Offerings, Plans, Reflections
The role(s) of the political philosopher; Love and normativity; Being and nothingness
Greetings!
This week if you’re not interested in political philosophy, you may be disappointed. With Andrew Stewart’s essay “The Roles of the Political Philosopher” now online and Ben Laurence speaking tomorrow on “The Role of the Political Philosopher”, there’s a bit of a pincer movement vibe at play. For those wanting a holiday from the world of politics, Jeffrey Anderson offers a mind-bending reflection on Berkeley, physics, aliens, and existence. More on all this below!
Offerings
Your Sunday Read
“The Roles of the Political Philosopher”: A political philosopher can be many things: guidance counsellor; guide to knowledge; obstetrician of the revolution; conservator of the discourse; theory-providing citizen-discussant; critic of ideology; seeker of moral truth; and so on. In this essay, Andrew Stewart considers the guiding aims of the political philosopher, defending a pluralist view that extends far beyond the traditional role of “theorist”. You can read Andrew’s essay here.
This week, we also uploaded an essay from our “New Basics” series. “Love” by philosopher and novelist Carrie Jenkins critiques the idea that “certain kinds of ‘normal’ relationships – loving, committed, monogamous, permanent – are respectable while others aren’t”, before offering an account of “eudaimonic love” that foregrounds “what it is about love that is truly valuable and worthy of our respect, and what kinds of relationships best exemplify those qualities”. You can read Carrie’s essay here.
Event: Monday 1st May at 11am PDT/2pm EDT/7pm UK
“The Role of the Political Philosopher”: What should we want from political philosophy? We may want it to address the most fundamental questions about justice and to articulate the idea of a just society or we may want it to help us to think about the problems of injustice that confound us in the real world. In this event, political philosopher Ben Laurence will argue that the worlds of theory and practice need not be in conflict. Full details and registration here.
If you missed the wonderful Josh Cohen discussing “On Being a Loser”, you can watch the recording here.
Plans
Please disperse. Nothing to see here.
Reflections
Following his recent reflection on the subjective idealism of Bishop Berkeley, Jeffrey Anderson takes us on a deep dive into theoretical physics in order to look deeper into what may be entailed by Berkeley’s seminal idea that “to be is to be perceived”:
Being and Nothingness
The Irish bishop George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) stated that “to be is to be perceived” and by doing so revolutionised philosophical thought, introducing the world to his notion of subjective idealism. Berkeley did so via his famous work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). Subjective idealism denies the existence of physical objects, arguing that every day objects are merely ideas of the mind and therefore cannot exist without being perceived.
However, subjective idealism encounters a problem relating to the unfolding of events relative to the flow of time. For example, food stills rots even when no one is there to witness it rot. Berkeley addresses this problem from a religious perspective, arguing that as God is omnipresent He is always there to ensure objects and events are perceived. This ensures that objects exist and events unfold as we would normally expect. However, Berkeley’s response runs into a potential further difficulty: it presupposes time to be objective in nature, that is, objective in the sense that it lies outside of the subjective experience of human beings.
Our everyday experience of time, however, tells us that the flow of time is actually a subjective experience. This is something we are all aware of as human beings. St Augustine (354 – 430) illuminates this issue when he notes that “it is within my mind, then, that I measure time. I must not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective. When I measure time, I am measuring something in the present of my mind. Either this is time, or I have no idea what time is”. More recently, Albert Einstein made a similar point: "when a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute – and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.”
As Einstein revealed, time is not universal but local, relational not objective, and discontinuous not flowing. Once we move away from believing the “obvious”, based on our perceptual limitations, a new understanding is possible. Imagination opens up a whole new, previously unnoticed world. The idea that time flows presupposes that there does exist a past, present and future. After all, it is obvious that time does flow in such a linear fashion as we human beings experience this in every living moment. That said, we used to truly believe that the Sun rose in the East and set in the West. This seemed obvious as the Sun moved across the heavens of a quite literally stationary Earth. It was also obvious that we walked on a flat Earth. If I were to stand atop the very highest of mountains and look out as far as the eye could see, the flatness of the Earth is just so obvious, as my eyes do not lie.
Let us imagine an alien species, not too dissimilar to ourselves (alien humans), living on a planet (Alien Earth) at the outer reaches of the universe. When the distance from them to us (and vice-versa) is measured in billions of light years, our relative existence is way off into their future. It is self-evident that we exist in our own time but this is not case for them, due to their enormous distance from us (and vice-versa). For the alien humans, humanity on planet Earth has not yet even come into existence. We exist relative to ourselves but not yet relative to the alien human species. Putting to one side Berkeley’s omnipresent God for the moment, in this example being and nothingness coexist.
At the level of the unfathomably small, theoretical physics tells us that space and time have no meaning. That is, below a certain level on the Planck scale (the scale beyond which the currently understood laws of physics do not reach), they cease to exist. At this scale, reality as we know it vanishes into nothingness. The further implications are that we also vanish to nothingness in terms of our being in any physical/material sense. Once again, being and nothingness, existence and non-existence, coexist.
The scientific knowledge and scenarios explored above take our understanding far beyond Berkeley and his subjective idealism. Reality, either as perceived or not, is far more complicated than Berkeley could have ever envisaged.
Jeffrey Anderson is an independent thinker with an MA in Philosophy from The Open University. He has a special interest in human perception.
Ending
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Wishing you all a lovely Sunday, wherever you are.
Anthony Morgan
Editor