Philosophy Twitter

Taking a little blogging break during the holidays. Guess I ought to get off Twitter too. Or at least stop following. (Besides "follow" shouldn't there be an option to "lead"? And "get out of the way"?)

But you don't need to follow anybody. https://t.co/5IJqYxBL8x pic.twitter.com/WCcUQxToX5

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) December 8, 2021

Kosmic cheer

Remember when old December s darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the Kosmos.

William James, Letters I

To Thomas W. Ward. BERLIN, Jan., 1868.

Happiness is

 LISTEN. Happiness meets for the last time in 2021 today, scheduled to return in '23.

I've taught this course biennially for quite a long time now, and I still don't think we can do better for a coda than Charles Schulz. Happiness is a warm puppy. And really, it's "anyone and anything at all/That’s loved by you." 

So our parting takeaway has to be: love profligately, and love well.

And don't be Sally Brown.

Last words

LISTEN. Back from Thanksgiving, it's time to wrap things up and send the classes of Fall 2021 out to meet their uncertain futures. The usual last words apply, there really are no fortunes to be told. There definitely is advice to be given, however. Do stay curious, kids, do keep asking questions. And do keep in touch.

It was nice to hear again from my old grad school friend the Biochemist, who makes a point of sending out holiday missives every Thanksgiving and Valentines Day that keep our old far-flung and socially distant 80s cohort in touch in spite of ourselves.

She confessed some despondency in this Thanksgiving letter, "over the state of the country ... and yet I want to be optimistic. But I am genuinely scared about all of the unraveling I see around me."

Many of us feel that way, on occasion. Several of us agree that the daily news cycle is indeed frightful. We're learning to monitor and regulate our exposure to the worst of it. Better to start the day with a little history and poetry.

And best to heed old Henry's sunny words at the end of Walden. A morning atmosphere, at any time of day, is tonic. Wake up. Get up. Do something. Don't stare too long or hard at the light that would put out your eyes. Dream of dawns to come. Build your castles in the air and start climbing. 

Listen to Mark and Maria: 

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love… Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them." --Marcus Aurelius

“Mingle the starlight with your lives and you won’t be fretted by trifles.” --Maria Mitchell

And listen to the Almanac's trademarked wisdom. Be well, do good work. and keep in touch.

Oh, and to my old epistemologist friends who responded to that holiday letter with worries about "the problem of criterion," "infinite regresses of reasons," whether children or anyone else have justified beliefs, and various "meta-issues" in philosophy etc. I say: When you erkenntnistheorists finally settle those meta-issues, I hope you'll tackle the bigger one. We're all already justified in believing the metaverse is going to be big trouble.

Eagerness

LISTEN. We conclude Sick Souls, Healthy Minds today in Happiness, with John Kaag's concluding chapter "Wonder and Hope"--a far cry from the "Determinism and Despair" we began with. We also glance at James's own favorite essay, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," and at his last, "A Pluralistic Mystic." 

Is there a greater use of life than to spend it on something that will outlast it? Surely that depends on what the lasting legacy turns out to be. James spent himself defending experience, sometimes "against philosophy" but always against resignation and despair. 

The problem I have set myself is a hard one: first, to defend (against all the prejudices of my "class") "experience" against "philosophy" as being the real backbone of the world s religious life I mean prayer, guidance, and all that sort of thing immedi ately and privately felt, as against high and noble general views of our destiny and the world s meaning; and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theo ries), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind s most important function. A task well-nigh impossible, I fear, and in which I shall fail; but to attempt it is my religious act. Letters, April 1900

He may in youth have "dallied" with the thought of suicide but his mature philosophy counsels vigorously against it. [Happy birthday to another who's waged that battle, Jennifer Michael Hecht.]  In this light, his "maybe" in response to the question of life's worth is less equivocation than honest acknowledgement that it all depends, indeed, on the liver. Or more specifically on the liver's choices, and on the chances the liver is prepared to brook.

He wants us to feel that dependency, and to respond with appropriately energetic responses. If we couldn't feel we'd be lost. We'd like nothing, dislike nothing, value nothing. Life would be insipid, and insignificant.

Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is 'importance' in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.

Zest, tingle, excitement, joy: by any other name, that's the prize that makes life worth living. Emerson crossing his common, Wordsworth tramping his mountains and lakes, Whitman on the ferry and omnibus all had it. They defied their "highly educated" class status for it.

B.P. Blood may not have had it, but he had a mystics's sense of ineffable reality. James thought he also had a pluralist's sense of variable reality. He somehow had James's ear, in any case, and gave him his "last word... “There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.–Farewell!” *

The first bit of that last word is surely right, "there is no [final] conclusion." But there's plenty of advice to be given, beginning with WJ's own: "Hands off" others ways of pursuing happiness, trust your spontaneity, allow yourself to feel, be receptive to joy... and as he says in "What Makes a Life Significant," persevere on behalf of your "unhabitual ideals."

The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,— the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man 2 s or woman 's pains.—And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.

Also, take a cue from your best canine friend. "With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension." But he loves you anyway. 

If only we could learn to be so accepting of one another. 

 

"...Our question, then, is whether we have reason to be grateful for the universe..." Of course we have. Happy Thanksgiving!
==

* Postscript. It occurs to me that the real "last words" for James, and for all philosophers, should be those he wrote in a letter in 1903 reproaching himself for thinking he (or we) could ever really "settle the Universe's hash... as if formulas about the Universe could ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were not eternally the really real!"

Elevated

LISTEN. It's the short week before Thanksgiving break, and just a couple class days remain of the Fall semester after it. It's getting late real early, as Yogi said. (He really didn't say everything he said.) 

So we'll step it up in CoPhi today, looking at James on habit and consciousness. We'll preview some of our final reports as well, and get started reviewing for our last exam. Busy time. We should be grateful. That's our story, everybody's story. Happy Thanksgiving!

We saw Tick Tick Boom last night, Lin-Manuel Miranda's paean to his hero Jonathan Larson, to creative perseverance, and to friendship. I give it all the stars.

Oh, and by the way... on Saturday I finally went and did that skin-deep, self-indulgent thing I almost did last May, before surgery forced a postponement. I know it's no big deal to my students' generation, but to mine it still feels subversive and transgressive and a little risky. "Bad ass" even, said Younger Daughter. Stats and anecdotes are mixed on the matter of regret.

But I can't imagine ever regretting an arms-length reminder to regard the recurrent daily light of dawn as a perpetual invitation to wakefulness and, well, to creative perseverance. Morning is "when I am awake and there is a dawn in me," when (like Henry) I'm most susceptible of enlightenment. 

I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

And John Kaag's students "just shrug and say, 'Yeah, whatever, the guy is woke.'"

Yes, he was. I want not to forget to set my internal alarm too. The arm's just a post-it. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.

Elevate, and maybe even transcend.

  

Habit

LISTEN (11.11.21). Today in Happiness CoPhi our focus is Habit, a chapter in James's Principles of Psychology and an anchor of the happy life.

James wrote Principles better to understand the origin of consciousness, but habit's great gift is its harnessing of the power of unconscious autonomous activity, thus freeing the conscious mind for other pursuits. Turn over as much of life's necessary and repetitive little tasks to unconscious habit as you can, James advises, and watch your mind and spirit soar.

John Kaag says James wanted to be somebody, to make his mark in the world, and that "makes being happy rather difficult." But James was always going to find happiness a challenge, ambitions or no. He knew intuitively that we are, as Aristotle said, the product of our habitual acts... (continues)
==

Consciousness and transcendence

LISTEN (11.16.21.) Today in Happiness CoPhi we consider John Kaag's fourth chapter in Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. "Consciousness and Transcendence" are big topics which I've considered before. I think Peter Ackroyd was onto something when he proposed to define transcendence in hyphenated fashion": trans-end-dance: the ability to move beyond the end, otherwise called the dance of death. The Plato Papers

This particular dance of transcendence should not be confused with Johnnny Depp's in that film...

Consciousness is complicated... (continues)

Truth and consequences

LISTEN. Today's poem ("...I begin to wonder about people—I wonder/if they also wonder about how strange it is that we/are here on the earth...") reminds me of this:

“Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others —above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received and am still receiving.” Living Philosophies (via Chris Stevens, Northern Exposure)

Teachers are here for the sake of those others we call students, which makes it so gratifying to hear that one of them has mentioned to a colleague that I've made a memorable impression. We can't all be Einstein, but we can try to contribute in some small way to others' happiness while pursuing our own.

Today in Happiness it's chapter five of Sick Souls, Healthy Minds and glances at "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth" (Pragmatism Lecture VI) and "The Gospel of Relaxation." (See also Ed Craig...) 

John Kaag says James's attention to determinism and free will, habit, and consciousness were among the "vectors of meaning" that saved his life. We should also notice that they were vectors of happiness. Meaning and happiness do converge in James's cosmos, and you really can't have one without the other. Nor can you have truth in pristine epistemic isolation. "To embrace the pragmatic theory of truth is at once a commitment to become more, much more, than a formal epistemologist." 

James had little use for 

the "bald-headed young Ph.D.'s" (ouch!) and their "desiccating and pedantifying" ways. His evident objection was not to their baldness, their youth, nor even their Ph.D.'s but to their cocksure belief in the exclusive primacy of an approach to philosophy that begins and ends in questions about the establishment of "certain knowledge" and insists on technicality and jargon at the expense of clarity for all except a very few specialists. James always declared himself on the side of experience, against "philosophy," wherever the latter had been shrunk to fit the limited dimensions or stylistic exclusivity of a "school" or discipline. He scorned some epistemologists' implicit view of reality as something necessarily twinned and correlated to whatever questions we happen at the moment to be asking about what and how we can know, as though abstract knowing were the highest purpose of life rather than one among many. Springs

Kaag shares James's discomfort with narrow academic professionalism/pedantry, and the sense that being a "student of life's value and worth" is a larger mission than that of many students (read professors) of philosophy. "Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation." We're often encouraged to forget that, we profs, and to get on with the production of ever more verbalities and verbosities. In the process, as we were saying last time, we grow (in yet another colorful Jamesian phrase) "stone-blind and insensible" to life's simple joys and pleasures. (We'll read that soon in context, in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.")

James's hallway (corridor) metaphor, treating pragmatism primarily as a method of negotiation and navigation among disparate interests and ends in philosophy and in life, reminds Kaag of James's beloved summer place in Chocorua with its fourteen doors "all opening outward." Pragmatism is a portal, not a sanctuary, "a place to dwell and meet the world" and maybe transcend it.

The distinction between truth and facts is crucial, for grasping the point of the pragmatic proposal that we reconstruct our conception of truth and our attitude toward it. "The facts may be out there, waiting for us to find them"--some of them--but the truth is our story about the facts"... and as we were saying in class yesterday, telling and acting from better stories about ourselves and the facts is an indispensable condition for creating a better society. 

The free will story is prerequisite to the kind of optimism (meliorism) we need to face our most daunting challenges. "It holds up improvement as at least possible," it gives us a chance. 

"The Gospel of Relaxation" has so impressed a friend that he now referes to it simply as "The Gospel," and I know instantly what he means. It's there that James speaks of the "buried life" or "inner atmosphere" of so many up-tight unhappy souls. Their Binnenleben has them too tightly wound. They need to let it go. Students need to relax before the big exam and trust their prior preparation, teachers need to relax in preparation for class and learn to "trust their spontaneity."

Back when I was still a struggling grad student, trying to figure out what I wanted to say about the philosophy of William James, I memorized this passage in Talks to Students ("On a Certain Blindness"):

Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is 'importance' in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.

I didn't know what exactly to say about that, then. Now I know he was talking about our respective "springs of delight," possibly the most propitious happiness insight any philosopher has ever articulated. Zest is what we want, and what we can have if we just learn to attend to our eagerness. 

For James, says Kaag, pragmatism was James's lifelong protest against resignation in the teeth of a Divine plan--of a Plan of any provenance, really--that might short-circuit our opportunity to seek salvation each in our own way, through our own effort and intellect and force of will.

Moral Equivalence redux

LISTEN. AT&T is out again, I’m thumb-typing this on the phone. Do I get bonus points?

Another look at "Freedom and Life," chapter 2 in Sick Souls, Healthy Minds...

"Anhedonia," the inability to feel pleasure, is a strange condition indeed. Even the most miserably deprived sufferer must have some derivative notion of what it might be like to experience the cessation of pain. Wouldn't the contrast, even if only imagined, be pleasurable? But young James, on his Amazon voyage with Louis Agassiz in the late 1860s, turned "with disgust" from every imagined good. It appears he'd “just about touched bottom” well before that crisis diary entry in 1870.

(More images of WJ in Brazil)

We've noted the life-saving impact on James of Renouvier's definition of free will, "the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts." He thought to try it, and was thus reborn as the prophet of pragmatic volition. It was a philosophical bootstrapping operation, as Kaag says, that defies common sense. "You can believe in free will by simply exercising your free will?" 

Or is it the other way around, with the exercise preceding whole-hearted belief? Either way, the result is "a decision about how we will live and what we will become." Decisiveness is what James-in-crisis was lacking. Do something, even if it's wrong. Goethe's advice is sound: "What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it." What have you got to lose but your indecision?

"Always look on the bright side..." Practical advice, almost always. Believe that life is worth living, and see if your belief doesn't in fact help create the fact. Is this the power of positive thinking? Or of consistent willing? Or just of stubborn persistence? Again, what have you got to lose?

James's claim that most of his contemporaries would not have preferred to "expunge" the Civil War, even if they could do so without expunging its results, must strike many of us as strange. Or even perverse. But his point is that a hard-won victory is a thing to treasure and to inspire. 

Without examples of heroic nobility we may find ourselves incapable of rising to a challenge of any sort, never mind a war for union and freedom. That may be true. But can we ever learn to exemplify such nobility in non-martial ways? Can we lay down arms and still charge to defeat a more universal common enemy? 

Whenever this question arises in class, as it did yesterday, students are quick to insist that it is of our nature as human beings to be bellicose, belligerent, and violent on behalf of our various causes. We can't help ourselves, they're sure.

Well, maybe so. But I can't help recalling the resolve of one James Tiberius Kirk when he and his crew confronted the denizens of a planet who were similarly sure of their incapacity to behave civilly. We humans are violent, he acknowledged, but we're not going to kill today. Tomorrow we'll reaffirm that pledge. And tomorrow, and tomorrow. As someone said in class yesterday when we talked about how to go about breaking bad habits and substituting better ones, it really is a day-at-a-time proposition. 

Recall Yuval Noah Harari’s crucial insight: the stories we tell determine the sorts of society we can create. Beware stories of resignation and despair, they have a way of preempting more hopeful possibilities.

Believe devoutly with James in a pacific but still-challenging non-Chautauquan future—unless you disagree with him about the “insipid” quality of that form of life—and our belief has at least a chance to help create the fact. But if he’s right, if nothing is more characteristic of our nature than the willingness to take a chance, then we’d better give peace a chance. 

And in addition to an army enlisted "against Nature,” or those bits of nature and human nature that would defeat us, we’d better muster an army in defense of nature and against anthropogenic environmental destruction. Maybe something like what Naomi Klein and AOC have envisaged. The future is now. 

Consciousness and transcendence

LISTEN. Today in Happiness we consider John Kaag's fourth chapter in Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. "Consciousness and Transcendence" are big topics which I've considered before. I think Peter Ackroyd was onto something when he proposed to define transcendence in hyphenated fashion": trans-end-dance: the ability to move beyond the end, otherwise called the dance of death. The Plato Papers

This particular dance of transcendence should not be confused with Johnnny Depp's in that film...

Consciousness is complicated.

Naturalized and pluralistic transcendence in the Jamesian vein, as I see it, takes us beyond our personal end and links us to life's great trans-generational chain, not by transmuting or "uploading" consciousness but by raising it, and introducing a wider sense of identity with John Dewey's continuous human community. "A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain," James said in Varieties of Religious Experience. 

And in Pragmatism James said our really vital question is: "What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"

For those questions and that vision of life to vitalize ours, we must have moved beyond our mortal end. We must have come to see our own consciousness as in some important sense continuous with that of trans-temporal humanity. We move beyond our finite span of years when we begin deeply to care about the life-world beyond them. 

Can we begin to do that by connecting with our own internal streams of thought? It may sound paradoxical, but that's the view James seems to defend in Principles of Psychology's Stream of Thought chapter IX. By acknowledging and embracing our unique first-person subjectivity we begin to build bridges "beyond the end," towards the other links in our vast human chain. We come to realize that, just as our own consciousness delivers the world whole and not "chopped into bits," so it is for others. The continuity and vivacity of their internal lives are as real to them as ours to us. We're in the stream together, sinking or swimming together, and though we don't know precisely what their subjective streams entail for them we know enough to recognize our shared humanity. 

James lost his father and a son, in his forties. The death of precious others often propels us towards transcendence and a reckoning with death that can carry us past our grief and loss. The father's death was quite poignant, as James learned too late and from too far away that he'd not have an opportunity to say a proper good-bye in person. So he wrote a remarkable trans-Atlantic letter in December 1882.

...We have been so long accustomed to the hypothesis of your being taken away from us, especially during the past ten months, that the thought that this may be your last illness conveys no very sudden shock. You are old enough, you've given your message to the world in many ways and will not be forgotten; you are here left alone, and on the other side, let us hope and pray, dear, dear old Mother is waiting for you to join her. If you go, it will not be an in harmonious thing. Only, if you are still in possession of your normal consciousness, I should like to see you once again before we part... 

As for the other side, and Mother, and our all possibly meeting, I cant say anything. More than ever at this moment do I feel that if that were true, all would be solved and justified. And it comes strangely over me in bidding you good-bye how a life is but a day and ex presses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good-night. Good-night, my sacred old Father! If I don t see you again Farewell! a blessed farewell! Your WILLIAM.

I read that letter to my own dad, in his terminal summer following a diagnosis of leukemia. He got the message Henry may have missed, really so very simple: a message of gratitude and love, and an assurance that his message and presence would not by his children be forgotten. Not ever.

But "the taste of the intolerable mysteriousness" of existence returned, intensified, when young Herman James passed in 1885. Is consciousness really "a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel"?  It does seem likely that even a complete comprehension of how the brain gives rise to self-awareness would  leave the why and the wherefore unresolved. The mystery of consciousness as a generic phenomenon  is hard enough, particular consciousnesses must be harder still to crack. "The continuous flow of the mental stream" is subjective. Looking at its physical correlates does not promise deep insight.

We read also today of Thoreau and his marvelous conclusion in Walden. "Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." As a morning person, and a saunterer in the Thoreauvian spirit, and a dreamer of human intrepidity, I find in those lines great inspiration. I'm thinking of getting them inscribed in a visible and lasting way. Ask me about that next week.

James the "nitrous oxide philosopher" would have been intrigued by Michael Pollan's (and others') advocacy of research into the therapeutic potential of appropriately-prescribed hallucinogens.

HE has short hair and a long brown beard. He is wearing a three-piece suit. One imagines him slumped over his desk, giggling helplessly. Pushed to one side is an apparatus out of a junior-high science experiment: a beaker containing some ammonium nitrate, a few inches of tubing, a cloth bag. Under one hand is a piece of paper, on which he has written, "That sounds like nonsense but it is pure on sense!" He giggles a little more. The writing trails away. He holds his forehead in both hands. He is stoned. He is William James, the American psychologist and philosopher. And for the first time he feels that he is understanding religious mysticism.

Mind-altering drugs may not afford deep metaphysical insight after all, but it's becoming increasingly clear that they can help PTSD sufferers (like war vets) and others whose pain is not amenable to mainstream pharmacology. James the humanist would agree.

James's summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire was a wonderful getaway for him, and an apt metaphor for his philosophy and its anchoring temperament: "fourteen doors, all opening outwards."  Like a transcendent consciousness, and (though the metaphors are mixed) like a flowing stream. James loved "the open air and possibilities of nature." Fling open the doors. Get out there. Even, or especially, in November.

Another chance

LISTEN. Another look at the Dilemma of Determinism today, in CoPhi (previously discussed in Happiness), and at John Kaag's "Determinism and Despair" chapter in Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.

The dilemma of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right horn is subjectivism. In other words, if determinism is to escape pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and ethical, in us... (continues)

We'd have to be pessimists, if we didn't think our various regrets might ever actually lead to constructive action on our part, to ameliorate the world's deficiencies and wrongs. We'd be conceding our permanent impotence in the face of its inexorable injustice. That's the left horn.

The right horn is subjectivism (not to be confused with subjectivity), which leaves us impotent and the world unjust but at least puts on a show "for the production of consciousness," gives us something to think about and deepens our appreciation of the deplorably un-closeable gap between how things are and how they should be.

That's a destructive dilemma, or for James it was. It was destructive of his volitional nature, his will to do something and not just think it. As John Lachs said, "There is something devastatingly hollow about the demonstration that thought without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it."

Hollow is a good word for a world whose content is "indifferent" and whose actors are merely supposed to register sharp thoughts and feelings as they sit back and watch the gruesome play unfold. That's when, in Camus's later words, "the stage sets collapse" (cue Sisyphus and his stone) and a feeling of farce sets in. Intolerable farce, if you're James or a temperamental Jamesian. The future is then without "ambiguous possibilities," the play's denouement is already written, and we're just spectators. 

No thanks, said James. Say I. That's "sick," in soul and solar plexus. A gut punch.  Give us a universe of alternative possibilities and meaningful chances, let us improvise our lines, let us do and not just think and feel.

But of course it's in no one's power to give that, we must take it for ourselves. Take it upon ourselves to act as if that's our universe: a pluralistic world of possibilities and chances in which we can feel ourselves truly at home. “No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance." 

Taking chances means risking failure, accepting no guarantee of success, rejecting the dilemma of determinism and embracing our fallible melioristic opportunity to write a better ending. 

Nevertheless there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.

Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable.

Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism... Pragmatism Lec. 8

Speaking of better endings: we stuck with Andie McDowell and her daughter to the end of The Maid, after the unhappy middle acts. Alex and Maddy's chances look good. Isn't that all any of us can ask?

Habit

LISTEN. Today in Happiness our focus is Habit, a chapter in James's Principles of Psychology and an anchor of the happy life.

James wrote Principles better to understand the origin of consciousness, but habit's great gift is its harnessing of the power of unconscious autonomous activity, thus freeing the conscious mind for other pursuits. Turn over as much of life's necessary and repetitive little tasks to unconscious habit as you can, James advises, and watch your mind and spirit soar.

John Kaag says James wanted to be somebody, to make his mark in the world, and that "makes being happy rather difficult." But James was always going to find happiness a challenge, ambitions or no. He knew intuitively that we are, as Aristotle said, the product of our habitual acts. 

So we'd better form good habits and realize that we're both "spinning our own fates" and creating social structures in the process. "Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society," to the huge relief of the "children of fortune" (like James himself) whose privileged status in the social hierarchy depends on conserving the status quo.  This is not a fly-wheel to brag about, if you fancy yourself a progressive egalitarian urging your readers to "be not afraid of life" and relish risk for the sake of its potential rewards.

James complained in 1884, as we teachers always do, that teaching "devoured" his time. Well, workers of the world in every occupation might remind us that that's what the working life does. Why should teachers be exempt? We actually have more flexibility than most, should we wish to form new and better habits of personal time management. 

I do think our four-course-per-semester load is at least one course over the line, at a school that purports to honor and expect research and publication as much as excellence in the classroom. But we who have steady and tenured employment might want to recall how exploited and undervalued many of us once were back in the days of adjunct, piecemeal employment.

"Do every day or two something for no other reason that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.” That was once my rationale for rising at 5 a.m. Lately I wait for the first flicker of dawn, which these days (after the clocks fell back) is closer to 6. My biggest aversive daily effort now is probably my commute. Meetings, thankfully, are not a daily occurrence.

James’s most useful and damning observations:

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right.

There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean.

Happiness does not coexist well with misery and contempt. If either shoe fits, do “set the matter right.” Don’t forget: “Any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself.” We really are what we habitually do. 

Maybe

LISTEN. Entering class today for the first time in the Covid era without a university-imposed mask mandate, in  a red state and with shaky guidance from our school's president to "encourage our community members to consider the use of masks as circumstances warrant" and "encourage our students, faculty and staff who have not been vaccinated to consider taking this precaution."

Great. Do please consider it, all who've previously chosen to disregard minimal considerations of public health and responsible citizenship.

Wonder who was consulted about this.

But okay. Here we go.

In CoPhi today, another pass at "Is Life Worth Living?" 

That essay was based on James's lecture to the Harvard YMCA in 1895. Early provisional answer: maybe. Depends on the liver.

Before century's end he was offering a less equivocal answer, in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings":

"Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."

Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys.

The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ali! my brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people. . . . when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,—the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present."(11)

The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception...

And this is James's great theme, on my reading: immediacy, supported by perception and constant attentiveness to novelty and possibility in our experience. It is immediacy that calls us out to ourselves for analyzing too much and appreciating too little, for brooding too much and forgetting how lucky we are, for fabricating too much instead of exploring and discovering. Immediacy applies the brakes to unchecked speculation and subjectivist rumination. 

But philosophers in our tradition must also think about immediacy, as well as consult it. Which gets priority? Neither. It's a circular dance, without a lead partner.

My friend in Alabama who's spent a career worrying "the problem of the criterion" finds such irresolution annoying and intolerable. I find it merely emblematic of pragmatism and the human condition. It's the best we can do. It might be good enough. Maybe.

Maybe too, on the heels of Carl Sagan's birthday, we can ponder our lucky stars from a cosmic perspective. We're star stuff. What a wondrous world we've awakened to. There's no place like home.

Moral Equivalence

LISTEN. "The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party," begins James's "Moral Equivalent of War." This is no idle metaphysical dispute about squirrels and trees, it's ultimately about our collective decision as to what sort of species we intend to become. It's predicated on the very possibility of  deciding anything, of choosing and enacting one identity and way of being in the world over another. Can we be more pacifistic and mutually supportive, less belligerent and violent? Can we pull together and work cooperatively in some grand common cause that dwarfs our differences? Go to Mars and beyond with Elon, maybe? 

It's Carl Sagan's birthday today, he'd remind us that while Mars is a nice place to visit we wouldn't probably want to live there. Here, on this "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," is where we must make our stand. Here, on the PBD. The only home we've ever known.

In light of our long human history of mutual- and self-destruction, the substitution for war of constructive and non-rapacious energies directed to the public good ought to be an easier sell. Those who love the Peace Corps and its cousin public service organizations are legion, and I'm always happy to welcome their representatives to my classroom. Did that just last year. 

But the idea of sacrificing personal financial gain for the opportunity of a lifetime to immerse in another culture and lend tangible life-support for our fellow human beings is not immediately enticing to most of those who've been raised to value personal acquisition over almost all else. Have we lost our appetite for peace? Have we become inured to war? Do we just want to score an early Black Friday deal?

James didn't think so. Or wouldn't have, re: Black Friday, though he did already cringe (in that '06 letter to H.G. Wells, who he cites in Moral Equivalence) at the commercial Bitch-goddess "values" of our cash-besotted society. He "devoutly believes" in a pacifistic future for humanity, or maybe really just believed in believing in it. That's a start.

A non-military conscription of our "gilded youth" would be good for them and for us all, so many of the great non-gilded majority already effectively "conscripted" by circumstance to enlist not in a noble cause but for a crummy paycheck. You don't really get to be all you can be, in today's Army. But tomorrow's could be mustered to fight not "against Nature" but (for once) for it, and for our continued place in it. We could choose to battle the consumer lifestyle that has fueled anthropogenic climate change.

Yuval Noah Harari seems to me to be on James's wavelength when he says "the story in which you believe shapes the society that you create." If we believe we can successfully battle our own worst "Onceler" impulses, that "fiction" stands a fighting chance of becoming fact. If we don't, it doesn't. Apocalyptic fatalism is not constructive.

James's old student Morris Raphael Cohen once attempted to persuade James that baseball could be the sort of moral equivalent he was looking for, a way of channeling our martial impulses into benign forms of expression on playing fields, in harmless competition. James wasn't having it. "All great men have their limitations," Cohen sighed. ("Baseball as a National Religion") 

But it may well be that sports mania of the sort we see in stadia and on the streets of championship teams actually intensifies and exacerbates the aggressive side of human nature rather than diverting and deconstructing it, We should consider that. And we should observe that pro athletes like Aaron Rogers are certainly not forces for progress, are not worthy role models for our kids.

Nonetheless, I'm unduly proud of all those gold gloves in St. Louis!

As for the imagined pacifistic future of the race? Not holding my breath. But I do still invite my friends in the Peace Corps to come make their pitch. 

And as friend Ed says, "effective public service benefits from the martial virtues. As James said, 'we must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.' Onward civic soldiers, marching on as if to war." 

Let's drop James's dated "manliness" rhetoric, though. Humane-ness will suffice. Or so we may freely suppose.

Play on

LISTEN. A good weekend for me includes at least two leisurely morning dogwalks (unhurried by pressure to join the daily stress-parade on I-24) and afternoon bikerides in the neighborhood, on the Richland Greenway to Centennial Park, and in Warner Parks. Check, check, and check. Crisp cool mornings and sunny afternoons in the 60s made our walks and my rides a delight.

This weekend's highlight, though, was an internet live stream from Venice, Florida. I was here, but wife and Younger Daughter were there to honor our dear friend Patricia. She died a year ago, but the pandemic prevented a proper memorial at that time. 

We participated in a ceremony to honor her service as a Unity minister in July at Unity Village in Kansas City. 

We were honored to participate last night in her memorial commemoration at Unity Village near here, with music and poetry and a scattering of ashes amongst the flowers. Her life of service and nurture and kindness inspire like the rose, reaching for the light but keeping rooted in the soil of this earth. That example has not sailed over our human horizon, though there was talk last night of a "transition" and a departure to another realm. For myself at least, she's still right here. Her goodness blooms like the rose. --Jy 15, '21

Saturday's service was at the church she founded in Venice. Sharon's tribute to a woman of boundless energy, cheer, and love was eloquent and heartfelt, a proper goodbye to a beloved friend and humanitarian who lived a wonderful life and will always live in our hearts and minds. (Her remarks start at about 37 minutes into the service.) Woo-hoo!, as Patricia would say. And, go Chiefs! A legacy of unconditional love, devotion, and service indeed. 

==

In CoPhi today we conclude Why Grow Up: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age. 

Susan Neiman's counter-reading of Shakespeare's seven stages of human life corrects the popular misconception of the Bard's message. 

He was not saying life sucks and then you die, she says, he was mocking that defeatist self-sabotaging attitude. Good, I mock it too. Many parts do suck, of course, and death--or infirmity, at least---bears down these days like a motivated  and amped-up NFL lineman. But I choose to look on the bright side, after yesterday's lovely spring sunshine and the promise of more days  like it just ahead. None of us of course, at any age, ever knows how many. So we must savor them all, if we can.

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women mere players... 

The idea that we're all just performing a script we've been handed, without license to improvise and discover in spontaneity the specific joys and meanings of our lives, is bleak. That's the bleakness I find, too, in so many of the rationalist/determinist philosophers we've encountered in our survey of the western stages of would-be enlightenment. Just follow the script? No, if you're a player you should play, and you should enjoy it.

And as for the the idea that we must undergo a debilitated second childishness, before exiting to mere oblivion? I prefer Hannah Arendt's more uplifting emphasis on the corollary: our mortality is met and matched at the other end by natality, and life goes on. If we can learn to appreciate and celebrate both ends of the play, we get a second childhood which is not a descent into dependency and loss (sans everything).

This is an important point, I think: being childlike and "forever young" (as Dylan sings it) throughout the entire pageant and especially near the end, in the sense of being forever curious and open to new experiences and discoveries, is virtuous. Being childish, incompetent, incontinent, unconfident, uncurious... That's unenlightened, it's immature, it's unworthy of freethinking independent human beings. It's undignified. It serves only the interests of those with profit to gain from selling you something you likely don't need. "Children make more compliant subjects and consumers." Are we a nation of children, in this sense? We don't have to be, if we don't buy that script.

One of my discussion prompts today asks if we know adults who never grew up, or who say they admire Peter Pan, or who are "young at heart" and "open to the world,"  or any young people who've missed out on the joys of childhood. I'll bet we all do. The good news of enlightenment is that it's never too late to rewrite the script.

"I wish I'd known enough to ask my teachers the right questions before they died," Neiman laments. My dad was my earliest teacher-by-example, as I'm sure many of us would say. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to ask him all the questions I'd long put off posing, in what we knew would be the final months of his life back in the summer of 2008. Ask your questions. Write that script.

"Most people grow happier as they grow older." The data support that, we've learned in Happiness class, even though most of us know a grumpy old person or two. The U-Bend varies, in different places. The Swiss start aging happily at 35, the Ukrainians not 'til 62. But happier days await most of us, say the stats. 

"Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one," just as each season of the year brings its own unique joys. "To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring." George Santayana, "perfection of rottenness" and all, was right about that.

Leibniz thought most people would choose on their deathbed to live their lives again only on the condition that they would be different next time. Nietzsche thought that was cheating, but Bill Murray arranged it in Groundhog Day (and won Andie McDowell's heart). I like David Hume's attitude: I might not want to repeat everything I recall of the last decade, but I'm banking on the next one being better. Give me ten more unscripted years and I'll take my chances.

The great message of enlightenment, surely, is that fear of living is self-fulfilling. Life doesn't have to suck. And while people my age may not be able entirely to avoid being "sneezy" (achy, sore, tired) they don't have to be grumpy either. The happy flip-side of the insight that no time of life is the absolute best is that no time has to be the worst. Life is good. (And bad, and ugly, and sometimes exquisite.) The mortal curtain comes down, the natal curtain rises. The play's the thing. Play on.

4.13.21

Taking chances

LISTEN. The World Series may be over, but "radical evil gets its innings" still (wrote William James in the "Sick Soul" chapter of Varieties of Religious Experience). That's what's really at stake in the free will-determinism debate: whether we'll get ours, and have a shot at amelioration. 

William's philosophy was, among other things, the working-out of a strategy to prolong the game and not surrender to fated failure. Determinism as he understood it is the functional equivalent of a rainout that cancels the game and gives the win to the evil visitors. The home team doesn't even get another chance to score and maybe walk off with winged victory.

And, William's philosophy was a quest for real success in living, not the squalid, fake, morally-flabby cash-value form he diagnosed as our national disease in a 1906 letter to H.G.Wells ("the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success is our national disease").

Our text reveals young James as a Stoic, not quite yet a Stoic Pragmatist, buoying his despondent friend Tom Ward in 1866 (WJ was 24) with classic advice about seeking harmony with nature and accepting what could not be altered. Two years later he had more and better advice for his friend:

Remember when old December s darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one s evil moods over one s way of looking at the Kosmos. Letters, vol.1

 

That's still Stoicism, but it's also humanism and a hint of what he would soon come to regard as the essence of freedom. Control your attention, entertain the specific and more constructive thoughts you choose when you might have other lesser thoughts. Be free in your mind, attend to what you will. Don't surrender to incursive and debilitating thoughts and moods. Don't concede determinism, which for James meant a pre-determined "future with no ambiguous possibilities," a block universe fixed and unalterable "from eternity" as (according to some) an implacable consequence of Darwinian evolution. 

James was a Darwinian, declaring himself opposed to "the Christian scheme of vicarious salvation" and "wedded to a continuously evolutionary" view but not a believer in implacable consequences. He thought Darwin's bulldog Huxley went too far towards embracing causal determinism and abandoning free will. James wanted a pluralistic universe of alternative possibilities and meaningful chances. In Varieties  he would also write:

“No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference… between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.”

And that's the difference between sick souls and healthy minds: the difference between resignation and hope. James understood both attitudes, had lived them both alternately and repeatedly. His life was a long series of vacillations between those antipodal poles, but he always managed to swing back to the sunny side. He returned to life and restored its music, reversing the "falling dead of the delight" and restoring the spirits of the "melancholy metaphysician" again and again. We who were not blessed to be happily "once-born" (and thus delivered to lives of uninterrupted bliss) can relate to his swings and returns. Possibly, they can teach us something valuable about happiness.

One of our discussion questions in Happiness today: Does life lose zest and excitement, if things were foredoomed and settled long ago?

A student responds: 

"I would definitely say so. What’s the point of caring if nothing I do changes the outcome? Well, I suppose I’m just destined to care, then? Really, this whole debate becomes muddied with these types of infinite back-and-forths.

Now, I don’t think a radical determinism necessarily removes all excitement (Well, unless if it’s destined to). My point is that one can think of it as a book. The ending of the book doesn’t change as you read it. No, it remains the same at every twist and turn of the plot. However, the reader remains engaged and on the edge of their seat the entire time. So, could a predestined life not be just as excitable?"

Interesting analogy. When reading a story whose ending we don't want to "spoil" we pretend, page by page, that the outcome is still really unresolved and that what happens in the subsequent unfolding of the tale will "determine" what ultimately happens. Don't we? We pretend, in other words, that the story has not already been entirely writ. We try to block out any awareness of an AUTHOR, whose existence would imply a PLOT and a PLAN (or SCHEME) which the characters in the story have no power to influence. We want those characters' actions to contribute to the determination of events. That's what makes a story compelling to us. James would say that's what makes life compelling too. We're all authors here, in a pluralistic and unfated world. Turn the page.

Meaningful work

LISTEN. Braves win in six. Choppers top Cheaters. Okay, winter's coming quick now. Pitchers and catchers report in about 113 days.

Continuing in CoPhi with Why Grow Up?, we note a "hallmark of modernity" in the reversal of Plato's and Aristotle's preference for contemplation over activity. Those who only sit and think would think better to get up and do something, or make something, or till the earth. Create fungible assets. Invent money. Accumulate capital. Buy and spend, create a tax base.

Or move, at least. Don't just sit there. But of course, peripatetics are also contemplatives. They may or may not be good pursuers of property, but they're excellent pursuers of happiness.

You wouldn't have known it to watch him--the walking scene in The Last Days of Immanuel Kant rivals paint-drying for dramatic interest--but Kant thought action the source of meaning in life. He moved, albeit at a snail's pace, but with consistent devotion. Just a little perambulation is all it takes to get the mental juices going. As Rebecca Solnit says, 3 mph is plenty. 

In a truly humane society, said Marx, we'd hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and do philosophy ("criticize") after dinner. (And rear cattle?) Hmmm. That really doesn't sound like utopia. I'd rather be reading, walking, biking, talking, and eating someone else's catch in the evening. As for philosophizing, that would be more-or-less constantly in the air. 

Hannah Arendt distinguished labour and work, the former being driven by necessity and the latter by freedom, "the creation of lasting objects." How many of us really work, by that definition? 

"We are about to lose what makes us human, Arendt says: our freedom to express ourselves. We are about to get used to being less than human, less than we should be. We are getting used to being a mass, a labor force, human resources, things."

Did Sisyphus work? Did he create value in his "struggle toward the heights"? Well, we're still talking about him. An intellectual legacy must be worth something. Arendt says "works and deeds and words" all count. Writers should be happy, it really is nice work transferring thoughts and feelings from one mind to another by means of symbolic expression.

But most jobs don't rise to the level of work in this honorific sense, said Growing Up Absurd author Paul Goodman, they're mostly useless, harmful, wasteful, demeaning, and dumb. That was in 1960, already, on the cusp of the New Frontier. "Is it possible, how is it possible, to have more meaning and honor in work? to put wealth to some real use? to have a high standard of living of whose quality we are not ashamed? to get social justice for those who have been shamefully left out? to have a use of leisure that is not a dismaying waste of a hundred million adults?”

And the culture of advertizing creates (in political scientist Benjamin Barber's words) "an ethos of induced childishness: an infantilization that is closely tied to the demands of consumer capitalism" where the chief product is consumer lust.

Is there a realistic alternative? Can we learn to consume wisely, and not be consumed by things? We must, for "our present conditions are unfit for grown-up human beings." 

So how does a young person go about finding meaning in work?

Or is that the wrong question? "Even if you cannot find meaning in the means you use to make a living, there are plenty of other places to find it." Volunteers in service to others are living purposively and meaningfully, whether they're getting appropriately remunerated for it or not. Someday, maybe, the world will become human enough to realize that.

But "is anything less grown-up than worrying about" what others think?

Stay

LISTEN. In Happiness we turn to John Kaag's Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.

Audacious title, but if a life can be saved by philosophical intervention I think James is as plausible a lifesaver as any old dead philosopher. He intervened successfully on his own behalf, in one of the great shifts of vision in the annals of self-recovery.

Young William James felt "pulled in too many directions" and worried that we might be nothing but cogs in the machine of natural necessity. He wanted to find a single direction he could commit to, and a resolute will with which to do it. 

His age, like ours, was distinctively obsessed with the quest for meaning and beset by anxiety, depression, and fear. He found a new way, Renouvier's,  to think about things, decided to try it, and the rest is the historical founding myth of pragmatism I like to purvey.

In his late 20s he "just about touched bottom." He'd lost his dearest friend, possibly the love of his life. He couldn't commit to anything. He couldn't envision his own future. He needed something solid and reliable to hold onto, something to embolden his will and get him up and doing.

On the last day of April, 1870, he recorded a new diary entry: " I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. [He'd been having a lot of those!] I finished the first part of Renouvier's 2nd Essay and saw no reason why his definition of free will-- the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts-- need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present-- until next year-- that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."

And: "Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative... needful for the acquisition of habits."

We are what we repeatedly do, as Artistotle had long since noted. Funny how we have to keep rediscovering the most basic things, we humans. And sad how we don't learn the hardest lessons by attending to the hard-earned wisdom of those who've gone before us

On Feb. 6, 2014 John Kaag, a young post-doc scholar at Harvard who'd been languishing in his own sea of despond, happened on the scene of a horrific tragedy.  A young man named Steven Rose, about the age James had been when he confided his own crisis in that diary entry, leapt to his death from the observation deck of William James Hall.

I've been there, in 2010. The view is bracing. In a glance you take in Harvard, James's home at Irving Street, and everything else for miles around. It's vivifying, if you're in a mind to receive an infusion of liveliness. Tragically, Mr. Rose was not.

He may have been one of those given to "too much questioning and too little active responsibility," resulting in deep pessimism and a hopeless view of life. Who knows? 

We do know, though, that identifying and fighting actual problems and challenges to lives worth living is itself a source of "cheerfulness" and self-strengthening resolve. 

And we know there's reason to suspect far more in heaven and earth than is typically dreamt of in our normal waking consciousness. The dog on my lap hasn't a clue about such things, and yet we share a life-world. Of what wonders may we be similarly clueless?

James doesn't know, nor do we. The point is to remain in touch with the "deepest thing in our nature," which deals with possibilities rather than finished facts. That "dumb region of the heart" is smarter than we know.

So we'll discuss that feeling of being "pulled in too many directions" and why, for those who feel that way, philosophy can't just be a "detached intellectual exercise." Philosophical arguments (such as free will vs. determinism) must "vivify" and point away from darkness and stasis, to matter at all. 

Can belief that life is worth living become self-fulfilling? James said it could. But as Tim McGraw's dad Tug's old rallying slogan said, you gotta believe. You gotta believe.

"Is life worth living?" Maybe. But that implies maybe not. Can we, should we ever say that? Ask your doctor, the cartoon on my door advises, if a longer life is right for you. But no: ask yourself.

Ask yourself what your hypothetical future self, after you've made an irreversibly-terminal decision, would wish to tell you. In a word, I think it would be: Stay.

“None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience. History and philosophy ask us to remember these mysteries, to look around at friends, family, humanity, at the surprises life brings — the endless possibilities that living offers — and to persevere. There is love and insight to live for, bright moments to cherish, and even the possibility of happiness, and the chance of helping someone else through his or her own troubles. Know that people, through history and today, understand how much courage it takes to stay. Bear witness to the night side of being human and the bravery it entails, and wait for the sun. If we meditate on the record of human wisdom we may find there reason enough to persist and find our way back to happiness. The first step is to consider the arguments and evidence and choose to stay. After that, anything may happen. First, choose to stay.” ― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

The best years

LISTEN. Happy Halloween, happy November.

"Becoming adult" is our next chapter in Why Grow Up...

Stephen Law tweets: "I'm 60. Yet I don't feel that I am a 'grown up', and feel I would be a fraud if I pretended to be one (I do know how to *act* like a 'grown up')."

To which I say: just wait four years. 

A student asked the other day, in response to my approving citation of Susan Neiman's statement that it's a mistake to think the best years are between 16 and 26 (or 18 and 28?): What is the best? Sixty-four, I said. Next year I'll say sixty-five. When I stop updating my answer, you'll know my time is past. Not dead yet.

While I'm here, I'll still keep on trying to think for myself. That's Kant's definition of maturity. Are we there yet? 

Education, travel, and work at their best all "undercut the dogmatism of the worldviews into which we are born." That's the project of a lifetime. Not learning, not going, not finding something valuable to do with your time all block it. Sadly, many are blocked early and never get going. Many get stuck replicating the choices and limited opportunities demonstrated by their parents. But "if you don't reject any of their choices you are not grown-up." And if you won the parent-lottery, you'll find plenty of their choices to have been spot-on. Not all, though. 

Learn some languages and learn to love music early on, is something I wish the adults in my life had been more insistent about. They gave me a good model of fluent English, and bought me a piano and lessons. But I wanted to play ball during lesson-time. Coulda done both, with the right cajoling.  Or incentives. They used to give me dollars for A's, why not for sticking with Mrs. Boas?; and then her successor whose name now escapes me and who I resented, ironically I now see, because lesson time coincided with the first half of my favorite TV show: Glen Campbell. John Hartford was great on that. 

But my parents, who had not read Rousseau's Emile, nonetheless reflected its conviction that children must be raised in freedom and happiness. They weren't Tiger parents, they wanted me to want to pound those keys. They wanted me to accept responsibility for my own choices. And later, they supported my academic choices as a young adult. Not every philosophy major can say that. I was fortunate in my choice of parents.

Neiman has interesting things to say about books, which "make you think differently about love and loss and integrity," and the book of the world, which as Augustine said is sadly neglected by so many who know only one page.  Travelers are readers of the great world-book. Stay-at-homes mistake their own cultural assumptions for the whole of reality. They do not dwell in possibility, their actuality is stunted. 

But virtual travel is one good thing about the internet. Interesting story on Sunday Morning about a photographer of old abandoned homes who finds them with Google maps. But then he goes there. 

Best way to travel is still on shanks' mare. Those who do not walk, said Rousseau, are like "prisoners in a small closed-up cage." If you want to understand where you are, you've got to get away. In your mind, anyway. Isn't that what the poet meant when he talked about not ceasing from exploration? 

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time...