Exam Day, before I head to Ottawa KS and KC MO for the annual Baseball in Literature and Culture Conference.
Asked to provide our panel moderator (who teaches just up the road) with my bio, I noted that I used to get to this event simply by crossing the hall to Dining Room C. Now that our school no longer hosts I cross four states and 650+ miles. Not complaining, it's an opportunity to revisit old friends and family and stomping grounds en route.
But we'll begin talking about these guys, and George Berkeley too, if time allows. If it doesn't, we'll time-travel back to them next week.
And, to Fantasyland, to ponder the incendiary psycho-message of The Courage to Heal and (speaking of Back to the Future) the bizarre Satanic Panic of the '80s. Did the former really say that feeling bad about yourself probably means you've repressed memories of molestation? Did the latter really lead to the imprisonment of dozens on the strength of no evidence at all?
In A&P, we continue with Nature's God on the Spinoza-Locke connection. When the latter declares his god a thinking thing, this "can only be meant in the same sense that Spinoza first proposes it. The universe itself is the thinking of God... [and] the extension of God," the modalities in which the one true and irreducible substance of all reality makes itself knowable and known. But Locke didn't want us to know that he knew that. He raised "philosophical evasion to a performance art." He wasn't lost, he was just exploring.
In Bioethics, we conclude On Immunity. Is that concept a myth, after all, in an entirely bad way? Total immunity, in the sense of invulnerability to all risk, definitely is. But partial immunity through collective prophylaxis is perhaps a necessary fiction, if we're to overcome the resistance to sound medical science in our ranks and our psyches.
The poet Pope, like the Panglossian metaphysician Leibniz, said Being can't be improved on. What a demoralizing thought. "Superficiality incarnate," James called it. "Leibniz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind..."
François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire, agreed acerbically and hilariously with James. But there was nothing funny about the Lisbon quake, or any natural cataclysm. If we have grounds for optimism it's not in the fact of such events, but in the constructive and ameliorative human response to them. Rebecca Solnit points this out effectively in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. She cites James's firsthand account of the great San Francisco quake of '06, wherein he details the sense of "social uplift" he took away from the willingness of people to pitch in and help one another through disaster. Hope springs eternal, for those who can keep their heads in a crisis.
Brains, John Campbell says in his Berkeley Philosophy Bites interview, are a big asset. "It's very important that we have brains. Their function is to reveal the world to us, not to generate a lot of random junk."
Voltaire, dubbed by Russell "the chief transmitter of English influence to France," was an enemy of philosophical junk, too. One of the great Enlightenment salon wits, a Deist and foe of social injustice who railed against religious intolerance (“Ecrasez l’infame!”) and mercilessly parodied rationalist philosophers (especially Leibniz, aka Dr. Pangloss). "Pangloss was professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology. He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses…" Candide [V&L, u@d]
“There is a lot of pain in the world, and it does not seem well distributed.” [slides here]
Plenty of people believe in a "pre-established harmony," and seem to find comfort in it. I've never understood the mindset of feeling blessed by the hurricane that obliterates the other side of the street, but that reflexive response seems always on tap for people in hurricane alley. It's hard to cultivate your garden if you and your garden have been blown away.
David Hume was a cheerful and clear-headed freethinker, prudently advised by friends not to say everything he thought in so many words. The dialogue form gave him just enough cover to keep people guessing as to the full extent of his heresies. But he was plenty clear that miracles, if by the term we mean anything other than an exceedingly improbable (though perfectly possible) event, do not happen. “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.” Hume also said
Asked to provide our panel moderator (who teaches just up the road) with my bio, I noted that I used to get to this event simply by crossing the hall to Dining Room C. Now that our school no longer hosts I cross four states and 650+ miles. Not complaining, it's an opportunity to revisit old friends and family and stomping grounds en route.
But we'll begin talking about these guys, and George Berkeley too, if time allows. If it doesn't, we'll time-travel back to them next week.
And, to Fantasyland, to ponder the incendiary psycho-message of The Courage to Heal and (speaking of Back to the Future) the bizarre Satanic Panic of the '80s. Did the former really say that feeling bad about yourself probably means you've repressed memories of molestation? Did the latter really lead to the imprisonment of dozens on the strength of no evidence at all?
In A&P, we continue with Nature's God on the Spinoza-Locke connection. When the latter declares his god a thinking thing, this "can only be meant in the same sense that Spinoza first proposes it. The universe itself is the thinking of God... [and] the extension of God," the modalities in which the one true and irreducible substance of all reality makes itself knowable and known. But Locke didn't want us to know that he knew that. He raised "philosophical evasion to a performance art." He wasn't lost, he was just exploring.
In Bioethics, we conclude On Immunity. Is that concept a myth, after all, in an entirely bad way? Total immunity, in the sense of invulnerability to all risk, definitely is. But partial immunity through collective prophylaxis is perhaps a necessary fiction, if we're to overcome the resistance to sound medical science in our ranks and our psyches.
The poet Pope, like the Panglossian metaphysician Leibniz, said Being can't be improved on. What a demoralizing thought. "Superficiality incarnate," James called it. "Leibniz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind..."
François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire, agreed acerbically and hilariously with James. But there was nothing funny about the Lisbon quake, or any natural cataclysm. If we have grounds for optimism it's not in the fact of such events, but in the constructive and ameliorative human response to them. Rebecca Solnit points this out effectively in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. She cites James's firsthand account of the great San Francisco quake of '06, wherein he details the sense of "social uplift" he took away from the willingness of people to pitch in and help one another through disaster. Hope springs eternal, for those who can keep their heads in a crisis.
Brains, John Campbell says in his Berkeley Philosophy Bites interview, are a big asset. "It's very important that we have brains. Their function is to reveal the world to us, not to generate a lot of random junk."
Voltaire, dubbed by Russell "the chief transmitter of English influence to France," was an enemy of philosophical junk, too. One of the great Enlightenment salon wits, a Deist and foe of social injustice who railed against religious intolerance (“Ecrasez l’infame!”) and mercilessly parodied rationalist philosophers (especially Leibniz, aka Dr. Pangloss). "Pangloss was professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology. He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses…" Candide [V&L, u@d]
“There is a lot of pain in the world, and it does not seem well distributed.” [slides here]
Plenty of people believe in a "pre-established harmony," and seem to find comfort in it. I've never understood the mindset of feeling blessed by the hurricane that obliterates the other side of the street, but that reflexive response seems always on tap for people in hurricane alley. It's hard to cultivate your garden if you and your garden have been blown away.
David Hume was a cheerful and clear-headed freethinker, prudently advised by friends not to say everything he thought in so many words. The dialogue form gave him just enough cover to keep people guessing as to the full extent of his heresies. But he was plenty clear that miracles, if by the term we mean anything other than an exceedingly improbable (though perfectly possible) event, do not happen. “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.” Hume also said
- “Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.”
- “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”
- "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
- "A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”
- “He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper, but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to his circumstance.”
- “Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.”
He was also clear that he thought Epicurus had the right attitude towards life and death, annoying Johnson and Boswell with the calm he brought to his final hours.
And he thought Epicurus asked good questions. “Epicurus's old questions are still unanswered: Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?”
Hume tried to be a friend to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but they became "enlightenend enemies." The bumptious Swiss was a peripatetic but also a bit of narcissist and rogue, and an advocate for the public interest (the General Will) as deserving priority over personal self-interest. He was right, if we're going to go to the trouble of creating civil institutions we really need to fund them. We all need to pay our share. But we all need to have a voice in identifying the public interest, too. We're finding out, aren't we, if that model will work in our time.
==
11.6.17. On this day in 1860 Abe Lincoln was elected President, and Jeff Davis was elected to lead the confederate rebellion...in 1917 the Bolshevik revolution begins with bombardment of the Winter Palace in Petrograd during the Russian October Revolution... It’s the birthday of the man who founded The New Yorker magazine, Harold Ross... In his honor, one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons:
==
4.4.17. On this day in 1832, Charles Darwin (books by this author) traveling aboard the HMS Beagle landed on the shores of Rio de Janeiro as part of a five-year trip. “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” But he remained hopeful that "the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply."
Hope is the subject of another terrific book by Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark... and of today's eponymous poem by Lisel Mueller. "It is the singular gift/we cannot destroy in ourselves, the argument that refutes death, the genius that invents the future, all we know of God."
Solnit: “Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.” And, "To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” And, “Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”
And, someone concluded his book on William James with:
Hope-the need for it, the possibility of it, the sense of it as the only reputable alternative to inadmissible despair-is the center of his vision as I see it. The prime requisite of hope is confidence that what we do matters and may make all the difference further along the chain of life... "Hope" is that thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tunes without the words/And never stops at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment