Delight Springs

Monday, October 23, 2017

Pinhead dancers and friendly ghosts

[Orig. publ. 3.14.17]
Back from the break, diving into neo-Platonism and scholasticism, and a report on Harry Frankfurt's Bullshit ("On Bullshit" was originally penned in '86 and published in '05). "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this." Yes, everyone. Especially the purveyors, who don't really believe their own horse hockey. Do they? Or care about it, so long as it's "believable" enough to support the brand? Frankfurt, by the way, also wrote the natural sequel: "On Truth"... boy do we need that now more than ever!

Also, reports are scheduled on Peter Singer's Ethics in the Real World and (with Descartes and his "what if I'm dreaming?" worry in mind) Inception ("Forget the end of the film. Think about the beginning and the real world..."). Maybe Nigel Warburton's Classics too. And the Simpsons again? D'oh!

The year 529 is a semi-arbitrary but convenient milestone, with Emperor Justinian's shuttering of the philosophical schools in Athens ushering in a millennium of intellectual somnambulism. The Sleeping Beauty version of this narrative says philosophy pricked its finger on Christianity and awaited an awakening buss from its aforementioned French rationalist Prince Rene in the 17th century.

Looking back from then, Francis Bacon would complain of "cobwebs of learning'' and Thomas Hobbes would say the problem was Roman religion's sponsorship of "Aristotelity"-which is is not Aristotelianism but its unthinking authoritarian parody, made to conform with Church dogma and stripped of curiosity. 

It needn't have been so. A respectful Aristotelianism fused with theology might have had wonderful discursive results, with talk of soul and sin leading seamlessly into fruitful reflections on mind-body and free will. Instead, "Christians were required to believe, for example, that a piece of wafer could become flesh... and that God could become three persons at once." 

Were? Past tense?  Let's not be smug, standing here potentially on the precipice of another Dark Ages "led" by benighted Climate and Science Deniers, Conspiracy Kooks, and ethnic chauvinists. Sad. Scary. Wonder what Stephen King thinks of Steve King? Who's scarier? No contest.

"By the year 1000, medicine, physics, astronomy, biology and indeed all branches of theoretical knowledge except theology had virtually collapsed. Even the few relatively educated men, holed up in mosasteries, knew markedly less than many Greeks had done eight centuries earlier... In short, Christendom was colossally ignorant."

The cult of Aristotle was sloppy, and inattentive to their favorite (& only) Philosopher's actual views. Medieval Christians "knew" that the soul survives death. Aristotle said it didn't, his God was disinterested in humans, and he was dubious about that wafer. We must not forget that "he himself was animated by the spirit of open-minded inquiry," which at its best uses the spoken and printed word to fuel passionate curiosity-not shut it down. So, "the real problem with medieval learning is that the medieval professors allowed themselves to be tyrannized by books... Instead of putting ideas to the test of new experience, they... put them to the test of old books." Old books are great, but they should never have the last word.

Image result for casper the friendly ghost catching a ballHow many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Hint: How many bodies do you need to dance? Call this the Caspar the Friendly Ghost Problem: how can Caspar move through a wall AND catch a ball? Dan Dennett is "convinced that Descartes’ dualism — the idea that an immaterial mind interacts with a material body — was a 'cul-de-sac'... 'There was a latent contradiction built into the very idea of Casper the Friendly Ghost and basically that’s what’s wrong with dualism. Nobody’s ever solved that problem remotely satisfactorily.'" It was an entertaining show, but I recall being perturbed when they interrupted it one day to break the news of President Kennedy's assassination.

I want to get a word in for Philo of Alexandria, the millennial philosopher with the perfect name who nowadays gets little attention or respect. He began, and a pagan teacher named Alcinous continued, "a tradition of marrying holy scriptures to Greek philosophy" with the claim that the God of scripture is identical with the Good of Plato. ("Plato himself would have insisted that they were utterly different.) Like many arranged marriages, these were often bereft of passion and hard to sustain. But it was, and for some still is, a popular tradition.

Another Diogenes (not the Dog Philosopher) created "the strangest document in the history of philosophy" (c.120 AD) with a huge Vietnam Memorial-like colonnade inscribed with Epicurean wisdom updated to catch the zeitgeist of "salvation" through philosophy. That's not really what Epicurus was talking about. 

This is another arranged marriage likely to founder, unless we understand that those who've attained ataraxia consider themselves already "saved," not lost. They aren't looking to go anywhere. As Jennifer Michael Hecht says, Epicureans aren't looking for a path out of the forest. They just wanted to hang a "Home Sweet Home" sign on a tree" and chill. "...pick some blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze... Just try to have a good time."

Plotinus's "Neoplatonism" was trying to eff the ineffable, to describe the indescribable. Futility, thy name is Plotinus. It all comes down (or goes up?) to The One, for him. But it's all the same, isn't it, in this Heraclitean flux? But The One is beyond being. Doesn't seem like there'd be much more to say. Just, “withdraw into yourself and look.” 

When he withdrew and looked, Plotinus claimed to see that  “the world is finite, harmonious, and good,” that it possesses a purchase on divine perfection by virtue of the continuous "emanations" therefrom that reach even us. How does he know that? “The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.” Yes, but... You really get all that from a sweep of introspection, Plotinus? Why don't I? Why doesn't everyone? Is it possible you're reading some things into your account, engaging in a bit of wishful thinking? And engaging in a bit of corporeal revulsion, "almost ashamed of being in the body"? But how, except with your body, are you going to hammer up a HOME sign, sit under a tree, and chill?  

"Proclus of Athens (*412–485 C.E.) was the most authoritative philosopher of late antiquity and played a crucial role in the transmission of Platonic philosophy from antiquity to the Middle Ages." He was a magical thinker, holding that "the job of philosophy was merely to explain spiritual truths which had already been arrived at by other means" and "treat[ing] the basic premises of his theology as if they were beyond question." Magical thinking endures in our time. Fortunately, questioners do too.

Lots of good questions suggest themselves today. How do we respect and revere books without being "tyrannized" by them, for instance? How should we think about Caspar? What is "salvation"? What's the job of philosophy? My answer to the last: to help us figure out how not to be tyrannized, how to think about Caspar, how not to think of ourselves as "lost" so we won't have to be "saved."
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10.23.17. The first national Women's Rights Convention opened in Worcester, Massachusetts, on this date in 1850. Two years earlier, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had launched the woman suffrage movement with their hastily organized Seneca Falls Convention in New York. They published the Declaration of Sentiments, using language modeled after the Declaration of Independence, to call for voting rights for women. They also expressed a hope that conventions for women's rights would continue to be held at regular intervals... And on this day in 1920, the novel Main Street by Sinclair Lewis was published (books by this author)... Lewis wrote:

“The Wonderlust--probably it's a worse affliction than the Wanderlust.” And: “She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.” And: “I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers... coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now — and we're going to try our hands at it.”
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Amy Krouse Rosenthal has died. She was not lost. Her remarkable viral essay bespeaks an Epicurean love of life that was its own saving grace. "Her favorite line from literature, she once said, was in Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” as spoken by the character Emily as she bids the world goodbye: 'Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?'

When she reached 40, Ms. Rosenthal began calculating how many days she had left until she turned 80.

“How many more times, then, do I get to look at a tree?” she asked. “Let’s just say it’s 12,395. Absolutely, that’s a lot, but it’s not infinite, and I’m thinking anything less than infinite is too small a number and not satisfactory. At the very least, I want to look at trees a million more times. Is that too much to ask?”
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Happy birthday Albert Einstein, who said "The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives." And, “The important thing is not to stop questioning." And, “It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.”  And, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

Image result for einstein on a bicycle

5:30/7 am, 37/41/22, 6:51

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