Nothing matters? I'm skeptical

LISTEN. As late as about 3 pm yesterday I was prepared to declare, on the last day of the 162-game regular major league baseball season, that it didn't matter to me who won the National League Central Division pennant. Then, my team ran the score against the Chicago Cubs up to 9-0. Suddenly I was nine years old again and nothing mattered more. That's how you stay forever young, and reconnect with Trump-loving family members. Is it a cure for overdoing democracy? I believe it just might be.

Pyrrho and the ancient skeptics didn't want us to have beliefs, but also somehow wanted us to believe (or entertain the notion?) that "nothing matters" -- or so we're told in our CoPhi chapter on them. But would it matter, if nothing matters? This is no deep paradox, just a shallow confusion. But it makes for good animated satire.

	Philosophy Matters (@PhilosophyMttrs)
10/4/18, 12:30 AM Nothing Matters Part 2: Rick and Morty and Nietzsche ... buff.ly/2yavB9d

In any event, much matters. The late Christopher Hitchens' statement about nihilism and meaning matters to me:

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Hitch-22 [10.4.18... More old "skeptics" posts]

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But enough of skeptics and nihilists, I want to think instead of Josiah Royce and his 1892 Spirit of Modern Philosophy. It so earnestly affirmed that life and ideas matter, and that philosophy is the discipline most directly devoted to their articulation, that it would never have occurred to me back in 1978, when I first picked it up as a green undergrad (when green still just meant naive and uninstructed), to give either nihilism or extreme Pyrrhonic skepticism a moment's consideration. It helped me, back then, to imagine I had a clue of what the German pre-Heglian metaphysical idealists Fichte and Schelling were up to, with their mystifying talk of the autonomous noumenal self, objective transcendental consciousness, etc. I'm scheduled to share that reconstructed imagination with a gathering of Royce scholars at Vanderbilt in a little over two weeks.  I begin with this text:

No, the philosopher's work is not lost when, in one sense, his system seems to have been refuted by death, and when time seems to have scattered to scorn the words of his dust-filled mouth. His immediate end may have been unattained; but thousands of years may not be long enough to develop for humanity the full significance of his reflective thought.

This early (for undergrad me) statement of the long view, always the best philosophers' reflexive purview, anticipated (I see now in retrospect, looking back) the radically mind-expanding shift of perspective I'd find in The Long Now - the raised-consciousness commitment to deep time as ours, in our present, and the eponymous Stewart Brand-led foundation that's been raising consciousness and ethical acuity with projects like the Clock of the Long Now.  The concept of a 10,000 year clock, meant to symbolize and motivate the long-term thinking we need to break our cycle of addiction to unsustainable short-sighted consumerism, was Danny Hillis's idea. Announcing it in Wired in the millennial year 01995, in the spirit of Royce's Spirit of Modern Philosophy, he professed:

I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.

I have hope for the future. 

Of course, as Greta Thunberg has reminded us, you can't just hope. You have to earn it. You have to do something.

Aristotle

LISTEN. The latest New Yorker cover raises a specter, one which we touched on in Happiness class out on the James Union Building stoa late yesterday afternoon.

Some "transhumanists" and futurists think it's our destiny to merge with our machines and become a hybrid species. Is that already happening? If so, I recommend getting outside ASAP and going for a long walk. Unplugged. Step away from the console, Ray Kurzweil. ("...within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself.” The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology)

Can we know, reliably forecast, or even roughly anticipate the future? How many of us, for instance, saw the Internet coming even as late as (say) 1989, when we were already well into the Microsoft era of personal computing? I recall one morning in 1992, during my one-year stint at East Tennessee State, when my colleague excitedly told us about his new discovery of an exotic thing called a "search engine." 

Humans have been trying to peer into crystal balls for as long as they've been peering at anything, but our prognosticating track record is pretty spotty.  The future is an open and undiscovered country, as today's CoPhi subject Aristotle explained back when we were his far future.

Aristotle formulated the openness of the future in the language of logic. Living in Athens at a time when invasion from the sea was always a possibility, he made his argument using the following sentence: ‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow.’ One of the classical laws of logic is the ‘law of the excluded middle’ which states that every sentence is either true or false: either the sentence is true or its negation is true. But Aristotle argued that neither ‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow’ nor ‘There will not be a sea-battle tomorrow’ is definitely true, for both possibilities lead to fatalism; if the first statement is true, for example, there would be nothing anybody could do to avert the sea-battle. Therefore, these statements belong to a third logical category, neither true nor false. In modern times, this conclusion has been realised in the development of many-valued logic. Anthony Sudbery, Aeon

As Montaigne said, Que sais-je?

As Doris Day said, Que sera sera.

As George Santayana said (sort of), there's no cure for death but to enjoy its prelude.

And as Richard Dawkins said, we're going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. [YouT]

An old post:

Today in CoPhi it's our first pass at Aristotle. "One swallow doesn't make a summer" (or a spring-were the Greeks really so vague about the seasons as these alternative translations suggest?) was his most poetic observation by far.

 If then the work of Man is a working of the soul in accordance with reason, or at least not independently of reason... and we assume the work of Man to be life of a certain kind, that is to say a working of the soul, and actions with reason, and of a good man to do these things well and nobly, and in fact everything is finished off well in the way of the excellence which peculiarly belongs to it: if all this is so, then the Good of Man comes to be "a working of the Soul in the way of Excellence," or, if Excellence admits of degrees, in the way of the best and most perfect Excellence.

And we must add, in a complete life; for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.

Happiness is far more than the sum of its parts, it's a quality of soul steeped in a lifetime of habitual virtue. Or so we say, when interchanging "happiness" with "eudaimonia." Flourishing or well-being are better substitutes. By whatever name, though, Aristotle's saying the good life takes time, possibly more time than a lifetime affords. If your child suffers a tragic and premature end, even after you've gone, your life has suffered diminution. In some non-trivial sense your well-being has taken a hit, your flourishing has foundered.

Russell:

From 335 B.C. to 323 B.C. (in which latter year Alexander died), Aristotle lived at Athens. It was during these twelve years that he founded his school and wrote most of his books. At the death of Alexander, the Athenians rebelled, and turned on his friends, including Aristotle, who was indicted for impiety, but, unlike Socrates, fled to avoid punishment. In the next year ( 322) he died. Aristotle, as a philosopher, is in many ways very different from all his predecessors. He is the first to write like a professor: his treatises are systematic, his discussions are divided into heads, he is a professional teacher, not an inspired prophet. His work is critical, careful, pedestrian, without any trace of Bacchic enthusiasm. 

Russell didn't much like Aristotle's perennial quest for the "mean" between extremes, particularly when applied to truth and other intellectual virtues. But splitting the difference between excess and deficiency is often the right strategy in life.

...with respect to acting in the face of danger, courage {Gk. ανδρεια [andreia]} is a mean between the excess of rashness and the deficiency of cowardice; with respect to the enjoyment of pleasures, temperance {Gk. σωφρσυνη [sophrosúnê]} is a mean between the excess of intemperance and the deficiency of insensibility; with respect to spending money, generosity is a mean between the excess of wastefulness and the deficiency of stinginess; with respect to relations with strangers, being friendly is a mean between the excess of being ingratiating and the deficiency of being surly; and with respect to self-esteem, magnanimity {Gk. μεγαλοψυχι&alpha [megalopsychia]} is a mean between the excess of vanity and the deficiency of pusillanimity.

So many of the circumstances of life are beyond our control, on either side of the grave. Can we increase our chance of eudaimonia, or must we just learn to accept our fate and let happiness happen or not? Aristotle says we can take steps to develop our character, form strong habits, and live the good life. This is only partly subject to our control, since much depends on the quality of our early nurture. Some overcome adverse beginnings, others are derailed. Life and luck are unfair.

And that's why Aristotle was so concerned to create a just society, a polis capable of nurturing and supporting all its citizens (except slaves and women-in this regard Plato scores over his pupil). "We live together, and need to find our happiness by interacting well with those around us in a well-ordered state." If you choose to go it alone, you may or may not be pleased with your life but you definitely won't flourish in Aristotle's terms. 

The middle ages enshrined Aristotle as The Philosopher, the great authority not to be challenged. He would have hated that, inimical as it is to the spirit of free and open debate governed by reason alone.

Only hedonists conflate pleasure and happiness, but that doesn't mean the relation between them is easy to pin down. Wouldn't Aristotle admit that it might be possible to indulge the right pleasures at the right time for the right reasons etc., thus acknowledging that the time and place for pleasure is always a matter of judicious discretion? Bertrand Russell seemed to think he would not, and for that reason found the Nichomachean Ethics less than wholly appealing.  "The book appeals to the respectable middle-aged, and has been used by them, especially since the seveteenth century, to repress the ardours and enthusiasms of the young. But to a man with any depth of feeling it cannot but be repulsive." Repulsive!

I would have said tepid, not repulsive, but Russell has a bit of a point. I'll still line up on Aristotle's side of the School of Athens, though. Which side are you on?

Today in Fantasyland, speaking of theme parks... "Black America" opened in Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th century. "Black Panther" it wasn't, staffed as it was with "actual field hands from the cotton belt" and designed to show the slaves' "happy, careless life." Right.

Then we learn of a former Tennessee governor and senator who makes Bill Haslam and Bob Corker look pretty good by low-bar comparison who traveled the country with the same fantastic "treacly" message, before Hollywood got in on the whitewash with Birth of a Nation's "shameless" celebration of the KKK. In this light it might seem unfair to pick on the south, while the whole country was losing its mind to illusion and delusion. The Mind of the South contended that southerners had a particular "incapacity for the real, a Brobdingnagian talent for the fantastic."

The modernist New Theology is old by now, still foolishly stoking a simplistic God/Satan struggle for our souls. Other modernists realized Christianity must adapt to the times or be winnowed like every other struggler, bending to the theistic evolutionary hypothesis that evolution was "a new name for 'creation' rather than its denial. But Billy Sunday's old-time religion ("I don't believe your own bastard theory of evolution") captured a greater share of the credulity market and set the stage for Dayton, Tennessee, 1925.  What a circus. "It was absurd that 'the book of Genesis, written when everybody thought the world was flat,' should refute science." Was and is. But some people evidently just don't mind living a contradiction, or in defiance of their time.

(Carl Sagan & Neil deGrasse Tyson set them straight...)

The expanded consciousness of a Democritean cosmopolite

LISTEN. Today in Happiness we begin by noting the Epicureans' departure from both the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in their thoroughly material approach to mind/soul. Our spirit is for them ineluctably embodied, anchored to our organism, dependent on our situation in the material world.

It's a feet-on-the-ground philosophy, a grounded worldview that potentially opens onto rich tapestries of experience. More ethereal souls would not understand, mediated as they would have to be in their recessive duality, cut off from the immediacy that may well be our surest source of happiness. “The notion that the soul is distributed and corporeal is in many ways more appealing than the notion that an incorporeal soul is lodged in the brain,” writes Catherine Wilson. As material spirits, our most ordinary encounters are capable of delighting us. Every fiber of our being may be alive and receptive to extraordinary perceptions.

May, not must. We have to attend to the inherent possibilities of delight, and constantly cultivate our perceptual acuity, lest we become dull and inured to the monotony of everydayness. If we don't, and if we've been saddled with a temperament given to misgiving and ruminative regret - very few of us, it seems, are entirely exempt from such feelings - we'll not flourish. "The worm at the core of our usual springs of delight can turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. But the music can commence again, and again and again, at intervals."

The music of life is available and on tap for those who've grasped their intrinsic consanguinity with the cosmos. You could call this insight Democritean cosmopolitanism. “To a wise man," wrote Democritus, "the whole earth is open, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe.” (Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Elusive Structure of the Universe and the Journey to Quantum Gravity).

More simply: "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." That's Carl Sagan, who was a big fan of Democritus. 

The travel writer Pico Iyer just published an essay on this theme. In The Beauty of the Ordinary he writes of Fall and the cycles of the seasons,

the season’s special lesson is to cherish everything because it cannot last; from Vermont to Beijing, people relish autumn days precisely because they’re reminders of how much we cannot afford to take for granted, and how much there is to celebrate right now, this shining late September afternoon... I’m more enamored of the fall, if only because it has spring inside it, and memories, and the acute awareness that almost nothing lasts forever. Every day in autumn — a cyclical sense of things reminds us — brings us a little bit closer to the spring.

And every day in late September brings us a little bit closer to October baseball. (Cards' magic number to clinch the Central is down to 3.) Bart Giamatti, not long before his own time here was cut tragically short, said he knew nothing's forever but needed to think so. "I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun."

George Santayana also said a similar thing. "To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring."

And: "There's no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval." Life offers many happy returns, while we're here and paying attention in our animal bodies, with our animal minds.

But now, what if an artificially intelligent being emerges someday and somehow wires itself to attend to things and reflect on their beauty? Is that possible, conceivable, comprehensible by us? Would its "body" not then in some meaningful sense be the whole world?

But then, aren't ours - on the Democritean premise - that already? That which we perceive being inseparable from that with which we perceive, the composite of our material atomic substance, can't we already say we are the world? We don't need to de-corporalize and upload our consciousness, to have and enjoy this delightful insight. We just need to expand and open it.

Socrates himself

LISTEN. His name has three syllables, in case (like me) you always hear Steve Martin's two-syllable solecism echoing in  distant memory from the early days of SNL. His re-enactment of Socrates' last scene is good, though not Platonically GOOD. ("I drank what?!") For a figure who represents an early iteration of the great recurring tragedy of anti-intellectualism in the western world, Socrates has sure inspired a lot of levity. Woody Allen's My Apology is another example.

And speaking of Plato, as we will, his name is not supposed to evoke "level high ground"... but does, as a matter of fact, connote "a state of little or no change" in the eternal Forms. In any event, this might be the right day to introduce the Pythons' Philosophers' Song as an aid to mostly-correct (Brit-English) pronunciation. Immanuel Kant was a real pissant etc. Just don't believe a word of it, Socrates himself really was not "permanently pissed"...

Before we surrender entirely to comedy, we'll canvas the serious side of Socrates' legacy. But before that, let us note the serious school strike that went global on Friday. Greta Thunberg, a 16-year old, started it last year. Socrates would smile. Plato, who wanted philosopher-kings to rule and who had little stomach for grassroots democracy, probably would not.

Both, though, would agree with John Dewey's point-cited by Richard Hofstadter-that thinking really does matter. "Let us admit the case of the conservative," John Dewey once wrote. "If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place."

Is our world so "apparently stable" lately? I'd say it's imperiled enough to require the services of a Socrates. Urgently. As our upcoming Lyceum speaker says, "To keep American democracy healthy, people all across the country will have to do more than engage with different ideas online. They’ll need to find shared interests and goals despite their persistent, and often deep, differences." How about our shared interest in preserving the planet for our form of life? (That Lyceum is October 4, if our speaker makes it back from Iceland.)

Talisse also says, in a spirit that Socrates and Plato might not find uncongenial, "When it comes to democracy, more isn’t necessarily better..."

Change is coming, says Greta, like it or not.

Last night's 5th installment of Country Music was all about change, by the way. America in the '60s, Dylan and Cash, Lynn and the pill, Tom T. Hall's Harper Valley PTA...

An old post:
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.

2.13.18
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Another:

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.

Urgency and the Epicure

LISTEN. It's on to Catherine Wilson's Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction in Happiness today.

We're catching up, since Tuesday's class was pre-empted by the panel discussion on Suffrage and the Constitution. The Epicureans famously retreated to their Garden commune, in pursuit of life's simpler and less mediated pleasures. Would they have been engaged at all in the sort of civic activism that brought women the vote in 1920, or that is attempting to bring young people out to vote in 2020, or that tomorrow will bring citizens (the younger the better) out to demand action on the climate crisis? Would they have acknowledged any "urgent need of acting now," if that perturbed their garden delights? Where can we find the right balance between personal gratification and public commitment?

Those are some of our questions today. Others include

• Is it in fact foolish to fear "complete and personal annihilation"? -“To fear death, then, is foolish, since death is the final and complete annihilation of personal identity, the ultimate release from anxiety and pain.” ― Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things... Gutenberg etext
• Do you think Epicurus was on the right track in thinking of atomic "swerve" as a "basis for free will"? 11 If they swerve randomly and unpredictably, how does that refute or challenge determinism? Or is his point that we can try to emulate their example and be random and unpredictable ourselves? Is random unpredictability really another name for freedom? (Remind me to tell my undergrad pub story...)
• Does Epicurus's analogy of atoms to "dust motes dancing in a sunbeam" remind you, as it does me, of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot ("a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" 12)? Do you see any parallels between Sagan's cosmic philosophy and Epicureanism? What about the "multiplicity of worlds" hypothesis vs. the view of Christian salvation as limited to "one small corner of the many world universe" etc. 16
• Do you think it will ever be possible to discover how and why the structure and activity of atoms in the brain and nervous system give rise to consciousness and the subjective feeling of selfhood?
• Do you agree that generation and dying are symmetrical processes? 51 In other words, do each of us owe the world a death? Do you find beauty and consolation in that perspective? Is death a peaceful sleep and a dispersal of spirit and soul atoms? 

Talking about these things is indeed an Epicurean delight, or can be. But gathering in the streets to demand social justice and climate sanity can too. A good Epicurean knows when to take a break in the conversation and go pound the pavements.

Democritus and the Sophists

LISTEN. An old post: Today in CoPhi it's Democritus and the Sophists, and reports on The God Dialogues and Kant (we weren't supposed to get ahead of Descartes yet, so he's out of order - and he'd really hate that.)

Democritus, the "laughing philosopher" (did we note that Heraclitus was the "weeping philosopher"?) doesn't really sound like such a barrel of laughs. He urged repentance, preferred a "well-ordered demeanor" and, Gottlieb tells us, was broadly contemptuous of human folly. Was he laughing with us or at us? But you could ask the same of Mark Twain, who damned us, and Kurt Vonnegut (impatient, as previously noted, with our species' penchant for unkindness). Is it misanthropic to deplore misanthropy? It's not unfunny.

Democritus may not been a side-splitter, and he may have been wrong about atoms being unsplittable, but his general outlook was astonishingly ahead of the game even if "he simply made it all up and luckily turned out to be right." He was a lucky guy indeed, living (legend has it) to an astonishing 109 and then "cheerfully" (according to Simon Critchley's Book of Dead Philosophers) pulling his own plug. Before that, if you can believe it, he extended his life by inhaling the aroma of fresh-baked bread. (If you can believe that, I'll give you a great deal on a bridge.)

Some early Christians opposed atomism on the grounds that its explanatory hypothesis displaced divine fiat and jettisoned a personal afterlife (with persons and souls dissolved and remixed). That's still the kicker behind lots of present-day science denialism, isn't it?

Leucippus first influenced Democritus with the atoms-and-void idea. Later it was taken up by Epicurus, then Lucretius in De Rerum Natura, "the way things are":

• “All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.” 
• O minds of mortals, blighted by your blindness! Amid what deep darkness and daunting dangers life’s little day is passed! To think that you should fail to see that nature importantly demands only that the body may be rid of pain, and that the mind, divorced from anxiety and fear, may enjoy a feeling of contentment!” 
• Don't think our eyes, our bright and shining eyes, were made for us to look ahead with... All such argument, all such interpretation is perverse, fallacious, puts the cart before the horse. No bodily thing was born for us to use. Nature had no such aim, but what was born creates the use.
• “What once sprung from the earth sinks back into the earth.” 
• “The atoms in it must be used over and over again; thus the death of one thing becomes necessary for the birth of another.”
• The main obstacles to the goal of tranquillity of mind are our unnecessary fears and desires, and the only way to eliminate these is to study natural science. The most serious disturbances of all are fear of death, including fear of punishment after death, and fear of the gods. Scientific inquiry removes fear of death by showing that the mind and spirit are material and mortal, so that they cannot live on after we die: as Epicurus neatly and logically puts it: “Death…is nothing to us: when we exist, death is not present; and when death is present, we do not exist.

Atomism grew up "when chemists and physicists developed sophisticated ways to measure material phenomena," to lift them out of the murky realm of subjective and deniable opinion, and lower them down from the transcendent and resplendent but entirely invisible realm of eternal and indestructible objects.

And then we learned to blow them up. "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad-Gita. Growing up is not necessarily the same as maturing, for a species, an individual, or a saber-rattling commander-in-chief. We'll have done that when all our leaders learn to stop speaking flippantly about their "nuclear options" (and big buttons) that are nothing but MAD.

We mentioned Richard Dawkins' rainbow the other day, today we're invited to consider his related views on meaning and design (see Lucretius above). "Is there a meaning to life? What are we for?" We can summon answers without reverting to superstition, thanks to what we've learned about atoms and the void ever since we stopped embracing fantastic solutions to our existential puzzles and started charting the world's actual (not alternative) facts. 

The great legacy of Periclean Athens is the value they and we (some of us) place on the ability to speak and debate persuasively, civilly, and sometimes disinterestedly. The old Greek sophistes, Sophists, the likes of Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, et al, shared that value to a much greater extent than is commonly conceded. They taught grammar, linguistics, rhetoric, literary criticism, music, law, religion, human and social origins, math, and natural science. Big History, some now call such a broad portfolio of academic interest. 

Their undeserved bad name seems to have come from the reigning animus people had to those early teachers for presuming to seek remuneration. Fortunately we no longer expect our teachers to live hand-to-mouth, not entirely anyway. (MTSU faculty is behind the salary curve, btw, an important fact for faculty retention.) The fraction of Sophists who deserved their bad name, and the bad name of contemporary sophists, is earned not by their paychecks but by their failure to invest in truth for its own sake. They "could not care less about truth," peddled "ruses," sought to portray a mere "semblance of wisdom without the reality." There are someacademics and philosophers who fit that description, but you're more likely to encounter them in law and politics.

In addition, Plato resented the bad Sophists for getting Socrates in trouble. Really he resented Athens and its too-clever satirists (like Aristophanes) for not discerning the difference between a bad Sophist, denizen of the "logic factory," and a good Socrates.

Protagoras is the most interesting Sophist. What does "Man is the measure of all things" mean, if it means to embrace and applaud subjectivity? Does it have to mean an extreme personal relativism? Or cultural relativism? Or maybe something more innocuous like the view my old mentor Lachs calls "relationalism" - all things must be measured by standards and yardsticks actual humans can wield.  

"Protagoras apparently drowned in a shipwreck after he had been tried and banished (or in some stories condemned to death) for his agnostic religious views. He also wrote a treatise on wrestling." (Critchley)

In Fantasyland, we're reminded today of Sir Arthur C. Clarke's declaration: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."  He didn't mean that it is magic, but that magic thinkers can't appreciate the difference between natural law and supernatural hocus pocus... and that too many of us are and will continue to be magic thinkers, until we finally grow up and accept childhood's end. “There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded.”

Homeopathy is magical thinking, in Andersen's book. And phrenology, and mesmerism, and Ben Carson's Seventh Day Adventism, and so-called Christian Science, and countless other varieties of pseudo-scientific snake-oil miracle-whipped charlatanry.

"Matter cannot suffer," said Mrs. Eddy. It quite evidently can, as it can do all the things we witness. That was William James's brilliant answer to those who would denigrate materialism as a philosophy incapable of accounting for the wonder of life. "To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent, the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred for ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities."

The California Gold Rush reoriented a lot of Americans' gaze back to the literal ground  of our real material world. Heaven can wait. But can we? We're like patient, diligent, long-term-planning ants some of the time, but then impatient, party-hardy grasshoppers the rest. Our "wilder, faster, and looser" side may not be in it for the long haul after all.

==
Some CoPhi questions: If everything is composed of atoms, does it follow that there is no life after death? Does atomism in fact "liberate [us] from superstition, fear of death, and the tyranny of priests"? If thought consists in the motion of mind-atoms, can we freely think our own thoughts? Or are we passive spectators of "our" minds? What difference does it make, if particles are inseparable from forces and fields and bundles of energy and thus cannot be proved to be "unsplittable" (as the ancient atomists said)? Is it "reasonable to suppose that every sort of world crop[s] up somewhere"?

	Brian Greene (@bgreene)
The observable universe extends for about 92 billion light-years. No human has ventured farther from Earth than 1.29 light-seconds. pic.twitter.com/l7fdzsQocl

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