Titu asked:

What is the connection between a theory of art and the concept of the world of ideas/ forms?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

I assume you know about Plato’s theory of ideas, since you are asking for the connection from there to art. But although Plato denies a role to art in value-laden human activities, most thinkers who came after him (including his pupil Aristotle) found ways of protesting against his strictures, with varying degrees of conviction.

The connection of which you speak was not, however, accomplished until early in the 19th century by Schopenhauer. He unveiled the one criterion that all preceding arguments had missed: That the Platonic forms/ideas, as “Urbilder”, are archetypal images of perfection, but have no independent existence. They are after all ideas; and there can be no traffic down from heaven into human minds as this would imply a kind of empirical contact. Rather, says Schopenhauer, the Platonic idea is in fact identical to Kant’s “Ding an sich”, a noumenon or “creature of the mind”. What does this mean? That Platonic forms, like Kants “Dinge an sich”, are purely imaginary constructs which evolved in the cognitive mind after the digestion of phenomenal impressions. Hence it is our cognition that manufactures “immutable essences” and “fundamental archetypes” after the event. In a word: one cannot think of either Platonic ideas nor of “Dinge an sich” without first having their actual counterparts before one’s eyes. And so everything in the world that Plato wished to reduce to ideas/forms is in fact a Platonic idea/form in its own right, and ditto for Kant’s “Dinge”. We deduce the type from the particular, not the other way around. And so, by this turnabout, we come to the ideas and forms of art.

Is a statue a copy of reality? By no means. Even Cicero chastised Plato for this error, maintaining that Phidias depicted the “ideal form” of the goddess, not the living goddess herself. How right he was! Just consider that none of the divinities is reducible to the form of “the god or goddess”. Some measure of individuation is indispensable, even among the immortals!

It was Schopenhauer’s merit to draw this consequence — namely, that every work of art is an “Urbild” in itself — unique and unrepeatable. Every authentic work of art is both, a type and an individual, but the type exists only ideally, in virtue of our categorisation of genres.

It is on this account that the modern commodification of art is beset by considerable anguish. There are always clever people around whose fakes and forgeries can delude the best experts, and this has repercussions in a business where art is traded as money and investment. Paradoxically, however, it does not affect Schopenhauer’s dictum. Even a forged painting is a unique work, and a fake only when its author hides his/her name. A buyer who acquires it for cheap and actually enjoys it will not complain as long as they are aware that the name in the corner is mere decoration.

Which leaves us with one last thought. The foregoing made it clear (I hope) that the connection between the theory of art and theory of ideas is altogether spurious. It remains attractive to some; but neither Plato nor any Platonist could clinch the point, because at bottom the whole notion of copulating art with the eternal ideas is simply a category error. Whereas those who look for “soul food” in the arts are at least on right track. What we look for in a poem are not the fine words, nor the lovely melodies in music, nor the splendid colours in a painting. We expect them to “speak” to us, to appeal to our affections; and in this respect every art lover brings his own “archetypes” to the experience, to encounter his/her pleasure or catharsis in the collision between them.

Ross asked:

I have a question . Why has modern philosophy abandoned what was the goal of ancient philosophy namely the pursuit of wisdom? Is this a weakness in modern philosophy or were the ancients misguided?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

I ask you a question in return: What is wisdom? Maybe you tend, like many people, to think of a grey-bearded old fogey who utters mysterious mantras or is steeped in religion but inclined to an unorthodox point of view? Well, its etymology points to “wis”, derived from the old German “wissen”, which denotes the capacity to think and explain, as well as “witz”, in English “wit”, which used to mean sharpness of intellect. If you are familiar with Shakespeare, you’ll know that this is how he used the word and so did all writers before the 19th century.

This doesn’t leave much room for the prejudice in which you indulge. I can’t see Kant or Hegel, even Heidegger and Wittgenstein having abandoned wisdom. But maybe your real concern is the university circuit and the thousands of academics who write papers and combat each other’s “position” on one or another trifling issue, and otherwise teach the subject in the same way as a physicist or anthropologist or economist would deal with it – facts, doctrines, histories, theories and an undue emphasis on fads and fashions, while you feel that you’re missing out on what is supposed to be “wise” about all this. Unfortunately this is a perspective as old as philosophy itself. Even Thales and Pythagoras, or Plato and Aristotle had their commentators back in the ancient days, some of them far from embracing wisdom, but preferring scurrilous argumentation.

No, there is nothing new under the sun in this respect. What has changed is methodology. Beginning with Galileo in the age of Shakespeare, science began to develop a predominantly empirical, factual, experimental and probative methodology of exact knowledge; and if you look at this closely, you will quickly understand that this comprises a division in the area of “wis”-dom which grew to question features of our existence that cannot be encompassed this way. In spite of which, science has in recent times moved increasingly into research that is intrinsically closed to “factual” theorising; but its prestige in our modern world has burgeoned to such an extent that we are totally intimated and most reluctant to rebut its incursions into such matters as life, mind, art, spirituality etc., as if they were amenable to the same methodology (not to say technology!) that gave us computers, atom bombs and contraceptive pills.

In sum: It is not the case that philosophy has abandoned wisdom; simply that men endowed with wisdom are harder to breed in an environment dominated by the sciences and to some extent by the prior needs of educational curricula. Hence the weakness you perceive can be put down simply to the swings and roundabouts which affect all human activities over time – after all, we haven’t had a second Shakespeare for a few years either, and if Einstein had been born in 1564, he would have been unemployable!

Kelly asked:

Using the ethical theory of deontology criticise and evaluate the practice of gene editing.

Answer by Hubertus Fremerey

One has to put the question in a larger context. The Enlightenment was a great project of improving the lot of mankind by putting each and every institution before the ‘tribulanl of reason’ as Kant put it in a lengthy footnote to the foreword of Critique of Pure Reason (1st ed.).

But since humans are objects of our critical review, we always have some vague idea of what is good and what is not in humans. Otherwise there would be no criminal law reflecting on ‘bad behaviour and punishment’ and no education and civilization either which are meant to keep the human excesses and evil tendencies in check.

But even then, a lot of madness and cruelty remains. And the natural response of the Enlightenment was: What to do about that? But this is only on behaviour, of ‘mentality’. The question of sanity and decency in human conduct.

Now what about the body? We call some people ugly. We call other people ‘challenged’. We call people crippled — either from birth or from accidents.

In our age of improvement we want to correct things to the better. That’s natural.

But in our age of science and technology, we try to prevent bad things from happening. Why repair any bodily or mental aberration after birth and not before? At first sight, there is nothing to object.

On second sight, there is a lot of trouble: Who defines what is good?

Only humans can decide what is good or not in humans. Animals can’t. And robots can’t either. Then we enter the problem of eugenics. The Nazis have demonstrated what this comes to: ‘Kill all Jews, they are aberrations and not the right sort of humans!’ ‘Kill all crippled people, all people with dementia, etc.! They are life not worth living!’

From this derives an ethical principle: ‘Humans are not allowed to define what a human is!’ To be more precise: ‘A human is what is born by a human mother.’

Thus we are in an ethical conundrum: We find it natural to improve things, but a human is not a thing for other humans to define, and thus every improvement has to be executed with greatest reluctance, reflection and circumspection.

It is not the case that nothing can be done. Teachers and MDs and surgeons are improving humans all the time. But they shun back from any general concept of improvement. There is no accepted standard of a good and sane human — whether with respect to the body nor to the mind nor to ‘soul and character’. The accepted principle of all medics is always: ‘Try to remove or alleviate suffering — but nothing else!’ Not even euthanasia is generally accepted.

Now, we all sometimes meet a person who seems perfect: Great looks, great mind, great character, great intelligence, a 10 on almost every skale. There are not many of such people, maybe one in 1000, but we know them from personal experience and call them dream women or dream men or superstars. And don’t look for the dark side. Some are really good. There need not be a dark side. They are not only perfect, they are even truly nice and helpful and humble and ready to learn. They are neither arrogant nor neurotic, they are simply perfect. But only one in thousand — or less.

Now imagine a city of 5-10 million inhabitants like London. Then you may see a small city with 5-10 thousand — the perfect people from London! Every one of them is nice and bright and just perfect. Wouldn’t that be your utopia? The new humanity?

Today there are nearly 8 billion humans inhabiting the Earth. Many of them are poor and wretched and some cruel and repellent. What about extracting from these 8 million perfect specimens and get rid of the others and start humanity from scratch? Something like this was on the minds of Hitler and Himmler and some others.

Now you see the real problem. It is not just ‘deontology’. It is a fundamental problem of human existence: ‘What sort of people should there be?’

Look up https://www.amazon.com/What-People-Should-There-Pelican/dp/0140222243/

For the time being, human engineering is a technical problem: We simply do not know what we do. Thus genetic engineers are reluctant to do much if anything. Only in some cases, preventive measures are allowed even by the Catholic Church. And killing people ‘that are not perfect’ is a no go. But what if genetic engineering becomes really precise? Then people may sue their parents : ‘You could have prevented me! You could have known from my genes that I have this handicap!’

The next step would be to enter the project of trans- and posthumanism: Start creating perfect humans all over again! Look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism

This is not killing ‘deficient humans’. There is no natural objection to improving humans. It is called the paradox of transhumanism that ‘improving the human’ may coincide with ‘replacing humans by something better’.

Then we are in the center of metaphysical anthropology: What would we call ‘the essence of humanity’?

Do not even think of ‘man in the image fo God’! We do not think of God as having two legs and two arms, a belly and a head. So what does ‘in the image of God’ come to? It must be something spiritual. But what exactly? A creative mind? And what if a smart computer displays a creative mind? Would the computer be built ‘in the image of God’?

Once you start genetic engineering of humans there is much much more to it than mere gene editing and IVF. You are right in the middle of metaphysical humanism.

This is only a starter, just some hints. And now that you have seen the whole picture, you may get to your original question on the details.

Look up https://www.amazon.com/Posthumanism-Stefan-Herbrechter/dp/1780936060/

Douglas asked:

The phrase “the blind leading the blind” is a reference to moral choice. It appears over 100 times in the Bible. Is it possible to reintroduce moral choice effectively to a person? I’ve found no success. How to pose a moral dilemma to a person in denial?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

I don’t agree that the phrase is about morals. It has a much wider use as a metaphor of certain aspects of the human condition. That it appears 100 times in the Scriptures (including the New Testament) is therefore hardly noteworthy. However, the scriptures lay great stress on an underlying notion of (dis)obedience, which could be taken as the focus of moral behaviour — but this is debatable and not everyone would see it that way. We might e.g. take into consideration that it is not uncommon for biblical protagonists to argue with God about the disparity between his and their own sense of justice. Hence it is also useful to compare the Sermon of the Mount, where we find 90 mentions of reward and punishment without a single instance of faith as a blessing in its own right.

So it occurs to me that you have inadvertently pre-loaded your question with an illicit association of the Christian religion with morality. Now this happens to be a highly topical issue for us today, in an age of weakening faith which induced many writers (religious and secular alike) to a call for reflection, along the lines of “are morals possible without religion?” Therein lies in fact the answer to the preloading I referred to.

For it fails to take account two facts that cannot be left out of sight: First, that Christianity is today embedded in a global network of religions and regarded even by many of its followers as no more than an equal to several others. Second, that the historical record of practical Christian morality exhibits several phases of horrifying derailment (e.g. witch burning) that one would prefer to forget as they can scarcely be used for an advertisement.

Add to this an apparently growing disaffection with both Christian morality and spirituality and we are homing in on the burning focus of your question — for which the real issue is not how to reintroduce moral choice or how to pose moral dilemmas to doubters, but rather how to re-ignite a remedial sense of moral hope into Christian societies.

I will not pretend that I have the solution to hand. Yet there is one aspect you need to be better aware of: namely, is that morality is not a code — unlike the rules of ethics or the legal systems of nations, moral rules are not written down, but mostly taught by word of mouth and example, and drawn from the customs and traditions of whatever social collective one belongs to. Inevitably, therefore, they frequently differ from one cultural realm to another, from one religion to another, even from one village or city to another; and in addition they change much more often than ethics or laws in reponse to external influences. This opens the door for anyone who wishes to make such a claim that all morals are relative, temporary and subjective, as well as relying on authoritarian figures and/or institutions imposing them in their own interests rather than that of the people. Taken together, they form a considerable impediment to the wishes implied in your question.

Melissa asked:

I have a good friend whom I’ve known since she was born. She grew up in a really religious family, I had no problem with her telling me some things about her belief and God until she met an old friend, who also is from an religious family.

This girl has told me some stories which gave me goosebumps. Things like she had screws in her leg because of a car accident and when they had to operate her leg to get those screws out the doctors said that the screws mysteriously disappeared. Another story was that she ran away from someone and climbed on an old garage roof. The roof collapsed under her feet but with the power of god she was able to jump 2 meters back on the roof.

My friend unfortunately does believe all those stories of her and I feel like she is getting to deep into those things. I hope that you can give me advice or a second opinion on this.

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

Let’s get this straight, Melissa. A friend of a friend of yours is one of many people around the world — millions, in fact — who believe in miracles. You are very unlikely to find anyone here (on a web site devoted to philosophy) who believes in miracles, so you would not be totally surprised if we said, ‘We don’t believe, etc.’

However, that is not in the least bit helpful to you. To anyone belonging to the large group of ‘believers in miracles’, philosophers are miserable sceptics who wouldn’t recognize ‘the truth’ even if it slapped them in the face. You can imagine the response if you said to your friend that a philosopher had said to you, etc., and your friend said to her friend that a philosopher had told her friend, etc.

A long line of Popes (to quote just one example) have presided over canonizations based on reports of miracles, which they presumably believed. Catholicism (to name just one religion) has given the seal of approval to the belief in miracles. — Well, I’m not going to tell you my politically incorrect opinion about this!

David Hume, in his book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) gives a concise and persuasive account of why we should not believe in miracles. I will summarize Hume’s central argument, which is about probability, using an up-to-date example.

Probability is involved everywhere, when we form beliefs. Take the news, for example. You read or hear a news report and you think, ‘I just don’t believe that. It couldn’t possibly happen.’ A tiger is loose in the Florida Keys and is attacking local residents. The report could turn out to be true (recently a tiger escaped from a nearby zoo) or false (the ‘tiger’ is just an unusually large wild cat). But without more information you have to make a judgement call.

That’s all scientists do. They look for the best theory. Sometimes it turns out that the ‘best theory’ is false. Theories are in a constant process of testing and appraisal. However, one assumption of the scientific enterprise is that the universe is law governed. If that assumption turned out to be wrong (which it could conceivably be) then everything we had so far found out about how the universe works would be trashed. If miracles of the kind you describe do actually happen, then we can say good bye to science. As Hume says, it would be ‘a greater miracle’ if that turned out to be the case. It is more probable that reports of miracles are false, than that the universe is not law governed.

Improbable, but not impossible. There is a hypothesis that is taken seriously, ‘Simulation Theory’, according to which the entire universe is a computer simulation, like ‘the Matrix’. In the Matrix ‘laws can be bent’. Anyone who has played a 3D computer game is familiar with this. Monsters can appear from nowhere, and then disappear without a trace. If Simulation Theory were true, there could be vampires, zombies, werewolves, screws could disappear from broken legs, and girls could do a standing jump of two meters. (Women athletes have jumped higher than two meters, using the ‘Fosbury Flop’ technique but that requires a short run-up.)

There is to date, so far as I am aware, no evidence in favour of Simulation Theory, which is why I called it a ‘hypothesis’. It’s something we can imagine, like Descartes’ ‘evil demon’. Which is not to rule out the possibility at some time in the future evidence might turn up that points to the possibility that the hypothesis may be true, after all.

Don’t even bother to try to tell your friend this, because it won’t make any impression. Your friend’s friend is in no danger, however. She doesn’t need to be ‘saved’. There are millions like her, as I have indicated, who are perfectly happy with their beliefs and their world view. She is ‘crazy’ by my lights — the lights of a trained philosopher — but safely so. If she starts doing crazy things, then that’s another matter, in which case a call to social services might be needed.

Robert asked:

What is the age of the Earth if time does not exist?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Good question! What a predicament for all of us, not just philosophers, to be told on one hand that time flows, which ought to mean it is a measurable quantity as our clocks show us; or, in the view of eternity, there is no such thing as time.

However, it is only a human dilemma. To understand the world as the theatre where past, present and future rules, we need a constant that hovers over temporality – something that ticks impartially in the background with unwavering regularity, but has no beginning nor end. We take in our stride (or try to ignore) that such an infinite clockwork makes it impossible to identify a moment in time, as likewise it is impossible to assign to any temporal occasion a definite location in infinite space. We need such a constant to deputise for the one thing we don’t have: a reference point at rest in the centre.

And so we devise conceptual makeshifts such as the fabled ‘big bang’, to which we cling as a feature to help us with ontological reasoning. We need this sort of thing so that science can operate instrumentally, e.g. measuring time as well as space by using the velocity of light in a vacuum as a constant. Yet light is also a phenomenon, and so we go round in circles.

Hence the answer to your specific question must be detached from the dubious conception of time as some kind of res fluidum. The age of the earth is simply a number that answers to its orbital motions around the sun, retrofitted to the moment of its ejection from the sun. It is a very inaccurate measure, since the length of each of those years is not a fixed quantity – consider that the very word “year” defines “1 orbit”, which varies constantly even now and compels us to insert leap years every now and then – but only God knows the length of leap years over a span of several billion years!

All this is bamboozling in high degree. Factually regarded the Earth’s age is not measurable by any means at our disposal. Whatever age our scientists derive from the solar carousel must revert to human intuition; and this would not ensure that the numbers associated with the genesis of the solar system are intelligible – if they were doubled or even multiplied by a hundred, would anyone genuinely comprehend the difference?

In sum: Make do. Don’t worry about time and space and how to reconcile their infinitude with a concrete distance/duration with which you can associate empirically. An existent cannot be finite and infinite. In fact, an existent cannot be infinite, as all existents are made of finite parts. But being finite, they must exist in time, i.e. to begin at one time and end at another. And now the only means at our disposal to unravel this question is to consult Einstein’s relativity. However be prepared for more perplexity here, because with “curved space” and “time dilation” the aforesaid problems return with full force.

Not a satisfactory answer to your question, I agree; but I suspect there really is no answer. Which may be one reason why philosophers have struggled with these conceptions ever since Anaximander put the idea of an “apeiron” (boundless cosmos) on the map nearly 2600 years ago.