Paul asked:

What is beauty?

Answer by Tony Fahey

Whilst in philosophy in particular, and academic discourse in general, it is advisable to avoid sweeping statements, I believe it is fair to say that the issue of defining beauty is one that has occupied the mind, not just of scholars, but of many people over several millennia. For example, for Plato, an ideal from of beauty is not found in the natural world: in individual things such as objets d’art, people, animals and so on, but in the Realm of Ideal Forms which it shares with other forms such as Justice. Plato acknowledged that everything that belongs in the material world is made of substances that time will eventually erode. However, he also held that everything is made after a timeless mould that is eternal and immutable; that is, everything in the physical world is but an inferior copy of an ideal form which exists in, which for him, is the ‘real’ world.

According to Plato then, all that we perceive in the material world are but poor imitations of these original forms. Against this, Aristotle argues that there is no such as an absolute or ideal form of beauty. Things in the material world are real. Nature, he says, is the real world; things that are in the human soul/mind are not, as Plato holds, a priori concepts, but concepts and ideas gained by empirical experience. That which we perceive as beautiful, he argues, is not some poor imitation of that which has its archetype in a metaphysical realm, rather it is a representation of a quality intrinsic to the thing itself.

However, rather than continuing with a detailed and long-winded history of the issue of the question of beauty over the centuries, let me give you my own understanding of this concept as I have come to see it.

In Philosophy the rubric under which the issue of beauty is discussed is aesthetics. The term aesthetics derives from the Greek word aisthanomai, which means to perceive, to feel and it is in this ancient term that we find the essence of the meaning of that which we know as ‘beauty’. That is, it is the appreciation by the mind of the quality we recognize as beautiful in phenomena (i.e. things in the world outside the mind) transmitted to the mind through the senses. The question, of course, that arises from this description is: ‘what is it in the mind that allows it to make this judgment call?’

In the issue of the relationship between mind and phenomena, from Kant we learn that ‘although all knowledge begins in experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of it’. What Kant argues is that before we experience things in themselves (phenomena), there already exists, within the mind, a certain a priori framework that allows us to give meaning to that which we experience through the senses. For Kant, this framework is made up of the intuitions space and time and the law of cause and effect. Now, it seems to me that in the much the same way that Kant makes the case for space and time, and the law of causality privileging the mind to put order on that which the mind experiences, so too can a case be made that there also exists within the mind (let us call it) a property that privileges it to make a judgment call on that which it experiences or perceives as beauty. That property is what I call the instinct of equilibrity.

Let me explain:

Human consciousness privileges us with an awareness of our existence. Intentionality, as a feature of consciousness, privileges us with the wherewithal to contemplate affairs of the world. However, in order to put order on that which we experience, as well as space and time and the law of cause and effect, nature has furnished the mind/brain with another, equally important, feature which I call the instinct of equilibrity: that is, an innate sense of equilibrium which is essential in the making of judgment calls necessary not only for our safety and development, but also for our appreciation of that quality in things which we have come to describe as beautiful. It is in virtue of this feature that the mind rises above the prosaic or mundane, to focus on that special indefinable quality in things that makes them worth experiencing simply for the enjoyment or pleasure from that which they are in themselves. It is in virtue of this feature that we develop our sense of justice, goodness, truth, and beauty – qualities which, whilst perhaps indefinable in themselves, are essential in establishing an environment in which human beings can live, prosper, grow, and even come to appreciate that which find aesthetically pleasing or beautiful.

It seems to me that it is this instinct, this sense of balance or proportionality, that was in Keats’ mind when he said that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty! – that is all/Ye know and all ye need to know’. That is, at its most refined, beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.

Wilona asked:

What is life?

Answer by Helier Robinson

The best definition that I know of was given by Erwin Schrodinger, the physicist of wave equation fame, who suggested that a living organism is a system of very high negative entropy in dynamic equilibrium. Entropy is a measure of disorder, and negative entropy is a measure of order. Dynamic equilibrium is equilibrium through change. For example, a car driving along a road is kept in dynamic equilibrium, relative to the legal side of the road to be driven on, by the driver; if the driver falls asleep then the equilibrium collapses. According to the second law of thermodynamics entropy can increase but not decrease, so that the opposite applies to negative entropy: it can decrease, but not increase. But living things manage to avoid this by feeding on negative entropy: sunlight, carbon dioxide, and oxygen for plants, and plants or other animals for animals. (The fate of every living thing is to live for a while and then be eaten by something else, with the exception of those that die in forest fires, volcanic eruptions, etc., and humans who do like the idea of being eaten and so get cremated or buried.) Your negative entropy is lower if you are tired or ill, and its dynamic equilibrium collapses when you die. See Schrodinger, What is Life? Cambridge University Press, 1948.

Almustapha asked:

Describe the difference between objective valuation and subjective valuation.

Answer by Martin Jenkins

Objective Valuation

Objective valuation in ethics, would make recourse to a criteria, an index that is characterised by impartiality or by some absolute authority. It is not up for debate, dependent on people or the product of their feelings, impulses or desires. For example, Immanuel Kant would maintain that his Categorical Imperative is a product of detached, impartial reasoning. It is devoid of subjective impulses or desires for particular results or resting on the same impulses and desires acting as motives (which he would term a Hypothetical Imperative: If you want B then do A). This permits acts, goal oriented acts which could be completed when resting on less than honest motives. For instance, I help the person across the road in hope of monetary reward-or approbation from others or feeling good myself. The acts and its consequence is good (i.e. vulnerable person has crossed the road) but the motive is wrong. Similarly, my motive may be good — to help a vulnerable human being — but the outcome less than good: I help the person across the road only to find that unintentionally, I helped him evade his pursuing and exasperated carers. ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’ as Sartre wrote. Subjective valuation does not therefore, guarantee a good motive or consequence.

So for Kant, Reason demands that the Imperative is not subject to confusion or contradiction by its being ‘universalisable’ — it can feasibly be applied to all human beings. It is a matter of deontology: the act alone is good. Regardless of motives or consequences, it will ‘shine like a jewel’.

Subjective Valuation

Although much criticised by Kant, Subjective valuation is for some thinkers, the only basis of ethical valuation. They are and only can be person dependent. For Nietzsche, objective valuation claiming its basis in Judeo-Christian religion, is a myth, part of the two-thousand year valuations of the of Judeo-Christian religion which is ‘Platonism for the people’. In actuality, objective evaluations are social projections of a particular peoples values — a ‘table of values’ as he terms it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (or, those of its creative thinkers/ philosophers). The value of such values are those of a timid, uncreative, restrictive and repressive mentality which has done untold damage to the culture of Europe. In no sense are they objective. They would, Nietzsche believed, be replaced by the valuations of ‘new philosophers’, initially termed the Ubermensch.

Further, Nietzsche believed that Kant’s Categorical Imperative was, like all evaluations made be humans, a subjective testament to their creator-symptoms of who/ what s/he is. Kant’s objective evaluation was in essence, the subjective valuation of a human being who valued order, timidity and being subject to commands from external authorities-in this case, Reason.

Finally, how could the ‘objectivity’ of such objective valuation be tested? It would have to be contrasted or verified by criteria. This is either self-justifying-assuming the truth of that which has yet to be proven i.e. Kant assumes the truth of Reason. Why? Or, the problem of justifying objective valuation leads to an infinite regress. i.e. the value of Reason is valued by what? by something else? This in turn is subject to another criteria and so on ad infinitum.

Regarding subjective valuation, you might also want to look at the philosophies of Max Stirner and Ayn Rand.

DA asked:

1) What is the message of the Oracle of Delphi to Chaerephon about Socrates?

4) What are the charges brought against Socrates? What are Socrates’ responses to the charges?

Answer by Tony Fahey

1) The Oracle of Delphi pronounced Socrates the wisest of Greeks; and Socrates took this as approval of his agnosticism which was the starting point of his philosophy: ‘One thing only I know’, he said, ‘and that is that I know nothing’. Philosophy begins when one begins to doubt — when one begins to question the accepted wisdom of tradition. Particularly the one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms.

2) Puzzled by the priestess of Delphi’s statement, Socrates felt obliged to seek the meaning of her remark. By questioning others who had a reputation for wisdom, he came to see that he was wiser than they, because unlike them he did not claim to know what he did not know.

Plato’s dialogue, Apology, professes to be the speech made by Socrates in his own defence at his trial — or rather it is an account of Plato’s recollection of Socrates’ defence given some time after his trial. In a typical Athenian trial of that period the defendant was given a limited time (measured by a water-clock) to answer the charges and, although he had to defend himself, he could, if he so desired, buy a suitable speech from a professional speech writer — a Sophist. Socrates, of course, rejects this approach and declares that he will speak plain and unvarnished truth. It can be argued, of course, that his disavowal of any knowledge of rhetoric (rhetoric is the art of speaking eloquently and persuasively) and that his ambition is to tell nothing but the truth, is itself a form of rhetoric in that it implies that his statements can be trusted implicitly.

3) The Apology, then, is, according to Plato, Socrates’ answer to these charges. Socrates opens his defence by accusing his prosecutors of eloquence (what he means by this is rhetoric- the art off speaking persuasively), and rebutting the same charge which was made against him. The only eloquence he admits to, he says, is that of the truth. If this approach offends the court, he says, the court must forgive him for, not being familiar with the ways of the court, he is not familiar with its un-forensic way of speaking. Socrates goes on to relate the incidence where the Oracle of Delphi was once asked if there was anyone wiser than Socrates, to which the Oracle answered that there was not. Socrates claims to have been bemused by this statement, since he always claimed that he knew nothing. However, he also accepts that the god cannot lie so he set out to see if he could find someone wiser than himself. This sequence is central to the Apology because it is from here that Socrates infers his raison d’etre derives. That is, he regards the Oracle’s reply as a puzzle that has to be resolved. Therefore he sees it as his life’s mission to expose false knowledge.

4) Socrates had been accused of being an ‘evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things under the earth and in the sky, and of making the worse seem the better cause, and of teaching all this to others’. He was found guilty by a majority and was, in accordance with Athenian law of that time, to propose an alternative penalty to death. The judges had to choose, if they found the accused guilty, between the penalty of demanded by the prosecution and that suggested by the defence. Therefore, it was in Socrates interest to suggest a penalty that would be accepted as a reasonable alternative to death. However, he chose the sum of 30 minas. While this was much more than Socrates could possibly afford (the sum was guaranteed by Plato, Crito, Critoboulus and Apollodorus) it was considered insufficient by the court and he was sentenced to death. From this, it can be argued that Socrates actively sought this verdict, since, to suggest an alternative penalty that would be acceptable to the court was tantamount to admitting that he was guilty of the charges against him — this of course he could not do for central to the charges made against him were that he was guilty of not worshipping the gods that the State worshipped, but of introducing new divinities, and of corrupting the minds of the young by instructing them accordingly.

Tracy asked:

Why did Thales believe that water represents the fundamental question of
our reality? Any arguments for this belief.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

The Greeks believed that the cosmos was infused with life throughout. The kind of material universe we believe in would have seemed very strange to them. So when you examine all life forms on earth, you find that the one thing they all have in common in a reliance on water to sustain them. No water, no life. So water is fundamental.

Thales had no instruments to prove his point. You need to bear this in mind. His claim was a philosophical proposition designed to challenge other thinkers to either agree or come up with a better proposition.

Today, 2600 years later, you can find scientific textbooks informing you that 70% of the contents of the universe is hydrogen.

Not a bad guess, then?

Leila asked:

When Nietzsche said that God is dead, what exactly did he mean? What I think is this. That men are making a mistake by believing in a God’s society (the Church) is presenting him, who is supposedly dead because of the society changing and that one should search for a God through their own consciousness and use that for the individual determination of values. I know I must be completely wrong on this.

Answer by Martin Jenkins

How do you know you are completely wrong?! On the contrary, many writers maintain what you propose. Nietzsche could be saying that the Judeo-Christian God has died along with his philosophical/ theological justification (i.e. metaphysical theology/ philosophy). If there is to be a new God (or many gods? See Old and New Law Tables 11. Thus Spoke Zarathustra) it will be either one corresponding to the table of values of a people. For instance, in The Anti-Christian, 16, 17, 18, 25, 26, he traces the alterations of the Jewish peoples’ understanding of their God made in response to their changing material circumstances. In this sense, Nietzsche is similar to the Non-Realist school of Theology. This mode of thought proposes that ‘God’ is a projection of human traits and values. (See the works of Ludwig Feuerbach and Don Cupitt.) It does not objectively exist independently, it is a human creation but non the less, possesses a reality as an ethical construct. So God would be a symptomatic projection of a peoples ‘table of values’ at a given time and place. Nietzsche may well be read as opposing the Judeo-Christian conception of God and opening a space for the re-valuation of It.

However, Nietzsche opposes the equality of human beings because this defies the nature of life itself-which is will to power. As are all supposedly equal as creations of and, as before God, it seems safe to conclude that Nietzsche would oppose this. Let’s not forget that a lot of his writings are an attack of Judeo-Christianity and its descendants in the modern forms of secular equality and democracy! In addition, if equality follows from the one God, that Nietzsche opposes equality, he must therefore oppose the one God. In this sense, he could be opening up the possibility ‘that one should search for a God through their own consciousness’ and their determination of values. Fine, but this seems to me to create more problems.

Firstly, an individual determination of values is open ended: it might result in the very rejection of a God as we know it along with all the Biblical and Theological/ Philosophical architecture which informs us we are talking and thinking of the same entity. Secondly, the ‘individual determination of values’ would be lauded by Nietzsche but it does not prima facie, lead to a single God-it could lead to as many gods as there are creators. Again, a plurality of gods, their natures and characteristics, might be irreconcilable with that of the single God. Thirdly, the concept of God might be superfluous with Nietzsche’s revaluation of values. People remaining true to the earth would realise that they-and not any other entity-are the authors of their values. God would be redundant.