الخطوط العريضة للقسم
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Born in Iran months after the end of the First World War and raised by farming parents in present-day Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was still a girl when she sensed something deeply wrong with the unquestioned colonial system of her world, with the oppression that was the axis of that world. By the time she was a young woman — a time when our urge to rebel against the broken system is fiery (hot, burning) but we don’t yet have the tools to rebel intelligently, don’t yet know the right questions to ask in order to tell whether the answer we are holding up as an alternative is any better or worse — she rebelled by embracing Communism as “an interesting manifestation (indication, expression) of popular will.” Working by that point as a telephone operator in England, she joined the Communist Party. “It was a conversion, apparently sudden, and total (though short-lived),” she would later recall. “Communism was in fact a germ (spark, bug..) or virus that had already been at work in me for a long time… because of my rejection of the repressive and unjust society of old white-dominated Africa.” It didn’t take her long to see the cracks in Communism. She left the party, discovered Sufism, grew fascinated with the nascent (growing, emerging) field of behavioral psychology and its revelatory (significative, indicative), often disquieting (disturbing, alarming) findings about the inner workings of the mind, of its formidable powers to act and its immense vulnerabilities to being acted upon. But she found no ready-made answer to the problem of social harmony.
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Spontaneity and the Search for Meaning: Erich Fromm on the Wellspring of Individuality, Creativity, and Love
In my own push-pull struggle with spontaneity — the longing for its unloosing of joy, the terror of its loss of control — I was reminded of some immensely insightful and encouraging passages by the German humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) from his first major work, Escape from Freedom (public library) — his classic 1941 inquiry into how to cope with our moral aloneness.
A capacity and willingness for spontaneity, Fromm argues, is the railroad switch that shifts our life-track away from what he terms negative freedom — our impulse to escape from freedom rather than to it, overwhelmed by the tyranny of possibility — and toward its opposite, positive freedom.
He writes:
The realization of the self is accomplished not only by an act of thinking but also by the realization of man’s total personality, by the active expression of his emotional and intellectual potentialities. These potentialities are present in everybody; they become real only to the extent to which they are expressed. In other words, positive freedom consists in the spontaneous activity of the total, integrated personality.
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Indian & Chinese Ethics
BUDDHISM. Buddhism can be traced to the experiences of Siddhartha
Gautama, born a prince around 560 B.C.E. at Lumbini near the capital of
the Kingdom of Shakya, India. Gautama is often called Shakyamuni or
Sakyamuni, after his birthplace. According to early accounts of his life,
Gautama grew up in the court and was shielded from contact with the real
mundane world of the people he would someday rule. He married at 17 and
fathered a child. However, his life changed dramatically in 529 B.C.E.
when he departed from the palace, abandoned his worldly existence, and
began a career as a wandering seeker for the meaning of life. Gautama
spent the next six years visiting various Indian religious groups, sitting with
several teachers of renown, and experimenting with many religious
practices, such as asceticism and meditation. His search ended in 523
B.C.E., while he was in meditation and contemplation at the foot of a tree, a
"Bodhi tree," located at Sarnath, a site still considered a hallowed
Buddhist shrine.
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Plato says that happiness is the possession, or the possession and correct use, of goods. Correlatively, misery is the possession of bads, or the possession and incorrect use of goods. If we ask why anyone does what she does, and reach the point of showing how her action fits into a happy life, we have fully explained and justified her action; no further question about why she wants to be happy and live well is apt. Put another way, we do everything for the sake of happiness, and we need nothing beyond happiness. Wisdom is both our highest good and the ability to use other goods well and beneficially. So, wisdom should be the first concern of anyone who wants to live well and be happy—that is, everyone. In particular, wisdom is more important than bodily and reputational goods such as health and honors. But as the condition that enables skillful activity in any domain is expertise in that domain, so too the state that enables skillful activity with goods is expertise concerning goods. So, wisdom—the highest human good—is knowledge of the good.
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Aristotle was Plato’s student, so we should not be surprised to see him developing similar ethical views. Still, there are differences of emphasis, points on which Aristotle is more explicit, and some points of clear disagreement between them.
Aristotle provides formal criteria for our final end—happiness—that closely resemble Plato’s. We do everything for the sake of happiness and do not seek it for the sake of anything further, and we need nothing beyond happiness. The best candidate for something of this sort, he argues, is a full life of excellent rational activity. Some readers think Aristotle has a compound theory of happiness: it is a full life of excellent rational activity, plus external goods such as health, wealth, good looks, and good children. However, Aristotle clearly distinguishes what happiness consists in from what it needs as background conditions, and he thinks happiness needs external goods as background conditions, not as constituents.
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Stoicism, a school of thought that flourished in Greek and Roman history of classical antiquity. It was one of the loftiest and most sublime philosophies in the record of Western civilization. In urging participation in human affairs, Stoics have always believed that the goal of all inquiry is to provide a mode of conduct characterized by tranquillity of mind and certainty of moral worth.
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Paulo Freire: Critical Pedagogy Versus the Banking Model of Education
Paulo Freire’s philosophical views grew from his experiences as a teacher and the interactions he had with his students. Rather than continuing with the established cultural patterns of relating to people through a hierarchy of power, Freire’s starting point in the classroom aims to undermine the power dynamics that hold some people above others. Freire emphasizes that a democratic relationship between the teacher and her students is necessary in order for the conscientização process to take place.
Freire’s critical pedagogy, or problem-posing education, uses a democratic approach in order to reach the democratic ideal, and, in this sense, the goal and the process are consistent. He explains how the teacher who intends to hold herself at some higher level of power than that of her students, and who does not admit to her own fallible nature and ignorance, places herself in rigid and deadlocked positions. She pretends to be the one who knows while the students are the ones who do not know. The rigidity of holding this type of power dynamic negates education as a process of inquiry and of knowledge gained.
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By Maria Popova, www.brainpickings.org
How the ability to call your idea “by various names, borrowed from various
languages,” empowers you to conceive that idea “in a way precise, clear and
unconfused.”
Nothing furthers the reach of thought in language more surely than proficiency in multiple lexicons, which confers upon the bilingual or multilingual mind a lush advantage of thought. That is what the radical philosopher William Godwin (March3, 1756–April 7, 1836) explores in a passage from his altogether excellent 1797 book The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (public library) —
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Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change
Expanding upon her previous writings on hope, Solnit writes in foreword to the 2016 edition of this foundational text of modern civic engagement:Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.
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The central focus of Dewey’s philosophical interests throughout his career was what has been traditionally called “epistemology,” or the “theory of knowledge.” It is indicative, however, of Dewey’s critical stance toward past efforts in this area that he expressly rejected the term “epistemology,” preferring the “theory of inquiry” or “experimental logic” as more representative of his own approach.
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