Descartes, Montaigne, Pascal, spiritual freedom & faith

Word of the Day: "úht-cearu"––the worries that gather as one lies sleepless before dawn (Old English; lit. "early-morning care").
A feeling bleakly recognisable across centuries; a word that echoes in our current moment.
Cf Swedish "vargtimmen"/"wolf-time".
(Pron. "oot-chair-oo") pic.twitter.com/3TtO5KktMn

— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) March 31, 2020

Another good reason to get up at dawn.



Today at Pandemic U., it's Montaigne, Descartes (on his birthday), and Pascal in CoPhi, and Spiritual Freedom in A&P.

My short shtick: Descartes craved certainty, Montaigne repudiated it, and Pascal -- though a brilliant mind and marvelous writer of thoughts ("pensees") -- was a bad gambler. The challenge of faith is not a coin-flip, the question of our origins and destiny doesn't come down to a simple either/or between Christianity and Atheism.

I side for once with Charles Sanders Peirce, who said contrived doubts like Descartes's of his own existence are not a proper starting-place in philosophy. And while Pascal's statement that our problems are largely due to our inability to sit alone in a room has real resonance at this moment, I can't relate to his fright at the silent immensity of the night sky. "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Really? It intrigues me, and fills me with wondrous curiosity. It elicits my support of SETI.

Montaigne remains for me the most compelling of that trio, I love that he fell off his horse and thus lost his fear of death. I love that he was a peripatetic. "My mind will not budge unless my legs move it." I love his fascinated fixation on life's little details. And I love that he invented the personal essay as we know it. In a way he was, as Sarah Bakewell has noticed, the first blogger.

In A&P it's "Natural and Spiritual Freedom" (LISTEN). Spiritual freedom, unlike its natural counterpart which we share with the rest of the animal kingdom, requires (says Martin Hagglund) "the ability to call into question, challenge, and transform our ends" -- in other words, it requires philosophy, our primary tool of spiritual "self-maintenance."

Speaking of the other animals, Hagglund's discussion of natural and spiritual faith & freedom reminds me of Walt Whitman's encomium to our less internally-conflicted cousins. 

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth... Song of Myself

I'm reminded as well of George Santayana's "animal faith," which poses a nice counterpoint to both Cartesian methodological skepticism and Cartesian indubitability. "Without this faith there could be no rational approach to the necessary problem of understanding and surviving in this world." g'r Someone should work out the connections between Hagglund's and Santayana's versions of qualified faith. Both strike me as varieties of natural and humanistic freedom I can believe (or have spiritual/animal faith) in.

The first natural feature of life that our commitment to self-maintenance implies is the inherent finitude of life. We "disintegrate and die" when the project of self-maintenance ends. Data and Picard know that, or will in their 24th century. "A butterfly that lives forever is really not a butterfly at all." It's the butterfly of the finite moment that symbolizes a happy, "blue skies" existence.

Plus, I'm with JL: I don't necessarily want to live "forever," but I'd take an extra (healthy) decade or two. "Engage!"

Spoiler warning: Picard gets a material upgrade at the end of his first season, but his body is still as fragile and finite as a healthy 94-year old can ever expect. Hagglund points out, "Even if the material we are made of were improved and made more durable, our bodies would still have to run the risk of breaking down and ending our lives." That's the risk we run as finite beings leading vulnerable lives. If COVID-19 is good for nothing else, it's reminding us of that. To live a human life necessarily requires boldness and fortitude. That's our continuing mission.

Finally, I love the walking metaphors Hagglund has sprinkled through his book. Just as a walker must project a spatial horizon, "anyone who is leading her life must project the temporal horizon of her death." This is serious business, this leading of lives.

 "To believe in this living is just a hard way to go." Godspeed (or its secular counterpart), Mr. Prine.

Opening Day! (sorta) with Spinoza and Kierkegaard

Tuesday was virtual re-Opening Day for our school semester, today is virtual Opening Day for mlb. It's not the same, it's hardly a replacement, but we must find our silver linings where we can. I enjoyed tuning in to Game 7 of the Cubs' 2016 World Series win against the Indians yesterday, I'm looking forward to the "David Freese Game" of the 2011 Cards-Rangers World Series today. Retreating into the past has its pleasures too, when the future's on hold.

Meanwhile at Pandemic U., we're doing Spinoza today (slightly out of order temporarily, for no better reason I guess than to give me a thin excuse to recycle that stale old "Descartes before the horse" joke) in CoPhi, and Kierkegaard in A&P. What an odd couple, a blissful fatalistic rationalist (the "Lens Grinder") and an angst-ridden melancholy absurdist/irrationalist (the Faith Leaper).

Spinoza's God was Einstein's...

Kierkegaard's was Abraham's.

Some of the best things Spinoza ever said:

• “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
• “I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.”
• “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”

The best thing Kierkegaard ever said:

If you like to listen, check out the marvelous stage production about Spinoza called The New Jerusalem (audible)... and Charlton Heston channeling my old Vandy classmate and Kierkegaard expert George Connell, in an installment of the Giants of Philosophy audio series.

This crazy semester and "This Life"

LISTEN

We're back.

My first-ever Spring Break/Cactus League holiday in Arizona was gloriously good for three days. Then it rained, they pulled the plug on Spring Training (and the NBA and all the other organized spectator sports), and Spring Break was extended to give my colleagues and me time to prepare for Pandemic University online. Oh Brave New World...

So I've posted a little video and encouraged students to take virtual co-responsibility for their education. It can work, if we're all in. We'll see.

In CoPhi there will have to be some trimming, we're only up to Augustine and Boethius  et al. But we'll not trim Camus and the Existentialists, they're never more relevant than in times of crisis. And plague.

Nor will we trim American Philosophy: A Love Story, whose author John Kaag published his new William James book during our extended break. His fundamental message, to my taste better conveyed than by the Existentialists: life may be worth living, it's our choice. 

Also just out during our break: Ann Druyan's companion book to the newest rendition of Cosmos. It puts all this in perspective. “A world [this] tiny cannot possibly be the center of a cosmos of all that is, let alone the sole focus of its creator. The pale blue dot is a silent rebuke to the fundamentalist, the nationalist, the militarist, the polluter—to anyone who does not put above all other things the protection of our little planet and the life that it sustains in the vast cold darkness.”

In A&P we finally take up Martin Hagglund's This Life, a robust defense of secular values and an impassioned plea for egalitarian politics. "To be religious is to regard our finitude as a lack,an illusion, or a fallen state of being," he asserts. It might be, if there were any alternative. Infinitude is not on our menu. His audacious rejoinder: "Any life worth living must be finite and requires secular faith." Full commitment to the secular life requires our fidelity, without which its object vanishes. It's entirely on us. 

Hagglund draws a distinction, surprisingly due in part to C.S. Lewis, between eternal life and "living on" in this one (secular faith opts for the latter). Woody Allen, whose autobiography just came out, famously articulated a similar sentiment: “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”

Self-absorbed though that may sound, it's also implicitly expressive of the central tenet of secular faith: that life is worth living. or (as Kaag's James would have it) may be. "If I did not have faith that life is worth living, I would never be compelled to fight for the memory of the past or for a better future." I'd be stranded in a meaningless pointless eternal present. I'd have effectively abolished time, not (in Charles Taylor's phrase) simply "gathered" it. Secular faith regards time as irreducibly sacred."The days are gods," as Emerson the secular transcendentalist put it.

It's entirely fortuitous that we're doing Augustine in CoPhi on the same day that in A&P we encounter him  insisting on the inescapabiliy of secular faith -- "the source of our passion for the world and our care for one another." Is there really a greater passion, a deeper care? 

This Life is a revelation in many ways, including its insight into Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård's extensive, micro-attentive ruminations on quotidian banalities. It's telling, to realize that Knausgaard's determined quest for focus translates, in his native tongue, as attachment. Under his unblinking gaze "even dull experiences come alive with the sensory, perceptual, and reflective richness of being in the world." We tend to exaggerate the exceptional and extraordinary, when in fact it's the everyday that typically tethers us to our lives. "Setting the table, cleaning the house," walking the dogs... it's all as rich as we're prepared to notice, when attending with a will to attachment.

Hagglund quotes Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights: "in heaven I should be extremely miserable." Why? Because nothing there is ever really at risk or at stake. We humans require challenge and vulnerability to perceive value, it seems. Also, apparently, Ted Danson will be there.

A sharply drawn allegation, which I found useful to mention when I gave my little talk to the Honors College early last month (it seems so long ago, already), is Hagglund's claim that having religious faith means believing that "what is truly valuable" can survive the destruction of earth and everything finite." I said I looked forward to hearing the Dean's perspective on that, he being a person of unconcealed faith. Guess we won't be hearing that, not this semester in that forum. Seems like we've already lost much, to COVID-19, that would have been of great educational value.

But I do think people of religious faith, not just secularists, can think they take the climate crisis seriously. Can they unreservedly affirm, though, that  the fate of the earth is ultimately in our hands? Can any of us afford not to make that assumption, in these unsettled days? 

Spring (almost)!

Stoics & Epicureans and Psychopaths

It's that Big Day. I early-voted last week, fortunately for a candidate who has not yet withdrawn. (Or has she? Better check the headlines.) When the Establishment decides to establish a preference and a plan things clarify quickly, don't they?

[POSTSCRIPT: The headlines are truly scary, apparently I slept through a tornado.]

Back from chilly Chicago and the APA, where I shook Daniel Dennett's hand and thanked him for his prompt email correspondence years ago ("I wouldn't be so prompt today"). Martha Nussbaum and Philip Kitcher were other highlights, along with the James Society and SAAP sessions.

In CoPhi we begin catching up with the Stoics and Epicureans, for whom philosophy was always  much more than a profession. A colleague shared a note from an old student, expressing gratitude for the specific way philosophy (Plato in particular, not Prozac) may have saved a friend's life. You do that, said my colleague's correspondent. We all do that, my colleague generously deflected.

But honestly we don't all go out of our way, we academic philosophers, to relate to our students in a human way - let alone to save a life). We've been trained to see ourselves as professional scholars and our vocation as one of technical proficiency.

It was much more than that to the ancient Hellenistic therapists. It was a way of life that understood and actively disarmed the existential torments and terrors that can make living just, as Mr. Prine said, a hard way to go.

The Epicureans remind us to recall how little we recall of life before birth, and of how much we therefore don't have to fear, going forward. Relax, they said, think and talk it through with your friends, enjoy a simple life in the company of kindness. The gods aren't gunning for us. Aταραξια (ataraxia) is available for the taking, if you're willing to devote yourself to it. When your death comes you'll not feel a thing. (Montaigne will re-learn this ancient lesson, after Spring Break.) Meanwhile, have some fun.

The Stoics were similarly about simplicity and natural living, if a bit more grim about it. Cicero also said don't fret your mortality, though in his case there was talk of redemption in a hereafter. Seneca said life's plenty long, for most of us, but we cut ourselves short with frivolity, distraction, and procrastination. Wouldn't he have loved the Internet!

Are Stoics too cold-hearted and dispassionate? Are they Vulcans? Most self-styled Stoics of my acquaintance are, like Mr. Spock, at least half-human in this regard. Massimo Piggliucci, a contemporary stoic of some renown, says he's hanging out his shingle. So for a fee you can find out just how helpfully human a stoic counselor can be.

Fantasyland today notes that America has spawned a particular suburban dream and an idea of idyll in places like southern California and south Florida, which happen also to be hotbeds of celebrity and the fame fixation. Seems like more kids these days are more intent on becoming known and adulated by their peers. They might reconsider that goal, in the light of Stoic and Epicurean wisdom about the benefits of a quiet life among people who really care about you.

If we have time today we'll also talk about Augustine and free will, and I'll look to the lighter side of the issue and of his story, "make me chaste but not yet" etc. 

I saw a copy of John Kaag's new book at the APA, and also a sneak-peak preview in the WSJ. One of the talks at the SAAP session seemed to suggest that James liked "sick souls" more than "healthy-minded" happy folk. Not so, I think. That's not the posture I'd recommend, anyhow.

In A&P we're wrapping up Neuroexistentialism and considering psychopathy and personal responsibility. Patricia Churchland's Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition is good on this topic, btw. "Not every murderer is a psychopath; not every check forger, drug dealer, or habitual liar is a psychopath." Or every POTUS, just #45.

I have to agree with Stephen Morse, that the likes of Charles Guiteau and Bernie Madoff and Timothy McVeigh, crazy or not, deserve more from us (and less) than sorrow and regret "but not anger, blame, and punishment."

And I guess I have to agree with C.S. Lewis - or is it C.I., or C.L. - whichever of them said "a system that treats people as responsible agents is ultimately more humane and respectful" ends our book on a responsibly-sane note.