HCJ 1 Reading

Photo of Aristotle

Here's my bastardisation of what I've learnt in the past week or so.


Aristotle is a name which keeps just cropping up again and again. I'm sure that he would've been chuffed with the way his teachings got the cut and paste treatment with the Bible. It led to several centuries of scholastic reverence of his logic and was par for the course for any university student, with no alternative offered. Thereafter, it was near impossible for the individual to have freedom of thought; even the most learned of men had been told what to think, and how to think it. This meant that rather than looking at things from a different angle or questioning the knowledge of Aristotle men were content to simply learn his ponderings by route, and bring nothing new to the table. Any novel ideas potentially dangerous to the Church (which would have been essentially anything and everything that contradicted either the Bible or Aristotle) were spirited away amid cries of heresy. The move to Platonist values aided the eventual expansion of minds beyond that of the generic Latin-and-Aristotle happy meal of before.

Pieces of Pythagoras' work were particularly contentious; he believed that through numbers alone you could understand the universe, contrary to almost every assertion in biblical texts. This cold and logical approach to the majesty of God's creation was largely ignored before the Renaissance. I used to think that it was the Huns or some other organised barbaric force that had crippled the advance of civilisation, but it seems it was the Church doing most of the damage. They can at least be credited for keeping literacy alive, albeit in small monastic pockets.

Another theme of the Renaissance was the return to humanity and the rejection of original sin; the idea that, at your conception, you are the product of something very naughty and that for the rest of your life you must repent/abstain/flog yourself wherever possible to pay this bad karma off. Bit of a bad start. As this lifted away, the suffocating influence of the Church grew weaker - instead of people fearing themselves and each other they could instead focus on their own development and aspiration. The representation of humanity is highlighted most clearly in Renaissance art, moving away from barren iconic imagery to more realistic depictions of men, women and children; people are celebrated and portrayed as beautiful and rosy - a world apart from the conservative, ashamed depictions of before. Protagoras said that "Man is the measure of all things." It may seem egocentric, but it's true; if we are the only intelligent life then for anything to be measured or quantified, then it's down to us. It also places importance on human beings rather than constantly looking to God for answers.

Along with the blossoming of humanism and realism in art, science was really the main driving force behind the age of Enlightenment. Galileo was a follower of Pythagoras, mentioned above for his mathematical approach to the universe. He put forward the very modern notion of separation of church and state, and that the Bible should not influence science in any way - "Nature is the book of God and is written in the language of mathematics." I really like this quote. He's not trying to contest the existence of God, only move away from strict Adventism, much like persons who may say that evolution is simply a tool of God rather than completely spiting Darwin altogether.

Galileo.

Galileo was first and foremost an astronomer, but his contributions to that field were also integral to modern physics. He formed the concept of acceleration, and put forward the idea that with no external force a moving body might continue to move indefinitely in a straight line, at a constant speed, irrespective of size or shape. This was revolutionary as at the time most of his contemporaries had thought that a lump of lead heavier than the other would hit the ground first; this theory disproved that, and also went partway to explaining the movement of planets in orbit. Even his observation of celestial bodies (with the telescope he had built) served to irritate the best and brightest minds of the day - the thought that Jupiter had four moons was preposterous, as it pushes the number of heavenly objects from seven (the planets) to eleven, a number which (probably, I don't know) has no religious or mystical significance. Bad news for the astrologists out there.

Galileo was, unsurprisingly, denied a ceremonious burial, but miraculously made it past retirement age without getting stabbed in the face by the then current Pope.

Newton's laws of motion helped to fill in the ever-decreasing gaps about the mechanics of the universe. These natural laws expanded further on the previous work of Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus. His work undoubtedly accelerated the Scientific Revolution, but with all of this comes yet more diminished influence from the Church, and to a large extent God. These great men - Galileo, Newton, Kepler - they all pushed forward the idea of Empiricism, an idea that changed the world forever. Empiricism relies on facts, facts that can be hypothesised, tested, and then replicated by anyone to the same result, and is the philosophy behind all science today. It is the reason you're asked to do three replicates of dull things during biology in school - three tests, three similar results and the mean taken from those three will give the most accurate estimation and therefore, hopefully, the most truth. It is a posteriori reasoning as opposed to the a priori reasoning of all classical philosophers and many Renaissance ones, with the exception of Machiavelli.

Dreamy

Machiavelli's book The Prince was a big deal not only because of its callous subject matter, but also because of its scientific content; the examples he provided in each instance were not only theoretical, like that of Descartes, but tried and observed by Machiavelli to hold true. He offers in his book practical advice for anyone looking to gain power by any means. There are no ethical maxims to consider, it is purely instrumental to the end. The Prince was initially written as a bit of suck-up to the Medici family and although it never worked out for him, it remains influential to this day. Any dictator would be fairly unsuccessful without employing the tips in the book - 'It is better to be feared than loved...[but not hated]' is an example. It seems like Kim Jong-II and Saddam Hussein didn't quite know how to strike that happy balance, and so assumed that massive statues in their (idealised) likeness and public holidays celebrating their glory could brainwash people into forgetting that, actually, they're not very nice guys. 1984 by George Orwell has the famous example with all of the posters slapped in everyone's home bearing the iconic Big Brother - reminded that he's watching them, and that they must love him. The main protagonist, after a long bout in Room 101, is finally broken in the last line of the book, sobbing into his pint and saying that he really loves Big Brother. I'm not sure but I want to say that George must have at least glossed through The Prince before he penned 1984.

Descartes came along to the party in the early 1600's and blew everyone's minds with his series of musings about the nature of reality. He postulated that, through his own double strength brand of Cartesian doubt, nothing that he knows does he really know for a fact. He doesn't know beyond all doubt that his mother is really his mother, or that anything around him isn't a figment of his own imagination or the twisted experiment of another's. As he chipped off every layer of himself he came to realise that the only thing that he knows he truly has are his own thoughts, hence "I think therefore I am." or even "cogito ergo sum" even though he was French and not from ancient Rome. But it sounds more impressive that way I guess. He goes on: if the sensations and sights he sees around him are not the work of an evil demon trying to deceive him, then they must be the work of God. God allows him the freedom of thought enough to know that he is indeed thinking, and this idea is so strong in Descartes' mind as to be free from doubt. 'All things that we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are true.' This raises the question however of how you define which of these things are distinct and clear.
Descartes is often cited as being inconsistent, and while that may be true it is apparently all part of his quirky charm. His ideas on dualism - that of mind and matter being separate - led to debate on if that is the case, then how can the eternal mind control the material body, and kicked up even more fuss about subjects like free will. His method of Cartesian doubt however, which he uses to arrive at the cogito, is completely invaluable to the modern world, to science, to law and especially journalism.