Richard Ford's Thanksgiving happiness

LISTEN. Around Thanksgiving every year I pick up one of my favorite novels, Richard Ford's Lay of the Land (#3 in his wonderful Frank Bascombe trilogy, before it became a tetralogy). It takes place around Thanksgiving, c.2000. "Thanksgiving ought to be the versatile, easy-to-like holiday, suitable to the secular and religious... [it] won't be ignored. Americans are hard-wired for something to be thankful for. Our national spirit thrives on invented gratitude."

Here's one of Frank's ruminations on happiness, recalling a "shining moment of glory that was instantly gone" when he caught a foul ball and impressed his kid. I can almost totally relate... but can't agree that "happy is a lot of hooey." (Though of course the way a lot of us talk about it is.)

“The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when "Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can't even be appraised as simply "happy", but only in terms of "Yes, I'll take it all, thanks" or "No, I believe I won't." Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life's about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me.”

Ford on Fresh Air...

"I too am an Epicurean"

LISTEN. It's our penultimate lesson in how to be an Epicurean, today in Happiness, with the chapters on "Science and Scepticism" and  "Social Justice." (And, sneak peaks of reports on Stoicism and Watts redux, and a surprise.)

"Our life has no need now of unreason and false opinion," but now more than ever that's what we have in spades. See yesterday's dawn mention of Kurt Andersen's "plunge" into the Fox abyss, and Moscow Marsha, and really just about everything in the headlines over the last several years. Will we ever get out of Fantasyland? Maybe, when Fred Rogers's children take the lead. 

Or we could just accept the atomic premise that most of what happens depends on the swerving "little particles" over whose movements we exercise minimal control. But we can save that discussion for the last chapter - "Should I be a Stoic instead?"

Meanwhile, convenient as it would be for those of us in the most egregiously emitting nations to do so, we can't afford the luxury of accepting things like climate change as entirely beyond the scope of our involvement. We have a moral responsibility to seek solutions. Being an epicurean does not mean retiring to our respective gardens and awaiting the apocalypse. What would Thomas Jefferson do?

What he said was:

I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece & Rome have left us. Epictetus indeed has given us what was good of the Stoics; all beyond, of their dogmas, being hypocrisy and grimace. their great crime was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines: in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice. the merit of his philosophy is in the beauties of his style. diffuse rapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. his prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been defied by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention...

I do love the Monticello Sage's Plato-bashing here, notwithstanding the latter's truly admirable and visionary gender utopianism. But one of chapter 12's epigraphs does make things uncomfortable for a Jeffersonian: "A free life cannot acquire great wealth, because the task is not easy without slavery..." He kept his slaves but squandered much of his wealth on books and wine. We hold these truths to be self-evident... Noble words, ignoble deeds.

Was Marx an Epicurean at heart? His  youthful ideal "society of the future would be recreational and allow for individual whims and preferences," like Bertrand Russell's. He too was an epicurean, of sorts. But his critics will remind us, he also said "better red than dead."

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every
person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational potboilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and the capacity.
[…]
Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least 1 per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle... "In Praise of Idleness" [b'p]... Russell on the value of philosophy for life

Some questions: Is Epicurean scepticism peculiarly well-suited to this moment in history?

Will we ever, or should we even desire to, explain everything in terms of micro-phenomena?
Should an Epicurean concerned about climate change become an activist? Should calculations of personal happiness and the enjoyment of one's own life be decisive for him/her in addressing that question? Is it self-destructive to affirm "the view that the fate of all plants, animals and humans resides with a loving and intelligent deity?

Russell, Ayer, Sartre, de Beauvoir...

LISTEN. Today in CoPhi, with the annual holiday of gratitude looming, we begin with Bertrand Russell and intend then to move on in the Little History to Ayer, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus, and if we're exceptionally ambitious to Wittgenstein and Arendt.And, more American Philosophy: A Love Story (we're nearly to the section with James's heart-wrenching hike up Mt. Marcy in the summer of '96) and more Fantasyland, speaking of which...

First a quick un-reality check, sampling the bizarre up-is-down bullshit currently being peddled on Fox. An exchange yesterday: CHRIS WALLACE: Senator Kennedy [Rep., LA.], who do you believe was responsible for hacking the DNC & Clinton campaign? Russia or Ukraine? KENNEDY: I don't know. Nor do you. W: The entire intel community says it was Russia. K: Right. But it could be Ukraine. Fiona Hill is entitled to her opinion. 

The Ethicist rightly points out the insidious implications for democracy of such gaslighting by Trump's defenders: Radical skepticism issues in the claim that others don’t know something that is, in fact, part of the common knowledge of those who are following the evidence, undermines the possibility of common action. Building a separate “reality” leaves us baying at each other in the dark.

And Kurt Andersen takes "a full appalling plunge," situating the whole sorry scene in, of course, Fantasyland.

There. I don't feel better about the state of the nation vis-a-vis truth, facts, and reality; but at least I'm not ignoring it.

Here's what I read yesterday that I do feel good about: the Times magazine's profile of Mr. Rogers,  who dedicated his life to “the child in all of us — that part of us which longs to help in the creation of a new and better world.” He told a commencement audience: "the most essential element in the development of any creation, any art or science, must be love. A love that begins with the simple expressions of care for a little child."

It's good to feel good about ourselves. “When people help us to feel good about who we are, they are really helping us to love the meaning of what we create.”

Also good: Margaret Renkl's tribute to her family matriarchs, like her grandmother Mildred. "When the schools in Lower Alabama finally desegregated and everyone she knew, including my grandfather, urged her to retire, she ignored them all. “A child is a child,” she said and kept on teaching." That's how you build a better world, one decent choice at a time. Hell is not other people, as Sartre said, but a child's hell in particular might be the product of other people's unlovely indifference and dishonesty.

Bertrand Russell had thoughts about hell.

"There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment."

Of course, one bird's hell is another man's holiday.

Today's featured philosophers are all over Brainpickings and Arts & Letters Daily:

“We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more,” Albert Camus wrote as he contemplated how to live honorably through shameful times at the peak of World War II, a quarter century before he became the second-youngest Nobel laureate.

It took another seer of uncommon insight and unrelenting humanism to consider this necessary mending work as the maelstrom of injustice was only just beginning to seethe in the entrails of the world. That is what Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970), who would himself receive the Nobel Prize shortly after the war for his “varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought,” examines in the preface to the 1935 edition of his book-length essay In Praise of Idleness (public library) — his insightful inquiry into the relationship between leisure and social justice... (continues)

==

In Praise of Idleness-"To correctly calibrate modern life around a sense of enough — that is, around meeting the need for comfort rather than satisfying the endless want for consumerist acquisitiveness — would be to lay the groundwork for social justice. In such a society, Russell argues, no one would have to work more than four hours out of twenty-four — a proposition even more countercultural today than it was in his era. He paints the landscape of possibility:

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational potboilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and the capacity.
[…]
Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion...

==
How to Grow Old-
Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the dissolution of the personal ego into something larger. Drawing on the longstanding allure of rivers as existential metaphors, he writes:

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

In a sentiment which philosopher and comedian Emily Levine would echo in her stirring reflection on facing her own death with equanimity, Russell builds on the legacy of Darwin and Freud, who jointly established death as an organizing principle of modern life, and concludes:

The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

(more Russell)
==
Echoing Kierkegaard’s unforgettable admonition — “Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy,” the Danish philosopher wrote in contemplating our greatest source of unhappiness — Camus considers how the trance of productivity robs us of the very presence necessary for happiness:

Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time. They say I’m active. But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself. Today is a resting time, and my heart goes off in search of itself. If an anguish still clutches me, it’s when I feel this impalpable moment slip through my fingers like quicksilver… At the moment, my whole kingdom is of this world. This sun and these shadows, this warmth and this cold rising from the depths of the air: why wonder if something is dying or if men suffer, since everything is written on this window where the sun sheds its plenty as a greeting to my pity? I can say and in a moment I shall say that what counts is to be human and simple. No, what counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world? My cup brims over before I have time to desire. Eternity is there and I was hoping for it. What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness.
[…]
The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. Besides, how can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair? If I listen to the voice of irony, crouching underneath things, slowly it reveals itself. Winking its small, clear eye, it says: “Live as if …” In spite of much searching, this is all I know.

Complement the altogether beautiful Lyrical and Critical Essays with Camus on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons, his illustrated wisdom on love, and the beautiful letter of gratitude he wrote to his childhood teacher after receiving the Nobel Prize.

(more Camus)

==

... can’t help but wonder whether the publicity stunt was necessary. After all, physicist Richard Feynman — who won the Nobel Prize himself a year after Sartre — put it best in his eloquent denouncement of awards:

I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish academy just decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize — I’ve already gotten the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding a thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it — those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don’t believe in honors.

Making a fuss out of declining an award seems not much different from making a fuss over accepting it — both make the award more real than it need be if one were truly interested in breaking free from the system. Why can’t the private pleasure of finding things out be enough, award or no award? Then again, Sartre had a peculiar relationship with the real and the irreal — and that might be what makes his declination all the more interesting. Perhaps what he wrote in his passionate love letters to Simone de Beauvoir applies here as well: “Try to understand me: I love you while paying attention to external things.”

==

Beauvoir, who lived through two World Wars, devoted much of her work to the notion that happiness is not only possible but our moral obligation — a notion rooted not in a rosy wishfulness but in an incisive intellect that used every tool of skepticism to probe untruth and dispel ignorance. A devout lifelong atheist, she reflected at the end of her life that while many of her philosophical ideas evolved over the decades, her atheism remained unflinching. She held a strong conviction that the dogmas of religion preclude the critical thinking and analytical reasoning necessary for philosophical inquiry and for the evolution of human thought itself — an interference particularly pronounced when it came to the question of whether one is to take an optimistic or pessimistic attitude toward life and human nature. Beauvoir writes:

Faith is often an appurtenance that is given in childhood as part of the middle-class equipment, and that is unquestionably retained together with the rest of it. If a doubt arises, it is often thrust aside for emotional reasons — a nostalgic loyalty to the past, affection for those around one, dread of the loneliness and banishment that threaten those who do not conform… Habits of mind, a system of reference and of values have been acquired, and one becomes their prisoner.

With an eye to the ultimate delusion of religion — that of personal immortality, to which the pious cling as a hedge against the terror of the void that death presents — Beauvoir adds:

Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly. And to crown all, the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself.

But out of this courageous confrontation with difficulty arises an unexpected fountain of hope — that more lucid and muscular counterpart to blind optimism. Beauvoir writes:

In what colors do I see this Godless world in which I live? Many readers tell me that what they like in my books is my delight in happiness, my love of live — my optimism. But others, particularly when they write to me about my last book, Old Age, deplore my pessimism. Both these labels are oversimplified.
[…]
My natural bent certainly does not lead me to suppose that the worst is always inevitable. Yet I am committed to looking reality in the face and speaking about it without pretense… It is just because I loathe unhappiness and because I am not given to foreseeing it that when I do come up against it I am deeply shocked or furiously indignant — I have to communicate my feelings. To fight unhappiness one must first expose it, which means that one must dispel the mystifications behind which it is hidden so that people do not have to think about it. It is because I reject lies and running away that I am accused of pessimism; but this rejection implies hope — the hope that truth may be of use. And this is a more optimistic attitude than the choice of indifference, ignorance or sham.

(more de Beauvoir)
==
Alfred Jules ("Freddie") Ayer (1910-1989) was a brash young English logical positivist who took the philosophical world by storm in the 1930s, insisting that whatever couldn't be verified must be "nonsense." Late in life, he had an experience his younger self would certainly have dismissed as such.

The experience, make of it what you will, seems to have improved him.

A sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express — that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.

Stealing money is wrong” has no factual meaning — that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false. It is as if I had written “Stealing money!!

Theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible; and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it.

The existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved... [A]ll utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical.

Much later in life, Ayer had a Near Death Experience and wrote about it in an essay he titled "What I Saw When I Was Dead"... "My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no God."

A few days later he added: "What I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief."

His wife summed up his transformation delightfully when she said "Freddie became so much nicer after he died… not nearly so boastful. He took an interest in other people."

He now admitted: "There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis — about the meaning of what we say — and there is all of this … all of life."

Not long before his NDE, Ayer had an improbable run-in with prizefighter Mike Tyson. "Ayer, small, frail, slight as a sparrow and then 77 years old -- was entertaining a group of models at a New York party when a girl ran in screaming that her friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. The parties involved turned out to be Tyson and Naomi Campbell. 'Do you know who [the bleep] I am?' Tyson asked in disbelief when Ayer urged him to desist: 'I'm the heavyweight champion of the world.' 'And I am the former Wykeham professor of logic,' Ayer answered politely. 'We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.'

That must have been an interesting conversation.

Russell bio... Russell Society... Russell's History... Russell @aldaily... "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927) g'r... Camus @aldaily... Sartre@aldaily... de Beauvoir @aldaily...

==
2010-01-01 | A.J. Ayer was a philosopher of renown and a steadfast atheist. In the end, his closest friend was Father Frederick Coplestone more » ...2019-09-23 | Wittgenstein is more cult than argument. His followers know he was right, even if they don't know what he actually meant more » 2016-05-18 | Wittgenstein’s charisma. He lived philosophy as a personal struggle. That made him severe, ruthless, censorious, and depressed. And bewitching more » (More Wittgenstein @aldaily...)
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2019-03-22 | Hannah Arendt knew that being human in inhuman times is hard, occasionally impossible work. She is a thinker of the difficult, a thinker for now more » ...2019-09-12 | In the 1920s, Arendt was Heidegger’s “wood nymph.” When they met again in 1949, she found him childish and dishonest, a recluse lost in the hills more » (More Arendt @aldaily)

Real life for epicures

LISTEN. What is real? What can we know? Those questions headline today's Happiness readings in How to Be an Epicurean.

So much of what we call reality is mere convention, so much of what we think we know is hearsay and hand-me-down. Convention is real, but less enduring than the atoms and their natural configurations. We generally give it an outsized place in our imaginative depictions of the social reality programming (social-programming reality?) we call real life. Its elements include "institutions such as universities, senates, and film studios" that exist "only in virtue of our beliefs about their importance and usefulness." They are evanescent. So are we. Enjoy, while you can.

So do ghosts and gods and unicorns and angels and witches and Sherlock Holmes exist? Sure, they're as real as the words we coin to describe them. How real is that? Ask an English major, or a philosopher whose only expendable coin is language.

But if you ask William James, he'll remind you that words are often inflated and unsupported by anything solid and sustained. They lack the glimmer and twinkle of really real life, as we encounter it only in immediate perceptual experience.  "Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught..." As for facts, they require fact assessors. Hence, all that specious political talk about alternatives-yours, mine, ours.

Fact is, the world of macro-objects and animals is real enough but not exclusively so. It would be naive to think so. But first-person subjective experience is paradigmatically real for people like us, it's "the best we can do." We'd better take it seriously. Trust, but verify, as the old actor said.

"Social conflict based on different fears and perceptions is deeply unpleasant." So we shouldn't reside in our fears and presume only to admit our own personal perceptions. We dispel fear by facing and engaging difference.

Finally, we can talk about what kind of empiricist an epicurean ought to be. I favor the radical (not the Humean) variety.

"...In the deservedly famous chapter on “The Stream of Thought” James takes himself to be offering a richer account of experience than those of traditional empiricists such as Hume. He believes relations, vague fringes, and tendencies are experienced directly (a view he would later defend as part of his “radical empiricism.”) James finds consciousness to be a stream rather than a succession of “ideas.” Its waters blend, and our individual consciousness—or, as he prefers to call it sometimes, our “sciousness”—is “steeped and dyed” in the waters of sciousness or thought that surround it. Our psychic life has rhythm: it is a series of transitions and resting-places, of “flights and perchings” (PP 236). We rest when we remember the name we have been searching for; and we are off again when we hear a noise that might be the baby waking from her nap..." SEP... Principles of Psychology ch XI, The Stream of Consciousness

Time and life are but the streams we epicures go a'fishin' in... For real.

Hiking with squirrels in an expanding recurring universe

LISTEN. Today in CoPhi: Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, Henry David Thoreau's essay "Walking," and more Fantasyland.

We begin with a squirrel, the one James used to explain what he meant by his "new name for some old ways of thinking," the pragmatic method in philosophy. You can learn a lot from him.

Will we ever learn why dogs are so obsessed with them? Probably not because they're tracking a new dawn in philosophy. It's more about the will to power for them, I think, but not the more subtle power-play of Nietzschean self-overcoming. "Become who you are"? Dogs don't have to think about that, the way some humans do.

• "James, like the most thoughtful philosophers and poets, wavered... [he] never stopped talking about the insufficiencies of talk..." William James's "Springs of Delight: The Return to Life"
• "Transcendentalists and pragmatists alike [insisted] that philosophy should not be exclusively concerned with abstract concepts and "pure reason,” but was meant to help individuals work through the trials of experience..." John Kaag
• "Walking gives one many things, according to Thoreau, but one of its greatest gifts is time..." Kaag 69
• "Sigmund Freud, who visited [James's "Philosophers' Camp"] in 1909, reflected on his time there as the 'most amazing experience' he'd had in the United States'..." Kaag 123
• Charles Sanders Peirce "was compulsive, brilliant, and just a little mad..." John Kaag
• "James's first glimpse of Peirce, in September 1861... was enough to reveal Peirce's brilliance, his energy, and a troubling hint of violence." Robert Richardson
• "Peirce's response to the problem of determinism had a slightly different emphasis than James's did. Whereas James sought to prove the existence of freedom through an act of Renouvier-inspired willfulness, Peirce, the scientist, wanted to carefully explore the degree to which 'chance'--what he too to be the enabling condition of freedom--operated..." Kaag 142
• "The pragmatic attitude was... an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered, but are tools... that people devise to cope with the worldin which they find themselves." Louis Menand

Human teenagers especially seem drawn to Nietzsche.

Gary Zamiya's old essay captures the phenomenon, and the subsequent falling-out. He came eventually to feel sorry for the philosopher who proclaimed the Overman but lived a life of pain, solitude, and under-appreciation. Concluding a visit to Nietzsche's spartan hovel in Switzerland, where Zarathustra's thunder-clapping prophecies were born, he turns to leave.

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.

John Kaag's Hiking With Nietzsche (g'r) traces a similar journey, from youthful obsession to mature reflection. We can still learn a lot, he thinks, from an obsessive, hermetic, paranoiac misanthrope who philosophizes with a hammer. Nietzsche was notoriously given to overstatement, as when he said that the best ideas come only while walking. But it's not much of an overstatement. “Walking is among the most life-affirming of human activities. It is the way we organize space and orient ourselves to the world at large. It is the living proof that repetition—placing one foot in front of the other—can in fact allow a person to make meaningful progress.”

We can learn what Nietzsche did not mean to teach, as well, but whose life as a whole stands as a cautionary warning: that self-imposed isolation is in the end self-defeating, and not so life-affirming. Don't be sullen Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine. Connect. Open up. Break your silence and speak, but also listen. Poor Nietzsche's antipathy for weakness, as James put it, is not strength.

For the record: it's not just young people who find Nietzsche compelling. Right, Ed?

One of the more engaging accounts of Nietzsche's life, fictional but credible, is Irvin Yalom's When Nietzsche Wept ("a novel of obsession").  It depicts Nietzsche's relationship with a real-world friend and colleague of Freud's, Josef Breuer, who needs therapy as badly as his patient and gets it in the form of Nietzsche's "gift" of eternal recurrence (YouT): “...every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, every choice avoided. And all unlived life will remain bulging inside you, unlived through all eternity. And the unheeded voice of your conscience will cry out to you forever.”

“The greatest weight.-- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” The Gay Science (aka The Joyful Wisdom)

Is Bill Murray's Groundhog Day a plausible interpretation of Nietzsche's intentions? He definitely becomes "well disposed," after many false starts.

Eternal recurrence is a cyclical hypothesis. C.S. Peirce had a more lineal progression in mind when he identified ultimate truth as the hypothetical outcome of all our research, the "ideal end of inquiry" at the ever-vanishing end of history. "Ever not quite," as James liked to say, is our relation to it. But we must keep reaching.

The most salient observation in today's Fantasyland selection was Thomas Jefferson's statement about other people's beliefs not picking our pockets ("it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.") When will humans ever learn to tolerate and even encourage one another's harmless differences? 

Thoreau's English counterpart and semi-soulmate Wordsworth had, like William Ernest Hocking in American Philosophy: A Love Story, an excellent library. But his study was outside. Thoreau approved that message.

 

It’s the birthday of astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, born in Marshfield, Missouri (1889), for whom the Hubble Telescope is named. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and received a law degree. He passed the Kentucky bar exam in 1913, but gave up practicing law after one year to return to Chicago for a doctorate in astronomy. “I chucked the law for astronomy,” he said, “and I knew that even if I were second- or third-rate, it was astronomy that mattered.” Hubble went to work at Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, where he discovered that there are other galaxies outside the Milky Way, opening up a whole new field of astronomy.

He later discovered that these distant galaxies were moving away from the Milky Way; in other words, he hit upon the concept of the expanding universe, which has been called “the most spectacular astronomical discovery of the 20th century.” WA