Quantifying happiness

Older Daughter complains that her general college intro to the humanities, the "search" class all incoming freshmen are required to take at her new school, is biased towards those whose upbringings were more conventionally pietistic than hers.

Actually what she texted was: "My search class would be easier if we were a religious family." 

Well... half of us are religious, by my standards,  and all of us are "spiritual." But maybe not enough to get a neophyte through a first reading of an annotated Christian Bible. My possibly-annoying reply: 

"For what it's worth, I'm using The Good Book: A Humanist Bible in A&P next semester."

Helpful or not, I'd say any humanities "search" that excludes the humanist POV is prejudicially incomplete. A complete search for meaning must look high and low, far and wide. It must not treat the stuff of life as any tidier or more determinate than it actually is. 

Which brings us to our topic today.

Aristotle was right, as usual (but not always: there's no explaining away the whole chauvinistic, paternalistic, misogynistic patriatchal slave society embarrassment): a well-educated person seeks only so much precision as the subject-matter allows. So he'd probably not have thought much of Jeremy Bentham's hedonic and felicific calculus, or of most over-reaching contemporary social science. The right analysis at the right time with the right goals and premises etc. etc.

But what about Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of Myths of Happiness (not to be confused with our HAP 101 author Jennifer Hecht's Happiness Myth)? She was asked "How do you quantify happiness?"

There are basically two components. The first is the frequent experience of positive emotions like joy, curiosity, success, self-esteem, etc. The second component of happiness is the sense that your life is going well and that you’re progressing toward your goals like you hope to be. So we measure happiness by simply asking people how happy they are, how satisfied with their lives they are, how often they experience positive emotions. There’s no thermometer for happiness, so there’s not really any other way to measure it other than just to ask people.

Fair enough. But when you ask people, you have to let them answer for themselves. If I tell you that I'm off-the-charts happy after a good hike, you can't vote me down by finding two others who hate leaving the house. So I'm thinking the shorter answer would be: you don't.

I'm also thinking the "measurement" debate misses the central issue here. The challenge of measuring happiness isn't to compare mine to yours, it's to get as clear as we can, each of us, about our own, and then to set about realizing the greatest com-possible set of them in a social context. Our respective sources of happiness, enthusiasm, delight, meaning are personal and often incommensurable. They cannot be precisely calibrated, weighed and measured, sifted and compared. But...

Each of us still stands to gain immeasurable, unquantifiable, irreplaceable insight into our own situations and psyches through the exercise of ranking our own preferences, prioritizing our own ends, and arranging our own lives to reflect those priorities. That's what the Epicureans were saying about simplicity: once you know what really makes you happy you just need to strip away the obstacles between yourself and the habitual practices that will bring it to you. What are you afraid of? As JMH will tell us later in the semester: take what's yours. 

But hands off mine. Any invidious, hierarchical attempt to impose impersonal inflexible numbers on personal experience and aspiration is imperialistic. It's unkind. It's inhumane. It's not nice. Cut it out.

On the other hand, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" seems vague enough not to offend most of us humanists in this regard. Bentham's aim was true, even if his formula doesn't really yield hard numbers, units of "hedons" and "dolors" and the like. If he was a "boy" to think so, omitting sufficient attention to the priceless and immeasurable qualities of culture and character that make for a suitbly happy human,  he was at least a big-hearted boy. It's a little harsh to say he "cut himself off from dialogues," we have the perennial Mill-Bentham conversation every semester. 

But even if our happiness is ultimately unquantifiable by any precise instrument, might it not still be useful to pursue its expansion? Most of us can tell when our happiness seems to be growing. Attaching a number to that perception would just be pedantic excess, unless we don't think we'd notice otherwise.

Where Bentham was really off-base was not in undervaluing the quality of human pleasure and happiness but in expecting more charitable behavior from people than our experience of their nature supports. "Given the priority for most people of their own happiness and that of those close to them, why should they be expected to choose the action providing the greatest happiness of the greatest number, if that meant sacrificing their own?" Right. We want felicity with virtue, and without supererogatory self-sacrifice. 

"Why should we trust any person, wise or not, to be able to make accurate estimates about the pleasures and pains of other people?" Estimates are fine, for social science purposes. But what will you do with them? Again, hands off my pleasure and pain, if your intent is somehow to dismantle or rehabilitate my own sense of what my experience can possibly mean to me. We all have to work that out for ourselves. I don't have to follow you, you don't have to follow me. Repeat after Brian & me: we're all individuals. (Don't be the one who says "I'm not.")

But let me meet the number crunchers halfway. They get a lot of things right. For instance, "commuting to work turns out to be especially low on most people's scale of reported well-being." Yup. But it could be worse. I could be commuting in the other direction.

Last time we began to raise "questions addressing the powerful influence of hopes and fears about what might befall individuals in the afterlife." I wonder if it would be productive to devote more time to those questions. It strikes me that Epicurus was right: take worries about a punitive afterlife off the table and you'll never encounter a greater personal liberation from groundless fear. But if you've had the hell scared and scarred into you from childhood on, it must be very difficult to jettison.

Here's the claim in this chapter I find hardest to fathom: "perceived health and actual health turn out to be weakly correlated; and neither is found to be indispensable for happiness." And that goes for "any other factor or set of factors" too. How can that be?

Well it can't, if "being free of profound depression or chronic pain" (for instance) makes a tangible difference in measureable happiness.

I don't know how to resolve the quantification quandary, but I do know that I want to be on the "sunny side of the misery line" too. I want my champagne account pre-paid. I want my share of bubbly, any way you measure it. I'll look at your research. But I don't want to hear that I'll either get it or I won't, depending on my "set point" or dexterity with my 40% share of influence. I want to know (as Ms. Lyubomirsky said in her first book) the how of my happiness. 

Pyrrho and Epicurus at the APA

In CoPhi today it's Pyrrho the deep skeptic,  Epicurus the hedonist (though I've indicated *my dissatisfaction with applying that label to him) and seeker of simple pleasures and happiness; and APA the behemoth that tried to eat philosophy. 

What an amusing fantasy mental image to visualize: toga-clad old Greek and Roman wisdom-seekers roaming the Baltimore or Boston or Atlanta Marriott, amidst all those smoldering pocketed pipes and raggedy patched tweeds and all that careerist angst at the American Philosophical Association's Eastern Division meeting in December. I'd skip a post-Xmas visit with the family in St. Louis, to see that. 

Actually I did attend a Central Division APA at the St. Louis downtown Marriott back in the '80s. (It was the Whitey Herzog era, "What a Team/What a Town/What a Time!" booster banners dotted the streets. Better red than dead, they were.) Spotted no obviously-Pyrrhonic skeptics or Epicurean hedonists. But, philosophers behaving badly, being obtuse about credit card swipes and obnoxious about "the fine points of life?" Oh yes indeed. 

I'm not a big fan of professional philosophy conferences, though I've done my share of APAs and TPAs and SAAPs etc. They're necessary for "networking" and maintaining professional relationships and collegial friendships. But skype and other new communications technologies have begun to supplant the demeaning   job "meatmarket" function of these conferences. Good riddance. 

On the other hand, I do cherish the bizarre memory of strolling through a Vegas casino en route to Bill McKibben's SAAP keynote on the environment in 2000. Euguene, Oregon. Lexington, Kentucky. Milwaukee. New Jersey. College Station. Bakersfield. I've been everywhere, man...

Well, Carlin Romano's point is that the time has come to "think differently and more inclusively" about philosophy in America. It's not just for us card-carrying APA pros anymore. Thankfully so.

Today's AtP reading concludes at the outset of a discussion of the ideas of political philosopher Michael Walzer (Just and Unjust Wars et al), who says our national identity (in contrast to most nations) is largely invented rather than inherited. The Constitution itself, and the Constitution Day public reading thereof which I'll be participating in, on our campus next Tuesday, is a prime example of what he means.

I caught Walzer on the radio during my commute Monday. He argued for a U.S. military strike in Syria. What a pleasant surprise, for a change, to find our leaders apparently opting to give diplomacy and peace a chance before letting the bombs fly. On the other hand, he's right: we can't afford to turn a blind eye to children being murdered, anywhere. The whole world should be watching.

Back to Pyrrho and Epicurus... but first a quick follow-up on Plato and Aristotle. Check out this version of School of Athens.

As for Aristotle’s eudaimonia, in some ways it anticipated Epicurus’s garden and what Jennifer Michael Hecht calls “graceful-life philosophies” that proclaim in all simplicity: “we don’t need answers and don’t need much stuff, we just need to figure out the best way to live.” Then, and only then, will we be happy.

As for Pyrrho: If you’d asked him Who rules the Universe?, he might have replied: Lord knows. Cats, again. And pigs.

 

Reminding us of Pyrrho’s famous pig, who impressed Montaigne by riding out a storm at sea with much greater equanimity (and, crucially, much less comprehension) than his human shipmates, and of J.S. Mill’s declaration that it’s “better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” Hecht comments: “This whole pig-versus-philosopher debate is pretty hilarious, yes?”

Yes. But I agree with Spinoza and Hecht. “The happiness of a drunkard is not the happiness of the wise,” though of course there are happy occasions when it has its place too. Bottom line: “Knowledge and wisdom are worth it,” it can be everything to have found true love and meaningful work, and both– all-- can end in a flash, without warning. Stay on your toes, but don’t fret too much about the storm.

One more little animal image for Pyrrho, whose name I prefer to pronounce compatibly with this mnemonic trick: just remember that a pyrrhonic skeptic is like a piranha fish, toothily devouring every proposed candidate for belief. Cats and pigs too, probably.

And as for Epicurus, Jennifer Hecht‘s got his number. It’s listed.

For an Epicurean, somewhere there are beings that are truly at peace, are happy… The mere idea of this gentle bliss is, itself, a kind of uplifting dream. After all, we human beings know a strange thing: happiness responds to circumstances, but, basically, it is internal. We can experience it when it happens to come upon us; we can induce it with practices or drugs; but we cannot just be happy.

No, we must work to “solve the schism” between how we feel and how we want to feel. Happiness is a choice and a lifetime endeavor, and though it comes easier for some than for others there are tips and tricks we can use to trip our internal happy meters and achieve ataraxia, peace of mind, simple contentment, “tranquillity, or the freedom from disturbance and pain that characterizes a balanced mind and constitutes its first step toward the achievement of pleasure.”

Stop fearing the harmless and remote gods, Epicurus said. Stop fearing your own death, it’s not (as Wittgenstein would echo, millennia later) an event you’ll ever experience. “Life is full of sweetness. We might as well enjoy it.”

*Sissela Bok calls Epicurus a hedonist, but that's only technically correct. Yes, he said pleasure's at the heart of happiness. But what kind of pleasure?

A happy life is tranquil, simple, loving, and above all free from pain, fear, and suffering, available to all regardless of social status, nationality, or gender. Such a life of pleasure, Epicurus held, would of necessity have to be a virtuous one; ...

That’s Alain de Botton, author of a text I used to use in this course, and controversial proponent of religion for atheists. (Don’t confuse him with Boethius.) His interview with Krista Tippett was instructive. Like Jennifer Hecht, he wants us to use philosophy to enhance our bliss and sweeten our dreams.

Pyrrhonian deep skepticism and moral/cultural relativism share a common root. Simon Blackburn voices the right reply to those who say we can function without beliefs, or without discriminating between better and worse beliefs, when he points out that this is simply impractical and socially dysfunctional. Not only might you get run over by a racing chariot or step off a cliff, you also scatter seeds of discord within your community and perhaps even your family.

So I too “would defend the practical importance of thinking about ethics on pragmatic grounds.” To pretend  with “Rosy the Relativist” that we can all simply have and act on our own truths, our own facts, without confronting and negotiating our differences and critically evaluating our respective statements of (dis)belief, really is “farcical.” Lord knows.

I’ve been thinking some more, btw, about a student’s question whether Oprah is a philosopher. I’d say she has philosophical moments, sometimes asks the hard questions, and is indeed seeking to have and share a “graceful” (if opulent) life. So, sure. Same for the poets (like Whitman) who let us off the hook for contradicting ourselves (“I contain multitudes.”) I don’t think the Philosophy Club should be exclusive or restrictive. Many of my colleagues would disagree, amongst themselves, at their annual association meetings and in their ivory towers. They’ll never give me a car, either.

Anyway: we won’t suffer a meaning deficit, though, if we live simply and naturally in the company of friends who’ll help us conquer our fears and address our many questions about life, the universe, and everything. That’s the Epicurean way, when we decide nature’s already provided enough for our peace of mind and our contentment. That’s ataraxia.

So finally there are these dots, connecting Epicurus and Pyrrho:

Epicurus, though no friend to skepticism, admired Pyrrho because he recommended and practiced the kind of self-control that fostered tranquillity; this, for Epicurus, was the end of all physical and moral science. Pyrrho was so highly valued by his countrymen that they honored him with the office of chief priest and, out of respect for him, passed a decree by which all philosophers were made immune from taxation.

Tranquility and a free ride: now that would make me happy. A free ride to the APA, not so much.

"On the Happy Life"

De vita beata. Sounds like Iron Butterfly's in the house, but it's just an old Roman pagan and his successors.

Our Bok-led exploration of happiness continues with Seneca (and the anti-Seneca, La Mettrie), Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Descartes, and Pascal. For my money she may as well have stopped with Seneca, who comes closer than the rest to expressing something fundamental about our condition. I'm not crazy, though, about how he finally (at Nero's insistence) expressed his view.

But it's hard to dispute his views that peace and harmony come (or should) to the kind, that beneficence is its own reward, that one should attempt to harmonize with nature, that we should prepare ourselves for whatever fortune and fate may decree, and that we should not let good fortune or material wealth own us.

And, that we should all seek a "reasonable departure" from this earth. He should have been so lucky.

I prefer the example of another old Roman, Cicero. We've been talking a lot in HAP 101 about Experience Machines and irreplaceable daughters. (Skyped with mine last night, as she slurped her Ramen and told tales. I haven't watched her eat so attentively since I held the spoon.) He knew something about that. He was a wise old consul, and an honest Stoic. Sometimes there just is no consolation.

After the loss of his daughter Tullia in childbirth, [Cicero] turned to Stoicism to assuage his grief. But ultimately he could not accept its terms: “It is not within our power to forget or gloss over circumstances which we believe to be evil…They tear at us, buffet us, goad us, scorch us, stifle us — and you tell us to forget about them?”

Now, to a raft of happiness-renunciators, convinced that we must leave earth and corporeal existence to find our bliss. Did they all misread Ecclesiastes?

I'm bound to give Augustine short shrift. His view that happiness cannot be anything "mortal and transitory" strikes me as entirely false, and entirely destructive of our only sure shot at the good life.  He imprisoned himself in a Bad Idea.

Boethius deserves slightly more consideration, given his literal imprisonment. His conversations with Lady Philosophia were fun. Were any of us in his desperate situation, who knows? You and I might also reaffirm "the Augustinian view that although there was little hope for his or anyone's happiness on earth," we might always aspire to heaven. 

Aquinas held out for "perfect happiness." Greed is not good, when it entails the sacrifice of imperfect happiness that's more than good enough. I come back to John Lachs' good question: why isn't good enough good enough?

Descartes told the Bohemian princess that "truths that make one sad" are better than cheerful delusion. Perhaps. But in which category should we place Descartes' "God is no deceiver"? She was right, wasn't she? Happiness is far more complicated than the philosopher thought. Indubitably so.

Pascal is fun to read. But he subscribed to original sin and perpetual punishment. He was preoccupied with suffering in the afterlife, when there's way more than enough on our plates already. No fun.

All geniuses have their limitations. I agree with Voltaire, he was a "sublime misanthrope."

Voltaire was one of those salon wits, a Deist and foe of social injustice who railed against religious intolerance (“Ecrasez l’infame!”) and mercilessly parodied rationalist philosophers (especially Leibniz, aka Dr. Pangloss).

Pangloss was professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology. He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses… Candide “There is a lot of pain in the world, and it does not seem well distributed.” [slides here]

Voltaire’s countryman Diderot offered a sharp rejoinder to those who said nonbelievers couldn’t be trusted. “An honest person is honest without threats…” And Diderot's "Imam" comment, cited by Bok, was positively Hitchens-esque. 

As for La Mettrie? Some of us will agree with his statement that “the universe will never be happy as long as it isn’t atheist.” Of course it's not the universe whose happiness is at issue, it's yours and mine. But, too bad he seems to have been a hedonist pig, and would not have considered it an insult to be told so. "Wallow in it... and you shall be happy in their manner." (My emphasis.)

The Playboy Philosophy? We can do better.

Aristotle to Outlaw

We have Aristotle on two tracks (the Little History and Philosophy Bites) today in CoPhi, and on the third a "Woody Allen-ish" philosopher from New York (Canada originally), Lou Marinoff. He's featured in today's reading from America the Philosophical, as is local star Lucius Outlaw. 

Aristotle‘s in the Pythons' philosopher's song too, though he's even more sober than his Ionian predecessors. He rejected his teacher Plato’s metaphysics, returned to the cave of the phenomenal world to take a closer look, avoided universalizing abstractions and CAPS (preferring forms in things to transcendent and remote FORMS "above"), and inspired the name of our annual Spring speaker series in the philosophy department at MTSU, the Lyceum. 

Our first-ever Fall Lyceum is coming up on November 8, with Carlin Romano coming to explain why America really is a vibrantly philosophical civilization if you look in the right places. Watch for details.)

The best quick & graphic way of illustrating the difference between Plato and his student Aristotle, I’ve found, is by pondering Raphael’s famous painting School of Athens [annotated]. Pay close attention to the hands.

Aristotle said one swallow doesn't make a summer, and a few moments of pleasure don't add up to a happy life. Nor does a "happy childhood." We must be in it for the long haul, and must see our good as coordinate with that of others including those who'll succeed us after we're gone. It's all about eudaimonia ("you die" is a helpful mnemonic, aggressive and hostile though it sounds, and though it really means you live.)

Aristotle was a naturalist, noticing our continuity with the rest of nature. Like trees and plants we flourish when well-nurtured. Unlike them, we must take charge of our own nurture in order to reach our potential.

It's so ironic that the middle ages made Aristotle "The Philosopher," i.e. the unquestioned Authority. That was indeed "against the spirit of philosophy."

Terence Irwin's podcast interview is compelling listening, for those unaccustomed to a Yorkshire accent (or whatever it is). He makes the same point I just did about coordinating the personal and the public good, and "identifying one's own interest with other people's interest" etc. 

He also helpfully corrects overly-simple reductions of Aristotle's ethics to a dogged middle-of-the-roadism. Avoiding extremes doesn't mean choosing the blandest, milk-toastiest possibility. It means doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason etc., and that could very well turn out to be something exciting. Or scary. (Like bombing Syria? What would Aristotle say?)

I used Lou Marinoff's Plato, Not Prozac in Intro (before it was CoPhi) some years ago. Was a bit tempted to experiment with hanging out a shingle and seeing whether the market could bear my therapeutic presence. One of these days, maybe.

Best intro to him might be this Times feature from awhile back.

...philosophical counselors disagree on everything from the best name -- philosophical practice? public philosophy? -- to whether they should be trying to cure people, empower them or guide them to self-understanding...

Marinoff and other practitioners hold that we all have a philosophy of life, whether we know it or not, and that we can benefit from identifying that philosophy, making sure it helps us rather than hinders us -- defining success, say, in a way we might actually achieve it -- and then strengthening it through dialogue with the great thinkers. 

Sounds reasonable enough, doesn't it? But when professions and income levels collide, controversy ensues.

Lucius Outlaw was a pioneering African-American philosopher who studied at Fisk. He's at Vanderbilt now (where he's said some terrific things about teaching, learning, and love). I'm not quite sure why Carlin Romano's chosen to shine such a spotlight on him (I'll put it on my list of questions for Carlin when he comes, in November.)

The most prominent African-American philosopher in America is Cornel West, "in a league of his own" in Outlaw's own words. Here he is in London last year with our first podcast interviewee, MM McCabe (Socrates), and then in the public sphere of NYC, in a taxi, in and on "the examined life."

Kwame Anthony Appiah, London-born Ghanaian-raised, Cambridge-educated, and Princeton-based, is another African-heritage philosopher in America we should all know. His Cosmopolitanism, discussed here, would be required reading in every school, if I were philospher-king. He too was featured in The Examined Life, articulating why it's not only okay for people to be different but actually imperative. And healthy.

See also his wonderful talk on "Ethics in a World of Strangers."

There have been important African-American philosophers all along, including (notably) W.E.B. DuBois and (arguably) Booker T. Washington. And then there's Hubert Harrison.

Hubert Harrison, the “Black Socrates,” defies the stereotype of unblinking theism among African-Americans. He also admired Paine, noted errors in the Bible, and embraced Agnosticism (“such an agnostic as Huxley was”).  He said he had no intention of bowing down to a lily-white god or worshipping a Jim Crow Jesus. He was more than a little literal when he also embraced Nietzsche’s repudiation of “slave ethics.” Admitting that reason alone did not meet his every need, he still preferred “to go to the grave with my eyes open.” That’s a really good personal credo, “eyes open.” Mind too. JMH

One more thing. The Bible book of Ecclesiastes came up in discussion on the CoPhi site, over the weekend. I broke my vow of staying entirely off the Internet during the Sabbath to post my own two cents. Seems crucial, from an Aristotelian or Marinoffian or just plain life perspective, to try and get clear on just what the author was trying to say. Surely not that you have to die and be one of the proud, the few, the "elect," to be happy. I prefer Jennifer Hecht's gloss:

Koheleth brushed aside the dream of an afterlife with a simple appeal to reason--Who knows this?--and the conclusion that humans have nothing above the beasts in this regard...

But it doesn't follow that simple happiness is unavailable in this life. The recipe's pretty simple.

Love your spouse. Get some work to do, do it with all your might; enjoy the simple pleasures of food, drink, and love. Everything else is vanity. 

But, it's a form of vanity we can live with. The search for true love, solid friendship, good work, and daily delight might just be enough. Enjoy your life. A person could do worse. The search for happiness on this orb is anything but a "dismal" undertaking, as someone sadly suggested. You could ask Aristotle. It's the end and aim of life.

Bridging differences, lighting fires, enjoying life

It was a very good day. The Study Abroad phone confab left me almost convinced that our dream course in the U.K. is now practically an inevitability, though of course many devilish details remain to discharge. Delightfully devilish details, I've decided.

Maybe the best news on this front: my colleague's  discovery of an ideal text anthology for our peripatetic journey called The Joys of Walking, small enough to slip in a pocket but rich and various enough of content (including the likes of Thoreau and Dickens) to attract students from across the disciplines.

Got off the phone and into the drink at precisely the time of mid-day when Sol's rays were hitting it right, the goldilocks swimmer's window. (Happiness, I've found, redounds to those who notice and applaud these small "just so" moments.)

Then, just as I'd climbed out and settled in to the deck chair for a few more sunny golden moments before getting back to work, I had to deal with an annoying, falsely-urgent bureaucratic paperless-pushing crisis. I hadn't filed the latest meaningless e-form at school, and the deadline loomed. (What happens when such deadlines pass? Happily, our "spectacular blue marble" keeps on spinning.)

Catastrophe averted, it was time to keep a happy appointment at Portland Brew with an old colleague. C & I taught computer ethics to Vandy engineers together years ago and had met up just once since his return from the west coast. Now, having built a thriving philosophy program from scratch out there in just a few short years, he's come "home" to turn the same trick. If he does it again, here, I'll call it a miracle. And unlike him, he knows, I don't believe in miracles.

But I do believe in the power of conversation and friendship to bridge Big Question differences. We differ on the God question, but share (besides some common experiences and mentors and pedagogical values) the language and mindset of pragmatism. When talking James, we complete one another's sentences. I'm looking forward to his book on the uses and abuses of prayer.

Our biggest point of agreement, pedagogically, is I think captured by the familiar quote from Plutarch by the bench in our Walnut Grove at MTSU: mind is a fire to be lighted...

We agree, our top job as teachers is to get our charges to understand what Emerson meant when he said students in libraries must not forget: those exalted old authors they've been assigned to read were themselves students in libraries too, typically, when they first thought about writing those books.

My friend and I had much to catch up on. We've both lost our dads since our last meeting, he quite recently. There's no replacing a good parent's (or a son's or daughter's) treasured and meaningful and real place in one's life. Our philosophy cannot entirely prepare us for the loss, or predict the priceless gain of happy memory that for most of us eventually overrides the grief.

We talked, too, about the present state of our profession and how much we both "pray" for the passing of the present voc-ed mania of administrators (as reflected in the "retention and graduation" mantra they keep drumming into our heads especially in the public sphere of higher ed). And I told him about Carlin Romano's uplifting celebration of The Philosophy Major, not (contrary to what some administrators would like students to believe) an endangered species at all.

A few doors down from Portland Brew is The Filling Station, a beer-lover's mini-paradise. I'd brought my empty Rogue Dead Guy growler in happy anticipation, and filled 'er up with Duck Rabbit Milk Stout. I'm not dead yet, guy.

Capped the day with a wonderful spousal date at Alegria in Green Hills. If you go, ask for the crawfish hushpuppies. Life is good.

"Quite a hitch ahead"

When William James was prepping the lectures that would eventually become his Varieties of Religious Experience, the famous Gifford Lectures in Scotland, he wrote to Mrs. James about a personal episode of quasi-mystical significance, on a starry night in the mountains:  "the Edinboro lectures made quite a hitch ahead.” 

That's what I'm looking to do today too, make a hitch ahead in a couple of scheduled meetings.

First a conference call with a rep of the International Study Abroad organization in Texas. Hoping to move our dream course in Britain a little further down the developmental road.

Then later, getting together with an old Vandy pal who's moved on down the road himself via the west coast, recently returning from several years in paradise (so-Cal version) to take up residence in one of our more conservative, religiously-affiliated local institutions of higher learning. Less of a stretch for him to be there, pragmatic theist that he is, than it would be for me. 

Speaking of church-affiliated schools, I went for a walk the other morning up the road from my friend's new home, on the campus of Belmont U., and was amused to rediscover a building I'm sure was not consecrated to the memory of the late author of God is Not Great. But he'd love the irony of this, there:

Hitch figures prominently in current plans for the Spring semester's next offering of Atheism & Philosophy. We're going to close with him, appropriately I think in a course focused this go-'round on the meaning of atheism, and how the godless face the prospect of personal annihilation without the relieving promise of eternity. Hitch showed us just how to do that with dignity and grace, in Mortality. And in life.

We'll probably use his Portable Atheist, too, unless somebody knows a better anthology. Took a few suggestions from the floor in HAP 101 yesterday. Dan Barker and Carl Sagan were suggested. More nominations? Always makes me happy to contemplate the future.

But back to that conference call. My colleague and I had one of our productive impromptu hallway meetings the other day and I agreed with his proposal that we not bury our course's lead. We should step out boldly with the tag-line "Walking Tour of Britain," and make our search for the roots and branches of American thought the subtitle. 

Why? Because walking is a perfect mirror and metaphor of the kind of thinking philosophers try to achieve: stepping out of familiar and cozy surroundings, strangers in a strange land, open to meeting whoever and whatever may lie over the horizon and up around the bend, over the heath, under the dale etc. 

The pace and rhythm of collaborative perambulation are ideal for encountering, entertaining, perhaps assimilating and appropriating a new thought. Much better than sitting in a room which, in most instances, could be anywhere. A foreign landscape can only be itself, and it requires the visitor to mind the gap between there and home. Mind it, respect it, shrink it if we can.

I begin, btw, to get a glimmer of understanding as to why my colleague and I are both so smitten with baseball: the whole "leaving/circling/returning home" theme is another mirror of our way of thinking and philosophizing.

He's a Yankee, I'm a Card, but I think we're going to make a pretty good travel team.  

Defining happiness

Before we move on in CoPhi from Carlin Romano's introduction to America the Philosophical, I must linger self-indulgently over his pleasing discussion of the current status of the philosophy major, so recently targeted for "restructuring" by benighted local administrators who knew not what they proposed to do.

...evidence of philosophy's growing appeal to younger Americans continues to mount. According to an overview article in Philadelphia Inquirer, undergraduate philosophy programs rose from 765 to 817 in the decade from 1998 to 2008, and schools across the country reported sharp rises in philosophy majors... 

The major also increasingly appeals to American undergraduates because evidence shows employers associate its graduates with high intelligence and a flexible, critical, independent frame of mind that helps them master change and new information better than other entry-level candidates... philosophy majors scored highest of all majors from 2001 to 2004 on the verbal reasoning and analytical writing parts of the G.R.E... degrees in philosophy and religious studies rose 46%...

Just sayin' you might want to think twice before signing over your life to the study and management of concrete. Philosophy's really not that hard.

But now, today, it's on to HAP 101 and the elusive quest to nail down a definitive definition of happiness. I'll just say, right away, that I'm with Bok in preferring plurality. Let a hundred definitions bloom, and let us feel free to try them all over the course of a lifetime. What floated your boat at age 19  may lack buoyancy at 59. Etc.

A single definition would exclude some pursuits and lock others in, and that surely is not a road we need to go down.

Bok thinks Nozick's Experience Machine happiness is a sham and an illusion, and I tend to agree. Pleasures strictly in and of the head, cut off from their apparent sources and objects beyond the sensory deprivation tank (which might be another name for consciousness, regarded as an entirely interior phenomenon), are surely less real (because less realized in overlapping fields of experience) than those relating us to other persons and their lives.

I just wrote my daughter the college freshman a little postcard, I'll drop it in the mail chute on my way to class later. The writing and the dropping give pleasure because they signify a connection to someone I love and care about and who I miss. We've never been apart for two weeks before, ever.

You could plug me into a machine that would give me that "experience," but I want more.  I want the experience to mean something. I want to enjoy pondering the pleasure she'll experience when she opens her mail slot and finds Woody waiting for her. I want the postman to deliver the damn card, complete the circuit, and round up our experience.

She's got a friend in me, see. A real and not a virtual pal.

Chapter III begins with Alexander Pope's18th century Essay on Man, searching (as are we) for a way to describe something "for which we bear to live, or dare to die." Most of us, at least by the time we're dropping cards to our distant daughters, know what it feels like to be willing to live or die for someone or something else. Isn't that enough? Why do we need a definition?

Maybe because "Happiness is happiness" is a miserable tautology, and we want our words to rise to the occasion. If happiness is the aim and purpose of existence, surely there's a way to say why.

There is, I just did (or began to). But I was speaking for myself, and that's the point: we must express the myriad meanings of our lives in our own words, to the extent we can, and must sometimes admit that words fail. When others' words fail, we must learn to refrain from condemning their happiness as a sham.

Philosophers have a hard time with this, words being our weapons of choice. The "conceptual shotgun," James called it, while admitting that something always "glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught" in a definition.

Douglas Adams' POV gun came closer to finding words, but that was a movie. Bok still has to write, though, and we have to read her words.

She gives us three anchoring questions in this chapter. We'll add more today, no doubt.

Are people the best judges of their own happiness, or outsiders? In defining happiness, should we think of entire lives or of shorter periods such as moments, days, or years? And to what extent are virtue and happiness linked?

 Good ones. And I love Willa Cather's gravestone, but am unsure why Bok calls the sentiment "purely subjective." Can someone explain?

Also: "dissolved" is one thing, kinda like what Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow"; but "decayed" is something else. Is that relevant?

Bok calls Epicurus a hedonist, but that's only technically correct. Yes, he said pleasure's at the heart of happiness. But what kind of pleasure?

A happy life is tranquil, simple, loving, and above all free from pain, fear, and suffering, available to all regardless of social status, nationality, or gender. Such a life of pleasure, Epicurus held, would of necessity have to be a virtuous one; ...

And then there's Kant, who's more concerned with being worthy of happiness than of actually attaining it. I'm for both.

Much else to ponder in this chapter, but I wanted to come back once more to the Experience Machine. Aren't we all Experience Machines already? Isn't that another name for life? And when someone is lucky enough to possess a machinery finely tuned for the production of experiences we call "happy"-- I'm thinking in particular of Thassadit Amswar, in Generosity (have any of you begun to read it, I hope?)-- they should also be so lucky as never to suffer a power outage.

One more thing. I agree with Bok, whatever our personal experience of and capacity for happiness, we always want more and better for our kids. Not just "smiley-face episodes," but rich full flourishing lives that they can enjoy while living them. Even Nietzsche, if he'd had kids, would have felt that way. Surely. Or at least until he fell to pieces over that horse. "The feeling of power increases" most, for a parent, when the children thrive.

To your appointed rounds, Mr. Postman!

Caving to reality

We commence engaging all three of our texts in CoPhi today, the full panoply, with the Little History discussion of Socrates and Plato and Philosophy Bites podcast interviews on the Socratic method and Platonic eros. Plus, the full introduction to Carlin Romano's America the Philosophical. A full menu, it'll be filling. And good.

In the southern part of Europe is a little country called Greece… the Greeks have lived in it for more than three thousand years. In olden times they believed that before they came to the land it was the home of the gods, and they used to tell wonderful stories…

And then Socrates came along to challenge some of those stories. (There actually were some important pre-Socratics like Thales and Democritus already challenging what everybody knew, but we’re jumping ahead in our Little History.) And that’s why, from a western philosopher’s point of view, the Greeks matter.

The old Parthenon must have been lovely, but I think ours was prettier yesterday.

??????????

Socrates, from Alopece, near Athens, asked a lot of questions. Did curiosity kill the philosopher? No, a narrow plurality of 500 jurors did. (His unrepentant attitude during sentencing didn't help, either.) They convicted him of "impiety" (atheism) and corrupting the youth of Athens. One more reason I'm lucky to live in the 21st century: I don't like hemlock. I'm like one of my favorite philosophers, Woody Allen, that way.

He was “snub-nosed, podgy, shabby and a bit strange,” says our text. "He was ugly," says podcastee Mary McCabe. But brilliant and charismatic too, as gadflies go.  Said he had nothing to teach, but those around him (including young Plato) said they learned plenty from him, especially how 

to discuss with others in this open-minded, open-ended way that allows them to reflect on what they think and us to reflect on what we think, without dictating, without dogma, without insistence, and without imperative... to be true to themselves: to be sincere about their beliefs and to be honest... and to have some respect for their companion.

 If that's not good teaching, what is? 

"Plato, they say, could stick it away..." -they being Monty Python. And the late great Hitch sang it too, sorta. But Plato was a serious and sober fellow, in Reality, usually capitalizing that word to distinguish it from mere appearance. The everyday world is not at all what it appears to be, he said. If you want Truth and Reality and the Good, get out of your cave and go behold the Forms. He seemed to think that’s what his hero Socrates had done. I’m not so sure. But read the relevant Platonic dialogues telling the tragic and inspiring story of the last days of Socrates and see what you think.

He also had interesting thoughts about love and eros, as expressed through his constant dialogue character "Socrates" (who may or may not have spoken faithfully for his martyred namesake) in Symposium. Angie Hobbs says Plato rejected Aristophanes' mythic notion that we all have one unique other "half," formerly parts of our hermaphroditic spherical selves, that would complete us and make us happy. But he defended a view some of us find equally implausible, the idea that the true and highest love spurns particular persons and embraces the Form of Beauty.

The Form of Beauty "is always going to be there for you," but on the other hand "it's never going to love you back." Unrequited affection is hardly what most of us think of as Perfect Love. There's a myth for you. "Pain, fragility, and transience" don't sound like much, but try sustaining a relationship without them. That's the story and the glory of human love, no? Just ask Cecil the Butler about Sidney Poitier.

Are we experienced?

It was a restful and playful-yet-productive Labor Day here. Made some headway on next semester's Atheism & Philosophy  reading list. I love when work is indistinguishable from play, as it so often was back when I was learning my chops in Peter Markie's classes at Mizzou. Let's do it just that way today, kids.

In CoPhi we'll start getting acquainted with America the Philosophical. Carlin Romano (who's coming to campus to inaugurate our new Fall Lyceum on November 8, with the chance of an early appearance in our classes on the 7th ) says everybody who thinks America is un- or a- or even anti-philosophical has just not dug deep and wide enough. Especially wide. As the poet said, we are vast and contain contradictory multitudes. We're philosophical at the roots, where we're not weedy.  But of course, he concedes, we're also vain and superficial and unconscious all across the landscape too. We're in the weeds with Jersey Shore and American Idol and Honey Boo-Boo et al. So it's easy, too easy, to overlook all the philosophizing that's all around us.

Carlin's thesis will strike many, especially your entrenched working class of paid professional philosophers, as itself radical. He's breaking their rules. defying what Richard Rorty called their "scholastic little definitions of philosophy."  But as James says in the opening epigraph, "between us and the universe, there are no 'rules of the game.'" America, Romano insists and tries to document in his book, "America in the early twenty-first century towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world." Wow. Can he back that up? We'll see.

One point of immediate concern is the claim that in America there exists a "widespread rejection of truths imposed by authority or tradition alone." Hmmm. That's not exactly been my experience, confronting prejudice in the classroom. Wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard "that's just the way I was raised" or some variant thereof, in declining the invitation to think or even listen. And I don't just get this from Braves and Sox fans.

As I said the other day,

If you believe X because dad or preacher or bible or teacher or tradition or a little voice told you so, that's unphilosophical. If you believe it because you experienced something that you think supports it, and are prepared to discuss that experience and that belief, then we can reason amicably together. 

Carlin's AtP introduction goes on to mention the source of one big embarrassment in the profession of philosophy in America, Professor Colin McGinn (formerly of the U. of Miami, also mentioned in the recent NYTimes philosophy blog The Stone as signifying a positive watershed moment for women in the field), and several of my own influences: John Rawls ("widely touted as the greatest American political philosopher"), Alain de Botton (a popularizer and twitter star), several popular philosophy mags, Harry Frankfurt (On Bullshit), philosophical novelists Iris Murdoch and Rebecca (36 Arguments for the Existence of God) Goldstein, Sophie's World (a great read for Intro students, my colleague Bombardi says), Monty Python ("Socrates himself was permanently pissed..."), Matthew Lipman, Hannah Arendt, Mooney & Kirshenbaum (Unscientific America), Susan Jacoby (Age of American Unreason), NPR and BookTV (the new middlebrow standard-bearers), Chris Phillips (Socrates Cafe, Socrates in Love), Open Court and Blackwell publishers (The Simpsons, The Matrix, Facebook...& Philosophy... and don't forget Jimmy Buffett), X-phi, cyber-phi, Richard Rorty, Oliver Sacks, Robert Fulghum, Cornel West, Obama-the-pragmatist, Isocrates... (Wait: Isocrates? Where'd the "I" come from?)

Notice how many of those names and works have emerged not from academia but from the wider world. That's Romano's point: philosophy in America's way bigger than we (and the APA) thought. I'm not sure I'd include The Playboy Philosophy in that list, as Carlin does, but we'll see.

In HAP 101 we'll continue exploring happiness with Sissela Bok's chapter on Experience. 

It's a happy convergence. The roots of American philosophy are planted not only in British soil (though they surely are, as we'll see with our intrepid summer Study Abroad adventure just over the horizon), but in the immigrants' commitment of our forebears to find, enjoy, and consume fresh uncharted experience in a new land. This philosophical Americanism is more a state of mind than of geography. "New lands" can always be found, in an inner landscape unchained to old prejudices and tradition for its own sake. 

And that's why William James called his and our philosophy of experience Radical Empiricism.

My view is that James's radical homegrown version improves significantly on classic old-world British Empiricism. It was just not radical enough about the sources and deliverances of personal, perceptual experience. 

The back-to-the-roots, self-affirming spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson is the quintessential spirit of radical empiricism (nothwithstanding his having called himself a Kantian transcendentalist):

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote those books.

In other words, young American Scholars: look always to your own experience when reading those books and having those conversations with other experiencers, be they living cophilosophers or dead old legends. "Life is our dictionary ... This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it ... Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds."

And yet, Bok reminds us, as always the trick here is to balance one's own experience with that of others, and with the accumulated experience-based practical wisdom of humanity at large. Common sense isn't always "common" in the low sense.

Staying only with one's subjective perspective on happiness as on anything else shackles understanding; but so does leaving that personal perspective aside in the name of objectivity... It matters to learn to shift between the two, considering experience as seen both from within and from without.

 The point is not to exalt egoism and the private heart, to the exclusion of all others; but to be happily engaged in one's life alongside others similarly occupied. Like injustice, we must learn to see unhappiness anywhere as our concern. Meaningful happiness is all the happier, experience all the richer, the more widely and freely it's shared.

Noble labor

Saw The Butler yesterday, after shopping for Younger Daughter's new bedroom chest (what some country folk around here call a "chester drawers.")

Well okay, I confess I mostly sat in the car listening to Krista Tippett and a Sagan-inspired lady astronomer on the radio talk about human/cosmic connections while wife and daughter plowed the furniture aisles. Giving moral support.

And then getting it. If you're looking for a good way to mark and celebrate the dignity of work, struggle, and perseverance in pursuit of justice for all on this Labor Day...

The first Labor Day was celebrated 131 years ago, on Tuesday, September 5, 1882. The holiday was the idea of the Central Labor Union in New York City, which organized a parade and a picnic featuring speeches by union leaders. It was intended to celebrate labor unions and to recognize the achievements of the American worker. WA

Go and see The Butler. Despite the miscasting of Robin Williams as Ike, it's moving and inspiring too.



Winfrey and Whitaker and company made me proud to carry my union card, and proud to bear a local connection to the children who suffered life-threatening abuse and humiliation to lead us out of darkness during the days of the Nashville lunch counter protests and freedom rides. But, ashamed and disgusted with that earlier generation of pale Nashvillians who demeaned and persecuted them.

The film finally leaves us hopeful and uplifted. It's good to exit the cineplex, for a change, with the echo of a well-earned round of applause almost drowning out the idiot noise of fantasy conflagration in the adjoining theater. It's a rare treat, nowadays, for the movies to make you think your species might be worth saving after all.

Workers of the world, we shall overcome. But take the rest of the day off, first. "I fully believe in the legitimacy of taking moral holidays."