How the World Thinks, and other things

LISTEN. Today in CoPhi we begin with Socrates... but I have some misgivings about that. The past several semesters I've made a point of spending quality time with pre-Socratics, but this time there were other texts I wanted to make room for. But I do want to take a moment to just say: Democritus of Abdera was no dummy. And Protagoras was no screaming relativist, but more like a pragmatist. And Thales was right, water is a universal solvent. The pre-Socratics were trying to puzzle out a naturalist account of our condition. They were headed in the right direction. Read all about them in Anthony Gottlieb's wonderful first volume history of western philosophy, The Dream of Reason.

Sorry for the abrupt ending, entertaining though it is... Part 2 concludes quickly and without incident:

I've been telling everyone in my Zoom classes that our goal in CoPhilosophy is amicable conversation, collaboration, and mutual support. That's probably only possible if we embrace the Socratic definition of successful conversation: nobody "wins," everybody acknowledges the depths of our shared ignorance, and we resolve to continue a conversation constructed upon careful listening and the proffering of reasons for our claims and statements. In times like these, that would be quite the achievement.

Plato said we're like cave-dwellers who are clueless about what's "outside." I agree with the first part, we're substantially in the dark and cut off from the light. But maybe the light's not out there, beyond the sun; maybe it's more a product of our own reasoning and empirical observation, and circumspect critical analysis of the natural facts we can behold right here in the "cave" of the world.

If we are prisoners held captive by a notion that reality is easy to glean on the walls and screens directly before our passive gaze -- kind of like the bar-stool patrons at the Boulevard during Happy Hour? -- then we need to get up and move around, and explore the world. We need to get more peripatetic, as I keep saying. We need to take our minds to the gym, roam our thinking paths like Darwin on his Sand Walk or Bertie Russell on his daily mornings' hour perambulation.

Maybe, then, we'll discover the light of the sun to be nothing transcendent in a metaphysical sense, but merely a metaphor for the mind unshackled by prejudice and lazy complacency. You don't transcend nature when you navigate its byways, you find yourself planted more firmly in her.

What would Plato make of our modern versions of the cave, in particular all those entertaining, flickering screen spectacles we stare at incessantly and seem incapable of tearing ourselves away from? Rebecca Goldstein in Plato at the Googleplex imagines he'd be smitten with the silicon simulacrum's capacity to deliver information, but possibly not so sure of its relation to wisdom.

I would not want to live in Plato's so-called utopian Republic, not if I don't get to make my own vocational choices and rise or fall on my own merits and initiative there. Much as I talk about what I'd decree if I were Philosopher-King, I'll take my chances with what we're still calling democracy. But ask me again in November.

Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland asserts we've become a nation more interested in "truthiness" than truth, in alternative "facts" and fake "realities" than reality itself. Seems unarguable to me, I just hope we've hit peak-fantasyland... but again, ask me in November.

2/3 of Americans believe in angels and demons. Really? I know that many say they do, but surely a percentage of them are like my daughter: they say it just to annoy me. 

Today, for the first time in my classes, we take up Julian Baggini's How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy as a needed complement to Nigel Warburton's Little History of (Western) Philosophy. I'm sure he must be right, bi- and multi-cultural people do indeed "score higher on creativity," not to mention empathy, insight, and wisdom. They, sadly unlike most people historically and in some places regionally, enjoy encountering new ideas, philosophies, religions, traditions etc., and assimilating what's distinctive in each.

Writing that last line, I realize it sounds a lot like Captain Picard's nemesis the Borg, a monolithic aggressor that robs individuals of their autonomy while muttering the mantra that "resistance is futile." Nothing could actually be further from the cosmopolitan ideal of genuine global citizenship. I like that Baggini mentions Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethicist, in making the point that cultural identity can be a complex thing and we ought to embrace our diversity, not shrink from it.

I also like Baggini's citation of neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty's repudiation of "the philosophers' own scholastic little definitions of 'philosophy'...intended to exclude" other traditions and cultures from the conversation of humankind. The pluralistic form of philosophy requires many voices and visions, multiple perspectives, endless points of view.

Today in Environmental Ethics we commence our look at Robin Attfield's Very Short Intro, which announces early on: "the environment that our grand-children inherit will be vastly different from that of our early ancestors, and even from the environment we were born into ourselves." He's not talking about the pandemic or the political swamp-pit of our present moment, but he could be. 

The world is awash in change, uncertainty, and executively-orchestrated chaos. It would be hard to dispute or dissuade a younger person who'd concluded that the older generations have saddled theirs with an irretrievable climate catastrophe. I've had more than a few conversations with young "anti-natalists" whose present intent is to stop propagating our species altogether, saying they find it unconscionable to contemplate bringing new life into such a world. How sad. 

But I'm still wearing my rally cap, hoping for the right kind of change. That astronauts' image of the Earth hanging beautifully and vulnerably in space is still transformative and inspiring for me, still a powerful reminder that we're one species on a small rock with every incentive to bridge our differences and make a habitable, sustainable world for our children's children (etc., ad infinitum).

The heedless, voracious, unsustainably anthropocentric "Last Man" cannot be our paradigm. Right?

Biospherical egalitarianism, the "equal entitlement of all species to live their own way of life," expresses a lovely "live and let live" sentiment. But I must confess my own bias for human solidarity and survival. Live and let live, but prioritize humans if ever a choice must be made. But show me that a choice must be made, my inclination is to presume that human survival will not require animal and plant-species sacrifice.

One of my discussion prompts today asks if Stoicism is the wrong philosophy for this moment, if indeed it counsels that we should "follow nature" and comply with the status quo? But Stoic Pragmatism might be just right...

Another: If you don't feel "at home" anywhere, do you lack an environment? But shouldn't we feel at home everywhere, given our cosmic identity as creatures of the stars?

Margaret Renkl, again, a Nashville resident who writes a wise weekly column for the national newspaper of record, reminds us of the small comforts that put it all in perspective in her latest essay.

We may be in the middle of a story we don’t know how will end, or even whether it will end, but we are not helpless characters created and directed by an unseen novelist. We have the power, even in this Age of Anxiety, to enfold ourselves in small comforts, in the joy of tiny pleasures. We can walk out into the dark and look up at the sky. We can remind ourselves that the universe is so much bigger than this fretful, feverish world, and it is still expanding. And still filled with stars.

Her essays are consistently good, as is her first book Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. I don't know if she'd say so herself, but she's a worthy philosopher.

One more question:

What do you think about "needlessly cutting down a healthy tree"? Here's what I thought about it, earlier this summer: