An Educational Reboot at 25; Beginning a Classical Education after College

Today is July 4th, Independence Day, the day we celebrate our liberty and it is also the day that I, at nearly 26, having a college degree, and a job as a lumberjack* am starting over with my education. I have always wished I had a liberal classical education, the education meant for a free citizen of a free country and now I am going to do something about it.

I was homeschooled for most of my basic education. Though I did have to study algebra and a few other subjects which were of little or no interest to me at the time, my basic education was very informal. It was this informality which allowed me to develop a love of learning and especially of reading, I only read books which were of interest to me. This informality with its few requirements was a bed of soil in which to spread the roots of the mind and the resources made available to me(lots of books, willing parents, the infantile internet, etc.) proved to be good mental nutrients. However, this informality also had its drawbacks, the greatest of which was that I was not formally educated; a thing is itself and is not not itself, informal education is not formal education.

I have always believed, along with my parents that the end of education is mental, personal, even virtuous, and not economic, nor practical. That is to say that education is about developing the person and especially the mind to its greatest possible extent, not about getting a job. I have a job; I cut down trees. By most current standards I am highly educated having a college degree and I plan to continue this education with a PhD. I recently realized however, that even after earning a PhD, I would feel that there was a hole in my education because I had never studied the trivium, the three basic subjects of a formal classical education; grammar (Latin grammar, that is), logic, and rhetoric. I have been out of college for over a year and I have a year or so before I begin graduate studies; I’m going to fill that hole. I’m going back to high school.

*Technically I am not a lumberjack because the trees I cut down are generally in neighborhoods, dead, and of little value as lumber but, lumberjack is much easier to say and conveys the basic idea.


From: JWKraft.com 

What is an Unhealthy Economy?

What does it mean to say the economy is unhealthy? Essentially, an unhealthy economy is one in which there is not enough money circulating. A healthy economy is like a lake with a river running through it; the river keeps things fresh and active. When the river dries up, the water in the lake is no longer circulating and it grows stagnent. The plants and fish eventually die and the water gets worse. This is like an unhealthy economy.

When the economy is down the basic problem is that there is not enough money moving around. There may be enough money but people are not spending it freely enough. If one day everyone were to close their bank accounts and burry all their money in coffee cans the economy would come to a grinding halt; that is essentially what happens (albeit in less dramatic fashion) when the economy slows down.

If a large enough group of people guard all their money and burry it in coffee cans then they are not buying shoes. If they are not buying shoes then the shoe store has to lay off its employees and eventually close. If the shoe store closes then the shoe factory will close and layoff its employees. If the shoes factory closes then the leather and rubber companies will close down and layoff their employees. The situation spirals out of control now because all these laid off employees are no longer getting a paycheck and so are no loger buying products and that is even less money in circulation. Less and less money is circulating and more and more companies are forced to lay off employees and close down. The problem is that there is not enough money circulating.

In the days immediately following the September 11th attacks the American people were shocked, scared, and grieving; they stayed at home as much as possible. The economy took a hit because people stopped spending money. President Bush addressed the American people on tv and essentially told them that it was their patriotic duty to go shopping; they listened and economic disaster was averted.

An unhealthy economy is one in which money is not circulating enough. How to cure an unhealthy economy is a question for a future post.

From: JWKraft.com 

The God Confusion and Clearing it Up

I tend to stay up on current debates in philosophy and one debate which is always current is the existence of God.  Yet when I read these debates I can’t help but feel that very little real debating is happening at all; there is a great deal of of talking and very little communicating.  One example of this God Confusion is when belief in the God of monotheism is compared to belief in Zeus, Peter Pan, or pink unicorns.  Many of the people making this comparison really believe that it is a valid attack which exposes the ridiculousness of theism in general while many of those theists on the receiving end are left feeling like they have been cheated or swindled but are unable to respond with anything more potent than, “well that’s not fair, that’s not what I meant” all the while having to concede the point that they do know what it is like to not-believe in Zeus.  

They have in fact, both been swindled, both are victims; one is the drug addict, the other is the jilted family of the drug addict, and the drug which is so tempting and so hard to get rid of once it is lodged into the conversation is equivocation.  Equivocation occurs when a word is used to mean two different things in the same conversation without clarification.  God, is one such word and a word which means many very different things to different people.  When someone equivocates between gods like Zeus and Allah they are mistakenly assuming that the difference between these two is one of personality and nothing else; like the difference between Zeus and Poseidon.  Zeus and Poseidon are both polytheistic gods in the Greek pantheon but they are an entirely different type of thing from Allah.

Zeus and Poseidon are both gods in the same way that Pongo and Perdita are both Dalmatian dogs but Zeus and Allah are different type of thing entirely in the same way that plants and animals are different types of things or humans and stones are different types of things.  Pongo’s black spots are characteristic of what he is, a Dalmatian; so black spots should be and are characteristic of other Dalmatians such as Perdita, but Pongo’s black spots are not characteristic of other types of dogs such as poodles or other types of things such as water lilies.  It may be true that Zeus is a type of thing having only myth and superstition to commend itself to our beliefs and if it is true then we can say the same thing about Poseidon, he being the same type of thing, but it being true of Zeus and Poseidon does not indicate that it is true of Allah any more than Pongo and Perdita’s black spots indicate that poodles or water lilies have black spots.

I took a philosophy of religion class from a prestigious university and early in the term, it became obvious that the students were using God to mean many very different things yet even in that academic setting, God was rarely if ever well defined.  Similar situations occur on a daily basis online, in print, and around dinner tables, and pint glasses.  Clearly, God confusion is prevalent.  To clear up and avoid this God confusion I suggest asking four questions about any particular god in question whenever he happens to come up.  Knowing these questions should help you to both avoid equivocation and thus have a more constructive conversation and to understand ideas about God that others may hold.

The first question to ask when God comes up in a contentious conversation is; is the god in question a monotheistic or polytheistic god?  Asking just this one question would help you to avoid the equivocation between God and gods such as Zeus.  Monotheists of all religious and philosophical stripes believe in one single god, that is what makes them monotheists.  They usually believe this God to be all powerful and also usually the creator of the universe.  Christians, Jews, and Muslims are monotheists as are most proponents of Deistic secular philosophic conceptions of God such as Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” or Spinoza’s “God or Nature”.  These concepts of God are very different from polytheistic gods such Zeus, Poseidon, and the rest of the Olympians, the gods other forms of Paganism, of Hindus, Vodouists, most far Eastern religions, and most pre-Christian and pre-Islamic middle and near Eastern religions.

The fact that polytheists believe there are many gods automatically makes those gods very different from any monotheistic God because monotheists believe God to be all powerful and the creator or at least present everywhere in the universe.  There cannot be two all powerful beings, two creators of everything, or two all present beings.  If a god has even one equal, then he is not all powerful.  Polytheists also believe their gods to be powerful; they could hardly be called gods otherwise, but their powers are limited.  Zeus may be able to send lightning but he has trouble governing the other squabbling gods, he must always make sure the Titans are kept locked up, and far from being the creator, he is himself a created part of the universe.  This is nothing like the all powerful creator God of monotheism.  If the god in question is polytheistic then proceed to the classics department of your local college or university; if it is monotheistic then proceed to the next question.

The second question which must be addressed is; is God as he is being discussed here, natural or supernatural?  That is, is God material or inmaterial, part of the universe or beyond the universe?  Materialist ideas of God come from a strictly materialist concept of being and differ sharply from the more traditional religious ideas of God as the supernatural creator of the universe.  The staunchest materialists not only believe that physical matter is all there is but that physical matter is all that could be; strictly speaking they believe that any inmaterial ideas are non-sensical.  So any concept of God that they endorse has to fit into this view.  This could take the form of either God as a force or God as the Universe.  In the first view, God is the animating life force of the universe, our love, our passions, even what gives us purpose.  This concept of God is much like the Force in Star Wars.  This is also where we get Christian-atheists, they believe in God as a force for good but not as a person who exists and whom we should know, fear, or obey.  In the second possible materialist concept, God is the Universe or the Universe is God’s body.  In this way we are all quite literally part of God.  This concept makes God, physical, singular, in a way all powerful, the creator of Earth but not really the creator of the universe and certainly not personal.

Materialist conceptions of God necessarily connect God to creation which is very different from the inmaterial supernatural concepts of God in all three major monotheistic religions.  To religious monotheists saying that God is part of the universe is idolatry (worshiping creation) and a major sin.

The third question to ask about God is, how knowable is he?  To Deists and most philosophic monotheists, the Spinozas and Aristotles out there, God is a necessary part of the metaphysical or ethical reality, he certainly exists but he is not knowable.  He probably doesn’t care about us (why would he?), he is probably not a person in the way we think of a person, and there would be no way for us to find him or communicate with him if he was.  Aristotle believed, God was perfect and so did the most perfect thing, which Aristotle believed was thinking and because God was the perfect thinker he only thought about perfect thoughts and the only perfect thoughts were thoughts about the perfect thing which was himself.  Aristotle’s God was wholly consumed with thinking about himself, not a very personable guy.

Jews and Muslims both believe in a God who is a person and does have ideas about us and what we should be doing, but who is still not very personable; he is know-of-able.  By the term, know-of-able I mean he can be learned about, possibly even interacted with but he is very difficult to know as we know our family members or even as we know politicians or celebrities.

Obviously there is a very broad spectrum of what individuals believe but in general, Jews believe in a God who cares for them and directs them, on occasion even intervening for them but who primarily speaks through the scriptures and is a God to be feared not approached lightly.  In Islam, God occupies a place between Judaism and philosophic Deism; Allah has given them his words in the Quran but it is blasphemy to even suggest that he would interact with the created world.  This is why it is so offensive to Muslims to suggest that Jesus, a man is the son of God.  Allah could not even dictate the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad directly but instead had an intermediary, an angel bring the message to the Prophet.

The third option is that God is knowable as a person.  This is where the Christian concept of God falls and also interestingly enough, most polytheistic gods.  Zeus is a literary character, there are stories of what he has done, his battles with the Titans, his rivalries with his brothers, his affairs with mortal women, and his own marital problems.  He is also a god who interacts with humans, he has favorites whom he intervenes for, he appears to people, he is very knowable.  Christians, such as myself, also believe God is very knowable and personal.  He came to Earth in the form of the man Jesus to live and die as a man, to demonstrate his character, to teach love, and ultimately to sacrifice himself for the salvation of his people.  Christians also maintain that the Spirit of God dwells in them and speaks to them.  After his death and resurrection, Jesus appeared to many people as recorded in the New Testament including famously, his mother, Mary Magdalene, Peter, and Paul.  Contrast the personal knowable Jesus and Zeus with Allah who couldn’t even speak to his own prophet, the God the the Jews whom Moses could only glimpse from behind without dying, and the God of Aristotle who couldn’t care less and you see the difference that made by how knowable God is.

The final question to ask about God is, is he transcendant or not?   A transcendent God is a god beyond the universe, that is, he transcends space and time.  A transcendent God is not dependent on the universe and his position privileges him to make claims that non-transcendent beings could not rightly make.  Transcendence allows God to be truly all powerful, as he is not dependent on anything.  It allows him to have all knowledge as there is nothing which is beyond him.  It allows him to make claims about truth which cannot be disputed because no one else knows all or created all.  If God is transcendent then reality is quite literally what God says it is, reality bends to his will.  A transcendent God is a truly awesome and scary thing; this is what Anselm had in mind when he defined God as, “the being than which no greater can be conceived.”  Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Deists all believe in a transcendent God.  Contrast this with the God of the materialistic monotheists and the gods of the polytheists; these Gods are not all powerful because they are part of the universe and bound by it as we are; they also have no special claim to determining morality, and their only possible claim to special knowledge would be that they are more intelligent, older, have more experience, or see more of the universe.  Their claims to special knowledge about the universe are the exact same type of claims made be human experts in their particular fields not the kind of knowledge which is true by definition that a transcendent God can claim.

Asking these four questions should clear up the vast majority of equivocation about God out there.  I hope this helps you to avoid any future God confusion.  The four questions to ask whenever a contentious conversation about God arises are; is this God monotheistic or polytheistic, is he natural or super-natural, how knowable is he, and is he transcendent?  Below I’ve made a cheat sheet of the most common answers people give to these questions.

Cheat Sheet of the Gods
Pagan and most Eastern gods are polytheistic, supernatural, knowable, but not transcendent.

Materialistic conceptions of God are usually monotheistic, natural, unknowable, and not transcendent.

Philosophical Diestic Gods are monotheistic, supernatural, unknowable, and transcendent.

The God of the Jews is monotheistic, supernatural, slightly knowable but not very personable, and transcendent.

The God of Islam is monotheistic, supernatural, know-of-able, and transcendent.

The God of Christianity is monotheistic, supernatural, knowable, and transcendent.

That should clear up most of the God Confusion.

This article originally appeared here, The God Confusion: JWKraft.com

Two out of Three American Voters Do Not Think

A recent NPR article gave several documented examples of Americans changing position on issues relative to how it reflected on their preferred candidate, sometimes even completely flipping the percentages of Republicans and Democrats who believed a certain way.  The article goes on to consider one possible explanation for this, that negative information about the party or person someone is loyal to is inconsistent with their loyalties to that person and this inconsistency is unsettling to them and so to resolve the inconsistency they reject the negative information.

One example is whether or not the president has influence on the price of gas (i.e. whether he should be blamed when the price rises); when Bush was in office 2/3 of Republicans said no and 2/3 of Democrats said yes, currently with Obama in office the numbers are exactly reversed.

I have a different, if parallel explanation; 2/3 of American voters do not think.  They are not interested in finding truth, what genuine thinking is about, but rather, in confirming their own biases.  Thinking for them, is a security blanket, it is Mother whispering that they have been right all along.  The truth has no use if it does not reaffirm what they already believe.

Originally from JWKraft.com

Pseudo-Polite Conversation

“Never mention politics or religion, in polite conversation.”  It’s a common phrase and you heard it many times.  It is also one of the most destructive ideas of Western civilization.  Think about it for a minute, is there anything more important to discuss than politics and religion?  Religion, is what you believe, is, and politics, is what you believe should be.  Religion in this sense could also be a worldview, it could be a particular theory of metaphysics, or it could be one of the more traditional religions.  In any case, it deals with man’s relationship to God or lack there of and questions of ultimate truth and reality.  Politics deals with man’s relationships with each other.  I can think of nothing that could be more important to discuss, especially in polite conversation.  

The purpose of this proverb, (I’ll be referring to it as the pseudo-polite rule, and you’ll see why in a second) is to maintain a polite atmosphere.  The fear is that, if it’s discovered that two people in a conversation disagree with one another, then the conversation will quickly turn to bickering.  I contend that if the conversation would turn to bickering simply because there’s a disagreement, than it is not a polite conversation to begin with, only pseudo-polite.  The parties to a conversation like that never had any real respect for each other in the first place, they just didn’t have the opportunity to display their disrespect.  It is extremely foolish and immature to take the position that one can only be polite with those one agrees with.  Now, it is true that there are many foolish and immature people out there who can only be polite with those they agree with but these people are bigots, and creating a pseudo-polite environment, only enables them to continue in their bigotry.

Arguments are after all, cooperative, not competitive ventures.  The purpose of an argument is always to come to agreement.  Usually when arguing, you are seeking to convert your opponent to your point of view.  Sometimes you’re seeking compromise, but either way you’re seeking agreement.  Also, when venturing into an argument, you accept the risk that you could be the one converted.  In this way an argument is a cooperative venture.  Those who seek to “win an argument” were never in an argument in the first place, they were in a bickering match. 

I don’t know when the pseudo-polite rule was invented, but I do know that through most of history, in most cultures, it was not the norm.  Perhaps it is because rhetoric is no longer taught in most schools and so people have a distorted view of argumentation and can no longer distinguish it from bickering, or perhaps it is this distorted view that led to rhetoric no longer being taught in school.  Whatever the cause, one need only look at the debates between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to see that arguing was not always equated with bickering and enmity.  These two men had extremely divergent views in both politics and religion, yet they had tremendous respect for one another and tremendous friendship.  

When the United States was in its infancy.  There was no Australian ballot.  The Australian ballot is how essentially all voting takes place in the Western world today.  It has become so common that there’s no longer any need to refer to it as the Australian ballot.  It’s simply the way voting is done.  You go into a booth and close the curtain fill out the ballot and place it in a box.  In this way, no one knows, if you voted Republican, Democrat, Whig, Socialist, or Libertarian.  We have become so concerned with the pseudo-polite rule that casting a ballot behind a shower curtain, has become a sacred right in most people’s minds.  When the US was in its infancy, ballots were cast by walking up to a table and picking up a red piece of paper or a blue piece of paper and placing it in the ballot box.  When voting, you may have turned and held up your ballot for everyone to see, you may even have had to do this on stage.  All your friends, family, and neighbors knew who you voted for and you better believe it got discussed.  This discussion is something that we have lost and I hope and pray that we can get it back.

I mentioned before that the pseudo-polite rule is one of the most destructive ideas of Western civilization, the reason for that is this.  The pseudo-polite role attempts to limit or shut down completely, argument and debate (among friends and family, at least).  Progress comes through dissent.  You can have no progress, if you have no disagreement.  If you only agree and you only speak about things you agree on then the status quo is the best you can hope for.  Progress only comes when someone says, “I think there is a better way to do this.”  That, is a disagreement.  

Furthermore, what is the point of conversation at all, if you’re only going to discuss things you agree on?  If you meet a friend for lunch and you both adhere to the pseudo-polite role, then you might as well just sit and smile at each other, because you’re not going to get anything done with conversation!  Conversation among friends like that (and they can’t really be friends if you can’t disagree) is nothing more than a mutual patting each other on the back fest!  A nation or a culture with out argument and debate is like a crab, it can only move sideways or backwards.  The nations with the most vibrant debating culture are sure to be the ones making the quickest and most rapid progress.  Get out of Pleasant Valley and stop being afraid of running into someone you might disagree with!

Philosopher’s Bread

Someone snide once said, “Philosophy bakes no bread.”  It was probably an engineer, but they do have a point, philosophers are historically underpaid.  Being a philosopher I take a natural interest in how the greats have managed to buy bread.  I wanted to find a list of philosophers’ other jobs but couldn’t so I started this one.  It will be in a constant state of revision.  I interpret “philosopher” broadly.  Also, for the last century or so most people who called themselves philosophers have worked in academia, that’s not very interesting so I’ll skip most of those.  Without further adieu, the list of philosophers’ other jobs!

Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury
Thomas Aquinas, Dominican monk and master of University of Paris
Aristotle, private tutor to Alexander the Great
Augustine, family wealth, bishop of Hippo
Francis Bacon, politician, author
Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Cicero, Roman senator
Descartes, soldier, private tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden
Benjamin Franklin, publisher, diplomat, author
Hegel, newspaper editor, author, professor
Heraclitus, aristocrat
Hobbes, author, private tutor to the Prince of Wales
Hume, merchant clerk, private tutor, historian, author
Thomas Jefferson, farmer, inventer, diplomat, politician
Kant, teacher, author
Kierkegaard, family wealth, author
Kraft, coffee roaster, tree removal specialist
Leibniz, diplomat, historian, librarian
Locke, physician
John Stuart Mill, worked for the East India Company, Member of Parliament
Newton, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Cambridge
Nietzsche, medic, professor, author
William of Ockham, Franciscan friar
Pascal, inventor
Plato, family wealth, teacher
Pythagoras, cult leader
Rousseau, author
Bertrand Russel, aristocrat (3rd Earl Russel) , professor, diplomat, author.
Duns Scotus, Lecturer, Oxford, Cambridge, & Paris (interesting because he died in 1308)
Jean-Paul Sartre, playwright, literary critic
Socrates, soldier
Spinoza, lens grinder
Thales, olive press tycoon
Voltaire, author
Wittgenstein, extreme family wealth but he gave it up, professor, author, military officer