Whilst researching a chapter on the notion of blame among hominids, I was chasing down a rabbit hole and I ended up finding Schopenhauer’s oft-quoted,
Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants
And that’s where the trouble started. Memory is fallible. Although I feel deceived, I don’t feel bad because many people have misattributed this quote to Schopenhauer, but if the Wikipedia footnote is steering me right, this was actually Einstein’s misquote—the Einstein; Albert Einstein of E = MC2 fame.
According to the citation, Albert said this:
„Der Mensch kann wohl tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will.”
— Albert Einstein, Mein Glaubensbekenntnis (August 1932)
It translates into the offending sentence.
‘Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants.’
The full translated quote reads,
‘I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer’s words: ‘Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants’ accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.’
Albert Einstein
What Schopenhauer actually said not only doesn’t resonate quite so well, it doesn’t even convey the same notion. His actual words were:
‘You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.’
Du kannst tun was du willst: aber du kannst in jedem gegebenen Augenblick deines Lebens nur ein Bestimmtes wollen und schlechterdings nichts anderes als dieses eine.
— Arthur Shopenhauer, Ueber die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens
Arnold Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will
In the spirit of misattributed quotes, here are a few things Einstein never said but are attributed to I’m anyway.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Not Albert Einstein
“I refuse to believe that God plays dice with the universe.”
Not Albert Einstein
Though to be fair, the last one at least directionally reflects something he did say,
“It seems hard to sneak a look at God’s cards. But that He plays dice and uses ‘telepathic’ methods… is something that I cannot believe for a single moment.”
Albert Einstein
Yet again, I am confused. I feel I’ve been living a lie.
Why do non-linguists think they can disintegrate language. As this rant targets a certain class of illiterate feminists, I’ll disclaim at the start that I fully support feminism and egality across all intersections. The rant is aimed at wilful ignorance and has been a peeve of mine since at least the 1980s. This is further a subset of PC speech, this rampant scourge of Liberal political correctness by the American Liberal establishment.
The problem I have is of people who have no understanding of the meaning or origin of the word man—people who insist on extracting it from everything. I don’t have any need for waitresses, actresses, or even mistresses, dominatrixes and other gender-marked terms. I’ll even add a further disclaimer: I don’t support gendered terms. Case in point: I love French, but I feel it’s time to lose the gendered nouns. It serves little purpose. I’d go as far as to say that it serves no purpose, but then I’d be as guilty as these feminists I’m railing on about. I also have to issue with referring to people as it and they rather than the typical he, she, him, and her. In fact, I’ve been called out for calling a human it.
Feminist Philosophy of Language, a guide on sexism in language and feminist language reform, also discourages the usage of man and -man as gender-neutral because it has male bias and erases women under a masculine word.
As a male, I may come across as mansplaining. I don’t even care about retaining some old word out of tradition. Get rid of it, and good riddance, but don’t do so on the grounds of faulty reasoning. George Carlin shared my sentiment, but his take here is on the use of euphemism to obscure meaning.
I am well aware that meaning drifts over time, and I am wholly sympathetic to the insufficiency of language. Let’s crack on.
Considering the root, in Latin, we had homo—an undifferentiated human being—and vir—an adult male, whence comes virtue. Old French gave us human, which derives from the older term, ghomon, which meant earthling, obviously non-gendered.
The word man comes from Old English and meant person with no gender intent. This is the same man as mankind and the still non-gendered, yet somehow offensive, man. The genesis of the confusion is when man split off and was also used to refer to a human adult male. Evidently, this is confusing to some.
The word man comes from Old English and meant person with no gender intent. This is the same man as mankind and the still non-gendered, yet somehow offensive, man. The genesis of the confusion is when man split off and was also used to refer to a human adult male. Evidently, this is confusing to some.
Before man was split to also refer to an adult male, Old English had distinguished the sexes by wer and wif. Wer came from the aforementioned Latin vir, which had heretofore already merged into its ungendered vulgate form. It is retained in English the word werewolf, common to most English-language speakers. Less common human-animal hybrids bearing the were- prefix are werebears, wereboars, and the rest as illustrated in this page from Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth. Note the lack of gender specificity.
At one point, wifman was used to distinguish a woman-man from a generic man. For the most part, wer was replaced by man, though its universal sense was also retained as it was as well in homo. In Old English, Man was also employed as an indefinite pronoun.
Obviously, wife is retained still as a gender-marked term indicating the woman in a marriage arrangement. I’m sure I had a point here, but I may have lost it, so before I quit, the last term I’d like to mention—just because—is queen, which had originally meant a woman, become a wife, and then to a king’s wife, and finally (though this last sense remains), a female sovereign ruler irrespective of marital status. There are the queens of queer culture, but I think I’ll end on this note.
I must have missed the memo. Disinterested has merged into uninterested. Disinterested used to mean you mean impartial; now it means not interested. Whereas uninterested means not interested in a topic.
I am not strictly a prescriptivist when it comes to language, but it does provide a certain level of efficiency in communication. Descriptively, one needs to interpret conversation through some local lens, but one can’t persist a description for too long because it might have drifted the next time you try to apply it. Imagine having to negotiate meaning and intent every time we engage in communication.
Uninterested means not interested in a topic.
A car was a vehicle last week, but those are now called ABC because this week car means XYZ—only to have to reevaluate this shared meaning in the next contextual engagement.
Disinterested used to mean not being interested in the outcome.
Disinterested used to mean not being interested in the outcome. But that’s changed. It seems that now, in order to provide clarity of communication, we need to use the word impartial so as not to introduce the ambiguity now embedded in disinterested.
Recently, I was speaking with a well-educated linguaphile, and I mentioned that I was looking for a disinterested person to mediate a debate. This man is in his eighties, yet he immediately interpreted disinterested as uninterested. When I shared my understanding of the meaning, he conveyed that he was unfamiliar with that parsing. This came as a surprise to me because he is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst—quite the word wordsmith in a Jungian sort of way. I presumed that he would have understood the distinction and nuance in the interpretation. Once I clarified, he adopted my meaning—at least within the scope of our conversation. This said, I might drop disinterested from my vocabulary altogether. I’ll retain uninterested in the way a always have, and I’ll employ impartial where I would have heretofore employed disinterested.
Did you get this memo? Do you use disinterested and uninterested as close synonyms or do you retain the nuance?
The discussion became heated, and the two decided to submit the issue to arbitration, so they approached the lion.
As they approached the lion on his throne, the donkey started screaming: ′′Your Highness, isn’t it true that the grass is blue?”
The lion replied: “If you believe it is true, the grass is blue.”
The donkey rushed forward and continued: ′′The tiger disagrees with me, contradicts me and annoys me. Please punish him.”
The king then declared: ′′The tiger will be punished with 3 days of silence.”
The donkey jumped with joy and went on his way, content and repeating ′′The grass is blue, the grass is blue…”
The tiger asked the lion, “Your Majesty, why have you punished me, after all, the grass is green?”
The lion replied, ′′You’ve known and seen the grass is green.”
The tiger asked, ′′So why do you punish me?”
The lion replied, “That has nothing to do with the question of whether the grass is blue or green. The punishment is because it is degrading for a brave, intelligent creature like you to waste time arguing with an ass, and on top of that, you came and bothered me with that question just to validate something you already knew was true!”
Moral of the Story: The biggest waste of time is arguing with the fool and fanatic who doesn’t care about truth or reality, but only the victory of his beliefs and illusions. Never waste time on discussions that make no sense. There are people who, for all the evidence presented to them, do not have the ability to understand. Others are blinded by ego, hatred and resentment, and the only thing that they want is to be right even if they aren’t.
When emotions run high, intellect goes low.
This story is circulating on LinkedIn and has made the social media circuits. As you can judge from the attendant ‘moral of the story’ that this has been interpreted by an absolutist. This is a telltale sign of a Modern versus a so-called Postmodern who will allow for a different translation.
Heather at https://hermeneutrix.com/ commented briefly on the recent Political Spectrum post. Visting her site, she is all about words. Check it out. But even before visiting, I had the idea to visualise my reaction to her response.
To be fair, this is a response I get from my Pragmatist colleagues: don’t get your knickers in a twist arguing semantics. But in my noggin, I envision this Venn diagamme. (Well, not exactly. I just made this up, but you get the point.) Since the topic happened to be on the definition of Conservative, I’ll retain the context, but this is arbitrary.
Before I get to this, I want to set the stage with a more common and arguably more agreeable term: tree. If we ask a large number of people on the street to provide attributes of a tree, we might get something like this image abstraction below.
Tree
Venn: Tree
Although people may have different ideas, there will be some key core elements—trunks, branches, and roots. Of course, within the taxonomy of trees, there are types—pine, oak, willow, redwood, birch, and so on—each sharing these key attributes. These trees have some distinct attributes—coniferous versus deciduous, green versus red, flowering versus non versus, fruit-bearing, nut-bearing, height, and age. I think I can stop.
In general, I think it’s safe to say that if you point to a tree, and ask what it is to a person with sight and language, they will either respond ‘It’s a tree’ or ‘It’s an elm’. Even the elm response can be quickly qualified with a follow-up question, “What is an Elm?”
I understand that a botanist or an arborist may have a more nuanced definition. In fact, when I lived in a rental property outside of Chicago, my wife at the time defended the life of a tree that looked rather like a berry-bearing ficus, but that the village elders said was a weed and not allowed to remain. Here, we get into whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable or a squash is a berry or a fruit, or is corn a vegetable or a grain—or are we discussing maize? I get it. Even here, we can quickly come to terms. I said chips; I meant fries.
I could even get into the political conversation where the US justice system tried to redefine person to strip the rights away from those they didn’t want to have them. Of course, the United States has a history of not considering people to be people, though some were given 3/5ths and 4/5ths of personhood. Mighty white of them.
Back to trees. There are natural and artificial trees, but these are just simulations—hullo, Baudrillard. In the English language, there are non-arboreal trees, some not even rendered from fibres. We’ve got shoe trees—for which I fail to see the relationship to trees—and bell trees. We even have tree structures, like a taxonomy or a family tree, leveraging the branching metaphor. Some of these things escape the main bubble, but the connexion is never lost and is easy to navigate to a core understanding.
Conservative
I think we are amicably on the same page here and ready to move on from tree to conservative. Here, the circles are much more varied and divergent. Although there is common ground, as well there are points where there is no intersection in meaning.
Venn: Conservative
I’ve discussed a simpler abstract term before: fairness. To recapitulate, most people will tell you they want situations in the world to be fair. Only fair means entirely different things to different people. I’ve written about this in several places, so I’ll continue on our conservative journey.
Venn: Fair (oversimplified for effect)
Not only has the term conservative morphed over the years, it has different meanings—though to be fair, probably fewer than ‘liberal’. As I’ve discussed here before prior to the recent post, liberals are conservatives, but no one is really defending this position because the goal is identity, and identity involved separation to be distinguished.
Like fair, conservative has some common ground. The challenge is to understand which flavour is being used. Are you communicating by using the same term, or are you talking across each other? In some cases, this can lead to what I’ll call false positives (borrowing the language of statistical errors) where you think you are in agreement, except you aren’t. The other side of this coin is the false negative, where you think you are in disagreement when in fact you are talking about two different things.
This happened to me. A mate asked me to meet her at a certain time and place —I’ll just use McDonald’s because it is so ubiquitous. I went to the McDonald’s and waited. After a while, she called.
“Are you close?”
I scan the car park.
“I don’t see you. Maybe I missed you. I’m parked on the side near Taco Bell, not the oil change place.”
“There’s no Taco Bell at McDonald’s. What McDonald’s did you go to?”
It turns out that she was a distance away and wanted me to meet her halfway—like two-thirds to be honest. I assumed she meant the one we’d commonly visit.
This is a false positive. Communication was presumed to occur. It did. It just wasn’t useful. And since the reason for the rendezvous in the first place is to save time—one might say to ‘conserve’ time, but even I wouldn’t stoop to such a low target.
Wrapping up, the challenge is that trees are objects in the world. We can quickly recalibrate ourselves by reference. This is not possible for abstract concepts. I tend to refer to these are weasel words. Some use these words unknowingly. Whenever I hear some yahoo wintering on about freedom or justice, my first impression is that this bloke is tripping on a Kool-Aid propaganda overdose. Most common people falsely believe that people can understand what’s in their heads.
And to be fair—the left sort, not the one on the right—, when these yahoos utter the term, they are probably using it like their neighbour. But walk a few blocks or miles, and that bet is off. Sure, if the people have a common connexion, this might moderate the differences. But if one attempts to triangulate across worldviews, all bets are off. You may or may not be singing from the same hymnal.
Caruso: [Dan,] you have famously argued that freedom evolves and that humans, alone among the animals, have evolved minds that give us free will and moral responsibility. I, on the other hand, have argued that what we do and the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, and that because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions, in a particular but pervasive sense – the sense that would make us truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward. While these two views appear to be at odds with each other, one of the things I would like to explore in this conversation is how far apart we actually are. I suspect that we may have more in common than some think – but I could be wrong. To begin, can you explain what you mean by ‘free will’ and why you think humans alone have it?
Gregg Caruso
Dennett: A key word in understanding our differences is ‘control’. [Gregg,] you say ‘the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control’ and that is true of only those unfortunates who have not been able to become autonomous agents during their childhood upbringing. There really are people, with mental disabilities, who are not able to control themselves, but normal people can manage under all but the most extreme circumstances, and this difference is both morally important and obvious, once you divorce the idea of controlfrom the idea of causation. Your past does not control you; for it to control you, it would have to be able to monitor feedback about your behaviour and adjust its interventions – which is nonsense.
In fact, if your past is roughly normal, it contains the causal chains that turned you into an autonomous, self-controlling agent. Lucky you. You weren’t responsible for becoming an autonomous agent, but since you are one, it is entirely appropriate for the rest of us to hold you responsible for your deeds under all but the most dire circumstances.
Daniel Dennett
if your past is roughly normal, it contains the causal chains that turned you into an autonomous, self-controlling agent
Dan Dennett
So commences this debate. The argument unfolds largely on semantic grounds. Even here, one can see the debate over the distinction between control and causation. I understand what Dennett is attempting to parse here, but I object on the grounds of causa sui.
I recommend reading the Aeon article as there is much more than this distinction, but it does remain a semantic issue. I started a post on backwards- and forward-looking perspectives, that better articulate Caruso’s perspective, but I am also working on other things. This was quicker to post and I wanted to keep a bookmark anyway, so it’s a win-win.
Whenever I hear the phrase, ‘We don’t need to argue semantics’, two thoughts come immediately to mind.
We do need to argue semantics
Your position is shrouded in the ambiguity that you’d prefer remain intact—even if you are unaware of the ambiguity
This might be something less, but I find that many philosophical arguments are caused—at least in part—by a lack of a common foundation.
A common response to a ‘definition check’ is ‘you know what I mean’ or ‘everyone knows what X means’. My response is, respectively, ‘I might know what you mean, but I want to be sure’ or ‘great, so this should be easy for you to provide’.
Video: Why? – “What for?” or “How Come?” — Daniel Dennett
As a rule, I don’t have much faith in humans. It would be apparent if you read some of my posts. I find most people to be akin to vapid sports fans: Hooray for my team—whether that team is political party or persuasion, science, religion, and whatever. Not a lot of critical thinking or reasoning. I believe Geuss mentioned that most people are just trying to make it to the next day and acquire more stuff—at least more stuff than the neighbour. Social media is a turn for the worse. Luckily and thankfully, there are exceptions to this rule.
Engaging in a CS Peirce forum that I was invited to because of some interactions I had in a postmodern forum, I asked for the source of a Peirce claim made by another Lee Smolin.
When you explain a system by referencing the laws, that’s not the end of the explanation; you have to—we must explain how the laws came to be and why there are these laws and not other laws.
Lee Smolin on CS Peirce
At 8:43, Smolin cites Peirce by saying ‘that when you explain a system by referencing the laws, that’s not the end of the explanation; you have to—we must explain how the laws came to be and why there are these laws and not other laws—and he goes on to say this is 1893…’
Video: Are the laws of the universe immutable and unchanging?
Not being a direct quote, I was experiencing difficulty finding the source of the citation, so I asked in the Peirce group. As I am wont to do, I added that I didn’t buy into the assertion, but if I could find the source I could gather more context.
I don’t buy into the assertion that in describing a system one needs to provide an origin story, so I was hoping to discover context to determine whether it’s Smolin or Peirce to have an issue with.
I was given a citation that didn’t happen to be accurate,
A second member chimed in that of course one needs an ‘original state’, so I clarified that it was not the original state that I held issue with. It was the narrative behind it—the story of the origin, not the origin itself.
He responded, ‘That’s Deacon!’ More precisely, the response was as follows:
YES!!!!!!! That’s Deacon!!!!
I’m not even schooled in Peirce, and now I’m getting his classmates.
To my origin clarification, I also added this bit:
I feel that ‘reasons’ or ‘whys’ are less important than ‘how’. In fact, I feel that ‘why’ is often used in English as a synonym to ‘how’ in many contexts.
So when asks ‘Why are you late?’ they are really asking ‘How it is that you’ve arrived late?’ or ‘How come you’re late?’ Why feels like a metaphysical stand-in for how.
…to which he responds with the top clip by Dan Dennett making my same point a decade ago—or I suppose that I am making his same point a decade later.
It seems that I’m late to the party yet again. This is becoming a trend.
Have you even just let your mind and fingers wander?
The English language morphs, and sometimes some useful notions are lost to the dustbin of history. I take it especially hard when other languages retain these aspects.
I tend to evaluate much in terms of time. In practice, this is why I dispute notions of self and identity—Plank-sliced frames stitched in time.
Although ‘today’ is the central reference and I could start with ‘today’, I’m going to unfold this chronologically, instead. First some background.
Getting Down to Basics
Day
In its original incarnation, day meant the ‘period during which the sun is above the horizon’ and was expanded to comprise the entirety of a cycle.
Fun Fact: Days used to be measured starting at sunset rather than midnight as is the current custom. So time was relative in a different sense to today.
Evening
Originally referring to the time just before sunset—parallel to the morning having meant the time just before sunrise—, it’s been expanded to mean the time from sunset (post the original intent) and bedtime.
Morning
Although morning had originally been limited to the time just before sunrise, its domain has been expanded to encompass the part of the day between midnight and noon, exclusively.
Morrow
Morrow simply means morning. Good morrow would have been taken as ‘good morning‘.
Night
Night is ostensibly the dark part of a day.
Yester
I don’t want to be the one to break it to you, but yester (from gester) means yesterday. More on this later.
Putting It All Together
Ereyesterday
Ereyesterday can be disintegrated into three components. Ere means before or previous, so reintegrating, we get something like the day before yesterday or the day prior to yesterday.
Yestermorrow
Yestermorrow is a rendition of yesterday with a focus on the morrow—the morning.
Yesterday
If you’ve been following the breadcrumbs, there is no big reveal here. Given that yester already means ‘the day before today‘, yesterday disintegrates into yesterdayday—’the day before today day‘. That’s the English language for you. It could be worse.
Yesternight
Yesternight is the flip side of yestermorrow, but it should be more recognisable as the night of the prior day—yesterday.
Yestreen
I debated whether to include this yestreen the mix. Yestreen is more of a Scottish word that is a synonym for yesternight. And we don’t use either of them anymore. Such a shame.
Today
As with tomorrow, today was generally written as a hyphenated word—to-day—until about 100 years ago. It had been two words until the 1500s. Essentially, today refers to this day—the current day.
Tomorrow
As with today, tomorrow was generally written as a hyphenated word—to-morrow—until about 100 years ago. It had been two words until the 1500s. Effectively, tomorrow refers to the next morning, though we have extended the meaning to account for the entirety of the next day.
Overmorrow
If you’ve been paying attention and following the progression, you’ll have guessed that overmorrow is the day over tomorrow—after tomorrow.
And so it goes…
I understand that many (at least some) languages retain some of these time markers—German and Dutch come to mind. There are other markers such as the English fortnight—meaning fourteen days or two weeks, but I wanted to limit my focus around today.
Love and hate are almost archetypal. In some ways, they are opposite ends of a spectrum, if not for the challenge of love having several other contexts that don’t serve to anchor the other end.
Hate and the love that opposes it are trebled versions of dislike or disdain and like or affinity. Both of these terms are hyperbole meant to elicit an emotional response. As such, they are abused to this end.
As Cristhian notes, hate is used as a qualifier—hate speech, hate crime, and other things people want to punctuate. It’s exclamatory. We might have rather presented it as !speech or crime! or perhaps borrow from Spanish, ¡speech! perhaps stylise it in all caps to double down on the effect ¡CRIME!
In any case, the intent is to manipulate emotions. Perhaps the intent is similar to the Spinal Tap parody of turning the volume to 11 — on a scale or 0 to 10. Hate is off-the-charts loathing. Perhaps it denotes a pathological response almost paralleling evil, another nonsense word.
Synonyms are detest, abhor, loathe, and so on. Hate seems to be just a smidge harsher.
I’d say that English has more than its fair share of nonsensical terms, but other languages have words to serve the same archetypal role. In French, there is a similar superlative— je le hais.
I don’t really have much more to add. I was just triggered by this piece, and I felt compelled to comment. Much language usage seems to be phatic, but in this case, I suppose emphatic is the word for the day.
* Thin Line Between Love and Hate is a song I first heard as a cover by Chrissy Hynde on the first Pretenders album, but it was first performed (perhaps even written by) The Persuaders, a fact I discovered searching for the video to insert here. The original sounds good, too. I just wanted to find the one who introduced me to it.
Philosophics 