Stoics & Epicureans

LISTEN. Looking forward to Margaret Renkl's appearance on our campus this afternoon for Constitution Day, to moderate a panel on Suffragists and Citizenship that celebrates Tennessee's decisive role in ratifying the 19th amendment.

That's why we're not meeting today in Happiness. But we are commencing a new read, Catherine Wilson's Very Short Intro to Epicureanism. If we like it, we may read her soon-to-be-released bigger book on the subject.

It's Constitution Week on our campus, marked yesterday by Al Gore's appearance-along with the British author of a new book on Gore's dad, and some of my MTSU colleagues (DNJ). It's all a reminder that we must never allow ourselves to be so stoically detached from the challenges of an "unpropitious" time that we neglect to do the right thing.

An old post. Epicurus and his friends retired from public life, having lost all patience with the unhappy society of their peers whose fear of death they diagnosed as a waste of time and a violation of logic. Better to live simply and bravely with your pals, they thought, pursuing (but not wallowing in) pleasure and avoiding the gratuitous mental pain of the material rat race. Like Aristotle they wanted to live well and flourish, with a bit more emphasis on fun and happiness. Also like Aristotle, they deeply valued friendship. Their commune inspired Marx's dissertation.

Contrary to scurrilous popular rumor they weren't lascivious hedonists or self-indulgent esthetes, preferring a plentiful pot of cheap stew to share over good conversation. Bread, cheese, and olives were staples - their version of pizza. The most valuable commodity of all, they thought, was the precious gift of time. As their admirer Henry Thoreau would eventually say, they considered  that"the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." In the long run we're all safely dead, he and they figured, so we'd better make the best of the time we have.

"Epicurean" is another of those adjectives that's drifted far from its progenitor's intent. Check out the latest issue of Epicure magazine, promoting the "gourmet lifestyle" and designed for globetrotting "bon vivants" and "well-travelled foodies." Epicurus and friends would rather have just hung out in the Garden and chatted over their modest but filling fare. "If you start drinking expensive wine, then you'll very soon end up wanting to drink even more expensive wine, and get caught in the trap of longing for things that you can't have" - not without abandoning your friends and slaving your time away to pay for your refined and expensive taste in vino. I'll stick with the Bay Bridge Sauvignon they sell at Kroger for $2.99, and the sale-priced IPA.

Be calm and carry on, as we say. "Calm is an internal quality that is the result of analysis: it comes when we sift through our worries and correctly understand them. We therefore need ample time to read, to write, and most of all, to benefit from the regular support of a good listener: a sympathetic, kind, clever person who in Epicurus’s time would have been a philosopher, and whom we would now call a therapist."

True to his doctrine, Epicurus died painfully but without fear or complaint. He "suffered all his life from bad health, but learnt to endure it with great fortitude. It was he, not a Stoic, who first maintained that a man could be happy on the rack."

And "in a final letter to Hermarchus, Epicurus writes, 'On the happiest, and the last, day of my life. I am suffering from diseases of the bladder and intestines, which are of the utmost possible severity.' But he goes on, amazingly, 'Yet all my sufferings are counterbalanced by the contentment of soul which I derive from remembering our reasonings and discoveries.'" Critchley

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an epicurean, in his day. "Death is not an event in life." Well, that sentiment's a bit self-centered but it's literally true, with respect to one's own demise. "I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind." But what of the pain of losing friends and loved ones? We must turn to the Stoics to deal with the loss of precious others, and may then find them coming up somewhat short of heart and soul.

Ataraxia, calm, tranquility, serenity, equanimity... that's the big stoic aim, based on the idea that we can't control external events but can control our inner attitudes and responses. Can we? Shouldn't we try, in any case? We should control our emotions, say stoics like Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius, lest they overwhelm us with the madness of violent feeling.

Marcus Aurelius asks, 'Why do you hunger for length of days?' The point of life is to follow reason and the divine spirit and to accept whatever nature sends you. To live in this way is not to fear death, but to hold it in contempt. Death is only a thing of terror for those unable to live in the present. "Pass on your way then, with a smiling face, under the smile of him who bids you go." 

Epictetus: "Men are disturbed not by things [pragmata], but by the opinions [dogmata] which they have of things. Thus death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But
the terror consists in our opinion of death, that it is terrible."

Cicero thought we shouldn't worry about dying, but not for Epicurus's reasons. Live now, Seneca said, life's long enough for those who make the right choices about how they spend the hours of their days. Annie Dillard and Maria Popova agree, "how we spend our days is how we spend our lives." But did Seneca make the right choice complying with crazy Nero, in his final hour? Not his finest, I'd say.

"The Stoics were keen astronomers and recommended the contemplation of the heavens to all students of philosophy. On an evening walk, look up and see the planets: you’ll see Venus and Jupiter shining in the darkening sky. If the dusk deepens, you might see some other stars – Aldebaran, Andromeda and Aries, along with many more. It’s a hint of the unimaginable extensions of space across the solar system, the galaxy and the cosmos. The sight has a calming effect which the Stoics revered, for against such a backdrop, we realise that none of our troubles, disappointments or hopes have any relevance." They'd have been pleased to ponder all those game-changing "new" exoplanets, and (unlike some religions, says David Weintraub) to welcome ET. Winston Churchill too: “I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilisation here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.”

3.1.18

Milesians plus

LISTEN. Looking forward to Al Gore's appearance on our campus this afternoon, talking about his dad's contribution to the passage of Civil Rights legislation in the '60s.

UPDATE.

Al Gore spoke with deep gratitide for his parents' influence, & with impassioned urgency when asked what he wanted students in the audience to understand about the climate crisis. "We know what we have to do. What's not to like about doing the right thing?!" #mtsu #AlGore https://t.co/aNMGVvFmKF

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 17, 2019

And, looking forward to the second installment tonight of Ken Burns' film Country Music. Last night's debut was compelling, offering strong evidence of the genre's essential African and African-American roots and promising no "whitewash" of its troubled history with race. Burns has never ducked that fundamental part of America's story, in any of his films. One reviewer's impressions coincide nicely with our turn to pre-Socratic philosophy: it's all about coming to terms with change.

Burns’s chief takeaway from his immersion in the genre is spot on: country music is not, and has never been, static. “I think there’s a paradox that has always existed in country music,” Bill C. Malone, the lone academic voice in the series and the author of the genre’s definitive history, “Country Music, U.S.A.,” says at one point. “How much change do you embrace? And how much change can you make without completely obliterating what you were?” At its best, Ken Burns’s “Country Music” works so well because it declines to present this tug-of-war between change and the status quo as a tension in need of narrative resolution. That tension is the narrative; change is essential to the tradition. David Cantwell, Ken Burns' Delightful "Country Music" Series 

Change is essential to the tradition of western philosophy too. Just recall Zeno's paradoxes of motion, and Diogenes' solvitur ambulando refutation. It is solved by walking, more broadly by embracing the change that's always gonna come. More on that shortly. First, we ask: What changes?

It's Milesians today in CoPhi, plus (from Fantasyland) Jefferson, Joseph Smith, and others, plus Nightwalking with Dickens.

Does reality or nature consist of some kind of stuff, or stuffing? What might that be? Good questions, and though it's easy to discount the earliest attempts to answer them we really ought to appreciate the merits of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, particularly their dedication to a recognizably naturalist-secular mindset millennia before its (our) time.

To be sure, Thales made proclamations like “all things are full of gods,” and “the magnet has a soul because it moves iron,” and Anaximander said that his ‘indeterminate boundless’ was ‘divine’. But it would be a mistake to simply conclude that the Milesian philosophers were ‘spiritualists’. When speaking of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Aristotle plainly stated: “Of the first philosophers, most thought the principles which were of the nature of matter were the only principles of all things.”

...It is to Thales’ credit that he sought to simplify explanations of natural phenomena by discerning that which unifies the totality of reality and depicting it as simply as possible, even if he erred on the side of oversimplification. Thales clearly marks the beginning of rational explanations in place of mythological ones. As such, he marks the beginning of Greek philosophy.

A significant advance in Anaximander’s philosophy is his appreciation of what is not perceivable. Anthony Gottlieb puts it well in his history of philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, The Dream of Reason, pointing out that in a sense what Anaximander did not see is even more important than what he did see: “He realized that the best accounts of nature could not always rely on what was directly observable, but sometimes had to dig deeper. Instead of Thales ’ water, he postulated something invisible as the arche, or basic stuff, of the world. If the philosophy of Thales demonstrated one essential facet of scientific thinking, namely the urge to simplify and reduce observable phenomena, Anaximander’s work exemplified an additional and equally fundamental one: science says there is more to the world than meets the eye.”

...However naïve and extraordinary many views of the three oldest Greek thinkers may seem to us, it marks a powerful, fundamental change from a mythical conception to a natural, that is scientific, explanation of the world, when Iris [the rainbow], who is in Homer a living person, the messenger of the Gods, is here transformed into a physically explainable, atmospheric phenomenon” (p19).
So with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, philosophy was off to a good start. Their philosophies seem remarkably free of the extra-rational influences of religion.

Chad Trainer, The Merits of the Milesians, Philosophy Now

Did Thales really say everything is H20? Not so fast, says Anthony Gottlieb in The Dream of Reason. LISTEN...

Virtue, meaning, and a good life

LISTEN. We finish Daniel Haybron's very fine Very Short Intro to Happiness today.

More important than whether you're happy, says Haybron, is your contribution and legacy. Will you be deservedly well thought-of, for having lived well? So much the better if living well makes you happy, but in the long perspective of history the personal and subjective experience of virtue will barely register. Isn't that all the more reason to make happiness a priority? If you don't, who will?

That's not to endorse "acting badly" in the pursuit, but some will wonder what's to stop any of us from doing so. What compels conscience and compassion, aside from the unpleasant prospect of being poorly thought-of? Decency and virtue might be motivation enough, and their own reward, for the noblest natures. Others rightly care about the judgment of generations to come.

But then there are the deplorables, the philistines, the jerks. They claim the right to be terrible people. Until quite recently I would have said they were marginal to our civilization and not a threat to it. Lately that's less clear. "One should not be an asshole in the pursuit of happiness." You may get yourself in big trouble.

"According to some studies, having kids doesn't make us happier." Having just graduated a couple of them, I've made my own study. I can't imagine the past 20+ years of my life without them. More than that: anticipating them was a source of happiness long before their births. But I know that's not everybody's experience.

"Any life dedicated to worthwhile ends is meaningful," even if the judgment of worth is uncertain or, again, awaits the verdict of history. While we live we have to make that call for ourselves, have to believe we've chosen worthwhile ends, if we're to experience that sort of meaning. Of course, we may never know.

We do know, don't we, that those gawking consumer-touroids on p.104 are draining life of meaning even if they think they're "making memories"? Like selfish and shallow people everywhere, they look more desperate and absurd than happy.

Happiness really is an aspirational ideal, something worth chasing no matter how elusive it may turn out to be.

"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it," says Nobelist Daniel Kahneman. Hmm. As a professional thinking person that's disconcerting. But as Michael Lewis points out in The Undoing Project, Kahneman and his pal Amos Tversky have shed needed light on the extent to which we ought to mistrust our own intuitions about everything, including what will make us happy. “Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe." Well no wonder we often get it wrong. Wonder's that we ever get it right. On the other hand, “When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice."

More uplifting (and poignant) is that heart-grabbing missive from the battlefield that closes Haybron's book. "I am such a lucky person to have the life that I have." That says it.

Tversky said it too, commenting on his own fatal illness. “Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”

And next we turn to another good book, in Happiness class, on Epicureanism. But first, it's Thursday Happy Hour at the Boulevard. Hope it's not too hot for the patio.
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This makes me happy, reminding me of a time not so long ago when actual teenagers amused themselves by exploring the real world: "Cave paintings were discovered in Lascaux, France, on this date in 1940. Four French teenagers and their dog, Robot, stumbled upon the caves while they were out exploring one day..." WA

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September 12 is the birthday of the journalist and editor H.L. (Henry Louis) Mencken (books by this author), born in Baltimore, Maryland (1880). He graduated as the valedictorian from his high school at the age of 15, but even though he was burning to write, he did exactly what his father expected: He took a job at the cigar factory. He started out rolling the cigars alongside the other blue-collar men, and he actually enjoyed that manual labor. But when he was promoted to the front office, he was hopelessly bored... When asked what he would like for an epitaph, Mencken wrote, "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."
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NOTE. These bits below the double lines are the residue of my old practice of checking in each morning with On This Day, Writer's Almanac, and the like, for a quick review of historical highlights and curiosities to help place the day's news in perspective and balance its preponderance of bleakness. Re-purposed old posts may thus include a dated appendage that does not coincide with the new day's date... but if it's interesting or amusing enough, to me at least, so what? Ergo,

"It's [not] the birthday of Margaret Sanger, born in Corning, New York (1879). She coined the term "birth control," she was its most famous advocate in the United States, and she was the founder of Planned Parenthood. H.G. Wells said of her, "The movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time."

Margaret Sanger was born into a working-class Irish family. Her mother died at 50, after 18 pregnancies... In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which in 1946 became Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She also funded research to create a contraceptive pill. She said, "No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." She died in 1966, at age 87, a year after the landmark Supreme Court decision Griswold vs. Connecticut finally made birth control legal for married couples." WA

East and west and yin and yang

Where were you on 9.11.01? What do you remember of that day? The current cohort of new students may not have an answer...

In CoPhi today, our attention turns to the dichotomy noted last time between eastern and western approaches to philosophy. That split is well exemplified by The Monk and the Philosopher, the monk being Matthieu Ricard ("the happiest man in the world"), the philosopher his late father Jean-Francois Revel (1924-2006). If anyone is in a position to bridge the difference it must be Ricard, who walked away from a promising scientific career in molecular biology to go and study Buddhism with the Dalai Lama in Tibet. Ricard on happiness...

And if anyone nailed it, in observing the crowd-mind of our increasingly benighted time, it was his Dad. Revel said:

“A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.”

Too many of the most "responsive" among us, in fact, don't even require "prestige" in any but the most literal sense, in our phrase-mongering tweeters and instagrammers and snapchatters. That's precisely why Stephen Batchelor's advocacy of a secularized Buddhism strikes many as right for our time.

Interesting thought from Elon Musk, echoing the late John McDermott (and others of course) about the "journey":

Elon Musk‏Verified account @elonmusk 19h19 hours ago

If heat death will be inevitable end of Universe, it actually *is* all about journey

An old post:

So much to talk about in CoPhi today, spanning east to west. My hook this morning is the ever-elusive Tao, the way of natural harmony and balance and reconciliation of mutual opposition. It’s hard to talk about (“The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao” etc.) but maybe that’s why we ought to try.

M 30/T 31 PW 18-39. Buddhism & Jainism, Confucius & Taoism, Early Greek philosophy (pre-Socratics), Socrates, Plato. RECOMMENDED: JMH ch3 & p11-24

Two of the Tao’s better trans-cultural emissaries are Fritjof Capra and Benjamin Hoff, authors respectively of The Tao of Physics and The Tao of Pooh.

I’m a follower of Pooh from way back, he was Older Daughter’s favorite bear. (There have been a few, eh Boo-Boo?)

Capra, though, I’m really just finally beginning to explore, through the back door: David Kaiser’s How the Hippies Saved Physics . Maybe it’s a load of quantum flapdoodle, as skeptic Michael Shermer & others say [review of What the #$*! Do We Know?], but it’s challenging (or at least provocative) flapdoodle.

Our tendency to divide the perceived world into individual and separate things  and to experience ourselves as isolated egos in this world,” Capra contended, had long been understood in Eastern traditions as a mere illusion which comes from our measuring and categorizing mentality. Western observers’ impressions of the physical world as pointillist and fundamentally cleaved off from human consciousness arose not from the nature of reality per se, but from the mental filters and habits we happened to have imposed…  three centuries after Newton and Descartes, quantum physicists had only just learned that “we can never speak about nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves”—a deep insight that Capra considered comparable to age-old Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist teachings.

JMH as usual has helpful things to say about all our topics today.  Consider her remarks on the Buddha’s conception of karma, for instance, and how questions like whether there’s a God or an afterlife or an immortal immaterial soul are unhelpful.

He said worrying about these things would be like a man pierced by an arrow asking questions about the family origins of the man that made the weapon… He said that to ask where the soul goes after death is like extinguishing a campfire and then asking whether the fire went east or west when it left. “The question is not put rightly.” Was there a God? Were there gods? The Buddha said these are questions “which do not edify.”

And here we can note an east-west meeting of the minds. Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates in particular were always more interested in the practical business of how to live well, than in speculative and metaphysical  questions about ultimate truth.

And this brings us to Socrates and Plato. The former “taught” the latter, who in turn taught Aristotle.  Each student disagreed with his mentor in big ways, without abandoning attention or respect. (Good role models for us all, we co-philosophers and listeners.)  But there’s a real question about whether Plato the metaphysician didn’t exaggerate Socrates’ interest in the hypothetical world of essences, Ideas, and Forms and understate his preoccupation with ethics. It’s the primarily-ethical bearing of Socrates’ inquiries, after all, that gets Solomon to label him a Sophist (and to intend by that a compliment).

Socrates was not opposed to the Sophists; he was the best of them…

Socrates believed that virtue is the most valuable of possessions, that the truth lies beyond the “shadows” of our everyday experience, and that it is the proper business of the philosopher to show us how little we really know. PW

Socrates “knew nothing and yet was wiser than most, since at least he knew that he knew nothing.” JMH continues:

Socrates counts among those great minds who actually cultivated doubt in the name of truth. The Socratic method is an eternal questioning. This is not relativism; there is truth to be found, but human beings may best approach it through doubt than conviction.

Plato’s allegory of the Cave, in Republic  Book VII, is a thinly-veiled homage to his teacher Socrates (whose “last days” he witnessed and was deeply affected by), though his own philosophy went considerably further than Socrates’ in asserting metaphysical knowledge of another world.

Up@dawn, 1.30.12... LISTEN

Native & indigenous wisdom

LISTEN. The subject in CoPhi today is native and indigenous wisdom, which preceded Europeans on just about every other continent including North America. Following is an old post from 2011, when my  Environmental Ethics class viewed our relation to nature and the cosmos mainly through the lens and from the perspective of the indigenous original occupants of the "new world." Their relation to land, sky, sea, and other beings was generally humble, respectful, and sustainable. It was not especially industrious, if by that we mean perpetually transforming the landscape to facilitate commerce and "growth." They did not think of natural resources as something to plunder and profit from, or of life in general as a get-rich scheme. They would have agreed with Henry David Thoreau's statement about personal wealth: I am "rich in proportion to the number of things I can afford to let alone." They were impressed by the intrinsic continuities between humans, other animals, and the entire natural universe. They did not believe in using things up. They did believe in passing things on.
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We begin today with Native American Wisdom, a collection of provocative quotations attributed to sundry indigenous sages. Here are a few of the questions and comments they’ve provoked in me. Tell me yours.

“All things are connected,” of course– whether Seattle said so or not– but just how intimately? Is the universe “internally” and determinately wired, or are the relations between us and our world loose enough to sustain our ambition and initiative?

And, just how much bigger is Mother Earth than you and me? How much does she suffer our collective foolishness and our consumptive excess? How much can we actually perturb and derange long-term ecological interrelationships and regional or planetary biodiversity? Do we give her too little credit, and ourselves too much?

We all spend forever on this rock, Annie Dillard once wrote, mostly “tucked under.” So the question of how we regard our ancestors, tucked already, is at the same time a question of how we see ourselves spending eternity. For those inclined to take the long view, it is a sacred question: the earth is home, now and always, to wave upon wave of human aspiration and repose. It is incubator and sacred burial ground alike.

Native peoples famously revere the spirit of both the land and all the life upon it, and still they hold the humans to special account: “A man who would not love his father’s grave is worse than a wild animal.” Humans bring something new to the wild world. Human nature is larger than nature per se, in this respect, but is also inseparably a part of it. Human culture is “civilized” but it often needs the tonic of wildness. What does this complicated condition say about us? What special obligations, of an ethical nature, does it impose?

Philosophical naturalists are not necessarily natural lovers of Nature, but indigenous naturalists always are. They’re born conservationists. But, conservatives, with respect to technology and science and “progress”? Is there a form of change naturalists can or should believe in?

I always think of native peoples as tribally territorial, deeply imbued with a sense of place; but at least one of the native speakers we read today chooses to emphasize the concept of homeland as open and unbounded, not so much a particular place as an expansive and figurative landscape, a stage for uncircumscribed movement by free peoples across space and time. How different is that, I wonder, from the combustible freedom of mobility we celebrate in our own time? When people nowadays re-locate for work or whim, and cruise for personal amusement, are they free? Or just untethered?

“It does not require many words to speak the truth.” How many words will we need to address this? Too many, no doubt. But this is the most interesting question I’ve found so far, in my own reflections on native wisdom. A proclivity for more silent forethought might be the most important thing we can hope to learn. Guess we’ll have to talk ourselves into it. [words… talked out…Reality (conceptual shotguns)]

“We do not want riches. We want peace and love.” Another big challenge to the heirs of western ideology: is our civilization’s commitment to the perpetual expansion of wealth compatible with the other, simpler, humbler virtues we say we honor?

On the question of education, it’s hard not to feel one’s cheeks redden when reading Canassatego’s polite repudiation of “the white man’s kind of education.” Thoreau issued the same indictment in Walden, of the practical disutility of so much that we call “higher education.” Why don’t we all study “cabin building” and, if not deerslaying, then at least gathering, planting, and harvesting?

“We shall soon pass, but the place where we now rest will last forever.” Or, as I usually prefer to put it: “the things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves…” We should be teaching our children that, too.

And what about a sense of humility before “the Great Mystery”? If anything, such an attitude would actually reinforce the vaunted presuppositionlessness of the scientific quest.

“A pause giving time for thought was the truly courteous way of beginning and conducting a conversation.” But we hate the silent pauses, don’t most of us, most of the time? That’s a correctable deficiency on our parts, isn’t it? From fear of being taken for slow half-wits we leap into the breach, too glib to be good. A council of elders would find our typical exchanges brash and impudent. They’d want nothing to do with our classrooms, our courtrooms, our interview exchanges. Don’t you sometimes feel the same way? Don’t you frequently find yourself wanting to push your interlocutors’ “mute” buttons, if only they had them?

I’ll give you a few moments to think about that. And I’ll shut up now, just for now. Your turn. Take your time.

up@dawn Jan 24, 2011... LISTEN

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More old native wisdom posts...

The value of philosophy, and the freedom of the universe

LISTEN. In Happiness today we're catching up with the early chapters of Daniel Haybron's Very Short Introduction. Can we really objectify, quantify, measure, and compare our happiness? Is "life satisfaction" something different? Is it enough? If "most people actually have good lives," why has there been such an epidemic of reported episodes of young people contemplating suicide?

If you or anyone you know is ever in that dark place, please consider and share the wisdom of Jennifer Michael Hecht in Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It. 

“None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience. History and philosophy ask us to remember these mysteries, to look around at friends, family, humanity, at the surprises life brings — the endless possibilities that living offers — and to persevere. There is love and insight to live for, bright moments to cherish, and even the possibility of happiness, and the chance of helping someone else through his or her own troubles. Know that people, through history and today, understand how much courage it takes to stay. Bear witness to the night side of being human and the bravery it entails, and wait for the sun. If we meditate on the record of human wisdom we may find there reason enough to persist and find our way back to happiness. The first step is to consider the arguments and evidence and choose to stay. After that, anything may happen. First, choose to stay.” 

My go-to guide for many of our questions is Bertrand Russell's Conquest of Happiness, still holding its value as a reminder that we can't just wait for the world to shower us with joy, we must take steps. But a relatively few steps yields great rewards.

“The secret of happiness is very simply this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

“What I do maintain is that success can only be one ingredient in happiness, and is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.” 

“I do not myself think there is any superior rationality in being unhappy. The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead.”

“Very many people spend money in ways quite different from those that their natural tastes would enjoin, merely because the respect of their neighbors depends upon their possession of a good car and their ability to give good dinners. As a matter of fact, any man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travel or a good library will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like everyone else.”

"One who acquires easily things for which he feels only a very moderate desire concludes that the attainment of desire does not bring happiness. If he is of a philosophic disposition, he concludes that human life is essentially wretched, since the man who has all he wants is still unhappy. He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”

“To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.”

Russell was no Stoic, he was more nearly Epicurean in the falsely-ascribed hedonistic sense... but here's a strong stoic insight:

“When some misfortune threatens, consider seriously and deliberately what is the very worst that could possibly happen. Having looked this possible misfortune in the face, give yourself sound reasons for thinking that after all it would be no such very terrible disaster. Such reasons always exist, since at the worst nothing that happens to oneself has any cosmic importance."

And when all else fails, just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving... as we were saying yesterday about cosmic philosophy and this crucial make-or-break moment in our species' history.

“We have reached a stage in evolution which is not the final stage. We must pass through it quickly, for if we do not, most of us will perish by the wa y, and the others will be lost in a forest of doubt and fear... civilised man must enlarge his heart as he has enlarged his mind. He must learn to transcend self, and in so doing to acquire the freedom of the Universe.” 

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Russell's reflections on the value of philosophy still hold their value, as we'll note in CoPhi today. Here are some complementary thoughts from his History of Western Philosophy, also still standing strong all these years on. LISTEN... (recorded @dawn, 8.30.18)

"Philosophy" is a word which has been used in many ways, some wider, some narrower. I propose to use it in a very wide sense, which I will now try to explain. Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something inter- mediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable ; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge so I should contend belongs to science ; all dogma as to what surpasses definite know- ledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so con- vincing as they did in former centuries. Is the world divided into mind and matter, and, if so, what is mind and what is matter? Is mind subject to matter, or is it possessed of independent powers ? Has the universe any unity or purpose? Is it evolving towards some goal ? Are there really laws of nature, or do we believe in them only because of our innate love of order ? Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on a small and unimportant planet ? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet ? Is he perhaps both at once ? Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile? If there is a way of living that is noble, in what does it consist, and how shall we achieve it? Must the good be eternal in order to deserve to be valuc'd, or is it worth seeking even if the universe is inexorably moving toward? death?

Cosmic philosophy; Life is good

[LISTEN] Nice long holiday weekend, must remember this is Tuesday... and not forget Happiness, where we had a delightful conversation last time about one of my favorite films by a morally-compromised director. What are the things that make life living, for me? Let's see...

I enjoyed how our upcoming Lyceum speaker from Vandy noted the irony of celebrating Labor Day as a prof "at a university founded by a notorious union-buster"... and couldn't resist echoing the observation. My university's "most prestigious scholarship is named for a Koch-funded alum whose campaign of extreme libertarian stealth has damaged our democracy." Our Buchanan scholars, not to mention our entire faculty and staff, should all read Democracy in Chains. Then maybe we can muster a movement to remove his name, along with Nathan Bedford Forrest's from the ROTC Building (and something like a gazillion streets in middle Tennessee). Names and symbols do matter.

BTW, The Times let me set the record straight Sunday: William James was not a "white-man's-burden" nationalist/imperialist/racist like his friend Kipling...

And on Sunday Morning, General Mattis pulled out his copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. I'd wondered how he coped with working for an impossible Commander in Chief.
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We're talking cosmic perspective in CoPhi today. Did you see the Super Blood Wolf moon last night? Or the big eclipse, August before last? Celestial events always dwarf the petty pace of politics and pop culture, and restore - however briefly - a sense of perspective so crucial to the philosophizing imagination. Even an ordinary everyday experience in the open air of dawn can evoke that cosmic feeling, as it did for me on my morning dog-walk today (I can't speak for the dogs, they didn't seem particularly moved. But they do always seem to have a sane perspective on things, from a canine point of view.) The moment we stepped out into the predawn we were met by a bright and brilliant post-supermoon, joined shortly thereafter by a fireball sunrise. Look up!

"The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it's more than just what you know. It's also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:

The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it's not solely the province of the scientist. The cosmic perspective belongs to everyone.
The cosmic perspective is humble.
The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.
The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.
The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.
The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place.
The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment, the only home we have.
The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.
The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.
The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag waving and space exploration do not mix.
The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.

At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.

Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.

During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their low contracted prejudices. And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective." Neil deGrasse Tyson

And, the cosmic perspective dismisses all narrow parochialism. The Tennessee eclipse? Really?

In Nashville's sky, a ring of fire (nyt)...
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Originally published August 21, 2017
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[Posted just after the solar eclipse:]
...Weren't you happy to experience and share that cosmic diversion last Monday? But that gets it backwards. Politics, impactful though it is on lives and prospects, is the diversion. We need to remember that we're standing on a planet that's evolving, and revolving, etc. We need to retain a cosmic perspective. Then, we'll not be so inclined to discount the importance of our happiness.

If we were to ask the question: “What is human life's chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

Thus spake my philosophical spirit-guide James, a little over a century ago. But if that's too current, you can go back to Aristotle. "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence." 

But the issue of our existence is never settled by the citing of authorities, no matter how lustrous. We have to work it out for ourselves, find a way to flourish in personal terms while also remaining responsibly committed to the welfare of our peers and the survival of our species. No simple task, but there's none more urgent.

That sounds almost grim, in an existentialist sort of way. "You will never be happy," said Camus, "if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

Well, I disagree. That's too pessimistic, too Schopenhaurian.

“What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”

If that's the course you signed on for, this one will disappoint. The world does have a great deal to offer. It has a world. We get to live here. We're the lucky ones who got to live at all, who'll get to be happy if we apply ourselves just a bit to the question of how to do it.

 That, anyhow, is our working hypothesis. It makes me happy to begin working it out again. We'll see if we can verify the SoL's 60-second secrets, and its preference for eudaimonia.

There's nothing more fun, and often funny, that the pursuit of happiness.

  

Originally publish 8.__.17
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"Life is good"

So said the Amazonian Piraha people, according to Daniel Everett, before it became a popular marketing slogan.

Happiness (the class) begins today with Daniel Haybron's Very Short Introduction, which includes that epigramatic reference to the Pirahas and then tells us that Socrates - so often exalted as a paradigmatically happy man, right up until the hemlock kicked in, in his 70th year - "didn't miss out on a thing." Well, he missed out on his 71st. Life might have been better, certainly longer.

Was Socrates happier than the average college student? "You might think the typical college student lives in a state of bliss," with minimal obligations and maximal opportunities to ruminate, socialize, and party, but apparently that would be wrong. How many of them are living the examined life? Ignorance is perhaps not bliss, after all? But what about enlightened Socratic ignorance? Either way, American students are apparently less happy than we thought.

Panama is most blissful, evidently. Or was. More recent results point elsewhere. Denmark? Iceland? (I think I recall Eric Weiner's Geography of Bliss giving them high marks.)

One way to chart our happiness index is to ask what's on your bucket list. Another: what's noton your deathbed list of things you just have to do one more time. Maybe not "another peck at the mobile phone, or one more trip to the mall." Maybe you won't wish you'd bought more crap.

"What sort of life ultimately benefits a person," wondered Aristotle. What, not shopping or iPhoning? How many of us can even imagine how bizarre those activities would seem to an old Greek philosopher?

A young Intro student yesterday told me it was his impression that philosophy was mostly about pondering and pontificating on our feelings. But Haybron quickly withdraws feeling theories from the field, in favor of "life satisfaction." But don't confuse that with "subjective well-being," a catch-all of psychologism he says we must confuse with our real quarry.

Has there really never been a better time to be alive? I wouldn't have said the first decade of this millennium was the best ever, but it depends on the yardstick. Steven Pinker's Better Angels makes the case for our good luck.

Many indigenous peoples say the only thing they envy about the western industrial lifestyle is healthcare (and we know how fraught that is). William James told his friend Schiller to "keep your health, your splendid health - it's worth all the truths in the firmament." Hard not to agree, especially after a bout with serious illness. If you've not experienced that, by the time you reach "a certain age," you're even luckier than most.

Haybron says "we need a theory - a definition - of happiness." Do we? What do you mean, we? We philosophers? We authors? We moderns? We shoppers and social media fanatics? Why can't we be happily undefined and atheoretical? Presumably because the absence of a good theoretical framework leaves us in the wrong "state of mind." [But maybe we just need an ever-shifting, changing, growing list of "things that make life worth living," and not a formal definition.]

Happiness is a state of mind, for sure, but it's even more a state of experience and expectation. No? 

Originally published 8.31.17