“The Mozi” by Mo Zi (translated by Ian Johnston)

This is the definitive English translation of the complete philosophical works of Mo Zi. Much of his original texts have been lost over the centuries and Johnston has done an excellent job of filling in the holes, as best he could, based on context and historical references from other writers, such as Mencius, Han Fei, and Mo Zi’s own followers. The book weighs in at just under 1000 pages, so I will attempt to just give a taste of Mo Zi’s philosophy, which stands in stark contrast to his Confucian and Legalist rivals.

Mo Zi begins on the ways of the gentleman, ““It isn’t that there is not a peaceful place to dwell, but that I am not at peace in my heart; it isn’t that there is not enough wealth, but that my heart is not enough.” This is why a gentleman is hard on himself but easy on others, whereas a common man is easy on himself but hard on others. When a gentleman takes office, he does not lose his ideals…. Even if he is mistaken for a common man, he never feels resentment because he has confidence in himself.”

Mo Zi gives advice for governing affairs of the household and of the State. Often, he compares and contrasts the two. “Even a compassionate father will not look kindly on a son without promise. For this reason, a man who occupies a position for which he is not competent is not the man for the position…. Men of great talent are difficult to direct, yet they can serve a ruler and be respected. Great rivers do not resent little streams that fill them because they are what can make them great.”

A theme Mo Zi returns to repeatedly is the need for moderation. “If there is restraint and moderation, then there is prosperity. If there is lack of restraint and moderation, then there is decay…. When there is moderation with regard to men and women, Heaven and earth are in harmony. When there is moderation in the winds and rains, the five grains ripen. When there is moderation in clothes and garments, skin and flesh are in harmony.”

Mo Zi defines virtue by example of the three sages of the past. “The three sages were cautious in their speech, careful in their actions, and meticulous in their planning, searching out the world’s hidden affairs and neglecting personal benefit in order to serve Heaven above, so Heaven took delight in their virtue.” There are three realms that were of import. “Exalting worthiness is of benefit to Heaven, to the ghosts, and to the common people as well as being the foundation of government and affairs.” Mo Zi expands on governance. “If those above and below do not have unity of principles, then rewards and praise are not enough to encourage goodness, and punishments and penalties are not enough to put a stop to evil…. If those above and below do not have unity of principles, then those the ruler rewards will be those the people condemn…. If above and below there is not unity of principles, then those the ruler punishes will be those the people praise…. If those who help his sight and hearing are many, then what he hears and sees is far distant. If those who help his speech are many, then the comfort given by his wise words is far-reaching. If those who help his plans are many, then his schemes and devices are swiftly accomplished. If those who help in his activities are many, then the matters he embarks upon will be swiftly brought to completion.”

Mo Zi probably lived in either the Spring and Autumn period or the time of the Warring States. In either case, the city-states of China were fighting nearly constantly, in an attempt to unify the country. Mo Zi was opposed to all offensive war, especially larger states trying to take advantage of the weaker. “The killing of one person is spoken of as unrighteous and certainly constitutes one capital offense. Reasoning on this basis, killing ten people is ten times as unrighteous, so certainly constitutes ten capital offenses…. But when it comes to what is a great lack of righteousness, that is, attacking states, then they do not know and condemn it. On the contrary, they praise it and call it righteous…. Now suppose there was someone who, when he saw a little bit of black, called it black, but when he saw a lot of black, called it white. We would certainly take this person to be someone who did not know the difference between white and black…. Now when something small is a crime, people know and condemn it. When something great is a crime, like attacking states, then they don’t know and condemn, but go along with it and praise it, calling it righteous…. Nowadays, when kings, dukes and great officers carry out government, with regard to someone killing another person, his own state will try to prevent this because everyone knows that to do this is not righteous. But they are able to kill large numbers of people in a neighboring state and take this to be great righteousness.” Even when ruling within a state, Mo Zi was opposed to aggression. “When there is compliance with Heaven’s intention, there is rule by righteousness. When there is opposition to Heaven’s intention, there is rule by force…. Therefore, the most abhorred name in the world is given to him and he is called a tyrannical king.”

A large part of Mo Zi’s philosophy is constructed in short dialectical dialogue, particularly his thoughts on language, logic, and science. For each pairing the ancient compilers of Mo Zi’s teachings composed a thought described as the canon, followed by a short explanation. Over the years, some have been lost or bastardized. Here is Mo Zi’s take on peace, “C: To be at peace is to know no desire or aversion. E: To be at peace: To be tranquil.” Some of his thoughts come across as aphorisms or little riddles. This is Mo Zi on the difference and absurdity of comparison, “C: Different classes are not comparable. The explanation lies in measurement. E: Difference: Of wood and night, which is longer? Of knowledge and grain, which is greater? Of the four things—rank, family, good conduct and price—which is the most valuable? Of the tailed deer and the crane, which is higher? Of the cicada and the zithern, which is the more mournful?”

Mo Zi often returns to both benevolence and righteousness. “C: To take benevolence as being internal and righteousness as being external is wrong. The explanation lies in matching the face. E: Benevolence: Benevolence equates with love; righteousness equates with benefit. Love and benefit relate to “this” (the self); what is loved and what is benefited relate to “that” (the other). Love and benefit are neither internal nor external; what is loved and what is benefited are neither external nor internal. To say that benevolence is internal and righteousness is external and to conflate love with what is benefited are examples of “wild raising”. It is like the left eye being external and the right eye being internal.”

On criticism, Mo Zi expounds, “C: Whether criticism is admissible or not does not depend on whether it is much or little. The explanation lies in being admissible to negate (deny). E: Criticism: In sorting out whether criticism is admissible or in admissible, if you take the principle as susceptible to criticism, then, even if the criticism is excessive, it is right. If its principle is not susceptible to criticism, even if the criticism is slight, it is wrong. Nowadays, it is said that what is much criticized is not admissible. This is like using the long to discuss the short.”

In the final sections of Mo Zi’s philosophy he returns to singular statements. Here he again discusses the ways of the sage, “The sage dreads disease and decay but does not dread danger and difficulty. He maintains the integrity of his body and the resolve of his heart. [He] desires the people’s benefit; he does not dislike the people’s love. The sage does not consider his own dwelling. The sage does not concern himself with the affairs of his son. The sage’s model (method) is to turn his mind from his parents on their death for the sake of the world.”

Mo Zi was not always modest. Here he praises his own wisdom, “My words are sufficient for use. One who casts aside my words and changes my ideas is like one who casts aside the harvest and picks up grains. To use one’s own words to negate my words is like throwing eggs against a rock. Even if one uses all the eggs in the world, the rock remains as it is and cannot be destroyed.” Mo Zi explains why his words are more important than others who provide more physical sustenance to the people. “I think nothing equals understanding the Way of former kings and seeking their concepts; understanding the words of the sages and examining their statements. Nothing equals spreading these words among kings, dukes and great officers above, and next among the ordinary people. If kings, dukes, and great officers make use of my words, countries will certainly be well ordered. If the ordinary people make use of my words, conduct certainly will be regulated. Therefore, I think that although I do not plough and provide food for the hungry, although I do not weave and provide clothes for the cold, nevertheless my achievement is more worthy than those who do plough and provide food and those who do weave and provide clothes.”

Mo Zi ends by returning to his advice on the basics for an ordered and righteous society, “Whenever one enters a country, one must pick out what is fundamental and devote one’s attention to it. If the country is disordered and confused, then one speaks about exalting worthiness and exalting unity. If the country is poor, then one speaks about moderation in use and moderation in funerals. If the country has a liking for music and depravity, then one speaks about condemnation of music and rejection of Fate. If the country has fallen into licentiousness and lacks propriety, then one speaks about honouring Heaven and serving ghosts. If the country is dedicated to invasion and oppression, then one speaks about universal love and condemning aggression. Therefore I say, pick out what is fundamental and devote one’s attention to it.”  Finally, Mo Zi suggests to concern oneself with what is within first, before concerning oneself with others’ opinions. “In the case of those who bring order to the spirit, the multitude do not know of their achievement.”

“The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

Pessoa said of his heteronym, Caeiro, “If there is a part of my work that bears the ‘stamp of sincerity,’ that part is the work of Caeiro.” Caeiro, himself, writes in one of his first poems, “I have no ambitions or desires./ Being a poet is not my ambition./ It’s my way of being alone.” Most of Caeiro’s poems dealt with the concreteness of nature. “But if God is the flowers and the trees/ And the hills and the sun and the moonlight,/ Then I do believe in him,/ I believe in him at all hours./ And my whole life is one long prayer and mass,/ And a communion with the eyes and ears.” He also wrote obliquely about the craft of poetry. “And I, if they come and ask me what I have done,/ Will say: I looked at things, nothing more.” Many of his poems deal with the peace associated with being in the moment and the futility of humanity. In a short poem, quoted in full, he states, “A carriage passed along the road, and was gone;/ And the road wasn’t anymore beautiful, or any uglier./ So it is with human actions in the world./ We take nothing away and we add nothing; we pass and we forget;/ And the sun is always the same sun every day.” In another poem, he claims, “Nature never remembers, which is why it’s beautiful.” He is a materialist, who doesn’t search in nature for metaphors or anthropomorphic qualities. “Because everyone loves flowers for being beautiful, but I’m different./ And everyone loves the trees for being green and giving shade, but/   I don’t./ I love the flowers for being flowers, that’s all./ I love the trees for being trees, without the addition of my thoughts.” Caeiro is decidedly apolitical. “I accept injustice as I accept a stone not being round,/ And a cork tree not having been born a pine or an oak./ I cut an orange in two, and the halves, of course, were unequal./ To which half was I being unjust—I, who will eat both, given that I am going to eat them both.”

Caeiro’s oeuvre comes complete with interviews with him, conducted by Alexander Search, a British polyglot, who translated many of Caeiro’s poems into English. Search was another one of Pessoa’s heteronym creations. Search introduces Caeiro, “The poet speaks of himself and his works with a sort of lofty religiosity which, in anyone with less right to speak in such a manner, would be frankly unbearable. Caeiro always speaks in succinct, dogmatic phrases, censuring or admiring (although it’s rare for him to admire) in such absolute, despotic terms, as if he were offering not a mere opinion, but rather stating an inviolable truth.” Caeiro later interjects, “To teach is to destroy. The only worthwhile thing in anyone is what he or she doesn’t know.” In one of his last poems, Caeiro states, “If, after I die, someone should choose to write my biography,/ nothing could be simpler./ There are only two dates—that of my birth and that of my death./ Between one and the other all the days were mine.”

“States and Social Revolutions” by Theda Skocpol

Skocpol compares and contrasts the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions to find what causal factors they held in common. She considers all three to be social as well as political revolutions. “What is unique to social revolution is that basic changes in social structure and in political structure occur together in mutually reinforcing fashion. And these changes occur through intense sociopolitical conflicts in which class struggles play a key role…. An adequate understanding of social revolutions requires that the analyst take a nonvoluntarist, structural perspective on their causes and processes…. Social revolutions cannot be explained without systematic reference to international structures and world-historical developments…. It is essential to conceive of states as administrative and coercive organizations.”

Skocpol stresses that while the State is often aligned with the dominant class, the two are not the same and in times of crisis, particularly, their interests do not always overlap. In France, by the end of the eighteenth century, she quotes Francois Furet, “Tied to the development of commercial production, hostile to local powers, promoter of national unity, the state was—along with money, at the same time as money, and more than money—the decisive source of social mobility. Progressively the state had undermined, encroached upon, and destroyed the vertical solidarity of the estates, especially the nobility…. By the eighteenth century, the new groups [of elites] make up the majority of the nobility. Culturally, the state had offered to the ruling groups of the kingdom, assembled henceforth under its aegis, another system of values than that of personal honor: the fatherland and the State… creating a parallel and contradictory social structure: an elite, a governing class.” This fits in with Turchin’s thesis that it is intra-elite competition, particularly from disaffected marginal elites, that is the impetus for cycles of revolution and turmoil. Skocpol explains, “The distinction between the First (ecclesiastical) and Second (Noble) Estates, on the one hand, and the Third Estate, on the other, was by the eighteenth century more a fluid zone of transition than a barrier.”

Skocpol next describes her view of the Qing Dynasty’s class structure right before its collapse. The dominant class was the landed gentry. “Was it fundamentally an Imperial state with a unique Confucian culture and educational system? Or was it fundamentally a class-stratified agrarian society? My view is that old-regime China was an inextricable amalgam of both of these. The dominant agrarian class depended upon the administrative/military backing of, and employment opportunities within, the Imperial state. And ruling dynasties depended upon local class dominants to extend controls over and appropriate resources from the huge, unwieldy agrarian expanse that was China.” The intra-elite struggle came about when the educated Han elite came to break with their Manchu imperial overlords. “Modern-educated students and military officers developed radical nationalist views that synthesized provincial loyalties with hostility to the “alien” Manchu dynasty…. Professionally trained officers had only the most tenuous loyalties to the Manchus and to the Imperial system…. The newly established representative assemblies were rapidly transformed by groups of local and provincial gentry and merchants into formal platforms from which to advocate a “Constitutionalist” program of liberal, politically decentralized reforms…. By 1910 many organized gentry groups were prepared ideologically and organizationally to assert their decentralizing program against the Manchus.” E.P. Young would claim, “The politicization of the gentry is perhaps the outstanding feature of [Chinese history in] the early twentieth century.”

In Russia, the elites had a subservient position to the Tsarist state apparatus. “Over a period of centuries the lands of independent nobles and princes were expropriated and passed out as rewards for official careers to a new class of service nobles. As this happened, the tsars took pains to ensure that no new groupings of independent landed aristocrats could arise. Service nobles were given rights to serf “souls” and to landed estates. Yet typically, their possessions were not concentrated in one locality or even one province, but were scattered over different regions of the empire…. Lifelong military or civil service careers [were] mandatory for every adult male noble…. During the eighteenth century Russian nobles were finally released from lifelong state service, and their private-property rights were fully and officially confirmed…. Russian nobles still gravitated toward state employments as the one sure site of opportunities to reside in the cities and to earn salaries and rewards to supplement the very meager incomes that most obtained from the serf estates.” Intra-elite competition again played a role in upsetting the balance of society. The change was spurred by the State’s goal of rapid industrialization, as Russia sought to catch up to the great powers of western Europe, especially after its defeat in the Crimean War. In turn, however, “the processes of financing rapid industrialization tied the Russian state and economy more closely to Western Europe.” Arthur Mendel contends, “Besides dangerously concentrating a proletariat, a professional class, and a rebellious student body in the centers of political power, industrialization infuriated both these new forces and the traditional rural classes.” The end was brought on by the crisis of World War I. “[Tsar] Nicholas would not sacrifice the autocratic principle: and so upper- and middle-class civilian and official disgust with him grew. Public criticism flourished especially because it could be couched in nationalistic terms…. Once the initial rebellion was underway, it spread irrepressibly from military unit to military unit, from factory workers to railway men, from the capital of Petrograd to Moscow and to the provincial cities.”

Skocpol contends, “In both ancien regime France and late Imperial China, relatively prosperous landed-commercial upper classes gained collective political leverage within and against the administrative machineries of monarchial autocracies…. Escalating international competition and humiliations particularly symbolized by unexpected defeats in wars (such as the Seven Years’ War and the Sino-Japanese War) inspired autocratic authorities to attempt reforms that they believed would facilitate the mobilization and coordination of national resources to meet the external exigencies…. [However,] the French privilegies and the Chinese gentry were attracted by the association between parliamentarism and national power in more modern foreign competitors…. Autocratic attempts at modernizing reforms from above in France and China—specifically, tax reform in France and railroad reorganization in China—triggered the concerned political resistance of well-organized dominant class forces…. And as dominant class groups based in various institutional and geographical locations (e.g., parlements, provinces, representative bodies, and municipalities in France; and provinces, armies, and assemblies in China) competed in endeavors to define new political arrangements, the monarchial administrations and armies were broken irretrievably apart.” She continues, “Revolutionary political crises emerged in all three Old Regimes because agrarian structures impinged upon autocratic and proto-bureaucratic state organizations in ways that blocked or fettered monarchial initiatives in coping with escalating international military competition in a world undergoing uneven transformation by capitalism…. The ultimate effect of the impediments to state-sponsored reforms was the downfall of monarchial autocracy and the disintegration of the centralized administrative and military organizations of the state.”

Skocpol makes the case that “peasant revolts against landlords were a necessary ingredient in all three Revolutions, whereas successful revolts by urban workers were not.” However, “peasants participated in these Revolutions without being converted to radical visions of a desired new national society, and without becoming a nationally organized class-for-themselves. Instead they struggled for concrete goals—typically involving access to more land, or freedom from claims on their surpluses.” There were differences in the three Old Regimes. “A peasant revolution against landlords did ultimately occur in China as in France and Russia, but the peasants of China lacked the kind of structurally preexisting solidarity and autonomy that allowed the agrarian revolutions in France and Russia to emerge quickly and relatively spontaneously in reaction to the breakdown of the central governments of the Old Regimes. In contrast, the Chinese agrarian revolution was more protracted…. The peasant contribution to the Chinese Revolution resembled much more a mobilized response to a revolutionary elite’s initiatives than did the peasant contributions in France and Russia.”

Skocpol next focuses on the similarities in State capacity building that consolidated the permanence of the three Revolutions. Franz Borkenau states, “Every great revolution has destroyed the State apparatus which it found. After much vacillation and experimentation, every revolution has set another apparatus in its place, in most cases of quite a different character from the one destroyed; for the changes in the state order which a revolution produces are no less important than the changes in the social order.” Skocpol contends that the new State structures were even more all-consuming and all-controlling than the monarchial regimes they replaced. “Autocratic and proto-bureaucratic monarchies gave way to bureaucratic and mass-incorporating national states…. Under the Old Regimes, the privileges and the institutional power bases of the landed upper classes had been impediments to full state bureaucratization and to direct mass political incorporation…. Political consolidation was possible in large part because revolutionary leaderships could mobilize lower-class groups formerly excluded from national politics, either urban workers or the peasantry…. The new state organizations forged during the Revolutions were more centralized and rationalized than those of the Old Regime.” Many of the marginal elites of old, who survived the turmoil and purges, could be coopted as technical experts to the new State machinery. Whereas, “all such agrarian states as France (after the consolidation of royal absolutism), Tsarist Russia, and Imperial China… more or less continuously generated surpluses of aspirants for participation in state employments”, the new revolutionary regimes could recruit all of the surplus-elites crafty and able enough to have stuck around.

Finally, it was not any particular ideology that made these three Revolutions successful. The impetus to success was more structural and impersonal. Skocpol states, “It cannot be argued… that the cognitive content of the ideologies in any sense provides a predictive key to either the outcomes of the Revolutions or the activities of the revolutionaries who built the state organizations…. The Jacobins accomplished instead more mundane tasks—of state building and revolutionary defense—indispensable to the success of the revolution that devoured them. In Russia, the Bolsheviks were pummeled by the exigencies of the attempt to take and hold state power in the name of Marxist socialism in an agrarian country shattered by defeat in total war. They found themselves forced to undertake tasks and measures that directly contradicted their ideology. In the end, triumphant Stalinism twisted and upended virtually every Marxist ideal and rudely contradicted Lenin’s vision in 1917 of destroying bureaucracies and standing armies. In China, the Communists set out in proper Marxist-Leninist fashion to take power through proletarian risings in the cities. Not until well after these were crushed and new and viable peasant-oriented movements had taken root in military base areas in the countryside did “Maoist” doctrine develop to sanctify and codify what had been done…. In short, ideologically oriented leaderships in revolutionary crises have been greatly limited by existing structural conditions and severely buffeted by the rapidly changing currents of revolutions.”

“The Murder of Professor Schlick” by David Edmonds

Edmonds has written a short, but detailed, group biography of the Vienna Circle, including its precursors, origin, heyday, and, eventually, where its members scattered to after the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938. Edmonds calls the Circle’s members logical-empiricists, although they are also commonly known as positivists. Ludwig Wittgenstein was never a member and never even attended a meeting as a guest. However, his legacy over the Circle looms large. His Tractatus-logico-philosophicus was studied sentence by sentence by the Circle every week, over a number of years (1925-27), to parse out its exact meaning.

On August 5, 1924, Moritz Schlick, the head of the Vienna Circle, wrote to a fellow German philosopher, Hans Reichenbach, about discovering the Tractatus, “The author lives close to Vienna, and is highly original, also as a human being; the more one studies his treatise, the more one is impressed by it. The English translator [Frank Ramsey], a mathematician from Cambridge, whom I met in the summer, is also a very intelligent and sophisticated mind.” (The Circle first read the book in its English translation because Wittgenstein could not find a German language publisher.) Edmonds continues, “Within the Circle the Tractatus acquired a status of almost biblical significance…. The Tractatus is a work impatient of explanation and skinned to the bone. It can be seen as a pursuit of an ornament-free language—in which every element expressed the logic of language and thereby of the world (unlike ordinary language, which obscures its structure with its many redundancies—or ornaments)…. Wittgenstein, in the tradition of Frege and Russell, held that the tools of modern logic could be used to dissect the nature of language. He thought that philosophy should be limited in ambition: the task of philosophy was the clarification of propositions…. The Circle also embraced Wittgenstein’s discussion of logical truths. Wittgenstein held that logical truths were tautologies; they are true, but not in the way that empirical propositions can be true…. [Logical truths] are the essential frame to permit propositions to picture the world. They are the limits of sense…. The Vienna Circle found what they regarded as the ultimate solution (to the problem of how mathematical knowledge is compatible with a strict empiricism) in their interpretation of the Tractatus…. The Circle believed the same line should be applied to mathematical truths: they too served as tautologies…. The reason we do not need to refer to the world to establish their veracity is because the meaning is built into the terms themselves.”

The beginning of the end of the Vienna Circle was actually when its leading members decided to publish a manifesto to honor Schlick, upon his return from a sabbatical at Stanford. Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Herbert Feigl were the authors, but they purported to expound the philosophy of the Circle as a whole. It was actually in this document that the name Weiner Kreis appeared for the first time. “The Circle’s basic orientation was science free from metaphysics.” The manifesto stated, “The scientific world-conception knows no unsolvable riddle.” Furthermore, the Circle’s mission was “removing the metaphysical and theological debris of millennia.” The manifesto ended, “The scientific world conception serves life, and life receives it.” Phillip Frank, a physicist in Prague and frequent guest to Circle meetings, stated, “The whole original Viennese group was convinced that the elimination of metaphysics not only was a question of better logic but was of great relevance for the social and cultural life.” 

Schlick, himself, was not entirely pleased with his return gift. Edmonds explains, “Although he had now presided over the Circle for five years—and in a 1923 letter to Bertrand Russell he described the Circle as a working union of philosophers—he had become perturbed by the idea of philosophy as a team sport. He viewed the Circle as a set of like-minded philosophers meeting to thrash out problems but without losing their individuality…. He was the Circle’s most apolitical member, whilst the manifesto was a blatantly political document…. Until the publication of the manifesto, those who attended Circle discussions had no need to see themselves as belonging to a movement. But from that moment, fissures within the Circle began to deepen.”

However, Schlick was in no way opposed to the project of removing any trace of metaphysics from philosophy. He stated, “Philosophy is the activity by means of which the meaning of statements is clarified and defined.” Carnap had asked, “Can it be that so many men, of various times and nations, outstanding minds among them, have devoted so much effort, and indeed fervor, to metaphysics, when this consists in nothing more than words strung together without sense?” Metaphysics was about feelings, whereas philosophy was about science and truth. Neurath claimed, “Metaphysical terms divide, scientific terms unite.” Carnap felt it was the province of poets, not philosophers, to deal with metaphysics. He quipped, “Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.” Edmonds states that Schlick felt, “Empiricists do not tell metaphysicians that they are wrong but rather that they assert nothing of any meaning. That is, they do not contradict the metaphysicians, rather, they simply fail to understand them.”

With the rise of the nationalist right in Austria after WWI, the positivists faced a growing backlash at home, even within academic walls. The University of Vienna itself was a bastion of reactionary conservatism. “Although there was nothing explicitly pro-democratic about logical empiricism, it was implicitly anti-elitist. The priestly caste claimed some special insight into God, while the metaphysician claimed some special understanding of the world beyond appearance…. Logical empiricism was also skeptical about the ontological status of the group: the base unit for explaining action was thought to be the individual.” The Circle’s espousal of methodological individualism and belief in the paramount truth of empirical facts ran foul of the fascistic currents of the day.

Edmonds goes into some detail about two philosophical problems that divided members of the Circle. The first was the issue of protocol sentences. “The logical positivist project can be seen as having two components. On the one hand, there was an investigation into the link between words and propositions…. But beyond the analysis of language, there is the link between language and the world…. There must be some way words get their meaning not from other words but from the world…. Words get their meaning in the context of a sentence or proposition and the way that proposition stands in relation to the world…. There was mostly agreement that the protocol sentences on which knowledge and meaningful language were to be constructed were fundamental observation statements…. [But] what was to count as a protocol sentence? Did protocol sentences really exist? Were they open to doubt? What was the relationship between protocol sentences and the empirical world?… Foundationalism means (roughly) that there are propositions that are true and certain, independently of other propositions…. Within the Circle there was a dispute about whether protocol sentences provided solid foundations…. The idea was that with valid inferences, we could move from these secure basic statements, these protocol sentences, to more complicated ones…. Carnap’s initial view was that protocol sentences captured immediate experiences and required no further justification or public confirmation. They were sense data—the things that are immediately present to the mind…. Neurath maintained that the observations had to be about the observable attributes of objects and the properties on which we could publicly agree…. [Eventually] Carnap was forced to acknowledge what Neurath had long asserted, namely that rock-bottom certainty was beyond reach. If protocol sentences were about the physical world (as opposed to sensations and impressions of that world), then it was always possible that they were mistaken.” Schlick did not concede to Neurath, like Carnap. He “insisted that protocol sentences had to be about how objects appeared to a particular person and take the form of here, now, this…. The advantage of the Schlickian framework is that it begins with statements that cannot be refuted and that require no further confirmation…. The drawback is that it is unclear how one can make the move from subjective statement about me and my experience to a statement to which we all can assent…. Schlick’s radical subjectivism, Neurath claimed, took protocol sentences down a cul-de-sac.” Neurath’s solution has come to be called Neurath’s Boat. Edmonds explains, “We have to presume existing knowledge…. We cannot overturn all our assumptions at once—that would be nonsensical. But neither can we assume that there are any rock-solid foundations. We can always jettison bits of “knowledge” as we progress.” Neurath, himself, stated, “We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials.”

The other major issue amongst members of the Circle was the verification problem. “If a statement was not analytic—true or false in virtue of its terms—then, according to the verification principle, it was only meaningful if verifiable…. It is what made many statements about ethics, aesthetics, and religion nonscientific and neither true nor false…. The Carnap version stated that whether a synthetic sentence was cognitively meaningful depends on whether there is criteria for verifying it. The Wittgenstein version [embraced by Schlick and Waismann] was that the meaning consists in the criteria…. A satisfactory account of the principle—which excludes ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysical assertions but includes scientific theories about nonobservable entities—continues to prove elusive. All attempts to tighten the principle have let in either too little or too much. It is also self undermining, for the principle itself seems neither analytically true nor verifiable.”

“Philosophical Papers” by Frank P. Ramsey (edited by D.H. Mellor)

This is a collection of Ramsey’s papers, written while a fellow at King’s College from 1925 until his death in 1930. The book begins with his essay “Philosophy” from 1929. Ramsey states, “Philosophy must be of some use and we must take it seriously; it must clear our thoughts and so our actions.” After this injunction, Ramsey gets a little cheeky, playfully contradicting his chief sparring partner, Ludwig Wittgenstein. “The chief proposition of philosophy is that philosophy is nonsense. And again we must then take seriously that it is nonsense, and not pretend, as Wittgenstein does, that it is important nonsense.” Ramsey continues in a more serious vein, “Essentially a philosophy is a system of definitions or, only too often, a system of descriptions of how definitions might be given…. We are driven to philosophize because we do not know clearly what we mean.” He concludes with a warning against scientism, “The chief danger to our philosophy, apart from laziness and wooliness, is scholasticism, the essence of which is treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category.”

Ramsey continues his probing of philosophy and meaning in his essay “Universals”, which deals with particulars and universals in the world. Defining meaning, he states, “Now it seems to me as clear as anything can be in philosophy that the two sentences ‘Socrates is wise’, ‘Wisdom is a characteristic of Socrates’ assert the same fact and express the same proposition. They are not, of course, the same sentence, but they have the same meaning, just as two sentences in two different languages can have the same meaning.” Ramsey is not concerned with language games, but the underlying truth behind the words. “The whole theory of particulars and universals is due to mistaking for a fundamental characteristic of reality what is merely a characteristic of language.” Ramsey states that he is “interested not so much in sentences themselves, as in what they mean, from which we hope to discover the logical nature of reality.”

In his paper “Facts and Propositions”, Ramsey lays out his theory of beliefs. He begins, “I prefer to deal with those beliefs which are expressed in words, or possibly images or other symbols, consciously asserted or denied; for these beliefs, in my view, are the most proper subject for logical criticism…. The mental factors of such a belief I take to be words, spoken aloud or to oneself or merely imagined, connected together and accompanied by a feeling or feelings of belief or disbelief…. It is evident that the importance of beliefs and disbeliefs lies not in their intrinsic nature, but in their causal properties.” Ramsey concludes with an endorsement of Peirce’s pragmatism, “The essence of pragmatism I take to be this, that the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible causes and effects. Of this I feel certain.”

Ramsey tries to dig into the idea of partial beliefs in his essay “Truth and Probability”. He claims “that we act in the way we think most likely to realize the objects of our desires, so that a person’s actions are completely determined by his desires and opinions.” Beliefs are manifest in actions. He continues, “The theory I propose to adopt is that we seek things which we want, which may be our own or other people’s pleasure, or anything else whatever, and our actions are such as we think most likely to realize these goods.” Ramsey next breaks down the differences in deductive and inductive reasoning. “Our opinions can be divided into those we hold immediately as a result of perception or memory, and those which we derive from the former by argument…. Logic as a science of argument and inference is traditionally and rightly divided into deductive and inductive…. A formal deduction does not increase our knowledge, but only brings out clearly what we already know in another form…. We are bound to accept its validity on pain of being inconsistent with ourselves. The logical relation which justifies the inference is that the sense or import of the conclusion is contained in that of the premisses…. We can divide arguments into two radically different kinds, which we can distinguish in the words of Peirce as (1) ‘explicative, analytic, or deductive’ and (2) ‘amplifiative, synthetic, or (loosely speaking) inductive’. Arguments of the second type are from an important point of view much closer to memories and perceptions than to deductive arguments. We can regard perception, memory and induction as the three fundamental ways of acquiring knowledge…. We have the lesser logic, which is the logic of consistency, or formal logic; and the larger logic, which is the logic of discovery, or inductive logic.” Following Peirce’s pragmatism, Ramsey explains why it makes sense to base our partial beliefs on inductive processes. “We are all convinced by inductive arguments, and our conviction is reasonable because the world is so constituted that inductive arguments lead on the whole to true opinions…. This is a kind of pragmatism: we judge mental habits by whether they work.”

Mellor chooses to conclude this collection with an “Epilogue”, which was actually a speech Ramsey prepared for the Apostles’ Club at Cambridge in 1925. Ramsey cheekily challenges the view that the debating club has anything to talk about anymore. Ramsey teases, “I do not wish to maintain that there never has been anything to discuss, but only that there is no longer; that we have really settled everything by realizing that there is nothing to know except science…. Science, history, and politics are not suited for discussion except by experts…. Then there is philosophy; this, too, has become too technical for the layman.” He can’t resist poking a little fun at Wittgenstein, who by 1925 had quit the Apostles in disgust at their flippant musings. Ramsey half-jokes, “The conclusion of the greatest modern philosopher is that there is no such subject as philosophy; that it is an activity, not a doctrine; and that, instead of answering questions, it aims merely at curing headaches.” Ramsey concludes in a much more serious vein, “Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does…. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.”

“Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

In this essay, Jung explains why the dream world is as important to the psyche of an individual as is his consciousness. He begins with symbols. “What we call a symbol is a term, a name, or an image which in itself may be familiar to us, but its connotations, use, and application are specific or peculiar and hint at hidden, vague, or unknown meaning…. A term or image is symbolic when it means more than it denotes or expresses. It has a wider “unconscious” aspect—an aspect that can never be precisely defined or fully explained. This peculiarity is due to the fact that, in exploring the symbol, the mind is finally led towards ideas of a transcendent nature, where our reason must capitulate…. We also produce symbols unconsciously and spontaneously in our dreams…. Dreams are indeed the chief source of all our knowledge of symbolism…. One cannot invent symbols; wherever they occur, they have not been devised by conscious intention and willful selection.” Symbols are not mere signs. “A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and the symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight…. A symbol does not disguise, it reveals in time…. In former times men lived their symbols rather than reflected upon them.”

Jung broke away from Freud’s manner of dream interpretation by forgoing the practice of free association. Instead, he stuck to a closer reading of the dream. “I no longer followed associations that led far afield and away from the manifest dream-statement. I concentrated rather on the actual dream-text as the thing which was intended by the unconscious, and I began to circumambulate the dream itself, never letting it out of my sight…. If one wants to understand a dream it must be taken seriously, and one must also assume that it means what it manifestly says.” Jung follows and expands on Freud’s role of the archetype in dream motifs. “They are what Freud called “archaic remnants”—thought-forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual’s own life, but seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited patterns of the human mind…. The archetype is… an inherited tendency of the human mind to form representations of mythological motifs—representations that vary a great deal without losing their basic pattern.” When interpreting dreams, context also matters. “Two different individuals can have almost the same dream, yet if one is young and the other old, the problems disturbing them will be correspondingly different, and it would be absurd to interpret both dreams the same way…. Interpretation of dreams and symbols depends largely on the individual disposition of the dreamer. Symbols have not one meaning only but several, and often they even characterize a pair of opposites…. The correct interpretation depends on context, i.e., the associations connected with the image, and on the actual condition of the dreamer’s mind.”

Jung continues by assessing the dream material. Dreams can look forward, as well as back. “One must always bear in mind that dream material does not necessarily consist of memories; it may just as well contain new thoughts that are not yet conscious.” For the individual’s psyche as a whole, what one does not remember consciously can be as important as what one does. “Forgetting is a normal process, in which certain conscious contents lose their specific energy through a deflection of attention. When interest turns elsewhere, it leaves former contents in the shadow…. Consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates…. “Forgetting” may be defined as temporarily subliminal contents remaining outside the range of vision against one’s will. But the forgotten contents have not ceased to exist…. Among the lost memories we encounter not a few that owe their subliminal state (and their incapacity to be reproduced at will) to their disagreeable and incompatible nature. These are the repressed contents…. In spite of their apparent non-existence they can influence consciousness.”

Jung posits that the unconscious compliments the ego, completing the psyche. “The message of the unconscious is of greater importance than most people realize. As consciousness is exposed to all sorts of external attractions and distractions, it is easily led astray and seduced into following ways that are unsuited to its individuality. The general function of dreams is to balance such disturbances in the mental equilibrium by producing contents of a complementary or compensatory kind.” Man has become divorced from this complementary aspect of himself to his detriment. “Moral and spiritual tradition has collapsed, and has left a worldwide disorientation and dissociation…. We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer…. In reality we are confronted with anxious questions, the answers to which seem nowhere in sight.” Modern man could do worse than to take his dreams more seriously. Their symbols have not lost their meaning just because we have forgotten and ignored them in our rush to subvert what we cannot consciously understand.

“The Undiscovered Self” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

In this essay, Jung seeks to extricate the individual from the grip of society. In doing so, he challenges the preeminent position of the State, the reliance on scientific rationality, and the very nature of modernity. Jung states that the individual “as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or “normal” man to whom the scientific statements refer.” He claims that the onus of morality has been abrogated by the individual into the hands of the State. “The moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitably replaced by the policy of the State…. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea.” Jung posits that man is not so removed from his past that he can ever do away with religion. “The religious impulse rests on an instinctive basis and is therefore a specifically human function. You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return.” The State has replaced the Church as the altar to which rational man worships.

Jung needs to keep reminding us that the human life is so much more than just his rational ego and the outside world. “The life of the individual is not determined solely by the ego and its opinions or by social factors, but quite as much, if not more, by a transcendent authority.” Consciousness and the unconscious are two sides of the coin that make up the entirety of the Self. “Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being…. The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, performed by it.” The individual is a subjective beast, alone in the world. “Subjectivation (in technical terms, transference and countertransference) creates isolation from the environment…. As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge…. The individual in his dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle. Ego-consciousness would like to let its own will play this role, but overlooks the existence of powerful unconscious factors which thwart its intentions.” Modern man began to equate himself solely with his conscious ego, that is to say, his own conception of himself. “The result is that modern man knows himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself…. His consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around him, and it is to the latter’s peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical resources…. He forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being…. Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side…. Western man is in danger of losing his shadow altogether, of identifying himself with his fictive personality and the world with the abstract picture painted by scientific rationalism…. The more power man had over nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all the irrational data—including the objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness is not.” Jung suggests that modern man would do well to reach within himself, instead of relying on the outside world for his salvation. “Happiness and contentment, equability of mind and meaningfulness of life—these can be experienced only by the individual and not by the State…. The social and political circumstances of the time are certainly of considerable significance, but their importance for the weal or woe of the individual has been boundlessly overestimated.”

“Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography” by Robert Irwin

Ibn Khaldun viewed himself as primarily a historian, albeit one deeply steeped in Islamic learning and jurisprudence. His day job was as a court politician, who worked as an advisor to and judge for various sultans, sheikhs, and warlords. As such, he was sometimes in positions of great power but, when the winds of fortune shifted, he was also often sent to prison or into exile. It was in 1375, during the start of a four year semi-self-imposed exile, that he began his greatest work, the Muqaddima. “Ibn Khaldun sought the protection of a powerful tribe in the hinterland and, for reasons that are mysterious, the Alad ‘Arif, the leading clan of the Suwayd Arab confederacy in western Algeria and the subjects of the Merinid ruler, welcomed Ibn Khaldun with open arms and lent him a castle, Qal’at Banu Salama…. In the Qal’at Banu Salama, far from libraries and intellectual companionship, this Arab Prospero was to write for the next four years before returning to Tunis where he could check his facts in the city’s libraries…. His withdrawal from politics could be compared to the Sufi practice of khalwa, a temporary withdrawal from society in order to meditate, though Ibn Khaldun’s meditations were focused specifically on how God worked in the world through social processes…. Though he started with a study of the Berber and Arab tribes of North Africa, subsequently the Muqaddima and the ‘Ibar expanded into a comprehensive account of civilization and social organization.” 

Ibn Khaldun was a conservative and an elitist, even for his time. He looked back to the period of Muhammad and the first four Caliphs with nostalgia and reverence. “The most famous and perhaps the central thesis of the Muqaddima is that, in the harsh conditions of desert life, tribal groups of necessity develop a special kind of group solidarity which Ibn Khaldun called ‘asabiyya…. ‘Asabiyya was defined in medieval Arabic dictionaries as “a strong attachment, which holds several persons closely united by the same interest or the same opinion.”” Ibn Khaldun admired the Bedouin way of life. Although an urbanist himself, he praised the rustic spartanism of nomadic culture as opposed to the decadence of cities. Foremost, he celebrated tribalism. “Ibn Khaldun argued that group solidarity, together with the tribesmen’s hardihood and courage gave the tribes who possessed [‘asabiyya] a military advantage…. But within a few generations, perhaps three, maybe four, these conquering tribesmen lost their ‘asabiyya and became civilized. They succumbed to luxury, extravagance, and leisure. Soft urban life led to degeneracy…. [The ruler’s] regime would fall to an assault by the next wave of puritanical tribesmen from the desert.” This was the cyclical nature of conquest and rule that Khaldun expounded in the Muqaddima. Anthropologist Ernest Gellner summed it up, “Characteristically the tribe is both an alternative to the state and also its image, its limitation and the seed of a new state.”

For Ibn Khaldun, all history derived from Islamic precepts. All life was consumed by religion. “Ibn Khaldun defined theology (kalam) as the science “that involves arguing with logical proofs in defence of the articles of faith and refuting innovators who deviate in their dogmas from the early Muslims and Muslim orthodoxy.”” He was a doctrinaire Ash’arite, who traced his scholarly lineage back generations. “Ibn Khaldun, who was an Ash’arite, also described al-Ghazali as an Ash’arite—that is to say a scholar who followed the tenth-century theologian Abu a’l-Hasan al-Ash’ari in using rational argumentation in favor of Islamic orthodoxy…. According to Ash’arite doctrine, God’s omnipotence meant that “everything good and evil is willed by God. He creates the acts of men by creating in men the power to do each act.”” Although tempted, Khaldun tried to steer clear from any causal hypotheses. Instead, Khaldun admonished, “We were forbidden by the Lawgiver (Muhammad) to study causes. We were commanded to recognise the absolute oneness of God.”

Out of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, Ibn Khaldun subscribed to Maliki law. “Fez was the chief center of the teaching of the Maliki madhhab. A madhhab (literally “way followed” or “doctrine”) is a school of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence…. Malikism was the dominant madhhab throughout the Maghreb and Andalusia…. The Maliki madhhab’s name derived from its founder, Malik ibn Anas (d. 796). In his treatise, the Muwatta’ (The Well-Trodden Path), Malik, a practicing judge, had summarized and systematized the views and practices of the jurists of eighth-century Medina…. The Muwatta’ contained some 1,700 hadiths.” According to Khaldun, “[Malik] was of the opinion that by virtue of their religion and traditionalism, the Medinese always necessarily followed each preceding generation of Medinese, in respect of what they cared to do or not to do.” This chain of knowledge was all important to Khaldun, who respected the verbal wisdom of past scholars more than book learning or self-mastery. “Independent judgement no longer had any role in Islam, if it ever had, and adherents to a particular madhhab simply had to obey what was handed down by tradition.” Khaldun stated, “It should be known that the science of the principles of jurisprudence is one of the greatest, most important, and most useful disciplines of the religious law.”

Finally, although never mentioned explicitly by Khaldun himself, Irwin makes the case that Khaldun was probably a Sufi. “Sufis who belong to tariqas (Sufi orders or brotherhoods) trace the origin of their tariqa through an initiatory chain of mystical shaykhs, all the way back to ‘Ali and through him to the Prophet…. The earliest Sufis were individual ascetics and there were at first no Sufi tariqas. The tariqas started to form around the early thirteenth century…. In fourteenth-century North Africa Sufism was so pervasive that it came close to becoming Sunni orthodoxy.” Khaldun wrote in the Muqaddima, “The Sufi approach is based upon constant application to divine worship, complete devotion to God, aversion to false splendour of the world, abstinence from the pleasure, property, and position to which the great mass aspire, and retirement from the world into solitude for divine worship.” He also compared the relationship of a Sufi obedient to his shaykh as “like a corpse in the hands of its washer.” Ibn Khaldun, pessimistic to the end, maintained, “The purpose of human beings is not only their worldly welfare. This entire world is trifling and futile. It ends in death and annihilation.”