Philosophical bugs

It's interesting how references to animals show up in philosophy. Plato put in a good word for some dogs in The Republic, comparing their traits of bravery and loyalty to guardians of the ideal city.

Hegel remarked that the owl of Minerva (Roman name for the Greek wisdom goddess Athena) "spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." I take that to mean that we mostly figure things out when they are over--or when it's too late.

Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak we couldn't understand him (I disagree with him for reasons elaborated here).

Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous essay about foxes and hedgehogs, quoting a Greek poet as saying that "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

I recently stumbled on another philosophical animal reference from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) from his New Organon:

Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.

I don't usually think of myself as a Bacon fan, but that is a pretty good way of stating the need for balance between data and perspective.

Plus, bugs are cool.

FINDING THE BALANCE

Caption: Seamus, like his fellow rebel, Frida Kahlo, fights for bread and roses.

I don't get to Washington very often, but when I do I gravitate to three monuments.

One is dedicated to Jefferson, the brilliant but flawed poet of freedom. Another is dedicated to Lincoln, its suffering servant.

The third is for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who demonstrated that in modern societies, freedom and economic and social justice are compatible.

Roosevelt's reforms not only helped save the nation from depression, competing totalitarian visions, and the unrestrained greed of what he called the "economic royalists"--they have made possible a better, more dignified life for working people, the elderly, and the less fortunate.

Recently, I came across this passage by Latvian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin which elegantly sums up his accomplishments:

...Roosevelt's greatest service to mankind (after ensuring the victory against the enemies of freedom) consists in the fact that he showed that it is possible to be politically effective and yet benevolent and human; that the fierce left- and right-wing propaganda of the 1930s, according to which the conquest and retention of political power is not compatible with human qualities, but necessarily demands from those who pursue it seriously the sacrifice of their lives upon the altar of some ruthless ideology, or the practice of despotism--this propaganda, which filled the art and talk of the day, was simply untrue. Roosevelt's example strengthened democracy everywhere, that is to say the view that the promotion of social justice and individual liberty does not necessarily mean the end of all efficient government; that power and order are not identical with a strait-jacket of doctrine, whether economic or political; that it its possible to reconcile individual liberty--a loose texture of society--with the indispensible minimum of organizing and authority; and in this belief lies what Roosevelt's greatest predecessor once describes as 'the last best hope of earth.'

For the last few decades, we've been force-fed the poisonous notion that justice and freedom cannot mix--and as a result both have suffered. Roosevelt showed that both are not only necessary but possible.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED