And what's a "moral universe"? Best statement of it I know is James's, in "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," in the passage at the end of Part II that begins: "Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could harbor..."
James also said our one really vital question is: what is life going to make of itself? What is this world going to be?
Life goes on, as Samuel Scheffler's thought experiments in Death and the Afterlife (and in a Stone essay) make clear and not cliche.
Consider a hypothetical scenario. Suppose you knew that although you yourself would live a long life and die peacefully in your sleep, the earth and all its inhabitants would be destroyed 30 days after your death in a collision with a giant asteroid. How would this knowledge affect you?
It affects me with the realization of just how much I rely on the assumption of humanity's endurance and advance, for my own sense of meaning and purpose. So long as we're here, and they're here after I'm gone, the moral universe subsists. I don't have to be here. Neither do you. Good thing.
But while we're here, let's appreciate the natural universe too. Margaret Renkl's latest column is another gem, meditating on the wildlife just beyond her window and concluding:
...How lucky I am to live in a home with windows. Against all odds — the encroachments of construction companies and lawn services and exterminators — these windows still open onto a world that stubbornly insists on remaining wild. I love the bluebirds, and I also love the fierce hawk who reminds me that the peace of the backyard is only a fiction. I love the lizard who looks so much like a snake, and I also love the snake who would eat her if it could.
And my friend the mole, oh how I love my old friend the mole. In these days that grow ever darker as fears gather and autumn comes on, I remember again and again how much we all share with this soft, solitary creature trundling through invisible tunnels in the dark, hungry and blind but working so hard to move forward all the same. Margaret Renkl, nyt
William Blake, she reminds us, was right about this (I think he was wrong about plenty else, but that's another story): Every living thing is holy. And while every living thing is still destined to live out its unique and personal existence in the blink of an eye, we still have it in our power to refrain from acts that would end the marvelous parade of living beings whose extinction would be the annihilation of the moral universe. That includes us. But not only us.
A related question: do those who have a harder time caring about their hypothetical great-grandchildren (etc.) than children and grandchildren lack a moral imagination? Or are they merely human, all too human?
In CoPhi, we turn from Plato to his disillusioned student Aristotle. I'll ask my usual question, as we ponder Raphael's "School of Athens": which side are you on? And I'll endorse Aristotle's view that a virtuous character rests on solid habits. I'll doubtless bring Willy James into it too, with his "enormous fly-wheel of society" statement. And Maria Popova, also a fan.
We'll note Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland appreciation of Sir Francis Bacon's early insight about humans' tendency to embrace superstition and notice only those instances of experience that seem to confirm it, while selectively ignoring other instances that do not. He didn't call that confirmation bias but that's just what it is, and we're all prone to it.
In Baggini's How the World Thinks we'll go with him to the Indian philosophy conference, where "no questions were taken"... in sharp contrast to what typically goes on at American academic philosophical conferences. That seems very strange, to those of us who've attended more western philosophy conferences than we can count. Is it an error? Or just an alternative approach? Both east and west are smitten with the metaphor of "seeing," but mustn't we also analyze, cogitate, interrogate, and converse about our different perspectives, in order to figure things out?
One thing I do find appealing (but finally not defensible) in the Indian approach to pedagogy: students are supposed ALWAYS to defer to their teachers, even when they're wrong. Wonder what that's like.
The Japanese philosopher Nishida said "It is the artist, not the scholar, who arrives at the true nature of reality." But he was a scholar. What did he know?
My view is that western philosophy is right to distance itself from the idea of philosopher -as-sage or guru. But, a little more artistry in our discourse and our publications would be welcome.
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