Meaning's up to us

Our Camus class yesterday prompted a student to say:

Life inherently has no meaning. We are all Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill. You must create your own meaning. Life has no meaning so you are free to give it whatever meaning you want to. So don't let the futility of existence get you down. Embrace futility dance with the absurdity and see that through the absurdity and meaningless of your existence comes with the infinity of existence.

And it prompted me to recall what Hitch said about that:

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities…” Christopher Hitchens

And what Sagan said:

The hard truth seems to be this: We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We would prefer it to be otherwise, of course, but there is no compelling evidence for a cosmic Parent who will care for us and save us from ourselves. It is up to us. Carl Sagan

And Dawkins:

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?” ― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder... RD Explains the MoL (vid)

And Bertrand Russell:

The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need -- of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed. A Free Man's Worship

And finally again, Camus:

Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Keep on pushing.

Happy Halloween.

Almost forgot the Pythons:

Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations. Monty Python's Meaning of Life

"Nothing very special"? But it can be: and that's what means the most.

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5:45/7:09, 37/64

Peace

Our friendly regional Peace Corps rep visited my classes yesterday, seeking possible future recruits for one of the better options available to young people in transition, in uncertain times. (Aren't they always?) We recently noted Voltaire's counsel to "cultivate our garden," a call to service the Corps answers better than anyone. They've come in from the Cold War, and applications are spiking since they streamlined the process. Oh to be twenty again, with a world to save!

Immanuel Kant, who I bashed a bit yesterday for his deontological cold-hearted refusal to admit our universal worthiness to be happy, deserves kudos for his "perpetual peace" campaign. "To pay men to kill or to be killed seems to entail using them as mere machines and tools in the hand of the state, and this is hardly compatible with the rights of mankind." He'd support the Corps, to pay for peace and pay it forward. Its success is one great measure of our worthiness. War and the perpetual threat of war have been our species' norm, at least as far back as the hypothetical state of nature. We have to initiate and establish a state of peace, and continually work to sustain it. If we're unwilling to do that, maybe we don't deserve happiness.

That "debate" in Boulder last night was anything but peaceful. Or worthy, or real, or generous.

Still thinking about Camus, whose Nietzschean roots I now finally grasp. In Richard Powers' Generosity: An Enhancement, Russell Stone (get it?) is Sisyphus, striving to overcome his own inertia. As noted in Happiness last time, we're not very good at assessing the extent of our own flourishing. But if we've faced down the absurd, and the threat of self-annihilation, maybe it's true: we must imagine ourselves happy, or at least push ourselves in that direction. “Maybe happiness is like a virus," Stone thinks. "Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.” It would be nice to know.

5:39/7:08, 53/66

Brave new world

In Happiness yesterday we belayed Sisyphus and caught up with Nietzsche, considering his "gifts" of adversity, hardship, and total recurrence - thanks, but no - the formula of his happiness ("a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal"), and his dream of a stark new "dawn of day" for

the mountain climber, who, although he sees his goal far above him, nevertheless falls asleep on the way from utter exhaustion, and dreams of the happiness of the contrast this effortless rolling down hill.

So we did sort of get to Sisyphus, with that image of strenuous ascent relieved by a revery of hope for the other side of the mountain. It looks like a deluded revery, for the condemned man. But Nietzsche's point is also Camus's: in just such moments we may seek our happiness. We must. Or we imagine we must.

Or as Daniel Haybron puts it in The Pursuit of Unhappiness, reported by Crystal, Jesse, and Dilyse, “Even when things don't go very well, even when life is hard, it still tends to be a pretty wonderful thing to be alive.” 

Yes, it's a wonderful life. But no, I can't write a blank check to the demon for every "this," when he asks: "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" I'm not that well disposed to suffering, which does not always offer a saving grace. I refuse to reduce it all to a single thumbs up or down. On this this, I'm with the meliorists, the utilitarians, and the Buddhists.

Still, we need our contrarians. Haybron concludes with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World "Savage":

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” “In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.” “All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the nght to be unhappy.” “Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to- morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence. “I claim them all,” said the Savage at last. Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. “You’re welcome,” he said.

The Savage is welcome to have it all, all over again, eternally, in a world without end and with few comforts (no soma, no beer), with pain, suffering, "real danger," and self-overcoming - the right to engineer one's own nonconformity. It's not what most of us mean by happiness, but it's a perspective that needs representing in a course on happiness. It takes all kinds.

Podcast
5:55/7:07, 63/67

Sisyphus

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Really? Why?

Those are our Happiness questions today. But first I have to say: Happy Birthday, Older Daughter! The day of your birth back in the halcyon '90s was the least Sisyphean, the least routine or repetitive, the most inimitably joyous, I'd ever experienced. 

Did Sisyphus have kids? 

If all the days of your life, save one or two, were filled with unpleasant drudgery, but those one or two were as ecstatic as the birth of a child, would you call yourself happy? I think I would. Fortunately I've had many more than one or two great days, and relatively few days of dread. Thanks to my walking habit, even most of those were salvaged by a happy hour away from the rock of pointless routine. And because I find my teaching vocation mostly gratifying, most of my routine feels purposive, not pointless (except when pushing paper and filling out forms for our administrative overlords).

If Sisyphus had no children, no down-time to himself, and no hope for early retirement, I really can't imagine him happy. (Maybe he was a secret Buddhist, meditating on the transience of existence and willing the good of all sentient beings, behind his rock.) Nor can I really imagine Samuel Beckett's "Unnamable" happiness: "I can't go on, I'll go on." But apparently, happily, some can.

5:30/7:06, 61/61

Supremely happy

It's been a Humean autumn: we did David Hume on happiness a couple of weeks ago, in Happiness, I've been enjoying our independent readings course on Hume, and today it's Hume in CoPhi. “Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness... Tendency to joy and hope is true happiness; tendency to fear and melancholy is a real unhappiness."

After a few youthful bumps in the road, Hume seems to arrived and stayed in a lifelong condition of supreme happiness. He learned both to practice and to sporadically suspend "abstruse" scholarship, in order that he might "be still a man" amidst his philosophizing.

Hume is commonly misunderstood as a firebrand atheist. He was an atheist, in the strictest sense: he did not affirm the existence of a supernatural creator god, and found much fault with the standard reasons people give for doing so. But Simon Blackburn points out that his practical bent focused his main interest on the natural implications and consequences of belief. So, for instance,

if you find a religious text telling you that homosexuality is a bad thing, well that text is written by someone and he brought to it his ethics, and he takes out of it his ethics. So, in a nutshell, as I like to put it, Hume’s position is you can’t check out of Hotel Supernatural with any more baggage than you took into it. That’s a very important discovery. It means that arguing about the existence of God becomes kind of pointless. What you should argue about is the implications people think they can draw from it.

Whether there is a god or not, in other words, Hume's point was that nobody can ever prove He/She/It shares, sanctions, or will reward our prejudices. We have to work it out for ourselves.

James Boswell, who we've already consulted for a first-hand account of Dr. Johnson's rocky refutation of Berkeleyan idealism, was also present to refute the legend of Hume's unmanly demise.

On Sunday forenoon the 7 of July 1776, being too late for church, I went to see Mr David Hume, who was returned from London and Bath, just adying. I found him alone, in a reclining posture in his drawing-room. He was lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance. He was dressed in a suit of grey cloth with white metal buttons, and a kind of scratch wig. He was quite different from the plump figure which he used to present. He had before him Dr. Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric. He seemed to be placid and even cheerful. He said he was just approaching to his end. I think these were his words. I know not how I contrived to get the subject of immortality introduced. He said he never had entertained any belief in religion since he began to read Locke... He then said flatly that the morality of every religion was bad, and, I really thought, was not jocular when he said that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious. This was just an extravagant reverse of the common remark as to infidels.

I had a strong curiosity to be satisfied if he persisted in disbelieving a future state even when he had death before his eyes. I was persuaded from what he now said, and from his manner of saying it, that he did persist. I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state. He answered it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn; and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever...

I asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes...

He had once said to me, on a forenoon while the sun was shining bright, that he did not wish to be immortal. This was a most wonderful thought. The reason he gave was that he was very well in this state of being, and that the chances were very much against his being so well in another state...

...Mr. Hume's pleasantry was such that there was no solemnity in the scene; and death for the time did not seem dismal. It surprised me to find him talking of different matters with a tranquility of mind and a clearness of head which few men possess at any time...

Le Bon David had, by this account, as good a death as he had a life. Thus he refuted his critics, no craven foxhole conversion, no rocks needing to be kicked. He'd smile to know we'll next be talking Sisyphus.

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5:45/7:05, 57/65

A conversation with Nietzsche

We never even got to Nietzschean happiness yesterday - did he? - when, at a reporter's request, we flipped our usual process and did reports first. And that was the ballgame, so positively provocative were our reporters' questions. But it's ok, Nietzsche recurs.

I wonder: what would Nietzsche say, in reply to the questions that pre-empted him?

1. Are you interested in illusory happiness?
2. Can you be happy in an unhappy environment?
3. Would you allow or regulate genetic engineering intended to make people happier?

I suspect he'd evade the first question, with talk of masks, perspectives, and rhetorical shots at the very concept of "real" happiness as a pleasure-seeking convention of weakness .

To the second, he'd disingenuously boast of his own icy and superior state of flourishing amidst the warm-hearted herd.

To the third, he'd insist - perhaps rightly - that to truly enjoy and appreciate one's ascent and arrival at the peak, one must have endured the arduous climb. So, no to Happy designer-genes.

And what would Fritz have said about one of the more heated peripheral topics to arise in our free-flowing response to #3, on GMOs? "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger," maybe?

5:40/7:03, 54/82

Cultivating our classroom garden

Voltaire and Leibniz are up, today in CoPhi.

Yesterday in Happiness we had a constructive, positive conversation about J.S. Mill's recovery after a pressure-cooker childhood of experimental education, thanks to his belated discovery of the indispensable importance of cultivating an inner life. Identifying one's own peculiar sources of joy, one's wellsprings of personal delight, is crucial. Saving the world while sacrificing yourself may sound noble, but it's literally self-defeating. Fortunately young JSM rallied in time.

And then, a report purportedly on happiness ("the happiest people we know" was the original proposal) that instead featured a YouTube video of Christian apologist William Lane Craig bashing evolution and an attack on Richard Dawkins for not debating him. It didn't make me happy, having just read Dawkins' rationale in Brief Candle in the Dark. (He views Craig as a scripted science-denier and defender of genocidal scripture, not an honest debater.)

But it did remind me of my resolve to do the Atheism course next semester in a different spirit, to foster a climate of mutual affirmation, to make sure we all spend our classtime articulating views positively, not engaging in paltry polemics. Our theme will be Atheism & the Afterlife, exploring the reasons why godless people happily affirm mortality.

Today will be good practice. Voltaire was a master of parodic satire, which can be executed in a positive way but is more often construed by its targets as hostility. If I were a Leibnizian, I'd have a hard time not responding defensively to Dr. Pangloss. But I might find it easier to engage a discussion of what Voltaire meant when he urged us all to "cultivate our garden." We'll focus on that, on Voltaire's garden and on ours. The classroom will be our garden, our crop will be civility. The best of possible worlds surely must be, as J.S. Mill also discovered, a world of happy, productive cultivators.

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5:30/7:01, 48/78

Bridging identity

My weekend was highlighted by a ceremonial event on Saturday for a man who never stood on ceremony, and who probably wouldn't have approved all the pomp and fuss of the occasion. My late father-in-law, Freddie William Roth, was honored with the dedication of a bridge named in his memory.

It was, in fact, the last of more than a thousand such bridges he built in middle Tennessee over the span of a decades-long career. Several of his old coworkers commented on his intelligence and memory, his uncanny ability quickly to calculate the complex mathematics involved in supporting weight and defying gravity, and his absolute refusal to cheat or cut corners. "When you crossed one of Freddie's bridges you knew you were safe." "If you wanted a job done right, you called Freddie."

He had a year of college, but mostly taught himself his craft and code of honor. "School of life," indeed. And he knew exactly who he was.

He's who I think of first, whenever my philosophy classes address topics like today's -  personal identity. How do you know you're the same person you were yesterday, or last year, or last decade? I think Freddie would just shake his head and chuckle, and remember why he became impatient with school back in the day. If you built a thousand bridges, you'd know. You wouldn't have to ask.

In fairness to my discipline, I think most of us have little use for extreme versions of the identity question. We realize that if we ever really don't know who we are, we probably need to consult psychiatric specialists. Urgently. Most of us accept the continuity of life as we encounter it in our own individuated experience, and in our accreted memory, as bedrock common sense.

And yet, it's worth wondering how the experience of memory secures that sense of self, worth pondering how tenuous our identities are when memories fade, are forgotten, or are falsely resurrected. Thomas Reid, of the Scottish "common sense" school, said we just need enough overlapping memories to hang our stories on, to know we're who we think we are. That does make sense, more at least than the unrealistic Lockean demand for total recall; but it doesn't eliminate the worry that at least some of our overlaps may be more fabricated or reconstructed than accurately recollected.

So, the practical common sense solution is to take good notes and archive them. Notch experience on your stick, as you go. Build a lifetime of solid recorded memories, and they'll be a bridge to the past you won't fear to cross, a legacy to attach your name to.

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5:25/6:59, 35/70

Too cool for school?

A review of a new book on Hume makes an important point, but slightly misleads.

Hume wanted to restore to the philosophy of his own day something of the equable temper of ancient philosophy. Of course, this wish was in part encoded disparagement of the dogmatic, intemperate spirit with which Christianity had infected the realm of thought ever since the momentous church councils of the fourth century.

What it did not mean was that Hume wanted to reintroduce the ancient idea of philosophy as intellectual medicine. Concerning the ends of philosophy Hume was unswervingly modern. For him philosophy was a mode of investigation and a style of thought. It could never be a therapy.

Actually, as we noted in Happiness yesterday, Hume distinguishes "abstruse" scholarship from the sort of popular philosophy he himself perpetrated in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, and does indicate and endorse the practical therapeutics the latter at its best can deliver. That's a crucial qualification, of course, "at its best"-bad pop philosophy is just BAD, but philosophy that frees itself from the academic cloister and speaks directly to the specific natures, needs, and yearnings of real men and women can indeed be an antidote to the worst maladies of melancholy-especially those of the self-induced variety.

We were considering some of those in our reports yesterday, when debating the value of "mind-wandering" versus "presence," the "trapped" feeling some of us associate with our insatiable and never-fulfilled consumer culture, and the sad sense of happiness postponed by the hoops and rigors of formal education. My plea to young people, borrowed from Le Bon David: don't wait another moment, enjoy your education and your life now. It won't make you uncool. And, so what if it does?

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6:00/6:56, 62/67

It is happening

That was a nice Fall Break, with plenty of sunshine and quality time out in it. A memorable Southern Festival of Books with Older Daughter. A merciless series of serenades from Younger Daughter: "Go Cubs Go..."

Her sister says "gross," of that Cubs' victory song, but it's actually kinda sweet. And thanks to my partisan gloating after the first and only Cards win in Game 1, I deserved it. Anyway, it seems to be the Cards' destiny to break everybody's curses.

So, it's a good day to think in CoPhi about a philosopher who found his bliss in contemplating the rational necessity of all that is. Was that Cubbies fan with the "IT IS HAPPENING" sign a Spinozist?

Not anymore, probably. The whole point of passionate crowd fandom is somehow to defy what William Carlos Williams called its delightful "spirit of uselessness" and try to help the team. The point of Spinozism, to the contrary, is to reconcile oneself to the inevitable and happily accept it.

Today, mourning the Cards - the team of my youthful indoctrination - I'm a Spinozist. Tomorrow, though, in rank defiance of Younger Daughter's insistence that I'm not allowed to, and of Einstein's own Spinozism, I'll add my slim support to the Cubs' cause. I'll do what little I can to disrupt the orderly harmony of what exists and boost the fates and actions of those talented young human beings from the North Side. It ultimately, cosmically doesn't really matter who wins a game. It does matter that we can care.

There's no crying in baseball, and there's no acceptance of metaphysical necessity either. It is happening.

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5:40/6:55, 48/78

Stay happy

Fall Break begins today, soon as I get out of my Education Abroad meeting this afternoon and tune in the Cubbies trying to break their goat curse against the Cards. "Hey Chicago, whatta ya say...?" The great thing about being a Cubs fan, apparently, is that - win or lose - you stay happy. Miserably happy, or happily miserable, maybe, but you don't forget to enjoy the game no matter what. Growing up in St. Louis, in the halcyon '60s and let-down '70s, that wasn't always my experience. Don't tell Younger Daughter, but I kinda envy the Chicago way.

Podcast

Spinoza

We finish Lenoir's Philosopher's Guide in Happiness today. He's given us a Gallic perspective on our subject, and a refreshingly happier one than we're accustomed to getting from the likes of Sartre and Camus. We must imagine Sisyphus happy, with his rock? But the Algerian was onto something crucial when he said "real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present." The cultural stereotype says French people don't want to be happy, not in the American way at least, but Lenoir delightfully defies it.

Lenoir exits the page with Spinoza, who breathed his last request... for beer. Something about that strikes me as deeply reverential for life (if you like beer). I intend to follow suit.

But I still can't embrace a "Spinozism of freedom," or agree that free will is a cruel illusion. It may be a happy one, or none at all. If he's right, though, we can't actually choose either to renounce or affirm it - can we? Or reconstruct our conative wills, at will? "We can do what we want, but cannot want what we want," if we take this line. Or so Schopenhauer, another determined fatalist, supposed.

And: a truly pantheistic universe, perfectly and integrally stitched by rational necessity, really ought to yield universals and absolutes. But Spinoza rejects this. Why?

Why do Spinozists allow themselves to entertain and applaud even delusional sources of bliss? Einstein's endorsement of "Spinoza's God" seems the better model, admitting our relative ignorance of all the cosmic laws but still wonder-struck by their consistency and compelled by intellectual curiosity (aka "love of god") to seek their accurate articulation.

Lenoir cites a Bengali Swami, Anandamayi, as having expressed the core of Spinoza's bliss in these terms: "There isn't an inch of earth where God is not." The world in its totality (as distinct from its parts, in all their unreconciled plurality) would be a lot easier to accept, if you believed this. 

But, seriously: how can you?
5:30/6:49, 60/87

Matthieu Ricard

Took advantage of Indian Summer yesterday with a long lunch-hour walkabout at the old civil war fortress. How do other academics, granted the glorious freedom to get away from their desks at mid-day, allow themselves not to, on days like these? 

And, how do they allow themselves and their classes not to spill out into any of our many seductive campus courtyards? We did that in my classes yesterday again, in the morning for a CoPhi report on The Simpsons & Philosophy (Sophia was right, it's much easier to think out there) and then late in the day in Happiness to learn why Matthieu Ricard is such a happy guy. Damon, Caroline, and Jessica assumed appropriate meditative postures on the ground and gave us a great introduction to the "happiest man in the world."

Ricard repeatedly writes that happiness takes work, but promises that it's work we're all fitted for if we're willing. We don't have to toss our western careers and lifestyles and move to Tibet, we can detach from the toxins of our culture, from our habitual acquisitiveness and busy-ness, at will.

This is an eastern message whose "astonishing" western echo Frederic Lenoir finds finds in Stoicism and Montaigne's skepticism. 

This wisdom can be summed up in a few words: nothing is more precious than life, and in order to be happy we just need to learn to love life and enjoy it in the proper, adaptable way, in accordance with our own natures.

And also like Chuang Tzu, and the current Dalai Lama, Montaigne has a happy sense of humor. He laughs at himself and invites us all to lighten up in a spirit of gentle self-mockery: On the highest thrones we're still seated on our asses, etc. What fun he would have had with TV's viagra and cialis spots.

But, just learn to love life really seems more promissory than practical - kind of like the Pythons' "How to Do It."

Here's Jackie to tell you how to rid the world of all known diseases... Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvelous cure for something, and then, when the medical world really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be diseases any more.

Tune in next time, sure, but don't expect anyone to teach you how to love life. That's the self-help each of us has to manage for ourselves if we can. The happy example of a radiant French-Tibetan scientist/monk, and a TED Talk or two (or two dozen) is more than encouraging, but ultimately the pursuit of happiness is personal.

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6:49/6:49, 59/86

Tupac, Donald, and the Prince on means and ends

OK, I get it now. Machiavelli is better-known to my students than Hobbes because Tupac Shakur made him "gangsta" ("Makavelli"), having discovered his hero in prison; and youth loves to epater le bourgeois. Go Rimbaud.

Yesterday was Machiavelli & Hobbes Day in CoPhi, and at last I understand. First a student in section 12 asked if I was familiar with Tupac and whether his Machiavelli was the same.

Then, an older student in section 11 explained to the younger cohort that Tupac was probably more familiar to their parents' generation. Then she proceeded to endorse the Florentine's ruthless "whatever it takes, end justifies means" murderous modus operandi. "It makes a lot of sense."

Maybe it does, in The Donald's America. ("Trump is also a student of Machiavelli.") Is that what we've come to? Hail to the Gangsta in Chief? No, Machiavelli and Tupac both lost in the end, and Trump will be a loser too. Already is, in his own sense of the word.

Our relation to means and ends, and the reciprocal relation between them, is much more complicated than any of those losers can apparently appreciate. "The point of inquiring into means, and into ends considered as means or causes of further consequences, is not merely to determine how to achieve an end, but to appraise the value of the end itself." As Calvin learned the hard way from Hobbes.

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5:30/6:48, 65/85

Hobbes "walked much and contemplated"

Machiavelli and Hobbes are on tap in CoPhi today. Students often come to them already intrigued with the former but unaware of the latter, though both their names have become adjectival terms of notoriety. Beware Machiavellian politicos and their ends-justify-the-means mentality, we all seem to have been forewarned, and beware Machiaveliian schemers generally. But while the last century spawned chilling examples of totalitarianism and its murderous toll, fewer of us have been alerted to the dangers of the Hobbesian superstate.

The explanation could have something to do with the evident sweetness of temper of "Tommy" Hobbes (as my old poli-sci prof at UMSL called him), who envisioned Leviathan but exemplified something more like the lamb in his personal conduct and bearing. Simon Critchley's Book of Dead Philosophers offers an endearing glimpse of a true English eccentric. He "avoided excess 'as to wine and women' and stopped drinking at age sixty," he "walked vigorously every day to work up a sweat... and expel any excessive moisture," he sang "prick-songs" late at night to stimulate his lungs and lengthen his life.

My favorite thing about Hobbes remains, naturally, his peripatetic nature. He walked to work up a sweat but also to stimulate ideas, which he'd interrupt himself long enough to record by disengaging the quill from his walking stick. "He walked much and contemplated," says Aubrey's Life, "and he had in the head of his cane a pen and ink-horn, carried always a note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entered it into his book, or otherwise he might perhaps have lost it."

Another explanation of the failure of "Hobbesian" to convey the menace it might is, of course, a certain sweet-natured cartoonish tiger-cat who resisted his namesake's "war of all against all."

Podcast
6:30/6:47, 58/82

Magic music

Fine report yesterday from Alex, Kodi, & Blake in Happiness, on music: on how its engagement with the brain's neurochemistry delivers such pleasing doses of dopamine and makes learning fun, how musical improvisation flows like a good conversation and vice versa, how the discordant strains of a Stravinsky can shock, how the enthusiastic energy of "Na Nach Nachma" can heal, how the frenzy of "Crash Worship" can induce a trance of awakening. We agreed that people who deliberately resist exposure to all kinds of music are missing the point. Our closing note was to supplement the "ten happiest songs according to Science":

--Don't Stop Me Now- Queen
--Dancing Queen- ABBA
--Good Vibrations- Beach Boys
--Uptown Girl- Billy Joel
--Eye of the Tiger- Survivor
--I'm a Believer- The Monkees
--Girls Just Wanna Have Fun- Cyndi Lauper
--Livin' on a Prayer- Bon Jovi
--I Will Survive- Gloria Gaynor
--walking on Sunshine- Katrina and The Waves

My top ten has to include some Beatles & Stones ("In My Life," "Happy"), just about any Steely Dan (Donald Fagen's "New Frontier," about early-60s bomb shelter vigor and optimism, is my go-to song whenever I need a quick hit of happy), John Prine ("Spanish Pipedream")... Bottom line: all brains may be more-or-less the same, when it comes to the neurophysiology of music, but minds differ. And that's good!

In CoPhi Blake and Axle did a nice Harry Potter report, though they didn't mention my favorite Dumbledore quote: "Happiness can always be found, if we just remember to turn on the light." And maybe they'd agree with this one too:  “Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!”

Podcast
5:45/6:44, 57/60

Big Bangs, First Causes, Bullshit, Pythagoras

Yesterday's CoPhi discussionsof Anselm's Ontology and Aquinas's First Cause were bracketed by a report on Bullshit (and Philosophy) in section 12, and on Pythagoras in 11. So, when a student in 11 (not having encountered the bullshit in 12) said his theory opposed "that Big Bang bullshit," he wasn't trying to be funny. What created our universe, then, if not a singular primordial blow-up? "The creator created it!" Duh!!

And that was his theory, an unvarnished version of Aquinas's... not quite so involved as Ann Elk's theory of the brontosaurus. But what's to insure the godliness, the omni-qualities of power, knowledge, and goodness, of the seminal creation? He didn't have a theory on that yet, he'll get back to us. Also, on how an unexplained and incomprehensible divinity is an explanatory improvement on the as-yet unexplained and incomprehensible universe as such.

The bullshit session in 12 was good. Someone asked if I'd ever bullshitted. My bullshit answer: I got through grad school, didn't I? And prelims? Everybody does it to an extent, but Harry Frankfurt's opening line - "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit" - has never wrung truer than at this very moment in what can only ironically be called our cultural and political evolution. The presidential campaign has only just begun, it's gonna get thick.

Then Pythagoras, who was such a strange combination of superstitious mystic and ordered rationalist. Beyond the numbers astrology and the music of the spheres, though, he's credited with saying as many sensible things as Socrates and the rest of his successors.

• “As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” [A pre-Singer animal liberationist]
• “In anger we should refrain both from speech and action.” [A conciliator]
• “Educate the children and it won't be necessary to punish the men.” [A prison reformer]
• “A man is never as big as when he is on his knees to help a child.” [A nurturer]
• “All is Number.” [An over-quantifier] 
• “Do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in few!” [A born tweeter]
• “Silence is better than unmeaning words.” [A Wittgensteinian]
• “Declining from the public ways, walk in unfrequented paths.” [A road-less-traveled nonconformist]

Just before class I was pleased to note that my little motivational message, aimed at certain squabblers who know who they are, was picked up and amplified ("favorited") by one of my favorite Plato scholars, @mmmccabe1.

Phil Oliver ‏@OSOPHER  23h23 hours ago

Enjoy: To all who've been stressing about exams or reports: please stop. Enjoy your education. http://bit.ly/1KRsDTS 

It's another exam day today. Should be fun. 

5:30/6:44, 63/65