Dehumanization

LISTEN. Two remarkable human beings visited our campus and shared their stories of survival yesterday.

Frances Cutler Hahn was a hidden child in France. Born in 1938, she was very young when her parents hid her in a Catholic children’s home to save her life. During the Holocaust she practiced two religions, had five names and took refuge in seven homes with eight different families. Her mother was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau and her father, a member of the French resistance, died of wounds he suffered in combat. 

Jack Cohen, born in 1932 in Greece, lived as quietly as possible in the Italian occupied section of Greece from 1941 until the Germans began arresting and deporting Greek Jews to the ghettos and death camps in 1943. The family fled to a monastery in the mountains for two years until it became too dangerous to remain there. Once again the family fled, this time to a small village, until the end of the war. Although most of the family survived, Jack’s grandmother was captured and, presumably, murdered. They never saw her again.

Our last CoPhi midterm report presentation, in a coincidence of serendipitous synchronicity,  immediately preceded this event. The topic: "dehumanization." That's exactly the deplorable phenomenon behind the holocaust, and behind so much of the loathsome ugliness in our public political discourse today.

As Mr. Cohen said, that's humanity at its worst; but we should turn our attention and our intentions to humanity at its best. Without the kindness, altruism, and willingness to "stick their necks out" of some "righteous Gentiles," said Mrs. Hahn, countless more innocent lives (including hers and Mr. Cohen's) would have been sacrificed to irrational hatred. Most of us are not haters, but few of us want to stick our necks out. That's how the haters win.

An important reminder, on Halloween, that there's nothing scarier in the known universe than human indifference to the suffering and injustice perpetrated by our fellow humans: “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Primo Levi

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented... For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” Elie Wiesel

Leibniz's search for meaning

LISTEN. Leibniz searched harder for fame and philosophical reputation, I suspect. But he did invent the calculus. Or maybe he and Newton both did, in a nice pre-established harmony of genius invention. There's no denying Leibniz's intelligence, but there is some question as to his grasp of the depths of human suffering.

A monad, says the Philosophical Dictionary, is "a complete individual substance in the philosophies of Conway and Leibniz, who supposed that each contains all of its properties—past, present, and future."

"Leibniz maintained," writes Anthony Gottlieb, "that the “true atoms of nature” follow patterns that are implanted in advance by God: “everything happens to each substance as a consequence of the first state God gave to it.” The same is true of people, according to Leibniz--everything that they will ever think or do is fixed before they are even born--but this does not mean that they cannot exercise free will..." It doesn't? Then free will doesn't mean what most of us think it means, namely the capacity to think or do something that wasn't already fixed.
Anne Conway came up with the term "monad" and lent it to Georg W.F. Leibniz, who bent it to mean something very different from her more Spinozistic view that "all beings are modes of god, the one and only spiritual substance." His monadology, coupled with theodicy ("an attempt to explain or defend the perfect benevolence of god despite the apparent presence of evil in the world"), resulted in one of the more bizarre and bloodless metaphysical systems ever devised by the mind of man... or monad. Matthew Stewart tells the tale of Leibniz's attempt to one-up the humble lens-grinding pantheist Spinoza in The Courtier and the Heretic. "The difference between Leibniz and Spinoza on happiness, as on all subjects, comes down to their different attitudes toward God..."

And towards material reality, and humane credulity.

Leibniz rejected the Cartesian account of matter, according to which matter, the essence of which is extension, could be considered a substance. Leibniz held instead that only beings endowed with true unity and capable of action can count as substances. The ultimate expression of Leibniz's view comes in his celebrated theory of monads, in which the only beings that will count as genuine substances and hence be considered real are mind-like simple substances endowed with perception and appetite... this position, denying the reality of bodies and asserting that monads are the grounds of all corporeal phenomena, as well as its metaphysical corollaries has shocked many. Bertrand Russell, for example, famously remarked in the Preface to his book on Leibniz that he felt that “the Monadology was a kind of fantastic fairy tale, coherent perhaps, but wholly arbitrary.” And, in perhaps the wittiest and most biting rhetorical question asked of Leibniz, Voltaire gibes, “Can you really believe that a drop of urine is an infinity of monads, and that each of these has ideas, however obscure, of the universe as a whole?” SEP

No, not really. My hunch is that Leibniz was motivated more by a hunger for attention, notoriety, and philosophical distinction, a desire to distinguish himself from the pack of rationalists like Spinoza and Descartes. [Leibniz vs. Spinoza] My judgment aligns with William James's, that Leibniz's philosophy is superficial, feeble, cold, and unreal. But it's entertaining, and it's a useful prod to hold our philosophers to a standard more humane and relevant to the actual experience of real human beings. Voltaire's Candide, “stunned, stupefied, despairing, bleeding, trembling,"  asked the right question: If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?” I don't want to know. If this is scientific optimism, I'll pass.

I'll pass on pessimism too. James's pragmatic meliorism is the sane alternative, in a world of woe (and joy, and all points in between) like ours.

...there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism. Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable. Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism... Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become. It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism... Pragmatism: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking... Refillism

And it's clear that a world in which a Holocaust can happen must work harder for its salvation than the refined monistic theodicy of a Leibniz could ever manage to do. Two Holocaust survivors are visiting our campus this afternoon. The number of living witnesses to this historical human abomination and rebuke to over-refined rationalist-intellectualist philosophies is dwindling fast, we must hear their stories and learn their lessons while we still can. Soon there will be no more. Holocaust memory must conquer irrational, immoral denial.

Fortunately we'll still have the written testimony of literary and psychological heroes like Viktor Frankl, whose Man's Search for Meaning is an amazing, inspiring document that attests to the power of endurance. He quotes Nietzsche: “Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”

We had an excellent report on Existentialism Monday in CoPhi, out on the JUB stoa. Its gist was also Frankl's message: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

Leibniz really had no clue.

Vatican wisdom

LISTEN. We're scheduled to finish The Art of  Happiness today, concluding with a selection of the Vatican Collection of Aphorisms (named for its discovery in the Vatican Library in 1888). They have, a note proclaims, "less importance" than other works. There must be sound scholarly reasons for that judgment, but I find them every bit as interestingly provocative. It's not really Vatican wisdom, of course, it just resided there in undeserved neglect. I find it important enough to ponder.

"All pain is readily discounted..." Spock said "there is no pain" in an early episode of the original Star Trek. He was very clearly experiencing crippling, incapacitating pain, only the superhuman will of a Vulcan could "discount" it. But the suggestion that our experience of pain is in fact subject to volitional control has been useful to me ever since. I'm quite sure my own pain threshold is higher than average, because of my lifelong habit of discounting (by which I really mean re-framing): that's not a pain, it's a distraction...

"We are born once. We cannot be born a second time... Life is ruined by procrastination..." We get just a few-score trips around the sun, if we're lucky; but  we live most of our lives, most of us, as though we had nothing but time to burn. It must be a defense mechanism against despair. If we allowed ourselves to hear each second of life ticking into lost eternity we'd go mad. But timely regular reminders of our mortality are crucial to a life well-lived. Carpe, carpe..., as Mr. Keating said. (And Robert Herrick.) Gather the harvest today, tomorrow may never come.

 "...when it comes to death, all of us human beings live in a city without walls." Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey and the techno-optimistic transhumanists don't accept this, but if we ever did build those walls the city would soon be miserably overcrowded with inhabitants whose indefinitely-extended time would suddenly be devalued. Remember death, Montaigne advised after falling from his steed, but don't worry about it.

"...we are protected by pleasure but destroyed by pain." But pain is "readily discounted" by those who choose not to surrender to it but rather resist and re-frame. The pursuit of pleasure though, while it lasts, postpones our demise.

"The person who says that everything happens necessarily cannot criticize the person who says [the opposite]..." Because that too was necessitated. Better to avoid necessity altogether, admit the contingencies of life and circumstance, and just try to make good choices (and learn from our mistakes).

"We must laugh and philosophize and manage our households..." Or as David Hume said, be a philosopher but be still a (hu)man. 

"We must try to make the latter part of the journey better than the first... when we reach the end, we must keep an even keel and remain cheerful." The nectar, as John McDermott said, is in the journey. Enjoy it all, don't regret its end but recall it with gratitude. Appreciate and celebrate the whole trip.

"We must get out of the prison house of routine duties and politics." And politics. Everyone living and paying attention in 2019 must understand this. Routine duties are not intrinsically imprisoning, except when we allow them to prevent us from doing more meaningful things. That, by the way, is why I get up at 5 in the morning. (Like Trollope, among other famously early-rising writers... b'kings)

"...the false belief about the belly's having unlimited capacity." I only fall prey to that false belief when faced with a buffet spread like they had after the funeral the other day. And then its falsity soon is all too evident. Remember, next time: one or two bites of each of half a dozen desserts really ought to suffice, and might not exceed capacity. (A most practical bit of Epicurean wisdom, this!)

"Every man departs this life as though he had just been born." Time to leave already? But I just got here! (But then there are those who really expect to enter pearly gates and think they can't wait... or who've not managed to discount pain and can think of nothing but its cessation.)

"Nothing is sufficient for the person who finds sufficiency too little." Like the best cliches, this familiar one is too true.

"The most important consequence of self-sufficiency is freedom." Freedom from dependency is probably over-rated, since we can't help depending on one another. But we're all wired, it seems, to crave the feeling of strength and confidence that comes of self-reliance. Better to aim at self-sufficiency while acknowledging the help of others along the way that makes it possible at all.

And before we close this book, let's remind ourselves one more time of the core principle of Epicurean happiness, Leading Doctrine #2: "Death means nothing to us, because that which has been broken down into atoms has no sensation and that which has no sensation is no concern of ours." But let's also recall the flip-side, implied throughout the Epicurean catalog: life is for the living.

Funereal politics

LISTEN. We attended a funeral Saturday for my wife's uncle. deep in rural-red Tennessee, in a Pentecostal church. The eulogist concluded, to applause: “Trump 2020!” It was a clear instance of what Robert Talisse calls too much “democracy,” the cure for which he says is more deliberate engagement with people in non-political and non-politicized social activities. Funerals and other ceremonial rituals commemorating birth and death used to be that way. No more, apparently. "Even our houses of worship [have] become political echo chambers," says Michele Margolis.

Another eulogist noted that the deceased doubted even his own mother's eligibility for heaven, since she was a Democrat. Ha ha. That's what Mel Gibson said about his saintly wife, and he wasn't kidding either. "And the people said amen."

At the cemetery, we dodged a scary falling limb as skies darkened and a gale kicked up. Thank you for saving us, Jesus. But if we'd been a few inches less fortunately positioned, no doubt, the other congregants would have had a ready explanation at hand: too bad, but they were Democrats.

Politics didn't come up at the post-funeral reception, at our table, and the food was good. I found common ground with other mourners at the dessert bar, but fudge brownies and chess pie may not be enough to rebuild a shattered culture on.

You could say this was all just a demonstration of what we've always known about small-town life at its worst, forgetting for the moment the Hollywood charm of monochromatic lazy-day Mayberry: it reinforces our worst tribalizing instincts for conformity and ostracism of non-conformists, it rewards small-minded intolerance and the ignorant prejudices of the proudly uneducated populace. "The idiocy of rural life," Marx called it.

Yes, but thanks to our electoral system the small-town mentality now has an increasingly outsized influence on the nation's course and destiny.

Another instance of politics poisoning what ought to be a refuge from partisanship: Trump was booed at the World Series last night, where a chorus of "lock him up" could be heard. Admittedly I'd have joined in, if I'd been there. But I'd still have felt sullied and cheap and un-American. Slate spins it another way, though: "America came together to boo Donald Trump at the World Series."

Uncle Jimmy was always pleasant with me, our relationship - apparently unique, to judge from the remarks of several eulogists - was almost entirely apolitical. We met most typically at the annual Decoration Day gathering, at the family cemetery where he's now taken up his final abode.

This is the remedy, for the worst polarizing effects of partisan tribalism: make a point of keeping politics out of places and occasions where it doesn't belong. But the trouble with that approach is that it leaves such apolitical relationships in a superficial place of mutual pleasantries. We don't get to know one another, or really appreciate and explore our differences. An entire society built on the surface of social encounter, with no depth or meaning or insight, would be shallow and boring.

On the other hand, shallow and boring may be just the relief we need from the current climate of rancor, vituperation, and dishonesty. Love may fail, Vonnegut said, but politeness and kindness will prevail. Or at least they may be a start. "There's nothing weak about kindness, compassion, and looking out for others," whatever their political party, a very wise and decent man at another funeral last week said he wanted his daughters to know.

Anyway, and for the record (please note, my daughters): at my memorial service decades from now (I hope), let there be no partisan politics spoken from the dais. Play John Fogerty's "Put Me in Coach," Mark Knopfler's "Walk of Life," and Eric Idle's "Always Look on the Bright Side." (And "The Galaxy Song" for an encore.)

Read a passage or two from William James ("the really vital question for us all is,What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?") and John Dewey (on "the continuous human community in which we are a link" etc.), and tell a funny story or two at my expense. I won't mind. Lay out an ample dessert bar. Do not display my vacant corpse. Scatter my ashes at the public park, the ballpark, the dog park.

And remind everyone that an end comes for us all, eventually we must all find a final perch; but (as Nietzsche concluded "The Dawn"), "other birds will fly farther!"

Nietzschean hell

LISTEN. Looking forward to Happiness today, featuring Epicurus's repudiation of the gratuitously, injuriously frightening concept of eternal damnation. It's a hell of our own making.

The hound of hell, the Furies, the eclipse of day, Tartarus vomiting dreadful tides of heat from the pit--these nowhere exist... Rather it is the fear of punishment for our evil deeds in this life... the guilty mind, fearful for its deeds, applies the prick and flagellates itself... In short, the life of simpletons is made into a hell here and now.

The inhumanity of promoting the self-inflicted torments of the idea of hell gave Bertrand Russell one of the reasons why he was not a Christian (LISTEN). "I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to his preaching..."

Where the hell did this idea come from?

Our ancestors developed their ideas of Hell by drawing on the pains and the deprivations that they knew on earth. Those imaginings shaped our understanding of life before death, too. They still do. The afterlife is an old room in the house of the human imagination, and the ancients loved to offer the tour...
Belief in an old-fashioned, everlasting Hell hasn’t gone away. Just ask the pastor at most local churches, or the subway preacher with his brimstone-heavy pamphlets. But Hell has long been assailed as one of Christianity’s cruder means of maintaining control. And some spiritual leaders, emersonintent on presenting a less vengeful God, have attempted to soften or, in some cases, to abolish Hell—mostly to the anger and the anxiety of their co-religionists.
...we have afforded lavish attention to the specifics of punishment and left Heaven woefully undersketched...

Hell is so much easier to picture. The recent U.N. report on the climate forecasts, with devastating frankness, worldwide catastrophe, absent a sudden upsurge of yet undetectable stewardship and coöperation. Meanwhile, Drumpf’s E.P.A. has dismantled an expert panel on air pollution. This is, of course, a disaster...

You sow the coal and reap the whirlwind. Heat the air, and let the icebergs roll on righteously, like a mighty stream. First comes the flood, then comes the fire. It matters, very much, what you do. Vinson Cunningham, "How the Idea of Hell Has Shaped the Way We Think"

We think, many of us, that there will be hell to pay whatever we do. "All right then," says Huck Finn, I'll go to hell." Often than not, as Sartre said in No Exit, we're one another's torturers. Hell is other people.

Some say hell just means separation from god. That would put us all in The Bad Place, if the atheists are right. We'll just have to dress down and adapt, and enjoy ourselves as best we can.  Anyway, "if heaven ain't a lot like Dixie..." My version of that: if heaven doesn't have a World Series... (Go Nats!)

Some people, some students, think report day is hell. What would that make me?

Nietzsche's Zarathustra addresses the topic. "Now he's dragging me to Hell: are you trying to prevent him?' 'On my honour, friend,' answered Zarathustra, 'all you have spoken of does not exist: there is no Devil and no Hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body: therefore fear nothing any more!" And, "the tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell." He may have got that from his hero Emerson, who spoke of living from the devil if that be the source of one's personal strength. But neither of them was speaking literally, they were both literary philosophers and not "analytic assholes" (see previous post, "At the Royce Conference"). Emerson was also probably the source of Nietzsche's "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger": RWE said in Compensation that "every evil to which we don't succumb to is a benefactor."

We'll have a report on Nietzsche today, whose "formula for our happiness" was
"a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.” Note, that's their happiness, not ours: they're the "Hyperboreans" who reject the resigned happiness of "weaklings" and embrace "the will to power." They're not democrats, or utilitarians, or probably even decent neighbors. They think we're complacent comfort-craving sluggards who'll be left in the dust of the philosophy of the future. "Man is a rope over an abyss." They think we're going down.

They also (to their credit) reject hell, as conceived by Christians who think humans must be cowed by threats of punishment in a punitive afterlife. But do they create a fresh hell, in imagining a world of convention-snubbing self-exalted uber-persons? Or a world of Dwaynes?

There are lots of Dwaynes and former Dwaynes out there, the latter having grown up and fallen out with the hero of their youthful disenchantment. Gary Kamiya was one:

I stumbled upon Friedrich Nietzsche when I was 17, following the usual trail of existential candies -- Camus, Sartre, Beckett -- that unsuspecting teenagers find in the woods. The effect was more like a drug than a philosophy. I was whirled upward -- or was it downward? -- into a one-man universe, a secret cult demanding that you put a gun to the head of your dearest habits and beliefs. That intoxicating whiff of half-conscious madness; that casually hair-raising evisceration of everything moral, responsible and parentally approved -- these waves overwhelmed my adolescent dinghy. And even more than by his ideas -- many of which I didn't understand at all, but some of which I perhaps grasped better then than I do now -- I was seduced by his prose. At the end of his sentences you could hear an electric crack, like the whip of a steel blade being tested in the air. He might have been the Devil, but he had better lines than God.

I was sold. Like those German soldiers in World War I who were found dead with copies of ''Thus Spake Zarathustra'' in their pockets, I hauled my tattered purple-covered copy of the Viking Portable Nietzsche with me everywhere... He was the closest thing I had to a church.

Eventually, I stopped going to church...The philosopher John Searle once told me that reading Nietzsche was like drinking cognac -- a sip was good, but you didn't want to drink the whole bottle. I'd been pounding Nietzsche by the case...

it was the monstrous doctrines at the heart of his thought -- the Overman, the Eternal Recurrence -- that had drawn me; they hypnotized me because I couldn't figure out whether they were coming from man or some frightening gospel. Now that I understood how much of Nietzsche's work was an attempt to turn his personal torment into something lasting, I realized that perhaps those enigmatic pronouncements were best seen not as antitruths handed down from on high, but as words he whispered to himself, beacons he lighted in the darkness to cheer himself up...

Yes, part of Nietzsche would always stand far above the tree line, and I would treasure that iciness. But I had to walk on the paths where I could go.
Still confused, I stood in the doorway. And then, as a gift, the following words came into my head, words spoken by Zarathustra to his disciples, disciples that Nietzsche himself never had. ''You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? . . . Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.''

I took a last look at the room. Then I walked out the door. 

A Nietzsche follower is an oxymoron.

A Nietzsche emulator is sadly anipathetic. "Poor Nietzsche's antipathy," William James called his stance of unremitting hostility to "herd" values, while acknowledging the importance of his questions but not the probity of his answers. "Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation? and must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance?"

My main objection is to his anti-democratic contempt for most people, whom he considered incapable of "finding themselves..." He rejected the humane liberalism of Mill and the utilitarians who promoted the greatest happiness for the greatest number. I have no issue with any philosopher who renounces his own happiness (understood in conventional terms) in deference to personal challenge and "self-overcoming," but the eventual happiness (and reduction of present suffering) of the greatest number still seems a worthy social goal. Could there ever really be a SOCIETY of "supermen" (as opposed to a society that might tolerate the occasional Nietzsche)?

John Kaag was a Dwayne. He's not quite an ex-.

Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are is a tale of two philosophical journeys--one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen, the other seventeen years later, in radically different circumstances: he is now a husband and father, and his wife and small child are in tow. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both of Kaag's journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy, yet they deliver him to radically different interpretations...

Different stages of life naturally invite different interpretations. Does Nietzsche have something important to say to all ages? Our reporters today span those stages of life. Can't wait to hear their answers.

Kaag, btw, is very good in this book on walking, and on happiness.

Nietzsche's eternal return...  When Nietzsche Wept (book)...film)

Spinoza & art

LISTEN. "Google said on Wednesday that it had achieved a long-sought breakthrough called 'quantum supremacy,' which could allow new kinds of computers to do calculations at speeds that are inconceivable with today’s technology... a mathematical calculation that the largest supercomputers could not complete in under 10,000 years was done in 3 minutes 20 seconds." Whoa! Are we finally going to get an answer to the ultimate question? Are we going to like it?

Reports in CoPhi have been good, so we're running a bit behind. Maybe we'll get to Spinoza today, maybe not. He'll wait for us. 

We had a good report on him last month in Happiness. Kathryn related his surprising view that "nothing in the universe is lacking in something it ought to possess...[and] nothing is more or less perfect. The ideas of perfect and imperfect come from our human minds, not out of Nature." More surprising still, his equation of nature with God implies that "since all things are derived from, and get their power from, God, everything is what it supposed to be, perfect in itself." That's hard to swallow. Impossible for me, in fact. But remember, "perfect" is not a natural conception. Nature/God is indifferent to such judgments. We cannot be. Well, I cannot be.

Spinoza's philosophy is intriguing but confusing. It's had a resurgence of late, as Rebecca Goldstein explains. David Ives's play The New Jerusalem offers a helpful introduction (as does this BBC "In Our Time" discussion). "His Spinoza is perky and adorable, a brash but modest young fellow whose head is amusingly stuffed not with baseball statistics but with incisive conclusions about God, nature and the universe. You may have no idea what he’s going on about — Spinoza’s work is famously dense — but you can’t help rooting for the guy."

Less dense and confusing are some of his pithier aphoristic asides. "To understand is to be free... The more you struggle to live, the less you live... No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides... I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace...” g'r

An old post. Baruch (nee Benedict) Spinoza (and Susan James on his concept of the passions).

Spinoza ("Spinozer," my old teacher from Brooklyn called him) believed in Einstein’s God (or would have), and vice versa. Gambling with your soul?  Einstein famously said God does not play dice with the universe. God doesn’t play at anything, or listen to anyone, or save or punish or forgive or do anything intentional and deliberate. No more than nature does, anyway. God just is. Paul Davies:

Sometimes (Einstein) was really using God as just a sort of convenient metaphor. But he did have, I think, a genuine cosmic religious feeling, a sense of admiration at the intellectual ingenuity of the universe. Not just its majesty, but its extraordinary subtlety and beauty and mathematical elegance. 

You could say the very same of Spinoza.

In HAP 101 last year we tried to make sense of the Buddhist-inspired statement that we're not part of nature but all of it. Spinoza offers another take on that disorienting notion.

In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.

I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them. 

 Nothing in nature is by chance... Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.

The passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from the necessity and efficacy of nature... I shall, therefore, treat the nature and strength of the emotion in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids. 

They were pantheists, Spinoza and Einstein, a lot less tormented by the vast and starry universe than Pascal (“the eternal silence of these infinite spaces" etc.) with his personal and possibly punitive God. As we note  Jennifer Hecht noting, there’s a howling statistical error at the heart of Pascal’s specious reasoning: “We may be struck by lightning or not, but that doesn’t make it a fifty-fifty proposition.” Pascal's fright contrasts sharply with Spinoza's cosmic bliss. "What Pascal decried as the misery of man without the Biblical God, was for Spinoza the liberation of the human spirit from the bonds of fear and superstition."

[Descartes to Deism... Tlumak on free will...Descartes before the horse (& Spinoza/Einstein slides)... Spinoza @dawn...Pantheism SEP... FAQs... He's back (Goldstein)... The Curse]

Spinoza, says Susan James, was interested in our capacity to maintain ourselves as ourselves, which he called our conatus. How do we do that? By breathing, sleeping, fighting, friending,... but ultimately he thought our best bet was to resign ourselves to an acceptance of rational necessity. 

"Spinoza thinks that, in so far as you're passionate," subject to external influence, "you're in bondage and unfree." How to free yourself? Become mentally active, get "a better understanding of yourself and the world," and experience his version of cosmic bliss or supreme happiness. And what does this maximal understanding come to, in a word? Pantheism. 

In Spinoza's vision, there is no ultimate distinction between different individuals. We are all part of the same single substance, which is also God. This means that our sense of isolation from and opposition to one another is an illusion, and it also means that our sense of distance from God is mistaken... Given that the universe is God, we can therefore be confident that whatever happens to us happens for a reason. Passion for Wisdom

And still they called him heretic and atheist, and excommunicated him despite his "intellectual love of God," which he said was "the highest felicity." God only knew why.

He's still a good guy to follow on Twitter, btw.

1. Spinoza Quotes ‏@BenedictSpinoza6 Oct

   "[True #happiness & blessedness does not consist in enjoying wellbeing not shared by others or in being more fortunate than others]." (TTP)

   Expand
2. Spinoza Quotes ‏@BenedictSpinoza5 Oct

   "It is the #nature of reason to conceive things under a form of eternity." (E5p29pr) @philosophyideas

But, there are difficulties involved in trying to internalize a "Spinozism of freedom"...

Spinoza is led to a complete and undiluted pantheism. Everything, according to Spinoza, is ruled by an absolute logical necessity. There is no such thing as free will in the mental sphere or chance in the physical world. Everything that happens is a manifestation of God's inscrutable nature, and it is logically impossible that events should be other than they are. This leads to difficulties... Bertrand Russell 

= = = = = = = = = = 

Also today: art. We'll try to discern the artfulness of Duchamp's Fountain, Dewey's ballplayer, maybe even Mapplethorpe's transgressive iconoclastic work. We'll introduce Wittgenstein's family resemblance, the Institutional Theory, and more.

And then we'll be done with Philosophy: The Basics.

Arthur Danto, premier aesthetician of his generation (and former MTSU Lyceum speaker), had interesting thoughts on what makes Andy Warhol's Brillo cartons and Marcel Duchamp's urinal (click, then scroll to the bottom to see his "Fountain") works of art. In a word: interpretation. Or in another word: philosophy. "Things which look the same are really different" is Danto's "whole philosophy of art in a nutshell." Thus spake  the "weightiest critic in the Manhattan art world"  of his generation. [The end of art]

I don’t claim to know what art is, or if Marcel Duchamp’s “fountain” should count. But like most of us, I know what I like: I like John Dewey’s approach in Art as Experience.

Dewey’s antipathy for spectator theories of knowledge did not block his acute perception of “the sources of art in human experience [that] will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd.”

The crowd at the fountain had best be careful not to be infected by something less delightful.