchiridion, I don't necessarily think you should "confine your aversion to those objects only which are to the natural use of your faculties, which you have in your own control," because there are certain cases where I think you should show your aversion to things that don't seem to be in your control.  For example, though you yourself might not have the ability to get rid of a corrupt ruler, by expressing your aversion to this ruler you might end up contributing to a larger group of people who can collectively get rid of this ruler.

On Walking to the Door

Like Alex, I've been getting pretty frustrated with the Stoics, especially with their metaphysics. There are a ton of things you can reason successfully about. Still, these guys never seem to get enough, and they continue to reason about experience--working backwards. It can't be done. 

'if there is something in the world which human reason, strength and power are incapable of producing, that which produces it must be better than man. But the heavens and everything that, which display unceasing regularity cannot be produced by man. Therefore that by which those things are produced is better than man. And what name rather than God would you give to this?'

I wouldn't give it a name. Sure, you can understand an experience of strength or power but that is completely different. Understanding just puts labels on everything so your brain can file it neatly away. That color you're seeing? Yellow. The shape? Curved. The curved yellow thing? Banana. Check. Everything you know about bananas, you know because you had an experience and you understood; what more could reason possibly tell you beyond that? If you're trying to get to the 'essence' of the banana, its 'ultimate reality', then enjoy your aneurysm. 

For the Stoics, A man is a creature who possesses the capacity to see connections as a natural endowment. The whole world is the work of immanent logic, and in his power of articulate thought man is supposed to have the means to formulate statements that mirror cosmic events. That is an attractive notion. More, I like it. Few contemporary philosophers offer us such sweeping visions of our world and ourselves; few have the courage to reach as far or as wide. But the Stoics think they can reason there way to anything. "The world has no beginning-- otherwise, there would have been nothing to start it!" Yeah, that makes sense--wait  a second. What? "The world had a beginning-- and infinite regress is impossible!" Both of those seem reasonable, since we can't experience either. That's exactly the sort of dialectic crap that ruins it for me. Time and space don't belong to reason. You're better off watching Carl Sagan videos on Youtube. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxlPVSAnWOo

World-View Mayhem

One of the things that I find the most frustrating about reading ancient philosophy is the huge number of unsubstantiated claims that get thrown around. For example, the Stoics' belief in the gods. Where did they see them? What experience do they have with them? What they provide us with is a line of reasoning that seems, for some reason, strange, antiquated, irrelevant. I realized, however, that this is because I am being presented a world-view drastically different than any one which I could encounter today. Our most basic premises are not shared, and for this reason, it is very difficult to wrap my finger around the totality of what they're saying. Every sentence I read from the book floods my mind with a million objections that I need to suppress in order to focus and try to latch on to a world-view such as the Stoics', that says free-will is freedom of the attitude, or that nothing is something. These claims make no sense to me, and my head is screaming "no, no, no", but whenever I am able to forcibly silence my own thoughts, I can sometimes catch a glimpse of the thoughts of the Hellenistic philosophers.

This has led me to conclude that there are multiple (perhaps equally valid) ways to view the world, and existence. The issue is that many of them are mutually exclusive.

The Hellenistic Philosophers--Class Synopsis February 25, 2011

We began by discussing Zeno as a reactionary. He saw that Epicureanism was sweeping Greece and sought to reverse this trend, because he saw Epicureanism as a false philosophy. Zeno harbored a special hatred for atomism, and hedonism (pleasure as the good), two Epicurean staples.

We then learned that the word for Epicurus’ school, “Stoa”, means “porch” in Greek. This name was used because, being a foreigner, Zeno was not permitted to own his own space, and thus he and his followers met on a porch.

There were three main periods of Stoic thought: ancient, middle, and Roman/new Stoa.

On a side note, Dr. Layne mentioned that not-being has an ontological status of being to the Stoics, which is a crucial point, for it will have many implications in metaphysics.

Again expressing the dialogue between Epicureanism and Stoicism, Dr. Layne showed us a chart which depicted the almost diametrical nature of their belief systems. Glancing over: where the Stoics believed in monism, the Epicureans believed in atomism; where the Stoics defended an absolute teleology, the Epicureans disregarded any notion of an ultimate end or goal; where the Stoics were Pantheistic (their Gods played an integral role in the composition and nature of our world), the Epicureans believed in absentee gods; to the Stoics the soul was distinct from the body, but to the Epicureans, the soul was embodied (made of tiny, round atoms); where the Stoics held a strict, deontological ethic, the Epicureans believed that pleasure was the good.

The metaphor of the orchard illustrated the tripartition of philosophy from the Stoics’ perspective. The walls or outer parameter of an orchard is logic: it delimits and defends the orchard. The necessary conditions of the orchard, like sunshine, and water, and everything necessary for the trees to grow, represents physics. And finally, the fruit of all our labor is Ethics.

Logos meant many things to the Stoics. It was the source of truth in logic, the constructive principle in physics, and the normative principle in ethics. Long describes logos as having two parts: 1) dialectic, and 2) rhetoric. By all accounts, logos acts as a fountainhead of understanding. Rejecting the Parmenidian and Platonic sense of nous, the Stoics subscribed to a Heraclitean logos in order to argue for the objective and subjective man. This point became very unclear to me as it was then connected to episteme (mind), and ousia (being). It seemed to boil down to logos being “in us”.

The Stoics placed a heavy emphasis on language, and saw logos as the principle of truth, i.e., the law of thinking, knowing, and speaking (again, dialectic and rhetoric). Since logic is the elaboration of the criteria for truth, it needed to be treated first, so that it could act as the hand-servant of the Stoics’ other investigations (especially ethics).

The Stoic reliance on the senses, or their epistemological optimism, led them to engage in a dispute with the skeptics. For the Stoics, man is born “Tabula Rasa” or “blank slate”. We have no intuitive knowledge. Experience is the source of everything we know, meaning that sensation holds an important position to the stoics, for all knowledge depends upon it.

Foreshadowing Descartes’ “clear and distinct” ideas, the Stoics argued that only cataleptic sensations were infallible. These referred to any comprehensive presentation of reality. The term verdical presentation was brought up, meaning a sensation to which we assent—logos in our soul. This is important to the stoics, because they believed that we were not free as to whether or not we experience a certain sensation, but we were free to affirm/assent to or deny said sensation.

This “liberty of assent” should adhere to certain rules put forward by the stoics. These rules took the form of Stoic logic, or dialectic, which provides guidelines for inference.