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