Lovely asked:

If the old woman lives affluently do you think the Brahmin will not want the life of the old woman?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

Voltaire’s story of the Good Brahmin raises a deeper, and to me more interesting question than John Stuart Mill’s ‘Why is it better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied?’ (from Utilitarianism 1861).

The Brahmin has been seeking all his life for the joy that the old lady gets from her religion — a joy for whose loss no material comforts can compensate. He has sought, as philosophers do, the way of understanding. Yet as philosophers know well, the search for understanding brings dissatisfaction and pain.

So we are not comparing human happiness or pleasure with that of a non-human animal. These are two paradigmatically human lives. (See Gideon Smith-Jones’ answer to Canton Not all pleasures are the same.)

On my interpretation, the Brahmin has set his heart on ‘finding the answer’, and now, too late, he realizes his all-too-human limitations. (Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry would have something to say about that.) And yet he would not trade places with the old woman.

Why?

You have to know why a person would choose to pursue a life in philosophy. This is something I have been explaining to my Pathways students for over two decades. They have not chosen the ‘life of a philosopher,’ but merely to study the subject for pleasure or the other rewards that study brings. Yet they understand.

The way of philosophy does not promise enlightenment. That wasn’t part of the deal. There is nothing in this or any other world that is worth trading for the understanding a philosopher seeks. That’s what you believe. To survive disappointments, battle scarred, and still press on is your badge of honour.

‘My pain is mine: I will not give it up.’

Something must also be said about Voltaire’s jaundiced view of philosophy — the same Voltaire who satirized the philosopher Leibniz in his novel Candide. Voltaire was a brilliant writer but a great philosopher he was not. I would hazard a guess (only a guess) that the pain he describes is his own secret pain. Not good enough to reach the heights of philosophy, he settled for ‘brilliant writing’ instead.

He would have been better off with a yacht and a Lamborghini and pad in St Tropez.

Whom would you prefer to be: Leibniz or Voltaire? or take the money?!

It’s a question I ask myself on occasion.

Jurgis asked:

What do you think of Merab Mamardashvili’s motto, ‘The Devil is playing with us, when we are not thinking precisely’?

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

Talk about ‘precision’ is like waving a red flag to a bull when you’re in conversation with an analytic philosopher. The English language is no longer enough — algebraic symbolism is now the norm in articles published in the major journals. The idea goes back to the 18th century philosopher Leibniz and his ‘characteristica universalis’:

“All our reasoning is nothing but the joining and substituting of characters, whether these characters be words or symbols or pictures… if we could find characters or signs appropriate for expressing all our thoughts as definitely and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometric analysis expresses lines, we could in all subjects insofar as they are amenable to reasoning, accomplish what is done in Arithmetic and Geometry.”

(For a longer quote, see http://follydiddledah.com/image_and_quote_7.html.)

The ‘scab of symboles’ as Hobbes called it affects some areas of philosophy more than others. Some parts are still relatively free of it. Yet even then one finds points explained with irritating overkill, as if clarity can be achieved only by the philosophic equivalent of legalese, allowing no possible room for misinterpretation.

This kind of stuff bores me senseless — I’m not ashamed to admit, I won’t even make the attempt to read it even there are reasons to think there is something good buried down there. I don’t care. Let it stay buried. Academic philosophers should talk like normal human beings or shut up — because no-one outside their tiny circle is listening.

My view of precision is much more practical. It’s about having your mind on the job, something Robert Pirsig talks about in his Zen and the Art. It’s not a new idea: Aristotle was there first. You have to have the eye, or the ear, or the feel for what you are doing — whether it is making a brush mark on a canvas, tightening a nut on a motorcycle engine, selecting the right word, or choosing one of innumerable ways of casting an argument.

Mamardashvili was a Georgian philosopher, working under the Soviet regime. (See his profile in the ISFP Gallery of Russian Thinkers http://isfp.co.uk/russian_thinkers/merab_mamardashvili.html.) In his book Philosophizer, Geoffrey Klempner states:

“I have a theory that Russian intellectual life is afflicted by chronic bad conscience, which will take many generations to overcome. Under the Communists, ‘intellectuals’ and ‘philosophers’ (so-called) debated apparently weighty problems, all the time aware of the vast weight of censorship bearing down, silencing any genuinely significant idea. They pretended concern for the pursuit of truth while all the time hopelessly mired in lies. Those who refused to bend ended up in the Gulags. A lucky few escaped to the West.” (Chapter 9, ‘A touch of poshlust’)

This is somewhat unkind. Despite the restrictions on freedom of thought, Russian thinkers succeeded in producing a welter of original ideas, that have no counterpart either in the analytic or continental traditions. Yet there is a point to be made here. When a thinker protests, ‘At all costs, I am trying to think precisely,’ there is always a suspicion that the motivation for philosophy — the pursuit of truth at all costs, regardless of the outcome — has taken second place. This applies as much to analytic philosophy as it does to those Russian thinkers (I suspect Mamardashvili was not one of them)  who allowed themselves to be cowed by the the fascist bullies of the Soviet regime.