Epicureans & Stoics

It's Epicurus and the Stoics today in CoPhi, and more reports...*

In Fantasyland today, it's the '50s. By the end of that decade the average American was watching TV for a third of their waking life-and remember, this was before cable. There were about three channels, but those post-midnight test patterns were mesmerizing. "Nowhere and never had people spent more time consuming fictions and advertizing," and not reading or patronizing the arts. We'e topped them for screentime, though, haven't we? Thanks, Steve Jobs.

 And continued thanks to Walt Disney for magically transforming Marceline, MO into Main Street USA.

Did Hugh Hefner deserve our thanks for his part in starting the sexual revolution? His "wankers" and "readers" were grateful, if not fully liberated from misogyny and stunted sexual/emotional development. [Hef U@d... obit]

And then there's the also-recently-departed Reverend Billy Graham, our "ad hoc national Pastor-in-Chief" who, like Hef, promised liberation and salvation. I wonder how many of his congregants returned from a Graham crusade and unwound (so to speak) with a centerfold. Sin and repentance will always need one another, as in a sense Graham and Hef needed one another.

In A&P today we turn to Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. A freethinker, by her accounting, is anyone who shares the Enlightenment commitment to displacing superstition and supernaturalism with reason and evidence adduced from the natural world. And a secularist is one who insists on distinguishing private faith from the conduct of public affairs. Freethinkers and secularists have been more central to our history than is commonly acknowledged. Suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for instance, was censured by her fellow suffragists for excoriating Christianity in her Woman's Bible. 

The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire on the vital questions of the hour, she was commanded to ask her husband at home. Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up. gr

There was room for freethought in colonial America, says Jacoby, because its religious pluralism militated against a common cultural definition of heresy and sparked widespread interest in views like Deism. Evangelicals and rationalists alike supported separation of church and state.

When asked to explain the Constitution's omission of God, Alexander Hamilton deadpanned: we forgot. Or maybe "the framers [were] so godly that any mention of the Supreme Being in the Constitution would have been as superfluous as acknowledging the sky overhead." Or just maybe they were secularists... and poor Tom Paine was their scapegoat. Common sense suggests nothing less, just as it supports Jefferson's dictum: "it does no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." I've known Christians who agreed, though the more vocal of them continue (like Jefferson's hysterical critic John Mason) to sputter about "devils," "horror," etc. They placed Jefferson's name alongside the French corrupters Voltaire and Rousseau. Jefferson must have found that gratifying.

I've noted how it offended Southern Baptists in the administration Belmont University, years ago,  to learn that I'd attended a few Unitarian Universalist services. They evidently shared the Calvinist revulsion at the thought that nobody should be left behind, everybody should be saved. What kind of a god damns his own children? The kind a progressive, secular, young and hopeful democracy leaves out of its founding documents.

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*Last semester when we took up the subject of Epicurus and the Stoics we heard a report on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. "Stuff your eyes with wonder," and don't "hide your ignorance... you'll never learn." Well, the un-bookish oafs currently running the show in Washington haven't concealed their ignorance, but will they ever learn? Will we ever learn to stop electing un-bookish oafs?

Epicurus and his friends retired from public life, having lost all patience with the unhappy society of their peers whose fear of death they diagnosed as a waste of time and a violation of logic. Better to live simply and bravely with your pals, they thought, pursuing (but not wallowing in) pleasure and avoiding the gratuitous mental pain of the material rat race. Like Aristotle they wanted to live well and flourish, with a bit more emphasis on fun and happiness. Also like Aristotle, they deeply valued friendship. Their commune inspired Marx's dissertation.

Contrary to scurrilous popular rumor they weren't lascivious hedonists or self-indulgent esthetes, preferring a plentiful pot of cheap stew to share over good conversation. Bread, cheese, and olives were staples - their version of pizza. The most valuable commodity of all, they thought, was the precious gift of time. As their admirer Henry Thoreau would eventually say, they considered  that"the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." In the long run we're all safely dead, he and they figured, so we'd better make the best of the time we have.

"Epicurean" is another of those adjectives that's drifted far from its progenitor's intent. Check out the latest issue of Epicure magazine, promoting the "gourmet lifestyle" and designed for globetrotting "bon vivants" and "well-travelled foodies." Epicurus and friends would rather have just hung out in the Garden and chatted over their modest but filling fare. "If you start drinking expensive wine, then you'll very soon end up wanting to drink even more expensive wine, and get caught in the trap of longing for things that you can't have" - not without abandoning your friends and slaving your time away to pay for your refined and expensive taste in vino. I'll stick with the Bay Bridge Sauvignon they sell at Kroger for $2.99, and the sale-priced IPA.

Be calm and carry on, as we say. "Calm is an internal quality that is the result of analysis: it comes when we sift through our worries and correctly understand them. We therefore need ample time to read, to write, and most of all, to benefit from the regular support of a good listener: a sympathetic, kind, clever person who in Epicurus’s time would have been a philosopher, and whom we would now call a therapist."

True to his doctrine, Epicurus died painfully but without fear or complaint. He "suffered all his life from bad health, but learnt to endure it with great fortitude. It was he, not a Stoic, who first maintained that a man could be happy on the rack."

And "in a final letter to Hermarchus, Epicurus writes, 'On the happiest, and the last, day of my life. I am suffering from diseases of the bladder and intestines, which are of the utmost possible severity.' But he goes on, amazingly, 'Yet all my sufferings are counterbalanced by the contentment of soul which I derive from remembering our reasonings and discoveries.'" Critchley

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an epicurean, in his day. "Death is not an event in life." Well, that sentiment's a bit self-centered but it's literally true, with respect to one's own demise. "I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind." But what of the pain of losing friends and loved ones? We must turn to the Stoics to deal with the loss of precious others, and may then find them coming up somewhat short of heart and soul.

Ataraxia, calm, tranquility, serenity, equanimity... that's the big stoic aim, based on the idea that we can't control external events but can control our inner attitudes and responses. Can we? Shouldn't we try, in any case? We should control our emotions, say stoics like Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius, lest they overwhelm us with the madness of violent feeling.

Marcus Aurelius asks, 'Why do you hunger for length of days?' The point of life is to follow reason and the divine spirit and to accept whatever nature sends you. To live in this way is not to fear death, but to hold it in contempt. Death is only a thing of terror for those unable to live in the present. "Pass on your way then, with a smiling face, under the smile of him who bids you go." 

Epictetus: "Men are disturbed not by things [pragmata], but by the opinions [dogmata] which they have of things. Thus death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But
the terror consists in our opinion of death, that it is terrible."

Cicero thought we shouldn't worry about dying, but not for Epicurus's reasons. Live now, Seneca said, life's long enough for those who make the right choices about how they spend the hours of their days. Annie Dillard and Maria Popova agree, "how we spend our days is how we spend our lives." But did Seneca make the right choice complying with crazy Nero, in his final hour? Not his finest, I'd say.

"The Stoics were keen astronomers and recommended the contemplation of the heavens to all students of philosophy. On an evening walk, look up and see the planets: you’ll see Venus and Jupiter shining in the darkening sky. If the dusk deepens, you might see some other stars – Aldebaran, Andromeda and Aries, along with many more. It’s a hint of the unimaginable extensions of space across the solar system, the galaxy and the cosmos. The sight has a calming effect which the Stoics revered, for against such a backdrop, we realise that none of our troubles, disappointments or hopes have any relevance." They'd have been pleased to ponder all those game-changing "new" exoplanets, and (unlike some religions, says David Weintraub) to welcome ET. Winston Churchill too: “I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilisation here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.”

Some questions: Are you afraid of death, of dying, or of any other aspect of human mortality? Why or why not? What's the best way to counter such fear? Are you epicurean in any sense of the word? Have you experienced the death of someone close to you? How did you handle it? Do you believe in the possibility of a punitive and painful afterlife? Do you care about the lives of those who will survive you? Which do you consider more important? Why? Do you consider Epicurus's disbelief in immortal souls a solution to the problem of dying, or an evasion of it? Do you find the thought of ultimate mortality consoling or mortifying?

And one more: Can Epicureans and Stoics help us break our addiction to the spectacle of Drumpf?  "...as each new day brings a new scandal, lie or outrage, it has become increasingly difficult to find our epistemological and ethical bearings: The spectacle swallows us all." Can we afford the luxury of ignoring him? Can we sustain our sanity if we don't? What do you say, Emperor?

• “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” 
• “You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” 
• “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” 
• “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” 
• “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

The slave said something very similar. “Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.” 

Don't you wish the emperor and the slave had been on the ballot in November?

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10.4.17. On this day... 1957 USSR launches Sputnik I, 1st artificial Earth satellite... 2006 WikiLeaks is launched, created by internet activist Julian Assange.

And it's the birthday of Anne Rice (1941), who said “The vampire is an articulate character in our literature. In the last 30 years or so, the vampire has been an articulate, charming, beguiling complex person so he’s miles away from a zombie. The vampire is the poet and the writer of the monster world. The zombies are the exact opposite. They’re not sexy, they don’t listen to good music and they don’t wear good clothes.”

On writing, Anne Rice once said: “There are no rules. It’s amazing how willing people are to tell you that you aren’t a real writer unless you conform to their clichés and their rules. My advice? Reject rules and critics out of hand. Define yourself. Do it your way. Make yourself the writer of your dreams.” WA
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2.23.17. Happy 384th birthday to master diarist Sam Pepys, who expressed an epicurean attitude when he observed "how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.” He was more the hedonist, though. “The truth is, I do indulge myself a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it; and, out of my observation that most men that do thrive in the world do forget to take pleasure during the time that they are getting their estate, but reserve that till they have got one, and then it is too late for them to enjoy it.” Gather ye rosebuds...

5:30/6:26, 55/76, 5:34

Aristotle redux

Not to bury the lede, I must briefly preempt The Philosopher to report my good news: I'm here today. There was a searing moment during my commute Tuesday night when that seemed, for an instant, improbable.

On my way home from Murfreesboro to Nashville at around 9 pm I was involved in a 3-vehicle collision on I-24. One was a FedEx truck that slammed into my passenger side while swerving to avoid the other car. I spun completely around a couple of times before coming to a dead stop straddling two lanes in the middle of the interstate as traffic continued to whiz by in the inner and outer lanes, time enough to think "this is how it ends"... but I'm still here, I'm not quite sure how, but nobody was injured. The other car ended up alongside facing the other direction, full and with small children crying in terror. If the truck hadn't come to a stop just behind us, diverting oncoming traffic, I doubt I'd be here today.

So, I just want to register a profound sense of gratitude that we're all still here drawing breath, and urge you all to be careful out there. I've been running up and down that highway all these years, and maybe had become a bit complacent. It's useful to be reminded that we're always potentially a swerve away from our last commute.

The Corolla I've been pedaling for almost ten years is not looking good, but on the lighter side: Younger Daughter's very jealous of my rental, which (after seeing a photo) she describes as "beautiful and big and safe"-it's a Jeep Wrangler. My sister urges me to consider a truck or a Volvo, something sturdy. I'm honestly not convinced it would have made any difference last night, and I note that Volvo's going all electric soon. I've had my heart set on a Leaf or a Bolt. But I'm thinking about it.

The French philosopher Montaigne fell off his horse and nearly died one day, 500 years ago. But the next day he felt like he had a new lease on life. That's me, today and (I must not ever again forget) every day: lucky. "Don't worry about death," just get on with living... and loving life. 

And drive defensively.

Now, more Aristotle today in CoPhi. The "research institute" and peripatetic academy he called the Lyceum was into everything from anatomy to zoology, so I'm sure he and his followers would have had said something to say about my Near Death Experience.

Wonder what he'd say about America's epidemic of gun violence, and the latest horrific atrocity. He'd be appalled, of course, by the violence itself and by the immediate swirl of fake news about it on social media. And he'd want to know what, at long last, how many children have to get shot before we finally try to do something about it.

Our Philosopher is the star, by the way, of a new musical tour de force based on his Poetics and Rhetoric, "addressing language’s power to influence others, for good or evil" and wondering “How can we persuade if the subject is complex and, as is so often the case, our listeners incapable of following a long chain of reasoning?” And, if they don't really value the truth as much as he does?

Aristotle, dubbed by Dante "master of those who know," loved Plato but he loved truth more. "All men by nature desire to know." I don't know about that. In our time we're seeing strong confirmation for the proposition that all desire to assert what they believe as if they knew it, or as if knowledge just meant firm conviction and not justified true belief. If we all had a natural instinct for truth we'd have a lot less talk about alt-facts. The reality-based community would feel a lot more secure and facts would change our minds. Summarizing the latest literature on confirmation ("myside") bias and irrationality Elizabeth Kolbert writes:

“As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding”... And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Drumpf Administration.

...Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science...

“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring.

 Aristotle may have been naive about all this, but knowing that we're prone to "knowing" things that just ain't so should reassure us that real knowledge is still a reasonable aspiration worth fighting for.

"Aristotle was much too down to earth" to go in for eternal Forms or absolute Anythings. "The Cave was not so bad once you turned the lights on" - did Dumbledore say that? Look in all the dark corners, "for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful." 

Aristotle's latter-day critics point to his un-Darwinian emphasis on teleology in nature, but in fact he was "stumbling along the right track." Lions have sharp teeth because sharp teeth help lions survive and multiply, not because a cosmic design ruled out toothless lions.* It's important to distinguish "how come" questions from "what for" questions, as Professor Dennett said at the Googleplex, and to admit the possibility of design without a designer.

He's also concerned about our current rash of unreason, telling an interviewer "the real danger that’s facing us is we’ve lost respect for truth and facts. People have discovered that it’s much easier to destroy reputations for credibility than it is to maintain them. It doesn’t matter how good your facts are, somebody else can spread the rumour that you’re fake news. We’re entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we’ve not experienced since the middle ages." Ironic. The middle ages distorted and perverted Aristotle's respect for truth and facts. Is the postmodern age about to sin against his philosophy again?

Aristotle is generally very good at distinguishing different kinds of question, with respect to causes. They are material, formal, final, and efficient, respectively concerning what things are made of, how they're formed, what purposes they serve, and what precipitated and changed them). Change is a big reality for Aristotle, always involving somthing that changes in both its before- and after-modalities, revealing potentiality and actuality. "No logical mystery there."

God might be a mystery, though it mystifies some that Aristotle's God thinks so much about Himself. "The idea that there was a being who one morning conjured up the universe out of nothing and then busied himself handing out rewards and punishments to its measly inhabitants" did not mystify The Philosopher, it annoyed him.

The fundamental type of existence for Aristotle is not to be found in Plato's self-subsisting world of eternal Ideas or Forms, it's just ordinary things - trees, rocks, plants, animals. The former "puts the cart before the horse" and tempts me to trot out that bad old Descartes pun too soon. Instead I'll just put a few questions in the spirit of the great founding empiricist. Would you rather attend Plato's Academy or Aristotle's Lyceum? Have you ever sharply disagreed with a teacher whom you nonetheless deeply admired? Is art really a "cave within a cave", or a source of light and truth?

Speaking of "language's power to influence others"...

In Fantasyland today, we go to the movies. (Last night Older Daughter and I went to see "The Darkest Hour," wherein Winston Churchill deployed the English language and sent it successfully into battle.) Cinema narrows the gap between fantasy and reality, magically transporting us into other worlds. Good literature does that too, but there's something peculiarly magical about the silver screen. William James said it produces "hallucinations and illusions [as] vivid as realities." What would he say about VR? What would Aristotle? Plato, we know, would not approve of its un-reality. But sometimes nothing tells the truth like fiction.

And then there's the world of advertizing. It also spins fantasies, for a profit. Don Draper didn't really want to teach the world to sing, he wanted the world to sing his jingle and buy his client's product. But as fantasies go, it's pretty alluring. Ommm...

Orson Welles' Martians seem pretty benign, in retrospect, compared to Nazis then and now.

Celebrity culture may seem benign, but hasn't it really distracted us dangerously from the proper focus of democratic life?

In A&P, John thinks it's possible to talk about our opinions openly without getting into a big fight if we just keep it "personal, accurate, but not universal." He finds atheist humor "a good icebreaker." That's why I keep recommending Julia Sweeney. "Not believing in God is one thing... but an ATHEIST?!" That was her Mom, as I recall. And her Dad: "Don't come to my funeral." To which Julia wished she'd replied: "Just try and stop me!"

Are more than half of millennials disenchanted with religion? That sounds like a movement, if it finds someplace to take  that disenchantment.

Are theists and atheists "similarly skilled at finding meaning in life and self-actualization"? It depends on what you mean by "similarly"... and "skilled"... and "meaning"...

Ulla may be my favorite Atheists in America testifier. "I went to services a few times at a local Unitarian church... I look at pictures sent back by the Hubble space telescope [...&] find it  inconceivable that people believe that this force we are witnessing is God's creation." But she meets other opinions with an indulgent smile.

And, on this day after the passing of Rev. Graham: "I watched an interview with Billy Graham's daughter, who stated that you couldn't be wise unless you believe in God. In view of that, I'm doubly glad that her father's teachings had but a fleeting influence on me." Me too.

Betty cowered between hymns by her Presbyterian choir, convinced "they were the Lord's spies  checking on my behavior." He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake...

Like Ulla, Betty accepts others' prayers graciously.-more graciously, certainly, than Daniel Dennett when he asked his divine solicitors if they also intended to sacrifice a goat on his behalf. (In his defense, he was trying to "break the spell" of magical thinking over the prayer-based community.) But Betty also reads and thinks, and shows you can break your own spell without depriving others' of theirs. Live and let live, to the limits of mutual tolerance.

Margaret's Congregationalist-Universalist father believed in anyone gets to go the an afterlife, pretty much everyone should. Good for him.

I often reference Dr. House, in Bioethics. He's one of the few atheists portrayed in American pop culture, and he perpetrates a stereotype of atheists as bitter, misanthropic cynics. Even so, he usually saves his patients.

Margaret gets the last word in this book, which nicely punctuates my highway escapade. "I'm not afraid of death since I don't believe in an afterlife; I'm just not ready to go yet." That's it, exactly.

What do you think, Susan Jacoby?

And what do you think about euthanasia, Bioethics?
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Happy birthday George Washington (1732), who lost his first political campaign for refusing to bribe the electorate with booze. (He won his second when his campaign manager did not refuse.)

And, happy birthday Dolly the Sheep (1997).

It's also the anniversary of the Olympic "miracle on ice" in Lake Placid (1980)-a hockey game. Really. It was nice to see the U.S. women's team take the Russians yesterday, but that wasn't a miracle either.
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10.2.17. It's the birthday of Groucho Marx, Nat Turner, Wallace Stevens, and Mohandas Gandhi... who said, respectively: “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members”.... “I should arise and … slay my enemies with their own weapons”... “It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job”... “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” WA
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2.21.17. Speaking of *lions... "Most of the ideas that went into The Communist Manifesto [published on this date in 1848] were brainstormed over the course of a week and a half in a room above an English pub — a pub called the Red Lion, located in the Soho district of London." And it's the birthday of the brilliant but troubled David Foster Wallace, who diagnosed part of our problem when he said “postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving." WA ("This Is Water")

5:30/6:28, 56/68, 5:32

Socrates & Plato in love

Another atrocity.

In CoPhi today it's another (simpler) look at Socrates & Plato.  It was on this day in 399 BCE that "Socrates was sentenced to death by the city of Athens for corrupting the minds of the youth of the city and for impiety."

But first, something not completely different...

A recent John Lachs podcast interview reveals the heart and mind of "a wise old wizard" forever seeking the true pivot point between stoic acceptance of limits and a pragmatic "can do" spirit of intelligence and reason brought to bear on the boundless challenges of living. Living is hard, and Lachs loves to stir things up by saying the thing you least expect to hear. Here, for instance, he declares compassion and guilt useless emotions, and activism too often a misspent passion. In fact he's one of the most compassionate and caring people I've ever known, and one of the most committed agents of constructive change. He's a tireless proponent of liberty, hence a foe of "meddling". He says we all need to stop telling others how to be happy, and let them seek their own good in their own ways. He's a paragon of the purpose-driven life.

Another new podcast features my Vandy friends Aikin and Talisse, delivering 15 minute bursts of unscripted philosophizing. Worth a look, if you're curious to see how "analytic" philosophers philosophize.

We would be remiss, the day after the holiday of love, not to take just a bit of time and spend a few good words on the subject. In Socrates in Love one of our contemporaries says "I'm worried my beloved America is becoming as loveless as ancient Athens in its days of decline.” There's a lot not to love, lately and always, but also the reverse. The same speaker says Socrates "epitomized the fact that you're meant to stay open to all views, to all human experiences, because that's how you deepen your love for people and of wisdom." All views, in this Age of Deplorables? No. But the spirit of the remark is true.

Is there any figurative truth to the old Greek myth that humans originally had four arms, four legs and a head with two faces, before Zeus split us into two separate parts so we'd have to search for our better halves? Is that any part of the story and glory of love? Or is it a formula for frustration and self-inflicted solitude?

In Plato's Symposium, Socrates say Diotima taught him all about amor. "She was my instructress in the art of love," which she declares an intermediate "spirit" between mortals and the divine. It begins "from the beauties of earth and mount(s) upwards for the sake of that other beauty, the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is... beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he [the true philosopher of love] will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities..."

Sounds good, I guess, but these realities of a higher love sound a bit thin and wordy. Academic, even. On Valentines Day, and most days really, don't we want something a little more substantial?

Romantic love is deemed to be of a higher metaphysical and ethical status than sexual or physical attractiveness alone. The idea of romantic love initially stems from the Platonic tradition that love is a desire for beauty-a value that transcends the particularities of the physical body. For Plato, the love of beauty culminates in the love of philosophy, the subject that pursues the highest capacity of thinking. The romantic love of knights and damsels emerged in the early medieval ages (11thCentury France, fine amour) a philosophical echo of both Platonic and Aristotelian love and literally a derivative of the Roman poet, Ovid and his Ars Amatoria. Romantic love theoretically was not to be consummated, for such love was transcendentally motivated by a deep respect for the lady; however, it was to be actively pursued in chivalric deeds rather than contemplated-which is in contrast to Ovid's persistent sensual pursuit of conquests!

Modern romantic love returns to Aristotle's version of the special love two people find in each other's virtues-one soul and two bodies, as he poetically puts it. It is deemed to be of a higher status, ethically, aesthetically, and even metaphysically than the love that behaviorists or physicalists describe. IEP

That's a step in the right direction, back down the ladder. Count on Aristotle to move away from the Academy and keep us grounded. But it was bachelor Nietzsche, of all people, who knew “it is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

If you can believe the crowd that sources goodreads, Marilyn Monroe was the great authority on love. "You'll never find that half who makes you whole and that goes for everything... [but] Keep trying... keep smiling, because life's a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about.”

Plato was rightly (if insufficiently) "nagged by a doubt about the Academic way of life: 'I feared to see myself at last altogether nothing but words, so to speak-a man who would never willingly lay hand to any concrete task." That's a reasonable concern. If you're holding out for "absolute beauty" you may be spending a few holidays alone. Better to climb the ladder of love in both directions. Remember what Heraclitus said about the way up and the way down? Don't kick that ladder away. The cave can be a very cozy place, with the right company, and your "better half" may not be a needle in a haystack after all.

In Fantasyland, we ponder pioneer legend Daniel Boone's picturesque pastoral fantasy and supercelebrity, Thoreau's rustic naturalism, Emerson's "transparent eyeball," and the Barnum-esque episode in 1835 when it was widely believed that life had been discovered on the moon. Plus, Chicago's Columbian exposition with its "fanstastic quasi-reality" architectural mock-ups, an early precedent-setting VR realization emulated four years later in Nashville and now, perpetually, in Las Vegas.

In A&P, Kevin regrets being "infected" by supernaturalism in Christian school when he was most vulnerable. "Indoctrination" is a hard word, but what else should we call the doctrinal training of six year olds? He intends to "inoculate" his own children against atheophobia, "the fear and loathing of atheists that permeates American culture." He's "all for reading" sacred texts, but not for sanitizing them by ignoring the distasteful bits. He finds Dan Barker's principles more humane than the ten commandments. I like the Vonnegut principle: "try to be kind to other people." (Kurt put it more bluntly.)

Amy named her daughter after Wonderland's Alice, in hopes of inspiring her to be courageous and follow her curiosity. Alice means Truth.

Adrienne is saddened that her sisters "do not seem to value their own reproductive rights" as much as they value Chik-Fil-A, and considers agnosticism a halfway house rather than a final destination.

Justus found "stilted" his friends' repeated prayerful injunctions of "Lord" (if you're a Simpsons fan you might hear what grates about that), finding more congenial company in the podcast universe.

In Bioethics, we'll ask if gene editing will be mandatory, in our future.

An ethical dilemma from the near future==
9.25.17. It’s the birthday of American novelist William Faulkner (books by this author)(1897), who once said, “If I had not existed, someone else would have written me.” Faulkner is best known for his long, lyrical, and often violent novels that explore Southern culture and history, like Absalom, Absalom! (1936), As I Lay Dying (1930), and The Sound and the Fury (1929). When President John F. Kennedy invited Faulkner, then teaching in Charlottesville, Virginia, to dine at the White House with other Nobel Prize laureates, Faulkner famously declined, saying, “Why, that’s a hundred miles away. That’s a long way to go just to eat.”

Faulkner was raised in Oxford, Mississippi, where he would spend most of the rest of his life, and was a voracious reader, though he didn’t do well in his studies...

[In his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech he said "It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past."]

It was on this day in 1957 that nine black teenagers, six girls and three boys, entered Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, escorted by members of the 101st Airborne Division of the National Guard.

At the time, Little Rock was considered a relatively liberal southern city. There was no segregation on buses or in libraries or parks. But schools were still segregated three years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating integrated classrooms... So on this day in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent 1,000 troops from the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students up the front steps and into their classrooms. The students were shown on national television walking into the school, with stern looks on their faces, their heads held high, as the mob stood all around them... All nine of them were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1998. WA
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2.14.17. Happy Valentine's Day, when "more than a billion letters of affection are sent and 60 million pounds of chocolate are purchased"... 36 questions lead to love... On this day in 1895, Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest opened in London. It expressed his philosophy that “we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality." I wish I'd said that, Oscar. Since it's my birthday, today I will.

5:30/6:37, 42/49/40, 5:25

Socrates

It's Socrates and the Socratics (including that dog Diogenes) today in CoPhi.*

In A&P, Billy Graham scared the devil (and a load of groundless guilt and shame he couldn't shake in college) into a young Minnesotan named David,with his god-fearing Southern Baptist "graphic description of eternal damnation." But then he had a driveway moment with the inestimable Julia Sweeney and began letting go of the fear, guilt, shame, and (eventually) faith. Soon he saw the incoherence of a theology that would hold finite beings like ourselves ultimately responsible for an infinite creator's "preordained outcome."

(My favorite moment from Sweeney's tour de force one-woman show, btw, is her profane (though still somehow gentle) take-down of Deepak Chopra.)

A good question on this Valentine's Day eve: do religious couples have happier relationships? Do atheists have better sex? To the latter, "one large correlational study"says yes. But Ethan found something more gratifying than the hunt for an atheist partner. And, he points out, being raised without religion is not the same as being raised atheist.

Here's a problem I don't recall wrestling with as a kid, perhaps because I "went forward" in terrified quest of formal salvation while still an only child - and only a child. Sen wonders "why God would send my nonbelieving brother to burn for all eternity and expect me to forget about him if I was in Heaven."

The most disgraceful, pathetic, yet still laughable words directed to an inquiring child I've yet encountered were Ronnelle's mother's in reaction to his coming out,. "I rebuke you, you abominable lil codependent [?!] faggot. I curse the day I had you. You are dead to me. Get thee behind me Satan." Wow. Thanks Mom.

Also in A&P today, we'll hear a Fantasyland report. Kurt Andersen says religion is the ultimate conspiracy theory, with "God the mastermind plotting and executing His all-encompassing scheme, assisted by a team of co-conspirators, the angels and prophets."

That may provide a smooth segue to Bioethics, where today we're scheduled to hear a report on Dan Brown's Origins. I haven't read it, and am curious to know what it might have to do with our course topic. A clue, from an ambivalent review:

“Origin” grows out of questions raised by scientists who adopt atheism in a world where strict creationism has less and less relevance. The novel doesn’t paint Kirsch as an enemy of religion, though its prologue does show him arriving threateningly at a scenic abbey in Montserrat to challenge three religious leaders just after a meeting of the Parliament of the World’s Religions... But in the world of quantum computing, where Kirsch’s earlier pioneering work had broken boundaries, the divine was harder to apprehend. The book’s final destination reveals the essence of what Kirsch saw and created, and it inspires awe. Getting there is worth the roundabout journey."

So, a mystery awaits.

*Socrates, they say, was firmly devoted to argumentative reason as a better method than revelation or hope. Should we call his devotion "faith"? Not if that means an unwavering refusal to seek and ponder all evidence, to entertain challenging questions, even to welcome those that question the utility of argumentative reason itself. His fabled humility, his ignorant form of wisdom, officially invites every challenge.

But unofficially, Socrates was definitely betting on reason against superstition and tradition for their own sake. His trust in reason was firm, his delight in philosophical argument was inextinguishable. He drew his dying breath in the middle of an argument his successors have continued to this day, as to the meaning and practical value of a life committed to virtue, curious inquiry, and intellectual integrity. He died in contempt of what he considered the misplaced presumption of fearing death more than vice, "which runs faster than death."

That's how we've come to see him, as a pedestal-mounted figure larger than life, gazing across the centuries in reproach of small-mindedness and irrational fear. We downplay his personal shabbiness and eccentricity, forgetting the actual figure he must have cut as the ancient Athenian equivalent of a street person. How did such a vagabond manage to ingratiate himself with the upper crust elites of his city? It was his spellbinding gift of gab, tiresome to many but entrancing ("bewitching," said the smitten Alcibiades) to many more. People looked beyond the pug nose and the ugly-ass mouth ("more ugly even than an ass's") to the beauty within.

His conversation was compelling but it was not personally revealing. His version of dialectic withheld affirmative assertion, instead soliciting others' definitions and demonstrations in order to trip them over their own inconsistencies and send them (and us, peering over their shoulders) back to the philosophical drawing board.

Athenian democracy had just been overthrown by the Spartans and decimated by their Thirty Tyrants, as Socrates went to trial. His own anti-democratic leanings were well-known. 

If you were heading out on a journey by sea, Socrates asks Adeimantus in Plato's Republic, who would you ideally want deciding who was in charge of the vessel? Just anyone or people educated in the rules and demands of seafaring? The latter of course, says Adeimantus, so why then, responds Socrates, do we keep thinking that any old person should be fit to judge who should be a ruler of a country? Socrates’s point is that voting in an election is a skill, not a random intuition. And like any skill, it needs to be taught systematically to people. Letting the citizenry vote without an education is as irresponsible as putting them in charge of a trireme sailing to Samos in a storm.  Why Socrates Hated Democracy, SoL

But did he really hate democracy? Gottlieb says no, he was in fact too democratic for his time and place. He was an ultra-democrat, committed to the examined life for all. This may have sounded to some like an endorsement of "exaggerated individualism" but for Socrates the examined life is also the collaborative conversational life. "Philosophy is an intimate and collaborative activity: it is a matter for discussions among small groups of people who argue together in order that each might find the truth for himself. The spirit of such a pastime cannot accurately be captured in a lecture or a treatise." It's best captured in talk, preferably while walking. Hence Plato's dialogues, and ours.

Not even the Delphic Oracle's authoritative declaration of Socrates' wisdom could stifle the gadfly's appetite for rational argument and inquiry, provoking him to "check the truth of it" for himself. Can we possibly take literally, then, his claim to philosophize at the behests of God or his daimon? No. He just did it because he thought it was the right thing to do. 

He also thought it best not to weep and wail for our finitude, even at death's door. "No one knows with regard to death whether it is really the greatest blessing..." Maybe he'll get to meet his "heroes of the old days." Or maybe he'll just have a nice long sleep. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him to worry about an unpleasant or hellish alternative. He was ahead of his time, and Epicurus's, in this regard.

Socrates and Plato were both "unworldly" but in different ways, the former in his shambling indifference to social status, hygiene,and finery, the latter in regarding carnal existence as a form of incarceration in the shadow of eternal essences and Ideas. Socrates kept a sharper focus on the duties and blessings of this world, "not simply a preparation for something else." And he thought we could all do that. "For Plato, philosophy was the ladder to this elevated world of the Forms, but not everyone could climb it." For Socrates, "anybody could examine his own life and ideas and thus lead a worthwhile existence."

The paradigmatic Socratic question: Is something good because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it's good? The Socratic answer: it can't be the former, that's arbitrary. Real gods don't play darts with the universe. Hypothetical gods shouldn't, either.

What would he say about people who achieve wealth and success by behaving badly? Or about the state of our democracy? Would he agree with William James regarding "our national disease"? Would you?

We know how it ended for Socrates. They told him to shut up. He persisted (like Elizabeth Warren, and like Paul Kalinithi), until the hemlock shut him down. It's up to the rest of us, now, to persist when we're told to "shut up about the bad stuff."

In Fantasyland, in addition to the aforementioned dot-connecting between conspiracy theorists and theists, we read of the Freemasons. What was their secret? Poore Richard said it's no secret at all. It's an open secret, isn't it, that like fraternal boys' clubs everywhere the Masons wear funny hats and engage in silly rituals? They're not just for boys anymore, though. Lots of reputable (or famous) folk (including my old Dad) were in the club, leading some to suspect a nefarious world-historical plot. Cue Dan Brown again.

It's all too common to hear Bible Belt evangelicals claim that AIDS or 9/11 or the latest natural disaster is God's razor strap, designed to whack his children back into line. But did you know that many Yankees thought God whipped their butts in some early Civil War skirmishes to punish them for not yet outlawing slavery?

Mark Twain, quirky as always, had his own scapegoat for that war: Sir Walter Scott's popular novels romanticizing the feudal old South. Scott's "sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless" society is largely to blame for the war. Twain was a spinner of yarns and tall tales, but maybe that one's not entirely fabricated of whole cloth.
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Feb.13, 2000: Charles Schulz's last Peanuts...
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Happy Darwin Day (+1), a highly tweetable holiday #DarwinDay2018...

•  “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
• “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
• “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
• “As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him." [A colleague objects that this is an invitation to nationalism and war. It would be, if the progressive movement to expand our tribe stopped with the nation-state. A more expansive  and hopeful Darwinism predicts we won't stop there, and thus may yet avoid blowing ourselves to bits in the name of our nationalist "sympathies."]
• "any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man."
• “Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.”
• “We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.”
• "I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for...the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished."
• "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one... whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

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9.20.17. Today is the birthday of American poet and essayist Donald Hall (books by this author) born in Hamden, Connecticut (1928), who once said, “Every good poet in the world has written only a few terrific poems.”

At 89 years old, he longer writes poetry. “Not enough testosterone,” he says. Instead, he’s turned to prose: his last book is collection called Essays After Eighty (2014). Starting the book was simple. He said, “One day I looked out the window and began writing about being an old man looking out the window at the year going by.”

Hall was educated at Exeter, where he played softball with visiting poet Robert Frost, whom Hall remembers as “a spoiled brat,” even though Frost was 79 years old at the time... WA==
On Ken Burns' Vietnam last night, LBJ told an aide it's easy to get into a war but hard to get out. Then he jumped in with both feet. When will we ever learn?
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It's Constitution Day on our campus, with patriotic music blaring ("Stars and Stripes Forever") ahead of a public reading of that most sacred of human documents. But as a recent op-ed asked, is it still up to the task of governing a society marked increasingly by a wealth gap?
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2.9.17. 5:40/6:42, 32/40/26, 5:20. Happy Birthday  to Alice Walker, who said “no person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow”... and to Irish rebel Brendan Behan, who said "Never throw stones at your mother,You'll be sorry for it when she's dead, Never throw stones at your mother, Throw bricks at your father instead." On this day in 1964, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time...