Philosophy: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 8

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Plato argued that the things we see are imperfect copies of perfect, unchanging 'Forms'. Any circle you draw is slightly flawed, yet you can think of a perfect circle; for Plato, that perfect Form was more real than anything in the physical world.

Plato set out the theory in dialogues such as the Phaedo and the Republic, written in Athens in the fourth century BC, usually through the voice of his teacher Socrates. His Greek words for the Forms, idea and eidos, both come from seeing and mean 'form' or 'look'; English 'idea' descends from them. The Forms, such as beauty, justice or the perfect circle, can be grasped only by reason, not by the senses. In the Republic's Allegory of the Cave, prisoners who have only ever seen shadows on a wall take them for reality, much as we do with the physical world. Plato's own student Aristotle rejected separate Forms, arguing that form exists only in real things. The debate lives on: many mathematicians, Kurt Gödel among them, have held that numbers exist independently of us.

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WonderPhilosophy

In Aristotle's ethics, eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness, means flourishing: living and acting well across a whole life, not just feeling good for a moment.

The Greek word joins eu, 'good', and daimon, 'guardian spirit'. Aristotle (384–322 BC) explored it in the Nicomachean Ethics. He reasoned that a good lyre player is one who plays the lyre well, so a good human life must be one that does well what is special to humans: using reason. In practice that means living by the virtues, good traits of character such as courage, generosity and honesty. Each virtue, he said, is a middle path between two extremes: courage lies between cowardice and recklessness. Virtues grow by habit: people become builders by building, and just by doing just acts. He also admitted that a flourishing life needs some luck, such as friends and a measure of wealth. Modern psychologists still use his word: they separate 'hedonic' wellbeing, feeling pleasure, from 'eudaimonic' wellbeing, a sense of meaning and growth.

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StillnessPhilosophy

The Golden Rule, treating others as you would like to be treated, appears in religions and philosophies across the world, from ancient Egypt and China to Greece and beyond.

An Egyptian papyrus from between 664 and 323 BC already says: 'That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another.' Around 500 BC Confucius was asked for one word that could guide a whole life. He chose shu, 'reciprocity', and explained: 'What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.' In Greece the orator Isocrates gave similar advice. Versions also appear in Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian and Islamic teaching. The English name comes from Anglican preachers; its earliest known use is from 1604. The negative form, 'do not do', is sometimes called the Silver Rule. Critics point out its limits: George Bernard Shaw joked that you should not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, because their tastes may differ.

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WonderPhilosophy

The Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that facts about how things are cannot, on their own, prove how things ought to be. Getting from 'is' to 'ought' needs an extra step: a value judgement.

Hume (1711–1776) made the point in a short passage of A Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739–40 when he was in his late twenties. He noticed that writers on morality would reason for a while about how things are, then suddenly switch to what we ought or ought not to do, without explaining where the new 'ought' came from. A simple example: 'smoking damages health' is a fact, but 'you ought not to smoke' only follows once you add a value, such as 'you ought to protect your health'. The idea became known as Hume's law, or Hume's guillotine, because it cuts facts off from values. It does not say facts are irrelevant to ethics; it asks that the value behind an argument be stated openly, where it can be examined. Philosophers still debate whether the gap can ever be bridged.

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In 1689 John Locke compared the newborn mind to 'white paper', with no ideas built in from birth. Everything we know, he argued, is written on it by experience.

Locke (1632–1704), an English philosopher and physician, set out the idea in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. At the time many thinkers held that some ideas, such as the idea of God or basic principles of logic, are born with us. Locke disagreed: he asked how the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and answered in one word, experience. It comes in two kinds: sensation, what we see, hear and touch, and reflection, noticing the workings of our own mind. The later label tabula rasa is Latin for 'scraped tablet', the wax writing tablet of the ancient world; Aristotle had used a similar image. The German philosopher Leibniz replied that the mind is more like a block of marble whose veins already favour certain shapes. Modern science takes a middle view: genes and experience work together, and neither tells the whole story.

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StillnessPhilosophy

Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.

Epictetus (c. 50–135) was born a slave in Hierapolis, the ancient city beside today's Pamukkale in Turkey. He studied Stoic philosophy in Rome, was freed and began teaching, and after the emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Rome he ran a school at Nicopolis in north-western Greece. He wrote nothing himself. His pupil Arrian recorded his talks and gathered the most practical lessons into the Enchiridion, Greek for 'handbook': 53 short chapters meant to be kept close at hand. The book opens by dividing things into those in our power, such as our judgements and choices, and those that are not, such as other people, reputation and events. This line, in George Long's Victorian translation, applies that idea. Epictetus still expected people to act; what he asked was that their peace of mind should not depend on how things turn out.

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StillnessPhilosophy

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Marcus Aurelius (121–180) was Roman emperor from 161 and a follower of Stoic philosophy. His Meditations were private notes written in Greek, partly during long military campaigns on the Danube frontier, and never meant for publication; their Greek title means roughly 'to himself'. This line closes passage 4.3, where he reminds himself that people seek retreats in the countryside or by the sea, when the best retreat is into one's own mind. He then gives himself two rules: things outside us cannot touch the mind, because our distress comes from our own judgements, and everything we see is changing and will soon be gone. In Greek the closing line is only a few words, literally 'the world is change, life is opinion'; the wording on this card is a popular, freer rendering of it.

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If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.

This is passage 17 of the twelfth and last book of the Meditations, the private notebook that the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180) kept in Greek. The word translated 'right' means 'fitting': it belongs to the Stoic idea of kathekon, the appropriate action that a person's reason and role call for in a given situation. So the rule sets two tests: before acting, ask whether the act is fitting; before speaking, ask whether the words are true. Marcus wrote this as the most powerful man in the Roman world, who could have lied or acted unjustly at little risk. In the first book he thanks his teacher, the Stoic Junius Rusticus, for teaching him to write plainly and read carefully, and for sharing his own copy of the Discourses of Epictetus, the former slave whose ideas shaped his own.

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StillnessPhilosophy

It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it.

Seneca (c. 4 BC–AD 65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, playwright and statesman, born in Córdoba in Spain, who later became tutor and adviser to the emperor Nero. He wrote this essay around AD 49 to Paulinus, probably his father-in-law, who was in charge of Rome's grain supply. It opens with a common complaint, echoed in the physician Hippocrates' saying 'life is short, art is long': that nature gives us too little time. Seneca replies that life is long enough if it is well used. What shortens it is how we spend it: chasing money and status, serving other people's ambitions and putting off living until later. His remedy is time given to philosophy, including reading the great thinkers of the past, which, he says, adds all their years to our own.

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No man was ever wise by chance.

The line comes from the 76th of Seneca's Moral Letters to Lucilius, a collection of 124 letters he wrote in the last years of his life, after withdrawing from the emperor Nero's court. Lucilius was a younger friend serving as procurator, a senior official, in Sicily. In this letter Seneca, by then an old man, admits he has been attending a philosopher's lectures for several days and shrugs off those who laugh at him: you should keep learning for as long as you are ignorant, which means for as long as you live. Then comes the point: money may arrive of its own accord, and titles and influence may be handed to you, but virtue never falls on anyone by chance. It takes long, steady work. In Latin the sentence is only four words: nulli sapere casu obtigit.

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StillnessPhilosophy

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

The Tao Te Ching, 'the classic of the Way and its power', is a short book of 81 poetic chapters and the founding text of Taoism. Tradition credits it to Laozi, 'Old Master', said to have kept the archives at the Zhou court in the 6th century BC and to have written the book at a gatekeeper's request as he left China through a western pass. Historians doubt he was a single real person; the oldest surviving copy, on bamboo strips, dates from around 300 BC. Chapter 46 contrasts a world in harmony, where fast horses pull dung carts on the farms, with a world at war, where warhorses are bred on the borders. It then says there is no greater disaster than not knowing what is enough, and ends with this line. The English proverb 'enough is as good as a feast' makes a similar point.

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It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.

The sentence comes from the opening paragraph of Discourse on the Method (1637) by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650). He begins with a joke: good sense is the most fairly shared thing in the world, since no one wishes for more of it than they already have. Then he adds that a good mind is not enough; what matters is applying it well. The book sets out his method in four rules: accept nothing as true unless it is clearly evident, break problems into small parts, move from simple to complex, and check everything for gaps. Descartes, then living in the Netherlands, wrote it in French rather than scholarly Latin so that ordinary readers could follow it. It introduced three scientific essays, one of which laid the ground for the x and y graphs still taught in school. Part Four contains 'I think, therefore I am'.

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WonderPhilosophy

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was an English philosopher and economist who later sat in Parliament. On Liberty, published in 1859 and dedicated to his late wife and collaborator Harriet Taylor Mill, argues that society may limit a person's freedom only to prevent harm to others. This line comes from its second chapter, on freedom of thought and discussion. Mill points to the Roman orator Cicero, who said he studied his opponent's case as hard as his own, or harder. Anyone who cannot answer the other side's reasons, Mill argues, has no real grounds for preferring their own view. Nor is it enough to hear opposing arguments as summarised by one's own teachers: they must be heard from people who actually believe them and defend them in earnest.

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was an English statesman who rose to Lord Chancellor, and a philosopher who argued that knowledge should be built on observation and experiment. His Essays, first published in 1597, brought to English the short essay form that Montaigne had pioneered in France. 'Of Studies' appeared in that first edition and was enlarged in 1625, the version quoted here. 'Conference' meant conversation and debate. Bacon then explains the three parts: someone who writes little needs a great memory, someone who talks little needs a quick wit, and someone who reads little needs cunning to seem to know what they do not. The same essay gives his advice that some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few chewed and digested.

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WonderPhilosophy

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) wrote this in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, his lectures on how to live well, probably named after his son Nicomachus. He has just defined happiness, eudaimonia, as activity of the soul in keeping with virtue, and adds that it must last 'in a complete life'. Swallows return to Greece in spring, but spotting one does not prove that the warm season has come. Later in the same book he tests the idea with Priam, king of Troy, who prospered for most of his life but met terrible misfortune in old age; few, he says, would call such a man happy. The English proverb 'one swallow does not make a summer' is often traced to this passage.

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WonderPhilosophy

The sun is new each day.

Heraclitus lived around 500 BC in Ephesus, the Greek city on the Aegean coast of today's Turkey whose ruins stand near Selçuk. He wrote a single book, now lost; more than a hundred short sayings survive because later writers quoted them, and this one is preserved in Aristotle's Meteorology. Ancient sources suggest he meant it literally: he seems to have thought the sun was a mass of fire lit afresh each morning and put out each evening. It also fits his best-known idea, that everything is always changing, as in the saying attributed to him that you cannot step into the same river twice, because new waters keep flowing past. His riddling style earned him the nickname 'the Obscure'. Modern editions number his fragments; this one is known as B6.

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StillnessPhilosophy

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was a French nobleman and magistrate who, at 38, retired to his family estate near Bordeaux and spent years writing in the library of its tower. The result was the Essays, first published in 1580, which gave the essay its name: essai means 'attempt' or 'trial'. The line comes from 'Of Solitude', in the first book. Montaigne says we may have wives, children, goods and health, but should not tie our happiness to them so tightly that losing them tears us apart. Everyone, he advises, should keep a 'back shop' of the mind, a private room entirely their own, where they can be free and talk with themselves. Belonging to oneself, in this sense, means not being owned by possessions, ambition or other people's opinions. He later served two terms as mayor of Bordeaux.

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StillnessLiterature

The readiness is all.

Hamlet says this to his friend Horatio in the last scene of Shakespeare's tragedy, written around 1599–1601. He has agreed to a fencing match with Laertes but feels uneasy, and Horatio offers to call it off. Hamlet refuses: if death does not come now, it will come later, so what matters is to be ready. He does not know the match is a trap set by King Claudius, with a poisoned blade and poisoned wine. By the end of the scene Hamlet, Laertes, the king and the queen are dead.

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StillnessLiterature

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.

This is the best-known sentence of Walden (1854), from its second chapter, 'Where I Lived, and What I Lived For'. From 4 July 1845, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) spent two years, two months and two days in a one-room cabin he built beside Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. The sentence goes on: he wanted to learn what life had to teach, and not find, when he came to die, that he had not lived. He was never cut off from the world; he walked into town every day or two.

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WonderLiterature

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.

The line comes from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. William Blake (1757–1827) printed his own illustrated books, and before this line he describes etching copper plates with acid, which melts away the surface to show what lies beneath; perception, he suggests, can be cleansed the same way. He goes on: man has closed himself up, and sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern. Aldous Huxley named his 1954 book The Doors of Perception after the line, and the band The Doors named themselves after Huxley's book.

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DrivePhilosophy

Lost time is never found again.

The saying appeared in the 1748 edition of Poor Richard's Almanack, the yearly almanac Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) published in Philadelphia from 1732 to 1758 under the name 'Richard Saunders'. It carried short sayings, many of them older proverbs that Franklin sharpened. The same year he wrote his best-known line on the subject: 'Remember that time is money.' In 1758 he gathered the almanac's best sayings in The Way to Wealth, where this one is followed by a warning: what we call 'time enough' always proves little enough.

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DrivePhilosophy

Well done is better than well said.

The line appeared in the 1737 edition of Poor Richard's Almanack, which Benjamin Franklin published every year from 1732 to 1758 under the pen name 'Richard Saunders'. With sales of up to 10,000 copies a year, 'Poor Richard' became a household name in the American colonies. The saying suited its author. Franklin (1706–1790) left school at ten and became a scientist, inventor and diplomat, known for practical results: he showed that lightning is electricity and invented the lightning rod. English has a close cousin: 'Actions speak louder than words.'

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DrivePhilosophy

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

Roosevelt gave the speech 'The Strenuous Life' in Chicago on 10 April 1899, while he was Governor of New York. The year before, he had won fame leading a volunteer cavalry regiment, the Rough Riders, in the Spanish–American War. He argued that a life of ease leads to decay, in a person and in a nation, and that success comes to those who do not shrink from hardship. The speech also defended the war the United States had just begun to keep control of the Philippines, which many criticised.

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Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was born into slavery in Virginia and freed at the end of the Civil War, when he was about nine. As a boy in Malden, West Virginia, he worked at salt furnaces and in a coal mine, studying when he could. In chapter 2 of his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), he recalls envying white boys, until he learned how success should be measured. In 1881 he became the first head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he built into a leading Black college.

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