Two Comments on Curiosity

"...[O]ver and above that lust of the flesh...there can also be in the mind itself, through those same bodily senses, a certain vain desire and curiosity, not of taking delight in the body, but of making experiments with the body's aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge. Because this is in the appetite to know, and the yes are the chief of the senses we use for attaining knowledge, it is called in Scripture the lust of the eyes

...[I]t is easy to distinguish between the way in which the sense pleasure and the way in which they serve curiosity. Pleasure goes after objects that are beautiful to see, hear, smell, taste, touch; but curiosity for the sake of experiment can go after quite contrary things, not in order to experience their unpleasantness, but through a mere itch to experience and find out."

[Augustine, The Confessions, Book Ten, section 35, translated by Frank Sheed]

The simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is Curiosity. By curiosity, I mean whatever desire we have for, or whatever pleasure we take in, novelty. We see children perpetually running from place to place, to hunt out something new: they catch with great eagerness, and with very little choice, at whatever comes before them; their attention is engaged by everything, because everything has, in that stage of life, the charm of novelty to recommend it.

But as those things, which engage us merely by their novelty, cannot attach us for any length of time, curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections; it changes its object perpetually, it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied; and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness, and anxiety. Curiosity, from its nature, is a very active principle; it quickly runs over the greatest part of its objects, and soon exhausts the variety which is commonly to be met with in nature; the same things make frequent returns, and they return with less and less of any agreeable effect. 

In short, the occurrences of life, by the time we come to know it a little, would be incapable of affecting the mind with any other sensations than those of loathing and weariness, if many things were not adapted to affect the mind by means of other powers besides novelty in them, and of other passions besides curiosity in ourselves. These powers and passions shall be considered in their place. But whatever these powers are, or upon what principle soever they affect the mind, it is absolutely necessary that they should not be exerted in those things which a daily and vulgar use have brought into a stale unaffecting familiarity. Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in every instrument which works upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself more or less with all our passions.

[Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Part One, section 1]

Notes on Hegel's Vision of Freedom

Like everything on this blog, these are the notes of an amateur, and they ought to taken with a grain of salt, if taken at all. 03/18/2016

-At first, you might think that the most fundamental conception of freedom is Selbstbestimmung, self-determination. Let's start with this hypothesis, and see what we can make of it.  Hegel calls this first pass at a definition of freedom "being-with-oneself."

What would absolute and complete full self-determination, complete being-with-oneself look like?

Well, the opposite of self-determination is dependence. Now there is metaphysical dependence: something might depend on something else to exist. Peter van Inwagen's example is a wrinkle in the carpet. The wrinkle needs the carpet to be there for it to exist as well.

And there is epistemic dependence: the way one concept could only be understood with the help of another concept. If this seems obscure, consider the idea that something might only be explained [or at least most helpfully explained] by contrasting it with another idea. If X is totally epistemically independent of Y, then X can be understood fully without recourse to comparison with Y. If X is totally epistemically independent, not just of Y, but of everything, then it could be understood without the use of any other concept. It would be self-presenting or immediate.

Something that were completely self-determining would be both metaphysically independent and epistemically independent. Hegel thinks this is impossible. Nothing has these qualities, in his view.

So any freedom or self-determination that exists has to exist with some level of dependence, either metaphysical, epistemic, or some other kind. Hegel calls this "being-with-oneself-in-another." This is our second pass at an understanding of freedom. But how does this reconciliation of self-determination with dependence-on-the-other happen? It happens because the self stops experiencing the other as an alien and alienating presence.

Now there are at least two kinds of freedom or being-with-oneself-in-another.

(A) The first is speculative or theoretical freedom. This is the free contemplation of the world, a.k.a. philosophy. It's a kind of being-with-oneself-in-another because when we do philosophy we (eventually) come to understand that the world is our home, even though it often seems hostile and foreign in the beginning.

(B) Another kind of being-with-onself-in-another is practical freedom, which is the sort of freedom we exercise by using our will in the world outside our heads. Now practical freedom must be understood in three separate phases.

(1) Personal freedom -- This is when an arbitrary will is able to choose its own ends. Note that it is the will that is doing this, not some other faculty. You have this sort of freedom when you have a bunch of will-less objects or things that you have complete control over. Many teenagers have this sort of freedom; they have their own room, they have their own things that they have complete discretion over. 

(2) Moral freedom -- This is when a will is able to choose its own ends not spontaneously but in accordance with the self's vision of the good, a vision of the good that is reflectively endorsed by the self.   

(3) Social freedom -- This is when a society has created rational social institutions that are able to both (a) help form individuals capable of exercising both personal and moral freedom and (b) give definition and particularity to the citizen's vision of the good.