Great Minds Discuss People

everyone knows the famous quote great minds discuss ideas average Minds discuss events small minds discuss people before we go any further in considering this quote do you know who said it Socrates right well no the quote is commonly attributed to Socrates but you won't find this assertion in any of Plato's dialogues and quite frankly if you're familiar with Plato's dialogues you should immediately know that this attribution is a bit suspicious ious sort of like that stupid quote about killing a butterfly that people keep attributing to n for some reason the other common attribution for the

great minds discuss ideas quote is Elanor Roosevelt but that attribution isn't correct either this quote originally appears in a 1901 autobiography by Charles Stewart The Autobiography discusses his childhood in London and the quote in question isn't steuart's own thought it's a transcript of something he'd heard spoken by Henry th Buckle Henry Thomas Buckle was a scholar of History who would sometimes come over for dinner Stuart writes quote his thoughts and conversation were always on a high level and I recollect a saying of his which not only greatly impressed me at the time but which I

have ever since cherished as a test of the mental caliber of friends and acquaintances Buckle said in his dogmatic way men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things and the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas end quote Stuart adds as a kind of comment on this quote the fact of course is that any of one's friends who was incapable of a little

intermingling of these condiments would soon be consigned to the home for dull dogs end quote in other words in the original Source the person who took down the quotation doesn't fully approve of it he says it's a nice test for the overall mental caliber of one's friends but he also calls it dogmatic and he says that anyone who rigidly held to this principle would become well dull perhaps the kind of person whose idea of a good conversation is to give a Non-Stop lecture about nothing but ideas that can be just as annoying as an obsession

with gossip a good conversation usually involves a bit of all three condiments as Stuart puts it different spices for the conversation so why are we talking about this well for one I think it's a funny irony that the man who said that only small minds discuss people has had his quote taken from him and given to Socrates or Elanor Roosevelt I guess he should be happy about this right we're talking about his ideas rather than the person who said the ideas but on a little further reflection the other thing that is somewhat interesting is that

Buckle's quote about the highest classes of intelligent people discussing ideas instead of people well this quotee discusses people the subjects in the quote are three different types of people and the conclusion is to categorize them in short Buckle's Paradigm here is useful in so far as we want to understand the kind of person that we're talking to Buckle's quote is an evaluation of different human psychologies I'd like to look at Buckle's idea a bit critically here and we're going to do it with the philosophical approach of one of the most important and Infamous philosophers of

the 19th century Fredick n and while it is rarely discussed as one of n's Central ideas one could justifiably argue that n's method seems to proceed as almost the reverse of Buckle's famous Dogma what do I mean by this well n's profound claim at the end of chapter 2 of Beyond Good and Evil is that quote psychology is the path to the fundamental problems end quote in the old days it was often said that theology was Queen of the sciences that one ought to begin in the search for knowledge from the position of of metaphysics

from an understanding of the ordering principles of the universe which were thought in Christian Europe to be best studied by studying the Bible n's daring inversion of this saying is his Proclamation that psychology ought instead to be the queen of the sciences that we should begin our search for the truth by first understanding the human mind both our own and the minds of those who have advanced previous truth claims n lays out this methodology and Beyond good NE Vil in the very first chapter in section 6 quote gradually it has become clear to me what

every great philosophy so far has been namely the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious Memoir also that the moral or immoral intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant has grown indeed if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about it is always well and wise to ask first at what morality does all this aim end quote in other words the most abstract Concepts that seem to be so far up high in the realm of ideas so

far above personal and interpersonal concerns we have to remember that these ideas still come into being in the physical brain a physical brain within a physical body thoughts are a product of one's physiology and are driven by dozens of unconscious impulses drives and motivations that the person person thinking the idea might not even be aware of therefore the claim is not that the philosopher may be attempting to consciously deceive although this might certainly be included but rather that his ideas constitute an involuntary an unconscious confession of his inner aims the philosopher doesn't even know he

is doing this nche finishes out his passage in Beyond Good and Evil with this striking claim quote accordingly I do not believe that a drive to knowledge is the father of philosophy but but rather that another drive has here as elsewhere employed understanding and misunderstanding as a mere instrument end quote this is one of the main philosophical threads that runs throughout Beyond Good and Evil the assertion that the will to truth as n calls it is not the primary motivation of human life but merely a form of the will to power human beings as physiological

creatures are animals that evolved in an indifferent Universe of clashing forces quote clever animals that invented knowledge end quote there is no mechanism by which nature would select for beings that know the truth rather the truth would be selected for to the degree that it is a source of power that is to say to the extent that knowing the truth helps us propagate ourselves and to survive because we do not have a drive to seek the dispassionate disinterested truth in n's view he sees all of philosophy all of our great ideas about reality as reflections

of a physiological reality in other words as the French philosopher Jil delus said while interpreting n we always have the beliefs that we deserve according to who and what we are the central question in nich's work therefore is not what or why but who who is speaking here who is making the claim to put this into the phrasing of another cheap modern truism consider the source this doesn't just go for other people but for ourselves too n would say that when we have an idea we should ask ask ourselves what Drive Within Me is philosophizing

here this can be even more difficult with ourselves than with others since our own thoughts present themselves as well I mine we tend to self-identify with our thoughts and they don't come with a stamp of origin that tells us for example this anxious thought is because you didn't get enough sleep last night or maybe you're feeling irritable because you didn't have enough to eat this morning instead the thought presents itself as an unvarnished perception of reality most people don't ever consider these factors when evaluating the ideas of others because the motives for our own ideas

remain unconscious to us and because of the great pride that we conscious beings take in our Consciousness it is an uncomfortable Road of inquiry to proceed down and most of us will not want to do this according to n because if we accept that the self's activity is truly unconscious which is to say pre- rational and therefore pre voluntary then we've undermined the entire basis of the Free Will Doctrine and therefore we've also undermined the entire doctrine of morality n gives a number of examples throughout his work of using this method of evaluating the idea

by reference to the person the best example is schopenhauer Arthur schopenhauer's philosophy is pessimistic he believes that no lasting happiness is possible in life because our desires can never be adequately and finally satisfied either they go unfulfilled or new desires emerge as soon as the old ones are stated schopenhauer was influenced by Buddhism and his philosophy Bears many important similarities with Buddhism in this respect schopenhauer believes that desire inherently leads to suffering and that the only way to become free of suffering is to put an end to our desires schopenhauer treats nothing as a given

except Sensations and our representations of those Sensations from his perspective it is not a given to say that there is a material world for example a world of objects rather that so-called world of objects is our rep representation a creation of the intellect the underlying basis of this world of representation certainly exists but it exists within our nervous system in the form of Sensations that's the only sure claim we can make about external reality that it consists of these Sensations that we represent to ourselves when we look to the intelligible content of the only object

that we represent that we also have an inner awareness of that object being ourselves for we are both objects that we represent with the senses and the thing perceiving and representing shophow argues that what we find is will that is our inner experience desire striving impulse push and pull prior to any intellectualizing about the world that is its character accordingly schopenhauer argues that the true substance of the entire world is Will and that the inner content of every object we represent his will schopenhauer describes the will as blind stupid self-perpetuating waiting its reason for being

is to continue itself and thus he describes the fundamental will as the will to live if the goal is to liberate oneself From Desire therefore how would that become possible if we ourselves and in fact everything in the world are made of Desire so to speak if what we really are is will it is through the faculty of the intellect through the faculty that does the representing that we can have a taste of Liberation from the will one method schopenhauer suggests is Aesthetics Liberation through ART schopenhauer argues that in aesthetic contemplation we can temporarily lose

ourselves and commune with a world of pure representation schopenhauer said that the highest form of painting was achieved by the Dutch stilllife painters to explain all of this in a very nice metaphor therefore when you contemplate the form of the Apple in a Dutch still life painting or the form of a flower you are contemplating pure representation you have no will driving you to or away from from the form that you contemplate you don't want to eat the painted Apple in other words it is not an object of your hunger not an object of your

desire similarly if a painting were to depict a beautiful woman the goddess Venus for example it can serve as an image of the feminine without literally being the object of our physiological desire for sexuality Aesthetics for schopenhauer art is valuable to mankind because it allows the faculty of representation to create a world that is not the object of our will and thus schopenhauer says we can achieve a state of willess contemplation and over a long period of time through this and other means such as meditation one can weaken and eventually negate their own will to

live schopenhauer argues that this is the goal of spirituality of all the world's religions the overcoming of the individual willing self and a state of desireless contemplation of the world and because the entire world is will this means that one can gain Liberation from this samsaric world by those same means now at this point one may wonder how exactly any of these very abstract and somewhat complex metaphysical and moral ideas could demonstrate n's underlying Insight that we ought to look at these ideas as the personal confession of schopenhauer well if we consider the consequences of

these moral and metaphysical positions schopenhauer comes to the conclusion that procreating is the worst thing a human being can do life is suffering and procreation creates new life which creates new suffering sexuality therefore is truly a vice as many world religions have decreed lust is therefore one of the worst manifestations of desire and schopenhauer infamously called the feeling that one had after sex the devil's laughter post-nut clarity as we say in modern times but schopenhauer takes this even further and argues that women as a gender are evil as they are the objects of sexual desire

they tempt mankind to continue living to continue pursuing to continue procreating with this we're ready to consider n's critique of schopenhauer in genealogy of morals essay number three he does not attack schopenhauer's ideas by logically deconstructing them but by exposing schopenhauer the person nche writes quote of few things does schopenhauer speak with greater Assurance than he does of the effect of aesthetic contemplation he says of it that it counters sexual interestedness he never wearied of glorifying this Liberation from the will as the great Merit and utility of the aesthetic condition indeed one might be tempted

to ask whether his basic conception of Will and representation the thought that the Redemption from the will could be attained only through representation did not originate as a generalization from this sexual experience in all questions concerning schopenhauer's Philosophy by the way one should never forget that it was the conception of a young man of 26 so that it partakes not only of the specific qualities of schopenhauer but also of these specific qualities of that period of Life listen for instance to one of the most explicit of the countless passages he has written in Praise of

the aesthetic condition listen to the tone the suffering the happiness the Gratitude expressed in such words end quote N then quotes from schopenhauer from his magnum opus world as well in representation quote this is the painless condition that epicurus praised as the highest good and the condition of the Gods for a moment we are delivered from the vile urgency of the will we celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of alition the wheel of ixion stands still end quote ixion was from Greek mythology he was a demigod who was invited to live at Olympus by

Zeus ixan then grew fond of Hera Zeus's wife and attempted to seduce her when Zeus discovers Ian's desires he throws him out of Olympus and inflicts a horrific punishment ixian is condemned to be lashed to a burning wheel which shall ever turn revolving endlessly as it rolls through the sky the wheel of ixion is an excellent metaphor from the Western Canon for conveying the ideas that schopenhauer receives essentially from the East a man whose sexual desire condemns him to Forever wheel through the void suffering in agony that is the image of ixan and it is

also the image of the buddhistic samsara in short shopen how had very strong sexual impulses and was also at war with those impulses as n remarks in the gay science number 14 all of those writers who spoke of their sexuality as a kind of raging demon were always that same Demon's favorite play thing only a man who felt himself to be totally enthralled to the sexual Allure of wom could come to regard them as demonic Servants of the evil one who bewitch us into continuing to pursue our desires schopenhauer's main problem in life is how

he will find some reprieve re from the sexual impulse that he hates so much and he finds he has particular success by fixating instead on Art the really subversive idea that n brings to light here is that schopenhauer's entire metaphysical philosophy of Will and representation is this not just a confession of his own psychosexual melodrama he authors a philosophy in which one escapes the will by means of representation perhaps the entire reason for coming up with this view of the world comes out of fundamental need to find reprieve from his sexual desires within the still

desireless world of still life paintings to say it more abstractly to find reprieve from will within representation are these abstract categories themselves therefore simply schopenhauer's autobiography so what has happened in the course of the psychological analysis is that ideas which appear to be dispassionate were in fact the expression of an inner struggle of the passions this is exactly what N means when he says that the abstrusest metaphysical position can be explained by questioning the motives behind such a position there are numerous other examples of n doing this many of them in the first chapter of

Beyond Good and Evil his remarks on epicurus his remarks on Kant renan Socrates himself he also uses this method to draw certain generalizations for example the idea that philosophies which fixate on a world Beyond on a spiritual world is more important than the physical are products of a sick or dying physiology the doctrine of Heaven and the constant fixation on the afterlife is the philosophy of the old man of the body and decline or we might consider nich's famous proposal of the master and slave Morality In which he argues that our position in a social

power structure will affect our moral outlook on the world so what are we to make of all this n's great Insight is that the ideas that someone puts forward are not actually separable from the person putting those ideas forward if human beings had some truth seeking faculty that allowed them to assess information with no attachment or motivation to the outcome maybe then we could talk about ideas as separate from people but when even our very perception of the world is limited by who and what we are then we can't simply discuss ideas without considering the

perspective that gave us the idea in other words to discuss ideas is to discuss people because the idea is not some magical thing that dropped from the lap of being it came from a physiology from the perception of a given drive or impulse it reflects more about the person who uttered it than about the world as such and therefore contrary to Buckle's adage the great mind evaluates an idea first by considering the source of that idea great minds discuss people if you enjoyed the nche podcast or found it helpful you can visit us and support

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