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Absurd Assumptions • Post Post, Meta Letter • I Am Not ‘Sexuate’ • Freedom For Snails Now! • Meaning Multiplies • Whipping Nietzsche Into Shape • Literature vs Life • Angry Stoics • Atomism

Absurd Assumptions

Dear Editor: I found Dr Doolan’s article ‘Authenticity and Absurdity’ in Issue 163 to be an interesting exploration of potential definitions of authenticity. However, the entire structure of the article fell apart for me when he type-cast society into one demographic of his choosing. Doolan seems to be describing people as something like walking stomachs, seeking to consume without critical thinking. To believe that we’re all obsessed with social media, all happily adopting the common denominator, all pursuing our selfish fame and fortune, and all gradually evolving into Kim Kardashian, is illogical. I don’t believe he recognises that the audience of this magazine are critical thinking, self-aware individuals! Perhaps he’s still in the 70s, where we’re all ‘just another brick in the wall’ (Pink Floyd).

His claim that business school prepares students to serve blindly in the corporate world is also incorrect. After my undergraduate degree in philosophy, I pursued an MBA, where the students were advised that we have a responsibility to ensure that people of all statuses are considered and cared for in our decision-making and business case proposals. We were advised to think of solutions that are sustainable – not just in terms of a clean, green Earth, but also in terms of the impact on people’s livelihoods. I can still recall one professor passionately advocating for our business cases to directly answer the question: ‘What about the plight of a poor girl living and working in a sweatshop on the other side of the world?’ One can only really belong in society if one takes some responsibility for it. Doolan seems to have excluded the entire demographic of people who care, people who lead, people who think critically, people who solve problems creatively, people who are not drones, not self-absorbed, not selfish, and who read, think and write. In short, his definition of ‘authenticity’ is absurd.

Rahul Dhingra, Toronto

Post Post, Meta Letter

Dear Editor: In Issue 162 Christina Aziz elucidates the progression from modernism to postmodernism, now converging in metamodernism, which represents a synthesis of the two previous schools of thought. As a strong supporter of science-based progress, I prefer the modernist perspective over the postmodernist, primarily because postmodernism succumbs to an inherent contradiction: as Aziz reports, one of the forerunners of postmodernism was Friedrich Nietzsche, who asserted that ‘Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions’. This statement reflects the rejection of objective truth, which is a fundamental postmodernist concept. However, the statement presents a significant problem: if someone asserts something like Nietzsche does in his statement, he asserts it as a truth; but if truth is an illusion, even his assertion is an illusion, thereby undermining its own foundations, and indeed, the very foundation of postmodernist thought. A school of thought that undermines itself is unsustainable.

Andrea Gianoncelli

Dear Editor: The problem with resurrecting and ‘feeling nostalgic’ for pre-post-modern narratives is: Just whose narratives are we talking about? Postmodernism arose out of a rejection of all things modern, that is to say, all things Western. Given the current political climate much of the Western world is entrenched in, I suggest that postmodernism’s light-your-own-way ethos towards metanarratives isn’t going away any time soon.

Marion Lisa Robson

I Am Not ‘Sexuate’

Dear Editor: It was interesting to learn about Luce Irigaray’s life and her ideas in the interview of in Issue 162, but I have a different point of view on gender and sex. First, ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are different concepts. The former describes our body, the chromosomes we’re born with, etc. The latter is related to our psyche, and is far more complex. So, while there are at least three sexes (male, female, intersex), plenty of genders exist. As a feminist, it is painful to observe women who used to shout ‘My uterus is mine’, now saying ‘My uterus is I’, and trying to tell their sisters what is ‘feminine’ and what is not. I was born as a female, but it is not a key concept of my identity or personality: I am who I am, regardless of what my body looks like.

The differences between the sexes that Irigaray identifies are, in my opinion, a product of the narratives and stereotypes that societies built and imposed upon both men and women. But we’re free now; we are the writers of our own stories. So how about we stop worrying about what’s in other people’s underwear?

Alice Nieri, London

Freedom For Snails Now!

Dear Editor: This is in response to PN 163’s ‘Politics of Freedom’ theme. All that talk of politics has me thinking: What would be the politics of snails, if snails were capable of governance?

By chance, I happened upon the MNN (Mollusk News Network), which filled me in on the latest in gastropod politics. Snail Democrats (those who favor zipping towards the future) say that globalism is great as long as the globe is small. Republicans (who favor an approach where one can stop and behold one’s own slime tracks) say that the curvature of a globe is harder to slide across than a flat plane. Rebellious youth, be they slimennials or Gen S, have been painting their shells florescent colors in defiance of cultural norms. (Hungry birds sometimes show admiration for these bright designs.) Liberals continue to argue that global warming is a crisis because increased exposure to the sun is a form of ‘cosmic salt’. Conservatives claim this is ridiculous, since the increased moisture should revitalize mucus layers; and besides, they could all evolve into sea snails if the Earth floods. Transgender politics are politics as usual, since snails are hermaphrodites, and there’s already only one type of bathroom. Great way to keep it simple.

Then there’s the issue of capital punishment. Is it cruel and unusual to vinegar-spray a convicted felon? The beer trap was already vetoed, based upon the fact that it would waste good beer. I guess they might just have to go back to the old-fashioned ‘sprinkling of the salt’.

Privacy is a hot topic. Secretion hackers (shackers) have refined techniques in taking personal information based on people’s mucus trails; so the public is advised to carry a hose wherever they go. And then there’s arms control. A gang of cone snails has been on a poking spree near the beach. Congress is calling for a ban on all harpoon barbs longer than two inches. Of course, there’s been controversy surrounding the attempted assassination of former president Clump, who was well-known for his ungainly orange shell. Conspiracy theorists contend that no snail should have been able to get that close with a bottle of boric acid. The SSS (Snail Secret Service) say they had no chance because most of their bodyguards are banana slugs, who are usually, well, sluggish.

Larry Chan, New York City

Meaning Multiplies

Dear Editor: I enjoyed the many thought-provoking articles in Philosophy Now Issue 162, ‘The Meaning Issue’. My thoughts: Philosophers rightly frown on claims of knowledge based on blind faith, dogma, and myth. Using reason and empirical observation, we have discovered much regarding our own nature and our unique place in the universe. This has provided solid grounds for drawing logical conclusions as to the meaning and purpose of our existence. It shows us that humans are unique in numerous ways. For example, we are organic. This is rare. Over 99% of the stuff in the universe is inorganic. It always decays, going from more complex states to simpler states, until it all eventually ends up as nothing but dust. But organic stuff grows at least for a while. Our bodies and minds grow into more complex structures. Organic things are driven to eat and procreate, but humans rise higher, and use reason to understand the world and attempt to make it a better place. We think and feel. We thrive and strive. We build and create. Relative to anything we’ve found around us, we are far more intelligent, being able to reason and deduce. We seek and find truth and knowledge. We discover and capitalize on cause-and-effect relationships.

These unique abilities inform our calling: to seek truth and knowledge. Our purpose is to make meaning out of the chaos of the universe we reside in. To find and create order. To build, intentionally. To strive to reach understanding and knowledge, which we call truth. If in the future we find something that negates this, so be it, we will adjust our understanding. But for now, this is the most logical conclusion as to the meaning and purpose of it all.

Scott E. Newton, Pacifica, CA

Dear Editor: Our lives should have value, not just meaning. Hitler’s life had considerable meaning for himself, for his followers, and for his victims. However, for his victims his life had a marked negative value, and for many of his followers too. So we should assess the positive or negative value of a life, not its meaning.

How do we do that? Certainly it’s best to believe that our own lives have positive value. Believing our life has a negative value is a feature of depressive illness and a cause in itself of depression. It also makes us less capable of effective action, whether for good or for evil.

However, we are not best placed to assess the value of our own lives. To best decide whether our lives have a positive or negative value, we can turn to those who have been affected by both our actions and our failures to act. We will naturally find conflicting views, but we’re likely to accept the judgement of those we think lead valuable lives. It would be most accurate to assess the value of a life in some objective way. Unfortunately, probably the best we can usually do is to accept the verdict of those whose lives we’ve touched, as to whether we’ve harmed or helped them.

Allen Shaw, Leeds

Dear Editor: C.S Lewis was a young officer in WW1, and an atheist at the time. He was injured himself, and also witnessed suffering of others. After converting to Christianity, Lewis spoke of suffering as ‘God’s megaphone’. So suffering is a discipline the Almighty imposes on His creation? But surely, in our quest for meaning in suffering, don’t we deserve a more three-dimensional process? The process must be one that both theist and atheist can embrace.

Victor Frankl’s seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) comes to our rescue. It is an autobiographical account of Frankl’s experience of incarceration in the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Writing that book would have been a valuable and very personal opportunity for Frankl to reassess the meaning-based logotherapy he developed in the early 1930s. In PN 162, Patrick Testa cites Frankl’s three point plan for dealing with the ‘meaning in suffering’ dilemma. First there is creativity. Second there is love (this doesn’t necessarily mean between two people. It can be a passion for a project). Third, there’s striving for justice. Might there be a fourth dimension to Frankl’s process? One might add that there’s meaning in suffering when out of suffering comes some greater good.

Kevin Chubb, Cadoxton, Barry

Dear Editor: I really enjoyed ‘The Meaning Issue’ of Philosophy Now (Issue 162), because it goes to the core of existence, not only on an individual level but even the cosmic level, and the variety of discussions reflected that range.

Rob Gilbert’s article, ‘The Present Is Not All There Is To Happiness’, raised some interesting points. The intersection of Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia (a good life) with the significance of time’s projection into both the past and the future caused me to consider an aspect that Gilbert alluded to, which is the difference in perspective from youth to age. People rarely acknowledge that we’re not really in a position to judge if we’ve lived a ‘good life’ until later in that life. It’s only by looking back over what one might have achieved or feel satisfaction about that one can truly make that judgement. I say this as someone who is probably in the last quartile of their life. When we’re younger, we naturally project into the future dreams and ambitions that are yet unfulfilled. Not surprisingly, our priorities change with age. What seemed important in our youth no longer matters, and we judge our lives by other criteria, which could have to do with family or just encounters we’ve made over a lifetime. Many of us, looking back, can identify with John Lennon’s line, ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making plans’.

When we’re young there’s a natural tendency to want to explore the world, both physically and intellectually, because we instinctively want to broaden our horizons and expose ourselves to different perspectives. Looking back, I’m glad I did that, despite having limited resources. The journey of life is made most rewarding by diversity, of which failure is a part. I tell people that I don’t dwell on regrets simply because I own my mistakes and don’t put the blame on others.

Paul P. Mealing, Melbourne

Whipping Nietzsche Into Shape

Dear Editor: In your News section of Issue 163, reporting on a new exhibition on Friedrich Nietzsche, you state, “What finally pushed poor Freddy over the edge was the sight of a delivery man in Turin brutally whipping his horse.”

Recent works have started to question this long-established account. For instance, in his 2022 book Friedrich Nietzsche, Ritchie Robertson calls it a “dubious story, not found in print before 1930.” Yet in Nietzsche Now!, published this year, Glenn Wallis writes on the veracity of the story: “Apparently it first appeared in an Italian daily some eleven years after the event, written up by an anonymous reporter who had interviewed self-identified witnesses” as well as members of the Italian family Nietzsche had been lodging with. Would any Nietzsche scholars care to shed further light on the matter?

Patrick West, Deal, Kent

Author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)

Literature vs Life

Dear Editor: Thank you for the literature theme of Issue 161. I appreciated Mike Sutton’s piece on ‘Milan Kundera’s Philosophy of the Novel’, yet also couldn’t help but see it as another example of philosophers getting caught in the futile all-or-nothing binary that the search for essential truth in human affairs has come to feel, and, stuck in that mire, proposing constructions of the individual that are said to fit how things work in life but don’t – at least not in my life.

The pragmatist Richard Rorty supports Kundera’s case for essential truth’s usefulness in science and engineering, but not for the conduct of human affairs. They both seem to conclude that, where access to certainty and unanimity is lost, truth ceases to exist, at least in human affairs. To paraphrase, where there is no evident immutable truth, there is no truth. This is the futile all-or-nothing binary. Futile because setting the minimum standard at immutability is a hurdle designed to elicit failure. Futile, too, because in the absence of immutable truth, humans don’t give up on truth, they get on with making collective work around social norms – normative social truths if you like. They do this because the real world demands it. The real world works fine with ‘all-or-something’ rather than ‘all-or-nothing’. Normative truths are not immutable, but they are sufficient at delivering enough certainty for societies to go on functioning with a semblance of order. The truths are contested, and they will evolve through this process, as they should. They are not immutable, just good enough to work until they don’t, and then they get replaced.

Rorty and Kundera also position individuals contrary to the workings of the real world. Lines such as “The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth”, and “it is precisely in losing the certainty of truth…that man becomes an individual” suggest to me that people require an absence of collective truth in order to flourish individually. But individuals flourish in connected communities, and connected communities need normative truths to function. Think of a garden bed filled with flowers. Passers by will marvel at the flowers while not noticing that the flowers don’t exist without the bed, and that maintenance of a healthy bed is of deep interest to the flowers. Individuals don’t exist without the bed of society to live in, and they certainly won’t flourish when the health of their society is neglected. Maintaining normative truths is key to that social health, and therefore crucial to the flourishing of individuals.

Peter Pearce, Brisbane

Angry Stoics

Dear Editor: As both a student of Stoicism and a psychiatrist, I found David Ashton’s critique of the Stoic view of anger in Issue 163 quite compelling. I agree that the Stoics’ adamant and near-total opposition to anger is, as Ashton notes, ‘not the whole story’, and that in certain contexts, anger can have positive effects. That said, I believe Ashton goes too far in arguing that anger may “sometimes be rational, creative, or morally righteous.” This claim is not strictly wrong, but it misses the much more common disastrous effects of intense or prolonged anger, and it’s really these forms of anger that so worried the Stoics, as indeed they worried the great sages of Buddhism and Judaism (I make this case in my book, The Three-Petalled Rose).

In psychotherapy, we recognize that ‘getting in touch’ with one’s anger is often a necessary first step toward healing after emotional or physical trauma. However, getting ‘stuck’ in an angry emotional posture for long periods is never beneficial for personal growth or physical and emotional well-being. Indeed, the vast majority of patients I have treated would do far better with less, not more, anger. Furthermore, the supposed cathartic benefits of venting anger (‘blowing off steam’) have been convincingly refuted by recent research (see psychiatrist.com/news/it-might-be-time-to-rethink-how-we-handle-anger/).

On a more philosophical level, Dr Ashton argues that anger can represent a justifiable moral judgment in response to harms done. Again, I don’t disagree; but anger is neither necessary nor sufficient to reach a moral judgment regarding harms or injustice. One can conclude that slavery, rape, and genocide are morally repugnant without necessarily becoming angry – as indeed the ancient Stoics would have argued.

Finally, Dr Ashton’s assertion that “For the Stoics, the virtuous life is free from all passionate emotions”, though technically correct, requires some context and qualification, lest readers suppose that the Stoics were a bunch of emotionless automatons. Far from it! The ancient Stoics sought a life of eudaimonia, that is, of equanimity, happiness, and personal flourishing, characterized by what Seneca called “an immense, unchangeable, equable joy, together with peace, calmness… greatness of mind, and kindliness” (On the Happy Life, III).

Dr Ronald W. Pies, Lexington, Mass

Dear Dr Ashton: I write in response to your article on stoicism and anger management, for which I thank you, as it has allowed me to reflect and respond.

Stoicism is not a fixed philosophical system, but has always developed over time, both as a system and at the level of individual practice. Many of the issues to which you allude have already been accepted by many. A pertinent example is the use of emotion as a guide to virtuous action. However, you seem to have missed an important Stoic concept: what are termed the first and second movements. The first movement is the immediate instinctive, emotional response to an event. This is uncontrollable in humans and is often quite strong. It is this that can be used as a moral input to the process of evaluation. The interpretation of the experience is the second movement. It is under the full control of the conscious mind, and is the guide to the most virtuous response.

The Stoic exhortation to ‘extirpate emotion’ is not to remove the first movement, which is impossible. Instead it asks us to control consequent emotional responses, which I would suggest are harmful in the vast majority of cases. Our thoughts have consequences: anger leads to a rapid shift in our attention, and to a profusion of thought processes that take up our limited processor speed and cause perturbation, inhibiting rational reflection and causing emotional upset. Visible anger is usually viewed negatively when observed by others, especially if such responses are recurrent, which they often are. What results is the formation of negative opinions of us in others. Such an opinion spreads usually by word of mouth and can have negative effects on our life chances. Equally negative is the fact that we’re all role models to those who follow us: our children, younger relatives, those junior to us in the work environment… Role modelling is an extremely powerful source of teaching, for good or ill.

I am often asked by my junior doctor colleagues why I never get upset or stressed. My response is that my reason for taking up medicine is to serve the patients, and through them the community, to the best of my ability. The knowledge that becoming stressed or emotional will impair my ability to carry out this duty is a strong motivator indeed to maintain a quiet mind. In the past I was not able to do this; Stoicism has helped me a great deal. And one of the most helpful aspects has been the extirpation of second movement emotion, now accurately understood and put into effect.

Dr Ricky Jones

Dear Editor: It was disappointing to read the article ‘Stoics in Need of Anger Management’ by David Ashton in PN 163. The essay seems to promote many of the so-called ‘positive’ aspects of anger, like the correction of injustice or the creation of art. Now, I understand that anger evolved as a natural and powerful emotion that served the individual and collective needs of our Stone Age ancestors. But shouldn’t philosophers want humans to continue to evolve, to find other ways to motivate people, using wisdom and mindfulness to strive toward the greater good?

At one point, Ashton counters Stoic philosophy by asking, “[Stoics say that] Angry people make worse decisions than calm and ‘stoic’ individuals. But where’s the evidence for this claim?” The evidence cannot be more clear: just read a newspaper or watch CNN! The positive correlation between anger and carnage couldn’t be greater. Dr Ashton, it is time to evolve away from id-based behaviors like anger and fear, towards the higher, spiritual beings we are capable of becoming. Raise the bar, my friend!

Tim Strutz, Harrison Township, Michigan

Atomism

Dear Editor: I really enjoyed Raymond Tallis’s article ‘Atomism & Smallism’ (PN 163).

‘Boiling down’ into what stuff is made of is an application of the atomic hypothesis which he quotes from Richard Feynman. It is a great metaphor which describes the quest for ‘little particles’ that has occupied physics since scientific thought began. But philosophy throws up the conceptual problems of atomism as Tallis explains.

Atoms, for a start, displayed features which suggested that they are complex and therefore are not basic building blocks of matter. So physicists dug deeper, through sub atomic particles until – what? Featureless entities which are indistinguishable from one another?

The name of these entities, wave-particles, at least gives us a sort of picture to hang onto. But really we have no clear language for entities with no features, that can ‘boil up’ to create human size objects with all the features which we observe. Also we have no explanation as to how featureless entities can produce the features of the macroscopic world. If this is a search for fundamental reality then we are facing failure, he argues, and I think he is right.

I’m not a physicist but I understand that for any entity to be detected it must involve some medium which is disrupted by the entity. Objects become visible because they interfere with light waves. If they are smaller than the wavelength of light then that cannot be detected by light. A beam of electrons behave like waves with much smaller wavelengths so therefore, as in the electron microscope, much smaller objects can be detected. Moving into the sub atomic particles, traces of particles are used to construct their properties. As an example, liquid argon gas with an electric field applied can show up tracks of certain particles such as the neutrino. However as we dig deeper the methods become complicated and are far more indirect than a simple observation through a microscope. Eventually the question arises as to how we can detect these proposed entities at all. There may be no medium existing that they interact with, so rendering them permanently invisible to us. For these reasons there may be physical limits to ‘boiling down’ to any fundamental particles, as well as no explanation as to how to ‘boil up’ from featureless entities to the familiar world of human size objects. Therefore fundamental reality may elude us for reasons far greater than technological difficulties.

Pamela White, Nottingham