Change

Today in CoPhi our topic is change. What kind of change can we believe in? Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Zeno of Elea all had ideas about that. And so did Goober of Mayberry. When did the idea of America begin, Andy? Maybe the reading group should take up Fantasyland with us.*

The waters around us have definitely grown, the constitutional crises du jour are flowing faster than we can step into (even Scott Pruitt predicted that), the times are changing and the battle outside is raging. It was another weekend of street protests, even in Nashville (in front of our Senators' offices at West End & Murphy).

Robert Altman's Nashville seems more timely than ever, Hal Phillip Walker more electable than ever, as our nation's newly-staffed National Security Council now excludes the National Security Adviser and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs but somehow has room for the guy who said “I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” [UPDATE: Remember Steve Bannon? He's history, but Leninism in America still lurks. The more things change...]

President #45 is issuing orders with his pen, saying "you're fired" to our highest law enforcement officer and threatening to sack most of Foggy Bottom, tweeting loosely about WWIII... and #44 has broken his 10-day silence to speak to our core value as an open-door society hospitable to all the yearning huddled masses.

Have the ancients any relevant wisdom for us, on all this? Has the more recent hirsute philosopher anything valuable to bring out, besides Floyd's razor?

Heraclitus was the Heidegger of his time, presumably indifferent to complaints  like Aristotle's about his ambiguous syntax and cryptic aphorisms. (Hubert Dreyfus defends Heidegger's obscurity as instrumental to his project. Does the same defense rescue Heraclitus?) Gottlieb gives us examples, some curious and others fairly clear, including:

• Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep.
• Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child.
• As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them.
• War is father of all and king of all.
• The way up and down are one and the same.
• It is disease that makes health sweet and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest.
• Much learning does not teach understanding.
• It is in changing that we find purpose.

And the goodreaders share these, decrypted and streamlined:

• Time is a game played beautifully by children.The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change.
• The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny - it is the light that guides your way.
• The people must fight on behalf of the law as though for the city wall.
• Wisdom is to speak the truth and act in keeping with its nature.
• Allow yourself to think only those thoughts that match your principles and can bear the bright light of day.
• The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts.
• The sun is new each day.
• What was scattered gathers. What was gathered blows away.

So, he had his vapid moments but also his Dylanesque depths. The main takeaway, inarguable I'd say, is that change is our constant companion and we must work to make it our ally. The universal flux and turmoil is the stream we're destined to fish and swim in, we "beasts, drunkards, sleepers, and children" who keep letting slip our proper logos, our ruling principle. 

And what is that principle, exactly? He doesn't exactly say. He does say we're an oppositional species. Our opposites attract and clash and sometimes issue in the attuned harmony of high and low notes. 

Also, he was an "intellectual pyromaniac," fascinated by the transformational symbolic fire of living. "In his philosophy the central fire never dies: the world 'was ever, is now, and ever shall be, an ever-living Fire.' But fire is something continually changing..."

"Heraclitus maintained that everything changes; Parmenides retorted that nothing changes." (BR) Parmenides, pupil of Xenophanes (the guy who said horses and oxen would describe their gods as horses and oxen too) and teacher of Zeno, said everything's eternal and so the times can't be a changing after all. But that's absurd on its face, isn't it?

His main question was a serious one: how can language and thought hook onto the world? Through "touch," somehow, presumably meaning that a prerequisite of knowledge is some form of perceptual immediacy. That doesn't sound absurd to me, but it does seem to block the possibility of inferential knowledge. Again, we've got to ditch the armchair and the classroom and go out into the world we seek to know. That wasn't Parmenides' method.

The essence of [his] argument is: When you think, you think of something; when you use a name, it must be the name of something. Therefore both thought and language require objects outside themselves. And since you can think of a thing or speak of it at one time as well as at another, whatever can be thought of or spoken of must exist at all times. Consequently there can be no change, since change consists in things coming into being or ceasing to be.

This is the first example in philosophy of an argument from thought and language to the world at large. BR

The first, not the best.

Zeno, like so many philosophers before and since, was trying to subvert our confidence in common sense with his paradoxes. It leads too often to confusion and unacceptable consequences, so a good dialectician (or one who seeks knowledge by Q-&-A) walks us back from paradox to a reconsideration of our first premises. Socrates was a better one than Zeno, says Gottlieb, because the former had constructive intentions while the latter just wanted to defend his mentor Parmenides.

As for the Achilles paradox, I still prefer the Diogenes solution: solvitur ambulando: just walk away. A few quick strides will cover an infinitude of minute distances.

In *Fantasyland today we read of the 18th century's Great Awakening, when pious congregants "felt the Holy Spirit" and expressed It in un-self-conscious spasms of "moaning, weeping, screaming, jerking, and fainting" supposedly marking a "supernatural presence, God shaking and slapping a sinner... or possibly Satan's resistance" to the beginning of the end of time.

And, "America's spiritual founding father," George (wait for it) Whitefield, who taught us to seek salvation in re-birth. These were not our Methodists, whose outer shows of charisma and enthusiasm (and miraculous healings, speaking in tongues, etc.) got dialed down quite some time back. But "the most distinctive characteristic of early American Methodism was this quest for the supernatural in everyday life." And that's the ticket to the American Way: "If I think it's true, no mattter why or how it's true, then it's true..."

That wasn't the way intended by the nation's political founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson urged his nephew to "question with boldness the existence of a god," and took scissors (or a penknife) to his Bible.

Why wasn't God mentioned in the Constitution? "We forgot," deadpanned Lin-Manuel's hero. They had the right to remain silent.

Sapere aude! said the Sage of Konigsberg in his renowned Enlightenment encomium. But thinking for yourself is not the same as thinking by yourself, to suit yourself, just because you're feeling it.

In A&P today we take up this semester's course theme, Atheism in America, with Atheists in America. Editor Melanie Brewster is quick to identify an elephant that sometimes lurks in our classroom, the historical gender disparity among freethinkers - and especially among those who've come of age in the New Atheist movement of the past decade. "A lot of women are turned off by what they call the 'warlords of atheism,' by the aggressive, militant, take-no-prisoners, decidedly un-friendly testesterone-fueled variety of unbelief associated by some with Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. Happily there haven't been many of those in A&P over the years, and if there were we'd tone them down.

"Only a handful of studies" have explored the question of a link between unhappiness and irreligiosity, though it's not uncommon in Positive Psychology circles (for instance) to declare the correlative opposite connection and thus, by implication, to reinforce the popular but unverified prejudice that atheists skew to the unhappy side of the line. In my experience, the more typical attitude among the godless is Robert Ingersoll's. He reported experiencing unadulterated joy, when he realized he harbored not even a scintilla of speculative belief in the possibility that the Christian scheme of salvation might be right. “When I became convinced that the Universe is natural and that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into
every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles
became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf or a slave.”

New Atheists tend to be advocates of science. Does that make them scientistic, in a bad way?

Anthony Grayling says humanism intends to "make the best of" life, in light of the world's inevitable constraints. But if that sounds too much like accepting a consolation prize for not getting into heaven, he has a Good Book, a "secular Bible," for us. More than consolation, it offers inspired snippets of the best that's been thought and said by humanity so far. And the book's still being written.

African-Americans are widely perceived to be generally unimpressed by godlessness, but Frederick Douglas - "an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice" - offered a scathing indictment of those representatives of traditional theism who've "shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system" and its oppressive successors.

In Bioethics today, we look at clinical ethics...
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Who are you, Generation Z, whatever you call yourself? What changes will you bring us? How will you respond to our really vital question?
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Notice the many perspectives on change represented in the sidebar. The dawn of every new day  announces and symbolizes change, of course. Every new sentence is a potential change in the direction of thought, action, and life. And as visionary ecologist Ernest Callenbach says of "Tomorrow," every instance of decay is a potential step in the direction of new growth and opportunity. Carpe diem.
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Among the problems we might ponder and possibly solve today: Should philosophers be deliberately enigmatic and impenetrable? Can an obscure epigrammatic statement really be profound? Or should philosophers always strive for prosaic clarity? 

And, oh yeah: What do we think of Goober's pre- and post-beard persona, and of his friends' recoil from philosophy? Couldn't he have kept the beard and, unlike Heraclitus, just toned down the arrogance and pretense? Can't we all hope to sustain our good characters and still be ourselves, amidst the change that's gonna come?
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Following up on the scourge of campus loneliness... Calvin & Hobbes... A comic take on Plato’s cave in our time... we're a tiny twig on an improbable branch, said S.J. Gould... Orville... Buchanan... Escaping Drumpf (McKibben)... Dutch cycling...
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9.11.17. Today is the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It changed everything, some say.
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1.31.17. 5:20/6:50, 46/64/43, 5:10. It's Norman Mailer's and Thomas Merton's birthday. Mailer said re-writing was more fun in his later years. "Since at my age you begin to forget all too much, I would hardly remember what I had written the day before. It read, therefore, as if someone else had done it. The critic in me was delighted. I could now proceed to fix the prose. The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.”

Merton said we should "consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce man and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity.”