Macfarlane, Mill, Darwin, Marx, Kierkegaard

It's October, a transitional month. I took my elegiac last dip in the pool before it filled again with falling leaves Friday. Time for MLB's postseason, lawn displays that frighten the dogs on our daily walks, and in just a few days Fall Break and a flight out to California to see Older Daughter. 

Jimmy Carter is 97 and still an inspiration, the anti-Machiavelli. I've learned that Charlie Brown depended on donuts. Mark Zuckerberg knows we're Fantasyland. Anthony Doerr's literary ambition is matched by his personal humility and love of libraries. The house across the street is scheduled for demolition. 

And it's time for midterm report presentations. 

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LISTEN. Robert Macfarlane, who tweets obscure and fascinating words (for instance, one of his recent Words of the Day: “waymark” - a sign or mark placed to guide walkers along a route) and writes about the hidden dimensions of naturalistic spirituality, was on On Being yesterday. (tr/g'r)

His conversation with Krista Tippett was about a subject I don't think I've ever heard discussed before at such length and depth. It was mesmerizing. “Since before we were Homo sapiens,” he writes, “humans have been seeking out spaces of darkness in which to find and make meaning.” Darkness as a medium of vision? Well, I suppose that's why I'm up and typing at 5 a.m.

Macfarlane is a peripatetic, on the surest path to naturalistic spirituality. “A walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.” And, “Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.... We easily forget that we are track-markers, through, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete--and these are substances not easily impressed.”

 

Macfarlane's The Old Ways: 

A Journey on Foot rev. by Jan Morris... Guardian

J.S. Mill was a peripatetic too. He's up first today in CoPhi.

From A.C. Grayling's new History of Philosophy -

Achieving happiness is to be done, J.S. Mill said, not by seeking happiness – 'Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so' – but by seeking the happiness of others, helping to improve mankind, or pursuing artistic or other goals ...

What I like most about Mill, apart from his pioneering feminism (“I consider it presumption in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be..."), is his recovery from an indentured and abusive childhood and subsequent post-adolescent breakdown, at the instigation of his father James and his godfather Jeremy Bentham. They colluded in raising young John Stuart as a pressured prodigy, with an astonishing experiment in hothouse home schooling--Greek, Latin, & Euclid beginning at age three...

He read histories, many of the Greek and Roman classics, and Newton by eleven. He studied logic and math, moving to political economy and legal philosophy in his early teens, and then went on to metaphysics. His training facilitated active command of the material through the requirement that he teach his younger siblings and through evening walks with his father when the precocious pupil would have to tell his father what he had learned that day. IEP

The pedagogical/utilitarian experiment was arguably a success (if also an incursion on the personal liberty of the future author of On Liberty); but I'll bet he was going to be a world-class philosopher even if he'd been allowed a normal childhood.

He credited his recovery largely to the late discovery of music and poetry, specifically the poetry of Wordsworth.

What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence... I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis... The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it. J.S. Mill, Autobiography

 

2016-11-07 | Democracy is flawed: Citizens lack knowledge and judgment. John Stuart Mill proposed giving extra votes to those with university degrees. An idea whose time has come more » 2018-02-17 | The comprehensive John Stuart Mill. He was out to combine Bentham with poetry, the Enlightenment with Romanticism, and to span the entire philosophy of his time more » More Mill @aldaily

Also today, Darwin...

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

"Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish, a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening." Carl Sagan

"If I were to give a prize for the best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter in motion on the one side, and the world of meaning, purpose, and design on the other. He understood that what he was proposing was a truly revolutionary idea." Daniel Dennett

"The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question." Stephen Jay Gould 

An old post:

I’ve had a lifelong obsession with an old zoologist at my alma mater, Winterton C. Curtis (1875-1966), who happens to have been my first real landlord: my parents rented rooms in his home soon after my birth, while my Dad was finishing his veterinary degree at Mizzou.

I remember him visiting our family in the years just prior to his death. He pulled dollars from my ear.

Later I’d learn of his historical importance, as one of the expert witnesses not allowed to testify at the infamous 1925 trial of John Scopes in Dayton TN.

Well, during our recent visit to Columbia, MO, Older Daughter and I rode by the place with my old roomie RD (still a Columbia resident).

And that’s what got me hunting for the little offprint of the memoir Dr. Curtis published in the Columbia Missourian in 1957, that belonged to my Dad. Found it yesterday. And, found it again this morning online: “A Damned-Yankee Professor in Little Dixie.” (The house is pictured on p.37.)

And check out the last page, where he talks about how the former university president “admitted publicly” that faculty positions were rotated among “the various Protestant denominations…” What a different world it was, not so long ago.
I’m just intrigued by the single degree of separation between myself and someone who was born in 1875, who began his university teaching career at my old school in 1901, who was in Tennessee literally alongside H.L. Mencken in 1925, and who used to entertain a little boy who would one day move to Tennessee to philosophize about things like the Scopes Trial.

Somewhere in a box I have my dad’s personal correspondence with Dr. C...

A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial
from "D-Days at Dayton: Fundamentalism vs Evolution at Dayton, Tennessee" by Winterton C. Curtis (1956) - The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago.... W. C. Curtis at the Scopes Trial

2015-04-06 | Half of Americans reject evolution, the second-lowest acceptance rate of 34 developed countries. Just try defending Darwin in Kentucky more » More Darwin @aldaily

And Marx...

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today, by Louis Menand...

And Kierkegaard...

"Life must be understood backward, but it must be lived forward”

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” - why not both, not Either/Or but Both/And?

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it... Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too... This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.” I think not.

But cut him some slack, he was a sometimes-cheerful peripatetic... and apparently a philosophical counselor too. How Kierkegaard Can Help Us Cope With Drumpf-Related Anxiety...

2019-05-04 | The afterlives of philosophers. Nietzsche’s reputation fell almost immediately into disrepute; Kierkegaard, on the other hand, became an inspiration for “mindfulness.” Why? more » 2019-11-04 | Reading Kierkegaard can be dispiriting. He seems so dour, so tortured by inner turmoil. But he was, in some odd way, a happy writer more » More Kierkegaard @aldaily

11.18.19