Talking cures

LISTEN. At the end of class yesterday a student reported having been physically bullied and threatened, and verbally abused, at a Trump rally in Murfreesboro over the weekend. She and the other anti-Trumpers were badly outnumbered by the ruffians, and unprotected by the police on site. She does not believe the polls that have him losing, or expect he and his Proud Bystanding Bigots to go peaceably if he does. 

My advice: don't go to Trump rallies, you can't reason with those people in that setting. Go to the polls. Early voting starts tomorrow here. Do all you can to encourage every sensible person you know to do likewise. Work the phones too, if that's something you're comfortable doing. 

Then, call on your inner Stoic. Some things are up to us, others are not. It's up to us to resolve that we'll not let the bigots and Know Nothings prevent us from pursuing our happiness, even in such a world.

Let's give ourselves permission to distract ourselves a bit, from Trump and his band of blind mice, from what they've done to subvert sound and responsible environmental action, from the general insanity of these times. Breathe. Peep at leaves. Root for the Rays. Ride your bike, walk your dog. Or do whatever you do,when you need a moral holiday. We all do, about now. Just take it.

Speaking of moral holidays, William James is up today in CoPhi. So is his old pal Peirce, who ungraciously deflected James's praise (accusing him of "kidnapping") and tried to rebrand and insulate his philosophy as "Pragmaticism." Nonetheless, it was James who introduced the term pragmatism to the world in 1898 (in a lecture at Berkeley called "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results"*) and later elaborated on the permission it grants us all to preach and practice the gospel of relaxation.**

James: "The universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their anxieties occasionally, in which the don't-care mood is also right for men, and moral holidays in order..." Holidays aren't forever, but they should be frequent. They're tonic. Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means

And,

* "...Philosophers are after all like poets. They are path-finders. What everyone can feel, what everyone can know in the bone and marrow of him, they sometimes can find words for and express..." Sometimes. Other times, they feel the frustration and irrelevance of elusive words. ("I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describe by concepts and words what... exceeds either conceptualization or verbalization." --Talk talk talk words words words @dawn..."What an awful trade that of professor is...")

And,

** "The advice I should give to most teachers would be... Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the class-room trust your spontaneity and fling away all further care.

My advice to students... If you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, "I won't waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not." Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently."

Peirce's best insights, for my money: Do not pretend to doubt in philosophy what you do not doubt in life. Do not block the way of inquiry. Do seek wisdom in collaboration with our fellow inquirers, past present and future. Do your part to move down the road towards truths, the views destined to be arrived at, when all the questions have finally been asked and the experiments run. 

We're also talking Nietzsche, Ayn Rand's favorite philosopher, again today. That's not an endorsement I'd want, any more than the Senate candidate in Tennessee wants Trump's. (We've noticed that your signs have changed, Mr. Hagerty.) I have little use for "poor Nietzsche's antipathies" (as James named them) and misanthropy and misogyny, his anti-democratic and anti-utilitarian contempt for what he called human weakness and I'd just call the human condition of vulnerability and mutual dependence. But I do still enjoy talking Eternal Recurrence.

And Freud also makes an appearance today. It will be interesting to compare his "talking cure" with James's views on the insufficiencies and limits of talk. 

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry; but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. Talked out @dawn

The philosopher's conceptual shotgun is a scattershot weapon. James and I would both trade it for a POV phaser. "Give me that thing." And put down that cigar, Sigmund.