The Jamesian take on life

WJ wrote candidly to his dying sister of the tissue-thin line between life and death. She was grateful, and funny, in reply. They both valued honesty about experience above all. With such mutual transparency they found delight even  in mortality's final chapter. They would emphatically "have it so."

"...the scorching directness, the emotional candor, the acceptance and validation of the worst as well as the best of life, the sheer intensity toward life in all its forms, the avidity for experience, the honesty of mind and perfect pitch of heart that has become, in this case more than most, transpersonal but family-fixed. This is the Jamesian take on life."

"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson: https://a.co/6sJX0tZ

Three Roads Back

Richardson's posthumous survey of how hdt, rwe, and WJ rebounded from the worst darkness humans can know is another afterthought for my address that probably should've been in the foreground. Better late than never. Footnotes are a good backstop.

"In dark times, from the personal to the global, one way I have found to fight back against what is going wrong is to re-examine the lives and works of figures from the past. I have spent many decades with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James. All faced disaster, loss, and defeat, and their examples of resilience count among their lasting contributions to modern life.

Emerson taught his readers self-reliance, which he understood to mean self-trust, not self-sufficiency. Thoreau taught his readers to look to Nature—to the green world—rather than to political party, country, family, or religion for guidance on how to live.

William James taught us to look to actual human experience, case by case, rather than to dogma or theory, and showed us how truth is not an abstract or absolute quality, but a process. Experience—testing—either validates or invalidates our assumptions. Further, James says, attention and belief are the same thing. What you give your attention to is the key to what you believe. Whoever or whatever commands your attention also controls what you believe…"

— Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives by Robert D. Richardson
https://a.co/5dphVYG

The delight drug

 Less than two weeks 'til my James Society Prez Address in DC, where I'm supposed to find "delight in dark times"-a topic more daunting now than I could have imagined back in September when I proposed it. Looking for one last ray to lead us from the cave, I turn again to the always-reliably-illuminating Bob Richardson.

WJ famously decried the inadequacy of words to capture the brilliant immediacy of experience. “What an awful trade that of professor is,” he complained at term’s end in 1892, “paid to talk talk talk!… It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words.”

But it's finally his fluently original way with them that consistently delivers delight. The gaslighting authoritarian apologists and bullies who've presently hijacked our institutions can't take that away. Kipling was right, at least about this: words are our most potent drug. Better even than nitrous.

"He was the first to use “hegelism,” “time-line,” and “pluralism.” He had a gift for phrases that stick in the mind: “the bitch-goddess success,” “stream of consciousness,” “one great blooming, buzzing confusion,” “the moral equivalent of war,” “healthy-minded,” and “live option.” He used examples, anecdotes, jokes, anything to impart narrative dash and energy to the page. And there are many places where, standing on the arid plain of experimental data, James turns to face the reader, reaching outward through his own experience to us, in prose that can stand comparison to anyone’s."

--William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson

We should not underrate the power of words, the right words in the right measure at the right time, to delight the shadowed soul and lead it back to daylight. WJ might have been the last to say so, but among the best at showing it.

==

It was my pleasure to exchange a few good words with Richardson in Chocorua NH in August 2010 (at about the 26-minute mark here), at the best academic gathering I’ve ever been privileged to participate in-“In the Footsteps of William James” (kudos to then-prez Paul Croce for bringing it to fruition). It was split between Chocorua and Harvard, marking the centenary observation of James’s exit from material existence in August 1910. The sufficiency of matter to sustain all life’s purposes happened to be the topic of our brief exchange. 

Troubled, but resolved

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.” John Stuart Mill

Audio recording (& links) on substack...

My default response to Trump and Trumpism, these past years, has been to wake up every morning and try to pretend they don't exist, at least until after I've had an opportunity to read, reflect on, and write about something that actually ennobles and does not degrade life.

I like to greet the dawn in a spirit of renewal and hopefulness, two of the countless words clearly not in the MAGA vocabulary. I like to check in with those guys in the U.K. who go with their dogs to the ocean and "drink in" the glory of the start of another day on earth. 

Then I like to go for a dogwalk.

Only then do I ever want to allow myself be sullied with news of the latest desecrating disgrace from DC. 

It's getting harder and harder to keep my mornings clean.

The shameful scene in the Oval Office yesterday contaminated this morning. A despicable pair of spineless Russian assets, somehow occupying the highest elected positions in the land, ambushed and tried to bully the courageous leader of a beleaguered nation committed to the democratic values our country once symbolized. On waking, I couldn't get the ugly scene of betrayal out of my head.

I'm going to work to reclaim my mornings. Dogwalks will be my lifeline. 

But I'm also going to look for more ways to discomfit the imposters who've confiscated the executive branch of our government, as well as their enablers in the congress and the judiciary. I'm going to use my modest platform and voice, including my classroom. I'm not going to be one of those the next generation will pity for remaining silent in the face of calumny and treason.

I'm going to trouble myself to use my mind and voice and pen. I will not look on and do nothing. 

But right now we're going for a walk.

I, Human

"Who was it who first said, "I don't know what I think until I see what I write"? Versions of this statement have been attributed to writers as various as Joan Didion, William Faulkner, Stephen King and Flannery O'Connor. Google's robot doesn't know who actually said it, but almost anybody who writes, whatever they write, will tell you it's true.

In "I, Robot," the 2004 film loosely inspired by Isaac Asimov's classic sci-fi novel of the same name, one robot is unlike all the others of its model. It has feelings. It learns to recognize human nuance, to solve problems with human creativity. And with those attributes comes the questions inevitably raised by being human. Twenty-six minutes into the film, the robot asks, plaintively, "What am I?" This is a question writers ask every day. I suspect everyone else does, too..."

Margaret Renkl https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/opinion/i-human.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Edward Abbey on how to live and how to die, 19-year-old Simone de Beauvoir's resolutions for a life worth living, Oliver Sacks in love

…Long after he composed his passionate prospectus for how (not) to die and not long before he returned his borrowed atoms to the earth, Abbey offered his best advice on how to live in a speech he delivered before a gathering of environmental activists:

It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here.

So… ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.

Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

Couple with Anna Belle Kaufman's spare and stunning poem about how to live and how to die, then revisit the poetic science of what actually happens when we die.

Maria Popova 

https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/edward-abbey-simone-de-beauvoir-oliver-sacks

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Who’s afraid of Beowulf?

And who will be our Grendel?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rYTyqPItej0&si=T0JLVdGCB3QTSF-T

What’s a humanist?

Depends on who you ask.

Not quite my definition:

Humanists are non-religious people who shape their own lives in the here and now because we believe it's the only life we have. A lot of people share humanist values without even knowing the term. Maybe you're a humanist! Find out by taking our quiz! https://humanists.uk/humanism/how-humanist-are-you/

My preferred version: 

Some humanists (Spinoza, Einstein, John Dewey for example,) are natural pietists who revere nature and the cosmos, regard life as precious and sacred, and are vitally concerned for the future of life (while harboring no fantasy of a supernatural afterlife for themselves personally). 

But some others are as you say.

Like Santayana said…

Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions

https://theonion.com/historians-politely-remind-nation-to-check-whats-happen-1819572992/

Praise Song for a False Spring

Any sign that nature is working as it ought to reminds me to keep faith in the future.

As bad as things are, as bad as they might yet get, this is not the end of the story. We don't know what will happen, but we know this: Even the bitterest winter doesn't last forever. Spring is coming.

--Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/17/opinion/nature-false-spring.html?smid=em-share

A happy and virtuous consciousness

Yesterday was Henry Adams's birthday.*

Late in William James's life-very late-he and Adams corresponded about Adams's entropic pessimism. 

William's attitude is key to finding delight in dark times. It's never too late to be happy.

From the summer of 1910:

…The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"—save that it sets a terminus—for history is the course of things before that terminus, and all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its effects, of which rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity" factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of human institutions—their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to do with their energy-budget—being wholly a question of the form the energy flows through. Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium—in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully canalisés that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate, but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one question.

There! that's pretty good for a brain after 18 Nauheim baths—so I won't write another line, nor ask you to reply to me. In case you can't help doing so, however, I will gratify you now by saying that I probably won't jaw back.—It was pleasant at Paris to hear your identically unchanged and "undegraded" voice after so many years of loss of solar energy. Yours ever truly,

WM. JAMES.

[Post-card]

The Letters of William James, Vol. 2 gutenberg.org

* https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-sunday-february-95e?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios (Richard Ford too. Frank Bascombe deals with the second law better than Henry did.)

"the springs of life"

“If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life.”
– HDT, Walking

SOLVITUR AMBULANDO
60 Quotes on Walking
Poetry, song, scripture, and literature provoke contemplation of the paths of life -- and spur putting one foot in front of the other RUSSELL SMITH 

https://substack.com/home/post/p-157058529?source=queue

A genuinely happy birthday

[Recording on substack...]

I've not been capturing so many "daybreak" reflections in this space lately, having committed awhile back to  doing (and holding close) more personal journaling.

I'm sticking with that commitment, reinforced by the recent WAPO story about a centenarian who's been keeping a daily journal without lapse for 90 years! Never mind that most of her entries are pretty banal--where she went, who she spoke with, what she had for dinner etc. Wouldn't it be amazing to have a shelf full of dated personal journals you could pull down at will, full of that kind of ephemera along with the occasional deeper reflection too? 

Michael Palin also inspires, in this regard.

But there are still times that do call for a step back and a shared stock-taking, when reflection wants wider expression. This morning is one of those times.

A thunderstorm rolled into middle Tennessee early this morning, stirring our big pup Nell to the anxious heavy panting that loud atmospheric disturbances trigger in her. There was going to be no sleeping through that. So I commenced my usual pre-dawn routine and put the water on to boil a bit earlier than usual.

I recently switched digital journals (which I've been keeping fairly constantly for a few years now) from the Google docs platform to Apple, when I learned of an upgrade to the iPhone Journal app. That's where my daily journaling routine now begins, with (mostly) voice dictation to unpack whatever partial thoughts, feelings, and perceptions happen to be sitting on the surface of awareness as the fresh-dripped coffee pour begins to kick in. (I do measure out that portion of my life in coffee spoons, Mr. Eliot.)

This morning's early digital journal recorded my deep gratitude for family and friends who made my 68th birthday very special yesterday. Good conversation, good memories, good food, good times. 

It began with an hour-long group text with far-flung pals whose acquaintance goes back decades to grad school and beyond--nearly half a century, in the case of my buddy from Mizzou. We celebrated our respective 21st birthdays (his the day before mine) as callow undergraduate philosophy neophytes on a snowy night in Columbia Missouri forty-seven years ago last night. We've agreed that we must try to arrange a repeat performance on the semi-centennial of that milestone in 2028, wherever we are. 

Then a shared catfish basket and brownie a la mode at a new (to us) lunch venue called The Ridge with my wonderful wife.

Later our generous daughter popped over for a visit. She always brings light and cheer, and frequently the best baked goods in town-her own creation.

Then, a fabulous sushi dinner at Ginza (next door to Parnassus) with the delightful couple we like frequently to meet there.

A simple day, simple pleasures, affectionate memories that surfaced with the storm this morning and made their way first into my digital journal, then the bedside Moleskine, and now (in less personal detail) here. I don't want ever to lose them, those priceless memories. And so I've notched them (as Thoreau and Virginia Woolf and others have said one must) on the stick of externally stored memory.

Pretty good way to start a rainy day in February, way better than scrolling the latest offenses to decency emanating from what used to be the world's most emulated seat of democracy.

(And, note to self: that presidential address to the William James Society in DC is scheduled for a month from today, bright and early. Get it done.) 

Could say more. And will. But this will do for now.

It’s Abe’s birthday too

"…The idea of a small government that serves the needs of a few wealthy people, Lincoln warned in his era, is "the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent."

HCR 

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-11-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

On the soul of a materialist and the value of a “plurality of consciousnesses”

Dan Dennett was a good teacher.

"…Patient, smart, and imaginative, Dennett could explain concepts from every angle, inventing new ones if given the time. And I also hadn't reckoned with the communicativeness of personality—the fullness of an individual, even briefly glimpsed, and what it suggested about what they might know. What is a materialist philosopher—a person who doesn't believe we have souls—supposed to be like? I'd had a picture in my head, something involving coldness, bluntness, harshness, and it was wholly wrong, a caricature waiting to be erased. It wasn't so much that Dennett's personality made me reconsider his ideas, but that his specificity made me consider them more specifically. The more you know a person, the more interesting they become. This can be true not just for who they are but for how they think. And the stakes are higher when you're face to face. It's easy to close a book, and harder to end a conversation…

Some novels, Bakhtin thought, even allow us "to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses," a perspective that is "born at a point of contact" between people. By knitting together those voices, a profile could similarly allow readers to consider the possibility that all the sides of an argument were, together, right…

Dennett persuaded me. By the time I'd finished writing the Profile, I no longer believed in the hard problem—and I no longer felt that denying its existence was a slight against my idea of what it meant to be human. The experience left a high watermark in my intellectual life. Ever since, I've found it difficult to be satisfied with reading or thinking on my own. If someone's ideas fascinate, perplex, or frustrate me, I want to get to know the person. If I don't understand some question, I want to "report it out…""

—Joshua Rothman

An Academic's Journey Toward Reporting

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/an-academics-journey-toward-reporting

Evolutionary humanism

Today marks the 216th birthday of Charles Darwin. For us, it's a day to reflect on Darwin's underpinning values – his humanism – and to recognise what was once considered radicalism has become common sense to most people today. DarwinDay

Our most noble attribute

#DarwinDay salutations! Today is a fantastic day to contemplate the profound effect that Charles Darwin has had on the entire world. It's astonishingly to think that so few people have so radically changed how we view humanity, and for the better, too.

(Not just dogs)

No to theocracy (and no to a severe edit)

 I wrote a letter in response to 

Ross Douthat’s recent column on religion. It'll run, says Peter Catapano, but it's been trimmed down to the last paragraph. [UPDATE: It was published Feb 15 online, and ran in the print edition Sunday Feb 16]

So here's my edit:

To the Editor:

Re: Ross Douthat, Feb.7--

Ross Douthat's convergent arguments for a god based on "Fine Tuning" (aka the "anthropic principle") and human consciousness, while impressive coming from a "precocious undergraduate," do not finally compel assent. As Carl Sagan put it in his book Pale Blue Dot, “There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.”

And as Rebecca Goldstein has said of "intelligibility" arguments alleged to prove the divine probity of human consciousness (Argument #35 in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, from the intelligibility of the world), they point (if anywhere) to something like Spinoza's pantheistic impersonal god, aka the universe itself, and not an object of personal worship.

Undergraduate conversations about the possible existence of a god are fun, sometimes. But insisting that they should make us all religious flirts insensibly, at this moment of political blitzkrieg in Washington, with theocratic intolerance. We don't all need to be religious, any more than we all need to be Republican.

Phil Oliver
Nashville
The writer is an associate professor of philosophy at Middle Tennessee State University.

“the ricochet wonder of it all”

Important not to lose that, in distracting and chaotic times like these.


"I'm stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else," poet Diane Ackerman wrote in her Cosmic Pastoral, which so enchanted Carl Sagan — her doctoral advisor — that he sent a copy of the book to Timothy Leary in prison. "Wonder," Ackerman observed nearly half a century later in her succulent performance at The Universe in Verse, "is the heaviest element in the periodic table of the heart. Even a tiny piece of it can stop time."
…
https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/08/12/eating-the-sun-ella-frances-sanders/

Tenderness as an Act of Resistance

Margaret Renkl and Kate DiCamillo "remind us that we know how to fight, and how to keep fighting."

"…I fall into the mineshaft of despair over and over again, and over and over again something (the moon, an eagle, the snow) or someone (a kid who tells me that  makes them feel brave, a stranger who looks me in the eye and smiles, a grandparent who tells me about reading aloud to their grandchild) will reach down to pull me out," she wrote. "I've learned to not resist these hand-holds. I've learned to let the beauty of the world and the bravery of other people pull me up and out of the despair."

I thought of Ms. DiCamillo when I read about the Democrats' Senate sit-in and the countrywide protests held last week. I thought of her when the F.B.I.'s acting director, Brian Driscoll, stood up to the bullies demanding the names of agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases; when security officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development refused to give Elon Musk access to internal systems; and again when Ellen L. Weintraub, the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, refused to step down after President Trump fired her on social media. All around us, brave people are fighting. Even if some of those fights prove to be doomed, they remind us that we know how to fight, and how to keep fighting.

All around us, too, is beauty — art and music and stories, like the brave mouse in "The Tale of Desperaux," that make us feel brave, too; evergreens that shelter singing birds and hardwoods trembling on the verge of green; lighted planets lined up in a parade across the night sky; glowworms hiding deep in the leaf litter, waiting for warmth to turn them into fireflies; ponds with clouds scudding across their shining surface, and turtles sleeping deep in their soft mud…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/opinion/trump-resistance-compassion.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Experience Pill

Still sounds pretty "invasive" and unreal to me…

"In 2018, researchers restaged Robert Nozick's Experience Machine thought experiment… to see if, forty years later, Nozick's findings—that people would reject the Experience Machine because it offered pleasurable experiences that were not "in contact with reality"—still held. 

They discovered that if you replaced Nozick's invasive machine with an Experience Pill that promised a lifetime of pleasurable experiences with no side-effects, people were more likely to say they would take it. The researchers hypothesized (correctly, as it turned out) that "the less invasive an intervention is—the less it severs contact with reality—the more people will be prepared to accept it.""

— The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen
https://a.co/hWJSWYB

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief

 by Maxine Kumin

Blue landing lights make
nail holes in the dark.
A fine snow falls. We sit
on the tarmac taking on
the mail, quick freight,
trays of laboratory mice,
coffee and Danish for
the passengers.

Wherever we're going
is Monday morning.
Wherever we're coming from
is Mother's lap.
On the cloud-pack above, strewn
as loosely as parsnip
or celery seeds, lie
the souls of the unborn:

my children's children's
children and their father.
We gather speed for the last run
and lift off into the weather.

"Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief" by Maxine Kumin from Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief. © Penguin, 1989. Reprinted with permission. WA

Letting our freedom flag fly

We'd misplaced this garden flag, haven't flown it in a few years. Found it last night. Putting it out there this morning.

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Resistance is not futile…

But sometimes debate is. I've read that you should never argue with someone whose television is larger than their bookcase.

Mark Twain said never argue with a fool, observers might be unable to tell the difference. I don't spend much time trying to dissuade MAGA people, though I'm happy to ask them lots of questions. But as Lucy [or Sally, or Marcie, or?] told Charlie Brown, "I don't think about things I don't think about." So I don't expect thoughtful responses.

Maria Popova: "When debate is futile – remembering Bertrand Russell (who died on this day in 1970 having lived nearly a century and won the Nobel Prize) with his extraordinary response to a fascist's provocation."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/10/06/bertrand-russell-oswald-mosley/

Flow redux

Socially mediated distraction via iPhone isn't the form of attentive flow we need.

"When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote more than twenty years ago about “flow”—that state of being in which someone is so involved in an activity “that nothing else seems to matter”—he argued, “Attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.” We might believe that our attempts to fill our interstitial time with mediated distractions qualify as an effort to optimize our experiences under less than optimal conditions. But the concept of flow needs to be revisited in an era of smart machines."

"The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World" by Christine Rosen: https://a.co/bNObLyT

Russell’s happy merger

"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life." — BertrandRussell, The Conquest of Happiness

I agree with Russell in spirit, but "personal transcendence" requires at least enough ego to generate those wider interests. I'd say you should make your interests personal and expansive. Inclusive. Connective. "Larger than yourself." Pretty sure that's what he meant anyway. Impersonal means more than merely  personal. Interpersonal. We don't need zero ego, we need a social ego that bonds us with our species and with the future of life. That's how you transcend time and mortality. Or try.

Note: he says not that the ego recedes but that its walls do.  They become permeable. The self doesn't disappear, it grows and becomes part of "universal life." The trick is to feel and embody that before shedding mortal form. It's Peter Ackroyd's "trans-end-dance, a.k.a. the dance of death" (Plato Papers).

Maria Popova: Bertrand Russell died on this day in 1970, having lived nearly a century and won the Nobel Prize, leaving us his immortal wisdom on how to grow old.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/07/03/how-to-grow-old-bertrand-russell/

Instinctive mythology

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way."

— Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads To Freedom

Opening Day!

Another semester dawns. An inaugural I always enjoy...

https://open.substack.com/pub/philoliver/p/opening-day-b66?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3lg7ltodrd22y

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

On a Cold, Dark Inauguration Day, a Message From the Birds

"…Birds don't exist to serve as symbols, and yet they can't help but mean something to the symbol-making species watching them through a window or a storm door. On this Inauguration Day that brings no hope for help from elected officials to address climate change or to protect vulnerable species, including our own, the living world is showing us what to do: In the dark days already gathering, we will need to do our best to look out for one another and for the creatures we love."

Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/opinion/winter-birds-cooperation-survival.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Read banned books

I got a Little Free Library for Christmas (aptly complementing the gift of light). I'm going to put it up soon as the next big freeze ends and ground yields to shovel. Ray's going in there, for sure.

“I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote ‘Fahrenheit 451’ I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are” —Ray Bradbury

A problem with (most) academics

(And the virtue of inter-disciplinarity):

"Knowledge is indivisible. When people grow wise in one direction, they are sure to make it easier for themselves to grow wise in other directions as well. On the other hand, when they split up knowledge, concentrate on their own field, and scorn and ignore other fields, they grow less wise — even in their own field." — Isaac Asimov

Disruptive avatar

That's another name for Philosopher, at least the sort fashioned in a Socratic mold. Agnes Callard's new book is out just in time for the start of our semester. (And she'll be our Lyceum guest in March.) Can't wait to resume my disruptive vocation on Tuesday. There will be questions, starting as always with "Who are you? Why are you here?" And why are we?

"Socrates did not write great books. And yet he is responsible for one truly great creation: the character of Socrates. Socrates made himself into someone that other people could be. He fashioned his very person into a kind of avatar or mascot for anyone who ventures to ask the sorts of questions that disrupt the course of a life."

— Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard

It was nice to see Ann Patchett giving a brief shout-out to Callard (though she mispronounces the name, which rhymes with mallard and J.G. Ballard... and though it sounds like Dr. Karl is more enthusiastic for the subject matter than she is.

See this Instagram post by @dremilyherring

"This week the New York Times ran the review of my biography of Bergson in print! If anyone knows how I can get my hands on a copy in Paris let me know!" --

dremilyherring

osopher

 17h

Great to see the book getting this attention! But Bergsonians (and Jamesians) will rightly resent Anthony Gottlieb's dismissive condescension. If subjective human experience is not relevant to our grasp of the significance of time, what in the world is??

@dremilyherring: https://www.instagram.com/p/DE0HV1_MCah/?igsh=ZGUzMzM3NWJiOQ==

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I'm tempted to write a letter to the Times Book Review.

I wrote The New Yorker a letter, taking issue with Gottlieb's Leibniz, which they won't publish so soon on he heels of my last one. But I needed to write it:

Anthony Gottlieb wants us to overlook Gottfried Leibniz's "best of possible worlds" theodicy and give the old philosopher a break. [The Man Who Knew Too Much, Jan.6]

William James was an ecumenical philosopher prepared to give just about every variety of experience-based philosophy more than an even break. But he rightly drew the line at Leibniz,

a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate, you have only to read that charmingly written 'Theodicee' of his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove that the world we live in is the best of possible worlds. --William James, Pragmatism Lecture I: The Present Dilemma in Philosophy

The notion that suffering on earth could ever be adequately compensated by its hypothetical absence elsewhere in the cosmos is indeed a feeble attempt to rationalize the insufferable.

#try

We pragmatists must frequently remind ourselves, as WJ did when he mocked himself for thinking he could "settle the universe's hash" with a grand final statement in philosophy:

"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." ― [falsely attributed, probably, to Marcus Aurelius, Meditations]

And yet we must try. Fools and authoritarians do seem to have an outsize influence on events. #meliorism

"to work for something because it is good"

That's hope.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” but the summations of the state of the world often assume that it must be all one way or the other, and since it is not all good it must all suck royally. Fitzgerald’s forgotten next sentence is, “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

You wonder what made Vaclav Havel hopeful in 1985 or 1986, when Czechoslovakia was still a Soviet satellite and he was still a jailbird playwright. Havel said then, The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed."

"Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities" by Rebecca Solnit: https://a.co/2ykoSIT

William James Society - A Note from the President

 Now, to work on that Presidential Address in D.C. in March...

William James Society

A Note from the President: Happy New Chapter!

Welcome to the William James Society, members old, new, and prospective. I greet you at the dawn of the next quarter-century of our organization’s history. I was honored to be here in the beginning as an inaugural board member, and am humbled to be here now as president in 2025-6.

On behalf of the society I invite you to (re-)join our growing, pluralistic community. We reflect various backgrounds, disciplines, and traditions. Some are institutionally affiliated scholars, others are independent. But all share the belief that William James’s philosophical and humanistic legacy offers something crucial our time desperately needs.

The future is (as ever) uncertain but, we Jamesians believe, is also malleable and at least partly, potentially responsive to our most thoughtful and committed exertions in the present. “The really vital question for us all,” he said, “is What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?”

James also liked to say life feels like a “real fight,” not a mere game of inconsequential “private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will.” That rings at least as true in 2025 as it must have in 1884, when in Dilemma of Determinism he sought to rally his peers to the spirit of “meliorism”–of trying to improve the human prospect, without any advance guarantees of success.

But because James was a happy fighter, a seeker and celebrant of what he called our “springs of delight,” I think an organization devoted to promoting his distinctive mode of thought and action must also court joy, hope, and a resolute resilience in the face of whatever hard challenges await us.

And because he was a pluralistic humanist, we should also embrace his philosophy of ‘co’: “The pluralistic form [of philosophy] takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of ‘co’…”

As so, my fellow James Society cohorts, we can afford neither of the twin luxuries of excessive optimism or pessimism in these challenging times. Neither of those attitudes can summon our best efforts. Let us get on with doing our small bit to try and build a better world.

The great essayist E. B. White said “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” Hard, sure. But a Jamesian will insist on both.

So let us be meliorists. And let us have a good time doing it.

Happy New Year!

Phil Oliver
President, William James Society

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About WJS

Membership in the Society is open to anyone interested in issues related to the thought and character of William James, and joins you to a growing community of scholars and others with related academic interests.

The William James Society (WJS) is a multidisciplinary professional society which supports the study of, and communication about, the life and work of William James (1842-1910) and his ongoing influence in the many fields to which he contributed.

The William James Society was founded in 1999 by Randall Albright and quickly grew to include members from across the USA and around the world. In 2001, the Society ratified an organizational constitution, held its first annual meeting, and elected executive offices. For many years, WJS published the in-house newsletter and scholarly outlet Streams of William James. In 2006, the society shifted gears and began publishing the academic, peer reviewed, online journal William James Studies.

Joining the Society helps to fund the following:The offering of the annual WJS YOUNG SCHOLAR PRIZE.
Co-hosting academic panels at:The American Philosophical Association
The American Academy of Religion
Society for the Advancement of Philosophy
European Pragmatism Conference
Making and making freely available our online journal: William James Studies.

If you are also interested in the life and work of William James, we hope that you will consider joining us in our endeavors.

https://wjsociety.org/