Phil Midterm 5
Conclusion
• "Don't ever forget these things: The nature of the world. My nature. How I relate to the world. What proportion of it I make up. That you are part of nature, and no one can prevent you from speaking and acting in harmony with it, always." (2:9)
Lesson 5
• Accept your own insignificance in the face of the size of nature. • Learn that human fame and human achievement count for little in the course of things. • But also appreciate the harmony of nature which reflects the possibility of an inner harmony in you
Lesson 2
• Both Zhuangzi and Marcus reflect on the passing of time and that time is infinite. • Compared to it, your life-time is minute. • So, be alive to this moment. • But do not overvalue it.
Human relations to the world around us
• Ecology • Zhuangzi—natural world—tao
Story
• Lived in china and cultivated the way and virtue until it began to decline • Teachings aimed at self effacement • Departed→reached boarder→left 2 books→no one ever saw him again
Lesson 1
• Looking for models of living • Identifying what is admirable or not in them Reminding oneself of those one knows The ethical uses of (private and public) memory • The ethical uses of fiction • Learning to distinguish between good and bad associates
Cosmos
• Meaning "jewel" • Everything is rational and coherent • Radiantly rational order
Meditation 1:
• On Other lives • "That I had good grandparents, a good mother and father, a good sister, good teachers, good servants, relatives, friends - almost without exception
Zhu
• Universe =tao • Mysterious and changing interplay of opposing and complementary forces (yin and yang)
The Problem of Morality
• Zhuangzi and Marcus are concerned not just with the fact of human dying but with the question how this reflects on our living existence. • They assume that everything, including everything human, is transitory and seek to show us that this does not devalue our existence. • Modern View: console ourselves that we live on through our children→insufficient because everything human will eventually cease to exist and undergo the transformation of all things. • Bc of their assessment of human life in terms of its place in the universe (cosmic style of ethical thought)
N Himself
• agitated political and intellectual climate, Nietzsche developed into a radical and revolutionary thinker. • A descendent of Lutheran pastors, he had originally been destined for a theological career. • But having come to develop religious doubts, he took up the study of Classics (Greek philosophy and philology), instead. • Found writings of Schopenhauer which changed course of life
The ethics of heroic individualism
• "Janus" in Latin "the gateway" but also a god who looks both forward and backward (January) • alert his audience to the profound significance of the fact that our culture has lost its belief in God→lost all ultimate values • result is that our culture is sliding into a state of nihilism in which all values are arbitrary and nothing matters ultimately anymore
Meditation on the Unity of Nature
• "The world as a living being - one nature, one soul. Keep that in mind. And how everything feeds into that single experience, moves with a single motion. And how everything helps produce everything else. Spun and woven together." (4:40
Meditation on Living with others
• "We were born together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions." (2:1)
Nietzsche & Zuh
• 1. Both reject established and mainstream thought • 2. Both see themselves as outsiders • 3. Both refuse to develop a single coherent philosophy • 4. Both communicate through multiple stylistic devices • 5. Both refuse to set out to disturb, discomfort and disorient the audience
Resolution of dream story
• 1. Dream and being awake are surely different • 2. Should accept both as part of life • 3. "this is called the "Transformation of Things" o Philosophy of integration rather than differentiation o Leads him to reject the usual divisions into right and wrong o He cant even know whether when he thinks he doesn't know he mat not actually be knowing (explores question of not knowing) o Think we don't know but we do (illusions may contain truth) o Must ask whether we really know what we are striving for.
Nature according to Stoics
• 1. Nature is governed by logic—reason and can thus in principle be fully understood (**rationalism) • 2. Everything in nature is strictly causally determined (**fatalism) • 3. Nature and God are identical, the cosmos is both material and spiritual at once (**pantheism)
Four Basic Lessons From Zhuangzi
• 1. There is nothing that is not acceptable. • 2. The Way has never known boundaries. • 3. Accept all the emotions. Without them we would not exist. • 4. Man's life has always been a muddle. The dead do not wonder why they ever longed for life.
three different kinds of ethical commitment.
• 1. Universal ethics: ideals that can or should be pursued by all human beings. (To what extent do Confucius and Aristotle aspire to this?) • 2.Group ethics (Professional ethics, medical ethics, military ethos, monastic discipline) • 3.Personal ethics (Personal commitments that may supplement or conflict with universal and o Daoist is strictly personal
Evolution of Doaism
• 1. We need to think about ourselves in relation to nature. • 2. Nature is ever-changing o Produced new form of art: landscape painting o Mountains & water = yin & yang • Human beings have a place in nature; they are part of nature and subject to its forces. • They generally fail to understand nature and see themselves as superior to it. • They must learn to contemplate nature • Eventually generated colorful religion incorporating a panoply of popular deities→philosophy and religion are v different though o Daoist philosophy came to influence Chinese Buddhism, generating a distinctively Chinese version of Buddhism ("Chan Buddhism") which, transferred to Japan, turned into Zen Buddhism.
Differences
• 2. Preoccupation with ancient Greek culture and the critique of the Christian tradition • 2. His diagnosis of a coming of nihilism • 3. His characteristically extreme modern individualism • 4. Affirmative "master-morality" • 5. A moral commitment to human "greatness and heroism"
Nietzche
• Abandoned academic career to purse wandering • Homelessness breaks open realities • Summer: stay in mountains • Created figure Zarathustra: prophet as a symbolic representation of himself (in a poem) o Zar withdraws to mountains from human community until moment comes when he feels forced to rejoin humanity • In gay science creates "madman" who seeks to alert his listeners that god is dead
The Emperor
• Adopted by emperor Hadrian after death of Hadrian's successor • In charge of large empire→very successful • Sought to maintain the highest standards of gov to do everything to secure the state • Spent much of his time fighting rebellious tribes on borders of empire • Dies of illness o Endeavored to transcend his official position and pursue a genuinely philosophical form of life
Spiritual Exercises
• Both, Zhuangzi and Marcus Aurelius seek to achieve self-perfection through meditating on the nature of the cosmos. • Both believe that one must live attuned to the universe (the tao or cosmos). • Contemplating the universe and adapting oneself to it are for both of them the two components of a successful human life. o Practical conclusions differ
History
• Chinese Phil Zhuangzi in the 4 cent
Contrast to Arist and Conf
• Confucius: Make sure to practice the proper funeral rites for your parents. • Aristotle: You can assess whether a life has been happy or not only at the time of death or even after death. • Confucius and Aristotle seek to understand human life from inside that life. (humanistic) • understand human life as a growing-up process, as a maturing process. They ask how one can become a gentleman or freeman. • Neither of them offers us an ethics specifically concerned with the later stages of life
Life Ethics
• Confus and Aristotle: simply maturing and early life • MA: developing an organized program of meditation in pursuit of this ethics—following stoic practices • Mediation on ones life--Socratic principle that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Aristotle & MA
• Contrast: Stoics to a materialist and atomistic view of nature • Agree: with Aristotle that the cosmos is open to rational understanding - departing in this respect from Zhuangzi whose paradoxical view of the universe was, instead, poetical and metaphorical
Zhuangzi
• Daoism's most influential thinker • Story of butterfly: But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. o Between Zhuang Zhou and a butterfly there must be some distinction. This is called the Transformation of Things." • inspired by skepticism concerning our usual beliefs about the world • rejects common beliefs and social conventions and advances an individualistic ethics unconcerned with public affairs and political office.
Two views of Human nature
• Daoist ethics rests on a view of nature rather than human nature • The ultimate ground and origin of everything is Nothing. • Cosmos, outside world, non-nature • From this has sprung the cosmic energy (qi) that has produced "the myriad of entities. • "This energy manifests itself in contrary, yet complementary forces (yin and yang). o Process constitutes the way (dao) o Humans must learn the way not through conceptual understanding but by contemplating it and fitting themselves into cosmic order • Found confusion's idea of ritual contemptuous
Summary
• Daoist ethics rests on a view of nature, rather than a view of human nature. • the cosmos originates in Nothing and from this emerges a cosmic energy (qi) that manifests itself in a play of contrary but complementary forces (yin and yang). • This process as a whole constitutes the Way (tao). Human beings must learn this Way, not through conceptual understanding, but by contemplating it and fitting themselves into the cosmic order.
Diagnostician of Nihilism
• Disintegration • Nihilism: Absence of dominant, highest values • Anomie: lack of any values o Not anomie bc we have certain values, but they have no meaning bc we don't have our highest values—now just superficial • Trying to open our eyes→revaluation of all values!
Questions Story 2 creates for Conf
• Does Confucius understand real, deep friendship in spirit? • Does Confucius understand personal, intimate, human feeling? • Does he understand the true spirit of mourning? • Does Confucius appreciate genuine, spontaneous ceremony? • Or is he caught in the established social rites and gestures of the past?
Zhaungzi's interpretation
• Does not produce argument • Wants to convince us that things are never "clear and distinct" and that this is so particularly with the knowledge I have of myself o Makes arguments but also tells stories, makes jokes, tells poetry, nonsense • Refuses to rely entirely on reason • Not concerned with scientific thinning or dissecting and controlling nature • Rather: ethical thinking concerned with the question of how we can learn to live by attending to nature.
The Free Sprit
• Don't just accept what I say, this is my judgment, you may come to different conclusions • Only by focusing on this thought can we understand the truly radical nature of Nietzsche's philosophizing. • does not mean to set up his own philosophical system in opposition to the systems of other philosophers. • rejects, instead, the very idea of a philosophical system, of a single, coherent, total view of the world. • "Free Thinking" adopting diverse styles of writing, spontaneous notebook entries, polished aphorisms, essays • Don't have one total view of the world, be fascinated with opposing pov, things are enigmatic, accept that as a stimulus for thought o Not setting up a system of philosophy • Perspectivism: all have different pov, accept and open up to all
Center of Nietzsche
• End of Christianity at the hand of its own morality • Criticism extended to the moral teachings of his philosophical predecessors o Calls for a "reevaluation of all values" • Called an immoralist bc he attacks all moral systems (Kant, Mill) • Charge is misdirected—N knows that human life gained its meaning though such constraints • Challenge for him was to find the right set of moral or ethical values→the right moral constraints o V critical of science of morals (Mill & Kant) • Radical questioning at base of phil
Aristotle
• Ethical theory • Ethics based on politics • The family has no ethical significance • Contemplation of the timeless • The temporal is not fully real • Mortality not a central theme o concern with the timeless, the belief that only the timeless is fully real
Values
• Ethical thinkers assumed values were given by some authority (ex; God, reason or human nature) • Realization that this is not so has thrown mankind into a state of anxiety and uncertainty • N: Values are anthropomorphous—we make them up, have no reality o Our modern understanding of the world undermines this faith o Resulting: essentially nihilist age (assert values but do not believe in them) • N's question is whether we can overcome nihilism and create new values in the face of a truth pic of the world and our place in it
Fate
• Everything is causally set and unchangeable but we as human beings are responsible for our actions • Were the first to face the "free-will" problem • Free meant for them to live in accordance with nature and in turn to accept ones fate • We will follow what is necessary (free but determined) o Either I agree to follow fate or I don't agree but am pulled to follow anyway • Can engage in spontaneous actions→but seems that there must be antecedent causes even if they don't know it • Appears to be not free and not responsible for actions • Resolve problem by arguing that free will and causal determination are fully compatible • We can call A free when the causal chain goes through A's decision making and that A's action is not free only when it is causally effected in another way o Through the consciousness=free o Not through consciousness=unfree Both compatibilists and opponents of compatibilist
Meditation 5
• Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it. Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. ... The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live." (3:10
Stoic Practices
• Forming an ethical plan of action at the beginning of every day and reviewing every evening how well you have done. • Keeping a diary. • Recording in a notebook your own ethical advances and failures. • Considering and modeling yourself on ethically admirable lives. • Submitting yourself to the ethical teachings of a master. • Corresponding with such a master or with a friend concerning your own and their ethical progress. o All in MA meditations and some in Christian culture and psychology
Nietzsche—History
• German Phil (1844-1900) • Born into an age of profound political, social and intellectual upheaval • 1848 democratic revolutions shook much of Europe, including Germ • Changes in modern technology, industrialization, and the emergence of a capitalist economy→uprooted millions from countryside and forced into factory labor force and impoverished urban experience • Political and economic tensions—publications of Communist Manifesto which urged proletariat to rise and throw off bourgeoisie • Creation of modern science—Darwin publishes origin of species o Undermined the belief in divine creation and upset the traditional pic of the place of human beings in the natural world • Religion under pressure—rediscover actual historical figure of Jesus (Life of Jesus published by Strauss) denied divinity of JC, questioned historical accuracy
Regret
• Given that everything passes, we must learn also how to deal with regret • Regret at having done or not done something. • Regret at opportunities missed • Regret at no longer being able to make up with those who are gone/dead.
MA Summary
• In contrast to Zhuangzi, the hermit by the river, Marcus takes upon himself a public and political career. • He accepts that fate has destined him to be an emperor; but he concludes that only philosophy can save him. • Practices: Other human lives, Time, Change, And death
Foundation
• In order to understand and assess the foundations of our ethical commitments, must learn to look at ethics from an external, extra-moral, even extra-human pov • Proposed a distinction btw advocating a moral pov and a science of morals, a distinction btw what we call ethics and meta-ethics o Compare different systems • Essential part: distinction btw life affirming and life denying • Life affirming: accepts the value of life and takes accordingly a positive stance towards it o Ex. Ancient Greeks, recognize the reality of human suffering in their tragedies but at the same time looed at life in an affirmative fashion • Life denying: has an illusory picture of reality and/or rejects reality in the name of something else o Ex: Buhdism & Shopen o they seek to transcend suffering by denying the world. Their views are "nihilistic." • Accept life & death, sadness & happiness • Focus on the universe as a whole • Seeks to define an ethics by considering the relation of human beings to the universe and their place in it
Questions
• Is Zhuangzi's ethics meant for everyone or only for those who have "a talent for the Way" and have "heard the Way"? • Could everybody practice the ethics of the Way or would society collapse, if we tried to?
Today
• Is our problem lack of values or too many • Change so quickly they lack basis • Satisfied with low, trivial values bc we no longer have a higher standard by which to assess our lives • sets out to diagnose the nihilism he finds inherent in our current cultural condition, in order to open our eyes to the need for a new order of values.
Main Idea
• It concerns our place in the world as a whole and our relations to that world. • We could even say that it is located at the center of the three other aspects of ethics.
Lesson 3
• Like Zhuangzi, Marcus meditates on the transformation of things • Don't desire for things to remain the same. • Accept growing up and growing old. • Accept your own birth and your own death.
Loss of Values
• Loss of highest values: can also be liberating as it opens up the possibility of a new and hopefully more truthful form of ethics • Loss of existing values: the experience of nihilism, allows for the possibility of a revaluation of all values, for the replacement of our life-denying values by ones that are true to life and nature
Lesson 7
• Make yourself part of the human whole. • When you have separated yourself from others you can always renew your relation with them. Be a citizen in the human city.
2nd Story
• Master Sanghu, Mengzi Fan, and Master Qinzhang, the friends are once again united by a common belief. • Who can join with others without joining with others? Who can do with others without doing with others? Who can climb up to heaven and wander in the mists, roam the infinite and forget life forever and forever? • "Joining with others while not joining with others" is Zhuangzi's characterization of friendship which differs thus from the usual family or kinship relations that can be described simply as a "joining with others." • When Master Sanghu dies, Confucius sends his disciple Zigong. But Zigong is scandalized by the friends' apparent lack of concern for the dead Sanghu. • Zigong goes back and reports his findings to Confucius. "'What sorts of men are they anyway?' he asked."→ "'Such men as they,' said Confucius, 'wander beyond the realm; men like me wander within it.'"
Meditations Summary
• Meditation 1: Look to others as models for living, but do so in a discriminating fashion. • Meditation 2: Be alert to the moment, but do not overvalue it. • Meditation 3: Don't desire for things to remain the same. Accept change. • Meditation 4: Accept your own mortality
Giving Oneself Style
• Modern ethics, for instance in Kant and Mill, has been moving between the poles of the individual self and the universal with little regard for the concrete human relations and institutions that exist in-between these poles • Nietzsche rejects the idea of ethical universals and appears thus left with the possibility only of an extreme individualism. • Makes some people drawn a less extreme form of heroic individualism is spelled • N remains more of a critical thinker than an affirmative one
Muddle!
• Must learn to accept things for what they are to overcome • Accept that changing nature of our feelings and emotions • Have these emotions, must just let it be and accept them • Accept both life and death
Basis
• NATURE not human nature—cosmos, outside world • The way: cosmic force in and behind everything that exists. o Ethics based on mystical and cosmic philosophy • Named vs nameless • Spoken of in paradoxical terms
Meditation 3:
• On change • "Constant awareness that everything is born from change. The knowledge that there is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants or children? Go deeper.
Meditation 4:
• On death • "Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. • To pass through this life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. • Like an olive that ripens and falls. -- Praising its mother, and thanking the tree it grew on."
Meditation 2:
• On time • "Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone." (4:40) • "Everything transitory - the knower and the known.
Marcus Aurelius
• Personal ethics • Ethics as redeeming politics • The family (and individual others) as the essential basis of ethics • Meditation of temporality • Only the temporal is real • Mortality as the central concern of ethics o must accept that not only everything human but everything that exists is temporal and that we must value things and our own lives as such. o problem of mortality is to be overcome by accepting our mortality.
Madman
• Proclaims god is dead • Addressing those who have already lost their faith • who seeks to alert his listeners to the profound significance of the fact that God is dead • Explaining the implications of what is lost • Lost not only belief in god but our belief in any highest, ultimate value—not something ppl in square can understand • Lost not just the belief in the personal god→equally the belief in the authority of reason, login, and meaningful cosmic order • Madman understands that with the loss of our highest values all other values have become unmoored • Lost the standard by which to measure all other values • Nihilism: loss of ultimate values—the highest values become devalued→ nihilism • His listeners have not yet come to understand what this means
The meditations of Marcus Aurelius
• Really a diary not meant to be published • You: meaning Me marcus • Only philosophy can guide us • record the emperor's ethical reflections on himself and admonitions to himself. • They constitute an ethical exercise; an essential part of his ethical practice • Such practices were developed by philosophers in the Stoic tradition - Greek in origin but elaborated in Rome.
Overman
• Rethink the role of pain in life • Take on pain to become more than what you are • Satisfaction is not enough, must be able to take on pain • Enjoy uncertainty • human condition is essentially precarious, that we must live like tight-rope walkers finding a balance in the space between mere animal nature and a merely imagined trans-human form of existence→overman is reaching a higher level of human nature • Abolition of the concept of necessity, try to do without • Abolition of the will & knowledge in itself—rethinking • Only thing that can be done is create a new Trans-human species that can thrive over this nihilism • Metaphor: to reach a higher level of human culture o Michelangelo: exemplar of higher form of humanity also ancient Greeks o Goal of individual greatness—larger than human figures • True human nobility: greatness of soul, true graciousness, constantly giving not expecting return, endurance of poverty & sickness
New Values
• Revaluing of all values • Need to be life-affirming rather than life-denying • Contrast btw master-morality vs slave-morality o Either master things or become enslaved by them • Affirming: heroic, this worldly, creative (master) • Denying: pessimistic other worldly (slave) • With out failure of where we are, we cannot create this higher form of being human • Overman: goal, more than human, strive to get beyond ourselves
Painting
• Rock is passive element • Waterfall is active element • Human beings are embedded within the painting • Contemplative attitude toward nature • Firmly rooted in world
Marcus Aruelius
• Roman emperor • Ethics with regards to nature "cosmos"—central notion • shared with Zhuangzi the goal of creating an ethics based on an understanding of nature.
Philosophically
• Stoic o Originated with Greek philosopher Zeno o Develop a philosophy distance from Platonism and aritsotealianism o Z had school in Athens called painted hall o Second life in rome o Influenced the Christian tradition as well as early modern thought o Being indifferent to pain, pleasure, grief, joy—only part true o Cosmos: fundamental ethical view was the end goal of human life is eudaimonia—happiness, well being—but they conceive this happiness quite differently from Arist o Eud: living in accordance with the cosmos (nature)
Sotic Terms
• Stoic philosophers coined the word "cosmopolitanism" • They saw themselves as citizen not of an arbitrarily restricted human community but as citizens of the world • reflected the ambitions of classical imperialism which aspired to universal rule
Confuc & Zhuang
• The relation of the followers of the Dao is one of friendship. Every follower of the Dao is given the attribute "master" (zi). No disciples, no teacher • The only genuinely "great and venerable teacher" of the Way is the Way itself. o Ironic view of Con student master relationship o Confucius is saying that Zigong must forget rules and learn to act out of his heart. • * Zhuangzi adds that the sage must also forget being concerned with Confucian virtues like benevolence and righteousness. In contrast to what Confucius teaches, he must even forget rites and music. He must practice forgetting everything and concern himself only with the immediate and simple tasks of life. • finds the Way only when he gives up working consciously on himself. At the end he is certainly nothing like a Confucian gentleman. He has, rather, returned home to be once again a pig farmer. • Conf: becomes a "gentleman" - is "like carving horn, like sculpting ivory, like cutting jade, like polishing stone
Daoist Ethics
• The ultimate goal of Zhuangzi's Daoist ethics is to learn to integrate oneself into the working of the Way. • This is not an intellectual task. • The Way is nameless and beyond understanding. • Learning to live according to the Way means to accept the working of the Way. • This acceptance may involve giving up on striving to understand the Way. • The purpose of such deliberatively paradoxical and confusing speech is to get us over talking altogether about being and nonbeing, about beginning and not beginning. o Do our words really mean anything • strive to accept the way of things - including birth and death - and not take ourselves too seriously. • need to learn to laugh at ourselves and not obsess over how to take care of ourselves, arranging our relations to others in the proper way, and fitting into the established social order with its ambitions, its rites, and rituals.
Paradoxical Terms
• The way is empty, yet remains full. Deep, it is like the ancestor of the myriad creatures. • The ultimate ground and origin of everything is Nothing.
Lesson 6
• Think of yourself as part of a larger whole. • See the order that pervades the cosmos and live by it.
Contrast
• Toa: nameless, beyond human reason • Stoic: completely rational, comprehensible if we attune ourselves to it
History
• Turtle shells were used for oracle • Incised with inscriptions and then heated up making cracks that were taken to convey messages abt the future
Aurelius
• Universe as cosmos as determinate, rational whole
Nietzsche
• Universe as the world as science reveals it to us • Sobering reality in which human beings must seek to find their own meaning • Call this an "existential" vision of the human condition and N's ethics an existential ethics • Thrown into the world and must make something out of it • Values are anthropomorphous—we make them up, have no reality
Problem of the external world
• When are we sleeping or awake • Method for distinguishing truth and illusion • Descartes: Whatever may be doubtful for us, I cannot doubt that I exist as a thinking conscious being—**clear and distinct (things we can quantify) • From this can recuperate our knowledge of the external world • Can now make ourselves masters and possessors of nature o Similar to Friedlich's painting
Lesson 4
• Yet another agreement between Zhuangzi and Marcus Aurelius: • Accept your own insignificance. • Learn that human fame and human achievement count for nothing in the course of things. • Conceive of your life as a whole. • Accept your own mortality • And give meaning to the moment in which you are living in the face of that
2 Views of Philosophy
• Zhaungzi: primary concern is the contemplation of nature • Rejects public office and recognition • Questioning our usual assumptions and certainties→seeks to attain an authentic form of existence • Not concerned with achieving status of sage hood: prefers to continue with a simple life of a fisherman (stay in the mud) rather than obtain an official position and administer the state-- prefers the natural river to the artificiality of the court and the temple o Different from Conf o "Torch of doubt" for the sage—raising doubts abt what we actually know
The Ethics of Forgetting
• Zhuangzi =The Great and Venerable Teacher (ironic)—also what Confucius is called • Z: The Way cannot be taught; there is then no such person as "the great and venerable teacher" • "the True Man of ancient times": meant to the model for the Daoist sage o meant to be set apart from the "sage kings" of the past which serve as human models in Confucius' Analects
Differences
• Zhuangzi seeks to escape from "the world" into nature. • He refuses to take on the administration of the realm of Chu, when it is offered to him, and instead prefers "to drag his feet in the mud" while fishing. • Zhuangzi exhibits thus the ethics of the monk or hermit who shuns contact with the humans • Marc: willing to take on the burden of Imperial rule (though reluctantly so) but seeks to maintain at the same time a philosophical perspective that transcends "the world." • Like other Roman Stoics he is both a philosophical thinker set on ethical self-perfection and politically engaged. o Can only turn to philosophy for support
Genoa
• city of Genoa serves Nietzsche as a symbol for that possibility • Where Columbus left from • Live dangerously, more worlds to be discovered, two ships on different orbits
The Old Master
• cultivated the Way and virtue, and his teachings aimed at self-effacement • Old Master wrote a work in two books, setting out the meaning of the Way and virtue→departed beyond the gates • Concerned with moral corruption of Chinese state • Foster The Way (Dao) (not large social change though) • Practiced "self-effacement" and withdrew from society
One Thing Is Needful
• current age as an age of nihilism. • must advance the values of a life-affirming "master"-morality. • Only the few, "the strong," may be able to live by it. The others may have to submit themselves to the will of these strong individuals.
The chaos and labyrinth of existence
• danger of Nietzsche's radical enterprise of rethinking and reassessing all values, of seeking to live a life of heroic individuality versus the secure and thoughtless existence of the herd were not unknown to Nietzsche himself. • suffered a severe mental breakdown in Turin, Italy. • spent the last 11 years of his life as an invalid in the care of his mother and his sister.
1st Story
• four Daoist masters, Si, Yu, Li, and Lai, who are united in their shared views of life and death. • There was no disagreement in their hearts and so the four of them became friends • I received life because the time had come; I will lose it because the order of things passes on." • Having had the audacity to take on human form once, if I should say, 'I don't want to be anything but a man! Nothing but a man!' the Creator would surely regard me as a most inauspicious being." o Different names of the way: The Way, Heaven, yin and yang, the Creator
Conclusion
• map the space in which our ethical concerns are situated. • Self others community • sometimes conflict with each other→may have only a pragmatic, case by case solution • neglect of any one of those three dimensions is, however, problematic • 2. that of our existence as natural beings: organic, embodied beings and as such part of the biological and physical world • Think of ethics not only in abstract terms, but as concerning our most serious contemporary issues
Freidrich
• motivated by Christian beliefs and German Idealist philosophy. • His painting represents a concern with the world above or beyond, a transcendent reality. • Humans dominant of nature, center of image • Above the clouds • Contemplative
Ethical Practices
• original inspiration from Socrates' declaration that the unexamined life is not worth living • late Stoic thinkers developed detailed techniques of self-examination aimed at ethical self-development. • concern with developing a system of methods for ethical self-improvement is in tune with their goal of achieving a fully rational, logically coherent, scientific view of the cosmos. • Z: resists precisely this urge to systematicity. He does not believe that we can have an adequate theoretical view of things. His outlook is poetical and skeptical.
Friendship
• relation between those seeking to gain Daoist wisdom can never really be that of Master and disciple. • every Daoist is called a Master—critique of conf • Essential relationship: friendship • In both stories the friendship is based on a shared way of seeing the world. • Daoist ethics is based on a particular vision of nature. It is in this sense that we can call it a "visionary ethics."
Ideal Unique Human existence
• survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until everyone of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. • ethical existence must not be bound by general rules and permanent habits o Fleeting habits, loose yourself
