The Poet of Dialectics.

Karl Marx's Das Kapital is a ground-breaking work of economic analysis. But, argues Francis Wheen, it is also an unfinished literary masterpiece which, with its multi-layered structure, can be read as a Gothic novel, a Victorian melodrama, a Greek tragedy or a Swiftian satire 

In February 1867, shortly before delivering the first volume of Das Kapital to the printers, Karl Marx urged Friedrich Engels to read The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac. The story was itself a little masterpiece, he said, "full of the most delightful irony". We don't know whether Engels heeded the advice. If he did, he would certainly have spotted the irony but might have been surprised that his old friend could take any delight in it. The Unknown Masterpiece is the tale of Frenhofer, a great painter who spends 10 years working and reworking a portrait which will revolutionise art by providing "the most complete representation of reality". When at last his fellow artists Poussin and Porbus are allowed to inspect the finished canvas, they are horrified to see a blizzard of random forms and colours piled one upon another in confusion. "Ah!" Frenhofer cries, misinterpreting their wide-eyed amazement. "You did not anticipate such perfection!" But then he overhears Poussin telling Porbus that eventually Frenhofer must discover the truth - the portrait has been over-painted so many times that nothing remains.

"Nothing on my canvas!" exclaimed Frenhofer, glancing alternately at the two painters and his picture. "What have you done?" said Porbus in an undertone to Poussin.

The old man seized the young man's arm roughly, and said to him: "You see nothing there, clown! varlet! miscreant! hound! Why, what brought you here, then? - My good Porbus," he continued, turning to the older painter, "can it be that you, you too, are mocking at me? Answer me! I am your friend; tell me, have I spoiled my picture?"

Porbus hesitated, he dared not speak; but the anxiety depicted on the old man's white face was so heart-rending that he pointed to the canvas saying: "Look!"

Frenhofer gazed at his picture for a moment and staggered. "Nothing! Nothing! And I have worked ten years!" He fell upon a chair and wept.

After banishing the two men from his studio, Frenhofer burns all his paintings and kills himself.

According to Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, Balzac's tale "made a great impression on him because it was in part a description of his own feelings". Marx had toiled for many years on his own unseen masterpiece, and throughout this long gestation his customary reply to those who asked for a glimpse of the work-in-progress was identical to that of Frenhofer: "No, no! I have still to put some finishing touches to it. Yesterday, towards evening, I thought that it was done . . . This morning, by daylight, I realised my error."

As early as 1846, when the book was already overdue, Marx wrote to his German publisher: "I shall not have it published without revising it yet again, both as regards matter and style. It goes without saying that a writer who works continuously cannot, at the end of six months, publish word for word what he wrote six months earlier." Twelve years later, still no nearer completion, he explained that "the thing is proceeding very slowly because no sooner does one set about finally disposing of subjects to which one has devoted years of study than they start revealing new aspects and demand to be thought out further". An obsessive perfectionist, he was forever seeking out new hues for his palette - studying mathematics, learning about the movement of celestial spheres, teaching himself Russian so he could read books on the country's land system.

Or, to quote Frenhofer again: "Alas! I thought for a moment that my work was finished; but I have certainly gone wrong in some details, and my mind will not be at rest until I have cleared away my doubts. I have decided to travel, and visit Turkey, Greece and Asia in search of models, in order to compare my picture with Nature in different forms."

Why did Marx recall Balzac's tale at the very moment when he was preparing to unveil his greatest work to public scrutiny? Did he fear that he too might have laboured in vain, that his "complete representation of reality" would prove unintelligible? He certainly had some such apprehensions - Marx's character was a curious hybrid of ferocious self-confidence and anguished self-doubt - and he tried to forestall criticism by warning in the preface that "I assume, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself." But what ought to strike us most forcibly about his identification with the creator of the unknown masterpiece is that Frenhofer is an artist - not a political economist, nor yet a philosopher or historian or polemicist.

The most "delightful irony" of all in The Unknown Masterpiece, noted by the American writer Marshall Berman, is that Balzac's account of the picture is a perfect description of a 20th-century abstract painting - and the fact that he couldn't have known this deepens the resonance. "The point is that where one age sees only chaos and incoherence, a later or more modern age may discover meaning and beauty," Berman wrote. "Thus the very open-endedness of Marx's later work can make contact with our time in ways that more 'finished' 19th-century work cannot: Das Kapital reaches beyond the well-made works of Marx's century into the discontinuous modernism of our own."

Like Frenhofer, Marx was a modernist avant la lettre. His famous account of dislocation in the Communist Manifesto - "all that is solid melts into air" - prefigures the hollow men and the unreal city depicted by TS Eliot, or Yeats's "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold". By the time he wrote Das Kapital, he was pushing out beyond conventional prose into radical literary collage - juxtaposing voices and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors' reports and fairy tales, in the manner of Ezra Pound's Cantos or Eliot's The Waste Land. Das Kapital is as discordant as Schoenberg, as nightmarish as Kafka.

Marx saw himself as a creative artist, a poet of dialectic. "Now, regarding my work, I will tell you the plain truth about it," he wrote to Engels in July 1865. "Whatever shortcomings they may have, the advantage of my writings is that they are an artistic whole." It was to poets and novelists, far more than to philosophers or political essayists, that he looked for insights into people's material motives and interests: in a letter of December 1868 he copied out a passage from another work by Balzac, The Village Priest, and asked if Engels could confirm the picture from his own knowledge of practical economics. Had he wished to write a conventional economic treatise he would have done so, but his ambition was far more audacious. Berman describes the author of Das Kapital as "one of the great tormented giants of the 19th century - alongside Beethoven, Goya, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Van Gogh - who drive us crazy, as they drove themselves, but whose agony generated so much of the spiritual capital on which we still live".

Yet how many people would think of including Marx in a list of great writers and artists? Even in our postmodern era, the fractured narrative and radical discontinuity of Das Kapital are mistaken by many readers for formlessness and incomprehensibility. Anyone willing to grapple with Beethoven, Goya or Tolstoy should be able to "learn something new" from a reading of Das Kapital - not least because its subject still governs our lives. As Berman asks: how can Das Kapital end while capital lives on? It is fitting that Marx never finished his masterpiece. The first volume was the only one to appear in his lifetime, and the subsequent volumes were assembled by others after his death, based on notes and drafts found in his study. Marx's work is as open-ended - and thus as resilient - as the capitalist system itself.

Although Das Kapital is usually categorised as a work of economics, Marx turned to the study of political economy only after many years of spadework in philosophy and literature. It is these intellectual foundations that underpin the project, and it is his personal experience of alienation that gives such intensity to the analysis of an economic system which estranges people from one another and from the world they inhabit - a world in which humans are enslaved by the monstrous power of capital and commodities.

Marx was an outsider from the moment of his birth, on May 5 1818 - a Jewish boy in a predominantly Catholic city, Trier, within a Prussian state whose official religion was evangelical Protestantism. Although the Rhineland had been annexed by France during the Napoleonic wars, three years before his birth it was reincorporated into Imperial Prussia and the Jews of Trier became subject to an edict banning them from practising in the professions: Karl's father, Heinrich Marx, had to convert to Lutheranism in order to work as an attorney. His father encouraged Karl to read voraciously. The boy's other intellectual mentor was Heinrich's friend Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a cultured and liberal government official who introduced Karl to poetry and music (and to his daughter Jenny, the future Mrs Karl Marx). On long walks together the Baron would recite passages from Homer and Shakespeare, which his young companion learned by heart - and later used as the essential seasonings in his own writings.

In adult life Marx re-enacted those happy hikes with von Westphalen by declaiming scenes from Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe while leading his own family up to Hampstead Heath for Sunday picnics. There was a quotation for every occasion: to flatten a political enemy, enliven a dry text, heighten a joke, authenticate an emotion - or breathe life into an inanimate abstraction, as when capital itself speaks in the voice of Shylock (in volume one of Das Kapital) to justify the exploitation of child labour in factories:

Workmen and factory inspectors protested on hygienic and moral grounds, but Capital answered:

My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,

The penalty and forfeit of my bond.

To prove that money is a radical leveller, Marx quotes a speech from Timon of Athens on money as the "common whore of mankind", followed by another from Sophocles's Antigone ("Money! Money's the curse of man, none greater! / That's what wrecks cities, banishes men from home, / Tempts and deludes the most well-meaning soul, / Pointing out the way to infamy and shame . . ."). Economists with anachronistic models and categories are likened to Don Quixote, who "paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight-errantry was equally compatible with all economic forms of society".

Marx's earliest ambitions were literary. As a law student at the University of Berlin he wrote a book of poetry, a verse drama and even a novel, Scorpion and Felix, influenced by Laurence Sterne's wildly digressive novel Tristram Shandy. After these experiments, he admitted defeat:

Suddenly, as if by a magic touch - oh, the touch was at first a shattering blow - I caught sight of the distant realm of true poetry like a distant fairy palace, and all my creations crumbled into nothing . . . A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed.

Suffering some kind of breakdown, he was ordered by his doctor to retreat to the countryside for a long rest - whereupon he at last succumbed to the siren voice of GWF Hegel, the recently deceased professor of philosophy at Berlin, whose legacy was the subject of intense dispute among fellow students and lecturers. At university, Marx "adopted the habit of making extracts from all the books I read" - a habit he never lost. A reading list from this period shows the precocious scope of his intellectual explorations. While writing a paper on the philosophy of law he made a detailed study of Winckelmann's History of Art, started to teach himself English and Italian, translated Tacitus's Germania and Aristotle's Rhetoric, read Francis Bacon and "spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight". This is the same eclectic, omnivorous and often tangential style of research which gave Das Kapital its extraordinary breadth of reference.

As a student Marx was infatuated by Tristram Shandy, and 30 years later he found a subject which allowed him to mimic the loose and disjointed style pioneered by Sterne. Like Tristram Shandy, Das Kapital is full of paradoxes and hypotheses, abstruse explanations and whimsical tomfoolery, fractured narratives and curious oddities. How else could he do justice to the mysterious and often topsy-turvy logic of capitalism?

"What does it matter to you what people whisper here?' Virgil asks Dante in Canto 5 of the Purgatorio. "Follow me and let the people talk." Lacking a Virgil to guide him, Marx amends the line in his preface for the first volume of Das Kapital to warn that he will make no concession to the prejudices of others: "Now, as ever, my maxim is that of the great Florentine: Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti [Go your own way, and let the people talk]." From the outset, then, the book is conceived as a descent towards the nether regions, and even in the midst of complex theoretical abstractions he conveys a vivid sense of place and motion:

Let us, therefore, leave this noisy region of the market, where all that goes on is done in full view of everyone's eyes, where everything seems open and above board. We will follow the owner of the money and the owner of labour-power into the hidden foci of production, crossing the threshold of the portal above which is written, "No admittance except on business". Here we shall discover, not only how capital produces, but also how it is itself produced. We shall at last discover the secret of making surplus value.

The literary antecedents for such a journey are often recalled as he proceeds on his way. Describing English match factories, where half the workers are juveniles (some as young as six) and conditions are so appalling that "only the most miserable part of the working class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it", he writes:

With a working day ranging from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night labour, irregular meal-times, and meals mostly taken in the workrooms themselves, pestilent with phosphorus, Dante would have found the worst horrors in his Inferno surpassed in this industry.

Other imagined hells provide further embellishment for his picture of empirical reality:

From the motley crowd of workers of all callings, ages and sexes, who throng around us more urgently than did the souls of the slain around Ulysses, on whom we see at a glance the signs of overwork, without referring to the Blue Books under their arms, let us select two more figures, whose striking contrast proves that all men are alike in the face of capital - a milliner and a blacksmith.

This is the cue for a story about Mary Anne Walkley, a 20-year-old who died "from simple overwork" after labouring for more than 26 hours making millinery for the guests at a ball given by the Princess of Wales in 1863. Her employer ("a lady with the pleasant name of Elise", as Marx notes caustically) was dismayed to find that she had died without finishing the bit of finery she was stitching. There is a Dickensian texture to much of Das Kapital, and Marx gives the occasional explicit nod to an author he loved. Here, for example, is how he swats bourgeois apologists who claim that his criticisms of particular applications of technology reveal him as an enemy of social progress who doesn't want machinery to be used at all:

This is exactly the reasoning of Bill Sikes, the celebrated cutthroat. "Gentlemen of the jury, no doubt the throat of this commercial traveller has been cut. But that is not my fault, it is the fault of the knife. Must we, for such a temporary inconvenience, abolish the use of the knife? Only consider! Where would agriculture and trade be without the knife? Is it not as salutary in surgery as it is skilled in anatomy? And a willing assistant at the festive table? If you abolish the knife - you hurl us back into the depths of barbarism."

Bill Sikes makes no such speech in Oliver Twist: this is Marx's satirical extrapolation. "They are my slaves," he would sometimes say, gesturing at the books on his shelves, "and they must serve me as I will." The task of this unpaid workforce was to provide raw materials which could be shaped for his own purposes. "His conversation does not run in one groove, but is as varied as are the volumes upon his library shelves," wrote an interviewer from the Chicago Tribune who visited Marx in 1878. In 1976 SS Prawer wrote a 450-page book devoted to Marx's literary references. The first volume of Das Kapital yielded quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Voltaire, Homer, Balzac, Dante, Schiller, Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Defoe, Cervantes, Dryden, Heine, Virgil, Juvenal, Horace, Thomas More, Samuel Butler - as well as allusions to horror tales, English romantic novels, popular ballads, songs and jingles, melodrama and farce, myths and proverbs.

What of Das Kapital's own literary status? Marx knew it could not be won second-hand, by the mere display of other men's flowers. In volume one he scorns those economists who "conceal under a parade of literary-historical erudition, or by an admixture of extraneous material, their feeling of scientific impotence and the eerie consciousness of having to teach others what they themselves felt to be a truly strange subject". A fear that he could himself have committed this offence may explain the anguished admission, in the afterword to its second edition, that "no one can feel the literary shortcomings of Das Kapital more strongly than I". Even so, it is surprising that so few people have even considered the book as literature. Das Kapital has spawned countless texts analysing Marx's labour theory of value or his law of the declining rate of profit, but only a handful of critics have given serious attention to Marx's own declared ambition - in several letters to Engels - to produce a work of art.

One deterrent, perhaps, is that the multilayered structure of Das Kapital evades easy categorisation. The book can be read as a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created ("Capital which comes into the world soiled with gore from top to toe and oozing blood from every pore"); or as a Victorian melodrama; or as a black farce (in debunking the "phantom-like objectivity" of the commodity to expose the difference between heroic appearance and inglorious reality, Marx is using one of the classic methods of comedy, stripping off the gallant knight's armour to reveal a tubby little man in his underpants); or as a Greek tragedy ("Like Oedipus, the actors in Marx's recounting of human history are in the grip of an inexorable necessity which unfolds itself no matter what they do," C. Frankel writes in Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought). Or perhaps it is a satirical utopia like the land of the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels, where every prospect pleases and only man is vile: in Marx's version of capitalist society, as in Jonathan Swift's equine pseudo-paradise, the false Eden is created by reducing ordinary humans to the status of impotent, alienated Yahoos.

To do justice to the deranged logic of capitalism, Marx's text is saturated with irony - an irony which has yet escaped most scholars for the past 140 years. One exception is the American critic Edmund Wilson, who argued in To The Finland Station: a study in the writing and acting of history (1940) that the value of Marx's abstractions - the dance of commodities, the zany cross-stitch of value - is primarily an ironic one, juxtaposed as they are with grim, well-documented scenes of the misery and filth which capitalist laws create in practice. Wilson regarded Das Kapital as a parody of classical economics. No one, he thought, had ever had so deadly a psychological insight into the infinite capacity of human nature for remaining oblivious or indifferent to the pains we inflict on others when we have a chance to get something out of them for ourselves. "In dealing with this theme, Karl Marx became one of the great masters of satire. Marx is certainly the greatest ironist since Swift, and has a good deal in common with him."

What, then, is the connection between Marx's ironic literary discourse and his "metaphysical" account of bourgeois society? Had he wished to produce a straightforward text of classical economics he could have done so - and in fact he did. Two lectures delivered in June 1865, later published as Value, Price and Profit, give a concise and lucid précis of his theories about commodities and labour:

A man who produces an article for his own immediate use, to consume it himself, creates a product but not a commodity . . . A commodity has a value, because it is a crystallization of social labour . . . Price, taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value . . . What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist…

And so on.

Whatever its merits as an economic analysis, this can be understood by any intelligent child: no elaborate metaphors or metaphysics, no puzzling digressions or philosophical excursions, no literary flourishes. So why is Das Kapital, which covers the same ground, so utterly different in style? Did Marx suddenly lose the gift of plain speaking? Manifestly not: at the time he gave these lectures he was also completing the first volume of Das Kapital. A clue can be found in one of the very few analogies he permitted himself in Value, Price and Profit, when explaining his belief that profits arise from selling commodities at their "real" value and not, as one might suppose, from adding a surcharge. "This seems paradox and contrary to everyday observation," he writes. "It is also paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things."

The function of metaphor is to make us look at something anew by transferring its qualities to something else, turning the familiar into the alien or vice versa. Ludovico Silva, a Venezuelan critic of Marx, has drawn on the etymological meaning of "metaphor" as a transfer to argue that capitalism itself is a metaphor, an alienating process which displaces life from subject to object, from use-value to exchange-value, from the human to the monstrous. In this reading, the literary style Marx adopted in Das Kapital is not a colourful veneer applied to an otherwise forbidding slab of economic exposition, like jam on thick toast; it is the only appropriate language in which to express "the delusive nature of things", an ontological enterprise which cannot be confined within the borders and conventions of an existing genre such as political economy, anthropological science or history. In short, Das Kapital is entirely sui generis. There has been nothing remotely like it before or since - which is probably why it has been so consistently neglected or misconstrued. Marx was indeed one of the great tormented giants.

The Guardian, Saturday July 8, 2006

‘Stop blaming everything on Russia’: Heirs to 1917 revolutionary-era emigrants appeal to EU

Over 100 descendants of the Russian nobility residing outside the country have addressed European nations with a call to stop irrationally alienating Russia and give an unbiased appraisal to the current Ukrainian crisis.

The open letter written by Prince Dmitry Shakhovskoy and his wife, Princess Tamara, and signed by over 100 people representing the diaspora of the so-called first-wave emigration, was published by Rossiiskaya Gazeta on Thursday.

“The aggressive hostility that Russia is facing right now is lacking any rationality and the double standard policy is simply exceeding any limits,” claim the authors of the message. “Russia is being accused of all crimes, it is pronounced guilty a priori and without any evidence, while other countries are shown surprising leniency, in particular when Human Rights are concerned,” they letter reads.

“We cannot put up with daily slander targeting modern Russia, its leaders and its president, who are slapped with sanctions and smeared with dirt, in contradiction to basic reason.”

The descendants of the Russian nobility also said that they were outraged by fact that European officials and mass media had been consistently silencing the facts of the cruel shelling of civilians in eastern Ukraine conducted by the Ukrainian military with support of paramilitary groups brandishing Nazi symbols. Another disturbing fact was a full blockade of the Donbass region by the Kiev regime, which seeks to completely destroy the region that it still declares a part of Ukrainian territory.

The pro-Kiev forces also allow numerous attacks on Russian Orthodox Churches, acts of violence and even murders of priests, destroy temples and launch repressions against believers, the message reads.

“We cannot remain indifferent and silent in the face of planned elimination of the Donbass population, open Russophobia and hypocritical approaches that contradict the interests of European nations themselves. We hope that the countries that in their time had shown hospitality to our families will again set on the path of reason and impartiality,” claim the descendants of the Tsarist White Guard officers and soldiers.

Earlier, the Russian parliament suggested that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe launch an international panel to investigate crimes against humanity in Europe, such as the tragedy in Odessa or mass executions of civilians near Ukraine’s Donetsk. The proposal mirrors an address to international organizations, and national parliaments and governments, calling to investigate crimes against civilians in southeastern Ukraine, passed by the State Duma in October this year.

December 25, 2014 RT

Appreciating Philosophical Thinking

An Introductory Course for Politics Students

                                                                        “Without inspiration the best powers of the mind                                                                          remain dormant, there is a fuel in us which               

                                                                         needs to be ignited with sparks.”

Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803).

What is Philosophy?

Philosophy is different from many other Arts subjects in that to study it you need to do it. To be an art historian, you needn't paint; to study poetry, you needn't be a poet; you can study music without playing an instrument. Yet to study philosophy you have to engage in philosophical argument (reasons or evidence leading to a conclusion). Not that you have to operate at the level of the great thinkers of the past; but when you study philosophy, you will be doing the same sort of thing as them. You can play football without reaching the level of Pelé, and you can get a great deal of intellectual satisfaction from philosophizing without the originality or brilliance of Wittgenstein. But in both cases you will have to develop some of the skills used by the great practitioners. That's one of the reasons why philosophy can be such a rewarding subject to study.

The word 'philosophy' is derived from the Greek for 'love of wisdom'. But that isn't particularly helpful in understanding how the word is used now. Philosophy is a subject at the core of most humanities courses. It focuses on abstract questions such as 'Does God exist?', 'Is the world really as it appears to us?', 'How should we live?', 'What is Art?', 'Do we have genuine freedom of choice?', 'What is the mind?', and so on.

These very abstract questions can arise out of our everyday experience. Some people caricature philosophy as a subject with no relevance to life, a subject to be studied from an armchair for purely intellectual satisfaction, the academic equivalent of solving crossword puzzles. But this is a serious misrepresentation of large parts of the subject. For instance, the heated debate about whether boxing should be banned can only be answered by addressing important abstract questions. What are the acceptable limits of individual freedom in a civilized country? What are the justifications for paternalism, for forcing people to behave in a particular way for their own good? In other words, this debate is not simply about gut reactions to the sport, but depends on fundamental philosophical assumptions (a claim for which no argument is given; one which is accepted for the purposes of the argument).

The analysis of reasons and arguments is a particular province of philosophy. In fact, inasmuch as philosophy has a distinctive method, it is this: the construction, criticism and analysis of arguments. Philosophical skills are applicable in any area where arguments are important, not just in the realms of abstract speculation. They are particularly useful when you are writing essays, since you are usually expected to make a case for your conclusions rather than simply assert them. For this reason, a basic grounding in philosophy is extremely valuable, whatever academic subject you intend to pursue.

The extract above is from Block 1 of A103: An Introduction to the Humanities (by: Nigel Warburton).

The first law of philosophy: “For every philosopher, there is an equal and opposite philosopher”

Some Philosophical Problems:

It is notoriously difficult to give a good general definition of philosophy. But here are a few examples of problems you might find philosophers discussing. If you find any of the following questions interesting or thought provoking, the chances are you will get a lot out of the subject.

The Problem of Evil:

Christians believe that God is all powerful and all loving. But these attributes are difficult to reconcile with the existence of evil in the world, as Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher pointed out:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

From Plato, Phaedo (c.380 BC):

"The soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and intellectual, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable; and ... the body is in the very likeness of the human, and mortal, and unintellectual, and multiform, and changeable.” 

After death, the soul "departs to the invisible world - to the divine and immortal and rational: thither arriving, she is secure of bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears and wild passions and all other human ills, and for ever dwells ... in company of the gods.”

From Aristotle, De Anima (c.325 BC):

“The soul ... cannot be separated from the body.” 
“The soul is ‘what it is to be’, or the principle ... of a certain kind of natural body having within itself a source of movement and rest.” 

“We should not ask whether the soul and body are one, any more than whether the wax and the impression are one, or in general whether the matter of each thing, and that of which it is the matter are one.”

  

From Rene Descartes, Meditations (1641):

“My essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing. It is true that I may have ... a body that is very closely joined to me. But nonetheless, on the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am simply a thinking, non-extended thing; and on the other I have a distinct idea of body, in so far as this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing. And accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.”

From Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (1665):

“Mind and body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under that of extension. ... And consequently the order of the actions and passions of our body is the same as the order of the actions and passions of the mind.”

From Nicolas Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics (1688):

“Mind is not and cannot be united to ... body.”

“Your body cannot act immediately on your mind. Hence although your finger was pricked by a thorn, and although your brain was stimulated by its action, neither finger nor brain was able to act on your soul and make it feel pain.”

“You are unable, by yourself, to move your arm, change your place, situation or posture, treat other people well or badly, or produce the smallest change in the universe.”

 From David Hume, A Treatise Concerning Human Nature (1739):

"[The mind] is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement ..."

A Useful Reading Plan:

Stage I:

Start with Stephen Law, Philosophy Files (Orion Books, 2000). Then read Nigel Warburton, Philosophy: The Basics (Routledge, 1999). Simon Blackburn’s Think (Oxford University Press, 1999) reinforces Warburton’s The Basics. For those interested in reading selective short philosophical extracts, should start choosing articles from Warburton, Philosophy: Basic Readings (Routledge, 1999). A dictionary of philosophy is handy at this stage. Warburton’s Thinking from A to Z, (Routledge, 1996) is a hand, succinct and useful one for this stage.  

Stage II:

Start with Roger Scruton’s A Short History of Modern Philosophy (London & New York: Ark Paperbacks, 1996). To familiarize yourself with academic reading and writing in philosophy read Warburton, Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide (London & New York: Routledge, 2008). Now is time to read Warburton’s Philosophy: The Classics (Routledge, 1998). If by now you have not finished reading Warburton’s Basic Readings, read the whole book now. The following three books should ideally be read together, all by Bryan Magee. Start with his The Story of Philosophy (A Dorling Kindersley Book, 1998) as the main text and read selectively from the other two: The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to western Philosophy (OUP, 2000) and Talking Philosophy: Dialogues with 15 Leading Philosophers (OUP, 2001).

Stage III:

To ensure you are well familiar with the history of philosophy before you start specializing in a particular area, read Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (Routledge, 1991) as a way of recapping what you have so far learnt.

If you have access to a high speed internet connection, Philosophy Talk, a series of radio shows presented by two philosophy professors at Stanford University in California, can be listened to at www.stanford.edu/philosophytalk/. Each show examines a different philosophical thesis in a provoking and irreverent way. You will need RealPlayer to listen to the shows, but this can be downloaded for free using a link on the site if it is not already on your computer. A pair of headphones or external speakers will make listening more rewarding.

You might also like to look at The Philosophers Magazine - a publication, which aims to make top-class philosophy available to a wide readership. Each issues contains a collection of articles on a popular philosophical theme, together with philosophy-related news, reviews, features and interviews with famous philosophers. It is published quarterly. For details, see the magazine website at www.philosophersnet.com/.

WWW References:

One very useful and reliable online source is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy available at http://plato.stanford.edu/. One of the most useful websites for those interested in Philosophy is at http://www.epistemelinks.com. This consists of a wide range of philosophy sites sorted by category. Though limited in its scope, you could access some useful information on Theory of Knowledge from http://www.ditext.com/clay/know.html. David Chalmers’ website is another useful source to explore particularly in relation to Consciousness and Philosophy of Mind: www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers. 

Britain in 2014: How Poor a Rich Country Can Be!

There are 4 million people at risk of going hungry in the UK and there are 272 food banks across big cities and towns. 500,000 children live in families that can't afford to feed them. 3.5 million adults cannot afford to eat properly. (Source: All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger in the UK, Poverty and Social Exclusion project - BBC 08 Dec. 2014)

An income squeeze, benefit delays and excessive utility bills are blamed by a cross-party group of MPs for a huge rise in the use of food banks. The inquiry, by Conservative and Labour MPs and Church leaders, says many families are one unexpected bill away from financial crisis.

They urge quicker benefit payments, the extension of free school meals and a living wage to reduce hunger. Downing Street said it would consider the report "seriously". But one Conservative peer who served on the inquiry team had to apologise after suggesting hunger in Britain was caused in part by people being unable to cook. Baroness Jenkin of Kennington later acknowledged her words had been badly chosen.

At the same time, according to Age Concern UK, Each winter, 1 older person dies needlessly every 7 minutes from the cold - that’s 200 deaths a day that could be prevented. As we get older, our bodies respond differently to the cold – increasing the likelihood of a heart attack, stroke, pneumonia, and breathing difficulties. Of the winter deaths that happen every year, 9 in 10 are older people.

Age UK estimates that 1.7 million older people in the UK can’t afford to heat their homes, and over a third (36%) of older people in the UK say they live mainly in one room to save money. Cold weather adds to the financial worries of older people. 30% say they avoid heating rooms like the bedroom, bathroom or living room because they are worried about the cost. (www.ageuk.org/get-involved).

This is all thought provoking given that the UK appears to have overtaken France in 2014 to become the world’s 5th largest economy. See Centre for Economics and Business Research: http://www.cebr.com/reports/world-economic-league-table-2015/. Britain jumped France all with the help of its multi-billion pound sex and illegal drug industries. According to official figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) earlier this year, the sex trade added around £5.7 billion to the UK’s economy in 2013 while illegal drugs added £6.62 billion. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11313327/Britain-edges-past-France-on-world-stage.html

France refuses to comply with recent European Union regulations which add prostitution and illegal drugs to new pan-European accounting standards, because it does not deem them "voluntary commercial activities”. A director of, France's statistics office, INSEE, referred to using drugs as a "dependency" that does not include "free will". Eric Dubois said prostitution resulted from "Mafia networks and trafficking illegal immigrants".

‘Noah's Ark’: the world’s first DNA databank of all living things.

Not quite the Biblical Noah’s Ark, but possibly the next best thing. Moscow State University has secured Russia’s largest-ever scientific grant to collect the DNA of every living and extinct creature for the world’s first database of its kind. “I call the project ‘Noah’s Ark.’ It will involve the creation of a depository – a databank for the storing of every living thing on Earth, including not only living, but disappearing and extinct organisms. This is the challenge we have set for ourselves,” MSU rector Viktor Sadivnichy told journalists.

The gigantic ‘ark’, set to be completed by 2018, will be 430 sq km in size, built at one of the university’s central campuses. “It will enable us to cryogenically freeze and store various cellular materials, which can then reproduce. It will also contain information systems. Not everything needs to be kept in a petri dish,” Sadivnichy added.

The university’s press office has confirmed that the resulting database will contain collected biomaterials from all of MSU’s branches, including the Botanical Garden, the Anthropological Museum, the Zoological Museum and others. All of the university’s departments will be involved in research and collation of materials. The program, which has received a record injection of 1 billion rubles (US$194 million), will promote participation by the university’s younger generation of scientists.

Sadovnichy also said that the bank will have a link-up to other such facilities at home, perhaps even abroad. “If it’s realized, this will be a leap in Russian history as the first nation to create an actual Noah’s Ark of sorts,” the rector said.

Russia is of course not the first to attempt something of this general scale - the quest to preserve biological life forms is one everyone should be engaged in. Britain has done just that with its Frozen Ark project, its venture into preserving all endangered life forms, also the first of its kind.They say it’s"the animal equivalent of the 'Millennium Seed Bank'," a project that encompasses all of the world's seeds.

Humans, Animals & Consciousness.

The aim of reproducing the following two news items below is to draw your attention to the concept of 'consciousness'. What does it mean to be conscious? Where do our thoughts and feelings come from? Do other animals have feelings and thoughts? And if so, are they entitled to any rights like humans? These questions may lead to many more in your mind. If you are curious and wish to research it further, try Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained (Penguin, 1991).

Argentine Court Extends Human Right to Freedom to Orangutan

In an unprecedented decision, an Argentine court has ruled that the Sumatran orangutan 'Sandra', who has spent 20 years at the zoo in Argentina's capital Buenos Aires, should be recognized as a person with a right to freedom. The ruling, signed by the judges unanimously, would see Sandra freed from captivity and transferred to a nature sanctuary in Brazil after a court recognized the primate as a "non-human person" which has some basic human rights. The Buenos Aires zoo has 10 working days to seek an appeal.

The "habeas corpus" ruling in favor of the orangutan was requested last November by the Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights (AFADA) alleging that Sandra suffered "unjustified confinement of an animal with proven cognitive ability." Lawyers argued that just as a person, the ape is capable of maintaining emotional ties and has the ability to reason, while feeling frustrated with her confinement. Furthermore, the legal team claimed that the 29-year old orangutan can make decisions, has self-awareness and perception of time. And therefore, all things considered, Sandra's presence at the Zoo constituted illegal deprivation of liberty.

Habeas corpus is a fundamental legal term in human rights, dating back to the early fourteenth century during the reign of Edward I in England. At that time courts began requiring the monarchy to report the reasons behind restricted freedom of a subject. "This opens the way not only for other Great Apes, but also for other sentient beings which are unfairly and arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in zoos, circuses, water parks and scientific laboratories," the daily La Nacion newspaper quoted AFADA lawyer Paul Buompadre as saying.

Sandra who was born in 1986 in the German zoo of Rostock, arrived in Buenos Aires in September 1994, where she’s spent 20 years behind bars. The World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) claims Sumatran orangutan to be the most endangered of the orangutan species. Found only in the northern and western provinces of Sumatra, Indonesia, the species is fast losing its natural habitat to agriculture and human settlements. Sandra's case is not the first in which "habeas corpus" was invoked to secure the release of wild animals in human captivity. However, in the US the two recent cases failed. A New York court, earlier this month has ruled that Tommy chimpanzee was not legally a person and is therefore not entitled to human rights. And in 2011, a lawsuit against SeaWorld to free five wild-captured orca whales was dismissed by the San Diego court.

Apeus corpus? Chimps not Human, Says New York Court.

A New York court has ruled that a chimpanzee is not legally a person and is therefore not entitled to human rights. An animal rights group had sought to free a chimp from captivity, likening it to a person suffering unlawful solitary confinement. 

Tommy is the great ape at the center of the scandal. Formerly in the entertainment business, his life has fallen on harder times and he’s forced to live in a cage on his own in upstate New York. His owner Patrick Lavery, who’s had Tommy for 10 years, claims he is well-cared-for under strict state and federal license rules and inspections. He says Tommy lives in a seven room enclosure and has access to lots of toys and other forms of entertainment, according to AP.

The case was put forward by the Nonhuman Rights Project, who wanted Tommy to be released from captivity and sent to a wildlife refuge in Florida to enjoy his retirement. A spokeswoman for the group Eyder Peralta stated why she believes chimps should not be kept in cages in solitary confinement.

"The argument has been that scientists have found that a chimp is cognitively similar to humans, therefore deserves some of the same rights. In this case, the Nonhuman Rights Project is asking the court for a writ of habeas corpus, which compels a person's captor to explain why he has a right to hold a person captive," she said. However, the courts have failed to see the group’s point of view. An appeals court in October ruled against the Nonhuman Rights Project in October and Tommy’s hopes for freedom have been dashed again after panel of five judges at New York Supreme Court's appellate division voted unanimously to deny Tommy legal personhood. "Needless to say, unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions. In our view, it is this incapability to bear any legal responsibilities and societal duties that renders it inappropriate to confer upon chimpanzees the legal rights — such as the fundamental right to liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus — that have been afforded to human beings," an extract from the ruling stated.

The decision was welcomed by Tommy’s owner: "I just couldn't picture any court granting habeas corpus for an animal," he said. "If it works for one animal, it works for all animals. It would open a can of worms," Lavery said.

The Nonhuman Rights Project says it will once again appeal the decision: "It is time for the common law to recognize that these facts are sufficient to establish personhood for the purpose of a writ of habeas corpus," the organization said, referring to characteristics of chimps it says are "similar to those possessed by human beings," the organization said in a statement.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel though for the Nonhuman Rights Project as the judges in the court added that the decision does not leave chimps defenseless. The judges cited legal protections to animals, including the fact that New Yorkers may not possess primates as pets. "Thus, while petitioner has failed to establish that common-law relief in the nature of habeas corpus is appropriate here, it is fully able to importune the Legislature to extend further legal protections to chimpanzees," the judges said, as published on the Nonhuman Rights Project’s website.

(Russia Today: December 05, 2014 09:27)

US-Cuban Relations: A Step in the Right Direction.

President Barack Obama’s announcement on 17 December that Washington and Havana have decided to take steps to normalise relations came as a pleasant surprise and will possibly pave the way for a more thoughtful and reflexive phase in US foreign policy towards Cuba. 

This was the speech most countries had been hoping to hear from a US president for decades - especially after President Obama’s election in 2009. But such a move required imagination, courage and common sense which no US president was prepared to display before. Obama’s speech, delivered with  his natural eloquence, contained objective facts as well as the usual rhetoric on promotion of human rights and democracy.

(Watch "To the Cuban people, America extends a hand of friendship."  https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/545268614656323584)

Politically, the speech was an admission of US failure to change the nature of the Cuban political system after 54 years, and that the US hopes to do so from now on through ‘constructive engagement’. Washington had driven itself into a corner since the end of the Cold War, when there was ample opportunity for new diplomatic initiatives to normalise relations with Cuba, denying itself an exit strategy particularly when Havana could no longer be a national security threat. The only way out of this impasse was for the US to admit defeat and change policy. Apart from the President’s own enlightened contribution to the policy shift, other external factors have also played a role. The increasing political isolation of the United States at international level reflected in UN General Assembly votes every year in favour of removing sanctions, and the growing political consciousness in the region leading to the emergence and consolidation of anti-hegemonic states such as Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela among others have demonstrated that the US ‘backyard’ cannot be managed in the old ways.

Cuba, on the other hand, has shown that hegemonic aggression can be defeated with resolve and sustained resistance. While the US succeeded in causing a great deal of human suffering in and economic damage to Cuba – the embargo has cost Cuba $1.1 trillion (BBC) – its main political objective was not achieved. Let’s hope that this may be the harbinger of a wider change in US foreign policy thinking, given that the negotiations with Iran could also lead to a rapprochement with Tehran by July 2015. The picture, however, is much more complex than it seems at first and one should expect more continuity rather than change in the direction of US foreign policy: the new sanctions imposed on Venezuela in the same week on the pretext of human rights abuses there confirm this concern. It seems that for decision-makers each case has its own merit and ‘new thinking’ will not apply to Venezuela for the time being, as long as there is still the possibility of destabilising the government in Caracas.

However, Washington’s continued coercive measures against its adversaries in the name of human rights will undermine its standing internationally. All nations, small or large, want to be treated with respect, integrity and on a fair basis in international interaction. Demonising our adversaries is an old practice. However, with the advent of communication technologies, there is more scrutinising of politicians and states by citizens everywhere on the planet. The louder US rhetoric is on human rights and civilised norms of behaviour, the more attention it draws to its own actions internationally.

World public opinion has been witnessing a series of exposures in the past few weeks on institutionalised racism in the US as well as the use of torture authorised by its highest officials. Is it not about time that the US contemplated its own actions and slogans? As far as race relations are concerned, the US Civil War in the 19^th Century was supposed to end slavery and racism in the country, and then again the civil rights movement in the 1950s sought to end racism in this modern society. Yet earlier this month UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on the United States to make the police more accountable, amid a spate of police killings of African Americans across the country.

The Senate Report last week on the use of torture as part of President George Bush’s War on Terror also raised some serious questions about the degree to which US decision-makers address human rights concerns in practice. The question is why at the beginning of the 21^st century, the most vociferous liberal democracy on human rights refuses to prosecute those involved in the process and needs to be told by the United Nations to prosecute those responsible for torture. This is not the first time that the US record on human rights has come under the spotlight: Amnesty International named the US the No. 1 human rights abusing country in its 2004 annual report following revelations about the torture of inmates in Iraq’s Abu-Ghraib prison. Do those innocent civilians who are killed by US drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen or by its allies such as Israel in Palestine, have any human rights? Have US regime changes in Iraq and Libya and the attempts to overthrow the Syrian government not claimed enough innocent lives and brought pain and suffering to the people of these countries? It is high time Washington took an honest look at its own record. This would only increase its chances of maintaining its global leadership.