A Bear – Poles Apart

You are free to act as long as you don’t interfere with other people’s freedom to act. That’s the ideal of minimal freedom supposedly given to us in Western society. The restriction is by no means a trivial one. Thick volumes of law books are printed to stipulate the vast number of things we are not allowed to do, effectively making our freedom quite illusive. But that being as it may, our society is quite faithful to the idea that the citizens should only be burdened with negative duties. There are a great number of absolute “Don’ts” but only a few absolute “Dos”. The positive duties that do exist, are almost always preceded by voluntary action. If you work, you have to pay taxes, but of course you don’t have to work.

There’s an elementary justice to this. Man is born free, so any law is actually a violation against his nature, but to secure an equal level of freedom for everyone, the very same freedom is restricted. No one is completely free anymore, but at least we are equally free/unfree.

Within this logic it would have been very illegitimate to demand that anyone should perform any positive duties. We may have duties to society, family and neighbors, but those would be moral duties and as such not the business of government to impose.

The western idea of law and government starts and stops at that simplified notion of freedom. But what if freedom is something bigger than this? What if society in itself is a violation of anyone’s innate freedom? Then it wouldn’t be enough to protect against private offenses between citizens, but the state would have to remedy the offense it has caused by its very existence. It might be necessary to impose positive duties on people to liberate them from the compulsive selfishness that society has already fostered.

But that would require a completely different notion of freedom and shatter the very foundation of our Western political belief.

Better let freedom remain an illusion then.

We are all biased, carrying a load of prejudice around with us that interfere with our judgments. We don’t start from afresh every time we observe something new but use our previous knowledge to understand and interpret what we see. It couldn’t be otherwise, but it is still unfortunate that we are not like small children seeing everything for the first time being able to wonder about everything without having been dulled by habits. Philosophy is the readiness to question everything and to do that we must constantly wage the battle against our own prejudice. It is there and unfortunately so.

However, there is a tendency in modern philosophy to make a virtue out of our bias. They say we live and experience life as a continuation of everything that has gone before us having learned from thinkers and philosophers of the past even if their imprint on our mind is indirect and subconscious. This is undoubtedly correct, and it does give us a warm and romantic feeling of connectedness with the past, but the implication is that whatever we come up with as our perception of the truth, it’s unique for our time. Every period of history then has its own potential conclusions, and accordingly whatever the ultimate truth is, it can only be found at one particular time in history. Given the long span of human history, it’s highly unlikely that we are living in the period most conducive to truth, and so whatever conclusion we arrive at about anything, it’s probably not the truth. Wouldn’t that make you want to give up? Why philosophize if we can’t find the truth anyway?

Philosophy is the search for truth. If we reached it, we wouldn’t know for sure that we were there, but at least there is a chance that we have reached it. If that possibility is removed from the outset, there would be no point striving towards it. There would no point in examining life, and an unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates says. That’s rather depressing, isn’t it?

We are certainly prejudiced by the time and place we happen to live in, and it’s extremely difficult to avoid it. But when we have such a grand task before us as the search for truth, we can’t let that stop us from trying and we must at least believe in the theoretical possibility of finding it.

The philosophers of the past should be an inspiration and not a restricting prejudice.

Sing the song of sports if you feel like it. By all means, celebrate the healthy body (of a healthy mind presumably), admire the body control of great athletes and search for the deeper meaning in the fighting of those modern-day gladiators who have turned into non-violent gentlemen. Sure thing, the aesthetically inclined can envision the likeness between sports and art and find symmetry and order there, no less than in other human pursuits. No doubt you can reflect on sports as long as you want and listen to endless televised analyses by sports journalists and other serious thinkers.

Sports is certainly not a joke, but to call it a philosophy is rather a stretch.

Sure enough, one can philosophize about any human activity, including stamp collection and shoe making, and refer to it as philosophy of whatever, and the point is not to stingily protect the honorable name of philosophy, but there should be a minimum connection to a reasonable meaning of the word.

Philosophy isn’t just any thinking about anything; if it were, the term would have been quite redundant. Rather it signifies a purity of thought, that is, thinking that doesn’t start from specific physical objects, like the sciences do, but rather begins as abstraction and then works its way toward physical objects if necessary.

Philosophy of art, for example, would be a philosophy proper in that it first reflects on the general nature of art and only treats actual works of art as instances of this generality.

The so-called philosophy of sport necessarily observes athletics as it’s being exhibited and only then starts to reflect on it, so it is rather a part of the science of sport.

Everything worth reflecting on is not a philosophy, but fine, if it really makes feel better while jogging or watching football in your armchair, call it philosophy.

Nothing ever turns out as planned. Any vision of a great society is doomed to failure if perfection is the only measure of success. Hopefully no one expects perfection, though, and even a moderate version of the ideal could reasonably be counted as success. But it’s pitiful to see how most revolutionary fantasies have ended, not in a moderately acceptable variation of the original idea, but almost in its exact opposite. Dreams of universal brotherhood have ended in the most despicable tyranny.

Now, what is to blame for that, the original theory or the people trying to carry it out? If it’s the theory the whole world view that accompanied the revolution must be discarded and the devoted followers must see their entire belief system crumble; a depressing alternative. If the people are at fault and the unfortunate outcome was caused by just a few bad apples who contaminated the ideals, then we better try again make sure we keep our purity this time. The believers then keep their optimism and feel encouraged to try again; only to repeat the failures of their predecessors.

But could it be that the theories are good enough and the leaders no worse than what it’s reasonable to expect from fallible humans? After all, all plans seem to fail more or less without that leading to the assumption that all theory is useless. The plans that are more likely to be accomplished, are the ones that are closer to the system already in place, and so they don’t resemble a plan quite as much as more radical schemes. Any project that forms a part of an ongoing system is more likely to succeed just because it has the advantage of already partially existing.

The failure of a social theory in practice doesn’t prove the theory wrong, it may also mean that the current practice wasn’t quite right. Go ahead and try to change the practice then and expect more failure.