Can there ever be a law for which all of the human race would stand in agreement? Can any statement be so obviously true that it would be impossible to deny its validity, and contradict it? As an example let's take one of the most famous statements in the western canon by Rene Descartes:
“Therefore from the fact alone that I know that I exist and that, at the same time , I notice absolutely nothing else that belongs to my nature apart from the single fact that I am a thinking thing , I correctly conclude that my essence consists in this alone, that I am a thinking thing.”
“…it is certain that I am really distinct from my body and that I can exist without it.”
Are you compelled by the first quote but find the second a little hard to accept? The first rests on the second: he has to make an association with the disembodied mind of God to get out of the fix of being deceived by his earthly embodied senses. This idea, roughly diluted to “I think therefore I am!” is a foundation stone of western culture.
Let’s say you disagree with smoking, in fact, to the point that you see it as an absolute evil. Rightly, you would promulgate the argument and argue for its sanction. Already, in making the effort you have to face defeat in that your realisation is not so obviously true in that it requires no argument. It takes Descartes almost sixty pages to attempt to convince us of his.
Let’s say I have a good friend who sees drinking in a similar way. He’s into ‘Straight Edge’ – people who do no drugs of any sort but still go to punk music gigs and the like. Straight Edge, as a movement, seems to me an odd child of the anarchist movement that combines a distrust or hatred for substances such as alcohol and nicotine (seen by them as controlling drugs, like soma in Brave New World, plied to the public by those in power to subdue them) with the libertarian/anarchist principles of having the ‘right’ to live how you wish without pressure to conform to a prescribed method of entertainment.
“Therefore from the fact alone that I know that I exist and that, at the same time , I notice absolutely nothing else that belongs to my nature apart from the single fact that I am a thinking thing , I correctly conclude that my essence consists in this alone, that I am a thinking thing.”
“…it is certain that I am really distinct from my body and that I can exist without it.”
Are you compelled by the first quote but find the second a little hard to accept? The first rests on the second: he has to make an association with the disembodied mind of God to get out of the fix of being deceived by his earthly embodied senses. This idea, roughly diluted to “I think therefore I am!” is a foundation stone of western culture.
Let’s say you disagree with smoking, in fact, to the point that you see it as an absolute evil. Rightly, you would promulgate the argument and argue for its sanction. Already, in making the effort you have to face defeat in that your realisation is not so obviously true in that it requires no argument. It takes Descartes almost sixty pages to attempt to convince us of his.
Let’s say I have a good friend who sees drinking in a similar way. He’s into ‘Straight Edge’ – people who do no drugs of any sort but still go to punk music gigs and the like. Straight Edge, as a movement, seems to me an odd child of the anarchist movement that combines a distrust or hatred for substances such as alcohol and nicotine (seen by them as controlling drugs, like soma in Brave New World, plied to the public by those in power to subdue them) with the libertarian/anarchist principles of having the ‘right’ to live how you wish without pressure to conform to a prescribed method of entertainment.
Now if we take this from the angle of having a right to be at liberty to do as you wish in so far as it doesn’t affect others then, given we are all different and confronted with different situations simply by the act of living, plus the capacity for change within our environment, the goal of achieving a situation in which we can practice this right is unachievable: the law would not be able to act quick enough.
This is why we have politics and make agreements on ‘to what limit’ interference will be tolerated. We haven’t moved on from the group mentality; we band together with those who share similar habits/interests. A group’s members may find themselves at extreme odds with another group’s habits/interests; or they may share their interests but not their habits! So we have democracy to iron things out.
I fear this is about as good as it gets. Nothing is certain for nothing can be argued for as existing as an absolute, undeniable position.
This is why we have politics and make agreements on ‘to what limit’ interference will be tolerated. We haven’t moved on from the group mentality; we band together with those who share similar habits/interests. A group’s members may find themselves at extreme odds with another group’s habits/interests; or they may share their interests but not their habits! So we have democracy to iron things out.
I fear this is about as good as it gets. Nothing is certain for nothing can be argued for as existing as an absolute, undeniable position.
The language is partly to blame: for it to work we must make distinctions (between this and that; yes and no; yours and mine). Due to the vagaries of human experience opinions differ and different groups are formed: one group eats meat, another eats soya, both are destroying the rainforest, but how much does the rainforest matter and who makes that decision? Did this become a problem just because people like eating meat and soya or was it for other reasons; did problems arise for the rainforest before or after they started doing this?
Too prescriptive and you get Germany in 1939, the Japanese Empire, Communist Russia – they thought they had ‘the one right way’. Too free and you get the holocaust of the American Indians by ‘liberated’ European immigrants. Both lead to the same ends it seems? British democracy has been used to plunder the world of its resources, but in that slow creeping way with lots of incentives to the local populations to ‘get on board’ (see the recent Scottish referendum)! There are more people about, so some people seem to think this global economy has worked? But here it is – space is the real issue: more space less interference; less space more interference.
Well that’s a long winded way of saying I will try and accommodate/can accommodate your desire to be free of smoke but that wouldn’t stop me smoking given the space to myself, because whatever your argument is, it will never be as strong as my experience or not so neatly, I counter Descartes’ claim above.
There are many issues I’d like to resolve such as car pollution, use of nuclear power, the various evils of humankind and the belief that going somewhere faster is necessarily better, but none of these will be resolved without compromise for the very fact that every thought we have is informed by our sensual, embodied experience of the world.
(I’m making a lot of claims of my own here: how am I doing this? Am I not contradicting my own argument? Is it that I’m not making a claim to anything other than the need to make such argument in the first place. Aah – the beauty of language; the allure!)
Too prescriptive and you get Germany in 1939, the Japanese Empire, Communist Russia – they thought they had ‘the one right way’. Too free and you get the holocaust of the American Indians by ‘liberated’ European immigrants. Both lead to the same ends it seems? British democracy has been used to plunder the world of its resources, but in that slow creeping way with lots of incentives to the local populations to ‘get on board’ (see the recent Scottish referendum)! There are more people about, so some people seem to think this global economy has worked? But here it is – space is the real issue: more space less interference; less space more interference.
Well that’s a long winded way of saying I will try and accommodate/can accommodate your desire to be free of smoke but that wouldn’t stop me smoking given the space to myself, because whatever your argument is, it will never be as strong as my experience or not so neatly, I counter Descartes’ claim above.
There are many issues I’d like to resolve such as car pollution, use of nuclear power, the various evils of humankind and the belief that going somewhere faster is necessarily better, but none of these will be resolved without compromise for the very fact that every thought we have is informed by our sensual, embodied experience of the world.
(I’m making a lot of claims of my own here: how am I doing this? Am I not contradicting my own argument? Is it that I’m not making a claim to anything other than the need to make such argument in the first place. Aah – the beauty of language; the allure!)
To end, here is a great quote from Virginia Woolf’s book Orlando:
“No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage than the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. […] It is not the love of truth, but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and exaltation of virtue...”
“No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage than the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. […] It is not the love of truth, but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and exaltation of virtue...”
Simon Leake
