David B. Calhoun’s Blog

Not much from me today I’m afraid - I’m tired and I’m ready to start work tomorrow bright at early at… 8:00am! Eeek!

Anyhow, part of my day today was spent reading the Usenet message boards, in particular the philosophy one. There were a bunch of people trying to piss off the philosophy people, saying that science is more superior than philosophy (the original post was on the subject that the sciences were one time just a branch of philosophy [hence Ph. D = Doctor of Philosophy]). So I decided to piss off the people who hold science so holy and supreme.

I basically said that while science offers us cures for diseases and extension of our lifespan, it doesn’t necessarily have an impact on our lives - that is, it doesn’t help us grow into better people. It just extends our life. More importantly, science doesn’t give us answers into the questions that really matter in life - i.e. the “Why?” questions. Traditionally, philosophy has been mocked as the meaningless pursuit, since it seems to be all theory and doesn’t produce results. While on the other hand, science is always in action, producing things that help our physical bodies.

Oh joy, something to fix my body, but nothing to fix my mind or to give me answers as to the purposes of life, or how to become a better person. If we did not have bodies, science would be completely useless…

Ok, that’s it for my anti-science rant. I just want to qualify this with saying that I appreciate science. There is no doubt it has helped the quality of life over the past couple of centuries. However, this is purely on a physical quality scale. Add to that the fact that science pursues no other end than in hoping to achieve a greater understanding of the physical world. Here’s an analogy: it’s like a person who has been confined to a certain space in their house and yard. Along the way, this person decides to dedicate their life to discovering and catalogueing the world around them. But it’s like collecting stamps - it serves no purpose but to pass time. This is science embodied - the person with a pointless hobby. No effort is made to improve himself as a person or, if there are other people in his house and yard, no effort is made to improve his relationship with them, since examining his house and yard take priority.

In summary, science has no end, and can only be used as a means. So it is not the end-all - something else is needed. On the other hand, philosophy seeks to help people become better persons, to know themselves better, to behave well with other people, and most importantly, to find THE end, THE telos, THE purpose of life. Dismissing philosophy is like the stamp collector dismissing the wise man and laughing him off, ignoring him to pursue his stamp collection.

“For human ways are under the eyes of
the Lord,
and he examines all their paths.
The iniquities of the wicked ensnare
them,
and they are caught in the toils of
their sin.
They die for lack of discipline,
and because of their great folly they
are lost.”
Proverbs 5:21-23

Here’s my obligatory philosophy entry - one has to be made every so often, after all! This is the beginning of a longer essay, and this is a horribly rough outline.

Anyhow, this entry is about role models. Specifically, the role models of today contrasted with the role models of yesterdays.

Just today my mom was talking about how we admire children for their honesty (to a degree) and their free spirited carefree-ness. What a sad day when children are perhaps the best role models for adults everywhere! Not to put down children, but the state they are in is not earned - it is not something tested by time or weathered by experience, it simply is what it is. This isn’t far removed from the reverance people have for beautiful people - people who were born with certain characteristics and were shown undue attention early in life simply based on their looks. The whole point being that a system of merit should be preferred over a system that disregards merit.

(the ideal of the role model of today contrasted with yesterday, adapted by a lecture by David Ciocchi in Spring 2005)
Back to the child example. A separate issue is also at play here: the nature of the role model itself. In years past, the role model was someone whose life’s actions were looked upon as good examples for what we out to aspire to be. They were the most practical models for us - not some unachievable height of fame and glory, but a practical example which we could realistically imitate. A famous example of this in the ancient world is Plutarch’s book The Lives (full title: the Lives of Illustrious Men). In each case the man is praised insofar as he has contributed to his society - to how much he has served society itself.

Today the role model is better said to be someone we are jealous of for attaining fame and glory. The famous actor or actress is admired so far as they are popular or have attained a great amount of wealth. By admiring them, even if we admire their acting, we are not actually admiring them and using them as an example for how we ought to live our own lives. A person might object - “what about people like Mother Teresa?”. Certainly we ought to admire her as a good person to follow, but in reality she is admired rather because she is the exception to the rule. Her selfless dedication to society is something that ought to be admired, and is - but is not followed as a sort of practical guide for how we ought to contribute to society.

When we come back to the admiration of traits in children, you can see how I was distrubed that we would even compare them to role models. Maybe calling them role models is a bit extreme, but nevertheless children have traits while we see as admirable, something that ought to be followed.

To put it bluntly: society today sees being childlike, content and happy - almost blissfully ignorant - as something to be desired over and above the person who has earned their way into a position that serves society as a whole, and has given their life to society over themselves. Is this bad? I definitely think it is. As I’ve often thought, maybe I was just born in the wrong time.

I’ve been puzzled by this for a while now as a sort of philosophical problem, and I may be blowing it out of proportion, but it just fascinates me: to what extent does a person’s life nullify their opinions? I used this analogy in Literature class last Wednesday: people think Nietzsche (who, by the way, has the craziest name in the history of philosophy) told some truths, yet he lived the last decade or so of his life in a syphillis-induced insanity. There seems to be a disconnect from the great life he was teaching and the life he was living, in other words. But does his life make his view null and void? A while back I wrote “Beware of philosophers who don’t live what they teach/preach”, and this is still appealing to me today, but it seems there are different things going on here.

The first, the doctrine/teaching is stated by the philosopher. That is, some fact is thrown into the open air and presented as fact. If the doctrine is useful to us, then this will be presented with a life application to this fact. For instance, it is all well and good that a race of Hapropianides live on the planet Zong at the other corner of the galaxy, but if there is no application then the fact becomes useless to us. However, it doesn’t cease to be a fact! This is the key point.

Therefore, if a philosopher presents a truth (or what is taken to be truth) and gives a method of living this truth, then we would expect the philosopher to live by this method. However, if the philosopher completely contradicts the method of living the truth, the truth claim itself remains untouched (unless we are to assume that the philosopher wasn’t as smart as we once thought, and possibly made an error as to the truth itself). Therefore, the truth claim and the application are completely different things. Yet what I wrote still stands - beware of the philosopher who doesn’t follow his own doctrines, because obviously his method of living those doctrines is flawed. It would be wise to follow a philosopher who gives us a method for following a truth and is able to live that truth, and that the method isn’t completely incapable of being followed.

For when a person explains that the Earth is spherical and yet refuses to travel across the Atlantic for fear of falling off the edge, we ought to avoid only the person and the method, and only follow the truth claim itself (assuming that it is really a truth).

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung, and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.” C.S. Lewis

Some interesting, if not flawed, insight from Victor McCampbell:

“It seems clear to me now that contentedness is something superior in nature to happiness. That is, as happiness in a purely pleasurable sense (in contrast to an Aristotilian sense of happiness as a sort of utility of one’s doing their work, and doing it well).

There is an outright advantage contentedness has over this type of happiness: it seems to be a sort of telos or end, wheras happiness is only a means to an end. This is also seen in the sense that a person who is content is a person who is happy being content in their current state. For how could a person be content who was not happy with their present lot in life?

On the other hand, it is possible to imagine a person who is happy but not content. We admire celebrities because we envy their wealth and their good hand in life, but we fail to realize that these celebrities go on making movie after movie, buying house after house, even marrying spouse after spouse, and all to what end? Surely they are happy with their wealth yet not content in it, for then they wouldn’t seek more.

Therefore, contentedness is superior, for it is an end. Contentedness seems only subservient to happiness because happiness is required to be content - yet this is deceiving: one can be content and have happiness only in the sense that they are happy in their contentedness. This is an extreme example of a contented person, yes, but it illustrates with more clarity the superiority of contentedness.”

It is a sad day for self-refuting premises:

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

from Nietzsche’s Nachlass (1900), A. Danto translation.