But wrong he was … or at least that’s what John Locke thought. Locke was a doctor who thought that thought needed more than thought— it needed eyes and ears and even a nose. According to Locke, we cannot justify our beliefs with just pure logic because logic is only glue; it needs things to stick together, and those things come from observation. We begin life, he argued, as a blank slate; and through sensation, we are written upon. Once we see something, we can use logic to create more complex ideas. Once we’ve seen horses and horns, for example, it’s easy to dream up unicorns. But underneath it all is observation. It’s not “I think therefore I Immanuel Kant looked am,” but rather “I see, at Descartes’ and Locke’s disa greement and called for a group hug. All therefore … our knowledge, he posited, is a combination of the oh, I see.” senses and the mind. The mind is like a pair of glas ses. Without them, we only see a blur of color; we need the lenses to bring reality into focus. The mind takes what com es in through our senses and creates the world we see by add ing its own concepts, such as numbers, space, time, and eve n absolute rules of right and wrong. According to Kant, the se concepts are all preprogrammed into our brains, and all people have them— m and have the same ones. Fried thoug ri ch H ht Kan to und egel t was ri erstan over t g d ht that r eality, ime. I we nee ndeed but he that th d lense , the le e univ thoug s n erse u ht tha s turn requir nfolds t the l s out t es its o e i o n n p s be his a wellp stick it chang tory it ordere ed in”), so osite (as Arlo self. H d patte the sta G bly sta u egel th t h rn. He rie sai te of th rt a wa ought also th d, “Yo e univ r. If on destro u can’t ought erse gi e were y each t h h v a s e a v t t a thin s r e o r a light ise to it other. nger, it and th g From witho s oppo would e cycle t u h s t w it e a dark ir smo in; but e. The starts we silly s lderin to b e again. e o cause pposit g ashe Histor little h they a es inev s arise y chug uman r e it e axact o s a new s think s along pposit , highe , do, o accord es, the r form r want i n y g to this of the . Acco patter univer rding n s , t e o regard , Hegel, steppi less of real w ng bac what isdom k and comes seeing the lar from how o ger scr u r role fi ipt of ts in histor y.
Hegel and zsche shared a first Niet Friedrich name, but that is all they had in common. large Nietzsche was a very short man with a very with ized moustache who liked to say he philosoph h what came a hammer. He thought his job was to smas s in the chess pawn not are We l. before—and that meant Hege s who leave idual indiv match of history, he argued, but great we make us; our mark on the world. History does not make ing history: writing history. But making history requires break being faster, better music, climbing higher mountains, ive. creat stronger, smarter, and more
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Mar/Apr 2010