LISTEN. "Insight," Josiah Royce's name for philosophy--"this curious scrutiny of ours into the truth...this game of reflection"--sponsors, he says, the philosopher's "return to life."
Return to life - I don't recall being at all struck by that phrase or even noticing it, on my first reading of The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. It may have registered subliminally, though, because it grabbed me sharply later when I came across William James's insistence that "the return to life can't come about by talking."
Curious indeed. I wonder if Royce and James talked about that. They must have, they talked incessantly. James was sure that Royce's talk led to the wrong "insight," the metaphysical idealism which--from James's point of view--subsumes individuals under an Absolute scheme of rational order ("intellectualism") that absorbs their autonomy and co-ops their freedom. Royce, for his part, was convinced that James's talk led to intellectual anarchy and atomistic isolation.
Both were sure that life itself, or rather our sense of continuity with all the currents of life, hung in the balance. Both avidly sought the terms of our return. Ours? Or theirs? Most non-philosophers, and perhaps most people generally, are unaware of feeling so entirely detached from life that they must urgently investigate the way home. We all have our bad days, but many fewer of us regularly experience an Oz-like "not in Kansas anymore" sense of ourselves as cut off from the only life we've known and loved. Or say so in public, anyway. Alice's adventures in Wonderland are exceptional and extreme. Most of us escape the rabbit hole. Right?
Well, James and Royce were exceptional. Both thought it their job to clear the path back from Wonderland, back to Kansas, back to life as they thought they knew it. "I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe's hash in one more book," James mocked himself and his vocation a few short years before he died. The hash remains unsettled, though it must be said that James's empiricist form of settling has enjoyed more general sympathy in the decades since his and Royce's departure than the latter's absolute metaphysical idealist approach. But as we know, popularity is not the last word. Words aren't even the last word. "I must deafen you to talk, or to the importance of talk..."
The Stoics and Epicureans, like the Skeptics before them, understood too that "this curious scrutiny of ours into the truth" has to issue in something more tangible than talk if it's to provide useful therapy.
An old post:
There are three obstacles to happiness, Epicurus said– fear of death, fear of pain, and fear of the gods– but all can be removed easily enough.
“Death is no problem because when we are alive we are not dead and when we are dead we don’t know it… Fear of pain is worse than pain itself. Accept the pain, embrace the sting… and you’ve vanquished your worst foe, the one in your head.” (J.M. Hecht)
Strike one, strike two… and since any gods there may happen to be, out there in the empty spaces between the stars, are quite evidently “totally unconcerned with human affairs,” fear strikes out. Be happy.
Seneca‘s end was not so happy, but it was more or less consistent with his life. He did not strain against the leash of perceived necessity. But does he illustrate the limits the of therapeutic acceptance, and cross the line into defeatist resignation? [text… J-L David painting]
Other Stoics are better role-models. Cicero‘s De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) is a neglected classic. Bottom line: “If you want truth, you have to avoid making up anything.”
Marcus Aurelius had a cold unblinking eye for harsh home-truths. He poses a question never more timely than right now, for a celebrity-besotted society like ours:
He who has a vehement desire for posthumous fame does not consider that every one of those who remember him will also die very soon… But suppose that those who will remember are even immortal, and that the remembrance will be immortal, what then is this to thee? And I say not what is it to the dead, but what is it to the living?
Not enough to live for, is what. But the Philosopher-Emperor finds life worth living all the same, for those who cultivate a properly-stoic sensibility. Contented are those who learn to comprehend the universe,
by contemplating the eternity of time, and observing the rapid change of every several thing, how short is the time from birth to dissolution, and the illimitable time before birth as well as the equally boundless time after dissolution.
Our time is brief, but so then also is our pain. From this perspective, the trite modern phrase about not sweating the small stuff (because it’s all small) can become meaningful and profound.
The skeptic Sextus Empiricus offers an interesting observation on anthropomorphic God-projection, as Jennifer Hecht summarizes: divine virtues are thought to be “fully realized versions of human virtues.” But “that did not make sense unless God had our weaknesses.”
Weaknesses like impotence, fallibility, and ignorance: whose acknowledgement by us is also our greatest strength. So, says Sextus, your God is too small.
But of course, as a skeptic, he must always add: for all we know.
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