Sisyphus, paterfamilias?

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

That's our big Happiness question today. Last time I pondered it publicly it happened to be Older Daughter's birthday, prompting me then to wonder if Sisyphus had kids. If so, the existential urgency of pushing that rock might have been a little more salient. What he or we call his happiness would have been inseparable from his familial commitment.

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.
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Today is Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, a day in which the dead are traditionally believed to walk among the living...

It’s the birthday of English poet John Keats (books by this author), born in London in 1795. He’s best known for poetic odes like Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn, about the famous Elgin marbles on display in the British Museum, which ends with some of the most famous lines in poetic history: “beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

By the time he died at the age of 25, John Keats had only published three small volumes of poetry, 54 poems in all. He’s now considered one of the finest poets in the English language. He once told a friend, “I carry all matters to an extreme.” WA

Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal

Morning came both later and earlier than usual today, after last night's incredible World Series Game 5 ended in the wee hours. As Yogi Berra might have said, it really wasn't over 'til it was over. If you were Pascal, who would you wager on now? If you were Montaigne, you'd be smart to say "Que sais-je?"
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"I hate IB," says Younger Daughter as she slaves over her art project at 5 am. What she really hates is having to deal with the fallout from chronic procrastination. As old Seneca said, we have plenty of time. We waste it. The International Baccalaureate program is about developing the "intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills needed to live, learn and work in a rapidly globalizing world" - and it's about learning not to procrastinate.
que
On the other hand, we tend also to love, with the late Douglas Adams, that lovely whooshing noise deadlines make. I spent most of yesterday anticipating the whoosh, with my Baseball in Literature and Culture conference presentation in Kansas bearing down. It's nominally about Vin Scully, but ultimately about gratitutde and finding meaning in a secular world. I'll mention All Things Shining by Dreyfus and Kelly, and their claim that "the most important things, the most real things..well up and take us over, hold us for a while, and then, finally, let us go." They whoosh. 

And on the other other hand: it was supposed to be her Spring Break last week. I sympathize.

Three Frenchmen today, in CoPhi (after we wrap up all remaining group reports): Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal - a humanist skeptic, a rationalist/foundationalist, and a fideist gambler, respectively. The first and last were known for slogans in their native tongue: "Que sais-je?" ("What do I know?") and "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point." ("The heart has its reasons that reason does not know at all.")

Descartes, of course, preferred his previously noted Latin cogito declaration. I can't help repeating Kundera's quip: that's the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothache. I've never been more certain of anything in my life, than of the body's various aches and pains. I'm more certain of them every day. Fortunately, solvitur ambulando is still my working slogan.

Descartes wanted only good apples in his sack, by Nigel's analogy. He was prepared to waste a lot of perfectly acceptable beliefs, in order to avoid potential errors. Unlike James he thought our errors are awfully solemn things, not necessary and instructive steps along the way of life and learning. He rejected what Pyrrho and Montaigne both  accepted, the inevitability of uncertainty. As Sarah Bakewell says of Montaigne, “Learning to live, in the end, is learning to live with imperfection in this way, and even to embrace it." Pascal also hated not knowing, but decided the best route ultimately was not the Rationalist Road.

Might we be dreaming? Doubting Descartes, early in his Meditations, says what do you mean we? Ultimately he decides we're all here, at least as awake as Gilbert Ryle's ghost can be. If we can trust our clear and distinct perceptions we can rule out the evil demon hypothesis, and stop worrying that we might be brains in vats, or humans in matrix-like pods, or something.

Descartes' "most practical critic" was the American C.S. Peirce, who said we shouldn't pretend to doubt in philosophy what we don't question in life. One of Descartes's surprising contemporary admirers is A.C. Grayling. He thinks Descartes was wrong about consciousness and the mind-body problem, but wrong in wholly constructive ways that have benefited subsequent philosophy.

Montaigne, Bakewell points out, answered his own question about "How to live" with hard-won but much-treasured lesson that Epicurus was right, death per se is not one of our experiences. He learned that from his own "near death experience," which he says taught him that nature drips a comforting anaesthetic into our veins when we need it most. “If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.”

But, "as Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out.”

Many readers through the past half-millennium have been struck by the contemporaneity of Montaigne's mind, his capacity for "living on through readers' inner worlds over long periods of history" and speaking to them like a friend and neighbor despite the distance of centuries and the differences of culture. He achieved that authorly immortality so many have aspired to, but so few actually attained.

He achieved, in his own terms, freedom. “Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties. Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed. Be free from family and surroundings. Be free from fanaticism. Be free from fate; be master of your own life. Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will.”

"Given the huge breadth of his readings, Montaigne could have been ranked among the most erudite humanists of the XVIth century. But in his Essays his aim is above all to exercise his own judgment properly. Readers who might want to convict him of ignorance would find nothing to hold against him, he said, for he was exerting his natural capacities, not borrowed ones. He thought that too much knowledge could prove a burden, preferring to exert his ‘natural judgment’ to displaying his erudition." SEP

And, as we've already apreciated about him, Montaigne was a peripatetic who said his mind wouln't budge without a big assist from his legs.

Pascal's best thoughts (and worst) are in his best-known book, Pensees.  His best invention was a rudimentary calculator called the Pascaline. His most noted argument was for a wager that asked "what have you got to lose" by believing? That depends on how you think about the integrity of belief, and on how much you value your Sundays. I'm betting there's both more in heaven and earth (if you invert the terms) than Pascal dreamed.

Pascal said: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” And “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” And “Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.” (But, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”)   And “I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.” (That's what Mark Twain, and really all the wittiest wits, said too.) And “To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.” (But Nigel says he said he wasn't one.)

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.” But, “People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” That's why Descartes took the Rationalist Road. Pascal sticks to Faith Street: “It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.”

So, how do you know you're awake and not dreaming? Is it meaningful to say "life is but a dream"? Does "Inception" make any sense at all? Are you essentially identical with or distinct from your body (which includes your brain)? If distinct, who/what/where are you? How do you know? Can you prove it? Is there anything you know or believe that you could not possibly be mistaken about, or cannot reasonably doubt? If so, what? How do you know it? If not, is that a problem for you?

Do you believe in immaterial spirits? Are you one, or hoping to be? Can you explain how it is possible for your (or anyone's) material senses to perceive them?

At what age do you hope to retire? What will you do with yourself then? Will you plan to spend more time, like Montaigne, thinking and writing?

Have you had a near-death experience, or known someone who did? What did it teach you/them? How often does the thought occur to you that you're always one misstep (or fall, or driving mistake) away from death?

What have you learned, so far, about "how to live"? Have you formulated any life-lessons based on personal experience, inscribed any slogans, written down any "rules"?

Do you agree that, contrary to Pascal, most nonreligious people would consider it a huge sacrifice to devote their lives to religion? Why? Is the choice between God and no-god 50/50, like a coin toss? How would you calculate the odds? At what point in the calculation do you think it becomes prudent to bet on God? Or do you reject this entire approach? Why?
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It's the birthday of Christopher Columbus, Ezra Pound, and John Adams (1735) who said “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” And "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

...and it's the publication anniversary of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), “as nearly flawless as any fiction could be” according to Eudora Welty: She wrote: “Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience- or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.” And “I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.” And “It is not everyone,' said Elinor, 'who has your passion for dead leaves.”

One more anniversary to note, in light of last night's ballgame that at times felt more like a heavyweight bout:  "1974 The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali KOs George Foreman in the 8th round in Kinshasa, Zaire"
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[Orig. publ. 3.28.17] Happy birthday Cy Young, Sam Walton, & Lady Gaga. On This Day

At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat. This Day

Aikin & Talisse on swamping and spitballing (YouT)

Priority registration begins Monday. The Philosophy of Happiness (PHIL 3160) returns, Fall 2017 - TTh 2:40, JUB 202. One more thought from Pascal: “All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”

5:30/6:40, 58/70/50, 7:03

Hyperborea

"We are Hyperboreans," proclaimed poor hyper-driven Nietzsche in the opening lines of The Antichrist. He was truly a man out of time, never at home with his contemporaries or at ease with the ("all too") human race. What did he mean? And what did he mean, "we"? Where is Hyperborea?

It's nowhere yet. When, then? 

Nietzsche often wrote of the philosophers of the future, with whom he identified. His prophet Zarathustra, laughed out of town, said he'd come too soon. Hyperborea is his dreamworld of free spirited Ubermenschen who've shucked their mere humanity and crossed the abyss ("man is a rope over an abyss"), having made their transition to a post-human world free of resentment, envy, and legalistic constraint. Their creative revaluative power is unbounded, except by their own wills.

The rest of us, who don't make the crossing, presumably will be the couch-potato left-behind leftovers whose liberal champions (in Nietzsche's slanted estimation) were people like J.S. Mill. "Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does." 

The preceding sentence in that Twilight of the Idols aphorism, by the way, profoundly inspired Viktor Frankl, in his Nazi captivity: "If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how."

Are Hyperboreans happy? You would think so:

HYPERBOREA was a fabulous realm of eternal spring located in the far north beyond the land of winter. Its people were a blessed, long-lived race free of war, hard toil, and the ravages of old age and disease.

But happiness in the "all-too-human" English sense, concerned to maximize the common flourishing of the greatest number, is not what Nietzschean Hyperboreans are seeking. Their happiness is a harder colder thing, something most of us might find difficult to distinguish from monomania, intolerance, and incivility.

Better to live among ice than among modern virtues and other south winds! ... We were brave enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others: but for long we did not know where to apply our courage. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatality -- was the plenitude, the tension, the blocking-up of our forces. We thirsted for lightning and action, of all things we kept ourselves furthest from the happiness of the weaklings, from 'resignation'...

Nietzsche never shakes fatalism, so far as I can tell, but combined with his stoicism and a recycled version of "eternal return" it becomes for him a great "gift" of affirmation and the source of "our happiness." Eternal recurrence in Hyperborea is not my idea of the good life-it's "the greatest weight," by his own admission-but Nietzsche's popularity endures with a small but assertive few for whom "a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal" is the road from here to there. Perhaps we can tolerate them.
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It's the birthday of the early American self-help writer Napoleon Hill (books by this author), born in a one-room cabin in rural Wise County, Virginia (1883)... Hill published Think and Grow Rich (1937), refining his early ideas into an accessible self-help book. It was enormously successful, and still is — Think and Grow Rich has sold more than 70 million copies. In Think and Grow Rich, he wrote: "Do not wait: the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work whatever tools you may have at your command and better tools will be found as you go along." WA
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Podcast-Nietzsche's Hyperboreans... CoPhi-Nietzschean happiness... "N & Eternal Recurrence"... "The Challenge of ER" (Ph'y Now)

[Originally published 10.22.15] 5:40/7:02, 53/81

Becoming J.S. Mill

It's John Stuart Mill today in Happiness. “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” Sounds simple, but most of us are not the most adept promoters. Nor was Mill, as a twenty-something just getting over a mental collapse precipitated by his father's pressure-cooker experiment in utilitarian pedagogy.

We may actually have regressed, since Mill's time: many of us, it has emerged in class, are uncomfortable with the promotional program. We don't want to seem too happy, or too interested in being happy. Could some of that attitude be swayed by Mill's civic-minded emphasis on promoting the general happiness, and not merely one's own? Maybe it's less uncool to take an interest in others' flourishing?

And maybe Mill was right when he said most of us do better not to pursue happiness so actively at all, that it is

only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, without being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinizing examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning. This theory now became the basis of my philosophy of life. And I still hold to it as the best theory for the great majority of mankind.

If he's right about this, and about the danger of too much outward "analysis" uncompensated by sufficient inward "cultivation" of enjoyment via music, literature, and other sources of personal delight, we must beware the shoals of academia. Young Mill was a prodigy, and a recovering analyst. He found music and poetry just in time.

But isn't it amusing, he worried that he and we would eventually weary of Mozart and music generally. "I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations." I recall thinking the same thing in my own youthful enthusiasm for the Beatles. The inveterate and perennial habit of youth is to imagine it has discovered the transient apex of possibility, soon to be lost and lamented.

Wordsworth's poetry seems to have been Mill's greater salvation, not because he was the greatest poet but because he was the right one, at the right time, for the overstressed homeschooled utilitarian-in-utero.

What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.

In a word (or two), Wordsworth taught Mill the value of subjectivity and feeling. Objective analysis and dispassion have their place in life, but a happy life also cultivates its own enthusiastic delights. The greatest happiness for the greatest number is good, but must not be allowed to displace one's own capacity for joy.
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10.24.17. It's the birthday of the writer Sarah Josepha Hale (books by this author), born in Newport, New Hampshire (1788). She had no formal education, but her family encouraged her to read... was a vocal supporter of Thanksgiving, and along with a litany of other social causes and campaigns, the campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday was her dearest cause. She wrote letters to one president after another — Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and finally Abraham Lincoln, who did, in fact, listen to her... It's the birthday of poet Denise Levertov (books by this author), born in Ilford, England (1923). She decided to become a poet, but she didn't want to go to graduate school. Instead, she got her nurse's training and spent three years as a civilian nurse during the Blitz in London. She liked the work itself, but she didn't like the structure — she was just 19 years old, and she had been homeschooled her whole life. She said: "I didn't like the strain of taking even the one and only examination that I ever took in my life, and I didn't like the way in which one's personal life was regulated. I was always crawling in and out of windows to avoid curfews!" She said: "I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer." WA

[Originally published 10.20.15.] 5:40/7 am, 44/73

Pinhead dancers and friendly ghosts

[Orig. publ. 3.14.17]
Back from the break, diving into neo-Platonism and scholasticism, and a report on Harry Frankfurt's Bullshit ("On Bullshit" was originally penned in '86 and published in '05). "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this." Yes, everyone. Especially the purveyors, who don't really believe their own horse hockey. Do they? Or care about it, so long as it's "believable" enough to support the brand? Frankfurt, by the way, also wrote the natural sequel: "On Truth"... boy do we need that now more than ever!

Also, reports are scheduled on Peter Singer's Ethics in the Real World and (with Descartes and his "what if I'm dreaming?" worry in mind) Inception ("Forget the end of the film. Think about the beginning and the real world..."). Maybe Nigel Warburton's Classics too. And the Simpsons again? D'oh!

The year 529 is a semi-arbitrary but convenient milestone, with Emperor Justinian's shuttering of the philosophical schools in Athens ushering in a millennium of intellectual somnambulism. The Sleeping Beauty version of this narrative says philosophy pricked its finger on Christianity and awaited an awakening buss from its aforementioned French rationalist Prince Rene in the 17th century.

Looking back from then, Francis Bacon would complain of "cobwebs of learning'' and Thomas Hobbes would say the problem was Roman religion's sponsorship of "Aristotelity"-which is is not Aristotelianism but its unthinking authoritarian parody, made to conform with Church dogma and stripped of curiosity. 

It needn't have been so. A respectful Aristotelianism fused with theology might have had wonderful discursive results, with talk of soul and sin leading seamlessly into fruitful reflections on mind-body and free will. Instead, "Christians were required to believe, for example, that a piece of wafer could become flesh... and that God could become three persons at once." 

Were? Past tense?  Let's not be smug, standing here potentially on the precipice of another Dark Ages "led" by benighted Climate and Science Deniers, Conspiracy Kooks, and ethnic chauvinists. Sad. Scary. Wonder what Stephen King thinks of Steve King? Who's scarier? No contest.

"By the year 1000, medicine, physics, astronomy, biology and indeed all branches of theoretical knowledge except theology had virtually collapsed. Even the few relatively educated men, holed up in mosasteries, knew markedly less than many Greeks had done eight centuries earlier... In short, Christendom was colossally ignorant."

The cult of Aristotle was sloppy, and inattentive to their favorite (& only) Philosopher's actual views. Medieval Christians "knew" that the soul survives death. Aristotle said it didn't, his God was disinterested in humans, and he was dubious about that wafer. We must not forget that "he himself was animated by the spirit of open-minded inquiry," which at its best uses the spoken and printed word to fuel passionate curiosity-not shut it down. So, "the real problem with medieval learning is that the medieval professors allowed themselves to be tyrannized by books... Instead of putting ideas to the test of new experience, they... put them to the test of old books." Old books are great, but they should never have the last word.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Hint: How many bodies do you need to dance? Call this the Caspar the Friendly Ghost Problem: how can Caspar move through a wall AND catch a ball? Dan Dennett is "convinced that Descartes’ dualism — the idea that an immaterial mind interacts with a material body — was a 'cul-de-sac'... 'There was a latent contradiction built into the very idea of Casper the Friendly Ghost and basically that’s what’s wrong with dualism. Nobody’s ever solved that problem remotely satisfactorily.'" It was an entertaining show, but I recall being perturbed when they interrupted it one day to break the news of President Kennedy's assassination.

I want to get a word in for Philo of Alexandria, the millennial philosopher with the perfect name who nowadays gets little attention or respect. He began, and a pagan teacher named Alcinous continued, "a tradition of marrying holy scriptures to Greek philosophy" with the claim that the God of scripture is identical with the Good of Plato. ("Plato himself would have insisted that they were utterly different.) Like many arranged marriages, these were often bereft of passion and hard to sustain. But it was, and for some still is, a popular tradition.

Another Diogenes (not the Dog Philosopher) created "the strangest document in the history of philosophy" (c.120 AD) with a huge Vietnam Memorial-like colonnade inscribed with Epicurean wisdom updated to catch the zeitgeist of "salvation" through philosophy. That's not really what Epicurus was talking about. 

This is another arranged marriage likely to founder, unless we understand that those who've attained ataraxia consider themselves already "saved," not lost. They aren't looking to go anywhere. As Jennifer Michael Hecht says, Epicureans aren't looking for a path out of the forest. They just wanted to hang a "Home Sweet Home" sign on a tree" and chill. "...pick some blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze... Just try to have a good time."

Plotinus's "Neoplatonism" was trying to eff the ineffable, to describe the indescribable. Futility, thy name is Plotinus. It all comes down (or goes up?) to The One, for him. But it's all the same, isn't it, in this Heraclitean flux? But The One is beyond being. Doesn't seem like there'd be much more to say. Just, “withdraw into yourself and look.” 

When he withdrew and looked, Plotinus claimed to see that  “the world is finite, harmonious, and good,” that it possesses a purchase on divine perfection by virtue of the continuous "emanations" therefrom that reach even us. How does he know that? “The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.” Yes, but... You really get all that from a sweep of introspection, Plotinus? Why don't I? Why doesn't everyone? Is it possible you're reading some things into your account, engaging in a bit of wishful thinking? And engaging in a bit of corporeal revulsion, "almost ashamed of being in the body"? But how, except with your body, are you going to hammer up a HOME sign, sit under a tree, and chill?  

"Proclus of Athens (*412–485 C.E.) was the most authoritative philosopher of late antiquity and played a crucial role in the transmission of Platonic philosophy from antiquity to the Middle Ages." He was a magical thinker, holding that "the job of philosophy was merely to explain spiritual truths which had already been arrived at by other means" and "treat[ing] the basic premises of his theology as if they were beyond question." Magical thinking endures in our time. Fortunately, questioners do too.

Lots of good questions suggest themselves today. How do we respect and revere books without being "tyrannized" by them, for instance? How should we think about Caspar? What is "salvation"? What's the job of philosophy? My answer to the last: to help us figure out how not to be tyrannized, how to think about Caspar, how not to think of ourselves as "lost" so we won't have to be "saved."
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10.23.17. The first national Women's Rights Convention opened in Worcester, Massachusetts, on this date in 1850. Two years earlier, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had launched the woman suffrage movement with their hastily organized Seneca Falls Convention in New York. They published the Declaration of Sentiments, using language modeled after the Declaration of Independence, to call for voting rights for women. They also expressed a hope that conventions for women's rights would continue to be held at regular intervals... And on this day in 1920, the novel Main Street by Sinclair Lewis was published (books by this author)... Lewis wrote:

“The Wonderlust--probably it's a worse affliction than the Wanderlust.” And: “She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.” And: “I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers... coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now — and we're going to try our hands at it.”
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Amy Krouse Rosenthal has died. She was not lost. Her remarkable viral essay bespeaks an Epicurean love of life that was its own saving grace. "Her favorite line from literature, she once said, was in Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” as spoken by the character Emily as she bids the world goodbye: 'Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?'

When she reached 40, Ms. Rosenthal began calculating how many days she had left until she turned 80.

“How many more times, then, do I get to look at a tree?” she asked. “Let’s just say it’s 12,395. Absolutely, that’s a lot, but it’s not infinite, and I’m thinking anything less than infinite is too small a number and not satisfactory. At the very least, I want to look at trees a million more times. Is that too much to ask?”
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Happy birthday Albert Einstein, who said "The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives." And, “The important thing is not to stop questioning." And, “It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.”  And, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

5:30/7 am, 37/41/22, 6:51

The Happy Heretic-David Hume

Back to Happiness, after a lovely little Fall Break. Spent part of mine happily with family and bicycle in the woods around The University of the South, in Sewanee. The Domain, they call it, kind of a world unto itself. Profs and students wear gowns to class, and "Sewanee angels watch over and protect the members of the Sewanee community..." Well, if it makes them happy to think so I suppose a heretic should raise no serious objection, since the Anglican-modeled Episcopalians on the Mountain tend not to proselytize or persecute.  What would David Hume say? Or "primitive cultures" and/or Bill Wilson? (I'm unclear about today's report topic. Are 12-steppers a primitive culture? Hmm...)

[Orig. published 10.15.15:]

It was kind of an unofficial Heretics Day in CoPhi, with Spinoza and reports on Galileo, and Luther. The theme continues this morning with more Luther, and St. Paul (another equestrian accidentalist like Montaigne, not usually described as a heretic... but what else should we call the inventor of such major tenets of the incipient upstart Christian faith as Jesus' divinity, holy spirit, atonement etc.? ); and in Happiness we're spending just a bit of time with the happy heretic David Hume,  "Le Bon David," "the Great Infidel." He said:

• “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."
• “He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper, but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to his circumstance.”
• “Heaven and Hell suppose two distinct species of men, the Good and the Bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.” 
• “To be a philosophical Sceptic is the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian.” 
• "If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.”

One of Hume's heresies, increasingly mainstream with time and the ubiquity of Buddhist thinking, is the illusion of selfhood. “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception..." This is a subtraction that many, like Alison Gopnik, have found additive. Lost baggage can lighten a journey and gladden the heart.

Until Hume, philosophers had searched for metaphysical foundations supporting our ordinary experience, an omnipotent God or a transcendent reality outside our minds. But Hume undermined all that. When you really look hard at everything we think we know, he argued, the foundations crumble. Descartes at least had said you always know that you yourself exist (“I think, therefore I am”), but Hume rejected even that premise...

But here’s Hume’s really great idea: Ultimately, the metaphysical foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or “reality” or even “I”? The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain intact. Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game. 

In fact, if you let yourself think this way, your life might actually get better. Give up the prospect of life after death, and you will finally really appreciate life before it. Give up metaphysics, and you can concentrate on physics. Give up the idea of your precious, unique, irreplaceable self, and you might actually be more sympathetic to other people... (continues)

Another Humean heresy, especially where I live, is his skepticism regarding miracles.

When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should have really happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of the testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

It's not a position most students are initially happy with, but in the long run the habit of "rejecting the greater miracle" removes motes from the eyes and restores clear vision. For some, that's the greatest miracle of all.
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10.19.17. Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino was born on this day in 1433 (d. 1499). He said “in these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.” And “at every person's birth, he or she is assigned a certain daemon by his own star, a guardian of life to help with his destined task.” Seems like your daemon might be of assistance in discovering what you want. Have you found yours?

Ficino also said: "Books that distribute things... with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again." And, if you can believe the Internet: "Never worry about anything. Live in the present. Live now. Be happy." Hmm. We thought it was Bobby McFerrin.
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Podcast
5:30/6:55, 49/79

Middle Ages

Back from Fall Break. Good times with the family re-united, hiking and biking on the Mountain and in the Domain and in our own backyard.  Now to the not-entirely-dark ages.

[Orig. published March 2017:]

What a summery first day of Spring that was!

Back from the philosophy conference in Birmingham, in Vulcan's shadow, where I was pleased to meet John Kaag and thank him for his American Philosophy: A Love Story. He's a peripatetic too, noting that "walking gives one many things," especially time and attention. “Looking back," he writes, "I had the realization that at one point in the not-so-distant past, philosophy wasn’t the sort of thing that was discussed only at formal conferences and in arcane journals. It was exchanged over dinner, between families. It was the stuff of everyday life." And, “The love of wisdom was not bound in academic journals that no one read; it rather permeated all aspects of human existence.”

And most pointedly: "The point of American philosophy isn't to be 'right'... is not to have a specific rock-solid point, but rather to outline a problem, explore its context, get a sense of the whole experiential situation..." Always good to remember, at a conference. SAAP conferees tend to remember it better than some others.

Then, I contributed my small bit to the William James Society's panel discussion of immortality "re-envisioned"and "Existential Pluralism" and reaffirmed our continuing commitment as public philosophers to the ongoing project of constructively melding and applying American philosophy's traditional elements - pragmatism, pluralism, radical empiricism, and especially meliorism. Some of my friends find it very difficult to do that, on paper. In practice, and in the spirit of James, I don't see how we can possibly fail to try.

I'm with him: "I am willing that every leaf that ever grew in this world's forests and rustled in the breeze should become immortal. It is purely a question: are the leaves so, or not?" Only time and experience will finally tell. In the meantime, we must remember: "The inner significance of other lives exceeds all our powers of sympathy and insight. If we feel a significance in our own life which would lead us spontaneously to claim its perpetuity, let us be at least tolerant of like claims made by other lives."  Let us not let "blindness lay down the law to sight." And let us not stamp out possibilities, prematurely. [My wife reminded me of that, out on the patio at Bar Louie in downtown Nashville yesterday, as I gazed longingly at the upscale high-rise condos and wished for the possibility of reincarnation, to see what it would be like to live up there.]

The most compelling and most vulnerable possibility these days, surely, is the very continuation of lives worth living. The really vital question persists: what is life going to make of itself, on this earth of things? That's the existential question. As Billy Collins says in today's poem ("The Order of the Day"), you never really know.

In late antiquity and the middle ages the big questions tended to be more about life's rumored sequel and how to achieve it. Augustine first thought you had to make alliance with the forces of good, in their death struggle with the forces of darkness. He was on the right track, I tend to think, before his big conversion. He was right to suppose that our side needs all good hands on deck, to resist and overcome evil. He put that conversion off as long as he could, praying for purity but only in due course. For the record, though: I don't think he was right to think of our carnal condition as an entombment. Incorporeal souls sow no wild oats, ascetics enjoy few existential delights.

So, buoyed by Platonism, he "put all forms of materialism firmly behind him" and "turned back the clock of intellectual history." The old Greek commitment to reason was not finally comforting enough to him. "He returned to a version of the comforting supernatural stories which most of the first philosophers sought to dispense with, or at least to rationalize."

Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy dialogue found its own form of comfort, not in Augustine's Christianity but in Lady Philosophy's timeless stoicism. God (or Good?) sees all in a single atemporal sweep, "at a go," and thus somehow leaves the hapless victim of tortured persecution and execution as free as it found him. He can still choose to be "philosophical" about every misfortune, even to his dying breath on the rack. His freedom's a lot like Kris Kristofferson's and Janis Joplin's, "just another word for nothing left to lose."

Anselm's God, "than which nothing greater can be conceived," and his famous "proof" thereof, is another of those notorious sleights of hand made to do heavy philosophical lifting with nothing more muscular than verbiage. It's still shocking to me, how many bright people (including young Russell, briefly) it's seduced. 

Speaking of great misfortune, poor Abelard's is painful to ponder. Gottlieb blames "his scholarly prowess and his passionate involvement with logic" for emboldening him to undertake his own fateful seduction. How ironic, that he would go on to make his mark as "the first serious moral philosopher of medieval times" and "to apply rational analysis to the nature of moral goodness." Too little, too late.

Moses Maimonides did not address Abelard's peculiar form of perplexity but did try to bring philosophy, science, and religion together. “Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.” But try telling that to the world. He was right, though. “You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.” But, “Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.”

He was onto confirmation bias early. “We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. [...] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.”

Was he really the first to say this?: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Did he anticipate James's Will to Believe notion that "our errors are not such awfully solemn things"? “The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.”

He was sort of a bioethicist before his time: “The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it.” And, “No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.” Actually that might have helped Abelard, with a little timely saltpeter in his diet.

William of Ockham's famous "razor" said we should keep our theories simple, our ontology thin. "It is pointless to do with more what can be done with less." Remember Goober's beard?

Remember Buridan's Ass? Apparently "no such animal appears in his writings." Too bad, he's been such a workhorse for logicians.

Giordano Bruno was a mystic friar, but he also had a vivd scifi imagination. He said there must be other worlds and "countless suns" out there in the Void, "innumerable globes like this on which we live and grow." We've only confirmed that in the past twenty years or so. It (and other heresies) got him torched in 1600. Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson tell his story.

Finally today, Aquinas. His First Cause Argument, echoing Aristotle, said a never-ending series of causes and effects would lead to an unacceptable regress. The first term in any explanatory sequence, he thought, has to be self-evident. But is that itself self-evident? Russell says, of "the supposed impossibility of a series having no first term: Every mathematician knows that there is no such impossibility; the series of negative integers ending with minus one is an instance to the contrary. But here again no Catholic is likely to abandon belief in God even if he becomes convinced that Saint Thomas's arguments are bad; he will invent other arguments, or take refuge in revelation." It's not just Catholics. Remember confirmation bias?

More questions: Can the definition of a word prove anything about the world? Is theoretical simplicity always better, even if the universe is complex? Does the possibility of other worlds somehow diminish humanity? Which is more plausible, that God exists but is not more powerful than Satan, or that neither God nor Satan exists? Why? Are supernatural stories of faith, redemption, and salvation comforting to you than the power of reason and evidence? And what do you say to Carl Sagan?:

“The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” 

[More good questions here... ]
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It was on this day in 1954 that the first transistor radio appeared on the market.

Transistors were a big breakthrough in electronics — a new way to amplify signals. They replaced vacuum tubes, which were fragile, slow to warm up, and unreliable... With transistor radios, teenagers were able to listen to music out of their parents' earshot. This made possible the explosion of a new genre of American music: rock and roll. WA

On this day in 1867 US takes formal possession of Alaska from Russia having paid $7.2 million... 1922 British Broadcasting Company (BBC) founded, later called British Broadcasting Corporation... 1962 James Watson (US), Francis Crick (UK) and Maurice Wilkins (UK) win the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their work in determining the structure of DNA

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3.14.17. Happy birthday J.S. Bach, who said “I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.” That's not what Dan Dennett says in From Bacteria to Bach and Back. “You shouldn’t trust your intuitions. Conceivability or inconceivability is a life’s work—it’s not something where you just screw up your head for a second!”

The Alabama Freedom March began on this date in 1965. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and 3,200 demonstrators set off on a 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the disenfranchisement of black voters... WA
5:30/6:50, 59/73/46, 6:57