Lifelong teaching

Exciting news today for our Enlightenment Now class: on July 13 my old friend (and Best Man 28 years ago this past Sunday) Professor Daryl Hale--just retired from a teaching career at Western Carolina University--has agreed to zoom with the class in my absence, pinch-hitting while I'm at my Baseball in Literature and Culture conference in Ottawa KS. 

He's a Kant scholar and has regularly taught a course on Enlightenment at WCU. He's the smartest and funniest Kantian I know.  And he's also a baseball fan, and an early bird, like me. His guest stint came about just a few moments ago, when I received a text from him commenting on the Mets' amazing Jacob deGrom. Then he mentioned his retirement, after "I finished my last class on Enlightenment this spring, one of my favorites." Well, why hadn't it already occurred to me to ask him to fill in? "How stupid of one, not to have thought of that..." (As Huxley said of Darwin's natural selection.)

So I issued the invite, with the caveat that I'd understand if he was truly done with teaching. "Never done with teaching, just with grading." I get that. Like my colleague who's also retiring this summer, and like my mentor John Lachs, we can contemplate and even relish retiring from academia --(Lachs once said the great thing about tenure is that you can show the Dean any finger you like)-- but never from teaching and learning and philosophizing. 

But I'm still here tonight, when we'll finish Robertson's Very Short Intro. The two topics he raises in the second half of the book that most capture my imagination are (1) the rise of public spaces like coffeehouses, in the 17th and 18th centuries, as sociable venues for the enactment of enlightenment values (truth-seeking, mutual indulgence/toleration  etc.) and the exchange of ideas... and the decline of that sort of coffeehouse culture in our time; and (2) the rise and fall of the type of Public Intellectual in our day. 

Matthew Green also deplores the absence of conviviality among strangers in Starbucks and other commercial-chain coffee emporia nowadays. "Would you go up to a stranger in a coffee shop and ask them for the latest news?" No, they'd either be mortified or they'd likely spew a fount of fake news. I'm with him, we need a coffee revolution.

I agree with Erica Stone, "our universities have a duty to engage with the public." And our philosophers have a duty to step out of the ivory tower, if not into literal coffeehouses like Chris Phillips ("Socrates Cafe") and into pop culture celebrity like Cornel West --the two of them together are quite a duo, West by himself is by turns exhausting and exhilarating and almost always constructively provocative-- then at least into the sphere of social media where they can reach and enrich a broader public. I'm pleased to hear West in conversation with Rob Talissse on the Why We Argue podcast. Brothers!

"There is something devastatingly hollow about the demonstration that thought without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it," as my old lifelong teacher has said. And demonstrated. Thought without action is even more hollow than concepts without percepts.

A few other questions, and my preliminary responses to what we've said about them so far:

Was Descartes right that "the mind has no sex"? 91 Do most of our contemporaries agree?

"No one knows exactly what causes gender dysphoria. Some experts believe that hormones in the womb, genes, and cultural and environmental factors may be involved..." https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001527.htm

It's the "cultural and environmental factors" I find most intriguing, and perhaps that's what many of us also find most confusing about this phenomenon. Or perplexing, for those who prefer a black-and-white, male-or-female world. Those of us over a certain age may be especially challenged by this brave new world of gender complexity, but the enlightened view generally is to welcome complexity and celebrate it.

I agree, whatever gender differences may impact how we view the world, they must not be allowed to occlude our common humanity in the search for truth.

1. Do you believe that language is an innate or a divine gift? (68)
2. How can the Free Masons be an essential part of the public sphere if they impose secrecy? (89)

1. Since I don't personally believe in divines, I can't see it as a divine gift. And I can't see it as a gift in the literal sense, since the only candidate for such largesse must be a god. But in the looser sense in which anything we consider a boon and an asset is a gift, I do think language is a gift... even though I also share the Jamesian ambivalence I've mentioned, noting the limits of language and the ways in which we distort life by trying to render ineffable experience in words.

The question as to whether language is innate seems to me a related but somewhat different issue. Were we humans and our antecedents always born with a capacity for language, or at least an innate "grammar" or scaffolding for symbolic communication? Or if not always, then emergently? I guess that's the Noam Chomsky line in linguistics. My line is that I can well imagine the evolutionary path of our forebears NOT having turned to language... in which case I suspect we wouldn't be here. So again, my gratitude for the "gift"... I don't think much thinking or co-philosophizing would go on without it!

2. Interesting paradox. I think of my old dad, who was a freemason (of course he never really divulged any "secrets") in much the same way, it seemed to me, as he was a member of the school board and Rotary and Kiwanis (civic organizations designed to bring merchants and small business-people and professionals together for "sociability" and boosterism etc.). In other words, freemasonry for him seemed just one more club that brought him into regular contact with his peers. I sort of see that as a way of building the public sphere.

Ben Franklin said the masons' great secret was that they had no real secrets. Ritual and clubbiness, yes. But nothing for the rest of us to be suspicious of.

Is there something there to grasp or is enlightenment unobtainable?
Would it be wrong to fit enlightenment into a paradigm of understanding that has passed into history?
Should we continue to think of enlightenment as a society in search for moral virtue?
Could communism in its truest sense be the once or a future embodiment of enlightenment?
When we think of enlightenment do we have to think of a structure that includes politics or should it just be one's own understanding of the world?
I felt that the conclusion of this book left me to wonder where the influencers of the enlightenment end?

If by enlightenment we mean a commitment to human betterment, progress, social justice, and in general the amelioration of the human condition, then that's not "there" in any sense that implies necessary existence. These are contingent states of affairs the attainment of which depends upon human agency and resolve. I can think of no reason to declare them unattainable, a priori. The point of pursuing enlightenment, like the pursuit of happiness (which on recent interpretations may simply be different aspects of the same pursuit), is to fulfill one of the crucial conditions of their attainment: our will to attain them.

Yes, I think it would be wrong to consign enlightenment to the dustbin of history... or of mere historical scholarship. Our course (following Pinker) is called Enlightenment Now. History is still being made and written.

I prefer to think of enlightenment as individuals building a better society collaboratively, in search of every kind of virtue. Moral virtue is a subset of virtue in the wide old Greek sense of arete, meaning excellence across the board and in every facet of life involving human volition.

If true communism reconciles the public interest with private freedom, and if it is realistic, then perhaps something like it is the future of enlightenment. But it'll be very different from any nominal form of communism we've yet seen.

I think we should think of enlightenment as embracing both personal and public dimensions. No need to exclude either.

I hope the "influencers" don't end at all, since we're still quite far from achieving an enlightened society. 

1: Does the Enlightenment “matter” today? 2: Had the French Revolution not occurred, would the Enlightenment (as it is defined in this book) have continued past the 18th century?

It does indeed feel like we're regressing, de-lightening, devolving, marching backwards with the rise of uncritically-minded superstition, baseless and outlandish conspiracy-mongering, blatant dishonesty etc. And that's why I think the values of enlightenment, theirs and subsequently, matter now more than ever. Progress constructed on the dispassionate (but not unimpassioned) quest for truth, facts, and reality can be our salvation. Its continued neglect will likely be our reversion to a more primitive and less hopeful condition. And yes, if we're really thinking (really THINKING) for ourselves then each of us can fashion our own sense of what enlightenment means. Our text indicates that on one interpretation that's exactly what Kant was advising, not the more absolute and objective conception of enlightenment as a categorical construction of the universal mind. We should ask Prof. Hale about that.

I wonder if a less bloody French Revolution might have contributed to a more enduring and widely-embraced form of enlightenment. If France and other European powers had remained in the grip of autocracy and coercive monarchy, on the other hand, would that have hastened an eventual revolutionary explosion of democracy? Or would it have isolated the American experiment and expedited the decline of our democracy? These historical what-ifs are intriguing, if inconclusive. To me, this just signals the importance of owning the present as history-in-the-making, wondering less about what might have been and more about what might still be.

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

My brain wants to agree with this in general, but I can't get past the "good books" phrase.

Aren't "good books" like "good art" — relative? Who gets to decide what constitutes a good vs bad book? I feel like that's a very slippery slope.

And... What's the criteria for a good book? Who is the authority on this criteria and why are they the authority?

Even if you're reading "bad books," you still have the advantage over the other man because you have the ability to read.

Well that's right, as lots of educators say: better that the kids read Captain Underpants than nothing at all.

But I do still think there's such a thing as a Good Book-- and there are many of them, not just one. It's true that we always have to ask about the ulterior agenda of those who propose to canonize any books. But I will always argue that Twain is better than Danielle Steele, for instance. Walker Percy and Shelby Foote wrote better books than just about any on the current bestseller list. We can and should differ, and debate, about what books are good, and why we think so. But if we throw in the towel and say its all just relative and subjective, then we might as well give up any hope for an enlightenment project of any sort. "Betterment" and "progress" require the exercise of critical judgment, not its abandonment. Sapere Aude! But then also have the courage to expose your own critical judgment to the critical scrutiny of your peers. (What's the Latin for "Have the courage to co-philosophize"?)

Habent animos cooperari, says my Latin translator. Doesn't have quite the Kantian ring to it. Dare operam is better. But I think Sam Fleischacker is right, as reported by our text, that Kant's great question is indeed "an invitation to public discussion in which diversity of opinion will flourish" as to what enlightenment really is. Doesn't mean all those opinions are equally correct. Let's discuss.

Robertson raises the philosophers' dispute over metaphysical foundations. Do we need them, as Alasdair MacIntytre said? Or not, per Richard Rorty? I'm with Rorty in this one, but not quite in the way Robertson characterizes it. Minds can "establish" truths (not Truth) but not finally settle them, not in the way a mirror can settle the matter of one's appearance. Truth happens to ideas, they become true or false depending on the non-arbitrary (hence non-relative)varieties of context and history etc. etc. Or so we Jamesians would wish to establish. But that's Inside Baseball, as it were. And this particular ball is in the tall weeds beyond the fence, better leave it alone.

Finally, I think, Robertson sounds the right concluding note. Enlightenment is about our "willingness to engage with change in this world independent of the next, to think about what might constitute 'progress'." We need to think hard about that, but not (again) only think.