LISTEN. Going for the pre-op consultation this morning, this surgery adventure is about to get real. If I must be carnally invaded (and I must, dogwalks have become excruciating), minimally is the adverb of choice. It seems the enlightened thing to do, under the circumstances.
"Age clarifies," begins Lachs's eponymous book. Garrison Keillor said a similar thing in a recent essay. "I expected to be grumpy in old age and of course there’s still time, but instead I’m awestruck..." (But then he also said some appropriately grumpy things about the state of academia, and the way it can leach the life and interest out of its subject-matter...)
Lachs: "Stoic pragmatists are committed to making life better until their powers are overwhelmed... pragmatists are unlikely ever to give up, while stoics may give up too soon." (Is that why the classicist Mary Beard intemperately describes Stoicism as "nasty, fatalistic, bordering on fascist..."?)
Enlightened stoic pragmatists explore their options.
Susan Neiman strikes me as such an explorer. She says you're fooling yourself if you think youth is the happiest time of life. Ask Grandfather Philosophy. Enlightened maturity is best, though her hero Kant was more about deserving than actually achieving happiness. We should go for both. You should not have to "renounce your hopes and dreams" to get what you want and need. That's Stones (not Stone) philosophy.
In "What is Enlightenment?" (1784) Kant answered his own question promptly and succinctly, for once. "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!"
In a distracted age like ours, and a country like ours (like Brian's) where we're so lockstep-sure that we're all individuals, it takes a resolute and committed will to think for yourself. Even those who think they're thinking may just be re-arranging their prejudices, William James probably wasn't the first to say. Most people would die sooner than think, Bertrand Russell repeated. Real originality is hard. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet, Honest Abe.
But I can vouch for the accuracy of this statement from Susan Neiman: "All the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement... Judgement is important because none of the answers to the questions that really move us can be found by following a rule." Surprising statement from a Kantian, though even he was probably not much moved by the Categorical Imperative. Point is, there's a big gap between the way things are (according to experience) and the way reason tells us they could and should be. "Growing up requires confronting the gap between the two, without giving up on either one."
If travel is essential for growing up, the pandemic's really set us back. Former Harvard President and Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers's disdain for language-learning would too. As we've noted in CoPhi, discussing Julian Baggini's How the World Thinks (and as Wittgenstein's "language games" imply), learning a language is inseparable from thinking new thoughts and expanding your mental world.
Is 18 to 28 the best time of life? Neiman thinks it's the hardest, made harder by the conceit that you should be loving it then and missing it the rest of your life. Better to look forward with the poet to a long and gratifying maturation. "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made."
Well, I'm hoping "the best" doesn't include the worst debilitating effects of neuropathy and spinal stenosis. I'm looking forward, in the last of life --way before the last, actually-- to getting my groove back. And my reliably durable stride.
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* "...there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.
Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable.
Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become..." Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
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