Delight Springs

Monday, March 18, 2024

George Plimpton

George signed my old copy of his Sidd Finch* fable, in Cooperstown in 2001. He'd just talked about the pleasurable experience of connecting two remote points in space with a hurled baseball. I think he was a connoisseur of obscure but distinct pleasures.

"Writing is a very lonely business and when you come to a book fair and you sit at a table and people come up to you with books that they've had in their library for many years and they think it's been somewhat enhanced by a signature, it's always a pleasure."
George Plimpton, born on this day in 1927.**
**It's the birthday of George Plimpton [and John Updike, to make a pleasing writerly connection], born in New York (1927). He was the founding editor of The Paris Review, a job that he held for 50 years, from 1953 until his death in 2003, and he conducted long, insightful interviews — including one of only two interviews that Hemingway gave in his life. WA

*George's late-life hearing wasn't spot-on...


but I didn't mind. Just glad I got to meet him, he was only with us another couple of years. 

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Faith, gratitude, sublimity, happiness

A remarkable 30 minutes with Paul Simon and Stephen Colbert


http://dlvr.it/T49Dbg

Colbert and Simon on religious faith, gratitude, happiness

This interview is "incredible"-meaning delightful

I don't agree with Colbert on one point, I do think happiness (not sublimity) is the more profound "goal"… but I respect Stephen's thoughtful (if slightly manic) reflections here. And his experience, and his pain and suffering. And I share his gratitude. I just don't think I owe it to a god.

But as Montaigne said, "Que sais-je"… I don't know, and neither do you. Believe what you will.

Paul's a Yankee fan and a scorekeeper, and his gratitude is unconditional. He and I are co-congregants in the Church of Baseball. Time to cue up Graceland...



Friday, March 15, 2024

Infinite pi

Why do mathematicians care so much about pi? Is it some kind of weird circle fixation? Hardly. "The beauty of pi, in part, is that it puts infinity within reach," Steven Strogatz writes. "Even young children get this."http://nyer.cm/YRAp5EU

It's also nice that someone in our Honors College provided free 🥧 yesterday. I care about 🥧 too.

Stephen Hawking (who died on Einstein’s birthday) on Einstein’s & Spinoza’s God

I use the word "God" in an impersonal sense, like Einstein did, for the laws of nature, so knowing the mind of God is knowing the laws of nature. My prediction is that we will know the mind of God by the end of this century…

https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/07/17/stephen-hawking-brief-answers-to-the-big-questions/

Thursday, March 14, 2024

YouNeverKnow

A great word, though an unsettling state of mind. But this much I know...


http://dlvr.it/T441tM

A nation of Know Nothings?

Long day ahead, first of two Thursdays when I get to stay at school for my block of classes in the MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) tag-team course on Knowledge, 6-9 pm. My job is to represent philosophers' contribution to the subject. What do we know? Should it bother us to know how much we don't know? Etc.

One thing I know for sure: Younger Daughter was thrilled yesterday afternoon to trade in her beloved but miles-weary 2014 Buick Encore, a.k.a. Steve, for a 2023 Nissan Frontier pickup she's dubbed Frankie

And I know she deserves every happiness.

I also know that with her new vehicle and her looming new career, she's showing the kind of courage Elizabeth Zott urged in Lessons in Chemistry (a truck-warming copy of which I was happy to give her as we awaited the e-signing and paperwork). "Courage is the root of change…"

That's the first thing I'll say about knowledge tonight. If we know anything, we know it takes courage to change and wisdom to know when to stay the course.

That could also be my segue to talk about the Know Nothing-ism I think characterizes the rise of authoritarian bluster in our national politics. But I should probably steer clear and stick to the relatively-safe space of Socrates, Pyrrho, Montaigne, Descartes et al.

If I could muster the courage, though...

The Biden administration has "passed a series of laws that rivaled President Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s…" *

Their opponent is a thug who promises to end democracy as we've known it.

Seems like a no-brainer. But it seems we've become a nation of Know Nothings.

So we'll see.
==
*HCR continues:
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan rebuilt the economy after the worst of the coronavirus pandemic; the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act) is rebuilding the nation's roads and bridges; the $280 billion Chips and Science Act invests in semiconductor manufacture and scientific research; the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act enables the government to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies and invests in programs to combat climate change. Projects funded by these measures are so popular that Republicans who voted against them are trying to claim credit. 

Biden, Harris, and the Democrats have diversified the government service, defended abortion rights, reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, relieved debt by enforcing the terms of student loans, passed a gun safety law, and reinforced NATO.

They set out to overturn supply-side economics, restoring the system on which the nation had been based between 1933 and 1981, in which the government regulated business, maintained a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. The result was the strongest economic recovery from the pandemic of any country in the world…"

And yet, droves of voters say they prefer the guy who vows to be a dictator on Day 1. 

As the old Dominican hurler Joacquin Andujar once said, when asked to name his favorite English word: youneverknow. 

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Ripples: Terry Pratchett

'No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence.' The great humanist author Terry Pratchett. He was our patron and is sorely missed. He died #OnThisDay 2015. GNU Terry Pratchett.

https://www.threads.net/@humanists_uk/post/C4ajxc3I9ur/?xmt=AQGzKkiKd2K0_NxXdYXJBmuxbTDFt3-Xw8wBpkH7flo3kg

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Elizabeth Zott, meliorist

Meliorists are social chemists, who embrace and catalyze constructive change. We must learn their lessons.


http://dlvr.it/T3yTVW

Lessons in Chemistry

Lessons in Chemistry was good on screen. The book is better.

Elizabeth Zott publicly and unapologetically declares herself an atheist. ("Actually, a humanist. But I have to admit, some days the human race makes me sick.") She loves dogs, works to empower the oppressed, instills confidence and curiosity in her daughter, and openly resists ignorance and venality in '50s-'60s workplaces of the sort that so many women of her generation had to endure in silence. 

Every young woman, every young person needs to learn her lessons in humanity.
Whenever you feel afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change - and change is what we're chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make this pledge. No more holding yourself back. No more subscribing to others' opinions of what you can and cannot achieve. And no more allowing anyone to pigeonhole you into useless categories of sex, race, economic status, and religion. Do not allow your talents to lie dormant, ladies. Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what YOU will change. And then get started.

I think [religion] lets us off the hook. I think it teaches us that nothing is really our fault; that something or someone else is pulling the strings; the ultimately, we're not to blame for the way things are; that to improve things, we should pray. But the truth is, we are very much responsible for the badness in the world. And we have the power to fix it.

Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun

Chemistry is change... that’s what we need more of—people who refuse to accept the status quo, who aren’t afraid to take on the unacceptable.
She was, in short, a meliorist of the highest order.

(There's a nice interview of the author appended to the audio edition.)

Monday, March 11, 2024

Spring "feels like coming home"

On the Wild Intoxications of Spring

My happiness is twofold. Spring is here! But also: Thank God it didn’t come too terribly early this year.

"...I think of one of my favorite lines from E.B. White: “Notes on springtime and on anything else that comes to mind of an intoxicating nature.” What else is there to write about in springtime but anything that comes to mind of an intoxicating nature? It’s been a dark winter of worries, but the wildflowers are blooming and the birds are singing again. It feels like coming home."

Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/opinion/anthropocene-spring-backyard-census.html?smid=em-share

‘Fantastic Voyage’-ish A.I.

A.I. Is Learning What It Means to Be Alive

Given troves of data about genes and cells, A.I. models have made some surprising discoveries. What could they teach us someday?

...“I think these models are going to help us get some really fundamental understanding of the cell, which is going to provide some insight into what life really is,” Dr. Quake said.


Having a map of what’s possible and impossible to sustain life might also mean that scientists could actually create new cells that don’t yet exist in nature. The foundation model might be able to concoct chemical recipes that transform ordinary cells into new, extraordinary ones. Those new cells might devour plaque in blood vessels or explore a diseased organ to report back on its condition.


“It’s very ‘Fantastic Voyage’-ish,” Dr. Quake admitted. “But who knows what the future is going to hold?”

..."Professors should be very, very nervous."


https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/science/ai-learning-biology.html?smid=em-share

Don’t Panic

It's the birthday of science fiction writer Douglas Adams, born in Cambridge, England (1952). He was unemployed, depressed, living in his mother's house, when he remembered a night from years before. He was a teenager traveling around Europe with his guidebook The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe, and that night he was lying in a field in Innsbruck, drunk, looking up at the stars, and he thought somebody should write a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy as well. And so years later, he wrote the radio play The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, chronicling the adventures of the kindly and boring Arthur Dent, who is still wearing his dressing gown when he is whisked away from his suburban English home just in time to escape Earth being demolished by an interstellar highway.
In 1978, the radio broadcasts were such a success that Adams turned them into a series of five successful novels: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), and Mostly Harmless (1992).
He said, "I find that writing is a constant battle with exactly the same problems you've always had."

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-monday-march-ca4?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

He died at 49. 

He also said: 

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by."




The poetry of Spring Training

Spring Training

by Maxine Kumin

              for Victor

Some things never change: the velvet flock
of the turf, the baselines smoothed to suede,
the ancient smell of peanuts, the harsh smack
the ball makes burrowing into the catcher's mitt.

Here in the Grapefruit League's trellised shade
you catch Pie Traynor's lofting rightfield foul
all over again. You're ten in Fenway Park
and wait past suppertime for him to autograph it

then race for home all goosebumps in the dark
to roll the keepsake ball in paraffin,
soften your secondhand glove with neat's-foot oil
and wrap your Louisville Slugger with friction tape.

The Texas Leaguers, whatever league you're in
still tantalize, the way they waver and drop.
Carl Hubbell's magical screwball is still
give or take sixty years unhittable.

Sunset comes late but comes, inexorable.
What lingers is the slender hook of hope.

"Spring Training" by Maxine Kumin, from Connecting the Dots. © Norton, 1996. Reprinted with permission.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-monday-march-ca4?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Friday, March 1, 2024

E. B. White’s day

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

E. B. White's wry and pithy ambivalence about balancing civic commitment with personal enjoyment has long been one of my favorite statements ever. It captures the pragmatist's great challenge: to be a happy meliorist. Is this where he said it first, in a 1969 interview when he was 70?

The rest of the interview is pretty great too, including:

"It has never struck me as harmful to make a conscious effort to elevate one's thoughts, in the hope that by doing so one's writing will get off the ground, even if only for a few seconds (like Orville Wright) and to a low altitude. I am an egoist, inclined to inject myself into almost everything I write. This usually calls for good taste, if one is to stay alive. I'm not against good taste in writing, however unpopular it may be today.

"I was a flop as a daily reporter. Every piece had to be a masterpiece--and before you knew it, Tuesday was Wednesday.

"My deadline now is death. Thurber once said it's remarkable how many people are up and around."

"How should one adjust to age?" Mr. White asked, and replied: "In principle, one shouldn't adjust. In fact, one does. (Or I do.) When my head starts knocking because of my attempt to write, I quit writing instead of carrying on as I used to do when I was young.

"These are adjustments. But I gaze into the faces of our senior citizens in our Southern cities, and they wear a sad look that disturbs me. I am sorry for all those who have agreed to grow old. I haven't agreed yet. Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself--a lad of about 19…

Universities have become very big, and with the bigness comes remoteness, inaccessibility. This is bad, and it causes trouble. When I was an undergraduate, there were a few professors who went out of their way to befriend students. At the house of one of these men I felt more at home than I did in my own home with my own mother and father. I felt excited, instructed, accepted, influential, and in a healthy condition.

Apparently, most students today don't enjoy any such experience, and they are ready to dismantle the Establishment before they have either defined it or tasted it. In a democracy, dissent is as essential as the air we breathes. It's only when students form an elite society, immune from ordinary restraints, that I worry about dissent…

I seldom peddle advice to the young. Most of them seem better informed than I am, and they have their own special problems.

I'll say this, though: Every country is entitled to a few mistakes. The Vietnam war is a mistake. The Selective Service is inequitable. Yet even a country that is in the midst of a mistake must have an armed force loyal to its basic beliefs and prepared to defend its general principles. If that were to go, all would go…

I was never a reader. I was arriving at conclusions almost independently of the entire history of the world. If I sat down to read everything that had been written--I'm a slow reader--I would never have written anything. My joy and my impulse was to get something down on paper myself….

I would rather watch a really gifted plumber than listen to a bad poet. I'd rather watch someone build a good boat than attend the launching of a poorly constructed play. My admirations are wide-ranging and are not confined to arts and letters."

 


Thursday, February 29, 2024

"immediate delight... fruits for life"

Leave "the liver" (but not the delighted liver) out of it

"...Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they religious or of non-religious content.

To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time.

It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.

Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior to others, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It is either because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life..."

WJ, Varieties

But doesn’t just say “no it isn’t”…

(See Monty Python's Argument Clinic)

"The good student contradicts his teacher and makes him more eager to explain and defend the truth."
— Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

https://www.threads.net/@philosophybits/post/C36pHl7r3iG/

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Cheer up & think

Two ways philosophy can help. Worth essaying, as Montaigne would say. Give it a try.

Michel de Montaigne wrote, "The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness."

Linus Pauling said, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." WA

 


Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Letters From Spring: A travelogue from baseball’s past and present - The Athletic

"It was raining in New York — a miserable afternoon in mid-March. Perfect. Grabbed my coat and got my hat, left my worries on the doorstep. Flew to Miami, drove to Fort Lauderdale, saw the banks of lights gleaming in the gloaming, found the ballpark, parked, climbed to the press box, said hello, picked up stats and a scorecard, took the last empty seat, filled out my card (Mets vs. Yankees), rose for the anthem, regarded the emerald field below (the spotless base paths, the encircling palms, the waiting multitudes, the heroes capless and at attention), and took a peek at my watch: four hours and forty minutes to springtime, door to door."

— Roger Angell

I was eight years old when Angell wrote those words during spring training, 1975. I wouldn't first read them until many years later, but when I did read them I was eight years old again. I always am, every year when reading Angell's classic essay, "Sunny Side of the Street." I always thought it could have been called "How long until Springtime, door to door?"
...
Joe Posnanski

http://theathletic.com/2394789/2021/02/18/letters-from-spring-a-travelogue-from-baseballs-past-and-present/

“Why is philosophy important to you?”

Good answer, Massimo. It does help us wade meaningfully and strive more forcefully. Or it can.

"Philosophy, as you know, literally means love of wisdom. To embrace philosophy means to adopt a way of thinking about everything that attempts to wade through the bullshit and to live a meaningful life based on reason and compassion. Since the philosophical stance applies to everything, it is hard for me to imagine something more important.

Even, or perhaps especially, when it comes to personal relationships—with my daughter, my wife, my siblings, my friends, and so forth—it is because of my understanding of philosophy that I keep trying to be a better human being, or the best version of it that I am capable of."

— Massimo Pigliucci
https://open.substack.com/pub/celineleboeuf/p/why-philosophy-massimo-pigliucci?selection=12e95e24-eb44-4879-8068-c8f8d101069d&r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Monday, February 26, 2024

"The sun on your arms or whatever"

I spent a lot of my weekend watching Spring Training on the MLB network.

Here’s part of what draws me back to baseball in the desert every March. 

“...As a sentient being who happens to be a passionate sports fan, I have had ample opportunity to grapple with this question. Why do we bother? We will most likely never meet the athletes we root for. We will never make as much money as they do. Nothing they do affects our physical health, our families or our livelihoods. Yet our emotional well-being rises and falls with their success on the field, on the court and on the baseball diamond.
I believe it’s because, in a world in which tribalism is pulling us apart, the completely imaginary tribalism of the sports fan is a necessary balm. Not because it allows you to celebrate — though you do occasionally get to do that — but because you get to lose. A lot. Nothing brings us together like communal suffering. And this simulated losing helps prepare us for the worst that life can dish out.”
As the late great commissioner said, “it breaks your heart”… and then it strengthens your resilience. It builds the muscles of care, confidence, and perseverance. It's great fun in the sun. And it happens every Spring.

Bill Bradley played a different game (and politics too) but I think he understands the feeling: "If you can have an openness and joy about life that allows you to experience other people, nature, feeling the sun on your arms or whatever every day, you are gonna have a full life, whatever you do." 

Saturday, February 24, 2024

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton

What an ambitious, impressive attempt to bring together the worlds of serious literature, Kantian philosophy, and quantum physics. I'm uncertain (like Heisenberg!) it succeeds but it's wonderfully, entertainingly provocative.

Understanding the world as a "reciprocal reflection of perspectives" is pretty Jamesian, too.

From the postscript:

"Quantum theory is the victory of science over the presuppositions that make science possible. That its findings still register such shock manifests how deeply those presuppositions take root. The physicist Carlo Rovelli puts it this way as he outlines what he calls the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics: "If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no 'outside' to the totality of things…. [W] hat exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. The world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives."[ 1] Indeed, the alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics I have discussed here—from objective collapse to many worlds—are, in his words again, "efforts to squeeze the discoveries of quantum physics into the canons of metaphysical prejudice."[ 2] Those canons of metaphysical prejudice work in mysterious ways. Even as they guide how scientists think about the meaning of their most significant discoveries, they also affect the lives those scientists lead, how they judge their lives, how we all judge our lives."


In short, despite our dearest desires and most desperate dreams, we are finite. That we can only ever understand things in relation to one another means that understanding will always stem from a limited perspective. Our reason propels us to incredible heights—understanding the fundamental components of matter and laws of the universe, seeing almost to the edges of the cosmos and the beginning of time. But it also leads us woefully astray. For the very ability we have to map our world and hence see our way through the dark also treats that map as though it were the world, and hence drapes a new veil over our enlightened eyes.

"Metaphysical prejudice": the perfect term to describe that magical thinking that Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant each explored, engaged with, and ultimately undid. Quantum theory may not gird us against metaphysical prejudice, but we cannot fully grasp its meaning while maintaining that prejudice. And thus, the persistence of its apparent paradoxes serves as a powerful reminder of how deeply set, how necessary to our thinking those prejudices are. When we see an effect, we reach for a cause, out there, in a world that is ubiquitous in space and durable in time, because we know, just know, that is how the world must be. We know so, but we are wrong. There is rigor there, indeed. But to see that we are the chess masters who made it, we must let the angels go. And that, it seems, is the hardest task of all.

— The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton
https://a.co/eN3tq95

Help yourself

"…The most profound achievements of moral and political philosophy lie not in abstract theory or geometric proof but in finding words by which to light our way to lives well-lived. If that is not self-help, what is?"
—Kieran Setiya

Is Philosophy Self-Help? | The Point Magazine

https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/is-philosophy-self-help/

W.E.B. Du Bois

Paternal wisdom from WJ's student-

"Be honest, frank and fearless and get some grasp of the real values of life… Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself."

On W.E.B. Du Bois's birthday, his lovely letter of advice to his daughter.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/02/23/w-e-b-du-bois-yolande-letter/

https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/C3st5cSxv8o/

Friday, February 23, 2024

Lifelong companions

We have much to learn from our most loyal sidekicks, our forever pals.


http://dlvr.it/T38lTX

Freedom of the spirit

Yesterday in CoPhi, some denied that greater freedom for all to pursue happiness (in the spirit of J.S. Mill) would improve society.

Mr. Shirer, and anyone who's ever lived under the thumb of dictatorship, would disagree. I hope this generation of students never has to learn that the hard way.

It's time to vote.
"Living in a totalitarian land taught me to value highly—and fiercely—the very things the dictators denied: tolerance, respect for others and, above all, the freedom of the human spirit."
William L. Shirer, born on this day in 1904
It's the birthday of William L. Shirer, born in Chicago, Illinois (1903). After graduating from college, he expected to spend two months in Europe. He stayed for more than twenty years, and became one of America's most outstanding war correspondents. He spent much of his early career in Vienna, Berlin, and Prague, reporting on the Nazis' rise to power. Back in the United States after the war, Shirer was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. This gave him time to write one of the most famous chronicles of World War Two, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959), which won the National Book Award. WA

Lifelong companions

It's no illusion from their perspective, they're all in. If only humans would learn to "live fully in the moment" that way with one another!

I've now enjoyed the delight of living, and paid the painful price of parting, with a dozen or so lifelong canine companions, going all the way back to Queenie and the little red wagon. Great models of companionable commitment all. And they're all still with me.


"You know the pain is coming, you're going to lose a dog, and there's going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can't support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There's such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware that it comes with an unbearable price." ~Dean Koontz, The Darkest Evening of the Year

Thursday, February 22, 2024

No disembodied philosophers

It's the birthday of an old sourpuss who didn't believe in happiness or the ultimate value of life. But paradoxically perhaps, he is nonetheless a great pleasure to read.

"Schopenhauer believed that we live in a world of continual strife and that the "will," our inner nature, inevitably leads to pain and suffering unless we are able to renounce desire and assume an attitude of resignation. He was a great influence on the literature of Thomas Mann, the music of Richard Wagner, and the psychology of Sigmund Freud." WA

And he was a peripatetic who loved dogs. He walked with a series of poodles he called Atman.


Rousseau, who's on our agenda in CoPhi today, was another peripatetic some thought pathetic. Like Schopenhauer, he was a complex and  damaged personality probably better appreciated from the distance of decades or centuries rather than up close and personal. Our Socrates Express chapter on him is entertaining (and owes something, I suspect, to Gymnasiums of the Mind). I hope it inspires a few of us to go outside, as lately-- in this mild (and yesterday marvelous, at 70 degrees) mid-TN February-- I've been doing after every morning class before lunch. One of these days soon we'll all get out there during class. "Doing and not-doing" is well worth doing.
"When we walk, we are simultaneously doing and not-doing. On one level, our minds are engaged: focusing on the terrain ahead, cognizant of the periphery. Yet none of this thinking occupies much cerebral space. There's plenty left over for meandering, and freak following.

No wonder so many philosophers walked. Socrates, of course, liked nothing more than strolling in the agora. Nietzsche regularly embarked on spirited two-hour jaunts in the Swiss Alps, convinced "all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." Thomas Hobbes had a walking stick custom made with a portable inkwell attached so he could record his thoughts as he ambled. Thoreau regularly took four-hour treks across the Concord countryside, his capacious pockets overflowing with nuts, seeds, flowers, Indian arrowheads, and other treasures. Immanuel Kant, naturally, maintained a highly regimented walking routine. Every day, he'd eat lunch at 12: 45 p.m., then depart for a one-hour constitutional—never more, never less—on the same boulevard in Königsberg, Prussia (now Russia). So unwavering was Kant's routine that the people of Königsberg set their watches by his perambulations.

Good walkers, all of them. None, though, compares with Rousseau. He'd regularly walk twenty miles in a single day. He once walked three hundred miles from Geneva to Paris. It took him two weeks.

For Rousseau, walking was like breathing. "I can scarcely think when I remain still; my body must be in motion to make my mind active." As he walked, he'd jot down thoughts, large and small, on playing cards that he always carried with him. Rousseau was not the first philosopher to walk but he was the first to philosophize so extensively about walking.

The walking philosopher gives the lie to one of the discipline's greatest myths: that it is a mental pursuit wholly divorced from the body. From Archimedes's eureka moment in the bath to Descartes's masterful fencing to Sartre's sexual escapades, philosophy has a swift corporeal current running through it. There are no disembodied philosophers, or philosophies. "There is more wisdom in your body than in all of your philosophy," said Nietzsche."

Nietzsche, another bumptious and somewhat deranged peripatetic whose personality, we can only imagine, would have been so much harder to stand had he remained seated.


Wednesday, February 21, 2024

The Jamesian shrink

On a search for the cure, inspired by Marcus Aurelius, William James, Walker Percy, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Lou Marinoff. And my dogs.


http://dlvr.it/T33fpF

The Jamesian shrink

LISTEN. We teachers these days can't avoid noticing how many of our young students are self-diagnosing as anxious, displaced from a consistent core identity, and pessimistic about their prospects in life.

Young adulthood has always been a challenging time of life, but things seem different now. It's become commonplace to identify the Internet and social media as the locus of difference driving young angst. I guess that'll do, in the absence of more directly-life-threatening sources of distress (like, say, a Russian invasion or a war of extermination). 

Jonathan Haidt has a book coming soon, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

I'm scheduled to deliver an MTSU Honors lecture later this semester in their series Mental Health and the Good Life: Strategies for Happiness, Wholeness, Wellbeing. I'm personally and philosophically motivated to understand and do what I can to address this issue.

I've been discussing it with a friend, who proposes a form of therapeutic intervention involving film studies and the Shakespearian premise from As You Like It (which we'll be taking up later this semester in Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up) that "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players..."

It's an intriguing proposal. Call it cine-behavioral therapy. Reminds me of Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer, a young man on a mission he calls The Search. “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Maybe we should register for Socratic shrink Lou Marinoff’s counseling seminar and get ourselves certified. Hang out a shingle. It might be self-therapeutic, if not more broadly ameliorative (or remunerative).

I do wonder, though, if it’s ultimately constructive to encourage a young person who’s already feeling disaffected and detached to take a step further into the gallery and view herself as merely a player on a stage, a character in her own drama.

Walker Percy again: in Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World he wrote about a troubled biologist with an identity crisis and a condition his lapsed Catholic “counselor” calls angelism (“excessive abstraction of the self from itself”). Deploying a tool he calls a “Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer,” the doc prescribes a cure involving a long slog home through the swamp–in other words, a deeper immersion in the real world of physical exertion and resistance. The goal: “recovery of the self through ordeal.”

"He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Instead he orbits the earth and himself. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman."
It could be that unhappy young people these days are feeling more ethereal and out of touch with reality because, well, they’re out of touch with reality. Too much in touch with electrons and virtual misrepresentations of reality. Too cut-off from from the “lovely ordinary world.” Orbital. In desperate need of William James’s “remedy” in On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, right after the passage in which he applauds Emerson’s unbidden “exhilaration” at merely being alive and “crossing a bare common”:

Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities.

But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got

far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare,

the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed

with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities;

and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy

connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow

stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods

and joys.


The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and

primitive level…


So yes, there must be a version of the examined life that doesn’t descend into egocentric self-absorption and self-pity. A version that recovers what’s best in the experience of being a live human subject with goals and dreams. Ideally too, a version that doesn’t require therapeutic intervention involving serious risk of bodily harm.

When I hang out my shingle I’ll be framing my Marcus Aurelius morning mantra. It may not take, with many brooding anxiety-ridden youngsters, but they need to hear it:

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive-to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”
And: push away from the screen. Get out into the open air. Walk the dog. Go for a hike. Socialize with your friends in real time, in real places. Get over yourself. Heed Eleanor Roosevelt: “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”

I may not be cut out for counseling after all.  Solvitur ambulando may not be everyone’s cure. But isn’t it worth a try?