Delight Springs

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Spinoza, Locke, Reid, Berkeley

More terror, this time perpetrated by an ex-Uber Uzbek who targeted cyclists... The White House chief of staff is peddling fake news about the Civil War... the world is so much scarier than Halloween, and the world of tomorrow we seem to be trending towards, as envisioned by Seth McFarland's comic-parody Orville ("Majority Rule") is scary too.

So a happier note is needed: It's Game 7 tonight in LA., after the series was squared last night. Go Dodgers! -but go extra innings please. What a saving spectacle it's been. Too bad so few students, by show of hands, even seem to know the World Series is happening. The nation has become too distracted by amusements and absurdities (aka politics), apparently, to indulge the national pastime. It's the nation's loss.
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[Earlier version orig. publ. 4.4.17] Back from the conference in Ottawa and KC, where I've now comfortably rebooted my old tradition of resetting the season and preparing the return to life known as Opening Day (met the author of a book by that title in Ottawa, celebrating the heroic courage of Jack Roosevelt Robinson). It was easier to walk across the hall for the annual baseball conference, but as Baruch Spinoza would tell you if he could, easy is overrated.

Spinoza didn't make it easy on himself by affirming pantheism, but perhaps he found the solace of solidarity with nature and the universe sufficiently off-setting and worth the cost in personal terms. He thought he'd touched all the bases: God, nature, freedom, emotion, everything. QED (Not quite easily done.)

He "claimed to demonstrate both the necessary existence and the unitary nature of the unique, single substance that comprises all of reality. Spinoza preferred the designation "Deus sive Natura" ("god or nature") as the most fitting name for this being, and he argued that its infinite attributes account for every feature of the universe."

An infinite God leaves no remainder, but also leaves individuals without a personal savior. He didn't think he needed one, with his rationalist's intellectual love of God. Free will may be an illusion, but a Spinozism of freedom is supposed to free us from reactionary passions like anger and self-pity. He would have been pleased by Einstein's endorsement. “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind..."

But, freedom? "It would be moral bondage if we were motivated only by causes of which we remain unaware, so genuine freedom comes only with knowledge of what it is that necessitates our actions. Recognizing the invariable influence of desire over our passionate natures, we then strive for the peace of mind that comes through an impartial attachment to reason." Much easier said than done. But again, Spinoza wasn't about easy.

Anthony Gottlieb's Spinoza brought "a breeze of the future," a foretaste of our present, with determinism and secularism in the ascendant in the most enlightenend quarters. Was he really "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers," as Bertrand Russell averred? "Those who were acquainted with him," said Bayle in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, called him "social, affable, honest, obliging, and of a well-ordered morality." But they didn't confirm his mythic identity as a humble lens grinder scrabbling to sustain himself for his philosophic labors. "[H]is lens-making was primarily a scientific pursuit rather than a commercial one."

If we "understood clearly the whole order of Nature," according to Spinoza, we'd come to his  conclusion that "all things [are] just as necessary" as a true mathematical proposition. "Unfortunately, people did not come to see this at all." Fortunately, I say, lest we stop trying to be the change we want to see in the world. He'd say not to sweat that, if we want change then we necessarily will do what we think we must to achieve it... but we can't bank on making a difference that confounds the "whole order." And I say, again, I'm banking on it.

This God-intoxicated man has many secular and atheistic intellectual descendants, who are tarred by "no stigma in economically developed countries except the United States." Still, "he believed that he believed in God." Maybe Einstein did too, Gottlieb's judgment that he was "probably just being diplomatic" notwithstanding.

John Locke's empiricism overstated the blankness of our slates, and relied too heavily on memory as a guarantor of personal identity. Thomas Reid was not in his league, but may still have had a better idea with his overlapping memories thesis. Until we become cyborg, total recall will not be an option.

"Locke's grand work," said C.S. Peirce, "was substantially this: Men must think for themselves." 

Thomas Jefferson may have overstated the case for Locke's influence on the founding generation of the American republic, but if he influenced the sage of Monticello it would seem to follow that in fact his shadow has loomed large. A direct line can be drawn from his social contract to John Rawls's, and from there to the current generation of progressive politics in America... to say nothing of his namesake on Lost. The authority of a rulers derives from the freely-contracted consent of the governed, or from nowhere. It doesn't come down from heaven nor out of the barrel of a gun.

Locke "greatly admired the achievements that his friends in the Royal Society had made in physics, chemistry, and medicine, and he sought to clear the ground for future developments by providing a theory of knowledge compatible with such carefully-conducted study of nature. The goal of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was to establish epistemological foundations for the new science by examining the reliability, scope, and limitations of human knowledge in contrast with with the pretensions of uncritical belief, borrowed opinion, and mere superstition. Since the sciences had already demonstrated their practical success, Locke tried to apply their Baconian methods to the pursuit of his own philosophical aims. In order to discover how the human understanding achieves knowledge, we must trace that knowledge to its origins in our experience."

The Essay Concerning Human Understanding sounded the Enlightenment keynotes: think for yourself, question conventional and inherited wisdom, stop quibbling and splitting hairs about angels on pinheads (etc.)

Samuel Johnson's stone-kicking refutation of Bishop Berkeley's idealism is usually met with derision, but as a practical response I place it in the same category as Diogenes' ambulatory refutation of Zeno's paradoxes. Works for me.

Berkeley's idealistic immaterialism ("in which he employed strictly empiricist principles in defense of the view that only minds or spirits exist") deserves some derision, though it also makes a perverse kind of sense if we don't repudiate Locke's representational realist assumption about ideas and their putative inferential sources. Better to repudiate, and admit that experience gives us the world - not just ideas of a world. But it gives us a world in need of elaboration and refinement, which was always the point of reflecting on experience in the first place.

Better also to repudiate the idea that being and perceiving are one. But, Berkeley's Three Dialogoues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) is still an entertaining read. "Here Berkeley spoke through Philonous ("Mind-lover"), who tries to convince his reluctant friend Hylas ("Woody") that it is only by rejecting the artificial philosophical concept of material substance that skepticism can be finally defeated and the truths of common-sense secured."
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It’s the birthday of the sports writer Grantland Rice (books by this author), born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee (1880). The most popular sports writer of his day, he wrote an estimated 67 million words in his 53-year career. In 1925, when other newspapermen were happy with a weekly salary of $50, Grantland Rice was making $1,000 a week, about the same as Babe Ruth.

He was known for the extravagant style he used to describe sporting events; he once compared four Notre Dame football players to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And in addition to his newspaper articles, he also wrote many poems about sports. The well-known saying “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” originated with his poem “Alumnus Football,” which ends with the lines: “For when the One Great Scorer comes / To write against your name, / He marks — not that you won or lost — / But how you played the game.”

Grantland Rice’s own favorite sport was golf. He wrote: “Golf is 20 percent mechanics and technique. The other 80 percent is philosophy, humor, tragedy, romance, melodrama, companionship, camaraderie, cussedness, and conversation.” WA

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