Garden wisdom

LISTEN. John Dewey got a mention in the Times. In an opinion piece, by an academic, but still it's a rare and welcome echo of a time in this country when philosophers' views were valued and sought after and considered by the broad educated public. Dewey's (and Molly Worthen's) rejection of academic irrelevance is as timely as ever.

I'm also happy this morning that one of my favorite novelists has a new book out. Richard Powers has just published Bewilderment. Hope for a Grieving Kid and Planet May Lurk in the Human Brain, headlines the Times review.  That sounds right. Where else are we going to find it? The brain is wider than the sky.

Also, the Cards won again. Nine straight. Roger Angell was surely right, “It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team," but forming and honing the habit of caring is anything but foolish. It teaches me to care in class and in life about bigger things. It's an affiliation that pays its way. 

We conclude our very short intro to Epicureanism today. I wanted us to read it early in the semester because it's a view I find both enticing and challenging, and thus a good benchmark against which to measure subsequent Happiness philosophies.

I am enticed by the Epicurean appeal to friendship and small-scale community, the invitation to repudiate ungrounded fears of eternal perdition and a punitive afterlife, and the encouragement to reject the false promise of materialist consumerism. I am challenged by the suggestion that we can conscionably pursue our personal happiness in some remote garden, far removed from the push and pressure of politics. 

I hope our course generates enough smart deliberation to help me resolve the tension between enticement and challenge. Can I declare, with Mr. Jefferson, that I too am an Epicurean? 

If I cannot resolve the tension, I'll just have to continue to be a pragmatic pluralist with regard to Happiness. That is, I'll continue to deny that any single approach to our quarry is wholly and exclusively adequate. I'll continue to be enticed by Epicurean virtues and challenged by Epicurean disengagement. And I'll continue pursuing a good and happy life. One could do worse. As tensions go, it's not an unhappy one.

Next we'll consider their rivals the Stoics, in light of the stoic dimension of Buddhism. A central point of contrast is the notion that we ought to love our fate, and cultivate that attitude when it's not spontaneous. "It was necessary, the Stoics believed, to adopt a philosophical attitude towards the unfurling of events, understanding their inevitability... There is a beauty and nobility in the Stoic conception of amor fati..." Well, say the Epicureans, there's also beauty and nobility in resistance to fear and misery. They have "no such exalted notion of the ultimate wisdom of Providence and no... love of fate." 

I'm still with them, in that debate, but I look forward to our coming conversations. We'll see. We'll differ. We contain multitudes, it's very well that we'll contradict one another. That's one of the things friends are for.

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LISTEN (9.'19). "For the Epicureans," writes Catherine Wilson, "politics implied a striving for power and admiration which was incompatible with virtue, pleasure, and peace of mind." So, they retreated to their garden outside the city and cultivated "true friendship." Tempting. I've definitely had a touch of the apolitical blues lately, the seductive cure for which seems to be disengagement from the civic arena and investment in relationships of trust and mutual support that don't depend on polarized party partisanship.

But somebody's got to hold the pols to account. It's a false dilemma that pits private against public life. Did the Stoics have a better understanding of this?

"The earliest humans, Lucretius proposed, were wild shaggy creatures living solitary lives in caves and forests... they raised themselves by degrees to a condition of civilization." Are we there yet? We're only as civilized as our institutions and practices and (as has been much remarked in the past three years) norms allow us to be. That's why even Epicureans sometimes have to summon the grit to exit the garden, enter the arena, and prosecute a case against those who threaten our tenuous hold on civilization in the name of truth and philosophy.  

"The normalization of Drumpf and Trumpism—allowing those things to be defined merely as a political problem needing a political cure—degrades democracy. Calculating political advantage, too, narrowly misses the point of taking part in politics, which is to defend values."

Or as old Neil, gadfly to southern men and Republican presidents from way back, said: let's impeach the president. Then, we can all "avoid contact with the person causing [us] pain." To do nothing in the face of his incessant insults and anti-democratic degradations would be to surrender to fatalism, and as Wilson concludes her little book:

Epicureanism is not a fatalistic philosophy. It lays great weight on human choices and preferences... It invites us to take pleasure in what is near at hand: in warmth, food, and drink, in moderation; in the company of those we happen, for whatever reason, to like; in the recurrence of spring after winter; and in the surround of foliage and flowers, and the appearance of new life.

There will be, as Chance the gardener (not rapper) knew, new growth in the garden in the spring. It's really very simple. And ordinary, and beautiful.