Darwin's most constructive (for us) regret: "If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness..." But once a week is not enough. We need a daily dose of music and poetry (among other things) to flourish.
Also on my mind since yesterday: the new New Yorker piece on Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens (which means wise people). If his large message really is that "our political struggles barely matter" and that it's okay not to care, then that's not okay. The Lorax again speaks for me and the trees. "If someone like you doesn't care a whole awful lot, nothing's gonna get better. It's not." If we're going to live up to our name ("sapiens," wise guys) we'll listen to him. We can't afford the luxury of complacent optimism but we'd better be hopeful. Don't panic, but also don't stop thinking about (and working for) tomorrow. Nice to see an accurate write-up on that message in our student paper.
Today in CoPhi we note Arthur C. Clarke's famous observation that advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, for a scientific neophyte. We have lots of those, for whom magical thinking is the norm. Where's the harm in that? one might ask. Isn't it like homeopathy, benign and mostly harmless? But of course it IS harmful to your health to deny yourself effective medication in deference to snake oil. Surely it does harm our society that so many would impede the progressive promise of scientific rationalism. And it harms the children of magical thinkers to deny the reality of pain, suffering, and disease.
Mr. Twain again: history rhymes. Trouble is, so many of us have a tin ear for poetry.
The great California Gold Rush, says Kurt Andersen, was an inflection point in our history when many Americans began to entertain the fantasy of heaven on earth and the entrepreneurial spirit was born. Our national mythos obscures "the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops" whose fantasies fell flat. But we celebrate those hard-luck ants and grasshoppers, those nose to the grindstone puritans with "a weakness for stories too good to be true," who pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and start all over again. They have high apple pie in the sky hopes. Or maybe just holes in the head.
Today in A&P we wonder with Neil Levy about choices without choosers and "a neuropsychologically plausible existentialism" according to which unity can be imposed on what we may choose to call ourselves (but not our selves?). Levy does not agree with Dan Dennett, though, in characterizing the self as a "user illusion." There's more to us than that, in the form of "a system with causal powers and the capacity to act on the world." Such a system presumably can be authentic or not, in more-or-less familiar Existentialist terms.
For the trio of authors of "Relational Authenticity" it all comes down to 4Ms and 4Es: mind, meaning, morals, and modality are situated in a way that is embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended...
Heideggerian authenticity can sound a lot like parochial nationalism, with his emphasis on the establishment of identity through shared practices of a specific environment - especially if that environment is identified with a homeland and a "hero"-for heroes are rarely without their villains, whether truly villainous or scapegoated and persecuted. That may have been the furthest implication from his intent, but it's hard to give a defender of the Reich an unprejudicial hearing.
Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus all come in for consideration and scrutiny here. A question for J-P (too bad we've come too late to hop the channel with Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion to ask him...and too bad that Python video has been blocked):
Is your famously disingenuous waiter really so inauthentic? Or is it mutually and rightly understood by waiter and customer alike that role-playing is an inescapable element of normal human life? Is it so different from playing professor-and-student? That's a frequently-fun game - finite or infinite? "(Infinite games are more mysterious -- and ultimately more rewarding. They are unscripted and unpredictable; they are the source of true freedom.") - I've always felt was authentic enough to continue indefinitely. My hopes are high for the play to go on and on.
I totally agree everyone should have a time were they listen to music or/and do poetry. I can't remember a day since I was young were I went without music. Music calms me and blocks out thing that annoy me. Music is definitely a significant part of my day to day life!
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