Up@dawn 2.0
© 2024 Up@dawn — All rights reserved. No parts of this blog shall be reproduced without the consent of the author. https://philoliver.substack.com (Up@dawn@Substack)... @osopher@c.im (Mastodon)... @osopher on Threads & IG... Continuing reflections caught at daybreak, in a WJ-at-Chocorua ("doors opening outward") state of mind...
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
A second naivete
born"…
"Then George mentioned the people who stumble upon Quakerism later in life. "They are often going through a second naivete, as some philosophers call it." I stopped him when he said that and asked him to elaborate. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, he said, had first floated the concept of a second naivete. On the other side of adult critical thought, Ricoeur posited, resides a place where ancient symbols and myths and stories can regain their power to instill hope and wonder. A second childhood of sorts—but of a higher order, if one is so fortunate. The phrase, when George said it, lit up in my mind, not unlike when Neal Weaver mentioned the line from St. Paul about renewal and a transformation of the spirit.
Years earlier, after my cancer diagnosis blurred my future prospects, I put a lot of thought into how I should fashion my sixties if I were so lucky as to have them. I imagined a period during which I attempted to shed my hardened conceptions and to look at things anew. A time to revel in what I didn't know while trying to fill in those huge gaps. I would aim again to greet things as I found them and savor the complexity, which only grew as one saw and learned more. A recapturing, as I saw it, of a much younger phase in life when the limbs and mind and spirit were much more fluid and more limber. I had no name for this approach, but suddenly, "a second naivete" fit quite well."
— American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal by Neil King
https://a.co/bIQ4PxE
Thursday, October 10, 2024
Fellow-feeling
Aka empathy.
Enjoyed our discussion of Mr. Rogers (and SpongeBob) in #H1 yesterday, prompted by Ella's reading of Lyceum speaker Mariana Allesandri's essay "It's a Terrible Day in the Neighborhood...""When your heart can sing another's gladness,Fred moved a crusty old Senator to emotion when he testified on behalf of public television's children's programming in 1969:
Then your heart is full of love.
When your heart can cry another's sadness,
Then your heart is full of love." -Fred Rogers
Saturday, October 5, 2024
Ben and Me (and me)
I'm enjoying Eric Weiner's Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life.
He writes that old Ben Franklin was not (as I and others, including *AI, have believed) an early proto-pragmatist but rather "what neuroscientist David Eagleman calls a 'possibilian' [who] asks [not] what can we do about this now [but] imagines what might be done in the future, no matter how improbable. The possibilian is infinitely patient. The possibilian always perseveres, and never sighs."
Well, I think he was both. I know I am, though I do often sigh these days and my patience is definitely not infinite. But it's a useful reminder that desired practical results are not always delivered promptly. Nonetheless, we must persevere if we intend that we and our successors in the great parade of humanity are to continue to live long and prosper.
Anyway, it's nice to have a new perspective from Esoteric Eric on the Founder who winks.
==
*Yes, Benjamin Franklin was a pragmatist, and his pragmatic spirit was a key part of his success: [1, 2, 3]
Practical results
Franklin believed that what mattered was the practical results of improving himself and making others happy. [3]
Experimental approach
Franklin's pragmatism included an experimental approach and an orientation toward human progress. [1]
Resistance to dogma
Franklin's philosophy was unique in its resistance to dogma. [2]
Championed virtues
Franklin championed virtues like industriousness, frugality, and common sense, and believed they were foundational to a prosperous society. [2]
Understood virtues as habits
Franklin believed that virtues were habits or skills that could be improved through practice. [4]
Franklin's biographer Walter Isaacson claims that Franklin laid the foundation for American pragmatism. Franklin's pragmatic spirit was closely tied to his life experiences, including growing up in a poor family in Boston and dropping out of school at age 10 to work in the family trade business. [3, 5]
Generative AI is experimental.
[1] https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ells/article/view/49522
[2] http://mastersinvest.com/newblog/2024/5/9/the-munger-series-learning-from-benjamin-franklin
[3] https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ells/article/download/49522/26690
[5] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/467713/summary
Monday, September 30, 2024
Play's the thing
But the look the humans share says: What does it look like? Call it what it is. Every dance is a game, and every game its own best explanation. Everything alive, even we newcomers. . . . What are all creatures—even me—doing at all times but playing in the world, playing before their tinkering Lord?
Our tinkering Lord is natural selection, with or without a pre-meditative tinkerer. Play on, Hamlet. And Richard. Can't wait for the sequel.
(And because the mlb regular season ends today, let's play into the post-season. Then, start counting the days to Spring Training.)
Saturday, September 28, 2024
part of the stream
— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
Friday, September 27, 2024
Anxiety: the bright side
MTSU's Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies is hosting its first Applied Philosophy Lyceum of the academic year on Friday, September 27, 2024, at 5:00 PM in COE 164. Catered reception following.
Looking forward to introducing our Lyceum speaker this afternoon, assuming we're not flooded out…
I'm delighted today to introduce Dr. Mariana Alessandri, professor of philosophy at University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley and (it is possibly relevant to note) a New Yorker.
I do understand that when she writes "Against Cheerfulness," she means forced and phony cheer, the "American way [that] borders on psychosis." I don't think she's against the spontaneous and natural sort of joi'e de vivre that even the gloomiest of Guses can occasionally enjoy. No less committed a Scrooge than Schopenhauer, after all, said
"Cheerfulness is a direct and immediate gain, — the very coin, as it were, of happiness… for it alone makes us immediately happy in the present moment, and that is the highest blessing for beings like us, whose existence is but an infinitesimal moment between two eternities. To secure and promote this feeling of cheerfulness should be the supreme aim of all our endeavors after happiness." -The Wisdom of Life
Schopenhauer--the guy who said “What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life"-- said that!
Dr. Alessandri has written widely and in public, contributing (according to its editor) some of the New York Times philosophy series The Stone's most impressive essays. One of those, in 2019, found the late Fred Rogers' dark side: "It's A Terrible Day in the Neighborhood and That's Okay" concludes:
"If we are convinced by Rogers' and Aristotle's claim that feelings are not wrong and that "what's mentionable is manageable," we should begin mentioning our own sad, lonely and disappointed feelings. In doing so, we would show children — and our grown-up selves — how to appropriately manage them."
Dr. Alessandri introduces herself, on her website, this way:
"I'm a teacher, philosopher, accidental activist, and mother, but if I could be a superhero, my cape would read: 'Defender of Dark Moods.'
As long as I live in a world where people apologize for crying in public, I will write books and essays on why complaining is good, why [fake] cheerfulness isn't, and why Mister Rogers was right that "everyone has lots of ways of feeling and all of those feelings are fine." You can find [her] my work at The New York Times, New Philosopher, Womankind, [Aeon,] and other places."
[And] Check out what drives [her] nuts on Instagram and in her newsletter, In the Cave.
Speaking myself as a mostly-happy melioristic pragmatic pluralist, and despite her reluctance during the Q-&-A in Boston to endorse the hopeful positivity of meliorism, I was gratified by Dr. Alessandri's inscription in my copy of her book: "Dear Phil, I think the pragmatists and existentialists have a lot of common ground!"
And so we have.
Please join me in welcoming
DR. MARIANA ALESSANDRI
Professor, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
“THE UPSIDE OF ANXIETY: Kierkegaard on feeling better about feeling bad”
Is anxiety best described as a lack of faith, an error in reasoning, or a brain disease/chemical imbalance? Do any of our contemporary definitions or descriptions of anxiety help us feel better about it? In 1844, the “congenitally anxious” philosopher Søren Kierkegaard posited that the more anxious a civilization is, the more profound the culture. Can Kierkegaard’s defense of anxiety help us, in 2024, to feel better about feeling bad?
Join Dr. Mariana Alessandri, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and author of Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods, as she talks about the mental illness that 1 in 3 college students suffers from.
* This event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the discussion.
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Playground
http://dlvr.it/TDdSS9
Playground
And here's a passage that describes my every trip to Parnassus:
"I WANDERED AROUND THE BOOKSTORE for so long looking for my prize that my father lost it. "All right, already. Pick one and be done with it." But that was the problem: How could I pick the right one when it might be any book in the entire store? Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. I started my rounds again, across Chicago's finest chain bookstore's two large floors. "Five minutes," my father said. "Then I'm picking one for you." I was in the Nature and Science section of the Young Adult books when my eyes fell on a turquoise spine with shimmering letters that read Clearly It Is Ocean. I opened the book and was dismayed. The font was smaller and denser than I liked. But the pictures of surreal sea life were incredible, and I wanted them. On the back was a picture of a skinny woman with long red hair and a diving mask pulled up over her radiant face. I had never seen an adult look so fulfilled. One glance at the author and I fell in love as only a ten-year-old can. My father scowled at my choice. "Are you sure?" I was sure. "Are you sure you're sure?" He waved his hand, taking in all the superior treasures that I was passing up. I was sure. The author in the photo was sure. All the fish in all the lakes and oceans were sure. Clearly this was the book I was meant to have."
— Playground: A Novel by Richard Powers
https://a.co/5o7xdRt
Friday, September 20, 2024
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Richard Powers on What We Do to the Earth and What It Does to Us
Should we be feeling awe, delight, terror about the environment, AI, etc.?
"Do I have to choose one of them? I mean, all of them. Don't you feel all of them?"
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
Macho “Stoics” on the internet
"Working through a book with some students yesterday and had a realization.💡
Many of us would agree that our culture is broadly nihilistic — lot of despair, feelings of pointlessness, atomization, and isolation. "Does anything matter?!"
A lot of the toxic stuff online targeting young men is flourishing IN THIS CONTEXT. Guys are offered "systems," and "discipline," and "tradition" as a balm for this aimlessness and anxiety about meaning."
👇 https://www.threads.net/@greatbooksprof/post/C_vF9PnusBk/?xmt=AQGziKuazBiKpApNr6Oa7gCvvqV9D39ZVA3FnnNdKNkC_Q
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Cousin Mary‘s instructions
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it."
Mary Oliver, born on this day in 1935
https://www.threads.net/@reboomer/post/C_u3B2wOcYK/?xmt=AQGzPk2MS5HzI2P78zSTO4gVzAH3AmvRjRN2bl-_xjQAWA
Monday, September 9, 2024
How the Philosopher Charles Taylor Would Heal the Ills of Modernity
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/24/cosmic-connections-charles-taylor-book-review
Saturday, September 7, 2024
Get up and move
https://www.threads.net/@arthurcbrooks/post/C_lA1mSh166/?xmt=AQGzBrjFTm0gO1PI4UQCCxp9eAdnCwVWMRA56a_sieKdPQ
Friday, September 6, 2024
“Divisive concepts” form (for the convenience of my students)
"…Even more so than Florida, Tennessee is a one-party state, with a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature. The Tennessee house and senate passed a resolutionto honor the Danube Institute; on the floor of the Tennessee house, the state representative Justin Jones questioned why the state was honoring the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán's thinktank. Tennessee has a state ban on the teaching of "divisive concepts", one that includes public universities. To report a professor for teaching such a concept (such as intersectionality), Tennessee provides an online form..."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/05/why-fascists-hate-universities-us-bangladesh-india
Saturday, August 31, 2024
Happy Labor Day!
Leisure, the Basis of Culture: An Obscure German Philosopher's Timely 1948 Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism – The Marginalian
"…when we take a real vacation — in the true sense of "holiday," time marked by holiness, a sacred period of respite — our sense of time gets completely warped. Unmoored from work-time and set free, if temporarily, from the tyranny of schedules, we come to experience life exactly as it unfolds, with its full ebb and flow of dynamism — sometimes slow and silken, like the quiet hours spent luxuriating in the hammock with a good book; sometimes fast and fervent, like a dance festival under a summer sky.
Leisure, the Basis of Culture is a terrific read in its totality, made all the more relevant by the gallop of time between Pieper's era and our own. Complement it with David Whyte on reconciling the paradox of "work/life balance," Pico Iyer on the art of stillness, Wendell Berry on the spiritual rewards of solitude, and Annie Dillard on reclaiming our everyday capacity for joy and wonder."
Maria Popova
Tuesday, August 27, 2024
A fruitful inspiration
"The fact is that the history of philosophy is more the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind than the history of a sharply defined discipline. The traditional image of it as a sort of meditative science of pure thought, strangely cut off from other subjects, is largely a trick of the historical light. The illusion is created by the way we look at the past, and in particular by the way in which knowledge tends to be labelled, chopped up and re-labelled. Philosophical work is regularly spirited away and adopted by other disciplines. Yesterday’s moral philosophy becomes tomorrow’s jurisprudence or welfare economics; yesterday’s philosophy of mind becomes tomorrow’s cognitive science. And the road runs in both directions: new inquiries in other disciplines prompt new questions for the philosophically curious. Tomorrow’s economics will be meat for the moral philosophers of the day after. One effect of these shifting boundaries is that philosophical thinking can easily seem to be unusually useless, even for an intellectual enterprise. This is largely because any corner of it that comes generally to be regarded as useful soon ceases to be called philosophy. Hence the illusory appearance that philosophers never make progress.
It is said that the psychologist William James once described philosophy as ‘a peculiarly stubborn effort to think clearly’. This is a rather dry definition, but is more nearly right than any other I know. True, clarity is not exactly the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of philosophy. There is no denying that philosophers’ attempts to think clearly have often rudely backfired. (Any subject that is responsible for producing Heidegger, for example, owes the world an apology.) Still, William James was right to describe philosophy as he did. Even the darkest of its practitioners are struggling to make sense of things, and it is this effort that makes them philosophers. Sometimes the effort does not pay off, but often it does.
To call philosophical thinking ‘stubborn’ was particularly apt. Bertrand Russell once described it as ‘unusually obstinate’. For the one thing that marks it off from other sorts of thinking is its unwillingness to accept conventional answers, even when it seems perverse not to do so from a practical point of view. That is why philosophers often make such excellent figures of fun. The earliest Greek historians of philosophy understood this better than we do today, for their books were peppered with ludicrous anecdotes, some of which may actually have been true and most of which are very much to the point even if they were made up. To disapprove of such lampoons of the eminently lampoonable is to miss the joke at the heart of philosophy. Philosophers have regularly cocked an eyebrow at what passes for the common sense of the time; the punch line comes later, when it is ‘common sense’ that turns out to have been uncommonly confused. Sometimes the joke goes wrong, of course, and it is the philosopher who ends up looking foolish, but that risk comes with the job.
The attempt to push rational inquiry obstinately to its limits is bound often to fail, and then the dream of reason which motivates philosophical thinking seems merely a mirage. At other times, though, it succeeds magnificently, and the dream is revealed as a fruitful inspiration."
The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (New Edition)" by Anthony Gottlieb
Monday, August 26, 2024
Opening Day feeling: “this one thing”
"…d.r.: And you stand up onstage in front of all these people and play. It's such an honor to have all of your energy focussed on this one thing that you care about so much. And to know that all the work you've done in the past—all the thinking about what the next line's going to be, or what the next story you're going to tell is, or what the next note you're gonna play is, or what you played last night that really was fun and you need to remember how to do that again because people enjoyed it so much and you enjoyed it, that you have this North Star. It's unreal.
g.w.: It's so heartening that, with everything that's going on in everybody's lives and in the world, people still feel that impulse. They still want to go and sit in a dark room and listen to people sing."
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/what-gillian-welch-and-david-rawlings-took-from-the-tornadoFriday, August 23, 2024
AOC on Janeway, KDH on the Titanic
Kamala on the Titanic-"It's not about you..."
Post by @nicmonseesView on Threads
Thursday, August 22, 2024
“What Are You Going to Do With That?”
http://dlvr.it/TCFnFG
“What Are You Going to Do With That?”
Thus begins Erik Baker's "disillusioning" Harper's essay, not exactly the inspiration I'm looking for as another semester is about to begin. Baker continues:
Republicans certainly don't—a mere 19 percent of them expressed "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in higher education in a Gallup poll last year. But we already knew that. More striking is that Democrats' confidence is down to 59 percent. Men, women, young people, the middle-aged, and the elderly range from ambivalent about to decidedly wary of today's colleges and universities. Of college graduates themselves, only 47 percent were able to muster more than "some" confidence in the institutions that minted their credentials. No wonder fewer students are enrolling in college after high school and fewer students who matriculate stay on track to finish their degrees.But I say reports of the death of higher education and the humanities are greatly exaggerated. I can't do much about administrators, but I'm pretty sure I can persuade at least a few students that reading and learning are good for them, for their democracy, for their humanity. Some of those students will have their lives altered positively and permanently when they learn to love learning.
On campus, the atmosphere of disillusionment is just as thick—including at elite schools like Harvard, where I teach. College administrators have made it clear that education is no longer their top priority...
So I do look forward, again and perennially, to Opening Day…
Wednesday, August 7, 2024
Tim's "more than happy"
“Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health care decisions, and we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness…. The fact of the matter is,” where Democratic policies are implemented, “quality of life is higher, the economies are better…educational attainment is better. So yeah, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we're working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance. So if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.” HCR
Tuesday, August 6, 2024
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
Into the Heart of Life: Richard Powers on Living with Bewilderment at the Otherworldly Wonder of Our World – The Marginalian
"…Set sometime in the near future, when our search for life beyond the Solar System has come to its inevitable fruition, [Bewilderment] tells the story of a thirty-nine-year-old astrobiologist and his neurodivergent, frightened, boundlessly courageous nine-year-old son, searching together for other worlds and instead discovering how to reworld ours with meaning.
Radiating from their quest is a luminous invitation to live up to our nature not as creatures consumed by "the black hole of the self," as Powers so perfectly puts it in his talk, but as living empathy machines and portable cosmoses of possibility, whose planetary story is yet unwritten…
As the father searches for other worlds, he is savaged by despair at humanity's catastrophic mismanagement of this one, haunted by the growing sense that we couldn't possibly be good interplanetary emissaries until we have become good stewards of our own home planet. But each time he hits rock bottom, he bounces back up — as we all do, as we all must in order to go on living — with rekindled faith in what we are capable of…"