What happens when a Philosopher joins your company's legal department

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Philosophical Break-Up Lines, Infographic

The page you're looking for could not be found

"Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth;
The page you're looking for could not be found."
—Shakespeare

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

CONTENTS

1. The movie
2. Leaf Falling Example
3. Determinism
4. Random Snoopy Example
5. Flower Plucking Example
6. Hume
7. Bart Simpson & Dobby Example
8. R&G Are Dead

The Movie

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is a Tom Stoddard flick about free will against the plot of Shakespeare's Hamlet. It illuminates the philosophical debate between Hard (or, Soft) Determinism vs Libertarian Free Will or Hume’s compatibilism. It is a theatrical query on whether or not life is determined, or whether we have free will. 

Leaf Falling Example

If you take for instance the leaves falling from the trees in a Northern Hemispheric winter, you might say the leaves had to fall due to the presence of a hormone in leaf-dropping trees that signals a chemical message to every leaf to essentially, “Take a dive!” 

Once this message is received, little cells appear where the leaf stem meets the branch. They are called “abscission” cells. Like their namesake, “scissors,” they cut themselves free. 

Determinism

In this sense, a leaf must fall. Its prior causes necessitate later effects. It is the leaf's fate to fall; it is already determined. 

Random Snoopy Example

“What if the wind picks up and blows the leaf off the tree?” 

That’s a good question, Snoopy. 

In this scenario, it appears that the leaf’s fate is random, i.e., not-determined. It can be affected by additional forces. Since the presence of random is not under our direct control, there is still no free will.

Hume

But what if your tribe is seated at the same campfire as Hume? 

You may retort the notion of determinism, saying that free will does not mean to do other than what you actually do, nor is it something that happens other than what actually happens. 

It means, doing something you want to do, regardless. 

Flower Plucking Example

Here, we pluck a flower and put it in our hair. Adorning ourselves with nature’s beauty. We exercised free will when we chose to pluck the flower. We seal its fate in our own story. 

Was the flower going to wither and fall, regardless of our action? Yes. 

Did we exercise free will? 

Yes. No. Maybe?

Bart Simpson & Dobby Example

Consider instead a more serious topic, one of life and death. 

In this scenario, we as human beings cannot escape death. We are still trapped in the cycle of birth and death (regardless of whether that cycle is singular or plural; get it? This image of Bart dying over and over is a gif. It keeps playing). 

We still die 

(dramatic pause), 

eventually. 

But if we had a choice, we may not choose death. The fact that is not our choice to make indicates that we have no free will. 

This is the dilemma of determinism, 

Dobby.

R&G Are Dead

In R&G Are Dead, both realize they are trapped. Literally living out a certain set of actions. In their realization, they still "decide" (free will) not to tell Hamlet, which ultimately leads to their deaths, the climax of their roles in the play Hamlet. 

Oh, and, by the way, 

Heads or tails? 

"Free will is a revenge theory.
We cannot answer the question of who wins."
~Soph Laugh

Cato Letters, Revisited

"We derive our liberty directly from our nature as human beings." 

Powerful words echo through the pages of time, relevant still today as they were in 1720 when the London Journal launched a series of letters under the pseudonym "Cato." The letters were written with such vigor and eloquence that they soon made the London Journal the nation's most influential paper - a particularly vexatious irritant to the administration.  

John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon wrote about more than the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. Their political convictions were consistent with the natural law and natural rights theories embraced by the radical Whig writers and particularly by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government. 

The theoretical principle upon which Cato based the authority and compass of government was in our inherent right to defend ourselves against those who would trespass against our lives, liberty, or property. The contract by which civil society is established is one that constrains sovereignty to the safeguarding of the lives and estates of its subjects. This proposition defines the limit of state action, relegating its role to only that which is necessary to enforce "the laws of agreement and society." 

When government seeks to impose constraints upon the individual's natural and absolute liberty, beyond that which is necessary, the state becomes despotic and must eventually fall to revolution. 

Again, powerful words, but what do they mean? Beyond Trenchard and Gordon's fondness for the Whig revolutionary martyr, Algernon Sidney, whose Discourses Concerning Government was one of the leading treatises on the rights of resistance to tyrannical government, was the philosophy that self-same rights have their origin in the laws of nature, from which the rights of the individual are derived, directly prior to the establishment of civil society. 

In the name of self-awareness, a wave of patriotism swept the land, combined with High Church views, which judged failure equally pernicious. The next wave as passionate as The Independent Whig, which vehemently advanced the primacy of the individual conscience over ecclesiastical authority. 

Two groups in diametric opposition, with the same distrust of hierarchy and an equal sympathy with latitudinarian principles, albeit differently expressed. 

If freedom of conscience is our first natural right, then immunity from the convictions and judgments of others is the clearest implication of the supreme law of nature. In other words, 

To each their own.

The style and wit permeating through the Cato letters attack pretension, leaving collaboration in its place. The world of "collective enterprise" forged the way for the industrial revolution. From the embers that regenerated the classics, to the birth of the next new fiction. The stories we continue to tell ourselves along the way echoing public support. 

The penultimate recognition of self-hood is the limits of authority any One has over the other. In society we are held accountable for the results of our actions, intentional or unintentional, knowing or unknowing. To safeguard other we temporarily imprison ourselves. Where? Oh where, did our freedom go? 

Controversies arise when we attempt to answer that question because the answer is not the answer. The question is the answer. The unanswered question implies an incomplete understanding of freedom. If some are free and others are not, none of us can know freedom. We can only know the illusion of freedom. 

Where, then, can freedom be found? 

There is no such thing as a Glorious Revolution, only the spectacular growth of collective debt brought about in large measure by the sacrifices incurred in the endeavor to safeguard illusions. The wars of kings, nothing but ill-conceived self-protective schemes carried out under the illusion of freedom, in exchange for monopoly privileges, at the cost of heavy burdens for public credit and public goodwill, under which the whole of society operates. 

Under the terms of the principles culminating throughout the Cato letters, we are told to look to nature for individual authority. In other words, to look within. When faced with a choice to exercise authority, we realize that it is not a choice, but a matter of seasonal fortune and circumstance. As the world evolves, so too do our seasons. A season for reaping, a season for sowing. The collective centerpiece becoming: Progress. 

But progress is just another name for work, with the proceeds going to the fortunate. In Book X of Virgil's Aeneid is writ: Fortune favors the bold. In book XII, fortune is that which we learn (receive) from others.  In other words, fortune is a gift. But even Virgil feared the Greeks, even when they brought gifts. 

By receiving more, we must become more. More is the foundation upon which opportunity is born. When life offers one more, the one who honors self-freedom intimately senses the notion of privilege, recognizes the opportunity of that state, and feels the responsibility to give back by becoming the epitome of that which brings more to the world. 

It is human nature to desire more, to do more, to become more, and to give more. Reconciling the gifts of nature with human nature is where the greatest opportunity for human advancement lies. Human evolution is not the taking of liberties under false illusion. It is the recognition of liberty of all. 

The instant that liberty and the recognition of liberty become the driving principle of humanity is the instant in which we will, as a species, understand freedom. The path to this understanding is our collective journey and all that we do to advance it, a gift to the world. 

The illusion that false liberty affords benefits some but not all. The alliance between what benefits and that which offers safety of all people is what constitutes the Supreme Law. It is the Supreme Laws that the liberators of society seek. This is our measurement rod, not crime and punishment. 

Even Trenchard re-examined a number of his political beliefs when Gordon died. Political adjustment is precisely what is required for a world that desires to discover true freedom. Until our world leaders act on behalf of THE ALL, we do not understand the meaning of government. We have and know only the illusion of government, no matter how influential. 

The natural rights purported by enlightenment thinking are not limited to government. The proper limits of authority reside with the individual. The right to resist tyrannical magistrates is personified in individual compromise. The sharing of the world's resources is what loosens the shackles of our collective illusions. 

Solidarity is Freedom

Harvard with My Daughter: Richard III

WITH MY DAUGHTER

Below is my homework on Richard III: that revengeful, plotting, deformed Machiavellian tyrant we love to hate. I got a B+. 

ENGL E-124

Shakespeare’s Early Plays

Fall 2017

1. The first thirteen lines in Richard III’s opening soliloquy are about the improved state of affairs for his family after the ascendency of his brother King Edward IV to the English Crown. “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York” (1.1.1-1.1.2). Using winter and summer as metaphors for sadness and celebration, Richard III reminds the audience that his family suffered during the civil wars and the wars of the Roses, when “clouds … loured” (1.1.3) upon their house (of York). But in line fourteen, the monologue shifts from a relieved Duke of Gloucester for his family’s “victorious wreaths” (1.1.5) to the revengeful, plotting, deformed tyrant, known as Richard III: “I, that am rudely stamped (1.1.16) / Cheated of feature by dissembling nature (1.1.19) / Deformed, unfinished (1.1.20) ... villain” (1.1.30). Here, we discover that the kingdom may be at peace: “Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings” (1.1.7) under the sunny reign of his brother Edward IV, but the spell of the long winter: “In the deep bosom of the ocean buried” (1.1.4) remains with our vibrantly melodramatic hero-villain who has “no delight to pass away the time” (1.1.25). His determination to become the villain speaks to the real-life political scheming – made ever more popular by the Tudors - of a tyrant’s ascent to political power. Richard III laments that he “hate[s] the idle pleasures of these days” (1.1.31), then declares “And if King Edward be as true and just / As I am subtle, false and treacherous / This day should Clarence closely be mewed up” (1.1.37 – 1.1.38). Here, Richard IIIs plotting and promulgation of the false prophesy “which says that ‘G’ / Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be” (1.1.39 – 1.1.40) stops with the poignantly abrupt: “Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes” (1.1.41). At the surface, it is as if he is silencing the mechanisms of his own tyrannical thoughts in order to falsely greet Clarence with the mild smile and gracious air tyrants put on when rallying support for power. No strenuous effort is required on behalf of the audience/Reader to recognize Richard III as the rationalist tyrant. In Book VIII of Plato’s Republic, the regime of the tyrant is examined, explaining that in the early days he has a smile and a greeting for everyone he meets (such as how Richard III greets Clarence); he disclaims absolute power (Buckingham convinces the people that Richard III is the true ruler; then Richard III feigns modesty: (3.7.204) “I am unfit for state and majesty.”); essentially scheming (spreads lies, slanders others, generates conflicts between others to promote his plot) his way to the throne. Richard IIIs deceitful machinations are transparent and ironic, bringing an Elizabethan/modern audience to delight in the notion that the unflinching, unsparing villainous Richard III lost more than his life in the process - he lost his soul.

2. When in Act I, Scene III, it is proclaimed that King Edward IV wants to make peace between his wife Queen Elizabeth and Richard III, and their respective kinsmen, Richard III takes the offense, accusing Queen Elizabeth of wishing her husband dead and imprisoning Clarence and Lord Hastings: “Meantime, God grants that I have need of you: / Our brother is imprison’d by your means” (1.3.76-77) and “You may deny that you were not the mean / Of my Lord Hastings’ late imprisonment” (1.3.89-90).  Naturally, Queen Elizabeth is forced into defensive posturing: “Brother of Gloucester, you mistake the matter / The king, on his own royal disposition, / And not provoked by any suitor else / Aiming, belike, at your interior hatred / That in your outward action shows itself / Against my children, brothers, and myself / Makes him to send, that he may learn the ground” (1.3.62).  Entering the scene, at first unnoticed, Queen Margaret, widow of Henry VI, upon overhearing Richard III and Queen Elizabeth’s discord, laments for her lost husband, son, and title: “I was, but I do find more pain in banishment / Than death can yield me here by my abode / A husband and a son thou ow’st to me / And thou a kingdom; all of you allegiance / The sorry that I have, by right is yours / And all the pleasures you usurp are mine” (1.3.166-171).  Queen Margaret further curses Richard III: “And leave out thee? Stay, dog, for thou shalt hear me / If heaven have any grievous plague in store / Exceeding those that I can wish upon thee / O, let them keep it till thy sins be ripe” (1.3.214-217) and then curses Elizabeth: “Poor painted queen, vain flourish of my fortune / Why strew’st thou sugar on that bottled spider / Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about? / Fool, fool, thou whet’st a knife to kill thyself / The day will come that thou shalt wish for me / To help thee curse this poisonous bunch-backed toad” (1.3.242-247). Essentially, Queen Margaret is portrayed as bitter about the assignation of her husband and son and her loss of power: “I was, but I do find more pain in banishment / Than death can yield me here by my abode” (1.3.166-167). Out of pain and grief, she curses Queen Elizabeth to the same fate: “Thyself a queen, for me that was a queen / Outlive thy glory, like my wretched self! / Long mayst thou live to wail thy children's death / And see another, as I see thee now / Decked in thy rights, as thou art stalled in mine / Long die thy happy days before thy death / And, after many lengthened hours of grief / Die neither mother, wife, nor England’s queen” (1.3.200-207), and with these poignant words she foreshadows the play’s plot. When Queen Margaret returns in Act 4 Scene 4 she admits how her curses come to fruition: “... prosperity begins to mellow / And drop into the rotten mouth of death” (4.4.1-2). Margaret further warns the Duchess of York, Mother to King Edward IV, Clarence, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, that she is: “hungry for revenge” (4.4.60) and that of Richard III she aspires to declare: “The dog is dead!” (4.4.77). It is here when Queen Elizabeth recites Queen Margaret’s curse: “O, thou didst prophesy the time would come / That I should wish for thee to help me curse / That bottled spider, that foul bunch-backed toad!” (4.4.78-80). Again we see the use of a toad as a metaphor. In the Book of Exodus, the Second Plague brings frogs and Richard III is being likened to one. Aesop wrote a fable about an old frog who died after trying to inflate herself to become as big and powerful as the ox that crushed a young frog into the mud (perhaps a metaphor for Richard III’s involvement in the demise of the essentially helpless Edward V, King of England and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York – the two young brothers and only sons of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville). Here we see an almost woeful prophet of God, Queen Margaret, acknowledging how she had cursed Queen Elizabeth: “I called thee then vain flourish of my fortune” (4.4.81) but now, seeing it come to fruition, acquiesces to Queen Elizabeth’s request to “quicken” (4.4.123) her words so that they will “pierce” (4.4.124) like her own. Here she comes to the aid of Queen Elizabeth. After bestowing a gift in recompense, Queen Margaret exits, but her wrath continues in Queen Elizabeth’s Margaretian-like curses of Richard III. Without Queen Margaret the play would lose the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ logic derived from the Bible (“Vengence is mine.” Deuteronomy 32.35), though Queen Margaret’s willingness to help Queen Elizabeth find the words to curse Richard III almost implies a ‘turn the other cheek’ (Matthew 5:39) attitude. While the divine right of kings, or God’s mandate, the political and religious doctrine of royal and political legitimacy asserting that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving the right to rule directly from the will of God, did not come to the fore until under the reign of James I of England (1603-1625), the Christian notion of a divine right can be traced back to 1 Samuel (24:6-7) when “[David] said to his men, ‘The LORD forbid that I should do such a thing to my master, the LORD’s anointed, or lift my hand against him; for he is the anointed of the LORD.” In this way, Queen Margaret could not vow to harm Richard III, only curse him, for it would be against the word of God to do otherwise. This keeps the play in check with the Protestant Rule of Faith: “ALL Protestants agree in teaching that “the word of God, as contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” (Archibald Alexander Hodge). Under Queen Elizabeth I, the scriptures were infallible, and given in inspiration by God. This aspect speaks to the divine authority of the Tudor monarchy, attesting that it is by the will of God that the monarchs reign on Earth.

3. When Richard III with his train enter, asking: “Who intercepts me in my expedition?” (4.4.135), his mother, the Duchess of York, claims it is “she that might have intercepted thee / By strangling thee in her accursed womb / From all the slaughters, wretch, that thou hast done!” (4.4.136 – 138). Here, his own mother laments his very existence, but he reminds her that he is “... the lord’s anointed” (4.4.150), further attesting to his legitimacy and the fine line upon which even his mother treads. He implores that she: “Either be patient and entreat me fair” (4.4.151) or he will “...with the clamorous report of war / ... drown your exclamations” (4.4.152-153), which he does with the sounding of alarums. His mother demands to speak: “O, let me speak!” (4.4.159) to which he retorts: “Do then, but I’ll not hear” (4.4.160). The Duchess of York softens her tone: “I will be mild and gentle in my words” (4.4.161). “I have stayed for thee / God knows, in torment and in agony” (4.4.163). Here, Richard III reassures his mother, “And came I not at last to comfort you?” (4.4.165). But it is to no avail, for his mother now recounts of the burdens of her pregnancy with him: “A grievous burden was thy birth to me” (4.4.168) and how he, despite in his prime being “daring, bold, and venturous” (4.4.171) only in age to be: “confirmed, proud, subtle, sly and bloody / More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred / What comfortable hour canst though name / That ever graced me with thy company?” (4.4.172-175). Basically, she is giving him the ultimate guilt trip. Richard III reminds her that they had “breakfast once forth” (4.4.177) but that if he “be so disgracious in your eye / Let me march on and not offend you, madam / Strike up the drum” (4.4.178-180).  Here, his mother pleads again: “I prithee hear me speak ... Hear me a word / For I shall never speak to thee again” (4.4.181, 4.4.183-184). Richard III consents, really he has no choice as she words are thunderous over the alarums. Now begins the curse put upon Richard III by his own mother: “Either thou wilt die, by God’s just ordinance / Ere from this war thou turn a conqueror / Or I with grief and extreme age shall perish / And never more behold thy face again / Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse / Which in the day of battle tire thee more / Than all the complete armour that thou wear’st! / My prayers on the adverse party fight / And there the little souls of Edward’s children / Whisper the spirits of thine enemies / And promise them success and victory / Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end / Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend” (4.4.186-198). Richard III does not succeed in silencing his mother’s attacks with the sounding of drums (music); thus, he listens. It is almost as if his silence here tells us that he is considering her words, taking them to heart. The next scene, of course, is a discussion on matters of the heart, as if his mother’s curse is not only a prophesy for his ultimate demise, but also as a set-up for the ensuing dialogue between Richard III and Queen Elizabeth on his love for her daughter: “I mean that with my soul I love thy daughter / And do intend to make her Queen of England” (4.4.265-266).   

4. It is difficult to separate Richard Burbage’s original delivery of: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” (5.3.361, 5.3.367) from the intensity of how the line is remembered, but the line itself returns us full-circle, back to the irony with which the play begins. Richard III was discontent during a time of great peace and celebration. At the beginning of the play his family was victorious, but he was: “Cheated of feature by dissembling nature / Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world, scarce half made up / And that so lamely and unfashionable / That dogs bark at me as I halt by them” (1.1.19 - 1.1.23). Here, Richard III’s lament that he was cheated out of his rightful inheritance (good looks, healthy body for wooing women) foreshadows his final lament that he was also cheated out of victory by a horse. In 2 Kings 23:11 it is writ: “He removed from the entrance to the temple of the LORD the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun. They were in the court near the room of an official named Nathan-Melek. Josiah then burned the chariots dedicated to the sun.” In this Biblical passage horses and chariots were being used in idolatrous processions, as noticed in regard to the sun. In the opening soliloquy of the play, the Duke of Gloucester states: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York” (1.1.1-1.1.2). Metaphorically, Richard III destroys his entire family (the chariots) under his brother’s (son of York) sunny reign. He beings with the plural “we” and “our” and ends with the singular “my”, which speaks to his lament: “I shall despair. There is no creature loves me / And if I die, no soul shall pity me” (5.3.204-205). It is as if the play ends on the same ironic thread with which it begins, with false glory in relation the sun of York, King Edward IV.