The Philosophy Thread

[Louanne Learning]

Truth, as a concept, is beautiful and good.

 

[DLC]

Two different types, lol.

 

[Louanne Learning]

Two different types, lol.

Two things guide our decisions and our actions: reason (mind) and emotion (heart).

This theme is explored in Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

We’re all born to be righteous, but we are righteous about different things. What it comes down to in many cases is whether it is reason (our mind) or emotion (our heart) that predominates in making our moral decisions.

A famous letter written by Thomas Jefferson explores this theme. In 1786, while in Paris as the American Minister to France, Jefferson fell in love with a beautiful 27-year-old married English woman named Maria Cosway. By all accounts, she and her husband had an open marriage, but nevertheless after some time, Maria’s husband insisted she return to England.

Her departure caused Jefferson great pain. He wrote her a letter that in part consisted of a dialogue between his head and his heart.
After the letter's preamble, it begins:

Head. Well, friend, you seem to be in a pretty trim.

Heart. I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings. Overwhelmed with grief, every fibre of my frame distended beyond its natural powers to bear, I would willingly meet whatever catastrophe should leave me no more to feel or to fear.

Head. These are the eternal consequences of your warmth and precipitation. This is one of the scrapes into which you are ever leading us. You confess your follies indeed: but still you hug and cherish them, and no reformation can be hoped, where there is no repentance.

Heart. Oh my friend! This is no moment to upbraid my foibles. I am rent into fragments by the force of my grief! If you have any balm, pour it into my wounds: if none, do not harrow them by new torments. Spare me in this awful moment! At any other I will attend with patience to your admonitions.

Head. On the contrary I never found that the moment of triumph with you was the moment of attention to my admonitions. While suffering under your follies you may perhaps be made sensible of them, but, the paroxysm over, you fancy it can never return. Harsh therefore as the medicine may be, it is my office to administer it. You will be pleased to remember that when our friend Trumbull used to be telling us of the merits and talents of these good people, I never ceased whispering to you that we had no occasion for new acquaintance; that the greater their merit and talents, the more dangerous their friendship to our tranquillity, because the regret at parting would be greater.

Heart. Accordingly, Sir, this acquaintance was not the consequence of my doings. It was one of your projects which threw us in the way of it. It was you, remember, and not I, who desired the meeting, at Legrand & Molinos. I never trouble myself with domes nor arches. The Halle aux bleds might have rotted down before I should have gone to see it. But you, forsooth, who are eternally getting us to sleep with your diagrams and crotchets, must go and examine this wonderful piece of architecture. And when you had seen it, oh! it was the most superb thing on earth! What you had seen there was worth all you had yet seen in Paris! I thought so too. But I meant it of the lady and gentleman to whom we had been presented, and not of a parcel of sticks and chips put together in pens. You then, Sir, and not I, have been the cause of the present distress.

And it continues for several more paragraphs, if you wish to read it.


Those who want to know depend more on reason (mind), and those who want to believe depend more on emotion (heart). It’s not that one is right and one is wrong, it’s just different ways of approaching the world.

 

[Louanne Learning]

Here’s what it boils down to:

Can we devise a reason-based morality?

 

[Louanne Learning]

Can we devise a reason-based morality?

Hume, in his 1748 book, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, wrote that without reason it is all sophistry and illusion:

“When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” (Section 12, part 3)

 

[Louanne Learning]

Science concentrates on “what is” – a set of facts, without a lot of wiggle room outside of the physical evidence.

Philosophy concentrates on “what ought to be” – positions that take the variation of human behavior into consideration.

I don’t think this means philosophy ignores science, but rather takes into account each spectrum generated along the “what is” of existence.

There can be no philosophy without choice. Which deviation from the norm most embodies “the good?”

This brings to mind Plato’s Theory of Forms - the idea that the real world is changeable and unreliable. Beyond this world of “appearances” is a world of permanence and reliability.

Which study seeks the better form – Science or Philosophy?

Which better comprehends the true reality behind the world of everyday experience?

 

[Louanne Learning]

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”

― Heraclitus