If you want to understand what's going on in Hungary...

If you are curious why a country, which is part of the EU, has a strong conservative-nationalistic and clerical leaning, how it can have a far-far-right party standing at around 17% percent in polls monitoring possible election outcomes, why it accepts the rule of a party led by a single man portraying himself as the savior of the nation, and claiming that no one is part of the Nation who is not a True Hungarian, then I'm glad to offer you a short list of suggested readings.

If you want to understand what’s going on in Hungary you don’t need to understand a lot of very complex theory. And you should definitely not, not even for a second, listen to the politicians.

Just go and read a few – as it happens to be, quite entertaining – books. One of them is Istvan Orkeny’s One minute short stories (Egyperces novellák). Orkeny makes fun of the oppression and nonsensical, often ad-hoc and cruel rules the communist regime enforced on Hungarians with the support of the Russian army. Also (a bit similarly to Joseph Heller, but in a much-much more condensed version) he points out forcefully the meaningless violence of the Second World War, and the perverse distortion of any rationality.

If you then go on and read Peter Nadas’s book, Parallel Stories (Párhuzamos történetek), you can get a much broader and detailed picture – a bit the opposite of Orkeny – about the many ties of the dictatorial oppression that run through and corrupted the lives of generations in Central- and Eastern-Europe. It has less humor than the brilliant, absurd short stories of Orkeny, but offers a much more detailed picture of all the political ties between the histories of neighboring countries in the region, and gives awe-aspiring depictions of individual fates.

A nice third novel to round out the collection is Gyorgy Spiro’s Spring Exhibition (Tavaszi tárlat). The novel focuses on the story of a man who was in hospital during the events of the 1956 revolution against the Russians. Accordingly, he couldn't take part in the fights, he couldn't go to work, he was left out of everything and seen nowhere. But in the eyes of the secret police, who want to hold a few big lawsuits (pre-organized), this makes him an ideal victim to involve in one of their schemes. He gets accused of having been a member of a secret organization plotting against the communist system. As he reflects in the following days, in his terror before being taken away, he sees through the injustice and artificiality of the systems workings, and it's perverse logic: they can make a victim out of someone, because he is entirely innocent.

Oh, and just in case you would wonder: but why did Hungary fight on the side of Nazi Germany in WW II in the first place? Well, it is enough to read a bit of Laszlo Nemeth’s excellent book, Sin (Bűn). Nemeth guides you through the reality of late 1920’s, early 1930’s Hungary. The country hasn't been called ‘the land of the two million beggars’ for no reason. Society’s structure was still very much the same as before WW I, when all the privileges of the aristocracy still existed and were enforced by law. If you weren't lucky enough to be born into at least an upper middle class family, you didn't stand much chance for a decent life.

All these novels portray the reality the majority of Hungarians had to endure and struggle with during the last hundred years. You might get an idea from this, why they aren't surprised by, why they aren't revolting against the changes the current Fidesz-KDNP government carried out.

And I’m not talking about their economical policy. That is a matter which according to some has a certain chance of success. We will see later whether it works or not. The problematic points are the eroding of honesty, the acceptance of archaic and extreme clerical and nationalist views, the message that it is perfectly alright to govern a country by force. Meanwhile, there is not even a glimmer of self-criticism, or a chance of being open to input from any other sources than the ones loyal to them. And that’s just what we had to get used to for a long time in our history due to a conservative, slowly adapting and status quo preserving aristocracy, and then later due to the ultra-nationalist revisionist Horthy era, and after that the WW II governments, including a short Nazi and German rule, and then a Communist rule, supported by the Soviet Union and its wast army, far outnumbering the Hungarian one.

But one thing they couldn't ruin is an excellent art life. As one of my friends wrote recently in a review on the work of Laszlo Krasznahorkai (author of Satan’s Tango, and collaborator of Bela Tarr, the famous director of among other movies The Horse of Turin): Hungarian literature is world literature, in as far as it is concerned with all its issues, exemplifying all its trends, advancing new solutions and style, and creating great works in all its genres.

Rules and exceptions

When I was small I often wondered about the saying 'The exception strengthens the rule'. I thought I would share the three ways in which I have managed to make sense of the saying since then.

1. When there is an exception we explain it by citing a special explanation (e.g. when someone is crazy we invent a new category and do not modify our original category of normal – so the rule of what counts as normal does not alter, the rule does not change, it gets stronger because we can apply it.

2. When someone acts out of habit, against his usual dispositions, we can usually say that this does not change the pattern of his behaviour, and we relegate the case to an isolated category of exceptions.

3. Also, exceptions are cases not properly belonging into the set of cases that the rule covers. By making it explicit how they stand out, you can understand the rule better.

Any further comments? Did I terribly misunderstand something?

A little puzzle: the present and the future you, and their conflicting interests

Imagine that you have some character trait that you feel you would be better off without. Imagine also, that you lack some trait you would be happy to have. If you now make certain decisions and commit yourself to them in due time you can, with good chance, achieve to become the sort of person you want to be.

But what if the person you become does not enjoy being the way she is? What if she finds some of her traits bothersome? Of she thinks others find it irritating that she is the way she is and maybe that's why she feels lonely. Maybe she should change...

The problem emerging from this scenario is the following one: if you value certain character traits now and manage to become the sort of person who has them, your scale of values and their ranking might change enough to make some of the values you have at this point seem worthless in your eyes. That is, there does not seem to be any chance to make yourself still feel attracted to the vision about what sort of person it would be nice to be, that you had earlier.

Is this the same type of problem that Jon Elster discusses, for example in his Ulysses Unbound? Not exactly. There, Elster is primarily focusing on how you can stay committed to a goal, when you know all along that the goal is good. For example, how an alcoholic can stick to his resolution not to drink, although he knows he will want a drink very badly when he gets home after work. The difference between this case and the case I mentioned above is, that the scenarios Elster discusses take it for granted that you know what the right is. You just need to stick to it somehow - you need to avoid temptation, temporal effects of scaling, etc. But you do not face an entirely new set of values. You just get into a situation where you temporarily value the bad thing. The changing-personality scenario is different. It portrays the possibility of a good change which you find meaningless once achieved. This type of problem has a pair in the field of decision making general (not constrained to altering your own personality). 

There is an argument, made by L. A. Paul, in an article in preparation, in connection with having children, according to which no matter what you think now about having kids, that does not really matter. Actually having them is such a life changing experience, that you cannot now put yourself into the place of the person you will be after you already have kids. So, those problems that you might see with having kids are not sure to still be there once you have them. (Of course no one is saying that they might not, or that they disappear without a trace. But your priorities change.) Also, the good parts of having kids might be entirely different than what you expect. And this is just partly an issue of access to information about what it means to have a kid: you can get to know a lot by talking with your parents, relatives and friends, by working with kids, by reading about them, and so on. The information you do not have access to is this: what sort of person you will become. You might be surprised by finding joy in some things you would never have expected. Also, since what we care for influences the way we focus our attention and what we spend time on, you might find that you notice things about kids which you would never have done if you would have stayed your earlier self.

So, why is all this a problem? As Paul suggests, sometimes we need to be a bit crazy and make these decisions. One cannot find out sooner. Well, this might be true of having kids. But what about cases when for example teenagers are supposed to make choices about the job they choose? Or when it is left to politicians to decide about education? Or when one follows some self-help book for successful managers, and accepts its values and sets out to become like suggested? What do we base these decisions on?

There are two risks of making bad decisions in such situations: one is when we get to the point that we have changed, but we become a sort of person who does not care about being like that anymore. The other is that we misjudge what being that sort of person will be like: we thought we would be better, kinder, more courageous and just. But in fact we turn out worse and we don't even mind it anymore. We enjoy ourselves and the measure of what's a good life and a good person is gone.

It seems that in all these situations we cannot rely on anything else than on the experience and advice of those who have gone through changes we are thinking about undergoing. But we have to take into account that they are quite probably not able to occupy once more their perspective from before the change. Another thing that might be helpful is to have an objective value  scale, which is sufficiently independent of our character to hold in place, no matter how our changes turn out to be. Having such a scale of values can help us orient ourselves even if the metamorphosis is a bad one. (Poor Kafka, he saw how many of his contemporaries by becoming 'bugs' adopt to their sad and constrained jobs which do not provide them with any sort of feeling of usefulness and pride in their work.)

I cannot end this post with any more particular suggestions. But I'm more than curious to read what you think, what you recommend me to read and how you handle such problems.

Why scientists who say 'we have discovered free will doesn't exist' don't say anything new

The problem of 'free will' in philosophy is not about your ordinary notion of 'free', which has to do with your political, personal, cultural, etc. freedom. It is a metaphysical thesis. The problem stems from the contradiction of two views that most of us find very plausible, but they also seem incompatible. The first view is that as material beings in this universe whatever happens to us is determined by natures causal processes. The other is that we are human agents who can decide what they do - and we usually think of decision as the power to determine what to do.

The clash is this: if we are determined by previously occurred physical/chemical/

/biological/take-your-favorite-natural-scientific-level-of-explanation causes then there is no more room to determine anything.

Philosophers in general aren't committed to a soul which would exist independently of the body and therefore wouldn't be affected by natural causes. But there are some who do. Someone holding such a view would be a libertarian and a dualist.

There are also another group of libertarians among professional philosophers, who don't think we have any part which exists independently of our bodies, but our biological working is so special that it gives rise to higher order processes and capacities, one of which is the ability to reason and decide. Some people try to give evolutionary accounts of how this might have developed, how it might work. There is lots of sophisticated work done on such theories in collaboration with cognitive psychologists. These people are libertarians and naturalists.

But in fact, most philosopher think the opposite: that we are beings whose behavior is determined causally. These people can be divided into two groups: compatibilists and determinists.

Compatibilists think something like this: there is no free will in the classical sense. But the thought that there is, is so deeply embedded in our social practices (law, schooling, choosing your job, spouse, house, etc.) that there are practices that make use of the idea. Accordingly, we have to understand these practices. So, we have to figure out how we think of morality, of action, of being free and how this relates to our attributions of responsibility. There seems to be a system to it, so there might as well be some implicit criteria controlling this behavior that can be uncovered.

Determinists are usually skeptics about any form of making sense of being free (be that a full-blooded or a practice-based sense). They try to explain why we think that we are free, or how we should conceive of our behavior and morals if there really is no freedom. 

So, when scientists, neurologists or psychologists announce again that they have discovered there is no freedom don't get scared. Many of us knew long ago what they 'discovered', in fact knew more and did more constructive work than they did. And even most of the experiments carried out so far to disprove the possibility of the libertarian philosophers being right suffer from serious flaws. On this see A. R. Mele's easy to understand book which is a serious study of the experimental data on free will since Libet's experiments up to about 2008.

I personally think that despite most experiments being flawed  and quite short-sighted, there isn't much chance to prove libertarian views right. If I would have to place my bets I would argue that all behavior has underlying biological processes that realize it, and which are determined. But I also think that there is a very interesting social practice related to our evolution, our emotions, our cultural development and our higher order abilities, and the notion of free will is a component in this practice.

If you want more goodness from heavy weight clever philosophers go read a bit on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and on Flickers of Freedom. And please, oh please, do not buy the books of the Sam Harris style amateurs, who are struck by realizing the possibility of determinism! They did not prove anything new. Just realized a very-very old point of philosophy and write about it in an amateurish way.  Of course this is not to say that they are not clever people or excellent researchers in their own field. Neither am I claiming that they are bad people who want to harm anyone. They are just ignorant of a lot of important work having been done in a field that they don't know much about.

It seems today every fifth neurologist feels bound to write a book about free will. They thereby make their more clever and subtle colleagues appear in a bad light as well. Also, if you are interested in good research done on actions on how behaviors and actions are caused on the neural level there is lots of amazing stuff about it, for example here.

In Exeter

I spent a few days in Exeter during this summer, visiting a conference. When I travel and I can get the time I like to read a bit about the place where I'm going. In this case I was lucky: I could read a short summary of Exeter's history and also, I arrived a day before the event started so I had time to look around a bit. After a nice walk in historical downtown I had a lovely coffee in the main square while preparing for a seminar I'm teaching.


Suddenly, after years, the urge to write a poem rose up again. I wrote it in Hungarian, but proceeded to make a quick translation. Here is the result:


In Exeter, on the 11th of July 2013

The long buzz of the bell of the Cathedral,
While I lay in the grass reading the Meno,
And above the green square seagulls flew.
Cloudless, blue sky, cheerful,
But how different this sounds from that heard seventy-one years ago,
The humming and the company of speakers both changed.
Behind me the Spanish chatter,
Sometimes the sound of airplanes,
No traces of the scare, caused five years ago,
By a young Arabian man,
Who exploded the toilet on himself.
I'm going to the loo, it was nice to see you,
And I walked by 'the house that moved'.


Some things that help you understand it:
- In front of the cathedral there is a nice, big grassy field.
- Plato's dialogue 'The Meno' is about knowledge and virtue.
- In the second world war the Germans bombed Exeter heavily and most of the historical buildings were destroyed. They didn't rebuild them in the same style, so you see some beautiful older buildings besides very simple or ugly modern ones.
- In 2008 a young Arabian man wanted to blow up a bomb in the toilet of a cafe in the city center, but the bomb wasn't effective and it only hurt him.
- There is a house called 'the house that moved'. During the 1950's when the city's road system underwent large developments this old house happened to be in the way of one of the new roads. Instead of destroying it they laid down rails, lifted the house on the with some cranes and moved it out of the way. There it stands in it's news place. Lovely building, see some more photos here.
Some things that help you understand it:
- In front of the cathedral there is a nice, big grassy field.
- Plato's dialogue 'The Meno' is about knowledge and virtue.
- In the second world war the Germans bombed Exeter heavily and most of the historical buildings were destroyed. They didn't rebuild them in the same style, so you see some beautiful older buildings besides very simple or ugly modern ones.
- In 2008 a young Arabian man wanted to blow up a bomb in the toilet of a cafe in the city center, but the bomb wasn't effective and it only hurt him.
- There is a house called 'the house that moved'. During the 1950's when the city's road system underwent large developments this old house happened to be in the way of one of the new roads. Instead of destroying it they laid down rails, lifted the house on the with some cranes and moved it out of the way. There it stands in it's news place. Lovely building, see some more photos here.
Some things that help you understand it:
- In front of the cathedral there is a nice, big grassy field.
- Plato's dialogue 'The Meno' is about knowledge and virtue.
- In the second world war the Germans bombed Exeter heavily and most of the historical buildings were destroyed. They didn't rebuild them in the same style, so you see some beautiful older buildings besides very simple or ugly modern ones.
- In 2008 a young Arabian man wanted to blow up a bomb in the toilet of a cafe in the city center, but the bomb wasn't effective and it only hurt him.
- There is a house called 'the house that moved'. During the 1950's when the city's road system underwent large developments this old house happened to be in the way of one of the new roads. Instead of destroying it they laid down rails, lifted the house on the with some cranes and moved it out of the way. There it stands in it's news place. Lovely building, see some more photos here.

I was fascinated with how people tried to destroy Exeter again and again, but it is still there and it is so peaceful and lovely, and some of the buildings still stand and are used. This contrast between the earlier and more recent horrific events, and the cheerful, careless atmosphere of the main square before the Cathedral struck me.

On the role, usefulness and value of the humanities

When one studies a subject in the humanities or works in any of its fields one can often encounter complaints from students and even from professionals that the humanities are useless and it does not make sense to learn or practice them.

Most of these complaints come from students in other fields. Accordingly, the source of their complaints is probably that they don't know what one could be working on in the humanities. They have no knowledge of what is studied, how it is studied, what one working as a professional in the humanities does, how this relates to society and whether it is useful or not. Their ignorance and intolerant attitudes can usually be dispelled quite easily if one spends a few minutes explaining what they don't know.

The problem is worse if one encounters serious grown ups voicing such concerns. A few years ago in one of his books for wider audiences Stephen Hawking pushed that the job philosophy did earlier is now entirely taken over by science and therefore we should stop doing philosophy. Hawking is surely a great physicist but we should treat his claims regarding other fields with due suspicion. Of course they can be right, it is just that he is not a professional on education, on teaching or on research, but on physics. Thus we should require a bit more detailed information and argument before we accept big - and superficial - words.

Another instance of condemning the humanities occurred just recently in Hungary. The leading party, Fidesz, is in a governing-frenzy. The country's economic situation is bad, Fidesz enjoys two-thirds majority in the parliament, that is they can pass any law they want, and accordingly they try to reform everything. The under-secretary responsible for higher education, István Klinghammer, voiced the view in an interview with him that "In today's world it is the natural sciences and the mechanical sciences are producing value. The humanities, and culture, are very important, but they do not produce values, they give people delight and  enjoyment."

Are such views justified?

There might be many reasons why they aren't. First, there is an organization trying to test whether teaching philosophy in primary schools helps kids develop better skills, needed both for science and humanities related subjects, but of course also beyond school subjects - such as when reading news, instructions, contracts. According to some studies on the effect of their classes critical thinking group-games, with philosophy related material, can lead to such development. They also recently argued for this publicly.

Another function philosophy and other fields of humanities serve is one of being information sources that can shape decision making well. This happens on three levels: first, we all learn the basics of literature, history, the structures found in society throughout school. This shapes both our identities, our notion of what sort of beings we are and what has happened to communities of humans before our birth. An adequate preparation of this sort can help people spot dangers and threats, both on the personal and the community level, thereby guarding them against making immoral judgments, accepting very bad choices from their representatives, and so on. Second, keeping track of good and bad decisions, of different types of states and their relations, on how people conducted themselves and what good and bad effect that had (on their psychology, personal happiness, groups, economy, etc.) is important, both in order to avoid similar pitfalls, and in order to get good ideas for solving problems. Third, many practical questions touch on the lives of individuals, on the lives of communities, nations, institutions. If these questions are to be answered well, they need to be informed by data about how the individuals and the groups behave, what they are, what they value. It is not much use to push certain developments at all costs, if it radically undermines the life-quality of those whom it should serve. This mechanism at large explains why it is a bad decision simply to push forward production rates, without taking into account their effects on our environment, or its effects on small and large scale societal changes.

Any type of humanistic discipline, but especially literature, has an additional virtue: it provides us with a special understanding of others. Understanding isn't used here either its emotional meaning (as to forgive), nor in its scientific meaning (as to give a good causal explanation of it). Understanding in this sense means that we can see the motives for which others act, why those motives are important for them, why they resist forms of rationality that rely on values or reasoning that are external to theirs, and why certain people and groups cannot handle some problems. This sort of understanding can serve the role of disabling our animal instincts to react aggressively and hostile to anyone unknown, or belonging to a different group. Understanding disables our ability to condemn other people for things that stem from their being different from us.
Fostering this form of understanding does not mean - and as clever democrats and liberals know it never did - that one should accept evil, harm bringing means or the condemnation of virtues. A good liberal will stand up and try to show that she or he is right, and act accordingly. But that does not mean that she takes away the right of others to try and defend their views. Bad and faulty views fall, since questions of morality, conduct and norms aren't relative within a group. Nor are they relative on a general human level. (In relation to what would they be relative in the latter case?)
In connection to understanding consider literature for a moment: when one reads a book like Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher, the book takes about 10-16 hours to read, depending on your tempo, your imagination and level of tiredness. It tells the story of a single person - in the course of this it touches on other people, but all the way through, the protagonist is in the center. How often do you take the time and effort to pay attention to someone else for this amount of time? How often do you spend time on trying to figure out why and how it happened that one did just what one did? How often do you make so much effort to understand how someone's position in society makes them feel? Literature can enable us to do this.
Of course there are many different types of works, not all of them aim at giving us better understanding of others (some of them do not even aim at being entertaining, but for a good reason), some are just shallow forms of entertainment. There is not much wrong with fun, but those books are not the ones doing a lot of important work. The ones combining entertainment and enabling understanding are the great ones.

Also, a charge often brought against people studying humanities is, that many of them do not get jobs in their fields. Let us have a more careful look at this claim, and at why it is problematic.
1. What exactly does this mean? What percentage of people getting diplomas in humanities subjects do not get a job in their field? What's the percentage in law, in engineering, in economics, in management? One rarely sees such claims backed up by data.
2. Why is this a problem? A good training is not necessarily a vocational training. One can gain many skills, experiences and value without preparing for one given job. What sorts of skills can one obtain if one gets a decent humanities diploma with a decent result? A) one will be good at organizing large amounts of data quickly, B) learning new theoretical constructs quickly, C) use models to understand meaning, communication, social interactions better, D) communicate clearly.
3. If there are so many people getting humanities degrees that they cannot get jobs in their fields, why did the governments adopt a uniform and unrealistic support scheme for universities, where you get more money if you have more students? Obviously, this led the universities in every field to accept more and more people. Inevitably, the standards dropped. Since to do well in any field of the humanities appropriately one needs to be quite clever, it could easily be foreseen that the faculties will get lots of people who actually won't be able to do well in these subjects, and cannot get a job in this field with their diplomas. This is similar to the huge droup-out rates in informatics, maths or in other difficult fields.
4. Many people make the following mistake. They look at one or a few undergrad(s), someone who is at most average, or below that in his/her subject and conclude that the people studying in that field aren't studying anything useful, since they cannot give a clear account of what they will do, what their professors research, etc. Of course there is no field where, with the exception of a few outstanding students, young people could answer such questions well. They can give you textbook definitions. What can they tell you about the inner workings, the everyday, the many connections of their field to other social institutions? What can anyone without determination and aspiration tell you about such things? So, why not ask the best ones who have finished and have gotten jobs?
5. What exactly does it show that many people getting a diploma in the humanities do not settle for 'a job in the humanities'? It surely does not show that the overwhelming majority of them don't have the abilities, or knowledge to do so. There simply aren't too many jobs in the humanities. So, they work in all sorts of fields.
Where, you ask? At companies, at hospitals, for the government, as writers, and so on. Would it be better if all these jobs were filled by people with different diplomas? Is it so: the good and giving private sector would love to create more jobs, it is only that there wouldn't be enough people to fill them? No, this isn't the situation. And people with humanities diplomas are obviously capable of doing these jobs well.
But wait, couldn't they do these jobs just as well without their diploma? Well, it isn't sure that they could. Think of the following: people after leaving school with 16 or 18 aren't usually very reliable and disciplined. University gives them many skills in this. Even if at a humanities faculty you learn certain things not related to how a business is run, or a car constructed, you do not just read pulp. You have to exercise your capacities in many ways, figure out solutions to problems, prepare for exams, grasp difficult material, organize your life well and get through exams. All tests and experiences that strengthen the confidence and enable you to handle a job much better.

Also, let us not forget that most systems that are important in our lives, including moral, political, cultural systems (and by cultural I mean habits, forms of leisure and punishment, duties, all in all: forms of life) are not systems that emerge simply from the workings from underlying natural systems. Of course they are realized by such systems, but this does not mean that from the workings from the underlying systems we can understand the workings of the higher level systems. Anything in this world has an underlying natural realization. But this does not mean that the logic of a higher order system is always determined by the functioning of the lower one. Also, it does not mean that we can read off good suggestions on how to make a system work better by understanding natural systems.

Of course, no one clever is against cooperation between the humanities and sciences. Why would anyone be? Why wouldn't we use all the methods we have to discover interesting answers to interesting questions? The suggestion simply is, that the material of humanities is well worthwhile funding and studying, even working on it as a vocation, it can change lives, and thus it is valuable. At the same time when more and more people in the humanities understand how the sciences can be used to contribute to the pursuit of truth, the general public should understand why the humanities are doing just fine, doing good work and can solve many of their problems on their own. You just have to study them, before giving an opinion.

Plus: maybe it is not entirely fair to weigh this in, but most fields in humanities are still way more cheaper than research on sports cars, on far away galaxies, on new anti-depressants, on oil mining, etc. Many of these fields also receive large amounts of funding from the private sector. Although they contribute to economy and create jobs, taking into account their negative consequences - such as enforcing bad consumer choices, creating extra profit for already wealthy companies, pushing non-sustainable energy usage, etc. - is it sure that that's where government funding is best spent? Let's rather spend more on cancer research, Alzheimer's, good economic models, and research in ethics.  

A little more poetry - on sex, marriage and a guilty conscience

A bit of poetry again. This one is a dark peace, but although I haven't felt the feelings it tells about in a long time, I cannot resist the supreme verses, rhymes and the mood it creates.

Tony Harrison - The White Queen, I. Satyrae, V

Northwards two hundred miles, an emptiness
As big as Europe; Sah'ra; Nothingness.
South six hundred, miles of churning sea
Make of the strongest swimmer a nonentity,
Bleaching the blackest flesh as white as spray.
The sea makes no demands but gets its way.

The campus wants its pep- and sleeping pills.
It's not the diseases, but the void that kills,
The space, the gaps, the darkness, that same void
He hears vibrating in clogged adenoid
And vocal cords. Through his cool stethoscope
He hears despair pulsate and withered hope
Flutter the failing heart a little, death
Of real feeling in a laboured breath.
He knows with his firm finger on a pulse
It is this Nothingness and nothing else
Throbs in the blood. Nothing is no little part
Of time's huge effort in the human heart.
There's love. There's courage. And that's all.
And the itus et reditus of Pascal.

He's not asked out to drinks or dinner much.
He knows how the slightest sweatrash on the crutch
Scares some and with good reason, whose child's whose,
Whose marriage depends on sjamboks, and who screws
In Posts & Telegraphs, and reads instead
His damp-stained Pensées on their double bed.
The Nothingness! Lisa - she couldn't stand
The boredom and packed off for Switzerland.
She sends him a postcard of a snowblown slope:
Boris, ich bin frei ... und friere. He can't cope
Here alone. There's nothing for a sick MO
Sick of savannah, sick of inselberg,
Sick of black Africa, who cannot go
Ever again to white St Petersburg.

The speaker here is an Englishman, placed for duty in Africa. Harrison himself spent some years in Nigeria and Senegal, and has met several colonists - people who earlier or at the time worked for the British Empire. As a poet he was interested in their experiences and lives, but due to his political outlooks he always remains critical towards such characters and the lives they lead as colonizers and (often) abusers of the locals.

The speaker of the poem is a doctor giving a parallel speech: he talks at the same time about his own loneliness and seclusion in the small place far from England where he has to work, and where his wife has left him, and at the same time commenting on the more general feeling of being isolated, lonely and desperate.

Still, he perceives his own situation as worse than that of others: he does not even have a family to care for, nor can he find pleasure in bodily joys as do others.

At the end he cites a line from a letter sent by her (ex- ?) wife: the woman writes to him about how free she feels (we can only guess whether this is due to being back in Europe or rather to having left her husband and their boring life behind). Also, she seems to tease her with adding in her letter: "und friere", meaning in English she is freezing. This suggests both that she feels alive, she experiences strong physical sensations, and mental ones as well, since she gets a noteworthy experience of her being in Switzerland. It is also taunting: it points to the never-changing heat and dryness his husband has to endure.

(And also: you can find here a short recommendation of his reissued Selected Poems.)

Making your life better - learning how to spot when they try to trick you: An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments

One thing philosophers are good at is reasoning. Whether practical or theoretical, if you can make the question sufficiently clear they can help you understand better what you have to make up your mind about, what question you need to ask, what you need to discover - and this is not only true of personal affairs.

To acquire reasoning skills can be quite hard. Most philosophers get some education in logic, and also they have to read pieces of writing which present arguments for and against positions on a certain question.

But as they say: "In philosophy we always begin in the deep, because there is no shallow." This fact can tickle one's self-esteem when one is already well ahead in the studies, but can be scary to starters, to people only interested in philosophy out of curiosity, to the wider public (and employees of funding bodies), and to those who we should attract: the potential students.

Therefore I always greet with joy good publications that help introduce people without previous training to parts of philosophy.

Ali Almossawi's book does splendid work on this front. And another great thing about it: it's freely available online. Although not compulsory, I would strongly encourage everyone to donate at least a few bucks. Being in the process of writing a book I can appreciate the effort that goes into such an enterprise. Now, have a look at the book and enjoy - if possible with your kids or youngsters.

Arguments from most people

Most people fear that they run out of time. They want to enjoy their lives. Many of them are fine with their work, many of them hate it, nevertheless there aren't too many who can say that their work is a cherished part of their lives.

Accordingly, most of them take school, studying, learning, developing skills, work to be toiling, a mild or strong form of suffering, deprivation of the precious time they have so little of to spend on things they like and love.

Since this is so, they don't like to spend their free time on things difficult. (At least, not many of them do. I'm not talking of the few, who enjoy in their free time chess, philosophy, mathematical riddles, reading about biology or learning languages.) And as a result, they never learn and understand many things falling outside the field the help of which they earn their money. This is fair enough, problems only begin when these people, being completely ignorant of how education, science, research, politics or economics work still feel strongly inclined to voice their opinion. And not just to voice, but to be heard, to have an effect on the decision makers. Since the decision makers are politicians who have to take the easiest roots to get good points by the public whose votes they depend on, they like to attack education, educational institutions, academia, culture, etc. Anything, that the average Joe doesn't understand how it turns out more dollars, and helps in making his life-quality better.

As a result one encounters ridiculous arguments in public debate, concerning the role, the function (or the lack of it), the importance, the inner working, etc. of society, education, economy and what not. Many of these arguments are clearly faulty. If one is intelligent to grasp a reading as easy as An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments (about which see my earlier note) one can also understand how these arguments are rather rhetoric than to the point. They don't help anyone else, then the person uttering them. And even them also in their short sighted pursuit for power. Alas, the ignorance of the masses is not something to lament about. It's a fact we have to live by.

But just for fun I've compiled a list of arguments often put forward, just for fun. Of course the arguments don't run in these forms. The way I put them tries to make explicit what's wrong with them. But you can easily recognize them. Most of them use Philosophy as an example, as it is an especially popular boogie-man these days among the uneducated and the narrow-minded.

1. My knowledge is enough to guide me through my everyday affairs, so all the knowledge that is beyond that is unnecessary. Philosophy makes a lot of claims of re-shaping my knowledge, so it is also unnecessary. I don’t have to know anything I don’t use in my everyday life. (Also, I don't need to accept anyone else's measure of how successful I am in my life.)

2. Most people aren't interested in what philosophers are interested therefore philosophers are wrong.

3. Most people don’t agree with philosophers therefore philosophers are wrong.

4. The conclusions philosophers draw aren't changing what they are explaining therefore they are superfluous.

5. Philosophers don’t use mathematics therefore they are wrong. (Even if they do, they probably don't use for anything interesting.)

6. Philosophers do not apply one methodology and study one field of questions therefore they are stupid.

7. Philosophy hasn't changed in a long time. I don’t know philosophy, but I know this, therefore philosophy is unnecessary.

8. Philosophy is what I think most uneducated people not working in science think therefore it is wrong.

9. Philosophy is something everyone can do without training therefore it is wrong.

10. Philosophers aren't interested in what scientists say therefore they are wrong.

11. Philosophy is not science therefore it is useless.

12. Most people don’t understand philosophy therefore philosophers are talking nonsense. In contrast most people understand mathematics, physics and linguistics without training perfectly, so these are sensible activities.

13. People not working in philosophy don’t know why philosophy is interesting or important, therefore it is neither. Whereas everyone knows without any further thinking or education how useful it is to investigate the big bang, the distant stars, unknown tortoise species, sedatives and game theoretic situations, so these are useful things.

14. Philosophy, and the humanities in general, are about drinking and dreaming. I never studied philosophy or any humanistic discipline and know only people who were unsuccessful undergraduates in these fields, but they are perfectly representative of the fields, therefore they are useless.

15. Bad humanities students cannot explain to me convincingly why their field of study is important.  I don’t understand it either and I lack both education and intelligence to look after it, so they are useless. Whereas building especially fast cars, working out better investment strategies are amazing ways of making life on this planet better and fascinating in themselves.

16. I don’t understand this writing, therefore it is philosophy and therefore philosophy is wrong. (Also, it would claim that this is circular reasoning, which shows even more how wrong it is!)

17. I don’t have time for this, so it cannot be important (although I have time for drinking and/or hiking and/or tv and/or movies ...).

18. It’s hard to get a job with it therefore the people who do it are stupid/therefore it is easy. The clever people are successful and rich, so they must be the doctors, engineers, etc. and everyone else is just not clever enough for those professions.

19. Science makes sense. So, earlier philosophy and religion had to make sense in the same way. There is no other way in which they could have played a part in society and the world. There is no other way for them today either.

20. If philosophy and literature would do a good job there would be less violence, pain, stupidity. But there is a lot, therefore they are not doing a good job. It is not, that people who do philosophy and literature should first become better and then the descriptions which deal with them and their issues would also be better. It is that philosophy and literature should make people better. (The Pamela fallacy.)

A sweet love poem for you on this sunny-cloudy Saturday morning.

Kate Clanchy

Patagonia

I said perhaps Patagonia, and pictured

a peninsula, wide enough

for a couple of ladderback chairs

to wobble on at high tide. I thought

of us in breathless cold, facing

a horizon round as a coin, looped

in a cat's cradle strung by gulls

from sea to sun. I planned to wait

till the waves had bored themselves

to sleep, till the last clinging barnacles,

growing worried in the hush, had

paddled off in tiny coracles, till

those restless birds, your actor's hands,

had dropped slack into your lap,

until you'd turned, at last, to me.

When I spoke of Patagonia, I meant

skies all empty aching blue. I meant

years. I meant all of them with you.