Philosophical questions

Philosophy is to ask questions. The most successful questions which have been asked are to inspect the results of scientific studies. Questions about Religion, Ethics, and Aesthetics, all of which are rooted in the human metaphysics based on human nature and human rights, cannot be settled apparently. That is because of the two concepts: conscience and truth, which are resulted from human nature and human understanding of our environment, the earth, and the sky. Conscience in Chinese is “良心” and truth is “天理.” Both are the cornerstones of a good society, if not just Chinese society.

Motivated by my recent reading of an essay written in Chinese (see the attached photo, authored by a female essayist Wanying/Bingxin Xie (谢冰心1900-1999), whose essays were on my must-read list whenever published in the newspaper, People’s Daily, where I grew up in China.

Her essay was started by inspecting right and wrong in an ordinary sense, it was one’s opinion against another’s opinion whenever it tends to be necessary for a settlement. She then theorizes the problem in a larger sense: exploring three differences that cannot be settled easily if at all. One is time, a historical view; the second is the environmental difference; and the third is social/cultural, in which the settlement must have to encounter the misunderstanding, the difficulty in persuasion, and the result of attacking one another.

Her short essay, Right and Wrong (1921), ended with the questions “What is the truth? and what is the conscience?” by knowing the two are the cornerstones for a settlement of disputes, both of which are the causes of human beings’ painstaking doubts and hesitations.

The image of Bingxin Xie’s essay came from my elementary school alumni Xiaoqing Xie, who was a retired professor at Beijing Language University. I am obliged to express my pleasure and appreciation to use it as a source of the discussion in this article.

Between the first and second round of presidential voting – a French election, Le Pen vs. Macron

“A tantrum by infantilized populists may elect Le Pen,” George Will made his analysis of the voting results of the first round of French presidential voting yesterday, in the Washington Post, A27. He has foreseen “the social esteem of those in the lower strata of a government-ordered society” coming because individuals diminished as infantilized wards of a government. Quoting Will’s words about Le Pen:

Le Pen’s measures to “detoxify (her term) her party have included purging the party’s founder, her antisemitic father (he once called the Holocaust a “detail” of history). And destroying campaign leaflets showing her pleased to be shaking Vladimir Putin’s hand (her party has received Russian funding). And deploring inflation even more than immigrants. All this is cosmetic, but successful.

Then, George Will mentioned the book, “What Ails France?” by French-British Professor Brigitte Granville. (Please see the photo at the end of the article.) Quoting George Will again:

A “righteous consensus,” the statism that “asphyxiates the country’s potential,” France’s paternalism expresses the “tenacious notion of the state as saviour.” Sixty-two percent of France’s GDP is spent by the government, the European Union’s highest level.

What a surprise! This has explained by George Will as follows.

The French distrust of free markets is related to low trust of one another, and high trust in government bureaucracy, which employs 20 percent of France’s workforce. Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) said, “France is an extremely fertile country: bureaucrats are planted in its soil, and taxes spring up.” High income taxes (on top of a purchase) help explain why average annual hours worked per employee has decreased 20 percent in 30 years. France’s labor code fills 3,784 pages.

A French word describes the French disease: dirigisme, the micromanaging state as source and director of society’s creativity, which for that reason is another scarcity. The self-fulfilling assumption is that the public is infantile. Another assumption is that the civil service is omnicompetent. A French thinker, Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), warned against the cognitive dissonance inherent in paternalistic statism:

“The government should know everything and foresee everything in order to manage the lives of the people, and the people need only let themselves be taken care of . … Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state … to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.”

According to Professor Granville, Macron has a politically perilous trait, an “ingrained dislike to ordinary people, or at least an inability to disguise that fact. That’s elitism, the opposite of populism.

George Will ended his column with the following:

France’s flirtation with Le Pen’s version of Henry Adams’s curdled notion of politics (“the systematic organization of hatreds”) illustrates how populists’ rote denunciations of “elites” open a path to power for demagogues. Today, one such is implicitly promising to wield the French state’s gigantic redistributive power to somehow redistribute esteem, thereby assuaging populists’ resentments. She could become president of the nation once considered the cradle of the Enlightenment.

I always read George Will’s column first once I picked up my Sunday paper. Although this analysis is based on French politics, it is suitable for most library democratic countries.

The above is the editorial review on Amazon.com’s book section.

Faith and Religion

Faith is our ability to believe, given at birth. Religion is in which we may choose to believe.

The metaphysics of human beings is not the same as the physics of human beings.

The mind is not our brain plus other sensibility-related body organs. The mind works with the support of every part of our living body, but not another way around. The great philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) described this phenomenon by saying that the mind is indivisible and the body is divisible. (Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641, page I2, translated by Michael Moriarty, Oxford University Press) Reading Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) recently, I was impressed by his keen observations on the human mind with little scientific discovery in medicine and human anatomy at his time. Descartes’s path of growing up is not just to be a learned man but to discover truths by being open-minded toward his own doubts about his acquired knowledge. (Discourse on Method, 1637, translated by Laurence J. Lafleur)

A dozen decades later, another great philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was born. He carried on human endeavors in scientific discoveries with his most impressive motto, “Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” His study in astronomy enabled him to develop a systematic approach to the understanding of human reason and human judgment. His theory of moral laws (Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785, translated by Lewis White Beck) can be used for Karl Marx’s theory about a communist society. Neither is practical; both sound convincing to me. Are both theories dreams that can never be realized? Who knows? Human makes progress perpetually.

I have been following the late Christopher Hitchens’ public appearances to defend his writings. (1949-2011) He is a very good debater to me, for which he can be a perfect embodiment of my thesis in Mind and Language, my latest writing on March 30, 2022. In his book “God is not great. How Religion Poisons Everything” (2007) he has not only shown his vast knowledge of this topic historically but also related to contemporary problems caused by Faith and Religion. To me, the latter seems to be his problem in committing a logical flaw; that is, he has used the bad actors in current public world affairs to deny Religion categorically.

In the conclusion of his book, (Chapter 19, p277) he started by quoting Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781) as follows.

The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the truth, but rather the pursuit of truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent, and proud. If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand. (Anti-Goeze, 1778)

After quoting the above, Christopher Hitchens wonderfully pointed out the following:

The great Lessing put it very mildly in the course of his exchange of polemics with the fundamentalist preacher Goeze. And his becoming modesty made it seem as if he had, or could have, a choice in the matter. In point of fact, we do not have the option of “choosing” absolute truth, or faith. We only have the right to say, of those who do claim to know the truth of revelation, that they are deceiving themselves and attempting to deceive–or to intimidate–others. Of course, it is better and healthier for the mind to “choose” the path of skepticism and inquiry in any case, because only by continual exercise of these faculties can we hope to achieve anything. (God is not great. 2009, by Hachtte Book Group, Inc. page 278)

I concur with him that neither the absolute truth nor faith can be our choice. The truth is a logical consequence of our faculty in reason using data at hand. With new data coming in, our logical analyses may change, and so does the truth. Furthermore, faith is our faculty to reason, consequently, to believe.