[LISTEN] Nice long holiday weekend, must remember this is Tuesday... and not forget Happiness, where we had a delightful conversation last time about one of my favorite films by a morally-compromised director. What are the things that make life living, for me? Let's see...
I enjoyed how our upcoming Lyceum speaker from Vandy noted the irony of celebrating Labor Day as a prof "at a university founded by a notorious union-buster"... and couldn't resist echoing the observation. My university's "most prestigious scholarship is named for a Koch-funded alum whose campaign of extreme libertarian stealth has damaged our democracy." Our Buchanan scholars, not to mention our entire faculty and staff, should all read Democracy in Chains. Then maybe we can muster a movement to remove his name, along with Nathan Bedford Forrest's from the ROTC Building (and something like a gazillion streets in middle Tennessee). Names and symbols do matter.
BTW, The Times let me set the record straight Sunday: William James was not a "white-man's-burden" nationalist/imperialist/racist like his friend Kipling...
And on Sunday Morning, General Mattis pulled out his copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. I'd wondered how he coped with working for an impossible Commander in Chief.
==
We're talking cosmic perspective in CoPhi today. Did you see the Super Blood Wolf moon last night? Or the big eclipse, August before last? Celestial events always dwarf the petty pace of politics and pop culture, and restore - however briefly - a sense of perspective so crucial to the philosophizing imagination. Even an ordinary everyday experience in the open air of dawn can evoke that cosmic feeling, as it did for me on my morning dog-walk today (I can't speak for the dogs, they didn't seem particularly moved. But they do always seem to have a sane perspective on things, from a canine point of view.) The moment we stepped out into the predawn we were met by a bright and brilliant post-supermoon, joined shortly thereafter by a fireball sunrise. Look up!
"The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it's more than just what you know. It's also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:
Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.
During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their low contracted prejudices. And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective." Neil deGrasse Tyson
And, the cosmic perspective dismisses all narrow parochialism. The Tennessee eclipse? Really?
In Nashville's sky, a ring of fire (nyt)...
==
Originally published August 21, 2017
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[Posted just after the solar eclipse:]
...Weren't you happy to experience and share that cosmic diversion last Monday? But that gets it backwards. Politics, impactful though it is on lives and prospects, is the diversion. We need to remember that we're standing on a planet that's evolving, and revolving, etc. We need to retain a cosmic perspective. Then, we'll not be so inclined to discount the importance of our happiness.
But the issue of our existence is never settled by the citing of authorities, no matter how lustrous. We have to work it out for ourselves, find a way to flourish in personal terms while also remaining responsibly committed to the welfare of our peers and the survival of our species. No simple task, but there's none more urgent.
That sounds almost grim, in an existentialist sort of way. "You will never be happy," said Camus, "if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
Well, I disagree. That's too pessimistic, too Schopenhaurian.
That, anyhow, is our working hypothesis. It makes me happy to begin working it out again. We'll see if we can verify the SoL's 60-second secrets, and its preference for eudaimonia.
There's nothing more fun, and often funny, that the pursuit of happiness.
Originally publish 8.__.17
====
Happiness (the class) begins today with Daniel Haybron's Very Short Introduction, which includes that epigramatic reference to the Pirahas and then tells us that Socrates - so often exalted as a paradigmatically happy man, right up until the hemlock kicked in, in his 70th year - "didn't miss out on a thing." Well, he missed out on his 71st. Life might have been better, certainly longer.
I enjoyed how our upcoming Lyceum speaker from Vandy noted the irony of celebrating Labor Day as a prof "at a university founded by a notorious union-buster"... and couldn't resist echoing the observation. My university's "most prestigious scholarship is named for a Koch-funded alum whose campaign of extreme libertarian stealth has damaged our democracy." Our Buchanan scholars, not to mention our entire faculty and staff, should all read Democracy in Chains. Then maybe we can muster a movement to remove his name, along with Nathan Bedford Forrest's from the ROTC Building (and something like a gazillion streets in middle Tennessee). Names and symbols do matter.
BTW, The Times let me set the record straight Sunday: William James was not a "white-man's-burden" nationalist/imperialist/racist like his friend Kipling...
And on Sunday Morning, General Mattis pulled out his copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. I'd wondered how he coped with working for an impossible Commander in Chief.
==
We're talking cosmic perspective in CoPhi today. Did you see the Super Blood Wolf moon last night? Or the big eclipse, August before last? Celestial events always dwarf the petty pace of politics and pop culture, and restore - however briefly - a sense of perspective so crucial to the philosophizing imagination. Even an ordinary everyday experience in the open air of dawn can evoke that cosmic feeling, as it did for me on my morning dog-walk today (I can't speak for the dogs, they didn't seem particularly moved. But they do always seem to have a sane perspective on things, from a canine point of view.) The moment we stepped out into the predawn we were met by a bright and brilliant post-supermoon, joined shortly thereafter by a fireball sunrise. Look up!
"The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it's more than just what you know. It's also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:
The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it's not solely the province of the scientist. The cosmic perspective belongs to everyone.At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.
The cosmic perspective is humble.
The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.
The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.
The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.
The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place.
The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment, the only home we have.
The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.
The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.
The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag waving and space exploration do not mix.
The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.
Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.
During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their low contracted prejudices. And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective." Neil deGrasse Tyson
And, the cosmic perspective dismisses all narrow parochialism. The Tennessee eclipse? Really?
In Nashville's sky, a ring of fire (nyt)...
==
Originally published August 21, 2017
====
[Posted just after the solar eclipse:]
...Weren't you happy to experience and share that cosmic diversion last Monday? But that gets it backwards. Politics, impactful though it is on lives and prospects, is the diversion. We need to remember that we're standing on a planet that's evolving, and revolving, etc. We need to retain a cosmic perspective. Then, we'll not be so inclined to discount the importance of our happiness.
If we were to ask the question: “What is human life's chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.Thus spake my philosophical spirit-guide James, a little over a century ago. But if that's too current, you can go back to Aristotle. "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence."
But the issue of our existence is never settled by the citing of authorities, no matter how lustrous. We have to work it out for ourselves, find a way to flourish in personal terms while also remaining responsibly committed to the welfare of our peers and the survival of our species. No simple task, but there's none more urgent.
That sounds almost grim, in an existentialist sort of way. "You will never be happy," said Camus, "if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
Well, I disagree. That's too pessimistic, too Schopenhaurian.
“What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”If that's the course you signed on for, this one will disappoint. The world does have a great deal to offer. It has a world. We get to live here. We're the lucky ones who got to live at all, who'll get to be happy if we apply ourselves just a bit to the question of how to do it.
That, anyhow, is our working hypothesis. It makes me happy to begin working it out again. We'll see if we can verify the SoL's 60-second secrets, and its preference for eudaimonia.
There's nothing more fun, and often funny, that the pursuit of happiness.
====
"Life is good"
So said the Amazonian Piraha people, according to Daniel Everett, before it became a popular marketing slogan.
Was Socrates happier than the average college student? "You might think the typical college student lives in a state of bliss," with minimal obligations and maximal opportunities to ruminate, socialize, and party, but apparently that would be wrong. How many of them are living the examined life? Ignorance is perhaps not bliss, after all? But what about enlightened Socratic ignorance? Either way, American students are apparently less happy than we thought.
Panama is most blissful, evidently. Or was. More recent results point elsewhere. Denmark? Iceland? (I think I recall Eric Weiner's Geography of Bliss giving them high marks.)
One way to chart our happiness index is to ask what's on your bucket list. Another: what's noton your deathbed list of things you just have to do one more time. Maybe not "another peck at the mobile phone, or one more trip to the mall." Maybe you won't wish you'd bought more crap.
"What sort of life ultimately benefits a person," wondered Aristotle. What, not shopping or iPhoning? How many of us can even imagine how bizarre those activities would seem to an old Greek philosopher?
A young Intro student yesterday told me it was his impression that philosophy was mostly about pondering and pontificating on our feelings. But Haybron quickly withdraws feeling theories from the field, in favor of "life satisfaction." But don't confuse that with "subjective well-being," a catch-all of psychologism he says we must confuse with our real quarry.
Has there really never been a better time to be alive? I wouldn't have said the first decade of this millennium was the best ever, but it depends on the yardstick. Steven Pinker's Better Angels makes the case for our good luck.
Haybron says "we need a theory - a definition - of happiness." Do we? What do you mean, we? We philosophers? We authors? We moderns? We shoppers and social media fanatics? Why can't we be happily undefined and atheoretical? Presumably because the absence of a good theoretical framework leaves us in the wrong "state of mind." [But maybe we just need an ever-shifting, changing, growing list of "things that make life worth living," and not a formal definition.]
Panama is most blissful, evidently. Or was. More recent results point elsewhere. Denmark? Iceland? (I think I recall Eric Weiner's Geography of Bliss giving them high marks.)
One way to chart our happiness index is to ask what's on your bucket list. Another: what's noton your deathbed list of things you just have to do one more time. Maybe not "another peck at the mobile phone, or one more trip to the mall." Maybe you won't wish you'd bought more crap.
"What sort of life ultimately benefits a person," wondered Aristotle. What, not shopping or iPhoning? How many of us can even imagine how bizarre those activities would seem to an old Greek philosopher?
A young Intro student yesterday told me it was his impression that philosophy was mostly about pondering and pontificating on our feelings. But Haybron quickly withdraws feeling theories from the field, in favor of "life satisfaction." But don't confuse that with "subjective well-being," a catch-all of psychologism he says we must confuse with our real quarry.
Has there really never been a better time to be alive? I wouldn't have said the first decade of this millennium was the best ever, but it depends on the yardstick. Steven Pinker's Better Angels makes the case for our good luck.
Many indigenous peoples say the only thing they envy about the western industrial lifestyle is healthcare (and we know how fraught that is). William James told his friend Schiller to "keep your health, your splendid health - it's worth all the truths in the firmament." Hard not to agree, especially after a bout with serious illness. If you've not experienced that, by the time you reach "a certain age," you're even luckier than most.
Haybron says "we need a theory - a definition - of happiness." Do we? What do you mean, we? We philosophers? We authors? We moderns? We shoppers and social media fanatics? Why can't we be happily undefined and atheoretical? Presumably because the absence of a good theoretical framework leaves us in the wrong "state of mind." [But maybe we just need an ever-shifting, changing, growing list of "things that make life worth living," and not a formal definition.]
Happiness is a state of mind, for sure, but it's even more a state of experience and expectation. No?
Originally published 8.31.17
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