Tag Archive: Philosophy

Russel on prudence and passion

Posted by Ankit On October 17th, 2012

A few days ago I wondered about a curious dichotomy that I find in Wilde's writing, that most of his major characters are sharp people with little respect for conventional mores in theory but very conventional lives in practice. I see it as Wilde's well-thought out tacit approval of some of society's seemingly stifling customs. I came across a few lines from Bertrand Russel which seem appropriate here. For those who do not know, Russel was a philosopher whom one could actually understand and respect but that was probably because he was also a gifted mathematician. He had the common sense which the best of philosophers so often lack (My God I hate it when people like Descarte can't figure out whether the table in front of them is real or not). The lines:

The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant...

Civilization checks impulse not only through forethought, which is a self-administered check, but also through law, custom, and religion. This check it inherits from barbarism, but it makes it less instinctive and more systematic. Certain acts are labelled criminal, and are punished, certain others, though not punished by law, are labelled wicked, and expose those who are guilty of them to social disapproval... On the one hand the purposes of the community are enforced upon the individual, and, on the other hand the individual, having acquired the habit of viewing his life as a whole, increasingly sacrifices his present to the future.

It is evident that this process can be carried too far, as it is, for instance, by a miser. But without going to such extremes, prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. TheÂ worshiperÂ of Bacchus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of everyday preoccupations... Much of what is greatest in human achievement involves some element of intoxication, some sweeping away of prudence by passion. Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting, with it, it is dangerous. Prudence versus passion is a conflict that runs through history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party.

-Bertrand Russel in Â The History of Western Philosophy

Science as a belief

Posted by Ankit On April 26th, 2010

It's interesting how much one doesn't know of oneself until he is asked specifically and has to think about it. So the other day Khatri bhaiyya asked me why I get so flustered whenever the topic of homeopathy comes up. As it turns out, I really do get irritated but if he had not mentioned it I would never have admitted it to myself. Then I had another discussion with Jackie upon something similar and the upshot of it all is that some little things became a bit less vague.

I suppose that of all things that irritate me, the one that does it to the greatest extent is the statement, 'well, science is just another belief.' Frequently it is uttered by someone who has just had a long and winded argument and has decided to settle it all by pointing to the shaky grounds upon which we have built all are architectures. The thing that drives me nuts is that the statement is actually spot on. At its very heart science is actually just a belief with its own axioms and suffers from both an anthropological bias and severe sensory limitations. But it's a very special kind of belief. And it's this special nature of the belief which I find hard to convey to someone who has just made this statement. It's hard to make them understand that the important thing about science is not so much that it has 'made things work' but the fact that it's a humble, self-correcting, and ideally non-dogmatic, non-hierarchical system. A system which always stands incomplete and is never too shy to admit its own incompetence. A system where a rank outsider like Einstein can come along from nowhere and change our entire world view. It's hard to convey how important the act of 'allowing complete irreverence' to exist inside a 'belief system' is to its own well being. This one fact alone should actually be enough to warrant a qualified mention of 'science as a belief' because as I understand, everything else that humans believe in; from religion to economic doctrines to political ideas to homeopathy in fact- everything sort of assumes immunity from the wisdom of the common folk. They are all static and their leaders are unquestionable. So yes, Science at its very heart is just a belief but we should give credit where it's due. We should give credit to a system which, despite the initial appearance, is more equal and more hardworking than others. Or we might not and I should stop giving a damn.

There is another reason why I have more respect for Science than individual opinions and personal hunches. In fact, on a rational day, I have about as much respect for any belief, any morality as any other, including mine - which is not much. The reason is that they are all going to stop mattering or change once the individual ceases to exist, or the environment or circumstances change, or humanity finishes. These presumptuous thoughts don't really matter in the larger scheme of things. Laws of nature, on the other hand, transcend humanity - or so I feel. If there is another civilization somewhere else and if they are intelligent and curious about their surroundings and if they ask questions, I believe that they would find the exact same laws of nature as we have or will - but that's just pure belief and I agree...

God and Russian literature

Posted by Ankit On February 26th, 2010

We all understand that it's all a theater, don't we? That the world as we know it is just a cosmic afterthought, a mere divine joke in which a lot of people take their parts far too seriously and the rest of them have a hearty laugh about it. It's like a friendly banter over beer and you just have to look closely enough to realize that nothing really is sacrosanct. So in this world which appears serious but is actually quite ridiculous, every smart theory must have its stupid, trivial dual. Like god for example. Science works its ass off trying to explain every little detail, checks and rechecks itself innumerable number of times, sweats like a pig, and finally has to contend with so much uncertainty that Heisenberg's cat, in comparison, seems like a sure bet. It's the serious explanation but then there's the joker's explanation which is god. 'It's just the way it was intended' and poof!, there goes all your seriousness.

Anyway, the reason I was thinking on these lines is that while reading a bit of Dostoevsky, it suddenly dawned upon me that all my disappointment in Russian literature might not have anything to do with its content at all. One thing is for sure though, when it comes to depressing, morbid imagination there is no race which trumps the Russian. No other group of people, as a whole, has inflicted as much misery upon the world as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov together have through their stories of the sad farmer whose wife had an affair. But that is probably not the only reason why I find it hard to read Russian literature (actually I very much like Chekhov). The main reason, I think, is the bloody names these Russians have. 'Bezukhovs', 'Drubetskoys', 'Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya', 'Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov', 'Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva' etc. I mean, what the hell? Here I am, trying to wade through an already dense plot where commentaries on human nature are getting intermingled with moral dilemmas and plot twists, and suddenly Ms. Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva walks in and I have to spend the next two minutes dealing with her roadblock of a name. Any race which is sadistic enough to name their young one Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva must necessarily be a depressed one. Their tragedies must necessarily be complex and detailed and heroic and there must necessarily be a complete lack of trivial subject matters. The trivial subject matters are for races which name their children Tom and Rob and Dick. For such races, human life is a travesty to begin with, their coffers have always been full and they have never had to face paucity as a culture, hence, their literature is light on its feet. Imagine an elaborate tragedy with backstabbing siblings and cheating wives and death and misery and moral turpitude and imagine its central character named Bob. Just doesn't cut it. Something tells me that that central character can only be named Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov or some other Russian derivative of the same. Well that's my alternative 'god' theory of the difficulty of Russian literature. It kicks in when I don't feel like thinking or arguing because it's all quite pointless to begin with. There is never a resolution to any argument so I might as well have a bit of fun and indulge in a bit of mockery - very much like the god argument. Did I make any sense? Oh dear god, I sincerely hope not!

Ultra Deep Field

Posted by Ankit On May 26th, 2009

(*Clicking on the above image will take you to a high resolution version. But beware, it's 18 MB so it will take time to load).

The above image is frequently referred to as the most important image ever taken by humanity. It is also a source of very personal and intense emotions to me. Whenever life starts getting cumbersome or I start feeling a tad bit too sad because things seem to be out of control, whenever I start taking myself and probably you too seriously, this is one image which almost shocks things into their proper perspectives. It's called the Hubble ultra deep field.

The hubble space telescope, on September 24 2003, focussed on a completely unramarkable portion of the night sky. It kept looking at the same spot for a bit more than 11 days and produced the image above. Our universe is almost unimaginably vast and the light coming from stars far far away is so dim that to take their image requires collecting light from them for a long time - a very long exposure shot. The portion of the sky that Hubble was looking at was only as big as a 1 mm square piece of paper held at a meter's distance from the eyes but even in this miniscule, unremarkable part of the cosmos, the telescope revealed the presence of stellar matter so brilliant and so numerous - it sends the brain whizzing. Every smudge, every spot, every set of non-black pixels that you see in the above image is a complete galaxy. Not just a star, a galaxy. To put things in perspective, our galaxy the milky way, which is rather a mediocre galaxy in terms of size, contains an estimated 200 billion stars and our Sun is merely an average star. The above photograph contains atleast 10000 galaxies - and all of it in just a faint cosmic whisper. The image is also a snapshot of our tumultous past. It takes 8 minutes for the light from the Sun to reach Earth. This means that every time we look directly at the Sun (if we can) we are not actually looking at how the Sun looks at the present moment but rather at how it looked 8 minutes ago. The farther an object is from us, the older in history its visual signature. The galaxies above have been calculated to be 13 billion light years away (13*1000000000*9,460,730,472,580.8 kms) which means this photograph actually shows how these galaxies looked 13 billion years ago. This is very close to the Big Bang. It is fascinating to realize that we are looking at something so ancient and so proximal to that primordial point of infinite density which by its own obliteration gave birth to a universe whose immense beauty we bask in.

I do not remember who but someone very eminent once said about the human race that we are what happens when Hydrogen is given 14 billion years - and how poetically beautiful, how exhilaratingly true! This image, on its own, makes me realize, enforces in me, a tremendous appreciation for the beautiful harmony of nature, its melodious evolution. It makes me wonder how pedestrian , in comparison, our own creation stories are, how utterly boring and uninspiring and local any other explanation of our presence. In the mysterious attractions of the black holes and the hellish symphony of the quasars our universe has given us wonders more surprising than any that humans have dreamed of. In its vast empty distances and hot swirling vortices, it has given us puzzles more intricate and beautiful than any other. In its utter and cruel inhospitablity to our life form, the universe has given us reasons to appreciate our balmy little blue planet - a whirlpool of human emotions and ambitions, the host to every conqueror who ever lived and every sinner who ever died, but ultimately a speck of nothingness drifting away silently, quietly, but more importantly, aimlessly into the inevitable arms of posterity.