Are you inclined to accept essences as entities of substance? Or are you one of those down-to-earth materialists who spurns talk of generalities, essences, intangibles, Ideas, and Ideals?
Just wondering here: Is the idea of Ideas inextricably embedded in human nature? Or did the idea of Ideas spring from the heads of Plato and other ancient Greek philosophers the way Athena emerged from the head of Zeus? Sure, there’s no doubt humans had ideas long before young Greeks donned their first sandals to walk to Athena’s olive grove in her namesake city, where Plato lectured, or to Aristotle’s Lyceum to learn about or discuss the idea of Ideas. Ancient humans going way back probably before Homo habilis probably had ideas. Otherwise, that ancestor specifically and possibly more ancient hominids between us and them wouldn’t have made tools. Aren’t tools physical manifestations of ideas? But did those ancient humans, if not habilis, then some other hominid species prior to sapiens have ideas about Ideas? Did they distinguish between what philosophers call essence and accident? Think tool manifested in hammer and philosopher manifested in Plato. Heck, think writer manifested in Donald.
The question about the idea of Ideas is not centered on who might first have had specific ideas, such as in “I have an idea; let’s throw a party; I’ll grill some mammoth mastodon burgers over the cave-entrance fire.” Neither is the question centered on ideas as Michael Keaton uses the term in the film Nightshift, when he says to Henry Winkler, “I’m an idea man, Chuck. I get ideas all day long I can’t control…Tuna fish. What if you mix mayonnaise in the can right with the tuna? Hold it, hold it, wait a minute, Chuck. Take live tuna fish, and feed them mayonnaise. Oh! This is good. Call Starkist.”
Think not of someone’s getting an idea for a party or for feeding mayonnaise to live tuna. Think instead of how you define Idea in and of itself, as though Idea with a capital “I” differs from idea with a lower case “i.” Is there a capital “I” Idea that has an independent existence unrelated to an individual human mind? Maybe an example is worth examining. Take any capital letter “I” Idea, such as “nature of humanity.”
Is “Nature of Humanity” real in any sense other than being a mental construct, that which Merriam-Webster defines as a “theoretical entity”? Watch yourself here. You and I are walking a path of broken rocks. It’s easy to slip and fall on shifting footing when one climbs the talus of meaning to reach a mountaintop composed of such theoretical entities. “Nature of Humanity”? Is that a theoretical entity? Does either Nature or Humanity have an existence outside the mind, your mind, for example?
Is capital “N” Nature an independent reality or an idea that we impose on everything that is not us? What, also, of Humanity with or without a capital “H”? Is there such a theoretical entity sans your thinking about it? If on a given day no one thought of the term “Nature of Humanity,” or of the separate words Nature or Humanity, would each still exist? That’s that independent existence I asked about earlier.
Whoa! Are you and I discussing words or what the words represent? Is this a frivolous discussion about generalities and specifics, the difference, say, between fish generally and bluefin tuna specifically? Is this one of those go-nowhere discussions that mimics arguments made by the greatest philosophical minds? Let’s see.
Break down “Nature of Humanity” to its component terms. Read through writings on aesthetics, science, and philosophy, and you’ll encounter the word nature. Sometimes it will be Nature, its capital letter somehow conveying all that is not human, both that which lives and that which does not: Earth, air, fire, water, the fundamental elements of the Greeks and all those creatures large and small that are not human. Of course, to exclude humans is to ignore that humans are as natural as any other life-form on the planet, as natural as elements in Greek philosophy or in modern chemistry, like those six elements so essential to life: Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous. When we exclude ourselves from Nature are we not just Venn-diagramming the universe to prove a distinction that a different Venn diagram would contradict? Does our exclusion show up on either a cladogram or Tree of Life? Should we argue instead that Cytochrome C essential to apoptosis in cells from microorganisms through plants and animals, including human animals, binds us undeniably to living “Nature”?
As for Humanity, is it something real and independent of the human mind? You have used the word. What did you mean by it? What is its manifestation? Let me belabor the questions with some semantic pendantics. Merriam-Webster gives a three-part definition of the word: 1) “the quality of state of being humane”; 2) “the quality or state of being human”; and 3) “the totality of humankind,” meaning everybody. Does this breed yet another question, one about what a “quality” is? Oh! Yes, and there’s another meaning that echoes through academia’s hallowed halls, as in “I’m majoring in the humanities,” always used in the plural unless by a psychology or philosophy professor who says in a double entendre, “I teach humanity.”
Remember that upslope path over talus? We’re on it now. Are we looking for stable footing in words or in what they generally represent? We know we can discuss many ideas to arrive at a shared, understanding of them, plastically understood in ideas like “Let’s throw a party” that might or might not include a beer bong, or rigidly understood in an idea like “Let’s feed mayonnaise to bluefin tuna.” We can both envision and understand feeding mayonnaise to tuna regardless of Michael Keaton’s misguided and comedic logic. I can’t imagine, however, our reaching a definitive understanding and agreement on the idea of Ideas.
When you encountered the words nature and humanity above, did you understand both immediately, even though, if hard pressed for an on-the-spot, specific definition of either or both together, you might struggle. With so many meanings for humanity, a word that does not refer to a namable, specific human but that can be ascribed to one and to all as an inclusive category. Is “humanity” both essence and its manifestation, both Ideal Form and behavioral manifestation, the latter being a so-called accident? If humanity is a characteristic quality endemic to all members of the species, to the collective of individuals not only past but also present, is it also applicable to the collective of our close but defunct relatives the Neanderthals and Denisovans? Again, you’ve used the word humanity. What did you mean by it?
You might argue, that there is no independently existing “humanity” while accepting in the Holocaust or in slavery the existence of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Does that mean the word is meaningless outside the context of individual or group actions and that it has no independent existence?
“What’s this?”you ask. “Are you asking yet another question because you don’t have any answers for me, your reader? You want me to continue reading this, but you haven’t thoroughly answered the very first question about the idea of Ideas, about whether or not ancient humans thought about theoretical entities, and now you are throwing another question at me. It’s easy to ask questions like these, Donald, but much harder to answer them, especially when those questions are only vaguely understood or questions we’ve been asking since Plato walked and lectured in that olive grove.”
Let’s go back to the idea of Ideas, those perfect, unimaginable Forms of which Plato spoke, like the Ideal Tree. You cannot, of course, think of “Tree” without somehow applying some specificity. Oak? Red oak? Pin oak? Some other tree species, a conifer perhaps? Maybe only the late Bob Ross could paint an Ideal Tree, no doubt a “happy” one clinging to an Ideal Mountain above an Ideal Lake on the Ideal Summer’s Day. Bob, however, would be challenged if he tried to paint humanity. Leave nature painting to Bob and assign the task of painting humanity to Norman Rockwell. To capture “humanity,” would Norman offer one of his covers for the Saturday Evening Post or a new painting showing Earth’s current seven billion human inhabitants in some imitation of Signorelli’s The Damned Cast into Hell? Would he cram the canvas with images of the 100 billion past members of the species and images of those not yet born? Rockwell might ask for that indefinite list of characteristics you keep in mind and assocate with humanity. In collaboration, would artists Bob and Norman paint happy humanity walking up the talus slope of Mount Meaning? Is humanity an Idea without form? Is it paintable? I wish both painters were alive today so that we could ask.
This is where you inject the idea that Bob painted Nature and that looking at one of his paintings is like looking at Ideal Nature or the Idea of Nature. You might go further to say that actually standing in a meadow, or in the woods, or on a mountain, or by a waterfall is also a way to “see” Nature. Bob might say that in trying to define the general you simply go from looking at one “natural” object to looking at another and that with so many components of Nature, you have no choice but to generalize a larger view with “idealized” individual trees. With dual meaning, Nature with a capital “N” is the encompassing Idea, but it is not an indivisible whole. You watch the sun rise, and exclaim, “Isn’t Nature wonderful! I wish I could capture this moment like Bob. Where’s my camera?” But when you show someone your photo and painting as a representation of “Nature,” you will probably be disappointed by the reaction. “Yeah. Nice pic. Look at the one I took of a squirrel in my backyard.”
Why should I lead you up a path of loose stone in search of ideas, Ideals, and universals? My motivation comes from two sentences in Tom Butler-Bowdon’s 50 Psychology Classics. * In his chapter summarizing the work of Viktor Frankl, the author writes, “We live in an age of relativism, which waters down real values and meaning that exist independent of our judgments. But by choosing to be fee of such universals, over time we paradoxically hem in our own freedoms.” (102)
Do you accept “universals” and “real values” or reject them in favor of specifics? “I can accept both,” you say. “Doesn’t everyone?” you ask.
Are there theoretical universals or only relative and specific entities that are real? We know that we cannot envision Plato’s Ideal Tree. We can speak of it, but cannot point to or paint it. Is the “Nature of Humanity” the same? Are we equally at a loss with either or both of its terms? Would you argue that you can use the words nature and humanity or the expression “nature of humanity” with sufficient meaning that others would know what you mean? And if you do argue that such terms have meaning, then would you also argue that you accept universals of various kinds, like “real values”? Like “Good” or “Evil,” also. Beware contradictions that lurk in the reasoning, beware the treacherous footing; and especially beware the vaguely understood.
What of moral or ethical universals? Are Frankl and Butler-Bowdon correct in saying we live in an age of relativism? Was there really any age when universals prevailed? Don’t today’s proponents of Far Left and Far Right philosophies accept universals that they use relatively for their own political purposes? Think of the recent rampage of ISIS terrorists beheading innocents simply because they belonged to a different faith and accepted a different set of capital “I” Ideas, a set that specifically included beheading as a manifestation of an idea in support of an Ideal. One could argue that Ideals are real because they spawn ideas with real consequences. But then, there’s that Platonic Ideal Form, that Tree that is not a tree as we know trees, unless, of course, such an Ideal Tree appears in a Bob Ross painting.
Obviously, humans accept the idea of Ideas and Universals. Evidence lies in the acts motivated by such acceptance. But that also means that we accept much that we only vaguely share or understand, some sketchy commonality that is more like Bob Ross’s happy trees than like Rockwell’s 323 gritty covers for the Saturday Evening Post, which, in themselves, are depictions of stereotypes.
There is no living representative of habilis, neanderthanlensis, or Denisovan that could speak about the idea of Ideas, about Ideals, or about Universals. Most of the 100 billion humans who walked the planet are also gone, taking with them knowledge about their acceptance of Ideals they might have turned into specific ideas. We will never really know when humans first thought of either Humanity or Nature, let alone the “Nature of Humanity.”
Sorry to say, we twenty-first century humans are on our own, balancing on talus slopes in the climb toward Ideals. Any path that our ancestors made has disappeared as the talus slid under the gravity of specific ideas that every generation believes to be manifestations of Ideals. Sure, we have more sophisticated forms of communication than our ancient ancestors. We can read what humans wrote over the past five millennia, and now even can also listen to recordings or see videos our more immediate ancestors produced to record their idea of Ideas. In doing so, we have more recently closed the gap between past and present. So, what have we discovered?
Contrary to Viktor Frankl’s belief that “we” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have entered an age of relativism, humans have for millennia have been torn between Ideals and ideas, between Universals and specifics with successive generations never knowing whether their versions of Ideals and their ideas of Ideas are the same as the previous generation’s understanding except through interpretations that might or might not be arguable.
Can you foresee a time when there will be an Ideal that is indisputable and that has meaning outside its specific manifestations or outside its current milieu? President Gerald Ford once said, “Truth is the glue that holds government together.” I thought taxes were. President Woodrow Wilson said, “It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily, it is ideas. Ideas live, men die.” Need I comment more than to say World War I?
*Tom Butler-Bowdon. 50 Psychology Classics, Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books. New York. MJF Books. 2007.
Just wondering here: Is the idea of Ideas inextricably embedded in human nature? Or did the idea of Ideas spring from the heads of Plato and other ancient Greek philosophers the way Athena emerged from the head of Zeus? Sure, there’s no doubt humans had ideas long before young Greeks donned their first sandals to walk to Athena’s olive grove in her namesake city, where Plato lectured, or to Aristotle’s Lyceum to learn about or discuss the idea of Ideas. Ancient humans going way back probably before Homo habilis probably had ideas. Otherwise, that ancestor specifically and possibly more ancient hominids between us and them wouldn’t have made tools. Aren’t tools physical manifestations of ideas? But did those ancient humans, if not habilis, then some other hominid species prior to sapiens have ideas about Ideas? Did they distinguish between what philosophers call essence and accident? Think tool manifested in hammer and philosopher manifested in Plato. Heck, think writer manifested in Donald.
The question about the idea of Ideas is not centered on who might first have had specific ideas, such as in “I have an idea; let’s throw a party; I’ll grill some mammoth mastodon burgers over the cave-entrance fire.” Neither is the question centered on ideas as Michael Keaton uses the term in the film Nightshift, when he says to Henry Winkler, “I’m an idea man, Chuck. I get ideas all day long I can’t control…Tuna fish. What if you mix mayonnaise in the can right with the tuna? Hold it, hold it, wait a minute, Chuck. Take live tuna fish, and feed them mayonnaise. Oh! This is good. Call Starkist.”
Think not of someone’s getting an idea for a party or for feeding mayonnaise to live tuna. Think instead of how you define Idea in and of itself, as though Idea with a capital “I” differs from idea with a lower case “i.” Is there a capital “I” Idea that has an independent existence unrelated to an individual human mind? Maybe an example is worth examining. Take any capital letter “I” Idea, such as “nature of humanity.”
Is “Nature of Humanity” real in any sense other than being a mental construct, that which Merriam-Webster defines as a “theoretical entity”? Watch yourself here. You and I are walking a path of broken rocks. It’s easy to slip and fall on shifting footing when one climbs the talus of meaning to reach a mountaintop composed of such theoretical entities. “Nature of Humanity”? Is that a theoretical entity? Does either Nature or Humanity have an existence outside the mind, your mind, for example?
Is capital “N” Nature an independent reality or an idea that we impose on everything that is not us? What, also, of Humanity with or without a capital “H”? Is there such a theoretical entity sans your thinking about it? If on a given day no one thought of the term “Nature of Humanity,” or of the separate words Nature or Humanity, would each still exist? That’s that independent existence I asked about earlier.
Whoa! Are you and I discussing words or what the words represent? Is this a frivolous discussion about generalities and specifics, the difference, say, between fish generally and bluefin tuna specifically? Is this one of those go-nowhere discussions that mimics arguments made by the greatest philosophical minds? Let’s see.
Break down “Nature of Humanity” to its component terms. Read through writings on aesthetics, science, and philosophy, and you’ll encounter the word nature. Sometimes it will be Nature, its capital letter somehow conveying all that is not human, both that which lives and that which does not: Earth, air, fire, water, the fundamental elements of the Greeks and all those creatures large and small that are not human. Of course, to exclude humans is to ignore that humans are as natural as any other life-form on the planet, as natural as elements in Greek philosophy or in modern chemistry, like those six elements so essential to life: Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous. When we exclude ourselves from Nature are we not just Venn-diagramming the universe to prove a distinction that a different Venn diagram would contradict? Does our exclusion show up on either a cladogram or Tree of Life? Should we argue instead that Cytochrome C essential to apoptosis in cells from microorganisms through plants and animals, including human animals, binds us undeniably to living “Nature”?
As for Humanity, is it something real and independent of the human mind? You have used the word. What did you mean by it? What is its manifestation? Let me belabor the questions with some semantic pendantics. Merriam-Webster gives a three-part definition of the word: 1) “the quality of state of being humane”; 2) “the quality or state of being human”; and 3) “the totality of humankind,” meaning everybody. Does this breed yet another question, one about what a “quality” is? Oh! Yes, and there’s another meaning that echoes through academia’s hallowed halls, as in “I’m majoring in the humanities,” always used in the plural unless by a psychology or philosophy professor who says in a double entendre, “I teach humanity.”
Remember that upslope path over talus? We’re on it now. Are we looking for stable footing in words or in what they generally represent? We know we can discuss many ideas to arrive at a shared, understanding of them, plastically understood in ideas like “Let’s throw a party” that might or might not include a beer bong, or rigidly understood in an idea like “Let’s feed mayonnaise to bluefin tuna.” We can both envision and understand feeding mayonnaise to tuna regardless of Michael Keaton’s misguided and comedic logic. I can’t imagine, however, our reaching a definitive understanding and agreement on the idea of Ideas.
When you encountered the words nature and humanity above, did you understand both immediately, even though, if hard pressed for an on-the-spot, specific definition of either or both together, you might struggle. With so many meanings for humanity, a word that does not refer to a namable, specific human but that can be ascribed to one and to all as an inclusive category. Is “humanity” both essence and its manifestation, both Ideal Form and behavioral manifestation, the latter being a so-called accident? If humanity is a characteristic quality endemic to all members of the species, to the collective of individuals not only past but also present, is it also applicable to the collective of our close but defunct relatives the Neanderthals and Denisovans? Again, you’ve used the word humanity. What did you mean by it?
You might argue, that there is no independently existing “humanity” while accepting in the Holocaust or in slavery the existence of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Does that mean the word is meaningless outside the context of individual or group actions and that it has no independent existence?
“What’s this?”you ask. “Are you asking yet another question because you don’t have any answers for me, your reader? You want me to continue reading this, but you haven’t thoroughly answered the very first question about the idea of Ideas, about whether or not ancient humans thought about theoretical entities, and now you are throwing another question at me. It’s easy to ask questions like these, Donald, but much harder to answer them, especially when those questions are only vaguely understood or questions we’ve been asking since Plato walked and lectured in that olive grove.”
Let’s go back to the idea of Ideas, those perfect, unimaginable Forms of which Plato spoke, like the Ideal Tree. You cannot, of course, think of “Tree” without somehow applying some specificity. Oak? Red oak? Pin oak? Some other tree species, a conifer perhaps? Maybe only the late Bob Ross could paint an Ideal Tree, no doubt a “happy” one clinging to an Ideal Mountain above an Ideal Lake on the Ideal Summer’s Day. Bob, however, would be challenged if he tried to paint humanity. Leave nature painting to Bob and assign the task of painting humanity to Norman Rockwell. To capture “humanity,” would Norman offer one of his covers for the Saturday Evening Post or a new painting showing Earth’s current seven billion human inhabitants in some imitation of Signorelli’s The Damned Cast into Hell? Would he cram the canvas with images of the 100 billion past members of the species and images of those not yet born? Rockwell might ask for that indefinite list of characteristics you keep in mind and assocate with humanity. In collaboration, would artists Bob and Norman paint happy humanity walking up the talus slope of Mount Meaning? Is humanity an Idea without form? Is it paintable? I wish both painters were alive today so that we could ask.
This is where you inject the idea that Bob painted Nature and that looking at one of his paintings is like looking at Ideal Nature or the Idea of Nature. You might go further to say that actually standing in a meadow, or in the woods, or on a mountain, or by a waterfall is also a way to “see” Nature. Bob might say that in trying to define the general you simply go from looking at one “natural” object to looking at another and that with so many components of Nature, you have no choice but to generalize a larger view with “idealized” individual trees. With dual meaning, Nature with a capital “N” is the encompassing Idea, but it is not an indivisible whole. You watch the sun rise, and exclaim, “Isn’t Nature wonderful! I wish I could capture this moment like Bob. Where’s my camera?” But when you show someone your photo and painting as a representation of “Nature,” you will probably be disappointed by the reaction. “Yeah. Nice pic. Look at the one I took of a squirrel in my backyard.”
Why should I lead you up a path of loose stone in search of ideas, Ideals, and universals? My motivation comes from two sentences in Tom Butler-Bowdon’s 50 Psychology Classics. * In his chapter summarizing the work of Viktor Frankl, the author writes, “We live in an age of relativism, which waters down real values and meaning that exist independent of our judgments. But by choosing to be fee of such universals, over time we paradoxically hem in our own freedoms.” (102)
Do you accept “universals” and “real values” or reject them in favor of specifics? “I can accept both,” you say. “Doesn’t everyone?” you ask.
Are there theoretical universals or only relative and specific entities that are real? We know that we cannot envision Plato’s Ideal Tree. We can speak of it, but cannot point to or paint it. Is the “Nature of Humanity” the same? Are we equally at a loss with either or both of its terms? Would you argue that you can use the words nature and humanity or the expression “nature of humanity” with sufficient meaning that others would know what you mean? And if you do argue that such terms have meaning, then would you also argue that you accept universals of various kinds, like “real values”? Like “Good” or “Evil,” also. Beware contradictions that lurk in the reasoning, beware the treacherous footing; and especially beware the vaguely understood.
What of moral or ethical universals? Are Frankl and Butler-Bowdon correct in saying we live in an age of relativism? Was there really any age when universals prevailed? Don’t today’s proponents of Far Left and Far Right philosophies accept universals that they use relatively for their own political purposes? Think of the recent rampage of ISIS terrorists beheading innocents simply because they belonged to a different faith and accepted a different set of capital “I” Ideas, a set that specifically included beheading as a manifestation of an idea in support of an Ideal. One could argue that Ideals are real because they spawn ideas with real consequences. But then, there’s that Platonic Ideal Form, that Tree that is not a tree as we know trees, unless, of course, such an Ideal Tree appears in a Bob Ross painting.
Obviously, humans accept the idea of Ideas and Universals. Evidence lies in the acts motivated by such acceptance. But that also means that we accept much that we only vaguely share or understand, some sketchy commonality that is more like Bob Ross’s happy trees than like Rockwell’s 323 gritty covers for the Saturday Evening Post, which, in themselves, are depictions of stereotypes.
There is no living representative of habilis, neanderthanlensis, or Denisovan that could speak about the idea of Ideas, about Ideals, or about Universals. Most of the 100 billion humans who walked the planet are also gone, taking with them knowledge about their acceptance of Ideals they might have turned into specific ideas. We will never really know when humans first thought of either Humanity or Nature, let alone the “Nature of Humanity.”
Sorry to say, we twenty-first century humans are on our own, balancing on talus slopes in the climb toward Ideals. Any path that our ancestors made has disappeared as the talus slid under the gravity of specific ideas that every generation believes to be manifestations of Ideals. Sure, we have more sophisticated forms of communication than our ancient ancestors. We can read what humans wrote over the past five millennia, and now even can also listen to recordings or see videos our more immediate ancestors produced to record their idea of Ideas. In doing so, we have more recently closed the gap between past and present. So, what have we discovered?
Contrary to Viktor Frankl’s belief that “we” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have entered an age of relativism, humans have for millennia have been torn between Ideals and ideas, between Universals and specifics with successive generations never knowing whether their versions of Ideals and their ideas of Ideas are the same as the previous generation’s understanding except through interpretations that might or might not be arguable.
Can you foresee a time when there will be an Ideal that is indisputable and that has meaning outside its specific manifestations or outside its current milieu? President Gerald Ford once said, “Truth is the glue that holds government together.” I thought taxes were. President Woodrow Wilson said, “It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily, it is ideas. Ideas live, men die.” Need I comment more than to say World War I?
*Tom Butler-Bowdon. 50 Psychology Classics, Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books. New York. MJF Books. 2007.
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