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Free Thinking : The nation

From the UK, philosopher Jonathan Rée

  1. Prejudice, self-interest and self-display

    • Jonathan Rée
    • 30 Sep 06, 11:06 AM

    What is freethinking? It's not so easy to say. But perhaps it's easier to ask the question the other way round: what is the opposite of freethiinking?

    The most plausible answer, I think, is prejudice. which is why there has been so much traffic about prejudice on this blog recently.

    But what is prejudice exactly? In the coming days and weeks I want to try to clarify and define it, and I would appreciate your help: facts and anecdotes about prejudices, your own and other peoples, and also ideas about the different classes they fall into, and the different kinds of threat they pose.

    Here's my starter.

    Continue reading "Prejudice, self-interest and self-display"

  1. A short history of freethinking, part two

    • Jonathan Rée
    • 24 Sep 06, 09:50 PM

    Yes indeed: the ideal of freeing ourselves from prejudice is fraught with problems. (Many thanks, Nadim, for a superb little dialogue about this.) We can never be sure whether we are making progress with it. But that does not mean we should give up trying.

    In the first place, the indispensability of logic. As I said the other day in what I thought a dry and boring, but necessary, post on ‘Logic, or how to think’, we should always try to work out the logical entailments of what we affirm or deny. What is logic after all? It is simply what happens when thinking becomes self-conscious, just as arithmetic is what happens when counting becomes self-conscious.

    If people’s sums don’t add up, we tell them to check them and try harder, and won’t be very impressed if they retort that they are freethinkers, and as far as they’re concerned the world itself is unarithmetical. And we should be just as impatient with our home-grown illogicians, who claim that the world itself is illogical, and even imagine that they are speaking in the noble name of ‘freethinking’ as they do so. The world is complex and full of surprises, no doubt: but that only goes to show that we need to keep checking our logical compass.

    Secondly, the problem of prejudice. When I said we should try to free ourselves from prejudice, I did not mean that we could ever succeed, still less that we could ever know that we have succeeded. But that need not stop us being on our guard against the effects of our own prejudices – excavating our unconscious reasons for thinking as we do, and correcting intellectual distortions due to our own laziness, vanity, and self-regard. That, I suspect, is the best route to the only kind of freethinking worth having. (I plan to come back to the problem of intellectual narcissism in a later post.)

    And two of my intellectual heroes had some fine things to say on this point.

    Continue reading "A short history of freethinking, part two"

  1. Logic, or how to think

    • Jonathan Rée
    • 20 Sep 06, 09:57 AM

    My 大象传媒 controllers want me to put myself about a bit more. They would like me to spend more time cruising the blogosphere trying to pick up new partners. But I’m afraid I’m not ready for that, and I’m not sure I’ll ever want to be. I’m an old-fashioned sort, preferring to wait discreetly for things to turn up, and allowing things to develop slowly, under their own momentum.

    And it seems to me that’s what’s now happening on Freethinkinguk.

    I am keen to offer you a few more titbits about the history of freethinking, as well as further comments on democracy, prejudice, the idiocy of the internet, free speech, and the ways in which religious ideas continue to influence people who imagine they have got beyond them. These themes, and several others too (the history of the future, the politics of resentment) are jostling in my in-tray. And I must admit I'm not sure I’ll be able to fit them all in before the plug is pulled on the Freethinking blogs, which is due to happen in about six weeks. In any case they will all have to wait a little longer, while I attend to some themes that have germinated here on freethinkinguk in the past few days

    There have been some exceptionally interesting comments on my last two posts (‘Humble Opinions’ and ‘A short history of freethinking’), and I want tease out one particular strand in them, which I fear might otherwise gets lost. It's about the nature of logic.

    Continue reading "Logic, or how to think"

  1. The curious history of freethinking

    • Jonathan Rée
    • 14 Sep 06, 11:43 PM

    My minders at the 大象传媒 would like me to make my posts a bit snappier and whackier – a bit more bloglike in short. I shall do my best, but I'm afraid I may not succeed. After all they have also tagged me as ‘philosopher’, which implies taking care to look at everything in the round. And that takes time. If it’s not the way things work in the blogosphere, then something will have to give.

    That is why I have been insisting on the difference between holding an opinion and thinking things through. Comments on this distinction are still coming in (very interesting too), and I shall return to it, as incisively as possible, in a later post.

    But first I need to discharge an old promise by explaining a little of the history ‘freethinking’, and the part Bishop Berkeley played in its downfall. If I’m right, the story points to a paradox in the idea of freethinking – a paradox that has not lost its capacity to trip people up.

    Continue reading "The curious history of freethinking"

  1. Humble opinions

    • Jonathan Rée
    • 11 Sep 06, 12:17 PM

    In my last post I said that there is more to freedom than getting what you want.

    Of course the word ‘freedom’ is only a word, and if you like you can stretch it to cover people who are simply following their whims or wafting in the winds of fashion. But in that case freedom ceases to be something worth aspiring to or fighting for: it means being the puppet of your passions and your past rather than the controller of your present and your future.

    If freedom is to be really desirable, then it must have a relation to something beyond what you happen to want – a relation, as I said, to something like reason, responsibility, even truth.

    Reading the comments coming into this blog over the past few days, I notice several new versions of the old freethinking chestnut – the idea that criticising someone’s ideas, or perhaps refuting them, may mean infringing their right to their own opinions.

    In addition I am glad to find some real-world discussion about which regimes are better than others from the point of view of freedom.

    I shall quickly take up both these points (my hobbyhorse about the history of freethinking will have to remain in its stable for the time being). First I shall refer you once again to the case of the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, and secondly I shall try to draw your attention to the difference between thinking and having opinions.

    Continue reading "Humble opinions"

  1. Freedom truth and thinking

    • Jonathan Rée
    • 6 Sep 06, 09:43 PM

    The only thing that’s indisputable about the idea of freedom is that it’s always in dispute.

    And the same applies to freethinking too. It’s a word with a lot of history: in the eighteenth century, certain dissident protestants liked to refer to themselves as ‘free-thinkers’ – but they were roundly rebuked and ridiculed, and not without reason. They flattered themselves absurdly, according to their critics. (There was a very funny satire on them by Bishop Berkeley, for instance: he thought that their confidence that they represented freethinking only proved that they knew nothing either about freedom or about thinking.) But I had better rein in this historical hobbyhorse, or at least save it for a later outing. The essantial point remains: you do not prove that you are free by saying or thinking that you are.

    Continue reading "Freedom truth and thinking"

  1. True respect

    • Jonathan Rée
    • 1 Sep 06, 08:55 AM

    Lots of people seem to like my idea of a democracy of mutual respect, but they’re not sure that such a thing can ever exist. On the internet perhaps, or specifically here in blogland?

    But first we need to agree about the meaning of respect.

    One commenter has got shirty with me because I pointed out that, as far as I could see, he had made a logical mistake. (He thought that being able to change your mind was the same as being unable not to change your mind – as if being able to fall asleep were the same as not being able to stay awake.) He took offence, and now he alleges that I have failed to practice the kind of respect that I preach.

    Continue reading "True respect"

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