Peirce & James, Nietzsche, Freud

Orig. publ. 4.13.17.

Attended my second High School softball game in three days, on another lovely late afternoon in April. "Cruelest month" - ? No, happy days! Next year's going to be weird, with no players under our roof left to cheer for. Dr. Seuss may not have said it but we'll need to remember it: "Don't be sad it's over, be glad it happened." Actually, a little sadness will be ok too. And the game will go on. Ain't over 'til it's over.

Today in CoPhi it's the American Pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James (and John Dewey, R.I.P., and George Santayana, both neglected by Nigel), the godless post-nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the psychoanalytic therapeutics of Sigmund Freud.

We begin with a squirrel, whose circumnavigation of a tree was the improbable occasion for James's account of the pragmatic method. (That's the view from his summer place in New Hampshire atop my masthead, btw.) His camping companions couldn't decide whether a scampering, circling squirrel was itself circled by the human observers who tried and failed to keep the frenetic rodent constantly in their sights or not.

...Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one practical fashion or the other." Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting, but meant just plain honest English 'round,' the majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute. What Pragmatism Means

A silly and trivial dispute, perhaps, but helpfully illustrative of how pragmatists think. Define your terms, say what practical difference the competing answers would make, and get on with more pressing concerns. It all depends on "why you want to know and what difference it will actually make," if any. If none, forget about it.

Another way to illustrate the method: what's your current velocity, right now?

Charles Peirce, not related to Benjamin Franklin Pierce, said the final truth is what we would end up with if we could run all the experiments and investigations we'd like to. We'll never run them all, so the truth at any given time is always provisional, always tied to the present state of inquiry and always subject to revision or rejection in the light of further experience. 

Bertrand Russell didn't think much of this approach, and didn't make much of an effort to grasp its intent. Pragmatists are often accused of denying the facts, when they explicitly acknowledge facts but propose that we understand truth (or falsehood) about the facts as what we say about them but never, in media res, entirely convergent with them. What we say is subject to the present stage of inquiry, the inconclusiveness of which requires an admission that what we would say at the ideal end of inquiry will surely differ. Hence the perpetual gap between facts and truths, and the pragmatists' commitment to narrowing the gap in the long run while resisting unwarranted absolute claims in the interim.

So it's not true, contrary to Russell's derisive criticism, that pragmatists have to admit the truth of Santa's existence. It may "work" for a four-year-old to think so, but toddlers don't get the last word. 

This is a contentious and contestable view, admittedly, but it is not the caricatured reduction to whatever is "expedient" in a situation James's critics (like Bertrand Russell) made it out to be. It's more like Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatic and (later) Wittgensteinian invitation to an open and ongoing conversation between all comers with something to contribute. It is decidedly not a "Santa Claus" philosophy of truth.  Rorty said words are our tools and not symbolic snapshots corresponding to timeless propositional statements.  Our task is to "cope" with the world, not just copy it.

James may have been wrong about truth, but (to paraphrase A.C. Grayling's comment on Descartes) if he was, he was interestingly, constructively, engagingly, entertainingly, provocatively wrong.

Besides, he's the best writer in the James family (sorry, Henry) and possibly the best writer in the entire stable of American philosophers. I call him my favorite because he's the one I'd most like to invite to the Boulevard for a beer. Unfortunately he didn't drink. (Too bad they don't serve nitrous oxide.) Also, unfortunately, he died in 1910. Read his letters and correspondence, they humanize his philosophy and place his "radical" views in the context of their genesis: the context of experience, and of life.

James's interest in religion was rooted in the lives and experience of individuals, not particularly in God, heaven, the afterlife and so on. He psychologizes and naturalizes religion. It's mostly about life on earth, for Jamesians, not (again) old St. Nick.

Let me know if you'd like to buy a good bargain-priced book about him. About us all, really.

Friedrich Nietzsche said "God is dead" and seemed at turns dismayed and liberated to think so. Is a godless world one in which "everything is permitted" or one in which objective and authoritative permission is no longer available, in which the old rules have been mooted and "free spirits" are unleashed to create new rules for themselves?  But is God dead, in Nietzsche's terms? Maybe in old Europe, and maybe in more of the formerly sacred halls of worship in our own backyard than most of us will admit. Zarathustra may have come a century too soon in some quarters, and it may still be too soon in others, but it's hard to deny that ours is an increasingly secular age. I don't know many secularists who think everything is permitted.

Nor do I know many secularists who think compassion, kindness, and consideration are dead, dependent on a religious pedigree, or reflective of slavish resentment. That genealogy may explain the psychology behind some Christians' worldview, but most people in my experience still want to be good for goodness' sake. If your only motivation for being good, though, is to get to heaven, that's not good. And it's not goodness.

We're hosting a talk by a representative godless secular humanist who thinks you can be good without a god next Friday, at our annual Spring Lyceum: Ronald Aronson, author of Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists, and the Undecided.

If an Ubermensch is "not held back by conventional moral codes," he'd better be held back by law and communal disfavor. There are other, better names for people who "want to have their way without consideration of other people's interests": selfish egoists. Spoiled brats. NPDs. Mr. President. Not Superman.

Nietzsche's un-Kantian exaltation of unreason found partial alliance with Sigmund Freud, but is also placed on the shrink's couch as a classic textbook case of subterranean wish-fulfillment and unresolved, unconsious discontent with modernity. The Freudian Unconscious may not quite rise to the revolutionary status of Copernicus and Darwin, Frood may not have figured it all out, Deputy, but it would explain a lot. As "talking cures" go, though, I think I'd usually rather talk to a philosophical analyst than a psycho-...

Nietzsche himself was an early-adopter of psychoanalysis, and needed to be. He had a gift for his analyst, as documented in the film When Nietzsche Wept: eternal recurrence, the gift that keeps on giving. Or doesn't. Its up to you to affirm or negate, to receive the gift as a great liberation or the greatest weight.

Freud's reductive account of religion rivals Marx's, and like Marx's probably captures a significant but not comprehensive segment of believers. Much of Freud's universe is unfalsifiable, as Sir Karl said, but it's not hard to find a devout person who wants and finds more in religion than a protective paterfamilias in the sky. On the other hand, he wasn't entirely off base when he said “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” And, "man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments."

?s Does it really "work" to believe in Santa? Didn't you continue to receive presents after you stopped believing? Is believing in Santa analogous to believing in God? When James said truth is what works, did he mean what works for me, now? Or for us, on the whole and in the long run? Are words tools, or more like pictures? Is it possible that God is dead for some but not others, in some places and times more and in others less? Are compassion and kindness distinctively religious values? Do you know any kind and compassionate atheists? Should we embrace the irrational and emotional aspects of human nature, or try to overcome them? Is Freudian dream symbolism (snakes and caves etc.) profound or silly?
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11.20.17. It’s the birthday of astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, born in Marshfield, Missouri (1889)... At his high school graduation in 1906, the principal said, “Edwin Hubble, I have watched you for four years and I have never seen you study for 10 minutes.” He paused, and then said, “Here is a scholarship for the University of Chicago.”

...He was one of Oxford University’s first Rhodes Scholars, but he didn’t study astronomy there — he studied law, to please his father. He came home in 1913 and passed the bar, but his heart wasn’t in the law practice and he quit after a year. He taught high school Spanish, math, and physics, and coached the basketball team, and the students loved him. But when the term ended, Hubble went back to school himself: this time to earn his Ph.D. in astronomy at Chicago University.

After World War I, Hubble joined the staff of the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he studied nebulae. During his work, he discovered that the Andromeda Nebula was actually another galaxy, far away from our own Milky Way, which scientists had long believed was the only galaxy in the universe. He discovered 22 more galaxies, and he also proved that the universe was actually expanding, which supported the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Stephen Hawking called Hubble’s discovery “one of the great intellectual revolutions of the 20th century.” WA

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60 Minutes last night did a nice tribute to Voyagers 1 & 2, the little spacecraft that could-

"That's home. That's us," Carl Sagan once wrote. "A mote of dust suspended in a sun beam." Voyager 1 is now three times farther from earth than when that photograph was taken. Scientists believe Voyager 1 is now traveling in what's called "interstellar space" -- the space between the stars of our galaxy. Voyager 2 is expected to get there in a few years.

In about 10 years, when the Voyagers' nuclear power runs out, Stone says they'll continue zipping through the vacuum-like conditions in interstellar space. It's very empty out there and they're unlikely to crash into anything. Long after all of us are gone, Voyager 1 and 2 will just keep going and going.

Ed Stone: Think of that. We have actually sent a message, which will be in orbit in the Milky Way galaxy essentially forever, even after the sun and the earth no longer exist in their current state.

Anderson Cooper: Wait. This is, my little mind can't process some of this. Even after the sun and the Earth.

Ed Stone: The sun will become a red giant and envelop the earth and that will happen maybe five billion years from now. These two little emissaries will be out there in their independent orbit basically for billions of years.
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On this day in 1948 US balloon reaches height of 42.7 km (record)... in 1984 SETI Institute (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) is founded... 1998 First module of the International Space Station, Zarya, is launched.==
And It’s the birthday of American novelist Don DeLillo (books by this author), born in New York City (1936), best known for his intense explorations of politics, assassination, culture, and anxiety in books like White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), and Underworld (1997)... About writing, DeLillo says: “Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.” WA
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4.13.17. It's the birthday of Samuel Beckett, who waited for Godot but didn't know what he waiting for... and of Thomas Jefferson, who couldn't wait to declare our independence... and of Eudora Welty, who lived her whole life in the same house in Jackson, MS and said “the dullest man I ever saw in my life (Henry Miller) wasn’t interested in anything outside himself.” Emily Dickinson's poem about madness in spring was about people like him.

5:30/6:17, 52/85, 7:17