I thought it was time to publish some of the books I have been reading. Over the next few days you can look forward to a number of different posts covering the different books I have read. Within, you will find different quotes that I found to be interesting and illuminating.
Philosophy and Life — A.C Grayling
“In light of the foregoing remarks, ‘we’ and the ‘self’ which every ‘I’ is taken to denote are to be understood as follows in this book: the instances of ‘I’ who make up the ‘we’ to whom its remarks are addressed are in each case the underlying, fundamental, private selves lurking among the historically and socially constructed selves which are presented to the world as a public ‘myself’. And the ideal of philosophical reflection aimed at answering Socrates’ question is to make the fundamental self this public ‘myself’, or at the very least its governor.” (Pg. 18)
“Kant long ago observed that the conceptual categories we apply in managing experience create a world for us consisting of property-bearing particular things standing in causal relationships to each other in space and time. But all these concepts — ‘particular thing’, ‘space’, ‘time’ , ‘causality’ — are imposed by our minds on the raw data of experience to give them shape and coherence; they are our constructs, and Kant was of the view that by definition therefore they are not descriptive of reality as it is in itself — what he called ‘noumenal’ reality to distinguish it from the way the world appears to us, this being ‘phenomenal’ reality. On this view, the concept of causality is a cognitive convenience, not a fact about ultimate reality.”
“So to conclude: we — readers of books like this — are ultimately free, despite our many entanglements in history and society, to make choices about how we should live and what values we should live by.” (Pg. 33)
And one of my favourite topics, honesty, truth, and dishonesty. Grayling writes:
“Dishonesty in business, politics, government, policing, manufacturing standards — in short anywhere that dishonesty causes serious harm — is a different matter.”
“Here, though, the question of weighting enters. Yes, truth-telling is a very high good. So is kindness. It is sometimes unkind to tell a person the truth. Indeed, the Church of Scotland famously has a precept, it is a sin to tell an untimely truth.’ Which value should trump the other? Again, the answer is that it depends, of course, on cases.
“The great figure associated with this outlook [deontology] is Immanuel Kant.”
“A hypothetical imperative says, ‘If you want to be healthier, then you should give up smoking.’ But if you do not want to be healthier, you do not have to give up smoking. A categorical imperative says, ‘Keep your promises’ — no ifs and buts.”
“In the case of families, bearing in mind that that offspring and siblings are adventitiously together, having not chosen each other freely, the relationships do well to mature into friendship as the culmination of ‘growing up’, indeed as the mark of the fulfilment of that process.”
I have never read Cicero’s De Amicitia, which I quote below, but this passage is beautiful, positive and optimistic:
“Therefore though I grieve for Scipio, I take comfort and strength in what our friendship was like, and both he and our friendship survive this mere change. We walked the earth together, and learned and shared much together; none of this can be taken away. I think what he would wish for me, could he wish it now, is that I would not allow my missing him to make me fail in my duties to myself, to others, and to his memory. I dwell with pleasure on the good of the past, and summon courage to bear his absence now, and turn outward to others who likewise grieve, to comfort them in their affliction; for their is comfort in what we share, and in the knowledge that others understand how we feel.”
At the beginning of chapter 8 “Love” Grayling introduces the very great and ancient question of love. He introduces the different types of love. Let us consider each of them in turn.
- Pragma — “is the bond among comrades”
- Eros — “is erotic love”;
- Philia — “is the love of friends”;
- Storge — is family love;
- Ludus — is playful love;
- Agape — is the love of humanity; (in Latin this is caritas, from which we get ‘charity’ and ‘care’)
- And in the Greek’s view mania, which we (in the 21st century) call ‘infatuation’, was a punishment inflicted by the gods, and they were grateful to old age (they claimed) for releasing them from it. They prized philia, the bond of friendship above all other kinds.
There is no doubt about it that philosophers have recognized for a very long time the different types of love. Even as an undergraduate I was introduced to, I have to admit, only 3 different types of love. To see that there are far more than that is news to me — at least the 4 new types of love. I strongly recall being taught about eros, phillia, and agape.
“They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Grayling’s point is to say that ‘courage survived, and humane impulses survived’. He talks quite a bit about the holocaust in his book.
“Thus it was that even in Auschwitz courage survived, humane impulses survived — and because of them, some humans survived — even though the main story by far was the immense inhumanity engulfing them all. None of this says there were ‘good lives’ in either of the first two senses described above for any but those in charge at Auschwitz and other camps. But it does say that there were good lives in the third sense — lives worth living, and meaningful lives, even among the inmates, the brutalised, and those who died there. This is a significant finding.” (Pg. 203)
“The extreme case of scepticism about moral accountability arises in the ‘free will’ debate, for there a hard determinist position entails that no one is responsible for anything, and the very idea of morality — which depends on agency, responsibility, the validity of praise and blame — vanishes.” (Pg. 205)
This point is very relevant to 9.8 and I will certainly be using it:
“Physically, we are born to age and die, and in the process are vulnerable to many insults from microbes and viruses, falling rocks, abuse of our own organs by alcohol, nicotine and other drugs, radiation from natural sources, accidents and many other things besides. Psychologically, we are born to anxiety, conflict, desire, and stress more than we are born to happiness. This is because we are social animals and life among others is, psychologically, to jostle in the crowd, to have to compete sometimes, to experience uncertainty, to suffer setbacks and injustices small and large. ‘Life isn’t fair’ we say, and like almost all cliches this is true.” (Pg. 209)
In chapter 10 Duties, Grayling returns once again to the discussion of normativity.
“But although the entanglement in normativity is a vexation to some, it is in fact a convenience, and even a relief, to others — perhaps to most others.” (Pg. 212)
And then back we go to the Socratic question, the prevailing theme of the book:
“To the question ‘What sort of person should I be?’ normativity gives the answer: ‘Someone who fits in and gets by.” (Pg. 213)
Definitely a very interesting clarification, the distinction between ethics and morality:
“Recall that morality is not the same as ethics; morality deals with the question of how people behave, especially in their relations with one another; it does not, as ethics does, aspire to the great task of answering the Socratic question, but instead more limitedly seeks to guide (more usually, to instruct and direct) how people should act, independently of what their personal character and predilections are. And one sharp if surprising way to see what morality therefore is, is to recognize it as fundamentally a matter of good manners.” (Pg. 224—225)
“It is important to be clear about what ‘radical freedom’ and the absence of a blueprint mean. The latter does not mean that we have no genetic endowment or family circumstances or social pressures — no normativity — but rather that whatever effect these factors have, in the end it is what people do that makes them what they are. In Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre writes:
Suppose that, like Zola, we showed that the behaviour of these [base, weak, cowardly, and sometimes even frankly evil] characters was caused by their heredity, or by the action of the environment upon them, or by determining factors, psychic or organic. People would be reassured, they would say, ‘You see, that is what we are like, no one can do anything about it.’ But the existentialist, when he portrays a coward, shows him as responsible for his cowardice.He is not like that on account of a cowardly heart or lungs or cerebrum, he has not become like that through his physiological organism; he is like that because he has made himself into a coward by actions.” (Pg. 252—253)
“Seeking truth yields knowledge of things; seeking the good yields knowledge of what is to be done.” (Pg. 325)
Overall, I really enjoyed Grayling’s 2023 book Philosophy and Life. What didn’t I like? What did I find within it that rankled or irritated me? I would say that chapter 4 was a bitter pill to swallow. Adherence to a religion is a no-no for Grayling. “The straightforward answer — to pull no punches: a much more detailed answer is referenced in this endnote — is that adherence to a religion requires accepting a particular and problematic collection of claims, fables, and meaningless formulae as true or at least especially significant, and it even helps continue and even promote the serious harm that religions cause in the world, which the good they do in art, music and charity — good also done by the non-religious — does not excuse.”
Chapter 4 is full of reasons for why, according to Grayling, one cannot answer the Socratic question with religion. But one thing that I have noticed with Grayling, having read several of his books now, is that he is very consistent in his dismissal of Western religions, namely Catholic Christianity. At any rate, many philosophers since ancient times have denied the existence of a god, not least the Christian god. My point in saying this is simply to say that denunciation and repudiation of god or gods is not new at all. Of course Nietzsche denied the existence of the Christian god, and vehemently at that. But what you may not know is that Nietzsche was, in fact, taking aim at Christianity the institution.
Life, life and more life! 