Solvitur ambulando was Diogenes the Cynic's supposed rebuttal to Zeno's Paradoxes of Motion. It's a clever and (say some possibly sexist celebrants) manly rhetorical riposte, but more impressively it's a solid practical demonstration that ideas simply have to travel, to get anywhere. Up again off your Thinking Rock, your comfy chair, your laurels and your conventions. Perambulate, people, at least down the hall and back if not out into the wide open spaces of our local lyceum. It's about to get wintry here again, but that never stopped Socrates. Maybe some of us are more like Descartes, whose mind purportedly "only worked when he was warm."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, said “My mind only works with my legs.” (Also a good heat-and-light source.) I'm with him on that, so long as I still have legs to stand on. A mind really should be flexibly adaptable to circumstantial necessity.
Rousseau was not in fact known for his adaptability, being one of the more bumptious and difficult thinkers of all time. He was a little crazy, but his Reveries of the Solitary Walker registers some of the delights of the long-distance strider while striking a few good aphorisms along the way. “I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.”
And, “Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity.”
And, “In all the ills that befall us, we are more concerned by the intention than the result. A tile that falls off a roof may injure us more seriously, but it will not wound us so deeply as a stone thrown deliberately by a malevolent hand. The blow may miss, but the intention always strikes home.”
And ponder this passage, in which J-J describes the temporary suspension of ego that a good walk can engender.
“Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives.”The New England transcendentalists went in big for the "gymnastics for the mind" too. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” wrote Thoreau, “unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from worldly engagements.” Henry walked to work every day. Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you try (and don't live 42 miles away from campus).
"Charles Darwin planted a 1.5 acre strip of land with hazel, birch, privet, and dogwood, and ordered a wide gravel path built around the edge. Called Sand-walk, this became Darwin’s ‘thinking path’ where he roamed every morning and afternoon with his white fox-terrier." He loved dogs as much as he loved walking and thinking. Like us, Darwin's dogs are still evolving.
"Of Bertrand Russell, long-time friend Miles Malleson has written: 'Every morning Bertie would go for an hour’s walk by himself, composing and thinking out his work for that day. He would then come back and write for the rest of the morning, smoothly, easily and without a single correction.'" That really works, sometimes. But it doesn't work for "the average citizen [who] walks a measly 350 yards a day... it is not surprising that half the population is diagnosed as obese or overweight."
Several cities around the globe have a designated "Philosophers' Walk," and we peripatetics are doing our best to inaugurate informal ones everywhere we go. Did you see all those philosophers marching out there Saturday, all around the world?
Today in Fantasyland Kurt Andersen recalls Sir Walter Raleigh's gold-digging dream (a base to the first student who knows who called him a "stupid git," before promising to "give you everything I've got for a little peace of mind"), and regrets the early colonial pseudoempiricism he thinks helped pave the way for our present predicament. He cites historian Daniel Boorstin's contention that American civilization has favored those who are inordinately credulous and receptive to advertizing, and Sir Francis Bacon's prescient point about what we now call confirmation bias. "My side right or wrong" is a charirtable rendering of that attitude these days, when bias rarely acknowledges its own fallibility. Now, typically, it's just: "My side - !" Or, "I believe, therefore I'm right."
The School of Life, btw, is out with a new video saying bias isn't always a bad thing. But maybe they just want to believe that. "Loathing of bias is the flipside of faith in facts." Faith in? Or fidelity to? Semper fi, reality-based community.
Andersen says our founding mythology underrates the "run-of-the-mill" puritans who were in it for the money and not so much the theology, the first nonnative new Americans who landed at Plymouth Rock rather than Jamestown. "The Puritans are conventionally considered more 'moderate' than the Pilgrims. This is like calling al-Qaeda more moderate than ISIS."
Finally, Andersen reminds us that our forebears were apocalyptic. They were sure the end was near, and said so right after proclaiming Ronald Reagan's "city on a hill." Let's hope they're not about to have their dream fulfilled. But, that Doomsday Clock is ticking.*
Also recommended today: reflections on the pale blue dot and space exploration, the natural next step for a peripatetic species that revels in boldly going where no one has gone before. Did you catch Neil deGrasse Tyson on that, last night on BookTV?
In A&P today we ask if atheists can be good and find meaning in life. (SPOILER: yes they can.) We consider the views of Plato (Euthyphro), Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Rick & Morty.
In Bioethics we look at the relevance of moral theories and formulae that would, if reliable, settle our bioethical disputes. (SPOILER: they don't.) The new revised edition of our text invites us to weigh in on "Anna's story" and what we think of all the actors involved in her decision to issue a Do Not Resuscitate instruction. The message seems clear: no single theory will do the scenario complete justice. But what about the Mayor's Dilemma, bumped to chapter's end? Maybe we can try out our improvisational skills, on that.
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Two "most e-mailed" stories may indicate a surge of angst amongst collegians:
You’ll Never Be Famous — And That’s O.K. Today’s college students desperately want to change the world, but too many think that living a meaningful life requires doing something extraordinary and attention-grabbing like becoming an Instagram celebrity, starting a wildly successful company or ending a humanitarian crisis...
As students head to school this year, they should consider this: You don’t have to change the world or find your one true purpose to lead a meaningful like. A good life is a life of goodness — and that’s something anyone can aspire to, no matter their dreams or circumstances.
-Emily Esfahani Smith (@emesfahanismith), an editor at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is the author of “The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed With Happiness.”
The Real Campus Scourge. Across the country, college freshmen are settling into their new lives and grappling with something that doesn’t compete with protests and political correctness for the media’s attention, something that no one prepared them for, something that has nothing to do with being “snowflakes” and everything to do with being human.
They’re lonely...
We urge new college students not to party too hard. We warn them of weight gain (“the freshman 15”). We also need to tell them that what’s often behind all that drinking and eating isn’t celebration but sadness, which is normal, survivable and shared by many of the people around them, no matter how sunny their faces or their Facebook posts.
-Frank Bruni
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Happy birthday Robert Burns ("Auld Lang Syne") and Virginia Woolf who said “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” Though associated with a very small tract of London real estate (Bloomsbury) she was a true cosmopolitan. But what would she make of Marsha Blackburn and Diane Black?
Also on this day in 1939, Enrico Fermi split an atom.
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*Doomsdsay Clock 30 seconds closer to apocalypse. The clock is now set at two minutes to midnight — the closest it has been since 1953, after the United States tested its first thermonuclear device, followed months later by the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb test... (WaPo)
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For those who, like me, have been hoping to hear that Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac might receive a reprieve, here's a discouraging update... Gun violence in America's schools keeps coming closer to home... Larry Nassar won't be abusing any more gymnasts...
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Happy birthday Robert Burns ("Auld Lang Syne") and Virginia Woolf who said “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” Though associated with a very small tract of London real estate (Bloomsbury) she was a true cosmopolitan. But what would she make of Marsha Blackburn and Diane Black?
Also on this day in 1939, Enrico Fermi split an atom.
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*Doomsdsay Clock 30 seconds closer to apocalypse. The clock is now set at two minutes to midnight — the closest it has been since 1953, after the United States tested its first thermonuclear device, followed months later by the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb test... (WaPo)
==
For those who, like me, have been hoping to hear that Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac might receive a reprieve, here's a discouraging update... Gun violence in America's schools keeps coming closer to home... Larry Nassar won't be abusing any more gymnasts...
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9.5.17. Today in Happiness, we'll join Daniel Haybron's discussion of "attunement" and its three basic aspects: inner calm ("tranquility"), confidence, and expansiveness of mood or spirit ("feeling 'carefree,' or being 'uncompressed'). Just how I feel during and after our daily dogwalk through the neighborhood, and how I imagine I'd feel if I ever could set foot in the sea of tranquility.
The great fire of London ended on this date in 1666, and the great reign of terror began in France in 1793 (WA), among other things. If it's not one thing it's another.
==The great fire of London ended on this date in 1666, and the great reign of terror began in France in 1793 (WA), among other things. If it's not one thing it's another.
1.24.17 - 5:35/6:55, 41/53, 5:03
Happy birthday Edith Wharton, who said "There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it." She found her writing voice when her friend Henry James told her, in true Jamesian spirit, "Don't pass it by — the immediate, the real, the only, the yours."
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