Inspired by [post=8448974]this post[/post], I remembered this epigram that struck me when as a young man I first saw it in a toilet stall (no, not the “here I sit all broken-hearted” phrase):
“To be is to do” - Philosopher A.
“To do is to be” - Philosopher B.
“Do be do be do” - Sinatra.
In my case, I saw it with A = Socrates and B = Sartre.
But a quick internet search this morning showed many variations, with the names Socrates, Sartre, Nietzsche, Kant, Descartes, Voltaire appearing as either philosopher A or philosopher B.
Which would be the most appropriate for A, and which for B?
“To be is to do” might be a decent match for Aristotle. One of his key ideas was to define what an object is in terms of what it does, and a good object by how well it does it. For instance, a knife is a thing which cuts, and a good knife is a thing which cuts well.
According to a magnet I saw for sale today, it was Nietzche for the first and Kant for the second. Of course, I’m not sure which order the two phrases were in.
I know this is not a philosophy 099 course, but I wonder about this. Was there something inherently wrong in that idea? It seems so self-evident that I think I must be missing something. I can’t conceive of another way to say what a good knife is. What am I not seeing? If it doesn’t cut well, it can’t be considered a good knife, can it? How would Aristotle have defined a box cutter?
Not that I know of, and I didn’t mean to imply that there was. What’s perhaps more controvertial is the extension of the idea to us: Aristotle defined a “person” as a thing which thinks, which would make a “good person” one who thinks well. Which then, of course, raises the question of what constitutes “thinking well”, and whether a psychopathic genius is a “good person”.