Montaigne

Montaigne was originally scheduled for just before our Spring Break, but it got a jump-start week before last. Looked like a snow-globe out there for awhile. Now, it's practically Spring!

Older Daughter and I went and did what we'd been talking about doing for years, now that her Break and mine finally coincided: went to Florida's Grapefruit League Spring Training! Day after day of waking to 72 degrees, on the way to high 80s.  Baseball and bliss. 

But that was then. Now, Montaigne (& Bakewell on How to Live acc'ing to M)...

One good way to live, he thought, was by writing and reflecting on our many uncertainties. Embracing and celebrating them, in fact. That makes him an anti-Descartes, a happy and humane modern skeptic.

One thing we know for sure is the historical timeline. Montaigne comes first, but since I always introduce him as the anti-Descartes he rarely gets top billing. The late Robert Solomon did the same thing. Not fair, for a guy who gave us the essay and (as Sarah Bakewell says) is so much "fun" to read. Unlike Descartes he was a true skeptic (again though, not so far over the cliff as Pyrrho) and "quite happy to live with that." His slogan was Que sçais-je?

Montaigne retired in his mid-30s to think and write, and ponder what must have felt to him (ever since his unplanned equine-dismounting event) like ever-looming mortality. He inscribed the beams of his study with many of his favorite quotes, including "nothing human is foreign to me" and "the only certainty is that nothing is certain."

Some of Montaigne's life-lessons and rules for how to live, as decoded by Sarah Bakewell: Don't worry about death; Pay attention; Question everything; Be convivial; Reflect on everything, regret nothing; Give up control; Be ordinary and imperfect; Let life be its own answer.

Montaigne leaps from the page as mindful, both ruminative and constantly attentive to the present moment. He has good advice for the walker.

When I walk alone in the beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me.

Sarah Bakewell quotes Montaigne, disabusing us of the false image of him "brooding" in his tower. He was a peripatetic, too: "My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it." So, like Emerson he might have said "my books are in my library but my study is outdoors."

There's just something irresistibly alluring about the candid and disarming familiarity of his tone, that's drawn readers to this original essayist for four and a half centuries and obliterates the long interval between him and us. He makes uncertainty fun.

"The highest of wisdom is continual cheerfulness"...


 [Montaigne @dawn... M on Self-esteem (deB)... M quotes... M's beam inscriptions... M "In Our Time" (BBC)...M's tower...M's Essays...]

Also today, we'll consider the philosophical status of science. Montaigne the fallible skeptic actually had a better handle on it than Descartes, the self-appointed defender of scientific certainty. That's because science is a trial-and-error affair, making "essays" or attempts at evidence/-based understanding through observation, prediction, and test, but always retreating happily to the drawing board when conjectures meet refutation.

To answer some of my own DQs today:

Q: Are there any "authorities" (personal, textual, political, religious, institutional, traditional...) to whom you always and automatically defer? Can you justify this, intellectually or ethically? A: I don't think so. Whenever I feel a deferential impulse coming on I remind myself of the Emerson line about young men in libraries...

Q: Can you give an example of something you believe on the basis of probability, something else you believe because it has to be true (= follows necessarily from other premises you accept as true), and something you believe because you think it's the "best explanation")? Do you think most of your beliefs conform to one or another of these kinds of explanation? A: Hmmm... The sun will probably rise within the hour. I'm mortal. Life evolves. Yes.

Q: Do you think science makes genuine progress? Does it gradually give us a better, richer account of the natural world and our place in it? Is there a definite correlation between technology and scientific understanding? Do you think there is anything that cannot or should not be studied scientifically? Why? A: Yes, yes, yes, no. Science is a flawed instrument, because the humans who practice it are finite and fallible; but we have nothing to take its place. We shouldn't be scientistic, to the neglect of all the other tools in our kit (including poetry, literature, history, humor), but we definitely should be as scientific as we can.

Adventure time!

Our father-daughter Spring Break/Spring Training adventure can't happen fast enough.

We greet the dawn snow-and-ice-bound this morning, she in sub-zero Illinois, me surrounded by a record (for this date in Nashville) snowfall. But in our minds we're already there, a stone's throw from the best Grapefruit League venue ever (Al Lang Stadium) and short drives from next week's games in Clearwater (Tigers-Phil), Tampa (Red Sox-Yanks), Bradenton (Sox-Bucs), and Dunedin (O's-Jays). So, my topic for next month's 20th annual Baseball in Literature and Culture conference at my school is inevitable: Spring Training and the Perennial Renewal of Life.

Speaking of Blue Jays, I hope we see one in particular before our Friday return flight. He's the most interesting pitching prospect since Sidd Finch. If it were April 1 I'd be sure the late George Plimpton wrote this:

Daniel Norris ("The Van Man") has a consistent 92-mile-an-hour fastball, a $2 million signing bonus, a deal with Nike and a growing fan club, yet he has decided the best way to prepare for the grind of a 162-game season is to live here, in the back of a 1978 Westfalia camper he purchased for $10,000. The van is his escape from the pressures of the major leagues, his way of dropping off the grid before a season in which his every movement will be measured, catalogued and analyzed.

 

If a baseball life requires notoriety, the van offers seclusion.

If pitching demands repetition and exactitude, the van promises freedom.

"It's like a yin-and-yang thing for me," he says. "I'm not going to change who I am just because people think it's weird. The only way I'm going to have a great season is by starting out happy and balanced and continuing to be me. It might be unconventional, but to feel good about life I need to have some adventure."

(continues)

We need to have some adventure too, Older Daughter and I. We need to get out of this deep freeze and into the sunshine. Vamanos!

Sad young pessimists

One of yesterday morning's CoPhi reports featured the late David Foster Wallace's Kenyon commencement speech. The epitome of  intelligence and wisdom, he tells his young audience, is not knowledge but awareness. With awareness comes attention, perspective, sympathy, solidarity, and kindness. Without it, we lose our grip.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

How ironic & tragic that the brilliant and hyper-aware DFW couldn't continue to hold it together himself. As he so poignantly says here, sustaining awareness and keeping your perspective over a lifetime is hard. But it's doable. And it's necessary. This also reminds me of the form of Stoic intelligence, along with multiple others mentioned by Howard Gardner.

A later report yesterday afternoon noted a troubling trend in recent scifi, away from hopeful visions of the future of the sort we associate with the humanism of Gene Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy's Spock. I think awareness may be the cure for that too. There's nothing sadder, as Mark Twain said, than a young pessimist... except a bright and talented young pessimist. 

Hobbes

Back from Big Muddy. Independent, creative, experimental film-making is definitely alive and well. Who's afraid of Vagina Wolf? was more clever than shocking, though it should at least have startled every director-wannabe who's ever pondered the possibility of having to live in a friend's garage. (Is that most of them?) My favorite of the weekend, Finding the Gold Within, was nothing but inspirational.

What would Hobbes say?

"Hobbes (the English social contract philosopher, not the tiger) was fond of his dram," sang the Pythons. But he was fonder of his stick. His walking stick. (See below.) 

He was also a Royalist, a materialist, a determinist, and a pessimist about human nature. He was "difficult to classify" (Russell). I had an undergrad prof at UMSL, back in the day, who spoke weirdly of "mainlining on utopia with Tommy Hobbes." The Hobbesian utopia is no place I want to live.

But still I like much of what I know about him, particularly his daily morning ramble habit. 

I was amused when my old friend said he'd just spent five weeks in Britain and came away with nothing more philosophical than a visit to a castle where Hobbes had tutored. My colleague answered rightly by noting that an ancient English castle's more likely to stimulate the philosophical imagination than is a dusty library in Tennessee. But in any event, Hobbes is a fascinating and over-maligned figure whose steps I look forward to tracking with our Study Abroad course in Britain.

Thomas Hobbes is one of my favorite “authoritarians”: a walker who kept an inkwell in his walking stick, he lived to 91 in the 17th century and believed humans could be saved from themselves with the right kind of contract. Contrary to a student essay I once graded, he did not say pre-social contract humans were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Just that their lives would've been.

Hobbes did say that’s what it would be like to live in a “state of nature,” without civil authority or police or government to keep the peace and impose order. It would be a “war of all against all.” If you don’t agree, asks Nigel Warburton in his Little History, why do you lock your doors? 

Not, surely, because you think everyone’s out to get you. But it only takes a few miscreants, doesn’t it, to create an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust?

I’d like to think Hobbes might reconsider the extremity of his position, were he transported to our time. On the other hand, we might reconsider the benignity of ours, were we transported to his. Those were tough times: civil war, a king executed, murderous politics, etc. How much freedom would you trade for peace and safety, if there were no other way to  secure it? How much have you? How secure do you feel? Still relevant questions in our time, and Hobbes's answers were extreme indeed. But he was no monster, he was a peace-seeker and a civilizer. Most walkers are.

But, would life in a state of nature really be as bad as Hobbes thought? Most of us find most people less than totally distrustful, hostile, aggressive, and  vicious, most of the time. On the other hand, we're most of us hardly "noble savages" either. Civilization and its discontent-engendering institutions account for a percentage of everyday bad behavior, but surely not all of it. So Hobbes may have been onto something, with his claim that we're wired for trouble and must be subdued by something bigger than us all, something leviathan-like.

The Hobbesian threat of insecurity and fear of violent death, in our time, may be great enough to override everyone's desire for personal freedom. Is safety more important than liberty? "Better red (or whatever) than dead?" Better to have government snoops monitoring your calls, emails, etc., than... than what, exactly?

Even if you agree with Hobbes that humans left to themselves would revert to base, aggressive, instinctive behavior, you may yet hesitate to agree that the only corrective for this condition is an all-powerful and authoritative central state. You may prefer not to concede the mechanistic, physicalistic, materialist model of humans as incapable of changing, of choosing to become more kind and compassionate, less fearful and selfish. You may hold out for a species capable of rewriting its default programming.

Speculations about human nature as inherently good or bad have always slighted the individuality of persons, absorbing them in abstractions about universal nature. We should seek instead to grasp the particularity of our separate natures. Our separate plural natures. Our plurality, subjectivity, uniqueness.

"Common sense" gets things wrong often enough and egregiously enough, doesn't it? - the flatness of earth, the rectitude of slavery, etc. - to give serious pause. Uncommon sense is in shorter supply, and greater demand.

Finally today: Descartes' dreams of reality and appearance, and ours. Mine are not usually so lucid, but others say otherwise of theirs. Is it really possible to alter the "real world" by controlling your dreams? I'm skeptical.

And (as I keep asking): can someone please explain "Inception" to me?

What is my purpose?

Exam and report day yesterday, and all of them were good: Vaccination (and its discontents) in Bioethics, Comic Philosophy, Socrates/Plato, Thomas More, God, and "Playing God" in SciFi in CoPhi... That last one reminded me of this:

But who would ever confuse that blue and gray guy with God? Anyway, butter is good. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

My purpose, in any case, is to continue teasing out strong and thoughtful reports on varieties of topics from bright and purposive young people. First, though, a trip up the old cold river to take in the Big Muddy and support Older Daughter (who helped organize it) in her fledgling foray into the world of independent film. 

Machiavelli & civil disobedience

But first a word about what really matters: health. Though I complain often enough of the sorts of aches and pains common to members of my (Eisenhower-era) demographic, I'm rarely bedridden with illness. So, when I'm driven to my sickbed for an entire night and day and night, as I was between Saturday and Monday, it's a bit of a shock and (in retrospect) a welcome reminder. "Keep your health," William James wrote to his English pragmatist friend Schiller, "it's better than all the truths in the firmament." All else is bonus. I'm running on fumes and yesterday afternoon's half-bowl of chicken noodle soup so far today, but I'm up and running. That really does matter, way more to me today than Machiavelli ever did. But I'll try to fake it.

Mistrust, suspicion, refusal to really listen to others: these are symptomatic features of the world as Machiavelli (and Hobbes, coming next) knew it, a world full of testimonial injustice. Not to mention intrigue, plot, war, and violence. The more things change...

Niccolo Machiavelli praised virtu’ in a leader: manliness and valor are euphemistic translations, ruthless efficiency might be more to the point. The intended implication of "manly" is not so much machismo as hu-manity, with a twist. Machiavelli's manly prince judiciously wields and conceals the guile of the fox and the brutality of the lion, all the while brandishing an image of kindhearted wisdom. A wise prince, he said, does whatever it takes to serve the public interest as he sees it. But does he see it aright? Hard to tell, if you can’t believe a word he says. But Skinner and others think he's gotten a bad name unfairly. (See videos below.)

A new detective mystery starring Nicco has recently been published, btw, and was featured on NPR. “What would happen if two of the biggest names of the Renaissance — Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci — teamed up as a crime-fighting duo?” Beats me, may have to read The Malice of Fortune. One of our groups, I think, is doing a midterm report on Superheroes & Villains. Room for one more?

I'm a bit puzzled by the sentimental fondness some seem to feel for "machiavellian" politicians. Haven't we had enough of those? Wouldn't we rather be led by Ciceronians and Senecans and Roosevelts, evincing qualities of compassion and (relative) transparency? Don't we wish them to affirm and work for the goals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor's great post-White House achievememt?

But, Bertie Russell agrees that Machiavelli has been ill-served by invidious judgments that assimilate him to our time's conventions and accordingly find him objectionable, instead of appreciating his fitness to live and serve in his own day. Russell praises his lack of "humbug." Give the devil his due.

“I never say what I believe and I never believe what I say,” declared Machiavelli. “If I sometimes say the truth, I conceal it among lies”... more»

1. 

   'The Prince' and 'Why Machiavelli Still Matters ...

   The political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli wrote “The Prince” as a manual on leadership and governing during the late Italian Renaissance, ...

2. In Tuscany, Following the Rise and Fall of Machiavelli

   Five centuries after “The Prince” was written, visiting spots in and around Florence that track the arc of Machiavelli's life.

Arthur Herman makes the case for assigning Machiavelli to Team Aristotle... Inside the Mind of Machiavelli (Salon)

Looking for a firm modern presidential declaration of anti-Machiavellian sentiment? Jimmy Carter said: "A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity."

We're talking civil disobedience too, today. Again Nigel slights the Yanks, in not mentioningThoreau. “If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.”  And,

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?

So, here's my Discussion Question today: Have you ever engaged in an act of deliberate law-breaking, in order to challenge what you considered an unjust law? Are there circumstances in which you would do so? Would you risk arrest on behalf of social justice, climate change, or anything else? Will you at least support those who do? Are you a compliantist, a gradualist, or a transgressive reformer?

Russell, incidentally, himself a civil disobedient in the great tradition of Socrates, Gandhi, King, et al - ("On April 15 1961, at the age of 89, Bertrand Russell gave a speech calling for non-violent civil disobedience in his campaign for British unilateralism, i.e. to get Britain to unilaterally give up its nuclear weapons and membership in NATO") -  gives Thoreau only passing attention as an American representative of the romantic movement of the 19th century.

Anselm, Aquinas, & politics

It's more Saints today in CoPhi, and more Harvards: Anselm & Aquinas (with commentary on the latter from Anthony Kenny), Robert Nozick and political philosophy. Inexplicably, our politics chapter omits discussion of the most important political philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls. We'll rectify that in class.

Anselm stumped for the divine moral perfection (and omnipotence and omniscience) of a being “than which none greater could be conceived.” His Ontological Argumentis either ingenious or ridiculous, depending on who you ask. But it rarely persuades those who do not come at it armed with antecedent faith. "Faith seeking understanding," or maybe just the appearance of rational cover.

Anselm considers reason subordinate to faith. 'I believe in order to understand,' he says; following Augustine, he holds that without belief it is impossible to understand. God, he says, is not just... St Anselm, like his predecessors in Christian philosophy, is in the Platonic rather than the Aristotelian tradition. For this reason, he has not the distinctive characteristics of the philosophy which is called "scholastic," which culminated in Thomas Aquinas. Russell

In the time of Aquinas, the battle for Aristotle, as against Plato, still had to be fought. The influence of Aquinas secured the victory [for Aristotle] until the Renaissance; then Plato, who became better known than in the Middle Ages, again aquired supremacy... Russell

 Indeed, "Aquinas fully endorsed Aristotle..." (Cave & Light)

 Aquinas was sure there had to be an uncaused cause in back of everything, or else we’d never get to an end of explaining. Well, we probably won’t. Not ’til the would-be explainers themselves are gone. But is an uncaused cause really a step forward, explanatorily speaking?

Both of those guys were committed, of course, to belief in a heavenly afterlife. Samuel Scheffler, in the Stone recently, wrote of the afterlife here. Here, of course, is where people live the lives their beliefs inform. Life, not god or supernaturalism, is the natural impulse behind religion. Dewey's continuous human community is another way of naming nature's afterlife.

But what if you learned that the species would expire within a month of your own passing? That's Scheffler's thought experiment. He thinks he and we would be profoundly unsettled, that life would suffer an instant meaning collapse, and that this shows how invested we all are in a natural afterlife for humans (though not each of us in particular) on earth. He thinks "the continuing existence of other people after our deaths -- even that of complete strangers -- matters more to us than does our own survival and that of our loved ones." That's what he means when he begins his essay: "I believe in life after death."

He also explained his view on Philosophy Bites.

Our old dead Italian Saints said nothing about this, so far as I'm aware. Anthony Kenny does say Aquinas still agreed with Aristotle about "the best way to spend your lifetime down here on Earth," that happiness is ultimately an activity rather than a feeling, and that "the supreme happiness for rational beings was an intellectual activity." To Aristotle's standard "pagan virtues" he added faith (in Christian revelation), hope (for heavenly ascent), and charity (toward god and neighbor).

But the charity he seems to admire most in Aquinas is of the intellectual variety, "always trying to balance arguments from both sides" and treat those whose conclusions he disputes with civility.

Neither of today's 20th century Harvard philosophers was a Saint, but both were civil.
Robert Nozick began his academic career as a narrow analyst and wunderkind libertarian, but evolved well beyond his starting place. He came to realize that astringent libertarianism neglects "the reality of our social solidarity and humane concern for others." He came also to the view that "thinking about life is more like mulling it over" than like pinning it with a syllogism. "It feels like growing up more." He kept growing, 'til stomach cancer took him at age 63.

Nozick's chapter on dying in The Examined Life begins,

THEY SAY NO ONE is able to take seriously the possibility of his or her own death, but this does not get it exactly right. (Does everyone take seriously the possibility of his or her own life?) A person's own death does become real to him after the death of both parents.

He's right about that, in my experience.

Before his death (as Yogi Berra might have said) Nozick gave us the good oldExperience Machine. We just talked about this the other day. Here's a Yalie to talk about it too.

John Rawls, says Carlin Romano, wrote "the most important book of English-language political theory since Mill's On Liberty. His goal was a coherent theory of "justice as fairness" whose appeal would span the spectrum, after emerging from behind a "Veil of Ignorance." Not everyone buys it, but we all talk about it. Michael Sandel does too, to a much bigger class than ours, albeit mostly virtual & MOOCy.

And now there's a musical stage show. How many political philosophers can say that?! Rawls@dawn



Also a propos of politics, happily included in our chapter today: historicity, Kantian respect, egalitarianism, libertarianism, affirmative action ("reverse discrimination"), the Marxist critique of sham democracy, and paradoxes of conscience. Plenty, as usual, on our plates.