Bio: William Morris

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other people named William Morris, see William Morris (disambiguation).

William Morris
William Morris by Frederick Hollyer, 1887
Born24 March 1834
WalthamstowEssex, England
Died3 October 1896 (aged 62)
Hammersmith, England
EducationExeter College, Oxford
OccupationsTextile designerpoettranslatorsocialist activist
Known forWallpaper and textile designfantasy fictionmedievalismsocialism
Notable workNews from NowhereThe Well at the World’s End
SpouseJane Burden ​(m. 1859)​
ChildrenJenny Morris
May Morris
Signature

William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, poet, artist,[1] writer, and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. He was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production. His literary contributions helped to establish the modern fantasy genre, while he helped win acceptance of socialism in fin de siècle Great Britain.

Morris was born in WalthamstowEssex, to a wealthy middle-class family. He came under the strong influence of medievalism while studying classics at Oxford University, where he joined the Birmingham Set. After university, he married Jane Burden, and developed close friendships with Pre-Raphaelite artists Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and with Neo-Gothic architect Philip Webb. Webb and Morris designed Red House in Kent where Morris lived from 1859 to 1865, before moving to Bloomsbury, central London. In 1861, Morris founded the Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. decorative arts firm with Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Webb, and others, which became highly fashionable and much in demand. The firm profoundly influenced interior decoration throughout the Victorian period, with Morris designing tapestries, wallpaper, fabrics, furniture, and stained glass windows. In 1875, he assumed total control of the company, which was renamed Morris & Co.

Morris rented the rural retreat of Kelmscott ManorOxfordshire, from 1871 while also retaining a main home in London. He was greatly influenced by visits to Iceland with Eiríkur Magnússon, and he produced a series of English-language translations of Icelandic Sagas. He also achieved success with the publication of his epic poems and novels, namely The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870), A Dream of John Ball (1888), the Utopian News from Nowhere (1890), and the fantasy romance The Well at the World’s End (1896). In 1877, he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings to campaign against the damage caused by architectural restoration. By the influence of medievalism and Christian socialism in the 1850s he became a sceptic of industrial capitalism, after reading works of Henry GeorgeAlfred Russel Wallace, and Karl Marx in the 1880s Morris became a committed revolutionary socialist activist until his final acceptance of parliamentary socialism at 1896. He founded the Socialist League in 1884 after an involvement in the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), but he broke with that organisation in 1890. In 1891, he founded the Kelmscott Press to publish limited-edition, illuminated-style print books, a cause to which he devoted his final years.

Morris is recognised as one of the most significant cultural figures of Victorian Britain. He was best known in his lifetime as a poet, although he posthumously became better known for his designs. The William Morris Society founded in 1955 is devoted to his legacy, while multiple biographies and studies of his work have been published. Many of the buildings associated with his life are open to visitors, much of his work can be found in art galleries and museums, and his designs are still in production.

Early life

Youth: 1834–1852

Morris was born at Elm House in WalthamstowEssex, on 24 March 1834.[2] Raised into a wealthy middle-class family, he was named after his father, a financier who worked as a partner in the Sanderson & Co. firm, bill brokers in the City of London.[3] His mother was Emma Morris (née Shelton), who descended from a wealthy bourgeois family from Worcester.[4] Morris was the third of his parents’ surviving children; their first child, Charles, had been born in 1827 but died four days later. Charles had been followed by the birth of two girls, Emma in 1829 and Henrietta in 1833, before William’s birth. These children were followed by the birth of siblings Stanley in 1837, Rendall in 1839, Arthur in 1840, Isabella in 1842, Edgar in 1844, and Alice in 1846.[5] The Morris family were followers of the evangelical Protestant form of Christianity, and William was baptised four months after his birth at St Mary’s Church, Walthamstow.[6]

Water House, Morris’s childhood home; renovated in 2012, it now houses The William Morris Gallery.

As a child, Morris was kept largely housebound at Elm House by his mother; there, he spent much time reading, favouring the novels of Walter Scott.[7] Aged 6, Morris moved with his family to the Georgian Italianate mansion at Woodford HallWoodford, Essex, which was surrounded by 50 acres of land adjacent to Epping Forest.[8] He took an interest in fishing with his brothers as well as gardening in the Hall’s grounds,[9] and spent much time exploring the Forest, where he was fascinated both by the Iron Age earthworks at Loughton Camp and Ambresbury Banks and by the Early Modern Hunting Lodge at Chingford.[10] He also took rides through the Essex countryside on his pony,[11] and visited the various churches and cathedrals throughout the country, marveling at their architecture.[12] His father took him on visits outside of the county, for instance to Canterbury Cathedral, the Chiswick Horticultural Gardens, and to the Isle of Wight, where he adored Blackgang Chine.[13] Aged 9, he was then sent to Misses Arundale’s Academy for Young Gentlemen, a nearby preparatory school; although initially riding there by pony each day, he later began boarding, intensely disliking the experience.[14]

In 1847, Morris’s father died unexpectedly. From this point, the family relied upon continued income from the copper mines at Devon Great Consols, and sold Woodford Hall to move into the smaller Water House.[15] In February 1848 Morris began his studies at Marlborough College in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where he gained a reputation as an eccentric nicknamed “Crab”. He despised his time there, being bullied, bored, and homesick.[16] He did use the opportunity to visit many of the prehistoric sites of Wiltshire, such as Avebury and Silbury Hill, which fascinated him.[17] The school was Anglican in faith and in March 1849 Morris was confirmed by the Bishop of Salisbury in the college chapel, developing an enthusiastic attraction towards the Anglo-Catholic movement and its Romanticist aesthetic.[18] At Christmas 1851, Morris was removed from the school and returned to Water House, where he was privately tutored by the Reverend Frederick B. Guy, Assistant Master at the nearby Forest School.[19]

Oxford and the Birmingham Set: 1852–1856

[edit]

William Morris at 23

In June 1852 Morris entered Exeter College at Oxford University, although, since the college was full, he went into residence only in January 1853.[20] He disliked the college and was bored by the manner in which they taught him Classics.[21] Instead he developed a keen interest in Medieval history and Medieval architecture, inspired by the many Medieval buildings in Oxford.[22] This interest was tied to Britain’s growing Medievalist movement, a form of Romanticism that rejected many of the values of Victorian industrial capitalism.[23] For Morris, the Middle Ages represented an era with strong chivalric values and an organic, pre-capitalist sense of community, both of which he deemed preferable to his own period.[24] This attitude was compounded by his reading of Thomas Carlyle‘s book Past and Present (1843), in which Carlyle championed Medieval values as a corrective to the problems of Victorian society.[25] Under this influence, Morris’s dislike of contemporary capitalism grew, and he came to be influenced by the work of Christian socialists Charles Kingsley and Frederick Denison Maurice.[26]

At the college, Morris met fellow first-year undergraduate Edward Burne-Jones, who became his lifelong friend and collaborator. Although from very different backgrounds, they found that they had a shared attitude to life, both being keenly interested in Anglo-Catholicism and Arthurianism.[27] Through Burne-Jones, Morris joined a group of undergraduates from Birmingham who were studying at Pembroke College: William Fulford (1831–1882), Richard Watson DixonCharles Faulkner, and Cormell Price. They were known among themselves as the “Brotherhood” and to historians as the Birmingham Set.[28] Morris was the most affluent member of the Set, and was generous with his wealth toward the others.[29] Like Morris, the Set were fans of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and would meet together to recite the plays of William Shakespeare.[30]

William Morris self-portrait, 1856; he grew his beard that year, after leaving university.[31]

Morris was heavily influenced by the writings of the art critic John Ruskin, being particularly inspired by his chapter “On the Nature of Gothic Architecture” in the second volume of The Stones of Venice; he later described it as “one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century”.[32] Morris adopted Ruskin’s philosophy of rejecting the tawdry industrial manufacture of decorative arts and architecture in favour of a return to hand-craftsmanship, raising artisans to the status of artists, creating art that should be affordable and hand-made, with no hierarchy of artistic mediums.[33][34] Ruskin had achieved attention in Victorian society for championing the art of a group of painters who had emerged in London in 1848 calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelite style was heavily Medievalist and Romanticist, emphasising abundant detail, intense colours and complex compositions; it greatly impressed Morris and the Set.[35] Influenced both by Ruskin and by John Keats, Morris began to spend more time writing poetry, in a style that was imitative of much of theirs.[36]

Both he and Burne-Jones were influenced by the Romanticist milieu and the Anglo-Catholic movement, and decided to become clergymen in order to found a monastery where they could live a life of chastity and dedication to artistic pursuit, akin to that of the contemporary Nazarene movement. However, as time went on Morris became increasingly critical of Anglican doctrine and the idea faded.[37] In summer 1854, Morris travelled to Belgium to look at Medieval paintings,[38] and in July 1855 went with Burne-Jones and Fulford across northern France, visiting Medieval churches and cathedrals.[39] It was on this trip that he and Burne-Jones committed themselves to “a life of art”.[40] For Morris, this decision resulted in a strained relationship with his family, who believed that he should have entered either commerce or the clergy.[41] On a subsequent visit to Birmingham, Morris discovered Thomas Malory‘s Le Morte d’Arthur, which became a core Arthurian text for him and Burne-Jones.[42] In January 1856, the Set began publication of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, designed to contain “mainly Tales, Poetry, friendly critiques and social articles”. Funded mainly by Morris, who briefly served as editor and heavily contributed to it with his own stories, poems, reviews and articles, the magazine lasted for twelve issues, and garnered praise from Tennyson and Ruskin.[43]

Apprenticeship, the Pre-Raphaelites, and marriage: 1856–1859

Morris’s 1858 painting La belle Iseult, also inaccurately called Queen Guinevere, is his only surviving easel painting, now in the Tate Gallery. The model is Jane Burden, who married Morris in 1859.

Having passed his finals and been awarded a BA, Morris began an apprenticeship with the Oxford-based Neo-Gothic architect George Edmund Street in January 1856. His apprenticeship focused on architectural drawing, and there he was placed under the supervision of the young architect Philip Webb, who became a close friend.[44] Morris soon relocated to Street’s London office, in August 1856 moving into a flat in Bloomsbury in Central London with Burne-Jones, an area perhaps chosen for its avant-garde associations.[45] Morris was fascinated by London but dismayed at its pollution and rapid expansion into neighbouring countryside, describing it as “the spreading sore”.[46]

William Morris became increasingly fascinated with the idyllic Medievalist depictions of rural life which appeared in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, and spent large sums of money purchasing such artworks. Burne-Jones shared this interest, but took it further by becoming an apprentice to one of the foremost Pre-Raphaelite painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the three soon became close friends.[47] Through Rossetti, Morris came to associate with poet Robert Browning, and the artists Arthur HughesThomas Woolner, and Ford Madox Brown.[48] Tired of architecture, Morris abandoned his apprenticeship, with Rossetti persuading him to take up painting instead, which he chose to do in the Pre-Raphaelite style.[49] Morris aided Rossetti and Burne-Jones in painting the Arthurian murals at the Oxford Union, although his contributions were widely deemed inferior and unskilled compared to those of the others.[50] At Rossetti’s recommendation, Morris and Burne-Jones moved in together to the flat at Bloomsbury’s No. 17 Red Lion Square by November 1856. Morris designed and commissioned furniture for the flat in a Medieval style, much of which he painted with Arthurian scenes in a direct rejection of mainstream artistic tastes.[51]

Morris also continued writing poetry and began designing illuminated manuscripts and embroidered hangings.[52] In March 1857 Bell and Dandy published a book of Morris’s poems, The Defence of Guenevere, which was largely self-funded by the author. It did not sell well and garnered few reviews, most of which were unsympathetic. Disconcerted, Morris would not publish again for a further eight years.[53] In October 1857 Morris met Jane Burden, a woman from a poor working-class background, at a theatre performance. Rossetti initially asked her to model for him. Controversially both Rossetti and Morris were smitten with her; Morris, however, began a relationship with her and they were engaged in spring 1858; Burden would later admit that she had never loved Morris.[54] They were married in a low-key ceremony held at St Michael at the North Gate church in Oxford on 26 April 1859, before honeymooning in Bruges, Belgium, and settling temporarily at 41 Great Ormond Street, London.[55]

Career and fame

Red House and the Firm: 1859–1865

Red House in Bexleyheath; it is now owned by The National Trust and open to visitors.

Morris desired a new home for himself and his daughters resulting in the construction of the Red House in the Kentish hamlet of Upton near Bexleyheath, ten miles from central London. The building’s design was a co-operative effort, with Morris focusing on the interiors and the exterior being designed by Webb, for whom the House represented his first commission as an independent architect.[56] Named after the red bricks and red tiles from which it was constructed, Red House rejected architectural norms by being L-shaped.[57] Influenced by various forms of contemporary Neo-Gothic architecture, the House was nevertheless unique,[58] with Morris describing it as “very mediaeval in spirit”.[59] Situated within an orchard, the house and garden were intricately linked in their design.[60] It took a year to construct,[61] and cost Morris £4000 at a time when his fortune was greatly reduced by a dramatic fall in the price of his shares.[62] Burne-Jones described it as “the beautifullest place on Earth.”[63]

After construction, Morris invited friends to visit, most notably Burne-Jones and his wife Georgiana, as well as Rossetti and his wife Lizzie Siddal.[64] They aided him in painting murals on the furniture, walls, and ceilings, much of it based on Arthurian tales, the Trojan War, and Geoffrey Chaucer‘s stories, while he also designed floral embroideries for the rooms.[65] They also spent much time playing tricks on each other, enjoying games like hide and seek, and singing while accompanied by the piano.[66] Siddall stayed at the House during summer and autumn 1861 as she recovered from a traumatic miscarriage and an addiction to laudanum; she would die of an overdose in February 1862.[67]

In April 1861, Morris founded a decorative arts company, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., with six other partners: Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Webb, Ford Madox Brown, Charles Faulkner, and Peter Paul Marshall. Operating from premises at No. 6 Red Lion Square, they referred to themselves as “the Firm” and were intent on adopting Ruskin’s ideas of reforming British attitudes to production. They hoped to reinstate decoration as one of the fine arts and adopted an ethos of affordability and anti-elitism.[68] For additional staff, they employed boys from the Industrial Home for Destitute Boys in Euston, central London, many of whom were trained as apprentices.[69]

Although working within the Neo-Gothic school of design, they differed from Neo-Gothic architects like George Gilbert Scott who simply included certain Gothic features on modern styles of building; instead they sought to return completely to Medieval Gothic methods of craftmanship.[70] The products created by the Firm included furniture, architectural carving, metalwork, stained glass windows, and murals.[71] Their stained glass windows proved a particular success in the firm’s early years as they were in high demand for the surge in the Neo-Gothic construction and refurbishment of churches, many of which were commissioned by the architect George Frederick Bodley.[72] Despite Morris’s anti-elitist ethos, the Firm soon became increasingly popular and fashionable with the bourgeoisie, particularly following their exhibit at the 1862 International Exhibition in South Kensington, where they received press attention and medals of commendation.[73] However, they faced much opposition from established design companies, particularly those belonging to the Neo-Classical school.[74]

Design for Trellis wallpaper, 1862

Morris was slowly abandoning lithography and painting, recognising that his work lacked a sense of movement; none of his paintings are dated later than 1862.[75][76] Instead he focused his energies on designing wallpaper patterns, the first being “Trellis”, designed in 1862. His designs were produced from 1864 by Jeffrey and Co. of Islington, who created them for the Firm under Morris’s supervision.[77] Morris retained an active interest in various groups, joining the Hogarth Club, the Mediaeval Society, and the Corps of Artist Volunteers, the latter in contrast to his later pacifism.[78]

Meanwhile, Morris’s family continued to grow. In January 1861, Morris and Janey’s first daughter was born: named Jane Alice Morris, she was commonly known as “Jenny”.[79] Jenny was followed in March 1862 by the birth of their second daughter, Mary “May” Morris.[80] Morris was a caring father to his daughters, and years later they both recounted having idyllic childhoods.[81] However, there were problems in Morris’s marriage as Janey became increasingly close to Rossetti, who often painted her. It is unknown if their affair was ever sexual, although by this point other members of the group were noticing Rossetti and Janey’s closeness.[82]

Imagining the creation of an artistic community at Upton, Morris helped develop plans for a second house to be constructed adjacent to Red House in which Burne-Jones could live with his family; the plans were abandoned when Burne-Jones’s son Christopher died from scarlet fever.[83] By 1864, Morris had become increasingly tired of life at Red House, being particularly unhappy with the 3 to 4 hours spent commuting to his London workplace on a daily basis.[84] He sold Red House, and in autumn 1865 moved with his family to No. 26 Queen Square in Bloomsbury, the same building to which the Firm had moved its base of operations earlier in the summer.[85]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris

List of employee-owned companies

[List does not include religio-educational organizations like The Prosperos]

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See also: Worker cooperative § Worker cooperatives by country

This is a list of notable employee-owned companies by country. These are companies totally or significantly owned (directly or indirectly) by their employees.[1]

Employee ownership takes different forms and one form may predominate in a particular country. For example, in the U.S. over 5,700 of the roughly 6,400 employee-owned companies have an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).[2] An ESOP is an employee-owner method that provides a company‘s workforce with an ownership interest in the company. In an ESOP, companies provide their employees with stock ownership, often at no up-front cost to the employees. ESOP shares, however, are part of employees’ remuneration for work performed. Shares are allocated to employees and may be held in an ESOP trust until the employee retires or leaves the company. The shares are then sold.

Worker cooperatives are another form of employee ownership wherein workers are exclusive owners and managers of the firm, with one vote per employee in democratic decision-making.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

Canada

India

Japan

Scandinavia

Spain

United Kingdom

United States

See also

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companies

Anne Frank: “Terrible things are happening outside.”

Anne Frank

“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they’re robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone.”

― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

(Goodreads.com)

(Courtesy of Gwyllm Llwydd)

How to pose for a photo with confidence

David Suh | TEDNext 2024

• October 2024

What if striking a pose could not only make you look good but also help you embody who you’re meant to become? Demonstrating the art of mindful posing, portrait photographer and TikTok’s “King of Poses” David Suh shares body language secrets to help your most authentic, confident self show up for every photo.

About the speaker

David Suh

TikTok’s “King of Poses”

Reality Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Our perception of reality is a subjective lived experience, a virtual construct shaped by our senses, biology, and personal history.

Image: Denis Argyriou, via Unsplash

By: Shimon Edelman

(thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)

Things are not as they are seen, nor are they otherwise.
—”Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra”

It’s always night inside my skull — yours too, unless there are actual gaping holes in it. This proposition would be unremarkable, were it not for my visual experience, which often suggests otherwise. What it suggests right now, with me being awake and aware and my eyes open, is that the place from which I look out at the world is just behind the bridge of my nose. Even more strikingly, I see what I see through what appears to be a large oval hole in the front of my head. But when I feel around with my fingertips in search of it, I find that all is well with my face. This can only mean one thing: that the sensory reality that I inhabit is virtual. To put it less gently, I am living a lie.1

This article is excerpted from Shimon Edelman’s book “Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths.”

That the lie is being perpetrated by me on myself is something of a solace, as is the realization that it fits right into the bigger picture of what consciousness is. And I know I can — praise be to evolution — by and large trust my perception not to lead me into grave error, such as stepping off a cliff, or overlooking a pair of watchful eyes in tall grass, or otherwise messing with my chances of having and raising children. The perceived world is an illusion, but it is a useful one.

The predicament of the brain, confined to the perpetual darkness inside the skull, is, after all, not as dire as it sounds. The senses gather and make good use of enough information about what is happening on the outside to keep the virtual reality rig alive and kicking. If there is still any unease left, it comes from too much thinking, and too much worrying, about far-out things like ultimate truth. One such worry that arises out of thinking about perception is this: Given that everything we perceive is a virtual construct, how can we keep believing that our senses reveal to us the world as it really is?

Umwelten

The realization that the perceived world is virtual immediately leads to another one: that what it looks like should depend on the kind of virtual reality engine that one employs. Things are likely to look very different for species whose brain, body, and ecology all differ from the human “standard.” The same goes even for humans who happen to have special abilities. A useful, if fictional, prop for thinking about these matters is Zatōichi, the hero of a long-running action film series in Japan, whose prowess with a sword was not in the least impaired by his blindness. The trope, which the viewers loved, was that the Blind Swordsman leveled the playing field against sighted opponents by making better use of his remaining senses and his other skills. (He did not always play fair: In some fight scenes, he would first cut off the wicks of the candles, plunging everything into darkness.)

When a human and a dog go for a walk, the leash between them has each end in a different virtual world.

A key insight into Zatōichi’s situation is that light is of no use to him, nor is it even present as such in his perceptual world; and yet he acts as if the scene were brightly lit. Imagine this: Zatōichi and a sighted human walk into a barn. Make it a dark barn. Inside, the two of them meet a bat and an owl. There are now four qualitatively different kinds of perceptual worlds in play; five, if we count the mice scurrying on the floor; six, if the cat wanders in. Jakob von Uexküll, the ethologist who was among the first to realize the inevitable idiosyncrasy of each “lived world,” or Umwelt, remarked that “the dog is surrounded by dog things and the dragonfly is surrounded by dragonfly things.” When a human and a dog go for a walk, the leash between them has each end in a different virtual world.

How things really are

If different species, or even different individuals belonging to the same species, inhabit different perceptual worlds, what can we know about what the real world is like? Clearly enough to make action possible; apart from that, not much. Amazingly, the more basic a question about that real world seems, the more difficult it is to get a definitive answer to it. Is it dark at night? The sense in which it is for us is of little concern to a bat, and of no concern to a mole. Is air thick? Not really to us, but sufficiently so for a swallow to push against during its aerial acrobatics. Is water wet? Not to a duck or a water strider. In the face of such differences, it seems silly to insist that our perceptual world is somehow privileged or that what we perceive is how things really are.2

How things look and feel depends not only on who is doing the looking and feeling, but also on what action or other purpose it serves, as well as on the perceiver’s experiential history (and therefore on memory) and bodily and emotional state. I may see a rock outcropping encountered on a hike as a human face or as a battering ram, depending on where my mind was wandering as I was walking up to it (arguably, the best hiking experience requires that the hiker practice just seeing instead of seeing as).3

When I am hungry, a mountain track that I am facing looks steeper than right after a meal. The prospect of jumping at six o’clock in the morning into the indoor pool, in which the water is kept cool to prevent lap swimmers from overheating, feels discomforting to different degrees, depending on whether it is summer or winter outside, as I found out, having been doing this three times a week for many years. Luckily, it helps to think about other matters while swimming. For example, anticipating how the chapter that I am working on is going to end literally warms me up: It distracts me from the initial feeling of cold and I also swim faster, so that it takes me a couple of minutes less to do my usual 3,200 yards.

As we find ourselves compelled to doubt the very notion of objective truth about what the world is like, can science help? Yes, as long as we don’t expect it to do the impossible. Whatever the world is “really” like, evolution has been clearly successful — in an endless variety of strange and beautiful ways — in coming up with effective means of dealing with it. Science, which operates on much the same principles of variation and selection, can be at least equally successful. But evolution has no use for questions of ultimate truth and scientists too are supposed to shun them. In some disciplines, they have learned to do so. Is the electron really a wave or a particle? Quantum mechanics, an epitome of theoretical and practical success in physics, rightly refuses such questions.

The complexity of the human brain greatly exceeds that of any other physical system that we know of, so that in perception science it is even more important not to waste time on arguing about absolutes. What color is this banana? Purple (it’s my favorite variety from Costa Rica), but there is no matter of objective fact about this observation, because color has no physical definition: It is entirely the construct of the observer’s visual system in its interaction with the environment.4 At least as far as color is concerned, things are neither as they seem, nor otherwise.

There is a philosophical tradition out there that holds this — the essential emptiness of all things — to be an ultimate truth in its own right; indeed, the only ultimate truth. Some find this notion liberating — the religious tradition that is built around that philosophy holds this to be the only liberating notion. Others, like the reluctant hero of Ursula Le Guin’s “The Lathe of Heaven,” find it hard:

There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.

But now that we have seen it, bear it we must.


Shimon Edelman is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He is the author of several books including “The Consciousness Revolutions: From Amoeba Awareness to Human Emancipation” (Springer) and “Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths: A Realist’s View of the Human Condition,” from which this article is excerpted.

  1. The hole-in-the-face eye-opening exercise appears in a 2013 article by neuroscientist Bjorn Merker’s in the context of his theory of the brain basis of consciousness. If you try it at home, make sure to protect your corneas.
  2. The inseparability of species-specific or rather Umwelt-specific perception and action has been stressed by ecological psychologists such as William Warren.
  3. The notion of “seeing as,” originally due to Ludwig Wittgenstein (“Philosophical Investigations,” 1958), has also been discussed by Douglas Hofstadter (“On Seeing A’s and Seeing As,” 1995). It is a key component of theories of visual perception and consciousness.
  4. The claim that perception cannot be objective is central to the Interface Theory. I have discussed some evolution-related qualifications to this theory elsewhere. This theory and the debate that surrounds it are very relevant to thinking.

Is Truth Relative?

Viewing truth as context-dependent doesn’t diminish its value — it invites nuance and thoughtful engagement with differing perspectives.

Photo: Adobe Stock, bearok

By: Michael P. Lynch

(thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)

Relativism, almost more than any other philosophical topic, gets people riled up. Discussions of it pepper the internet, fill op-ed pages, and crop up in the Pope’s encyclicals. Opinions differ, to put it mildly, running from Stanley Fish’s declaration that relativism “is just another name for serious thought” to the conviction of conservative critics Allan Bloom and Robert Bork that relativism threatens to end Western civilization as we know it.

This article is excerpted from Michael P. Lynch’s book “True to Life: Why Truth Matters.”

Relativism about truth is nonetheless an idea with a venerable history, whose original champion, at least in Western culture, is usually thought to be the Greek philosopher, Protagoras. According to Plato at least, Protagoras believed that man is the measure of all things — be they values or the more mundane objects of everyday life. Plato interpreted this as an endorsement of the view that truth in general is in the eye of the beholder, or is relative. Nowadays, it is more common to encounter endorsements of relativism outside of philosophy departments. Indeed, the idea, or at least what appears to be the idea, has taken root across the intellectual spectrum — in anthropology, sociology, the humanities, and religious studies.

By that standard, Protagoras’s idea is one of the most successful philosophical theories of all time. The “über thought” behind relativism is that different opinions can be equally true relative to different standards. Interestingly, relativism is often motivated by some of the same things that motivate skepticism. People disagree about almost everything. And about some things, like religion, or politics, or morality, their disagreements are so wide and deep it can be difficult to find any common ground. Add to this the fact that our thoughts and perceptions are likely to bear the imprint of our biases, background assumptions, and expectations, and we arrive at the following premises:

⠀(1) People have different beliefs about what is true.
⠀(2) There is no way of stepping outside of our beliefs and checking to see ⠀whose are objectively true.

From these premises, skeptics conclude that there is some objective fact of the matter about who is right and who is wrong, but that we just can’t find out what it is. Relativists draw a different conclusion: Not that we can’t know what is true, but that there simply isn’t any objective truth to know. Truth is always truth in context; what is true for one person might not be true for another.

If truth is relative to culture, some believe, then it is culture that matters, not truth.

Despite the hostility that debates over relativism generate, many relativists and their opponents seem to agree on one thing. What they agree on is that if relativism really is the truth about truth, then truth doesn’t matter. If truth is relative to culture, some believe, then it is culture that matters, not truth. This is seen as terrifying to some, liberating to others.

Unsurprisingly, the extremists on both sides are wrong. Relativism is not necessarily a threat to truth’s value. The common temptation to think otherwise is the result of another myth: that truth matters only if it is absolute. But like the fable that truth can’t be a goal unless we can be certain that we’ve reached it, we need to see beyond this fiction. One can grant that some truths are relative without implying that having true beliefs is not important, or a goal of thought, or worth caring about for its own sake. This is not to say that there aren’t versions of relativism that do have these, and worse, implications. Some relativist views are crazy. But not all are. When it comes to relativism, my advice is to roll up your sleeves, make the necessary distinctions, keep the good, and discard the bad.

Simple(minded) Relativism

Philosophers have been busy refuting relativism about truth ever since Plato. This is deceptively easy when the target is the idea that truth is relative to the tiniest perspectives, like a single individual. Truth, on this position, is something like “truth for me.” Call this simple relativism.

Here’s why simple relativism is so simple to refute. Suppose I am such a relativist and announce that there is no such thing as truth per se, there is only truth-for-me or truth-for-you. A fair question to ask would be whether the statement I just made is true or just true-for-me. If I say that relativism is simply true, then I have apparently contradicted myself. For if relativism is true (for everyone, as it were) then it is false — it is not true that all truth is relative. On the other hand, if I go the other way and say that relativism is only true relative to me, I am consistent but unable to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with me. You need only remark that relativism is not true for you, and therefore false. Simple relativism, therefore, is either contradictory or terminally unconvincing.

Whether a relativist would accept this little argument, I am unsure; perhaps simple relativists don’t care about convincing anyone to be relativists. But there is an even simpler problem with simple relativism. It is this. Simple relativism implies that all my beliefs are true. For if truth is truth-for-me, and since everything I believe is true for me (or I wouldn’t, obviously, believe it), everything I believe, according to the theory, is true. I never make mistakes. How convenient!

This last point is the damning one. If there is one thing I know, it is that I don’t know everything, and no theory that says otherwise can be true or true for me.

One reason that people sometimes favor relativism — even simple relativism — over objective theories of truth is the sense that relativism encourages greater toleration. The thought that there is Truth out there with a capital “T” often goes together, relativists have pointed out, with the conviction that some people have privileged access to the truth and others don’t. Just this sentiment was the hallmark of 19th-century Western colonialism, when missionaries worked with the armies and police of colonial governments to force people to believe, or at least say they believed, what the colonialists wanted them to. But if there is no such thing as objective truth, then no one occupies a privileged position on the truth. We can no longer justify forcing people to believe in our gods by saying that we know the truth and they don’t. Abandoning the idea of objective truth seems to encourage a more tolerant outlook on life.

Concern for toleration is apt and important. And many people who have believed in objective truth have been intolerant. But it is a confusion to think that a belief in objective truth necessarily implies a lack of respect for other ways of life and other types of beliefs. The cause of intolerance is not objectivity but dogmatism. It stems from a sense that one can’t be wrong. Many people do indeed think that they (and they alone) know the real truth, whether we are talking about God, apple pie, or the New York Yankees. It is depressingly common for people to think they personally know what the truth is on any subject. But one needn’t believe that we know anything for certain to think that there is objectivity. The degree to which we believe there is objective truth about some subject is the degree to which we must admit that we can always be wrong about that subject — which is to say that we cannot be certain that our beliefs about it are correct. If truth is objective, then we must always be open to the possibility of being wrong. Thus respect for others should lead us to be careful about claiming that we know anything for certain, and that means believing that truth is more than just truth-for-me.

Simple relativism, were we able to make complete sense of it, would obviously undermine truth’s value. If everything you believe is true anyway, there is not much point in saying that you ought to believe the truth. There wouldn’t be much point in talking about truth at all. A basic point of even having a truth concept is to help us evaluate some statements as right and others as wrong. But if no one ever makes a mistake, such a concept would be pointless.

Luckily for us, simple relativism is simpleminded. Not every belief is true. Some are false, as attested by anyone foolish enough to believe simple relativism.

A closing point. Conservative critics often write as if simple relativism was the scourge of the Western world. They portray all college students, for example, as being brainwashed into this type of relativism by wild-eyed professors whose politics are somewhere to the left of Castro’s. And philosophy professors, who hear what seem to be endorsements of simple relativism all the time from their students, sometimes call it “freshman relativism.” In fact, simple relativism appears more popular than it actually is. It is true that in ordinary conversation, questions about morality, art, or politics are usually referred to as “matters of opinion.” We might also call them “who’s to say” issues, given the ubiquitous use of that phrase when such issues are brought up (as in: shrug, followed by “who’s to say?”). The funny thing about such questions, of course, is that we all do have opinions, and passionate opinions, about them. The death penalty, gay rights, arms control — we care about these issues. Thus in asking “who’s to say” we answer our own question: we are.

The phrase “it is true for me but not for you” is most often just shorthand for: “I believe it, you don’t, so let’s talk about something else.”

Further, we all recognize that there can be better and worse opinions about any of these subject matters — some opinions are simply better informed, more coherent, or just darn well more interesting than others. We even think that some opinions (2 plus 2 equals 4) are true and others (humans are invulnerable to bullets) are false. So why are so many of us apt to announce that they are not “matters of fact” but “matters of opinion” and assume that this means that truth is relative? Part of the reason is simple: When someone says that “this is true for me,” they don’t necessarily mean to be endorsing a philosophical position. The phrase “it is true for me but not for you” is most often just shorthand for: “I believe it, you don’t, so let’s talk about something else.” Similarly, the phrase “it is a matter of opinion” is a conversation-stopper, a way of getting out of a debate one doesn’t want to be in. This desire is often a very good thing, but such conversation-stoppers sometimes prevent us from having reasoned discussions about the issues that matter most. And they encourage us to think we are saying something deep (“truth is relative”) when really we are doing no such thing. At best, we are either stopping the conversation, or trying to express (in perhaps a less than felicitous way) the idea that everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. But of course, the fact that one should allow other people the opportunity to speak their minds and (to as great a degree as possible) practice what they preach doesn’t entail that no one has ever been wrong about anything.

So don’t assume that people are simple relativists because they attach qualifications to their opinions. This is a point that those who like to blame relativism for everything would do well to keep in mind. Simple relativism is a bogeyman; it is incoherent and believed by few if anyone.


Michael P. Lynch is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he directs the Humanities Institute. He is the author of several books, including “In Praise of Reason,” “On Truth in Politics” (Princeton University Press), and “True to Life,” from which this article is excerpted.

Weekly Invitational Translation: Money must be earned, inherited, won or stolen.

Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract” comparing and contrasting what you think is the truth with what you can syllogistically, axiomatically and mathematically (using word equations) prove is the truth. It is not an effort to change, alter or heal anything.

The claims in a Translation may seem outrageous, but they are always (or should always be) based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is one Translation from this week. 

1)    Truth is that which is so.  That which is not truth is not so.  Therefore truth is all that is.  Truth being all is therefore total, therefore whole, therefore complete.  Truth being true, is therefore accurate, therefore right, therefore flawless, therefore perfection.  I think therefore I am.  Since I am and since Truth is all that is, therefore I, being, am Truth.  Since I, being, am Truth, therefore I have all the attributes of Truth.  Therefore I, being, am total, whole, complete, true, accurate, right, flawless, perfection. Since I am mind (self-evident) and since I, being, am Truth, therefore Truth is Mind.  (Two things equal to a third thing are equal to each other.)

2)    Money must be earned, inherited, won or stolen

Word-tracking:
money:  credit
credit:  to trust, believe
earn:  make money by working, harvest
inherit:  heir
heir:  right to property when someone dies
win:  victory, conquer 
conquer:  to seek diligently
steal:  to take, capture, 
to seize:  to claim as one’s own

3)  Truth being all that is, there is nothing other than truth, therefore Truth is one.  Since Truth is one, everything is One’s own.  Since everything is One’s own and since I/we are Truth, We’ve won.  Everything is mine/ours.  Truth being true is therefore right, therefore proper, therefore property. And Truth being all that is, therefore all is the property of Truth.  Truth being whole, is therefore full, therefore plenty, and Truth being all that is, the harvest of Truth is here, now and plenty. Truth being all that is and Truth being true is therefore trustworthy, therefore creditworthy. 

4)    Truth is one.
        Everything is One’s own.
        We’ve won.  Everything is mine/ours.
         All is the property of Truth.
        The harvest of Truth is here, now and plenty. 
        Truth is creditworthy. 

5)    I/We are creditworthy.

Weekly Invitational Translation Group invites your participation.  If you would like to submit a Translation on any subject, feel free to send your weekly Translation to  zonta1111@aol.com and we will anonymously post it on the Bathtub Bulletin on Friday.

For information about Translation or other Prosperos classes go to: https://www.theprosperos.org/teaching.

Tarot Card for January 31: Prince of Disks

The Prince of Disks

The Prince of Disks has an unfailing determination to reach his goals, achieve his ambitions and create a world he is comfortable to live in. He has an interesting way of doing this – he takes every task a stage at a time. Whilst keeping the end aim in mind, he diligently attends to the task in hand, completing it satisfactorily and then moving on smoothly to the next logical stage.This method of working has numerous advantages – there’s the satisfaction of completing something – even though you might still be aware that this particular piece of work is just one step in the journey.Another plus is that work unfolds in a productive stream – each process deriving from the last. This often allows you to pick up on any detail you may have overlooked or missed.Also there is a consistent sense of progress – a feeling that you are drawing closer to your goals. Every single achievement is composed of many small acts which add together to create the whole.The Prince of Disks is a fertile and abundant card – it signifies the planting of seeds which will grow into great big trees. The tree would not exist without the seed which was planted in the very first place.So… on a day ruled by the Prince of Disks, you need to take everything a stage at a time. Decide early on what you’re actually hoping to achieve during the day – and make this a reachable goal. Then plot your method of working toward it. Now… off you go!!!

Affirmation: “I now locate my goals and work towards them with great energy.”

There’s one key villain in the L.A. wildfires. Any student of history knows who it is

By John BriscoeUpdated Jan 27, 2025 (SFChronicle.com)

A pump jack extracts oil from the ground in Signal Hill (Los Angeles County). California played a role in getting the U.S. and the world hooked on oil.Jae C. Hong/Associated Press 2021

The loss of property in the Los Angeles fires — put to one side, just for now, the tragic loss of life — is yet another natural tragedy for Californians. For those few property owners who will survive with resources enough to rebuild, the years ahead will be a hellscape beyond the those we’ve seen in the images of the burned areas in Pacific Palisades and the areas of the other fires.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken one minuscule step to alleviate the distress of those whose properties have been lost or damaged. As the New York Times recently observed, California’s environmental review and land-use laws are the most sclerotic in the country. Those reviews, and the years of lawsuits they invariably entail, and the endless permits that must be obtained, all requiring the payment of exorbitant fees, would mean most properties will never be rebuilt. 

Add to that the hell that owners of property in the “coastal zone” would face. The California Coastal Commission is notoriously disdainful of private property rights, notwithstanding they are enshrined in the state’s Constitution, as well as the United States Constitution. In the past three decades, the state’s Coastal Commission has pushed an agenda of “planned retreat,” which is its euphemism for requiring people in the coastal zone to move inland. Anywhere inland.  

Why? Because, they say, human-caused (“anthropogenic” in the language of those who know) global warming has caused sea-level rise, which will cause erosion and inundation of the coast. And so, you must move. They don’t pay you to move. They simply make it impossible to stay.  

In addition to rising sea levels, global warming is also to blame, says the state, for the extraordinary weather events and wildfires we have been experiencing.

Newsom has recently issued an executive order reining in the most draconian elements of California’s laws governing rebuilding after the Los Angeles fires. That is a good, though quite small step, toward discharging the state’s responsibility.

There is global warming. Rising seas are a result, as are extraordinary weather and fire events. And if there are anthropogenic causes of global warming — and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that there are — there is one clear villain in it all.

The state of California.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still burning in September 1945 when California engaged the federal government in the Supreme Court to establish the state’s primary right to drill for oil deeper and deeper into the seabed offshore of California.  

The state pushed to drill, it won, and it coddled the oil industry, the automobile industry and the tire industry.  

In the Los Angeles basin and the San Francisco Bay Area, efficient intercity light rail service had worked well for generations. In the Bay Area, it was the Key System; in Southern  California, the Red Cars served the people. In the same years after World War II, a consortium of Phillips Oil and Standard Oil of California (today, Chevron), General Motors and Firestone Tire and Rubber combined to form an entity with the anodyne name National City Lines. The consortium surreptitiously (to the public that is — but not to the state) bought the two intercity rail lines, ran them into the ground and then “persuaded” officials on the California Public Utilities Commission and up the state government chain to allow them to abandon the rail services. And with those services, abandon the public that had been served by it. The consortium succeeded.

The days after the state gleefully gave its approval to the cessation of intercity rail service, National City Lines sent workers to rip up the tracks and rails and sell them for scrap.  And it immediately sold off the vast rights-of-way for pennies, to anyone. Reacquiring rights of way, the auto and oil lobbyists knew, would be the most expensive part of ever reestablishing intercity rail service. The state then embarked on the most monumental freeway-building frenzy in history.

Thereby California brought on the immense burning of oil for our cars and the destruction of cheap and efficient mass transit, which set the standard for the U.S. Interstate Highway System and the addiction of the rest of the world to oil. It sentenced us to climate change and global warming.

Isn’t it time the state of California stops pretending it is the Great Climate Savior and acknowledges its complicity — its leadership — in getting the world hooked on petroleum and other fossil fuels, and the great damage — “existential” is a word it often uses — that addiction has caused?  

At the end of last year, the International Court of Justice in The Hague (often referred to as “the World Court”) heard what many have described as the most important lawsuit in history. The court will this year decide whether nations whose polluting has contributed to climate change are liable to those who suffer the effects. Most observers believe the court will answer yes.

The principle applies no less to parts of nations, such as states of the United States.

Reparations from the state to the property owners in Los Angeles are in order, and soon. They are already late.  

John Briscoe is a San Francisco lawyer, poet and author whose firm represented one of the key small-island states in the pending climate-change case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.