Delight Springs

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Flickering attention

"A Free Man's Worship" was originally "The Free Man's Worship" (1903), a more than merely stylistic change.

Russell's trajectory generally was away from precise Platonic exclusion and towards a pluralistic loosening of attitude and judgment. He would later declare his "outlook on the cosmos and human life... substantially unchanged" when he wrote Conquest of Happiness in 1930, but if FMW was written "only for people in great unhappiness" the change of article reflects a change of heart as well. Where the younger man wrote to steel himself and his readers against the "unyielding despair" of ultimate cosmic finitude and indifference to human destiny, the more seasoned philosopher "turned his atttention to other things" and focused on practical strategies for flourishing on a more human scale. So, from 1927, another text for my impending secular sermon:
...if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending—something dead, cold, and lifeless.
I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things. "Why I Am Not A Christian"
That's what Dr. Flicker said: the universe "won't be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we've gotta try and enjoy ourselves while we're here." I'll bet it's what they say at Sunday Assembly too.

The "spirit" in spirituality, for those of like mind, means the living breath of finite natural existence. Super-nature is not required, though the tolerant Sunday Assemblers "don't do supernatural but won't tell you you're wrong if you do." The philosophers will take care of that.

6:30/6:46, 36/47/29, 4:30

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