Talking cures (James, Peirce, Nietzsche, Freud)

LISTEN (recorded Oct.'20)... Speaking of moral holidays, William James is up today in CoPhi. So is his old pal Peirce, who ungraciously deflected James's praise (accusing him of "kidnapping") and tried to rebrand and insulate his philosophy as "Pragmaticism." Nonetheless, it was James who introduced the term pragmatism to the world in 1898 (in a lecture at Berkeley called "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results"*) and later elaborated on the permission it grants us all to preach and practice the gospel of relaxation.**
James: "The universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their anxieties occasionally, in which the don't-care mood is also right for men, and moral holidays in order..." Holidays aren't forever, but they should be frequent. They're tonic. Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means

And,

* "...Philosophers are after all like poets. They are path-finders. What everyone can feel, what everyone can know in the bone and marrow of him, they sometimes can find words for and express..." Sometimes. Other times, they feel the frustration and irrelevance of elusive words. ("I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describe by concepts and words what... exceeds either conceptualization or verbalization." --Talk talk talk words words words @dawn..."What an awful trade that of professor is...")

And,

** "The advice I should give to most teachers would be... Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the class-room trust your spontaneity and fling away all further care.

My advice to students: If you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, 'I won't waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not.' Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently."

My (additional) advice to students: if the results the next day are not instantly encouraging, don't give up on the method just yet. Give it another shot, and another. Don't pull habitual all-nighters. (Are you listening, Younger Daughter?)

Peirce's best insights, for my money: Do not pretend to doubt in philosophy what you do not doubt in life. Do not block the way of inquiry. Do seek wisdom in collaboration with our fellow inquirers, past present and future. Do your part to move down the road towards truths, the views destined to be arrived at, when all the questions have finally been asked and the experiments run.

We're also talking Nietzsche, Ayn Rand's favorite philosopher, again today. That's not an endorsement I'd want, any more than the Senate candidate in Tennessee wants Drumpf's. (We've noticed that your signs have changed, Mr. Hagerty.) I have little use for "poor Nietzsche's antipathies" (as James named them) and misanthropy and misogyny, his anti-democratic and anti-utilitarian contempt for what he called human weakness and I'd just call the human condition of vulnerability and mutual dependence. But I do still enjoy talking Eternal Recurrence.

And Freud also makes an appearance today. It will be interesting to compare his "talking cure" with James's views on the insufficiencies and limits of talk.

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry; but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. Talked out @dawn

The philosopher's conceptual shotgun is a scattershot weapon. James and I would both trade it for a POV phaser. "Give me that thing." And put down that cigar, Sigmund.

10.13.20

P.S. I've been on a podcast kick lately, particularly the BBC's In Our Time. I may just start assigning these, next semester.

WILLIAM JAMES. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' by William James. The American novelist Henry James famously made London his home and himself more English than the English. In contrast, his psychologist brother, William, was deeply immersed in his American heritage. But in 1901, William came to Britain too. He had been invited to deliver a series of prestigious public lectures in Edinburgh. In them, he attempted a daringly original intellectual project. For the first time, here was a close-up examination of religion not as a body of beliefs, but as an intimate personal experience. When the lectures were printed, as 'The Varieties of Religious Experience', they were an instant success.They laid the ground for a whole new area of study - the psychology of religion - and influenced figures from the psychiatrist Carl Jung to the novelist Aldous Huxley. To date, James's book has been reprinted thirty-six times and has been hailed as one of the best non-fiction books of the twentieth century.With:Jonathan ReeFreelance philosopherJohn HaldaneProfessor of Philosophy at the University of St AndrewsGwen Griffith-DicksonEmeritus Professor of Divinity at Gresham College and Director of the Lokahi FoundationProducer: Natasha Emerson.

PRAGMATISM. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the American philosophy of pragmatism. A pragmatist "turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad apriori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power". A quote from William James' 1907 treatise Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. William James, along with John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce, was the founder of an American philosophical movement which flowered during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the 20th century. It purported that knowledge is only meaningful when coupled with action. Nothing is true or false - it either works or it doesn't. It was a philosophy which was deeply embedded in the reality of life, concerned firstly with the individual's direct experience of the world he inhabited. In essence, practical application was all. But how did Pragmatism harness the huge scientific leap forward that had come with Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution? And how did this dynamic new philosophy challenge the doubts expressed by the Sceptics about the nature and extent of knowledge? Did Pragmatism influence the economic and political ascendancy of America in the early 20th century? And did it also pave the way for the contemporary preoccupation with post-modernism? With A C Grayling, Professor of Applied Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford; Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers' Magazine; Miranda Fricker, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.

3.11.21